Dark Star Safari Page 18

  A young Japanese man sat among some Ethiopians in the dining room of the Get Smart, eating national food. I joined him, and on the assumption that vegetables were less likely to be tainted, ordered ‘fasting food’ – it was all they had, anyway. I sat at the common table and we shredded the injera bathmat and squelched the vegetables.

  The man was Mr Daisuko Obayashi, sent to southern Ethiopia by the private company NEC of Japan to install a telecommunications system. He had been in Dila for two months. He spoke no Amharic, and his English was rudimentary. He had been in rural Tanzania for two years, but preferred Ethiopia.

  ‘Sometimes, Ethiopian people they buy me drink, but two years in Tanzania no one buy me drink!’

  He said he did not speak Swahili. Hearing that I lived in Hawaii he said he did not want to visit the islands. ‘Too many Japanese people there.’

  After ten minutes of this irritating small talk I thought: The only English speaker in Dila and he’s a fat head.

  He said, ‘In Tanzania, I go to disco and girls say they want to have sex with me. But I say no because of AIDS. Almost three years – no sex! Ha! Ha!’

  Perhaps that forced celibacy explained his tetchy demeanor, so I turned my attention to Tadelle and Wolde.

  ‘What do you think of this place?’

  ‘Is mess,’ Tadelle said. Tadelle was from Tigre, as was Mengistu, and so he missed the days of the Derg which everyone else deplored, for the years of famine, bankruptcy, mass murder, terror, and arbitrary imprisonment. Mengistu had built schools and hospitals, Tadelle said, especially in Tigre.

  ‘I sink zat Mengistu was good. Za Derg was good. Yes, some people was killed. But it was za soldiers and smaller people who did it.’

  ‘But there’s democracy now,’ I said, to needle him: the present government persecuted any group that dissented and turned the Ethiopian police into junkyard dog.

  ‘Za democracy we have is bad. Za government is just termites.’

  Lying in my small hot room at the Get Smart that night, I twiddled the knobs on my short-wave radio and listened in the darkness to the news. Wall Street was in trouble: The Dow went south again for the third straight day … Tech stocks deep in negative territory … The Nasdaq hit a five-year low … No sign of an uptick … Fears grow for a recession …

  But in Dila it made no difference.

  In the morning, I asked the Get Smart clerk for coffee. This was after all a coffee-growing region.

  ‘Is finished.’

  ‘Any fruit?’ It was a fruit-growing region, too.

  ‘Is finished.’

  ‘How about Ambo?’ Ambo was Ethiopian bottled water.

  The Get Smart clerk smiled: finished.

  We ate some of the pineapples we had with us and set off for Yabelo and Mega and the border town of Moyale.

  Steering around the deep potholes on the road south of Dila we entered long valleys, some of them green and cultivated, others no more than dust bowls. We came to the ramshackle town of Agera Maryam. ‘They have food here,’ Tadelle said, driving into a walled compound. A sad sweet-faced woman brought us some evil-looking goat meat and cold pasta. I ate some of the pasta, Wolde scarfed the goat, and Tadelle said, ‘Za people here are thieves. I must watch za car or zey will steal from it.’

  The table covering at the eating place was a week-old Ethiopian English language newspaper in which there was an alarming item, reporting this southern region was being ravaged by outbreaks of meningitis. It did not specify which form. Ethiopia (and the Sudan) is in the African ‘meningitis belt.’ There is even a ‘meningitis season’ – these very months. I made a mental note to buy some cans of food. There were no cans. All I could find in the way of packaged food were some boxes of stale cookies, made in Abu Dhabi.

  We drove onward through a wide mountain valley down an empty road past the town of Yabelo. The men in this region wore traditional dress, tunics and beads, the men carried spears, the women toiled on paths with bundles of wood on their heads, very young herdboys bullied goats with their crooks. The landscape had become hotter and drier, and in one sun-struck place a small boy was pressed against a tree for the relief of a little patch of shade.

  ‘The women very pretty here,’ Tadelle said, slowing down.

  But he was slowing down for roadkill – fifty-nine hooded vultures surrounded a dead hyena on the road, flapping their ragged wings and tearing at the animal’s flesh, while other scavenging birds, the kites and marabou storks, kept their distance. In the fields beyond were wild camels, or at least roaming ones, unsaddled, unhobbled, plodding towards the hills.

  This was the region of the Wolayta people, who lived in beehive huts that were topped with bald ostrich eggs, a token of fertility. Clusters of these huts lay along the road. The women were beautiful, with long plaits of braided hair and bright cloaks, some of the women heavily burdened with bundles of firewood. Men in fields were using yoked oxen and wooden plows shaped like wishbones, and all the boys striding with spears.

