Jinja and Northwards, February 2014
A week in the bustling suburbs of Kampala seemed to pass by with alarming speed, but Sunday was our final night before we walked east, along the northern shore of the lake. In the morning, on 2 February, we restored ourselves with a morning coffee at the Speke Café, and then resumed our long trek.
It was two hard days’ walk from Kampala to the river town of Jinja, following the main highway through the Mabira Forest, dodging trucks laden with logs that Boston was sure had been felled illegally. Sometimes, when the road was quiet, all that could be heard was the chattering of colobus monkeys or the occasional dog-like bark of a baboon in the surrounding jungle.
Jinja appeared as a vision of such incredible relief that I was almost too exhausted to notice the view. For all the arguments about the true source of the river, Jinja presented the first stretch of river that was incontestably the Nile; it was at this point that the river took on its moniker and began its journey due north. I’m sure a lot of Ugandans would have argued that I shouldn’t have wasted my time with the previous seven hundred miles, but getting to the hillside overlooking the point Speke had famously declared the ‘source’ was more than worth the perambulation.
Speke set foot on the grassy hill overlooking the point at which the river pours out of the lake on 28 July 1862. Clad in a tweed shooting jacket and sporting an enormous beard, he had waited for this moment all his life. Two years previously, he had looked out upon this same lake from the south, as his companion Richard Burton lay ill with fever, and declared that it was the fabled source of the Nile. It was to begin a conflict that lasted until the end of his life. Speke and Burton returned from that expedition separately, Speke going back to England whilst Burton rested in Arabia. According to Burton, the pair had made a gentleman’s agreement that Speke would not make any announcements until Burton had made it home safely and they could share the glory. Speke, however, went the very next day to the Royal Geographical Society and declared that he – and he alone – had discovered the source of the Nile. Thus began a rivalry that was to continue for the next five years.
To Burton’s chagrin, the eminent fellows of the RGS hailed Speke a hero and granted him more funds to return to the Nile and prove the theory by reaching the point at which the river actually exits the lake. So, in 1862, Speke – this time choosing a rather less argumentative walking partner in the form of James Augustus Grant – set off, while Burton wrote books and bitter letters from England. Burton contended that the Nile actually flowed from a number of sources and that Speke was a speculative opportunist, a bad friend – and, worse, a terrible geographer. In many ways, Burton was right. Up to that point, Speke had never actually laid eyes upon the Nile and, until he reached Jinja and saw it for himself, his theory that Lake Victoria was its headwater was pure conjecture.
Nowadays, an ugly red obelisk about fifteen feet tall, made of chipped marble and bearing a grubby plaque, marks the point at which Speke reached Jinja and uttered his famous words – relayed back to London and the eager ears of the RGS by telegraph – ‘The Nile is settled.’
As I glanced out across the bay, I felt, like that rogue Speke must have done, a sense of wondrous magic – and, I must admit, a little pride.
The lake, and the emergent river, didn’t give itself up until the very last moment. This was exactly how I wanted it to be revealed, like a secret being finally uncovered. The view, I knew, had changed since Speke stood here, the landscape redesigned by a great hydroelectric power station and dam, built in the early 1950s to harness the power of the river. Ripon Falls, over which he had looked, had been swallowed up by the dam, but the evidence of a wide, low cascade was still here in outcrops of drowned rocks and a small island on which a single tree flourished. Some iron girders still jutted from rock on the shore – I imagined them to be the detritus left behind by an early attempt to build a jetty. To the south, Lake Victoria opened up, a singular, glistening expanse. The southern horizon was obscured by rows of jagged islands sitting in the lake.
On this western side of the river Boston and I stood alone, but from the other side came distant voices. In the heat haze I could just make out the east bank full of vendors selling trinkets to the tourists.
The news that Speke had indeed ‘confirmed’ Lake Victoria as the source of the Nile infuriated Burton, who had been watching his progress with envy, so much so that he made a public declaration that, since Speke hadn’t actually bothered following the river North to a point at which it had already been explored, then nothing had been proven at all. To settle matters once and for all, a debate was arranged, to be held in Bath on September 15th, 1864, where all the great names in geography and exploration would be assembled and, finally, the rivals could slog it out over maps and oratory.
On the morning of 15 September 1864, Burton and Speke sat at opposite ends of the hall, and among the crowd were some of the most famous people of the day: Roderick Murchison, president of the RGS, and the explorer David Livingstone, who was by then a household name. The crowds were all there for the stars of the show – Burton and Speke, who were to clash that afternoon – but first, as in all Victorian meetings, there were the minutes and parish notices to deal with. Speke, never one for form, excused himself and decided to kill a bit of time by doing a spot of grouse hunting at his cousin’s nearby country estate. A few hours later, just after 2.30pm, a messenger burst into the hall and muttered something into the host Murchison’s ear: Speke was dead. He had been killed in an accidental discharge of his shotgun as he clambered over a style. Murmurs reverberated around the room. Burton’s face went white as a sheet. Some whispered that Burton had perhaps arranged the murder of his rival, others that Speke had committed suicide. Burton, aghast, had never wanted his companion dead – even the Nile wasn’t that important.
