10. Old Friends in Bat Valley
Papyrus grew in thick leafy clumps, as fresh as salad, by the lakeshore just inside the Ugandan border. The tall graceful stalks swayed, the feathery heads nodded, as my bus passed by, traveling west on a back road from the border town of Busia. I had not seen papyrus growing anywhere in Kenya, even on the Kisumu edge of Lake Victoria, but as soon as I crossed into Uganda I saw rafts of the tall delicately tufted plant in the swampland by the lake. It was like further proof that Uganda is the source of the Nile. Downstream in Egypt where real papyrus no longer existed I had seen images of the lovely plant picked out in bright vegetable dye on the walls of pharaonic tombs and on the tops of columns at Karnak. Anything that linked Egypt to the heart of Africa interested me: papyrus, lotuses, crocs, hippos, crested cranes, baboons, lions, elephants and their ivory, even the images of slaves, and the river water itself.
‘How did you first come here?’ I used to ask old-timers and elderly missionaries in the sixties. Many would say, ‘Down the Nile.’
That meant: By boat and train through Egypt, train to Khartoum, paddle steamer from Khartoum to Juba, and then fifty-eight miles by road to Uganda.
I had come by ‘chicken-bus’ — the buses that were full of Africans and their produce, including trussed-up chickens and infants so swaddled they looked mummified. One chicken-bus had dropped me at the Kenyan border. Good-humored hawkers and touts, money-changers and beggars descended upon me. They followed me, running, across no man’s land, a hot stony half-mile without any shade, until they were turned back at the chain-link fence and razor wire on the Ugandan side. Something was revealed about a person’s nature by the way he tried to run — more revealing when he ran towards you than when he tried to run away.
At the Ugandan checkpoint I went through the same formalities again, a crowd shoving each other to get into a small shed, for their passports to be stamped, and outside more money-changers and beggars. I bought a newspaper and read about bomb outrages that had occurred in Kampala the previous day: ‘Election violence.’ On the next bus, on the far side, I reflected that a person who has not crossed an African border on foot has not really entered the country, for the airport in the capital is no more than a confidence trick; the distant border, what appears to be the edge, is the country’s central reality.
Right from the frontier Uganda seemed a tidier better-governed place than Kenya, and it was visibly greener and more fertile, palmier, more lush, with rice paddies being planted and tended, and banana trees — all sorts of bananas. Ugandans say there are sixty varieties, for they are one of the staples here. This southeastern part of Uganda was green and low-lying and swampy, the big lake seeping into the hinterland.
The roads were in better shape — and so were the houses, old and new — than the ones on the Kenyan side, more reminders that Kenya was in a run-down condition and perhaps that Uganda was on the way up. Sugar cane was still being grown in the fields here, as in the past, on estates that had always been owned by Indians. Given the world price of sugar and most other commodities, this was somewhat surprising. Certainly farmers in Africa were earning less for growing coffee, tea, cotton, sugar and tobacco — and in some places were going back to subsistence farming, letting the cash crops die and planting corn for their own use.
Late in the afternoon my bus passed the town of Jinja, where at Owen Falls Lake Victoria flows north — the Victoria Nile — to Lake Kyoga and onward to Murchison Falls and Lake Albert, into the Albert Nile. This simple progression perplexed ancient speculators such as Ptolemy and the European explorers in Africa until the expedition of 1857–8 when Burton and Speke crossed from the east coast to survey the lake region of the interior. While Burton lay ill in what is now Tabora, in Tanzania, it was Speke who traveled to the southern edge of the great lake, to get a glimpse. He had no idea of the lake’s true size, but from what he was told by Arabs, he surmised that at its northern shore was an outflow, the headwaters of the Nile. Burton challenged him on this, and denounced him for his haste, for being too impatient to navigate the lake. Speke was defensive but insecure; he had a fragile disposition anyway (he was later to kill himself). Yet his intuition was correct: the lake was later proven to be the Niles source.
This familiar landscape gave me a soothing sense of homecoming, almost nostalgia. I was still traveling in a state of contentment, wary as always, but with a feeling of relative safety. I was visible as a mzungu, of course, but an older one in second-hand clothes, wearing a cheap watch and a faded hat. My sports jacket was terribly torn: battery acid had burned large holes in it on one of my truck rides. Tatters in Africa are like camouflage, mine made me less conspicuous. But African markets were wonderful places for finding people to patch clothes: I could get the coat mended in Kampala. That simple mission made me happier. And I had the Rimbaudesque thrill that no one on earth knew where I was. I had successfully disappeared in this southeastern bush of Uganda, a place I knew fairly well. I loved bumping along in this bus alone, in a crimson Ugandan sunset that would go dark in about thirty minutes as night dropped like a blanket on the bush.
I was also excited to be here because it was a return to my youth, or young adulthood. I had last been in Uganda thirty-three years before, and had been happy. I wondered whether, with a birthday looming, at the back of my mind was my plan to return to a specific time in my life when I had been supremely happy. Then, I had been in love with a woman who loved me, and planning to be married, and in those same months seeing my first book published. I knew that I was young and appreciated, living a life I had chosen.
It was in my mind to avoid a birthday party. I was so self-conscious of my age that I often asked Africans to guess how old I was, hoping — perhaps knowing in advance — they would give me a low figure. They always did. Few people were elderly in Africa — forty was old, a man of fifty was at death’s door, sixty-year-olds were just crocks or crones. Despite my years I was healthy, and being agile and resilient I found traveling in Africa a pleasure: I did not seem old here — did not feel it, did not look it to Africans — and so it was the perfect place to be, another African fantasy, an adventure in rejuvenation.
‘You are forty something,’ Kamal guessed in Addis. The highest number I got was fifty-two. Little did they know how much they flattered my vanity. But no one was vain about longevity in Africa, because the notion of longevity hardly existed. No one lived long and so age didn’t matter, and perhaps that accounted for the casual way Africans regarded time. In Africa no one’s lifetime was long enough to accomplish anything substantial, or to see any task of value completed. Two generations in the West equaled three generations in African time, telescoped by early marriage, early child-bearing, and early death.
In southeastern Uganda I wrote in my diary, I do not want to be young again. I am happy being what I am. This contentment is very helpful on a trip as long and difficult as this.
It had taken me years to summon up the resolve to return to Africa because in all travel one’s mood is crucial. I had been happy and hopeful here. I began to see that Africa had aged the ways Africans themselves had aged — old at forty: most Kenyans and Ugandans I had met so far were too young to remember independence. I had procrastinated about returning because I had suspected that the Africa I had known had disappeared, had become anarchic and violent. This seemed to be borne out by the headlines in Uganda that week about the bombs (‘grenades’) that had gone off at Kampala’s main market. Two people had been killed, ten injured — post-election violence was the repeated explanation, the opposition being blamed. But that disruption went with the territory It was politics, as Africans said. And I was just an anonymous man in old clothes on a corner seat in a chicken-bus reading about it in the local newspaper.