by Levison Wood
‘Properly?’
‘You know, Lev, those hundred miles you’ve just done?’
‘Five hundred,’ I corrected him.
‘Well, it was nice, but you could have saved your legs. Here in Uganda, we know the truth. The real source of the Nile is here, at Jinja, like your Speke used to say.’
Boston’s face was set rigid. I could tell he was about to explode, but I looked at him and we let it pass. Now was not the time for yet another argument about the true source of the Nile. I would leave that to be squabbled over by the ghosts of Burton and Speke. I was only here to keep on with our walk.
In the morning we stood outside Kasansero, on a hill overlooking the small landing site, where fishermen were already bringing in their catches of the night. The graveyard we stood in was simple and unadorned. Here was another reminder that the river we had been walking along connected Africa – beneath our feet was yet another mass grave housing the remains of thousands of victims of the Rwandan genocide. There is a man still living in Kasansero who personally buried more than two thousand bodies here. In May 1994, the first bloated corpses of those Tutsis who had been cast into the river and not been eaten by crocodiles had begun to reach Lake Victoria. If ever there was any doubt that the river that emerged from the lake at Jinja was the same one that entered it just south of Kasansero, here was the most grisly evidence: when the bodies entered the lake in the south they drifted north on the current, forming a gruesome trail of some ten thousand corpses across the lake and proving that the water that begins in Rwanda is the very same that leaves the lake and becomes the mighty Nile herself.
There are other gravesites outside Kasansero, and as we tramped back into the landing site to reach the shore I was reminded of the town’s most nefarious claim to fame. Kasansero, Matthias had told us, is reputed to be the place from which the AIDS virus first spread around the world.
‘Perhaps it spread from here,’ said Boston, keen to play devil’s advocate as ever, ‘but it came from the Congo. It was a trial on polio by some scientists that went wrong.’ He chuckled hysterically. ‘We all thought you whites were out to kill us.’
This seemed a strange moment for Boston to return to his usual theme of Congolese supremacy, but before I could chip in Matthias had other ideas.
‘It came from Tanzania,’ he said. ‘Prostitutes. Who knows where they got it from? Either way, this is where it started spreading.’
We had come back into Kasansero now. Some estimates put the percentage of people infected with HIV here at as high as seventy per cent, and one of the first buildings we passed was the settlement’s AIDS orphanage, where children watched us from the doors. ‘These fishermen just thought it was malaria,’ Matthias went on, ‘or flu. Pretty soon, they all got it and sent it back to their families. It wasn’t long before it reached Kampala.’
Thirty years ago, the world had not heard of HIV or AIDS, but in Kasansero people had started falling ill, and nobody knew the cause. The people here called the disease ‘slim’ because of the shocking weight loss most sufferers experienced before dying. Hundreds died as the infection first took grip, and the deaths haven’t stopped since.
As we reached the shore, Boston whispered, ‘It’s because they all share their wives, these dirty Bugandans.’
‘Everyone knows it. If you marry a woman, you are entitled to her sisters – and, likewise, your brothers are entitled to your wife. No wonder they all got AIDS. Look at these people!’ Matthias was watching a group of fishermen spreading out countless fish on the sand, to be salted and dried in the day’s sun. ‘Don’t shake their hands, Lev, you’ll catch it!’
Matthias was smiling, but I couldn’t bring myself to smile back. There is a gallows humour among Africans who speak of AIDS, but the thought that seven in every ten of the people around me would live short lives because of this scourge didn’t seem so funny to me.
‘They’ve come to accept it,’ shrugged Matthias as he showed us to a boat. ‘It’s no worse than malaria to them. If they die, they die. Most don’t bother even getting checked.’
We spent the morning out on the water, fishing with one of the locals. As Kasansero dwindled on the shore, I found myself glad to be away from it, drawn to the purity of the lake. The water glistened pristine in the golden midday light. The stench, the filth, the AIDS and the noise seemed irrelevant out on the seemingly limitless water. It really was, as John Hanning Speke had described it, a tropical sea.
