The Lunatic Express

by Carl Hoffman

  “And the Mungiki is there and he finds you,” Phillip said. “If you don’t pay the Mungiki one hundred shillings you will have your head cut off. Yes, you will lose your head.”

  “How about reporting the Mungiki to the police?” I said.

  Kimani and Phillip exploded in laughter. “The police are with Mungiki! No, you must pay always!”

  Inspectors and matatu owners and robbers all demanded their share. It was Phillip’s job, as the tout, to take care of everyone; even as he had been cajoling passengers on board and hiring other touts he had been keeping track of the police and the Mungiki and every other sticky finger and greased palm.

  Kimani’s matatu had been robbed at gunpoint three times. “Three or four men with guns get on the bus,” he said, looking serious, “and they say ‘move over.’ So you move over and they drive the bus to a remote place in the woods and steal everything. The first time, I was very worried. The gun was pointed at my head and it was even cocked. But now, hey, I just move over and let them work.” To make the robberies even worse, since the robbers stole the day’s proceeds, Kimani and Phillip did not get their day’s pay.

  It was a vicious racket, a Hobbesian struggle to survive. Everyone was guilty and no one was innocent, not even Kimani and Phillip. The fares they charged changed according to the situation, price-gouging as art. “We double the fare in the rain,” Phillip said, laughing. “The sun is bad for the matatu driver!” They boosted it at rush hour. They had their freelance touts attract passengers at forty shillings and then made the duped passengers pay sixty, claiming the freelancers were unauthorized. “If they refuse to pay, we don’t let them off the matatu,” Kimani said, giggling and taking a swig of Tusker beer. “They must pay!”

  Finally, at 1:00 a.m., they saw me into a concrete room with no running water behind a steel gate in a world of mud. I was delirious with fatigue, beaten up, my neck, back, knees, and shoulders aching; hungry for solitude and quiet and cleanliness; my nerves frayed from the constant jangling noise and crowds. Kimani and Phillip had four more days to go before the weekend. Another seventy or eighty hours of work for fifty bucks. And Wambugo had been working without sleep or food for two days and two nights, living purely on mira. And yet they all had been in a good mood, laughing and joking and eager to have another round.

  I passed out, woke, and felt an overpowering need to escape. I threw my clothes on and stumbled out into a light rain. It was still dark and I didn’t really know where I was. Somewhere near Ngong Town. But, no worries. I stood on the side of the road and a pair of headlights swerved around a corner, flashed, and I held out my hand. A matatu screeched to a stop. I piled in, and there was Shakira wiggling her hips on the video. It was 6:00 a.m. The smallest bill I had was a hundred-shilling note. The tout took it and offered no change; this time I knew better than to argue. Thirty minutes later we were stuck in traffic a half mile from the train station. And I felt like I was about to snap, was snapping. The matatu stank so badly I couldn’t breathe. Hips and shoulders pressed against either side of me. The DVD—now it was Diddy—was deafening. I had been in the thick of it for twenty-four straight hours, nothing but crowds and their heavy, musky odor, a constant barrage of noise and people and mud and jostling. “Let me out!” I barked to the tout, and I leapt from the minivan as if I had been held underwater for too long. And never had I been so grateful for a dim, cheap hotel room. I whipped my clothes off and lay sprawled naked across the bed. The room was silent. Still. Clean. Secure. I was alone. It was an almost unspeakable luxury.

  An ocean ferry capsized in a fierce Atlantic storm off West Africa and plunged beneath the waves in minutes, trapping hundreds of screaming passengers, and rescuers said Friday that more than 760 people were believed to have been killed. Just thirty-two people aboard the ship were known to have survived the disaster late Thursday night, some by clinging to the sides of the overturned craft.

  —Los Angeles Times, September 28, 2002

  FIVE

  That Train Is Very Bad

  IN ONE OF THE QUIRKS of African travel, there are few direct, nonstop international flights between major African cities. Which is why, to get to Bamako, Mali, from Nairobi, I had to fly through Addis Ababa, and the leg from Addis was twenty-four hours late. Around me in the gate were the shock troops of globalization. Groups of Chinese, the new merchant class of Africa, in black shoes and white socks and formless brown jackets clutching Naugahyde briefcases. Filipinos in flip-flops and T-shirts. And ten Sri Lankan seamen, bound for a ship in Dakar, Senegal, in crisp polo shirts and ironed blue jeans. “We will land and go straight to the ship,” said their leader, the first engineer. “We’ll go to Poland and then the Caribbean; it will be at least seven months, maybe a year, before we see our families again.”

