January 2014
North of Kasansero, the plan was to follow the shore for another 160km, seven days of hard trekking that would finally take us to Kampala, Uganda’s boomtown and capital city. In Kasansero the fishermen warned us that the way north was a morass of tributaries and dense swamps, and if we wanted to stay close to the lake the trek was going to be laborious. Boston and I bickered about which route to take and, in the end, settled on a compromise: we would gather the services of a few locals and their boat – not to ride in, but to ferry our packs along the shore while we walked along the bank so as to make us light enough to move through the swamps, and if necessary swim around the mangroves. On the night before we departed I left Boston to source some likely guides and lay awake, thinking of the walk to come.
In the morning, Boston introduced me to the boatmen he had hired. At the shore of the lake, three policemen in uniform were lined up, with AK-47s slung over their shoulders. Beaming, Boston introduced me to the first, who told me his name was Fred. Before I could say anything, they began to load our packs into the boat.
I looked incredulously at Boston.
‘It is better pay than for being a policeman, Lev,’ said Boston as the three jolly officials pushed their boat out onto the lake.
We pushed north. There was something quite indulgent about walking along a beach for days on end, with palm-fringed shores, rickety fishing boats and quaint wooden villages making it feel as if we were in a clichéd image of holiday perfection. Despite warnings of ‘chiggers’, the voracious red mites that lived in the sand, it was too beautiful to wear boots and a nice change to walk either barefoot or in sandals, with the lapping waves to cool our feet. Most of the lake was flanked by thick forests, some of it national parkland, where colobus monkeys and waterbuck abounded. All along the shorelines birds of every variety gathered in their thousands: sacred ibis, white storks, Ugandan crested cranes and Egyptian geese. Yet, for all this perfection, for long stretches paradise turned to hell. The locals in Kasansero had not been exaggerating when they called this place a quagmire. For miles the path disappeared into impenetrable mangrove swamps, and Boston and I hacked our way on, turning in circles, until we stumbled upon a trail blazed by locals to the next settlement along the shore.
The swamp seemed to stretch forever. An hour later, lost – and with the next settlement still ten miles distant – we were wading through brown, soupy water that reached our waists. More than once, I had stumbled and become entirely submerged, having to be fished out of the stinking brine by Boston. We had backtracked in search of Boston’s lost shoe, and spent ten minutes working out a way to pull him out of the soft earth that was trying to swallow him up. There was a part of me – some insane, masochistic part – that was beginning to enjoy the torment when Boston’s eyes drew mine down to what appeared to be a pool of black liquid right beside my feet.
‘It’s a snake,’ he whispered. ‘Look, Lev! A python . . .’
I saw the blackness uncurl and disappear, setting the surface of the water to ripples. I froze. Then, putting on my most nonchalant face, I smiled back at the overjoyed Boston. ‘It’s probably just a monitor lizard.’
‘I don’t think so, Lev.’ Boston had crouched and was already plucking a ghostly white snake skin from the reeds – by its rubbery texture, quite fresh.
‘Still,’ I muttered, with my eyes constantly on the water, ‘at least he’s quite small . . .’
An hour later, soaked to the skin, we stepped up onto dry land and, in front of us, stood three wooden huts and a crowd of villagers. Most of them were half-naked or just wearing filthy rags. By the remoteness of the place and the piles of shells lying on the sand it seemed they were shell-fish miners. We were to see more of them as we ventured north, men who collected shells to grind up and sell as chicken feed in the local markets. It is one of the worst-paid professions on the shores of Lake Victoria and, as they turned to see us, they were evidently thrilled. To them, strangers meant opportunity.
They rushed to meet us, eager to shake hands. One man cried out to congratulate us on not being constrained by such foolish things as ‘paths’ – and, as the crowd shifted, I saw something staked out on the beach, reflecting the cruel midday sun. Boston and I shared a look. It was another python skin – but this didn’t belong to the friend we had made in the swampland. This was ten times as big, more than six metres long. Nor was it a skin that had been shed. This gleamed black and blue, a true snakeskin taken from a dead python and pegged out to dry. It was the kind you only see in movies and nightmares and I couldn’t tear my eyes away.
A drunk man, deeply proud of his achievement, clawed his way to the front of the crowd.
‘You want to buy it?’ he slurred.
‘I don’t think I’d get it through customs,’ I replied, but the joke was lost on him.
‘Twenty dollars?’
Boston knelt at the skin to study it. By turns, he was shaking his head in what appeared disgust and grinning at the monstrosity of the beast.
The man in front of me produced an old mobile phone from his shorts and told me, with increasing pride, how just yesterday one of the villagers’ goats had disappeared. Fearing the worst, they had tracked its last movements – and there, lying before them, was this enormous python, gorged and swollen with the goat inside.
‘So we killed it. Watch . . .’
The cracked screen of the mobile phone came to life and I realised, with grim fascination, that he was about to show me the snake’s final moments. In the picture the man appeared to be pulling on its tail as the swollen beast thrashed around. Then, from out of shot, a machete appeared. The final act was half-obscured, but at last the python was still.
When the image turned black, the man was nodding in appreciation.
‘Did you eat it?’ I asked, for want of anything better to say.
He looked at me with disbelief. ‘Of course not!’ he exclaimed, as if to say that the very idea was absurd. ‘Snake meat is bad. It will become a drum.’
As we left them to their work, Boston sidled up to me and shook his head sadly. ‘Savages,’ he muttered.
