Images of Africa

A red dawn

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Wakamba Plain — Akseli Valdemar Gallen Kallela (1910) Public Domain.

I spent the years 2016 and 2017 living and working across southern and eastern Africa. Written down, those years don’t seem so long ago, but they are nearing on a decade distant now. Like any experience in your youth, that period was incredibly formative for me. Even so, in my memory those years already seem in retreat, as if sinking into a sepia photograph.

Recently, a few readers have asked me to share more of that time; perhaps writing some of those memories down will help stem their slippage into unreality. I’m afraid I have no neat narrative with which to bind the scenes into a logical sequence; instead the best I can offer you is a series of nostalgic images, that for one reason or another I think of often.

A red dawn. Red in every sense. Red in the pulsating orb that hung low over the horizon, flooding the sky with blood. Red in the river of ochre dust that was the road curving away before me. Red in my bleary eyes after a fitful night.

That morning found me in the borderlands between Rwanda and Tanzania, a route unworried by tarmac or phone signal, waiting for the transport I had been promised would pass by here at five a.m.. But Africa works on some hidden logic, some unofficial schedule known to everyone but the mzungu, the foreigner. The minutes slipped by as I waited, eyes on the far bend in the road, ears cocked for the telling rumble of a diesel engine. 0500 came and went. 0510, then 0515. By 0530 I really began to worry. If this bus did not come then I would have no idea what to do. My preordained bed for the coming evening lay some five hundred kilometres away, a good ten hour drive even without the stops that everyone seemed to know about — passengers and driver, even the hawkers who emerged from the bush on a nondescript bit of road to sell clumps of cassava or sugarcane batons to the bus — everyone but me and the official timetable I was given at the border. I was anxious to get going, worried about arriving into an unknown city at night. Weeks before I had learned the hard way about the dangers of walking the streets even just a little after dark on a continent where my skin colour marked me out (wrongly; I was completely broke) as someone with money.

It was those same fears that had prompted me to stop in this isolated village in the first place. After taking a bus eastwards from Kigali the day before, I’d been held up at the border for a number of hours. By the time I had started on this road it was already late in the day and I knew I shouldn’t arrive in Kigoma before dark. By late afternoon, just as the sky was beginning to dim, the bus had pulled into a long strip of village, a jumble of corrugated iron on the edge of a scrubby bushland. I espied a tumble-down motel, and glancing askance at the falling sun, decided it best to make a stop here and continue on the following day. The bus raised a blaze of dust as it sped away upon the dirt track, while I, coughing, wandered over to the “Manchester City Hotel” (never will you find a deeper love for the English Premier League than in rural Africa).

I sat for an hour upon the front bench of the guesthouse, eating the skewered gobbets of goat the staff were kind enough to roast for me upon a ramshackle brai. But word must have gotten out that a mzungu was in the village, for soon a crowd had formed in the road, assembling to gawp at the white man. It is a strange thing, to know you are the subject of a conversation you otherwise can’t understand, where in all the chatter you keep hearing the one word you know refers to you, and you alone — mzungu, mzungu, mzungu. The atmosphere remained friendly, but more and more folk kept emerging from the bush, from unseen dwellings I hadn’t thought could exist out there in the scrub. Past a certain point I grew uncomfortable, and retired to my room, hoping the removable of the novelty would cause the crowd to disperse.

My quarters composed of four cement walls painted in two shades of blue, roofed over by a sheet of corrugated iron. The bed was sunken in the middle, where the slats were broken. I soon guessed how this injury occurred when I found an unopened condom upon the dangling mosquito net. This was a truckers’ rest stop after all. I perched upon the edge of the bed and tried passing the time by way of my book. I didn’t get far. There was a commotion outside. A group of male voices outside the door. I knew nothing of what they were saying, except for that word again: mzungu, mzungu, mzungu. Whatever it was, it had something to do with me. What did they want?

I listened through the door, trying to work out how many they were. Four or five at least. For whatever reason, they didn’t knock. This only disconcerted me further. I let the minutes pass by, hoping they’d leave. They didn’t. Were they here to rob me? I was carrying little money, but they weren’t to know that. Mzungus didn’t pass this way often. I presented a rare opportunity. My eyes fell to my bag, where my laptop rested. That alone, an outdated machine slowly choking to death on the African dust, would be worth a few month’s salaries out here.

I could see under the crack in the door the day’s light was almost done. I should have liked to clamber into bed. But still they talked outside. Enough of waiting, I thought, let’s get this over with. I opened the door. Six men stood in the open courtyard. They stopped talking immediately, turning to face me. One stepped forward. An enormous man, built like a bull. Taller and wider than me, with a thick neck. If it came to violence, I had no chance. He drew himself up, as if squaring up to me.

“ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE!” He roared, and then turned on his heel and walked out. The others erupted in laughter. I looked around, confused as hell, adrenaline still rushing through my ears.

“He wanted to practice his English,” one of them gasped, “that’s all he remembers from school!”

I have two brothers, who are as dear to me as anything on this earth. But among the tumbledown streets of Zambia, I found another kind of fratenity. There was Mapenzi — whose name means ‘problems’, signifying, he told me, the marital issues his parents were having at the time of his birth. Nominative determinism meant he was struck by a recurring depression that is so unusual in Africa. He would oscillate between bouts of ecstatic mania and incurable melancholy. In the year I knew him, he lost no fewer than nine close friends and family to horrific road accidents (in Zambia the roads are bad and the drivers fast). He began to feel himself cursed.

Once he took me to see the Chief of Police in Kitwe. I had no idea why we were there. Mapenzi said something about it being necessary to help the program we were setting up in the city. No money changed hands, as far as I was aware, but you had to make sure the right people were made to feel important, so they didn’t pull the plug on you. A meeting with a mzungu would do that, apparently. No matter that I was 21, as green as could be, that I had no idea what to say. Later Mapenzi told me, mischievously, that he often used the chief’s business card to get out of speeding tickets. Any time he would get pulled over, he would call him up, “I’ve got one of your boys here, sir, can you speak to him?” And the fine would disappear.

Mapenzi took me to a wedding once, laughing as I was forced to dance with the mother of the bride. He cried at the airport when I left. We spoke for a few years after that, but we’ve lost contact now. I hope he’s well.

And then there was Daniel, who I used to joke was my black twin. In truth he was superior to me in every way. Stronger, faster, better-looking, incredibly smart. We shared a room for three months and became as close as two friends can be. Late into the evenings we would talk of our respective countries, their differences and similarities. He was amazed to hear stories of towering London, I of black magic. Do people really believe witches fly upon the backs of spoons at night? They do. How can they believe that? What do you mean how, they have seen it with their own eyes.

To make extra money, Daniel would write essays for his friends still at university. Any subject, any topic, he could write an assignment for you. Two hundred Kwacha per page, top marks guaranteed. He would wake up every day before dawn, stand at the foot of my bed, call me lazy, then go out and do press-ups in the garden. I taught him how to swim; he reckoned he’d invented a new stroke (spinning around in circles). I remember him once telling me he had never seen the ocean. For some reason the unfairness of that statement always stuck with me. Why is it that I should have had the good fortune of being born in Britain, to have had the opportunity of a good education in a rich economy, to have the means to travel? Why not him? After all, it was me who had flown to work in his country, not him in mine. I had done nothing to earn that privilege. People in the developed world dare complain about our lot; we don’t know we are born.

Daniel and I still talk, most weeks. He has a wife now, and a young daughter. His job with a Western NGO has allowed him to travel a bit. He’s been to South Africa a few times. He has seen the sea.

Once, to change trains, I made a stop for a few hours in a tiny little town in central Tanzania. I passed the time in an old colonial hotel, not far from the station, built to house the German officials who once oversaw the railway. The architecture must have been the height of fashion once, but by then seemed so out of time, so out of place, there, on the edge of a non-descript town amid the ochre wastes of East Africa. I was waited on by a single attendant who kept disappearing out the back to lie down. The town and hotel are little visited by foreigners now, who tend to stick to the safari parks in the north, or the island of Zanzibar. I can still picture myself sipping a mango juice under the veranda in an otherwise empty hotel, feeling myself as the building must have — utterly, utterly alone.

Other images come quicker now. The time I disturbed a rock python while walking a track in the bush, frozen in fear as its coils sprang away from me with a speed I hadn’t known snakes possessed. Watching a lizard get eaten alive by a swarm of ants. Reading at the shore of an Ugandan lake, sitting still for so long an otter poked its head out of the water right beside me. We each looked directly into the other’s eyes, both of us startled to be seeing the other, before he dunked himself back into the water. Upon the shores of another pond, watching in horrified fascination as three young boys launched their tiny fishing vessel within ten yards of a family of hippos, the male so large as to resemble a sunken colossus. Neither the boys nor the hippos paid each other any mind. Just another day.

Back to that red morning. After a poor night’s sleep — I kept dreaming someone was trying to force their way in — I took up position at the roadside. A land always seems most foreign in its pedology. In England, the soil is black, lush with green grass. In Tanzania, it is a rusted red clay, beyond dusty when dry, and studded with parched bush and scrubby trees. No one else was up at that hour, not even the animals. I watched as the sun slowly illuminated the dark rim at the edge of the earth, as if the world was being born anew. I began to doubt my transport even existed, let alone was on its way. Perhaps this village was all there was, the outside world nothing but a dream. What else could there be upon this red earth?

Then on the horizon, a plume of dust. The bus, the bus.