  “That must be hard,” I said, thinking of my own life and family, and how despite all my travels I’d never been gone more than two months before.

  “Yes,” he said, “but remember: you never know when you will die, so you must be happy all the time.”

  We dropped into Bamako at 2:00 a.m. and even in the middle of the night it was searingly hot, baking, in a city that looked like it had been hit by a bomb. Potholes and dust and dim lights, the smell of smoke and garbage and bodies asleep on every sidewalk, in front of stores, as if they’d been out walking and had just suddenly collapsed. I’d come for a train: the line from Bamako to Dakar was legendarily bad. And the moment I stepped out of my hotel in the morning I was adopted by Guindo, one of the city’s thousands of licensed guides. “What do you want?” he said. “A trek in Dogan country? Buy some masks?”

  “Can you help me get tickets on the train to Dakar?” I said.

  For a second his face looked blank. “Yes,” he said, “it’s maybe possible. But I think that train is very bad.”

  If the city seemed hot and ramshackle in the night, it was fifty times worse in the day. Guindo walked fast, and we skipped past piles of rubble and garbage and smoldering fires and broken-down cars filled with sand, past legless and blind beggars in 120-degree heat that was so sharp it burned my skin and mouth, through dirt streets thronged with men in pointy-toed slippers and women in silk turbans. There was nowhere to hide or to get away from the chaos and throngs. Crowds and heat and dust and noise, the streets bumper-to-bumper with crooked matatus with no glass in the windows, the smell of excrement and sweat and smoke.

  The railway terminal was empty; the train wasn’t here, and no one knew when it would return or depart. “No one knows anything,” said a man Guindo cornered. “There are no fixed dates. Maybe it will leave on Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday. You will know when the train is here when the train is here. You must come every day. My friend, this train is very bad.”

  “I don’t think you should take the train,” said Guindo, as we walked away. “I think it’s not too safe. How about a bus?”

  When I insisted on the train, Guindo said he would go to the station every day and, when the moment was right, get my ticket. He wanted the money—about thirty dollars—up front, and I reluctantly handed it over back at my hotel. “You don’t worry, Carl! I will call you.”

  It was Monday; the train was officially scheduled to leave on Wednesdays for the forty-eight-hour journey, but I figured, if anything, it would be leaving late. I called Guindo late the next morning to see if he was on the case. “No, Carl, the train is still nowhere,” he said. But at 5:00 p.m. my phone rang. “The train is almost here,” he said, “and it is leaving soon. Tonight. I have your ticket! You must be fast; I will pick you up right now.”

  Guindo arrived a few minutes later in a taxi so broken I had to hold the door shut. It was over a hundred degrees outside, and I was drenched. It hurt to breathe. This time the station was crawling with people and noise, bursting with heat. A sea of African humanity: women sitting on blankets, guarding huge piles of sacks filled with potatoes and mangoes, covered the platform, their batik boubou dresses a riot of blues and golds, their heads wrapped in scarves
, with dangling gold earrings and hennaed feet. Men in shimmering green kaftans with bell-shaped sleeves lugged boxes filled with what looked like salad bowls. The train wasn’t here and the sun was dropping. The platform reeked of rotten vegetables and fruit and sweat. Trash two inches deep covered the wavering tracks, and vendors hawked padlocks, paper fans, cheap flashlights, and little rolls of toilet paper.

  Suddenly I heard a grinding, rumbling, clanging sound. “The fucking train,” said Guindo, patting me on the shoulder. “Good luck, Carl,” he said, vanishing into the dim, crowded evening, like he was running away from the police. The train inched slowly in. It looked a thousand years old. Like it had been thrown off a cliff, beaten up, torn apart for scrap, and pasted together again. It had rusty holes in its sides and mud spattered across its flanks. I’d asked for a second-class ticket, which Guindo had bought me. The tickets actually had seat assignments, and when I fought my way through bodies and noise and boxes and crates and bags, my seat, my row, was destroyed. The seatbacks were there, but not the seats. I looked around; there were no others. An old man, toothless, thin, desiccated-looking in a soiled shirt, grabbed me by the arm. “Follow me,” he said. We climbed and squeezed out of the carriage, walked past two cars, and into one marked FIRST CLASS in faded letters. Its condition was identical to the other, except it had cabins, each with four bunks topped with a yellow, pitted, crumbling rectangle of foam.