It was the most ecologically minded thing I had ever heard Boston say. ‘It’s a predator,’ I said. ‘Perhaps they had to do it, to protect their goats.’
‘I did not mean that, Lev!’ Boston balked as we resumed our trek. ‘I mean – why kill such a beautiful creature, just for a drum skin? They could have made so much more money if only they had sold it to a zoo . . . These Bugandans, Lev, they’re too stupid to even think.’
Over the next days the shore alternated between dense swamp and pristine beaches where more landing sites like Kasansero had grown up. At times the mangrove forests were so alive with fire ants and spiders that we were forced to wade out into the lake and skip around the swamp instead.
The closer we got to his adopted home, the brighter Boston seemed to become. Passing from landing site to landing site, with the lake always glittering on the right – and, somewhere in it, the Kagera transforming to the true White Nile – he constantly chipped away. This, he told me, was a civilised country. I was humbled to admit he might have had a point. From the moment we set foot in Uganda the local attitude towards us seemed to change. Matthias’s news story must have helped, but the villages we passed through were not as immediately suspicious as were in Tanzania, and the police didn’t seem as eager to apprehend us for being English spies or the CIA. Uganda is a country that emerged from British rule in 1962 and it felt as if, unlike in some other corners of Africa, the colonial times were looked back on fondly. English is still the first language of Uganda, though the languages of the different tribes also proliferate, and perhaps it was this shared tongue that made it seem an easier, simpler country to navigate.
The Uganda we walked through might have felt more peaceful than Tanzania or Rwanda, but the truth is it is another piece of Africa with a violent, complex past. Unique among African nations, Uganda is a country inside which several kingdoms still exist, and perhaps it was this that meant it did not take to democracy easily after it gained independence from Britain. Uganda had been a British protectorate for sixty six years when independence came in 1962, and the first democratic elections saw an alliance between the Uganda People’s Congress and the Kabaka Yekka, a monarchist party primarily comprising ethnic Bugandans, who make up more than half of the population, come to power. The alliance lasted only four years before the UPC forced out the Kabaka Yekka, forcibly changed the constitution, and formally abolished the traditional kingdoms of Uganda. This new situation couldn’t last either and, in 1971, a military coup saw the UPC removed from power, and Idi Amin – a name now synonymous with East African dictatorship – begin his eight years of tyranny. This was a period marred by violence on a scale that came close to matching what we had seen in Rwanda. To maintain his military rule, Amin murdered more than 300,000 of his countrymen, drove the business-minded Indian minority out of the country – a feat which destroyed a once-flourishing economy – and led the nation to war by attempting to annex the Kagera region of Tanzania through which we had walked. Nor was Amin’s deposition, prompted by a mutiny in the army during that same war, to bring peace back to Uganda; his legacy can be felt, even to this day, in the succession of civil wars the country has endured.
On 23 January, the forty-fifth day of our journey, came the first truly seminal moment in our expedition: Boston and I each took a single step and crossed from the southern to the northern hemisphere. We were straddling the equator.
Fifteen kilometres south of the small town of Buwama, still two days’ trek from the suburbs of Kampala, there lies a nondescript, diagonal line in the road. At each end of the line stands a clear circular monument, with the word EQUATOR etched into the concrete. As Boston and I trudged up the Kampala road, the lake’s shimmering vastness somewhere off to our right, we could tell we were near. Tourists had gathered around the monuments and there was a shop too, selling wooden shields and tacky key rings.
As we reached the line, I checked my GPS. According to the little contraption the line itself was nine metres away from the actual equator, but, looking into the eyes of the gathered journalists, I thought it prudent not to mention this. In the south, Boston and I took one look at each other and, the next step, we were in the north. There was an element of theatrics in it but, as I beamed at the journalists – ‘At last,’ I grinned, ‘back in the north!’ – I saw, in the corner of my eye, that Boston was beaming with genuine pride.
With the journalists scuttling off to fill their columns, Boston and I headed on up the road. For a time he was unusually silent. At a coffee shop we sat down to fortify ourselves for the fifteen kilometres we meant to complete that day, and watched the tourists mill. It felt strange to be in the presence of other outsiders. Until now I’d seen less than a handful of white faces in weeks – I’d been living, eating, and breathing an unseen Africa, one far away from the safari hordes and luxury lodges. The key rings being hawked from the side of the road cheapened the experience, somehow, but they also brought us down to Earth.
‘Lev,’ Boston began, breaking his silence. By the look in his eyes, I thought he wanted something. ‘You know, we’re like brothers now.’
Now I knew he wanted something. I put down my coffee. ‘Yes, Boston . . .’
‘Well, since I began this trip, I have been thinking.’ He paused. ‘I have been your guide. I have done a good job, have I not?’
‘You have.’
‘And I have been loyal and worked hard. And . . .’ He seemed to be growing bolder with every statement. ‘And we are brothers in arms!’
He had begun to beam, and I did not want to shatter the moment. Besides, though I wouldn’t have stated it so plainly myself, there was truth in what he was saying. Boston’s forthright banter had enlivened many monotonous days of hacking through jungle, or trudging through swampland – it would not have been the same without him.
‘We are,’ I admitted.
‘And I have taught you a lot about Africa.’
‘You have.’
‘And you have taught me a lot about your world. And also about leading expeditions. Do you know, Lev, that is what I want to do in the future – to run my own expeditions . . .’
