The Lunatic Express

by Carl Hoffman

  As dusk fell we stood in the hallway leaning out of the window, while the train rattled slowly into Dakar. It was a world of sand and block houses and warrens clustered together, smoke and fires and drying laundry. We inched through it all at five miles an hour for almost two hours, and when the sun dropped it was all candlelight and kerosene lamps and market stalls pressed so close to the train we literally scraped against them. Oddly, I felt sad, sad that a grimy and uncomfortable journey was ending. Except that I’d become used to it, inured to it all, had made friends, connected to people, and it had ultimately become a pleasant sojourn through Africa that I was loath to end. But end it did. Somewhere in the suburbs Ly jumped off and asked me to pass him his bags through the window, and introduced me to his son. Half an hour later we stopped. No station—just sand and fires and smoke and cool Atlantic winds and thousands of dark figures pressing in on the train. I grabbed a taxi, and the minute the door closed I was enveloped in silence and stillness, and thought of all those people out there who would never get a break from it. And a few minutes later, in my hotel, I turned the shower as hot as it would go and stood under the water sudsing myself over and over again, watching a black stream of water swirl down the drain. It was a cheap hotel room—thirty dollars—but it seemed the most luxurious experience I could ever imagine. Yet a part of me wondered, imagining Ly in a noisy, cluttered home amid too many brothers and sisters and sons and uncles and aunts, who was happier.

  I’D TAKEN THE TRAIN from Bamako not just because it was so famously bad, but because it brought me to Dakar, from which a ship named the MV Le Joola had sailed six years before—and sunk in the second worst maritime disaster in history. The Aline Sitoe Diatta, its replacement, was leaving at 2:00 p.m. the next day. Surprisingly for the Third World, things had in fact changed after the Joola’s sinking—you couldn’t kill 1,800 people even in Senegal without people noticing. At a barred window to a room built in the twenty-foot-high concrete wall of Dakar’s port, I bought a third-class ticket on the afternoon’s departure. The smell of the Atlantic Ocean, mixed with peanuts roasting on vendors’ carts, wafted by on a cool breeze. Reminders of the Joola were everywhere, I couldn’t help feeling: my fellow passengers and I were held safely in a departure lounge and taken in groups of twenty by bus the 150 feet across the concrete dock to the Diatta, and escorted up the ferry ramp to the ship. Which was not just brand new, but spotless. Ships, all ships, are in a daily struggle against rust and corrosion, and this one didn’t have a single flake of rust on her sides or rails or decks. The chaos I’d read about on the Joola was nowhere in sight.

  I found my third-class seat—an airline-style reclining chair—three decks down, through a series of winding passageways all carpeted, and manned by stewards in white shirts and ties. Air conditioning made the room frigid, and a flat screen TV blared “Al Hamdoulilaha”—all praise be to God—over and over again, to revolving pictures of eagles in flight and snowy mountains and aqua icebergs and the Golden Gate Bridge at dawn. Men in kufi skull caps and flowing caftans, and women in turbans, plunked down and spread out, hoping to score a few extra seats. Two decks up, at the stern, I found a bar and white plastic benches overlooking the harbor, one of the busiest in the world. Tens of thousands of sacks of rice were piled on the docks, fifty feet high, and trucks were bringing more all the time; an army of men in robes and bare feet unloaded the trucks and stacked the pile higher. As the sun set, we edged away from the dock and steamed to sea. And, as everyone does on a ship, I leaned on the rail and watched its foamy wake as we rolled gently over the Atlantic.

  “This ship, you know,” said a man next to me, “is the replacement for one that sank. And I have ridden that ship many times.” His name was Zaid Zopol. He was a wandering minstrel, a street musician who spent six months of the year in Barcelona and six months in Africa, and though he was originally from Patagonia, Chile, he could have been from anywhere. He had long black hair in a ponytail, topped with a black cap, and wore a short black beard beneath vaguely Asiatic eyes. He wore an orange T-shirt and was draped with beads of beans and wood and cowrie shells, loose, yellow cotton pantaloons, and he stood clutching the hand of his girlfriend, a six-foot-tall Senegalese beauty in blue jeans, named Animata. “She is very frightened,” he said. “She cannot swim and she remembers the Joola.”

