25

Geoffrey Japer’s flight from London was running late, and Furniver whiled away the time inspecting the new airport’s facilities.

First he popped into the Gents for a pee, and as he stood in the stall, was struck by the fact that no graffiti were to be found. Not on the wall in front of him, nor to the left or the right of where he stood.

Curious, he investigated the toilet cubicles, and noted an extraordinary phenomenon. There were graffiti all right, but the word seemed inappropriate for what he found. The handwriting was neat and mature, as if from a school exercise book. This was surprising enough. But the contents were quite remarkable. Slogans and exhortations were exclusively political, with not a swear word in sight.

“Nduka is a thief” was the general theme, with elaborations that were almost polite. Thus “No amnesty for Nduka” was alongside “Nduka must face justice”.

It was, thought Furniver, oddly heartening. He returned to the lounge, and watched and listened as intending passengers buttonholed airport officials, as friendly as they were vague. Yes, their flight would take off; but it was, alas, delayed, until further notice. In the meantime, the incoming flight had not yet landed.

Bad sign, thought Furniver.

He kept a close eye on Reconciliation Point A, alongside Customer Service Point A. Both desks were deserted, as indeed were Reconciliation Point B and Customer Service Point B.

Sitting in the middle of the cream-tiled, white pillared departure hall were two amiable ladies, one perched on a first-aid box.

Some chairs, white, plastic, were in great demand, but in short supply. Passengers eyed them, as they would an unattended suitcase at Heathrow, but covetously rather than fearfully.

He continued to scrutinise the hall’s neat blue signs, and went in search of the Restaurant, the Shops, the Post Office, and the Bank, only to discover that they did not exist.

They were no more than promises, well-meant indication: a metaphor, thought Furniver, for Africa’s good intentions, from the African Union to the Lagos Plan of Action.

Every few minutes he made a foray for news. Old airport hands, used to delays, sought out the baggage handlers, best informed and most co-operative of workers, and pooled information; shared the confused dispatches from far-off battlefronts. A plane had been sighted in Dar es Salaam, or possibly Entebbe. Whatever, wherever, it was on its way!

The good news was relayed to the two friendly ladies. After all, they were in charge of the blue-signed Information Desk.

Furniver was now being closely followed by an earnest young man.

“Where are you flying to? I can help.”

“I don’t deal with ticket touts.”

The man pushed his spectacles back onto his nose.

“Suh, I am not a tout.” He gave Furniver a pained, dignified look: “I am a travel adviser.”

Furniver regretted his pompous reply.

After all, his credentials for the job were probably as good as any expatriate in Africa. Consultant, adviser, con man, tout. There are a lot of us around, thought Furniver.

We experts from Europe, we communicate silently with each other, a raised eyebrow, a shrug – but loudly and effusively and insincerely with our African partners.

We bump into each other at the hotel bars and at the business centres, invariably staffed by ladies debilitated by bilharzia, malaria, or other ghastly parasites.

We swap horror stories, of hotel rooms without minibars, and “lazy” locals, and complain about those business centres that charge $15 an hour for use of the internet, and airlines that demand more for a journey within Africa than a return flight from Kuwisha to London.

And we watch as Africa’s best and brightest leave. Each year they flee, by the scores of thousands: doctors and dentists, bankers and accountants, writers and athletes, footballers and musicians; they desert the continent for Europe and the US . . . and expatriates come in droves to take their places.

What the OM had talked about started to make sense.

“Brain drain and capital flight. Killing the continent. The best bugger off, taking their money with them,” the OM had complained at their last session at the Thumaiga Club. “And in return we send in second raters, and the donors tell Western investors to put their money here. Beats me. Odd business . . .”

Furniver’s ruminations were interrupted.

“Trust me,” said an airport official. “Your plane will arrive soon.”

The scuffle over Japer’s bag had been embarrassing.

“How was I to know that the chap was a customs officer?”

Furniver stayed silent.

“These people . . . no wonder . . .” said Japer, shaking his head.

He described his passage through immigration.

“Tourist? They asked me. I said I was in Kuwisha to help them.

“From Eng-land. Ambassador. Children and rhinos . . . The immigration bod gave me a filthy look. And then the penny dropped. I handed over my passport, with a $10 bill folded inside. The foreign editor was right.”

“Place is absolutely riddled with corruption,” he had warned. “But don’t offer a penny over $10. You’ll just spoil things for the rest of us.”

Japer and Furniver walked through the dozens of taxi drivers soliciting for fares.