‘It sounds like a good idea.’ By now I was growing impatient. When he was not cutting straight to the heart of Africa’s problems and proselytising sudden, violent solutions, Boston had a way of dancing around a subject like the most slippery politician.
‘This is the biggest expedition of your life, Lev. You will be promoted in the army for this. You’ll meet the Queen of England, and she’ll make you a Sir. Then you’ll become an MP.’
Hot coffee erupted from my lips as I tried to stifle my laughter. ‘Things don’t really work like that in England, Boston.’
Boston just snorted. ‘You will,’ he said. ‘Believe me, Lev. I know.’
‘Why don’t you just say what you want, Boston? You’re beginning to make me nervous.’
‘Lev, this is the biggest expedition of my life also. It is a very important thing for me.’ He gestured back at the monument to the equator, where some of the journalists still hovered. ‘It makes us heroes of the people. Lev, if I walked all the way to the delta with you, I would be just as famous as Mr Levison Tembula. I could run my business and make some money . . . and then, then I could go back to the Congo with a big name. I could become an MP too!’ He finished with a flourish. ‘Lev, I want to come to the end. I want to see the pyramids and the sea.’
I couldn’t help but feel sudden warmth for the mad Congolese sitting beside me. If it had been in my mind that my journey was barely even beginning, it had been in Boston’s that his was almost at an end. Kampala was only two days’ trek away, and my original proposition had been to leave Boston there, with his family, and find another guide to accompany me north, across the rest of Uganda and into South Sudan. The thing was – and perhaps I hadn’t realised it until this exact moment – Boston was more than a guide to me now. It had happened while I wasn’t looking, but he’d become a friend. His wild stories had been the things that kept me going through the first weeks, when my body had ached and complained at the torture I was putting it through.
‘I know I’m not qualified, Lev. I don’t speak Arabic, but I can learn.’
‘In a few weeks?’
‘I can do it.’
‘But what about your family?’ He had been looking forward to seeing them – and I had been looking forward to discovering what kind of woman had chosen to spend her life with Boston, and what kind of rebellious, curious children they were raising.
‘Lily would understand,’ he replied, with cool steel in his eyes.
For the longest time, I remained silent. I drank my coffee and thought. At last, I made my decision.
‘Come to the north of Uganda with me. Help me get through South Sudan.’ I couldn’t promise any further than that, and I was not certain how useful Boston would be as I tried to cross South Sudan’s infamous Sudd marshes. ‘How does that sound?’
Boston smiled and said he was happy with the compromise – but there was a twinkle in his eye, the muted pleasure of a victory quietly won, and before we had started to walk again I already knew that it was only a matter of weeks before he raised the question again.
On the forty-seventh day of our journey, Kampala came in sight. We were up before dawn, walking through the pitch black, past lay-bys where lorries were emblazoned with banners declaring ‘God is Great, God Is Good, God Is Everywhere!’ and along a road where the traffic police kept demanding to know what we were doing. By the time the sun came up we had already travelled ten kilometres, and stopped to find something to eat at a dingy roadside pub. As Boston and I picked our way through plates of goat liver, a beautiful Ugandan girl in a simple flowery dress came to sit with us. It was a nice change to speak to somebody who was not Boston; I could not remember the last time I had such an involved conversation with a woman – and, as she finished her drink, she leant across the table and asked if she could take my phone number.
‘Nice girl,’ I said, as we watched her leave, disappointed that she hadn’t got it.
Boston leaned in across the table and grinned. ‘You have a way with prostitutes, Lev.’
I looked after her, bemused. ‘I thought she was just on her way to Church . . .’
‘Maybe she was,’ Boston shrugged. ‘Even prostitutes have God, Lev.’
In the hills outside Kampala, the country suddenly burst open with activity and life. Ten kilometres away from the city centre, the suburban sprawl grew up. Suddenly the dirt tracks became roads, the roads sprouted pavements, and boda-bodas – the bicycle and motorcycle taxis peculiar to this part of Africa – appeared everywhere.
We had come 35km already today, but entering the city limits gave me a newfound sense of determination. Boston, meanwhile, needed no such encouragement. I heard only half of what he was saying, but he was virtually frothing at the lips to tell me about the city’s best restaurants and hotels, the bustling Nakasero Market, the hangouts of all the hotchpotch nationalities who made the city their home.
Walking into Kampala was like landing on the moon compared with my experience of Uganda so far. It is wrong of me to say it felt like stepping from the past back into the present, but that was what came to mind as we saw the first of the city’s skyscrapers in the distance and felt the crowds thickening around us. Boston had described the place with such passion that I might have expected the streets to be paved in gold; right now, I would have given all the gold in the world for the promise of a comfortable hotel bed.
Kampala is a teenager of a city – boisterous and messy, contradictory but naïve and growing fast. As at the equator, the Ugandan press had been warned of our coming and, as we trudged up to the central Kibuye roundabout, the crowd of faces waiting for us was immense. Among them I saw Matthias again. It seemed as if half of the city had heard about the Tembula Muzungu, and for the final few miles we were surrounded by a horde of hacks, baying like so many hyenas, all shouting out for photographs and interviews. I suddenly felt thoroughly self-conscious and embarrassed at the attention.
