The Black Nile

The Black Nile - Dan Morrison


CHAPTER ONE
Ah, the Nile. What hasn’t been said of it?
—Maria Golia, Cairo: City of Sand


The deacon grabbed me as I rounded a corner of the covered market near Old Kampala. His wide eyes were intense, wild—bereft—and they bore into mine as if we two were alone on the damp and teeming walkway, maybe alone on the earth.
I’d been searching for a bush hat among the acres of flip-flops and mounds of Chinese denim piled in the stalls of the market district; it was the last item on my list, a broad-brimmed canvas number to deflect the sun that my old blue walking cap would not, and I was about to give up when I was seized by the man in the worn black blazer and ivory shirt. He took my wrist in bony fingers, the knuckles swollen, their skin cracking, and brought his sweating face near to mine.
A stream of weekend shoppers adjusted its course around this new obstruction. A child stopped to stare and was pulled away by her mother. The deacon ignored them, just as he ignored the thunder rolling down from the hills surrounding the capital. “Do you,” he panted, his pupils and nostrils dilated wide as dimes, “believe in Jesus?”
Schon Bryan, standing beside me in a sweat-blotched golf shirt and devastated Carhartt work pants, gave a snort and walked to the railing. He lit a filterless Camel, adjusted his $200 sunglasses and looked down into the scrum of buyers and hawkers one level below.
I had seen these Pentecostal preachers gyrating on street corners all over Kampala, usually in the late afternoons. It looked like an exhausting line of work. “You know,” I told the deacon, twisting slowly away, hoping he would allow my arm to come along for the ride, “that’s a complicated question, and I’m a little busy right now.” He increased the pressure on my wrist and raised a Bible over our heads with his left hand, his breath fogging my glasses as the Muslim call to afternoon prayer began to echo from the nearby mosques. “Renounce Mohammed,” he shouted in his sawdust voice. “Renounce the devil, and come now to blessed salvation.”
Two women—one wearing a short stretchy neon blue skirt, the other in a longer, more traditional orange-and-black print dress with exaggerated poufs at the shoulders—watched from the doorway of a clinic selling herbal treatments for HIV. “Jesus!” the woman in the neon skirt called out. I glanced in her direction. “Save me,” she cried.
“I mean no offense,” I said, turning back to the deacon. “I’m just not interested. I’ve got something to do, and I’ve got to go.” He slackened his grip, his pupils and nostrils contracted, and his form shifted ever so slightly from one of madman to man. He gave a short breath and asked in a matter-of-fact tone, “What have you to do?”
“I’m looking for a hat.”
“But what is your purpose here? You are not a missionary. I don’t think you are an NGO. That is why the whites come. Why are you here?” A woman in a nurse’s smock opened the clinic door and shouted over the market’s clamor, “Godfrey! He will see you now.” The deacon looked to her and again to me. “Why are you here? Tell me your purpose.” He dropped my arm and lowered his Bible. It started pouring, and the market grew louder as more people pressed inside to escape the wet. Rain hammered the center skylight and the corrugated steel roof. “Tell me. I don’t have long.”
His simple request struck me in a way his evangelical hysteria had not. I cringed, and almost confessed, “I’m a hack journalist with something to prove, and I’ve brought my best friend to Africa to keep me company while I prove it, but I’m not sure he can handle what’s to come and I’m not sure I can either, and I’m terrified we’re going to get our fingers and lips chopped off in the north, or that we’ll be shot by bandits in southern Sudan, or that we’ll be arrested and beaten for snooping around in Khartoum. I couldn’t live with myself if I got Schon killed—I’d have to commit suicide.”
Instead I said, “I’ll tell you,” and my posture improved with each word. “I’m going down the White Nile, the length of the Nile, from Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean. I’m going to paddle a boat from Jinja to Lake Kyoga, maybe even as far as Karuma Falls, and then I’m going to trek through Murchison Park to Lake Albert, where I’ll find a fisherman to take me north to Nimule and into Sudan. From there we’ll follow the river to Juba, where I’ll hop a barge through the Sudd marshlands—we’ll fish off the side, Schon’s a great fisherman—and on up to Khartoum. I’ll follow the river north from there and visit the Sudanese pyramids and, hopefully, the Merowe Dam, carrying on through Nubia, past Aswan to Cairo, and then finally Rosetta. I figure I can make it in three months.”
It was my hand in the air now, tracing the Nile’s course from the equator to its exit in North Africa, more than three thousand miles away. The deacon ignored it, just as he ignored my flowering confidence in the plan, such as it was. His brow bundled into confusion, hurt even. “Why?”
“It’s just something I’ve got to do. No one’s made the journey in decades, at least not like this.” After years as a freelance reporter, I was tired of struggling for crumbs of piecework from a fast-shrinking roster of newspapers and magazines. The hustle made me feel small. I needed to do something big, something unrelated to the American news cycle, something deep and wide and untrammeled. The Nile beckoned—not the Nile of the six-day Egyptian package tour, with its unctuous guides and sunburned Germans, but the African Nile, the one nobody hears about, the river born of giant equatorial lakes and massive continental rains a lifetime away from Cairo, a region poised unsteadily between peace and war, where decades of conflict may at last have run their course.
“Someone is paying you?” the deacon said.
“No.”
“You are a student?”
“Not for years.”
“Where is your boat?”
“Well, I don’t actually have one yet.”