After that, Burton was never the same again – he was always to blame himself for the terrible tragedy. For him, Speke had been a worthy subordinate who had let his ego get the better of him. The truth was, to Burton their rivalry was all a game – it was the journey that mattered, not the destination – and friendship counted more than winning. For Speke, it seemed, all that mattered was the Nile – and, in the end, he won. In death, his glory was secured – and Burton would forever after be seen as the quintessential eccentric traveller, whose subordinate had claimed the ultimate prize.
At the bottom of the gardens, Boston and I found a little boat that would take us onto the Nile and motored out to a little island in the centre of the river, at the exact spot where it meets the lake. Here, an entrepreneurial soul had set up a gift shop selling awful T-shirts and key-rings. It was a dilapidated shack, perched on jagged rocks, and its floor was three inches deep in Nile water – but the shopkeeper didn’t care. He seemed to think of it as his own individual kingdom and welcomed us warmly, pointing out all the little souvenirs and keepsakes we could buy. Boston began to peruse the tat, but I just wanted to wade out from the outcrop and stand for a moment on this momentous spot. At the edge of the rocks a crude sign read ‘This is where the river Nile starts its 4,000 mile journey to the north.’ I gazed in that direction, tracking the great river as it cut a gorge through the forested valley.
Boston found me standing there, silently staring into the north.
‘What is wrong, Lev?’
I couldn’t put it into words. Gone was my wonder at standing in the same place as Speke and seeing the same things he had seen, more than 150 years ago. I was, I admitted, beginning to feel something very different. I wouldn’t say it to Boston, but I was suddenly affected by an overwhelming sense of terror. I was going to have to walk every last one of those miles and, across history, they had defeated better men than me.
The town of Jinja began life as a fishing village but its unique place at the mouth of the river made it a melting pot too. For much of Africa’s history, the Nile was a great divider, with different languages and cultures evolving along its eastern and western banks, the water itself a barrier to their intermingling. Jinja, however, was special. Jinja was one of those rare places where the river itself could be crossed, by a natural bridge of rocks at the top of the Ripon Falls – and, because of this unique geography, Jinja naturally attracted traders and migrants. Even the name Jinja is suggestive of a place where men from different worlds could come and find one another; in the languages of the Buganda and Basoga people, who lived on different sides of the river, it means the very same thing: the place of rocks.
The fishing village became a town in 1907, when the British named it an administrative centre, and Lake Victoria first began to be exploited for travel and industry. Now, it is Uganda’s second biggest town, with a population of almost 100,000. Boston and I arrived, dirty and dishevelled, and were thankful of a return to civilisation. Perhaps we had been spoiled by our week in Kampala, but from here the way north would feel increasingly rural and remote. It was time to spoil ourselves one last time.
We met my old friend Pete Meredith at the ‘Nile River Explorers’, a tented campsite and hangout for backpackers, ageing hippies and that most eccentric of breeds – the expatriate. Amid the lush tropical gardens, where vervets screeched incessantly from the tall branches and rock pythons slithered around the banks, long haired gap year types spoke of spiritual enlightenment and kayakers told tales of the ‘Nile Special’, a particularly daunting rapid just downstream. The river was beautiful and shrouded in mist. It was the weekend of the Nile River Festival, an event which saw hundreds of paddlers from around the world descend upon the white water north of Jinja.
‘It’s gonna be wild, bru.’
Pete Meredith’s distinctive South African accent was tinged with excitement. We’d first met some years before, when I had been roaming East Africa in search of adventure. In fact, it was Pete who introduced me to Boston so, in many ways, the reunion was an integral part of my journey. It simply had to happen.
‘I bet you’ve got some stories eh?’ he smiled, but I knew better than to regale this man with any. He’d been there and done it all and there was nothing I could tell him that he didn’t already know. This was a man who’d seen his best friend get eaten by a crocodile. In spite of his laid-back style, this tall vegetarian rafting guide was as hard as nails. He’d served in the South African Paratroopers and lived in the bush most of his life. Also for most of his life he’d drunk like a fish and partied hard – until recently, when he’d met Leila, a vegan yoga teacher, and together they’d travelled to India in search of enlightenment. Nowadays, they lived in a shipping container in Jinja and spent their time on the river. It was the Nile that brought Pete to Uganda; it was this river that provided the sole meaning of his existence. It isn’t surprising then that, in 2004, he was the man who led the first team to travel its entire length in a raft. He’d also been the source of much help in planning my own expedition.
‘Whatcha gonna do about South Sudan? It’s not good there at the moment, but you’ll have some fun . . .’
By fun, Pete really meant danger. I liked Pete; in spite of his new hippie leanings he was a soldier at heart.
‘You’re in good hands with Boston, but don’t let him rip you off!’
As Pete slapped Boston on the back, Boston’s face broke into an expression of disbelief. ‘Mr Pete, how dare you! You know I would give my life for Lev . . .’
‘Let’s go have some beers,’ Pete said.
In the NRE, it seemed that all the expatriates in Uganda had gathered together. Pete was unusual, having shunned life’s material things to live the life of his choosing – but not as unusual as many of the expats communing here. That’s the thing about ex-pats – they really are often very odd. It was fascinating to see them in their adopted habitat, carefree and wild. As Pete explained, you only had to spend a few minutes speaking to one before you discovered who coveted whose servant, who had slept with whose wife and who had bribed which local chief. In Jinja there were Americans, Dutch, French, South Africans and plenty of Brits – and, like elsewhere in Africa, they ranged from travellers to mercenaries, charity workers to missionaries. Each had their own agenda, whether it was money, oil, God – or simply the opportunity for bragging rights.
