Ted Conover

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

  By and by, an hour or two from Mombasa, we came up behind a grown man wearing a very plain gray uniform. Obadiah pulled over to give him a lift. This was the sort of thing Bradford would never have done: a violation of company rules! But it turned out that the fellow worked at the weigh station ahead. Weigh stations were too common in East Africa, and generally ineffective: they were supposed to keep overweight trucks off the road, because, over time, overweight trucks caused considerable, expensive damage to the road surface. Often, though, the driver of an overweight truck simply bribed his way through. I didn’t know whether Obadiah was overloaded or not, but any way you looked at it, doing a favor for the official made good business sense.

  The man got off as we came up on the queue of thirty or forty trucks waiting to be weighed. I could tell Obadiah chafed at being last—he kept leaning out his window, watching our former passenger’s progress as he walked toward the front of the queue. Once the man was out of sight, Obadiah jerked our truck out of the queue and trundled toward the front.

  “There is another truck, a Transami truck, up here, and he will let us in,” he assured me. That was exactly what happened. Drivers clearly could act as a team, to their mutual benefit.

  Obadiah showed me his paperwork after he returned from the weighbridge office with the necessary approvals. One of our two twenty-foot containers held medicine and other medical supplies from a Catholic church in Louisiana, the other wax and solvents. When I asked whether the containers actually weighed what the bills of lading said—many firms were known to overload trucks beyond the limit, because it increased their profits—Obadiah smiled and said, “Close.” Closer now, anyway, than in days of yore.

  I had noticed that Transami loaded the containers in an unusual way, with their doors facing each other instead of toward the rear. Obadiah explained that this was intentional, a strategy for reducing theft: the easiest way to break into the containers was through those doors, and if neither one was exposed, they were that much more secure. “It is a very good idea,” he said. I remembered how, eleven years earlier, Bradford had made him go hang off the rear of the trailer as the truck labored slowly up a particularly steep hill. He knew from experience that thieves lurked along that incline, and loaded trucks moved so slowly that the thieves had time to break in and throw cargo to the ground that would then be carted away. If the driving crew wasn’t alert, they wouldn’t know that they had been robbed until the next time they stopped, and found the doors swinging loose.

  The sun was going down, and I knew we wouldn’t drive much longer. The road was straight and only two lanes, and the angle of the light betrayed the deep grooves that westbound trucks left in the pavement; I had never noticed that before, and to me it made no sense. Was there always more traffic in one direction than in the other? “Why aren’t those grooves in the oncoming lane, too?” I asked Obadiah.

  “Oh, because we usually come back empty,” he explained. Trucks carried goods in from the coast, but there wasn’t much for them to ferry back—mainly just tea, now and then, and coffee. This road thus revealed an essential fact about the economy of East Africa: many imports, few exports; much going in, little going out.

  We pulled into a broad dirt parking lot at the side of the road in a village called Mtito Andei, and Obadiah turned off the engine. I wondered now about the absence of a turnman: Who would watch the truck while we slept? Obadiah explained that this lot had an askari (guard) whom he could pay to watch the truck while we ate, and he could just pay the man a bit extra to watch it while we slept.

  Our meal was in a large, fluorescent-lit hall, and certainly 90 percent of the other customers were drivers and assistants. It was your basic rice-and-chicken place, though you could also get fried potatoes, or goat. The men often ate in pairs, or in small groups, and those groups often looked ethnically the same: most trucking companies were small and, unlike Transami, hired men from the same tribe. No two diners looked as different from each other as Obadiah and I. I kind of enjoyed that.

  Obadiah woke me while it was still dark. I’d slept—or tried to—in the tractor’s narrow top bunk, where it was very stuffy, and it took me a moment to figure out where I was. We’d be on roads where there was a lot of construction today, he explained, and passing through Nairobi, as well, so we needed an early start.

