Boston had been singing Uganda’s praises for weeks, and I was anticipating the country with perhaps over-eager expectations. ‘There is a guesthouse in every village,’ he said as the border point of Mutukula came in sight, ‘and you can’t fail to find food. There are even internet cafés. Lev, you will see – Uganda is a different world to these backwaters.’
There is a small rainforest that straddles the Tanzania–Uganda border that teems with colobus monkeys. Boston and I spent two days hacking our way through the vines until, eventually, we discovered tracks made by illegal loggers and were able to make steadier progress north. At Mutukula we made the official crossing. According to Boston, now that we were in Uganda, we would see civilisation flourish – but, for the first day, there was only more impenetrable forest. It wasn’t until we banked back east to re-join the course of the river that we would come across our first town and I would see if Boston’s bold claims were true.
A few kilometres north of where the river meets the shore of Lake Victoria sits the fishing village of Kasansero. The phrase has connotations of a small, idyllic community with a long-established way of life, but Kasansero was more properly known as a ‘landing site’, a warren of houses and industry that had sprung up for workers to take maximum advantage of the lake. Like other landing sites along the shores of the lake, Kasansero had been founded to harvest the famous Nile Perch that flourish in the lake. In the 1950s, when Uganda was still a British colony, the prevailing view had been that Lake Victoria was an under-exploited resource that could feed great swathes of East Africa – and the Nile Perch had been introduced to the lake to create a new fishing industry. Places like Kasansero appeared all along the shore, people flocked to the lake to build businesses, and a new economy began to boom. But, though Uganda’s local population benefited, the introduction of the invasive fish was an environmental disaster. The Nile Perch are brutal predators. With no natural controls on their numbers, they colonised the lake with astonishing speed, condemning other species to extinction.
As the shanties closed in around us, great crowds began to throng the streets. Our arrival had been heralded by an article in the Ugandan press, written by a photographer and freelance journalist named Matthias Mugisha. The piece in New Vision magazine had announced to Uganda’s literary classes that a white man was daring to walk the length of the Nile, and crowds of fishermen, drunk from bags of cheap waragi gin, lined the streets to welcome us. One vociferous rascal even had a microphone and announced our arrival to the eager mob. Off to the side of the first street, African rap blared out of big black speakers sitting outside a barber shop where a badly drawn sign advertised a trendy mullet cut. Half of the population seemed to be wearing red and white Arsenal football shirts, the other half whatever ill-fitting garments had come over from Europe on the last charity delivery.
‘But how do they all know?’ I asked, as Boston and I were subsumed by the crowd. Surely these fishermen weren’t the types to read Uganda’s literary magazines.
‘This lot don’t read,’ Boston confirmed. ‘Not unless it’s the Red Pepper, full of scandal and what-not. They wouldn’t be interested in our trip unless you’d been terrorising young boys like those corrupt pastors they have here.’
At that moment a man emerged from the crowd, wearing a guilty grin. I could tell instantly that he wasn’t one of Kasansero’s fishermen.
‘How do you enjoy your welcome to Uganda, Mr Tembula?’
‘Matthias,’ Boston began, ‘it’s madness!’
I looked sidelong at Boston; despite his protestations, the fact was he seemed to be enjoying being the hero of the day.
‘Tembula’ means ‘to walk’ in the Bugandan language, and that is what Matthias had called me in his article: the white walker. Now, as we followed him deeper into Kasansero’s dense streets, that was what the crowd relentlessly cheered. One of them tried to force a bag of the cheap gin into my hands, but most were keeping it for themselves. Even the workers about to depart for their night fishing were still having a few for the road.
Being a Ugandan – and, as a journalist, prone to a bit of playacting – Matthias took my hand and led me towards the shore of the lake. Dusk was deepening and we would soon have to find somewhere to stay, but first I wanted to see the shore.
The waters of the lake appeared through the filthy streets like a light at the end of a very dark tunnel. Beyond the shacks and corrugated tin structures lay the beach, which seemed completely crammed with boats. Most of them had little coloured flags at the bow, and others, less quaint, used white plastic bags instead. Many barely looked like they could float, although they must have done judging by the size of the catches coming in. The air reeked of fish and you couldn’t walk across the sand without stepping in guts or tripping over discarded bits of netting.