‘Not me,’ said Pete. ‘I’m here for the river. Nothing else.’
Soon, outside the bar, the mist would burn away, and the Nile would be revealed to the hundreds of kayakers who were about to converge on it for a three-day celebration of daredevilry on the water. I had already heard Jinja spoken about as a ‘black hole’, a kind of vortex that sucked people in and refused to let them go – and the Nile River Festival was part of the reason. It is at the heart of Uganda’s booming tourism sector and, as Pete led Boston and me to its banks, sport lovers and groupies of every nationality were getting ready. Colourful streamers and stalls lined the riverbank, and the sounds of carnival were in the air.
By the time Boston and I reached the river, the party was already in full swing. Music was blasting out of speakers, beer was being drunk, and at first it seemed that kayaking was the last thing on anybody’s mind. Rather, the festival was about one thing: beer, and how it might be used to celebrate life along the water.
‘Check out the Special,’ said Pete, pointing to a seething explosion of foam. On the river, waves cascaded over enormous boulders to create a swirling rapid. It was the famous ‘Nile Special’ – unique because it performs its aquatic marvels 365 days of the year. Suddenly a red flash flipped in the air, spurting out of the rapids like an insignificant bean. It was a paddler – a professional, by the way he landed upside down in the white water but still managed to perform an Eskimo roll and get back up. The crowd cheered and he raised a fist, whooping as he passed by.
‘It’ll all be gone soon,’ said Pete with sudden melancholy.
‘Gone?’
‘Because of the dam. If they build another dam here, like they plan to, none of these rapids will be left and we’ll all be left without jobs. Not just us ex-pats – all the Ugandans who work in tourism too. People come from everywhere to see this water, and the government wants to fuck it up with another dam. It’s a total waste of time. You know, it’ll only generate 180 megawatts – but it’ll destroy twenty eight kilometres of river . . .’
I’d already seen the Owen Falls Dam at the mouth of Victoria – built in 1954, that was the dam which had submerged Ripon Falls, thus destroying the famed view that Speke would have seen. But at least it created 350 megawatts of energy, and submerged only two kilometres. This new one was a false economy.
‘Once it’s gone, it’s gone. The river will never be the same again. Fifty thousand people a year come to Uganda to get wet in these rapids. That’s a lot of cash – but it goes to the locals and not the government. That’s why they want to build this thing. It’s just greed. Think of all the people that will lose their homes.’
It was to be a story I’d hear over and over. Dams, and the taming of the Nile, seemed to be a constant feature of local politics, not just here in Uganda but further north as well. The Nile, it seemed, was all things to all men. A source of drinking water, food, entertainment, and above all else, money. The Nile is life.
But we had dallied long enough, first in Kampala and now here, this strange riverside vortex where, it seemed, if you did not leave straight away, you were destined to stay forever – just like Pete. After one last night of relaxation, watching the kayakers out on the river, we woke with raging hangovers and set off for the north.
‘Once upon a time, in the Congo,’ said Boston as we were approaching the village of Baale, ‘I met an old man near to the Ituri Forest. He lived just on the edge of the jungle and had got back from a hunting trip with his sons. He was a simple man, and he lived off wild bananas and bush meat. That day, he’d killed a porcupine and a monkey and was about to roast them over an open fire. I’d been walking for a few days and wanted to know how much further there was to go, so I asked him. “Bwana. How far to the other side of the forest?” And the old man laughed. “Son,” he said, with a hand on my shoulder, “I have lived here all my life. I am an old man now and I tell you this. These trees, this forest, it goes on forever. If you walk into the woods and keep going, no-one will ever see you again. You’ll be lost. There is no end.”’
Three days upriver from Jinja, Boston and I stood in front of what I could only describe as a vision from hell. On one side, the river cut its course north; on the other, what had once been virgin jungle was now a fresh plantation of tree stumps, blackened by fire, the indigenous forest being forced back by flames to make way for farming ground. The Nile was growing broader the longer we walked and, at this point, was almost a mile wide. But, as it became more powerful, so too did the opportunity for harnessing its power grow – not only in the dam we had seen outside Jinja, but in the potential for irrigation and agriculture as well. The river brought farmers here, and farmers meant deforestation. The Nile, we were seeing, brings life – but it also takes it away.
‘Did he really believe that, Boston? The old man?’
Boston scoffed, ‘He thought the forest was endless, and in it the animals and fruit would continue to be there until the end of the world. That’s the problem with Africans, Lev – they don’t see a problem with chopping down the trees, especially if there’s a profit to be made. See, the Mabira Forest we passed through – it looks real, but the truth is it’s like those Hollywood movie sets. It’s a façade. Go into the woods fifty metres and behind the old mahogany and teak trees you’ll find destruction, where the loggers have been. The government does nothing to stop it.’
It was true. In the Mabira we’d seen five-hundred-year-old trees sawn down at a rate of ten a day by teenagers who’d been paid three dollars by the landlord. This was big money for a poor villager, and with the economics of the industry working like that, what hope was there for convincing local Ugandan people to leave the forests alone? It’s all well and good preaching the wonders of conservation, but not to men with families to feed and roofs to keep over their heads.