The gravity lifted like the morning fog off Lake Victoria and he brightened. “Mzungu, that’s crazy. You will be eaten by crocs. I wish you God’s luck you won’t be eaten. You will find your hat two buildings over, to the right, on the ground level. The hats the whites wear in the bush. Now, if you will excuse me, I am late for my drip.” He walked to the clinic and said something in Luganda to the three women outside, who cackled at our impending death by crocodile.


Schon and I renewed our circuit around the market. “What was that all about?” he asked in his low baritone.
“He says,” I replied, scratching my beard in the humidity, “he knows where we can find our floppy jungle hats.”
“Well thank the Lord. I’m getting a little wobbly here, Maynard, and while you might be used to this volume of flip-flopping humanity and random encounters with drunken reverends or whatever that was, not to mention death-wish rides on the back of motorcycle taxis, it’s getting a little much for me after twenty-six hours on a plane. Planes.”
Schon’s budget route had taken him from his bartending job in the piney hills of North Carolina to Uganda via the airport at Raleigh, with stops in Minneapolis, Amsterdam and Nairobi. He’d looked fine when I picked him up more than twelve hours before—rested, satisfied, humming the Meat Puppets, gobsmacked by the heat and the East African diction and the roadside casket makers. Now the man was crashing. We walked down to the narrow lanes separating the tight grid of market buildings and joined a speedy current of pedestrians, motorbikes and diesel trucks. Tens of thousands of people visited the market district each day and it seemed my feet had decided I should bump into them all. We dodged those oncoming pedestrians we could and apologized to those we couldn’t, and we searched from stall to stall in the whole of the building two down to the right and found nothing at all like a bush hat. “Jesus!” one of the vendors called to me. “Osama!” shrieked another.
“I guess they don’t see too many beards around here,” Schon said. We forced our way back into the alley toward the road, where I flagged two boda-boda motorcycle taxis. I haggled with the drivers for the sake of self-respect as much as for frugality, and then we were off, Schon corkscrewing in his seat to gape at the giant black marabou storks flapping low and slow from parapet to light pole. The rain had turned the red clay streets to red mud streets; our teenage chauffeurs had a devil of a time getting us up the long hill of Makindye Road into Kampala’s leafy southern suburbs to a crest high above the exhaust line, where each skidded to a stop. I paid the boys and we walked with care down a rutted side road to the first house on the right. We passed through the gate with a “hallo” to Sunday, the young watchman, in his blue coveralls and black gumboots, and turned up the steep stone garden stairs to the sprawling rooming house run by Claire Infield, our temporary landlady.
We entered through the homey kitchen, with its barred windows, and turned left through the dining room into a foyer, where we came to our room. I opened the padlock and Schon collapsed into the smaller of the two beds. “What time’s it in America right now? Midnight?”
“The jet lag is easier if you can hold out until dark,” I said. “Get you onto Africa time. Sleep when everyone else does.”
He sat up and pulled off his waterlogged K-Swiss sneakers. “Morrison, I guarantee you half this town is asleep right now, and I’m about to join them unless we got something to do.” He looked around the big room. “When’s Noah get back? Tomorrow?”
We were bunking in the residence of my friend Noah Gottschalk, who would soon return from a visit to Florida. Claire housed a shifting roster of aid workers, do-gooders and other expatriates. Noah had been there more than a year, and his seniority earned him one of the bigger rooms. Next door was a flying instructor from Manchester, downstairs was a veteran worker for a Christian NGO, and outside held a shed with small private cells where two British legal interns bunked when they weren’t working to abolish Uganda’s death penalty. Noah himself worked with refugees.
“I take it I’ll be on the floor once he arrives, seeing how you’re the commander of this folly,” Schon said, stretching his arms out and propping his head under his hands. “Fine by me. I’ll take a floor in Uganda any day over a feather bed in Europe. I’m telling you, Amsterdam, walking down the aisle of the 777, I nearly swooned every third or fourth row. Europeans are pungent. I knew it would happen but there’s really no preparing for it. The first one really got me. A woman. Right in the face. I was able to stop breathing just in time to reset my blood levels without serious harm. You can laugh, but I’m telling you. They just kept coming. Each rude aroma differed from the last in some way. Why was that, you suppose? Different regions of Europe? Anyway, one guy smelled exactly like rabbit shit. So, yeah, the floor will be fine.”
I started unpacking the bags while Schon slept. Better, I thought, to spare him the initial anxiety. It was clear the moment he arrived that we had too much gear. Schon came off the Kenya Airways flight with three bags, a five-foot-long fishing rod case and a Wal-Mart tent the size of a surface-to-air missile. I’d arrived from Cairo with a giant black duffel containing a blue rucksack, a black paramilitary-style raid pack, a bag of medical supplies and a half dozen books, including guides to Sudan, Uganda and Egypt and some used paperbacks. My laptop had come as carry-on, along with my trusty old Nikon F2, a refurbished digital Nikon D50, a minidisk recorder, different lenses and filters, memory cards, various photocopied book excerpts, files and cheat sheets, two small hardbound notebooks from the bindery outside the Al-Azhar mosque, a handful of Staedtler and Pentel felt-tip markers, my Thuraya satellite phone and my battered Nokia. I turned the rucksack over and spilled its contents onto the floor, then turned to Schon’s gear.
