by Paul Theroux
‘Aid is not help’ and ‘aid does not work’ are two of the conclusions reached by Graham Hancock in his The Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige and Corruption of the International Aid Business (1989), a well-researched account of wasted money. Much of Hancock’s scorn is reserved for the dubious activities of the World Bank. ‘Aid projects are an end in themselves,’ Michael Maren writes in The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity (1997). One of Maren’s targets is the charity Save the Children, which he sees as a monumental boondoggle. Both writers report from experience, having spent many years in Third World countries on aid projects.
While these writers are kinder to volunteers in disaster relief than to highly paid bureaucrats in institutional charities, both of them also assert that all aid is self-serving, large-scale famines are welcomed as a ‘growth opportunity’ and the advertising to stimulate donations for charities is little more than ‘hunger porn.’
‘Here is a rule of thumb that you can safely apply wherever you may wander in the Third World,’ Mr Hancock writes. ‘If a project is funded by foreigners it will typically also be designed by foreigners and implemented by foreigners using foreign equipment procured in foreign markets.’
As proof of that rule of thumb, the most salutary and least cited book about development in Africa is an Italian study, Guidelines for the Application of Labor-Intensive Technologies (1994), revolutionary in its simplicity, advocating the use ofAfrican labor to solve African problems. After describing the many social and economic advantages of employing people themselves, working with their hands, to build dams, roads, sewer systems and watercourses, the authors, Sergio Polizzotti and Daniele Fanciullacci, discuss constraints imposed by the donors. Donors specify that purchases of machinery have to be made in the donor country, or bids restricted to firms in the donor country, or that a time limit is placed on the scheme, which ‘encourages the tendency towards large contracts and heavy spending on equipment.’
Labor-intensive projects are few in Africa because so much donor aid is self-interested.
Passing enormous smooth boulders, as big as three-story houses, we came to Kisumu. Kisumu was a port on the Winam Gulf of Lake Victoria, a rail head, a ferry port. But the train was defunct and the ferry was so irregular and in such bad repair that it was useless. I had thought I might stay here a few days and take a ferry to Uganda, but that was out of the question.
Kisumu was now just a bus stop. In its market there were the usual children hawking boxes of tea and containers of milk, women roasting ears of corn, and people selling huge heaps of old shoes and second-hand clothes. Even Africans did not find the second-hand clothes at such markets expensive. Most of them used to belong to you, they are the old dresses and T-shirts and shorts and neckties and ragged sweaters and blankets you put in a box and handed in at the church for collection – the Salvation Army, the Blankets for Africa, or whatever. You thought they would be doled out to needy people – but no, they are sorted into bundles: socks, shoes, slacks, blouses, skirts, T-shirts, sweaters, and so forth. These bundles are sold cheaply to market traders, who become the distributors, stacking them on their stalls and reselling them.
When my own clothes got ragged I too bought clothes in the market. It was my way of not looking like a tourist or a soldier. And I got fond of my second-hand shirts, one of which was bright red and lettered Top Notch Plumbing.
I spent the day in Kisumu, just walking around because I had been cramped in the bus seat. I walked to the old jetty, where there was no ferry, and the railway station, where there was no train. I noted that the market was full of charity merchandise: nothing made in Kenya, no textiles, only a few clay pots.
Leaving Kisumu on the afternoon bus to the border, I saw a booming Kenyan industry: just outside town, shop after shop of wood-workers, all of them making coffins – the freshly cut raw wood, reddish in the dampness, the men sawing it and nailing the long boxes, everyone hard at work. And the finished coffins were stacked or standing upright, lots of them. This was the busiest local industry I had seen in the whole of Kenya: the coffin-makers and their lugubrious product, a perfect image for a country that seemed terminally ill.
I made a note of those coffins, and sketched pictures of their shapes and sizes. But I also noted that, sitting in these buses watching Africa go by, getting off whenever I liked, I was traveling happily, in a state of great contentment, following the honks of the geese – on this particular day, the Egyptian goose, Alopochen aegyptiaca, prettily named but wild geese all the same.