We spent the next days walking north, but the further we went the more apparent the devastation became. Instead of hacking our way through jungle, here we walked through coffee plantations, banana trees and maize fields, all planted amid the shorn trunks, the uprooting of their stumps being prohibitively expensive. Seas of white ash made it seem as if it had been snowing. In the plantations only a few living trees remained, left there deliberately to provide shelter from sun for the farmers. On the third day, instead of baobabs, vines and knotted mahogany, a flat, unrelenting sugar cane plantation stretched for as far as the eye could see. Gently waving in the wind, the twelve foot high sugar cane was eerily silent. Boston and I stopped to survey it. Of all the things we had seen, this, to me, seemed the most atrocious: a ghastly vision of man’s victory against nature, and a visible statement of how consumerism, not conservation, was dictating Africa’s future. Sugar – that sweet crystal craved by millions in the West – had utterly vanquished an ancient biosphere, and in it millions upon millions of creatures, from the smallest chameleon to the most intelligent of primates.
‘It makes you sick,’ said Boston as we took off into the cane.
But it wasn’t sickness I felt. I felt trapped, just like the Africans running this plantation must have felt trapped – by economics, by industry, by the reality of putting food on the table at the end of each night. Africa has to develop, its people have to be empowered to use their natural resources – but it brought a tear to my eye, to think of the forest that had once been here, vanished forever so that we in the West can get fat and rot our teeth.
We weaved through narrow channels between the stalks, trying to keep to the river, but sometimes the pathways would go off at an angle and we’d have to blaze our own way, causing the only living creatures here – bush rats, mice and rattle snakes – to scuttle off into the cane’s interior. Soon, we began to smell smoke, a tell-tale sign of further deforestation somewhere to the north. Up ahead, a thick column of black smoke was rising into the sky. I judged it to be about two miles distant and, as we wended our way closer, it became difficult to see what was on the other side.
We emerged from the cane.
Ahead of us lay mile upon mile of charred bush. This deforestation was fresh and, not far away, it was happening right now. A wall of fire, where scores of men had hacked, chopped and ploughed up the trees into a straight line of ecological debris stretching east and west, blocked the way forward. As Boston and I watched, we could see the march of the flames. They were going north, annihilating everything in their path.
Boston and I followed the fire north, walking in fresh devastation. Until now, the method by which the forests were cleared for agriculture had been abstract to me, but here it was impossible to ignore. It touched all five of my senses. When the smoke was too strong, tears budded in my eyes and I kept having to knead them so that I could see.
‘It’s senseless. This is what makes Africa unique, and they’re killing it.’
For the first time, Boston wasn’t merely playing devil’s advocate when he disagreed. ‘You whites cut down your forests hundreds of years ago,’ he said. ‘You had your industrial revolution, and when you needed wood you took it. Well, now we need ours. We need to plant crops to feed our children, and plant sugar so you can feed yours whatever shit you feed them.’
He was angry at me for getting on my high horse and, as we found a way through the fire, I couldn’t blame him. We’d cut down England’s forests to build a navy, to make our own charcoal so that we could power the locomotives and mills that, in their time, had made Britain great – and allowed us to take over the parts of the world through which I was now walking. Why shouldn’t Africa do the same, and finally exploit its own natural resources? Yet, for all his damn logic, even Boston couldn’t hide his sadness at the irreversible change going on around us. Never again would this landscape look the same. The acacias, the birds, the buffalo, the antelope and monkeys – all of that was gone. And even more difficult to swallow was the hypocrisy I felt at bemoaning it, and my inability to conceive of a single answer to what was going on all around me.
On the other side of the flames, a group of men were busy preparing the ground for the march of the fire. In order to direct it, channels of debris had to be built and others cleared, so that the march of the flames could be controlled. Half-naked, these men turned to watch us arrive. Boston approached to introduce us, but it quickly became apparent that they were half-drunk; a bottle of waragi gin was lying on the ground, by the rim of a deep charcoal pit.
‘Five days,’ Boston translated, as the man chattered at him in Bugandan. ‘It took them five days to clear all this.’
‘Imagine what they could do in fifty.’
‘A man’s got to eat,’ said Boston and, as the other man continued to talk, his eyes were drawn to the charcoal pit. ‘That’s his pay,’ Boston went on. ‘He gets to keep some wood to turn into charcoal, which he can sell at market.’
I was about to get on my high horse again – these men charged with destroying the ancient forests weren’t even paid to do it? – when I heard a tiny squeaking from somewhere up ahead, where the bush was still thick and green, helplessly awaiting its annihilation. Leaving Boston to talk to this man, I crossed the desolation. Before I had gone two steps inside the acacias I saw a vervet monkey, hunkered down in the undergrowth. Vervets are a small but highly intelligent monkey, with white-grey fur and tiny black faces. Studies have shown them to have almost human characteristics – vervets have been documented suffering from stress, anxiety disorders, and even engaging in social alcohol use – and I had never seen it more closely than in this little monkey. She was a little more than a foot tall and her face was creased in anxiety that looked peculiarly human. In the bush she strained to get a better view of me. I watched her, unable to descry why she was risking the fire and smoke and wasn’t fleeing deeper into the forest like every other animal.
