by Levison Wood
I was woken, that first morning, by the sound of the call to prayer from the Ahmadiyya Central Mosque, which would have been fine had I not been kept awake, long into the night, by the sound of revellers from the Kampala Casino in a shopping centre not far from the hotel. January was the start of Uganda’s short rainy season, but even early in the morning the sun was scorching overhead. I took a leisurely shower, washing away all of the grime that had worked its way deep into my skin, and then filled myself with more breakfast than I had eaten since Kigali. My body wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, but once I had rested, it was time to go out into the city. It was time to re-provision for the journey ahead.
By the time evening came, my pack swollen with new supplies, I was ready to see Boston again. Since fleeing the Congo, Boston had made his home in one of Kampala’s more affluent suburbs, perched on top of one of the hills west of the city. I was due to arrive at six, but by seven I was still walking in circles, lost amid the winding lanes, where gated buildings sat back from wide, tree-lined roads. I have to admit, the sensation of walking was a wonderful thing, but by the time eight o’clock came around I was beginning to grow weary. I seemed to be passing the same trees and bends in the road over and over again. We had made it all the way from the Nyungwe Forest by trusting to our instinctive skills for navigation – but now, in this sleepy city suburb, I was lost.
I must have passed Boston’s house several times before I realised it was there. I hadn’t expected it to be so grand. Boston’s home seemed, to me, a palatial bungalow, set back from the road and surrounded by high walls and a locked gate, at which a security guard was snoozing. It put me in mind of the kind of compounds that rich European landowners used to inhabit in the colonial days. Once the security guard had given me a cursory look, the gate drew back and I saw the bungalow itself, sitting in a vast, green garden. Boston was already waiting underneath the eaves at the front of the house.
‘How did you get lost?’ he demanded as I hurried to meet him. ‘I thought you were supposed to be an explorer.’
‘Because you gave me the wrong directions,’ I grinned. ‘I thought you were supposed to be a guide?’
Inside, Lily was waiting in a pair of fashionable jeans and a low-cut white blouse – every inch the beautiful wife Boston had described. I’d only seen her briefly when we rode into the city, but now that we were in her territory she appeared comfortable and hospitable, with a reserved manner. Boston’s daughters had no such reservations. On seeing me, Penny marched up and held out a hand for me to shake. ‘Nice to meet you again,’ she announced, before disappearing to the dining table. Meanwhile, Aurore – the frizzy-haired girl who had been clinging to Lily when we arrived in Kampala – had already used my entrance as a diversion to sneak out into the garden, where she was excitedly skipping in circles – both to Boston’s delight, and the security guard’s evident ire.
‘What about your son?’ I asked.
‘Jezu Adonis is in bed,’ answered Lily. ‘He’s only one year old, so . . .’
Before his wife could finish, Boston burst in. ‘I’ll fetch him.’
Moments later, Boston was returning with Jezu Adonis walking tentatively at his side. The boy was obviously bewildered by the attention. He rubbed his eyes and, when he looked at me, his face creased in what I could only describe as terror. In seconds he was scrambling to get up into Boston’s arms. Boston kept directing him to shake me by the hand, but Jezu didn’t have the courage. He buried his face in Boston’s shoulder and started to weep.
Boston could not control his mirth. ‘He’s not normally so shy. He just doesn’t like you Muzungus. Come on, Adonis, say hello to the white man! He won’t eat you!’
The reassurance, though, only magnified Jezu’s doubt. Showing remarkable agility, he wriggled free from Boston’s grasp and hurtled for the safety of his bedroom. With a withering look at her husband, Lily followed.
‘Don’t be offended, Lev. He is one year old.’
‘I’m not offended, Boston.’
‘I’m telling you, Lev, it is not his fault.’
‘Boston, I’m really not . . .’
In the bedroom, the crying had subsided, and Lily reappeared. As she swept on into the dining room, summoning Aurore from the garden, Boston poured us two measures of whisky and handed me a glass. ‘I don’t like to leave them at home with the nanny,’ he confided, as the smells of home-cooked food tempted me on. ‘You never know if she’ll sell them to a witch.’
