I storm off with a trail of young girls chasing after me. The leader of the selfie gang holds my hand and starts telling me about her family. I have to meet them. Her mom will love me, her baby brother won’t touch me but that’s how he is. He’d rather crawl around than be coddled. I need a few minutes by myself to calm down, and dig deep for a crocodile smile that becomes genuine by the time we are back among the families. She shows her mom and dad our pictures, tells them I’m from Johannesburg and passes other morsels of information until her mom tells her to let go of my hand. I’m still a little pissed at Mohammed, and don’t really feel like talking. He buys me ginger tea and tickles me until I laugh, and my temper goes away without leaving a trail of blood on the floor: I need to live in Sudan.
We stop at his sister Amina’s house on the way back to Dongola. The first thing I notice walking into the house are the beds from Bashir’s house in the lounge. Amina offers me a seat on one of them and tells me to lie down. She puts a mink blanket over me to protect me from the cold night air. While her husband makes tea, she brings out a plate full of sweets she leaves in my hands. Her tenderness reminds me of Jilly and Astou from my life in Bamako.
I still haven’t found a hotel. Mohammed offers me a place at his house. When we get home, he leaves the car at the gate for the night. It doesn’t fit into the yard. ‘It’s not as if someone will break into it,’ he says.
The yard is even smaller than what I imagine when he says the car doesn’t fit into it. It has a bathroom at the left corner and space that can fit five people at most. A paint bucket with a satellite on top of it occupies the left corner of the yard. The house has two main doors next to each other, the one we enter opens into a lounge with a small passage that leads to the main bedroom and a small TV room with three angareebs. His wife and daughter, Fatma and Iman, have already dozed off. Fatma rises from her sleep to welcome me and to serve the take away dinner we pick up on the way home. Mohammed gently coaxes Iman out her sleep and tells me to ‘relax’ when I sit on an angareeb. When a Sudanese person tell you to relax what they mean is take your shoes off and sprawl your whole body on an angareeb; they are the homeliest people I’ve encountered in my travels.
In the morning, after my shower and coffee, Mohammed takes me to the dining room, which has its own entrance. There are two angareebs next to the door, and one at the back of the room next to the dining table. He takes out three photo albums and takes me through snapshots of his life since boyhood. One of the albums has an Ethiopian Airlines boarding pass from his first and only trip out of Sudan to Delhi. He was there to visit his sister in hospital.
In Amina’s pictures, she’s a dark-skinned girl who turns into a pale woman from using Hydroquinone. I’ve seen the change, marked with red blotches against unnaturally white skin, on a number of faces. The wall on one side of the room has framed certificates Mohammed has collected in his life as a police officer. I’m on my last hours in Sudan. My hugs are tighter and longer than usual, and when my eyes tear up when Mohammed leaves me at the door of the bus, I’m surprised by how deep my sadness is. It’s going to be hard for me to get over the peace I feel in Sudan.
Mohammed introduces me to the other passengers and asks them to show me where to get off. A man who happens to be an English teacher takes over the trip. He tells the driver where to drop me off, and assures me that I will know I’m at the right place when we reach a T-junction with a police station and road block. There, I wait at a restaurant for a bakkie to the banks of the Nile where I join a group of others waiting for a boat to take us across the river. Everyone gets off except for me. After seeing my picture, Moussa the boatman sails up the stream to drop me off next to vegetable gardens.
I drop to my knees and crawl up it. The only living beings around are the old man watering the garden and a white mule grazing on weeds. When I get to the top and back on my feet, it’s to views of an empty desert with granite pillars and columns and pieces of vases, remains from a seventh-century church, peeking out of the sand. There’s a fort a short distance away on what locals would call a hill, but is in fact a high sand dune with stones. The ruins of the city are scattered across the area, mostly as ruins of houses. Less than a kilometre across the road are the mud huts. There is nothing else around me. It makes being here feel like walking into the moment in the picture that brings me to Old Dongola until I see a bakkie, then a bus and other, occasional traffic on the new tar road between the tombs and the earth-coloured hills – again, actually dunes.
While royals were buried in pyramids, Sufi saints from the medieval kingdom of Makuria were mummified and left in tombs adorned with inscriptions. In a nine-hundred-year-old tomb whose existence goes international after a Polish archaeologist’s trip in 1993, walls have verses from the gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John.
There are around twenty tombs. Most are in near-perfect condition, others have lost their walls and beehives. Walking to the first one to start working my way around the group that’s here, I notice that there are small piles of sand with pebbles and flat headstones. I ask God and the gods to forgive me for stomping on their resting place. I’m a little nervous about being here, but it’s not because of the Muslim graveyard I walk carelessly around; graveyards are one of my favourite places.
The tombs are completely dark, even with the round opening at their roofs. There is no way to tell what’s inside unless I walk head first into the darkness. The air is stale in the first hut. There’s nothing inside it. The walls have inscriptions, including graffiti carved by previous visitors. I hear animal sounds that I think are from rats at the second and third tombs, and take it as my sign to walk past. And so goes my visit; with me marching boldly to an entrance and being scared to be in the dark by myself. When I remember that fear is an irrational emotion best dealt with through physical confrontation, I stand a few feet away from the entrances. One hut has an old wooden bed and cloth over it. It could be a net over a deathbed. They could be whatever is left after mass excavations when Western archaeologists ‘discover’ world heritage.
