A Primate's Memoir, page 20
I returned late afternoon two days later. Cassiano insisted I sleep in his hut, instead of my tent. He slept at his brother’s, next door.
I had been noting that these people in the second village, desert folk for centuries until a decade ago, had still not adapted to their new settings. They made a fire inside their house, which was certainly necessary with the mountain cold, but they had not modified the architecture from the way it was back down in the desert—still completely shut. Thus, the smoke accumulated to a horrendous extent. The village was filled with red eyes and tubercular coughs from the smoke. As soon as Cassiano had left for the night, I blew out the all-night fire he had left—my sleeping bag was warm enough, and the smoke was sickening. I went to sleep.
Around midnight, I discovered the other reasons why they kept fires going all night. I awoke to a sound that will give me the chills for the rest of my life. I woke up thinking, Oh, it’s raining. Then I thought, Oh, it’s raining on me—I can feel the drops hitting my sleeping bag, my face. Then I remembered I was sleeping inside a hut. Suddenly, I was monstrously awake. Things were moving all over me. My hair was moving. I shined my flashlight around. The smoke was also meant to percolate through the grass thatched roof. This would drive away the giant cockroaches. In the absence of smoke, the cockroaches had poured in, all over the bags of maize meal. But this was not the real problem. Because following the cockroaches were the army ants.
I would contend that army ants are the single most disgusting disquieting panic-provoking creatures in all of Africa. Their mere proximity leads me to twitch and moan and shudder and leap about with a Saint Vitus’s dance of agitation. They come in swarms that cover square acres. They are huge with pincers that take pieces of meat out of you. They crawl all over you silently, before a single one bites, and then through some pheromonal alarm signal, they all attack at once. They eat your eyelids and nostrils and soft parts. They attack anything, kill invalids who cannot run away from bush hospitals. Once they dig in your skin with their pincers, they hold on so tightly that when you pull at them to get them off, the head detaches from the body, leaving the pincers still in you. The Masai use them to suture people—bad cut, and someone grabs an army ant, holds the two sides of the cut together, lets the pissed-off ant sink its pincers in, and, quickly, twists off the body, leaving rows of ant head sutures in place.
But the worst thing about them is that when they attack, they hiss. A nightmare sound, the hiss of army ants, in the dark, sweeping over the field around you.
The place was swarming with them, the raindrops falling down on me from the thatching. They weren’t bothering with me. Yet. They were dismembering the zillions of cockroaches. There were roaches all over the maize sacks, and, horrifyingly, a three-dimensional bridge of ants, holding on to each other, had formed from the floor to the sacks, pulling off the cockroaches, ten times their size. I was covered, I was just furniture for the moment.
I had to get out. A movement, a stepping on ants on the floor, would trigger all those on me to attack, but there was no other choice. The only question was whether the ant column encompassed the front of the hut. If so, I would just have to run off into the jungle night until I cleared them.
I counted, procrastinated, made my move. By the second step, your body suddenly catches on fire. Flames, little flames, everywhere. You slap, scream, pull at them, keep moving. One on my eyelid, lips, many on my crotch, goddamn it. I burst outside, yelling, ripping my clothes off, rolling on the ground. Thank god the swarm was coming from the opposite end. I flailed, yelped, pulled ants off, spastically leapt about hammering a body part against the ground in an attempt to squash the ants. Cassiano and the rest of the village emerged and, predictably, found my plight hilarious. Once I had gotten the last of the ants off, gotten my clothes back on, I sheepishly explained what I had done. Disdainful of the ants, Cassiano leapt into his house, got a fire going, and soon the ants and remnants of the cockroach ocean were swept back into the forest.
At dawn, we left for the mountain. Cassiano, barefoot, led the way, macheteing a path through the forest, for lack of a preexisting one, until we reached the actual rock wall. From there, we began to climb, somewhat straight up. Precarious footings, scrambles across seams in the boulders where a shower of rock fragments would come off. It felt kind of unlikely, but he seemed to know what he was doing. An hour, two hours, exhausting, sweaty, fun, and we cleared the top. The highest point in Sudan. A cascade of dizzying sights below—other granite peaks with birds looping around them. Forest below with the steam lifting off of it. And in the distance, the desert.