He had brought all that I asked, and more. The solar charger (bigger than I imagined), the multivitamins, the ultraviolet SteriPen, the Katadyn water filter, the shock-resistant LaCie hard drive, three packs of brown Nat Sherman cigarettes, two Nalgene plastic water bottles, two boxes of Ziploc bags, three crank-charged flashlights, four small Swiss Army knives, two pint bottles of Johnnie Walker Red (for minor officials in need of inducement), a liter of Johnnie Walker Black (for a major official in need of inducement), four sixteen-ounce bottles of No-Ad SPF 50 sunscreen (one of which had exploded, coating everything else) and—what the f*ck was this?
“Hey, sleepy bear.”
He looked up, his face saggy. “What?”
“I told you to bring bug juice, not bug spray. How are we supposed to carry a dozen aerosol cans more than three thousand miles?”
“We’re not carrying them the whole way, jeesh. You throw ’em out when they’re empty and you keep going. I know they take up some space, but I know what works.”
“I’m telling you man, this won’t do. And what’s with the Ivory soap? You don’t think they have soap in Africa?” (I too, of course, had brought my own cleanser, a small bottle of Dr. Bronner’s all-natural peppermint.)
“F*ck you, Dr. Livingstone. I know what I like.”
We sifted the gear for two hours, taking from and adding to the pile. Half my books and half of Schon’s went under Noah’s bed. So did all but three cans of bug spray, half my underwear and under-shirts, half the sunscreen, most of my pecan Luna bars, my small cotton sleep sack, a small shortwave radio, half my pocket-width reporter’s notebooks and most of the batteries. Still we had too much.
I broke into the medical bags and sorted through the antibiotics, deworming serum, malaria test kits, analgesics, antiinflammatories, antihistamines, bandages, medical tape, two sterile intravenous kits, sterile sutures, a baby blue lice comb and a $40 super-coagulant QuickClot Battle Pack from Ranger Joe’s in Columbus, Georgia. Schon stared at the minor pharmacopoeia. “Seeing how I didn’t spend eight years interning at Johns Hopkins—oh, wait, neither did you—maybe you can tell me what all those are for.”
“It’s mostly antibiotics, but I’d rather keep them all,” I said of the mound of small cardboard boxes and silvery bubble packs. “Each does something different. Those are doxycycline, which you should have started taking yesterday, to keep malaria parasites out of your long-suffering liver. Penicillin, that’s for mouth infections and fever. Cipro, that’s for when I eat the wrong thing—and you know I will. Metronidazole for amoebas. And ampicillin, that’s for deep abdominal wounds.”
“Deep abdominal wounds.”
“Yeah.”
“Like in case we get shot.”
“Hey,” I asked, changing the subject, “what’s in the tackle box?”
Schon opened the gray case, revealing five fishing rods, three reels, four spools of line, a nine-iron, a gallon Ziploc bag of scuffed golf balls, a small camp stove that ran on flammable white tablets, a metal grill, a long set of barbecue tongs, a pocketknife, a cleaver, a butcher knife, pliers and a pair of red-handled tin snips. Packs of Camel and Marlboro Medium cigarettes and a sandwich bag of toiletries filled the little gaps that remained.
“Nice packing job, eh?” He was beaming. “Every cubic inch spoken for.”
“What’s with the snips? You looking to install some ductwork while we’re here? And what’s with the golf balls?”
“I need the pliers to make my lures. I can’t afford to buy ’em. Same with the snips, they’re for making spoons—the shiny things that make the fish go ‘Oooh.’ And golf’s a great game. I figure I could show some kids how to play, get some kind of poor man’s golf going with the locals. Set up a mini course. Shouldn’t be that tough.”
Schon was not, at first or second glance, an obvious personnel choice for a trek through Africa, but he had a quality more valuable than decades of experience in the bush. Untraveled, a touch conceited, with a cloistered and underworked intelligence, he was one of the few people in the world I trusted completely. My best friend of twenty-five years would do as I asked, would speak with full candor and would watch my back as only a person who knows you can. I also secretly hoped the Nile journey would somehow restart in Schon a sly creativity that had impressed me so as a child and that had been stilled by nearly two decades of disappointment and hard living.
He apparently harbored the same ambition. Stacked to the side of the great pile of gear were three Mead five-subject notebooks. “Dude, that’s a lot of paper,” I said. “You can’t possibly take that many notes.”
“Watch me. I been doing this for the last twenty years. I have filled hundreds of these, double-sided. Couldn’t stop if I tried.”
“Shit, why don’t you publish any of it? You’ve always been a good writer.”
“Huh. It’s a record of drunken lonely anguish, most of it. Not for general consumption. But these virgins,” he said, almost hugging the notebooks, “these are going to be fun.”
That night we hit the Petit Bistro for pepper steak and Nile Special beer, zeeming down the red clay back roads courtesy of the boda cartel that operated near the American club. We shot through the darkness past small shacks fronted by dirt yards and chickens and tall fine women carrying parcels on their heads. The ride seemed to be taking too long, and I was about to voice my doubts into the back of my driver’s pitted helmet when the traffic of Ggaba Road came into view. He made a right into a stream of Hiace vans, bodas, and Toyota pickups and ten seconds later we were there. The ride was 3,000 shillings each, about a dollar fifty, when fair price was 2,000. We found a spot on the crowded bistro’s roadside patio, near a group dinner by what I took to be an American church group. Three of the men wore matching blue oxfords and navy slacks; all the women were in long skirts, some with their arms showing, others not. None seemed to be drinking. Behind us another American man was shouting into his phone—travel plans, airport, early morning—at high aggrieved volume. “Can’t place the accent, can you?” I asked Schon.
