No Hurry in Africa (26 page)

Over the course of the week or so that I spent in Uganda, I experienced a series of mishaps in fairly quick succession. My camera broke, I broke my glasses, and African bureaucracy forced us to go three hours west of Jinja, our intended destination. We were required to go to the capital, Kampala, so that customs could check our backpacks. This could and should have been done at the border, of course. This enforced detour extended our travel time from Nairobi to over fifteen hours. When we got to Kampala, they did not even bother to check our bags, but it effectively lost us a day.

On the way back from the customs headquarters, which is several kilometres from the centre of Kampala, we had been kindly given a lift by a random Ugandan motorist. He was very smartly dressed, quite small, articulate, and extremely polite. He told us he was a Baluba. I suddenly remembered that in every class in school back home there was a big ignorant chap whom you would address as ‘ya big Baluba ya’ if he pushed someone around. It began as a racial slur after an Irish UN battalion had been ambushed by the Baluba tribe in the Congo in I960. I was kind of disappointed. This quietly spoken gentleman did not fit the Baluba image I had in my head at all. He was an educated man, but his geography was a bit ropey. When telling us about Kampala, he said,

‘It’s the capital of Uganda, you know—the same way New York is the capital of America, Johannesburg is the capital of South Africa, and Sydney is the capital of Australia.’

Wrong, wrong, and wrong, I thought, but decided not to embarrass him when he was being so generous to us.

He kindly deposited us at the main bank in Kampala because Damian and I needed to obtain some Ugandan shillings. The bank appeared to have no security men, but instead there was a prominent sign, hand-written in marker on white paper, that was sellotaped to the front door.

‘Please do not bring your gun inside the bank,’ the sign pleaded.

Indeed Kampala, an impressive and vibrant city of a million people, has a much better reputation than Nairobi where crime is concerned. The Baluba gentleman had been telling us about this.

‘Ugandans have an effective way of dealing with robbers and muggers when they are caught in the act. In Nairobi, they lynch them; in Kampala, we strip them naked and parade them up the street. It seems to work!’

‘Mmm… we used to do something similar in the North,’ Damian remembered aloud.

Having been to the bank, we proceeded across the road to a cafe for
chapatti
and
chai.
There were two big bibles sitting between the sauce bottles on every table, something you would not find in Nairobi. We fell into conversation with three other diners. Damian asked them about an animal whose head he thought he had glimpsed, in poor light, in the lake near Jinja.

‘Could it have been a crocodile?’ he wondered.

‘It may have been a hippo you saw,’ one of them answered.

‘Any chance it was a dinosaur?’ Damian joked.

‘I don’t think there are any dinosaurs in Uganda—only in South America,’ we were told.

His colleague added, ‘Yes, there are no dinosaurs in Uganda now,’ before adding a caveat, ‘there’s not supposed to be, anyway; the government should tell us if there were. I’d say a hippopotamus, definitely a hippo.’

We caught a bus back to Jinja, planning to camp outside the town. Jinja is a fairly prosperous market town, dotted with many dilapidated colonial mansions now being used as tenement homes. The town’s biggest claim to fame, of course, is that it is located overlooking the breathtaking gorge right at the source of the Nile where it emerges from Lake Victoria. It was on top of a cliff, with a commanding view of the spectacular Nile gorge, that we pitched our tent.

From childhood, I have been fascinated by stories of the great African explorers, and had been reading about them again recently in a book in Fr. Paul’s house. While putting up our tent, I shared one such story with Damian. I told him how, while searching for the source of the Nile, Dr. David Livingstone became lost for so long that, in 1869, the
New York Herald
dispatched Henry Morton Stanley to find him. After two years searching for Livingstone, on finally catching up with him, Stanley allegedly could only utter the famous inanity, ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume?’ Dr. Livingstone was the somewhat obsessive Scottish missionary and traveller who believed that his explorations in Africa would further his aims of ‘Christianity, commerce, and civilisation.’

‘Mmm, commerce and Christianity make dubious bed fellows,’ was Damian’s verdict, as he handed me a peg. ‘Livingstone doesn’t sound like a bundle of laughs.’