On top of the mountain, at the highest point, was a rock cairn. It was pyramidal, with a central core. With rapid motions, almost curtly, Cassiano motioned me away from it. Quietly, reverently, he knelt down. From behind his ear, hidden in his hair, he pulled out a small bird feather, which he placed in the heart of the cairn. At that moment, I deeply envied every animist his religion.
It was time to go. Or rather, it was time to start trying to go. Transportation was so precarious that you had to start weeks in advance. I would go back to the main road, try to catch a ride on some lorry either going straight back to Kenya, or via Uganda.
I left heaven, rode on the loggers’ lorry from the mountains down to Torit. I wound up sitting in the truck yard of the Wimpy Company, about the only thing that worked in Torit. Wimpy was a British road construction company, contracted through the British government to build a new Juba-Kenya road as a gift to Sudan. They had already been there for years, fighting to get a road through the desert and the tribal raids and the rainy seasons. The Wimpy truck yard was where things were at.
There was an unlikely turmoil of activity—British managers yelling at Arab foremen yelling at black workers, forklifts and jackhammers and road graders careening about. I spotted my targets from across the yard—six Somalis, sitting in a circle, drinking coffee made in an old oil can, in between two petrol tankers with Kenyan plates. In East and Central Africa, all the real longdistance drivers, the hard-ass crazies who would get in a petrol tanker by the dock in Mombassa, on the Indian Ocean in Kenya, and drive for three straight months through wars and revolutions to drop things off in the Congo and then turn back, all of these madmen, are Somalis. It’s some sort of logical adaptation of traditional desert nomadicism to a modern occupation. They are simply tough enough and resilient enough and don’t mind a six-month delivery trip across the continent. The crew is two or three guys, a driver and some gofers, austere tapered silent Somalis with a cab jammed with camel’s milk and boxes of spaghetti (a taste acquired from the colonial days of Italian Somaliland) and heaps of psychoactive plants to chew. Some prayer mats, some guns, no doubt something or other being smuggled. The Somali truckers.
I approached this group, went up to the senior guy, middle-aged with a goatee and an un-Somali potbelly. In Swahili, I said, I’m looking for a ride, are you guys going to Kenya? He didn’t even look up from his coffee. Get lost, he told me. I retreated to the other end of the yard, sat in the sand, read about the embroidery pattern on Joseph’s wondrous coat for about thirty-five pages.
Four or five hours later. They’re still sitting, drinking coffee, ignoring the other trucks sweeping around them. Now playing cards. I went up again. Do you at least know anyone else who is going to Kenya? Get lost, I told you, he told me again. I retreated back to my book. About two hours later, the senior guy shambled over to me and, in a voice as if he were giving me my last warning, said, Okay, we’ll take you to Kenya, but it’s going to cost you, believe me. We bargained a bit, agreed on a perfectly reasonable price. When do we leave? Tonight. He shambled back, I returned to my reading. A few minutes later, the junior-most of the gofers approached, silently handed me coffee and a bowl of spaghetti. “The sun is not so fierce there,” he said, motioning toward the group.
So I joined the Somalis. There were six of them—Abdul, Abdul, Abdulla, Achmet, Ehmet, and Ali. Abdul and Ehmet were the drivers of the two tankers. Achmet and Ali were the seconds, Abdul the Younger and Abdulla the two kid gofers. They were an inseparable crew and were about to start back from the three-month drive they had taken from Mombassa to deliver the petrol to Juba. It turned out, they were all from the same village in Somalia, possibly the only survivors; the village had been wiped out in one of the obscure wars that had been raging in the Horn of Africa forever, and they, all six of them, walked to Mombassa in Kenya. Despite the possible logic of their feeling grateful to Kenya for taking them in, they commandeered my map and marked the whole northeast corner of Kenya as belonging to greater Somalia. The Somali government’s tendency to make the same claim has brought the two countries to the brink of war more than once.
The six of them were mean, quiet bastards. Well, except for the two young-uns, the gofers. Abdul the Younger was, uncharacteristically, a mean, garrulous bastard—loud, talkative, bragging bully. He had the air about him of a petty, scheming con man always taken in by better con men. And Abdulla the Kid, the youngest of them all, maybe sixteen, was even more uncharacteristic—he was quiet and meek and had this curious, frightened, overwhelmed air to him, thick sleepy eyes and a seeming desire to be liked. He sat next to me and smiled hopefully, as if I were going to save him from his kinsmen.
