Ted Conover

by The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World;the Way We Live Today

  That trip was eventful. There were numerous breakdowns, a collision in Kigali, and many nights in “lodgings” where prostitution was, well, ordinary. In remote western Tanzania, we traveled with live chickens so we’d have something to eat in case we got stranded; my job was to feed and water them. Drivers had a reputation as cowboys of a sort—independent, self-sufficient wanderers. My companions were enterprising, resilient, and protective of me.

  Because of AIDS, they were in a world that was changing very quickly. But not only was Obadiah still on the road in 2003—and now as a driver—he was still with Transami. And so, eleven years later, I went back to travel again with Obadiah and see what had changed since my first visit.

  In some ways, Kenya felt reborn in the fall of 2003. Nine months before, leadership of the government had transferred from longtime strongman Daniel arap Moi and his KANU party to a new leader, Mwai Kibaki, in elections that were widely considered free and fair. This was a considerable achievement in sub-Saharan Africa, and in a republic so young: Kenya achieved independence from Britain in 1963. Kibaki (as yet unsullied by his election fraud of 2007, which would plunge the country into chaos) had run on a platform of fighting corruption, and there was expectancy in the air.

  On the other hand, plenty had gotten worse. In 2002, surface-to-air missiles had been fired at a Boeing 757 full of tourists as it took off for Tel Aviv from Mombasa’s Moi International Airport. They missed, but minutes later a suicide bomber blew himself up at an Israeli-owned hotel on a nearby beach, killing three Israelis and ten Kenyans. Four years before that, suicide bombers in trucks attacked the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, killing over two hundred people, mostly Kenyans, and injuring four thousand others.

  Statistically, of course, there was more danger elsewhere; the AIDS epidemic had swelled since my last visit, fulfilling many awful predictions. Antiretroviral drugs, which were saving the life of my friend Mark, were making their way into clinics, but for many people it was too late. And here the disease was less discriminating than at home: the presence of other sexually transmitted diseases, such as gonorrhea and chlamydia, appeared to facilitate infection by AIDS, which accounted for much of its spread among women. And though clinics were actively screening and counseling pregnant women about the transmission of HIV via breast milk, nursing infants were still getting infected. The commercial landscape around the hospital near my hotel in Mombasa had been transformed from a variety of shops to just one kind: coffin-makers. They displayed their wares outside, and what caught your eye was how many were for people who were very, very small.

  Another difference about AIDS in Africa was that its victims came from all up and down the socioeconomic ladder. On my earlier visit, I’d been struck by reports that seemed to show the toll was worst among the better-off. The best explanation I heard for this was that wealthier men could afford to have more sex: they were more likely to have mistresses than working men, and more likely to travel for business and to patronize prostitutes.

  It went to the very top. A few years before my first visit, the president of Zambia announced that his son had died of AIDS. In Kenya, however, officials were less forthcoming. Two weeks before my second visit, Britain’s The Economist magazine stated outright that the recent death of Kenya’s vice president, Michael Wamalwa, in a London clinic was a result of AIDS. Kenyans were told by their government that the vice president died from a heart attack related to kidney failure. Uganda’s government-owned New Vision newspaper reported that Wamalwa had been treated for pancreatitis, and that his doctor was a leading AIDS specialist. Nairobi’s The Nation did point out, seventeen days after the death, that “the clinic Mr. Wamalwa checked into in London is noted for outstanding work relating to HIV/Aids. It has also been established that one of the causes of pancreatitis, which the Vice-President was suffering from, is excessive use of anti-retrovirals.” But they quickly added, “We are not saying Mr. Wamalwa, or other leaders who have died in the recent past, suffered from these diseases.”

  The hint was hard to miss. But no Kenyan I asked seemed to suspect it, and many openly doubted me when I mentioned it. (Three years later, the vice president’s AIDS was still cloaked in euphemism. “Wamalwa died in London in August 2003, after a long illness,” wrote The East African Standard, in “The Man Who Died Just as the Party Began,” a remembrance published in 2006.) Because of its association with sex outside marriage, death by AIDS was still deeply stigmatized.

