Vagabond

by Mogoatlhe, Lerato

  I follow the voters inside the station and stick around for the count. The office has two tables. One has boxes with all the ballots and another is empty other than folded papers with the words ‘Yes’, ‘Unity’, ‘Unmarked’ and ‘Invalid’. To count, one officer opens the ballots like an envelope at an awards show and holds it up for everyone to see before passing it to the officer who puts each vote under its marked section on the table. All ballots go to ‘Yes’.

  ‘It’s unanimous,’ the officer says when he opens the last ballot. The results will fly to Juba, where they’ll be counted again with other ballots from around the world.

  Act three: We leave a trail of dust clouds behind us, hurrying to the sports ground in Zone Three of the camp. I’m with Elizabeth and her friend Kirr, who is ‘visiting home from Adelaide to witness the birth of my country and celebrate our freedom with my family’. He’s an engineering student who has found his way out of the camp.

  The crowd is the biggest I’ve been around all day. We form a wide circle that grows to the edge of the field. Even with the screaming and singing, you can still hear the loud banging from the drums. From opposite sides of the circles, a single, straight line with about seven people moves to the middle of the circle in perfectly synched shuffles, their right hands waving long thin sticks as they leap like antelope into the air. There is more crying and laughing, someone faints and everyone has the time of their life. My cheeks are wet with tears.

  I walk to a young girl who has been keeping to herself since I first laid eyes on her at the polling station. ‘This is so emotional,’ I say, breaking the ice. She turns her face to look at me. Her soaked blouse is all the answer I need. ‘I don’t remember my father,’ she says at last. ‘He was killed in the war when I was young and my three siblings don’t know him at all.’ The camp is the only home they know. ‘When I remember my mother’s struggle to raise us, and the days when we had nothing at all to eat, I know our suffering was not in vain.’ Somewhere in the crowd, the old woman is still going strong with her gun and cross back in her hands.

  Elizabeth and I go back home so I can collect my bags. She offers me a place on her bed when she finds out that I don’t have money for a hotel. We visit Kirr and his family on Sunday morning, and I get a snapshot of what childhood is like when you’re born into war. It reaches his village in Atar in the Upper Nile region when he’s three years old. He flees to a military camp in Dima in central Ethiopia when he’s nine.

  ‘Think of it as being like any child who goes to school, but instead of playing games when we go on break, we’d learn songs of the revolution and how to use guns.’

  In the years between Ethiopia and moving to Kakuma, Kirr sees people drowning and dying from diseases and animal attacks. About growing up a child soldier, he says: ‘There is a saying that “a child of a snake is also a snake”. The career of your father becomes yours as well. My father and uncle were also in the struggle; I learned about freedom from them and, like them, I fought for it.’

  I show him photographs from the celebratory lunch and ask if he knows the old woman with the toy gun and the cross. We find Adhiu Dau-Duot at her house in a dress that has been turned into a rag from being worn many times through the years. Her energy from the previous day is gone, as if her body suddenly remembered that it’s eighty years old. Kirr leaves me at the house while he visits his girlfriend. She’s Kenyan and they met when he lived in Nairobi. Alone with Mama Adhiu, one of her grandchildren becomes our translator as she takes me through her life. She talks with many gaps in her story to avoid the most painful parts of her life. She doesn’t remember what exactly in her violent political times made her become a guerrilla, only that she was around twenty-eight. Her husband was also in the struggle. ‘The toughest part about fighting in a war is holding on to life and protecting it. We used to eat anything to feed the belly. I ate sand and leaves; we did everything to support life, even if it meant drinking urine so we don’t die from thirst.’

  The pain of losing her home and husband is nothing compared to losing five children to the war. She put her gun down in 1992, after the arrival of her last-born child. Starting over in Kakuma in 1994, she lived in a tent, slowly building her hut with her hands. She shoots up from the chair, pouncing to her gun before aiming it at the sky. Her grandchildren laugh. She doesn’t want to go back to South Sudan.