  Zopol spoke Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, Arabic, Italian, German, and Polish. He had been a journalist for two years in Chile, “but I am free and in my country you couldn’t say what you wanted,” so he’d taken off. “It was in India that I was reborn. All my bags were stolen. I had nothing. Nothing. I was so poor. And India is even more fucked up than Africa.” He’d spent five years wandering overland from Cairo to Cape Town, and had tried to pass from south Sudan into Uganda to see the Blue Nile. “But the border guards had never heard of Chile. They said it didn’t exist, so they kept me in a room for three days.” In Dakar he had met Animata. “She was eighteen, a kid. I talked and talked to her for months. Just talking. I didn’t touch her for years. It was slow, so slow. But I love her so much, so deeply.” Now he divided his time between Barcelona and Dakar, and the two of them were taking the ferry to Ziguinchor and then going to the beaches along the coast.

  “That ship, the Joola, was awful,” he said. “It was always so crowded. But she is so scared; she is stubborn and she won’t listen to me. This ship is good, safe, but she can barely breathe!” It was a weird sensation to be, once again, traveling on the replacement of the very same conveyance that had once been a disaster. The now dark, gently rolling Atlantic waves, the lights of the ship and the stars overhead and the fresh, humid air—they were the same ones the passengers had experienced on the Joola, only six years ago. A hair’s breadth, it seemed, was all that separated us. While I knew the basic story of the Joola, I didn’t yet know it intimately. I had the name and telephone number of a man in charge of the organization of survivors, in Ziguinchor, and I asked Zaid if he could help me find him and translate for me. My French was passable, barely, but not nearly good enough for such a nuanced task.

  “I will buy you dinner,” I said, “if you’ll help me.”

  “Deal,” Zaid said, sticking out his hand. The Diatta’s dining room was carpeted in red, with white linen tablecloths and waiters in ties and wine glasses on the table. Animata wouldn’t eat, though; she sat clutching Zaid’s hand, and every few minutes had to go outside to puke. The Diatta was hardly moving; it was seasickness as an expression of fear. Oddly, my cell phone was working, and when Zaid dialed Moosa Sissako, he answered. They spoke in fast French, and then Zaid handed me the phone. “Just tell him again who you are and what you want. I told him, but he doesn’t believe me; he thinks you are in the U.S.A. and he wants to understand that you are next to me. He speaks maybe a little English.”

  I took the phone, said hello, and said I was hoping to talk to a survivor from the Joola. Did he know any? Could he find one for me to talk to?

  “Yes,” he said, “I can find one for you. You must call me tomorrow afternoon.”

  I tossed and turned in the night, freezing, squished in my seat, feeling that I might be better off, safer, if I wasn’t so far down below. But the benches on deck were sopping with dew, so I stayed put. And in the morning we zigzagged through a narrow channel into the Casamance River, passed Karabane Island, and arrived in Ziguinchor around noon. It was steaming, oppressively hot. Dusty. A garden had been built on the shore as a memorial to the victims of the Joola; its gate, under a green arch, was locked, though, and it was overgrown, the concrete paths choked with weeds, the benches broken, the fountain empty. Zaid called Moossa, and we followed his directions, walking through the dirt to the back end of town, past donkey carts and piles of dust and litter. Finally we ended up at a concrete office building that seemed to be falling down. Some of its windows had no glass; the front door hinges were broken, the plaster ceiling inside was crumbling and hanging and covered with black mold.

  “Wait here,” a group o
f men said, and soon a tall man in a pink dress shirt and blue jeans arrived, carrying a notebook. “I’m Moussa,” he said. “Come.” We entered a closed office, piled with stacks of papers and file folders, its air conditioner humming, a man thumbing through piles of receipts and tapping at an adding machine. There was a knock at the door, and a survivor of the Joola named Pierre Colly came in. He was twenty-four, dark-skinned, sturdy, with an egg-shaped head and a white and blue striped polo shirt. I asked him to tell me about his trip on the Joola.

  He looked down at the floor. Said nothing. Looked at us, and then at Moussa, who nodded. Colly started talking.