  The town names were large on the map, but the towns themselves were tiny. Mega was just a wide place in the road. There was nothing to eat here, but being among so many hungry people had killed my appetite. In Ethiopia I ate one meal a day, injera and vegetable glop, or pasta, a dish that was a hangover from the Italian occupation.

  Tadelle said, ‘There was a war here in 1983’ – no sign of it, though, except for some wrecked vehicles on the low bare hills. The war had come and gone, people had died, life resumed, nothing had changed, still the plow and the herd of goats and the cooking fire and the bare buttocks; the African story.

  I walked from shop to shop, making notes on what was for sale – cheap Chinese clothes, aluminum pots, knives, enamel basins: no food. Since I was the only faranji in town, I attracted attention, and boys began following me.

  ‘Please give me one birr. I am poor and I am a schoolboy.’

  They took turns begging. I said no, to discourage them from pestering farajis. Is this the right thing to do? I wrote in my diary that night. I don’t know. Everyone asked, everywhere I went from Cairo to Cape Town, people – kids mostly – had their hand out: Meesta. These kids in Mega I gave some of the Abu Dhabi cookies before shooing them away.

  Tadelle said it was too hot to continue for now. We would stay in Mega for a few hours and set offagain for Moyale later in the afternoon. We sat in the shade, Tadelle complaining genially about Ethiopian politicians (‘Zay are termites’) and we were joined by some girls from a shop who brought us bottled water. To kill time I demonstrated the blades of my Swiss Army knife.

  ‘One month’s salary,’ said Tadelle when I answered his question about the price of it. Fifty dollars, I had said. But most Ethiopians earned nothing at all.

  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.

  Buses did not operate on this north – south road. There were no place names on my map, just Marsabit in the middle of the Dida Galgalu Desert – Samburu land – a day’s drive south. I was reassured by the fact that the trucks were full of cattle and not people, for in these parts cattle were valuable and people’s lives not worth much at all. Even when tribesmen were shot here on this border no one troubled to file a report. They only said, ‘The Borena are fighting’ or the Oromo, or the Somalis, or the shifta. No one knew the body count. If cattle had been slaughtered or rustled the exact number would have been known and lamented.

  Each truck held twenty head of cattle. I paid three dollars to ride in the cab with the driver and three women and two infants and a bronchitic boy, a tubercular child of six or seven whom I caught drinking out of my water bottle. The women, one of whom was nursing a baby, were veiled and, being married, wore henna on their hands and feet. The lovely lacy floral designs seized my attention, even at seven in the morning on this hot day in this stifling cab.

  ‘Do not leave your seat, bwana – someone will steal it,’ said the tout who had taken my money.

  Such a surprise that though we had traveled only half a mile across the border everyone here spoke Swahili.

  After a great deal of shouting and a lot of quarrelling and a fight – the man had been thrown off the back for not paying up: he was defending his dignity by slapping at the men who had tossed him aside – we set off down the bad road south, into the heat and dust. The animals shuddered and trembled and on the worst parts of the road some of them fell down and were trampled and trapped by the others. The road deteriorated into a rutted rock-strewn track as soon as we left the border.
There were three keepers among the cattle, who attacked the fallen animals, twisting their tails and smashing them in the face with sticks to get them upright. All the cattle were going to the slaughterhouse in Nairobi, and they were a melancholy sight, these animals, for they had rather benign faces and trusting eyes, and dumb and docile they were off to be butchered. In the absence of refrigerated trucks they had to be taken alive to be killed and drained of their blood, through the halal method, stipulated by the Muslim faith.

  The driver, Mustafa, was a grumpy chain-smoking young man who apparently spoke only Swahili. ‘Wewe, muzungu,’ he said to me, when he wanted my attention. ‘You, white man.’ This sort of over-familiar word form was extremely rude but he was used to dealing with oafish budget-conscious backpackers. He clearly hated his job and you couldn’t blame him, the cab jammed with people, the truck bed filled with animals, and more men seated on the upper rungs, squatting on the cab roof and hanging from the sides, many of them chewing qât to stay serene.

  I had seen poor roads on this trip but this one was spectacularly bad, worse than the no-road route through the Sudanese desert. This was a narrow track of deep, wheel-swallowing potholes and sudden ruts, hard steep waves of them that made the truck jiggle and jump. But the worst of it were the loose boulders. Broken and very sharp, they were so large they sent the truck in a toppling motion as it climbed them and plunged, throwing the cattle to the floor. Still early morning, but the day was very hot, there was no shade, and the land stretched ahead, white and dazzling, like an alkali desert. We were traveling at about ten miles an hour and had 200 miles ahead of us.

  African children seldom cry – almost a miracle the way they are as patient as their parents – but the ones in the cab were screaming.