Walking the Nile

by Levison Wood

‘So you’re advocating mass genocide?’

  ‘Somebody’s got to clear up this mess,’ he replied, and after that Boston would brook no more conversation. It was time, he declared, for some well-earned rest; before dawn, we would be heading west.

  INTO THE WILD

  The Victoria and Albert Nile, February – March 2014

  At the westernmost point of Lake Kyoga the river rose again, depositing itself into Lake Albert two days further north-west. By fall of next night we had reached the outskirts of Masindi, a favourite haunt of, among others, Winston Churchill and Ernest Hemingway, the kind of place that drew adventurers and explorers from times past. The chief town of the Masindi region, it has a population that far exceeds the towns and villages we had tramped through since Jinja, with almost 50,000 Ugandans calling this home. An urban sprawl of red dirt roads and shanty shacks gathered around a square where modern banks and a public hospital suggested a tiny corner of modernity, it was the last significant town we would come to before we reached the vast Murchison Falls national park.

  Masindi was an important milestone for another reason: it was here that the British explorer Samuel Baker had based himself from April 1872 until June 1873. Baker, beaten by John Hanning Speke to the source of the White Nile at Jinja, had turned to his other overriding passion in life – the abolition of the slave trade. And it was from Masindi that Baker locked horns with the local Bunyoro king, Kabalega, to kill the trade at its source.

  Samuel Baker was born in June 1821, the eldest son of a London merchant family, whose considerable wealth had been built on the thriving trade in sugar. Marrying young, Baker, his wife and extensive brood left England to oversee the family’s plantation in Mauritius and, later, Ceylon – but, after his wife was stricken with typhoid fever, Baker found himself a widower at the youthful age of 34. Leaving his children in the care of an unmarried sister, Baker embarked on a new career, constructing railways and bridges in central Europe.

  Baker’s life was to take a startling, almost fairy tale turn when, in 1859, circumstances brought him to Vidin, then part of the Ottoman Empire. Visiting the slave market in the city, Baker became enraptured with one of the girls about to be sold. A white slave, she seemed destined for the harem of the Pasha – or honorary Lord – of Vidin; but Baker had other ideas. Though he bid to buy the girl himself, the Pasha’s resources far outweighed Baker’s own – so, if he wanted to acquire her, some nefarious tactics had to be employed. Baker decided that he would have to bribe the girl’s guards and, though she had legitimately been bought by another, he and the slave girl escaped in a carriage. Baker soon discovered that the girl was the orphaned daughter of an aristocratic Hungarian family, whose parents and brothers had been massacred during the uprisings of 1848. She was later to tell him that her nurse had helped her to a refugee camp, from which she had been abducted and sold to an Armenian slave merchant. It was this merchant who had brought her to market in Vidin, having groomed her to join the Pasha’s harem.

  The girl, whose name was Florence, would go on to become Baker’s lover, wife, and companion in his African adventures. Together they set out to explore central Africa in 1861. By this time Speke and Grant had already discovered Lake Victoria, but – following clues left by them – Baker and his wife would go on to discover Lake Albert to the north-west. Although Baker wanted to claim this as one of the Nile’s various sources, he was never taken quite as seriously as the other African explorers. Even though the river rising from Lake Albert did feed into the Nile further north, providing as much as fifteen per cent of the river’s northerly waters, Baker’s standing amongst Nile explorers never rose to the heights achieved by Speke or Grant. In part this was because he was always shunned by Queen Victoria, who refused to meet him because she was certain he had been intimate with his partner Florence long before they were formally wed. A civilian scandal involving his brother, a decorated colonial officer later convicted of sexually assaulting a lady on a train, also damaged Baker’s reputation – but it didn’t damage his zeal for Africa. By 1869 he was back, commissioned by the Khedive – or viceroy – of Egypt and Sudan to lead a military expedition into central Africa and quash the slave trade there, opening up great swathes of the interior for commerce and the advancement of civilisation. It was this quest that brought him to Masindi, and into direct conflict with the local kings.