Seeing the shore for the first time came as an incredible relief. It was everything I had imagined, and as I stood listening to the gentle sound of the water and the insects that buzzed around its shallows, I got to thinking about what it must have felt like for John Hanning Speke, the first European to ‘discover’ it. Speke and his fellow explorer, Richard Burton, had been on an expedition to locate the Source of the Nile when they reached this great water’s southernmost shore and named it after the reigning monarch. What they had discovered was one of the biggest freshwater lakes in the world, second only to Lake Superior in the United States, with more than 26,000 square miles of water. To me, as to them, Lake Victoria seemed a vast inland sea – and I was left in no doubt as to why, for many years, it was considered the true source of the Nile. The Nile is, in fact, the only river to drain out of the lake – all the water here would travel down that conduit, out to the sea.
John Hanning Speke was an officer in the British Indian Army, born in Devon in 1827. He was twenty-seven years old when he first came to Africa, joining an expedition into Somalia led by Burton, an explorer already famous for his African endeavours. Burton was a scant six years older than Speke but already a seasoned campaigner by the time they met. The legends about Burton were many and vast; if ever there was a true polymath it was Burton, who – as well as being a geographer and explorer – was also known for his writing, including poetry, and for his amazing capacity to absorb and retain languages. Some sources claim he was fluent in as many as twenty-nine tongues. Speke and Burton’s expedition into Somalia, in 1854, was disastrous and very nearly got both of them killed; attacked by indigenous tribesmen, Speke found himself captured and stabbed several times by spears, while Burton escaped with a javelin skewering both cheeks. But their dances with death hardly deterred the two explorers and they returned to Africa together in 1856, consumed by their desire to be the first to locate the source of the Nile. This trip was no less arduous. Both men became stricken with tropical diseases and, when Burton was too sick to carry on, Speke followed rumours of a great body of water. It was then that he first set eyes on the lake in front of me now.
Matthias asked me how it felt to be here, and the truth is I could not find the words to express what I felt. I’d arrived at the first major milestone in this journey, reaching a body of water that was vital to the explorers of old, and perhaps for the first time I felt like I was truly walking in their footsteps.
‘Now, Mr Tembula,’ said Matthias, ‘you can begin your journey properly.’
‘Properly?’
‘You know, Lev, those hundred miles you’ve just done?’
‘Five hundred,’ I corrected him.
‘Well, it was nice, but you could have saved your legs. Here in Uganda, we know the truth. The real source of the Nile is here, at Jinja, like your Speke used to say.’
Boston’s face was set rigid. I could tell he was about to explode, but I looked at him and we let it pass. Now was not the time for yet another argument about the true source of the Nile. I would leave that to be squabbled over by the ghosts of Burton and Speke. I was only here to keep on with our walk.
In the morning we stood outside Kasansero, on a hill overlooking the small landing site, where fishermen were already bringing in their catches of the night. The graveyard we stood in was simple and unadorned. Here was another reminder that the river we had been walking along connected Africa – beneath our feet was yet another mass grave housing the remains of thousands of victims of the Rwandan genocide. There is a man still living in Kasansero who personally buried more than two thousand bodies here. In May 1994, the first bloated corpses of those Tutsis who had been cast into the river and not been eaten by crocodiles had begun to reach Lake Victoria. If ever there was any doubt that the river that emerged from the lake at Jinja was the same one that entered it just south of Kasansero, here was the most grisly evidence: when the bodies entered the lake in the south they drifted north on the current, forming a gruesome trail of some ten thousand corpses across the lake and proving that the water that begins in Rwanda is the very same that leaves the lake and becomes the mighty Nile herself.
There are other gravesites outside Kasansero, and as we tramped back into the landing site to reach the shore I was reminded of the town’s most nefarious claim to fame. Kasansero, Matthias had told us, is reputed to be the place from which the AIDS virus first spread around the world.
‘Perhaps it spread from here,’ said Boston, keen to play devil’s advocate as ever, ‘but it came from the Congo. It was a trial on polio by some scientists that went wrong.’ He chuckled hysterically. ‘We all thought you whites were out to kill us.’
