by The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World;the Way We Live Today
I’d brought a pair of sunglasses as a present for Obadiah, and as it was our first sunny day, I presented my gift. “Oh! It makes the atmosphere so very cool!” he said. We passed a giant cement plant in Tororo, and cotton fields with picturesque groupings of traditional houses nearby. They were round and made entirely of straw, which was why the local word for them, kasisira, Obadiah told me, translated to “no-smoking houses”!
Not long after, we began to get regular glimpses of East Africa’s principal railroad line, which connected Kampala with the coast. In fact, our route had largely paralleled that of the railroad the whole way from Mombasa: the Uganda Railway (or “lunatic line,” as some in Britain had dubbed it at its inception) was the region’s first great infrastructure project, built in the last years of the nineteenth century—long before any highway. British hopes of making money from it took a back seat to strategic concerns: pieces of Africa were being claimed by European superpowers at the time, and Britain was eager to establish dominion around Lake Victoria, the source of the Nile, before anyone else did. Both the Germans (to the south, in Tanzania) and the French (in northern Africa) were actively interested and heading in that direction.
The railroad, which once carried British troops and even a disassembled ferryboat bound for Lake Victoria, succeeded in helping Britain cement her colonial claims. We drove through the town of Jinja, where the White Nile began its journey north from Lake Victoria, once an important stop on the train. But now the increasingly decrepit railroad mattered little. Three times a week, passengers could ride between Mombasa and Nairobi (a city which got its start, incidentally, as a depot on the new rail line). There was less frequent, and more dangerous, passenger service from Nairobi to Kisumu, and slow, sporadic freight service at different points inside Uganda and Kenya. But mainly the railroad served as a reminder of the colonial era, a time when white men ran everything, lions routinely ate people, and train tracks transformed landscapes and economies more effectively than pavement did.
Obadiah’s Renault ground its way up a mountain into a pretty area called the Mabira Forest. Near the summit was a big clearing—a pull-off spot for cars and trucks—ringed with thatched-roof huts, each with a smoking grill in front. Our truck was quickly swarmed by vendors in blue smocks, each with a white number on his back, holding up skewers of beef and chicken as well as chapati breads, sodas, and roasted bananas. This was fast food, Uganda-style. We bought a lot and were soon on our way, the cab full of good smells. Between bites, Obadiah told me about a Transami driver who had been so hungry when he arrived at the food stop, he climbed out without setting the brake. The truck rolled backwards off the road and “Oh, you should have seen Mike. That man was a very bogus driver.”
———
We arrived at the edge of Kampala late in the afternoon, the downtown skyscrapers just visible in the distance. Transami had a fortified compound that contained a smallish repair yard and then a mammoth yard with rows and rows of shipping containers stacked six and seven high. We parked the truck in their shadow, left via guarded gates, and proceeded on foot to one of those essentials of human existence that the city planners had barely left room for: a makeshift outdoor restaurant. Situated under a strip of what appeared to be the only trees for blocks, hard up against the company wall and looking totally impromptu, the place had a row of picnic tables and open cooking fires.
We were joined there by a Transami driver, Mbuvi, whom I had met that morning while waiting at the office at the border. He wore a red-striped button-down shirt, and I complimented him that it still looked every bit as crisp as it had ten hours ago. “Yes, well, I did not stop at the skewers restaurant is the reason why,” he quipped.
“What are you suggesting?” I asked in mock offense, pointing to a spot on my own shirt where something had dripped.
Mbuvi was an interesting man. I’d met others like him in developing countries, overeducated for the sort of work they were doing—a former college professor who’d worked briefly at the mahogany camp in Peru was another example. Mbuvi had taught for ten years, he said, at a Christian technical college, before leaving it for this job “because I needed the money.” He liked to rib Obadiah, and told me that Obadiah’s tribe, the Luo, who had migrated many years before from lands north of Kenya, never got past Lake Victoria “because they like fish so much.” After he heard Obadiah tell me what to do if I was ever pulled over by a policeman for speeding (“You must simply tell him, rubbish!”), Mbuvi said “That’s why the Luo are not good politicians. They like to fight too much!”