  Boston and I stood at the river port on the outskirts of the town, beneath a baking sun. Here, the river turns north, before banking west to flow through Murchison Falls National Park and finally enter Lake Albert. This is the ancestral land of the Bunyoro tribe. Traditionally they were colonial resisters, and fought bitterly against Baker, seeing his expedition as another way Europeans were bringing British influence to bear. But, after a year of establishing his presence here, it was Baker who won out, with the king of the Bunyoro captured and exiled, and the whole tribe severely weakened as a result.

  ‘Lazy bastards,’ said Boston, after yet another local porter had deserted us. ‘Even worse than the Bugandans. We’d have been better off with a woman. This Bunyoro couldn’t carry a bag for more than five minutes without complaining. What we need is a Sudanese or a Nilot. Maybe a Kakwa. They were Idi Amin’s old tribe. They’re warriors. They don’t usually carry things, but at least they’re strong. If you pay them enough, Lev, they’ll do it.’

  Walking through the kingdom of the Bunyoro had been much more challenging than our earlier trek through the southern parts of Uganda. Perhaps memories of Baker lingered, but it seemed outsiders were not looked upon kindly here. The local Bunyoro people had given us little by way of help, and for the most part had been suspicious to the point of being hostile.

  ‘It’s because of the LRA,’ said Boston as, circumventing Masindi, we sat at the side of a red dirt track with our rucksacks piled up. We had one spare rucksack that neither of us could carry and in that was our food, water, tents and electrical gear – all the spare batteries, cameras and solar panels we needed to charge them up. Emmanuel had left us on the road to Masindi, returning proudly to his village with enough money to fulfil his dream of owning a motorbike, only to be stopped and searched by police who, after giving the matter some careful consideration, decided to liberate him of all his hard-earned wages. Since then, we’d managed to find lads with bicycles who’d been willing to come along for cash and a bit of adventure, but one after another they absconded. We waited in the midday sun, with only a banana tree for shade, and hoped that someone would come along and offer help.

  ‘The LRA ravaged this area,’ Boston went on. ‘They stole kids and raped women. That’s why these people are scared of foreigners. Did you see the way the children run away and hide in the bush whenever we get near?’

  I had, and I’d wondered why. It wasn’t like in Rwanda, where they’d done it smiling, for fun. Here they were genuinely scared.

  ‘And all that was only a few years ago. The LRA were in these parts until about 2007, before they ran further north.’

  The LRA were the Lord’s Resistance Army, a militant movement – and, in many ways, a religious cult – with their heartland in northern Uganda and South Sudan, and bases of operation as far afield as Boston’s beloved Congo. Formed from the remnants of a civilian organisation called the Holy Spirit Mobile Force, which fought against the acts of terror perpetrated by the government against the northern tribes in the mid-1980s, the Lord’s Resistance Army claims to be founding a theocratic state out of northern Uganda and southern South Sudan, a nation based on a strict understanding of the Ten Commandments, as well as on local traditions. This unique blend of African mysticism and Christian fundamentalism has manifested itself in frequent bouts of violence and human rights’ abuses all across the region. Boston was talking about rape and child abduction in Masindi, and stories like this are not uncommon. The LRA has been accused of engaging in child-sex-trafficking, female genital mutilation, as well as forcibly enlisting abducted children to their armies and ritually preparing those enlistees a
s rapists of the future. The International Criminal Court has had warrants out for the arrest of its leader, Joseph Kony – who proclaims himself God’s spokesman on earth – for war crimes and human rights abuses since 2005, but he has somehow evaded capture. As Boston and I sat by the bank of the river, I gazed north and had the unshakeable feeling that the country we were walking into was hiding him.

  ‘Some of these kids are barely old enough to remember all that,’ I said.

  ‘It’s the memories that live on, Lev. Their parents tell them about what happened. They’re terrified of northerners, of Nilots and Sudanese, the Kakwa and the like. And it’s not just them – they’re scared of all foreigners here. They’re so superstitious. They probably think you’re here looking to steal children for witchcraft or something. You know . . .’ And here Boston winked at me in delight. ‘. . . you Muzungus eat babies! That’s why my son was so scared of you when you came to my house.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you might have disabused him of that notion. Do you want him to grow up scared of white people? Isn’t that irresponsible?’