At the roundabout police had cordoned off the thoroughfare, halting all traffic, and Boston and I walked into the crowds to rapturous applause. From somewhere off to the left there came a roaring of engines and, when I looked up, I could see a bank of motorcyclists turning circles around the roundabout. There must have been twenty of them, local Ugandan men dressed up like Hell’s Angels from some dire ’80s movie. Perhaps they had been tempted down by the promise of getting their souped-up scooters and Harley-Davidsons on national television, but their presence lent our arrival an even more carnival air.
Just as the crowd threatened to swallow us, one of the bikers wheeled around, ignoring the exclamations of a particularly agitated police officer, and gestured at his seat. Another was getting into position to offer Boston his when the police began to force the crowds back.
‘Come on, Lev. We need to arrive in style!’
The biker who was offering me his seat introduced himself as Commanda. The one who was tempting Boston up to ride pillion was named Gangsta. Somehow, I doubted that these were the names their mothers had given them. Still, the crowds were only getting thicker, and somehow we had to make our way to the centre of the city. It wouldn’t ruin the purity of the expedition, because we’d have to return and begin our walk here, at this same roundabout. And so, with the crowd still chanting my name, I climbed up beside Commanda and, with a whoop, he wheeled his Harley around and took off up the road. Behind me, Boston rode pillion with Gangsta while the rest of the bikers formed what I can only describe as an honour guard.
It was not, all things told, how I expected to arrive in Uganda’s capital city.
Stunned by the somewhat incongruous reception, I barely noticed the way Kampala grew up around us. The police had cleared the highway and soon we were riding between two whooping columns of Ugandan Hell’s Angels, right into the city’s heart. Sometime later, with the tower blocks of newer Kampala giving way to the old town, where colonial buildings still lined the streets and the evidence of Uganda’s British past was increasingly evident, the bikers deposited us in a square where yet more well-wishers had assembled. So much for getting to know the real Africa – this was a cavalcade of celebrity, and I wondered if it was the kind of reception of which Stanley or Speke would have approved.
I turned to say as much to Boston, but he was already swinging down from his bike and striding into the crowd. It took me a moment to register where he was going, but then I saw him put his arms around one of the ladies in the crowd, and for a second he disappeared as he was mobbed by children. These, I understood, were the family who had been waiting for him to come home. Lily, his wife, and his eldest daughter Penny, a resolute fourteen-year-old, looked as embarrassed by all the attention as we did. Clinging to Lily’s shoulder was his middle child, Aurore, a beautiful, frizzy-haired girl of six who hid her face in her mother’s breast.
In an ungainly fashion I clambered off the motorcycle and, in seconds, the bikers were off, riding in wild circles around the square in what I could only assume was further celebration. For a moment, I was lost. Coming out of the plodding serenity of our walk into this carnival seemed to have taken all of five seconds; I was in danger of losing my grip on reality.
Then Boston bounded back to my side. When everything around me was going crazy, there was still the – relative – normality of Boston to keep me grounded.
‘You will see me later, yes, Lev?’
‘Later?’
‘Are you forgetting already?’
In the moment I was, but Boston had invited me to his family home for dinner the following night. He had been chattering about it all the way into the Kibuye roundabout, and I had to admit to being particularly intrigued at seeing how Boston lived a more sedate, family life.
‘I’ll be there, Boston,’ I said, and we clasped hands in the African way – first up, and then down.
With Boston gone, it was only me and the revellers. For a moment I stood and watched them, and it was then that exhaustion truly caught up with me. We had come a long way today, and it was time to make camp.
A piece of Boston’s endless chatter came to my mind and I weaved my way to a place he had recommended, the Hotel Le Bougainviller. The hotel was located in a quiet, residential area of town, away from the bustle of the market and financial area. There, among the leafy hills and white-walled embassies, I closed myself in my room and found peace and privacy for the first time I could remember.
There is a guilt that comes when you experience a moment of luxury in a country where you have seen such poverty. As I lay back on the hotel bed, I was thinking of Kasansero, Moses and the AIDS epidemic, the stragglers I had seen eking out their subsistence lives on the shores of the lake – but I was thinking of other things too: the promise of a good steak, a glass of red wine, and a long, dreamless sleep. I closed my eyes. This was all, I told myself, very surreal. I resolved to make the most of it because, in a few days’ time, it would be back to the road – and, a few days after that, the luxury of Kampala would seem a very long way away.
Kampala is the pride of Uganda, a capital city that has more in common with the affluent cities of the West than it does the landing sites we had passed through on our way north. We were going to be here for seven days, the first real lull in our journey and, though I wanted to rest, I also wanted to know what made this city tick.
In this city of more than a million people there are a great number of different cultures all existing side by side. Although the Buganda, the local ethnic group, make up more than half the population, the city’s ethnic mix is truly diverse. As in most modern countries, the growth of the urban economy has seen people flock to the capital – but Kampala’s expansion has been driven by political factors too. During the rule of Idi Amin, and Milton Obote – who was overthrown by Amin and then restored to power following Amin’s deposition – many Ugandans from the native northern tribes were brought into the city, to serve in the police and army, as well as to shore up the government’s other, more shadowy, security forces. When the current President, Yoweri Museveni – who hails from the west of Uganda – came to power in 1986, many western Ugandans flocked to the city, especially those from Museveni’s own tribe, the Banyankole. The way that Amin and Obote crippled the once-flourishing Ugandan economy, driving out foreign investment and curtailing the freedom of business as they pursued their Socialist ideals, meant that unemployment was rife outside the vital urban centres like Kampala – and this fuelled a mass influx of people to the city during the 1970s and early ’80s. The result is a city with both the tensions that come from people with varied backgrounds and languages living in such close proximity, and the wonderful intermingling of those cultures. Many of the city’s suburbs consider themselves miniature versions of the ancestral homelands of the tribes whose members live there, and many Kampala residents don’t consider themselves to be ‘from Kampala’ at all, rather remaining true to their tribal roots. The city I was about to explore was not one I could ever hope to understand in a week – Boston still seemed to be working it out after all the years he had lived here.
