Ted Conover

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

  “Please alight! Alight now, please!” I looked around for my knapsack.

  “Let me see your identification!” I handed him my passport, and he asked me what I was doing in the truck.

  “Traveling, with the company’s permission,” I replied.

  “It is against the law for this truck to carry a passenger,” he declared hotly. “You will be arrested!”

  At this point, Obadiah climbed down, too, and jumped into the fray. I could not understand what he was saying, but as the policeman’s agitation mounted I sensed he was making things worse. Seeking to defuse matters, I interrupted: “Look, it’s okay, it’s not important that I ride in the truck today. I am happy to get out and cross on foot.”

  “It is too late!” said the policeman. “You have already broken the law!” At this Obadiah literally started screaming at the man. All traffic across the border had ceased; scores of people had stopped to watch. Deciding that Obadiah’s passion might be a hindrance to resolving this, I told him to let me talk to the policeman alone. It took a lot of persuading, but after finding a boda-boda driver to take me home, Obadiah got back in the truck and drove it across the bridge.

  Unfortunately, I had played right into the policeman’s hands. “Now we will take you to the station,” he announced, pointing to a building up the hill, still holding on to my passport. I repeated that I had the company’s permission, that I had done nothing wrong, but that I would be happy to desist if that would make him happy.

  He stepped very close to me and said in a low voice, hand on the rifle, “Let me see some dollars.”

  I had been wondering whether this moment would come. Under the circumstances, I thought acquiescing might not be a bad idea. I didn’t have dollars, though; the only bills I had were 500-shilling notes, each worth about $7.50. I handed him one and immediately saw I had overpaid. There was no dickering, no quibbling: he simply grunted, handed back my passport, and walked away. I climbed on the boda-boda and, deeply relieved, rode home to Beatrice.

  But the drama was only beginning. Obadiah, arriving home, asked me how much I had paid the man. I told him 500 shillings, not adding that I felt pretty good about getting out of the situation for less than ten bucks. But Obadiah went ballistic. “This man has no right to take your money! This man is very bad, very greedy. He has no right!” I agreed but was not upset; these things happened, in my experience, and as a traveler there wasn’t much you could do about them.

  This was not Obadiah’s interpretation. His foreign guest had been ripped off, half a mile from his own home! In broad daylight! It was an outrage! He was livid, and getting madder and madder. Things were supposed to be different in Kenya now, he said. Didn’t I agree we should file a complaint? At lunchtime he said, “I feel very heavy.” And soon after that he said I had to come with him, President Kibaki had declared that corruption must cease; we couldn’t let this stand!

  Oh, boy.

  Our first stop was the local Transami rep—the company maintained small offices in border towns like this, mainly to deal with Customs snafus. The man, who said he had witnessed the incident, was also in favor of complaining. He provided us with a signed statement on letterhead that said I had been authorized by the head office to ride in Obadiah’s truck. The three of us then walked to the office of the chief of police. They had me wait outside. I wondered why I was so much more nervous than they were. I heard a lot of raised voices behind the closed door, but couldn’t tell what they were saying.

  Finally Obadiah and the rep came out. “Now he will go get the policeman,” he told me. “We must wait.”

  “But how’s it looking? What did the chief say?” I asked. Obadiah said it was too soon to tell.

  The policeman arrived, and disappeared into the office for about ten minutes. Then Obadiah was ushered in to speak to the both of them; that took another ten minutes. The Transami rep, hanging out with me in an open hallway outside, where it was hot and muggy, predicted that we were going to win. Finally, I was invited inside and met the chief.

  He was in a big chair at a big desk. Obadiah sat to one side of it and the policeman to the other. The chief asked me to tell him what happened, and I did. The chief appeared to mull matters over for a moment, then gestured at me and Obadiah.

  “You have both broken the law. You by bribing a policeman and you by giving this man a ride.” He looked at the wall behind me. “Do you understand?”

