Walking the Nile

WALKING THE NILE

WALKING THE NILE

Levison Wood

Atlantic Monthly Press

New York

Copyright © 2015 by Levison Wood

Photo insert: © Tom McShane: photos 1-3, 8, 12, 22-23, 28-29, 41, 43-46

© Ashwin Bharwaj: photos 9, 16, 19, 21, 34, 36, 40

© Mahmoud Exxeldin: photo 42 All other images are © Levison Wood

Jacket photographs: © Tom McShane

Author photo © Tom McShane

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First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-0-8021-2449-4

eISBN 978-0-8021-9068-0

Atlantic Monthly Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

For the people of the Nile.

In memory of Matthew Power.

CONTENTS

Chapter One: Bor, South Sudan

Chapter Two: Beginning at the End: The Source of the Nile

Chapter Three: Kigali, New History: and Old Terrors

Chapter Four: Bandit Country

Chapter Five: Africa’s Greatest Leveller

Chapter Six: The Road to Kampala

Chapter Seven: Kingdoms of the Lakes

Chapter Eight: Into the Wild

Chapter Nine: The Gathering Dark

Chapter Ten: The Fog of War

Chapter Eleven: The Impenetrable Swamp

Chapter Twelve: A New Beginning

Chapter Thirteen: The Great Bend 224

Chapter Fourteen: The Sands of Time

Chapter Fifteen: The Land of Gold

Chapter Sixteen: The Mother of the World

Chapter Seventeen: The Long Road Home

Photo Insert

Acknowledgments

Index

About the Author

BOR, SOUTH SUDAN

April 2014

The moment we entered the compound, I knew things were bad. The South Sudan Hotel had been opened in the run-up to independence in 2011, promoted widely as a safe place for foreign dignitaries to stay while visiting Bor, but as we approached I saw the hotel minibus sitting gutted on the edge of the road, riddled with bullet holes.

Through the gates, the scene was no different. The reception hall had been devastated. Fire had charred the walls and the desks had been trashed. We waited in the ravaged compound for some time before the manager appeared from one of the missing doorways and welcomed us.

‘What happened here?’

The manager smiled. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘we still have rooms.’

He led us across the hotel forecourt. Along the verandas most of the doors had been kicked in, the rooms torn apart. The floor was dusted with broken glass from the smashed lights overhead. When we finally reached our rooms, the metal door hanging off its hinges and a footprint lay where the handle used to be. ‘Fifty dollars,’ the manager began. I looked inside the obliterated room. No water, no electricity, but it was still the best option we had. ‘We’ll take it,’ I said.

Before the manager left, he tried to explain. The ‘small protest’ we had heard about was actually a large-scale demonstration by the Dinka, the semi-pastoral people who make up almost a fifth of South Sudan’s population, against the Nuer, another of South Sudan’s ethnic groups. The Nuer and Dinka have a long and complicated history of attack and counter-attack along this part of the Nile. Today, the Nuer had barricaded themselves into a United Nations compound, but the Dinka had stormed the building and opened fire. In the ensuing chaos, forty-eight Nuer were killed, while seven Dinka lay dead. Now, the whole of Bor sat under a stalemate of sorts, waiting for the next eruption. All foreigners, the manager explained as he walked away, were valid targets as far as the Dinka were concerned.

There was no food at the hotel, so after some time we ventured back into the town centre – fully aware of the risk, with real trepidation. Soldiers, policemen and hundreds of armed civilians still flocked the city’s filthy streets. The market place stood empty – burnt to the ground by rebels in January – and all of the banks had been looted. An ATM machine hung like an eyeball out of its socket on an outside wall. Inside, credit cards, cheque books and filed accounts were strewn across the floor. Rebels and government soldiers alike had used the bank’s date stamps to plaster the walls with evidence of their pillage. The pillars around us were covered in graffiti. ‘Fuck you Nuer!’ cried one, and ‘Dinkas Defeated!’ claimed another. Bor, it seemed, had changed hands three or four times since the hostilities began only a few months ago. What was happening today was just another episode in the ongoing fight.

We ate at a small Ethiopian restaurant but we didn’t stay long. The looks we got from fellow diners – all armed to the teeth – were enough to drive us back to the relative safety of the hotel.