I was woken, that first morning, by the sound of the call to prayer from the Ahmadiyya Central Mosque, which would have been fine had I not been kept awake, long into the night, by the sound of revellers from the Kampala Casino in a shopping centre not far from the hotel. January was the start of Uganda’s short rainy season, but even early in the morning the sun was scorching overhead. I took a leisurely shower, washing away all of the grime that had worked its way deep into my skin, and then filled myself with more breakfast than I had eaten since Kigali. My body wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, but once I had rested, it was time to go out into the city. It was time to re-provision for the journey ahead.
By the time evening came, my pack swollen with new supplies, I was ready to see Boston again. Since fleeing the Congo, Boston had made his home in one of Kampala’s more affluent suburbs, perched on top of one of the hills west of the city. I was due to arrive at six, but by seven I was still walking in circles, lost amid the winding lanes, where gated buildings sat back from wide, tree-lined roads. I have to admit, the sensation of walking was a wonderful thing, but by the time eight o’clock came around I was beginning to grow weary. I seemed to be passing the same trees and bends in the road over and over again. We had made it all the way from the Nyungwe Forest by trusting to our instinctive skills for navigation – but now, in this sleepy city suburb, I was lost.
I must have passed Boston’s house several times before I realised it was there. I hadn’t expected it to be so grand. Boston’s home seemed, to me, a palatial bungalow, set back from the road and surrounded by high walls and a locked gate, at which a security guard was snoozing. It put me in mind of the kind of compounds that rich European landowners used to inhabit in the colonial days. Once the security guard had given me a cursory look, the gate drew back and I saw the bungalow itself, sitting in a vast, green garden. Boston was already waiting underneath the eaves at the front of the house.
‘How did you get lost?’ he demanded as I hurried to meet him. ‘I thought you were supposed to be an explorer.’
‘Because you gave me the wrong directions,’ I grinned. ‘I thought you were supposed to be a guide?’
Inside, Lily was waiting in a pair of fashionable jeans and a low-cut white blouse – every inch the beautiful wife Boston had described. I’d only seen her briefly when we rode into the city, but now that we were in her territory she appeared comfortable and hospitable, with a reserved manner. Boston’s daughters had no such reservations. On seeing me, Penny marched up and held out a hand for me to shake. ‘Nice to meet you again,’ she announced, before disappearing to the dining table. Meanwhile, Aurore – the frizzy-haired girl who had been clinging to Lily when we arrived in Kampala – had already used my entrance as a diversion to sneak out into the garden, where she was excitedly skipping in circles – both to Boston’s delight, and the security guard’s evident ire.
‘What about your son?’ I asked.
‘Jezu Adonis is in bed,’ answered Lily. ‘He’s only one year old, so . . .’
Before his wife could finish, Boston burst in. ‘I’ll fetch him.’
Moments later, Boston was returning with Jezu Adonis walking tentatively at his side. The boy was obviously bewildered by the attention. He rubbed his eyes and, when he looked at me, his face creased in what I could only describe as terror. In seconds he was scrambling to get up into Boston’s arms. Boston kept directing him to shake me by the hand, but Jezu didn’t have the courage. He buried his face in Boston’s shoulder and started to weep.
Boston could not control his mirth. ‘He’s not normally so shy. He just doesn’t like you Muzungus. Come on, Adonis, say hello to the white man! He won’t eat you!’
The reassurance, though, only magnified Jezu’s doubt. Showing remarkable agility, he wriggled free from Boston’s grasp and hurtled for the safety of his bedroom. With a withering look at her husband, Lily followed.
‘Don’t be offended, Lev. He is one year old.’
‘I’m not offended, Boston.’
‘I’m telling you, Lev, it is not his fault.’
‘Boston, I’m really not . . .’
In the bedroom, the crying had subsided, and Lily reappeared. As she swept on into the dining room, summoning Aurore from the garden, Boston poured us two measures of whisky and handed me a glass. ‘I don’t like to leave them at home with the nanny,’ he confided, as the smells of home-cooked food tempted me on. ‘You never know if she’ll sell them to a witch.’
‘You must be kidding . . .’
‘I’m serious, Lev. It happens all the time. Two or three kids go missing every week in Kampala. You see it in all the newspapers. Nannies desperate for cash will sell a child for a couple of hundred dollars and they’ll never be seen again. Once a witch gets hold of them, it’s dead.’ He lowered his voice to a whisper, so his children would not hear. ‘They murder them, chop off their genitalia, and turn them into lucky charms. People pay a lot of money.’
‘That’s disgusting, Boston.’
‘Yes, but it’s rife. The only way is to have your boy circumcised – that way he’s a man and useless to the witch. Are you circumcised, Lev?’
I decided not to answer.
