Walking the Nile

by Levison Wood

  ‘It must have been hell,’ I said, but Boston wasn’t listening. I found him lingering behind a smashed brick wall, where he was considering taking a piss into John Garang’s old toilet. It was only that image that brought me back to reality. It was time to continue our walk.

  Severino left us on the seventh day. We had come through the national park, the path like a tunnel beneath thick baobab trees with branches tangled in vines. After a time, we were able to walk directly along the banks of the river, and I was glad of it. Severino had told us that the area was still pockmarked with landmines, but on the riverside we would be safe. Huge boulders dotted the banks, Nile monitors skittering away at the sound of our footfalls, and solitary huts made from dried grass and wattle looked like constructions from some bygone age.

  Severino had had enough, and I was not sad to see him go. There was something resigned about him that made me think he was dangerous – here was a man who truly did not care – and, as we watched him hitch a lift back towards Nimule, I felt a weight lifted off my shoulders. There were still a hundred miles between us and Juba, and though Boston quickly found a replacement as porter – Martin, a village pastor, agreed to help shoulder our packs further north – the sense that I was truly alone on this trek had never been keener. I found myself walking, for long miles, ahead of Boston and Martin. Occasionally, I’d hear them having a heated theological debate, always laughing, always smiling – but I was in no mood for conversation. Only a few weeks ago, I would have loved to listen to Boston, the fervent anti-religionist, and Martin, a devout Creationist, battle over whether Adam and Eve were black or white – but now I shrank from their arguments. They seemed so frivolous. I couldn’t stop my mind from flitting back to that Ugandan hillside where Matt had died, nor flitting forward to what we were walking into. At every village we passed, the news from the north intensified. As the road progressed, we saw more people fleeing. Toyota minivans seemed to be the exodus vehicle of choice, piled up with mattresses, chairs, tables, cooking pots, goats and entire families. The mangled wrecks of pick-ups, buses and lorries littered the roadsides, and beyond, in the bush the entire landscape was filled with landmines. More families than I cared to think about had lost their lives in traffic accidents, all in an attempt to flee the mounting hostilities. It was those hostilities towards which I was willingly walking – and, for the first time in my journey, I began to question the sanity of what I was doing. Matt Power had already lost his life, all because of my indulgent quest to be the first man to walk the Nile. Was I really so selfish as to ask Boston to risk his life as well, or risk the lives of any of the other companions we would meet along the way? I began to think about home more and more often: of the family and friends whose lives I was missing out on; of the loved ones who must have forgotten about me while I was here, walking – just walking. I wanted to be in a world in which I didn’t stand out. I craved the anonymity of London’s streets, where police didn’t stop you for your papers, and you didn’t have to fear that the ground beneath your feet was littered with explosives.

  At the edge of the road, where I had stopped to take in the view, Boston and Martin caught up with me. They’d been aggressively arguing over the age of the Earth.

  ‘What is it, Lev?’

  I didn’t want to tell him the truth – that, for the first time, I was tempted by the thought of giving up – so instead, I pointed to the north. Over the horizon, the black storm clouds were gathering, heralding the rainy season to come. We were close to the borders of the vast swamplands of the Sudd now, and when those rains began to fall, the country would become impassable.

  ‘Then we’d best be walking!’ declared Boston and, for the first time, marched ahead of me down the road.

  On the 122nd day of the journey, Boston and I – having said goodbye to Martin on the road – pushed our way into the outskirts of Juba. If Kampala is a teenager of a capital city, then Juba is a petulant infant. Founded in 1922 by a group of Greek traders who came to supply the British Army camped along the Nile, it was one of the most fiercely contested battlegrounds in the Sudanese Civil Wars, and became the official capital of South Sudan after the peace agreement of 2005. Dusk was hardening into night as Boston and I entered, and everywhere we saw the detritus and filth left behind by the fleeing population. The first casualty of war, it seemed, was not the truth – it was hygiene. Piles of plastic bottles were strewn among the shanties, Marabou storks looking like pterodactyls plucked from some forgotten world as they picked through the waste looking for anything edible.