“I’m doing my best to ignore it,” he said. “I came on this excursion to get away from dudes like that right there.”
The man was now yelling, “Who is this? Who are you? You beeped me. Who are you? I want to know why you beeped me.” Persecuted by a wrong number, he later whined for a Coke and then whined for its cancellation and not soon enough he was gone and a nice Ugandan couple sat down in his place. She ordered pork chops. They looked great. On Ggaba Road an abrasive, almost electrical sound, like a fleet of slot-car racers, grew louder until its source came into view: a man on a small 200cc motorcycle dragging forty-foot lengths of rebar. The steel rods had been bent in half, tied in an oval and lashed to the rear of his Honda. He passed us at full throttle, leaving a comet’s tail of orange sparks.
The house was dark when we got back—Kampala savored its electricity for anywhere from six to twelve hours a day, and the power was still out in the morning. We took cold baths, Schon shaved and we walked down the hill to catch bodas into town, conceding most of the road to a herd of tall-horned cattle. At the City Bakery we ate meat pies and croissants and perused Kampala’s three daily newspapers. Top of the heap was the Monitor (independent, mostly grammatical), followed by the state-owned New Vision (would-be independent, kind of grammatical) and the scurrilous Red Pepper, my guilty favorite. The Pepper was a classic scandal sheet: The prior month it had invited readers to send in the names of homosexuals so they might be publicly identified and thus learn the error of their ways. To the horror of many, forty-five men made the paper, listed by first name and profession. Other Red Pepper campaigns named alleged sugar daddies, purported lesbians, suspected sugar mamas and garden-variety cheaters, but its hunt for gays inspired real terror in a country where the president had declared homosexuals “worse than dogs and pigs” and sodomy was punishable by life in prison.
The Pepper’s writing was darkly lascivious; the paper’s unique code name for the vagina was “Kandahar,” like the city in southern Afghanistan. “Pestle,” “whopper” and “shaft” denoted the penis. Intercourse itself was “shafting,” “bonking” or “sexing.” A typical Pepper story might begin like this:
MAN MASSACRES WIFE OVER KANDAHAR
Shock and fright enveloped residents of Katosi Fish landing site in Ntenjeru Sub-County when a jilted lover attacked and killed his ex-bonkmate with a panga. Ssebadduka Nankungu, a resident of Luwero Island, filled with hunger attacked Harriet Namakula and butchered her in cold blood.
Matters went out of hand when Ssebadduka failed to properly penetrate Namakula’s Kandahar and cause pregnancy. Sources intimated that the love-gone-bad bonkmates had always bonked day and night with hope of getting a child but all in vain. . . .
Along the way, the Pepper trafficked in fantastic scoops about Uganda’s political and intelligence elites that the Monitor and New Vision wouldn’t touch. “I see your taste keeps getting better,” Schon said, scowling up from the Monitor’s crossword as I chortled at the hot copy. He got up for a refill of coffee, lingering for a moment with the counter girl, and we walked onto Jinja Road in search of a ride. “That beauty had just about as much ass as you can legally carry on a frame that small,” he said as we walked to the corner. “God, I love it here.”
004
Cam McLeay leaned over my 1:800,000 scale International Travel Map of Uganda and with a ballpoint pen marked an X on the Nile an inch north of Jinja. “You got rapids up to here, mate. No point in launching before—you’ll be right on the rocks.” McLeay was a New Zealander, with dark eyes and short dark sun-battered hair. His handshake was crushing and his skin was weathered—the freckles seemed to have freckles of their own. He’d run rivers all over the world and now owned Uganda’s top rafting company. I’d come looking for advice on how we might find a boat to paddle from Lake Victoria’s outlet at Jinja down the White Nile to Lake Kyoga, a hundred miles north in the center of the country, and maybe even farther. The year before, McLeay helped lead an expedition that followed the Nile upriver from Egypt to its remotest headwaters in Rwanda, using motorized rubber rafts. After getting through Sudan unmolested they were ambushed by Ugandan rebels inside Murchison Falls National Park, and a man was shot dead. (Months later, they restarted their journey and extended the Nile’s official length by a few hundred feet.)
“I think it’s a great idea, great,” he said of our plan. “Just as long as you’re not in a hurry. Murchison is much safer now.” Peace talks had recently opened in the southern Sudanese capital of Juba between the Ugandan government and the rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army, whose grisly twenty-year insurgency had left much of Uganda’s north a wasteland of refugee camps and army bases. It was their forces who had ambushed McLeay’s group in Murchison. “Now, down here, in the first few days, you can just camp by the side of the river, and there’s a town here”—he marked another X—“sorry, bad habit, Namasagali, where you might find a place to sleep. There’s not a lot of options. Still, I don’t know where you’re going to find a boat. Whatever you may have thought, people don’t use the Nile for transport. The river traffic facilitated the colonial cotton trade, and once that dried up, so did most of the river travel. You know, I’m having a boat built right now to port our gear from camp to camp. The old boat, the one I’m replacing, that might do the trick for your purposes. I don’t know how bad off it is, but I can take you up there to have a look—I’d be happy to give it to you. The carpenter can fix it up; you’ll have to pay him of course, and wait until he’s finished mine—but maybe that’ll fit the bill.”
