Reporter’s Notebook : Africa: Epic Sights, Still Interludes

After six years in Africa, nothing stands out in the memory so much as the villages, the small moments, the silent moonrises that stop you dead in your tracks at the instant of happening.

What follows are images, people and places, from the margins of an African notebook, the leftover impressions that never fit neatly into stories but somehow are never forgotten.

Gbongwea was like that, a village of about 300 people in the far northwest corner of Liberia, the sort of place that gets few visitors. To say it is poor doesn’t quite convey it, for thousands of African villages are poverty-stricken by the standards of the developed world. Gbongwea has stood still in time, a place where schools are rudimentary, where magic still maintains a powerful hold, a place where the great, enveloping forest knows secrets no stranger will ever unravel.

The House of David

A village schoolteacher named David had surrendered his house to me and a colleague, moved out himself, his wife and children and had given his two beds and blankets to us. The next day was long and arduous, spent trekking from village to village, in a constant crowd of children and tribal elders, to the sound of pounding drums. By evening, we returned to David’s house, weary, our heads and notebooks full of an Africa that few outsiders ever see.

We sat outside on a straw mat, fired up the little gas cooker to make soup and then instant coffee. We broke open a can of tuna fish and ate a box of cookies and lay back, satisfied in the blessed silence. Cookfires and lantern light flickered in the distance among the huts. A rising full moon backlighted the flattened upper branches of the ancient trees at the forest edge.

A shortwave radio was turned on at some point, bringing in an Armed Forces Radio broadcast of a football game, a ritual Saturday afternoon contest in the bowl of some distant American college town.

Voices 10,000 Miles Away

Silently, our host joined us, accepted the marvel of instant coffee and listened to this strange thing, this talk coming from 10,000 miles away, and he wondered:

“There is electricity,” he asked, “in every town in America?”

My friend and I considered and said, yes, we thought so. A burst of touchdown cheering came through the radio. David listened a while but then came back to it.

“Do you think,” he asked, “there will ever be electricity in Gbongwea?”

Memory has filtered out the answer, possibly because it would have disappointed David and possibly because, in the stranger’s romanticized notion of what ought to be, electricity had no place in Gbongwea--it would have changed it irrevocably, made it something not quite so special.

Never mind the unlikely possibility of a return trip, or that this, after all, was David’s home and David’s people in the dark; it seemed better frozen, this memory. Perhaps, someday, David will get electricity for Gbongwea, and I’ll have it the way it was, with full moon and lanterns, David’s gift and David’s hope.

And so this, like what follows, is mine from Africa--six years on the road, 30 countries (with repeated visits to about 20 of them), and what seems like a thousand airports and ten thousand customs officers, roadblocks without number and the memory of an individual African generosity that must be without equal anywhere in the world. All this and the stunning sweep of the land, a geography so powerful and sometimes so strange that it acts, for some who see it, almost as a drug, and they are never so happy anywhere else again.

Often Africa is not what it seems. I remember working for days with a crew of foresters in the rain forests of Zaire, 150 miles north of the great bend in the Congo River. Using a surveyor’s glass, they cut undeviating straight lines through the jungle, thus to count the marketable hardwood trees, seeking giants among giants.

Flying across Africa, east to west, travelers often gaze down at this apparently impenetrable mass and imagine the life that must teem beneath the endless canopy of green. I imagined parrots and woolly monkeys and birds of paradise, Pygmy bowmen with spears and loincloths.

Instead, there was nothing. The rare sound of a bird was like a call from civilization. But a deathly stillness prevailed over the foliage and the hidden blackwater creeks that seemed utterly without motion. Once, in three days, we found the skin shed by a boa constrictor. It was dry, and crumbled at the first touch. And that was all.

I remember Ethiopia in 1982, when it had something going for it besides drought and famine. The highlands of Bale province, in the south of the country, were a mountain fastness on the order of Kurdistan.

Everyone rode a horse in Bale, swift gray stallions streaking everywhere at a gallop, their riders in bright blue woolen turbans, with green neck scarves trailing behind them like capes and streamers, and the bridles and saddle work of the horses decorated with red tassels. This was not a festival but the everyday business of Bale, which went on like a medieval joust on fields of green that touched the sky.

Getting there was fun, sometimes. Once, in a dugout canoe, I crossed the Chari River from Cameroon to N’Djamena to cover the war in Chad. At the hotel in town, vultures sat in a row at the edge of the empty swimming pool. A few yards away, in the finest tradition of an old French outpost, a lunch of river fish, exquisitely poached, was served on a bed of lettuce.

I remember some fine frog’s legs, too, speared from a drainage ditch in Accra, where the restaurant’s owner, somehow making do in a Ghana that then seemed beyond repair, maintained a jukebox that played, for free, an ancient selection of Hank Williams records.

In Sudan, I’ve swum in the Blue Nile River at sunset, while scores of swallows climbed and dived for their evening exercise and flights of white pelicans, in perfect Vs, glided in over the water like planes on final approach.

In northern Kenya, I’ve shot awake from my cot, sitting bolt upright under the pitch-black sky, to the roar of an old male lion, not 50 yards away, and thought, for a moment, that the very earth had opened. There is no sound like it in the world, and no place else in the world to hear it.