  Six years earlier, on September 26, 2002, a day just like this one, he’d walked through Ziguinchor. It was painfully hot and humid. Chickens pecked in the dirt. Goats tethered to sticks nosed through piles of garbage. Under a hazy sky and a punishing sun, Ziguinchor had a forgotten, end-of-the-earth feeling—a place of unpaved lanes and palm trees covered with dust. Crumbling two-story stucco buildings with tile roofs and narrow balconies fronted the baking streets, a legacy of the town’s colonial Portuguese rulers. Lethargic donkeys pulled two-wheeled wooden carts, ignoring their driver’s cracking whips; the snapping seemed more habitual than insistent. He was nineteen, happy, privileged to be heading to Dakar that afternoon for another year of school with his older brother. Even better, this year they were taking the ferry up the coast, instead of making the punishing fifteen-hour overland journey packed in a battered Peugeot taxi. That trip could be harrowing: the taxis were old, crowded, and stifling, the roads unpaved and rough. And the drive required traversing the narrow country of Gambia, a gantlet of border guards and corrupt police and soldiers manning roadblocks, who routinely exacted bribes. Everyone wanted to take the ferry; Colly had spent three days fighting lines and cajoling at the ticket window. But finally he had them: two third-class seats on the Joola.

  He and his brother kicked through the dirt streets toward the wharf on the Casamance River, past market stalls overflowing with blue jeans and T-shirts and CDs and padlocks and enamel bowls. Near the river the smell of fish, glistening on ice under the sun, mixed with the scents of smoke and overripe fruit. Beyond the gates of the ferry terminal floated the Joola. She was made of steel, built in Germany, 260 feet long and, for Africa, still newborn—only twelve years old—with a high, sharp bow and modern lines. There, Colly and his brother found chaos. The Joola had a rated capacity of 580 passengers, but thousands of people were crowding the concrete pier trying to get on the ship; among them were some 400 students heading back to the capital for the start of the new school year.

  Colly and his brother grabbed a sandwich and walked up the ferry’s ramp at the stern. On deck, a rumor buzzed through the ship: a fisherman in a pirogue had bumped into the Joola’s bow, fallen overboard, and drowned. Sudden deaths are taken as omens in Africa; Colly had a funny feeling. He had never been on a big ship before, and as the Joola swung away from the paved mole and edged into the harbor, he leaned on the rail feeling the thrum of the engines under his feet, feeling excited and nervous.

  For two hours the Joola plowed slowly up the ever-widening river toward the Atlantic, sliding past traditional Diola fishing villages on the beach, each a collection of thatched huts around a large, cylindrical central hall. Porpoises played in the ship’s white, foamy wake, diving and arcing over the waves. Just a mile shy of the Atlantic lay Karabane. The island wasn’t an official port of call, but the ferry always stopped there. When the Joola motored into the harbor, Colly watched as pirogues swept out, laden with mangoes and coconuts for the market in Dakar, and hundreds of people fought to board. The Joola listed so far to starboard that the doors on the lower side couldn’t be opened, and the surging crowds clambered up the port gunwales into the ship. Some, Colly saw, couldn’t make the climb and gave up. As the sun set, the Joola zigzagged through the twisting shallows and channels and swung north, up Senegal’s Atlantic coast, carrying 1,046 officially ticketed passengers. Later counts would show that at least another 717 had either bribed soldiers for passage or simply snuck on board.

  At 10:00 p.m. the Joola radioed its office in Dakar. Seas were calm; all was normal. Passengers were drinking and dancing in the bar on the Joola’s top deck, and Colly and his brother were there. On ships you feel removed from the world. Time stops in a way it never quite does onshore. You relax; you have nowhere to go. A feeling of freedom sets in. A Senegalese musician played and sang, but there were so many people, the bar so crowded, Colly felt overwhelmed. He and his brother bought more sandwiches at the snack bar and went out on deck, gazing at the foamy wake in the darkness. “This makes me think of the Titanic!” Colly joked. “Can you imagine that happening to us now?” They laughed, shook their heads. Colly mentioned the Titanic because, deep down, he felt that tinge of anxiety we all feel on every ship passage, on every airplane flight. Who hasn’t walked down the Jetway and wondered if this flight will be his last? Who hasn’t boarded a ship and thought of the Titanic?