‘You must be kidding . . .’
‘I’m serious, Lev. It happens all the time. Two or three kids go missing every week in Kampala. You see it in all the newspapers. Nannies desperate for cash will sell a child for a couple of hundred dollars and they’ll never be seen again. Once a witch gets hold of them, it’s dead.’ He lowered his voice to a whisper, so his children would not hear. ‘They murder them, chop off their genitalia, and turn them into lucky charms. People pay a lot of money.’
‘That’s disgusting, Boston.’
‘Yes, but it’s rife. The only way is to have your boy circumcised – that way he’s a man and useless to the witch. Are you circumcised, Lev?’
I decided not to answer.
In the dining room, huge platters of Congolese food were spread out in front of me: matoke, a kind of starchy green banana that is cooked and pounded into a meal; baked tilapia, no doubt fresh from the shores of the lake; ugali, with much more flavour than any we had eaten on our travels; and more rice and steamed vegetables than I thought I would see for the next several months. Lily was an excellent cook. Boston opened beers, which he insisted we drank from the bottle, and the family all ate with their hands. As I helped myself to more tilapia, I had a sudden surge of pride; it was an immense privilege, I knew, to be let into Boston’s house and to eat with his family. And, not to mention, the food was igniting taste buds I thought had died somewhere in the Tanzanian bush.
As we ate, Boston began regaling Lily with stories of our trek. Most of them I recognised, but there were moments here that I felt certain must have happened to somebody else, or else been plucked straight from Boston’s imagination. Lily took it all in with a healthy scepticism and I was suddenly reminded of the stories Boston had told me of her – how Lily herself had been tortured for being at his side during the conflicts of the Congo, how she’d distributed leaflets in an effort to re-take the Congo during its wars, how she had escaped with him over the border, leaving behind everything she knew to start a new life here. Was this shy, reserved, excellent cook really the same bold mistress? Unlike Boston, Lily was not a person to speak of the things she had lived through – but I could tell, by the gleam in her eye when Boston launched into another one of his tirades, that she had an inner strength she did not often display. There was no longer any doubt in my mind: when I wasn’t here, Lily wore the trousers; underneath her tiny frame and nervous smile, she was a powerful woman.
‘And I hear, Levison, that you’ve convinced Ndoole to come with you into South Sudan?’
I shot a look at Boston, who only shrugged in a noncommittal way. ‘He is a great guide,’ I ventured, uncertain exactly how Boston had framed his decision.
‘Do you know what’s happening in the north?’
I nodded. ‘We’ll have to make a decision somewhere up the road.’
Our crossing into South Sudan was still some five hundred kilometres away, but it had been in the back of my mind for many weeks. We had barely set off from the Nyungwe when rumours reached us of the rumbling conflict in the world’s newest country, and every time we had reached a town or village along the way the stories had intensified. Now that we were in Kampala, a modern city, I had access to the kinds of information outlets I hadn’t for most of my trek, and those rumours had solidified into real knowledge: the unrest in South Sudan had grown into much more. Five hundred kilometres to the north, a country was at war.
South Sudan gained its independence from Sudan in 2011 – ending one of Africa’s longest and blo
odiest civil wars – but, since then, has itself been dominated by internal conflict. In December, just as my trek was beginning, the president, Salva Kiir Mayardit, declared that his former vice president, Dr Riek Machar, was behind an attempted military coup. Power politics quickly turned to real fighting when Kiir ordered the disarming of troops from all but one ethnicity inside the Presidential Guard. Like Uganda, South Sudan is a country in which people from many different ethnicities live side by side – but Kiir’s act ignited the simmering disharmony between his native Dinka and Machar’s native Nuer. In the days that followed, certain Dinka elements began attacking Nuer civilians in the capital city of Juba – and, though these initial outbreaks of violence were quickly curbed, it wasn’t long before a conflict that had begun as political had come to be defined along ethnic lines. By the time I reached Kampala, hundreds of thousands of people were being displaced by the violence and fleeing across South Sudan’s borders to refugee camps in Kenya, Sudan – and especially Uganda.
