‘If you give me money I’ll turn on my headlights,’ the taxi driver said.
I gladly handed him some money and was rewarded by the sight of a wild-eyed hyena, frightened and hungry, gnashing its teeth and then in the bright beams of the car’s headlights using its toothy jaws to tear the protruding piece of meat from Yusof’s mouth.
The next day, with children and some adults howling ‘Faranji’ at me, I left Harar. I didn’t take the word personally. They were mocking me as they would any foreigner. I was certainly better off than the Harari woman cowering in a doorway who was being beaten by a man with a heavy stick just inside Harar’s main gate. She was screeching loudly as the robed and turbaned older man, with a grizzled beard, whacked her across her body using the thick part of the stick. A woman squatting near her made a face and leaned away, so as not to be hit by mistake. No one else took any notice. When he was through, the man was a little puffed from this exertion — wailing on someone with a stick is heavy work. The woman howled and bowed down, holding her head, and the man walked away swinging his stick, in the manner of a husband who has just done his duty.
Men are beasts all over the world: that could have happened anywhere. But the lepers, hyenas, ivory tusks and garbage, complaining donkeys, open drains in the cobbled alleys, the tang of spices, the butcher covered with blood raising his cleaver to split a furry hump and reveal the smooth cheese of camel fat — and smiling crookedly to offer the fat as a gift — the moans of people’s prayers, the dark-eyed invitation to a shadowy hut, the howls of ‘Foreigner!’ All these explained why Rimbaud had been so happy here. He had liked Africa for being the anti-Europe, the anti-West, which it is, sometimes defiantly, sometimes lazily. I liked it for those reasons, too, for there was nothing of home here. Being in Africa was like being on a dark star.
7. The Longest Road in Africa
Back in Addis, I tried to plot a trip by road to the Kenyan border and beyond. Not difficult to plot — there was only one road — but in these uncertain times no reliable information. The farther you got from an African capital the worse the roads — everyone knew that; but harder information was unobtainable, and the more you inquired the vaguer people became. In such circumstances the cliché terra incognita was something real and descriptive. The border was distant; distant places were unknown; the unknown was dangerous.
Border towns in African countries were awful places, known for riff-raff and refugees and people sleeping rough, famous for smugglers and back-handers, notorious for bribery and delay, nit-picking officialdom, squeezing policemen, pestering money-changers, the greatest risks, and the crummiest hotels. There was either a new national language on the other side of the border, or the same tribal language straddling it — and a nasty border dispute because the dotted line ran through a divided people. Roadside customs and immigration were horrible bottlenecks, usually on the bank of a muddy river. People told me, Don’t go.
There were some buses to the southern towns of Dila and Mega, and occasional vehicles to the frontier town of Moyale, but Moyale was the edge of the known world for Ethiopians. None of them ever went into Kenya — why would they? The north of Kenya was just waterless desert and rutted roads and quarrelsome tribes, and a border dispute among the gun-toting Borena people, and worst of all the troops of roaming heavily armed Somalis known as ‘shifta.’ Just dropping the word shifta into a proposed itinerary was enough to make traveling Africans go in the opposite direction.
On what was now the longest road in Africa, some of it purely theoretical, from Cairo to Cape Town, there had once been a plan for a great transcontinental railway. Apart from his dream of diamonds and conquest, Cecil Rhodes’s imperial vision for Africa was of a railway line that would run from South Africa to Egypt, taking in Nairobi and Addis Ababa, Khartoum and Nubia. ‘Your hinterland is there,’ is the inscription under his bronze figure, pointing north on a pedestal in Cape Town. Sections of the northerly running railway line were built in Rhodes’s lifetime (a short lifetime — he died at the age of forty-nine). Later, track was laid to the copper belt in Northern Rhodesia as far as the Congo border. The Germans built a railway across their colony of German East Africa, later British Tanganyika, later still independent Tanzania. The Tanzanians, under the leadership of the muddled Maoist Julius Nyerere, soon had a line south from Dar es Salaam into Zambia, entirely the work of Mao-sponsored Chinese railwaymen, chanting the Great Helmsman’s Thoughts as they hammered spikes and fastened rails. This was 1967, at the beginning of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which Tanzania too embraced in a superficial and self-destructive way.
By zigging and zagging, and taking a ferry across Lake Victoria, it was possible for a solo traveler like me, with a bag and a map, to go by rail from Cape Town to Nairobi. But north of Nairobi the tarred road gives way to mud, the buses stop running at Isiolo, and after that it is just a rocky road, and hyenas, and colorful Rendille tribesmen, wearing armlets and loincloths, carrying spears and sabres, and forever fussing over their elaborate coiffures. As soon as the road surface turned bad the bandits appeared, shifta carrying AK-47s, classic highwaymen. The road from Nairobi to the border was reputed to be the emptiest in Africa. That was where I was headed.
No one had any information about that road in Addis, and there wasn’t much available about southern Ethiopia either. People would say they had been to a certain town in the south and then, when I questioned them further, they would go blank. Even the Kenyans went blank. Visa requirements had changed. I would need one. I went to the Kenyan Embassy and was told by a sulky Kikuyu woman at a desk that I would have to wait three or four days for the visa.
‘Why can’t I have it today or tomorrow?’
In a scolding tone, she said, ‘Mr Ochieng, the visa officer, must not be distubbed!’
‘And why is that?’
‘He is busy.’
‘But I am busy too,’ I said mildly, ‘and I want to visit your wonderful country.’
‘You will have to wait.’ She picked up a telephone and flicked her fingers at me in a bugger-off gesture.
But I did not leave. I buttonholed diplomats and inquired about the road. Of the three officers at the Kenyan Embassy I spoke to, none had gone by land from Addis to Nairobi across the common border. A Kenyan man in a three-piece suit seemed insulted that I should suggest it.
‘We fly,’ he said.
One Kenyan woman confided that she disliked Ethiopians. ‘They are proud,’ she said. She meant racist. To annoy other Africans, Ethiopians sometimes said, ‘We are not Africans.’
With time to spare in Addis, I looked around. No tourists in the country meant that the antique shops were full of merchandise, both treasures and fakes, in the form of old Amharic Bibles made by scribes and monks, with hand-painted plates, silver crosses that looked like giant latch-keys, paintings on cloth stolen from churches, icons, chaplets, Korans, amber beads, venetian beads, ivory bangles and armlets, spoons of horn and iron, and wooden and leather artifacts from every tribe in the country — elaborate stools, milk jugs, spears, shields, Konso funeral posts depicting the lately departed with a carved penis protruding from the forehead. Mursi lip plugs, penis sheaths and cache-sexes, little metal aprons that Nuer women wore at their waist for modesty’s sake.