by Peter Boehm
I complained to the caretaker. On the first couple of occasions he denied everything. Then he said, “It’s funny that it only happens in your flat.” But it was happening in the other flats too – it was just that their residents didn’t complain. My neighbour just shrugged his shoulders. A gesture which expressed “What do you want to do? Why should I complain? It won’t make any difference anyway” all in one. But I hadn’t yet reached that stage.
I complained, but the caretaker always had an excuse ready. First there wasn’t any more wood for heating the water. And eventually, at some point, the pump had broken. But then how did the cold water get up to my shower?
This went on for months. He kept coming up with new and increasingly brazen lies, and I was seething – particularly because he just kept lying, and so made me even angrier. I got the owner involved. He was understanding, but did nothing.
Eventually I gave up. I moved. And I finally understood, and my theory has since been confirmed time and again – the caretaker wasn’t lying in order to wind me up. He didn’t mean it personally. It was just his life strategy. And it worked. Everything just took its course. Only a white man, who hadn’t yet fully integrated into African society, complained. That was all. Why should he change his strategy?
And so, in the same way, the Deputy Director of the Djibouti Railways lied like a schoolboy – although far more cleverly – and, until I arrived at the station at five o’clock on Sunday morning, I couldn’t shake of the uncertainty about whether or not I’d be allowed to get the train to Addis Ababa.
But when I arrived the uncertainty disappeared. As I was standing on the platform, a young man immediately invited me into his compartment and indicated a spare seat beside him. He introduced himself as Frédéric, and seemed as pleased as I was to have as much company as possible. He was in his early twenties, had the closely cropped haircut typical of the French soldiers, and was travelling with his pretty Ethiopian girlfriend to visit her parents near Dire Dawa.
And then, once I’d studied the train a little more closely, I also understood why the Deputy Director of the Djibouti Railways would have been happier if I hadn’t travelled. I now recognise the final stages when I see them. And that was certain – what was once the most profitable railway line in the world had now gone there.
In physics, you often study processes in terms of changing energy forms. An object has potential energy, for instance, when it’s lying on a table. If it falls off, its potential energy changes to kinetic energy, and to heat on the ground. According to the law of conservation of energy, though, the total energy of a system always remains the same.
In practice, however, the important thing is that not all energy forms are equally valuable. When an object is lying on the table, you don’t need to perform any work to make it fall off. But you do, on the other hand, to pick it up off the floor – and you can probably live without the heat which the fall has given to the object.
The inevitability of the direction of development processes and the related systems in Africa always reminds me of an object falling from a table. The system will end in a state of collapse – the final stages, - just as surely as the object will end up on the floor.
At first the system is still full of potential energy. It had been bought in the 1960s or early 1970s, when things were still better in Africa. Or it had been received later, from donor countries. But this is when the development – the fall from the table – begins. The valuable potential energy is completely changed into useless kinetic energy and then into even more useless heat. The potential energy is now zero – the system has reached retirement. Of course, this also has its advantages. Once it's on the ground, it can’t fall any further, and even having reached its final stages, the system can still be used in Africa for a very long time.
So, when I saw the abandoned rooms, crammed full of rubbish, in the side wings of the town hall in Nairobi, which had been built in the 60s, I noted them with the distanced wisdom of a physicist. I thought – “What’s this? The final stages!”, and when I saw the crumbling colonial-style houses, or the vehicles in Djibouti – “Who cares? It’s the usual final stages.”
Really, Africa held few surprises for anyone who had done their physics homework. I saw evidence of the final stages everywhere. Or falls leading to them. And it was exactly what had happened to the train I was sitting in. Everywhere were final stages.
The train had four carriages for passengers, and one cattle truck immediately behind the diesel locomotive. That was where staff and their families travelled, or anyone else who didn’t have a ticket.
Right at the start, our train reminded me of a travelling tin can. Its carriages were empty of anything you could remove. Where there had once been windows, luggage racks, lamps, fans or covers, huge gaps now yawned. Electric wiring was hanging out in many places. It goes without saying that, purely for safety reasons, there was no electricity onboard.
Then, as the train set off, it reminded me of a tossing boat on a high sea. At one point, later on, I saw the driver’s cab. The diesel locomotive didn’t go above 20 miles an hour. But that was more than enough to shake the carriages around wildly.
And later still, our train reminded me of a rollercoaster. As we crossed a bridge spanning a deep valley, Frédéric and his girlfriend screamed as though they were on one of these infernal machines at a fairground just before they plunge you into a steep descent. I thought that was a bit much. The speed of a rollercoaster was rather different from the speed of this train.
But it seemed that the pair knew better than I did. In Addis Ababa I was told that, in 2000, 43 trains were derailed on this line. That’s almost one a week. As I said – the true final stages!
There was no restaurant car on the train, and no bed in a sleeper car either. I was far savvier now. I now also knew why the booking clerk had laughed when I’d asked for a first class ticket. And right at the outset Frédéric had solved the mystery of why our carriage had no window panes. I’d wondered why he’d put my bag under our seat, thus creating an open space in the corridor.