  The A109, the highway that connects Mombasa and Nairobi, Kenya’s two principal cities, carries most of the country’s traffic. The road had been a mess for years, Obadiah explained, perpetually under construction, a symptom of the corruption besetting his country. The week before, while I waited in Mombasa for Obadiah to return from a previous trip, I had read in the newspaper of a nightmare traffic jam: heavy rains had washed out a portion of the road, stopping traffic in both directions and leaving cars at a sodden, miserable standstill for eighteen hours. Obadiah showed me where the washout had been, thanking his lucky stars that he had missed it by a couple of hours. Today it was merely several hours of stop-and-go, and of dodging potholes and cracks that left me looking more and more enviously at Obadiah’s bouncy shock-absorber seat.

  Traffic speeded up briefly but slowed again in Nairobi. We watched planes taxi while we waited to refuel at the Transami depot next to the airport. Obadiah, the professional traveler, revealed to me that he’d never flown. “Very nice, Teddi, it must be very nice to be in that plane.” Fast but dull, I said.

  Nairobi had gotten rougher since my previous visit. Homeless “parking boys” lingered by the side of the road, some selling things, some begging. A group of a dozen or so lounging around a grassy patch in front of an office building, in the vicinity of a lone adult, made me think of Oliver Twist and Bill Sykes, reincarnated from Victorian England into twenty-first-century Africa. Twice, as we crept through the urban slowdown, around traffic circles with trees containing big Marabou storks and their nests, Obadiah called a boy over and sent him to buy a couple of cigarettes from a nearby kiosk. I noticed he only summoned boys who were not part of groups, and he acknowledged that the groups worried him. “They are the bad sort,” he would say.

  Outside Nairobi, when we headed northwest into the Kenya highlands, the roads improved. After climbing gently for a while past large farms and stands of cedar, we came to the lip of a huge escarpment that was the scenic highlight of the trip: the edge of the Great Rift Valley. Before us extended a vast bowl of haze. Obadiah wrestled his rig around turn after turn as we crested, and then, with the incipient plunge, placed it resignedly in first gear. He hated to go slowly, but this was a place where, truly, your life was in danger if you did not. The speed put him in mind of our old driver: “Brad Mulwa—he was a very slow man, very fearful, so afraid. He did not believe in himself.” We passed baboons, and vendors of roasted maize on the cob who jogged alongside the truck and even climbed up it briefly to make a sale. I bought us each one, through the window. It had a good, smoky flavor but was tough.

  Trucks and cars of various sizes roared slowly by us in the other direction, as they climbed out of the valley, most of them belching smoke and moving about the same speed as we.

  Then a smaller truck, heavily laden and going downhill, passed us on a curve as we munched. It was a dangerous move, as the charred wreckage of totaled vehicles that shadowed us the entire way testified. Being passed always provoked Obadiah, who was convinced that, in his muscular Renault, he was always doing the maximum speed possible for a big truck under the circumstances; he was always staying just this side of the red line of safety. Anyone faster was by definition reckless. “That man does not care for his life,” he said of the driver who passed us. “He does not care!

  “You see, Ted, I am the best driver there is. I am very confident. If I can safely overtake, I do; if I don’t then it’s impossible.” He claimed to have never had an accident. But later, at the bottom of the big drop, he told me a story of having come pretty close. It was somewhere in Uganda, a steep hill that was lightly trafficked. He had been braking a lot but at a certain point the brakes p
roved inadequate, and he was past the speed where he could downshift effectively. As the speedometer moved past 120 kilometers (75 miles) per hour, he told his turnman to retreat to the bunk compartment, where he might be slightly safer in the collision that now seemed likely. But Obadiah, hands glued to the wheel, miraculously made it around every turn and dodged every obstacle until, four miles later, the road flattened out.

  “Some drivers can get scared, they panic! I do not. I was not scared. God gave me the responsibility and he will protect me.”

