Comoros Day 1: Grounded in Dar Es Salaam

My trip to the Comoros began in Nairobi at 3:43 in the morning. Instead of waking up to my alarm, which was set to four o’clock, I woke up to the sound of a mosquito buzzing its disharmonious song right by my ear. Appropriately enough, I have been reading Anguille sous Roche by Comorian author Ali Zamir, who relates the story of three sisters: Ear, Hand, and Mosquito. If my shaky French serves me correctly, the story revolves around the three sisters buying a goat for a joint meal. Hand eats the goat by herself and frames Mosquito, and until the end of time she will not let Mosquito reveal the truth to Ear.

I arrived at Jomo Kenyatta Airport with plenty of time to continue the book. We left for Dar Es Salaam as scheduled, passing by Kilimanjaro and Mount Meru on our way. It was in Dar Es Salaam where I feared that problems would arise, and arise they did – though not for the reasons I expected. My main concern was transiting between terminals, as I had bought my tickets with two different airlines. I was aware Tanzania has a transit visa, so I called my airline a few weeks earlier just to make sure I would not need to buy one. The airline confirmed my guess: all I needed to do was show up at the transfer desk and ask for guidance.

The officers at the transfer desk met me with a blank stare. I expected the motley group of four to say something after we had greeted each other, but as they stayed silent the onus fell on me. “Is this the transfer desk?” I stammered nonsensically. Only then did one of the employees think to ask where I was heading and beckoned me to sit down. A few minutes later, he led me downstairs where he handed me off to another official. We waited a little until a shuttle bus arrived, and I boarded it completely alone. I had thus been handed over to the bus driver, who proceeded to drive me to my terminal and showed me into the building.

I think I spent around an hour at this last stop. There were several wooden counters behind glass panels, none of them occupied, and opposite them stood old-timey wooden desks where people would fill in their arrival forms. There were, however, no people filling arrival forms. I sat in the hallway almost entirely alone; there were two or three others waiting to transfer, and occasionally an airport employee would walk through looking busy and avoiding eye-contact with all of us.

After some waiting, one of the other travellers walked around and began talking to me. He was speaking French, but because of his accented cadence I thought he was speaking English and responded in English as well. Only when he asked, with a hint of incredulity, “vous ne parlez pas français?” did I realise my mistake. The man worked in the oil industry and was just coming back from Ethiopia. He jumped around in his story, but I eventually pieced together that he was returning to his home in Anjouan from a mission to Madagascar, and that he had been waiting in the same hall since three o’clock in the morning.

Struggling as I was to keep up with the conversation, the man’s itinerary did not initially strike me as strange. Upon further reflection, however, I decided that flying from Nosy Be to Anjouan via Addis Ababa was absurd. I returned to the topic later and asked whether there was no ferry between Madagascar and the Comoros. The man shook his head with a faint wry smile and said, “there used to be.” Some five or six months ago, the Comorian authorities stopped and detained a ship sailing under Madagascar’s flag. I am not sure I understood the reason why, but in any case, the incident resulted in a spat between the two countries and the boat service between them was suspended. So, at least, said my new Comorian friend. What the Malagasy news says is that maritime traffic had been suspended because of a cholera outbreak in the Comoros.

The second man I met in the transfers hall was a lone Chinese tourist. I had seen him speaking into his phone and using it to translate short sentences to the airport workers; he approached me with the same method and was rather surprised to find that I spoke Chinese. The man said he was waiting for a flight to Entebbe which was due to depart in forty minutes, and he was growing frantic that nobody seemed to care the slightest bit. Still, he seemed genuinely curious about me, and I was curious as to how he ended up alone in Dar Es Salaam en route to Entebbe. It turned out that Mike – I only ever learned the English name he uses on his WhatsApp – was doing a solo trip across Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda without a smidge of Swahili and a very faint understanding of English. He had been trying to convey a sense of urgency to the occasionally present employees, but when I saw the translations he was showing them, I understood why they were more confused than hurried.

After a while chatting, we saw that another employee had come into the arrival hall and seized at him. He was clearly confused as to why I was getting involved in the affair, asking whether I was on Mike’s flight. I explained that I was headed elsewhere, but that his flight was departing in less than half an hour. This succinct summary finally set off an alarm in the employee’s head, and he was quickly joined by a colleague who proceeded to quiz Mike – with my mediation – about where he had come from and where he was going. Long story short, having exchanged WhatsApp contacts, I now lie in bed rejoicing that Mike did indeed make it to Entebbe.

Eventually, I too was allowed to escape the purgatory of the transfers hall. A door opened behind the desks, I was led upstairs, and voila: past the security check was a waiting room for a single gate. We got on the plane more or less on time. It was a two-by-two-seater with an open-rotor engine, which spun right next to my head as the pilot went through the routine checks. I sat alone in my row. The plane was more than half-empty, and I was one of only three European tourists on it – the other passengers were a few locals and two Indians. The women had dressed up brightly and wore turbans, with some using them to support the weight of huge bags they lugged onto the plane. I realised that they – despite having Comorian passports – all understood Swahili. It was later explained to me by my new oil-prospecting friend that Swahili and Comorian are very similar.

