by Peter Boehm
In Nairobi, the traffic police earn their living almost exclusively from the matatus – the minibuses which private entrepreneurs run alongside the public buses, but in different cities and countries the police earn a living from something else.
Anywhere in Africa where someone might breach the law, the police are never far away, and the picture in Nairobi was as follows – the matatus drive the same route several times a day, and so they can’t simply drive past the police. There are usually two uniformed officers standing at the roadside, and one will raise his arm briefly to indicate that they want to collect their money. The matatu stops, one of the policemen approaches and subtly (I’ve never understood why – everyone knows what’s going on after all) collects his 200 Schillings (about £2) from the driver.
Why do the matatu drivers pay? If they didn’t, the police would begin to examine the vehicles for deficiencies. And that takes time. And they’d be sure to find something. Or they might even get angry about the driver’s acting stupid and not wanting to pay, and that could lead to even more problems. The matatu drivers would much rather chew khat and recoup the bribe money through their speeding.
When I was stopped by a policeman in Kenya, on the other hand, I answered the perennial question of how I was with “not too good, officer”, at the same time turning down the corners of my mouth. This made it clear that I didn’t appreciate the harassment.
Or I just drove straight past the officers. If you do this, however, you have to first quickly check whether they may, exceptionally, have a car parked nearby which they could use to follow you.
I once made an illegal u-turn in the city centre in Nairobi. A policeman saw, and waved me over to him. But I was in a hurry - which was precisely why I’d turned when I shouldn’t have. So I simply ignored him, but hit a traffic jam immediately afterwards and the policeman caught me up. I had to drive him (he didn’t have a car) and myself (I was under arrest) to the police station. There I paid a fine of around £40. Then I was free.
Following intervention by my Somali acquaintances – they knew a matatu driver who was an expert in everything to do with meddlesome traffic police – the next morning I paid half the fine to the secretary at the offices of the court responsible, and I was let off the other half. In return, the file containing my charge disappeared, never to be seen again.
So it was no more surprising that the Djibouti police made a living from the Ethiopian girls. And as it happened, I saw this for myself the very next morning.
The police had been called to a hotel in Rue d’Ethiopie because of a dispute between a French soldier and two girls, and – in for a penny in for a pound .... we’ve got a family to feed, and the khat isn’t exactly cheap either! – they immediately filled their whole van to capacity with the girls. One of the policemen stood on the back wall and hung onto the roof. Each time another group had been loaded in, he trampled a couple of times with his black boots on any feet sticking out. They didn’t mean any harm. Africans – even policemen – are hardly ever cruel just for the fun of it. It was purely psychological. (See “Basic course in bribery for security staff”. Rule 1: More fear = more money.) He just wanted to make it clear to the girls that he was serious, and that they wouldn’t get off so lightly this time.
It was often the apparently trivial things, the small details – like the gleaming chains in the psychiatric unit of the hospital in Hargeisa – which shocked me. In room 5 of the Hotel de la Paix, it was a white plush teddy bear on the double bed, which I remembered for a long time.
I’d smelt incense and fresh coffee, and the three Ethiopian girls in room 5 immediately invited me to their traditional coffee ceremony. They were no older than their early 20s, and the teddy bear was lying there on the plastic quilt in their room, as though one of the girls would hug it tightly when going to sleep at night.
On the floor, fresh grass had been spread out for the coffee ceremony, and there was a raffia mat, where the third girl slept. In the corner there was a camping cupboard, and a cassette recorder stood on the window ledge.
One of the girls was roasting the green beans, grinding them in a mortar, and making the coffee on a charcoal stove. Later, her older brother joined us. He was wearing red tracksuit bottoms and a football shirt with a picture of Ronaldo on the front.
He spoke relatively comprehensible English. The girls didn’t even speak French, which was so ubiquitous in Djibouti. And since the four conducted their coffee ceremony in an even more conservative way than I’d ever seen in the Ethiopian capital, I concluded that they must be from the countryside.