“You see, people often throw stones at the train”, he explained, as though this were obvious. “We may need to take cover.”
When I later looked closely at the train, I saw the rusty wounds which stone throwing had inflicted on the outer shell of the carriage. There were a lot around the window holes. It looked to me as though someone had tried to aim at the windows, or at the passengers behind them.
But that was already the end of my moments of insight. It wasn’t until I reached Addis Ababa, for instance, that I learned that the railway line wasn’t really in its final stages after all, but that it was still just about afloat. The French government had put the system on a low stool, not a high table, so it didn’t have as far to fall.
Bruno Leclerc, representative of the French state-run developmental aid organisation AFD in Addis Ababa, explained to me that it was probably true that most of the metal sleepers were no longer attached with four bolts, as they were meant to be, but probably now with just one or two. This probably explained the swaying train ride and the derailments. But he told me that AFD had just recently bought some renovated diesel locomotives from Spain and Portugal to enable the rail traffic to keep going.
Djibouti is the most important port for Ethiopia, a country of 55 million inhabitants. Railways could play a decisive role in transporting goods. This was why, according to Leclerc, the European Union was working on a concept for its privatisation, and a major South African railway company had expressed its interest in purchasing it.
Leclerc was, therefore, like a cat on hot bricks. He felt that any delay would be dangerous. For him, the sale couldn’t be tied up quickly enough. He knew how far the railway might fall. He was hoping that it could be sold before it hit the ground again.
ETHIOPIA
• Among smugglers (Border – Dire Dawa – Harar)
Frédéric had to get out at the border because he didn’t have a Djibouti visa
in his passport, and so he wouldn’t have been allowed back in on his return from Ethiopia.
I therefore moved to sit with two young soldiers from the Djibouti army – Salim and his friend. They were on their way to Dire Dawa. They were going on holiday there. They were very keen for me to know that they spoke Arabic to each other. Not Somali.
In Ali Sabieh, a small sandy settlement just before the Ethiopian border, a wild mob attacked the train. They forced their way into our carriage, even before anyone could get out.
They were Somali women. You could see that by the bright scarves they had slung around their heads and bodies. They piled their bulging plastic bags and sacks waist-high in front of the train doors and settled themselves upon them, so anyone wanting to get in or out had to climb over them.
Salim explained to me that the women would buy large quantities of rice and sugar in Djibouti, to take back to Ethiopia. Once we’d crossed the border, they started to decant small sacks of sugar into larger ones. And then still larger and larger ones.
There were also three women, surrounded by heaps of sacks, sitting on the benches in the corridor opposite us. They were the same kind of sacks I’d seen in Djibouti, surrounding the people encamped for days outside the station. The women had got on the train there too, with us, not in Ali Sabieh. “Bedouins”, Salim said, glancing at them disparagingly. And the ticket collector also stopped by them and immediately started shouting.
He was a choleric person. We’d already experienced his attacks a couple of times. He’d been obsequiously friendly towards Frédéric and me, but by his anger he’d incited the soldiers against a woman near us. They beat her with a truncheon.
He now seemed to want the same fate for a woman immediately opposite me. I’d already been observing her. She was perhaps in her mid-twenties. She had yellow, penetrating eyes like a cat, and a regular and pretty face. Three small ornamental scars were emblazoned on her cheeks, as though on a pair of trainers. That indicated that she was a Somali, from the eastern part of Ethiopia. She was barefoot and smelt of dust, but her scarves with their red and green floral pattern looked clean.
It was only at the end of the argument with the guard that Salim reminded me that I must have noticed the young woman earlier. She was the victim of the guard’s first appearance, soon after we’d left Djibouti City.
The train was just leaving the station when the guard was suddenly overcome by one of his now well-known attacks. With a loud shout, he rushed to the emergency cord. He theatrically jerked the lever downwards, but the train carried on, unimpeded. In dismay, he jerked the lever up and down a couple more times, then stormed back to the young woman, dragged her out of her seat, and tried to push her off the moving train. But she held her ground. She clung onto the door, and let out such a terrible scream that he was eventually forced to let go of her.
The woman with the ornamental scars had been in our carriage all along. But it was only now that the guard noticed her again. Once he’d evidently decided that he’d yelled enough, he punched her with full force on the forehead, which really must have hurt. The scene played out just a couple of feet away from me. I could observe it exactly, and to this day I’ve not forgotten the woman’s reaction – she swallowed briefly and, for a split second, looked slightly afraid. That was all. She didn’t move her hand to protect her face, she didn’t make a single sound, she didn’t say a word of protest, she didn’t shed a single tear. Nothing. Just as though she’d simply deserved what she’d got after all. As though she’d now paid for her journey.
Salim said, “The Bedouins never buy a ticket.”
Before the young woman got out, I got him to ask her why they didn’t. She said one word and shrugged her shoulders.
“Just because”, Salim translated. She’d already forgotten the punch-up.
At Shinile, the last station before Dire Dawa, the women had reached the end of their journey. Salim said that they had to get out here, because the customs officers at the station in Dire Dawa checked the luggage again.