This seemed a strange moment for Boston to return to his usual theme of Congolese supremacy, but before I could chip in Matthias had other ideas.
‘It came from Tanzania,’ he said. ‘Prostitutes. Who knows where they got it from? Either way, this is where it started spreading.’
We had come back into Kasansero now. Some estimates put the percentage of people infected with HIV here at as high as seventy per cent, and one of the first buildings we passed was the settlement’s AIDS orphanage, where children watched us from the doors. ‘These fishermen just thought it was malaria,’ Matthias went on, ‘or flu. Pretty soon, they all got it and sent it back to their families. It wasn’t long before it reached Kampala.’
Thirty years ago, the world had not heard of HIV or AIDS, but in Kasansero people had started falling ill, and nobody knew the cause. The people here called the disease ‘slim’ because of the shocking weight loss most sufferers experienced before dying. Hundreds died as the infection first took grip, and the deaths haven’t stopped since.
As we reached the shore, Boston whispered, ‘It’s because they all share their wives, these dirty Bugandans.’
‘Everyone knows it. If you marry a woman, you are entitled to her sisters – and, likewise, your brothers are entitled to your wife. No wonder they all got AIDS. Look at these people!’ Matthias was watching a group of fishermen spreading out countless fish on the sand, to be salted and dried in the day’s sun. ‘Don’t shake their hands, Lev, you’ll catch it!’
Matthias was smiling, but I couldn’t bring myself to smile back. There is a gallows humour among Africans who speak of AIDS, but the thought that seven in every ten of the people around me would live short lives because of this scourge didn’t seem so funny to me.
‘They’ve come to accept it,’ shrugged Matthias as he showed us to a boat. ‘It’s no worse than malaria to them. If they die, they die. Most don’t bother even getting checked.’
We spent the morning out on the water, fishing with one of the locals. As Kasansero dwindled on the shore, I found myself glad to be away from it, drawn to the purity of the lake. The water glistened pristine in the golden midday light. The stench, the filth, the AIDS and the noise seemed irrelevant out on the seemingly limitless water. It really was, as John Hanning Speke had described it, a tropical sea.
Back on the shore, the day’s first catches were being landed. Crowds of ragged-looking fisherman were hauling their nets in from the water, or dragging their boats up onto the beach. The landing site hummed with the smell of newly caught fish. Great piles of tilapia, the freshwater fish common in the shallower waters of the lake, were being sorted and laid out, gills opening uselessly against the air.
Among the crowd one man in particular stood out. It was his eyes that drew me to him; they betrayed indescribable sadness. He seemed to have noticed me too, because I had not yet found my shore legs again when he made his way through the fish to find me. I got the impression he had been waiting.
‘Please, sir,’ he began, in English, ‘come and see my children.’
Still feeling groggy from the boat, and having had quite enough attention from boisterous teenagers on the beach, I was in no mood to see more children, but the man introduced himself as Moses and there seemed to be an element of begging in his tone. ‘Please,’ he repeated. ‘I have one hundred and twenty-three to look after.’
I looked at him dubiously. Any man with a hundred and twenty-three children is either a liar or mass fornicator on the scale of Genghis Khan – but those eyes told me differently. I gestured for Boston, and followed Moses up shore, through the ragged crowd.
Moses, it turned out, wasn’t a prolific womaniser, and nor did he have any actual children of his own. He was, in fact, the overseer of Kasansero’s AIDS orphanage and, as he led us past piles of plastic bottles, discarded nets and stinking fish bones that littered the narrow, muddy streets with open sewers on either side, I remembered Matthias’s declarations of the day before. Palms and orchids grew wonderfully out of the heaps of shit. Goats bleated from doorways and the occasional cow would munch without care on a piece of car tyre. All the while, reggae blared out of the barber shops and all-day drinking dens. It was, I decided, like an even unhealthier version of Sodom and Gomorrah.
We reached the orphanage soon after. A collection of wooden huts with tin roofs were filled with dormitory beds, each housing three or four children apiece. A classroom consisted of a tin roof with some scaffold holding it up, and there was – to my surprise – a neat little garden where sweet potato and beans grew. As Moses showed us around, some of the children were digging. ‘It’s the holidays,’ he said, ‘so they must work. It’s the only way I can feed them all.’
