My first evening in Sudan and I couldn’t find a toilet anywhere. Up until then, my luck had been good. I had flown into Khartoum that morning—Sudan Airways had had enough fuel to do that weeks flight. I had immediately caught a ride coming out of the airport. Dropped off at a ramshackle hamlet on the edge of nowhere, the desert rubbing up behind each hut on the single street. Reported to the police, as required. “The police” turned out to be a lone man in tattered uniform. Friendly guy, quizzed me at length about my last name, seemed amused and taken with it. “You are not from here,” he concluded. I confessed he was right, and he invited me to put my tent up in the yard at the police station, amid the half-dead rows of corn and chickens and obscure debris. Everything was turning out hunky-dory, except that I had had to go to the barnroom all day, and by now, evening, it was becoming critical. There wasn’t an obvious outhouse, and I figured I shouldn’t take a crap in his yard, didn’t want to make some horrendous faux pas my first evening. I wandered up to him, he lost in twilight thoughts.
Do you have a bathroom? His English is good, but he isn’t familiar with the term.
A toilet? He nods assertively, assuringly, disappears in the back and returns with more hot tea, which he thinks I am asking for. I am getting antsy and desperate.
An outhouse? Huh?
A men’s room? A loo? Befuddlement.
A water closet? The little boy’s room? The John? No dice.
Frantically, I squat and pantomime defecating. He suddenly roars in happy comprehension.
“Oh, you mean the latrine! Here in Sudan we call it a latrine!. Do you know the word ‘latrine’?”
Yes, yes, I know the word “latrine,” please, do you have one close by?
“No, here in Sudan we do not have latrines. Here in Sudan, we just relieve ourselves as we are, for we are a free people.”
With that, he grabs me by the wrist and marches me onto the main street of the hamlet, leading the way with his flashlight through the dark. He stops, points emphatically with his flashlight at a spot in the middle of the street.
“This is your place! Here in Sudan we do not have latrines, so you just be free right there!”
What the hell. I drop my pants, squat down, hope desperately I still have some toilet paper in my pocket. He has his flashlight trained on me. That’s all right, I say, I’m fine now, thanks a lot, no need to wait here, I’ll be back in a …
“No, I must stay here and see that you are fine! This is Sudan! You just be free!” He is shouting. “You are our guest!”
“Our”? I realize with horror that a crowd has drawn, the entire population of the hamlet. Who among them could resist? I hear a number of snickers and an unmistakable high, feminine giggle. His flashlight beam is held steady, on my ass. I resign myself, rest my chin in my hands, and make my mark on the village amid what sounds almost like murmurs of approval. And throughout, above it all, like a circus barker, “This is Sudan! You are our friend! We are a free nation! You just be free!”
I had come to Sudan to go on a vacation following the overthrow of Saul by the Gang of Six. The largest country in Africa, one of the poorest, howling empty desiccated wasteland of the Sahara, cut through the middle by the Nile. Chaos, famine, a northern Arabic Muslim half and a southern black animist half that have been having a civil war for decades. Searing heat, flash storms that produce rivers in seconds, hundreds of miles between bridges on the Nile, four paved kilometers of road in all the south, roads impassable six months of the year. Mutinies, coups, refugees from every neighboring country, locust swarms, tribal insurrections. It was in Sudan that I made the worst literary mistake of my life.
I was accustomed to making food mistakes on trips like this. My first backpacking trip ever was a disaster because of a food mistake. In high school in urban Brooklyn, we decided it was time to become outdoor hippies and made plans for an Easter vacation hike on the Appalachian Trail on a stretch a mere forty miles from Manhattan. We had no idea what we were doing. Word spread, and soon twenty-four were in on planning the trip. It turned out that it was going to take place on Passover. We divided into food groups. Those who were Jewish and keeping Passover diets who were also vegetarian. Nonvegetarian non-Passover keepers. Vegetarian non-Passover. And so on. We planned shifts of who would stay awake during which night hours to guard against mountain lions and poisonous snakes. We argued over placement of sleeping bags, determining who got to sleep near whom, rife with titillation over the various pointless crushes that various people had on others. We spent weeks meeting after school daily, planning the one-night trip. As our final stupidity, we wanted some sort of communal gesture to tie us all together into a utopian backpacking collective. We would carry supplies for each other—four or five people would carry everyone’s water. Someone else would carry everyone’s crackers. Someone else the cheese. We would be strong and united and interdependent. We would strike socialist-realist work poses around the campfire while others sang folk songs.
By the first half mile of the hike, eight people had quit in exhaustion. Within a mile, in some manner that defies spatial logic, the remainder were already scattered miles apart. I wound up with a friend named Kenny Friedman, having no idea where anyone else was. We never saw another soul. Unfortunately, all we carried by way of food was the chocolate and celery, nothing else, including water. We survived our gorging on chocolate but stayed up half the night, torturing each other with descriptions of things to drink and lamenting Alana Goldfarb, the flautist we had unsuccessfully tried to convince to go on the trip with us.
My food luck was even worse on desert trips. My first visit to the desert in Kenya had been by accident. I had hitched out to Mt. Elgon, straddling the Ugandan border, a snowy, 15,000-foot honker with elephants living in its caves. Went with my thermals and woolens, good mountain food as well—oranges and cheese and chocolate. It turned out that Idi Amin’s soldiers had been kidnapping foreign climbers, and the place was closed to whiteys. Disappointed, hitched back to the nearest town and spotted a lorry heading north to the desert. Jumped on, spent the next week wandering half sunstroked in the desert on the Ethiopian border with my wool socks and down mittens and liquefied cheese. Oranges, when sufficiently hot, actually shrivel to the point of contracting inward, tearing free of the peel. You open it up, and out pops a marvelous inedible petrified orange.
The next desert trip I planned better, which is to say, I planned for a desert trip. I went to one of the spanking new supermarkets in Nairobi, got my salt tablets and crackers and fluids. I wanted dried fruit; dried fruit is perfect for the desert, I’d decided; I’d always thought of myself as wandering through the desert eating dried biblical fruit. It was damn expensive. The dried pineapples or dried coconut or dried bananas were going to bankrupt me. Clearly not basic subsistence foods around here. Suddenly, I spotted a block of dried tamarind. Had no idea what tamarind was, but it was phenomenally cheap. Bought two bricks—two kilos of the stuff.
First evening, hiked off from the only town in the western part of the Turkana desert, made it up to the top of a desolate cinder cone by dusk. Set up my tent, dizzying floating view of the entire empty scorched planet below. Settled down to eat, unwrapped my block of tamarind, and bit off a hunk. A stupefying gustatory sensation screamed through my head at that instant. Imagine opening up an entire salt shaker into your mouth. Quick, before swallowing, pour a bottle of mustard in. Then, just a second, toss in a hunk of Marmite, some fetid French cheese, and an old fish. Multiply by a hundred thousand. That begins to approximate how strong the taste was. “Taste” almost stopped making sense as a term. It transcended taste. It was as if every neuron in my brain had been recruited into gustation, as if each cell were being rubbed with sandpaper made of tamarind. It turned out I had brought enough dried tamarind along to give gustatory hallucinations to every man, woman, and child south of Cairo. Wizened tough leathery murderous desert chieftains would pinch off a tiny smidgen of this sort of dried tamarind and still get queasy and weak in the knees. I lay up all night, trying to spit the taste out. Another ruined trip.
But this time in Sudan, it was a literary disaster that I precipitated. The morning after my night at the policeman’s, I caught a quick lucky ride, got to the Nile, and soon was on a barge heading south. I would spend the next ten days traveling upriver, heading to Juba, the capital of southern Sudan, some 800 miles away. This was the only route connecting the two halves of the country much of the year.
We loaded. My barge, along with a few others, was attached to a sort of tugboat. The barge had a center wall, with an awning above it. The passengers sat on the floor, against the wall, I settled in on my pack, next to two large Arab men in robes who smiled and then ignored me. Goats, chickens, sacks of charcoal and food, barrels, crates, were jammed on by sweating black workers who were yelled at by the Arabic foreman. We sagged to about an inch above the water, and still more cartons and drums were piled on. The sun was astonishing, even through the awning. In an inexplicable way, it was exciting to feel awful and dizzy and sick while just sitting still. Yeah, this was the desert, all right.
