Ted Conover

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

  “You believe that?”

  “Oh, yes. It is true.” His father, he said, was the first one to explain it to him, but many other drivers had confirmed it. “In fact,” he remembered, “Mbuvi!” Recently the other driver had nicked, but not squashed, a big snake; moments later he saw it flying alongside him, out the window—“very frightening!”

  We ate a fine dinner of grilled meats—beef, goat, chicken—at a large open-air restaurant near the Transami yard in Kisumu, where we were joined by Mr. Collins, who headed the local office. I took a room upstairs from the restaurant, while Obadiah resisted entreaties from an assistant of Mr. Collins to rent a room elsewhere and “fill it with girls.” “I am very tired tonight,” he told me, and would sleep in the truck.

  I asked Obadiah about a driver back in the yard in Kampala who looked as though he’d been beaten—he and Mbuvi had been talking to the man.

  “Yes. He was beaten by a burglar,” Obadiah said. They had broken into his house in Kampala and stolen not just the silver and jewelry but, in African style, almost everything else, too, including furniture, and then beaten him up for good measure.

  “Once they broke into my house in Mombasa while we slept,” he recalled. “I keep a panga [machete] for that. I used it on them,” and the burglars retreated.

  I thought of a college friend I had visited in Nairobi years before who worked for an NGO. In addition to having a twenty-four-hour guard, or askari, at the gate of her small, walled-in compound, her house had barred windows upstairs and a “rape gate” on the staircase, so that she would not be surprised while sleeping. The landscapes we were rolling through looked bucolic, but whether in country or city, it seemed violence was lurking everywhere.

  The next morning we passed back into the Great Rift Valley, which was filled with haze. This geological feature rends the earth all the way from northern Syria down to Mozambique. It is 3,700 miles long and has been slowly filling with silt for millennia, which is one reason so many important fossils of early humans and pre-human ancestors have been found there—notably the australopithecine skeleton called Lucy (between 2.9 and 3.9 million years old), and two other hominid ancestors—apes from which humans, gorillas, and chimpanzees diverged—that are 10 million years old.

  The highway we were on, by contrast, had not been paved until the 1970s. In the years before that, writes journalist Richard Preston, who lived briefly in Kenya as a boy,

  it was a gravel road engraved with washboard bumps and broken by occasional pitlike ruts that could crack the frame of a Land Rover. As you drove along it, you would see in the distance a plume of dust growing larger, coming toward you: an automobile. You would move to the shoulder and slow down, and as the car approached, you would place both hands upon the windshield to keep it from shattering if a pebble thrown up by the passing car hit the glass. The car would thunder past, leaving you blinded in yellow fog.

  Fifty years before that, the route from the coast to Lake Victoria and around the north side to central Africa would hardly have been discernible at all.

  Now, as I had seen, there is constant traffic. Preston, in his book The Hot Zone, goes so far as to suggest:

  If the [AIDS] virus had been noticed earlier, it might have been named Kinshasa Highway, in honor of the fact that it passed along the Kinshasa Highway during its emergence from the African forest…. The paving of the Kinshasa Highway [which links Congo and central Africa to Kampala and East Africa] affected every person on earth, and turned out to be one of the most important events of the twentieth century. It has already cost at least ten million lives, with the likelihood that the ultimate number of human casualties will vastly exceed the deaths in the Second World War. In effect, I had witnessed a crucial event in the emergence of AIDS, the transformation of a thread of dirt into a ribbon of tar.

  Of course, assuming that HIV did come from central Africa, the Kinshasa Highway wasn’t the only way for it to get out. There are other roads (such as the one I took on my 1993 trip, to the south of Lake Victoria), and there are boats, and planes. And yet the main idea is right: if not for the links to the outside, the virus might have stayed put. This is a cost of global connectivity: the same trucks that carry medicine in may carry all manner of germs out. It’s not intentional, of course, and truckers only begin the process; the rest of us complete it when we kiss and make love and nurse and bleed or, sometimes, when we simply breathe the air.

