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Africa

AFRICA DAYS: The Finale

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Note: Africa Days is a series of posts based on journals and letters from my years living in Kinshasa and traveling across Africa, beginning in 1974. Previous posts are below.

We first set foot in Africa in September of 1974 to begin our contracts with the American School of Kinshasa. We knew pretty much nothing, except that we’d be there two years and we’d like to see as much of Africa as we could.

We saw a lot. By the time we sailed for Europe in November of 1976, we’d been to 25 African countries. We’d traveled by riverboat and by packet boat and by ferries of every description. We’d ridden on planes and trains and in Land Rovers and overpacked buses, atop cases of beer in a truck through the Ituri Forest and in all manner of vehicles hitchhiking throughout South Africa.

Our first Thanksgiving dinner featured Spam with friends camped in a rainforest, the second was beef hearts with priests at their home in the bush. One Christmas we had fried termites with new acquaintances on a train to Zambia, another Christmas we helped slaughter a piglet for porc a l’ananas high in the Ruwenzori Mountains.

We slept in campgrounds in forests and on islands, in huts on mountainsides, under ledges in the desert and in too many missions to count, along with a sprinkling of hotels, government guesthouses and game park lodges — and countless nights in our trusty VW bus, Miles.

We marveled at blue-ice glaciers and turquoise seacoasts and rippling sands and fantastical rock formations, at a bubbling volcano and a crystal-clear swamp, and at the grandeur of wild animal herds on the plains and gorillas in the jungle. The fearsome slave castles, the joyous tribal celebrations, the craftspeople at work in leather or metal or fibers, on masks and carvings; the sound of drums in the jungle and of jazz in smoky nightclubs: Africa gave us all of this.

Also: The warmth of so many people in so many places, from the master Kinshasa carpenter Kidiela who created our wonderful Miles and the intrepid Kitsola who kept us safe from predators in the Okavango Delta, to the nameless man who brought us mint tea and dates on a silver tray one moonlit night in the Moroccan desert and the twinkly-eyed pere francais in Mali who strode toward us with open arms and took us home for a shower, a meal and a good night’s sleep.

It’s tempting to think in categories. The most wondrous sights? The Ruwenzori massif, the Okavango Delta and Tassili in the Sahara. But how about the Congo riverboat trip and the volcano Nyiragongo, Kilimanjaro, the game parks, Victoria Falls, Cape Town, Lamu, Zanzibar, Marrakesh, the Todra Gorge?

What about the richest cultural experiences? The Dogon people in Mali, the floating village of Ganvie in Benin, the festival in Cape Coast, Ghana. But there were also the multitudes of people making masks and carvings and tapestries and fabrics, dancing and singing and drumming and playing music throughout Zaire and West Africa.

A Bakuba mask we bought in Zaire

And then there were the disappointments. We didn’t get to drive across the Sahara, our absentee ballots didn’t make it to Algiers, civil strife kept us out of Uganda and Angola and Mozambique. And the trials and tribulations, many of them mechanical, others natural — mud, heat altitude, mosquitoes and tsetse flies, the water buffalo charging Mike as he sought firewood. Also the infuriating individual experiences — the long hours spent at the whim of border officials, the soldiers with rifles at Kinshasa intersections, the palms held out to be greased, the irregularity and unreliability of schedules.

We kept daily budgets— down to every last cucumber — intent upon stretching the money we’d saved in our two years of teaching (and our summer-school offering). This accounting shows that we spent $64.30 in 11 days in Zaire — $53 of it on “tow charges” (for the men who helped dig us out of mud holes) — compared to $240 over 12 days in Cameroon and Chad — mostly for gas, fresh food and donations to missions that allowed us to park overnight.

Halfway through the drive out, we made a list of rules to help us save money, including “avoid guides, avoid dashes (the word for bribe in Nigeria), avoid beers in hotels.” The big bucks were the $216 to get us and Miles on the train from Bamako to Senegal and the $650 to get us on the boat to Casablanca. By Morocco, we were still keeping our daily expenditure to $21 a day, and our savings would indeed permit us to embark on our travels in Europe with confidence.

So much for the summing up. How did our time in Africa shape us?

It’s easiest to answer one aspect — the professional one. We got married in June 1974, left the country a couple of days later, and ended up spending five years overseas. Mere months earlier, I’d been applying to larger newspapers, hoping to move up from the cub-reporting job that launched me in a career I adored. Unquestionably, this radical move became an obstacle to finding work in journalism; it was too unorthodox a step for prospective employers to see the benefit of. In the end things worked out happily indeed, but it took a while.

More broadly, the impact of those years on my life feels at once immense and unknowable. I think I gained a more critical understanding of what democracy means, the different forms that poverty takes, and how it feels to stand out for looking different, to be very much an “other.” We saw the various ways our fellow human beings feel and express joy and suffering, how they make music and art, the varieties of family and village life, and the different ways people respond to their natural environment.

To this day, I sometimes feel a tiny hit of astonishment that a tap will produce an endless flow of water that I didn’t have to lug from anywhere and needn’t suspect of disease-bearing. And I have never fully shaken off my unsettlement at the scale of our wastefulness; seeing people fight over the (empty but useful) tuna can that you learned to place carefully alongside the road will do that to you.

But back to the trip. At the end of our time in the Sahara, we drove 650 miles from Ghardaia to Tunis, where “we embarked on a nice Italian boat on which we spent a good night and woke up within view of Trapani, Sicily.” We would spend the next 7 months traveling in Europe — still in our faithful Miles (with fewer mechanical problems and better roads) — and the two years after that living in Paris. But that’s another story.

This story — our Africa days — ended on November 17, 1976, with the landing in Sicily.

