Africa Askew Read online

  Africa Askew - Traversing the Continent

  Peter Boehm

  Translated by Anthea Heyes

  “Africa Askew - Traversing the Continent”

  Written By Peter Boehm

  Copyright © 2014 Peter Boehm

  All rights reserved

  Distributed by Babelcube, Inc.

  www.babelcube.com

  Translated by Anthea Heyes

  “Babelcube Books” and “Babelcube” are trademarks of Babelcube Inc.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Preface

  DEPARTURE

  Mohammed‘s arrival (Nairobi – Bosaso)

  SOMALIA

  At the easternmost point with Abdullahi (Bosaso – Hurdiye and back)

  A nation creates a state (Bosasso)

  Dear old Horst (Bosasso – Garowe)

  Among kidnappers (Garowe – Hargeisa)

  The Somali Film (Hargeisa)

  The Somali Film II (Hargeisa)

  The Somali Film III (Hargeisa)

  Short khat glossary (Hargeisa)

  • The Somali Film IV (Hargeisa – Grenze)

  DJIBOUTI

  Vehicles in their final stages (Border – Djibouti City)

  • Hotel de la Paix (Djibouti City)

  • The rollercoaster to Addis (Djibouti City – border)

  ETHIOPIA

  • Among smugglers (Border – Dire Dawa – Harar)

  Strange Expatriates I: Arthur Rimbaud

  • Among smugglers II (Dire Dawa – Addis Ababa)

  Desta Pension (Addis Ababa)

  Stomach Zero (Lido Hotel – National Theatre)

  Emrakeb (Addis Ababa)

  • Flesh and blood (Addis Ababa)

  • An African party (Addis Ababa – Lake Langano and back)

  Through model railway country (Addis Ababa – Aksum)

  Excavation in Aksum (Aksum)

  • The End of the World (Aksum – Gondar – Border)

  SUDAN

  The Great Thirst (Border – Khartoum)

  The closed woman (Khartoum)

  Strange Expatriates II: Karl May

  Vehicles in their final stages II (Khartoum – border)

  CHAD

  Just imagine, no-one's here, and you’re not there (Border – Abéché)

  Vehicles in their final stages III (Abéché – N’Djamena)

  Take me with you (N'Djamena)

  But no, officer! (Border – Cameroon – Dutse)

  • The Emir of Dutse (Dutse)

  The strange transformation of Ahmed S. (Gusau)

  Sharia Cha-Cha (Kano)

  NIGER

  Hausa Blues (Border – Niamey)

  Country kids learn (Gadou)

  MALI

  47°C and rising (Border - Gao – Mopti)

  The man with the leather bag (Mopti)

  48°C (Mopti – Timbuktu)

  At the slaves‘ riverbank (Tillamedess)

  Mother Africa (Ouélessébougou)

  The Prophet’s birthday (Bamako – border)

  SENEGAL

  The pizza delivery service (Border – Dakar)

  The African consciousness?! (Dakar)

  The westernmost point (Dakar city centre – Pointe des Almadies)

  ARRIVAL

  Strange expatriates III – Peter‘s departure

  Preface

  Can you benefit from reading a travelogue that’s ten years old?

  You can, if it hasn’t already been overtaken by reality.

  Can you really benefit from reading a travelogue that’s ten years old?

  You can, if it talks about universal topics like corruption, stagnation and illusion, and if the heart of the text still holds true.

  Today, I’d add a portrait of a successful businesswoman or businessman, because in some areas the African economies are booming – before the next war comes along and destroys them again. And I’d write about the Nigerian film industry, one of those rare African success stories. Nollywood has completely taken over the African film market in a decade. But otherwise, I wouldn’t do anything differently.

  So can you really benefit from reading a travelogue that’s ten years old?

  Well, you have to if that exact journey would no longer be possible today – and the crossing wouldn’t be; at least, not on this route. Puntland has become unstable, there’s currently a terror alert in place for Somaliland, since the civil war it’s not advisable to travel alone through Darfur, in northern Nigeria barely a day goes by without an attack attributed to the Boko Haram (Hisba radicals!), Europeans make good kidnap targets in northern Niger, and there’s war in Mali.