I call Moussa to pick me up before my phone battery dies. Going back to Khartoum, I take my chances and wait for transport at the T-junction. One of the uniforms says he has called a bus that’s still in Dongola, telling them to reserve my seat. They’ll be here in an hour. The sun sets, darkness settles in with cold air and still no sign of the bus. I wait until my shuka is no longer enough to keep me warm. There’s an office with a bed, where I’m charging my phone. The old man doesn’t invite me inside no matter how many times I pop in to check my phone, and complain about how cold it has become. Everyone else is welcome, though. I go across the road to the twin-cab van where the uniform looking after me is sitting with two others. After fourteen days in Sudan, I’m used to being a pampered princess who never asks for anything, from food to hailing my cab or a minibus. I let myself in and ask them to help me find food. We drive off to get bread and grilled meat. The clock is ticking towards midnight; I make peace with the possibility of sleeping here until the morning, when I’ll go back to Dongola when, finally, a minibus to Khartoum arrives with space for one person between the driver and another passenger.
I sleep until we stop for fuel, where I remain in my seat while others look for food and fruit. The man in the seat next to mine buys me a bag of oranges. I wake up again when we get to Libya, on the outskirts of Khartoum. The driver wants me to pay six hundred pounds for the trip to Al Amarat. Public transport will start running again at 6am, according to the man we find to translate for us. He tells me I’m better off waiting at the bus station. His wife has a tea stall in front of a row of angareebs. He finds me a blanket and tells me not to move until 6am.
Buses that will be leaving for long distance trips start revving their engines, and passengers leave their angareebs to wash their faces and their mouths, filling the area with the guttural sounds of phlegm being pulled out of their nostrils. They stop for tea and legemat on their way to the buses. Getting into the taxi to K
hartoum, I understand why Masjeed and Bashir laugh when I tell them I’ll be using public transport; people push, pull, shove and step on each other to get into minibuses in Libya.
I spend my last day in Sudan at the Sheikh Hamed al Nil shrine in Omdurman, where the nineteenth-century Sufi leader’s remains are. Today is Monday and the throes of Sufi muslims who gather here on Friday have turned into a handful of people who are at the shrine to pray, or park themselves under a makeshift veranda. I’m here with Nusaiba, the twenty-year-old student I befriend on my trip to the confluence of the Nile. She should be in her lectures but wants to spend my last day in Sudan with me. She gives me pink faux pearl teardrop earrings and a necklace.
At the airport, I discover that travellers need to register their presence with the Ministry of the Interior within three days of arrival. This information is on my visa but I never read it. Without any money to pay for my fine, I ask the head of immigration at the airport to help me. My flight is leaving in a few minutes. He makes a call to Ethiopia Airlines, asking them to remain grounded while someone prints my boarding pass. ‘I hope this won’t happen again the next time I see you,’ he says, hugging me.
I have been travelling Africa since 2008. While I know only too well that there are ways of arriving in a new country, like knowing where I’m going and where I will be staying, I will never be this person, and it’s okay because I’m home in Africa.
AFTERWORD
I NO LONGER LIVE ON the road but I still travel around Africa. I want to see other parts of the world too but whenever the moment arrives when I have to spend the money in the saving account I have for my travels, my spirit whispers: ‘You have only scratched the surface of Africa’.
I often wonder about the hold this continent has on me. Perhaps it is that every new place I go to also has a familiarity from a lived experience in any of the countries I have been to before: The certainty that I can walk up to a complete stranger and be held with love like we have always known each other, the invitation I will get to join in a communal meal even with a plate of my own food in front of me, the unshakable faith that I will never lack for anything because everyone around me will hold my hand as I turn their home, a place that was a speck on the map, into mine as well.
It has been eleven years since those three months in West Africa turned into five years, and now my life, because I cannot think of a better gift to myself than that of knowing the continent that defines my identity intimately. As I write this, the main reason I started travelling – writing the continent beyond our strife – seems like a fluke. The Timbuktu of 2009 is gone. In its place is instability and milltary attacks, yet Abdul is still the same resilient hustler and now has a tour company, Timbuktu Camel Tours, that specialises in trips to Niger, Mauritania and Burkina Faso.
When I stood among Southern Sudanese refugees in Kakuma, crying tears of joy with them on the last day of voting to secede from North Sudan, I didn’t for a second think that the independent state would end up as another humanitarian crisis. I expected people to leave Kakuma refugee camp instead of escaping there like they have been doing since 1990. Against stark realities that keep increasing the number of people who seek refuge here, the camp made world history in June 2018 when it hosted TEDxKakumaCamp and a gay pride parade; no other refugee camp in the world has done this. There are endless examples of how this continent keeps surprising me by how closely hope lives to our despair; as if it’s a coin that can be flipped in a second to reveal its other side of love, faith and fortitude.