But I was wrong. They came from Addis Ababa. Not everyone there spreads fresh grass on the floor anymore. Especially not when it’s horrendously expensive, like it is in Djibouti as it has to be imported especially from Ethiopia. And the girls served some flat, chunked bread with the coffee, and even prayed before they distributed it. In Addis Ababa, now, it’s almost always popcorn which is served with the three small cups of coffee everyone is expected to drink.
At the same time, one of the girls was lying on the double bed in a short nightgown, with curlers in her hair. And an hour later she was carefully blowing through pursed lips on her freshly painted finger nails.
However, it didn’t strike me as contradictory to their conservative coffee ceremony, but rather as the mix which is characteristic of young Ethiopians. I knew that the homely Ethiopian suburbs, with their darkness and poverty, and with cowpats drying on the walls, could easily mislead people. You see them and feel as though you’ve stepped back centuries. But one case showed me dramatically just how much despair, how much thirst for life, how great a desire to escape from this narrow world can be fostered by these suburbs.
In the summer of 1996, a plane was hijacked from Addis Ababa. The hijacking became famous because a South African had captured the plane on her video camera as it plunged into the shallow water. She was on honeymoon, at the time, in the Comoros – an archipelago just off the East African coast. The notoriety was increased because the hijackers took absolutely no notice of the pilot’s pleas that he was about to run out of fuel.
Four years after the crash, we visited the father of one of the three hijackers, in a suburb of Addis Ababa. He was already over sixty. At the time of the hijack, his son had been 19, and had lived with his two accomplices in Djibouti for a few months before the attack.
The brutal aeroplane hijack was far beyond the father’s comprehension. He simply couldn’t reconcile it with his memory of his son. In the black and white photo he showed us was someone barely more than a child. He talked about a perfectly normal boy from the suburbs who, when studying for his end of school exams, had put his feet in a bowl of cold water in order not to go to sleep. A boy who was going to send him money once he’d got a good job in Nairobi, and someone who had only boarded the plane over there in order to pick up his certificate for his long-distance diploma studies.
But the son who actually boarded the plane to Nairobi was no longer an honest boy from the suburbs. The three hijackers claimed they’d escaped from jail. They now wanted to go to Australia.
When the pilot made it clear to them that the plane only had enough fuel to get to Nairobi, not for a trip halfway around the world, one of them told him, “If we don’t make it to Australia, then we want to die and make history.” Whilst the plane plummeted, they continued walking around, rather than sitting down and putting on their seatbelts.
Many of the motives of the three young men will probably never come to light, but one thing is clear – they’d dreamt of something more than a life in the suburbs with flatbread, honey wine and their bedrooms adorned with sacred images.
Without any prompting, the young man in room 5 made it clear that his sister and her friends were no “bar girls”. Sleeping with French soldiers for money was something they’d never do.
I had the impression that his sister also genuinely meant what she said, when she thought aloud a couple of times, accompanied by her friends’ snig
gers. “Wow, he’s handsome”, her brother translated. And, “Which room is he staying in, then? I’ll knock on his door tonight.”
She meant me! I’ve come across that often enough too. What do African women know of the real world? When they think of young and white, they always immediately see Tom Cruise.
In the evening, I saw the same girl leave the hotel, made up and veiled. She waved shyly, but didn’t stop. She’d turned into a “bar girl”. Into a bar girl who didn’t want to be one.
My curiosity aroused, I did a tour of a few discos that evening. I was glad that I didn’t bump into the girl. I’d have been embarrassed, and I’m sure she would have been too. The discos were embarrassing enough without that. Each had a long bar and a dance floor, thronging with twenty or even thirty girls.
It was a Saturday evening. Two discos were completely empty. As I entered, thirty female pairs of eyes turned to me greedily, much as starving people would eye a steak.
