Walking the Nile

by Levison Wood

  Back beneath the trees, I said, ‘We’ve got to get him out of here.’

  ‘The helicopter . . .’

  ‘We can’t wait for any helicopter,’ I snapped. ‘It’s the fire.’

  For more than two hours now, the fire had been coming our way. Coaxed by the wind, and fuelled by wood so dry it was perfect tinder, the flames were growing frighteningly close. Already the smell of smoke was strong, tendrils of grey wafting through the branches. ‘Matt can’t stay here,’ said Jason.

  By two thirty, the fire was less than fifty metres away. Bent low over Matt’s chest, Jason confirmed what we had been fearing: his breathing was fading fast, now barely perceptible as a rise and fall of his chest.

  ‘We need to move!’

  Boston and Jason helped me lift Matt, but he was too heavy for one man alone. Urgently, listening to the crackle of the nearby flames, Jason rolled out a tarp from his pack. We laid Matt gently on top and, taking a corner each, bore him off. Moses and Charles, meanwhile, rushed back towards the fire, hoping to cut around its edges and find the nearest ranger station – and the help we desperately needed. As they went, they loosed rifle shots into the air – anything that could draw attention.

  Two hundred metres on, the weight was too much. We stopped, momentarily clear of the grasping smoke, and laid Matt down to trickle the water Boston had brought from the river into his lips. Only, this time, when Jason bent over him, there was no breath coming from his throat.

  I dropped at his side. I tipped his chin back and put my lips to his. Instinct had taken over: I breathed out, into his lungs, and began to make compressions on his chest. I continued: two short breaths and thirty sharp chest compressions; two short breaths, thirty compressions, over and again. I was lost in the attempt to keep him alive, convincing myself that all he needed was a few more minutes, anything until a helicopter or some rangers arrived, when I heard Jason shout out on the edges of my vision. It took me a moment to understand. When I looked over my shoulder, Jason was holding Matt’s wrist and looking as hopeless as I have ever seen a man. ‘He’s dead,’ he said. There was no pulse.

  Some time later – I still cannot tell how long – we bore Matt to the very top of the forested hill, two hundred metres of steep, agonising climb. There we waited, at the top of the world. Matt’s empty eyes gazed up at us, his skin finally cold. As Jason threw himself to the earth in exhaustion, and even Boston looked faint from our charge up the hillside, I wrapped Matt in a tarp and whispered a prayer. Three nights ago, I was drinking a toast of Tamarind juice to the explorers of the Nile with this man. Now, because of my expedition, he would never see home again.

  It was five o’clock by the time the rangers returned, bringing with them ten more rangers from one of the reserve’s stations, several miles away. By then the fire was dying of its own volition and, up on top of the hill, the first intimations of dusk were drawing in. It was cooler, now – and, staring at the bundle that was all that was left of Matt Power, that seemed the cruellest irony of all.

  As we sat in disbelief, the rangers cut a makeshift stretcher from the branches of an acacia and, in a sombre procession, we bore Matt’s body back across the plain. After some hours we emerged from the bush and took shelter at one of the rangers’ outposts, where local police were waiting to take our statements. Numb, we recounted the events of the day at a strange remove. There was already a feeling that they had happened in a different age, in a different time.

  Once the statements were taken, it was already night, and a pick-up truck was waiting to take us away from the reserve. Alongside Matt’s body, we made the lonely drive west, forty five kilometres to the town of Arua, which sits on the western border with the Congo. Ordinarily, Boston would have begun some tirade about his years in the DRC, while simultaneously declaring the country’s superiority above all others, but as we approached he was silent. The only sound was of Jason, starting up his mobile phone and – now we had a signal – dialling a New York number.

  ‘Who are you calling?’ I asked.

  ‘Matt’s wife,’ he answered. ‘Jess.’

  In an Arua hotel, we sat together in the bar, staring into our beers. Every time I opened my mouth to speak, words failed to come. But I knew what I wanted to say: ‘Screw the Nile. To hell with the Nile.’ I wanted the cold comfort of English skies again. I wanted the familiar surrounds of London, or the plain, safe drudgery of the Staffordshire village where I had grown up. I wanted to be anywhere but here, thinking of the man who had died so that he could write about me on my indulgent, pointless, selfish trek.