  ‘This is my home and there is no one to take care of me in Sudan; but now that my country is free, I can start enjoying my old age.’ She’s been holding her breath, waiting for freedom for fifty-two years. ‘My biggest fear was dying before Sudan becomes free.’

  Later in the afternoon, I walk around the camp, meeting residents from DRC, Darfur, Ethiopia and Somalia on my way to the town. The river is dry from the drought that’s killing livestock and plants before they grow. I hang out with Turkana teens between trying to hustle money for my ticket. I only have 80 bob on me. Everyone I approach is too broke to buy my phone.

  ‘And even if I had money,’ a Congolese guy says to me at the camp, ‘No one uses a Nokia 3310 in 2011.’

  That evening, Elizabeth and I sit under a jet-black night sky with a crescent moon, eating a stew of mushy corn kernels seasoned with salt and gorrassa. Liz plays a song on her phone. She and her cousins sing along at the top of their voices. I don’t get up to join them when they dance, even when they pull me off my chair.

  Before Kakuma, refugee camps are a place I know in name and through news reports of humanitarian crises; a halfway house for people looking for a place to stay a while between war and peace. I don’t say this to anyone, but even with the thousands if not millions of shacks and mud houses I’ve seen, even after living on grilled plantain and peanuts for two weeks in Accra to fend off hunger while waiting for pay day, I don’t silence the voice in my head whenever it whispers ‘what a sad, pitiful life’. I see myself not as a woman at home but an observer to tragedy. I relate to the camp as someone who is conditioned to only see hopelessness and suffering.

  Watching Elizabeth and her cousins dance, I’m ashamed of myself for belittling their home and sniggering at the crumbling buildings and shaking my head in despair at the woman sitting outside her doorless hut with her son; too conditioned to recognise that what I first think of as a place that’s not fit for habitation is actually a home, and that the people I insult with my attitude are rebuilding their lives from rock bottom, one mud brick at a time. The school I pitied gives Kirr and many others wings to get scholarships and education at universities around the world – something that my okay final school report wouldn’t qualify me for.

  Elizabeth sits next to me and plays the song again. ‘Listen carefully,’ she instructs.

  Emmanuel Jal is her favourite musician, and ‘Stronger’ is her theme song.

  Emmanuel sings about growing up in the village of Tonj and the effects the war had on his childhood. He talks about how he comes from people who overcome pain without losing their humanity. The chorus echoes the universal belief that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Emmanuel is counted among the forty thousand child soldiers known as the Lost Boys of Sudan, who walked from South Sudan to Ethiopia and Kenya, where Kakuma refugee camp was set up in 1992 to house them.

  Emmanuel has never lived in Kakuma; still, his story inspires Elizabeth. It affirms her humanity and legitimises her dreams. She’s not just some displaced person who relies on aid for food, education, health, sanitation and jobs. As if she’s reading my mind, Elizabeth says, ‘Sure, it’s tough being a refugee and our life is hard but you know what? Kakuma is our home.’

  I ask her to play ‘Stronger’ again, and I’m the first to get up and dance. For the first time since my arrival, I stop thinking of Kakuma as a refugee camp: It’s home, and mine too after Elizabeth takes me in.

  I want to rewrite narratives about refugee camps because of this moment.

  I retrace my steps to town just before midday on Monday to keep looking for someone who’ll buy my phone. This time, I can see
clearly. My heart swells with pride at the kids who are in school, I marvel at the yards that are being swept clean and smile at the mud pile that’s being mixed with water and twigs to build new homes. The market becomes a bustling business centre with shops that sell coal, food, produce and household goods. There are kangas and kitenges, black and colourful burkas, other types of clothes, utensils, coals and kerosene; shoes, a hair salon, DVD rental, a TV to keep up with soccer games and life beyond Kakuma. There is a butchery and an Ethiopian restaurant next to a building advertising itself as a ‘hotel’, where a group of men lounge over coffee and bags of mirar.

