by Peter Boehm
Following these breakdowns, however, a second, no less productive life began for Karl May. His periods of Münchausen syndrome were now finally over. He now mysteriously claimed that his traveller’s tales had only ever been intended to be understood symbolically. And a couple of months after returning from his trip to the Orient, he personally destroyed the photographs showing him dressed as Old Shatterhand/Kara Ben Nemsi.
According to experts on his later works – including Arno Schimdt – the Kara Ben Nemsi impersonator had become a serious writer. The “former Karl” had been buried by the new one. “I drowned him ceremonially in the Red Sea, with ship’s coals to weigh him down”, Karl May wrote to the Plöhns, four weeks before his first breakdown. “While doing this I cried bitterly – it broke my heart”, his entry for the following day reads.
So for Karl May, the trip turned out to be completely different from what he had planned. And yet, it would have contained an important lesson for his audience, who at the time couldn’t be permitted to find out anything about these circumstances. And it is: The foreign is foreign, and anyone who wants to get to know it must be prepared for surprises. This seems very insignificant, but it isn’t. After all, what sounds so simple is actually the basis of peaceful coexistence – the beginning of human society.
Vehicles in their final stages II (Khartoum – border)
I could travel from Khartoum to El Obeid in an air-conditioned tourist bus. But then.... Where the wide red lines cease on my map, you have to be prepared for the worst. After this, there are no more tarmac roads, just dirt tracks.
I knew that the hardest part of the whole trip was awaiting me just after El Obeid. There isn’t a single red line over the whole of the 1,300 miles to the Chad capital N’Djamena.
In El Obeid, there were two buses going to Nyala, in Darfur, western Sudan. I studied them closely. They were both Jeeps from the 1950s, with a cargo space, and both looked dilapidated.
I decided to go for the one with the metallic green paint, because the luggage in that one wasn’t piled more than three feet above the driver’s cabin, and there weren’t as many people thronging in the luggage area.
It later transpired, however, that this was only because the driver and his assistant simply hadn’t yet got as far with loading the Jeep. When we set off, there were thirteen passengers in our luggage area too.
Four of them were soldiers, with coloured stripes on their lapels. In addition, there were four young men, each with a transistor radio slung across them. They’d made a little cover and strap for their radios from brightly coloured crocheted fabric. They had the devices with them all the time, took them everywhere with them, as though they were their most precious possession. But despite all this, I never saw them listening to the radio.
Then there were a couple of other men who would dash off straight into the bush to pray as soon as we stopped. I don’t know if they were travelling together. I knew nothing about any of these men. I couldn’t talk to them. None of them knew a word of English.
A man with a particularly impressive turban took his place in the passenger seat beside me. He was wearing a long, snow-white robe, carried a gnarled stick, and kept twisting his prayer chain around his fingers. When we stopped, he would often sit slightly apart from us, under a tree, to meditate. Before we set off, he’d always murmur some incantations which started with “Bismillahi....” (= in God’s name). He’d also do this when the bus began to stutter, and threatened to get stuck again.
It often did this, but the Sufi (as I identified him for myself) still never gave up. Even though, for three and a half days, his incantations never showed the slightest success, he continued to call fervently for God’s help. And for three and a half days, the vehicle persisted in getting stuck.
The Sufi’s skills were first put to the test as soon as we’d left the tarmac road. As the vehicle was hugely overloaded, the bodywork ground along on the back tyres. But the driver got by without the Sufi’s help. He and his assistant simply bent the bodywork outwards slightly, over the tyres. The minibus was repaired.
During the whole journey, we barely exceeded 10mph. The minibus had the handling characteristics of a wardrobe. It was far too heavily laden. If the road was at an angle, the driver positioned the vehicle in such a way that it threatened to tip over on my side – of course, bringing him and the fat Sufi down on top of me. Very early on I’d located where I could support myself if this happened and, of course, worked out the curses with which to get the two of them off me. But in the course of the 300 or more miles to Nyala, the driver actually only twice succeeded in keeping both the wheels on his side in the air for a longer period.
For the first day, we were constantly breaking down. At three in the morning we suddenly got stuck in the middle of the wilderness, without any more spare tyres. I imagined the worst. But before I closed my eyes, I saw the driver cutting the inner tubing from a tyre into pieces. He must have mended the hole with one of these pieces.
Later on, I would encounter this procedure time and again on long journeys such as this one. The drivers had everything they needed – old inner tubes for pending punctures, products for strengthening rubber, tyre levers and pumps. And they patched up their tyres as I’d patched up my bicycle tyres as a child.
When I decided to cross Africa at its widest point, I should have realised that it wouldn’t take me through particularly varied landscapes. During the trip, I never moved out of a band between the 8th and 16th lines of latitude.
When you travel along the lines of latitude, you stay in the same climate zone, and so you’re likely to keep encountering the same vegetation. But as we now jogged along through the bush, at the pace of a tired cyclist, it slowly began to dawn on me just what kind of a crossing this was.
