Rob the Gob

My final days in Uganda are marked primarily by contrast – most notably between myself and where I am. Jinja, a town at the head of the river Nile at lake Victoria, is nothing like the camp I stay in. This is a little preserve for the rich, (generally) white, and adventurous on the outskirts of town. Upon our arrival we get with the program of activities. Quad bikes and a guide are hired and a large groups of us zoom about the countryside for a few hours creating a vast cloud of red dust in our wake. The villages we pass through are poor in a way that my mind associates with relief appeals. Those tired images from the Television is some of it, but there is something buzzing in my brain, an alarm bell fed by memories of the bill-boards by larger roads – images of strapping young men holding aloft branded cement or the endless mobile telephone advert featuring glamorous, pale women. They are conspicuous by their absence here. The children all wave and excitedly gather round. The adults, not so much, and I think I know why. I feel like a cross between a hooligan burning through a council estate in a stolen moped, a patronising minor celebrity and (I am dressing in overalls and a goggles) a sort of earth-bound Biggles. We are astonishingly filthy upon our return, and joyful as it is, when I book the white-water rafting for the following day, a certain melancholy is descending on me.

A bungee jump in the morning soon wakes me up and I’m soon white-water rafting. It is an astonishingly beautiful setting, the water is a high as the river guides have ever seen, and we charge through the headwaters of the mighty Nile. The scale is astonishing- we are like ants clinging to a stick in a rough mountain stream. Despite many grade five rapids over the course of the day, I emerge unscathed. In the quieter areas we swim, and my girlfriend and I grin at each other say ‘we’re swimming in the Nile!’.

The next morning, my girlfriend has a morning bungee with a ten-year-old girl who is too light to jump solo. We say goodbye to the friends we have made on the truck – we were very lucky, and I hope that we see many of them again – and settle down in the bar to snooze a useless day away. It has been two weeks since I had more than five hours sleep. In the quiet, the melancholy fills me once again. Hidden beyond the bar are the lines of tiny, scruffy buildings each desperately crying for cash with constantly fading flashes of colour. Behind each of those, a hillside dotted with struggling farms teaming with poorly-fed children. The roads are lined with bill-boards, some proclaiming aid projects, others crowded with unsubtle adverts like ‘you are not a man unless you own a house – get a mortgage with [random bank]’.

As a rainstorm turns everything into noise and water, I chat to a Ugandan man about racism in England and America. His brother lives in Leeds. The conversation drifts about as he describes his shameful treatment by the Methodist church and a racist policeman he met from Alabama as afternoon bungee is rained off. It is the morning of the next day before I plummet riverwards twice more, forwards and them backwards into the swollen, swirling Nile. It’s a hell of a good way to wake yourself up. I find the staff at the adventure camp mostly likable, but they are apart, as am I. With people treating the world as an adventure playground, just because we can. We trying dutifully to help, our activities feeding money into the local economy, supporting projects, but we are all tourists. Better than rulers, I suppose. After a long delay (TIA), we return to Kampala.

Kampala by day or night is hideous up close. For the most part the people seem nice enough (they don’t hassle me at all, as it happens), but the places itself is like a constant, failing war against entropy. A sea of typical single-story tin-roofed dwellings crests into a few towers towards the centre, and a few of the newer buildings stand proud. A friend I made in a bar in Jinja has offered to take me out tonight and show me the nightlife. I have to be up at five to catch my plane, but, truth be told, I just don’t want to go out here. It’s horrible. There are a few nice restaurants and bars – Kampala has its prosperous people and western wallets just like any big city, but it’s all really quite charmless. Nicer places are guarded by men with guns, and sometimes metal detectors (which, being white, I am simply waved passed) on the door. It’s an odd way to be reassured. Last night we walked through the city streets to find our hotel – not in the bad part of town, but not in the nice part either – and I caught the real smell of it here. You can tart up one or two places, and I could haunt only these, I suppose, but the real life in this city is a grubby, dirty thing of gutters, stinking traffic fumes, desperation and aspiration. Cracked, close streets and already-decayed modern buildings hide malls which are warrens of tiny cabins full of glittering things to buy – mobile telephones arranged like jewels, fancy clothes behind a fading façade, ‘ethnic’ items for the tourists. Postcards that do not show the beggars with crippled legs. Outside squats a woman selling bananas, she looks defeated. A young man wanders around with a pile of silk ties in his hand, ready to sell to anyone who crosses his path. Another has a pile of socks under his arm. A glamorously dressed woman guides her heels between piles of mouldering refuse, and it all clicks into place. A monument to Ugandan independence bears a sign reading ‘no loiterers’. The guns that guard the places that are sanitised for my eyes and assumed necessity for the protection of the wealthy locals (and the banks) are old, relics of civil war, perhaps. I have no wish to see only the parts of this city that they guard, and I have no desire to look upon the rest of it any longer. I am glad to have experienced this place, but I have no wish to stay.