In a hotel without power, night seemed to come suddenly. After dark, I lay staring at the ceiling, wondering what tomorrow had in store. I had crossed the border into South Sudan from Uganda only one month previously. In that time, I’d come two-hundred-and-forty miles north through a country described by the UN as the most fragile in the world – refugees on the roads, armed gangs roving and raping through the countryside, a government on the verge of collapse – but there were still four hundred miles to go. From here on, the hostilities were only going to grow fiercer – and, as if that wasn’t enough, between here and the border lay the vast sprawl of the Sudd, the biggest swampland in the world. It had been the Sudd that stopped the Romans venturing further south in their conquest of Africa, the Sudd that held back Livingstone and Speke and the other Victorian explorers whose journeys I had hoped to emulate in their exploration of the Nile. For a second, in the hotel room, the lights flickered on and then off again, and I was left wondering: was it worth it?

In that moment, the night came alive. Gunshots punctured the silence, machine-gun fire rattling perilously close to the hotel. I sat up. Through the shuttered windows, I saw the darkness illuminated in flashes of brilliant red, tracers lighting up the skies above Bor.

I scrambled out of bed, stumbling onto the veranda. In the room alongside me, Siraje, my Ugandan porter, was already awake. As the thud of heavy weapons played in bursts outside the hotel, we hurried to pack our rucksacks. ‘Where to?’ Siraje asked. Outside the room, I looked across the courtyard. Soldiers and armed civilians were already gathering among the shadows. Who were they?

There was only one way to go. ‘Up,’ I said, and started to run.

Across the courtyard, close to the river’s edge, a half-finished five-storey building stood as a reminder of better times. We burst through the shattered door and swept away the hanging wires that blocked the stairwell. Running up the concrete stairs, we didn’t stop until reaching the open rooftop. If the hotel was to be stormed again, I judged this would be the safest place.

From here, we could see the street fight being played out in snatches of light, machine-gun fire in the thoroughfares, fires erupting in buildings a few streets away. The night was warm, and the sounds and smells put me in mind of my tour in Afghanistan, which seemed such a long time ago.

The fire-fight lasted for forty-five minutes, finally slowing down to a succession of sporadic bursts. As the worst abated, I looked to the north. All that I could see, by the light of the waning moon reflected in the shimmering waters of the Nile, were the rooftops of Bor, stretching on into an indistinguishable horizon. But I knew what was waiting for me up there. Beyond the boundaries of the town, the marshes seemed to go on forever. Miles away to the north, the key towns of Bentiu, Malakal and Renk were being contested by rebels. Escaping villagers were following the river south, searching for sanctuary in hastily erected camps – and, always, there was the spectre of the impenetrable Sudd.

In that moment, it seemed I had a decision to make. Four hundred miles of war-torn swampland lay ahead of me on my journey, but the question was – was this stretch of the Nile going to deny me, as it had so many others?

BEGINNING AT THE END: THE SOURCE OF THE NILE

December 2013

I don’t know where the idea to walk the entire length of the Nile came from. It was a question I’d been asked a hundred times or more, by well-meaning family, friends, and the occasional journalist, in the weeks before I set out on the expedition. I’d given each of them a different answer – but all of them were true. When George Mallory was asked by a reporter from the New York Times why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, he retorted with perhaps the three most famous words in mountaineering history: ‘Because it’s there.’ In the end, I could think of no better way to express the singular urge that drove me to Africa. I wanted to follow in a great tradition, to achieve something unusual and inspire in others the thirst to do the same. Much of my motivation was selfish, of course – to go on the greatest adventure of my life, to see what people can only dream about and test myself to the limits. But, ultimately, it came down to one thing. The Nile was there, and I wanted to walk it.

I sat in a truck, rising high through the Rwandan hills. Even now, that same question was buzzing in my ear. The man sitting beside me was staring out of the window, looking smart in a green polo shirt, his hair closely cropped. He smiled as the banana plantations passed us by.

I liked Boston because he hadn’t asked why. Boston was different; he instinctively knew that those who have to ask ‘why’ would never understand. Ndoole Boston, descendant of Ngumbirwa, King of the Nyanga, was to be my guide for the first leg of this journey, and he was more interested in the practicalities of our mission.

