We ate some more pineapple, and the girls asked for pieces.
‘Sebat birr,’ I said, and they laughed because that’s what they had charged for the bottled water.
I loved watching the pretty girls gorging themselves on the fruit, the pulp in their fingers, the juice on their lips and running down their chins.
Tadelle said, ‘Instead of Kenya, come wiz Wolde and me, and we travel togezzer. We teach you Amharic. We have good times. We go in za bush.’
He explained this in Tigrinya to Wolde, who smiled and said isshi — an emphatic yes.
I was tempted, I would have liked nothing better, but whenever I looked at the map of Africa I was reminded of the trip I had set myself, what a long road it was to Cape Town. If Tadelle and Wolde had been going south I would have gone with them, but they were traveling west to Konso and Jinka and the Omo River, the regions of buttock-naked people and lovely handmade ornaments.
On the last leg to Moyale, a gun-toting soldier in camouflaged fatigues — sticking out in the brown grass by the roadside — waved his weapon at us. Tadelle stopped and after a laconic conversation, the soldier got into the back seat with Wolde. Just a hitchhiker, but an armed one. I could tell from Tadelle’s demeanor that he hated the man and was thinking: termite.
The soldier had some information, but it was bad news.
‘The Oromo were fighting the Somalis here last week,’ he said.
Nearer Moyale, the Soldier muttered something and Tadelle slowed down. After the soldier got out, Tadelle said, ‘I don’t trust zis man.’
But the Somalis were everywhere, women with bundles, men driving goats ahead of them.
‘Any trouble here, Tadelle?’
‘Zey are poor people,’ he said.
We had come to a very infertile and inhospitable landscape, no trees, lots of idle squatting people, some with the look of refugees and scruffy-looking bundles, others just chancers and riff-raff, and urchins, the detribalized and the lost, the Artful Dodgers who gravitate to national frontiers. We were at the brow of a hill. Down below was a dry riverbed and a cleared area — no man’s land; and beyond it, Kenya, looking even drier than the Ethiopian side.
‘Zey are all thieves and termites — be careful,’ Tadelle said.
He found a parking place while I made some inquiries at the border post, an empty one-story building standing in a patch of waste ground. I was told that the border would be open at six the next morning. No information was available about onward transport in Kenya. I returned to the vehicle. Tadelle said angrily that someone had kicked off half his front bumper and stolen it.
Just then a white Land-Rover went by. An idealistic slogan, relating to hunger in Africa, was lettered on the door of the vehicle, two faranjis inside.
‘Could you give me a lift across the border?’
‘This isn’t a taxi,’ the first man said: a West Country accent.
‘I was looking for a place to stay on the other side.’
‘We don’t run a guest house,’ the other one said: a Londoner.
They drove away, leaving me by the side of the road. That was to be fairly typical of my experience with aid workers in rural Africa: they were, in general, oafish self-dramatizing prigs and often, complete bastards.
I walked back to Tadelle’s vehicle and saw that Wolde was crying.
‘What’s wrong with Wolde?’
‘Wolde is so sad to see you go.’
Wolde hid his face in his hands and sobbed.I was touched and a bit confused. He did not speak English but Tadelle had a habit of translating our conversations to him, so he had shared everything we had discussed on the long road.
We found a hotel, the worst one yet, but the best in Moyale, the Ysosadayo, three dollars a night for a mosquito-haunted room in the block behind it, pasta for a dollar, beer fifty cents, electricity that came and went. The hot airless room smelled of cockroaches and dust, the bed was hard and stinky as a prison cot. I gave ten dollars each in birr to Tadelle and Wolde and then walked around Moyale, asking questions. Within an hour, I established that cattle trucks left the Kenyan side for Marsabit at seven in the morning, that they took eight hours to reach Marsabit; no, they took ten hours to Marsabit; no, twelve. No, it was two days to Nairobi, or three, or if the truck broke down (‘but they always break down’), four days.
The longest road in Africa ran ever onward, to the horizon, into the big bare country of hot hills, in the distance, beyond the steel pipe that served as a customs and immigration barrier. Wherever I walked, I was followed and pestered for money in the insolent way of people who have nothing to lose. But the faranjis who came here were vagabonds themselves, and so no one was surprised when I said, ‘Yellem’ — there is nothing for you. There was no running water in Moyale. The Ysosadayo had a cistern, the shops got by with buckets. The principal activity on the long north — south road was the water carriers, young boys and young girls whacking donkeys on the hindquarters, each donkey loaded with four eight-gallon tins of water, back and forth across the border — for the water came from a well on the Kenyan side.In no man’s land between the two countries a crazy man in rags with matted hair lived in a little lean-to.
Wolde was still upset when I saw him again, but he was wearing a new shirt. He was friendly, helpful, not hustling for a tip but naturally good-hearted. I greatly regretted this parting, and felt that I could go far with them — our little team. They were game for adventure and would be loyal, Tadelle a good driver, the middle-aged pessimist (‘I hate zis country, zay are all termites’), and Wolde the youthful optimist, eager to please. We could go to the ends of the earth — though we were probably already there, for that was not a bad description of Moyale.
Tadelle had bought a new jacet, two shirts, a pair of shoes, khaki trousers; and still had change from ten dollars. The clothes had been smuggled from the Kenyan side to the Moyale market.
‘I like clothes,’ Tadelle said with feeling. He was wearing his new jacket in spite of the heat. It was still in the nineties, well after sundown.
He and Wolde wore their new clothes around Moyale, looking quite different from anyone else in town.
Dinner — cold pasta, warm beer — was a somber affair. Wolde was still snuffling with grief, Tadelle was quietly uttering treasonous remarks. Then the lights failed and there was silence.
At last, in the darkness, Tadelle said, ‘My name mean “gift”.’
‘That’s a nice name.’
‘Zere was one man,’ he said. ‘Adam.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘He have children.’
‘Yes. They found the bones in Ethiopia.’ The Lucy skeleton: bowlegged and tiny and ape-like — I had seen it in the museum.
‘According to air-conditioning,’ Tadelle said, meaning weather and climate, ‘za children were different colors.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I am black, you are red.’
‘Yes.’
At the far end of the table, in the shadows, Wolde began quietly to sob.
‘But we are bruzzers.’
8. Figawi Safari on the Bandit Road
Only cattle trucks went south, in a straggling convoy of ten vehicles or so. ‘Because of the shifta.’ The name was derived from a raiding, plundering, bloodthirsty Somali clan, the Mshifta; but now shifta meant any roaming bandit in that great desert that extends from Somalia to the Sudan and takes in the whole of northern Kenya. The shifta tended to raid the remote settlements and ambush isolated people and vehicles on the road. There were only a few roads and there were many shifta.