And then, that evening, at Hotel de la Paix I also met the schoolgirl who had heard that I was a journalist, and was desperate for me to interview her. She was in her final year of school, and was visiting her Somali friend who was staying in the hotel.
She was wearing a long tight dress, which emphasised her boyish figure, and you could clearly see her black lacy bra through the wine red chiffon bodice. She was the only one who didn’t have a glass of Tej in her hand that evening. But she was smoking cigarettes, and was vehement that she’d also already drunk some alcohol.
She was from a family of Djibouti Somalis and still lived with her parents, but she often came here at the weekends. It was so boring at home, she said. And she’d only put on the red dress, backcombed her shoulder-length dark hair and put on her lipstick once she’d reached her friend’s room.
She flirted with me unashamedly. And you could tell that she was enjoying it. It was her Saturday evening fun. And it was far better than what she could expect from her family at home, from everyday Djibouti.
After three days, I had to continue to Ethiopia. But in the end I was pleased that I’d had a short stay at Hotel de la Paix. “Bar girls” who were happiest visiting you at night – for the money of course, but maybe not always! – had struck me as strange to begin with and, judging by her enjoyment, the schoolgirl who just came here for fun seemed suspiciously close to sharing the prostitutes’ fantasised views of men. Neither could I forget the teddy bear on the double bed in room 5. But then, I thought, some European women also keep their cuddly toys on their marital bed. It wasn’t necessarily a statement of the girls’ age or development. And, after all, it was prostitution which had enabled them to escape their suburbs at all. And we all have to give something up if we want to gain anything. Everyone knows that.
At the end of the day, beneath the façade of African traditions, the residents of Hotel de la Paix harboured the same aspirations as I did, and as did most Europeans. And these traditions could collapse given certain social frameworks. In a word, I far preferred the girls in Hotel de la Paix to the teenagers in the cinema in Hargeisa.
• The rollercoaster to Addis (Djibouti City – border)
The train journey from Djibouti to Addis Ababa was really meant to be one of the highlights of my trip. In any event, it was the reason for my detour via Djibouti. It would have been less than 130 miles from Hargeisa to Dire Dawa, the station in Ethiopia at the halfway point of the journey.
Besides, I thought that the train journey would be bound to be a welcome change from endless bus journeys on dusty roads, and also one of those rare opportunities to travel in comfort. I imagined myself at the window of an air conditioned coach, amazed and amused by the strange scenery passing me by. Or in a cosy restaurant car, with freshly starched tablecloths, and the Italian pasta which is ubiquitous in Ethiopia. Come the afternoon I’d have indulged in a beer or – the height of extravagance – a glass of wine. In my wildest dreams, I even booked a cabin in a sleeper car.
This train journey couldn't go wrong. So much history of the Horn of Africa is reflected in the Djibouti – Addis Ababa railway line that every nut and bolt seems to tell you their version of it.
It dates back to an initiative by Menelik II, the founder of modern Ethiopia. After he’d finally succeeded, in 1890, in defeating the other provincial rulers, he had had himself crowned as Emperor of Abyssinia. But even in those days, the country was plagued with the same problem it has today. It had no access to the sea. The Eritrean coast had already been occupied by Italy, Djibouti by France, and Somaliland by Britain.
The railway line from the southern uplands, the centre of imperial power at the time, to Djibouti, the closest seaport, was intended to help the country break out of its isolation.
The extreme terrain which had to be overcome between the coast and Addis Ababa, however, meant that this railway line had always been something special. In the 465-mile stretch from the coast to the uplands, it has to overcome three clearly delineated landscape types – the desert as far as Dire Dawa, the Ethiopian part of the East African Rift Valley to Awash, and then the elevated plains from there to the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. This city is almost 8,000 feet above sea level.
As it was built with French funding, and its administration was in the hands of the French for a long time, its workers still use French today. And as it soon became clear that termites would eat all the wooden sleepers, the whole stretch had to be built using steel sleepers. Even today, many buildings along this stretch still have fences made of these strangely bent components, which look rather like sponge finger biscuits.