  Passing through rolling hills that afternoon, we saw giant tea plantations. We slowed for hamlets where a dozen people by the side of the road were all selling the same produce—carrots, in one place, scallions in another. Countless times we were waved to a stop by small-town policemen; Obadiah would slow to a crawl but seldom actually stopped, occasionally passing a 50-shilling note or a cigarette through the window to the officials, many of whom he seemed to at least recognize. I showed him pictures of my family and he told me of his: his younger brother, a teacher, had died just two months ago at age thirty-two, he said, “maybe cancer.” His mother had died two years earlier, at home near Kisumu. This was a lot of sad news. He himself carried one photo in his wallet—that of his new daughter, Catherine, who was six months old.

  “And we will see her tonight!” he said with a smile.

  “We will?” I had expected another night in the truck.

  “Yes! In Malaba. She lives on the border.” He saw my quizzical look and laughed. “With her mother. My wife, Beatrice!* I have taken another wife!”

  “Oh!” I said. “You have?” I knew that his first wife, and his two children by her, lived in Mombasa. The next photo showed Beatrice together with her daughter.

  “Much younger!” I observed.

  Obadiah laughed again. “We were married two years ago. I asked her parents, and then I asked my other wife. All of them said it was all right. She is twenty-five.

  “At first, Beatrice lived with my first wife, in Mombasa. But they did not get along. So she has moved here, so I can still see her often.”

  Malaba, on the border with Uganda, was part of his regular route, and border crossing usually involved at least an overnight stay, so the set-up was good: he could stay at home, and he and this part of his family could see each other.

  Sixteen hours after leaving Mtito Andei, we arrived in Malaba, a small town with dirt streets and few buildings over one story tall. I was indescribably happy to climb down from the truck, and Obadiah seemed almost as pleased to be home. Dusk had fallen; a small, bright-green-painted mosque was broadcasting its call to prayer. We had pulled over next to an unfinished mini-mall that had a big dirt lot in front. Obadiah told me to bring along my bag as we left the rig.

  We walked around to the back of the unfinished building, through tall grass and past a brick wall that separated it from the mosque. Obadiah climbed two steps up to a heavy metal door, and banged. We heard a bolt slide open, and were greeted by Beatrice and little Catherine. Beatrice was pretty; she had a warm smile and straightened, chin-length hair, and wore black jeans and a crisp pink blouse. She was gracious and welcoming, but Catherine seemed flabbergasted. I don’t think she had ever met anyone who looked remotely like me. I set out to make her first impression a good one: I happened to be carrying a little rubber ball, and I bounced it to her on the kitchen floor. She sent it right back to me. Her initial concern, however, made me appreciate the apartment’s remote location. Keeping a low profile would make life easier for me.

  The apartment had three small rooms and no plumbing; outside there was an outhouse, and a tap where Beatrice filled jerry cans of water. But there was gas for a stove inside, and she quickly stood over it to make me and her husband a dinner of ugali (a starchy dish of ground meal) and chicken. We ate without utensils, as is common in Kenya, and by tradition with our right hands, though the family wasn’t Muslim. Somehow, while taking care of Catherine, Beatrice also heated two small tubs of water and carried them to another outbuilding, laying beside each tub a small bar of soap and a pair of flip-flops so that Obadiah and I could bathe. As dinner got under way, various people stopped by to say hello (and get a look at me), including Beatrice’s mother, her sister, her niece (age six), and her friend Risper, who worked in a hotel not far away and wore a stiff, poufy dress. I was shown what Beatrice called the “guest bed,” which had a mosquito net with some big holes in it—but some net is better than no net, and I looked forward to a night’s sleep.

  Among the perks of Obadiah’s seniority were a regular route (Mombasa to Kampala) and the means to support a second family. At their home in Busia, Obadiah holds Catherine, his daughter by his wife Beatrice.

  Unfortunately, it was not to be. I am not sure why, but part of the reason must have been the loud clock hanging on the wall just above my head. Black plastic, with gold plastic trim and hands, it ticked loudly and played a few bars of a famous popular tune at exactly fifteen minutes past the hour, every hour, all night long—“Auld Lang Syne,” “Santa Lucia,” the Largo theme from Dvořák’s New World Symphony, “Für Elise,” “Simple Gifts” (“ Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free …”). As it happens, I had been plagued by the exact same model at a thatched-roof settlement where we’d stopped for the night on the river in Peru. It was made in China, of course, factory to the world; clearly, it had crosscultural appeal. In my fatigue-fueled delirium I imagined a scene where Obadiah and Beatrice, all dressed up, were receiving the clock, in an elaborate ceremony, as a wedding present. But in the morning Obadiah said that no, he had admired it in Nairobi and bought it for Beatrice himself.