10 Old Friends in Bat Valley
Papyrus grew in thick leafy clumps, as fresh as salad, by the lakeshore just inside the Ugandan border. The tall graceful stalks swayed, the feathery heads nodded, as my bus passed by, traveling west on a back road from the border town of Busia. I had not seen papyrus growing anywhere in Kenya, even on the Kisumu edge of Lake Victoria, but as soon as I crossed into Uganda I saw rafts of the tall delicately tufted plant in the swampland by the lake. It was like further proof that Uganda is the source of the Nile. Downstream in Egypt where real papyrus no longer existed I had seen images of the lovely plant picked out in bright vegetable dye on the walls of pharaonic tombs and on the tops of columns at Karnak. Anything that linked Egypt to the heart of Africa interested me: papyrus, lotuses, crocs, hippos, crested cranes, baboons, lions, elephants and their ivory, even the images of slaves, and the river water itself.
‘How did you first come here?’ I used to ask old-timers and elderly missionaries in the sixties. Many would say, ‘Down the Nile.’
That meant: By boat and train through Egypt, train to Khartoum, paddle steamer from Khartoum to Juba, and then fifty-eight miles by road to Uganda.
I had come by ‘chicken-bus’ – the buses that were full of Africans and their produce, including trussed-up chickens and infants so swaddled they looked mummified. One chicken-bus had dropped me at the Kenyan border. Good-humored hawkers and touts, money-changers and beggars descended upon me. They followed me, running, across no man’s land, a hot stony half-mile without any shade, until they were turned back at the chain-link fence and razor wire on the Ugandan side. Something was revealed about a person’s nature by the way he tried to run – more revealing when he ran towards you than when he tried to run away.
At the Ugandan checkpoint I went through the same formalities again, a crowd shoving each other to get into a small shed, for their passports to be stamped, and outside more money-changers and beggars. I bought a newspaper and read about bomb outrages that had occurred in Kampala the previous day: ‘Election violence.’ On the next bus, on the far side, I reflected that a person who has not crossed an African border on foot has not really entered the country, for the airport in the capital is no more than a confidence trick; the distant border, what appears to be the edge, is the country’s central reality.
Right from the frontier Uganda seemed a tidier better-governed place than Kenya, and it was visibly greener and more fertile, palmier, more lush, with rice paddies being planted and tended, and banana trees – all sorts of bananas. Ugandans say there are sixty varieties, for they are one of the staples here. This southeastern part of Uganda was green and low-lying and swampy, the big lake seeping into the hinterland.
The roads were in better shape – and so were the houses, old and new – than the ones on the Kenyan side, more reminders that Kenya was in a run-down condition and perhaps that Uganda was on the way up. Sugar cane was still being grown in the fields here, as in the past, on estates that had always been owned by Indians. Given the world price of sugar and most other commodities, this was somewhat surprising. Certainly farmers in Africa were earning less for growing coffee, tea, cotton, sugar and tobacco – and in some places were going back to subsistence farming, letting the cash crops die and planting corn for their own use.
Late in the afternoon my bus passed the town of Jinja, where at Owen Falls Lake Victoria flows north – the Victoria Nile – to Lake Kyoga and onwa
rd to Murchison Falls and Lake Albert, into the Albert Nile. This simple progression perplexed ancient speculators such as Ptolemy and the European explorers in Africa until the expedition of 1857–8 when Burton and Speke crossed from the east coast to survey the lake region of the interior. While Burton lay ill in what is now Tabora, in Tanzania, it was Speke who traveled to the southern edge of the great lake, to get a glimpse. He had no idea of the lake’s true size, but from what he was told by Arabs, he surmised that at its northern shore was an outflow, the headwaters of the Nile. Burton challenged him on this, and denounced him for his haste, for being too impatient to navigate the lake. Speke was defensive but insecure; he had a fragile disposition anyway (he was later to kill himself). Yet his intuition was correct: the lake was later proven to be the Niles source.