And some of this is because it feels so much like home. The city is dirty and hot, the accents strange (I wonder how we can share a language and yet I seem so unintelligible to them – strangely I can understand them with relative ease, but they sometimes look at me like I’m speaking Martian), and perhaps it is just the common language, or the food (everything with chips; burgers, pizzas, kebabs, even toasties) but this place really feels like the dirty edge of England. It is the attitude and mood of the people. It is the businessman in the café. His sunglasses cost more than everything I am wearing. This, in turn is more that the worth of the shop half a mile away. It is the hugely expensive four-by-four he drives. It is the apple Mac in the desk in front of him. It is his wife, that woman in high heels, spotless, glamorous, dark skin against beautiful modern fabrics. Fashionably slim, not hungry.

In China, I could not integrate because I am white, and it is the same here. My mere appearance makes of me, by turns a celebrity, a source of money, a potential mark, something to look down upon, despite how easily most of them slip through my eyes. Despite the spectacular backdrops, the human world here looks like the dragging heel of Britain. I wonder what they look like to the wealthy Americans, and to the rich English (the vast majority of the white folks you meet) – people who cannot understand the poor in their own countries, let alone these people. I think they just look passed them, see them, perhaps, as a problem that must be solved, or a resources, or an unfortunate side effect. Or an exhibit. Yet, I can feel that the people around me share the same fight that is waged in the trailer park, housing projects and council estates of Europe and The States, but so much worse. The disregard of the plight of your fellow man, the blind self-interest that has been engendered in these people. That is what I feel, that is what makes this feel like home. The nasty parts of home. China was heading that way – the erosion of community and the ideal of selfishness was becoming evident, but there was a strong, proud history too. In Cuba, Havana felt like this (though everywhere outside did not), but the regime, the relative prosperity and its isolation led to a distinctiveness and a certain joy. In South America, I saw a culture that had been violently crushed by Christianity, and then eroded from without. It feels more like that here, but worse. Still some of it shone through in South America. Not so here. What little remains of tradition is reduced to dances for tourists and ethnic arts; charred remains of countless waves of colonialism, war, civil war, each time chewed over by Christianity, Islam and (increasingly) Capitalism.

The needs of the people I see is primarily education and medicine. I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea that ‘we’ should swoop in like patronising angels and try to sort it all out – but ‘we’ have been coming here, patronising, exploitative or otherwise to pretend that this is anything separate from our world. Occasionally we see campaigns for birth control. More commonly we see Bibles and churches and religious schools. These people are desperate believers. A sign upon a church newspaper (I jest not) reads ‘God has a wonderful plan for you all’. It doesn’t explain what that plan is. Faith is of no use here, and neither is patronisation of any kind, especially that which might lead to passivity. There is so much ignorance and the grinding actions of basic hope. It is of no use. I wonder where the money goes – the papers are filled with constant accusations to the government of the misappropriation of aid – but not only this. There is wealth here being generated, but then dutifully siphoned into the pockets of Shell, Nokia and the rest in accordance with the unspoken law of the modern world. This situation will not change until the wealthier cultures stop insisting that the best thing is to be able to buy, and if you cannot, then you should pray. But this is not a matter of a new aid project or mission. The root cause of the inequalities and cultural dysfunctions I see here lie in our own homes. It is our society, and the way we organise things that must change. We must find some way to flourish that isn’t at someone else’s expense.