The train had barely stopped when the women started to drag their sacks from all around them. They worked in teams. Some stood outside, by the windows and doors, and the others were inside, handing the sacks out. This evidently needed agreement. Those outside shouted to those inside about what was still missing. And other things were shouted from the inside to those outside.
By now it had got dark. And because the lights on the train obviously didn’t work, Salim, his friend and I had to keep all of our luggage on our laps, to make sure it was safe.
It seemed as though there were a thousand women shouting all at once, and their cries were so high-pitched and harassed that I felt as though I were in the midst of a huge colony of seabirds which had landed around us. We couldn’t hold a conversation. We could only sit there and listen and marvel and wait until the spectacle was over.
Once the women had got out and their shrill cries had faded away, a profound silence settled over the train. It was like an over-laden mule relieved of the heavy burden from its back, and we – its passengers – could now breathe freely again.
Dire Dawa was the end of the journey for Salim and his friend. I’d wondered why they wanted to spend their holiday here. There’s nothing in this town, which was founded only when the railway was built. But in Djibouti there are lovely sandy beaches.
It was simple. In Djibouti, the women are either respectable, or they’re attached to French soldiers. They have money. So the Djibouti men have to go to places where they’re the ones who appear rich.
We’d actually wanted to find rooms in the same hotel. But the pair couldn’t come with me – because Salim’s father was already staying there. He was spending his holiday here. He’d found his peace.
Strange Expatriates I: Arthur Rimbaud
At first, his plan was as follows: “My day is done, and I am leaving Europe. The sea air will burn my lungs, lost climates will tan my skin. Swimming, trampling the grass, hunting and above all smoking; drinking alcohol as strong as boiling metal − just as my dear ancestors did around their fires. I will return with limbs of iron, dark skin and a furious eye: by this mask I’ll be judged to be the member of a powerful race. I’ll have gold. I’ll be idle and brutal. Women, take care of these ferocious invalids returned from hot countries. I’ll become involved in political affairs. Saved! But now I am accursed. I loathe my country.”[1]
These were the words of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud in 1873, in his brilliant prose poem “A Season in Hell” – and it’s also exactly what happened later on in his life. He left Europe. He filled his lungs with sea air. He lived in hot countries, and he eventually returned with gold, with dark skin, as a cripple, and had to be cared for by a woman.
Were these consistencies between his biography and his fantasies just coincidence, or had the poet, then aged 19, planned or even predicted the course of his life?
Probably a bit of both, but what Rimbaud had so lightly written about in “A Season in Hell” turned out, in reality, to be too optimistic. The 19-year-old hadn’t imagined, even in the slightest, how much hardship and despair, how many breakdowns and disappointments he’d experience, and above all just how much the life in these “hot countries” would change him.
Originally, “A Season in Hell” was going to be called “Negro book” or “Pagan book”. For Rimbaud, the book also served as a curse upon everything characteristic of European civilisation – Christianity, science, morality. “The shrewdest thing would be to leave this continent, where madness roams.”[2] Here, around the young Rimbaud, everything was corrupt from the roots up. But things were better in the “hot” countries. “I have no moral sense, I am a brute, you are making a mistake.... Yes, my eyes are closed to your light. I am a beast, a nigger. But I can be saved.”[3]
This was why Rimbaud had to travel to these hot countries. If he could shed all of this there, if salvation was waiting for him there. How could the 19-year-old know that you shouldn’t travel there simply becau
se you don’t want to be here. Because you’ll never be rid of the sense of “here”. Because as soon as you’re there, what used to be there has long since become here, and here has become there.
But what did Rimbaud care about that? “There” was foreign to him. He didn’t know anything about it apart from the fact that it must be different from here, and so it could be good – in fact it probably had to be. Thus he could project anything at all into it, and he chose to project noble savages, not corrupted by civilisation. He could equally have chosen something else. But he chose, and it’s this which makes the case of this highly eccentric and unconventional person so typical.
Even at the age when other young men’s heads are full of perfumed letters and blonde ringlets, the world was too narrow for Rimbaud. He needed only half a life for what would certainly have filled three lives for other people. He lived constantly in the fast lane, getting through everything in his life in such a short time.
Aged just 15, he escaped the provinciality of his northern French home town three times in quick succession, travelled to Paris and Brussels, and could only be re-captured by his teacher.
After that, there could be no more thoughts of school. He went to Paris, where he and his poet friend and lover Paul Verlaine became the scandalous couple of the literary avant-garde. After the communes had been suppressed, the pair went together to London and, after Verlaine had shot Rimbaud with a pistol and injured his arm, returned to France.
Aged 16, Rimbaud wrote his lyric poetry which is celebrated today. At 19, his prose poem “A Season in Hell”, which is part of the canon of world literature. But at 20 he had already given up literature again.
He told his childhood friend Ernest Delahaye, with some horror, “I don’t think about things like that anymore.” And so he returned to his travels – Stuttgart, Milan, Stockholm, Munich – usually on foot, and usually in the summer. In the winter he stayed in Charleville, his hometown in the Ardennes, and recovered from the physical exertions of the summer.