Sanjay Austa

Mugged in Africa. Adventures in the African Bush.

Follow @sanjayausta

It all went wrong from the word go. We had to bribe  our way into Africa . The mandatory yellow fever shot was supposed to have been injected  15 days prior. Not a week as our papers showed. The custom’s officer  at the Dar-es Salam airport  threatened to send us back on the next flight but after a bit of filibuster extended a greasy palm.

In  Zanzibar there was a power crises. The undersea cable had snapped, plunging the island in darkness. We spent sleepless nights in mosquito invested , hot and humid hotel rooms and when we asked for bath water the surly  waiter  told us to  take a swim in the ocean.

Our  safari jeep  stalled in the middle of Serengeti and two-days later deep in the Ngorongoro Crater, just a  gallop  away from the Crater lions.   And in the end , at the office , Musa, the quite, polite guide     metamorphosed into a bellicose  bully  and almost thrashed us all for demanding refunds.

It had only been a fortnight and  Africa had begun to seem like a scary place already. But there is nothing more scary than a girlfriend who has been dragged willy-nilly into  the African bush. She would rather have us spend the  money shopping in a DLF  Mall and had begun to nag  even before we saw our first giraffe.  Partly to placate her, and partly for my love for curios ,  I took her shopping on the penultimate day, in a handicraft bazaar in Arusha, Tanzania.

On the way back to our  hotel,  loaded with  African object de arts , I thought we had had our share of adventures for one trip. Tomorrow we would take the long road journey back to Dar es Salaam to catch our flight back to India.

Slung over my shoulders was my   Nikon  D700 attached with my   newly acquired  24-70mm Nikkor lens. In it,  the   32gb memory card had   the exploits of the day- ; photographs of the exotic Maasai in their villages or bomas.   In one distant village,  the Maasai even danced for my benefit. The tall lean men swirled  in their rhythmic war-formations jumping high and  hissing reptile-like  and humming drone- like,  while their women rotated  giant shell- necklaces around their necks.  It had gone on well towards the end.

And then it happened.

“They came from nowhere”, I told the police later. But I am sure the muggers  had been following us for a while.  Most of us have filmy notions of street-muggings.  You are walking down a dark deserted alley when hooded hoodlums waylay you.  They  pull  a gun or knife on you  and say stuff like “Your money or your life’.

But it took me a couple of minutes just to realize that I had been mugged at all. It happened so fast  that my memory of it is  a sort of blur.

I remember   we reached an intersection when I felt a tug on my camera strap. A stout man materialized in front of me and whipped  out a knife.  I slipped into a fuzzy nebulous state.

 He   said something in Swahili.  Maybe it was, ‘’ Your camera or your life’’. But I heard only a  dull  buzz in my head. Having lulled me into a shock with the knife, he snatched the camera.  Then I felt a hand go over my  trouser pockets. His accomplice was making a  bid for my wallet.  Fortunately his hand did not slip through and the duo ran across the street, swerved into an alley and disappeared.

I looked on zombie like.  Did I just get mugged in broad daylight?  It was the most bustling part of town. The two dozen or so people who saw the heist walked on without batting an eye. At the shop opposite, unemployed youth stood smoking casually just as before. A lady on the payment two feet from me,  continued to sell  corn and the cars  whizzed by just as lugubriously.

My girlfriend’s  shopping bags were intact and she  looked somewhat relieved. After what seemed an eternity we found a cab to take us to the police station.  The driver knew little English and as he raced down a lonely stretch, I thought he was part of the gang. But thankfully he was just trying to get us  to the station fast.

At the police station, a pot-bellied inspector took down my complaint. He said he had to get the evidence the traditional way. He  took us in his jeep to the crime spot and   in a style reminiscent of Indian police, picked up random people   on  the  street.

I asked  the inspector why had he  caught  innocent  bystanders. He said some of them must know the culprits. My report  was lodged so the inspector had to show he had done his duty by me.  He would not listen.  He threatened the young boys in the station for over an hour with dire consequences.  These young boys hated me. A foreigner who could not take care of his stuff and getting them into trouble like this. I could not look them  in the eyes.  I was lucky to be  leaving  town by an early morning bus the next day.

I lost the camera and sometime later the girlfriend but I carry a bit of Africa with me. The stories and the adventures you experience in life are far more valuable and makes life all that more exciting and meaningful.

 

 

 

 

 

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 1st, 2012 at 6:59 am. It is filed under Travelogues and tagged with african men, arusha mugging, camera stealing, crime in africa, dacoity tanzania, mugged in africa, mugged in tanzania, mugging in africa, mugging in tanzania, police in tanzania, robbery in tanzania, safety in africa, safety in tanzania, secutiry in africa, travel photographer india. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.