Walking the Nile

by Levison Wood

  There was no path that day. The river wound its way through national park land, the Kimisi Game Reserve, and though we were not supposed to walk here without permissions and rangers as guides, there had been no officials on duty in Rusumo and we decided to go ahead regardless. As we walked, despite the dark looks from our porters – who muttered to each other constantly in Swahili – the Africa I knew and loved stretched out in every direction. The river snaked through complete and utter wilderness – forest savannah as far as the eye could see, so thick and green that, from the escarpment above Rusumo, it looked impenetrable. Tall elephant grass and spiny acacia trees covered the hillsides. There were elephants here, hippos too. Boston took great joy in pointing out their spoor during the day.

  At Rusumo we had picked up a goat, but the animal was almost as obstinate as the porters and refused to be led. Taking it in turns to carry the brute, we followed the widening river. There were a few fishermen here and, more than once, we had to pay for the use of their dugout canoes to cross tiny crocodile-infested tributaries. We were practised at this now, and managed to barter a regular price to only a few cents. Slowly, I was getting used to using the precarious craft too. Though Boston was able to slide into the narrow slit of the boat, I was much less supple and had to kneel up, making it more prone to capsize. The only moment I saw anything close to a smile grace Selim’s lips was when he saw me concentrating on keeping my balance while he and his brother floated effortlessly past.

  By midday on Christmas Eve, the sun was unbearably hot and we stopped to rest in the shade of a marula tree; it was eighteen metres tall, in full leaf, and it was pleasingly cool beneath the branches. Selim and his brother settled down in the roots and, almost at once, I saw their eyes begin to close. A second later, Selim was asleep. The rope by which he had been holding the goat slipped out of his hand and, sensing his opportunity for escape, the goat took one look at Boston and disappeared into the undergrowth.

  When I cried out, Selim’s eyes snapped open. They seemed to track the goat as its backside disappeared into the foliage. Then he looked at me. Muttering something in Swahili, he was about to close his eyes again when Boston let fire with a string of invective.

  I think, if Boston had screamed at me with such vehemence, I too would have obeyed. In seconds, Selim had dragged his brother to his feet. Muttering darkly again, they took off after the goat.

  ‘You should never have hired them, Boston. They’re bone idle.’

  ‘No,’ said Boston. ‘They’re scared.’

  ‘Scared of what?’

  ‘They don’t know I speak Swahili, but I’ve been listening to them. They talk of bandits and robbers and Rwandan rebels. I think that’s part of the reason they resent us. Because we came out of Rwanda. They’re certain this place is haunted too.’

  ‘Haunted?’

  ‘It’s because of the bodies that came down the river. Rwandan ghosts washed up all along these banks.’

  I wanted to dismiss the notion as African superstition but, when I recalled the sensation of walking over Rusumo Bridge, there was something dangerously familiar in what Boston was saying. Africa is a continent that gets under your skin and never had I felt it more than that day.

  Selim and his brother returned over an hour later, dragging the goat behind them. Without word, they sank back into the roots.

  ‘Up,’ I told them. Then, with my hands, I made a walking gesture. The looks I got were more withering than the one the goat had on its face.

  By the evening we had reached the shores of Lake Bisongu, a remote, virtually unknown water source that borders Rwanda to the west. As Selim and his brother made camp, staking down the goat, the only other evidence of humans around was the occasional flash of torchlight from an illegal fisherman out on the water.

  ‘Lev,’ Boston began. ‘They’re talking again.’

  Selim and his brother were kindling the fire, chattering in Swahili.

  ‘So?’

  ‘They’re speaking about us. Lev, listen . . .’ Boston’s eyes seemed to open wider with every word that he heard. ‘Do you know what they’re saying?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘They plot to rob us. If we don’t share the goat with them, they mean to tie us to the tree and take everything.’

  When I looked, Selim was still whispering to his brother, words smothered by the crackling of the fire.