We finally got under way. I eagerly scanned everything. I planned to watch the passengers and see the transition from the northern Arabic merchants to the southern black agriculturists. I would get someone to teach me Arabic, write down tribal songs on my music paper, learn them on the recorder. I would watch the fishermen and the hippos and the crocs and the nomads with their camels drinking at the river. I would think that this has been unchanged for millennia, the British, the Egyptians, the Turks, the Ethiopians, all the way back to the Romans, all have come here to dominate and have gone, and this has continued, this river has given birth to the world. We would wander through the gigantic maze of the Sud reed swamp, we would travel through the lands of the nomadic Dinka tribe, we would cut across the centuries until there was time no more, until there was only heat and light and the movement of water. After a couple of hours of this sort of nonsense, I was already climbing the walls with boredom.
I got out the book I had brought along. Each trip, I bring one big book. Since this was going to be a very big trip, I had gotten a very big book. In Nairobi, I had shopped for books by the pound and bought the thickest book I could get for my money. It was Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers, an umpteen-thousand-page retelling of the Bible story. Within a short while I realized my tragic error. I had come to spend a month in the Sudan and had brought along reading material such that whenever I had had enough of my desert surroundings, all I had to read was Thomas Mann’s endless prolix descriptions of the desert, at an impossible pace of one five-page scene alternating with hundreds of pages of description of fig trees and types of camel caravans and, if my memory doesn’t fail me, chapters and chapters about drying of tamarind. This was the worst literary mistake I’d ever heard of, except for the earnest German student who was overlanding through Africa and wanted to improve his tenuous English during the trip. So he had brought along William Burrough’s Naked Lunch as his only book, a book that, I might add for the unfamiliar, is the classic Beat ’50s account of out-of-control drug use, with maybe 20 percent of its words being English that has never been used before or since and ditto for about 5 percent of the syntax. He nearly paid me to take the book off his hands. I desperately wished I had bought the Joseph and His Brothers in the original German, which I don’t know, so at least I could have continued reading it without understanding it. Instead, I settled down in the heat for the next ten days, alternating between staring at the desert in semicomatose desiccation and then rousing myself to read about it in Mann’s stiff Germanic convolutions. I would have died for some British comedy of manners to read, or some high-tech spy thriller set inside the Strategic Air Command. Or a phone book. Anything.
The days wore by. We slept on the deck, ate on the deck, sat on the deck, crapped on the deck. At first, I tried shitting off the side of the barge, but the heat and dehydration would leave me so dizzy when I would stand up afterwards that I was certain I was about to pitch backward into the Nile and its crocodiles. So I took to doing like the Romans and shitting on the barge like everyone else. Soon, however, that problem was mostly solved, as I was so dehydrated that nothing much more was forthcoming than painful stool rocks every few days. Everyone else shat enthusiastically, and each morning, the deckhands would pour barrels of Nile water down the deck, ostensibly to wash things over the side but usually only accomplishing a thorough mixing of the human and goat shit that would slosh back onto our bare feet and quickly dry in the sun.
The Arab merchants sitting nearby grew fond of me and would guffaw and pat me on the back and spit near my feet and tell me to be careful of the southern black Sudanese. Later in the trip, the southern blacks would tell me the same about the Arabs. One merchant, Mahmoud, took a particular shine to me and told me the story of his one visit to England years before. He told it well, and I welcomed its endless repetition, given the circumstances. He seemed to have a poorly disguised crush on either the queen or the queen mother, hard to tell.
Slowly, my brain adapted to the searing heat and repetition, which is to say that it became stupid to fill the space. By the fourth or fifth day, my major daily task had become to remember the names of all of my elementary-school teachers. I would wake and think, Today I shall remember the names of my elementary-school teachers. This would be followed by a walk around the deck, maybe a painful crap if I was unlucky, a delightful story from Mahmoud about his visit to England, some food, a quick nap from the heat. Then I would be ready. Soon, I would remember the names of kindergarten and first grade. I would fall asleep, nap for a while. Awake, sharp as a knife, kindergarten name at hand, sort of lose track of time after that. By late morning, I would be up to fourth grade, but then the heat would really set in, and I would have enough trouble remembering what phylum I belonged to, let alone teachers’ names. More napping. Afternoon, cooling a bit, ready for a big push, up to fourth grade, able to repeat the sequence over and over with confidence, ready for the final assault on the summit, when suddenly two Arabs would start fighting nearby, or a goat would have a convulsion, or some such other distraction that would be the exciting high point of the day. All thoughts would flee except for openmouthed goiterous gaping. Soon time for bed; project to be completed tomorrow.
Somewhere in the middle of it we passed through the Sud, the endless reed swamp that turns the Nile into a labyrinth. I remember little of it except the heat and mosquitoes and a sickening sense of paranoia about getting lost that kept me anxious and clutching my knees the whole time. Improbably enough, you become convinced you can recognize individual patches of reeds and are certain that you’ve seen that one before. That’s it, you conclude, we’re going in aimless circles. You spend hours wanting to murder the pilot for getting you lost and not being man enough to admit it, and then you quake with terror that he will admit it and confirm all your worst fears, and then Mahmoud and the boys in a rage will pull out their scimitars and behead the poor bastard in a ritualistic manner, take over the boat, fall into confused and factional arguments over direction, and all will be anarchy and violence and starvation and chaos as we the horribly, horribly, lost in the swamp.
Naturally, we cleared the Sud uneventfully.
Now it was only a final short stretch until Juba, our destination. Juba figures heavily in the collective emotions of the southern black Sudanese. By all logic, sprawling impossible dichotomized Sudan should have been two countries: the northern Arabic half and the southern black. Instead, it is one unworkable country dominated by the Arabs. If the place were ever to become two countries, Juba would be the capital of southern Sudan. The civil war that had been smoldering for decades was over just that proposition. Juba, fair graceful capital of Nubia, or whatever the future country was to be called, was a boiling, dust-spired collection of huts and refugee tents, with a four-kilometer circuit of paved road, the only tarmac for 600 miles. It was in Juba that I had a major anxiety attack for reasons that could probably not be understood by anyone for 6,000 miles. It was also in Juba that I felt the most alien in all my time in Africa. My first night, I got taken home by American Southern Baptist missionaries.
They were at the dock, waiting for barrels of something or other, and they spotted me immediately, invited me to stay at their center. Now, don’t get me wrong—the day I spent there involved not the slightest bit of proselytizing. It’s just that they seemed far more alien to me than any of the half-naked tribesmen I’d been hanging out with for the last weeks. They were all older Southern couples who’d spent years farming or dishing soup at the school cafeteria or working in the Chevy plant before suddenly getting the word from god one day that they should go to Juba and eat canned cheese food inside their compound. I couldn’t quite figure out what they did with their time, but it sure wasn’t pressing the flesh with heathens, at least not Sudanese heathens. No one, including Bud and Charlene, the seeming leaders, who had been in Juba for four years, was able to tell me where the town market was. They didn’t know where the road to the Zaire border was, if there were any commercial buses that went from Juba to anywhere, if the Jubanese had three arms each or were photosynthetic. They didn’t know anything about the place. I don’t think they ever went out of the compound, except to go to the dock to pick up barrels of supplies from the boat, or to the airport, to get weekly shipments of canned food from their organization’s Nairobi-based airplane. My lord, the food! Even I, raised in a world of Jiffy Pop popcorn and Coco-Marsh, was moved. Cans of Velveeta cheese food. Cans of Spam. Cans of chocolate syrup. Cans of imported dates, for god’s sake, sitting there amid oceans of dates, southern Sudan’s only agricultural product. I lounged around, showered, read old Life magazines, hid in my room. In the evening, another novel experience: my first video movie. We sat in their mosquito-netted gazebo, turned on the extra generator, and watched some Clint Eastwood thing, an almost incoherent movie, which, unfortunately, was not quite incoherent enough to persuade you to stop trying to follow the story line. We all got lost frequently, had to stop the film to argue about whether that fella with the glasses was really working for the Russkies or was he just pretending.