I didn’t blame Lily for being sceptical and, now that I saw her children the gravity of what I was suggesting we do struck me more pointedly. Could I really ask their father to accompany me into a live warzone, to act as my guide in a country he didn’t know and where he didn’t speak the language? I was determined to follow the river, no matter what, but I was beginning to believe that I couldn’t ask it of Boston. South Sudan, dominated by the vast marshes of the Sudd, had been one of the journey’s greatest challenges from the outset; I only hoped that the current conflict didn’t make it impassable.
‘We’ll know more when we get there,’ Boston declared, draining his beer as if to put a full stop to the conversation. ‘The refugees will tell us. Now, Levison, I have something you have to see . . .’
Half of me suspected a stuffed crocodile, but Boston took me through to the sitting room where photographs lined the walls and an old shoebox crammed with more had been unearthed and left on a table to pore through. It was good to see Boston so relaxed. He was the master here and I was his guest – no longer an employer or a leader – and it was a different kind of smile on his face as he showed me these old photographs. Here were pictures of him from his youth, the outrageous hair of the 1980s, his dubious fashion choices and oversized shirts; Boston and Lily standing proudly outside his first small business, a shop selling records; his old ranch in the Congo, where a young Boston – recognisable only by the smile – stood beside his mother, who looked almost identical to her son. Among them all there lay a lone photograph of Boston’s father. He picked it up between forefinger and thumb and handed it to me. ‘It was months before he went missing,’ he said – and I noted that here, with his family around him, he said ‘went missing’, whereas, out in the bush, he had always intimated murder.
Later, once the children had gone to bed, it was time to make my exit. Boston, perhaps driven by one too many beers, insisted on walking me down the road. ‘It’s so the great explorer doesn’t get lost!’ he exclaimed – but, by the end of the garden, where his security guard was still fast sleep, he seemed to have forgotten.
‘She’s worried about the north,’ I said, looking back at Lily in the door of the house. ‘I am too, Boston. Look, I have to go, but you . . .’
Boston didn’t want to hear more. This time, he wasn’t smiling when he cut me off: ‘There is a month between there and now. A lot can change, Lev.’
Alone, I wended my way down the twisting streets until, at the bottom of the hill, I was able to find a boda-boda to take me back into town. There, I sat up, long into the night, bickering with the unstable internet connection in the hotel lobby, as I tried to learn more about what was happening up north, and the challenges we would have to face.
‘Listen,’ said Boston, stalking across the hotel lobby for the TV buzzing in the corner. There, he fumbled to turn up the volume. We had spent the morning in the Kisenyi market, where Boston had commissioned a metalsmith to make him a catapult from smelted car parts. In the hotel, rap music began to blare out across the lobby, drawing infuriated looks.
‘Talentless!’ Boston fumed, insisting I watch. ‘Can you believe it, Lev?’
‘It’s rap music, Boston.’
‘But listen.’
I did. Only two words seemed to emerge from the mix. They were strangely familiar.
‘The song is called “Levison Tembula”,’ Boston explained. ‘Levison the Walker. You are famous, Lev, but it doesn’t stop it being shit.’
We had marked today as another rest day before we followed the shore east to Jinja, where the true White Nile emerged and began its course due north, but there was to be precious little resting. Boston had promised to show me the heart of the real Africa and it was with his sardonic grin emblazoned in my thoughts that we hailed a boda-boda driver and headed for the southern bounds of the city.
After several wrong turns, we arrived at a fenced-off section of woodland, which appeared as nondescript as everywhere else outside Kampala’s beating heart. Parked up inside was a brand new Land Cruiser, its windows blacked out, its wheel trims mysteriously clean, in spite of the dust that swirled around. As Boston bid goodbye to the boda-boda driver, one of the black windows wound down and a Ugandan man stepped out.