  Even if Beatrice slept well, she couldn’t have slept much more than I did: by the time I got up, around seven a.m., she had already washed Obadiah’s clothes and mine, and fired up a charcoal brazier for our tea water. She cooked me eggs with bread and jam. As I ate, cute little Lisa, age six, Beatrice’s niece, got up the courage to touch my blond arm hairs. Obadiah, out with the truck when I woke up, returned and Beatrice served him, too. She then showed me her small clothing shop, in the part of the building that faced the road. You could get to its back room through a little door in their apartment. Beatrice’s mother was in there, rolling up a sleeping pad on the floor, and from the clothing and other effects nearby I realized that I had probably displaced the granny and Lisa, the niece, the night before. Yes, Beatrice said, it was true, but Grandma liked sleeping with the girl, no matter where it was.

  Today, Obadiah explained, we would take the truck across the international bridge into Uganda—but clearing Customs there would likely take another twenty-four hours, so I could leave my things in the apartment as we’d be back there that night. That was good news: I was happy to have an easy day ahead. Little did I know …

  Obadiah and I had this in common: on the road in East Africa, we both attracted the attention of people wanting money. I attracted it because of my white skin and presumed wealth; he attracted it because of the expensive vehicle he was in charge of. The driver of such a machine, they correctly assumed, even if he was not paid a high salary, could be presumed to have some cash on him, if only for incidentals incurred on a long trip.

  Beggars require no pretext to ask for money: their destitution usually speaks for itself. But policemen usually do. The officers at the beginning of Braulio’s trip down into the Amazon had only to point at the many passengers riding illegally atop his fuel truck. In Kenya, a truck driver could be legitimately fined if he had a crack in his windshield or mirror, a burned-out running light, or worn tire treads. The way it usually worked was that the policeman identified the flaw, declared the official penalty, and then did the offender a favor by accepting a couple of bills in lieu of the fine. If he couldn’t find a flaw in the truck or its paperwork, then his negotiating ability was much diminished. Obadiah knew this well, and tried to begin every trip with his truck in the most unassailable condition possible. Except in extraordinary circumstances, as far as I could
tell, the company did not reimburse drivers for bribes.

  In front of Beatrice’s clothing store, Obadiah hailed two boda-bodas, or bicycle taxis. Each had a small upholstered cushion behind the driver’s seat, and pegs sticking out from the hubs for your feet. (Female passengers, whether wearing skirts or not, sat sideways on the back, just as they had upon mototaxis in Puerto Maldonado.) The name came from “border-border”: south of here, in the Kenyan and Uganda border towns that are both named Busia, the immigration posts are separated by more than half a mile, and the taxi drivers solicit customers by calling “Border-border?”

  The bikes took us to a Customs parking lot on the Kenya side of a small international bridge. Obadiah had already been there that morning and commissioned some local boys to wash the truck; at least four of them were sitting in the cab with the radio cranked up high. He paid them and they scattered. Obadiah invited me to drive across the bridge with him to the Customs yard on the Uganda side; from there we would walk back. But I was concerned: I had only a single-entry visa into Uganda. Wouldn’t that mean I had to wait on the other side? He said no, the border zone was special—but I could check with the Uganda authorities just in case. I climbed up.

  I was sleepy, and as Obadiah inched his big rig into the queue of trucks heading for the bridge, I slumped in my seat and drifted off. I was half awoken some time later by a man shouting, and then the truck jerking to a stop, right before the bridge. I sat up and looked out with alarm as my door swung open. An angry-looking policeman with a rifle in his hand gestured at me from the ground.