Dawn, and Edna emerges with a whopping great boom box, turned up high. Male chorus, accompanied by banjo, belting out “Oh, Susannah,” “You’re an Old Smoothie,” “Pack Up Your Troubles in an Old Kit Bag.” We all rise and shine, set the table for canned powdered egg breakfast while we sing “Swanee” in lusty voices, and I scram shortly thereafter.
Wandering through Juba, I encountered the incongruous University of Juba, where I had my anxiety attack. It had been built by the northern Arabic government as a sop to the pathetic, systematically underdeveloped state of the black south and then filled almost exclusively with northern Arabic students. There had been some obscure sort of rioting recently, so the place was mostly empty, the students having had their heads bashed in appropriately by someone in a uniform and sent back home to cool their heels in their malarial backwaters. The place had a few students milling about, presumably the counterrevolutionaries who had saved the day. I went into the library, where the librarian slept on the desktop. Looked around. Green peeling paint on the walls, cracked masonry. Looked like an aged Atlantic City bathhouse, complete with an inch of sand that had come in for lack of glass or screens on the windows. Books here and there, mostly English. Some technical books, some out-of-date journals—an Indian botany journal, the Italian Archives of Experimental Biology, a few others. I suddenly spotted issues of Nature, the British journal that is probably the premiere science journal on earth. And only three weeks out of date. Incredible. On the cover was stamped “Gift of the British Embassy and Sudan Airways.” Ah-ha, paid for by the former, delivered by latter. Thus, its relative currency.
I leafed through, excited at this contact with the outside world. And there, standing in my desert robes, with the sands lapping at my feet, I discovered that a group in New Haven had just published the experiment I was going to do when I returned to the States, having to do with a newly characterized stress hormone secreted by the brain. Scooped! Scooped. The very word ran through my head. I’ve been scooped in Sudan. I started hyperventilating. What was I doing here? Somewhere, somewhere far from here, science was swirling around, people in lab coats were toasting each other, breaking open bottles of celebratory champagne amid witticisms and anecdotes about Bertrand Russell and Madame Curie, all this was happening at just this instant, august old microbiologists were sitting down to pen their obligatory book of essays on ethics and biology, newly tenured associate professors were embezzling their grants, and where was I, stuck in southern Sudan, with unsettling fungi developing on my feet. I had to do something immediately!
I rushed out to look for a pay phone, the nearest one of which had to have been many hundreds of miles away. I didn’t know who I was going to call, should there magically be one there, but I had an overpowering need to make a phone call. I walked around, agitated, planning to catch desert rats and breed them for laboratory experiments, use my Swiss army knife to carve test tubes out of wood. At the edge of the campus, I encountered some young school kids who bowed solemnly to me, said, “Hello, visitor,” and handed me a flower. Then, they ran away giggling and waving. It broke my mood, and my archcompetitors in New Haven were forgotten for the remainder of Sudan.
I hung out in Juba a few days, getting information on the southern end of the country—what there was to see; what roads actually existed; of those, which were safe from rebels and/or government soldiers; of those, which were ever traveled by lorries. A foreign development worker filled me in on the latest news of the civil war. A Sudanese air force jet with engine problems had touched down in the desert, just happening to land near a rebel base. Hot damn, thought the rebels, let’s grab it, but the plane had taken off first. Irritated, with pent-up rebel energy, they grabbed a dozen French aid workers instead. They demanded 30,000 British pounds, sneakers, trousers, and radio time from the government. A heroic Canadian pilot flew in and out as a messenger and voluntary hostage. He brought in secret news to the prisoners as to the night the army was going to attack. They prepared, slipped sleeping pills into the rebels’ water that night. Naturally, the army came two days late. When they did, the rebels ran off into the bush, but not before releasing the hostages, telling them, “Get out, run, it’s not safe here.” So much for the war.
As for Juba itself, it was ramshackle and overrun with refugees from everywhere—Amin’s Uganda, the Chadian war, Mengistu’s Ethiopia, Bokassa’s cannibalism in Central African Republic. Swarms of gentle friendly beaten people. Occasional overlanding Brits with dangerous flinty looks and bits of gangrene about them, always resulting from some machete accident in Zaire, just before they got out ahead of the soldiers. Always swaggering bravado in near incoherent Cockney accents. A big market in the center of town ringed by mosques, women of the agricultural tribes sitting on the ground selling tomatoes, dates, onions, flatbread, warm milk, and sugar—goods spread in front of them on their shawls, piled in geometric shapes. Occasional Dinka tribesmen, the Masai-like cattle people, wander through—tall, thin, cloaked, detached, spacey, aloof. Outlanders, but dangerous ones, clutching their spears.
The big news was at the prison. Sharia, Islamic law, had recently been imposed by the northern government, a big reason for the smoldering civil war having burst into flames again. That afternoon, there would be a first public severing of a thief’s hand. A crowd of black southerners, furious at the imposition of Sharia on their animist and Christian lives, was already gathered, a riot predicted. I decided to pass up the show.
The flashiest thing in Juba, however, was the four kilometers of tarmac. It was driven endlessly, pointlessly, and exclusively by the large, air-conditioned vehicles of the various foreign agencies that supplied three quarters of Juba’s excuse for existing, as well as most of its discarded cans of Spam. U.S. aid people, British relief groups, UN High Commission on Refugees, missionaries, Norwegian aid people, Bible translators, all driving the four kilometers endlessly to visit each other and have drinks and eat canned cheese food and get on each other’s nerves. I don’t think I ever saw a vehicle in the main part of Juba that was Sudanese.
Unfortunately, there were probably no vehicles driven by anyone going in the direction I wanted to go, which was to some forests on the Zaire border that contained chimpanzees. Everyone knew about the forest and the chimps, but no one had ever heard of anyone going there. I settled for my second choice—a range of mountains called the Imatongs, along the Ugandan border. This had the highest peak in Sudan and, apparently, a fifty- by sixty-mile-long plateau of rain forest, floating above the desert. At the very edge of the forest was a logging town, a small encampment that constituted probably the most (only) successful enterprise in southern Sudan. There was a road to it, and a lorry leaving Juba to bring supplies.
I got a space on the truck, settled in happily. We filled up, but I had a decent seat on a sack of maize meal. I contentedly returned to Thomas Mann’s many-paged description of how Joseph and his brothers would lash sacks of dried tamarind onto their donkeys for long journeys, of the intricate knot work on the saddles of the camels, so on. Inexplicably engrossed, I finally noticed that the lorry was now jam-packed and was still sitting in the yard, at dusk. No petrol. It turned out that we were on line at the sole petrol station in Juba (not counting the private stores flown in for the aid organizations, of course). We were something like seventh on line, and an old pickup truck with a single barrel of petrol had arrived that day, servicing three of the trucks. We all got off for the evening, slept in the sand around the truck, and at dawn, were back at our stations, ready for our streaking journey to the Imatongs. Another day passed, and we were number two in line, and finally the next day, we were gassed up and started off. By then, the crowd on the lorry had swollen, and we were all standing on one leg, barely holding on to a metal bar with our fingertips, being elbowed in the ribs repeatedly by lurching old men, etc., all squeezed in among mounds and mounds of supplies for the lumber station. We were stopped within 100 yards, as we came to the bridge on the Nile. All people and sacks were off-loaded for a military inspection. Bags were poked with spears to determine if people were being smuggled inside, the Arabic soldiers inexplicably slapped around one protesting mama, I was asked in deadly seriousness what the name of the town was that I was leaving. I passed the test and the Arabs were soon interrogating the guy next to me.