The plane stalled for fifteen minutes, then thirty, and then the pilot got on the intercom to announce that there was a problem with the engine and we would have to leave the plane. We collected our bags and were led across the hot tarmac and up the stairs back to the gate where we had been sitting. The next departure time was given as two o’clock – an hour and a half later than our scheduled departure.

It was then that one of the other Westerners began a conversation with me. He was an older Italian named Mario, and – as I noticed later – he fully embraced the popular connotation of this name: the design of his phone cover was a big picture of Nintendo’s mustachioed plumber jumping up and punching the air. Mario was upset that we were being kept in a hall with no access to food during lunchtime. He tried to convince one of the employees to let us through to the café in the other hall, but this request was denied as the other hall was set aside for domestic flights. However, the employee he had spoken to picked up his phone, and some fifteen minutes later, a few ladies came in to open what seemed like a completely defunct cafeteria on our side.

At the café, Mario and I bought some sandwiches and talked about our travels. He said he had been to almost every country in Africa beside Niger, Chad, and Mali, and shared many tips for travelling. There is, for instance, a website one can use that generates fake flight tickets, which can be used for visa applications. These are especially useful when making itineraries on the go. Another website, he said, connects tourists to people in countries that require a person to sponsor visas. When I asked Mario how many countries he has been to, he said he only has seven left.

Our conversation at the café eventually attracted the attention of the only other Westerner, who had been waiting some ten minutes to pay for the water he had taken from the fridge. He was not, as I assumed, a tourist, but a military attaché at the French Embassy to the Comoros. He had been living in the Comoros for a year and a half and gave a mixed review of the country. It is safer than Mayotte and has a special charm, but it is heavily polluted and there is not much to see or do. Being French, he shared that there is a single place where one can buy wine in the Muslim country: at the Tennis Club.

A little after two o’clock, we noticed some commotion in the arrival hall and headed over. The flight, we were told, was cancelled. We would all be booked into a hotel in Dar Es Salaam and would be informed of further plans in due course. Naturally, I raised the issue of my not having a visa, as did my friend from the hydrocarbures industry. We fought in vain: we would either stay at the hotel and pay the fee for the transfer visa, or we would have to sleep at the airport. We took the former option.

The employee led us back down the stairs to the transfer hall, where an officer was now seated waiting for us. He said the card payment system was not working and asked us for cash, but I was loath to give him my 100-dollar bill and my petroleum prospecting pal did not have any cash at all. The employee thereupon led us out of the building to visit the ATM and exchange bureaux, after which he intended to take us right back the way we came from. In this part of the plan, however, he did not succeed, as the employee overseeing the exit would not let us get back in and insisted that we use the front entrance. We were thus driven through the metal detector once again and passed our bags through the scan, after which the employee led us back to the transfer hall through a secret tunnel right of the entrance.

Having spent perhaps half an hour on this task, we were finally taken to our van, where Mario and several other travellers had been waiting the entire time. The oil man and I squeezed into the back of the vehicle, and there he revealed to me many minutiae of Comorian politics. I knew that since its Independence, the Comoros has had around twenty coups, both successful and unsuccessful. It stands to reason, then, that the current president had also come to power as the result of a coup. He thereupon proposed a constitution which declared the Comoros a union with significant regional autonomy and established the union presidency as an institution that rotated between the islands. According to my new friend, however, the president later did away with regional autonomy and effectively killed the rotating presidency by amending the constitution to extend his political mandate – an assessment broadly shared by the European Union.

As we rode on, I noticed with satisfaction that we seemed to be headed to the city centre: I would at least be able to use this setback (and my thirty-dollar transit visa) to look around Dar Es Salaam. Not that there is all that much to see. From the hotel right in the heart of Dar Es Salaam, I made a small loop to the sea, passing by the Sunni Mosque, the clocktower, the City Hall, Saint Joseph Cathedral and the Azania Front Lutheran Cathedral, before heading back inland along the Askari Monument and the Azam Roundabout.

The city centre seemed small, unmodern, and strangely empty. There were salesmen and saleswomen offering coconuts, mangoes, and pomegranates, as well as ordinary people simply going about their business. I thought the number of beggars astounding, but most people who talked to me simply wanted their picture taken and were delighted to see themselves on my little camera screen. The roads and pavements seemed to be in a state of constant disrepair, or rather, in the state of constant pretence of repair: many were dug up in places, but the dust was clearly gathering on the materials. I retired early, having been told that our flight would depart at six o’clock in the morning. It took another few hours, though, until we were told our pickup time.