But enough. I’ve been in distribution camps where we’ve meas-ured starving children with a stick: tall enough and they take their chance; small enough and they are fed. It’s a form of selection. OK, not as gratuitously bestial as a Nazi death camp, but it was still a kind of system of selection for death. Less industrial, but the consequences for the luckless were the same.
The big relief charities ranked themselves by tonnage, while we smaller operators just got by on easing the processes of death. But The Fed’s founder, Jake, had been a charismatic figure in the early days of the aid business and it was he who had eventually, with Sarah’s help, secured a UN accreditation for evaluation and assessment. So we punched above our weight for a small outfit. And we got right on the tits of the big aid charities.
The fashionable rubric of our times was that fractured and fragmented interventions in sub-tropical African famine needed holistic management. Reaching the living bones of God’s forgotten people meant first negotiating the possibilities of charitable cooperation. We were the scouts, the pathfinders for the deployment of international aid.
I was to discover that that so often meant not so much feeding the hungry as analysing their plight. It was as if Screwtape himself had whispered in Wormwood’s ear and The Fed had been recruited as an unwitting double-agent for the devil. We withdrew our open hand from the mouths of infants in favour of trying to deploy big aid more effectively. But in reality that meant turning away to doff our cap to the great grain-mill owners of international development.
We flew into Nairobi and from there to Lokichogio in the north-west of Kenya towards the end of the second millennium, significantly enough for us. If there was a millenarian in me, I see now that we were approaching our end times even as we began. Ostensibly we were to establish where the hot spots of famine were in Bahr el Ghazal and identify “critical paths” to supplying them with British-sourced support. In practice, this meant naming who could realistically be fed and who was beyond reach. It’s a classic Western, neo-liberal approach and when we work with the market model, it’s always a mission of despair. But perhaps I didn’t know that at the time, or perhaps I just denied it.
We transferred to Juba and then to a dispersal camp in northern Uganda close to the Sudanese border, blagging a lift with UN transporters, as if we were on some kind of ghoulish pilgrimage to the living relics of Sudan’s starving. The air is thick with diesel in a transportation zone, but there was a smug little village of white plasterboard thatched cabins that had been purpose-built to house aid workers and crews. It was like the staff quarters of a holiday-let children’s camp. I presumed we’d get up the road into Sudan to witness what we were here for, but an administrative ritual had embraced the days of the camp. Soon after dawn, debates began about who had the most pressing need for telecoms, which was a field-phone affair patched into the UN system somewhere else. You could sit on the front deck of a cabin – some had proper verandahs – and place your call. Most of the boys, many of them Australian, evidently enjoyed the insouciant command structure of this palaver. There was a good deal of testosterone involved in being first to the phone, a locker-room rivalry between the various charities: our aid workers can beat up your aid workers. Ade made some desultory bids for the phone. But it wasn’t clear what he wanted to tell the office. Maybe just that we were there.
The next push of an aid operation was being run by a bumptious Australian in a branded charity T-shirt. There were a lot of those blue T-shirts. Corporate identity is an important factor in delivering emergency relief. On the third morning, when Ade was helping with some smaller supply trucks, I lit a cigarette and hung about on a porch as the Aussie charge-hand, a self-consciously unshaven ocker called Jimmy, made his calls. Apparently there were trucks that were ten days late, probably raided in Uganda’s bandit territories in the north, I imagine. And he was dealing, like a Sydney commodities trader, with three competing haulage firms for replacements. He was swinging around on the parapet fencing of the porch, saying things like “That’s forty-eight flat rate and if you want to go it alone, you’ll get stuck when the rains come and we’ll have to come and pull you out like we did last year . . . screw ’em.”
He hung up. I asked why we didn’t use some of the small flatbeds that Adrian was fiddling with.
“They’d never make it, honey. Roads are too rough. We need the big boys.”
We certainly do, I thought.
