All photos by Sam Yankee.
The train station in Kapiri Mposhi dwarfs the town’s mud-brick huts. It stood glowing in the evening sun, framed by dusty trees and a palatial forecourt. On one side, a group of boys played basketball, and on the other, a pile of burning garbage smoldered. Women squatted on the dirt road selling mangoes, cucumbers, tomatoes, beans, and dried caterpillars in neatly arranged conical piles. Against a pastel sky, gunmetal letters proclaimed the station as that of New Kapiri Mposhi, as if the station’s presence alone could bring the central Zambian town from old to new.
Inside the station, fluorescent lights flickered on as the sun set, illuminating scores of dead light fixtures, decaying ceiling tiles, and brilliant but peeling teal-painted walls. Scores of women and children sprawled around the linoleum floor of the main hall, sleeping on colorful sheets or watching listlessly as a group of toddlers kicked a coin around the middle of the floor.
I had set off from Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, at six in the morning to meet the Mukuba Express train from Kapiri Mposhi in central Zambia to Dar es Salaam (“Dar”) on Tanzania’s Indian Ocean coast. The train, operated by the Tanzania-Zambia Railway Authority (Tazara), was scheduled to depart Kapiri at noon on Friday and arrive, after a brief transfer at the border, in Dar on Monday. I was armed with several gallons of water, a loaf of bread, a kilo of peanut butter, insect repellant, toilet paper, a tired paperback, and, I hoped, a reservation for a first-class ticket. This reservation was, however, anything but certain.
The Tazara website’s bookings page helpfully states, “Remember that you will need to purchase your ticket either a few days before the journey or on the actual day of travel. Therefore, you need to choose the most convenient booking office, from where you will also buy your ticket.” Four mobile numbers are provided. A month before my intended travel, I created four contacts on WhatsApp: Tazara Zambia 1, Tazara Zambia 2, Tazara Zambia 3, and Tazara Zambia 4. To each, I wrote,
“Good afternoon sir or madam, is it possible at this time to book tickets for the 6 December train from Kapiri to Nakonbe? Also, do you know how I can book tickets for the Tanzania train?” I had read that bookings on the Tanzania side were to be accomplished via a separate reservation with a Tanzanian clerk.
Tazara Zambia 1 and 2 did not respond. Number 3 wrote back to me: “There is no train sir. Good day.” I found this rather discouraging, but a few days later Number 4 wrote,
“God smiles on the railways sir. We will find you a ticket.” Further questions, however, yielded no responses. With that, I dug deeper. Reddit, Facebook, and a few travel blogs yielded Tazara Zambia 5, 6, 7, and 8. I messaged each.
Number 6 proved to be the one. She wrote back to me right away, “First class is available. You can send your details.”
“Which details do you need?”
“Your full details.”
Ah, of course. I sent along my full name, passport number, and email address. That seemed to satisfy the requirement for full details. Payment was to be rendered once I arrived in Kapiri. Number 6, who introduced herself as Ms. Angela, also provided me with contact information for the Mbeya booking office, with whom I would reserve my ticket for the Tanzania side of the trip.
By 11:30, Kapiri came into view—a town of low-slung mud-brick buildings lining a dusty road dotted with vendors hawking machetes and sacks of seed. As we bumped along, the station appeared, incongruously massive and glowing in the midday heat, its grandeur out of sync with the muddy sprawl around it. But there it was. No train arrived at the platform at 12:00, the appointed time. None at 1:00. Nor was there any sign of life behind the window of the booking clerk’s office. And so I settled in for the wait.
Several armed police officers patrolled the somnolent station. Mid-afternoon, as I was pacing the platform, an officer waved me over to join him on his bench. He turned out to be the sergeant in command of station security, and he was delighted to chat with a foreigner—I was the only one in the station at that point.
Joseph taught me a few words in the local Bemba. Mulishani? How are you? Bwino. Very well. Natotela. Thank you. Then he moved on to other topics.
“My brother, congratulations on the election of Mr. Trump. You are very fortunate.”
“Ah yes, right, thank you.”
“You are pleased with his election of course.”
“Well, maybe, I suppose we will see.”
A pair of young female officers marched in front of us, stamped smartly, and saluted the sergeant. Joseph grinned and looked at me.
“My colleagues like you. You must have a Zambian woman, my friend. You can take her back to USA. You are good Christian man.”
“That is very kind of you, but I’m not sure Mr. Trump and his administration would appreciate it.” Joseph frowned. After a few moments of silence, he brightened again.
“Do you have beans in USA?”
“Yes, we have beans.” He frowned.
“Do you have maize?”
“We have that too.” He wilted further.
“Do you have nshima?”
No, I told him, we did not have the boiled cornmeal porridge that forms the heart of Zambian breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He beamed.
“I will become a rich man like Mr. Trump by importing nshima from Zambia to the USA. I will send it by the Tazara to Dar es Salaam and ship it to New York City. We will be partners, my friend.”