‘How far is it?’ he said, as the green expanse of the Nyungwe rainforest came into view.

‘Four thousand miles.’

Four thousand, two hundred and fifty miles, to be precise – and that didn’t even include the diversions we were bound to have to make in trying to cross the river’s most inhospitable domains.

We had driven all day yesterday and camped in these rain-drenched hills, but this morning the wait was almost at an end. Mist seeped through the forest as we rose, but occasionally we’d burst through one of the reefs and I could see the forest dropping steeply away beneath us. It was, I knew, almost time.

At last, the car came to a halt on the very edge of the Nyungwe Forest. It was known locally as the ‘buffer zone’, an expanse of planted pines and eucalyptus, trees alien to Africa but introduced in colonial times to meet the growing need for firewood. Stepping out of the truck, I got to thinking how very English it all looked, like a tiny piece of Staffordshire plucked up and planted on top of the indigenous tropical forest. Under other circumstances, it might have been disappointing – but not for me, not today.

Our local guide was waiting for us under the trees. Amani was a representative of the National Tourist Board of Rwanda, a Tutsi by ancestry. There was no mistaking him against the backdrop of dense foliage: he was wearing a fluorescent red plastic raincoat and carried a tattered child’s rucksack over his shoulder. No sooner had I set foot outside the truck than he was shaking my hand earnestly. ‘Come, it’s this way!’ he declared, taking off into the bushes before the introductions were even concluded.

Setting off to follow, Boston muttered into my ear, ‘Don’t trust this man. He is a government agent.’ I looked sidelong at him; Boston was deadly serious – but, up ahead, Amani was waving us on with the vigour of a young man who genuinely loved his job.

‘Government tourist agent,’ I said, and started to follow.

Amani was a government guide by profession but, as we entered the forest, I got to thinking he was probably far more at home taking corpulent Russian businessmen around the night spots of Kigali than he was hacking through the jungle. Before long, it seemed he had lost his bearings, and I doubted he could find his way back to the trail where we had begun. Still, his efforts at pretending he knew where the river flowed were second to none and soon, whether by accident or design, we had joined a path that screamed out ‘tourist trail’. I could tell this path was well-trodden because its edges were crisp and clear, the encroaching foliage beaten back. Spanking new signs and litter bins reinforced my impression that this was as tame as England’s own woodlands.

As we went, Amani gave us a spiel I knew must have been given to a thousand other visitors. ‘Most people think the source of the Nile is in Uganda at Lake Victoria,’ he began, ‘but most people are wrong. What you’re about to see is the true source of the river – it’s furthest tributary.’

Once again, Boston wasn’t impressed. I heard him tut beside me. Boston, it seemed, had his own beliefs about where the true source of the Nile was, but people have been fighting over the origins of this magnificent river since before recorded history began, and perhaps this was not the right moment to try to settle it once and for all.

‘Here,’ said Amani, ‘I hope you are not disappointed . . .’

At Amani’s side, we stopped. Despite the tourist trail, the tiny spring below us was every bit as insignificant and natural as I had hoped. A hole in the rock sprouted a trickle of water so pure it glistened in the mist. Dropping to my knees, I took an army-issue metal mug from my rucksack and dipped it into the water. It tasted cold and sweet, and would live forever afterwards on the tip of my tongue.

‘Not disappointed at all,’ I said, and offered the mug to Boston.

This was the Nile. More than four thousand miles to the north, the waters trickling through my fingers would meet the spectacular coast of the Mediterranean Sea. I was going to follow them, walking every step of the way.

What we were standing beside was only one of many contenders for the true source of the river. What we think of as the Nile is actually the confluence of two great rivers, the Blue Nile, whose waters rise in the highlands of Ethiopia, and the longer White Nile, whose tributaries stretch further south, through Uganda, past Lake Victoria and Tanzania, until they turn into the faint trickle whose waters I was now tasting. Even this is contested. White Nile purists are fervent in their belief that the Nile only truly begins at Jinja on the northernmost shore of Lake Victoria, but those with a less conservative approach argue that the river actually flows into Lake Victoria from the west. Here it has no name, but a few miles downstream it is known as the Mbirurumbe, and after that the Nyaborongo, and after that the Kagera; as wide as the Nile and longer than the Thames, the Kagera itself has tributaries originating in both Rwanda and Burundi. It was the longest of these, by a scant thirty miles, that Amani was showing us now.

