The Nile at Mile One | Outside Online

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The Nile at Mile One
On the rough road in Uganda, where visions past and future clash, and all things flow from the mighty river.

By Mark Hertsgaard

Where the Nile enters Lake Albert, in the northwestern corner of Uganda, lies a tiny fishing village named Wanseko. It is the end of the line, the last stop on the public bus route from Kampala, the run-down capital nestled among the hills above Lake Victoria, 160 miles to the south. The trip took nine hours the day I made it, crammed inside a 1960s-vintage American-made school bus that for some reason had been painted chocolate brown. Bench seats originally meant to accommodate two schoolkids each were now packed with four and five Ugandans of all ages, the small sitting on elders' laps amid high-pitched chatter and good-natured jockeying for space.

Apart from the close quarters, the drive was pleasant and cool for the first two hours. The farther north we traveled, the drier the land became, yet it remained beautiful and apparently fertile. On either side of the road stretched plains of golden grass, dotted by cone-roofed huts and oblong structures whose white crosses identified them as the schools and churches bequeathed by European missionaries a century ago.

By the time we reached Wanseko, it was late afternoon and I was one of only three passengers still on the bus. Wanseko was little more than a few low-slung shacks grouped around a dusty clearing the size of a football field. To the west, across Lake Albert, I could dimly make out the mountains of Zaire through a bluish haze. There was nothing like a hotel in town, so I paid the equivalent of a single U.S. dollar to spend the night inside a barren concrete room behind the general store.

Even more than his white skin, what set Churchill apart from the Africans he encountered was the technology at his disposal—guns, steamships, railways, the telegraph, and other emblems of the industrial era.

I had come to Wanseko while retracing a trip that Winston Churchill made through Africa in 1907. At the time, the future British prime minster had just begun his first significant government appointment, as Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for the Colonies, a post that naturally included Africa among its concerns. Churchill's expedition took him by ship across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal and around the Horn of Africa to the old Arab port city of Mombasa, located on the Indian Ocean in what is now Kenya. The newly constructed Uganda Railway carried him west to Nairobi and on to Lake Victoria, the presumed source of the Nile. He crossed the great lake and followed the Nile through Uganda, Sudan, and Egypt to Cairo. The expedition was a combination of business and pleasure for the 33-year-old Churchill, undertaken during Parliament's autumn recess and paid for in part by a book he would write about the experience, My African Journey.

Part travelogue, part policy paper, My African Journey is a short, impassioned book of dazzling prose and keen observation. It articulates virtually all facets of the ideology that shaped industrial man's impact on Africa in the 20th century—the values, fears, goals, and justifications that animated European efforts to recast the human and physical environment of Africa. Churchill saw the continent through the eyes of an inveterate colonizer, an unashamed imperialist who believed that colonialism benefitted colonizer and colonized alike. Even more than his white skin, what set Churchill apart from the Africans he encountered was the technology at his disposal—guns, steamships, railways, the telegraph, and other emblems of the industrial era. Technology had brought wealth and progress to the people of Britain, argued Churchill, and it would do the same for the population still mired in the "primary squalor" of Africa.

When I pulled a copy of My African Journey down from a friend's bookshelf in Nairobi, I was in the midst of traveling around the world, researching a book about the many environmental pressures crowding in on the human race at the end of the 20th century. Churchill's unqualified enthusiasm for technology had helped convince me to retrace his African journey, for technology, of course, lies at the heart of humanity's relationship with the environment. Yet to many contemporary environmentalists, technology is almost a dirty word. The root of the problem, as they see it, is the arrogant belief that modern man can, by virtue of his technology, live separate from, even superior to, nature—"to tame the jungle," as Churchill put it.

It is easy for a late-20th-century observer to condemn Churchill's boorish insistence on conquering nature. But there is no denying that technology has been inseparable from human progress since time immemorial. From the moment our first human ancestor picked up the first stone tool more than two million years ago—an event which, according to the fossil record, may have occurred less than 300 miles northeast of Wanseko, in the Great Rift Valley—the fate of our species has been inextricably linked to the creation of technologies that gave us more efficient means of extracting food, water, shelter, and other essentials from the physical environment. Churchill's generation had particularly good reason to regard technology as a liberating force. For millennia, the vast majority of humans had lived on the edge of starvation, struggling against natural forces beyond their control. But the industrial ascent of the 19th century—notwithstanding the often abominable working conditions imposed on the laboring classes—had shown how the application of technology could raise living standards for nearly everyone.

Like other champions of the industrial order then and now, Churchill had big ideas about what technology, properly applied, could achieve. I was following in his footsteps partly because My African Journey had made such a trip sound like irresistible fun, with enough risk thrown in to keep it interesting. But I also wanted to see how Churchill's ideas compared to African reality nearly a century later, and what that implied about our contemporary environmental dilemma.

That night in Wanseko, I wondered whether Churchill had managed to arrange better accommodations than I had. I slept poorly in my concrete hovel, awakened repeatedly by the chickens—or was it rats?—that, inches from my head, rustled and scratched against the wall outside.

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Mark Hertsgaard lives near Washington, D.C. This article is excerpted from Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future, published by Broadway Books.