  The next day we passed back through Nairobi and found ourselves in a traffic jam the likes of which I’d never seen. It wasn’t that the holdup was extremely long: we were at a standstill only for about an hour. But after half an hour or so, drivers started getting restless. It was a two-lane highway, with partially paved shoulders. As the delay extended, trucks and others filled the shoulders. Then, seeking further movement, some in SUVs started driving down the scrub/savannah beyond the breakdown lane. I think the semi trucks would have done so as well, but the ground was muddy in places, and, Obadiah confirmed, big trucks risked getting stuck. Finally, to my surprise, the pressure of the wait led various vehicles to head over to the lane for oncoming traffic, which at the moment was empty.

  “But as soon as the accident is cleared, they’re going to get in the way of oncoming cars,” I pointed out, as though Obadiah did not appreciate this. He shrugged. And, though it went against his nature, he basically stayed put. Eventually, and slowly, the jam cleared—much more slowly, certainly, than if everyone had just stayed put. And more slowly than if the crash that caused the pile-up—a large truck had tried to overtake a bus, then struck it when he ran out of room—hadn’t been so bloody and spectacular. There were many injured.

  Our last night on the road was spent in a small settlement called Emali. And our last day took us through a zone of national parks. We saw families of monkeys crossing the road (though we’d seen that outside of parks, as well), and a small herd of zebras. A westbound Transami trucker whom Obadiah, in his role as senior driver, stopped to help gave us a heads-up that there was a big obstacle ahead: somebody had hit an elephant.

  Ten minutes later, we arrived at the dead elephant—or what was left of it. Though there were no dwellings in sight, twenty or thirty people were gathered around the carcass, most of which, by now, had been hacked away by their knives for food.

  “How do you hit an elephant?” I asked Obadiah. The country was wide open; a driver would see a fast-approaching elephant without much trouble. And how could you hit an elephant and drive away? Just hitting a deer could total a car; if a vehicle hit an elephant hard enough to kill it, wouldn’t that vehicle still be here? But there was no sign of any vehicle, just a huge pool of blood and bloody bones and a tableau of torn skin and flesh.

  “Do you think those people killed the elephant, just for the meat?” I asked. “Maybe shot it? And did it here, so they could blame it on a truck and not get in trouble?”

  “It is possible,” said Obadiah somberly.

  ———

  That afternoon we saw a corpse covered by a blanket at the side of the road, near a stretch populated by vendors selling scallions to passing motorists, and we both theorized about what might have happened. Obadiah confirmed to me what I had heard other drivers say in Africa: that if you ever killed someone while driving, even if it was clearly their fault, you never stopped; the risk of getting lynched by people nearby was too great. Rather, you drove on to the next town and reported it to the police there. Nobody would fault you for this; everyone, he said, understood.

  In my various travels, it was always the idea of a random death that I most feared—being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Roads offered plenty of opportunities for that to happen, for sober people to get hit by drunks, for animals to step into the road, for accidents involving innocents. I did everything I could to minimize the chances of death—wore a seat belt, avoided cars or drivers that looked unsafe. But there was a limit to how much you could prevent. On our earlier trip, Obadiah had commented, “the road is very unfair, ve
ry harsh.” That was it, exactly.

  When we arrived in Mombasa, Obadiah stopped briefly at his house, where I got to meet his first wife and two of their three children, a teenage girl and boy. This wife was heavy and unglamorous, and the apartment was small; picturing Beatrice getting on here was difficult. Our trip ended as before, where it had begun, in the Transami yard. I would see Obadiah again in coming days, as I followed up with Mike; hung out with Suleiman, the dispatcher; and sought out other people in Mombasa.

  But my first trip to Kenya had begun in Nairobi, with Job Bwayo, the medical doctor and immunologist, and it is with Job Bwayo that this journey should end. Since working on the study that had brought me to Kenya in the first place, Bwayo had become the country’s leading HIV researcher, internationally known in the effort to find an AIDS vaccine. In subsequent work, he had tried to find out why a group of sixty Kenyan prostitutes he had discovered never caught the disease, despite presumably having had a great many exposures to it. As he told England’s Observer newspaper in 2001, “They didn’t have the virus or the antibodies. So they must have been getting rid of the virus so quickly that it couldn’t get established. We took the HIV virus and white blood cells from the prostitutes, put them in a test-tube and—bang!—they reacted. The cells killed the virus.” With funding from the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, Bwayo had assembled a team of Kenyan scientists to work with scientists from Oxford University on using the sex worker research to develop an AIDS vaccine.