  ‘Selim!’ I cried out.

  His eyes darted to find me in the dark.

  ‘You’ll get some goat, don’t worry. You won’t starve. But I warn you – any more talk of robbing us and we’ll leave you here in the forest. You have no idea where you are and the Rwandans will get you.’ I stopped, fixing him with my eyes. ‘Do you understand?’

  He nodded, terrified.

  ‘Happy Christmas,’ I said, and patted him sternly on the shoulders.

  In the dead of night, I woke with a start. From the shallows of the lake, only metres away from our guttering campfire, there came the sound of a most terrible thrashing. As I scrabbled up, wondering if it was Selim and his brother somehow making that racket, I saw that Boston was already awake. I followed his gaze to the water, where a family of five angry hippos were rolling and snapping at each other.

  ‘We’ve ruined their Christmas, Lev.’

  Shrinking into our tents, we waited until morning.

  Christmas Day was blisteringly hot. By dawn the hippos were gone and we were able to stake out our camp again. Despite having spent much of my working life overseas, I had always managed to make it home for Christmas; this would be the first year I would not wake to a cold English morning in the familiar surroundings of childhood. Still, I was determined that this would be a celebration. Boston and I decorated the thorn bushes with pants and socks in place of baubles and, since there were no turkeys to be snared, we said goodbye to the goat and butchered him for the day’s festivities. Despite their mutterings of the night before, we shared the meat with Selim and his brother. The day was long, the water of the lake inviting – but Selim was adamant that the shallows were alive with crocodiles, so the best thing we could do was sit in the shade and drink from the bottle of whisky I’d carried all this way for the occasion.

  ‘Boston,’ I began, as I passed him the whisky, ‘I have something for you.’

  He thought I meant the bottle and took it hastily, but I had something else as well. Until now, the jumper I had wrapped up had been serving as my pillow, and the one piece of warm clothing I was carrying. But Christmas is a time for making presents of jumpers, and I gave it to Boston with a smile.

  He beamed. ‘It looks like I’m going to need it, Lev. Look . . .’

  Above the lake, storm clouds were gathering, brooding and black. They were coming this way.

  Before the day was done, the rains had started. The way it fell in sheets across the lake was a spectacle of light and sound, the spray distorting the surface of the water so that it seemed we were staring through a constantly shifting veil. In the camp, Selim and his brother sheltered beneath a tarpaulin sheet, but there was no longer murder in their eyes – only misery. Boston and I sat out and let the storm rage all around.

  The rains moved on in the night and, by morning, the sun had returned with all its ferocity. Boston and I were up at dawn, debating whether to spend another day resting by the lake or to continue our push north, when Selim and his brother made their announcement. Animatedly, they summoned Boston to the tarpaulin and ranted at him in Swahili. When Boston returned, there was murder in his own eyes. ‘You were right when you said they were bone idle, Lev. Well, they were scared, but bone idle as well. They’re leaving us.’

  ‘Leaving?’

  ‘And they’ll leave us here, with all our packs, unless we take them back to the road today.’

  I looked at the camp. There was too much gear for Boston and me to shoulder ourselves, and it was twenty miles to the nearest road where we could realistically hope to find new porters. Part of me wanted to scream at Selim but t
he better part won out and I couldn’t help but smile in dismay. This was exactly the kind of thing the original Nile explorers had contended with on a daily basis: truculent aides who turned out (as I’d predicted) to be a hindrance rather than a help. There are certain clichés about African travel that always turn out to be true.

  I couldn’t bring myself to speak to Selim. Boston ordered them to begin packing up and we set off.

  It was a silent twenty miles to the nearest road, hacking through the entangled forest. When we reached it, the road was little more than a dirt track, running parallel to the river. When we emerged from the forest to see the red earth snaking north, a large cross, choked with creepers, stood amid the bushes on the opposite side of the track. Behind the creepers there hung a tarnished brass plaque. A chill ran through me: this was a memorial to a Danish aid worker who had been killed by robbers on this very spot in 1994.