Shortly after midnight, after twelve hours of waiting, the train arrived. A General Electric locomotive stood at the head of a freight car and twelve passenger cars, all painted in the royal blue, red, and white of the East African Community flag. A long line of porters loaded bundles, reeking of the not-quite-dried anchovies common in this region, aboard the freight car
A light appeared in the ticketing window. Within seconds, a crush of hopeful passengers had swarmed the window. The cool evening breeze melted away in the heat of hundreds of bodies. I joined the crowd, apologizing to the dozens of Zambian mothers and aunts I bumped into in the process. Only two clerks stood behind the grate: one for the perhaps thirty first class passengers, and one for about three hundred second and third class passengers. All transactions were in cash, of course, and recorded carefully in triplicate. I shoved a fistful of banknotes through the grate, desperately trying to hold onto my spot in the crowd. At last, I had my ticket. For about ten U.S. dollars, the Tanzania-Zambia Railway Authority was honored to welcome me aboard the Mukuba Express.
At last, the first class lounge was unlocked: another brilliantly teal-painted room under the light of flickering fluorescents. Their Excellencies the Presidents of Zambia and Tanzania smiled down from framed photographs on the wall. Here I met the only other mzungus on the train: a family of four Germans traveling Africa for a few months. Claudia, Adrien, and their two teenage sons had also reserved their tickets through Ms. Angela, and they were as ready as I was to board the train after a long day of waiting. They kindly shared their pizzas with me as we settled into ragged, overstuffed chairs for another two hours of waiting. At 2:00 a.m., the call came for first-class passengers to find their cabins.
Along with about a dozen fellow travelers, we shouldered our luggage and set out onto the platform. We had to scramble through trackside brambles and scrub to the first class cars, stationed beyond the end of the platform. The sound of squawking chickens drifted down from the third-class cars as I squeezed into the narrow corridor, finding my way to Compartment No. 2 of Coach 1201. Upon reaching my bunk, I spread one of the thick fleece blankets provided, and folded another as a pillow, and laid down to sleep.
The bright southern sun streamed into the cabin when I awoke. Dadum-dadum, dadum-dadum, dadum-dadum. We were rolling slowly through a lush landscape of low trees and shrubs, a rich green against the brilliant red of the soil. A few round thatched huts peeked above the greenery. I climbed down from my bunk to sit opposite my roommate, a middle-aged man named Joseph. He was a businessman of Kapiri Mposhi headed to the eastern town of Mpika to visit his mother. While much slower than a bus along the Great North Road, he explained, the train was far more comfortable and provided “God’s great adventure.”
The Tanzania-Zambia Railway was completed in 1976, linking the seaport of Dar es Salaam to Kapiri Mposhi in the heart of Zambia’s copper mining district. It was built by the Chinese state as Mao’s first major foreign project, a gesture of socialist goodwill. The Tazara was planned to help the newly-independent Zambia export its rich natural resources through the ports of also newly-independent Tanzania, rather than through Rhodesia and South Africa, both controlled by white minority regimes. Also known as the Uhuru, or Freedom, Railway, the line opened access to impoverished rural communities while enabling the export of critical minerals to international markets. Delivered in 2016, the Mukuba’s new passenger cars already featured broken plumbing, inoperable lighting, and scores of cracked or shattered windows propped open by beer bottles. Eight years of hard use and negligible maintenance had helped the new equipment settle into the faded 1970s glory of the rest of the railway.
The first-class compartment boasted four blue-upholstered bunks and a narrow table, as well as; an inoperable electric fan hanging from the ceiling. At the end of each carriage was a washroom with two sinks trickling water, a bathroom with a squat toilet (and view of the tracks whizzing by below), and a nonfunctioning showerhead. Feeling hungry, I pocketed my passport, map, and notebook and wandered down the corridor. I passed through the two first-class cars into the three second-class cars, in which six bunks (and passengers) were stuffed into a space even narrower than my four-bunk compartment. People grinned and said hello as I squeezed by. The end of each car’s corridor bore a red “China Aid” plaque and a plate with the mark of the Tangshan Railway Vehicle Co., Ltd., the manufacturer of these cars.
The corridor opened into a dining car, where two rows of booths rocked gently side to side with the movement of the train. Wrecked freight cars loomed trackside with alarming frequency; I hoped passenger trains were spared that fate. The dining car attendant told me that I had missed breakfast, but lunch would be served at 12:30. I sat down and spread my map across the table. In the eight hours or so since we left Kapiri, we had traveled about 200 miles— averaging less than thirty miles per hour. The Mukuba Express truly flies.
Every hour or so, the train slowed to a halt at another dusty village. At Kapoko village I decided to secure some breakfast. Each time the train stopped, women and children appeared at the windows, baskets on their heads piled high with fruit, t-shirts, and vegetables. I reached out with a five kwacha note, worth a little under twenty cents, and pointed at a mango. I held up one finger, hoping for a mango and some change. Instead, the woman handed me one mango, and then another. And another. For my five kwacha, I was the proud owner of seven sticky, dusty mangoes. Brilliant.