Back on the shore, the day’s first catches were being landed. Crowds of ragged-looking fisherman were hauling their nets in from the water, or dragging their boats up onto the beach. The landing site hummed with the smell of newly caught fish. Great piles of tilapia, the freshwater fish common in the shallower waters of the lake, were being sorted and laid out, gills opening uselessly against the air.
Among the crowd one man in particular stood out. It was his eyes that drew me to him; they betrayed indescribable sadness. He seemed to have noticed me too, because I had not yet found my shore legs again when he made his way through the fish to find me. I got the impression he had been waiting.
‘Please, sir,’ he began, in English, ‘come and see my children.’
Still feeling groggy from the boat, and having had quite enough attention from boisterous teenagers on the beach, I was in no mood to see more children, but the man introduced himself as Moses and there seemed to be an element of begging in his tone. ‘Please,’ he repeated. ‘I have one hundred and twenty-three to look after.’
I looked at him dubiously. Any man with a hundred and twenty-three children is either a liar or mass fornicator on the scale of Genghis Khan – but those eyes told me differently. I gestured for Boston, and followed Moses up shore, through the ragged crowd.
Moses, it turned out, wasn’t a prolific womaniser, and nor did he have any actual children of his own. He was, in fact, the overseer of Kasansero’s AIDS orphanage and, as he led us past piles of plastic bottles, discarded nets and stinking fish bones that littered the narrow, muddy streets with open sewers on either side, I remembered Matthias’s declarations of the day before. Palms and orchids grew wonderfully out of the heaps of shit. Goats bleated from doorways and the occasional cow would munch without care on a piece of car tyre. All the while, reggae blared out of the barber shops and all-day drinking dens. It was, I decided, like an even unhealthier version of Sodom and Gomorrah.
We reached the orphanage soon after. A collection of wooden huts with tin roofs were filled with dormitory beds, each housing three or four children apiece. A classroom consisted of a tin roof with some scaffold holding it up, and there was – to my surprise – a neat little garden where sweet potato and beans grew. As Moses showed us around, some of the children were digging. ‘It’s the holidays,’ he said, ‘so they must work. It’s the only way I can feed them all.’
Moses led us into a small hut. On the walls a poster warned against sin and the evils of fornication. ‘Abstinence is the way of the Lord!’ declared one. ‘Jesus loves those who avoid the sins of the flesh,’ read another. They seemed righteous and perhaps even backward to my Western eyes, and Boston snorted at their mention of God, but they all made sense against the third poster we saw. ‘HIV is Real!’ it declared, simple and stark.
‘There was a census done, ten years ago,’ Moses began. ‘Of a hundred people, only eight were reported to be HIV negative. This is where AIDs came from. The first reported case in Uganda was right here, on this very street. It was a woman called Nafakeero. She’d gone to Tanzania to trade in the markets at Kanyigo, and when she came back she fell very ill. The weight fell off her.’
‘It’s because of the hookers here,’ Boston suddenly interjected. ‘All these fishermen, they do nothing but fish and fuck, fish and fuck. All day long. No wonder they all have AIDS. I can smell it in the air.’
‘Boston,’ I said, with a stare that he understood to mean, ‘Shut up!’ In spite of his insensitivity, though, he did have a point. When landing sites li
ke Kasansero sprang up to take advantage of the lake, the effect was of a gold rush. Fishermen flocked here, leaving their families behind, and so did businesses who could take advantage of the new populations. Traders, tinkers, barbers and restaurateurs came – and, so, too did the prostitutes. When I had asked the fishermen I was out with what they spent their money on, ‘Ladies’ seemed to be the general consensus.
‘The fishermen I was out with on the lake, they talk about it like it’s malaria or flu.’
‘That is one of our biggest problems,’ said Moses. ‘After Nafakeero, it spread around Uganda like wildfire – and all because we dismissed it.’