  I was met at the Mombasa airport by Suleiman Abdallah, forty, Transami’s dispatcher of twelve years ago who, despite changes in ownership and management, had retained his job. Back then, Suleiman had been the man at headquarters responsible for checking up on me; he had been genial and reliable, and I had kept up some with him, too. Medium dark, he wore glasses and had been a bit chubby back in the day. Now he was graying and skinny, which I found a bit worrying, but he said he was fine—Ramadan had started, and he was losing weight from fasting. (Islam is the dominant religion in coastal Kenya; elsewhere in the country most people are Christian.)

  Suleiman was driving a Transami pickup truck. The company was now owned by the French conglomerate Bolloré, not by Belgians, but Suleiman’s new supervisor, a British expat in his forties named Mike Keates, who was transport manager, was aware of my history with the company and had not objected to my hanging out again there for a while. I wanted to meet Mike, but he was busy yelling at a driver on the phone when we arrived, so Suleiman showed me around the new office and paved truck yard. The dirt yard I remembered was two locations in the past, he told me. Since then, the new owners had made many other changes. The tarmac out back was one of them; Mike had blamed puddles of standing water in the previous yard for his getting malaria. I noticed that there were many more trucks now (ninety, up from forty-seven) and they were a lot newer, and mainly made by Renault; in the old days, all the trucks appeared to be British Leylands, on their ninth lives. (Global corporate ownership was starting to shake up patterns of brand loyalty. Up to the early 1990s, trucks you saw on the road in East Africa tended to reflect countries’ colonial masters: Somali truckers drove Fiats; Tanzanian truckers, Mercedes-Benz; central Africans, Renaults; and Kenyan and Ugandan truckers, Leylands.)

  “Oh, a lot has changed,” said Suleiman, chuckling. I might not have realized, he said, that the driver Mike had on the line was speaking to him from his cell phone, a vast improvement over the patchwork system of shortwave radios that had been in place before. When I reflexively said that was great, remembering how seldom the Transami radios had worked in the old days, Suleiman shook his head: “I’m not sure all the drivers would agree with you,” he said, and there was laughter from the half-dozen men at desks nearby. Drivers could receive calls for free, and it appeared that, like it or not, many of them often did—from Mike.

  In a similar vein, said Suleiman, all the trucks had been recently equipped with GPS devices. This allowed headquarters to track their every movement, part of the newly efficient regime with its higher expectations of profit. Weeks-long forays into central Africa with grossly overloaded trailers were mostly a thing of the past, as well: Transami now focused on speedy round trips to Kampala, Uganda, which normally could be accomplished in less than a week. I saw the computers where the tracking took place, and briefly met Mike’s boss, a twenty-four-year-old Frenchman named Nicolas, whose large desk was piled high with computer printouts and who seemed perpetually glued to his monitor. Crunching the numbers, now, was what management was all about.*

  Obadiah arrived in the afternoon. We embraced and had a public catching-up in the main room outside Mike’s cubicle. Still rangy and fit at age thirty-eight, he had gone even grayer than Suleiman. Now that he was a senior driver, he was paid extra for stopping to help out other Transami drivers who encountered trouble on the road. I took out a stack of photos from our earlier journey. Suleiman and employees out of Mike’s field of vision clustered around to look at the snapshots of men they had known. “There’s Francis!” “There’s Sam
i!” “Cromwel!” I wanted the news about all of them, so I made a list of each truck that had been in our convoy, along with its driver and turnboy:

  Fleet 19:

  Bradford (died)

  —Obadiah (now senior driver)

  Fleet 35:

  Zuberi (died)

  —Mlaghui Mwaruruma (died)

  Fleet 10:

  Malek (fired for stealing fuel, now driving a bus in Dar es Salaam)

  —Stephen (died)

  Fleet 37:

  Francis (died)

  —Duma (still a turnboy)

  Fleet 31:

  Sami (sick, unemployed)

  —Hassan (now a Transami driver)

  Toyota:

  mechanic: Cromwel (died)

  caravan leader: Mwalimu (retired).