  At my side, Boston said nothing. Perhaps his silence was the most fearsome thing of all. The walk really had begun to feel like a march into the bowels of hell. We had reached the frontier, the very edge of safety. Juba had been a battlefield only four months before, with thousands killed in the streets. No sooner had we crossed through the first shanties, to see the great conical mound of Rajaf Hill marking the southern boundary of town, and Jebel – a craggy ridge to the west – domineering the skyline, we began to see the soldiers. The streets were filled with SPLA. Machine-gun posts and sangars – temporary fortifications constructed from sandbags and stones – sat on every corner. Every hundred metres, figures lurched out of the shadows to demand our papers and send us on our way with a warning: the nightly curfew, designed to keep combatants from moving under the cover of darkness, was about to come into effect. Whole areas of the city were off-limits to civilians, and anyone caught taking photographs would be immediately arrested, perhaps even shot.

  By 7 pm, we had entered the old town and reached Juba’s bridge over the Nile – and there, to my relief, Andrew Allam was waiting for us, just as had been promised. I was grateful to see him. Allam might have been a government agent, but the government was in control of Juba and the further we walked into the city the tighter the security became. Enthusiastically, Allam shook my hand and guided us towards the iron bridge. One of the oldest landmarks in Juba, it had been built by the British long before the civil wars tore the country apart, and, Allam insisted, was testament to the good work the British had done for the region. This bridge was the only crossing to span the Nile in two thousand miles and was part of the reason Juba had grown from trading post to capital city in only eighty years.

  ‘You’ve had no problems?’

  ‘Some,’ I said, ‘but nothing we couldn’t handle.’ The lower-ranking soldiers who had stopped us were the most problematic: they seemed to think they had to shout first, ask questions later – and, if you showed any fear, they were quick to exploit it. Along the way, I had learned that the only way to deal with them was to demand name and rank, do my best impression of an indignant commander; tell the bastard to stand up straight, smarten his collar, and trust that they fell in line. Officers, I had found, were much easier to deal with: all they wanted was a nauseating show of servility and they usually let us go.

  ‘Well,’ said Allam, ‘you have nothing to fear for now! Everything’s in order. You’ll find Juba a calm enough place, once you—’

  We hadn’t even set foot on the bridge when Allam’s voice faltered and, out of the gathering darkness, appeared two unmarked Land Cruisers, gleaming in black. With a screech of tyres, they drew alongside us, the first banking slightly as if to bar the way ahead.

  Allam’s voice returned. ‘Stand still,’ he whispered – and, for the first time, I heard real nerves behind his words.

  The doors of the first car opened, and a shady-looking man stepped out. At first, I didn’t know why I found this man any more unnerving than the soldiers who had so regularly been stopping us. Perhaps it was because he wasn’t wearing any uniform. As he studied us, the doors of the second car opened and two other figures emerged, the first a particularly vicious-looking Dinka – with scars across his forehead. In dark sunglasses and a scuffed leather jacket, he didn’t look the sort of privileged officer who ought to have been stepping out of a gleaming new Land Cruiser, but it took me a moment to properly understand: these men were not soldi
ers at all; they were members of some other, shadowy security force. South Sudan’s secret police.

  The man in the leather jacket strode towards Allam, who held up his hands. In seconds, they were barking at each other in a language neither Boston nor I understood. I was beginning to curse myself for bringing Boston here – not only for putting him in danger, but for fooling myself that I could do this without a committed, local guide. As Allam and the man engaged in heated debate, I flashed a look around. Apart from us, the bridge was silent. Beneath us, the waters of the Nile rushed by. There was nowhere else to turn.

  In an instant, the security agent rounded on me. For the first time, he spoke in English – broken and slow. ‘How long you have in South Sudan?’

  I fumbled for my passport and the visa stamp within. ‘Two or three months,’ I began, handing it over.