Goodbye Uganda. I may return, but for now, I am glad to have been, but I will not miss you. You are beautiful, but you make me feel ashamed.

Tomorrow, Zanzibar.

Day 1

LIONS!
Well, not yet, but they’re in the post. Or rather, I am. In fact, it’ll be at least another day before I’m anywhere near any dangerous wildlife. Right now it feels more like I’ve massively over-packed for a trip to Amsterdam.
I hate leaving; there are so many stresses and causes for anxiety. I am afraid that without me to watch it, everything will crash. I know this will go away. Those I truly love, I love for their resourcefulness and intelligence.
I distract myself will sillyness…
The London underground at rush hour is a device designed by a mad Victorian engineer for one purpose – the extraction of purest geometry. He knew that the nature of the English would mean that nobody would ever make eye contact. Wondering exactly how many points of focus for human eyes could be found within a given circular space, he caused tunnels to be dug beneath the world’s largest city (it was then), and lined them with detectors shaped like tiles (that’s what they are, honest). Realising that even the poorest and stupidest citizens wouldn’t simply go inside this device voluntarily, he placed some trains inside and advertised it as a mass transportation system. His name was Philleus Cavendish-McBastard.
The detectors capture the geometry and link it up through the sewer system to every home.
Geometry powers London, you know.
So there you are – the London underground is a way of capturing people and harnessing their internal reserves of geometry. It is only a transport system as an afterthought. Which explains a lot.
The fuss that is made of airport security in Britian is, quite frankly, shamefully ludicrous. We should be given some kind of award. I dutifully complied with the instructions, but the one thing I didn’t unpack was the bag of electronics. Enough exotic chemicals and bits of metal to blow a hole three meters wide in any aircraft ever built, and nobody blinked an eye. Take a bottle of Ribena through, though, and you might be shot.
Let me get this straight once and for all. Airport security is an exercise in propaganda. It is only there so that the government can appear to be doing something. That is all. It has never stopped you on anyone you love from being killed.
An overnight stop over in Amsterdam came to calm me, however. We didn’t really do much except wander around, but it really helped. We weren’t in Britain anymore, and it showed on my face – I think I managed a beatific smile for an hour or so. Only the accident of birth placed me in that uptight country, and I often wish my friends all lived somewhere else.

Day two

A KLM flight from Amsterdam to Entebbe, Uganda; a long time on a plane, subject to the dubious entertainments and food on offer. The entertainments were lavish, as it happened, if you like films (which do) – information has become cheap. Many films at easy disposal took me through the bulk of it. The food was terrible. Much as I admire the Dutch for their many kindnesses, efficiencies and advancements – painting a fly onto the sweet spot of urinals is the greatest achievement in toilet technology since Thomas Crapper – Their airplane food is truly abominable. And the seats; please, I and everyone else will pay ten pounds more each if we can just have ten rows of seats removed so that our legs can survive the journey. The space is actually too cramped for more to be able to work properly, which is ridiculous. Perhaps KLM or their parent company own shares in a prosthetic limb manufacturer.
On the way I get my first glimpse of Africa. It is the Sahara. Desolation as far as I can see, as if some great interplanetary beast has come during my sleep, taken our fat wet world and sent it the way of Mars. I watch it in horror as it rolls passed the plane windows, not the wonderful bleak wilderness desolation of a moor or mountain range, but something else much more fascinating and awful. The total lack of life. It’s weirdly beautiful for a while. Then, some hours later, I spot it – The Nile, an impossible river at this point. I’m looking south and all of the civilisation of Egypt is to the north of the plane. All I can see is the desert, and this incongruous, vast ribbon of water sliding its way northwards by lazy loops and inattention. Wonderful. I watch it until it disappears, hundreds of miles laid out before me. Then I see a standstorm from above. Odd orange wall of cloud burning across the ground – a spell of slow-burning embers. Eventually it blends into high-level rain, which turns to low-level mist, darkness falls, and I see no more but the screen before me. A disappointing film later, we arrive at Entebbe.
The dark continent is just that to us. A representative of the hostel we’ve booked in at is there to collect us, which is rather reassuring. Traffic hurtles crazily about our vehicle as modern-looking city centre slides passed us, glowing in the dark. From a distance, it looks rather like Leeds. Closer in, the dwellings are dilapidated, single-story things, each seemingly entirely dedicated to some tiny purpose – the continuing life of the inhabitant, whether this comes form photocopying, bicycle repair or mobile phone sales. There are an alarming number of petrol stations.
The roads are terrible, but there are roads, which is good enough for our truck, which I meet at the hotel. You see some normal saloon and compact cars in the city, but as most of the roads between places would qualify only as rally tracks in Europe, most vehicles are either robust 4×4s or large trucks. All show signs of abuse. Everything in Africa does. Our home for the next few days is a colossal rolling tribute to practical thinking. It was converted from a Mercedes thing at some point by the judicious application of a huge quantity of metal and enough welding to construct a battle ship. It is robust – it has to be, and carries lots of spares. And a sack of charcoal, two braziers, a gas hob, enough fuel to burn London, our bags, enough food to feed us all for a week, equipment to prepare it (including tables)and innumerable other bits and bob, and us. I have yet to meet any of them, and speculate upon the people in the bar.