  ‘It’s only tall tales, and a bit of fun.’

  I wondered what my reaction would have been if, back home, a friend told me they were raising their children to be afraid of black Africans. ‘But these villagers,’ I went on, ‘they actually believe it.’

  There came the sound of an engine. When Boston and I peered down the road, we could see a cloud of red dust slowly moving towards us. Moments later, a shape started to form in the dust: a motorcyclist was coming towards us. I motioned to Boston to grab our packs and we scrambled to our feet, ready to flag him down.

  ‘It’s because that stuff happens,’ Boston went on. ‘Not the whites – but people do go missing here all the time. Only last week they found a woman just outside Masindi – murdered, with her breasts cut off. That’s witchcraft. I’m telling you.’

  The motorcycle rider slowed down as he approached, and we launched into our familiar haggle. This time we were lucky. For a fee, he agreed to tag along behind us, with our spare rucksack strapped to his saddle. Wearily, we took off. There were still some hours of daylight left and Boston wanted us to reach the village of Bweyale before nightfall.

  And so, we followed the river north. Although vast areas of the bush here have been burnt down to make pastures for cattle, it still felt bleak and wild, so much so that Boston and I had to find some local herdsmen to guide us through the maze of scrub until we could rejoin the river. A day further on, the Nile makes a sharp turn west and enters the ancient land of Murchison Falls National Park. Murchison Falls is the largest wilderness area left in Uganda, and is steeped in history. It was traversed by Samuel Baker and his wife Florence in 1864, and it was Baker himself who named the spectacular waterfalls at the heart of the park, in testament to the president of the Royal Geographical Society, Sir Roderick Murchison. Baker entered this area of wilderness from its western extremity, sailing upriver in the opposite direction to the one Boston and I were walking. What he discovered was beauty untouched. As he described it in his journal, ‘the fall of water was snow-white, which contrasted with the dark cliffs that walled the river, while the graceful palms of the tropics and the wild plantains perfected the view.’

  Baker’s journey had been fraught with difficulty. Already frustrated at his relative failures when compared with his contemporary explorers, he had faced hostile tribes and a civil war that had blocked his path and caused many months’ delay. The area he would name Murchison Falls was the fault line between the Nilotic Lwo and Acholi tribes, as well as other Sudanese groups and the Bantu-speaking Bunyoro, all of whom were engaged in battles for land and cultural primacy. This land of disparate people was almost impossible to navigate safely.

  In the early 20th century, when Uganda had become a British protectorate, Murchison Falls became something of a magnet for travellers consumed by the idea of seeing Africa in its rawest state. Winston Churchill came hunting here, searching for big game, and was as impressed by the falls as Baker had been a generation before. Word must have spread, because soon other world leaders and luminaries were making this a regular haunt. Roosevelt found wilderness here to surpass the American West, Ernest Hemingway crashed two planes in the park in less than a week, and the film stars of the early Hollywood era were drawn to this unspoiled landscape. Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn filmed The African Queen here in 1951 – though, by all accounts, it was not an experience Hepburn was keen to repeat.

  The park was gazetted as a game reserve under the British in 1926, becoming famous for its wildlife. Host to twenty thousand elephants, as well as thousands of rhino, lion, buffalo, and all the varied forms of African antelope, it became the glint in the ‘pearl of Africa’, so much so that, in the 1950s, the Queen Mother had a bungalow built here especially for her safaris. This golden age, however, was not to last. During the Ugandan Civil War, Idi Amin plagued the region with his militias, and finally renamed the park Kabalega, after the famous king who had battled with Baker here. War drove away the tourists and, when Amin ascended to the leadership of Uganda, he closed the gates to foreigners. After this, the park was ravaged. What had been a place of bounty quickly became decimated, as conservation activities in the park ceased, making its wildlife easy prey for poachers. By the end of Amin’s rule, in 1979, elephant numbers had been reduced to just over a thousand. During the turbulent 1980s, when the country lurched from one leader to another, the slaughter continued unabated; a succession of military factions occupied the park, and started to eat their way through the wildlife. By 1990, fewer than two hundred and fifty elephants and a thousand buffalo survived, the hartebeest and kob herds had plummeted to around three and six thousand respectively, rhinos and African hunting dogs had been hunted to local extinction, and giraffe and lion were on the brink of going the same way. Since then, fortunately, the tourists have gradually started to return, conservation activity has begun again, and populations are slowly starting to grow.