With the exception of the Ethiopian highlands, I found all the landscapes in the Sahel region oppressive. And it was even worse on the stretch from El Obeid to Nyala. The plains stretching out before us seemed to me to be endless. As was almost always the case during the dry season, there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky. Its deep blue spread interminably across the confounded land, and made it appear even larger and more barren.
On the whole stretch, I didn’t see a single hill worthy of this designation, no rocks, and no river either. There wasn’t even a dried out riverbed to carry water in the rainy season. There was just sand, a couple of stunted acacias, and a couple of gnarled bushes.
Calotropis was the only thing which seemed to flourish here. The plant is just as ugly as it is useless. It grows almost ten feet tall, has light brown branches and grass-green leaves filled with a milky fluid. Even goats, which really eat anything apart from meat, only turn to it during the most severe of droughts. There are thick forests of it.
The only variety was provided by hundreds of thousands of green and white striped watermelons, lined up by the edge of the road as if by magic. You couldn’t describe the places where they were lying as “fields”. Just like everything else, they were a wilderness, grazed by camels and goats. And because the melons’ leaves and stems had already been eaten or scorched by the sun and only the fruits remained, I couldn’t immediately work out how they’d got here.
Nonetheless, they were a real godsend. Thanks to them, we only rarely had to drink the brackish water from the wells along the route. Whenever we broke down yet again, one of us would simply collect a couple of melons, slam them on the ground with both hands, like a basketball, and split them cleanly down the middle. Then we’d gather around the halves, dig our unwashed hands into the fruit’s white flesh and, at the end, one of us could drink the leftover water.
We had our first major breakdown in the small town of En Nahud. We’d made a stop for breakfast, and were about to set off again when we heard a loud metallic crunching sound from behind us. One of our back wheels was loose. Even the driver thought it was something serious. Initially, he wanted to turn back to El Obeid, but a spare parts dealer at the market then persuaded him to have the
axle welded.
A couple of hours later we were on our way again, but I’d seen, during the repair work, how the leaf springs of our Jeep’s suspension were attached, but I no longer cared about anything. In place of the original steel clips, someone had now wrapped them with pieces of clothes line and thinly-sliced pieces of rubber tubing. So the entire weight of the bus was supported by rubber and some frayed cord.
To be honest, I was rather dejected. I thought we’d never make it as far as Nyala like this. We’d get stuck somewhere in the middle of the bush, and die of thirst.
But then, I was still new to journeys like this. I discovered later that the technique with the rubber seems to have proven itself. This was how the suspension was held in place everywhere – be it Sudan, Chad or Mali – and on all types of vehicle I used on my journeys through the desert.
We had another major breakdown in the afternoon. I’ve no idea anymore why we’d stopped. In any event, I was lying under an acacia bush with my shortwave radio. By now I was certain that we still had a way to go before we’d be at Nyala, and that, before then, I’d have to spend a couple more nights in the open. And this was when it happened.
Music can do things which other forms of media can’t. For instance, it can reach depths of the psyche, in a direct and targeted way, which would otherwise never rise to the surface.
On some silly German request spot radio programme, someone wanted to listen to “True” from the Spandau Ballet. I’ve always hated this piece for its sentimentality. But now I no longer cared. It reminded me of the time when I was young, and my memory of this linked itself to the situation I now found myself in.
Besides, it was a Saturday. The live reports from the German football league would be coming up next, and they reminded me even more of my youth. It’s true that, at the time, I hadn’t listened to them, but even in those days they fulfilled a very specific function.
It seemed to me that the ideal moment, the best time imaginable, the ultimate happiness was a Saturday afternoon by a swimming lake. Best of all, one slightly tucked away, outside the city. But it had to be a Saturday. A moment like this could only happen then.
When I was young, Saturday was by far the best day of the week. For as long as I can remember, we never had school on a Saturday. Of course, we didn’t have school on Sundays either. But that was kept free for excursions, and besides, Monday was already beginning to loom on the horizon.
Saturdays, on the other hand, had the right mixture. In the morning, everyone in the house was still busy with the work you never had time to do during the week. The pavement had to be swept. We children had to be bathed, and I spent the entire day looking forward to the evening, when I’d go out with my friends.
So the ideal moment could only be possible on a Saturday – it was the afternoon. It was hot. Really oppressive. Certainly one of the hottest days of the summer, and I was lying on a blanket, beside a lake, just with my girlfriend.
Everywhere was still. We did nothing but simply enjoy the peace. There were only a couple of fishermen a little further on. And they were the ones who listened to the live football reports. Ideally on their car radios.
I don’t know why the fishermen were important. But that’s always the case with my daydreams. The details are important. But why? Maybe they just had to listen to the radio so that they knew it was Saturday. Or perhaps I needed this symbol of rural lethargy in order to be able to have a greater enjoyment, myself, of the stillness.
So now, I sat under this acacia and wondered how on earth I’d managed to get myself into this situation. What was I even doing here in this godforsaken place? In a country where everyone considered me to be the “Chawatscha”, the Christian, an oddball? How in God’s name had I come up with the idea for this trip? How could it have got to the point where I was putting myself through all these hardships, perhaps even risking my life?
