Walking the Nile

by Levison Wood

Over the next days the shore alternated between dense swamp and pristine beaches where more landing sites like Kasansero had grown up. At times the mangrove forests were so alive with fire ants and spiders that we were forced to wade out into the lake and skip around the swamp instead.

  The closer we got to his adopted home, the brighter Boston seemed to become. Passing from landing site to landing site, with the lake always glittering on the right – and, somewhere in it, the Kagera transforming to the true White Nile – he constantly chipped away. This, he told me, was a civilised country. I was humbled to admit he might have had a point. From the moment we set foot in Uganda the local attitude towards us seemed to change. Matthias’s news story must have helped, but the villages we passed through were not as immediately suspicious as were in Tanzania, and the police didn’t seem as eager to apprehend us for being English spies or the CIA. Uganda is a country that emerged from British rule in 1962 and it felt as if, unlike in some other corners of Africa, the colonial times were looked back on fondly. English is still the first language of Uganda, though the languages of the different tribes also proliferate, and perhaps it was this shared tongue that made it seem an easier, simpler country to navigate.

  The Uganda we walked through might have felt more peaceful than Tanzania or Rwanda, but the truth is it is another piece of Africa with a violent, complex past. Unique among African nations, Uganda is a country inside which several kingdoms still exist, and perhaps it was this that meant it did not take to democracy easily after it gained independence from Britain. Uganda had been a British protectorate for sixty six years when independence came in 1962, and the first democratic elections saw an alliance between the Uganda People’s Congress and the Kabaka Yekka, a monarchist party primarily comprising ethnic Bugandans, who make up more than half of the population, come to power. The alliance lasted only four years before the UPC forced out the Kabaka Yekka, forcibly changed the constitution, and formally abolished the traditional kingdoms of Uganda. This new situation couldn’t last either and, in 1971, a military coup saw the UPC removed from power, and Idi Amin – a name now synonymous with East African dictatorship – begin his eight years of tyranny. This was a period marred by violence on a scale that came close to matching what we had seen in Rwanda. To maintain his military rule, Amin murdered more than 300,000 of his countrymen, drove the business-minded Indian minority out of the country – a feat which destroyed a once-flourishing economy – and led the nation to war by attempting to annex the Kagera region of Tanzania through which we had walked. Nor was Amin’s deposition, prompted by a mutiny in the army during that same war, to bring peace back to Uganda; his legacy can be felt, even to this day, in the succession of civil wars the country has endured.

  On 23 January, the forty-fifth day of our journey, came the first truly seminal moment in our expedition: Boston and I each took a single step and crossed from the southern to the northern hemisphere. We were straddling the equator.

  Fifteen kilometres south of the small town of Buwama, still two days’ trek from the suburbs of Kampala, there lies a nondescript, diagonal line in the road. At each end of the line stands a clear circular monument, with the word EQUATOR etched into the concrete. As Boston and I trudged up the Kampala road, the lake’s shimmering vastness somewhere off to our right, we could tell we were near. Tourists had gathered around the monuments and there was a shop too, selling wooden shields and tacky key rings.

  As we reached the line, I checked my GPS. According to the little contraption the line itself was nine metres away from the actual equator, but, looking into the eyes of the gathered journalists, I thought it prudent not to mention this. In the south, Boston and I took one look at each other and, the next step, we were in the north. There was an element of theatrics in it but, as I beamed at the journalists – ‘At last,’ I grinned, ‘back in the north!’ – I saw, in the corner of my eye, that Boston was beaming with genuine pride.

  With the journalists scuttling off to fill their columns, Boston and I headed on up the road. For a time he was unusually silent. At a coffee shop we sat down to fortify ourselves for the fifteen kilometres we meant to complete that day, and watched the tourists mill. It felt strange to be in the presence of other outsiders. Until now I’d seen less than a handful of white faces in weeks – I’d been living, eating, and breathing an unseen Africa, one far away from the safari hordes and luxury lodges. The key rings being hawked from the side of the road cheapened the experience, somehow, but they also brought us down to Earth.

  ‘Lev,’ Boston began, breaking his silence. By the look in his eyes, I thought he wanted something. ‘You know, we’re like brothers now.’