  Over eleven years, six of the twelve men I’d gotten to know had died, and at least one more was quite ill. I knew it would be wrong to assume all the deaths were due to AIDS; life expectancy in Kenya was low, and I had been gone a long time. Still, this seemed like a high number, particularly given that several of the dead had been young. Most jolting to me was the death of Cromwel, a jolly, robust, intelligent mechanic who spoke English well and devoured the thrillers of Nelson DeMille. “What did he die of, do you know?” I asked the gathered employees. There was some shaking of heads—people didn’t know, or would not say.

  I persisted in trying to establish causes of death. Somebody else had died of diabetes, they said; another had died of malaria; another had died of “heart.” Mike emerged during this discussion as Suleiman was telling me that Sami, a skinny driver from the Kalenjin, one of the Nandi-speaking tribes famous for producing marathon runners, who was fond of seventies-style zip-up shirts, white patent leather shoes, white leather jacket, and big long sideburns, was quite ill from “TB.”

  “You know, Suley, that TB is an opportunistic infection,” Mike interjected, speaking more gently now than he had on the phone. “TB doesn’t get you—it’s AIDS that gets you.” Everyone nodded deferentially, but nobody looked at Mike and nobody wanted to take up this line of thought. Mike signaled to me to follow him back into his office, but before he could get there his cell phone rang, his desk phone rang, and he caught sight of an employee he’d been looking for. He chose to go speak to the worker, and appeared to forget about me completely. The worker looked stubborn and not too smart as Mike yelled at him. Suleiman intervened to explain a few things in Swahili, but the man didn’t seem persuaded. Mike screamed, “If I gave your ass a bucket you wouldn’t know how to fill it with your own shit!” to general tittering around the office. The man didn’t laugh; I guessed he didn’t understand enough English to know what Mike had said. Mike took a little walk around the yard to blow off some steam before returning to talk to me. Finally he came back and apologized to me for the wait.

  “It’s permanent crisis management here,” he said, explaining his ongoing agitation. The crises, in order of occurrence, were:

  ACCIDENTS

  THEFTS (MAINLY OF CARGO FROM CONTAINERS)

  MECHANICAL BREAKDOWNS.

  Making them all worse, he said, was the “constant bloody pressure” of having a budget with monthly targets. His job boiled down to making sure the Mombasa operation was grossing about $717,000 every month: a recurring deadline to get things delivered and receive payment. I supposed this was the way business worked in the developed world, but Mike’s stress level suggested it was a new way of thinking for Kenya. “We’re under intense pressure to make money,” he summed up. “It’s not made easier when your average African has no perception of time.”

  Or perhaps of haste, I thought later, as I weighed Mike’s remarks. In any event, the pressured atmosphere around the office made me happy that I was about to get out of there and hit the road.

  Two days later, we were in the cherry red cab of Obadiah’s Renault semi rig. “Where’s the turnboy?” I asked, climbing up into the passenger seat.

  “No turnman!” Obadiah replied, using the current terminology. “They want to see if we don’t need one. It’s experimental.” This reminded me of North American freight trains slowly shedding their cabooses, a process begun in the 1980s and mostly completed during the 1990s.

  “I see. So having a mzungu for a turnman,” I joked, using the Swahili equivalent of gringo, “is like having no turnman at all?”

  “That is right!” Obadiah laughed.

  His truck, laden with two cream-colored containers, lumbered out of the guarded gate of the Transami yard and onto the dirt road that ran between the walls of other big companies on this industrial side of Mombasa. Soon we were on a paved street lined with commercial stalls, then we passed through an intersection.

  “Last week the police shot two robbers here,” Obadiah said. “In their car. It was stolen. Yes, they took guns and killed them.” Two intersections later, pieces of sheet metal slid off a truck ahead of us, which pulled over; Obadiah swerved to avoid the obstacle. Driving here required a different set of skills.

  By 2003, Obadiah was a senior driver and team leader, and drove a bright red Renault truck.