As it happens, the rain started that night. It banged up the dust and flattened the thatching. It had come early, but still too late for crops further north. All this rain was going to do was cruelly extend what they called the hunger season. I watched the liquid air form a constantly tearing gossamer veil from the edges of the roofs and imagined bulging Sudanese eyes in brittle-boned skulls turned to the sky. It’s over, I remember thinking, when I’d felt the rain on previous trips. It’s back to the European breadbasket for me.
I slept in the following morning and was only woken by wildly gunned engines, a familiar dawn chorus on wet, unmetalled African roads as axles are lifted from muddy little trenches. But the rain had stopped and the engines had been started a little later, the grey low mists of a rainy season pre-empted by high broken clouds as a capricious wind swung around. It was a window in the rains, an early warning of the soaking to come. But I knew there was still time for a run.
I walked out into freshened air. There were five or six oppos hanging about, Aussies and Yarpies, more than you’d expect to see when there was the daily business of warehousing to be done. I recognised one of them, Jimmy’s deputy, Jo, and approached her. She told me Sudan was opening three airstrips for three days.
“We’re shipping as much as we can – maize and supps mainly – to Loki to airlift it in by UN.”
I’d once heard a station manager, with English understatement, call the opening of airstrips a mixed blessing. Starvation was the Sudanese government’s weapon of choice for southern Sudan, to tie up the SPLA rebels in a famine zone. The airstrip closures, or no-fly zones, were officially to hinder rebel troop and arms movements. But in effect it was a means of controlling the food supply. Yet more unspeakable were the temporary reopenings of these supply strips. The distribution of food when it arrived would act as a draw to the local populace and the effort of long treks in emaciated frames was effectively a cull of the weakest. Thus was the subtle turning on and off of the Sudanese genocidal tap.
I went to make coffee. Adrian was down in the truck compound, where they were loading what they could of the big bags on to smaller trucks, muscular black bodies, sporting bandanas, whitened by the mist of escaping flour, swinging 400 kg bags on to flatbeds until their tyres touched the wheel arches, then they’d take a couple off.
By early afternoon, the ground was firm to the tread as the heat of the day hit the mid-forties. The loading had to stop. The metal of the trucks became too hot to touch. Staff were listlessly wandering around the encampment, splashing themselves from troughs, when a deeper mechanical rumble than any of our smaller trucks could manage shook the ground. The first of the big artics swung into the camp, a massive leviathan pulling a trailer, its dark-windowed cabin sealing the artificial climate of its crew. Six more followed. They were greeted with no cheers. We stood around, hands on hips, as they lined up on a levelled muster point, purpose built for the transport elite, and their engines idled then died, pulling human voices back into the air. The wiry and paunched drivers and crew tumbled from cabs like birds leaving elephants’ heads and they shed clothing as they hit the heat.
“Back to Plan A,” I said to Jo as I walked back into the shade. She said nothing, but winced back into the brightness of the lorry park. She seemed preoccupied, nervous.
“We can go with a road delivery now, right?” I pressed, trying to make eye contact with her.
“I don’t know,” she said.
I sought out Jimmy: “What are you going to do?”
“Get these loaded up and over to Loki airport just as qui
ckly as bloody possible, before the Sudes change their minds.”
I didn’t know where to start. Faced with the fatuously stupid, you have to backtrack into territory so facile and self-evident that for a while you can’t get your bearings.
“But it’ll take you two days to get these loaded and to Loki, and you don’t even know whether the airstrip will still be open when you get there.”
He started to turn away like his clipboard was telling him more than me. I followed.
“You don’t even know if you have planes, for Christ’s sake.”
“It’s the quickest way before the rain comes – I’m not getting seven forty-tonners stuck on the road for the SPLA to pick off.”
“Jesus, Jimmy, you’ve got seven trucks and a dry road – just get them into Sudan.”
“Listen, Missy, I don’t know what kind of authority you think you have here. But I say it’s zip. Understood? You don’t work for me and I don’t think you know how this works.” He smiled, like he was patiently explaining to a child. “So it’s my way, not your highway.”