Late afternoon came, and the card game continued. We had more coffee. I normally don’t drink coffee, and this stuff was sickeningly powerful, but I thought they would beat me if I didn’t drink it. Evening, more cards, more coffee, more spaghetti. At dusk, with the tumult of trucks no different from at noon, everyone prepared to sleep. I thought we were leaving today? I asked. Ehmet leaned over menacingly. Are you in some kind of rush? he said. No, no. Okay, tomorrow Kenya, tomorrow Nairobi, he said—an inconceivable goal. He wished me good night, smiling beatifically. Abdul and Ehmet, the seniors, slept in the beds in the cabs. Achmet and Ali got to sleep underneath the tankers; Abdul the Younger, Abdulla the Kid, and I on mats in the sand of the truck yard.
The next day we were up early, and the Somalis quickly formed their circle and started playing cards and drinking coffee. In boredom and irritation, I retreated back to the adventures of Joseph and his brothers, the brothers reminding me more and more of the Somalis. Midafternoon, Abdulla the Kid wandered over, conceivably sick of the coffee and cards himself, and sat next to me. Soon, I was playing recorder, Abdulla trying to teach me impossible Somali songs: modal, short, noodly chanted bursts of near-melody, little rhythmic fragments, quiet whispered parts. In revenge, I tried to teach him “Mares Eat Oats and Does Eat Oats,” real fast. He was impressed. Abdul the Younger sat down, ostensibly to taunt Abdulla for this wimp music stuff, but he was soon singing Somali songs and his favorite melodies from Saturday Night Fever.
More coffee, more spaghetti, another day gone by. We slept on the mats again. All night, as with the night before, trucks lurched just past our heads, yellow phosphorus klieg lights burned, pickup trucks screeched past us, spraying us with water from the only muddy potholes for a hundred miles. Dawn, the crew assembled for more cards. It was apparent to me that they had little desire to start the awful three-month journey back and would happily stay there forever. But today, fortunately, one of the British managers bellowed at them, “I want you bloody Somalis to get your asses out of here this hour or else there will be hell to pay.” Murderous grumbling among themselves, and we were off.
Adventure, barreling through the desert back to Kenya! I sat on the engine casing, jauntily chuckling good-naturedly at everything. Yeah, moving. We got to the eastern edge of Torit, to the last store in the town. Everyone piles in, buys new sandals, combs. Abdul the Senior Driver, in a seeming ritual, buys an absurd outlandish bottle of perfume and slaps its entire repulsive contents on everyone, including me. Anointed. Yeah, celebration for the long trip we’re beginning. Then everyone settles down under the tree next to the store, resumes playing cards. I despair. Twenty minutes later, the Brit shows up again, boots everyone into the trucks, and off we go. Its apparent from the view that that was the last grove of trees for a long long time, so we might as well drive.
Lurching, churneling through the desert sand, each cab pulling an empty double tanker. Desolate howling desert; sometimes the road would be anyone’s guess. Midafternoon, when the heat was intolerable, we napped underneath the vehicles. Late afternoon, we stopped for coffee and spaghetti. I was beginning to feel coated with caffeine and starch, queasy at the diet, but no one else seemed to mind. Tonight, however, to celebrate our departure, we had a special meal. This time, Abdul the Senior had the honors of mixing a ton of sugar and some pretty rank camel’s milk in with the spaghetti. With the heating over the paraffin stove, it formed a milk-sugar coating over each strand that made each bite that much more sickening. We sat in a circle, Somali style, knees resting on each other’s thighs, and everyone ate with their right hand out of the central pot. Then off to bed.
It seemed like we had been sleeping for only a few hours. In fact, we had been sleeping for only a few hours—it was ten in the evening, Achmet was shaking me awake. Hurry, we’re leaving. The trucks were already revving up.