  ‘I told you it was dangerous here,’ muttered Boston, darkly.

  ‘But that was twenty years ago,’ I said, trying to convince myself as well as Boston.

  We had to wait some hours before a truck rattled through. Fortunately the driver was happy to be flagged down and Selim and his brother clambered aboard the flatbed in silence. ‘Be careful,’ the driver told us as he gestured at the memorial. ‘He wasn’t the only foreigner killed round here. Bandits and rebels from Rwanda come across the national park to steal and kill. Make sure you get to Benaka tonight. Don’t camp here.’

  Before I could question him further, the truck’s engine burst to life and they rattled off southwards. I looked at Boston, who only shrugged.

  ‘Benaka, then,’ I said.

  ‘Uganda will be different, Lev. There are good people in Uganda. At least, in Uganda, a policeman will ask you for your name before he beats you up.’

  Boston was beaming again, but I wasn’t in the mood to reciprocate. It was 10km until Benaka, and another thirty until the border. Along the way we would have to ditch the more cumbersome parts of our packs and hope to re-provision, but I was eager to get every one of those kilometres behind us.

  AFRICA’S GREATEST LEVELLER

  Uganda, January 2014

  Boston had been singing Uganda’s praises for weeks, and I was anticipating the country with perhaps over-eager expectations. ‘There is a guesthouse in every village,’ he said as the border point of Mutukula came in sight, ‘and you can’t fail to find food. There are even internet cafés. Lev, you will see – Uganda is a different world to these backwaters.’

  There is a small rainforest that straddles the Tanzania–Uganda border that teems with colobus monkeys. Boston and I spent two days hacking our way through the vines until, eventually, we discovered tracks made by illegal loggers and were able to make steadier progress north. At Mutukula we made the official crossing. According to Boston, now that we were in Uganda, we would see civilisation flourish – but, for the first day, there was only more impenetrable forest. It wasn’t until we banked back east to re-join the course of the river that we would come across our first town and I would see if Boston’s bold claims were true.

  A few kilometres north of where the river meets the shore of Lake Victoria sits the fishing village of Kasansero. The phrase has connotations of a small, idyllic community with a long-established way of life, but Kasansero was more properly known as a ‘landing site’, a warren of houses and industry that had sprung up for workers to take maximum advantage of the lake. Like other landing sites along the shores of the lake, Kasansero had been founded to harvest the famous Nile Perch that flourish in the lake. In the 1950s, when Uganda was still a British colony, the prevailing view had been that Lake Victoria was an under-exploited resource that could feed great swathes of East Africa – and the Nile Perch had been introduced to the lake to create a new fishing industry. Places like Kasansero appeared all along the shore, people flocked to the lake to build businesses, and a new economy began to boom. But, though Uganda’s local population benefited, the introduction of the invasive fish was an environmental disaster. The Nile Perch are brutal predators. With no natural controls on their numbers, they colonised the lake with astonishing speed, condemning other species to extinction.

  As the shanties closed in around us, great crowds began to throng the streets. Our arrival had been heralded by an article in the Ugandan press, written by a photographer and freelance journalist named Matthias Mugisha. The piece in New Vision magazine had announced to Uganda’s literary classes that a white man was daring to walk the length of the Nile, and crowds of fishermen, drunk from bags of cheap waragi gin, lined the streets to welcome us. One vociferous rascal even had a microphone and announced our arrival to the eager mob. Off to the side of the first street, African rap blared out of big black speakers sitting outside a barber shop where a badly drawn sign advertised a trendy mullet cut. Half of the population seemed to be wearing red and white Arsenal football shirts, the other half whatever ill-fitting garments had come over from Europe on the last charity delivery.

  ‘But how do they all know?’ I asked, as Boston and I were subsumed by the crowd. Surely these fishermen weren’t the types to read Uganda’s literary magazines.