I felt that hot phosphorous rage, but I noted I was under control, which made me feel confident. I was in the grip of a terrifying calmness. I never wore a dog collar in the field, far less held a service. It was a hangover from the WorldMission days; the only sign was what we did, not what we said. But here on the baked earth of northern Uganda, I knew I was talking the Church’s book, rather than The Fed’s best interests.
“You don’t need to know who or what I am, or who I speak for,” I said. “Food in Sudan, anywhere in Sudan, is better than food warehoused at Loki for the hunger season.”
He returned to his clipboard. “It’s not going to happen.”
I tried reason. “Listen, I don’t want an argument. Surely all that matters here is that people get fed? So let’s take lorries into Sudan.”
“No.”
This was a power play. Nothing to do with facts.
But the burning inside wasn’t going to make me angry. Rather the opposite – it was feeding me. So I went for the challenge to his manhood.
“You’re bottling it, you friggin’ useless little cock.”
The pen froze over the clipboard. He didn’t look up straight away but took four paces towards me, so his face was very close. It was small and bristly.
“Listen, you dried-up little bitch, I don’t know or care where you come from, but you get right back there or I’m going to screw you good – you’ll walk bow-legged for a month.”
He held the stare, letting the silence and my lack of reaction establish his authority. I just chuckled ironically and held up a cocked little finger. He walked past me, catching my shoulder. I felt a coolness over my skin, tingling and insulating me from the heat. I looked down at my hands and stretched my fingers. They were like waking hands, not shaking, steady and purposeful.
It took the night and most of the morning to load the big lorries and it was early afternoon before the convoy shipped out. The drivers weren’t contracted for Lokichogio. Jimmy had five drivers, including himself, so in a further grotesque absurdity, he left two loaded trucks, with the promise that they would return for them, or find a further two drivers by radio along the route. I hissed to Adrian not to say that he was licensed and insured. We weren’t going to be part of this dilettante exercise. But in the event Jimmy didn’t ask. We were contaminated and even the prospect of shifting more of the supplies than he would otherwise be able to into a temporarily open airstrip wasn’t going to encourage a rapprochement with The Fed’s reps.
In an alpha-male roar, the five trucks swung out of the compound, heading east, a driver and one crew riding shotgun in each cab. If anything, it was hotter now. I looked south-east; no cloud bank. It could be a week before the rains came again. The whole encampment was strangely vacated, like a school after speech day. The only people left were the stevedores, the contracted loaders in their whitened scarves and sawn-off khakis. Somewhere there would be the cooks and ancillaries in their branded T-shirts and the compound managers and some armed security. I found Adrian in the shade of a baobab tree, swigging from a bottle of water and flicking the pages of a truck manual.
“Adrian,” I said. “Ade.”
He looked up.
“Adrian, we’ve got to do something.” I couldn’t think how to convey the awful dystopia that I saw around us. It was like I was the only one who could see it. “We’ve got a chance here to do something. It mightn’t ever come again. I don’t want to look back and think we didn’t take it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Adrian, we’ve got two fully loaded and fuelled trucks and an empty camp.” He turned his head, wanting more. “Adrian, please, we’ll never have a chance like this again.”
“Who for?” he said and his tone was blank.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Adrian, this isn’t about my ego, or yours. We’re here to do stuff, not just move stuff about. What did you say you’d joined up for?”
I was invoking the back garden in Kentish Town and I could see he knew it.
“Don’t you know there’s a frigging war on?”
We fell silent. He looked off west, towards the falling sun.
“So it’s Bonnie and Clyde,” he said.
I sighed and dropped my shoulders. “If you like. Come on, Adrian. This will never come again.”
There was a long pause. I had nothing else to say. Then the surprise.
“How do we get the keys?” he said, standing up.