Cam drove us from Kampala to his work camp north of Jinja and left for other business. “That,” Schon said as he drove away, “has to be the nicest man I’ve ever met.” The work camp was on the riverbank overlooking a jagged line of rocks and whitewater that stretched the width of the river, about six hundred yards. It was our first look at the Nile since Schon’s arrival, and we each stared at it for a moment without speaking. The work boat turned out to be too far gone to repair—it had rotted through in the rain and humidity. So, through Cam, I placed an order for a new one. It would take at least a week (and, after some cost overruns, about three hundred dollars) to build. Time enough to address a problem bigger than a boat: how to get into Sudan.
We returned to Kampala on a series of minibus taxis and the next day visited the Sudanese embassy to check on my visa application and to submit one for Schon. “What do you suppose the odds are these people will actually let me set foot in their country?” Schon whispered as we filled in his paperwork. Sudan’s government had no love for Western visitors. Still, I hoped Schon might fly under their radar and be allowed in. I’d brought him a letter of introduction I’d begged off a friend at Flak, a nifty culture website. “With any luck, they’ll think you’re official enough to warrant a visa and too insignificant to be disqualified,” I said.
From the tidy heights of Kampala’s diplomatic quarter we rode south to the Mengo-Bakuri neighborhood and the shadow embassy of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement. The SPLM was the political arm of the rebel army whose twenty-two-year civil war with the Arab north had recently been stilled by Sudan’s landmark Comprehensive Peace Agreement. After a conflict that had left two million people dead, the southern Sudanese in 2005 won autonomy, power-sharing, a cut of the oil revenues and a promise of free elections that many believed would make the autocratic rebel leader John Garang the first black president of Sudan. Then, on July 30, 2005, tragedy: Garang, flying back to Sudan from a meeting with his old friend and supporter, Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, was lost in a helicopter crash. (“The most shocking aspect of the whole thing was that it was accidental,” a Western diplomat told me at the time.) Garang’s deputy, Salva Kiir Mayardit, was elevated to president of south Sudan and vice president of the troubled national unity government in Khartoum. But even now, more than a year later, the rebels were still in shock at the loss of their maximum leader.
The SPLM office in Kampala was an unmarked walled compound not far from a gas station, and it still operated as an entity separate from the Sudanese government—evidence of the southerners’ virulent mistrust of their “partners” in the Arab north. This was an opening for Schon and me. The southerners were still issuing their own visas for the regions under their control, and the peace treaty had broadened that area to encompass the entire south, including cities and towns on the Nile that during the war had been in the hands of northern government forces. A southern travel pass would allow us to travel legally through the autonomous lower third of Sudan, right up to the official north-south border, regardless of whether our Sudanese visas came through or not. We sat on red cushioned armchairs in the shadow embassy’s front office and stared at the framed portraits of Garang and of his successor, Salva Kiir. A beige computer sat on each of the two desks, neither with any cables, power or otherwise, attached; they were totems of the modern office. From behind a curtain we heard the sound of careful hunting and pecking on a manual typewriter. Within an hour we each had a blue cardboard two-month pass for travel in and out of the autonomous south Sudan.
That night Schon made pasta and we joined Claire and her eleven-year-old prodigy of a daughter, Olivia, at the dining room table. We’d bought a bottle of claret on Ggaba Road; Claire, a curly-haired Briton, was pleased. Olivia was tapping on a laptop powered by the house’s battery backup. It was text for a Wanted poster, part of a project at the international school where Claire was on the faculty. “Wanted by the FBI,” she typed, “Funny Baboons Incorporated—for stealing the Moon.” Claire was recalling the early 1990s, when armed robberies were common in Kampala. “A bullet hit just under my bedroom window and broke a clay pot,” she said. “It was an enormous explosion.”
“A stray bullet?” I asked.
“No, he was shooting at the house. He was down there in the garden with an AK-47. We slept under the bed in those days, but you didn’t sleep. Men would come to the windows.” Her voice quieted at the memory of those fearful times. “There was a mother with a little baby in her arms, my Ugandan friend Martha and her child, Jean. The baby was crying with malaria, and we didn’t want the baby to cry, because people would know there was someone in the house.” By the time Olivia was born, a growing economy had calmed the air of desperate menace that once ruled the streets of Kampala. She sat at the table, sucking a berry-flavored ice-lolly and writing the Wanted poster, blissfully untouched by the violence that had preceded her. She was telling Schon about her school lunches, how the teachers were served first, no matter where they stood on line, and how the larger kids pushed the smaller ones out of the way. “It’s not fair, but that’s how they do it,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Once a man was right there at the window trying to get in,” Claire said. “I screamed at him and he ran away. He had a big wrench, like this,” she held her hands about a foot and a half apart, “and he just dropped it and ran away. He wanted to pry the bars open. Of course most of them use a car jack. They put it under the one bar and just lift the whole thing off. Oh—there’s a nasty leaf in my wine.” She’d been trimming flowers at the table in the battery-lit evening; there were fresh arrangements every day. I stepped onto the patio for a cigarette and looked at the window bars. One was twisted out of place.
“Great team, huh?” I asked Schon after they retired to their two connected rooms on the other side of the house, secure behind a solid door and a solid lock. We killed the red wine and broke into the Johnnie Walker Black, having decided its size and weight were more hindrance than boon.
“Yeah,” he said, opening his journal and blowing smoke rings that disappeared over the patio railing as Ronya, the house collie mix, snored under his chair. “I wish just one of the women I know had half the personality of that kid.”


