My assistant tells me I can't tease a chapter of my life in the newsletter without giving readers a payoff. So, because this story is high on my list of things I never thought would happen when I chose a writing career, allow me to tell you about my time in a Tanzanian prison.
It was August. I was retracing the footsteps of Henry Morton Stanley in his search to find the very lost explorer, Dr. David Livingstone. The book would be titled Into the Great Wide Open, in homage to Tom Petty. My editor wisely chose Into Africa instead.
My buddies Dave and Bill met me in Dar es Salaam. I flew in from Paris, having just spent July covering the Tour de France. The last night had been a long walk along the Left Bank with my sportswriter friend, Austin, putting three bottles of expensive French wine on his Sports Illustrated expense account.
Bill, Dave, and I hired a Land Cruiser from a smooth-talking man named Kennedy. Our driver was Chowa. Interesting guy. Didn't say much. Very mysterious. One day into our journey across Tanzania, after spending the night in a guest house on the wide open savanna, Chowa announced we needed to change our route. Something about bad men on the road. So we detoured south to the Zambian border under a full yellow moon, passing an overturned cattle truck and a herd of crows escaping down the highway.
Things went bad at dawn, in a town named Tunduma.
Chowa hit a child crossing the road.
The little girl's shoes flew off before my eyes as she sailed through the air. Chowa chose not to stop at first. But as we yelled at him to do the right thing, he finally braked to a halt — whereupon a mob descended on our Land Cruiser with clubs and knives.
So we raced away, past where the pavement turned to red dust, and into a town in the middle of nowhere named Sumbawanga. Up to this point, we were debating whether it was better to seek Justice or flee the country, unsure if we would be thrown in prison without a trial.
We did not need to worry. A police roadblock was waiting outside town. Four men in uniform. AK-47s. Chowa stopped, rolled down his window, and said something in Swahili — which is when the police eyed me with great disgust. They boarded the vehicle, the barrels of their automatic weapons poking up into the fabric roof covering.
For the next three days, Dave, Bill and I were questioned at the local police station. Chowa denied involvement, stating that I was actually the driver. We watched as local prisoners bound hand and foot were thrown aboard a train taking them to the national penitentiary. We wondered if that was also our fate.
Word finally came back that the girl was going to be ok. In fact, the authorities were less concerned about a child with a fractured skull than a hit-and-run which destroyed a car back in Tunduma the same day. Sumbawanga's police chief, a large woman who picked her nostrils with two pinkies as she gave us our freedom, was kind enough to hire a new driver for the next leg to Kigoma. Chowa was being held for further questioning, although he was the first person we ran into upon returning to Dar es Salaam.
You think a lot of weird thoughts when you're a married father of three young children, held in a faraway jail from which you might never exit. Even now, twenty years later, I remember the whoosh of relief as my flight lifted off from Tanzania for the welcome journey home. Bill, Dave, and I laugh about it now, but that was one hell of a messed up research trip.