What had become of my life? Really, I used to be just like all other children. I was good at school. I was popular. I had a promising future ahead of me. I enjoyed life. And I didn’t need to risk it in order to realise this.
The others had stayed where they were, they now had a wife, children and a terraced house. And they seemed happy with that. I was the only one who couldn’t settle into this life. What had happened since then? Where had my life been derailed? Something had gone wrong. But please, when was it?
We drove on until late into the night. When we stopped, in the middle of the bush, I heard drumming and singing in the distance. This led me to imagine a wild party – one with secret rituals and customs, given that we were in such an isolated place.
I latched onto one of the men with the radios, who had a torch with him, and walked with him towards the music. After a few hundred yards, we reached an isolated courtyard, surrounded by a palisade fence. All the guests were wearing long white robes. They were celebrating a wedding. Three young women were sitting on the ground, drumming on empty canisters. Others, particularly men and children, were clapping their hands along to this, and dancing some kind of polonaise.
Once they’d seen that I was white, they immediately surrounded me and gently touched me. It was nice. A little bath in the crowd. And they laughed and chattered excitedly. They could hardly believe their luck, that they had this unexpected guest. One of the men said to me, in English, “But you’re not playing!”
I gave the man with the radio my shoulder bag, and began to dance. The man wanted me to be happy, wanted me to dance. That’s all he could have meant by “playing”. Oh, was it beautiful!
I learned in Nairobi that “playing” in Swahili, with reference to adults, often means “sex”. The fact that adults can play things other than sport and Monopoly. This insight alone made it worth going to Africa!
This often happened in my time there. One minute I was enraptured, but the next minute I could be so angry again that I’d explode, or so sad that I’d want to cry. It was a constant up and down. I’d fall from the brightest peak into the darkest valley, and vice versa. One moment I’d swear that I’d never leave this place. When I saw, for example, how warmly two perfectly normal elderly women greeted each other at the market. How they’d held out their hands as though there were no tomorrow, and they way they’d clapped them together. And then I immediately regretted it, and thought, dear God, get me out of this damned continent right now.
These feelings could be brought about by normal everyday activities, like making a phone call, going to an administrative office, or waiting hours for someone who simply didn’t turn up. Anyway...
But back to the trip. Late at night on the fourth day we reached Nyala, and the following morning I was already sitting on the bus to El Geneina.
On the way to Nyala we’d passed at least a dozen roadside services like the ones I knew from Somalia. They contained rows of hundreds of crude bedsteads. The frames were made from branches, tied together, and strung with strips of hide or washing line. The beds were never more than 5 feet long.
I’d seen just such a bed in the large museum in Khartoum. It dated back to a Nubian culture, and was over three thousand years old. It was just as short, and built according to exactly the same principle – just much more elaborate.
El Geneina didn’t even have one of these outdoor hotels. The town had permanent houses, and was larger than Metemma, but nonetheless visitors had to go either to a mosque or to the local police station. Only the second option was open to me.
There were a dozen policemen and a group of teenagers sitting in the courtyard watching TV. The police welcomed me, gave me a straw mat, and showed me a place in a roofed corridor in front of one of their barracks. The floor was made of worn down bricks, and it was very uneven. And since the chief of police himself disappeared into one of the barracks to sleep, I initially thought he was rude and had given me a bad spot. The next morning, however, I saw that some of the special constables had slept in the courtyard, without a roof, just on a mat.
The following morning there was no bus
going to the Chad border. There wouldn’t be one until the afternoon of the following day. And because the Sudanese border guards had to inspect the entirety of the luggage in our vehicle, offload it and load it again, before the driver realised that they’d quite like a contribution to their kitty, we didn’t reach the Chad border post until late in the evening.
The official who stopped us thrust his hand out at me. I thought he wanted to shake my hand. But he grabbed my passport and disappeared with it, without a word, into his hut. A passenger translated that it was now late and his boss had already gone home. He’d taken with him the stamp that I needed in my passport.
Africa!
The official would keep my passport, the passenger continued, until his boss returned the following morning. I was to stay here until then.
Africa!!
Meanwhile, the bus and the other passengers – they didn’t need a stamp in their passport – drove on. So I had to spend yet another night outdoors, as Adré (that was the name of this apology for a town) didn’t have a hotel either.
Africa!!! You damned continent! Tortured by heat. Plagued by epidemics. Hamstrung by bureaucracy. May you become infertile, may your people wither. May you yourself be swallowed from the face of the earth, and may your name never be mentioned again.
Africaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!
CHAD
Just imagine, no-one's here, and you’re not there (Border – Abéché)
I must have already been delirious in Adré. You see, when I now went to the hospital in Abéché, the largest city in Chad, the doctor diagnosed malaria.
I’d already noticed in Nyala that I wasn’t well. I had a cold, and during the night I’d had a fever and hacking coughing fits.