Then all became apparent. From between the trees, two boys appeared. They were no older than seven or eight and, between them, they were holding what, at first, appeared to be a small rat. Instantly, the vervet set up an alarm call. The language of vervets has been deciphered to have distinct calls for every predator of the forest, but this must have been a very specific call – because, as the boys got closer, I saw what the vervet already knew: the animal in their hands was not a rat at all. It was, in fact, a tiny monkey – a baby, not more than a couple of days old. It was clearly the offspring of the mother fretting in the undergrowth.
While I had been watching, Boston had come to my side. Apprising himself of the situation, he began to bark at the boys. ‘Give it to her,’ he said, indicating the vervet’s panicked mother, but the boys just looked at him dumbly.
‘What do they want with it?’ I asked.
Behind the boys, an elderly man was appearing from the undergrowth. It seemed he had been watching our little confrontation play out, because he was grinning, with something approaching cunning in his eyes. Boston began to bark at him in Bugandan, before the man gave a sanguine shrug and chattered back.
‘He says they take it to market. They can get a good price for bush meat. Then they’ll use that money to buy food for their families.’ Boston stopped. ‘He says – does the white man want to buy it?’
I looked at the man and had the distinct impression that this was not truly an act of desperation by an impoverished family. This was a tiny movement in a much more complex economy, one that encouraged the impoverished to plunder the forest’s natural resources without thought of the future. Like the drunk villagers channelling fire behind us, this man and his children were pawns put into play by much bigger corporations, whose only responsibility was to their own profit. With a little help, locals like this could be taught how to look after the land and still make a living from it – but that was too much of an effort.
‘Don’t buy it off him, Lev. He thinks you’re a weak European. He thinks you’ll pay top dollar, because you’re too soft.’
‘I wasn’t going to buy it from him, Boston.’ Instead, I strode towards the boys and, before they could protest, simply lifted the baby vervet from their hands.
In mine, the vervet was no less frightened. Ignoring their protestations, I strode into the bush, clambering over smouldering embers to where the mother had last been seen. Sure enough, she was still waiting – but, on my approach, she set up the same startled cry as before. To this desperate mother, I was no better than the boys I could sense stealing after me, eager to reclaim their catch.
Panic took the mother and, before I could get near, she scuttled off to the sanctuary of a bush. Creeping near, I placed the baby vervet on the ground. Behind me, Boston was barking at the boys to go back to the forest, but I remained fixed on the vervets, hoping the mother could be coaxed out of her hiding. Slowly, I beat my own retreat. Only when I was some metres away did the mother emerge from the scrub. Tentatively, she crossed to where her baby was yowling – but still she seemed unsure. After sniffing the baby from a distance, neatly evading its grappling hands, she turned tail again, and disappeared into the undergrowth. Thirty minutes later, the baby was still there, stumbling in circles, and the mother was nowhere to be seen. Who can tell what truly goes on in the minds of animals? But it seemed to me, watching the baby left alone, that the mother was afraid of its new smell, corrupted by the hands of man. She had abandoned it.
‘Let’s go,’ muttered Boston, in sadness.
Over my shoulder, the boys were still lurking – and, even though I knew there were countless other animals being destroyed in the forest today, I did not want this one on my conscience. Ignoring Boston, I crept close and retrieved the vervet. Instantly, she set up a screech – but, moments later, still screeching, she was clinging to my neck in the way she would have done her mother. I stood and turned around. As I did, the boys scuttled off, just as quickly as the vervet’s mother.
‘Lev, you’re not serious. She won’t last an hour without . . .’
‘Bring me some water, Boston.’
Boston glared.
‘Boston, some water!’
After I had bathed her head and helped her drink some water from the cup of my hand, we picked our way back to the river and resumed our trek. Though she clung to me fiercely, it was obvious the stress of the situation had affected the vervet; soon, her screeching had faded to silence, and her head began to loll. Stopping to offer her more water, we picked our way north. At least the fires had not yet reached this part of the river and, for several kilometres, it was possible to believe we were back in Rwanda or Tanzania, where the bush remained wild and, in most areas, unplundered.
By nightfall we had made it to the village of Baale and, instead of our usual dilapidated shack, we were able to find a guesthouse. There were supplies in the village and, as well as soft fruit, we were able to find fresh milk. Holed up in the guesthouse, I gently roused the vervet and fed her a soft paste mixed from what we had bought. She began to perk up – until, after an hour or so, her screeching started again. Another hour later, her digestive system seemed to be back in working order – and Boston was fuming as he crouched in the corner of the room, making a simple nappy out of torn pieces of an old shirt.
‘What will you do with it, Lev?’ he grunted as, with the lights out, we listened to its mewling.
‘We’ll find her a home,’ I said. My mother had worked with monkeys in South Africa and I knew there were sanctuaries all over the continent where a tiny thing like this could be reared and, potentially, even reintroduced to the wild.
‘When?’ Boston was only angry because, as he tried to sleep, the vervet was clambering all over his face.
‘Soon,’ I said. ‘As soon as we can.’
But, right now, I had to admit I was even glad for the company of somebody – or something – who wouldn’t always be launching into some new tirade at the turning of every mile.
‘I think I’m going to call her Florence,’ I said, ‘after Samuel Baker’s wife. He rescued her from captivity too.’
But Boston wasn’t listening. For the time being, there were going to be three of us on this trek.
