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  This went without a hitch and, with a sincere hug of gratitude for the commissioner, we left the village with Charles roaring off in Burton from the playground’s beach to merry cheers from the good folk of Bor.

  The commissioner and the police had stressed that Charles must stay within sight of the tug at all times, which annoyed him as he could have reached Juba, by his own estimation, in a day. But we were quietly glad that he did not try it alone as we feared that he might never be seen again. Our skipper was from Dongola near Aswan, had been up and down the Nile all his working life yet even he did not know every meandering vagary of the ever-changing routes through the Sudd.

  He sometimes took a wrong turn into a cul-de-sac as banks of reed and cabbage floated across and confused the main waterway. At such times his crew used sounding poles with skill to find the deep-water channels.

  So Charles was reduced to hovering in circles at minimal hover speed. Each time he passed us, his scowl was more pronounced. We refuelled him by passing half-full jerry cans to him from off the side of the barge.

  Hippo and crocodile appeared from time to time, as did the occasional waterbuck. Colourful birds were everywhere, but none of us was ornithologically aware or able to identify them apart from the obvious flamingos and herons.

  At night the skipper manoeuvred his clumsy craft with cunning into still water zones downstream of solid-looking banks, at which point a weary and sweat-drenched Charles would tie up alongside. The mosquitoes and other biting insects had to be seen and heard to be believed. After dusk on deck we either sat or lay on our camp beds, tucked under our nets. Unfortunately I was unable to control my bowels all night long due to the many litres that I drank all day, as well as suffering with an indisposition that I shared with Charles which he termed ‘dourra-weevil diarrhoea’. Clinging to the rear of our barge, my buttocks were easy targets for the biting mosquitoes, and swatting them while holding on to the rear rail of the barge was a risky business.

  We were clearly not welcome on the tugboat itself, the wheelhouse of which was sandbagged against machine-gun fire with three heavily armed soldiers as escort.

  Once under way at dawn the skipper’s method of negotiating acute river bends was to steer at full steam for the outer bank and bounce off it to facilitate the turn, often against a strong current.

  After three days of this giddy journey, Charles had lost a great deal of weight and looked haggard. So it was with great relief that we all greeted the sound of our ‘foghorn’ announcing our arrival at Juba, a couple of river bends before the town came into view.

  Juba, situated close to the notorious old slaving centre of Gondokoro, was clearly a military town and also the Customs post between the Sudan and Uganda, even though the actual border was a hundred miles further south upriver. The site was originally, in 1922, a trading post and British Army camp.

  We arrived on a Friday, the Muslim day of rest, so everything was closed, including the Customs post. By using every letter of introduction I’d been given in Khartoum, we managed to locate a Customs officer whom we annoyed enough to make him and his wife keen to get rid of us. Then, using the same tactic, we persuaded the army general in charge of Juba to load Burton onto one of his lorries that same afternoon and drive us through thick forest and over well-guarded canyon bridges. The whole region had experienced a scorched-earth policy and widespread massacres some ten years previously, details of which were still kept a closely guarded secret by the Sudanese government.

  Nonetheless, Anya Nya guerrilla bands continued to ambush the road and, when major offensives were mounted against them, they faded, ghost-like, over the border into Uganda. We saw no living soul or animal all the way to Nimule, apart from three long green snakes, which seemed to favour the hot murram (hardened dirt) road surface as a basking area. They moved off in quick blurs of powerful motion as our lead vehicle approached.

  That night we came to the Nimule border post. Unless we crossed the border and let Peter and Nick in the old AA vehicle rush to Nairobi, 400 miles away, they would miss the RAF flight home. But the border was closed.

  My faith in humankind, especially Sudanese sergeants, was elevated considerably when our convoy leader, understanding our problem that Peter and Nick could be in danger of being accused of ‘desertion from their army’, broke international law and woke up the Ugandan border officer and his wife (whom he clearly knew) and drove his Sudanese Army lorry over the border in order to unload Burton safely in Uganda.

