Going home to Tanzania as a free man

Macwaia Saloum left Tanzania in the 80s to seek his luck in Greece. After 30 years and a farewell to drugs he decided to return home and make a difference to the society that fostered him.

Macwaia walks past the newspaper vendors, stalls with sweets and sunglasses near the post office in Dar es Salaam and his mind wanders back to the 1980s. Back then the area around Posta was green and the atmosphere was calm. It was only slightly hectic around lunch hour, when he passed through the streets after school. The city has grown rapidly in the 30 years he has been away.

Macwaia left his city and his family in 1984 to seek a new life in Greece. He lived the next 30 years of his life in Europe and most of them were shadowed by the effects of drugs and alcohol. When he finally got free of drugs, he decided to come home to Tanzania.

“I started having dreams about Tanzania when I stopped alcohol. I started having feelings and emotions again, and I thought that I have my own country with my friends and family, and that my future is only back home. If I stay in Greece, I will always be a foreigner,” he says.

He returned home last year, and this has been his first year in Tanzania as a grown man. His friends all thought he would never come back, or that he would return in a coffin. But Macwaia proved them wrong.

After he left alcohol and drugs in 2008, he wanted to do something good to his motherland, and he felt that his time in Greece had come to an end. In Greece he worked as a volunteer at the rehabilitation centre that he had attended himself, he volunteered at a youth centre, and he took courses in psychology.

“I wanted to give something to my society. I thought that I can do this work in my home too. I read on the Internet about the drugs problems in Tanzania, and I wanted to do something,” he says.

Macwaia has spent more of his life in Europe than in Africa. He was 25 years old when he left Tanzania. Today he is 56. He left at a time when the economy was tight and he remembers how difficult it was just to get hold of a cigarette.

Half a life

Along with other young men he left his home and went by truck, car and train through Kenya and Sudan, and onwards to Egypt by ferry on the Nile. He found work in Egypt and constructed houses as the Egyptian economy had golden years.

After three years he had earned enough to buy a plane ticket to Istanbul in Turkey and from there he boarded a bus to his final destination – Greece. He had heard stories about young Tanzanian men who got employed as seamen in Greece, and at that time all his friends wanted to try their luck on the Mediterranean Sea.

Macwaia was lucky. He got a job as a seaman and he sailed to Morocco, Singapore, India and beyond, but there was always alcohol on-board. He started drinking, and in 2003 he wasn’t able to sail any longer. He left the sea and spent his days in the underworld of Athens where drugs and alcohol made the real world blurred and distant.

He stayed there till a day in 2007 when he felt so bad that he went to the hospital. The doctor told him that had he waited two more days, he would be dead. The weight beneath his feet showed 47 kilogrammes and Macwaia left Athens to live in a rehabilitation centre in the city of Kalamata to save his life.

In 2013 he was declared clean of drugs. Many of his friends at the rehabilitation centre didn’t make it out of their addiction alive or fell back into dependence, but Macwaia didn’t want to go back.

“I have already seen everything. Nothing is new to me. I don’t have a lot of money, but I am alive,” he says.

The returnee

The life in Greece was far from easy. “Europe is a struggle,” Macwaia says and refers to the ongoing financial crisis, “In Europe there is also unemployment, and people live in containers in Greece,” he says. In Tanzania he feels at peace. When he left, his sister was eight years old, and when he returned last year, she was a wife and a mother.

For the past ten months he has been living with her and their mother in their family home in Temeke in Dar es Salaam, and he feels at ease. He has started a small poultry farm and every morning he has something to wake up to.

“It is fantastic. I have no stress, no fear and I feel free. I used to be walking around with fear for the police, if they would catch me, or if I would be attacked by some racist group,” Macwaia says.

He was afraid of returning and feared that one day the drug problem would come and knock on his door and send him back into dependency. But with his family he doesn’t feel afraid anymore. They support him and encourage him to work on his dream. The primary one is to help people with drug and alcohol dependency in Tanzania.

“My dream is to have my own centre of rehabilitation in Tanzania. My first priority is to work with people who have this problem. It is the same problem as in Greece, drug abuse is the same everywhere,” Macwaia says.

It is not just a matter of getting clean and forgetting about the past, he explains. It is about psychology and about learning to cope with oneself throughout life. There is no such thing as declaring that “No, I have finished with my rehab,” Macwaia says. He would like to help drug users, and through his work stay alert towards his own history and the risks of repeating it.

“It is very important to help these people, because through helping them, you also help yourself. I also had this problem, and there is no end to therapy,” he says.

As he embarks on his short journey from Posta to his home in Temeke, he passes by the post office and continues into the hectic space in between people on the rush around lunch time. His hat is a little crooked and makes him stand out, as someone who has seen and lived a lot.

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