  The tensions in the Sahel region, between north and south, between Muslims and Christians, have led to open conflict. You can read, in Africa Askew – Traversing the Continent, how it came to this.

  Berlin, January 2013

  Peter Boehm

  DEPARTURE

  Mohammed‘s arrival (Nairobi – Bosaso)

  One thing was certain. Africa’s easternmost point is in Somalia, and the closest town is Bosaso. Journalists have two options for getting from Nairobi to Bosaso – on an aid organisation flight, or on a khat flight.

  To use the first, I’d have had to think of how I could have portrayed an aid project in a marketable way in an article. In return, I’d have been taken along for free. That’s the way of the silent agreement between aid organisations and the media. To use the second, you need a couple of hundred dollars cash, and strong nerves.

  The first option was out of the question for me because I couldn’t find an aid organisation which would have taken me along. That would have made everything easier, but at the same time I wasn’t desperately sorry about it. The fact is that these kinds of aid and development projects only rarely work, not just in Somalia, and the newspapers I worked for probably wouldn’t have printed something like that anyway. So I was left with just the second option.

  I had, therefore, contacted an airline at Wilson Airport months ahead to enquire about a flight to Bosaso. That’s where all small aircraft leave Nairobi, so this includes the khat planes.

  There were two Somali women waiting there. They told me that there would be a plane to Bosaso every day. They asked when I wanted to fly, and laughed when I said not tomorrow, but in a couple of months. Africans often have to laugh about how far ahead white people plan.

  But now that I was sitting in the women’s austere office, with its completely empty desk and its couple of yellowed advertisements for Rome and Brussels, a few days before the flight, they were asking for $600. What a cheek! Even during high season, for that, you could fly to Germany and back.

  What could I do?

  If, as a white person, you don’t want to pay more in Africa than Africans do, you should just stay at home. You’re in the wrong place here. A bit like someone who comes here with an allergy to heat, and hopes to find respite from it. But at the same time, I didn’t want to be so clearly taken advantage of like this, like a beginner, a newbie who had never travelled in Africa before. That injured my pride.

  So I did the only thing that you can do in such situations – I kept my nerve and tried, not too sheepishly but also not too angrily, to bring the demands down to a more reasonable amount.

  I tried $400. To no avail. Very well, so I just kept my nerve a while longer. I turned it down. However, I was then astonished to find that the two women let me walk out of their office and didn’t call me back. At the time I didn’t know that they had the monopoly for khat flights from Nairobi to Bosaso. The town is so far in the north of Somalia that its supplies of the drug come almost exclusively from the much closer Ethiopian production area around Harar. Oh well, that’s just the way of it.

&
nbsp; I’d been planning my journey for over a year, and had tried to clear the path of all barriers. Was it now possible to cross the Ethiopian-Somali border? Where could I get a visa for Chad? Was there public transport between El Fascher and Abéché?

  I’d pored over maps, questioned anyone likely to know anything about the countries on my trip, tried to find local contacts, sent letters over, and slowly pieced together the route, like a jigsaw puzzle.

  And I’d already burnt all my bridges back home, cleared out my flat, sold my car and said goodbye to my friends, and now the trip was threatened by a minor detail. But there was no going back now either. From here, I could only press on.

  Of course, I could have paid the two women their outrageous price. But there again, there was still another option – I could keep my nerve.

  If I have learnt anything from my time in Africa, it’s that you have to keep calm at all costs, no matter what happens. In Europe this wasn’t necessary – and was even, quite often, wrong. You simply complained. But the opposite is true in Africa. Getting worked up only hurts you. In the end, the winner was always the one with the most patience, the one who could hold out for longest.

  And one other thing never left me during my three years or so as a newspaper correspondent in Nairobi – I never ceased to be astonished. I’d visited Africa a couple of times already, in partly for work, in partly for fun, and I’d read a great deal about the continent.