  We all hugged the portly sergeant, including his shoulder-mounted rifle and bandoliers, and gave him our last bottle of Glenfiddich. He beamed his pleasure, and asked us to tell no one that he had crossed the border or ‘we maybe start new war’.

  Peter and Nick, deciding not to hug the rest of us, bade us goodbye, wishing us a safe passage to the source of the Nile and went on their hasty way to Nairobi airport. We received a telegram a week later confirming that they had made it back, complete with the AA Land Rover, on the RAF transport flight, and neither was in trouble for their lengthy absence. Mike Broome, they reported, was ‘much better’.

  Ninety miles from the border port was the banana town of Gulu, where a storekeeper rented out small Isuzu vans with flatbeds. He drove north at once and, with help from the Nimule Customs officer, his pretty wife and three border guards, we heaved Burton onto the flatbed. The Hawk protruded well over the rear and the sides of the platform, but the driver, paid in advance, did not object.

  After a long drive through endless banana plantations and following in the murram dust of the Isuzu, we passed by the Karuma Falls in thunderous spate and on to Masindi Port. Then through deep forests, where the early Nile source searchers had suffered at the hands of treacherous native kings less than a century ago.

  ‘If we could but tune in,’ Charles said, lifting one hand off the steering wheel to touch his ear, ‘we could hear the long scream of anguish, of pain and hopelessness of the million slaves who trod this road.’

  We took a road signed to Entebbe Airport and came to a bend from where we could see what appeared more like an ocean than Lake Victoria, the main source of the Nile as confirmed by explorers Burton and Speke exactly one hundred years ago. Charles and I broke open two bottles of Coca-Cola and toasted our dead compatriots.

  Charles pointed south. ‘Of course you can say that this lake has many rivers down there that feed it and that they are all sources of the Nile,’ he said. ‘One such comes into the lake from Rwanda at a village called Kasansero, the home of the dreadful Nile perch which well-meaning Brits introduced to the lake.’

  He described how in the 1950s, when Uganda was still a British colony, administrators had decided to create a new fishing industry. They failed to foresee the damage which the huge and aggressive Nile perch would soon do, colonizing the lake in no time and killing off most of the existing stocks. They grow up to two metres and can weigh 150kg. As mummified perch have been found in Nile-side tombs, they are believed to have been worshipped by the ancient Egyptians.

  Kasansero became globally notorious on two counts later in the twentieth century. In 1985 the citizens began to die in their hundreds of an unknown sickness which many thought was a new version of malaria. It turned out to be the AIDS virus which subsequently spread around the world.

  Nine years later, in 1994, Kasansero’s river spewed over 10,000 bloated corpses into the lake during the Rwandan genocide. These then drifted north to empty out of the lake via the Ripon Falls at Jinja and into the White Nile.

  Charles drove us to Jinja to photograph the great hydro-electric power station and dam built in the 1950s where once explorer Speke had made his name by sending a telegram to his supporters at the Royal Geographical Society to announce his discovery with the words, ‘The Nile is settled.’

  The military attaché in Kampala had organized a major hovercraft demonstration at Gaba, on the shoreline of Lake Victoria. Hundreds of commercial and military guests, one of whom was a rotund sergeant named Idi Amin, watch
ed and clapped as Burton roared from the grassy bank into the water and back to land without noticing the difference.

  The East African press turned out in strength, and export orders flooded in. Back home the Ministry of Technology, astonished that the Hawk had survived the rigours of the journey, organized a sales tour of the USA and Canada, and small hovercraft, previously stigmatized for unreliability, began to be taken seriously.

  As I watched Charles glide over the great inland sea of Lake Victoria, the attaché touched my shoulder. ‘Well done, Ranulph,’ he said, ‘you made it, but you have had the most amazing chunk of luck. We were all expecting you and your team to end your days in the forest or in some godforsaken prison.’

  Like the early explorers, we had failed to follow the exact course of the entire length of the great river, but we had savoured a taste of its perils, extremes of climate, and had met some of the brave, strong people who survive along its length. As the attaché said, we had been lucky.