‘But you would have enjoyed the company of Henry Stanley,’ I suggested. ‘Livingstone was a sober Scottish evangelist. Stanley was a bit of a Welsh boyo.’

I told him that Stanley was an adventurer who was born in rural Wales, who ran away to sea as a cabin boy, worked in New Orleans as a servant in a great mansion, fought for the Confederacy in the American Civil War before switching to the Union side on his capture, reported as a journalist in the Wild West, spent years exploring in Africa and was finally offered a seat in the British House of Commons before he died in 1904. On the darker side, it was he who was largely instrumental in grabbing the Congo for the odious King Leopold II of Belgium. The Congo suffered from being ruled in the most brutal manner of any African colony. It was the size of Western Europe, and belonged to the King personally, and not to Belgium itself. Something of the horror of this period is captured in Joseph Conrad’s great novel,
Heart of Darkness.

‘Yeah, Stanley wouldn’t have been short of a story or two in the pub,’ Damian agreed.

‘Speaking of that, let’s crack open a beer,’ I suggested, and flipped the lids off a couple of bottles of the local brew.

Sitting down in the sunshine with our backs against a few rocks, while admiring the Nile gorge, we took a sip from our bottles, and I told him about another Victorian explorer named John Hanning Speke. He had served with the British army in the Himalayas and the Crimea War, and it was he who claimed to have discovered the source of the Nile at Jinja in 1862. While the Royal Geographical Society in London was still debating the merits of his argument a few years later, he shot himself—per-haps accidentally. Indeed, even today there is still debate about the true source of the Nile, as many argue that lesser rivers, which flow from the mountains of Burundi into Lake Victoria, are a continuation of the Nile. For the record, the detailed
Al-Adrisi
map made by Arab traders around 1160AD fairly accurately defines the outline of Lake Victoria, and identifies it as the source of the Nile.

On our third night in Jinja, after several hours of heavy rain, our tent became semi-submerged under a mini-landslide.

‘Avalanche!’ Damian screamed, before we knew exactly what was going on.

The tent had caved in on top of us. I crawled outside to assess the situation, but I forgot I was still nearly blind because my glasses were broken. It was too dark to see, and neither of us possessed a working torch. But we had the privilege of experiencing the steam rising from the misty waters of the mighty Nile as the sun broke. My pleasure was somewhat reduced, however, by the fact that while waiting for dawn, I had accidentally stepped on a line of flesh-eating
siafu
ants. They left many ferocious bite marks on my feet and legs before I could shake them off.

‘Sure Livingstone and Speke had to put up with much, much worse to get here,’ Damian piped up unsympathetically. ‘Didn’t you say they even encountered cannibals?’

The small backpacker campsite—incidentally, the first backpacker venue of any sort that I had found in Africa in over six months—was run by a few young Afrikaners. They had adopted a baby monkey as a pet. This monkey was very fond of going around drinking sips of beer out of people’s glasses. I noticed the monkey was holding up better than we were most evenings. I noticed too that nearly every backpacker there was part of an organised tour package with an ‘overland truck’ company. Independent backpacking is East Africa is virtually unheard of.

On the bank of the Nile directly below the campsite was a signpost warning of crocodiles in the bathing area. Having found a natural pool, we decided to take a chance and jump in regardless. It proved to be safe enough and some very carefree hours were spent in the warm sunshine, immersed in the waters of the Nile. We were joined by a few Norwegian girls and two bearded brothers from Bavaria named Helmut and Jurgen. They were students doing post-graduate research for a semester at a university in Kampala.

Occasionally we spotted fish eagles chasing communes of bats over the river at dusk. Luckily, there were no big eyes peering menacingly at us over the water. I heard about an Irish missionary in Turkana once, who used to send all the children into Lake Turkana before him when he wanted a swim. They created so much noise it frightened away the humongous Turkana crocodiles, leaving the missionary free to swim in peace. I hoped the story was untrue, or at least exaggerated!

Ugandans are very proud of the Nile.

‘It is responsible for providing water to Uganda, Sudan, as far as Egypt… and even the Mediterranean and Europe!’ a man in Jinja told me.

Well, yes and no, I thought. I was beginning to think that the teaching of geography in Uganda left something to be desired.