  It wasn’t until I moved there, however, until I actually lived there, that I got to know it properly. So many of the strategies I had arduously learned throughout my life were suddenly useless. I felt rather like a small child, who still has to discover the world. Everything was different. Everything needed practice if I didn’t want to fall horribly flat on my face.

  Such apparently easy things, like making a phone call or catching the bus, first had to be overcome. But more importantly, I didn’t understand the people – what made them tick, and why they actually did what they did. That was the hardest part – putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, someone who had grown up under entirely different social conditions.

  I had to portray this daily life which so astonished me, and these people who presented me with one puzzle after another. If this was what I found when I moved there, then how would less-travelled people have fared, without my previous experience?

  In order to put this amazement into words, I decided it would be a good idea to go on a long journey across Africa and to portray everything which struck me as characteristic and interesting. After all, if you just concentrate on parties, parliaments and organisations, Africa seems to be a rather poorer Europe – and nothing more. But this isn’t the case. Why else would I have been so amazed once I had moved there?

  This was why it was important to approach it from a different angle. From the everyday life of the continent and its inhabitants.

  Once I had resolved to embark on a long journey, the remaining decisions simply followed naturally. The length of the continent – so from the Cape of Good Hope to Cairo, or vice versa – had been crossed by so many already.

  I therefore had to traverse the continent, ideally at its widest point – so from the easternmost point to the westernmost, from Cape Hafun in Somalia to Cap-Vert in Senegal. Of course, I took the easternmost point to be the easternmost point of the continent, and not that of the Seychelles archipelago which is often counted as Africa politically and geographically.

  And I didn’t want to make it too easy for myself either. This is why I set myself the condition of completing the whole crossing on the ground. The direction of the crossing – east to west – was for purely practical reasons. It’s easy to get to Somalia from Nairobi. And because Somalia was where I anticipated the most problems, it was good to start there.

  I set off in January. By then, the rainy season in the Sahel region is over (June to October), and the roads are passable. And if everything went as I hoped, then I’d arrive in Senegal before the rains came again.

  I decided to use public transport, as that way I’d save myself the worry of using my own car. And because, after all, it was better for my plan to do everything as Africans do – or at least as they might have done.

  There wasn’t much choice for the route. The start was obvious – Somalia, Ethiopia. After that it got slightly trickier, as the three main civil war countries – Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Angola – lay across my path like a huge barricade.

  I picked North Sudan, because there is fighting in only a few regions there, and then through Chad, followed by the northern route through Nigeria, Niger and Mali.

  In the end, I had a journey ahead of me of over 4,500 miles as the crow flies. I gave myself a time limit of six months. And apart from money, all I now needed was what the Malian historian Amadou Hampâté Bâ had already recommended in the 1970s for those researching oral tradition in Africa: “The hide of a crocodile, so they can lay their head anywhere and on anything; the stomach of an ostrich, so they can eat anything offered them without feeling any disgust or becoming ill, as well as endless patience and the heart of a dove, so that they never get agitated or lose their nerve.”

  Above all I needed the heart of a dove – and I needed it right at the start.

  And I kept my nerve. I went back to Wilson Airport, went into the departure lounge, and simply spoke to someone who looked Somali – he’d be bound to have something to do with the transport of khat – and succeeded. The man introduced himself as Lulu and told me to ring him that afternoon.

  In the meantime, however, my composure had already melted away like chocolate ice-cream in the July sun. I accepted Lulu’s price of $460 immediately. But hadn’t I firmly resolved to beat him down?

  I of course paid the usual surcharge for white people. The Somali girl who later flew with me paid $300. And Mohammed, who was, admittedly, somehow related to the women filling the plane, just $50. And it was the two women’s plane. That was obvious. There was only one to Bosaso each day.