The next morning Jameel Ssessgabira was waiting for us outside his blue Toyota taxi. He was reading Bukedde, a Luganda-language tabloid, whose cover was dominated by the oversized bosoms of a local heroine. Jameel was nearly all business—I’d hired him several times since arriving in Uganda and he displayed none of the false affection that marked other short-term work relationships. Schon got in the back and I opened the front door only to be again reminded that we were in a former Crown possession, where the steering was done on the right. With an embarrassed grin I settled into the other side, and we pulled out of Claire’s driveway, past the barking Ronya (who had, so far as anyone knew, bitten only one person in her life, that being Olivia’s father), and past a vacant lot with a For Sale sign that Jameel peered at wistfully while barely keeping us from sliding off the crumbling road and down an embankment.
Our destination was the Ugandan government’s Water Hyacinth Control Unit, just east of Kampala, where the director, Engineer Omar Wadda, had granted us an interview. “So the dude’s a weed-whacker,” Schon said from the back.
“If only,” I said. “It’s a serious problem. The hyacinth was nearly the death of Lake Victoria. Nobody knows for sure how it got to Africa from South America, but the things breed fast, die hard, and live on shit. They double their mass every two weeks. It’s part of an environmental train wreck: The lake is full of these mutant fish, the Nile perch, that the Brits dumped in there fifty years ago to boost the fishing industry—”
“Which I am dying to catch one of,” Schon interjected.
“—and all the perch do is eat and shit. The hyacinth love that. Plus, more and more people are living on the lake to get a piece of the fishing action. All their cooking fires send tiny particles of smoke into the air, and the water vapor over the lake gathers around the tiny bits of smoke, causing rain—but it’s not mature rain, it’s a weaker rain that keeps real clouds from forming. But it’s good for the hyacinth because it’s nitrogen-enriched. Meanwhile, the people are cutting down more and more of the trees to cook their supper. While rainfall causes things to be green, it’s also true that green—trees and grasses—sustains rain through the humidity it creates, and with fewer trees there’s less rain. And fewer clouds mean there’s more sunshine, more evaporation. It’s the same phenomenon that turned the Sahara from a savanna to desert.”
“One hell of a Rubik’s Cube,” Schon said, distracted by the relentless flow of boda-bodas, mutatu minivan taxis and lorries. “Thanks, Perfesser.”
Omar Wadda greeted us at his plain office and had us sign his guestbook. He was a little stocky, with eyeglasses and a head of receding white hair, and he exuded the easy competence of a career civil servant. He’d been on the front lines of the hyacinth wars in the 1990s, he said, when the weed covered more than ten percent of the lake’s surface, about forty-six square miles. The plant choked the shoreline—fishermen couldn’t get their boats onto the water, and couldn’t get them back onto land. The wind would push giant colonies of hyacinth across the lake overnight; villagers would wake up to find their landing sites transformed into green prisons. Even the cargo ports connecting Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania were closed during the worst of it. “The government resolved to tackle this through several means,” Wadda said. “Biological: the use of weevils. Manual: giving hand tools, panga mostly, what you call ‘machetes,’ to the fishermen to cut their landing sites clear. Mechanical: using harvesters to keep the ports open. And chemical: this became controversial.”
The Ugandans had introduced weevils into the lake in 1995. While the tiny insects were slow-acting, the weevils could reach where Wadda and his men could not. Wadda’s men infected plants with the insects and gave them to fishermen to drop into patches of hyacinth on the open water, where the bugs spread from plant to plant, feeding on the leaves and laying eggs in the stalks. The larvae move into the roots and pupate—a cycle that happens several times and weakens the plant, until it dies and sinks into the water.
“The Americans, Japanese and the Dutch gave us the harvesters, and Egypt finally came in. They were against using herbicide on the lake, even though we had tested it and found it safe. They gave us $13.5 million to discourage the use of chemicals. They don’t want that precedent on the Nile waters. The combined effort worked. By 1998 there was a collapse of the hyacinth. But now it’s back. Seeds embedded in the lakeside have become exposed due to the low water levels, and have bloomed on the exposed ground.” The hyacinth lowered the water level and at the same time created microenvironments that favored mosquitoes and snails, Wadda said, which in turn brought malaria and schistosomiasis, a parasitic worm.
“Is there something preventing you from using more weevils?” Schon asked.
“The weevils can’t reproduce in a grounded plant,” Wadda said. “The plant has to be floating for the cycle to complete. While the hyacinth reproduces quickly, it takes about five years for the weevils to catch up. We have weevil rearing sites where they are held in reserve, but it will take time to reach the numbers we need. Still, they are doing it. While we are sitting here, the weevils are working.”
We drove fifteen minutes south to Port Bell, where Egyptian engineers used floating white combines to clear dense patches of the flowering aquatic plant from the shoreline. We signed the guestbook, and one of the engineers waded into the water and pulled out a hyacinth. It was an attractive plant, with a long and graceful stalk, elegant thick leaves and a purple flower. Surprisingly heavy, I thought. Wadda tore it open to expose the weevils inside. They were dark, the size of cookie crumbs, and they moved with delicacy across the curly brown fibers of the root bowl; farther down, the larvae were white pinheads, almost too tiny to be seen.
“Here’s the thing he couldn’t say,” I told Schon as we drove back into town. “The rainfall is definitely off, but another reason for the lake being down is the last election. Am I right, Jameel?”