This familiar landscape gave me a soothing sense of homecoming, almost nostalgia. I was still traveling in a state of contentment, wary as always, but with a feeling of relative safety. I was visible as a mzungu, of course, but an older one in second-hand clothes, wearing a cheap watch and a faded hat. My sports jacket was terribly torn: battery acid had burned large holes in it on one of my truck rides. Tatters in Africa are like camouflage, mine made me less conspicuous. But African markets were wonderful places for finding people to patch clothes: I could get the coat mended in Kampala. That simple mission made me happier. And I had the Rimbaudesque thrill that no one on earth knew where I was. I had successfully disappeared in this southeastern bush of Uganda, a place I knew fairly well. I loved bumping along in this bus alone, in a crimson Ugandan sunset that would go dark in about thirty minutes as night dropped like a blanket on the bush.
I was also excited to be here because it was a return to my youth, or young adulthood. I had last been in Uganda thirty-three years before, and had been happy. I wondered whether, with a birthday looming, at the back of my mind was my plan to return to a specific time in my life when I had been supremely happy. Then, I had been in love with a woman who loved me, and planning to be married, and in those same months seeing my first book published. I knew that I was young and appreciated, living a life I had chosen.
It was in my mind to avoid a birthday party. I was so self-conscious of my age that I often asked Africans to guess how old I was, hoping – perhaps knowing in advance – they would give me a low figure. They always did. Few people were elderly in Africa – forty was old, a man of fifty was at death’s door, sixty-year-olds were just crocks or crones. Despite my years I was healthy, and being agile and resilient I found traveling in Africa a pleasure: I did not seem old here – did not feel it, did not look it to Africans – and so it was the perfect place to be, another African fantasy, an adventure in rejuvenation.
‘You are forty something,’ Kamal guessed in Addis. The highest number I got was fifty-two. Little did they know how much they flattered my vanity. But no one was vain about longevity in Africa, because the notion of longevity hardly existed. No one lived long and so age didn’t matter, and perhaps that accounted for the casual way Africans regarded time. In Africa no one’s lifetime was long enough to accomplish anything substantial, or to see any task of value completed. Two generations in the West equaled three generations in African time, telescoped by early marriage, early child-bearing, and early death.
In southeastern Uganda I wrote in my diary, I do not want to be young again. I am happy being what I am. This contentment is very helpful on a trip as long and difficult as this.
It had taken me years to summon up the resolve to return to Africa because in all travel one’s mood is crucial. I had been happy and hopeful here. I began to see that Africa had aged the ways Africans themselves had aged – old at forty: most Kenyans and Ugandans I had met so far were too young to remember independence. I had procrastinated about returning because I had suspected that the Africa I had known had disappeared, had become anarchic and violent. This seemed to be borne out by the headlines in Uganda that week about the bombs (‘grenades’) that had gone off at Kampala’s main market. Two people had been killed, ten injured – post-election violence was the repeated explanation, the opposition being blamed. But that disruption went with the territory It was politics, as Africans said. And I was just an anonymous man in old clothes on a corner seat in a chicken-bus reading about it in the local newspaper.
What all older people know, what had taken me almost sixty years to learn, is that an aged face is misleading. I did not want to be the the classic bore, the reminiscing geezer, yet I now knew: The old are not as frail as you think, they are insulted to be regarded as feeble. They are full of ideas, hidden powers, even sexual energy. Don’t be fooled by the thin hair and battered features and the skepticism. The older traveler knows it best: in our hearts we are youthful and we are insulted to be treated as old men and burdens, for we have come to know that the years have made us more powerful and certainly streetwise. Years are not an affliction – old age is strength.
Jinja had once been full of Indian shops, selling cloth and kitchenware, and food, and several shops specialized in Indian sweets – syrupy globs of gulabjamun and sticky yellow laddhu. There were no Indians now; no sweet shops, no panwallahs. Some of the shops were boarded up, others were run by Africans. At the bus depot in Jinja I met a pair of young nervous Americans, backpackers wearing LL Bean shorts and Orvis hats, sticky sun cream on their noses, the girl gulping trail mix, the boy with his thumb in the Lonely Planet Guide to East Africa, looking a bit too conspicuous.