  ‘It says here you entered on 26 March.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  He snapped my passport shut in a flourish that seemed to betray some hint of triumph. ‘That wasn’t three months ago. That was only two weeks.’

  I could see Allam’s face turning to stone, but I persisted: ‘I meant I will spend two or three months here . . .’

  ‘Your story doesn’t calculate. You told me you had been here two or three months.’

  ‘No, I said—’

  He cut me off with a victorious snarl. ‘You’re lying. I can see this. Your story does not calculate.’

  Allam responded to him in the Juba Arabic. By the tone of his voice, I knew that he was flustered – and, all the while, the agent’s eyes remained on me.

  ‘Are you saying my English is bad?’

  ‘I am a colonel in the SPLA, comrade,’ Allam interjected. ‘We are brothers in arms! I have been serving this country for twenty-five years. The khawaja is just a little simple . . .’

  But this final plea for my stupidity didn’t pacify the agent. ‘Get in the car,’ he said, indicating Boston too. ‘In silence. You are all under arrest.’

  For a moment, I only hung there in disbelief. Then, Allam mouthed two words: ‘Do it.’ To see Allam suddenly so servile left me with no misapprehensions. Boston and I got into the car. In the back, as the agents bickered among themselves, Allam kept his head down and whispered from the side of his mouth: ‘These people are stupid, Lev. They don’t know anything except paranoia. Just stick to the story.’

  ‘What story?’ I snapped. ‘I told them the truth.’

  ‘Just keep it simple. They’ll kill you if they think you’re taking the piss out of them.’

  And as the Dinka climbed into the driver’s seat, one of the other spies forcing his way into the back, I heard Boston mutter under his breath: ‘These Dinka, Lev. They have no education.’

  It wasn’t until the Land Cruiser was pulling away that I saw both men in the car with us were wearing pistols at their sides. Outside, the darkness had solidified, and the hulking towers of new-town Juba were subsumed in the night. The 4×4 swung around, returning the way it had come. We were, I understood, bound for the centre of town. The light from street fires, where locals were burning rubbish, plastered itself across the glass. More than once, I saw dark figures at the edges of the road. Lone electric lights flickered in open doorways, while cows and goats grazed between the buildings, picking through piles of human excrement.

  Even before the war, this had been a frontier town, the government desperately trying to drag it into the 21st century. Many of the shanties had been bulldozed to make way for development: NGO compounds, banks, shops and more vulgar government ministries. Half-built high-rises sat uncomfortably between the more traditional South Sudanese dwellings, unfinished since the boom years that had followed independence. There was a tragic air about this landscape: Juba, only a year before was a boom town – a frontier settlement full of Africans of every nation trying to make a buck. Ugandans ran the taxis and motorcycles, and the fruit markets. Somalis ran the logistics and foreign exchange, Indians ran the garages and shops, Chinese built the road and factories and Eritreans ran the hotels. Juba, which should have been South Sudan’s shining beacon to the world, was being reclaimed by the wild.

  I whispered to Allam out of the side of my mouth: ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘The Blue House, Lev. Security HQ.’

  A kernel of fear hardened in my stomach. I knew of the Blue House only from hearsay. Its colloquial name didn’t sound terrible, but even so it inspired dread in the minds of the South Sudanese. It was an infamous construct, known to expats as the ‘Ministry of Torture’, and sat in the centre of town, its innards hidden from view by reflective glass windows and shiny blue walls.

  ‘What for?’ I asked – but my only reply was a glare from the Dinka guard at my side, and a deliberate flashing of his pistol.

  At around 9 pm, the Land Cruiser entered a stretch of highway cloaked in absolute darkness. On either side, the buildings had been blacked out. What few streetlights remained had been turned off, and even the cars that we passed moved with their headlights turned off. Five hundred yards on, the Land Cruiser slowed to a halt and, as the Dinka driver emerged to get us out of the back, I saw the fortress of the Blue House itself. Its gates were surrounded by soldiers in a dizzying array of uniforms; some I took for SPLA, but others I didn’t recognise, and still more were in plain clothes, hanging around in packs along the edge of the road.