He accompanied us as we walked a mile or so to a residential area and paid for rooms at City Harold’s Guest House. Our quarters were hot but clean, and City Harold had an outdoor bar in front that was cool and comfortable. Mbuvi didn’t drink—I was getting the impression that he was quite religious—but came out to sit with me and Obadiah and Beatrice. That morning, I’d heard him discussing Transami’s AIDS training workshops with other drivers. (In the old days, as I mentioned, the disease was more often referred to as UKIMWI, the Swahili acronym—I’d listen for it in their conversations—but now everybody just said AIDS. Truckers also had a slang term for it: “slow puncture.”) Obadiah mentioned a woman in Malaba who he thought must have AIDS by now because she had slept with “at least ten” company employees: “drivers, turnmen, everybody.” Beatrice said she knew her. Then they discussed a Ugandan-made AIDS drug that, according to them both, helped you put weight back on but then suddenly you died. Obadiah proudly mentioned how Beatrice, pregnant with Catherine, had tested negative for HIV—and stated that a baby who “breasted” from an infected mother would live only five or six months. Beatrice said she was glad that Transami tested its drivers once a year—something I hadn’t known. I was struck by this conversation, because I hadn’t mentioned AIDS in a couple of days; on my earlier visit, it seemed I was the only one who ever brought the subject up. Now the people I was with talked about it frequently.
Beatrice finished her second beer and went to the room. Obadiah, Mbuvi, and I stayed outside a while longer. I asked Obadiah when the annual company AIDS test had begun. He didn’t really answer, so I asked more directly. “Oh, I went in a little later,” he responded vaguely. Mbuvi joined the inquisition. Again Obadiah dodged. “You wouldn’t answer like that if it was just the two of us talking,” Mbuvi snapped at him, with startling directness.
Mbuvi now took it upon himself to set the record straight: Transami did not have any annual AIDS test. The inescapable conclusion was that Obadiah wanted Beatrice to think he had been tested, when in fact he had not. A couple of weeks later, Mike would clarify matters further for me. Only prospective employees were tested, he said, and employees who required hospitalization. There was none of the right to privacy that American patients expected: drivers were not typically told they were being tested, and were notified of the results only if they asked.
I let the matter drop; I wasn’t there to keep Obadiah honest, or to make him face up to deceptions. Lord knows, everybody has them. A woman in a tight dress walked by and we all watched her. Mbuvi finished his soda. “It’s very hard to be a strong Christian in the world of transport,” he said.
Obadiah’s morning would involve trying to get the two loaded containers off his truck and two new, presumably empty ones back on for the return trip to the coast. The evening before, we had identified the trailers he had to load up: they were near ground level in separate tall towers of containers. Since two of the three mega-forklifts that moved these containers around the yard were broken, and other drivers were in line before Obadiah, it was going to be a long wait. I elected to go shopping with Beatrice.
We caught one of the little matatu minivan buses to downtown Kampala, which was clean and well kept, its tall modern buildings complemented by trees, shrubbery, and grass. From there we took another van to the famous Owino market, which had more than five thousand stores and stalls and was as crowded and busy as garment districts everywhere.
She went to a number
of shops that she knew well. She wasn’t buying in quantity: just items she needed to restock, and some special orders. She bought leather belts, men’s and women’s underwear, two men’s shirts, a handbag, three blouses, and a girl’s dress. Beatrice didn’t appear to be getting a wholesale price; her profit would be the small markup you found in any small town. I acted as her porter, which enabled her to buy more. The main buying done, she checked out a couple of other places just for fun but didn’t want to dawdle, in case Obadiah succeeded in loading up quickly. It started to rain and so, maybe two hours after we arrived, we were back at a crowded matatu lot.
We had just missed one departing minivan; the next to our destination was empty and would leave once it was full. Beatrice and I took shelter inside, our laps stacked with bags of clothes, and I asked her how she was feeling. A bit uncomfortable, she replied, but thought she’d be fine if we made it home that evening. I told her about my wife’s experiences returning to work as a nursing mother; what seemed to interest her most was not the breast-pumping-in-the-restroom mechanics of this but the idea that a person as rich as I appeared to be had a wife who had to work. “We make more money than you do here, but life’s a lot more expensive,” I said, oversimplifying.