  Now I knew he wanted something. I put down my coffee. ‘Yes, Boston . . .’

  ‘Well, since I began this trip, I have been thinking.’ He paused. ‘I have been your guide. I have done a good job, have I not?’

  ‘You have.’

  ‘And I have been loyal and worked hard. And . . .’ He seemed to be growing bolder with every statement. ‘And we are brothers in arms!’

  He had begun to beam, and I did not want to shatter the moment. Besides, though I wouldn’t have stated it so plainly myself, there was truth in what he was saying. Boston’s forthright banter had enlivened many monotonous days of hacking through jungle, or trudging through swampland – it would not have been the same without him.

  ‘We are,’ I admitted.

  ‘And I have taught you a lot about Africa.’

  ‘You have.’

  ‘And you have taught me a lot about your world. And also about leading expeditions. Do you know, Lev, that is what I want to do in the future – to run my own expeditions . . .’

  ‘It sounds like a good idea.’ By now I was growing impatient. When he was not cutting straight to the heart of Africa’s problems and proselytising sudden, violent solutions, Boston had a way of dancing around a subject like the most slippery politician.

  ‘This is the biggest expedition of your life, Lev. You will be promoted in the army for this. You’ll meet the Queen of England, and she’ll make you a Sir. Then you’ll become an MP.’

  Hot coffee erupted from my lips as I tried to stifle my laughter. ‘Things don’t really work like that in England, Boston.’

  Boston just snorted. ‘You will,’ he said. ‘Believe me, Lev. I know.’

  ‘Why don’t you just say what you want, Boston? You’re beginning to make me nervous.’

  ‘Lev, this is the biggest expedition of my life also. It is a very important thing for me.’ He gestured back at the monument to the equator, where some of the journalists still hovered. ‘It makes us heroes of the people. Lev, if I walked all the way to the delta with you, I would be just as famous as Mr Levison Tembula. I could run my business and make some money . . . and then, then I could go back to the Congo with a big name. I could become an MP too!’ He finished with a flourish. ‘Lev, I want to come to the end. I want to see the pyramids and the sea.’

  I couldn’t help but feel sudden warmth for the mad Congolese sitting beside me. If it had been in my mind that my journey was barely even beginning, it had been in Boston’s that his was almost at an end. Kampala was only two days’ trek away, and my original proposition had been to leave Boston there, with his family, and find another guide to accompany me north, across the rest of Uganda and into South Sudan. The thing was – and perhaps I hadn’t realised it until this exact moment – Boston was more than a guide to me now. It had happened while I wasn’t looking, but he’d become a friend. His wild stories had been the things that kept me going through the first weeks, when my body had ached and complained at the torture I was putting it through.

  ‘I know I’m not qualified, Lev. I don’t speak Arabic, but I can learn.’

  ‘In a few weeks?’

  ‘I can do it.’

  ‘But what about your family?’ He had been looking forward to seeing them – and I had been looking forward to discovering what kind of woman had chosen to spend her life with
Boston, and what kind of rebellious, curious children they were raising.

  ‘Lily would understand,’ he replied, with cool steel in his eyes.

  For the longest time, I remained silent. I drank my coffee and thought. At last, I made my decision.

  ‘Come to the north of Uganda with me. Help me get through South Sudan.’ I couldn’t promise any further than that, and I was not certain how useful Boston would be as I tried to cross South Sudan’s infamous Sudd marshes. ‘How does that sound?’

  Boston smiled and said he was happy with the compromise – but there was a twinkle in his eye, the muted pleasure of a victory quietly won, and before we had started to walk again I already knew that it was only a matter of weeks before he raised the question again.

  On the forty-seventh day of our journey, Kampala came in sight. We were up before dawn, walking through the pitch black, past lay-bys where lorries were emblazoned with banners declaring ‘God is Great, God Is Good, God Is Everywhere!’ and along a road where the traffic police kept demanding to know what we were doing. By the time the sun came up we had already travelled ten kilometres, and stopped to find something to eat at a dingy roadside pub. As Boston and I picked our way through plates of goat liver, a beautiful Ugandan girl in a simple flowery dress came to sit with us. It was a nice change to speak to somebody who was not Boston; I could not remember the last time I had such an involved conversation with a woman – and, as she finished her drink, she leant across the table and asked if she could take my phone number.

