The time after leaving school was important to me in another way as well. From Crete, I took a boat to Alexandria. I took the cheapest class there was and slept on deck so my money would go further. As soon as I set foot on the African continent in Alexandria, I was tricked. A uniformed official demanded a landing fee of ten dollars and gave me a receipt. Only after I’d paid did I notice that no one else was asked to pay this fee. The Egyptians, of course, didn’t; and a few Greeks laughed at the deception. From that moment on, I was more careful.
Egypt is somehow behind a veil in my memory. Cairo, then by train along the Nile to Luxor and the Valley of Kings. Then on past Aswan toward Sudan. South of Aswan, the Nile is no longer navigable because of rapids; between Shellal and Wadi Halfa I had to travel on a dusty truck. Then Khartoum and Omdurman. What was impelling me was my curiosity about the Congo. The country had declared its independence the previous year, 1960, and was now sinking into chaos and tribal warfare. All of its institutions had failed, and law and order no longer existed. Furthermore, there was fighting between the rightist forces under Tshombe and Mobutu and socialists like Lumumba, who had been murdered. Somewhere at the back of my interest, though not applicable in any one-for-one sort of way, was the question of how Germany, after the First World War, could have lapsed so quickly from a civilized country into the barbarism of the Nazis. In the case of the Congo, the reasons were different; they were bound up with the ravages of colonialism, but the concrete collapse of institutional order was something I needed to understand. How was it possible that cannibalism was returning? In eastern Congo, political figures had surfaced who were not trained by Western elites but who represented rooted African traditions, people like Gizenga, Mulele, and Gbenye. Africa, after all, had had a European ethos forced on it.
Farther up the Nile, there are no passable land routes through southern Sudan; the flooding and the swampy Nile make passage impossible. I flew in a small mail plane to Juba. From there, it wasn’t far to the Congolese border. I remember the red earth everywhere, and buildings, even quite large buildings, roofed with dark rushes. In Juba I straightaway came down with amoebic dysentery, and I turned back after just one day, finally made it to Aswan in Egypt, where I sheltered in a shed for garden tools. I didn’t have any insurance. Things went downhill fast. The fever made me feel so cold that I wore a sweater in spite of the heat. I had almost nothing in the way of baggage, just a half-empty duffel bag. I had fever dreams in which I saw myself swimming miles out to sea, then something was biting me in the elbow, a fish, maybe a shark. I leapt up, and a rat ran right across my face. There were more of them too. When I extended my arm, I saw that a big hole had been gnawed in my sweater. I suppose the rat was getting wool for its nest. I found a little bite wound in my cheek. My cheek swelled up, and the wound was still leaking pus weeks later and refusing to heal. My shit was bloody froth, but somehow I still tried to get some structure into my situation by bedding down on carefully spread-out newspaper sheets. In my life I’ve often been down and out but never as much as this. I knew I had to get out of that shed.
I remember the fierce sun outside, and later on, some men milling around. I thought I was hallucinating, but they really were speaking German. They were Siemens technicians who were building the turbines for the Aswan Dam. The dam itself had been built by Soviet engineers, but the electrical equipment was installed by Germans. A doctor gave me some shockingly powerful medication, and I returned to Cairo on a plane. From there, I made it home. My greatest good fortune, though, wasn’t that as an eighteen-year-old I had survived such an illness but that I hadn’t managed to make it across the Congolese frontier. In 1992, when I was briefly the director of the Viennale film fest in Vienna, I invited the Polish writer and philosopher Ryszard Kapuściński as one of my guests. He had more knowledge of Africa than anyone I knew, and it was he as well who, a year before me, a young man himself coming from Juba, had reached eastern Congo. There he was arrested forty times in a year and a half and four times sentenced to death. I asked him what his worst day had been. The worst day went on for a week in which he was in a pit under sentence of death, and drunken soldiers were throwing poisonous snakes onto him. “In the space of a week,” said Kapuściński, putting his hand to his head, “my hair turned white.” His hair wasn’t just white, it was as white as driven snow. “I want you to get on your knees,” he said, “and thank God you were never there.” Apart from him, there was only one other reporter who emerged from there alive.
I wanted to make a science fiction film with him, but I wanted it to be different. Science fiction projects technical advances into a futuristic world, or aliens visit us to destroy us with superior technology and futuristic weapons, but I was fascinated—and he just as much—with the idea that the future might be one in which we had lost all our technical prowess, just as, after the fall of the Roman Empire, almost every innovation of technology, medicine, science, mathematics, and literature was lost. For the better part of the next thousand years, only scraps of the old knowledge survived, hidden in monasteries or preserved in translations into Arabic. The worst loss of all was the fire that destroyed the library of Alexandria, which housed the entire store of antique knowledge and literature and philosophy. Kapuściński and I had imagined a world, which he had seen in whole and I in part, where hotel elevators no longer functioned and water collected in their shafts; where hoteliers accompanied their guests upstairs with a light bulb in their jacket pocket, which they screwed in in the room and took back when the guest checked out; a world where traffic jams would last a week and you could only reach the airport on foot; where the computer terminals that supposedly controlled flight schedules sprouted creepers; where there was no petrol in gas stations; where currency was so destroyed by inflation that you needed a wheelbarrow full of pressed banknotes to buy a chicken; a world where in a military coup drunken soldiers could not shoot the members of a cabinet tied to posts because they kept missing; finally they managed to hit them in the knee or somewhere, then, at the end of an hour the ministers were somehow all dead; a world where, if water for once came out of the taps, you had to run to fill pots and bowls and even bathtubs because the army had blocked off the supply and was selling water from tanker trucks to the highest bidder. A world in which no one had any interest in reading or information except the crudest conspiracy theories. A world, then, that didn’t need to be imagined, just observed, because it had already existed for ages. Kapuściński thought about eastern Congo as a location, or the Sudan and its borders with Ethiopia and Kenya, or some banana republic in Central America, but we threw out all that because the countries, at least in Africa, were all racked by civil wars. Not long before, Kapuściński, riding in a truck in tall elephant grass, had been ambushed and shot at. In addition, there was the fact that, wherever one ended up filming, it would be supposed that one wanted to damage the reputation of a particular country or group of people. The film remained unmade.