by Ofir Drori
“Are there more roadblocks?” I said.
“Six more,” said the man in front of me.
At the next barricade there was shouting, the emptying of bags, clothes tossed in the air like water spraying from busted pipes. A policeman shoved a man against the bus. Another was taken aside. An officer leaned into my face. With his booze-soured breath on my cheek, he said, “Mzungu, why don’t you buy me a beer?”
I gripped his arm. “I have nothing in my pockets; why don’t you buy me a beer?”
Everyone watched until the man shook free and walked off.
“You should thank God for staying in one piece,” said a tall, dark Sudanese man as we climbed back onto the bus. “That was a very stupid thing to do.”
At the third roadblock, the commander fanned through my passport without looking at it. “Your documents are not in order. You’re under arrest, mzungu. Get in the truck. You’re sleeping in jail.”
I threw my backpack into the police jeep and leaned against the door. Policemen on both ends of the line ripped clothes from the bags of the Sudanese, who looked not at their harassers but at me; the abuse made us quick kin. When the Sudanese were finally gathering each others’ clothes from the dirt, the commander turned and approached me.
I told him, “I’m happy to sleep in jail but I won’t pay a bribe.”
“Go, go back to the bus with the others, go.”
To my left were three men still arguing with officers, holding creased documents, pointing to words and stamps that gave them permission to be outside the refugee camp. But they had no luck. The Sudanese watched their brothers through the rear window as the bus drove on.
At the next roadblock, we lined up with our bags. A policeman stepped toward the man on my right and shoved in the chest. The man stumbled backwards. His wife gasped.
“Tell your wife to shut up!” the policeman said.
The Sudanese man was thin in the shoulders, short. He glanced at his wife, looked away.
“You want to be beaten?” the policeman yelled. “Go down.”
The man crouched, wrapped his arms around his knees.
“Come here! Open your bag.”
He crawled forward and unzipped a small duffel bag. The officer pulled out a brown dress, which fell open from its delicate fold and dangled at the end of his hand. He tossed the dress on the ground with two more dresses and pulled out a pineapple, kicking aside the empty bag. The policeman took a machete from another soldier, then hacked the pineapple in two. He seized half the fruit in each hand, glared at the Sudanese man and brought one half of the pineapple to his mouth and tore out a chunk of flesh with his teeth. He threw down both halves, smiled and dragged a sleeve across his mouth.
“I searched your pineapple,” the soldier said, viciously. “And it’s okay!”
The soldier moved on, laughing with the other officers. The Sudanese man rose from the ground and walked past his wife without looking at her. I followed him around the bus, wanting to tell him that I was sorry I hadn’t fought for him, that what he’d suffered was wrong, that I wished his wife hadn’t seen him humiliated. I reached out to touch his shoulder but stopped. Tears were streaming down his face.
We reached Lokichokio, home to more than sixty aid agencies that I figured were doing their best to build the dislocated Sudanese a home. I arrived expecting to find characters from films about aid in Africa, the tired doctor without borders, the idealistic nurse vaccinating a child while speaking softly to visitors, young people wielding trowels and shovels. My naïve vision and my hope for a warm welcoming were dashed by the sight of a high white wall topped with barbed wire, the buildings, vehicles, and satellite dishes beyond reach. The NGO city looked like some kind of Oz beside the open field where refugees lived in tents. It was unclear to me if they were ever let in.
I pitched my own tent outside the locked gate and then wrote a letter to the UN coordinator, which I sent into the compound with Kenyan guards. That night, as I was eating food brought to me by refugees, two Kenyan officers drove up in a private vehicle and interrogated me as if I were a threat to security.
I said, “I came here to help. Who am I a threat to? The NGOs?”
“I don’t want you in Loki!” said the lead officer. “Go back to Nairobi.”
I didn’t leave.
On the fourth day a blond woman arrived at my tent.
In Hebrew, she said, “What are you doing here?”
“I want to enter Sudan and volunteer to help the refugees.”
She shook her head. “That’s what’s wrong with Israelis. Everyone says Israelis have an attitude problem. And you know what? They’re right.”
Her name was Aya.
“Listen, I’m sorry if I’ve caused any problems or offended anyone. I just felt for the Sudanese. I want to try to make some small difference. I’m not sure how. Tell me how I can do it.”