  Suddenly I was as indignant as Obadiah had been. “Are you saying that when an armed policeman takes your passport, angrily says he’s placing you under arrest, and demands that you produce some money, you should not do it? Because that’s exactly what happened. This was not a bribe, it was extortion.”

  “Well,” said the chief to Obadiah—he seemed unable to speak directly to me—“I see that he is a very clever and scheming man. Be that as it may, he now has two choices. Either the policeman returns this money and we settle it right here, right now. Or we wait until the court is in session Monday and settle it there.”

  I leaned over and conferred with Obadiah. Given that I had now been accused, I was willing to go to court if he wanted to. But it seemed life would be easier if I just accepted the money back. Obadiah said that was fine.

  The policeman had my bill folded up in his shirt pocket. He handed it back to me. We all stood up and shook hands. The matter was finished—at least for us.

  “That man will lose his job,” Obadiah said as we left the police station, and the Transami man concurred. “He will lose it tomorrow.”

  “But the chief defended him!” I observed.

  “The chief knows what happened,” said Obadiah. “That policeman is a very bad man. He involved a mzungu and he involved Transami, and now he will be out!” And indeed, Obadiah later confirmed, the policeman was never seen working in town again.

  That night we celebrated by going to a local bar, the Wangina—named, per custom, after the owner’s mother. It was a couple of blocks off the main drag, down a dark dirt street. The heat of the day had dissipated in a great booming thunderstorm that knocked out the power that afternoon; in the wake of it, the air felt cool and clean.

  The Wangina had a generator going, and used it to power a stereo (loud!), a television, and two dim bulbs that hung from a crossbeam under the corrugated metal roof. Three young locals played at a pool table. Handpainted on the wall was the injunction: No Politics, No Dancing.

  “Will you take beer?” asked Obadiah. I nodded. He had already passed some money to Beatrice’s sister. I had thought she was part of our entourage, but in fact she worked here: she took the money to a sort of cage across the room and passed it through a window to the owner, who sat inside it with the liquor. This cage, as it turned out, was the bar; apparently it was necessary to protect the owner from theft, of either liquor or cash. One didn’t expect the crime threat in a small town to be so high, but clearly it was: the aluminum pot that Obadiah had given me the night before, in case I needed to pee during the night, wasn’t just a convenience—they didn’t want to unbolt the apartment door at night, no matter what.

  Soon, he and I and Beatrice and Beatrice’s friend Risper, wearing another poufy-sleeved dress, were drinking at a long table. There were other groups nearby, with most of the drinks apparently bought by two truckers whom Obadiah pointed out to me. Generally speaking, they were the guys in town with money.

  Obadiah loosened up, and I noticed Beatrice rubbing her finger over his swollen knuckle. When I’d asked him about it before, he’d told me he had hurt the hand in a loading accident. But now he admitted that he’d gotten it from punching somebody the week before in a Mombasa bar. The victim, it came out with a little coaxing, was another Transami driver. The man had bought a beer for a woman without asking her, and felt greatly disrespected when she handed it to another guy. Somehow Obadiah had gotten caught up in protecting the woman from the driver’s aggression; it had taken the blow to make him stop.

  As he was finishing this story, the bar turn
ed off its generator—the power was back on—and simultaneously there was a break in the music. For a moment we could hear both the call to prayer from the mosque next to Beatrice’s apartment and the dialogue from the movie on the television, which now caught my eye: Charlie Sheen was playing a Navy SEAL whose mission appeared to involve blowing away large numbers of Arab insurgents. The juxtaposition was a bit unreal.