Moses led us into a small hut. On the walls a poster warned against sin and the evils of fornication. ‘Abstinence is the way of the Lord!’ declared one. ‘Jesus loves those who avoid the sins of the flesh,’ read another. They seemed righteous and perhaps even backward to my Western eyes, and Boston snorted at their mention of God, but they all made sense against the third poster we saw. ‘HIV is Real!’ it declared, simple and stark.
‘There was a census done, ten years ago,’ Moses began. ‘Of a hundred people, only eight were reported to be HIV negative. This is where AIDs came from. The first reported case in Uganda was right here, on this very street. It was a woman called Nafakeero. She’d gone to Tanzania to trade in the markets at Kanyigo, and when she came back she fell very ill. The weight fell off her.’
‘It’s because of the hookers here,’ Boston suddenly interjected. ‘All these fishermen, they do nothing but fish and fuck, fish and fuck. All day long. No wonder they all have AIDS. I can smell it in the air.’
‘Boston,’ I said, with a stare that he understood to mean, ‘Shut up!’ In spite of his insensitivity, though, he did have a point. When landing sites like Kasansero sprang up to take advantage of the lake, the effect was of a gold rush. Fishermen flocked here, leaving their families behind, and so did businesses who could take advantage of the new populations. Traders, tinkers, barbers and restaurateurs came – and, so, too did the prostitutes. When I had asked the fishermen I was out with what they spent their money on, ‘Ladies’ seemed to be the general consensus.
‘The fishermen I was out with on the lake, they talk about it like it’s malaria or flu.’
‘That is one of our biggest problems,’ said Moses. ‘After Nafakeero, it spread around Uganda like wildfire – and all because we dismissed it.’
I wondered if, in a continent that has faced up to and found a way to live with the constant threat of malaria and other tropical diseases, it was easier to dismiss AIDS as ‘just another illness’ than it was in the West. But Moses had other explanations. ‘At the time,’ he explained, ‘people blamed it on witchcraft. They said those afflicted must be cursed. In the end, we put some of them onto islands in the lake and wouldn’t let people visit them. We treated it like leprosy, something that could be contained, but we were not fast enough. By then it was already a way of life.’
‘In the Congo, we did not blame witches. We all thought that the lubricant in condoms was to blame – that you could actually get AIDS from a condom!’
‘It is a lack of education,’ said Moses.
‘We all thought you whites were out to kill us, sending condoms here!’ By now Boston was roaring with uncontrolled laughter. Then, at once, he stopped, and fixed Moses with a look. ‘Do you have AIDS?’ he asked, quite nonchalantly.
My heart plunged at Boston’s lack of tact, but Moses simply smiled benevolently and shook his head. ‘I am one of the fortunate sons. Both my parents died of AIDS when I was a boy, and I could so easily have been infected. But I was not, and this is why I wanted to help all of these children.’
We walked back into the sunlight. All around, the children were playing. Most of them had barely known their parents; Moses was all they had. He had not asked for any money, only that – through me – the world might know a little of his story. All the same, I handed him a few dollars. It was nothing more than a token, perhaps enough to feed a few of these children for a while. With Boston still shaking his head, we left Moses behind. Moved by his complete selflessness, we went back across the rubbish dumps, back to the beach, to watch those teenage fishermen laugh and joke. Soon, I imagined, some of them would have children of their own; and then, perhaps, they too would fall prey to ‘slim’ and disappear, leaving those children behind for Moses to look after. I wondered how many of those children would make adulthood, and how many of those would go on to fish on this lake and produce more children for the orphanage to take in. Moses was right: there was only one way the situation could change, and it was not with a few dollars pressed into his hand. It was with education, a changing of hearts and minds, the disintegration of all the myths of witchcraft, treacherous American scientists, and poisoned condoms, that thrived in places like this. But here, among people who either didn’t notice or didn’t seem to care, it was difficult to imagine how that could ever come to pass.
The following morning we walked north, away from Kasansero, with the glittering expanses of the lake on my right, a vast forest inland to my left, and the soft tread of sand beneath my feet.