“I’m the spokesperson for the United Nations here,” she said, impatient but disarmed by my tone. “You think there are volunteers here? You really think there are volunteers? Volunteerism is passé. People have jobs, careers. You won’t find a single volunteer in this camp. You can’t get in and help just because you want to.”
If all the organizations, which were here for the Sudanese, couldn’t keep them from being abused and humiliated just beyond the boundaries of the camp—and on the peaceful side of the border—then were they capable of doing anything? Was the world’s effort to help the refugees nothing but rhetoric and a ploy to fund the careers of privileged white workers? Had I not been Israeli, I might have argued with Aya, told her that a man like Father Albert would have laughed at her proclamation that volunteerism, that activism, was passé. Or maybe he would have been as distraught as I was that the system had left no room for the individual to help.
Oil glistened in the mud. Truck exhaust seemed to cling to my eyelashes. I wove through the matatus near River Road with Rachel.
“Beba beba beba!” said a boy ushering passengers into a van.
Rachel was glancing from side to side, pausing, moving again, absorbed in the commotion. I tried to point out the soot-covered mural behind the matatus, of street children in torn clothes transformed into radiant, uniformed students. I pulled Rachel onto matatu number twenty-three, and she glanced out the window at girls standing by a mound of refuse, my wish that she would see Nairobi for how it was alive.
Rachel had worked as a tour guide in the army, leading soldiers through the Golan Heights and Judaea with a Beretta 9mm at her hip. She’d tended bar at club Kat Balu in the years after Ofer and I had danced there on tables, and she’d worked at a tobacco shop, whose manager she’d moved in with, fallen for, and then left before coming to Kenya; she said she’d come to Africa to live in wilder places so she could find those places within herself.
We dropped near Aga Khan Hospital and followed a path away from the road, between trees that led past orange honeysuckle. I plucked a flower and sucked out the sugar as Mor and I had done as kids, and my shyness hit as I was about to pass the flower to Rachel; she was running her hands through her thick black hair. At the gates of the park sat a man on a tree stump selling cones of peanuts wrapped in newspaper.
“Rafiki!” he said. “Habari yako? Habari za Israel?”
I told Rachel what he’d said and that rafiki meant “friend” and then I felt too much like a teacher. I picked two cornets of peanuts wrapped in cartoons, paid and passed one to Rachel, and we stepped under the park’s cool canopy. People in work clothes slept on their bellies in the shade, legs spread, books and magazines over their faces, as though sweet afternoon naps had stretched into neglect. Deeper in the park, thick trees curtained us off from Nairobi. I stopped and watched and waited. A gray monkey ran at Rachel, jumped on her arm, swiped the cornet and scurried up a tree.
“Oh my god! Did you see that?” she said, pulling the peanuts from my hand and scanning the canopy.
A baby monkey eased himself down a tree trunk and crossed the grass
and she tried to lure him to take her hand. A larger monkey sprinted, scaled Rachel’s back and swiped the second cornet, then perched on her shoulder to eat. Rachel laughed and stroked the monkey’s tail and didn’t notice that I’d backed away to watch her. Monkeys descended en masse from the trees as though a signal had come from the deep heart of their biology. They rushed her, tugged her pants, hung from her belt.
Five cones of peanuts later, at the far end of the Monkey Park, the sound of rain drummed on distant tin roofs and swept over us as if we’d been caught beyond the end of our scene. We held hands and ran, laughing, searching for refuge in the downpour, breathing in the smell of wet grass. The rain soaked us by the time we found a gazebo. Rachel wiped water from her face with both hands and stepped toward me. We were panting, shivering, her wet tank top tight against her skin as my shirt was against mine. We pressed our bodies together, the cold our excuse. Rachel put her hands on my waist. I wrapped my arms around her back. I had too much to tell her. The warmth of her mouth was soft on my ear, and rain on the roof absorbed all but the sound of her singing, “Ode to My Family.”
Nigeria
SCARS
“If Africa had to have an enema,” photographer Duncan Willetts told me after my return from Turkana, “you’d shove it up Lagos.” Just as I’d needed to venture out from the safe places in Nairobi, so too did I need to venture out of East Africa. I’d realized that the chance of making an impact was greater in a place that was both broken and wild enough to scare away most anyone who could help.