“I gather that NoseAid want a picture of me and a baby on my lap, and as close to the rhino as we can get.”

“So I gather,” said Furniver.

“Don’t want to do it,” said Japer.

“It won’t be as bad as you think,” Furniver replied. “It’s not going to bite you.”

“But they tend to piss on you,” said Japer truculently.

Furniver was no expert on the characteristics of large African herbivorous creatures, but he felt that he could say with confidence that the prospect of Japer getting pissed on by a rhino was remote.

Lucy had warned him that Japer, scourge of the British establishment, had a notoriously short temper, invariably ignited should someone disagree with him. So it was with some diffidence that Furniver ventured an opinion, with what for him was unusual eloquence. It was a measure of his essential naïvety that he had failed to recognise that Japer was not referring to the big, horned beast.

“I think you will find, Geoffrey, that although it is a remote possibility, given the precautions that are taken at the rhino refuge, and that your contract also stipulates that guards equipped with dart guns should be on hand, you just might be gored. Most unlikely, given that the rhino will have been sedated, and confined to a stout wooden enclosure.”

He looked thoughtful: “Though if you were determined to be gored, and threw yourself at the rhino’s feet, grabbed its testicles, and squeezed them vigorously, it would in all probability gore you.

“But while I am not an expert in these matters, I think that the prospect that you will be peed on by the rhino, under those or any other circumstances, is so remote as to be ruled out. I have discovered that elephants have been known to piss on their victim after trampling on them. But rhinos? Before or after they’ve done their goring? Never happened,” he said, “never been reported. Never, ever, happened.”

He braced himself for an explosion.

But the prospect of what lay ahead, and its attendant risk of getting peed on, appeared to have filled Japer with such gloom and foreboding that even his effervescent temper had been dampened.

He looked at Furniver miserably. “Babies, Edward, not rhinos. Babies. I have to hold a baby. They tend to pee on you. I know. My sister’s got one.”

Once again, Furniver was lucky with the traffic, and the airport taxi dropped Japer at the Outspan, where Lucy, clipboard in hand, took over.

Japer checked in, left his bag with the porter, and climbed into Lucy’s car.

Twenty minutes later they parked, and walked the last few hundred yards to the railway track, from where they looked across a plastic and corrugated iron mass of huts and hovels.

Kireba, which had replaced Johannesburg’s Soweto as the slum that was de rigueur to have seen at first hand, never let itself down. No self-respecting visitor left it off their itinerary. From US students seeking to enhance their CVs, to visiting politicians and heavyweights of the aid industry; none could leave Kuwisha without having done their bit in Kireba, which provided both a photo-opportunity and the chance to earn curriculum vitae entry: Worked with Aids sufferers in Kireba, Kenya.

That was worth a good twenty points on the informal rating of the benefit of a gap year spent abroad. Africa itself was worth ten points; any thing to do with public health was worth fifteen points; assisting with an Aids programme was worth double that; and if you could claim that management skills had been honed by helping with the running of the Kireba clinic, or promoting a literacy campaign, and furthermore argue that all this “impacted” on “gender issues”, you were close to the 100-point maximum.

A visit to Kireba, then, was the East African aid industry equivalent of a tourist notching up one of the game parks’ big five; along with Kireba as an essential stop on the compassionate visitors’ itinerary was an Aids orphanage, a tree planting, a visit to Lokio, and a look-in on a local clinic.

Japer was suitably appalled at what he saw.

“To be honest,” said Lucy, as they surveyed Kireba, “there are worse spots – Lagos or Luanda are easily as bad – but the hotels are lousy.”

“Hotels? Slums? Don’t get you,” said Japer, unable to conceal his surprise.

But rather than correct him, she continued to rattle off statistics of life in Kireba: 600,000 people, one clinic, and more than 40 per cent of over-16s had Aids.

“Stand a bit to the left, so we can get in the corner of the State House grounds as background,” said Lucy, aiming her camera. “Smile! Now a serious look . . . thanks. That’s Kireba done,” she said briskly. “No time for the clinic. Got to get back for the start of the conference.”

On the return journey, Japer said little, but Lucy had no doubt that her visitor had been suitably moved.

“The donors’ conference starts in fifteen minutes,” said Lucy. “Ask for Newman Kibwana. I’ll be back after the opening session to take you to Wilson – that’s the domestic airport. I’ll see you here; got to collect my briefing notes for your trip to Lokio. Oh, and look out for Cecil Pearson, Financial News. He should be inside . . .”