  Night had fallen. The inside of the train was pitch black, and as hot as a toaster oven. People were shouting and loading goods through the window. Mosquitoes buzzed around my face. In the lower bunk next to me sat a thin, dark man from Dakar, returning there after a trip buying dozens of big clay pots to resell in the capital. At 7:30 p.m. the train jerked, slid forward, jerked to a halt again. I leaned out of the open window in the hallway, gasping for air. More people, more shouting, more boxes and bags loaded through the doorways and windows. The train lurched forward again, and this time didn’t stop. We were on our way, moving at ten miles an hour. Suddenly the power came on, the dim lights in the hall and my couchette revealing a world of dirt. My mattress was so stained it looked like a bullet riddled soldier had died on it. The walls were smeared with brown. Piles of dust covered the floor. Everything was broken, crooked, askew. A thin man in a shimmering green robe and beard arrived, and in the room he piled ice chests and gallon jugs of water, a single-burner stove, plastic trash bags, and bundles wrapped in twine.

  I had to pee badly, but the bathroom at the end of the hall was filled to the ceiling with boxes. Desperate, with my roommates talking out in the hall, I slid the door of my couchette closed, turned off the light, perched on the edge of my bed, and pissed out the window.

  Suddenly there was a tussle, and down the hall marched a short, stocky bulldog of a man in rolled-up blue jeans and a plaid shirt, crashing through the hallways like it was an NFL line of scrimmage. He was five foot seven, 200 pounds. “Confusion!” he yelled, when he burst into the room and saw me. “You speak English? Where are you going and where is your home?”

  “Yes. Dakar,” I said. “The United States.”

  “I am Papa-si!” he said, thrusting out a big, warm, dry hand, before crashing down the hall again for more bags and boxes.

  I felt exhausted, dirty, overwhelmed, and lay down on the mattress, imagining malaria and bedbugs and robbers, and drifted off to sleep to the rocking and jerking.

  I WOKE UP AT SIX in the morning. The night had seemed endless. The car’s passengers had been agitated for hours. We stopped every twenty minutes, and so many vendors got on and yelled and banged on the windows it sounded like ocean waves of voices crashing on the beach. Papa-si rearranged his boxes throughout the night, each time climbing up to the shelf above the hallway by boosting himself up on my bed. But as the hours passed the next day I settled into the rhythm of the clacking rails and gave myself to the heat and dirt. The sky was pure blue, the countryside desiccated brown and yellow knee-high grass dotted with leafless baobab trees, with sharp, high, flat escarpments in the distance—a hot, baked world that felt like Lucifer’s anvil. The Senegalese pot trader made thick, syrupy sweet tea, a ritual of boiling and pouring and boiling and pouring in two different teapots, over the stove teetering on the floor of the room, a fur fetish strapped tightly to his bicep. We passed village compounds of conical mud huts with peaked thatch roofs fenced with upright sticks, and paused at small brick station houses that must have been a hundred years old.

  At a place called Keyes, statistically the hottest location in Africa, with an average temperature in April—now—of 108 degrees, a man jumped on the train and stole a bag of charcoal; there were shouts, and a policeman emerged from the train and chased him down, returning with the five-foot-long sack on his head.

  By the afternoon it felt searing, leaning out of the windows—attached to which were signs admonishing DO NOT LEAN OUT OF THE WINDOW in French, English, German, and Spanish—it felt like bending over a barbecue. “Mon ami!” Papa-si would yell, every time he looked at me, giving me a thumbs-up. In the morning and afternoon and evening, men prayed on rugs in the hallways. When we rounded bends I could see hundreds of boys and men on the train’s roof. I wanted to go up to talk to them, but a guard on the train stopped me. Before every station they would stream off into the bush at the edge of villages; at Coulombo there were so many, soldiers and police streamed after them. They caught an unlucky few. I watched as one policeman held a man by the collar and kneed him repeatedly in the back, marching him into the heat.