She turned the subject to Obadiah, their marriage, and how much happier she was living in Malaba than living in Mombasa, with his other wife. And she worried out loud about his life on the road, and possible infidelity. In particular, she said, she worried when he was gone a long time, as he had been a couple of years before, when Transami had lent him out to a Ugandan Coca-Cola bottling plant that needed extra trucks for a couple of months of product promotion. Obadiah had mentioned this experience to me, and though I said nothing, I tended to think her fears were not without foundation.
“But after that we stopped there once,” she said. “I looked around to see if any women [prostitutes] asked about Obadiah, and I didn’t find any.” And on such slender shreds of evidence rested a willingness to love and to carry on. I liked Obadiah a lot, but I felt very sympathetic to Beatrice.
In 1993, three weeks into our earlier trip, our convoy of four Transami trucks had made it from Mombasa to Kigali, Rwanda. The densely populated country was a frightening place at the time: the apparent epicenter of the AIDS epidemic (approximately one-third of all adults were infected), it was also at the beginning of a bloody civil war. Our trucks awaited unloading in a fortified government truck yard called MAGERWA (Magasins Généraux du Rwanda) in the Gikondo district of the hilly capital, where during the day we watched funeral processions march by and at night we sought distraction in a beer garden and brothel known as the Snake.
Though Kigali was dangerous, life in the secure yard was a bit boring, especially for the turnboys. We sat there waiting for Transami’s local affiliate to supply Bradford with the paperwork he needed for Customs, and then we waited for the Customs clerks to okay the unloading of our truck, and for the crane operators to actually do it. The drivers and I could leave now and then but the turnboys were stuck. Though we were in a secure yard, so were a lot of other trucks and employees, and things could get stolen. Obadiah’s pants, for example, were swiped one day as they hung on a chain-link fence—a big loss. The turnboys could only get up to the Snake on rotation—if one of them covered another’s truck, for example.
So I spent more time with the drivers and with Cromwel, the sharp young mechanic. And it was Cromwel I was with one evening when, leaving MAGERWA up the steep, rutted road that led to the Snake, we were approached by two Hutu soldiers. They were dressed in fatigues, with jackboots and berets. One bore his rifle properly, with the barrel behind his shoulder, but the shorter one had his reversed, so that the barrel pointed up into the nose of anyone he spoke to. They appeared to be sixteen or seventeen years old, and both, we soon realized, were drunk. (Soldiers were young there, I knew, because so many older men had died.) They were unable to speak any but a local language, Kinyarwanda, but that did not prevent them from communicating that they wanted my passport and wanted us to go with them to some place we’d never heard of.
We stalled and negotiated and I said my passport was up at the Snake. This was the beginning of a several-hour-long saga that ended when two tall blond men from the U.S. Embassy, whom I called from the fortified apartment of the manager of the Snake as things deteriorated, grabbed me by either arm and, brushing past the Rwandan militia, headed through the beer garden toward an SUV they had left running at the gate. I caught an unexpected glimpse of Obadiah and suddenly remembered my knapsack, which was in my room at the Snake. I handed him my room key and asked him to take charge of my stuff until we could reconnect. And then I was gone.
So preoccupied was I with my own problems that I never considered what having the key would mean to Obadiah, who’d been basically imprisoned in MAGERWA for about a week. He stayed the night in the room, of course. And he wasn’t alone. The big surprise, however, came a week or ten days later, after I’d rejoined the convoy on its belated way out of town. We were in Bujumbura, capital of Burundi, when Obadiah, having noted the wealth of medicines I carried for emergencies (the kit filled about half my knapsack), asked about antibiotics; a “friend,” he explained, needed some after a night in a certain hotel in Kigali.
I must have gasped as the pieces came together in my mind. “You didn’t use a condom?”
“You know, the beer …,” he began.
