Lushoto has plenty of guest houses. The tourist contingency is unusual. Lushoto is within driving distance of Arusha, and so rich white people experiencing the standard Northern Circuit (Serengeti, Ngorongoro, Lake Manyara) can extend their vacations by visiting. Also, since Lushoto is so beautiful and marginally off the beaten track, it is a popular backpackers' destination. The rich/poor tourists can avoid each other quite easily and happily.
I walked around the nearby villages with a guide. I saw a spectacular viewpoint. I met many fascinating people. I watched a choir practice in a small church. I ran into somebody I had seen before (twice) in Pemba. A year ago, any one of these experiences would have stunned me; but by now, I am used to this sort of thing. While backpacking in Africa, expect the unexpected.
My topic of rumination during my stay was language. The local language is Kisambaa, a Bantu language (related to Swahili). Almost everybody in the area speaks Kisambaa. And I have been told by two locals (my rudimentary form of fact-checking) that everybody speaks Kisambaa within the home.
More people in the area understand Kisambaa than Swahili, probably. Children, for instance, speak Kisambaa only until they reach schooling age. Some elders only have a rudimentary grasp of Swahili. But Swahili is the national language, and so everybody speaks it by default.
So it seems magical to me that on all the streets, in the markets, even in the villages, people greeted each other using Swahili!
This may not be shocking to my readers, but it was shocking to me. In my travels in Uganda, a journey of a hundred kilometres is more than enough to stumble across five local languages. In every town, a different language discourages visitors from becoming members. I am told that Kenya is similar.
In Lushoto, I found Swahili to be a welcoming way to talk. Two people of the same tribe will greet each other in such a way that anybody passing by, even from another tribe, can understand. How could this have come to be? I am reminded of my French Immersion classes in high school. In grade 9, my teachers would roam through the class of native English speakers, saying, I want to hear you speaking French, people!
And so we did. Tanzanians universally credit Nyerere for spreading Swahili throughout Tanzania.
The beauty is obvious. I met people from Arusha and Moshi who live in Lushoto permanently and who are accepted enthusiastically by the locals. More impressive still: aside from comments about Indians, I have not heard a single derogatory comment about another ethnic group in my entire time here. Imagine living in Montreal for five months and making the same claim!
I met one Kenyan and had several more were pointed out to me by locals. We all watched EATV (the East Africa Television station) together in a bar and witnessed scenes from Kenya.
Tanzanians seem to be quite united in their opinions of Kenya. Everybody I have talked to in both Lushoto and Dar es Salaam has echoed the same sentiments.
Tanzania may be poor, but its people are proud. Popular opinion seems to be: life is very difficult here on the mainland, but we should still count ourselves lucky. Life could be much worse.