Finally, we departed, all of us magically repositioned exactly as we were before the checkpoint. We lurched through 110-degree dust for the next twelve hours, covering 130 miles. Searing heat, rocking violent jolts from the uneven pseudo-road. People barely holding on, no awning, kids vomiting everywhere. The metal bars became too hot to touch for more than a second, yet you grabbed on for dear life with each lurch. I had a desert shawl over my head and carefully-watched bottles of water, which I went through far faster than anticipated. My head began to hurt, to throb rhythmically. I was breathing fast, I noticed. At one stop, at a borehole, I ignored one of the basic rules of desert water, which is never to drink enough of it not to be thirsty anymore, as you will probably become sick from the bad water. I gulped the stuff down and was weaving green and nauseous within fifteen minutes. My eyes began to hurt, my groin started throbbing painfully. The next six hours were spent trying to control the nausea and make the time go by and not scream. Thomas Mann was out of the question; I was pinioned so tightly in the crowd as to be unable to lift my arms. Once again, the sacred list of the names of my elementary-school teachers was conjured up. I spent hours repeatedly reciting in my mind the first two paragraphs of my thesis talk, planned for the coming year. I tried to outline a lecture on baboon social organization, just for the hell of it, but couldn’t concentrate. I tried to fantasize about the summer student working in my adviser’s lab whom I had had a crush on, but couldn’t concentrate on that either—too exhausting and, under the circumstances, so pointless as not even to provide the frustrating distraction I was hoping for.
I wound up staring at the cheek of the tribesman sitting nearest me. As we had gotten further from Juba, we had picked up more people, Kakwa tribesmen, and they had become bushier and bushier, wild naked isolated men with ochered heads and lip plugs and scarification patterns the likes of which I’d never seen on anyone in Kenya. Many lacked nose bridges, which I thought was a particularly rough rite of passage mutilation, but turned out to be leprosy. Some had ears that were serrated. Others had goiter. Most had these ornate complex cheek scars in the shape of seven-limbed starfish—cuts had been made in the skin and sand pushed into the spaces, to form the cameo scar. I stared and stared at this one man’s scar, counting the limbs repeatedly. Nah, couldn’t be seven, must be six, I’d think, to lure myself into yet another counting to pass the time. The scar pattern seemed to be animate, undulating, probably due to my being dizzy—all this aided my inability to count correctly and motivated yet more time-passing counting. Mostly, as the hours lurched by and I swayed in more and more of a comatose fog of nausea and thirst and stomach cramps, I just wanted to kill the driver, for every bump, for every pause.
I had noticed, amid my heaves, that there was now a massive wall of mountains to our south. The Imatongs. Excitement amid the misery. Around 5:00, we got to the town of Torit, a fairly large one on the main road. Most of the hoi polloi departed, including my scar man and the young tough who had been standing on my foot for most of the afternoon. This left maybe a dozen of us, confused by all the space. Tentatively, we separated ourselves, lay down on burlap bags, and stretched. And something magical happened. The lorry came out of Torit and headed straight south into the mountains. We began to climb, and it got cooler. Some grass and bushes appeared. Some trees. The sun was getting low. Incomprehensibly, from out of nowhere, there was a breeze. A breeze! Everyone looked at each other and started laughing. Spontaneously, people started shaking my hand, people who had been standing next to each other since dawn suddenly recognized each other. At sunset, halfway up the mountain, some of the mamas on the sacks of onions began to sing. I lay on my back, looked at the stars and the trees. It was magic. The sweat on everyone, the tree branches we now had to duck, the smell of the shit of the goats jammed in with us—suddenly, all of it combined, it was summer camp again, I was with all my friends from the Jewish Community House day camp on an overnight trip to a dude ranch in the Catskills, I was on my first hay ride.
We swayed and dozed and sang and shook hands and discovered water in forgotten places and I was in love with all the women. We glided into the logging town of Katire, into its dark forest, nestled amid the mountains, and I was delirious with dehydration and pleasure.
I staggered out waving good-bye to all my friends. I smiled at the trees. I marched into the village and encountered my first Katirean, an old man with a hunting spear and a fantastically wry face. Around his neck was a rope, tied to which was a flute made out of a reed buck’s horn. He came up to me, fairly prancing. We shook hands; he oohed, aahed, bowed, wiggled, and was overcome with delight when I pointed to the flute, giving him a chance to play. He screwed up his face and blew across the opening of the horn, like a soda bottle, fingering the four notes. He played a simple tune and then sang it, complete with the dum de dums:
Dum de dum … Torit!
Dum de dum … Juba!
Dum de dum … Khartoum!
Dum de dum … Sudan!!
Tremendously animated, couldn’t keep still while singing. The second time, I sang along, both of us crooning together as if this were a song from our youth together. We bowed again, and he pranced away.
Certainly a good way to start off. I headed over to the police post to report in. The cop was a grizzled old man in a striking green-and-black striped outfit that could have been pajamas, or a leisure suit, or stolen from a prisoner. No one else was there except for an ageless crone sitting outside. I entered, presented the man with my passport and travel permit obtained in Juba. He grunted, squinted at the passport, held it sideways and upside-down, seemed not to know what to do with it. Finally, he spoke.
“Do you have your passport with you?”
It was a delicious African moment that I could not pass up.
“No, I do not have my passport,” I answered with deathly seriousness.
“That is very bad, very bad. Where is your passport?” Oh, perfect. I looked him in the eyes.
“You are holding my passport.” The balls in your court, copper. Could he save face? He turned out to be a polished professional—he glanced at the passport now seriously, actually flipped open the pages, looked at my picture, compared it with my face. Finally, he had his comeback line.
“You are right. This one is your passport. Now you can stay.”
We relaxed, his job over. Suddenly, he lunged at me, said, “We must go now.” Wha, wha, what did I do? It was time for dinner. The old woman outside, his wife, fed us beans and cabbage, and there was all the water one could dream of. I thanked him, and he said, “You are our guest. You do not say thank you. Would you thank your mother?”
The cop’s son, Joseph, about twenty years old, appeared. He was a schoolteacher here, just out of high school in Juba, and thus quite qualified. He was wearing a fine white shirt. I had been noticing other young guys in white shirts passing on the road by the light of our fire, women in white blouses. “You are lucky,” he says. “Tonight is a dance.” What’s the occasion? “No occasion, we dance every night, so you are always lucky when you come here.” Suddenly, I realize that I had heard music, drums, when I first walked through the village.
After eating, more water, Joseph and I departed for the dance. We walked through a stretch of forest, meeting more and more white-shirted people. The music got louder until we came to a large clearing, teeming with hundreds of dancers in white. Instantly I understood it—it was desert altitude euphoria. Scattered throughout the northern Kenyan desert, insane stinking hot shimmering desert, are occasional mountains, plateaus. On top, higher, cooler, there might be bush. On the larger ones, there are hints of forest. And always, somehow, there is water—a borehole, a spring. Invariably, the people there staggered up at some unknown point in the past out of desperation—to escape a battle, a famine, a plague. God knows what’s up on top of the unlivable mountain, but there’s nowhere else to go. They make their way up there and discover it’s heaven. Cool, shaded. Water! All the people I’ve ever met living on the desert plateaus are euphoric, slap-happy, dazed with their fortune. On one plateau I went to near the Ethiopian border, where a cold spring poured water coursing through the plateau and down into Lake Turkana, the entire population seemed to live in the water. You’d walk along the river; every forty yards there’d be another group swimming. Join us, they’d shout; do you want some water? Heaven. And here, up in Katire with the cool and the shade and the water, on top of it all, there were some of the only steady cash jobs anywhere in southern Sudan. And every night, everyone danced their heads off.
There were drummers and one barrel-chested man blowing into a hollowed log that emitted a vast single bass note. The dance itself was some sort of female-run mating ritual. The young men were in an inner circle, dancing in place. The young women rotated in a dancing circle around them. At some unpredictable point, the old men on the side would shout, “O-re-o! O-re-o!” and quickly, the women would grab partners. Surprisingly chaste, Sunday-schoolish dancing would ensue, the man and woman circling, the woman establishing a dance step, the man trying to match it, the difficulty escalating slightly. After a while, people (usually the men not chosen) would impatiently start shouting, “O-re-o!” until the old men would join in the shouts, and the circling and scouting would begin again.