  I chatted with Risper, who managed the front desk at a nice hotel near Busia, Kenya. “Obadiah told me you were interested in AIDS,” she said. “Most people in Kenya do not wish to speak of it, but I think we should. In Uganda they have suffered the most, and come to grips with it. But in Kenya we deny.” I asked Risper if she thought there was more safe sex now, more people using condoms. “Maybe some,” she said, “but still not too many. Not enough. The problem is that if the man does not want it, the woman cannot insist. Like that girl!” She pointed to a young woman, maybe sixteen, in a red top, sitting by herself and with an expectant look on her face. Tonight she would sleep with a trucker “or with anyone who will pay her 500 bob [US$7.50] in the morning,” Risper said. Or even for less: after a drink, a young and inexperienced girl might do it “for two or three reds” (100-shilling notes, meaning US$3 or $4.50). It was even possible that she’d forget to discuss price ahead of time, or else be too submissive and just wait and see what she was given. Discussing a condom, much less negotiating the use of one, was next to inconceivable for a girl like that, said Risper.

  During my first journey with Obadiah, there had been lots of involvement with prostitutes. None of the truckers’ wives were around, and their trip was many weeks long. Most of the places where we met women weren’t brothels per se; they were just regular roadside lodgings. Most of the customers at these small hotels were men, and most of the women who worked at them, serving drinks or food, were understood to be available for sex. They didn’t wear tight skirts or low-cut dresses or high heels, as hookers might in the West. Rather it was simply their presence in the bars or lobbies that signaled the men that they could be approached for paid sex.

  Many of them approached me in a friendly way—if the truckers had money, their mzungu friend must be loaded!—but Obadiah and the others always got me out of it by explaining that I was obsessed with AIDS and didn’t want to have sex. I might have put it differently and said that, in addition to being monogamously involved, I was reasonably concerned about AIDS, but the effect was the same.

  Our brief overnight stays and my need to depend on the truckers as translators—due to the limited English of the rural women and my limited Swahili—had made it hard to press them about their work and their lives. But a few days after this second voyage with Obadiah, I contacted health educators who worked with prostitutes in Mombasa, as well as an advocacy group for HIV-positive women (including many prostitutes) in Nairobi, and had long conversations.

  The women in Nairobi were particularly well-spoken and engaging. I bought lunch for seven of them at the headquarters of a group they belonged to, the Kenya Network of Women with HIV/AIDS (KENWA). They were better educated and better informed than many of their rural counterparts. The group’s literature explained that they were offered vocational training and “seed money so they can sell sundries to become financially independent.” Many of them had children, and KENWA tried to help with school fees, too. The group also offered medical care, including antiretroviral drugs, and helped feed some of the thousands of the city’s AIDS orphans.

  Among the more forthright of the seven women were Constance, Mary, and Jane. Constance was very pretty and wore an eye-catching black-and-white striped top, which was of a piece with her idea that “these men are attracted by sight—so you have to look good.” The other women were neither unattractive nor glamorous. Mary was buxom and heavy; Jane was slender. All of them worked bars, they explained, and there was nothing secretive about it. “We boost their business,” explained Mary.

  Sometimes the bar had a back room they could take clients to, “or if the man wants to take you for a long time he will take you to a different place, or his hotel room,” said Jane. On a good night, they might have sex five times, at 300 shillings (US$4.50) a pop. Oral sex was not common (“That costs more here,” explained Jane), but all of them said they would do it if the price was right.

  They flirted with me, saying wazungu (the plural of mzungu) made fine customers and they liked them very much. When they asked how much a prostitute cost in New York and I guessed that prices might start around $100, several laughed and asked if I would take them there immediately. Constance said that hooking could be better than being married, because you had more choice over the men you were with, and a husband might not give you enough to live on, might let you go hungry. “Here you are your own boss.” But Jane made it sound almost like forced labor: “We go because there is nothing else we can do in life. And you don’t need capital to get started! The only asset I need is what I have”—and she gestured to her body. Mary added that it was very, very difficult to go into another line of work after commercial sex, because you would have to work a month to make as much money as you might make in a few nights as a prostitute.