I bundled up my sleeping bag, grabbed my stuff, leapt on. Why the rush? Good time to drive, answered Abdul. It became apparent over the days that something dreadful had happened to these guys’ circadian clocks. There was no day/night pattern at all. We drove till midnight, went back to sleep. We started an hour before dawn, stopped twice during the day for naps, drove halfway through the night before stopping for a two-hour snooze. The only schedule was the five stops a day, where everyone would pile out, put out their mats, and pray to Mecca. The crazy schedule made no sense, but my head was soon reeling, especially since each day’s drive would begin with Abdul confiding in me, “Kenya, today,” and each day we would be, perhaps, another ten kilometers closer, lurching and spraying and heaving through the sand.
It also became apparent that these were savagely aggressive men, with the exception of Abdulla the Kid. We would come to some hamlet, and, essentially, the men would go into some house and shake down the desperately poor occupants. The five of them (Abdulla hanging back with me, looking more frightened than usual) would tromp into the decayed hut, find the frightened, half-decayed occupant, and take three onions. Or some cabbage or oranges. Or, our third day, a goat—the angry, frightened man in a tattered pair of shorts and nothing else tried to hold on to his only goat, and Ali and Achmet beat him. These were pathetically poor people, and the crew was just driving through, pillaging and threatening and taking what they wanted. I felt sick, didn’t want to eat any of the food, but was afraid to insult them. Abdulla seemed as uncomfortable as I. While Ali and Achmet were beating the goatman, Abdulla looked away and sort of whispered, Well, they don’t give us much food to take when we leave Mombassa, as if searching for an explanation.
A lot of the violence seemed to reflect the endless hostility between the Arabs and the Africans. Forever, the Somalis’ ancestors had probably been part of the raiders that rounded up the ancestors of these Sudanese as slaves. The slave market in Arabic Zanzibar had continued to operate well into this century. The Somalis had a seething contempt for inland blacks that seemed to be at their very core. “These Sudanese are like animals,” Ehmet chuckled to me, after one of their plundering raids of two cabbages from a hut where there was nothing else.
And the Somalis were almost as violent with each other. While they were quite affectionate in a way I’ve become familiar with from Arabs—holding your hand for emphasis as you spoke to him, sitting next to him with knee on thigh—they were also intensely aggressive. Each day, each meal stop, inevitably, there would be a fight. Achmet, under the truck, trying to get the paraffin stove going, would be criticized by someone for how he was doing it, and he would come up fighting. Ehmet would get us stuck in the sand, necessitating our unhooking the cab from the tankers; Abdul would criticize his choice of path, there’d be a fight. I came to recognize the ritual pattern. The two trucks would be parked parallel, with everyone gathering in between for food/coffee/cards. A tense moment would arise, and two would fight. Savage rapid fighting, grappling, kicking. The loser would invariably make a last attempt at saving face—the intensely calculating, pointy, taut Achmet would take on Abdul the Younger, quickly pummel him into the ground, walk away in triumph, and Abdul would leap up, his boot knife pulled out. And the ritual would continue. Everyone would lumber up at that point, wrestle Abdul down, take the knife away—Abdul would have taken Achmet, but he was unfairly outnumbered, face thus saved. Abdul would sulk by himself under a tree at a distance. A meal would silendy be prepared. People would begin eating, Abdul still sulking. One of the seniors, Abdul or Ehmet, would yell something joking or conciliatory, and Abdul the Younger would return to the circle.
This happened nearly every meal, every stop, the ritual of fighting—but no conventional ritual—there would be blood half the time. Only Abdulla the Kid was excepted. And me. It occurred to me that I was being treated so courteously, so gently, that I was in deep deep trouble. One day, as we stopped driving, and everyone was happy and uncharacteristically frisky, Ehmet bear-hugged me from behind, wrestled me down laughing. I laughed also, struggled to no avail, and was more than a little frightened. But other than that, I was treated with immaculate detachment. I attempted to pay for things on the few occasions where they bought instead of stole, and they huffily made me put my money away. Every meal, they insisted I eat first. It was all so considerate and ostentatious that I was absolutely certain that this was part of some long-standing Somali custom, feeding me and fattening me on sugared spaghetti until the preordained full moon when they would slit my throat from ear to ear. This fear was more than a little bit serious. I just couldn’t read them, and I felt more uncomfortable and frightened each day, as we disappeared into the no-man’s-land of desert between the two countries, they pillaging and beating and terrorizing the Sudanese, pulling knives on each other in moments of hideous anger, and placing the spaghetti pot graciously in front of me.