North of Baale, we followed the river for another hard day, along a dirt red track that ran parallel to the water. The road seemed endless, sparse and unpopulated, the indigenous forest razed but with so little agriculture in its place that it made what we had seen yesterday seem even more hopeless. Our goal was to reach Lake Kyoga by nightfall but, delayed by Florence’s constant chewing of my earlobe, stops to catch her when she scrambled from my shoulder, and my repeated attempts to find her a safe haven, we fell 10km short and spent the night in a little village called Galiyiro. North of us, the Victoria Nile disappeared into Lake Kyoga and emerged again on the lake’s most westerly point, then wending its way due west to Lake Albert. We had fallen a day behind and, with Florence, would fall even further – but that was a problem for another day. Now, hot and exhausted as we were, was a time for clean water, laundry, and clean clothes.
In the village, we shared dinner: big plates of chapatti and beans, with Florence bouncing between the two and stealing morsels from our plates. When I was finished, I looked up to see Boston stifling a smile. I thought he was laughing at the monkey, but he had a different kind of sparkle in his eye.
‘What is it?’
‘How did you like it, Lev?’
I had liked it well enough – but, then, I had eaten enough rotten goat and bush rat in the last weeks to make anything hot and filling feel like a banquet.
‘Haricot viande!’ he declared. ‘Meat beans!’
‘Meat beans?’ I asked, noting that Florence still held one in her tiny paws.
‘It’s the dish of refugees,’ Boston explained. ‘We’ll see a lot more of it the closer we get to South Sudan. You see, Lev, these beans, they’re rotten. Full of maggots.’
My stomach clenched. Instinct was telling me throw up, or at least throw a punch at Boston for not warning me before.
‘It’s protein, Lev! You whites wouldn’t understand. This is good food for starving Africans.’ He leaned across the table, wearing his familiar conspiratorial smile. ‘Trust me, Lev, when we cross over the border, you might be grateful to find a plate of haricot viande . . .’
At that moment, my phone rang. Boston was lucky: it was the only thing that stopped me from throwing my plate at his face. On the other end of the line was Pete Meredith. Pete had been in touch with a representative of the Ugandan Wildlife Education Centre in Entebbe, a big town sitting on one of Lake Victoria’s many peninsulas, some forty kilometres away from Kampala. The endless calls I had made during the day, it seemed, had not been so fruitless after all; if I could get Florence back to Jinja, the Education Centre would pick her up and rear her in safety, before aiding her reintroduction to the wild.
When the phone call was finished, Boston was still smiling.
‘You can wipe that smile off your face,’ I said, refusing to admit that the memory of the beans was not so disgusting after all. Even maggots taste good when you’re as famished as I was. ‘We’re marching again tomorrow, without this vervet to slow us down.’
In the morning, we bid goodbye to Florence. I had arranged for a taxi and local guide to take her back to Jinja and, outside the guesthouse, made certain she had a clean nappy and wished her a good journey. To me, Jinja seemed far away, but by car the journey would take only a few hours. Before Boston and I had reached Lake Kyoga, Florence would be safely with the representatives from the Wildlife Education Centre. Watching her little face peering through the glass, suddenly I understood how much I was going to miss the little monkey. My earlobe would heal, the smell of her faeces constantly dropping down my back would be gone, but for all of that I still felt torn. Perhaps it was only the heightened emotions that come with undertaking an expedition like this, but watching Florence go affected me in a way I had not anticipated. Suddenly, I was thinking of all the family and friends I’d left behind in Britain. Was this, I wondered, the first intimation of some sort of homesickness?
Boston was already half-way down the road. He turned and yelled for me to hurry up. We had taken on a local boy as a porter. Emmanuel was seventeen, of South Sudanese origin, and had a bicycle with which he could help us carry our packs. Some of the other local boys were pouring scorn on him as he trotted after us, but Emmanuel didn’t seem to care. ‘Perhaps if they’d gone to school, they’d be carrying the Muzungu’s packs too,’ he declared, though I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of him being proud to be my servant.
‘Are you okay, Lev?’
‘That monkey’s probably the closest I’ve ever come to having a baby,’ I replied.
‘You should have children, Lev. It is the best thing a man can do.’
I hung my head, half-afraid I’d prompted Boston to embark on another one of his rants. But, this time, he remained silent. ‘I think I’ll leave it for a while,’ I said, and took my first step out of Galiyiro.
It was another ten kilometres to the shore of Lake Kyoga. Compared with Lakes Victoria and Albert, Kyoga is a shallow body of water – all of its 660 square miles are less than six metres deep, with most of the water having a depth of only three to four metres. The shallow waters are perfect for lilies and water hyacinth, and as we came to the shore we first had to pick a way through thick, glutinous swamp land. Out on the water, floating papyrus islands and acres of water lilies gave the false impression of a succession of much smaller lakes. In places it seemed as if we might even be able to walk across the surface, if we balanced delicately on the slowly bobbing green sheet.
Boston, Emmanuel and I gathered ourselves. The only clear water we could see was the expanse where the Victoria Nile fed into the lake. According to the increasingly cumbersome self-imposed rules of my expedition, we could not use the flow of the river to gain an advantage, and had to follow its length in its entirety. Right now, that meant crossing the lake and continuing our trek on its northern bank, where we would follow the shore westwards unobstructed by swamps. There, we would find the headwaters of the river where it emerged from the lake.