  Boston and I had already been given permission by the Uganda Wildlife Authority to walk along the river. We had been summoned to see its chief, Colonel Andrew Seguya, in Kampala; Andrew had heard we’d been broadcasting our opinion that the true source of the Nile belonged in Rwanda – and only by our conceding that the source of the White Nile was in Uganda did the bespectacled colonel agree to help us. Two days out from Masindi, we came to the small town of Karuma, where another power station straddled the river and the falls, gentle compared with what we would find further west, still looked dramatic. Boston had told me that the Ugandan government had plans to transform Karuma into a new, modern city – not organically, by attracting investors and settlers, but by imposing growth from above and the building of yet another dam. Right now, there was no evidence of this. Ahead, the national park was a verdant line of green, and I was glad to be walking into it, leaving the deforested devastation behind.

  At a UWA ranger station on the outskirts of Karuma, we met the guides and porters who would take us into the park. A motley collection of crumbling buildings, the station didn’t look much like the headquarters of an operation tending to more than three-and-a-half-thousand square kilometres of wilderness, but inside we were introduced to Simon, the lead ranger, Francis, his right hand man, and Maureen, a gun-toting lady of such considerable girth that I had to quickly stop Boston from asking her how she intended to walk with us all the way to the Falls. Accompanying us there would also be two porters, George and Julius, who knew the park intimately as locals and had aspirations of becoming rangers themselves.

  As we were checking packs and Simon was showing us a map of the park, another ranger appeared in the station, dragging a handcuffed local after him. I watched as they crossed the station floor to disappear into its recesses, where Boston assured me the cells were waiting.

  ‘Poaching?’ I asked.

  Simon nodded, wearily. ‘Illegal fishing, this one.’ As he said it, I noticed Julius, one of the porters, looking particularl
y shifty. ‘He’ll be prosecuted and fined, but it doesn’t stop them.’ The fine, he explained, was ordinarily around 300,000 Ugandan shillings, roughly approximate to £70, a fortune for an impoverished fisherman, but nothing when stacked against the need for food for a man and his family. Simon and his rangers enforced the law as it was, but something was fundamentally broken that even subsistence fishing had to be policed like this. ‘It’s not him we have to worry about,’ Simon conceded as, finally resupplied, we left the ranger station to head for the park. ‘It’s when it becomes commercial. There’s meant to be no fishing, without a licence, inside the whole of the park, but boats come onto Lake Albert and up the river. That’s not subsistence. That’s industry.’

  Outside, Karuma Falls Bridge – originally built so that military could move swiftly over this part of the river – took us to the north bank and, from there, we entered the park. As we crossed the boundary line, Boston dug his elbow into my side and gestured for me to look up – but he needn’t have bothered: I had already seen the grotesque, decapitated head sitting proudly on the edge of the trail. Once, it had belonged to a buffalo. Flies swarmed the sockets where its eyes used to be.

  ‘It can be dangerous in there,’ Francis said as we passed. ‘Just yesterday that buffalo charged a ranger and injured one of the villagers inside the park. And only a week ago, a lone elephant killed four villagers. They can do that, when they’re not part of a herd. It turns them bad.’

  With that, Francis began the march again, leaving Boston and me to stare at the decapitated head. ‘I wonder what happened to the body,’ I muttered.

  ‘You should have learnt by now,’ Boston said, shaking his head. ‘These Bunyoro have eaten it.’ He paused. ‘Don’t look so surprised, Lev. There’s good meat in a buffalo. Idi Amin treated this place like his moving larder. That’s what the locals do too.’