So I landed in Nigeria.
An okada whirred up the street, its headlamp like a cyclops’s eye. Blinded, raising my arm to block the light, I shuffled out of the road. The day’s heat had baked the sewage, the rotting food, the pollution. Lagos was pungent as jungle—tropical industry. I turned right. A car and bus swerved, and I nearly tripped into the foul open trench at the edge of the road. Bus riders stared when headlights caught me on the dark sidewalk; the only other white faces I’d seen in Lagos were albinos’. The dangers here were of a different magnitude than in Nairobi.
My black camera bag was secured between my ribcage and arm in the same way I’d carried my rifle in the army. A lone streetlight lit power lines tangled in the air like veins. I’d been woken in the night by gunshots. I’d seen bodies in the street in pools of blood. On my first visit to city center a truck raced by with men firing rifles in the air merely to move money between banks.
Food vendors sat along the road beside kerosene lamps, the smell of burning oil mixing with lamp smoke. Women wore crazed hairdos of pointy centipedes and balls of hair that clung to their heads like moons. I moved through the sellers to the mama who’d been feeding me. She crouched with a giant spoon before a vat of boiling oil.
“You have one akara for me, mama?” I said.
“Na not six now only one, oibo?” She scooped a bean cake from the oil onto a piece of newspaper and took my naira.
“I’ll get more when I come back from the market.”
Oju Elegba bridge was a massive overpass, the daily locus of vast traffic jams. Packed under the decayed bridge, like the clotted blood of some sick heart, was an armada of dented dirty yellow minivans, most of them parked and empty now with night. I crossed beneath the bridge and swung left and walked five minutes to where the bridge arced down to the level of the road. I stepped onto the shoulder, reversed direction and moved from streetlamp to streetlamp beside four lanes of weaving traffic as the curve of the bridge slowly lifted me off the ground. I stopped and turned toward the market below.
In the blackness sweeping out beyond the overpass, lit faces marked the course of a hidden path. The faces belonged to sellers who sat with goods and paraffin lamps that carved their tiny red portraits from the dark, just their chins, cheekbones, dimples, and eyes revealed, everything else blacked out, as if the lanterns, themselves, knew what made the sellers human. I steadied my wrists against the sooty railing of the bridge, camera in hand. I’d come to capture the lyricism and magic of these lit gods perched along the curve of a black river through Lagos.
I zipped my camera into my bag, glanced in the direction I’d come, at the well-lit sidewalk along the road. Then I looked to where the overpass descended on the far side into plains of darkness broken neither by streetlights nor kerosene lamps—toward a place in daytime I’d seen a corpse face-down on the cement. I headed there.
At the far end of the bridge, I reversed direction at street level. The absence of people, of sound, of growling motors quickened my step. Sweltering Lagos dripped like a hot steaming bathroom after a shower. I headed for the lit junction directly under the center of the bridge. There was just enough light to see shapes ahead in the darkness. Men running. Crossing the road and turning toward me. They shouted, called to each other. It was noise, I had no doubt, made with the intent to scare.
Five area boys stopped twenty meters away and went quiet, like predators focusing before an attack. Breathing through my mouth, my pulse drumming in my throat, I walked straight toward them; they were close enough to run me down if I fled. And as I marched I tried to project an utter lack of fear that they stood in front of me, side by side, blocking my way. I fought my feet and stormed forward to shock them as they had shocked me. Two steps before I reached their line, a man jammed his arm against a concrete rib of the bridge, blocking my path at the neck. I raised my fist overhead, hammered it down into his arm, walked through the opening without stopping, without turning my head to look back. I fought the urge to run, fought the urge to glance over my shoulder, and I kept my ears cocked for the sound of footsteps, of pipes, chains, or a man running up to strangle me with a rope. I reached the light of the bus junction, shaking, still clutching my camera.