  I never get around to finding a buyer. Instead, a Turkana man called James takes me to the police station where he asks police officers to pool money for my ticket. They pay for my ticket to Kitale and give me 2000 shillings to cover my bus fare to Nairobi, padkos and my matatu from downtown to Rongai. I feel like the luckiest person in the world; loved unconditionally and so cherished that the weight of travelling around Africa is also carried by people who sacrifice the little they have to help me live through another day.

  I leave Nairobi for Rwanda a week later on a Kampala Coach bus, retracing my steps to Kampala, where I transfer to a bus to Kigali. David and Arrot are no longer my friends. They are my family.

  I have an insatiable wanderlust and know no other thrill as addictive as turning places that I only knew by name into the story of my life. More than everything that makes me roam Africa, I’m most intrigued by ancient places. The Djinguereber Mosque in Timbuktu still stands as tall and proud as it has been since 1324 when it was built on the instruction of Mansa Musa. This is my favourite picture of myself.

  A collection of one of the thousands of manuscripts that remain from days when Timbuktu was the centre of scholarship. They are still passed from one generation to the next by families, making them some of the most precious heirlooms anyone can inherit.

  Tuareg men put on a sword ‘fight’ at the Festival of the Desert.

  This photo was taken on the afternoon of my first visit to Djicoroni Para in Bamako, where I end up moving in a group of more than ten vagabonds. Djicoroni Para is easily one of the most downtrodden places I know, yet it is also my treasure for the unconditional love and sense of belonging I find here.

  The Malian hot season brought me to house number 227 Djicoroni Para. The four months I spent here helped me find my feet as a vagabond. My purpose of rewriting African narratives was crystallised here. The white woman is Miriam, next to her are Abbas and Mohammed from Conakry. Mohammed the snake charmer enjoyed regaling us with stories of his trips to the Gambia more than beading. The woman at the other end of the balcony is Oumou and the boy next to her is Champion at his tea station.

  If yassa is good enough for Salif Keita to sing about in ‘Africa’ then it’s worth me learning how to cook it. I become the kitchen skivvy to sisters Astou, who is sitting on my left, and Oumou.

  Every day at around 3pm, fishermen bring in large hauls of fish to Zalala Beach in Quilemane.

  Pemba has three faces. My favourite is the beachfront one with its crystal blue waters and live music wafting from a parking lot behind the beach café.

  Destinations that are the hardest to reach, I find, are often the most rewarding. Ibo in the Quirimbas Archipelago in Northern Mozambique is one such destination.

  The famous Zanzibar sunset.

  Stone Town, where time seems to have stood still since the days of its Omani rulers and Swahili rolls off the tongue like a melody.

  The Swahili word for paradise is peponi. It’s an apt description of Zanzibar. © Mahlatsi Maredi

  Lake Tanganyika at sunset during the rainy season turns indigo, adding an air of mysticism to Bujumbura. The lake flows in Tanzania, DRC, and Zambia as well.

  Sixteen drummers wrapped in green, white and red cloth file onto the stage, an open field in front of a school, with drums on their heads. They move in sync. An elder dressed in a raffia robe leads the troupe.

  Lamu has narrow streets that are ruled by donkeys. The oldest town on the Swahili coast is full of little surprises that make it one of the most wonderful places to experience.

  Adhiu Dau-Duot waited fifty-two years for South Sudan to gain its independence from North Sudan. However, she didn’t want to leave Kakuma Refugee Camp, which has become her home.

  The Hamar tribe is one of several who live in the Omo Valley in Southern Ethiopia.

  Emmanuel eating a chunk of raw beef. Tera Sega is a favourite across Ethiopia.

  One of my most vivid childhood memories is the Saturday school class that introduced me to ancient Egypt and the Pyramids of Giza. This is when I tell myself that a day will come when I discover the world beyond what I know of it.