Joseph was beside himself with excitement. He had borrowed my flashlight as a prop, stood in the stationary circle next to me, wiggling and shimmying, trying to attract the women’s attention, flashing the light on his arms, chest, crotch. “Yeah, yeah, o-re-o, let’s go, o-re-o,” he would shout, ignored until the old men gave the signal. Irrationally, I found myself feeling nervous that I wouldn’t be picked. Once we started, I was picked by the giggly girls frequently and then felt nervous and irritated because I was obviously being picked just because I was a novel, amusing Martian. “Tonight you will sleep with someone, you will find a wife,” shouted Joseph in my ear. Why not, anything is possible, euphoria, as long as there is water and shade. O-re-o, o-re-o, dancing for hours, Joseph slapping me on the back, people shouting hellos and shaking my hand, tureens of water being passed around during the dancing, the one rhythmic bass note over and over and over and over amid the drums, everyone in their clean white dress clothes celebrating the end of another day not spent in the desert below.
Silence, dawn. Mist-filled forest everywhere. Hints of antelopes, birds. People emerging from their huts. Spires of mountain everywhere. Caught a ride on the logging truck going from Katire, clinging to the edge of the recently hackedout dirt road, ascending to the upper edge of the forest that was being logged. Men working entirely with hand tools, cutting down trees here and there. An edge of clearing and the end of the dirt road. Beyond that, forest for fifty miles in every direction. A continuous plateau, thick, mist-filled rain forest forever, 10,000-foot granite peaks soaring out of the jungle, monkeys and hooting birds and bush buck and forest hunters, and every now and then, a break in the mountains, a pass, and a view of the pounding desert, 7,000 feet below. Like being on a huge, lush verdant ship, floating above the ocean of hell desert.
I put up a tent at the edge of the clearing, at the beginning of the forest. I would start exploring. My main goal was the peak of the highest mountain, some fifteen crow’s miles away, through the forest. Already visible, floating above, pure straight soaring rock and menace.
I had no maps. There were no maps. There were no directions, no one had gone in there. There were just little forest trails, here and there, made by the forest hunters. They came out occasionally to trade with the loggers, small silent men in loincloths who would then scamper back into the forest.
I developed this pattern of hiking that decreased my anxiety about getting lost and disappearing in the forest. The first day, I followed the first path for about an hour until it came to a major split. I stayed there awhile and went up and down the split until I felt I knew the trees at the junction perfectly, could recognize the path I had chosen (seemingly the one toward the peak) from both directions. I sat there, drew a map of the path past the junction, drew pictures of the trees at the junction. Played my recorder for a while and called it a day, went back.
The next day I breezed past that junction and went two more until I felt too anxious and went back and rehearsed those. It felt calming to know that I was relatively familiar with all but the most distal of the day’s choices of paths. A rhythm of anticipation developed; each day, closer and closer to the mountain, knowing the forest better.
It was thick, giddy with overgrowth; you want to scream at its complexity. Dark, moist, sheltering. Twenty-foot-high ferns, archetypal vines to swing from, sections of the narrow paths where you walked on roots and huge rotting leaves instead of ground. Every afternoon, the cooling rains came, light, invigorating, as you stood there with your head back. The smell and crush of decay underfoot. Along the paths, frequently a deep ravine, descending into a stream you could only hear, lost amid the giant ferns.
On about the fifth day, perhaps seven or eight miles into the path, I came onto the first village. It was a small clearing. Maybe an acre of maize hugging the side of the slope, in the edge where the forest had cleared but a granite wall had not yet started. Four extremely simple huts. Perhaps a dozen people—slight, muscular, taut, silent, in animal skins. A few lip plugs. The women smoked long pipes. They bent in greeting, but said nothing. I sat for a while, feeling uncomfortable, and finally pantomimed that I was going to the big mountain, looming ever larger, and they pointed me to the proper trail. And then, as I was about to leave, they brought out a boy, about ten. He had conjunctivitis. They motioned to his eye, pointed to me. Could I do anything about it? Why in god’s name did they assume that, just because I was white or an outsider or wore clothes, I would know what to do? I kind of knew what to do. I had antibiotic ointment and tetracycline with me, started him on both. I had them bring water from the river, had the kid wash his hands, had the father wash his own hands before touching the kid. We put on ointment. I pantomimed that I would return the next day with more.
So I obtained my village. I would now pass each day while getting closer to the mountain. I put more ointment on the kid each day, gave him antibiotics. They brought me a man with a badly lacerated thigh, which I treated. They brought me a woman with a horrible tubercular cough, which I implied I could do nothing about; they seemed resigned. They became more talkative, brought me maize. Someone pulled out a plinker—a musical instrument—a small box of wood with half a dozen metal tines of different length. When each one was plucked, a metallic note emerged. They played dizzyingly, with one hand, with a pulsating shifting rhythm and a harmony that I could not begin to penetrate. I played my recorder back. One day, I detoured and went on a monkey hunt with them. We crept through the forest. I felt like a clumsy oaf and giant, all five feet six inches of me, as they slipped through the bush. There were colobus monkeys in the trees above. Naturally, I felt a surge of rooting for the monkeys, only to have it replaced now and then by the anticipation of their actually getting one. One of the men slipped in an arrow and brought down a monkey, with a sickening crash through the trees and screams of others as they brachiated away. We carried it back. It was skinned and cooked in a pot, a subadult male, its hand sticking out. It was then that I noticed the monkeyskin rug, the monkey-skin clothing. I declined the meat but stayed on while they ate, feeling queasy and excited.
More days, pushing closer, the kid’s eye looking better. I felt like the father to all of them, like I was the god of antibiotics. About ten days into it, I reached the next village at the very base of the mountain. It had become one of the most ominous mountains I’d ever seen. Vast, looming, silent, craggy, dark magnificently complicated rock formations, rising up straight out of the jungle like some sort of citadel of the ruined jungle empire of Zinj. And at the end of the final valley of jungle, another tiny village, clinging to the base of the mountain as if the people, continuing the traditional task of their ancestors who served the last rulers of Zinj a millennium before, still guarded the path to the mountain.
When I finally reached the village, the people were familiar. My Schweitzer village was indigenous mountain hunters who had been up there forever and were ethnically completely novel to me. But this next village turned out to be made of refugees—desert people who had fled up there a dozen years before during the last bad festering of the civil war. They were Tuka tribe, very close to the Turkana, the Kenyan desert people just across the border. What a homey familiar touch—I’d know those lip plugs and neck rings anywhere. Also the potbellies on the kids, the coughs, the suppurating lesions. I knew about half a dozen words of their language, and we got on swell from the start. A homecoming. Quickly, I arranged to return in two days; a man there named Cassiano would take me up the mountain, this impossible rock now tearing straight up out of the trees behind their huts.
I returned late afternoon two days later. Cassiano insisted I sleep in his hut, instead of my tent. He slept at his brother’s, next door.
I had been noting that these people in the second village, desert folk for centuries until a decade ago, had still not adapted to their new settings. They made a fire inside their house, which was certainly necessary with the mountain cold, but they had not modified the architecture from the way it was back down in the desert—still completely shut. Thus, the smoke accumulated to a horrendous extent. The village was filled with red eyes and tubercular coughs from the smoke. As soon as Cassiano had left for the night, I blew out the all-night fire he had left—my sleeping bag was warm enough, and the smoke was sickening. I went to sleep.
Around midnight, I discovered the other reasons why they kept fires going all night. I awoke to a sound that will give me the chills for the rest of my life. I woke up thinking, Oh, it’s raining. Then I thought, Oh, it’s raining on me—I can feel the drops hitting my sleeping bag, my face. Then I remembered I was sleeping inside a hut. Suddenly, I was monstrously awake. Things were moving all over me. My hair was moving. I shined my flashlight around. The smoke was also meant to percolate through the grass thatched roof. This would drive away the giant cockroaches. In the absence of smoke, the cockroaches had poured in, all over the bags of maize meal. But this was not the real problem. Because following the cockroaches were the army ants.