  Since the days of Burton and Baker, Africa had grown a great deal less dangerous. But, a few years later, Idi Amin and others would perpetrate mass tribal murder, as would the Hutu of Rwanda, the Congolese and the jihadis of Nigeria. We had squeezed, by chance, between various bloody episodes of history.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Explorers

  ‘Heat, madam! It was so dreadful that I found there was nothing for it but to take off my flesh and sit in my bones.’

  —SYDNEY SMITH (1771–1845)

  The story of Nile explorer John Hanning Speke begins when, aged twenty-seven, he left the British Indian Army and joined another ex-Indian Army officer, Richard Burton, already famous for previous adventures, to search for the source of the Nile with the full support of the Royal Geographical Society. At first the two men approached their mission from the Somali coast. At some point they were attacked by Somali tribesmen. Speke was stabbed by spears and both Burton’s cheeks were skewered by a javelin, but they escaped and in 1856 tried again. This time they travelled inland from Zanzibar some 540 miles to the village of Ujiji on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, which they claimed as their first great discovery.

  Before they could set out to find a river flowing north out of their lake which might prove to be the Nile, both men were crippled by sickness and by the terrible heat. Burton lost all feeling in his feet and hands and Speke became temporarily blind.

  Eventually, partly recovered, they canoed with lake fishermen as guides and almost reached the north end of the lake when the guides would go no further due to a hostile tribe in that area. When questioned all the locals swore that the only river at the lake’s northern end flowed into, not out of, the lake. So, defeated and dismayed, they retreated to Tabora, their previous base and an Arab trading post back towards the coast. Here Burton recuperated further, but Speke, who recovered more quickly, decided to follow up a rumour of a much bigger lake directly north of Tabora.

  Burton was later to regret his decision not to go with Speke as the greatest mistake of his life. Speke and a small group of porters reached the unknown lake in three weeks of travel. It was vast and Speke had no doubt that it must be the Nile’s source. He named it Victoria.

  He rested on the southern shore for three days, then returned to Burton at Tabora. He had no evidence to support his claim, such as the sighting of a sizeable river flowing north out of the lake, but he had convinced himself, nonetheless, of his remarkable discovery.

  Burton tried to persuade Speke to go easy on a triumphal announcement. He was, of course, keen that the initial Lake Tanganyika discovery, in which he was the chief personality, should constitute ‘the triumph’, and not Speke’s Victoria.

  The two men agreed to make no announcements until back in England. Burton, however, needed a period of rest from his various illnesses when in Aden, so Speke carried on alone and as soon as he reached London made an announcement with the enthusiastic backing of the RGS and resultant acclaim from the media. The RGS, aware of the need to gain proof of Speke’s assertions, decided to send Speke back to Africa as soon as possible and without Burton who, on his return with his Lake Tanganyika ‘success’ story, was largely ignored. He was enraged and, hating Speke, began a long campaign to discredit him.

  Speke chose, as his new travel companion, James Grant, another Indian Army officer but very different in character from Burton, being modest and deferential, not aggressive and conceited. They arrived in Zanzibar in the summer of 1860 and made their way to Lake Victoria with a great many delays en route.

  It had taken Speke three weeks to reach the southern shore of the lake on his previous journey. But now it was over a year before he actually made it to the lake due to delays with porters and illness, including malaria and agonizing leg ulcers which Grant endured.

  Their problems, during their long and arduous travels, were experienced by many of the nineteenth-century explorers and included the ease with which they succumbed to malaria and their horses and oxen to the tsetse fly. Burton wrote of the tsetse and other insects: ‘The path was slippery with mud, and man and beast were rendered wild by the cruel stings of a small red ant and a huge black pismire. The former crossed the road in dense masses like the close columns of any army . . . Though they cannot spring, they show great quickness in fastening themselves to the foot or ankle as it brushes over them. The pismire . . . is a horse-ant, about an inch in length, whose bulldog-like head and powerful mandibles enable it to destroy rats and mice, lizards and snakes.’

