The Nile at Mile One (cont.)

Outside Magazine

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The Nile at Mile One (cont.)
Retracing the past reveals the fact that everything and nothing has changed.

Churchill felt no shame in observing that Africans were members of "an inferior race." Nevertheless, he argued, they could make the leap to modernity with the help of the British Empire. The "four millions of these dark folk" living in England's East Africa Protectorate could improve their standard of living if they would only accept the guidance of Europeans and embrace industrial development. Of course, Africans were not given much choice in the matter. This was the era of untrammeled European imperialism in Africa, and Britain was determined not to lose out in the carving up of the continent. Occupation of Kenya required the removal of such tribes as the Kikuyu and Masai from lands they had occupied for centuries, a task local British authorities pursued with relish. Author Peter Matthiessen has written that by 1939, "four-fifths of the best land in Kenya was the province of perhaps 4,000 whites; a million Kikuyu were to make do with the one-fifth set aside as the Kikuyu Reserves." Ugandans were more successful at resisting such expropriations. The country has suffered through terrible civil strife and an AIDS pandemic in recent decades, but partly because land ownership is far more evenly distributed than elsewhere in East Africa, hunger and poverty are noticeably less prevalent.

Next to a chemical processing plant, clusters of silver piping thrust themselves skyward like industrial dandelions, while overhead a red-and-white jetliner screamed its approach to the international airport.

Churchill insisted that Britain's intervention in eastern Africa would benefit all parties, but in retracing his journey roughly nine decades after the fact, I found the economic disparity between Africa and the industrial world as vast as ever. The forces of progress that Churchill championed seemed to have changed everything and nothing here. The physical environment had certainly been altered, but the prosperity derived was limited and narrowly distributed.

The first leg of Churchill's sojourn was the magnificent train ride from Mombasa to Lake Victoria. When I took that same train ride, I was impressed, as we pulled out of Mombasa, to see numerous signs of a functioning industrial society: smokestacks, power lines, petroleum refinery tanks, and row after row of low concrete warehouses awaiting replenishment from the half-dozen container ships moored in Kilindini Harbor. Next to a chemical processing plant, clusters of silver piping thrust themselves skyward like industrial dandelions, while overhead a red-and-white jetliner screamed its approach to the international airport. But the lives of the people were another matter; I often felt as if an African version of A Tale of Two Cities was playing out before me. As the descending airliner disappeared below the jagged skyline, the train chugged slowly past a squalid shantytown whose tin-roofed shacks of rotted wood contained the shops and meager households of the urban masses. Sprawled on the ground not ten feet from our click-clacking wheels, a man in trousers and a short-sleeve shirt slept open-mouthed, as if poisoned or drunk. Past the city limits, small children scampered from their mud and grass huts to gather along the track, wave and cheer, and plead with outstretched palms, "Give me pen! Give me sweet!" or merely, "Something!" Meanwhile, the gulf separating the races of eastern Africa remained as wide as when Churchill was writing condescendingly that it was impossible to "travel even for a little while among the Kikuyu tribes without acquiring a liking for these lighthearted, tractable, if brutish children, or without feeling that they are capable of being instructed and raised from their present degradation." Black-on-black tribal violence was still common, there was no love lost between black Africans and the Asian merchant class, and the dominant emotions between Africans and Europeans were distrust and fear. The closest interaction most whites had with blacks occurred within master-servant relationships. Spend an evening in the company of whites and one certain topic of conversation would be the relative honesty and competence of their maids, cooks, and gardeners. "You just never know what they'll fancy," one Nairobi matron, recalling alleged stealing, mused while being served Christmas dinner by a squad of middle-aged servants.

There was no more revealing symbol of the chasm between blacks and whites than the matatu, a vehicle in which most whites never set foot but that was the primary means of transport for blacks. To be sure, there were good reasons not to set foot in a matatu—unless terrible overcrowding and a high risk of death or dismemberment were your ideas of excitement. Matatu was a Swahili term for privately operated minibuses that were much faster than public buses, far more numerous, and only slightly more expensive. They also had lots more personality. Every matatu in Kenya had a nickname painted in bright colors across the front and back of the vehicle, with speed the usual theme. I rode one matatu called the Singaha Quick. Other names I saw included the Road Shark, the Gusii Express, and inexplicably, the '90s Explainer.

When I reached Lake Victoria, the only way to carry on to Uganda was by matatu. (The ferry Churchill took across the lake had long since gone out of service.) The bus stand in Kisumu, a bustling town on Lake Victoria's eastern shore, was a beehive of cheerful chaos when I arrived the next morning. While hawkers whistled, clapped, and shouted out their destinations, passengers milled about, occasionally hoisting their belongings up onto the roof before boarding their matatu of choice. I was assigned to an older matatu that already looked more than full. Twelve adults sat facing one another on metal benches that extended in a horseshoe down both sides of the van. Each person's hips and shoulders were wedged firmly against his or her neighbors'; I couldn't move my legs without kicking the person across the row. The last passenger on board, a broadly smiling young man wearing a dark wool suit (wool!) and carrying a large cardboard box, was directed to sit in a nonexistent space across the aisle from me. I watched him with my own eyes and still don't know how he managed to fit.

While we waited to depart, the skipping guitar riffs of African pop music filled the air and hopeful vendors approached the van. A hand would suddenly thrust its way inside the open back door, six inches from my face, and flash bottles of soda, or boiled eggs, pineapple slices, sweets, cheap wristwatches, plastic bowls and cups, cassette tapes, wrench and screwdriver sets, handkerchiefs, earrings, or most bizarre of all, packet after packet of unlabeled pills.

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