‘How’s it going?’
‘We got shot at!’ he shouted.
‘So did we,’ I said, ‘back where the road winds between those mounds.’
‘We must have been right behind you,’ he said in a strong Lancashire accent. ‘But they got nowt. I fucking floored it, and the soldiers up top were shooting to kill.’
He was Ben Barker, driver of a truck carrying paying passengers on an Africa overland trip. After dinner we found his brother Abel, who was one of his mechanics, and went for a beer in the Marsabit market. Ben described his route. He had fixed up an old diesel truck and started from his home in Grange-over-Sands, heading east via Turkey, then through Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and the Sudan — a barge across Lake Nasser. He too was headed for Cape Town. He had seven backpackers on board and was happy for a small fee to include me as far as Nairobi.
‘I don’t mind the driving,’ Ben said. ‘The worst of this sort of traveling is when the people in the truck get all south-faced and whingey. “And why can’t we see the crocodiles, then?” “Why are we driving today?” “Can’t we bloody stop for a while?” ’
Scruffy though it was, Marsabit was an oasis in the middle of widely scattered villages of pastoralists whose animals were in bad shape because of the successive droughts, or agriculturalists whose gardens were weedy and stunted. Because of this, Marsabit was the haunt of aid workers and agents of virtue, many of whose spiffy white Land-Rovers were parked at the Jey-Jey.
The model had been described by Mr Kurtz in Heart of Darkness: ‘Each station should be like a beacon on the road towards better things, a center for trade of course, but also for humanizing, improving, instructing.’ This was of course before disillusionment set in and Kurtz became a cannibal chieftain.
A similar scheme had been mooted fifty years earlier than Kurtz’s by Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House, who was ‘devoted to the subject of Africa’ and whose obsession, to the utter neglect of her distressed family in London, was an ‘African project’ Her scheme involved ‘the general cultivation of the coffee berry — and the natives — and the happy settlement on the banks of the African rivers, of our superabundant home population … educating the natives of Borrioboola-Gha on the left bank of the Niger.’
Fiona and Rachel worked for a British charity. What Kurtz was trying to accomplish on the Congo, and Mrs Jellyby on the Niger, they were attempting in the region of Marsabit. They were on their weekly trip, up from the south. They were in their mid-twenties, damp-faced from the heat and their long drive. They had a driver, however, and a high-tech vehicle that was worth a fortune. Am I imagining that the logo on the side showed a weeping continent and the slogan, Shed Tears for Africa?
‘We have a wet feeding tomorrow,’ Fiona said.
Rachel said, ‘Ninety underweight children, some of them malnourished — infants up to four-year-olds.’
‘What is a wet feeding?’
‘That’s porridge. Unimix for nutrition — maize, beans, oil, some sugar and fat. Americans call it Corn Soy Blend.’
‘You are going to a village to dump Unimix in a trough for people to eat?’
‘I wouldn’t put it that way,’ Fiona said.
I said, ‘We used to say, “Give people seeds and let them grow their own food.” ’
‘The rains have been unreliable,’ Rachel said.
‘Maybe they should relocate. If they relocated they might find work, and they might plant gardens if you weren’t feeding them.’
‘We save lives, not livelihoods,’ Fiona said, and it sounded like a phrase from a brochure that might have been drafted by Mrs Jellyby.
I said, ‘Or family planning advice — you could give them that.’
‘We don’t discuss family planning,’ Rachel said. ‘We feed children under five and lactating mothers. Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Something about “supervising a wet feeding.” It sounds like something you’d do in a game park.’
They were insulted and I was sorry I’d said it like that, because they were obviously hard working and earnest, and they had come a long way to dish up porridge for some ashen-faced tots in the north Kenyan desert.
I said, ‘In a game park, in a bad year, the rangers might spread some bales of lucerne near a waterhole to help the hippos make it through the season.’
They just looked at me, unhappy to be challenged.
I said, ‘And what would happen if you just sent the food?’
‘Their parents would steal it and let the kids die.’
In other words, natural selection. It was why the Samburu were so tough. The strongest survived, weak children died; children died all the time in Africa and yet even with AIDS and infant mortality the population growth was the highest in the world. But it had been high in Victorian England, as well. In Thomas Hardy’s novel, Jude the Obscure, the doomed and starving village children leave a note, Because we are too menny.
Fiona and Rachel were good-hearted, and earnest in their mission. But it fascinated me that in order to feed these ‘underweight children’ they had to battle the parents, who wanted (and who could blame them?) to snatch the food from the children’s mouths. Or was this over-dramatizing the situation, for there was often a note of melodrama among relief workers, charity in Africa frequently being a form of theater.
‘How long will you be doing this?’
‘I’m leaving next week,’ Fiona said.
‘I’ve got a month more,’ Rachel said.
‘So it’s possible that these people you’ve been feeding with Unimix will be left in the lurch after you go.’
‘The whole scheme comes up for review in a few months,’ Fiona said, turning bureaucratic.
Just to satisfy myself I visited Marsabit’s secondary school the next morning and met one of the head teachers, Mr Maina, who had lived in Marsabit his whole life, except for the years he had spent getting his education degree. He absolutely denied that anyone in the district was foodless. He emphasized that there was more food than ever because of the government’s indifference to traditional cash crops.
‘The farmers in Kenya are very demoralized, because the government does not support them,’ Mr Maina said. ‘In so many places the farmers have torn up their coffee bushes to grow cabbages and maize for subsistence.’
‘Why doesn’t the government care?’
‘Why should they care? They get money from the World Bank, and the IMF and America and Germany and everyone else.’
In a word, the Kenyan government too was dependent on its own version of Unimix in the form of donor country money. It was a proven fact that this money went into the pockets of politicians. At that moment, Dr Richard Leakey, a white Kenyan, headed a commission to uncover corruption in Kenya. But within weeks of uncovering a great deal of corruption, Dr Leakey was removed from his post and was fighting a corruption charge leveled against him by the Kenyan government.
Besides Ben and Abel, on the Africa overland truck there was Mick, a Yorkshireman, who as chief mechanic quietly boasted of having a complete welding kit on board, a spare engine and a generator. The seven paying passengers were seriously shaken, the effect of having been attacked and shot at by shifta the day before. One, Jade from New Zealand, was asthmatic and the stress was giving her symptoms of suffocation — or was that caused by dust blowing through the open truck? Another, a Canadian of about twenty — an immigrant from the Ukraine — welcomed me on board, then gave me an insane grin.
‘Yeah. This is a good day to die,’ he said, as I swung myself on board. He said this often; he had no other conversation. Not so much a victim of post-traumatic stress as a natural pain in the ass.