  It was Jason who broke the silence. ‘Thank you,’ he said, lifting his glass.

  I looked at him numbly, and lifted mine to join his. I could scarcely believe what he was saying.

  ‘We did all we could,’ he said.

  ‘It was simply his time,’ said Boston sadly, as he drained his glass.

  But, all through the long night, I wasn’t so sure. I would never forget the gesture Jason had made, but whether I could ever exonerate myself of blame is a question for which I’m not sure I’ll ever find an answer.

  In the morning, after making yet more statements at a police station which seemed ripped straight out of the pages of some farce, we made arrangements for Matt’s body to be returned to Kampala – and, thereafter, to be handed over to the US Embassy. I couldn’t bear to think about the shockwaves his death was sending around the world to his friends and family, so instead lost myself in the practicalities of his trip. There would be no helicopter to take Matt back to Kampala, but – after much haranguing – we sourced a coffin and persuaded the police to take him there themselves. Jason was to join the convoy. Before he left, he shook my hand, and made us a gift of the last of the ration packs he and Matt had packed for the trip. As they left, I got to thinking how well Jason was handling it; to me, Matt was a stranger, but to Jason a close friend. I was glad it was Jason who would see him back home.

  We spent the day in long silences. Boston walked, for hours, alone. At the hotel, I toyed with my phone. Half of me itched to pick it up, tell everyone I was coming back to England, that the expedition was over – but half of me wanted nothing more than to get back on the road, anything to put miles between me and the memory of Matt’s eyes rolling back in his head. Today, night approached so much more swiftly than it had the day before. That was what the days were now: an endless succession of hours, each blurring indistinctly into the last. I tried to write in my journal, but I did not have the words to capture how this felt.

  On 13 March, three days after Matt Power died, I emerged from a dream. As I woke, the memory of being beneath those trees as the fire advanced and we tried to beat life back into Matt’s chest receded, and I staggered down to meet the day. Dawn was breaking in the west, and in the corner of the hotel lobby a grainy television set broadcast news of the intensifying fighting in South Sudan. In the shade outside, Boston was already waiting. It was the hundredth day of our expedition and, in that moment, every one of them felt like a sentence.

  ‘How are you feeling, Lev?’ Boston asked, without emotion.

  I didn’t know how to reply to that. I was feeling as cold as Boston sounded. But everything about Arua was bearing down on me this morning: the hotel walls, the empty, endless sky. There was only one thing I could think of that would break this spell, but it seemed sacrilegious to suggest it. I still did not know whether I wanted to complete the expedition, whether I wanted to go even as far as South Sudan, whether there was anything I could have done differently for Matt Power. The only thing I knew with any certainty was there was only one thing in the world that could bring me out of myself for the moment: the simple, blunt, monotony of putting one foot in front of another, empty and unthinking, for hours on end.

  ‘I think we need to walk.’

  Boston and I found transportation back to the river, close to the point at which Matt Power had died. In silence, we tramped north. In the distance, lush green hills began to flank the easter
n bank of the Nile. By midday, storm clouds were brewing in the distance, and the first droplets of rain began to fall. Not one of us remarked on the irony; if Matt Power had joined us scant days later, his life might not have ended here, so far away from home.

  By fall of night we had entered into Madi country. The Madi people, claiming to have come from Nigeria, moved into new homelands in Uganda, via the Sudan, in the mid-1800s – and seeing them in their villages, their skins so much darker than the Ugandans of the south, their homes bedecked in bright orange and black paint depicting simple pyramids, made me think how far we had come. We took refuge in a village where the chief granted us permission to sleep in the empty store room of the district shop, and listened to the bustle in the village square. This, the chief had told us, was the night market: a place to which the Madi people came from near and far to buy and sell fish and other commodities in the pitch black.

  Soon after the market began, the heavens opened. The storm clouds we had seen during the day had followed us down river, and now the rain came down in violent torrents. Torrents that might have saved Matt Power’s life.

  Boston and I barely slept that night, but it was not just from listening to the rain hammer down on the rooftop. I was lost in thoughts of home, and of a home to which Matt Power would never return.

  In the morning, we did the only thing we could to keep the terrible feeling of sadness at bay: we continued north, soon to meet the border.

