The crew were all Tanzanians — friendly and solicitous. They had been in Port Bell for several days, loading the ferry. They were sensationally grease-stained as a result, which made the hand-washing ceremony at mealtime something to behold: everyone at the table leaned aside and took turns with the basin and the soap while someone else poured water from the pitcher. Lots of scrubbing, for ferry loading was filthy work. No matter how grubby an eater might be, he had to have clean hands.
‘I like coming here,’ the captain said in Swahili. ‘Uganda is our friend. Kenyans are also our friends, but the Kenyan police are always looking for rushwa.’
That was a new word to me.
‘Baksheesh,’ the captain explained. ‘Extra money. Kenya is a bad place.’
When the meal was over, the hour was late. Still we had not left the port, but so what? I went to my cabin, I finished my notes, brushing sea-flies off the bright page with one hand, writing with the other. Then I lay in my bunk and listened to my short-wave radio. Sea-flies settled on my face. I clawed them off. I heard the lurch and rumble of freight cars shunted on board — there were rails set in the deck. With the shouting of deckhands, the ferry responded to the weight of the new cargo and steadied itself.
I was already dozing, tasting sea-flies each time I yawned. The ferry shuddered when its engines revved, but I was asleep by the time we set sail. About an hour and a half out of Port Bell we crossed the Equator.
I woke several times in the night, though from odd dreams — the dreams you have in a strange bed — not from the movement of the ship. The Umoja stayed on an even keel, plowing through the calm lake, with only a slight chop from the southeast wind. The temperature was pleasant — cool fresh air drifting through the porthole, the droning engine deep in the body of the vessel, the hull vibrating in a massaging motion that soothed me.
When I woke I could not see land anywhere: we were at sea. Lake Victoria is the largest body of water in Africa — 70,000 square kms (27,000 square miles). A whole intact people, the Sesse Islanders, occupied a distinct archipelago in the north of the lake. The lake water was full of fish, but also full of crocs, bilharzia, pirates, islands and primitive craft. The lake had not been properly surveyed since colonial times, and only old charts were in use. So there were many uncharted rocks and hazards.
Clouds of sea-flies were blowing across the deck as I went outside. They smacked me in the face and got into my eyes. To the west was a smudge and when we came closer I could see that it was an island, flat and forested.
‘Goziba Island,’ Alex said.
‘Who lives there?’
‘Everyone. Ugandans, Kenyans, Tanzanians, Congolese, Rwandans, and more. They come in dugouts, or motorboats, or dhows. It is nice! No police, no government people. No taxes. Just in the middle of nowhere.’
The detailed chart in the wheelhouse showed the lake to be dotted with many such islands, around the edge, in the middle, some regulated and named, others nameless, open to whatever squatters could paddle to them. The dugouts were frequently overturned by crocodiles and the paddlers devoured. Sigulu Island in the northeast of the lake recorded forty-three deaths from crocs in a recent six-month period. The intense crocodile activity seemed to emphasize the free-for-all that was the general rule on Lake Vic.
Breakfast was ugali — African porridge that was a sort of thin gruel — served with sweet tea. I was reminded that the Africa I knew had never been a gourmet experience, but most of the food was palatable. Places might be famous for particular produce, like southern Ethiopia and its pineapples, Kenyan oranges, Ugandan bananas. The Tanzanian side of this lake was renowned for its mangos, said to be the best in the world. The lakeside avocados were also plump and tasty. Avocados were in season, so we feasted on those.
The chief engineer was at breakfast, reading the latest issue of Shipping News and Ship Repair. It was a British publication, from the Royal Institute of Naval Architects.
I said, ‘Maybe you should have let the engineers on the Kabalega read that.’
The chief engineer looked up and said, ‘There is nothing practical in here that will help them. They have a problem of water contaminating their fuel line. They haven’t located the source of it.’
I thought again of the captain’s act of kindness. And that if these men had not helped me and taken me aboard I would still be on that pier at Port Bell, kicking my heels. And who was I? Just another scruffy airplane-hating mzungu who wanted to go by boat to Mwanza. Here as elsewhere I was the only mzungu traveler. The others didn’t take buses, they feared the Sudan and Ethiopia, they stuck to selected routes and traveled in groups, to look at animals. As a rule they stayed a great distance from the general population. And yet, though I was solitary, all I heard was karibu, karibu, welcome, welcome, and ‘Take more ugali?’
The chief engineer was John Kataraihya, a man in his early forties. Like most of the other crew members he had grown up on the lakeshore. He had studied naval engineering and engine repair in Belgium. He was a bright, friendly man, with a steady gaze, intelligent and quietly confident in his opinions. He had seen a great deal of the world. He preferred Lake Victoria.
‘The Belgians have many problems,’ he said, and I laughed to hear him generalize about these people the way Belgians themselves generalized about Africans.
In an ironic turnabout, John had spent quite a lot of time in the city Marlow specifically disparages in Heart of Darkness. Brussels, he says, ‘the city that always makes me think of a whited sepulchre,’ for it is in the company office of that city that he gets his orders to go up the Congo River. The seemingly civilized company in the orderly city sends out King Leopold’s brutal directives. Marlow also notices German East Africa on a wall map, ‘a purple patch, to show where the jolly pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager-beer.’ German East Africa had become Tanganyika and then Tanzania.
‘But the Belgians have one big thing that makes them unhappy.’
He folded his copy of Shipping News and Ship Repair and said, ‘The main problem with Belgians is they can’t get along with each other. The Flemish-speaking ones hate the French-speaking ones. It’s a kind of racism, you can say. Or similar.’ As though referring to a benighted settlement in the bush, he added, ‘Antwerp is bad in that respect.’
Most of the time he had been studying naval engineering, but he had also traveled — tentatively at first, and then as his French improved, farther and farther afield. He had seen most of Belgium and its neighboring countries. ‘Even some small villages, I can say, very tiny ones,’ putting me in mind of Bombo and Bundibugyo in Uganda and the huddled community on Goziba Island.
‘Any problems traveling?’
‘For myself, I had a few problems,’ John said of his peregrinations in Belgium. ‘If they think you are a Congolese — one of their former people — they can treat you very badly and they insult you.’
‘That’s not friendly. No karibu.’
He laughed. ‘I said, “I am from Tanzania!” and that was okay with them. They said, “So you’re from Nairobi?” Ha!’
The idea that after almost 100 years of colonial rule in Africa these ignoramuses still had no idea of the difference between Kenya and Tanzania made him erupt in mocking laughter.
This was a good subject for chitchat in the Umoja galley, with John and some of the crew. I had recently read and greatly liked the book King Leopold’s Ghost, Adam Hochschid’s history of this bizarre period of colonialism in Africa. It was a book detailing the savageries of imperialism, the pathology of megalomania and rule through intimidation, as well as the idealistic reaction to it, the origins of the modern human rights movement. The Belgians had inspired Vachel Lindsay’s poem ‘The Congo,’ part of which went,