Jameel smiled behind his sunglasses. “Some say the government wanted more power before the vote and they took more water for the dam than they should have. The other countries on the lake were what? They were angry.” In February 2006 the International Rivers Network had released a study showing the lake’s historic low—it was down to thirty-five feet—was only partly because of drought. An analysis by the environmental group found that sixty-five percent of the lake’s decline was due to the overrelease of water into two hydroelectric dams at the source of the Nile in Jinja. The sluice gates were tightened following Museveni’s reelection that month, and the country’s electricity supply plummeted.
“Is that why there’s no power now?” Schon asked. “They’re doing penance now that the old man got reelected?”
“Power might have had something to do with his reelection, but it didn’t hurt that his main opponent was in jail for most of the campaign on treason and rape charges,” I said. “You know—’cause treason isn’t enough.”
“You gotta know your audience,” Schon said.
We drove back to the city and into Old Kampala, the city’s Islamic and Indian quarter. Schon wanted a haircut and shave; I figured an Indian barber would have a better time with his sandy mop than an African one. The streets, traffic and buildings all were coated in red dust of the clay hills, as were the letter-sized flyers that shouted from the lampposts and walls in fifty-point bold type—“Get a Lover”; “Get a Husband”; “Get a Wife”; “Get Fat”; “For Man Vitality & Size”—each with a mobile phone number below it.
The people, however, shone—under the red dust, their clothes were immaculate, pressed, their shoes all shined. In Cairo the shoe-shine men called out for customers. In Kampala men and women lined up and waited. Schon and I were invariably the most disheveled people on any sidewalk. My own appearance—the greasy long hair, the beard, the posture of a boiled shrimp, the clothes that refused to hold a crease—was strange enough that people didn’t waste much time on me. Schon, however, looked normal at first glance—he looked as a mzungu should, with short light hair, clean cheeks and expensive shades. This first impression dissolved into confusion however as the gaze continued from Schon’s face to his shirt—usually a nice short-sleeved polo from the golf resort where he tended bar—to his paint-blotted work pants and formerly white tennis shoes. We found a barber from Tamil Nadu who cut him clean under the fluorescent lights and then beat him about the head for twenty minutes, a massage that would have cost fifty dollars back home. Schon managed to flirt with the barbershop’s broom girl for a moment, and we stepped out into the Kampala evening, a golden light etching the tops of the grimy cement stalls and the crumbling colonial buildings. “I could use a beer,” Schon said, and suddenly there one was: two doors to the right, an outdoor café, a fridge full of bottles, sturdy plastic tables and chairs, a steel grill and a charming owner named Shems Lalji.
“So good to meet you,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “It’s an auspicious day, so the first round is on me.” He brought out three bottles of Bell beer.
“What’s the occasion?” Schon asked.
“I’ve just had my baby boy circumcised.”
“Mabrouk,” I said. “Mazel tov.”
“Thank you. And it’s especially notable, because the doctor is the same man my father brought me to for the same task, back in the sixties.”
I stumbled over the math. “That would make the doctor . . .”
“Eighty-one,” Shems said. “I was just a boy in 1972 when we left the country; Idi Amin had expelled the Asians. But our family doctor stayed through it all, and I found him when I moved back last year, and he’s still in fine shape.”
“A steady hand,” I said.
“A steady hand indeed. Excuse me for a moment.” He got up to turn a rack of lamb on the grill.
I asked Jameel, who was twenty-five, how his generation saw Idi Amin. “He was loved at first,” Jameel said. “He spoke like the people. And he built a hospital for the poor. And he made the language of the schools an African language, not English. These were good things. But he did some things that were velly bad. The Asians, they were robbing people. They had all the business. But he took everything of theirs, and other men got to have those businesses, those houses, for nothing; they did no work, and they did not know how to operate a factory, how to trade. Fifty thousand Asians were made to leave, to England, to India, to other places. And some, they could not leave—they had no passports but the Ugandan one, they were born here. Some of these families, they went to the dam in Jinja and they what? They jumped over the side. All, including the babies. It was velly bad.”
We had lamb with roasted potatoes, a right feast, while Shems told us his story. He’d grown up in Vancouver; his family were Ismaili Muslims, an ancient offshoot of Shiism. While Shems still considered himself an Ismaili, he was also a Sufi, part of a universalist strain of Islam.
“I started some restaurants in Vancouver, and they received good notices. I even published a book called Go Ahead, Make My Curry, but at some point I realized I wanted to come back to reclaim some of my family’s properties and make a go of things.” He had his café and a newly opened hotel he hoped would draw backpackers. He’d married a local woman, and now he was the father of a newly circumcised son. “Alhamdulillah,” I said. He and Jameel laughed.
“You know Arabic?” I asked Jameel, eyeing his nearly empty beer.
“I know alhamdulillah,” he said. “My father is a Muslim.”
“That means you’re Muslim, right?”
“I am Muslim,” he said, regarding the label on his bottle. “Yes.” It struck me: Hanging from his rearview mirror, where a Catholic might have a rosary and crucifix, was a plastic medallion depicting the Kaaba in Mecca. I’d completely missed it.


Noah Gottschalk was asleep in his bed when we returned to Claire’s house that night. I seized the spare. It was time for Schon to take the floor, where he slept like a faithful hound, uncovered on a thin foam bedroll. In the morning we had breakfast on the patio and I filled Noah in on our plan. I had become taken with the idea of traveling on Lake Victoria by fishing boat from Entebbe, a half hour south of Kampala, to Jinja, where the White Nile began. “From there we’ll claim our own boat, christen it with a bottle of Coke and paddle to Lake Kyoga. We’ll find someone to tow the boat across Kyoga, and from there we’ll paddle up to Karuma Falls.”