It took some time before we found passage over the water, paying for the services of some local fishermen and their precarious river-boats. Though we set off at midday, by the time we had crossed Kyoga the afternoon was paling, the light soft and diffuse. We had spent those hours clinging to the bow, trying not to panic at the sight of the alarmingly big holes in the basin of the boat, while Boston used a small tin dish to bail out water.
It was with some relief, then, that we came to a landing site on the northern bank. The village, the fishermen told us, was named Kiga, after the people who have lived in this region for generations untold, and we had attracted quite a welcome. Standing on the banks was a crowd of other fishermen, all staring inquisitively at the prospect of a white man intruding on their routine. A tall man stepped out of the crowd, and introduced himself as James. I was surprised to hear how clear his English was and, before I had introduced myself, he took me by the hand. ‘You will come and meet the chief,’ he began. ‘Leave your boy and bike here.’
Boston and I looked at Emmanuel and shrugged, but if Emmanuel minded being left by the lake he didn’t say a thing. Emmanuel was already further away from home than he had ever been, had already accomplished more than he could have done in his old job as a village water porter. The money we were paying him was to go towards his dream of one day owning a motorcycle, and he was happy to wait for us, thinking of the day it would come.
Up the bank, the shacks sat closely together, though there was nothing that could be easily mistaken for a road. Boston and I followed James through a dirty fishing village – every house surrounded by bones and fish guts, the huts no more than ramshackle piles – and came, at last, to a mud brick house. Inside, a middle-aged man slept sprawled on a wicker bed, his chest rising and falling with every whinnying snore.
At once, the man woke with a start and, barely pausing for breath, ordered James to provide seats. Moments later, small plastic chairs were arranged in a circle around the chief and his bed. Some other villagers were arriving, now. I took them to be villagers of note and, soon, they were introducing themselves as such. ‘This is the chief, Geoffrey,’ began a lanky youth in a gaudy red Arsenal football shirt, who had previously introduced himself as the head fisherman.
Geoffrey’s eyes fell on us. ‘Before you present yourselves, you must first sign the visitor’s book.’
If I had expected a grand, leather-bound ledger I was mistaken. A tattered school notebook was produced and Boston and I scrawled our names inside. ‘A relic from British times,’ he whispered from the corner of his mouth.
Once the signing was complete, I prepared myself. Just as I was about to launch into a speech detailing who we were and what expedition we were on, another man interrupted. ‘First, we pray!’ he barked, and led us back into the light. Outside the chief’s hut, it seemed the whole village had assembled. There must have been two or three hundred people here. As Boston and I faced them, I had images of how it had been for Baker, Stanley, Livingstone and Speke when they had first come across remote villages like these. Their journals are filled with stories of the contrasting hostility and welcome they received across inland Africa.
Around me, everybody lowered their head and folded their hands in their lap.
As the village pastor launched into his prayers, welcoming us to his village, Boston and I looked at each other in mute disbelief.
‘Lord!’ the pastor began. ‘Let us pray. We pray for our guest, this Muzungu who comes across the lake from the land of England. We pray for his health, that he does not catch any bad diseases. We pray that his children are big and strong and that he has many more. We pray for his goats and his chickens, and if he is a fisherman that his lakes are full of tilapia. We pray that he will have lots of money so that he may return to Kiga and give us some of it. Lord, we pray too for this Congo man, who is clearly not of sound mind, that he survives this great journey and may return to make more children with his wives . . .’
Suddenly, there was a sharp pain in my side. I looked round, to find Boston’s elbow being driven into my ribs. The faces in the crowd were all staring into me. It was time, it seemed, to add my own voice to the prayers.
‘Chief,’ I began, acknowledging each man with a nod. ‘Pastor. James. People of Kiga!’ Boston nodded in approval, but the more I went on the more foolish I felt; my skin was turning an unmistakeable shade of crimson. ‘My name is Levison Wood. Tembula Muzungu from over the water. And this is my companion, Ndoole Boston of the Congo. We have come from Kampala and beyond – from the mighty Lake Victoria . . .’ In spite of myself, I realised I was actually enjoying this. Beside me, Kiga’s collected dignitaries were nodding away, while the faces in the crowd were rapt. A flash of inspiration struck me, and I remembered the copy of the New Vision magazine in my rucksack, in which the journalist Matthias had written about our trek. As I produced it and Geoffrey handed it round, I continued my tall tale. I spoke of the greatness of the Ugandan people, the kindnesses we had come across in our journey, the beauty of the land and generosity of the tribes. As I concluded my spiel, rapidly running out of superlatives with which to describe the people of the north, the pastor translated the article and, at last, the chief’s face seemed to brighten up. Once we were done, he stood and surveyed the crowd.
Now it was time for a speech of his own. With his white string vest, fat belly and ragged trousers, I did not expect the voice that came out of his throat to be so bold. Yet, in seconds he had the village transfixed. James whispered in my ear, translating as he went.
‘The chief welcomes you to Kiga. We are blessed by your arrival, and may God bring you safety on your great journey. For the moment, Kiga is yours and you must feel at home. The chief has told the people of the village that they must not disturb you, harass you, or ask you for money. Nor,’ he added, ‘must they threaten to kill you.’ I made eyes at Boston, who was only beaming. ‘He has told them you are not only a white man – you are a Britisher, and must be afforded our respect. We hope that you will go away from here and tell people that Kiga is a good place. We expect that you will tell your queen and your president, and your minister for development, that Kiga needs the help of the white man to develop, and that we need the government here to give us more money so that we can buy better fishing nets. Also, Levison, we need another toilet. The one we have is almost full.’