  ‘This lot don’t read,’ Boston confirmed. ‘Not unless it’s the Red Pepper, full of scandal and what-not. They wouldn’t be interested in our trip unless you’d been terrorising young boys like those corrupt pastors they have here.’

  At that moment a man emerged from the crowd, wearing a guilty grin. I could tell instantly that he wasn’t one of Kasansero’s fishermen.

  ‘How do you enjoy your welcome to Uganda, Mr Tembula?’

  ‘Matthias,’ Boston began, ‘it’s madness!’

  I looked sidelong at Boston; despite his protestations, the fact was he seemed to be enjoying being the hero of the day.

  ‘Tembula’ means ‘to walk’ in the Bugandan language, and that is what Matthias had called me in his article: the white walker. Now, as we followed him deeper into Kasansero’s dense streets, that was what the crowd relentlessly cheered. One of them tried to force a bag of the cheap gin into my hands, but most were keeping it for themselves. Even the workers about to depart for their night fishing were still having a few for the road.

  Being a Ugandan – and, as a journalist, prone to a bit of playacting – Matthias took my hand and led me towards the shore of the lake. Dusk was deepening and we would soon have to find somewhere to stay, but first I wanted to see the shore.

  The waters of the lake appeared through the filthy streets like a light at the end of a very dark tunnel. Beyond the shacks and corrugated tin structures lay the beach, which seemed completely crammed with boats. Most of them had little coloured flags at the bow, and others, less quaint, used white plastic bags instead. Many barely looked like they could float, although they must have done judging by the size of the catches coming in. The air reeked of fish and you couldn’t walk across the sand without stepping in guts or tripping over discarded bits of netting.

  Seeing the shore for the first time came as an incredible relief. It was everything I had imagined, and as I stood listening to the gentle sound of the water and the insects that buzzed around its shallows, I got to thinking about what it must have felt like for John Hanning Speke, the first European to ‘discover’ it. Speke and his fellow explorer, Richard Burton, had been on an expedition to locate the Source of the Nile when they reached this great water’s southernmost shore and named it after the reigning monarch. What they had discovered was one of the biggest freshwater lakes in the world, second only to Lake Superior in the United States, with more than 26,000 square miles of water. To me, as to them, Lake Victoria seemed a vast inland sea – and I was left in no doubt as to why, for many years, it was considered the true source of the Nile. The Nile is, in fact, the only river to drain out of the lake – all the water here would travel down that conduit, out to the sea.

  John Hanning Speke was an officer in the British Indian Army, born in Devon in 1827. He was twenty-seven years old w
hen he first came to Africa, joining an expedition into Somalia led by Burton, an explorer already famous for his African endeavours. Burton was a scant six years older than Speke but already a seasoned campaigner by the time they met. The legends about Burton were many and vast; if ever there was a true polymath it was Burton, who – as well as being a geographer and explorer – was also known for his writing, including poetry, and for his amazing capacity to absorb and retain languages. Some sources claim he was fluent in as many as twenty-nine tongues. Speke and Burton’s expedition into Somalia, in 1854, was disastrous and very nearly got both of them killed; attacked by indigenous tribesmen, Speke found himself captured and stabbed several times by spears, while Burton escaped with a javelin skewering both cheeks. But their dances with death hardly deterred the two explorers and they returned to Africa together in 1856, consumed by their desire to be the first to locate the source of the Nile. This trip was no less arduous. Both men became stricken with tropical diseases and, when Burton was too sick to carry on, Speke followed rumours of a great body of water. It was then that he first set eyes on the lake in front of me now.

  Matthias asked me how it felt to be here, and the truth is I could not find the words to express what I felt. I’d arrived at the first major milestone in this journey, reaching a body of water that was vital to the explorers of old, and perhaps for the first time I felt like I was truly walking in their footsteps.

  ‘Now, Mr Tembula,’ said Matthias, ‘you can begin your journey properly.’