Whether he learnt it in geography class or not, Damien was able to tell me,

‘The rapids around here are considered to be among the finest in the world for white-water rafting.’

He was big into water-sports, like myself.

‘And what’s more,’ he continued, ‘in a year or two, rafting will be impossible because of the huge hydro-electric dam which they are planning to build. So it’s now or never, Brendan!’

And that is how he and I decided to blow what money we had left, white-water rafting down the grade five rapids near Jinja.

Even getting to the rapids had its moments. At one point, we passed a couple of men in a large hollowed-out tree trunk traversing the mighty Nile with a cow on board. There were plenty of people bathing, naked, in the river. Others, equally naked, were washing their clothes and having a bath at the same time. And this being Africa, Rachel, our Afrikaner instructor, only warned

‘There are crocodiles in the water very near the raft,’ just as we were jumping out of the raft for another swim.

After a few tester rapids, we approached the first monster one. All of a sudden, our raft was swept swiftly into the mixer.

‘Paddle! Paddle hard!’ Rachel shouted her instructions to us. ‘Get down! Get down! Paddle… ’

We survived that one, just. Before being able to draw breath, we were frantically battling through the next funnel. In an instant, I was tossed over the side. My body was sucked under by the force of the water, and bounced off’ a few rocks, as I was rapidly pulled downstream by the currents, before my lifejacket finally pushed my head above the water for a split second to catch a gasp of air. It was really scary at times but totally exhilarating. After months in the parched deserts of Kenya, I was enjoying every minute in the water.

Damian had taken a fancy to a black-haired Norwegian student at the campsite. As he was not getting anywhere with her at all, he decided he wanted to stay in Jinja to continue the chase. I was most unenthusiastic about parting from a travelling companion, but as Damian was planning to remain in Uganda for up to another fortnight, and as I was keen to return to Kenya soon, I accepted that we had to go our separate ways. We parted on good terms, promising to meet up in Nairobi again.

With Helmut and Jurgen, I ventured about 150km northeast to Mount Elgon. A huge extinct volcano, Mount Elgon is Uganda’s highest mountain and sits near the border with Kenya. Our destination was the spectacular and beautiful Sipi Falls near the village of the same name. It is in a fabulous setting of cliffs, gorges and caves. Here, three high iconic waterfalls tumble down to a peaceful unspoilt canyon below.

The brothers and I decided against staying at the ‘Baghdad Hotel’; we were similarly disinclined to stay at the ‘Downhill Quality Hotel’ a few kilometres away, after we called in.

‘Do you not think that the name “Downhill Quality” could be construed as meaning that your establishment is deteriorating?’ I asked the owner, although not using those words specifically.

By the look of the place, he had the name spot on, or perhaps it was never up to much in the first place. The reality was that it was more a tiny B&B than a hotel. The owner still could not detect any irony in the name.

‘The village is called Downhill, what’s the problem?’ he asked, not unreasonably, I suppose.

We settled in the end on a small Ugandan-run campsite in a banana grove. We were pretty much the only people staying there; certainly, we were the only foreigners staying in the village. Surrounded as we were on all sides by trees laden with ripe bananas, our campsite barman told us at breakfast,

‘Sorry, no bananas at the market this morning.’

No explanation was offered. We found bananas a while later at the ‘Jesus is Lord’ shop. The whole country seemed so much greener and lusher than the arid lands of Kenya. It reminded me of the fertile lower slopes of Kilimanjaro just below the rainforest where banana trees are also found in abundance. When Winston Churchill visited Uganda as Minister for the Colonies in 1907, he observed how fertile it was and described the country as the ‘Pearl of Africa.’

Uganda did not win independence from Britain until 1962. Since then, it has been relatively stable by African standards— that is, except for the 1970s. That terrible decade was dominated by the rule of one General Idi Amin. Despite being completely illiterate, the dictator considered himself well qualified for the job. On formal occasions he insisted on being introduced as ‘His Excellency, Field Marshal Al-Haji, Doctor Idi Amin Dada, DSO, MC, VC, Life President of Uganda, King of Scotland, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, Professor of Geography, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.’