The Nile has captured the imagination of mankind since the days of the Pharaohs, and the mystery of its source is one that held explorers at bay for millennia. The location of this little spring was a question that confounded Alexander the Great. It was a secret denied to the Roman Emperor Nero despite his expeditions upriver from the delta far to the north. In Rome, in 1651, a public fountain – the Fountain of the Four Rivers – was erected to depict the four major rivers of the known world, and the Nile was portrayed by a god with a cowled head, symbolising the fact that nobody could ever know from where the waters came. For a fascinating period in the middle of the 19th century, the urge to discover this tiny water source became a kind of grail quest for a particularly dedicated, and often idiosyncratic, group of British explorers. Piece by piece, these reckless, intrepid individuals had forced the mighty Nile to give up its secrets – by guile, pig-headedness and sheer power of will. Some of those explorers gave their lives to accomplishing this quest – others gave their legs, or their sanity itself – and in doing so, opened the world up to great swathes of the African interior.

Those Victorian explorers – David Livingstone, John Hanning Speke, Henry Morton Stanley, Samuel Baker and countless others – had lived long in my imagination, and it was faintly surreal to be standing here, having reached the apex of their quest so easily, with a big wooden sign that announced, in bold yellow letters, ‘THIS IS THE FURTHEST SOURCE OF THE NILE’ in the corner of my vision. My quest, however, lay in the opposite direction. The idea of recreating this fantastic voyage of discovery in reverse had first come to me in the winter of 2011, and it had taken almost two years to reach this point. For as long as I can remember, I had wanted to embark on an epic journey, one that harked back to the great expeditions of times past, a journey that would test me both physically and mentally in a way that no other could. I had done plenty of expeditions before, of course, and more or less devoted my life to travel and exploring the world. At the age of 21, I had hitch-hiked home from Cairo by way of a very troubled Middle East, including a reckless perambulation through Iraq just after the fall of Baghdad in 2003. A year later, I continued my roadside-thumbing career with a four-month voyage overland to India, following the fabled Silk Road. Again, I took the road less travelled, by heading through the middle of an insurgent-infested Afghanistan and fanatical Iran. It wasn’t the thrill of warzones that drew me to these hostile environments; rather, I hungered to discover the people in these places, the way humanity shines in the most troubled places of the Earth. The Nile itself had first cast its spell over me in 2010 when, as part of a charitable expedition, I had driven overland from London to Malawi to deliver ambulances to communities in need. Now, three years on, I had given in to its irresistible spell. I wanted to see the places Livingstone, Speke, Stanley and the rest had discovered as they cut their path into the heart of this most challenging continent. And, as in my expeditions in the past, I wanted to learn more about the people who lived along this mighty river, people whose lives were dictated by its ebb and flow. In a continent in which borders are always in flux, the Nile is a constant. I wanted to see how it shaped lives from the ground, day by day and mile by mile.

‘So,’ said Amani. ‘Now you begin, no?’

I stood and put the metal mug back in my rucksack. ‘Let’s start walking.’

The spring that fed into the puddle that, in turn, disappeared under the dense foliage soon faded into memory. As the day wore on, the excitement of having left the source of the Nile turned into something new: the promise of movement itself. Just as the Nile begins with a tiny trickle of water, this year-long voyage was beginning with a few tiny steps. No more planes, buses or Land Cruisers; no more anticipation and worry; now, only forward motion. On foot.

In the space of a few hundred metres, the forest seemed to alter immeasurably. Coming down the forested escarpment, we left behind the pines and eucalyptus. As we walked, the jungle grew more tropical, thick with oversized ferns and vines that wrapped around teak and mahogany giants.