I remember my first night in a Ugandan prison, after I had run afoul of the Ugandan army. The walls were splattered with blood (none of it, thank goodness, my own), and I, giddy with delight at surviving the night, tried to urinate into a steel combat helmet without turning it over.

I remember taxi drivers by the score and the incredible canniness with which they managed to keep their vehicles--and their paltry livelihoods--going. There was one named Samwell (his spelling) in Ghana, who bought almost as much brake fluid (or rather I did) as he did gasoline. Together, in his car, we braved an up-country trip, although the roads threatened to reduce what remained of his car to a collection of loosely bolted spare parts. We broke down every 30 miles, each time, I was sure, for the last, and he would reassure me (“Please no worry, master, please no worry”) and manage somehow to get the thing smoking and running again.

16 Days Together

We spent 16 days together, Samwell and I, he my guide, translator and protector, and when I left I felt like I had lost a brother. I couldn’t find him when I came back, and never saw him again.

They were tougher in Nigeria (where everything is tougher). Sitting down in a taxi at the Eko Hotel in Lagos, the first words you heard were “Five naira.” That was about $7.50, and that was just to get out of the driveway.

There were some epic sights in Africa as well. The Nigerians once expelled two million Ghanaians in one weekend, and the scene was as if half of Africa were on the move at once, clinging to the riggings of ships and lashing themselves and their belongings to the rooftops of buses.

Or the Sudanese refugee camp of Wad Kowli, hard by the Ethiopian border, where 80,000 Ethiopians had suddenly arrived and were somehow being fed and cared for. In the smoky light of the early morning, you could walk through the camp--miles of it--and see the people, thrown together here with only their ragged clothes, living in huts made of rags, but up and working and helping each other.

It was a tragedy, but it was as well a kind of human affirmation, not only because of the aid that flooded in from outside, but because of the Ethiopians themselves, their palpable determination to survive, to come back somehow, to defeat this thing that had happened to them.

Or the Liberians, just last year, turning out on election day--in the city, in the country in one-room, dirt-floored schoolhouses, waiting for hours to cast their votes. The result of that process was a blatant fraud, but Liberians may never again allow the fruits of a day like that to get away from them.

And probably more than anything else, I will remember the land around Nairobi, the Great Rift Valley below the Ngong Hills, the space and the light, and the wide, open sky above the Athi Plains. I saw it all on a motorcycle, which, at this very moment, the movers are carefully wrapping to load aboard a ship, the last item to leave the house. I never had a motorcycle before I came to Africa. When this one gives out, I think I’ll have it dipped in bronze.

For aficionados, it is a 1982 Honda XR500. For anyone else, suffice it to say it would go anywhere. An early ambition was to ride it across Africa, or at least to Kisangani in Zaire, but there was never time. So I rode it in the Rift and on dirt trails across the plains and worked at getting lost on it as often as I could. It was magic in Africa, with no fences, and you could see things on a bike, and cover ground as in no other way.

When it was cold and muddy on the high plains, the Rift was 2,000 feet lower and 20 degrees warmer, and the landscape, with its sharp ridgelines and broken-edged, dormant volcanoes, was like riding across a moon grown thick with thorn trees and populated by giraffe. I would stop and climb some rock and sit for an hour in the sun, smoking, watching hawks hunt the tree line and listening to the sound, way in the distance, of bells on the necks of Masai cattle.

In the hot, dry season, the plains were best. They rolled off in the distance south of Nairobi--were in essence, a sort of northern extension of the Serengeti, and still thick with game and thinly populated by Masai bomas, the rings of dried thorn where these proud and stubborn people live with their cattle. There were zebra out there, and Thompson’s gazelle, impala, wildebeest, giraffe, ostrich and birds of all sorts. There were probably lion as well, though I never saw one.

Running With Ostriches

I stuck mainly to rutted roads and never ran the game. It didn’t seem right, and it was dangerous besides, for in the high grass off the narrow trails the antbear holes and heavy rocks could dump a motorcycle. Ostriches occasionally would choose a path across my trail and run with me for a few hundred yards before giving their plumes a saucy toss and cutting away from my track like shifty halfbacks.

Once, though, an impala decided to give me a run. An impala antelope is one of the more magnificent creatures in Africa, a fine, shimmery russet against the tawny grass of the plains, all sinew and muscle and built for speed. For reasons known only to him, this one ran right beside me, on the edge of a little ridge. For half a mile we ran, side by side, neither of us anywhere near flat out.

Then he made his move--down a cut on his ridgeline, he headed across my course on the road, stretching his stride, turning it on, all his speed gathering, forelegs making a cross with hind legs, down the bank and across the trail, he shot before me. Up the opposite bank and into the high grass, he settled back into an easy gallop, assured, victorious.

But I remember him in that half-second he spent in front of me, his head up, horns back, flanks gleaming with fine corded muscle. There he remains--with some of the rest of Africa--frozen in his moment of perfection. It is Africa’s parting gift to myself that I give him the last word. Kwaheri.