“No we won’t,” Schon said.
“Or, if we’re too tired, or wimpy, we’ll find someone with a motor to put on the boat and putter us up to Karuma, and they’ll keep the boat as payment. After Karuma, it’s down to Masindi, and a hired car into Murchison Park, where the Wildlife Authority has offered us a motorboat for hire to get us to Lake Albert. From there we try to find a fisherman to take us to the Sudan border. I think it’s doable,” I said hopefully.
“Why are you traveling on Lake Victoria when the Nile starts at Jinja?” Noah asked, carving up a pineapple on a scuffed porcelain plate.
“I don’t know, I just like the idea.”
“It doesn’t make sense. If you want to somehow touch the water before it becomes Nile water you could do that from anywhere. It doesn’t have to be from Entebbe. Lake Victoria is big. It has its own weather. I’m just saying.”
We roamed across Kampala by boda-boda as I tried to gather the elements of a decent Plan B that would get us to Sudan once Plan A proved impossible. We visited the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, which was ferrying southern Sudanese refugees back home from camps in Uganda. They would love to have us along on such a trip, the local press officer said, but the wet season was running long—no UNHCR trucks would be crossing the border for some time. A trucking company that supplied southern Sudan was more amenable. “See our agent in Koboko,” the manager said, but their route went through Koboko in northern Uganda to Yei in southern Sudan, far off the Nile. The Karuma Falls and the more spectacular Murchison Falls made boating into Murchison Falls National Park impossible. At a local adventure company we learned there was no point in trying the northern overland route either—the roads were unreliable. “I wouldn’t go there without two vehicles,” our contact said. “One to pull the other out when it gets stuck. And it will.” We would have to leave the Nile at Karuma Falls and enter Murchison Park from the south, using the established tourist route.
Then, at the Sudanese embassy, a true reversal. My three-month visa had come through, but written across it, in English and Arabic, was the following restriction: Not valid beyond twenty-five miles of Republican Palace. It seemed that President Bashir of Sudan had been snubbed while applying for a visa to the United States at the American consulate in Havana. Havana being distant from things Middle Eastern, the visa clerk hadn’t known that sanctions in place since 1993 restricting the movement of Sudanese officials in the United States had been lifted in 2002. Bashir, who was heading to New York to attend the annual UN General Assembly, was not allowed to leave the island of Manhattan. In a fury, his government had placed similar shackles on all Americans in Sudan—diplomats, aid workers and lowly freelance journalists alike—limiting them to the capital. The restriction meant I would be traveling illegally the minute I left the south, with little hope of a reprieve if I were arrested on the way to Khartoum. We stepped outside the embassy and I let out a howl that set the marabou storks flying.
Sitting down on the embassy’s front steps, I pulled out the Sudan map. “We need to reassess. At this rate,” I said to Schon, “it looks like you’re not getting a Sudan visa. And even if you did, it would have the same F*ck You on it that mine has. Plus, we’re a week into this, and still in Kampala, and our boat isn’t ready and we don’t know when it will be. You’ve got less than seven weeks before you’ve got to be back to work. So you’re not going to see Khartoum. That puts your end point here—Juba—or here—Malakal, the last major town in the south. It’s just north of there that our blue southern travel passes become void.”
“I get that,” Schon said, “and I can live with it. But if you’re restricted to within twenty-five miles of the outhouse, how are you going to Khartoum? I mean legally.”
I didn’t know. “Maybe I’ll just make a run from Malakal to the capital without stopping, and then try to get the visa changed. I mean, it’s a risk, but maybe a worthy one.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Worth a month in a Sudanese jail. You better think it over, and I mean hard.”
We bodaed back to Claire’s in a foul mind. At the roundabout off Queens Way, I stared glumly at the white-and-blue mutatu minivan taxis, each with a shout-out to a team, neighborhood or deity spelled across its windshield: Arsenal, Nabinene Girls, “Maama wa Baana” (Mother and Child), a popular song by Master Parrot, Inshallah. Billboards advertising HIV treatment, marital fidelity, CelTel phones and a simple display of white text on a red background that asked, “Why are you paying a fortune for indifferent imported basmati rice when you can have . . .” The answer was obvious, at least to those who bought basmati rice.
Outside the Shoprite supermarket the dirt paths were populated by hip-high child beggars, their skin dusty and dry, their hair coarse. “Sir, sir,” they called to us as we waited in traffic, their mothers or minders squatting nearby in the dirt with infants in their arms. The street was clogged with mutatus, bodas and private cars. Two small boys approached Schon’s boda, calling, “Sir, sir, sir,” and were interrupted by a teenage boy in a yellow soccer jersey walking the median; he threw his elbows and forearms out in a menacing gesture. One boy jumped out of the way; the other ignored him and was in turn ignored by us. The teenager was carrying a bathroom scale in both hands, face out. I realized, as we pulled away, that he sold weight. Earlier, a day or two before, a boy had approached me with a scale on the lower end of Makindye Road and I, in a hurry, had said no thank you. I wished now I’d taken the time to stand on his scale and pay him his hundred shillings. Hustlers were everywhere in Kampala, in the best sense of the term. Boys and men and women, their arms roped with basketball jerseys, collared shirts, cardboard displays holding plastic combs and cheap manicure kits, lined the streets in the late afternoon looking for action from homebound commuters. They stood until dark.