  Occasionally the work was pleasurable. “Sometimes the man is sweet, and if you hadn’t asked for money, you might forget,” said Mary. Some of the men were funny, some would buy them drinks. But it sounded as though, more commonly, it was not. Men could be drunk, could be boors, could be rough. Some stank: “There are people you smell, and you can smell them the next day—seriously, you do not want to meet that man again,” said Mary. Jane added, “Even after you get out of the shower, you can smell him!” And of course the downside could be much steeper. “Sometimes men are cruel, and they beat us.” Every woman there had had a bad experience, including rape. Since it was a cash business, they were often robbed. And worst, of course, was that you could get various diseases, including AIDS.

  I told them I appreciated their candor, and hoped to stay in touch—Mary and Constance had e-mail addresses. I told them I was making a donation to the group, as it seemed very worthwhile. I started to put away my notebook and get ready to leave.

  “But what do you think?” Constance asked abruptly. None of the women, I noticed, were standing up. I sat back down.

  “What do I think about what?” I asked.

  “About our situation.”

  “Well, I think working to support a group like this is good, and paying close attention to your medicine and health is the right—”

  “No!” said Constance. “We mean, about our situation …”

  I was so thick. I thought I’d just been interviewing them about the work they used to do. “You mean,” I said, “you’re still hooking now?”

  She nodded.

  “All of you?”

  They all nodded. I took a deep breath. “And you can’t tell the men, or you would have no work. And your children would go hungry.” Again they nodded. “But you can tell them to wear condoms—”

  “Yes, but not all of them will,” said Jane.

  We sat and there was silence.

  “I guess it means you should do other work.”

  “In Kenya,” said Mary, “if you have no husband, and you have no degree, then there is little hope for you. All the jobs now are demanding HIV tests, especially the hotels.”

  “There must be some that don’t…,” I said, not really knowing.

  “What would you do, then?” asked Constance.

  I was totally unprepared. “I like to think I would stop this work,” I said. Could they be blamed for killing men if the men wouldn’t wear condoms? What if the women didn’t mention condoms, for fear of losing a sale? “I think you have to stop,” I said. “But I’m not a hundred percent sure.” And still I am not. This was so easy for me to say, and they knew it. They knew that I didn’t know. Despite my education and advantages, I didn’t know.

  The road was usually a very male realm, so I was pleased to learn the next morning that Beatrice would be accom
panying Obadiah and me to Kampala, the capital of Uganda. She did this periodically to restock her clothing shop, she explained—Kampala had a large clothing district and the prices were good. She would leave baby Catherine with her grandmother. We would have to make it a quick round-trip because Beatrice was breastfeeding and would become very uncomfortable if she was away from Catherine too long.

  It was a Sunday. Finished with breakfast, bathing Catherine, and other duties, Beatrice went alone to the Church of the Apostle. She would join us shortly. Obadiah and I took boda-bodas to the bridge and then walked across. Many strangers waved at us. Because of our confrontation with the policeman, we were now celebrities. We hung around with other drivers at the Transami office on the Uganda side until our truck cleared Customs, just before lunch.

  Women weren’t allowed in the fenced-in Customs yard—an anti-prostitution measure—but Obadiah had arranged a rendezvous point with Beatrice just outside. I stepped out of the truck and helped her aboard. Obadiah immediately got into the spirit of it. “Yes, madame!” he cried. “Make yourself comfortable. Feel free!” (I loved his usage of this phrase, the literalness of it—not Do as you wish, but Feel liberated!)

  The road to Kampala was good, though deeply grooved like so many others with the tracks of heavy westbound trucks. Kenyans described Uganda as green and beautiful and hilly, all of which it seemed to be. They spoke admiringly of Ugandans’ cleanliness and knack for organization. It reminded me, funnily enough, of how Victorian explorers to East Africa saw Uganda as an exception to the “blank, amorphous barbarism” of surrounding parts, “an orchid in a field of poison ivy.” There had been plenty of barbarity since pre-colonial and colonial times, of course, from the crazed genocidal reign of Idi Amin to the more recent terror of the Lord’s Resistance Army. But Uganda, devastated by AIDS, had a good reputation for the measures it had taken to curtail the epidemic, and some essence of good organization had endured the hardships.