After sharing the mangoes with my German friends in the dining car, I peeked into the next car, the bar and lounge. Although it was well before noon, several men were enjoying half-liter bottles of Kilimanjaro and Serengeti lagers. A football match blared on the television.
Further along, I found myself in the closest of five or six third-class cars, in which hundreds of passengers and the occasional livestock sprawled on hard plastic benches for the days-long journey.
About an hour after the promised time, an attendant appeared in the dining car.
“Would you like the lunch, sir?”
“Yes, please.”
“I will bring you the lunch, sir.”
A bowl and pitcher were brought around for us to wash our hands before eating. Lunch was a heap of nshima, the boiled white cornmeal porridge, formed into a loaf next to a sausage and boiled greens in a flavorless but brilliantly red sauce. I ate with the German family. Other diners looked on with glee as we mzungu ate with our hands, soaking up sauce and bits of greens with blobs of nshima.
When I returned to my cabin, Joseph was gone and a new passenger had taken his place: Tumi, a schoolteacher, was headed to visit his family at Nakonde for the December holiday, the border town to which I was also traveling. We chatted about traveling, holidays, and the challenges of education in Zambia’s multiethnic and multilingual society, especially in poor, rural regions. We eventually each settled into a nap, lulled by the gentle rocking of the train.
Dinner was more nshima, greens, and fried chicken. I ate with Tumi and Simon, a new roommate who had boarded the train while I napped. We soon moved to the bar area for several rounds of Safari Lager. Simon told me that he was a farmer and a businessman, showing me the Facebook page he uses to sell vegetables, sausages, and meats.
“I think I would like to be a farmer in America,” he said. “How much does a hectare cost?”
“Oh, probably seven or eight thousand dollars,” I said, “but you can’t make much money farming only a hectare. You’d need several hundred at least, and most farms are thousands.” Simon’s eyes bulged.
“I would need many workers!”
“That’s right, and you’d have to pay them at a minimum of $15 per hour.” He looked at me as if I were crazy.
“Maybe I could run a restaurant instead. Americans will like my food. Nshima and chicken, greens, cassava. It will be very good.” I agreed that a nshima restaurant would surely be popular.
As empty Safari bottles crowded the table, Tumi, Simon, and I were joined by a Zimbabwean woman traveling with her young daughter to Zanzibar for a vacation. The pair had taken the Zambia Railways line from their home near Victoria Falls to Kapiri, where they boarded the Tazara. We all agreed that, despite its unreliability, the Mukuba train offered comfort, unforgettable scenery, and above all an adventure. Adventure was the key as we shared cold beer late into the night, the train rumbling along past unseen hills and farmland.
I awoke before dawn on Sunday to find the train stopped in a small town, its station bearing the name Chozi. I dozed off again as we began moving, rolling along toward the Tanzanian border. When I rose a few hours later, however, we were back in Chozi. I made my way down to the dining car for breakfast: an omelet, buttered toast, and strong black tea. Two hours later, we were still in Chozi.
Like the other Tazara trackside towns, Chozi was centered around a peeling modernist train station that rose two stories above the surrounding buildings. Single-story mud-brick structures, roofed in scraps of corrugated metal, offered farming equipment, fruit, and beer for sale. Two deeply rutted dirt roads led off into the bush; barefoot children played in knee-deep muddy puddles. Goats roamed the village center, even wandering through the open station hall onto the platform. A railway shed stood about half a mile from where the train was stopped, now missing its locomotive.
After ten hours dozing, reading, and socializing in the shadow of the Chozi train station, I walked along the tracks to the railway shed. There stood the locomotive alongside an identical machine, both stationed over maintenance pits. Getting closer, I saw that workers were underneath tapping on the locomotives’ hardware with sticks and pebbles. A nearby room in the shed, with rusted lathes, milling machines, and drill presses visible through the window, had been padlocked for decades. I asked a mechanic what was going on. When we first passed through Chozi, a minor maintenance issue prompted the engineers to stop the train and switch locomotives. Shortly after we left the station the first time, they realized that this new locomotive did not have enough fuel for the rest of the trip, so we returned. In the meantime, the first locomotive had been accidentally derailed while undergoing repairs. None of the workers showed any sign of frustration, impatience, or despair while sharing this news, despite their total lack of necessary equipment. I eventually learned that the train would be underway in about twelve hours. We had already been stopped for the whole day and had until noon the next day to meet the connecting train to the coast in Mbeya, about a day’s journey to the east.
The unreliability of the line does not enrage or disappoint its passengers, for in the end, a train will always run. The Tazara proved true to its reputation: a monument not just to friendship and adventure, but to the art of patient waiting and good company.