  It started raining, so Colly and his brother and their friends returned inside to the packed bar. Colly stood by one of its four-foot-square windows, his brother to his right, a girl he’d just met to his left. West African rhythms filled the room, every seat taken. Colly opened the window. Rain, now harder, flew in—the Joola had sailed into a squall—and he slid the glass closed again. Around the room, lives were being lived: Music. Drinking. Laughing. Flirting. Everything was normal, except for the wind and rain outside, and even that was normal.

  And then it wasn’t.

  Colly heard a noise. A loud CRACK! Felt a bump. Everyone heard it and felt it. “Q’est qui c’est passé? What’s happening?” The lights went off; the hot, crowded room plunged into darkness.

  Shouting.

  The lights went back on. “What’s happening? What’s happening?” cried a hundred voices. “Are we going to die?” Colly heard a woman near him scream.

  The Joola rolled heavily to port. Colly grabbed the window, the curtain, a seat that was bolted to the floor. From instinct he slid open the window as he watched people, bags, cans of Castel beer tumble across the floor. The lights went out again. Decks below him, the cars and trucks on the Joola’s ferry deck broke their chains, a sudden and massive shift in weight. When the untethered vehicles tumbled to port the Joola rolled faster, past the point of no return. Colly heard a noise, a noise he’ll never forget: the sound of thousands of tons of rushing water. He knew only this: the water had him, it held him, and it pulled him of the window and it was night and dark and raining and he saw the sky. He reached out, felt something solid, grabbed it, thought, I’d better stay here until it finishes, and then he realized it already had. The MV Le Joola floated upside down in the darkness.

  He saw something white. A light. He swam toward it, calling his brother’s name. He swam and swam, and called and called, in rain and wind and rough seas. He swam for fifteen minutes, until he came to a floating fish trap. Seven people were clinging to it, and it began to sink, so Colly swam to the next one. Others were already there. I’m lucky, he thought. I better keep fighting. But it was still raining. Cold. Colly was freezing. His raftmates were losing strength. “Don’t give up,” he said. But one by one they slipped away and Colly was talking to no one, just hanging on to the floats telling himself over and over again not to give up.

  Toward dawn, six hours later, a fisherman in a small sailboat appeared. He was frightened. “What are you doing here?” he asked Colly.

  “Don’t be afraid,” said Colly. “We were on the Joola and it sank.”

  “That’s impossible!” said the fisherman. Then he told Colly that there was a flare stored in the floating trap. Colly found it, and the fisherman lit the flare.

  And then. And then the details go hazy. Colly can’t remember. Other boats appeared; he remembers a different fisherman refusing to help and then he was on a pirogue with eight other survivors, and that’s all, and then his life dissolved into a strange fate: of the 1,863 confirmed
passengers on board the Joola, Colly and sixty others survived, only one of them a woman. Three hundred more people died on the Joola than on the Titanic, and nearly every single one of the dead came from the town of Ziguinchor—among them its best and brightest students. Colly lived to become something he didn’t want to be, something that soon had a name: a rescapé.

  A survivor.

  I wrote, and listened for almost two hours. At times the tale rolled out of Colly, at other moments he stopped talking, said nothing, stared for long seconds. And then it was done; no journalist or investigator had ever asked to speak to him before. He had endured the sinking and then had been left alone. “I was lucky,” he said. “It was God who pushed me out of the window. But … often the sadness comes. I am alone and I think about my brother. And what happened was a big thing for people in Ziguinchor. People look at me like I’m weird. They say, ‘How could so many die and you live? It’s not normal! You saved yourself and the rest died!’ They give me a hard time. They call me the rescapé—the survivor.”

  Colly had dropped out of school and never returned. “I couldn’t think, and my older brother had been in charge of the family, so I had to take his place.” Now he was a taxi driver. Colly had to get back to work; Zaid had to get back to his girlfriend, waiting for us at the port. We climbed in Colly’s taxi and lurched down the streets in a cloud of dust. “When the anniversary comes, I just want to go away from here. I want to escape; I want to leave here and find a job and start a new life somewhere else.” A muezzin called the faithful to pray, the chants cutting through the heat. Colly pulled up to the gates of the port. He was silent, staring straight ahead. He had nothing else to say.

  “Have you taken the ship again?” I said, fumbling for money to pay the fare.

  “I have not done it, but if I had to I would. If I have to die on that ship, I will.”