I would contend that army ants are the single most disgusting disquieting panic-provoking creatures in all of Africa. Their mere proximity leads me to twitch and moan and shudder and leap about with a Saint Vitus’s dance of agitation. They come in swarms that cover square acres. They are huge with pincers that take pieces of meat out of you. They crawl all over you silently, before a single one bites, and then through some pheromonal alarm signal, they all attack at once. They eat your eyelids and nostrils and soft parts. They attack anything, kill invalids who cannot run away from bush hospitals. Once they dig in your skin with their pincers, they hold on so tightly that when you pull at them to get them off, the head detaches from the body, leaving the pincers still in you. The Masai use them to suture people—bad cut, and someone grabs an army ant, holds the two sides of the cut together, lets the pissed-off ant sink its pincers in, and, quickly, twists off the body, leaving rows of ant head sutures in place.
But the worst thing about them is that when they attack, they hiss. A nightmare sound, the hiss of army ants, in the dark, sweeping over the field around you.
The place was swarming with them, the raindrops falling down on me from the thatching. They weren’t bothering with me. Yet. They were dismembering the zillions of cockroaches. There were roaches all over the maize sacks, and, horrifyingly, a three-dimensional bridge of ants, holding on to each other, had formed from the floor to the sacks, pulling off the cockroaches, ten times their size. I was covered, I was just furniture for the moment.
I had to get out. A movement, a stepping on ants on the floor, would trigger all those on me to attack, but there was no other choice. The only question was whether the ant column encompassed the front of the hut. If so, I would just have to run off into the jungle night until I cleared them.
I counted, procrastinated, made my move. By the second step, your body suddenly catches on fire. Flames, little flames, everywhere. You slap, scream, pull at them, keep moving. One on my eyelid, lips, many on my crotch, goddamn it. I burst outside, yelling, ripping my clothes off, rolling on the ground. Thank god the swarm was coming from the opposite end. I flailed, yelped, pulled ants off, spastically leapt about hammering a body part against the ground in an attempt to squash the ants. Cassiano and the rest of the village emerged and, predictably, found my plight hilarious. Once I had gotten the last of the ants off, gotten my clothes back on, I sheepishly explained what I had done. Disdainful of the ants, Cassiano leapt into his house, got a fire going, and soon the ants and remnants of the cockroach ocean were swept back into the forest.
At dawn, we left for the mountain. Cassiano, barefoot, led the way, macheteing a path through the forest, for lack of a preexisting one, until we reached the actual rock wall. From there, we began to climb, somewhat straight up. Precarious footings, scrambles across seams in the boulders where a shower of rock fragments would come off. It felt kind of unlikely, but he seemed to know what he was doing. An hour, two hours, exhausting, sweaty, fun, and we cleared the top. The highest point in Sudan. A cascade of dizzying sights below—other granite peaks with birds looping around them. Forest below with the steam lifting off of it. And in the distance, the desert.
On top of the mountain, at the highest point, was a rock cairn. It was pyramidal, with a central core. With rapid motions, almost curtly, Cassiano motioned me away from it. Quietly, reverently, he knelt down. From behind his ear, hidden in his hair, he pulled out a small bird feather, which he placed in the heart of the cairn. At that moment, I deeply envied every animist his religion.
It was time to go. Or rather, it was time to start trying to go. Transportation was so precarious that you had to start weeks in advance. I would go back to the main road, try to catch a ride on some lorry either going straight back to Kenya, or via Uganda.
I left heaven, rode on the loggers’ lorry from the mountains down to Torit. I wound up sitting in the truck yard of the Wimpy Company, about the only thing that worked in Torit. Wimpy was a British road construction company, contracted through the British government to build a new Juba-Kenya road as a gift to Sudan. They had already been there for years, fighting to get a road through the desert and the tribal raids and the rainy seasons. The Wimpy truck yard was where things were at.
There was an unlikely turmoil of activity—British managers yelling at Arab foremen yelling at black workers, forklifts and jackhammers and road graders careening about. I spotted my targets from across the yard—six Somalis, sitting in a circle, drinking coffee made in an old oil can, in between two petrol tankers with Kenyan plates. In East and Central Africa, all the real long-distance drivers, the hard-ass crazies who would get in a petrol tanker by the dock in Mombassa, on the Indian Ocean in Kenya, and drive for three straight months through wars and revolutions to drop things off in the Congo and then turn back, all of these madmen, are Somalis. It’s some sort of logical adaptation of traditional desert nomadicism to a modern occupation. They are simply tough enough and resilient enough and don’t mind a six-month delivery trip across the continent. The crew is two or three guys, a driver and some gofers, austere tapered silent Somalis with a cab jammed with camel’s milk and boxes of spaghetti (a taste acquired from the colonial days of Italian Somaliland) and heaps of psychoactive plants to chew. Some prayer mats, some guns, no doubt something or other being smuggled. The Somali truckers.
I approached this group, went up to the senior guy, middle-aged with a goatee and an un-Somali potbelly. In Swahili, I said, I’m looking for a ride, are you guys going to Kenya? He didn’t even look up from his coffee. Get lost, he told me. I retreated to the other end of the yard, sat in the sand, read about the embroidery pattern on Joseph’s wondrous coat for about thirty-five pages.
Four or five hours later. They’re still sitting, drinking coffee, ignoring the other trucks sweeping around them. Now playing cards. I went up again. Do you at least know anyone else who is going to Kenya? Get lost, I told you, he told me again. I retreated back to my book. About two hours later, the senior guy shambled over to me and, in a voice as if he were giving me my last warning, said, Okay, we’ll take you to Kenya, but it’s going to cost you, believe me. We bargained a bit, agreed on a perfectly reasonable price. When do we leave? Tonight. He shambled back, I returned to my reading. A few minutes later, the junior-most of the gofers approached, silently handed me coffee and a bowl of spaghetti. “The sun is not so fierce there,” he said, motioning toward the group.
So I joined the Somalis. There were six of them—Abdul, Abdul, Abdulla, Achmet, Ehmet, and Ali. Abdul and Ehmet were the drivers of the two tankers. Achmet and Ali were the seconds, Abdul the Younger and Abdulla the two kid gofers. They were an inseparable crew and were about to start back from the three-month drive they had taken from Mombassa to deliver the petrol to Juba. It turned out, they were all from the same village in Somalia, possibly the only survivors; the village had been wiped out in one of the obscure wars that had been raging in the Horn of Africa forever, and they, all six of them, walked to Mombassa in Kenya. Despite the possible logic of their feeling grateful to Kenya for taking them in, they commandeered my map and marked the whole northeast corner of Kenya as belonging to greater Somalia. The Somali government’s tendency to make the same claim has brought the two countries to the brink of war more than once.
The six of them were mean, quiet bastards. Well, except for the two younguns, the gofers. Abdul the Younger was, uncharacteristically, a mean, garrulous bastard—loud, talkative, bragging bully. He had the air about him of a petty, scheming con man always taken in by better con men. And Abdulla the Kid, the youngest of them all, maybe sixteen, was even more uncharacteristic—he was quiet and meek and had this curious, frightened, overwhelmed air to him, thick sleepy eyes and a seeming desire to be liked. He sat next to me and smiled hopefully, as if I were going to save him from his kinsmen.
Late afternoon came, and the card game continued. We had more coffee. I normally don’t drink coffee, and this stuff was sickeningly powerful, but I thought they would beat me if I didn’t drink it. Evening, more cards, more coffee, more spaghetti. At dusk, with the tumult of trucks no different from at noon, everyone prepared to sleep. I thought we were leaving today? I asked. Ehmet leaned over menacingly. Are you in some kind of rush? he said. No, no. Okay, tomorrow Kenya, tomorrow Nairobi, he said—an inconceivable goal. He wished me good night, smiling beatifically. Abdul and Ehmet, the seniors, slept in the beds in the cabs. Achmet and Ali got to sleep underneath the tankers; Abdul the Younger, Abdulla the Kid, and I on mats in the sand of the truck yard.