  When I arrived at Wilson Airport at 5.45 the following morning, the small khat market on the forecourt was already breaking up again. No matter whether it’s a Sunday or a bank holiday, whether it’s stormy or hailing, the same spectacle takes place outside Wilson Airport every morning, just after it gets light. Mountain farmers and khat traffickers talk themselves into a rage over the price of the harvest, packed in potato sacks.

  The majority of the khat, harvested the previous day in the Kenyan highlands, is flown to Somalia. The young shoots from the khat bushes are plucked in the morning in Meru County, on the eastern slope of Mount Kenya, bundled in “kilos” and tied with palm thread and, to keep them fresh and mild in flavour, and wrapped in banana leaves.

  A “kilo” doesn’t actually weigh one kilogram, in fact not even half that. But this is the name used in Kenya and Somalia to refer to the bundles which are no thicker than a child’s arm.

  In the afternoon the harvest is transported almost 200 miles to Nairobi, and by the early evening everyone can buy it from kiosks in the city. The khat dealers hang out a banana leaf as a signal.

  Now a couple of men were still dragging around a few of the jute sacks, filled with the green twigs, but most of the sacks had already been piled in pyramids almost ten feet high on a line of vehicles.

  The drivers were waiting impatiently by the gate to finally be allowed access to the planes. There was already a small mound of stems on the ground by the window of the first car. Even at this time of day, the driver had already begun chewing.

  Outside the departure lounge, I positioned myself beside three women who looked as though they were also flying to Somalia. They were sitting on washing powder drums and suitcases, and it was clear from their black clothing that they had to be Somalis.

  Whenever I see Somali women, they always make me think of turnip tops poking up out of the ground. The hijab frames their faces severely at the top, stretches over their heads and then tapers down right to their ankles. T
he preferred colours for the hijab are black, fawn or a pale blue-grey, and the women often wear a wrapper of the same colour beneath it.

  Of all the countries I travelled through on my journey, Somalia had the strictest dress code for women. Even in Muslim Sudan and in the northern Nigerian states which are subject to Sharia law, the customs are lax in comparison.

  In the north of Somalia, in particular, Islam has seen a rapid revival following the civil war in the early 1990s. In Bosaso, I saw mothers in the street leading by the hand their four or five-year-old daughters, already hidden under the hijab. That would be unimaginable in Khartoum.

  Lulu really did turn up at 6am, and took me to the airfield fence. I had to pass my dollars through the fence to his contact. At least I was given a receipt. And when the guards at the gate let a tanker onto the airfield the khat vehicles, filled with their sacks of the drug, followed immediately.

  That was the signal to start. As though at the touch of a button, the airport now came to life. No-one involved with the khat transport wasted another second in getting the drug to the Somali markets.

  Lulu hurried me through the cash desk for airport tax, and then straight through passport control. When I put down my bag for a second to put my passport away, he reproached me with “why are you dawdling?”

  We then ran out onto the airfield, where the pilot and co-pilot had already begun weighing the khat sacks. We four passengers were also weighed, along with our luggage, and the weight was recorded. The small plane looked new, its metal shell glinting in the morning sun.

  The two pilots were “Asians” – the term used to refer to the descendants of Indian workers who were brought to East Africa during the British colonial period. They were father and son. You could see that. And they owned the plane.

  Lulu had advertised the fact yesterday that the plane would be flown by Asians. I hadn’t understood why he emphasised that so much. But now, watching the father carefully checking and the son precisely recording the weight of the plane’s load, I saw why. Lulu had wanted to reassure me.

  After all, almost everyone in Nairobi has heard at least one tale about khat flights. For example, a German aid organisation employee had told me the one about the plane which lost power in one engine shortly after takeoff. The pilot had had to turn back to Wilson Airport, but after landing he of course could not turn on the thrust reversal in his remaining propeller, as this would have made the aeroplane spin due to the one-sided braking. Consequently the plane shot off the end of the runway, and didn’t stop until it hit a fence. There were pictures of the battered aircraft in the papers the next day. The pilot fled the aircraft in a mad dash, because of the fire risk, leaving his two passengers behind in the hold. They were only released once the German had forced open the door.