So Adrian went in the office hut while I leaned on the door jamb trying to look nonchalant. A somnolent Ugandan staffer kept vehicle keys on a hook board. Adrian said he had to move the trucks down to the sealed area. They were contractors’ trucks, I heard him say, and insurance didn’t cover them being left outside a locked compound, and, yes, we know nothing’s going to happen to them in a semi-deserted camp on the Ugandan side of the border, but we’ve had enough trouble with contractors already and I’m not about to give them another contractual breach to use for bargaining.
He was good, I’ll give him that.
Adrian swung the first and slightly less loaded of the big lorries down towards the fences, dust and exhaust billowing from its sides, while I ambled to the far side of the other truck. I was a schoolgirl dodging a lesson.
I heard the engine die in the distance and there was an extended pause, like the whole camp was waiting for something to happen. I thought he might have changed his mind, gone back to our hut or bumped into someone with one of those clipboards, a compound manager maybe. But he appeared, admirably casually, striding up the centre of the camp track, examining the other set of keys as if there was some mundane issue with the tag. Perhaps there was. Maybe Adrian really was wondering whether the registering systems for transport could be improved. I pulled myself up the steps on the crew side as I heard the central-locking clunk on Ade’s door and we sat into the high seats simultaneously.
For the first time, I thought Adrian and I were making common cause and it felt good.
The engine fired and, without a word, he swung the tractor unit around, air-brakes hissing, and followed the line of his first short trip. Then, at the top of the encampment, as if it was natural, as if a forty-tonne truck can saunter and whistle carelessly, he edged us left, instead of straight down to the sealed compound and joined the main thoroughfare through the scrub, north-west, towards Sudan.
“Seatbelts,” I said and we laughed, nervously, like we were taking the piss.
I’d say the first thirty kilometres of that ride were the happiest time I can remember. The sheer thrill of straddling this monster that obeyed our illicit will, the self-righteous kick of breaching the fuss-body bureaucracy of the aid machine, the electrifying charge of danger, rolling at a steady 60 kph on a dust track, achingly slowly from the captivity of the distribution station and teasingly slow towards an unknown destination and known dangers.
I opened the drop-down compartment on the dash and took out the map a
nd compass, which all trucks carry as part of their administrative payload, ticked off on those clipboards as a pilot would check his plane.
Neither of us spoke much – it was so damn obvious what we were doing. We were constantly leaning forward and back to check the wing mirrors, our silent, mutual assents over the drum of the engine that pursuing motorbikes or jeeps could yet frustrate our joint venture. It was like that until we put about a hundred kilometres and several forks in the road between us and the rightful owners of our pirate ship.
As for that rightful ownership – how virtue added to the headiness of our banditry! And there was sweet irony. This machine, powered by diesel refined in the rich Western nations, was powering our nourishing cargo to those to whom it rightly belonged, by virtue of their crying need, if need can be a virtue.
We’re coming, I thought sentimentally, hold hard.
We drove north-west, following the valley of the White Nile, crossing the border north of Moyo, towards Kajo-Keji. In those days, you’d be unlucky to be stopped and searched. Relief lorries were obvious, there was nothing much to smuggle, and refugee traffic was all one-way, north to south. They probably thought we were stragglers from a convoy heading to Juba. Once in Sudan, we quickened our pace as Adrian grew accustomed to the varied bass ratios of the gearbox. I pulled the scarf and bush hat from my head and ran fingers through my matted hair.
Astonishingly, now I look back on it, given the tension of my heightened consciousness, I began to doze, head lolling like a home-brew drunk to the random jazz rhythms of the rutted road.
We’d decided to head up towards Rumbek, in the withering heart of Bahr el Ghazal, where the convoys now bound for Lokichogio would originally have headed, to identify local distribution stations where we could. At dusk, the base of my spine dulled from constantly counter-balancing the swaying cab, we pulled over in the scrub, ate some of the three-day emergency rations in tinned packets from under the seats, and as the safety of the night shrouded our great beast, we slept in our bags head-to-toe in the back of the cab.
A Dark Nativity Page 8