One evening the previous August, back in Cameroon, I had written in my journal, “I know that when we return to the U.S., this will all seem a dream.”

It does.

Africa

AFRICA DAYS 13: Leaving Zaire

Note: Africa Days is a series of posts based on journals and letters from my years living in Kinshasa and traveling across Africa, beginning in 1974. You can read previous and following posts on this site.

In the spring of 1976, as our final year teaching at The American School of Kinshasa drew to a close, we found (at last!) a used VW bus for sale. We determined to turn it into not only our transportation but also our home for the coming year, as we made our way up out of Africa and then across Europe.

We named the bus Miles Motuka (motuka is Lingala for motorcar), though every now and then we called him Miles from Nowhere. I say “him,” because this vehicle became a beloved figure in our lives. We certainly didn’t know it at the time, but we’d be traveling and living (full or part-time) in Miles for the next three years, joined during the last one by a little Paris-born girl named Laura Grace.

But back to Kinshasa. We spent $2,600 for the bus itself and almost that much outfitting it and buying what we needed for the trip — from spare parts to interior fittings to food and supplies and the cost of visas for 15 countries. We drew up a design for the interior and hired a wonderful craftsman/carpenter, Kidiela, to build it out. (Mostly of mahogany, if you please.) A friend installed a second battery off of which we could run our interior lights and radio and cassette player. I sewed curtains and cushion/mattress covers. Mike became a self-trained mechanic. We had bought backups for almost every part —  from the clutch to two spare wheels — many of which we would indeed deploy. (Mike once had to drop the engine, guided mostly by a detailed manual.) We had sand ladders and a shovel, cables and towlines and many jerry cans for fuel and others for water. 

We had a sink and a jug with a faucet braced above it, a stove and a siphon for a shower, and mosquito netting so we could sleep in the heat with the roof and windows and doors open. Our sofa made into a comfy double bed. Our desk/dining table folded down. Our closet had a sliding door. Our bookcase had a French dictionary, an atlas, an almanac and books on philosophy, history, art, poetry, memoirs, a songbook, essays and novels. Our cabinet held the food we’d stocked up on at the commissary, from coffee to canned meats to sugar to dried milk to pasta to raisins and crackers, which we’d supplement with vegetables and fruits along the route.

Given the abysmal state of Zairian roads, we would need to put Miles on a boat on the Congo River to get him out of Zaire (and later, as it turned out, on a train from Mali to Dakar and then on another boat to get him to Casablanca until, finally, Miles joined us on a ferry across the Mediterannean to Sicily).

We sent friends and family what we called “a tentative itinerary. It can be at best only approximate due to roads being washed out, mechanical issues, unforeseen political developments that might close borders, and our own whims.” We sent addresses for U.S. embassies where we would check for mail (“hold for arrival”). We noted that we’d make a decision in Bamako, Mali, as to whether to attempt a Sahara crossing. We’d done a lot of preparation in the hopes of making that happen, but our big investment in the future was in Miles, and we dreaded the idea of having to abandon him in the Sahara. (Most vehicles making the crossing were four-wheel drive.)

We sent 17 boxes of books and two barrels of personal effects to Mike’s parents in Minneapolis, noting that it might take six months for the barrels to arrive. Finally, when school ended, we collaborated with another couple to run a summer school for a month. We netted $3,500 to add to what we’d saved in our two years of teaching.

Miles on the riverboat barge, second vehicle from the top

On July 7, our trip began at last.

Letter home: “Our dream is coming true. We are on the Colonel Ebeya, a 3-tiered riverboat pushing two barges loaded with hundreds of people and a third loaded with merchandise, including a beautiful (to us) blue-and-white VW combi whose interior is a house fit for kings, not to mention a motor-parts store. We have labored painstakingly on this trip for a year and dreamed of it for three. The past few weeks have held little but the final assembling of all the tiny pieces. Yesterday, as the boat’s engines roared to a beginning, we found that the assembled product works.“

The boat trip took a week, a very pleasant one: watching life on the Congo River roll by, reading books, enjoying days without an alarm clock (we’d tossed into the drink the one that had so rudely interrupted our very early mornings in Kinshasa).

When the crane lifted Miles off the boat in Bumba and placed him on dry ground, we heaved a sigh of relief. 

We should have held our breath instead. There was all-too-little dry ground over the miles to come before we reached the Central African Republic. The Belgians’ total lack of investment in infrastructure was a gift that just kept on giving. I lose track, reading my journals, of how many mud holes we got stuck in — fearing each time that we might not make it through.

We once ended up jacking up both wheels, putting “everything under the sun under them — sand ladders, cables, palm fronds “ — and hiring two men to help me push us out. We crossed our fingers and powered through huge pools (burning out a clutch in the act). We changed flats, pumped up tires, patched tubes. And, against the odds, we trucked on.

At night we’d camp along the roadside, for lack of any alternative. Oddity that we were, we became a traveling roadshow for the populace. We once counted 50 people assembled to view our morning ablutions. At one village, someone drummed ahead a message to the next about our impending arrival. When we got there, a crowd had assembled on the road to greet us. 

There were 12 days of this.

At last we reached the Ubangi River, where I boarded a little motorboat that took me across to the Central African Republic. (The border crossing was — unusually enough — uneventful. A friend from our embassy in Kinshasa had cabled ahead about us.) There I cashed some travelers’ checks and sought out the ferry chief. Within a couple of hours, I was standing in the middle of the otherwise empty ferry, crossing the river toward Zaire, shouting above the motor, “I am the captain of the Queen’s nav-ee” and looking at Miles and Mike in the distance, in Zaire.

We drove Miles onto the ferry. It had been three weeks since we’d left Kinshasa. Our two years in Zaire were over. From now on, there’d be challenges aplenty. But at least the roads would be better.