In the dining room, huge platters of Congolese food were spread out in front of me: matoke, a kind of starchy green banana that is cooked and pounded into a meal; baked tilapia, no doubt fresh from the shores of the lake; ugali, with much more flavour than any we had eaten on our travels; and more rice and steamed vegetables than I thought I would see for the next several months. Lily was an excellent cook. Boston opened beers, which he insisted we drank from the bottle, and the family all ate with their hands. As I helped myself to more tilapia, I had a sudden surge of pride; it was an immense privilege, I knew, to be let into Boston’s house and to eat with his family. And, not to mention, the food was igniting taste buds I thought had died somewhere in the Tanzanian bush.
As we ate, Boston began regaling Lily with stories of our trek. Most of them I recognised, but there were moments here that I felt certain must have happened to somebody else, or else been plucked straight from Boston’s imagination. Lily took it all in with a healthy scepticism and I was suddenly reminded of the stories Boston had told me of her – how Lily herself had been tortured for being at his side during the conflicts of the Congo, how she’d distributed leaflets in an effort to re-take the Congo during its wars, how she had escaped with him over the border, leaving behind everything she knew to start a new life here. Was this shy, reserved, excellent cook really the same bold mistress? Unlike Boston, Lily was not a person to speak of the things she had lived through – but I could tell, by the gleam in her eye when Boston launched into another one of his tirades, that she had an inner strength she did not often display. There was no longer any doubt in my mind: when I wasn’t here, Lily wore the trousers; underneath her tiny frame and nervous smile, she was a powerful woman.
‘And I hear, Levison, that you’ve convinced Ndoole to come with you into South Sudan?’
I shot a look at Boston, who only shrugged in a noncommittal way. ‘He is a great guide,’ I ventured, uncertain exactly how Boston had framed his decision.
‘Do you know what’s happening in the north?’
I nodded. ‘We’ll have to make a decision somewhere up the road.’
Our crossing into South Sudan was still some five hundred kilometres away, but it had been in the back of my mind for many weeks. We had barely set off from the Nyungwe when rumours reached us of the rumbling conflict in the world’s newest country, and every time we had reached a town or village along the way the stories had intensified. Now that we were in Kampala, a modern city, I had access to the kinds of information outlets I hadn’t for most of my trek, and those rumours had solidified into real knowledge: the unrest in South Sudan had grown into much more. Five hundred kilometres to the north, a country was at war.
South Sudan gained its independence from Sudan in 2011 – ending one of Africa’s longest and bloodiest civil wars – but, since then, has itself been dominated by internal conflict. In December, just as my trek was beginning, the president, Salva Kiir Mayardit, declared that his former vice president, Dr Riek Machar, was behind an attempted military coup. Power politics quickly turned to real fighting when Kiir ordered the disarming of troops from all but one ethnicity inside the Presidential Guard. Like Uganda, South Sudan is a country in which people from many different ethnicities live side by side – but Kiir’s act ignited the simmering disharmony between his native Dinka and Machar’s native Nuer. In the days that followed, certain Dinka elements began attacking Nuer civilians in the capital city of Juba – and, though these initial outbreaks of violence were quickly curbed, it wasn’t long before a conflict that had begun as political had come to be defined along ethnic lines. By the time I reached Kampala, hundreds of thousands of people were being displaced by the violence and fleeing across South Sudan’s borders to refugee camps in Kenya, Sudan – and especially Uganda.
I didn’t blame Lily for being sceptical and, now that I saw her children the gravity of what I was suggesting we do struck me more pointedly. Could I really ask their father to accompany me into a live warzone, to act as my guide in a country he didn’t know and where he didn’t speak the language? I was determined to follow the river, no matter what, but I was beginning to believe that I couldn’t ask it of Boston. South Sudan, dominated by the vast marshes of the Sudd, had been one of the journey’s greatest challenges from the outset; I only hoped that the current conflict didn’t make it impassable.
‘We’ll know more when we get there,’ Boston declared, draining his beer as if to put a full stop to the conversation. ‘The refugees will tell us. Now, Levison, I have something you have to see . . .’
Half of me suspected a stuffed crocodile, but Boston took me through to the sitting room where photographs lined the walls and an old shoebox crammed with more had been unearthed and left on a table to pore through. It was good to see Boston so relaxed. He was the master here and I was his guest – no longer an employer or a leader – and it was a different kind of smile on his face as he showed me these old photographs. Here were pictures of him from his youth, the outrageous hair of the 1980s, his dubious fashion choices and oversized shirts; Boston and Lily standing proudly outside his first small business, a shop selling records; his old ranch in the Congo, where a young Boston – recognisable only by the smile – stood beside his mother, who looked almost identical to her son. Among them all there lay a lone photograph of Boston’s father. He picked it up between forefinger and thumb and handed it to me. ‘It was months before he went missing,’ he said – and I noted that here, with his family around him, he said ‘went missing’, whereas, out in the bush, he had always intimated murder.
Later, once the children had gone to bed, it was time to make my exit. Boston, perhaps driven by one too many beers, insisted on walking me down the road. ‘It’s so the great explorer doesn’t get lost!’ he exclaimed – but, by the end of the garden, where his security guard was still fast sleep, he seemed to have forgotten.
‘She’s worried about the north,’ I said, looking back at Lily in the door of the house. ‘I am too, Boston. Look, I have to go, but you . . .’
Boston didn’t want to hear more. This time, he wasn’t smiling when he cut me off: ‘There is a month between there and now. A lot can change, Lev.’