Amani had nominated himself our leader, though as we progressed I could tell that my first impression of him hadn’t been far off the mark. The difficulty in following a river from a forest source is that it keeps going underground, or gets hidden by the vegetation, ferns and thorn bushes that fill the jungle floor. Above us the canopy was so thick that it was almost impossible to see the sky, and it seemed that we were walking in a perpetual twilight. On occasion, I could hear where the water trickled. It was this tiny trickle that would become the greatest river on Earth, the life’s blood of civilisations that had risen and fallen since time immemorial. This elusive trickle gave life to six nations before it met the sea, but today it proved impossible to follow.

It soon became evident that Amani was not practised at blazing a trail. His occasional entreaties – ‘This way!’ ‘Here is the river!’ – soon proved themselves little better than wishful thinking.

At my side, Boston silently shook his head. ‘All he does is go east,’ he muttered. ‘He thinks, if we get out of the forest, he will see the river then. These Rwandans, they’re not jungle people like the Congolese.’

I had known Boston for less than a week, though he came highly recommended by two friends, Tom Bodkin and Pete Meredith, who had availed themselves of his services in the past. Pete in particular had spoken highly of Boston’s skills; Boston had looked after the logistics of one of Pete’s own expeditions, to make a film about kayaking the Nile’s biggest rapids, a feat never before attempted. What they hadn’t told me was that Boston wasn’t really a guide at all. In fact, Boston had never had any formal training in anything, and I was quickly beginning to understand that he was a jack-of-all-trades wheeler-dealer. Whatever you wanted Boston to be, that was him.

He was also the most outspoken man I had met in all my travels, and it was evident he was not going to pull any punches where Amani was concerned.

Ndoole Boston had grown up in eastern Congo, at a time when that country had been rife with fighting and internal conflict. Boston was proud to come from a royal bloodline. ‘My great-grandfather ruled a tribe in the mountains west of Lake Albert,’ he had told me, before adding that, ‘He ate men. It was normal then. He was the king, and would eat whoever he wanted – men, women, enemies. It was usually enemies – but, if he had a lazy servant, he’d eat him too.’ Across the generations, though, savage cannibalism had given way to religion and Boston’s paternal grandfather, Mwalimu Ndoole Nyanuba, had been a Pentecostal pastor with his own church in rural Machumbi. Boston’s own father had rejected family tradition again, becoming first a professor of geography who passed his disgust for religion onto his son, and later an MP under Zaïre’s – later, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s – Mbutu regime. In 1993, as Boston told me, tragedy struck, when his father died under mysterious circumstances. ‘Poison,’ Boston declared as we followed Amani aimlessly through the forest. ‘He was probably murdered, although I’ll never know. That was the year I became a soldier.’

After Boston’s father died, Boston became the head of his family. When he was only seventeen years of age, his mother encouraged him to take up arms and head out to fight the roving gangs that plagued eastern Congo and protect their family ranch. In no time at all, Boston had become head of his own militia, commanding some 300 troops, and it was with these men that he joined the then-rebel forces led by the future president, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, in 1996. Boston’s unit were instrumental in taking the cities of Kisangani and Lubumbashi from government forces, and bringing about the end of the Mbutu reign.

In 2005, eight years before we met, Boston had fled the Congo. His flight followed months of targeted assassinations of former soldiers and activists like himself, and escalating violence against his family. His ‘home’ was now in Kampala, the capital of Uganda. Boston would accompany me on my journey that far, but there we would part ways, I on my journey ever north, Boston back to the comforts of his wife Lily and their three children.

Around us, the jungle was becoming denser, and the trickle of water seemed to be ebbing further away. With it impossible to keep the river – if this could truly be called a river – in sight, the only really effective method was to look around at the mean height of the trees and estimate which way was downhill. By following invisible contours, I hoped we would stay abreast of the water. The theory seemed to work, albeit slowly, but by the time we stopped to refuel with lunch we’d covered only five hundred metres in a straight line, despite our GPS having logged a distance of 4km walked. We hadn’t completed our first day of this journey, and already I had a sign that I was actually going to walk much further than the 4,250 miles I’d planned.

‘We need to cover more ground,’ said Boston, with an ironic smile pointedly directed at Amani. ‘It is not even hard going! It reminds me of my time in the Congo, but there it is much thicker.’