  Ibn Tulun Mosque is the oldest in Egypt. It was built by Ahmad Ibn Tulun from 870 to 879 AD. He was born the son of a Turkish slave and died the founder of the Tulunid Dynasty of Egypt.

  These are some of the accessories ancient Egyptians adorned themselves with. © Karim Hegab

  A short walk from Lisamin Safari Hotel in Khartoum was an old woman with a simple coffee stall on the street. It was very basic: a small table, a couple of kettles to boil her water, drinking glasses and jars with coffee, ginger, sugar, and cardamom. I’d sit quietly with her and we would communicate with our smiles. It was such a tender and loving way to start my mornings.

  Khartoum’s skyline from the confluence of the White and Blue Nile rivers.

  Old Dongola was founded in the fifth century. It was the capital of the Makuria Nubian kingdom.

  XVII

  HEARING VOICES

  March 2011

  RWANDA IS AN ABSOLUTE pleasure to travel. Crossing over in Gatuna from Uganda, I walk into officialdom and efficiency – everyone and everything is where it belongs. There are no idlers and hustlers and money is changed at a container that’s been turned into a bureau de change. We form a straight queue to wait our turn at the immigration counter, where the customs official does his job without asking or expecting a thank you franc note. When he pages through my passport, poring over visas and stamps, his only question is if I enjoyed myself. ‘You’re going to love Rwanda,’ he declares. I already love that my three-month visa is free.

  Cars are in a designated parking lot and buses pass through a searching station one at a time. Our driver stands at the door, holding it open while an officer looks under seats and in overhead compartments. A second officer does the same to our luggage. It has been offloaded from storage, and we open our bags one person at a time. ‘Is this your bag, miss?’ he asks. He follows my nod with ‘may I please see what’s inside?’ He doesn’t rummage through my things or invade my privacy by asking what my tampons are for. He does this to every passenger until he is satisfied that we meet a very important condition for getting into Rwanda. Plastic bags are not used in the country or allowed in. He takes the ones he finds and sends us on our way. There isn’t a scrap of plastic or litter on the eighty-six-kilometre trip to Kigali.

  The country lives up to its reputation as the land of a thousand hills. The villages are the quintessential picture of rural Africa, with fat brown cows that have long white horns flicking their tails while they graze in green fields. Farmers are bent over their land, pulling carrots, cauliflower and onions out of dark brown soil. There are no children on the farms; they’re in school or walking home from school with books pressed against their chests. They wave at us and blow kisses our way.

  Kigali is as perfect as everyone says it is. From our last stop in Nyabugogo terminal, I get a boda boda to the city centre. Even in the chaos of the bus station, with traffic streaming in from most parts of the country and beyond the border, the city is meticulously organised. The are no vendors darting between traffic to sell water and toys, and even though the matatus are as regional as ever with bodies that are splashed with pictures of Drake, Rihanna, Snoop Dogg, Shakira, G Unit, Beyoncé by herself and with Jay Z, and African soccer stars who play for European clubs, like Didier Drogba
, Samuel Eto and Michael Essen, they don’t blare with music. They only stop at designated stops, and boda boda drivers all wear helmets and keep a spare one for their passenger.

  Boda bodas elsewhere in Africa pile in as many passengers as they can fit. Here, it’s always one person on a trip. They also only stop at marked areas. Robots have timers that tells us when to stop and when to go, people don’t jaywalk and only use pedestrian crossings and intersections. The city doesn’t vibrate with music booming from shops and cafés, and there are no hawkers turning pavements into mini markets. When people say Kigali is clean, they mean that there is no litter anywhere and no weeds growing wildly on the road side. Kigali is also perfectly beautiful. I catch my breath regularly, amazed at the city’s efficiency and the hills that envelope it.

  I’ve been in the city for less than thirty minutes and I’m already bored out of my mind. It’s not Kigali. It’s me: I don’t like sterile places.