Day three

A six am start places us in the truck with the others. It’s utterly dark outside, which gives me an excuse to glance about at the people I’m going to be travelling with. We are an odd mix of the relatively wealthy and interested. No gap years students (thankfully), but lots of teachers, all well educated. I like them all well enough – inevitably some more than others, but none of them are actually offensive. We bounce about on top of the flat bed, powered by huge bouncy leaf springs that sometimes throw us all off our seats, and our communication with the cab a button marked STOP. It is also used for GO. Even with a hangover, it’s quite good fun. For now.
Africa opens up to me the next morning by the slow light of dawn. It is orange. Soil, dust, cloud, sun. There are so many corrugated iron roofs (rust orange) that I wonder that there has been so much iron ever refined. Dust blows about us from the road, and I am again reminded of Mars. We have breakfast at the equator – a photo opportunity of a kind that makes me think of tedious hours flicking through endless albums and mumbling pleasantries in time. There is a small town, seeming supported entirely by the bloated wallets of those who stop to take pictures at the equator marker. The shops sell rubbish and call it art, but they have nice toilets, and I am British enough to appreciate that. I wonder if there is another on every road that crosses the equator. When we move on again, I see tall stalks, as high as people, rifled beaks pressed against their chests, sentinels standing guard over rubbish tips. They are utterly unlike anything I have ever seen. Yet it is not their form that is so weird, it is their mood.
Of course, it turns out that I inevitably am connected to some of these people. One knows an old teacher of mine very well. Another lives about ten minutes from my house. 50% of the people on board have studied physics at an undergraduate level. People always seem to find this amazing. It isn’t. If you add up all the people you know, and think about how much the nature of what they do has determined who they meet and where they go, and the myriad possible connections there are between such similar lives nothing is surprising. It is only a wonder that there are not more connections between us than we have fond. People crave significance where there is none. Six billion isn’t that big a number, once you start factoring out all those who can’t afford to do the things I do and all those who don’t have the inclination or opportunity, and start factoring in how many connections there are that people are prepared to find significant. Until I’m surrounded by thirteen other people who share my profession, have the same education as me, the same birthday and have the same bodyweight, I won’t even start looking. And at that point, I’m looking for somebody – not fate or god – that has arranged it.
As we approach the crater lake of Bunyoni, near Kabale, the roads cling precariously to the side of steep mountains and I begin to wake up. The land around is beautiful, volcanic undulations. The orange soil and banana trees have given way to a partially vertical patchwork of dusty crops and unconvincing terracing. England with the red turned up and vast balloons inflated just beneath the surface. The crater lake itself is so beautiful that my eyes start to hurt. We go for a paddle across the magnificent lake. It is huge, and the views are suitably spectacular, though perhaps I am too fatigued to properly appreciate it. It has been a long journey, and I am thankful we will return here in a few days. So it can better appreciate it.