After a month in Nigeria, the country for me became Fela’s land. Fela Kuti the late musician had danced in his underwear calling Nigeria’s dictators liars and thieves. Singing in pidgin English to be understood by the common man, he railed against Christianity, tyranny, injustice. Fela was jailed and beaten again and again for screaming at those who’d ruled Nigeria by the butt of a gun and often the barrel. And he’d lost his seventy-eight-year-old mother when government soldiers stormed his house and threw her out a window. They set fire to Fela’s compound and cracked his skull. In “Coffin for Head of State,” he sang of the funeral procession and of setting his mother’s coffin down in front of Dodan Barracks where the president lived, so Obasanjo would have to bury her.
Fela’s son Seun Kuti had continued the tradition of playing with the old band at Fela’s nightclub in Surulere, Lagos. I went one night. The lights came up as the guitarist introduced the rhythm. A shaker joined. Then the bass and drums. A sax sang over the groove, and Seun Kuti strode out wearing white bellbottoms and a sequined shirt. In purple pants I danced with everyone toward the stage. Seun thrust his hips at the crowd and roamed, claiming territory, arms back, his bowed chest sliding sideways. He sang, “Some dey follow follow dem close dem eye. Some dey follow follow dem close dem mouth … close dem ear … close themselves. I say, dem close sense.” The dancers and the saxophonist replied. Swaying to the slick groove of the Afrobeat, Fela’s son sang, “If you dey follow follow, make you open eye, open mouth, open sense. At dat time, at dat time, you no go fall.”
Fela had been the mouthpiece of a movement, his lyrics the substance, his sexuality and daring the fuel. He shouted down popes and imams and corrupt leaders and called on Nigerians to fight against the military dictatorship of Abacha, who surrounded himself with 3,000 loyal thugs and stole billions of dollars from public coffers.
More than a million people turned out for Fela’s funeral in Lagos.
Sweat flew off Seun’s body. The skirts of the dancers flared. Men carried onstage a section of tree trunk that thundered when they set it down. A band elder climbed onto the massive drum and slammed his hands into the drumhead and it boomed with a power that rattled the chest. Nigerians danced and raised their arms. I thought of Lokichokio and the
refugee camp, and how helpless I’d felt after the run-in with Aya, how I’d felt I was staring up a beast too massive to be seen in full. I imagined the Sudanese dancing to Fela’s music, throwing their own clothes in the air, crawling over the barbed wire into the NGO city to take the money and food meant for them. I imagined them shouting with us here, dancing to a drum that sounded like a cannon.
Hundreds of kilometers north of Lagos, a red road cut through a forest of thin trees. Clouds blocked the sun, dulling the day’s color. The breezeless, humid air clung to me like a hundred hands. I felt tired and lost, out of shape, as I headed into an area beyond Jebba sheltering isolated tribes. Tipsy Nigerians had said “There you find savages.” But why I was going, I couldn’t quite say.
Fulani women, elegant as royalty and wrapped in electric blue, passed with bowls on their heads. Tattoos rimmed their cheekbones, fanned out from the corners of their mouths. Some Fulani were dark-skinned, others light with blood that had come through the centuries from the north. I felt no desire to talk, though the women smiled and stopped to greet me. I waved and trudged on, each step as difficult and heavy as those I’d imagine Rachel taking up Mount Kenya after I’d sent her away two months earlier. We’d lived for weeks in a tent on the roof at Planet Safari and trekked to see Isaac and Kakuya—by the short route—and Isaac’s wife had given Rachel the Maasai name of Nashepai. But Rachel deserved her own Turkana, and the power of being with her had left me with no urge to travel at all. I’d fallen for her. But broken off the relationship.
“My Ofir,” Rachel had written in an email, “Don’t be angry with me but I keep on thinking of coming to you … that’s the only thing I can think of, my Ugalák child. I’m lost and I want to see you and it hurts. I don’t deal with reality very well … Yours, Nashepai.”
Hours on through the trees, I came to a hut painted with geometric designs. “Sanu!” said a man rushing up the path, greeting me in Hausa. He gripped my hand and led me through a clearing where the ground was covered with a yellow gravel of drying corn. Children snapped and spun spiral snail shells in the sand. Holding a book in the doorway of a mud hut was a Nigerian pastor named Leo, who said in English, “Oh, you’re welcome here. You’re very welcome in our village, my good friend. Let’s put your bag inside. Wow, you must be traveling a very long time to carry such a big bag.”