  He was traveling outside Kenya when I returned in 2003. But in 2007, I tried to get in touch by phone and hear the latest on his work. That’s when I learned that Job Bwayo had been murdered.

  It happened around six p.m. on February 4, 2007, a Sunday. Bwayo, fifty-eight, had driven his wife and two other women, a friend from Australia and an American missionary from Oregon, to visit an ostrich farm. As they were returning to Nairobi they came upon what they assumed to be a police roadblock. In fact, three young men with AK-47 rifles who are thought to have just committed a robbery were engaged in a carjacking. Already they had stopped a car carrying a disabled man and his son; after putting the son in the trunk, they had shot and killed the father and then gotten the car stuck in a ditch. At this point another car appeared, carrying four people; it, too, was made to stop and the occupants forced to get out. When one of them had trouble with her seat belt, the young men had shot her in the head and killed her.

  According to The East African Standard, “It was at that time that Prof. Bwayo ran into what was now a roadside siege. The thugs opened fire, killing him instantly before pulling him out of the car.” They shot his wife in the mouth and the American companion in the face, gravely wounding both.

  A colleague told London’s Guardian newspaper that Bwayo had a way of describing his work to fellow researchers: “We know that in the search for an AIDS vaccine, many different vaccines will need to be tested. Vaccine development is a marathon, not a sprint—and as we all know, Kenyans are very good at marathons.”

  *Obadiah and Bradford are pseudonyms.

  *Nicolas and Mike were the only white people in the office. They appeared to hire people from across the spectrum of Kenya’s tribes and religions. When I asked if that was for reasons of equal opportunity, Mike replied, “That, and it’s no good to have just one tribe. Then it’s too easy for them to maneuver anything.” In other words, with one tribe there would be more employee solidarity. Also, Mike explained, they could speak to each other in their mother tongue instead of Swahili or English, so “you wouldn’t know what they are saying.”

  *Beatrice and Catherine are pseudonyms.

  DOUBLE-EDGED ROADS

  NAPOLÉON BONAPARTE IS KNOWN as the greatest road builder of modern Europe. Roads were key to his imperial designs; famously, in order to move his Grande Armée and its artillery over the Alps and into position to dominate Italy, he widened a Roman route through the Gondo Gorge and over the Simplon Pass in Switzerland between 1800 and 1805. His design specification: that it be possible to pull cannons over the pass. Five hundred lives were lost in building the nineteen miles of road, which included twenty-two bridges and seven tunnels.

  His nephew, Louis Napoléon—elected the first president of France’s Second Republic in 1848, before restoring the monarchy and becoming Emperor Napoléon III in 1852—focused more on home. The industrial revolution was taking hold in France; buoyed by a popular mandate to restore and remake his chaotic nation, Napoléon III undertook a program of massive urban renewal. The ramshackle, medieval quarters of Paris were symbols not only of poverty and disease but of insurrection. Among his early projects was construction of the grand boulevards of Paris. Though the Champs-Élysées had begun to take shape nearly two centuries before, Napoléon III (through his prefect, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann) expanded the concept, tearing down twisting crowded districts dating from the Middle Ages and remaking the fractious city by endowing it with, in Haussmann’s words, “spaces, air, light, verdure and flowers, in a word, with all that dispenses health.” While that sounds lovely, another agenda of the project was military: famous for their beauty, these streets “were dictated in purpose and geometry by the potential requirements of a defending army and the need to permit the free movement of troops into areas of Paris that had previously been sources of rebellion.” In fact, early in his rule, Napoléon III halted street work in certain districts because the brick-shaped paving stones were being regularly repurposed as components of roadblocks and barriers. In the mind of the emperor, the plan “would slash the belly of this mother of insurrections.”