  THE FOG OF WAR

  South Sudan, April 2014

  At Adjumani, the last town of any real note before we came to the border, the signs of the conflict in the north were already plain to see. More than once we had seen stragglers coming down the roads, and in the villages along the river talk was of the sprawling refugee camps springing up along the border. The further north we came, the more evidence we saw of foreign NGOs and charitable organisations flocking to the camps. As chaos brewed ahead, it seemed Boston and I were fighting against a current – not of the river, but of people hurrying south.

  In the days following Matt Power’s death, Boston and I had walked in silence. On the east of the river, mountains of boulders emerged from the savannah. Perhaps it was only the memory of Matt’s death playing tricks on my mind, but I began to feel as if we were somehow walking back in time, into a prehistoric past. The villages we encountered were small and rough, with ramshackle huts open to the elements and no stores to buy food. On the night before we reached Adjumani we camped on the outskirts of a village where the locals watched us as if we were bandits, and only begrudgingly let us buy the only food they had available: bush rat stewed in a pungent peanut sauce. It had black, rubbery skin and, though Boston devoured it with relish, I could barely stomach the taste. In the end, as I watched the leftover skull in my plate being picked clean of flesh by some of the local children, I resolved that it was because of what had happened in the Ajai Reserve. I had lost my appetite since then. I was beginning to wonder if I had lost my appetite for the trek.

  On the 103rd day of our journey, we picked our way through thirty four kilometres of Acholi tribal land, finally crossing back to the east bank where the air was somehow cooler and black clouds spoke of the rains to come. I was eager for them; the heat was as fierce as it has been on the day Matt Power died, and I would rather have tramped endless days in the downpour than risk that again. By mid-afternoon, we followed the sweep of the river – and there, up against its banks, was the town of Adjumani.

  Adjumani was smaller than Masindi, but it was clear that the local population – nineteen thousand at the last official census – had been swollen dramatically by the influx from over the border. It had the feel of a frontier town, its main strip flanked by crumbling colonial buildings and a small roundabout where a policeman waved through traffic and goats. It was in the swarmed roads that we saw evidence of the fleeing South Sudanese. New Land Cruisers with RSS plates and tall, smartly dressed men with facial scars had set up camp here; these were refugees with money – and lots of it.

  ‘Some of them have fled as far as Kampala,’ said Boston as we picked our way into the centre of town. ‘The house prices have rocketed because of these Sudanese. They’re buying all the biggest houses in the city.’

  ‘Where do they get their money from?’

  Boston only laughed. ‘They steal it, Lev. Even you can see that! South Sudan is one of the most corrupt places in the world. All that aid money and charity donations going in – where do you think it goes? Not on aid . . .’

  Now that Boston said it, I remembered reading about how the president of South Sudan, the cowboy-hat-wearing Salva Kiir Mayardit, had admitted that over four billion dollars of public money had ‘gone missing’ – the implication was that it had been stolen by members of his own government.

  ‘This is why African aid will never work,’ Boston muttered, and we stopped for the goats to pass.

  Adjumani was welcoming the rich South Sudanese fleeing the violence on the other side of the border, but it was the next day that we discovered what was becoming of the less well-off. After a night in the relative civilisation of the town, where good hard cash could still buy a decent bed for the night, we followed a winding path north, keeping our eyes firmly locked on the mountains that marked the border of the world’s newest country. From our vantage point, on a rocky plateau overlooking the Nile, we could see small villages on the plain below. It all looked so wild and untamed, and as the mountains grew bigger so did their air of menace. Beyond them, only thirty miles to the north, lay a warzone.

  Nestled in the mountains’ black foothills I could just make out the telecommunications masts of the border post of Nimule, and the columns of faint smoke rising from a village fire somewhere between us and the hills. As we progressed across the plain, through elephant grass twelve feet high, and waded waist deep across a tributary from the river, the smoke grew thicker, and at last we emerged to find what I knew instantly was a refugee camp on the cusp of great crisis.