And it’s had illustrious visitors. The English writer, Evelyn Waugh, who wrote what are probably two of the funniest books in travel literature about Ethiopia, travelled on it twice – in 1930, for the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassi, and in 1935 prior to the Italian invasion.
I re-read both books after my trip. Waugh travelled in a sleeper car. Perhaps that’s where my wild fantasies came from.
And because the railway held the virtual monopoly for transporting people and goods in the Ethiopian uplands, it has long been considered the world’s most profitable railway line. Its monopoly was only broken in the 1940s, by the Italian road from the Eritrean port of Assab, built to avoid the extremely expensive railway. Following Djibouti’s independence in 1977, it was finally transferred to joint administration by Ethiopia and Djibouti.
But that was water under the bridge by now. It was late morning. The intense heat had already spread across Djibouti. I was standing in front of the station. I’d bought my ticket, so I’d done my work for the day, and thought that, now I was there, it couldn’t hurt to look around a little.
The imposing redbrick station building, its façade decorated with timber struts, still exuded something of the grandeur of the time when the line was built.
A dozen men and women were encamped on the forecourt with huge bundles – clearly traders waiting for the next train to Ethiopia, two days hence. They’d built a small camp there. A number of their sacks and bags were monsters, the size of a man. They’d spread blankets out on the ground between them. They were now dosing on these, sheltered from the glaring midday sun.
It was cool inside the station building. But not outside. Why shouldn’t I go in and chat to a few people? I thus came upon a helpful railway worker. Without beating about the bush, he took me to an official on the second floor. On the desk in front of him was a sign with the words “Deputy Director of the Djibouti Railways”.
The official looked young – perhaps in his late thirties. On his nose was a pair of elegant glasses with a thin brass rim.
He paused from studying his files, observed me with interest, and told me his boss wasn’t there. But if I had any questions I should just come back tomorrow.
But that wouldn’t work. Tomorrow was Saturday, so no-one would be in the office. And my train was leaving on Sunday.
“Well”, said the official, amicably, “that’s not too much of a problem. After all, only Djibouti
nationals are permitted to travel by train.”
He frowned. He now looked concerned. And the railway worker who had been standing beside us the whole time, listening with interest, nodded and grinned from sheer pleasure – perhaps, I thought, in acknowledgement of his superior’s successful trick.
“So does that mean I can’t travel by train?” I asked, incredulously. “But I only bought my ticket five minutes ago.”
“Yes, I’m afraid that’s so”, the official said, in a preoccupied tone. “Sometimes, here, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.”
Sometimes the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing! – I knew that! That corresponded exactly to my experiences. But the official at the ticket office hadn’t asked for my passport, nor for anyone else’s in the short queue. And besides, what about the many Ethiopians who had to travel on this railway? And although I’d mentioned it in my visa application, no-one in the Ethiopian Embassy had warned me that I wasn’t allowed to travel by train. In a word – it seemed unlikely, to me, that the deputy railway director was telling the truth. But I wasn’t certain. Anything was possible in Djibouti. Given everything I’d since heard about the state of the track and the trains, it certainly wasn’t out of the question that travel was forbidden for white people.
But could someone lie so brazenly just because he was afraid of a few journalistic questions? And could he do it so seamlessly, without having to think, without any detectable change of expression? And, on top of that, as the deputy director of a government body – the Djibouti railway?
He could. I must admit that the official had, briefly, left me perplexed. But then I remembered my time in Nairobi, and the caretaker of the first block of flats I lived in. I wasn’t unhappy there. But after eighteen months, there was suddenly no more hot water in the mornings when I wanted a shower. Instead of sleeping, the new night watchman was supposed to get up and heat the boiler. But, as I discovered with growing anger each morning, he didn’t do this.