The next day we were up early, and the Somalis quickly formed their circle and started playing cards and drinking coffee. In boredom and irritation, I retreated back to the adventures of Joseph and his brothers, the brothers reminding me more and more of the Somalis. Midafternoon, Abdulla the Kid wandered over, conceivably sick of the coffee and cards himself, and sat next to me. Soon, I was playing recorder, Abdulla trying to teach me impossible Somali songs: modal, short, noodly chanted bursts of near-melody, little rhythmic fragments, quiet whispered parts. In revenge, I tried to teach him “Mares Eat Oats and Does Eat Oats,” real fast. He was impressed. Abdul the Younger sat down, ostensibly to taunt Abdulla for this wimp music stuff, but he was soon singing Somali songs and his favorite melodies from Saturday Night Fever.
More coffee, more spaghetti, another day gone by. We slept on the mats again. All night, as with the night before, trucks lurched just past our heads, yellow phosphorus klieg lights burned, pickup trucks screeched past us, spraying us with water from the only muddy potholes for a hundred miles. Dawn, the crew assembled for more cards. It was apparent to me that they had little desire to start the awful three-month journey back and would happily stay there forever. But today, fortunately, one of the British managers bellowed at them, “I want you bloody Somalis to get your asses out of here this hour or else there will be hell to pay.” Murderous grumbling among themselves, and we were off.
Adventure, barreling through the desert back to Kenya! I sat on the engine casing, jauntily chuckling good-naturedly at everything. Yeah, moving. We got to the eastern edge of Torit, to the last store in the town. Everyone piles in, buys new sandals, combs. Abdul the Senior Driver, in a seeming ritual, buys an absurd outlandish bottle of perfume and slaps its entire repulsive contents on everyone, including me. Anointed. Yeah, celebration for the long trip we’re beginning. Then everyone settles down under the tree next to the store, resumes playing cards. I despair. Twenty minutes later, the Brit shows up again, boots everyone into the trucks, and off we go. It’s apparent from the view that that was the last grove of trees for a long long time, so we might as well drive.
Lurching, churneling through the desert sand, each cab pulling an empty double tanker. Desolate howling desert; sometimes the road would be anyone’s guess. Midafternoon, when the heat was intolerable, we napped underneath the vehicles. Late afternoon, we stopped for coffee and spaghetti. I was beginning to feel coated with caffeine and starch, queasy at the diet, but no one else seemed to mind. Tonight, however, to celebrate our departure, we had a special meal. This time, Abdul the Senior had the honors of mixing a ton of sugar and some pretty rank camel’s milk in with the spaghetti. With the heating over the paraffin stove, it formed a milk-sugar coating over each strand that made each bite that much more sickening. We sat in a circle, Somali style, knees resting on each other’s thighs, and everyone ate with their right hand out of the central pot. Then off to bed.
It seemed like we had been sleeping for only a few hours. In fact, we had been sleeping for only a few hours-it was ten in the evening, Achmet was shaking me awake. Hurry, we’re leaving. The trucks were already revving up. I bundled up my sleeping bag, grabbed my stuff, leapt on. Why the rush? Good time to drive, answered Abdul. It became apparent over the days that something dreadful had happened to these guys’ circadian clocks. There was no day/night pattern at all. We drove till midnight, went back to sleep. We started an hour before dawn, stopped twice during the day for naps, drove halfway through the night before stopping for a two-hour snooze. The only schedule was the five stops a day, where everyone would pile out, put out their mats, and pray to Mecca. The crazy schedule made no sense, but my head was soon reeling, especially since each day’s drive would begin with Abdul confiding in me, “Kenya, today,” and each day we would be, perhaps, another ten kilometers closer, lurching and spraying and heaving through the sand.
It also became apparent that these were savagely aggressive men, with the exception of Abdulla the Kid. We would come to some hamlet, and, essentially, the men would go into some house and shake down the desperately poor occupants. The five of them (Abdulla hanging back with me, looking more frightened than usual) would tromp into the decayed hut, find the frightened, half-decayed occupant, and take three onions. Or some cabbage or oranges. Or, our third day, a goat—the angry, frightened man in a tattered pair of shorts and nothing else tried to hold on to his only goat, and Ali and Achmet beat him. These were padietically poor people, and the crew was just driving through, pillaging and threatening and taking what they wanted. I felt sick, didn’t want to eat any of the food, but was afraid to insult them. Abdulla seemed as uncomfortable as I. While Ali and Achmet were beating the goatman, Abdulla looked away and sort of whispered, Well, they don’t give us much food to take when we leave Mombassa, as if searching for an explanation.
A lot of the violence seemed to reflect the endless hostility between the Arabs and the Africans. Forever, the Somalis’ ancestors had probably been part of the raiders that rounded up the ancestors of these Sudanese as slaves. The slave market in Arabic Zanzibar had continued to operate well into this century. The Somalis had a seething contempt for inland blacks that seemed to be at their very core. “These Sudanese are like animals,” Ehmet chuckled to me, after one of their plundering raids of two cabbages from a hut where there was nothing else.
And the Somalis were almost as violent with each other. While they were quite affectionate in a way I’ve become familiar with from Arabs—holding your hand for emphasis as you spoke to him, sitting next to him with knee on thigh—they were also intensely aggressive. Each day, each meal stop, inevitably, there would be a fight. Achmet, under the truck, trying to get the paraffin stove going, would be criticized by someone for how he was doing it, and he would come up fighting. Ehmet would get us stuck in the sand, necessitating our unhooking the cab from the tankers; Abdul would criticize his choice of path, there’d be a fight. I came to recognize the ritual pattern. The two trucks would be parked parallel, with everyone gathering in between for food/coffee/cards. A tense moment would arise, and two would fight. Savage rapid fighting, grappling, kicking. The loser would invariably make a last attempt at saving face“the intensely calculating, pointy, taut Achmet would take on Abdul the Younger, quickly pummel him into the ground, walk away in triumph, and Abdul would leap up, his boot knife pulled out. And the ritual would continue. Everyone would lumber up at that point, wrestle Abdul down, take the knife away—Abdul would have taken Achmet, but he was unfairly outnumbered, face thus saved. Abdul would sulk by himself under a tree at a distance. A meal would silently be prepared. People would begin earing, Abdul still sulking. One of the seniors, Abdul or Ehmet, would yell something joking or conciliatory, and Abdul the Younger would return to the circle.
This happened nearly every meal, every stop, the ritual of fighting—but no conventional ritual—there would be blood half the time. Only Abdulla the Kid was excepted. And me. It occurred to me that I was being treated so courteously, so gently, that I was in deep deep trouble. One day, as we stopped driving, and everyone was happy and uncharacteristically frisky, Ehmet bear-hugged me from behind, wrestled me down laughing. I laughed also, struggled to no avail, and was more than a little frightened. But other than that, I was treated with immaculate detachment. I attempted to pay for things on the few occasions where they bought instead of stole, and they huffily made me put my money away. Every meal, they insisted I eat first. It was all so considerate and ostentatious that I was absolutely certain that this was part of some long-standing Somali custom, feeding me and fattening me on sugared spaghetti until the preordained full moon when they would slit my throat from ear to ear. This fear was more than a little bit serious. I just couldn’t read them, and I felt more uncomfortable and frightened each day, as we disappeared into the no-man’s-land of desert between the two countries, they pillaging and beating and terrorizing the Sudanese, pulling knives on each other in moments of hideous anger, and placing the spaghetti pot graciously in front of me.