“But you said—” I began. What I was going to say was that he, of all the drivers and turnboys, was the one who understood about infection by HIV, who understood how you had to use a condom every time you were taking a chance, and particularly with a prostitute, for God’s sake!
“I know, I know,” said Obadiah sheepishly. I gave him what antibiotics I had, and his infection, as far as one could be certain, soon went away.
From then on, I had worried about him, and wondered about him. Very few of us were utterly consistent and self-controlled when it came to sex. But more was going on here: though Obadiah was better educated than most, and understood science, science remained to him one theory among many. Even Cromwel, on that earlier trip, had told me that sex with a virgin could take away your AIDS, and he was no yokel. When I’d gone over with them the rudiments of the epidemiology of AIDS, they all nodded respectfully but I could see my words getting filed in the mental drawer labeled “Possible Explanations.”
I understood that I lived in a culture that believed in the power of self-determination, where people could eat organic food in hopes of staving off cancer, where they could exercise and stop smoking to fight off heart disease, where many had routine physicals and sought the attention of a doctor when they got sick. But here it was different. Here you didn’t have as much power over your health. I remembered how in Bujumbura I’d been bitten by mosquitos numerous times, despite having taken the prudent measures to avoid it—long-sleeved shirts at dusk, insect repellent on exposed skin. All drivers had long experience of malaria. Trying to take their point of view, I’d thought how one unlucky mosquito bite could perhaps be likened to one unlucky fuck: you’d probably already had it, and what was the incremental risk of just one more? I wondered if what had been called Africa’s fatalism wasn’t just a reasonable response to the fact that there was only so much you could do.
As the years went by and I checked in on Obadiah, I was continually elated to hear he was fine. Dr. Frank Plummer, a Canadian immunologist who worked for years in Kenya with Job Bwayo, told me they thought maybe one in twenty people had a natural immunity to AIDS: “It appears there is some genetic involvement that allows them to process HIV in the correct way.” Who knew if Obadiah was blessed, just lucky, or immune? On he drove.
Back in the Transami yard in Kampala, Obadiah was under pressure. Beatrice was back, her breasts were bursting, and one of the containers Obadiah was waiting for was still at the bottom of a stack of five. I watched as he hitched a ride on the gargantuan forklift and disappeared around the corner. Mbuvi, the driver, watched with m
e.
“It is sad when you have to bribe people in your own company, isn’t it?” he asked.
“What do you mean—he’s going to pay that driver to do his containers?”
“Oh, yes—I expect he will,” said Mbuvi.
Twenty minutes later, when the truck was finally ready, Beatrice and I joined Obadiah in the cab. He looked not at all put out to have had to pay the forklift operator. “It is how you do business in East Africa, Mr. Teddi!” he said happily.
By late afternoon we were back at the Kenyan border. It was not Malaba, unfortunately, but Busia: Obadiah had been routed that way so that we could pick up additional cargo in Kisumu, Kenya.
This time there were no snags at the crossing. Not far into Kenya, Obadiah pulled over at a taxi stand; it was time to say goodbye to Beatrice. He climbed out of the cab and walked around to help her down. In the meantime, she had picked out a purse from our shopping expedition as a gift for my wife, and as thanks to me for helping her. I promised to send copies of the pictures I’d taken during my visit. She gently shook my hand, and then Obadiah said, “Come, madame! It is time to send you home!”
There are so many ways to be a couple. I watched through the window of the cab as Obadiah walked Beatrice to the taxis and matatus, where he put down her bags, took out his wallet, and gave her some money. They stood close enough to speak quietly amidst the surrounding hubbub. My wife and I would have kissed, but theirs was a different intimacy.
As we continued on to Kisumu, a city on the far eastern shore of Lake Victoria that was home to many from the Luo tribe, Obadiah told me that his father (who had five wives) had been a matatu driver here and that he himself had attended primary school in town. Matatu drivers, he said, were more reckless than truck drivers because their earnings depended heavily on their ability to move quickly along a route.
Obadiah swerved to hit a snake, and saw me flinch. He explained: “You know, Teddi, you must hit a snake. You must run him over. If you do not, it will have the power to fly after you—up to fifty meters!”