I wondered if, in a continent that has faced up to and found a way to live with the constant threat of malaria and other tropical diseases, it was easier to dismiss AIDS as ‘just another illness’ than it was in the West. But Moses had other explanations. ‘At the time,’ he explained, ‘people blamed it on witchcraft. They said those afflicted must be cursed. In the end, we put some of them onto islands in the lake and wouldn’t let people visit them. We treated it like leprosy, something that could be contained, but we were not fast enough. By then it was already a way of life.’
‘In the Congo, we did not blame witches. We all thought that the lubricant in condoms was to blame – that you could actually get AIDS from a condom!’
‘It is a lack of education,’ said Moses.
‘We all thought you whites were out to kill us, sending condoms here!’ By now Boston was roaring with uncontrolled laughter. Then, at once, he stopped, and fixed Moses with a look. ‘Do you have AIDS?’ he asked, quite nonchalantly.
My heart plunged at Boston’s lack of tact, but Moses simply smiled benevolently and shook his head. ‘I am one of the fortunate sons. Both my parents died of AIDS when I was a boy, and I could so easily have been infected. But I was not, and this is why I wanted to help all of these children.’
We walked back into the sunlight. All around, the children were playing. Most of them had barely known their parents; Moses was all they had. He had not asked for any money, only that – through me – the world might know a little of his story. All the same, I handed him a few dollars. It was nothing more than a token, perhaps enough to feed a few of these children for a while. With Boston still shaking his head, we left Moses behind. Moved by his complete selflessness, we went back across the rubbish dumps, back to the beach, to watch those teenage fishermen laugh and joke. Soon, I imagined, some of them would have children of their own; and then, perhaps, they too would fall prey to ‘slim’ and disappear, leaving those children behind for Moses to look after. I wondered how many of those children would make adulthood, and how many of those would go on to fish on this lake and produce more children for the orphanage to take in. Moses was right: there was only one way the situation could change, and it was not with a few dollars pressed into his hand. It was with education, a changing of hearts and minds, the disintegration of all the myths of witchcraft, treacherous American scientists, and poisoned condoms, that thrived in places like this. But here, among people who either didn’t notice or didn’t seem to care, it was difficult to imagine how that could ever come to pass.
The following morning we walked north, away from Kasansero, with the glittering expanses of the lake on my right, a vast forest inland to my left, and the soft tread of sand beneath my feet.
THE ROAD TO KAMPALA
January 2014
North of Kasansero, the plan was to follow the shore for another 160km, seven days of hard trekking that would finally take us to Kampala, Uganda’s boomtown and capital city. In Kasansero the fishermen warned us that the way north was a morass of tributaries and dense swamps, and if we wanted to stay close to the lake the trek was going to be laborious. Boston and I bickered about which route to take and, in the end, settled on a compromise: we would gather the services of a few locals and their boat – not to ride in, but to ferry our packs along the shore while we walked along the bank so as to make us light enough to move through the swamps, and if necessary swim around the mangroves. On the night before we departed I left Boston to source some likely guides and lay awake, thinking of the walk to come.
In the morning, Boston introduced me to the boatmen he had hired. At the shore of the lake, three policemen in uniform were lined up, with AK-47s slung over their shoulders. Beaming, Boston introduced me to the first, who told me his name was Fred. Before I could say anything, they began to load our packs into the boat.
I looked incredulously at Boston.
‘It is better pay than for being a policeman, Lev,’ said Boston as the three jolly officials pushed their boat out onto the lake.
We pushed north. There was something quite indulgent about walking along a beach for days on end, with palm-fringed shores, rickety fishing boats and quaint wooden villages making it feel as if we were in a clichéd image of holiday perfection. Despite warnings of ‘chiggers’, the voracious red mites that lived in the sand, it was too beautiful to wear boots and a nice change to walk either barefoot or in sandals, with the lapping waves to cool our feet. Most of the lake was flanked by thick forests, some of it national parkland, where colobus monkeys and waterbuck abounded. All along the shorelines birds of every variety gathered in their thousands: sacred ibis, white storks, Ugandan crested cranes and Egyptian geese. Yet, for all this perfection, for long stretches paradise turned to hell. The locals in Kasansero had not been exaggerating when they called this place a quagmire. For miles the path disappeared into impenetrable mangrove swamps, and Boston and I hacked our way on, turning in circles, until we stumbled upon a trail blazed by locals to the next settlement along the shore.