  ‘Nice girl,’ I said, as we watched her leave, disappointed that she hadn’t got it.

  Boston leaned in across the table and grinned. ‘You have a way with prostitutes, Lev.’

  I looked after her, bemused. ‘I thought she was just on her way to Church . . .’

  ‘Maybe she was,’ Boston shrugged. ‘Even prostitutes have God, Lev.’

  In the hills outside Kampala, the country suddenly burst open with activity and life. Ten kilometres away from the city centre, the suburban sprawl grew up. Suddenly the dirt tracks became roads, the roads sprouted pavements, and boda-bodas – the bicycle and motorcycle taxis peculiar to this part of Africa – appeared everywhere.

  We had come 35km already today, but entering the city limits gave me a newfound sense of determination. Boston, meanwhile, needed no such encouragement. I heard only half of what he was saying, but he was virtually frothing at the lips to tell me about the city’s best restaurants and hotels, the bustling Nakasero Market, the hangouts of all the hotchpotch nationalities who made the city their home.

  Walking into Kampala was like landing on the moon compared with my experience of Uganda so far. It is wrong of me to say it felt like stepping from the past back into the present, but that was what came to mind as we saw the first of the city’s skyscrapers in the distance and felt the crowds thickening around us. Boston had described the place with such passion that I might have expected the streets to be paved in gold; right now, I would have given all the gold in the world for the promise of a comfortable hotel bed.

  Kampala is a teenager of a city – boisterous and messy, contradictory but naïve and growing fast. As at the equator, the Ugandan press had been warned of our coming and, as we trudged up to the central Kibuye roundabout, the crowd of faces waiting for us was immense. Among them I saw Matthias again. It seemed as if half of the city had heard about the Tembula Muzungu, and for the final few miles we were surrounded by a horde of hacks, baying like so many hyenas, all shouting out for photographs and interviews. I suddenly felt thoroughly self-conscious and embarrassed at the attention.

  At the roundabout police had cordoned off the thoroughfare, halting all traffic, and Boston and I walked into the crowds to rapturous applause. From somewhere off to the left there came a roaring of engines and, when I looked up, I could see a bank of motorcyclists turning circles around the roundabout. There must have been twenty of them, local Ugandan men dressed up like Hell’s Angels from some dire ’80s movie. Perhaps they had been tempted down by the promise of getting their souped-up scooters and Harley-Davidsons on national television, but their presence lent our arrival an even more carnival air.

  Just as the crowd threatened to swallow us, one of the bikers wheeled around, ignoring the exclamations of a particularly agitated police officer, and gestured at his seat. Another was getting into position to offer Boston his when the police began to force the crowds back.

  ‘Come on, Lev. We need to arrive in style!’

  The biker who was offering me his seat introduced himself as Commanda. The one who was tempting Boston up to ride pillion was named Gangsta. Somehow, I doubted that these were the names their mothers had given them. Still, the crowds were only getting thicker, and somehow we had to make our way to the centre of the city. It wouldn’t ruin the purity of the expedition, because we’d have to return and begin our walk here, at this same roundabout. And so, with the crowd still chanting my name, I climbed up beside Commanda and, with a whoop, he wheeled his Harley around and took off up the road. Behind me, Boston rode pillion with Gangsta while the rest of the bikers formed what I can only describe as an honour guard.

  It was not, all things told, how I expected to arrive in Uganda’s capital city.

  Stunned by the somewhat incongruous reception, I barely noticed the way Kampala grew up around us. The police had cleared the highway and soon we were riding between two whooping columns of Ugandan Hell’s Angels, right into the city’s heart. Sometime later, with the tower blocks of newer Kampala giving way to the old town, where colonial buildings still lined the streets and the evidence of Uganda’s British past was increasingly evident, the bikers deposited us in a square where yet more well-wishers had assembled. So much for getting to know the real Africa – this was a cavalcade of celebrity, and I wondered if it was the kind of reception of which Stanley or Speke would have approved.