Alone, I wended my way down the twisting streets until, at the bottom of the hill, I was able to find a boda-boda to take me back into town. There, I sat up, long into the night, bickering with the unstable internet connection in the hotel lobby, as I tried to learn more about what was happening up north, and the challenges we would have to face.
‘Listen,’ said Boston, stalking across the hotel lobby for the TV buzzing in the corner. There, he fumbled to turn up the volume. We had spent the morning in the Kisenyi market, where Boston had commissioned a metalsmith to make him a catapult from smelted car parts. In the hotel, rap music began to blare out across the lobby, drawing infuriated looks.
‘Talentless!’ Boston fumed, insisting I watch. ‘Can you believe it, Lev?’
‘It’s rap music, Boston.’
‘But listen.’
I did. Only two words seemed to emerge from the mix. They were strangely familiar.
‘The song is called “Levison Tembula”,’ Boston explained. ‘Levison the Walker. You are famous, Lev, but it doesn’t stop it being shit.’
We had marked today as another rest day before we followed the shore east to Jinja, where the true White Nile emerged and began its course due north, but there was to be precious little resting. Boston had promised to show me the heart of the real Africa and it was with his sardonic grin emblazoned in my thoughts that we hailed a boda-boda driver and headed for the southern bounds of the city.
After several wrong turns, we arrived at a fenced-off section of woodland, which appeared as nondescript as everywhere else outside Kampala’s beating heart. Parked up inside was a brand new Land Cruiser, its windows blacked out, its wheel trims mysteriously clean, in spite of the dust that swirled around. As Boston bid goodbye to the boda-boda driver, one of the black windows wound down and a Ugandan man stepped out.
‘Have you brought gifts?’ he began.
Boston said, ‘You didn’t mention gifts.’
The man looked far from impressed. ‘You were told to bring a white cockerel and five litres of fresh cow’s milk. You should know, Levison Tembula, you cannot come without gifts.’
I looked at Boston, who didn’t seem in the least perturbed. ‘We’ll find them, Lev. Come.’
The gifts, Boston told me as we headed into the shanties, were for Mama Fina, reputed to be Kampala’s richest witch doctor. ‘She prefers to be called a traditional healer,’ he explained as we made for what looked a likely stall among the shanties, ‘but she was in the Red Pepper doing things that didn’t look medicinal at all.’
The Red Pepper had been the favourite rag among the fishermen in Kasansero, and I had already witnessed first-hand the sort of lurid headlines in which the tabloid specialised. Photographs of Mama Fina had been spread across its central section, where the paper exposed her as Kampala’s most prolific nymphomaniac, who regularly used sex as part of her dark magic.
‘Then why are we going to see her?’
‘So you can see for yourself, what these magicians can do.’
We came to a stall where it seemed we could buy eggs, Coke and other assorted goods but our requests for fresh milk were, predictably, met with bewildered silence. In the end Boston managed to unearth five litres of UHT in battered plastic cartons and, in place of a cockerel, a small billy goat who looked at us, disgruntled, as we led him away on a length of string. Before we got back to the Land Cruiser, Boston took a detour into the shanties, managed to procure a small jerry can and, with the broadest grin, proceeded to decant the UHT. ‘This witch doctor will never know the difference, Lev. It’s all for show.’
On inspection of our gifts – which, though blatantly not what was demanded, appeared to be good enough – the man from the Land Cruiser led us down to the shore of the lake. Towing the goat behind us, we trailed him along the beach until, at last, we began to see people. Twenty or thirty of them – poor men, women, even a few children – were gathered along the breakers of a secluded cove, where driftwood fires littered the sand. Clusters of homemade spears were lodged in the ground beside each of the fires; as we approached, I couldn’t help thinking they had the appearance of shrines.
‘Are they all waiting for her?’ I asked.
‘You don’t have to wait, Tembula,’ said the man who was leading us and, together, we picked our way through the petitioners.
Ahead of us a cliff reared up, and in its shadows I saw a recess in the stone, a natural cavern in which yet more fires were burning. It was exactly as I had imagined a witch doctor’s hideaway to be – peculiarly so. My imagination, stoked by Hollywood clichés, was being fed images to keep it alive. Smoke from incense sticks billowed in great reefs from the mouth of the cave, lending the cove a malign air. A group of camp followers, half-naked – and many of them disabled – gathered around one of the beach fires, stirring the contents of a cast iron cauldron. The spearheads, blades pointed upwards, suddenly took on a devilish air.
‘You know what this is, Lev.’ I was about to tell Boston it was downright creepy when he cut me off. ‘It is branding. Mama Fina isn’t even her real name. It’s Sylvia. All of this – the smoke, the cave – she knows what she’s doing. She is a clever woman, this Mama Fina.’
Boston was right. Mama Fina, he explained, had started out life as an orphan wandering the Mabira Forest east of Kampala, but, forty years on, was living the life of a fabulously wealthy business woman. This cavern we were approaching was not her home; it was her place of business, a store front for a very particular product. Mama Fina had made her cash every which way she could, first as a housemaid, a cleaner and washer girl, before taking over a textile business and beginning a chain of stores. She had even, Boston assured me, gone on to monopolise the boda-boda taxi service in Kampala. But it was here, in ‘healing’, that she had truly made her money.
‘Casting spells, mixing potions, chanting and singing, praying to the gods of water and wind and fire.’ Boston seemed to take great delight in recounting the list of acts she performed. ‘She is an actress, Lev, but these Ugandans believe her. Did you know, she is the president’s personal healer . . .’