  The tsetse fly is slightly larger than a standard house fly, is grey-brown in colour and feeds at the hottest time of day. The flesh of any tsetse-bitten animal is poisonous, so cattle herders in the tsetse belt of Central and Eastern Africa (north of the 27th latitude line) lead a precarious existence. The disease carried by the tsetse is known as African sleeping sickness (or trypanosomiasis) and it enters the body of the bitten person or animal via a tiny parasite which infects the brain and the spinal cord by way of the lymph and central nervous system. Sometimes symptoms can take months or even years to develop and can damage the kidneys, heart muscles and brain.

  The name ‘sleeping sickness’ reflects that form of the sickness involving dementia, convulsions, loss of bladder control and increasing listlessness, leading eventually to a coma and death.

  In certain areas of Eastern and Southern Africa, especially where there are large herds of cattle, up to 20 per cent of the human population can be infected. The flies like bright and dark colours, so wearing clothes of muted colours that blend with the background is a good idea.

  There are twenty known species of tsetse, including the nagana which go for cattle and others that specialize in humans, often giving them the sleeping sickness. You know when you have been bitten as the bite delivers a sharp stinging sensation.

  Add to the flies and the ants the various varieties of blood-sucking tics and killer-bees that attack as you brush past their habitats and you begin to realize some of the early explorers’ constant irritations. There were also endemic sicknesses, including leprosy and the pox. Burton wrote of the latter:

  On the way we were saddened by the sight of the clean-picked skeletons, and here and there the swollen corpses, of porters who had perished in this place of starvation. A single large body [of porters], which had lost fifty of its number by small-pox, had passed us but yesterday on the road, and the sight of their deceased comrades recalled to our minds terrible spectacles; men staggering on blinded by disease, and mothers carrying on their backs infants as loathsome objects as themselves. The wretches would not leave the path, every step in their state of failing strength was precious; he who once fell would never rise again; no village would admit death into its precincts, no relation nor friend would return for them, and they would lie till their agony was ended by the raven and vulture, the hyena and the fox.

  Quite apart from their travails with insects and illness, Speke and Grant could only advance towards their hoped for objectives with great diplomacy and patience through the
lands of the Bantu kingdoms north and west of Lake Victoria. There were at the time three such fiefdoms, the first of which was Karagwe whose King Rumanika was friendly. He warned them that the kingdom they would next have to traverse on their way north would need warning of their approach. While they awaited this king’s response to their messenger, they were shown around Rumanika’s harem. Despite the fact that most of the women were teenagers, they were so fat that they could not stand up but only slide around their floor mats on their knees and elbows like seals. They fed only on milk sucked through straws and, should they fail to drink the stipulated daily amount, they were whipped. Nonetheless, King Rumanika was considerably more civilized than his northern neighbours.

  King Mutesa of Buganda, who ruled from a village not far from modern Kampala, capital of Uganda, eventually sent his permission for Speke to visit him. Grant had to remain in Karagwe as his leg was still an open sore, so Speke went on alone.

  When three months later Grant joined Speke, their party continued northwards but split into two missions – Grant to open the way north into the third and last Bantu kingdom, Bunyoro, whose king was known to be hostile to strangers, and Speke to check out a river that Mutesa said flowed north out of Lake Victoria.

  Speke was therefore by himself when he came to the Ripon Falls at Jinja where, overjoyed, he named the outflowing river the Victoria Nile, after his Queen.

  All he now needed to do was to rejoin Grant, head north to Gondokoro and announce his great discovery to the RGS and to the world.

  He was also to record some of the barbaric behaviour of King Mutesa who, on accession to the throne of Buganda, had put to death some sixty of his own brothers by burning them alive. Whenever he presided at tribal courts he doled out such tortures as the slicing off of ears, hands and feet, the burial alive of wives with their dead husbands and the sudden chance execution of women from his seraglio. A girl might cough in his presence or open a door at the wrong time, and her head would be chopped off.