Not so long ago, the thought of going to Mogadishu used to fill me with dread. Now, I cannot wait to go there and write the country beyond news stories of al-Shabaab because the Somalia of five years ago – of bomb blasts – no longer exists; certainly not as a daily reality. Africa proves my conviction correct daily: The continent is always in a state of metamorphosis. We pick ourselves up over and over again, and come out of the fire more determined than ever to assert that we are greater than the clichés that reduce us to death and despair.
Pressed to pinpoint why I cannot stop exploring Africa, and why I have been planning to go to so-called war zones and conflict areas, I guess my answer will always be that I still hear voices telling me ‘Africa – now’. It’s more urgent than before that I find my way to Mogadishu, Darfur, N’Djemenna, Bangui, Malabo, Niamey and Juba to honour the instruction I received inside the mass grave in Ntarama; to spend time traipsing the Sahara and swimming around the Mediterranean coast, to be a hijabi and explore my conversion to Islam around the Horn of Africa and offer my sincerest gratitude to Allah at the Sahaba mosque in Massawa and around North Africa. Not because I have to, but because I live on a fantastical continent that has given me my heart’s desires and made my wildest dream come true.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It took a village for my dream to come true, from my publisher Thabiso Mahlape and editor Megan Mance to my family, friends, colleagues and hundreds of strangers who opened their hearts, homes and purses to help me make it through another day – some without even asking for more than my name because we didn’t have a language in common. Their presence in my life was fleeting. Time has turned them faceless but the gift of their generosity endures.
While living as a vagabond and thereafter, many people who read about my journeys in City Press and True Love and later followed my adventures through social media would send direct messages or stop me in my tracks to high five me or urge me to keep going. On days when wanting to travel Africa while earning a pittance reduced me to rage and tears of desperation, your encouragement kept me together. I was alone physically, but emotionally, I was travelling with a tribe – betam ameseginalehu, thank you very much.
Writing Vagabond made me remember childhood memories that I realise were planting a seed that would one day grow into my life. My mom, Dikeledi Miemie Mogoatlhe, wasn’t a fan of saying yes to everything, not even with my tears and tactics. What she never said no to was buying me books and music, or letting me hang out with her on Sunday afternoons when it was meant to be her alone time whenever I had seemingly random questions to ask, like ‘Mom, who is the Egyptian sun god?’ My first encounters with countries that would become the story of my life started with literature and music, and there was never a moment when asking for these was met with anything but, ‘I’ll do it tomorrow’. Thanks, Mommy, for feeding my lust and gluttony for all things African. To my paternal family, ba ga Mogoatlhe: Lesego, Vincent, Mapolo, Sebati, Maphalane, Grace, Leah, Dinaane, Isaiah, Matlakala, and my maternal family, ba ga Malebane: Dr Matlhogonolo, Matheko, Thabo, Esther, Oupa, Mangaka Ngubane. Ba ga Seabela: Mapula, Mpho, Tebogo, Oageng. Ba ga Dube: Ndu, Portia and Boitumelo.
For the rolls of Randelas wedged between my cleavage, the expressions of faith that became my sustenance and the phone calls, social media chats, messages, and emails that came in like clockwork to check that I was indeed fine: Tebogo Mothoa, Dr Khumisho Moguerane, Kgopedi Lilokoe, Heidi Uys, Babalwa Shota, Adam Levine, Norman Mekgoe, Sarah-Jane Boden, Nicole Gazard, Sikelewa Geya-Mdingi, Nonzwakazi Cekete, Dr Sindisiwe and Marinus van Zyl, Lerato Molele, Voilet and Tshepo Maila, Tsakani Shibisi, Dr Zakes Motene, Dr Cephas Chikanda, Tiny Bikitsha, Vukani Lumumba Mthintso, Lucas Ledwaba, Arrot Iramisi, Ceasar Pirs, Khuthala Nandipha, Thapelo Mokhathi, Mathata Tsedu, Mahlatsi Maredi, Tokiso Mbatha, Maikano Mokoka, Matshidiso Masebe, Thabiso Sekhula, Thami Kwazi, Carl Collison, Mapula Nkosi, Sonia Motaung, Nokwazi Mzobe, Adrien Dawans, Manana Monareng, Lerato Legoabe, Teshome Ayele, Mokgadi Seabi, David Odhiambo, Kwelagobe Sekele, Celuxolo Nhlengethwa, Neo Maditla, Ramathabathe Muroa, Siphiwe Ndaba, Neo Merafi, Dineo Rabaholo, Pepe Julian Onziema, Gelila Yehualashet, Souleymana Sene, Abdoulaye Alitunine, Ceaser Pirs, Nana Ama Afrakoma-Todhunter, Liphumileilanga Goduka, Joshua Mudau, Noletu Moti, Joe Correia, Dr Sithembile Mabaso, Lungi Mlotshwa, Nosipho Jiyane, Lebohang Maphasa, Sello Nzama, Omphile Raleie, Melinda Ferguson, Ali Naka, Lefa Mokgatle, Angela Lang, Lebo Mashile and my beloved Maetheng Hlalele, for keeping me sane and inspired when
it turned out that writing a book is easier said than done and supporting me through other challenges that come with the process of working on a manuscript.
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