Mama Fina was waiting for us in the mouth of the cavern. As the fog around her parted, I saw urns and pottery chalices arranged in delicate piles. Mama Fina was enormous. As she approached, she waddled like one of the ducks out on the lake. She was wearing an ill-fitting traditional dress, the bottom hem heavy with dirt, and her deep black eyes exuded what I took for a keenly focused greed. Her black hair was cropped close to her scalp and, on each of her fat fingers, huge jewels sat in rings. I was about to introduce myself when she opened her mouth and hollered four belligerent words.
‘Take off your shoes!’
Boston looked to me. Half of him had the air of a naughty schoolboy, but the other half was distinctly unimpressed.
Once we had taken off our shoes, Mama Fina’s hand shot out and clutched me by the wrist. ‘You have kept me waiting,’ she breathed and, barely concealing her anger, dragged me across the sand to one of the driftwood shrines.
‘Don’t worry, Lev. She is only going to bless you.’
Curiosity was driving me but I suspected I could not have backed out, even if I had wanted. We began by kneeling at a rock covered in a white sheet. This, Mama Fina explained, was a shrine to the gods of the water, and it was here that she would ask them to protect me from the evils of the river and the crocodiles who called it home. In a torrent of words I could hardly understand, she instructed me to pour water upon the ground nine times, and then to spit on the goat’s head a further nine. As I dredged up what saliva I had, my eyes locked with Boston, who only nodded – whether to compel me to go on, or in amusement, I didn’t quite know.
Afterwards, Mama Fina dragged me to an identical shrine. ‘This,’ she declared, ‘is the shrine to the gods of white men.’ She seemed to believe I would feel most comfortable here, but I was not sure how I felt, kneeling at this shrine. Again, I lifted a three-headed vessel, drew up water from the lake, and proceeded to pour it over the shrine.
‘Now,’ Mama Fina began, ‘take off your clothes.’
I looked at Boston and saw, in his eyes, that he knew this had been coming.
‘My clothes?’
‘Do it, Lev,’ said Boston. ‘It is better not to argue.’
With Boston’s eyes on my back and Mama Fina’s implacable glare on my front, I began to disrobe. I can’t say what compelled me to do it – certainly not belief in the gods of white men, nor in Mama Fina’s magic. Perhaps just a morbid curiosity at what was about to happen. Once I was stripped down to my underpants, Mama Fina directed me to the water. I was, it appeared, about to have a bath.
At Mama Fina’s instructions, I stepped into the lake but, before I had gone a single stride, she summoned me back.
‘What?’ I asked. Mama Fina was simply pointing at the poor goat. It appeared he was going to have a bath with me.
Tugging on the goat’s leash, I dragged him into the water. He wasn’t impressed. Only an hour ago he had been happily wandering through the shanties, chewing on whatever grasses he could find. Now, he was part of a ritual to some intangible gods. I muttered an apology under my breath and, hearing Mama Fina bark behind me, sank to my knees.
For a moment Mama Fina’s enormous body loomed above. Then, she set to work. It took me a moment to realise what she was doing. Hunkered over me, she was beginning to scrub my back with tea leaves and the filthy, tepid water of the lake. The scrubbing intensified and, in the corner of my eye, I could see Boston beaming from the shore. Then, as suddenly as it began, it relented. I heard the splashing that told me Mama Fina was retreating through the lake. Turning to follow, I realised, too late, that she had only been going to the shore to pick something up.
I was about to discover what the five litres of milk she had demanded we bring were for. She was already bringing it up above my head. Seconds later, the whole five litres cascaded around me, in all its freezing glory. Gasping for air, I reeled back – and, when I could finally rub the milk from my eyes, I saw Mama Fina’s face open in a wry chuckle.
‘The ceremony is over,’ she declared, and promptly tramped back to the shore of the lake.
On the beach I was presented with a spear and badly carved shield for my protection, charms I was entitled to as one of the blessed. Boston, I was later to learn, had given her 258,000 Ugandan shillings for her services today. That was the equivalent of around £60. Not bad work if you could get it, I thought.
‘That was her magic?’ I asked as we watched her waddle away across the beach, to where the black Land Cruiser was waiting. The goat tried to resist being pulled behind her, but his attempts came to nothing; he was, I guessed, about to become somebody’s lunch.
‘Do you feel blessed?’ asked Boston.
If this had happened at home, I might have felt violated. ‘Perhaps just a little . . . bewildered.’
But our display in the water hadn’t even drawn the attention of the onlookers from the beach. To them, it had just been another blessing among many: an ordinary day. Uganda, I had seen, was rife with magicians like Mama Fina. At the roadsides we had passed posters and flags advertising their dubious services: remedies for malaria, for syphilis, even for AIDS; help with finding lost property and lost lovers. In the back pages of the newspapers there was more of the same: Dr Kamaagagi was everywhere, selling his services as a spiritual specialist in erectile dysfunction.
‘If you want,’ said Boston, ‘I can take you to Owino. It is a market, in the centre of Kampala. There you can buy almost any fetish in the world. Bones, animal skins, snake poison, toads and cats. Masks and potions, herbs and trinkets, little bags of powder. You can get it all, Lev.’ He stopped. ‘Do you want to grow your penis by six inches?’
I stammered in reply.
‘They can do anything for you, these magicians.’