Day four

From our crater-lake idyll it is a bouncy and scary ride to a campsite near the borders of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Not nice places. But it’s where the gorillas live, and that’s what this section of the trip is about. On the way, across even more ridiculous roads at which we bounce and crawl across huge potholes, children wave. Some beg, some smile. Occasionally some throw stones. Mostly they ask for pens. There is some speculation as to the cause of this. I leave my speculations to myself. I strongly suspect that pens are set upon a crux of access – a fairly rare commodity where we are, virtually worthless where we come from. Something they can ask for that we can’t refuse. I am always appalled by how much people resent beggars, and how cruel they are to them. It’s as if being reminded that they are relatively wealthy and can change other peoples lives offends them.
The terrain is steep, and wooded at this height. Bamboo forests in some case, taller more majestic trees clinging ponderously upon the slops at some points, scruffier, scrubbier stuff or dusty crops in other places. The dust from vehicles paints everything by the side of the road from green to orange. Those trees might hide anything amongst their densely-packed columns. We see a volcano in the distance so vast that at first it seems to be part of the sky. We steadily climb, slamming and bumping along the paths, and each of us wonders if we will bounce off the road.
It’s my turn to help cook, and under the direct of an astronomy academic, we mange to produce a decent pair of Thai curry’s. The rest of the day is dull, and it’s a quick night’s rest in anticipation of the morning. I can’t sleep. I’m excited, but I’m mostly afraid.

Day five

Gorillas and guerrillas haunt the maintains of the Democratic Republic of Congo. This country is one of those places that you avoid like it harbours a plague. Of bullets. And another of kidnapping, and innumerable other cultural pathogens. Which it does. Unfortunately, there were no Gorilla permits for anywhere else, and I really wanted to see them. It’s a long drive, then an expensive and uncomfortable passage across the border. Then the most uncomfortable car journey of my life. It took two hours tracking the Gorillas (under expert, machine-gun toting –though very nice and capable – guidance, of course) by foot through thick vegetation – creepers as efficient as purpose-laid snares grabbing at your feet with every step is tiring. We followed trails left by an elephant. This adds a certain thrill to it. I wonder if we might stumble across it. I’d hardly credit it, were it not for the vast quantities of shit lying about the place.
Eventually we leave the elephant trails and start following the Gorillas from the last place thy nested. Spotting huge elephant poos is replaced with spotting smaller Gorilla poos and following slightly crushed vegetation. It’s very hard going, and everyone falls over a bit. The trees are not tall here, as we are too far up, and so a lot of light reaches the ground. This means that the entire place is teaming with low-level vegetation, thickly layered in piles upon the floor. It isn’t actually possible to put your feet onto the solid earth for nearly an hour. The best we can manage is to crash about through it. The local guides are substantially more graceful. How they keep from laughing astonishes me. We’re not stealthy, but this doesn’t seem to bother the Gorillas. Nor should it – a juvenile gorilla could break me in half. We are told to don masks – gorillas are so close to us genetically that many diseases can cross between the species.
We ‘creep’ around a corner (crash, bash, stumble, quietly swear, crash, crash) and there they are, just sat about. The silverbacks are huge things. I can’t quite get the scale of them into my head until I see one in the distance, fully revealed. His head is like my torso. One of the younger ones becomes curious. It wants to get close, but we can’t touch them, so, with some awareness of the comedy of it, we back away from the child, which of course, only encourages it to move towards us. Eventually it loses its nerve and runs back to mum. A adolescent female is next to get curious, and much the same thing happens again, this time with a bigger, more determined gorilla. He older ones are more used to the humans coming and looking at them, and just go about their day. We don’t annoy any of the big lads enough to make them charge us, though I am constantly preparing for them to do so (crouch down, don’t run, don’t make eye contact, change underpants later). In total, we spend an hour with them. They are playful, mostly disinterested, and always fascinating. There’s even some chest-beating.
After an hours trek back, another hour of spine-shattering discomfort in a 4×4 (somewhat ignorable due to gorilla-related euphoria), we have an hour’s wait at the border. I discuss the Gorillas with my girlfriend, and try to describe how it made me feel. She sums it up well – ‘like making first contact with a sentient alien species’. Not first contact, and not alien, I’d say. Too worryingly familiar, too disturbingly comfortable. But contact, yes. I can read things into the behaviour patterns of dogs – I can see them threaten, cower and beg, and anthropomorphise them, but I know I’m doing it. I can even attribute intentional behaviour to spiders, or even more lowly things than this with a stretch, but I know I’m doing it. I know it’s me that wants them to be thinking, that I’m pushing my own mental structures into them. Not so the Gorillas. I know they are thinking in the same exact way that I know you are; in some fundamental way, they are just the same as me.
I’m sure many things happened after that, but I really wasn’t taking much notice. I perched under a tree that had a power-point on it (strangely), for a while, and did some work. Then something strange started to happen. There was a gathering amongst the tents. As I nip to the toilet, a hushed whisper summons me to a line of chairs. The situation is explained, and I am sent to rally the troops.
The children from a local orphanage dance for us. It’s a bit chaotic, and I smile through, selfishly resenting being taken away from my work. The whole makes me feel like prince Philip – a patronising shit who doesn’t really understand what’s going on. Towards the end, one of them comes forward to explain the project. I want to do right by them, and it’s easy to pick out their cause simply because they are there in front of me. One of my companions points out how much money we spent chasing Gorillas, and she’s right, we should help these people. That’s true of most of the people we’ve passed too. People dig through their wallets and fill envelopes. I talk to my girlfriend, and she spends some time talking with the organiser. What they most desperately need is pens and paper. We decide to ship them a crate over when we get back. Hopefully we can get some of the larger producers to make a donation. I know in my hearth, though, that ten minutes walking these streets would find me ten more equally worthy causes.
Children here, they tell us, are taught in classes that can number up to two hundred. There is no state-sponsoring for pens and pencils. This explains a lot. I determine to buy an immense stack of pens at the next opportunity just to throw out the side of the truck. Something that we take for granted, so valuable here. I’m concerned about the organisations religious affiliations, but they are pro-family planning, prophylactics and see religion as belonging to communities rather than the alpha and omega (pardon the joke). They are a good organisation. They don’t have a website up yet, but here’s the email if you want to help out: orphanscare_aid@yahoo.com. Send them a pen. If you can stand to look at it, see if you can find something equally worthy. You will. Just avoid the God squad, and you can’t really go wrong. But watch that – there are a lot of dangerous and destructive things done in the name of faith in Uganda. Consider the catholic attitude to condoms in any country with a high percentage of HIV sufferers. There are innumerable other examples.
I try to get some more work done, but another travelling party arrives, and I’m compelled to rush about moving our stuff out of the way so that they can make themselves some dinner. I retreat to bed instead to consider Gorillas and orphans.