‘Have you brought gifts?’ he began.
Boston said, ‘You didn’t mention gifts.’
The man looked far from impressed. ‘You were told to bring a white cockerel and five litres of fresh cow’s milk. You should know, Levison Tembula, you cannot come without gifts.’
I looked at Boston, who didn’t seem in the least perturbed. ‘We’ll find them, Lev. Come.’
The gifts, Boston told me as we headed into the shanties, were for Mama Fina, reputed to be Kampala’s richest witch doctor. ‘She prefers to be called a traditional healer,’ he explained as we made for what looked a likely stall among the shanties, ‘but she was in the Red Pepper doing things that didn’t look medicinal at all.’
The Red Pepper had been the favourite rag among the fishermen in Kasansero, and I had already witnessed first-hand the sort of lurid headlines in which the tabloid specialised. Photographs of Mama Fina had been spread across its central section, where the paper exposed her as Kampala’s most prolific nymphomaniac, who regularly used sex as part of her dark magic.
‘Then why are we going to see her?’
‘So you can see for yourself, what these magicians can do.’
We came to a stall where it seemed we could buy eggs, Coke and other assorted goods but our requests for fresh milk were, predictably, met with bewildered silence. In the end Boston managed to unearth five litres of UHT in battered plastic cartons and, in place of a cockerel, a small billy goat who looked at us, disgruntled, as we led him away on a length of string. Before we got back to the Land Cruiser, Boston took a detour into the shanties, managed to procure a small jerry can and, with the broadest grin, proceeded to decant the UHT. ‘This witch doctor will never know the difference, Lev. It’s all for show.’
On inspection of our gifts – which, though blatantly not what was demanded, appeared to be good enough – the man from the Land Cruiser led us down to the shore of the lake. Towing the goat behind us, we trailed him along the beach until, at last, we began to see people. Twenty or thirty of them – poor men, women, even a few children – were gathered along the breakers of a secluded cove, where driftwood fires littered the sand. Clusters of homemade spears were lodged in the ground beside each of the fires; as we approached, I couldn’t help thinking they had the appearance of shrines.
‘Are they all waiting for her?’ I asked.
‘You don’t have to wait, Tembula,’ said the man who was leading us and, together, we picked our way through the petitioners.
Ahead of us a cliff reared up, and in its shadows I saw a recess in the stone, a natural cavern in which yet more fires were burning. It was exactly as I had imagined a witch doctor’s hideaway to be – peculiarly so. My imagination, stoked by Hollywood clichés, was being fed images to
keep it alive. Smoke from incense sticks billowed in great reefs from the mouth of the cave, lending the cove a malign air. A group of camp followers, half-naked – and many of them disabled – gathered around one of the beach fires, stirring the contents of a cast iron cauldron. The spearheads, blades pointed upwards, suddenly took on a devilish air.
‘You know what this is, Lev.’ I was about to tell Boston it was downright creepy when he cut me off. ‘It is branding. Mama Fina isn’t even her real name. It’s Sylvia. All of this – the smoke, the cave – she knows what she’s doing. She is a clever woman, this Mama Fina.’
Boston was right. Mama Fina, he explained, had started out life as an orphan wandering the Mabira Forest east of Kampala, but, forty years on, was living the life of a fabulously wealthy business woman. This cavern we were approaching was not her home; it was her place of business, a store front for a very particular product. Mama Fina had made her cash every which way she could, first as a housemaid, a cleaner and washer girl, before taking over a textile business and beginning a chain of stores. She had even, Boston assured me, gone on to monopolise the boda-boda taxi service in Kampala. But it was here, in ‘healing’, that she had truly made her money.
‘Casting spells, mixing potions, chanting and singing, praying to the gods of water and wind and fire.’ Boston seemed to take great delight in recounting the list of acts she performed. ‘She is an actress, Lev, but these Ugandans believe her. Did you know, she is the president’s personal healer . . .’