Images of Africa II

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Wanderer — Wynand Steyl (1978)

From the cloying clamour of Kampala bus station, you take a minibus north, out of the bustle of the Ugandan capital and into the hinterlands. You ride shoulders-hunched and head-bowed under a low roof, kneecaps pressed into the front-seats, trying your best to ignore the smell of the caged chickens resting upon your neighbour’s lap. You watch out the window as the industrial outskirts give way to a blurred forest. A yellow sun illumines the occasional strung out town. A dead snake lies in the road.

You arrive at your halfway point, a hazy collection of iron roofs and breeze block shops. Your sore knees’ relief is short-lived; you clamber into another bus. More hours spent gazing out the window, more country tearing past. The villages are fewer now, fellow passengers more sparse. You reach line’s end once more, asking the conductor where you can find a private transport. He points to a lone boda boda (motorcycle). You ride pillion for the last few miles, deep into the bush. The road here is a red river of clay, running before you into the hidden heart of the forest. There are no landmarks now, just the vibrations of the bike, just the breathing of your driver as you cling to his midriff.

Eventually, at the end of the earth, you come to your destination. A tiny village at the terminus of a dead end road. There is nowhere further on. You imagine you might be the only outsider to ever come here, to this nondescript place, barely marked on the map. Sheet iron is nowhere in sight, only a motley collection of wattle and daub roundhouses, topped by a dirty thatch. The inhabitants are thin and staring. You try to picture yourself through their eyes: pale and frightening and terribly novel. But then you see it: a small boy bounds across the dust, kicking a dirty ball. He stops across from you, stunned. He wears a shirt you know only too well — Manchester United. Even out here, last post on the frontier of unending jungle, the choking tendrils of globalisation smother all the world. The boy recovers himself, turns, and continues on his way. You see the name upon his back. Wayne Rooney. The Englishman from Croxteth, Liverpool, only a few miles from where your father was born.