The boy said to me, ‘Don’t you think we’ll be safer staying here until things quieten down in Kampala?’
‘Then you’ll be in Jinja for years,’ I said. ‘Things have not been quiet in Kampala since 1962. Get on the bus – you’ll be fine.’
But they didn’t, they stayed. If, as they said, they weren’t leaving until Kampala settled down, they might still be in Jinja now.
When I told Africans where I had come from, and how slowly I had traveled, they said, ‘So you must be retired.’
‘No, no, no,’ I said, over-reacting, because I despised the word and equated it with surrender. ‘I’m traveling, I’m working.’
That wasn’t it, either, not business, not pleasure, not work, not retirement, but the process of life, how I chose to pass the time.
Nearer Kampala the bush was denser and the towns better defined, with clearer perimeters – regulated subdivisions rather than the straggling squatter camps that were suburbs in Kenya. There were signs in Uganda, too, that people were houseproud: the huts and bungalows were painted and fenced in, with vegetable or flower gardens. Among them were very tall native trees standing singly or in clusters, the last remnants of the old growth forests, the habitat that had supported troops of monkeys and dangling orchids. What I remembered most clearly about this Jinja road was that on portions of it, for reasons no one could explain, there were long fluffy tracts where butterflies settled. There might be eighty feet of road carpeted by white butterflies, so many of them that if you drove too fast your tires lost their grip, and some people lost their lives, skidding on butterflies.
At the edge of Kampala was a sports ground, Mandela National Stadium. In my time it would have been named Obote Stadium, or Amin Stadium, In Kenya, it would have been Moi Stadium. African politicians habitually bestowed their own names upon roads, schools and arenas; they put their faces on the currency, full faced on the notes, in lumpy profile on the coins. The political health of a country was easily assessed by looking at the money and the names of streets. In the worst places you saw the same name and face everywhere, that of the president-for-life.’
There had been an election in Uganda just the week before I arrived. The posters and banners of the different parties were still prominent on shops. I recognized some of the candidates – I personally knew two of them, for they had been ambitious ranters even in my time. The incumbent Yoweri Museveni had won, and though one of the losers, a man named Kizza Besigye, disputed the result, it was generally felt that the election had been fair.
But grenades were still being lobbed into markets in different parts of the country and cars burned willy-nilly.
When I finally arrived in Kampala the news was that the loser, Besigye, who was contesting the election, had gone to Entebbe Airport for the flight to South Africa to give a lecture. He had been prevented from boarding the plane. He was told that he could not leave the country, ‘while the explosions are being investigated.’
‘I am not happy about the election,’ a Ugandan told me. ‘There was intimidation and fraud. The results were bichupali’ – a local word, not Swahili, meaning counterfeit.
‘What do you think?’
‘It was rigged. We have no work. In fact, the truth will emerge.’
Being a Ugandan, he said reedged and wuck and een fukt and troof and emudge.
Hearing this manner of speaking, the Ugandan way, made me feel at home too.
As a twenty-something I had spent many evenings drinking beer on the veranda of the Speke Hotel. I had never stayed there – my home was across town, near Bat Valley. So on my return the Speke became my home in Kampala. One of its many attractions for me now was that its phones had not been upgraded in forty years: it was impossible to call the United States – nor could anyone call me. At a better-class hotel I sent a fax to my wife to reassure her I was muddling along, and reading it she thought: Poor Paulie, all alone.
On my way back to the Speke that night I realized that I was walking through an African city in safety. This I liked: a nocturnal ramble was a novelty. I walked for an hour, all over town, even to the bombed market, and finally to an Indian restaurant. No hassles, lots of people on the street.
Many of the people were out collecting grasshoppers that had gathered under the streetlights. This I remembered from way back, the grasshopper season, when families shook bed sheets under the lamps and picked the insects out of them and popped them into jars to take home and fry. The grasshoppers arrived with the rains.