  The road took us past the port of Mombasa, with its high fences and a distant view of cranes used for unloading ships and stacks of containers. Beyond that was the Indian Ocean, where now and then you could still catch a glimpse of the trapezoidal sail of an old-fashioned boat. Old ways were fast disappearing around Mombasa, as they do in any port town that is a nation’s door to the outside, and it seemed material culture was the first to go—the wooden boats, the row houses on narrow streets in the Old Town, some with narrow wooden second-floor balconies supported by wooden scrolls. But Fort Jesus, the stone garrison built by the Portuguese in the days of colonialism and the city’s main tourist attraction, wasn’t going anywhere; and the two huge pairs of tusks that curve over Moi Avenue like a welcome sign seem nearly as permanent.

  Other durable links to the past can be found in the language. To take a colonial example: “turnboy” dates from early in the twentieth century, when the operator of a vehicle (most likely a white man) wanted somebody to turn the crank to start the engine. The grown man who performed this menial task became a turnboy, and a turnboy’s job came to include many other duties related to the operation of vehicles: keeping them clean, changing tires, guarding against thieves and vandals. By the start of the twenty-first century, “turnboy” had updated itself to “turnman.”

  Among themselves, most drivers spoke Swahili. Like English, Swahili is a lingua franca—but one lacking the taint of colonialism, which makes it popular in East Africa (and especially in Tanzania). Associated with a coastal tribe, the Swahili, which is predominantly Muslim, the language has been influenced by Arabic over hundreds of years of trade and conquest along the coast. Swahili traders began regular expeditions into the interior of East Africa starting early in the nineteenth century, spreading their language along the way. Long before English became East Africa’s language of government and education under the British administration of the first half of the twentieth century, the region’s many tribes did business in Swahili. At Transami, the tradition continued.

  It’s fascinating how the language adopted words relating to trucks and travel. Many were simple English cognates for manufactured things that did not exist in early-twentieth-century Kenya: a mechanic’s tulboksi contained a tork renchi that could be used to work on the silinda hedi or other parts of the mota. Other words revealed the pastoral origins of the speaker. The slang word for the tractor part of a semi rig was “horse” (farasi). A truck’s wheels, magurudumu, were often called “legs” (miguu) and slang for refueling was the same as “feeding.“ A rig that traveled fast was said to be “running.”

  As Obadiah and I crossed the bridge from Mombasa Island to the mainland and headed west on the motorway, we followed a trail of trade and migration that was centuries old.

  I enjoyed being back in a truck with Obadiah, and seeing him in charge. He seemed proud to have this job and I coul
d see why: working in international trucking for a European firm had a fairly high status in East Africa. You were well paid, mainly in salary but also through the opportunity to take advantage of the difference in countries’ official prices and sell fuel on the side. You were in charge of an expensive piece of manufactured equipment, which you got to operate—at high speed, if you so chose. And though management exerted control through productivity targets and supposed deadlines and GPSs and cell phones, everybody knew that once you were out there on the road, things could come up, trouble could happen, delays. The road brought unpredictability, which could mean peril, but it also meant freedom.

  Though gleaming and much newer than the last truck we’d sat in together, Obadiah’s Renault was also bought used. He had been given charge of it two years ago. At the time, its odometer read about 400,000 kilometers (almost 250,000 miles); now it said 682,310 kilometers (almost 425,000 miles). He was particularly proud of the driver’s seat, which had bouncy air suspension; I nodded my appreciation, having already noticed that Transami had not seen fit to install the same thing on the turnman’s side. The big cab had two sleeping bunks, which the Leyland had lacked; back then, management thought that giving the drivers a place to sleep would just encourage visits by prostitutes. Given the number of cheap lodgings you could find along the highways, I had always doubted that was true.

  As much of an improvement as Obadiah’s truck represented, though, he confessed that its suspension was better suited for European roads than African ones: the shocks and struts constantly needed replacement, he said. “Our roads are too rough and this truck is too fast.”

  Obadiah’s trailers weren’t loaded until about three p.m. so we had gotten a late start and didn’t expect to get too far that first day. The most memorable sight, as we left the coast, was the primary school students heading home in groups alongside the road. All of them wore uniforms, and the colors were glorious combinations seldom seen on students in North America: orange shirts or blouses paired with gray shorts or skirts; white paired with purple; kelly green with orange or khaki; pink with blue, pink with black.