  But streets and roads, which require so much labor and money to build, often outlive our intentions for them. Napoléon’s grip on power slipped before he could send those cannons over the Simplon Pass; it’s now a tourist route over the Alps, famous for spectacular scenery. Another of his military routes through the Alps, the Grande Corniche, is a chiseled ledge that overlooks the Côte d’Azur in southern France, a celebrated touring drive and setting for numerous automobile ads.

  And the same capacious, military-scaled roads that allowed Napoléon III to consolidate his rule provided the avenues of entry for the tanks and trucks of the Third Reich, which rolled into Paris on June 14, 1940, beginning an occupation of four years.

  “Double-edged sword” seems the right phrase to describe this military importance of roads. On the one hand an expression of national pride and economic vitality, on the other roads are an invader’s best friend, providing access to the centers of wealth and power. Hernán Cortés arrived on the Gulf Coast of Mexico in 1519, aiming to claim new lands for the king of Spain, thereby earning himself wealth and prestige. He and his men described their invasion as a mission to settle and convert the heathen to Christianity. They landed on the outskirts of the Aztec empire, in a precinct of one of its subject tribes, and followed the ever-widening roads toward Tenochtitlán, the center of Aztec power.

  It must have been a heady experience, invading a “new world” and making it your own—or even, as Napoléon I and the Grande Armée had done, invading the “old world” nations of Europe, longtime rivals and ancient cultures, and adding them to one’s empire.

  And, for the other side, there was the terror of being invaded. Consider the fear of the Amerindians, who knew nothing of the Spaniards’ giant wooden ships, their gunpowder, their finely forged swords, their horses, and their mastiffs; consider their villages in the Spaniards’ path, subject to pillaging at best, at worst to infection with smallpox, torture, and murder.

  Such horror, a leitmotif of the progress represented by roads, recurs throughout history: in the American South, where Native Americans forcibly removed from their lands in the 1830s walked west on the deadly “Trail of Tears;” in Warsaw many times over the past two hundred years; in Paris and Bataan during World War II; and in Indochina, where supplies flowed south on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the unarmed fled their villages—such as the girl Kim Phúc, famously photographed running naked on a pav
ed road with terrorized others, screaming with fright, burning with napalm. On roads, the triumph of invaders shadowed by the miseries of the vanquished; roads and flight.

  South African novelist J. M. Coetzee’s character Michael K, a dispossessed gardener, tries to walk across South Africa to return his mother’s ashes to her place of birth. But as an individual on foot he is harried, subject to search by any marauding soldier, while trying desperately not to be noticed.

  Of course, soldiers, too, can be afraid. One classic depiction is that of Lieutenant Giovanni Drogo, assigned to a remote border fortification in Dino Buzzati’s classic The Tartar Steppe. Over months and then years Drogo sees but fails to report signs of a road being constructed in the wastelands beyond the fort, presumably by the enemy for purposes of invasion; his impulse to do so is thwarted by denials both personal and institutional. Over fifteen years, the enemy prepares on the distant steppe. When finally they lay siege, Drogo lies febrile and helpless, undone.

  In 2003, the United States spent $190 million to rebuild a ravaged road across Afghanistan. The three-hundred-mile stretch of Highway 1, connecting Kabul to Kandahar, could theoretically now be driven in six hours instead of thirty. The day it was dedicated in Kabul, President George W. Bush in Washington issued a statement saying the highway would “promote political unity between Afghanistan’s provinces, facilitate commerce by making it easier to bring products to market, and provide the Afghan people with greater access to health care and educational opportunities.”

  But despite this road’s potential and the might of the country that built it, roads are vulnerable to disruption. To borrow a metaphor from the ecologists, they are all edge.

  The Taliban had killed four Afghans working on the road three months before the dedication; eventually nearly a thousand guards had to be brought in for the road to be finished. Some Afghan officials who attended the opening ceremony said they had been flown to Kabul, according to The New York Times, “avoiding the road out of concern for their safety.”