As James continued to translate, each sentence one behind the chief, the crowd burst into laughter, loud enough to drown out what he was saying. Only when the laughter had died down, could James carry on.
‘He tells the people they must not be afraid. Even though you are English, you have not come to turn him into a homosexual. No matter how hard you try, he will not marry you.’
I cast a look at Boston, expecting him to be as outraged as I was, but his laughter was as loud as any of the villagers, and seemed to cut through the general throng.
Moments later, I found the copy of New Vision being pressed back into my hands. ‘Fetch your boy,’ said James. ‘You may spend the night in our police station. Not as a prisoner, Tembula. You are our honoured guest.’
As James led me there, I was not sure how honoured I actually felt.
It was too late to continue our journey, and the fish that the villagers supplied was enough to convince me to spend a restful night here, rejuvenating ourselves for the day to come. Inside the lock-up, Emmanuel was asleep almost as soon as dinner was done, so it was only Boston and I who sat up, watching the sun setting over the lake. Around us, posters clung to the walls. In England they might have been declaring “Don’t Do Drugs!” or “Report Suspicious Behaviour!”, but this one was different. “SAY NO TO CHILD SACRIFICE” were the words that glared out at us from the wall. I made a silent gesture to Boston. ‘Just like your nanny,’ I whispered – but Mama Fina was in my thoughts as well.
‘Only human sacrifice is guaranteed to bring wealth to the man who consults a witch doctor,’ Boston snorted. ‘It used to happen in Congo until we banned it. Not so in Uganda. Here, everyone believes this shit. It’s like I told you – these people need education, Lev.’
I glared at him, compelling him to be silent in case any of the villagers heard, but sometimes Boston could not be stopped. He was standing in the door of the station, drinking bitter coffee from a chipped glass. ‘The problem with Africa,’ he went on, as a dying sun reddened the endless stretch of papyrus, ‘is that people are shortsighted. They follow any mafia hard man or jumped-up village bully if he offers them cheaper gin or free firewood.’
The sound of crickets was almost drowning out the waves lapping against the lake’s rocky banks, but they could not drown out Boston when he decided to get on his soapbox. ‘The chief doesn’t seem like so much of a bully here in Kiga.’
‘Don’t you believe it, Lev. Give him half a chance, and he’d be . . .’
‘He’s hardly Idi Amin.’
‘Well, why not? Amin is a classic case of a jumped-up village bully. But take the Congo, for example . . .’
I hung my head. I had already heard Boston’s war stories ten times over.
‘In the Congo,’ he continued, ‘we have eighty million people. Eighty million! That is more than you English. And do you know how many of them were educated when the Belgians left?’ The Belgians, Boston had repeatedly told me, had left the Congo in 1960, part of the first great wave of African independence. ‘Not a single one!’ he exclaimed. ‘The Belgians had banned it. At least you British educated your natives. Not so the Belgians – they were total bastards. How can a country be expected to start from scratch when even the leaders haven’t been to school? That’s how it happens, Lev. Without education, it’s the thugs who rise to power – they’re the only ones who can take control and rule. It’s the law of the fist.’ He paused, seeming to contemplate his own words. ‘People without education don’t think about the future, so these villains take over, and because the villains are short-sighted too, they’re corrupt. They steal and pillage their own country. You get generals who are only in command because they’re related to the president – just like here in Uganda. And those same generals have three or four big mansions each, just like those Sudanese! And the politicians, they’re all murderers these days. You can’t be a politician in the Congo without having been a fighter. And do you know what that means, Lev? It means you’ve probably raped women and killed children. That’s what qualifies you for government.’
‘Boston,’ I ventured, ‘you were a fighter.’
‘Not like that. I didn’t rape. I didn’t murder. And that’s why I’m here, tramping along this river with you, instead of in government. It’s a disgrace.’ He hesitated. ‘Do you know what I’d do if I was an MP, Lev?’
Whether I wanted to know or not, I was about to find out.
‘I’d start again. I’d wipe out corruption and ban the tribes. I’d kill anyone that dissented and force peace on people.’
‘Do you know, Boston, you’re beginning to sound like Idi Amin yourself. Kill anyone who doesn’t agree with you because you know you’re right. You’d be a dictator.’
‘I’d be a great leader of a great nation. How do you say in English? You cannot make scrambled without breaking eggs.’
‘Omelettes,’ I interjected.
‘What?’
‘You can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs.’
‘Precisely,’ Boston barked. ‘I think I’d probably need to kill at least half the population though. Maybe as much as two thirds. By then, we’d be left with decent people.’
There was a glimmer in Boston’s eye that told me he was aware of how outlandish he sounded, but the way he could nonchalantly profess all this after what we had seen in Rwanda, not to mention Uganda’s own recent past, struck me as bitterly ironic.
‘So you’re advocating mass genocide?’
‘Somebody’s got to clear up this mess,’ he replied, and after that Boston would brook no more conversation. It was time, he declared, for some well-earned rest; before dawn, we would be heading west.