Day Six.

Another dusty, bumpy road, and we return to the crater lake. I am more relaxed, and a few of us hire a boat to go skirting about some of the islands in the lake. One of them, – ‘punishment island’ – looks like it might be afloat. This leads to conversations about floating islands, and eventually, by circuitous means, on to science fiction disaster stories, and the planet of the apes saga. We see otters and kingfishers. We retreat back to the bar, and eventually dinner, and I manage to stay partially sober.
There is more dancing. I like this more, because we can join in more easily. I hate watching dancing – it’s a kind of weird voyeurism that makes me horribly uncomfortable. Jumping around like a lunatic is much more like it. I understand that certain types of dancing are an art form – albeit one that I have, as yet failed to properly appreciate – but dancing, for me, is something better done than observed. So we dance. My girlfriend makes a Ugandan friend – one of the dancers. She’s energetic, and seems nice. Later, I make a Scandinavian friend – a Swede now living in Oslo. He seems quietly bonkers. During the course of the dancing we find out that ‘punishment island’ is a place they sent unmarried others to. The guy admits, ‘the obvious question is ‘what did we do to the men?’ Well, men, of course, were too respected to be sent there as well’.

Day seven

Long, drive, everyone grumpy. I don’t think most American and English people realise quite how horrid, cruel and selfish they are. Not all, certainly (and before anyone says it – I know, but at least I do realise it, so there). Back to Kampala. Some of us go for a Curry – very, very good it is, too. Most people just sit in the hotel. The drive had been hot, dusty, bumpy, tiring, uncomfortable and long, and a lot of other things that don’t make you chirpy. We come back, and I write this. What more do you want from me, blood? In the morning, something else will happen. In fact, I’m going somewhere else. You’ll find out about this later.

TTFN from Africa.