There was an element of malice in Boston’s voice, and I could tell that he was trying to provoke Amani in some way. Boston, the proud fighter, didn’t want to cede any authority to this skinny Tutsi who, he believed, was leading us in circles. ‘You know, Lev,’ he went on, ‘we Congolese are jungle people. We know the forests. Rwandans, well, they just look after cows. They know nothing of trees. Do you know what they call snakes in DRC?’

I hadn’t a clue.

‘Go into any restaurant in Kinshasa and you can ask for two types of fish. Water fish and tree fish.’

‘What’s a tree fish?’ This sounded like the beginning of some terrible joke.

‘It is a snake. Everything is related to the trees in the Congo. Lev, I believe I should lead from now on.’

As I tried to pick my way through the logic of this particular argument, Boston unsheathed the machete I had bought for him and encouraged us to take off. It was a sturdy army-issue panga with a comfortable wooden handle, not like the flimsy machetes that are for sale all over the African bazaars. Gripping it with an iron fist, he pushed past Amani and started cutting blindly at vines and branches. I gave Amani what I hoped was a conciliatory smile and, together, we followed.

Boston’s path didn’t seem any better than Amani’s – but his panga was making short work of the dense vegetation, and our progress was faster. With Boston blazing the trail, too, we were able to stay closer to the occasional gurgle of water that marked the Nile’s first passage. In places the water didn’t seem to flow at all, and the only indication that we were following the mighty Nile was the soft earth underfoot. Sometimes this bog seemed to suddenly grow deeper and more expansive, so that we had no choice but to pick a way across. Thick and glutinous beneath the feet, it had the same effect as quicksand, and on more than one occasion I plunged into the quagmire up to my waist. As I wriggled, shouting profanities and grappling for Amani to help me, Boston seemed to float above the filth, keeping his boots as clean as the moment they came out of the box. He really was a jungle man.

As Amani hoisted me from the quagmire for the second time, I fixed my gaze on those boots. A nice pair of desert Altbergs, they were the best money can buy. I knew it – because I’d bought them for him. He looked back at me from the undergrowth ahead, beaming. He was proud of those boots, determined not to get wet feet.

With Boston hacking away, I could better take in the wonders of the Nyungwe Forest. Amani might have been a poor bushwhacker, but he was good at one thing: it was Amani who first saw the colobus monkeys leaping through the trees above us like little black ghosts. By mid-afternoon, we had dropped a couple of hundred metres in altitude, following the natural contours of the valley. In a short distance, the stream had grown from a pure, clean trickle to a bog and then, as it filtered through layers of vegetation, it finally emerged as a fully-fledged little river. At the moment it was hardly a foot’s length across, but it was clean again and definitely flowing. Trailing my fingers in the stream, it felt as if the water – even more than me – wanted to be rid of its forested womb and head out into the open sunshine beyond.

The water and I both got our wish when, in the late afternoon, we emerged from the Nyungwe. The forest ended suddenly, snatching us from the close darkness under the canopy to the bright sunshine of fields and mountains. It had been silent in the forest, save for the gurgling of the river and the occasional sniping of Boston and Amani, but now there were new sounds: the lowing of cows.

After leaving the sweaty humidity of the forest, it was a relief to be welcomed by the sight of this open plain. From the trees the stream trickled down, through small waterfalls, and seemed to be revelling in its first touch of daylight. With Boston’s panga back in its sheath, our feet followed the water. The first sign of life was a single large cow, wading in the long grass at the bottom of a hill. On the hillside were the first signs of human habitation. Neatly furrowed fields and a few banana trees stood before the distinctive shape of a track leading south. At the bottom of the track, still clinging to the stream, several small huts hid behind a stand of tall brown-and-white eucalyptus trees.

It dawned on me that what I was looking at was the first village that depended on the Nile.

‘Come on,’ said Amani, with renewed vigour. ‘These are Batwa. Let’s speak to them before they run away.’

Amani had already set off when I realised who he was speaking about. Outside the huts were the outlines of four diminutive people.

‘Pygmies,’ said Boston as he watched Amani stride ahead, shaking his head in what I thought was reproach. ‘Do not believe what this man tells