  I turned to say as much to Boston, but he was already swinging down from his bike and striding into the crowd. It took me a moment to register where he was going, but then I saw him put his arms around one of the ladies in the crowd, and for a second he disappeared as he was mobbed by children. These, I understood, were the family who had been waiting for him to come home. Lily, his wife, and his eldest daughter Penny, a resolute fourteen-year-old, looked as embarrassed by all the attention as we did. Clinging to Lily’s shoulder was his middle child, Aurore, a beautiful, frizzy-haired girl of six who hid her face in her mother’s breast.

  In an ungainly fashion I clambered off the motorcycle and, in seconds, the bikers were off, riding in wild circles around the square in what I could only assume was further celebration. For a moment, I was lost. Coming out of the plodding serenity of our walk into this carnival seemed to have taken all of five seconds; I was in danger of losing my grip on reality.

  Then Boston bounded back to my side. When everything around me was going crazy, there was still the – relative – normality of Boston to keep me grounded.

  ‘You will see me later, yes, Lev?’

  ‘Later?’

  ‘Are you forgetting already?’

  In the moment I was, but Boston had invited me to his family home for dinner the following night. He had been chattering about it all the way into the Kibuye roundabout, and I had to admit to being particularly intrigued at seeing how Boston lived a more sedate, family life.

  ‘I’ll be there, Boston,’ I said, and we clasped hands in the African way – first up, and then down.

  With Boston gone, it was only me and the revellers. For a moment I stood and watched them, and it was then that exhaustion truly caught up with me. We had come a long way today, and it was time to make camp.

  A piece of Boston’s endless chatter came to my mind and I weaved my way to a place he had recommended, the Hotel Le Bougainviller. The hotel was located in a quiet, residential area of town, away from the bustle of the market and financial area. There, among the leafy hills and white-walled embassies, I closed myself in my room and
found peace and privacy for the first time I could remember.

  There is a guilt that comes when you experience a moment of luxury in a country where you have seen such poverty. As I lay back on the hotel bed, I was thinking of Kasansero, Moses and the AIDS epidemic, the stragglers I had seen eking out their subsistence lives on the shores of the lake – but I was thinking of other things too: the promise of a good steak, a glass of red wine, and a long, dreamless sleep. I closed my eyes. This was all, I told myself, very surreal. I resolved to make the most of it because, in a few days’ time, it would be back to the road – and, a few days after that, the luxury of Kampala would seem a very long way away.

  Kampala is the pride of Uganda, a capital city that has more in common with the affluent cities of the West than it does the landing sites we had passed through on our way north. We were going to be here for seven days, the first real lull in our journey and, though I wanted to rest, I also wanted to know what made this city tick.

  In this city of more than a million people there are a great number of different cultures all existing side by side. Although the Buganda, the local ethnic group, make up more than half the population, the city’s ethnic mix is truly diverse. As in most modern countries, the growth of the urban economy has seen people flock to the capital – but Kampala’s expansion has been driven by political factors too. During the rule of Idi Amin, and Milton Obote – who was overthrown by Amin and then restored to power following Amin’s deposition – many Ugandans from the native northern tribes were brought into the city, to serve in the police and army, as well as to shore up the government’s other, more shadowy, security forces. When the current President, Yoweri Museveni – who hails from the west of Uganda – came to power in 1986, many western Ugandans flocked to the city, especially those from Museveni’s own tribe, the Banyankole. The way that Amin and Obote crippled the once-flourishing Ugandan economy, driving out foreign investment and curtailing the freedom of business as they pursued their Socialist ideals, meant that unemployment was rife outside the vital urban centres like Kampala – and this fuelled a mass influx of people to the city during the 1970s and early ’80s. The result is a city with both the tensions that come from people with varied backgrounds and languages living in such close proximity, and the wonderful intermingling of those cultures. Many of the city’s suburbs consider themselves miniature versions of the ancestral homelands of the tribes whose members live there, and many Kampala residents don’t consider themselves to be ‘from Kampala’ at all, rather remaining true to their tribal roots. The city I was about to explore was not one I could ever hope to understand in a week – Boston still seemed to be working it out after all the years he had lived here.