A few days out, somewhere just west of the barely defined border, Abdul rolled the truck. It was a bridge, maybe twenty feet long, spanning what was a deep river for perhaps two days a year during the rains and was now just a deep ravine. The road just beyond the concrete was washed out on the left, and Abdul came into it too close to the washout. Agonizingly slowly, we slid toward the left—”Whoah!” we all hollered—Abdul tried to turn the wheel to the right as we kept moving laterally, but it was useless. We slid further left, and then slowly, we begin to tip. There was even time for all of us to brace, to think, Leap out the window, no, don’t leap out the window, your head will get sheared off Almost imperceptibly, we rolled down and onto our side and completely over.
We squeezed out to inspect our state. The cab was upside-down, the first tanker on its side, the second upright back on the bridge. What a stunningly sickening feeling, to see the undercarriage of your vehicle exposed to the desert sun. We detached the two tankers from Ehmet s cab, which had already passed the bridge, a job that took all seven of us. Ehmet tried to pull out Abdul’s cab but instead slid and rolled as well. We were well and truly fucked.
The Somalis did the logical thing. Ehmet criticized Abdul’s driving, and they began to fight. Ali, Achmet, and Abdul the Younger began to fight. Abdulla the Kid and I cowered. Things quieted. We sat, felt dizzy in the heat. There wasn’t much shade to sit under, the tanker was too precarious. Everyone was tense as hell. Occasionally, we would do ineffectual things like dig at the tire with our hand shovels. By some unspoken decision of group distress, we ate nothing. Everyone was getting angrier. We were thirsty, and there seemed to be little water. Ali discovered poisonous ants nearby that made your foot go numb for five minutes and then throb for an hour. Scorpions turned up. Late afternoon, Abdul and Ehmet had another fight. Everyone seemed frightened in an undefined way.
By the next morning, still sitting there, Abdulla the Kid had defined that fright for me. The Toposa. These were wild-ass tribesmen who lived along the border, making a living, if one could believe it, raiding the Somali truckers. The army had almost gotten them under control until the civil war farther north necessitated the army’s withdrawal, and the Toposa had been running amok since then. They had guns (obtained from raids on army units), came in large numbers, took everything, shot the truckers, burned the petrol tankers. Weirdly, despite their growing familiarity with twentieth-century firearms, a moving vehicle was still apparently intimidating to the Toposa. They only hit stalled vehicles or ones stopped for the night—thus explaining the frenetic, noncircadian pattern of driving. Whether it had been an unspoken sense of Toposa around that had been sending the Somalis scrambling from sleeping to driving in minutes, or a spoken sense among themselves along with a gracious sparing me the news, or just general heebie-jeebies each time wasn’t clear. It made me faint to consider there was someone out there who could take on the Somalis. It seemed implausible, cowboys and Indians, but if these guys were scared shitless of the Toposa, I was perfectly willing to be as well.
Everyone was tense as hell. Everyone was yelling at everyone, until they were exhausted at that, sat, moping, shirting to avoid the poison ants. Achmet got out the guns, which seemed futile. Abdulla looked as sick as I felt.
Early afternoon, All, who had been perching silently on top of Ehmet s tanker, our highest vantage point, scanning the desert, reported that someone had spotted us and had moved off quickly toward the hills in the distance. Toposa, going to a village to report that we were stranded.
We were near panic. Ali and Achmet took positions with the guns. Ehmet tried again, as if with extra desire now, to get his cab out of the ravine. Abdulla the Kid huddled underneath the back tanker. We all breathed fast, felt like we had to do something to prepare ourselves, knowing there was nothing to do. All I could think about was the last passage of Thomas Mann I had been reading—Joseph’s brothers had attacked him, sold him into slavery, and had just brought his bloodied coat to their father (one could surmise that Joseph had been done in by lions, but you could never know), and Jacob, old Jacob, was haunted by never being certain what happened to his son. I suddenly decided I really wasn’t in a panic about dying, I was upset that I would never be found, my parents would never know what happened to me—I would just disappear, without a trace.
I sat there, clutching my knees, near tears, thinking about my old father. Abdulla the Kid was hiding under the bridge. The others were fighting. Achmet was pummeling Abdul the Younger; Ehmet and Ali were on Abdul the Senior, Ali bludgeoning him with the stock of the gun. It was chaos, sheer terrifying chaos, and the Toposa would be here any moment. It was then that we heard Baker’s engine.
From in the distance, we spotted it. It was approaching us from the Kenyan direction, puttering at an imperturbable crawl. It was a huge tractor. “It’s Baker,” shouted Ehmet, his hands still around Abdul’s neck. “It’s Baker,” all the Somalis shouted, leaping up. “It’s Baker,” I shouted, Abdulla the Kid and I hugging each other.
Baker, I was soon able to find out amid the huzzahing, operated the biggest tractor for the Wimpy Company, and his job was to trundle up and down the nascent quasi-road, pulling the company vehicles out of their frequent messes. It was a massive vehicle, outfitted with bulletproof glass. A Ugandan refugee rode shotgun, and they did a circuit up and down the stretch from the border to Torit, pulling out stalled and overturned company vehicles.
Baker puttered up, inspected our state, said, “Should be no problem.” He was a stocky, tall, intensely black Sudanese with a heavy beard. I fell in love with him instantly. He hooked some chains onto Ehmet’s cab, pulled it onto the road with barely a shrug. Fifteen more minutes of unhooking and hooking chains and Abdul’s cab and tanker were righted and on the road.
As the Ugandan coiled the chains, I realized that I had just made a decision, without even thinking about it, without even realizing that there was something to be decided. I sidled up to Baker. Could I ride back with him to Torit? I was tired of being frightened, and I had just imprinted on Baker, had decided that he was the safest, most protective human on earth. I wondered if I seemed bizarre, the intensity with which I was asking him to save me. This was a normal workday for him. You bet, he said, in oddly colloquial English. I got my stuff, felt fearful to tell the Somalis, wondered if Baker would protect me if they attacked me for ingratitude or something. Instead, they seemed disappointed, waved away the money I offered to meet Abdul’s original price. I swelled with warmth for them when I realized they were not going to beat me.
We departed, heading west again, the Somalis disappearing. We moved at a steady speed. I asked Baker about our progress, our likely destination tonight, and he said, “I don’t know. We do about 15 kilometers an hour, but it will depend on how the river crossing is up ahead, and if anyone else is stuck.” It was so refreshing—he didn’t categorically say, “Torit, tonight,” when there was no way to make it, didn’t lie, didn’t say anything confusing. He had said, “I don’t know,” and then outlined the contingencies in a way that was completely clear. I fell more in love with him.
A few miles ahead, as I began to calm down, a chain came loose on the back. It was a minor problem, would take Baker and the Ugandan a few minutes to fix. As he got out of the cab, Baker reached underneath his seat, said, Look, a surprise, and tossed me a mango, one for the Ugandan, one for himself. They went to the back to coil in the chain, and I leaned against the cab of the tractor, in the shade.
I may live to be a very old man someday, a lifetime filled with thoughts and emotions and sensations. But no matter how many of those experiences pile up, I will always look back with incredible pleasure and gratitude for the next instant. I bit into the mango, tasted the juice, and my eyes filled with tears, as I felt safe for the first time in many days.
Postscript: Within a few years, the brush fire of fighting between the north and the south had turned into a savage, full-blown war in the south that has produced two million civilian deaths, mostly from starvation, millions more refugees, armies of orphans—and has been largely ignored by the West. The Wimpy Company’s partially completed road was destroyed, they and virtually all other Western presences driven out of southern Sudan. Juba and Torit have been alternatively occupied by government or rebel forces and thus subject to a withering blockade and starvation by the other side. The Toposa have become a major raiding force on the Sudanese/Kenyan border, specializing in hitting refugee camps. And as has been well documented by various relief organizations, the enslavement and selling of southern blacks by northern Arabs has, once again, become widespread.
As I read the occasional report about the ongoing war, I always search for a mention of, or for any bad news about, Katire, the tiny logging village on the edge of the Imatong plateau. The absence of such news leads me to conclude that people there still dance in their white shirts and blouses each evening, and that thousands of feet above them in the shrouded forest, my villages are still safe, their residents hunting monkeys and raising maize, free of the scorched planet below them. I am comforted by this unlikely possibility.