  As the sun dropped, I discovered two men selling cold beers out of a cooler in the next car. I bought a round and settled on the floor of the vestibule, my feet dangling out of the train. Moussa was long and lean, wearing jeans and sandals, and he was returning to Dakar with crates and crates of mangoes that filled the bathroom—a journey he’d been making twice a week for five years. Which meant that he practically lived on the train, spending at least four days a week rumbling through the heat and dust. There was no moon in the black sky, and we clanked along at ten miles an hour, the Southern Cross just out of the open door, on the horizon. A man slept curled on a plastic sack next to us; we were squeezed together, our legs touching. It was hellish and filthy. But Moussa was happy; he rifled through a burlap sack and brought out a one-burner propane stove and two green chipped enamel teapots, and the Malian tea ritual began. Boil and pour. Boil and pour, always from two feet in the air—even on the jolting train he didn’t spill a drop. “The first is bitter, like life,” he said, pouring the tea through a strainer. “The second is easy, like friendship. And the third—ahh, the third is sweet, like love.” He made tea, two cups at a time, poured into shot glasses on a silver tray, for all of us crowded in the heat and dirt of the rattling vestibule. Free of charge, of course.

  By legend, at least, this was one of the worst trains in Africa, maybe the world. It was definitely hot, crowded, and broken. But it was also beginning to feel surprisingly pleasant; the heat, dried mud, and crowds simply stopped being remarkable, stopped being a thing that bothered me. Or I should say, once I stopped fighting them and surrendered to it, it seemed like nothing. It was part of the landscape. I was covered with a layer of sweat and grime. So what? Everyone else was, too. I stank. So did everyone else. As for safety, a hot, filthy, crowded African train brought to mind thievery and assault; I’d made sure my switchblade was close at hand, open and tucked against my hip as I’d drifted off to sleep that first night. Which spoke to my own prejudices and fears more than anything else, and made me remember something my father had once told me. We were driving through a “bad” neighborhood in Washington when I was a child and it was summer, the car windows open. Suddenly I’d started to roll mine up, fearful of assault. “You don’t need to worry,” my father had said. “These people are no different from you and me, except they’re poor. That’s all.” He’d been right, of course. Now I was on a barely functioning train in a place that looked and felt like Hades, but I felt safe, surrounded by peo
ple I’d known only twenty-four hours, and Moussa and Papa-si and the fetish guy in my cabin were all looking out for me, and they for each other. I was happy, losing myself in the African train and the African landscape. And hungry: whenever we’d stop I’d hop off the train and buy whatever was offered—grilled chicken and greens and bright red Baggies of frozen hibiscus juice, and sweet syrupy coffee, and never worried about my luggage, which nobody touched.

  In the afternoon of my second day, I fell into conversation with Lamine Ly, the fourth man in my compartment. The intense heat of the past two days was lessening; we were 200 kilometers from Dakar and the Atlantic Ocean, and hints of an Atlantic breeze passed through the windows every now and then. Ly was tall and thin, with a gray goatee and wearing a shimmering green kaftan, and there was something elegant about him. He was a lawyer in Dakar, he said, fingering a set of brown prayer beads, and he had a friend who worked on the train and had let him on for free. Where was I going? What was I doing? Why was I here? He was full of questions. And then, he said, “Do you believe in God?”

  I’d seen him praying regularly, assiduously rinsing his feet and hands with bottled water before kneeling on a rug in the hallway. But I looked him in the eye and answered honestly. “No,” I said, “I don’t.”

  He nodded, fingered his beads, looked at me with gray eyes. “Is it true that in America homosexuals live together?”

  “Yes,” I said, “it’s true. Some do.”

  “And some of them even adopt children and raise them?”

  “Yes,” I said, preparing myself for a tirade, assuming any Malian man in a caftan clutching prayer beads would be violently conservative. But he only nodded, fingered his beads, and thought.

  And then said, “People must live the way they must live. America must be a great country. I would like to see New York. My son is picking me up at the station in Dakar; someday I would like to take him there.”