The swamp seemed to stretch forever. An hour later, lost – and with the next settlement still ten miles distant – we were wading through brown, soupy water that reached our waists. More than once, I had stumbled and become entirely submerged, having to be fished out of the stinking brine by Boston. We had backtracked in search of Boston’s lost shoe, and spent ten minutes working out a way to pull him out of the soft earth that was trying to swallow him up. There was a part of me – some insane, masochistic part – that was beginning to enjoy the torment when Boston’s eyes drew mine down to what appeared to be a pool of black liquid right beside my feet.
‘It’s a snake,’ he whispered. ‘Look, Lev! A python . . .’
I saw the blackness uncurl and disappear, setting the surface of the water to ripples. I froze. Then, putting on my most nonchalant face, I smiled back at the overjoyed Boston. ‘It’s probably just a monitor lizard.’
‘I don’t think so, Lev.’ Boston had crouched and was already plucking a ghostly white snake skin from the reeds – by its rubbery texture, quite fresh.
‘Still,’ I muttered, with my eyes constantly on the water, ‘at least he’s quite small . . .’
An hour later, soaked to the skin, we stepped up onto dry land and, in front of us, stood three wooden huts and a crowd of villagers. Most of them were half-naked or just wearing filthy rags. By the remoteness of the place and the piles of shells lying on the sand it seemed they were shell-fish miners. We were to see more of them as we ventured north, men who collected shells to grind up and sell as chicken feed in the local markets. It is one of the worst-paid professions on the shores of Lake Victoria and, as they turned to see us, they were evidently thrilled. To them, strangers meant opportunity.
They rushed to meet us, eager to shake hands. One man cried out to congratulate us on not being constrained by such foolish things as ‘paths’ – and, as the crowd shifted, I saw something staked out on the beach, reflecting the cruel midday sun. Boston and I shared a look. It was another python skin – but this didn’t belong to the friend we had made in the swampland. This was ten times as big, more than six metres long. Nor was it a skin that had been shed. This gleamed black and blue, a true snakeskin taken from a dead python and pegged out to dry. It was the kind you only see in movies and nightmares and I couldn’t tear my eyes away.
A
drunk man, deeply proud of his achievement, clawed his way to the front of the crowd.
‘You want to buy it?’ he slurred.
‘I don’t think I’d get it through customs,’ I replied, but the joke was lost on him.
‘Twenty dollars?’
Boston knelt at the skin to study it. By turns, he was shaking his head in what appeared disgust and grinning at the monstrosity of the beast.
The man in front of me produced an old mobile phone from his shorts and told me, with increasing pride, how just yesterday one of the villagers’ goats had disappeared. Fearing the worst, they had tracked its last movements – and there, lying before them, was this enormous python, gorged and swollen with the goat inside.
‘So we killed it. Watch . . .’
The cracked screen of the mobile phone came to life and I realised, with grim fascination, that he was about to show me the snake’s final moments. In the picture the man appeared to be pulling on its tail as the swollen beast thrashed around. Then, from out of shot, a machete appeared. The final act was half-obscured, but at last the python was still.
When the image turned black, the man was nodding in appreciation.
‘Did you eat it?’ I asked, for want of anything better to say.
He looked at me with disbelief. ‘Of course not!’ he exclaimed, as if to say that the very idea was absurd. ‘Snake meat is bad. It will become a drum.’
As we left them to their work, Boston sidled up to me and shook his head sadly. ‘Savages,’ he muttered.
It was the most ecologically minded thing I had ever heard Boston say. ‘It’s a predator,’ I said. ‘Perhaps they had to do it, to protect their goats.’
‘I did not mean that, Lev!’ Boston balked as we resumed our trek. ‘I mean – why kill such a beautiful creature, just for a drum skin? They could have made so much more money if only they had sold it to a zoo . . . These Bugandans, Lev, they’re too stupid to even think.’