  Nyamanzi had once been a tiny village, like any of the other ramshackle ones we had stopped at on our way north. Now, it was a refugee camp threatening to outsize Adjumani itself. The line of UN-issued shacks, made from plastic sheeting over simple wooden frames, was only the beginning – Nyamanzi was vast, and only growing bigger. Boston and I stopped to take it all in. From the shadows beneath the plastic sheeting, countless South Sudanese eyes watched us. Boston was shaking his head, half in sadness and half in barely controlled rage. ‘It happens every time,’ he uttered, and I could feel his frustration: he had lived through innumerable moments like this, Africa forever fighting against itself.

  The fighting on the other side of the border was now four months old, and many of the refugees had been here since the beginning. There were now almost twenty thousand refugees from across the border, mostly ethnic Dinkas from South Sudan’s Jonglei state – and they were still coming. Between the clusters of shacks, Boston and I saw buses and trucks rolling through the red dirt, hundreds of other refugees disembarking with plastic chairs, mattresses, cooking pots and cases containing their most precious possessions – anything they had been able to save. As we wandered, we found no structure to the site. This was a city that had come into being overnight, without planning or order. There were no fences, no roads, just arbitrary groupings of families, friends, and work colleagues, each demarking their little piece of land with sticks or lines etched in the dirt.

  At last, after picking our way through the tents for an hour, we came to the centre of the encampment. Here, bordered by yet more tents, a clear patch of land had become a designated market. The stalls that lined the square were not run by refugees, but by entrepreneurial Ugandans – the kind who had seen, in the sudden influx of desperate South Sudanese, less a humanitarian catastrophe and more an opportunity for commerce. Still, they were providing a service vital to the camp. The stalls here sold firewood, nails, soap, bags of rice – as well as hazardous-looking home-made phone chargers, powered by motorcycle b
atteries.

  We were about to disappear back into the sea of tents when I saw a sign outside one tent offering the services of a barber, another where people sat at white plastic tables drinking tea, and another where pretty little girls could get beads and hair clips. Boston and I lingered, watching one girl having her hair put in braids.

  ‘Life goes on, Levison,’ Boston announced, and then it was time to go.

  Ever since Kampala, I had been catching up on the official news whenever I could. What had begun as political posturing and backbiting had rapidly spiralled into ethnic violence, with the Nuer ‘rebels’ regrouping in the north and attacking key towns along what reporters were calling ‘ethnic fault lines’. Towns such as Bor, Bentiu and Malakal had ended up becoming front lines and had changed hands several times over the winter. The rebellion had, if anything, only grown stronger since then, as the government forces pushed the so-called rebels out into the bush. Army defections became rife, with entire battalions moving over to rebel command – and others simply going rogue to become independent militias. The Jonglei, Unity, and Upper Nile states had been the worst affected – and these were the ones that straddled that nemesis of all Nile explorers, the vast Sudd swamp. The Sudd had been my greatest worry on undertaking this expedition; I had always known that, if I reached it too late, I risked the rainy season making it impassable. But now there was another variable to add to the mix: the very impassability of the Sudd made it a perfect base for rebel militias. When not attacking towns, they were said to disappear and melt into the emptiness of the Sudd where they could hide amongst the papyrus for weeks on end, waiting for new supplies of ammunition and armaments to be smuggled across the nation’s fluid borders in the north and east. There was so much information and misinformation flying around that to see a full picture was impossible, but it seemed that northern Sudan – led by Omar al-Bashir, who had himself come to power in a military coup twenty-five years before – was covertly supporting the rebels, whilst publicly giving shows of solidarity with Kiir’s government. In the east, meanwhile, the Ethiopians had adopted a neutral, mediatory stance, offering to hold peace talks – while Uganda, and even the USA, were sending in troops in support of the government. Hundreds of Ugandan soldiers had already lost their lives patrolling the roads and towns along the border they shared, and the USA had seen several of its own killed in the fighting when they attempted to extricate American citizens trapped inside the constantly shifting zone. More than a million people had already fled their homes, either seeking sanctuary across the border or settling in Internally Displaced Persons’ camps. With the country’s infrastructure rapidly collapsing, and the economy barely functioning, famine was being spoken about by the NGOs on the border. And, though the UN were involved in trying to broker a ceasefire, this was proving more problematic than it ought to have – the head of its mission, Hilde Johnson, had been accused of siding with the Nuer rebels instead of taking the UN’s mediatory stance when it transpired she had once been the lover of the rebel ‘leader’, Riek Machar himself.