  Behind me, Boston stumbled up onto the road. Allam was protesting to the agents again, but his arguments fell on deaf ears; with few words, they directed us towards iron gates, where yet more soldiers manned a gunnery point. Moments later, the gates were open and we were through, shepherded into a black courtyard bordered by tall, concrete walls.

  ‘Sit down,’ one of the soldiers barked. In silence, we took seats on a cold, metal bench, watching as the other two agents disappeared into the building. At my side, Allam drew a cigarette from his pocket and fumbled to light it – but, in a flash, the Dinka guard ripped it from his lips and ground it beneath his heel, cursing in Arabic. I could only assume it was to do with the blackout engulfing these streets.

  The minutes stretched on, each one seemingly longer than the last. Boston, preternaturally quiet, had his gaze fixed on the floor and, every time I tried to get his attention, he seemed to inch further away. It was only now that my feelings of guilt truly solidified. I found myself thinking of Lily and his children in flashes: here was Jezu Adonis, wearily climbing out of bed; here, his daughter Aurore welcoming me to their house. I had been foolish in coming to South Sudan myself, but even more foolish in bringing Boston.

  Movement erupted in the corner of my eye. The barriers were opening again, and through them marched six or seven men, with their hands tied behind their backs. I took them to be Nuer, captives from the opposing side of the conflict, and watched as more armed guards followed after. Only twenty metres from where we stood, one of the soldiers barked and the Nuer were forced to their knees, heads bowed against the compound wall. Now, they were lost to the shadows on the fringes of the courtyard. I could no longer see them; all I could see were the soldiers bringing batons back to rain down blows. For a short time the air was alive with screams of pain, and for a long time after all I could hear were muffled groans.

  Allam could not meet my eyes, almost as if he was embarrassed. ‘You don’t fuck around here,’ he muttered, darkly. ‘If they torture us, Lev, don’t say a thing.’

  For the first time, Boston lifted his head, his eyes flared. This, I remembered, would not have been the first time he was tortured.

  Moments later, the doors opened and our government captors returned. This time, they were not alone. Accompanying them came a corpulent officer, dressed in army fatigues. As he approached, the soldier ordered us to stand. Warily, we obeyed. The fat chief had come bearing a torch, and one after another he focused it on our eyes.

  ‘Why were you at the bridge?’ he demanded.

  ‘We were crossing it . . .’

  ‘You were filming,’
he declared.

  Behind him, one of the Dinka lifted my backpack and spilled its contents onto the ground. There, among all our camping gear and ration packs, rolled the camera, small laptop and recording equipment I was using to chronicle the expedition. The agents, I saw, were already holding my journals in their hands.

  ‘You were recording the bridge. The artillery pieces. Why?’

  I opened my mouth to respond, only to be cut off again.

  ‘What if we were to come to England and take pictures of bridges there? What would your government think? Why are you here, disrespecting the sovereignty of South Sudan?’

  I wanted to shout out, to tell him he could take all the pictures of English bridges he wanted, that we were only passing through – but the absurdity of the notion stalled me. What kind of a fool would be simply ‘passing through’ Juba at a time like this? I floundered for the words and, before I could find them, another officer had emerged from the doors behind.

  In the edges of the courtyard, the groaning of the captive Nuers went on.

  The officer who approached was evidently superior to the ones whose faces I could not see for the torchlight dazzling my eyes. He was dressed in smart plain clothes and shiny black shoes, the mark of the African spymaster, and, as he approached, the agents who had apprehended us stepped aside.

  At the new colonel’s gesture, the agents collected my camera, laptop and Dictaphones together, scrabbling through the packs to make certain there was nothing they had missed. From a pocket, one of them retrieved another digital memory card, the one that held all my photographs of Lake Victoria and the journey north: photographs of Kampala, of Kyoga, of Murchison Falls and Matt Power.

  ‘You are free to go . . .’ he told us.