The Nile at Mile One (cont)

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The Nile at Mile One (cont)
Churchill's vision still struggles to take hold.
When we finally departed, the crowding inside the matatu made it impossible for us passengers to see much outside, which was just as well. Daredevil speeds and passing maneuvers are matters of honor among many matatu drivers, and grisly accounts of highway deaths are a staple of the region's newspapers. One story featured photographs of a matatu that hit a petroleum tanker head-on while struggling to pass another matatu; the passengers had been charred into blackened lumps where they sat. Africans I talked to were aware of the dangers of riding these minibuses—how could they not be?—but they accepted them with placid nonchalance. On a continent where one infant in seven does not survive to age five and a woman of 50 is considered old, death is regarded not as a distant stranger, but as a familiar companion. Africans accept death and discomfort because they have no choice, just as they ride matatus because the only alternative is to cover the same distance on foot.

Africans accept death and discomfort because they have no choice, just as they ride matatus because the only alternative is to cover the same distance on foot.

Wherever I traveled, urban Africans seemed caught in a kind of purgatory, somewhere between the seductions of modernity and the habits of tradition. They had access to some of the same trappings of city life found in Europe and the United States, but these trappings were always compromised. There was mass transit, but it was wildly dangerous; newspapers, but they were only four pages long; public schools, but without books. Of the feast of materialism that Churchill had promised them so long ago, the vast majority of Africans had tasted barely a bite.

At the Ugandan border, I had to switch to yet another matatu to make the trip to Jinja, a town on Lake Victoria's northern shore near the source of the Nile. Churchill had ridiculed Jinja as an "outlandish name" for a town that geography and geopolitics had plainly destined for greatness; he wanted to rename it Ripon Falls, "after the beautiful cascades which lie beneath it, and from whose force its future prosperity will be derived." What was needed, he added, was to build a dam and "let the Nile begin its long and beneficent journey to the sea by leaping through a turbine." Easy to say, but it was 1954 before this vision was actually accomplished.

On the ride to Jinja, my matatu passed the electric power station that now hummed beside the dam. But the other blessings forecast by Churchill—"the gorge of the Nile crowded with factories and warehouses" and "crowned with long rows of comfortable tropical villas and imposing offices"—had yet to materialize. And later that afternoon, when a few greedy matatu drivers suddenly raised the price of the trip to Kampala by the equivalent of ten cents, more than half of the passengers angrily disembarked and prepared to wait two more hours for a later matatu rather than pay the higher fare.

The source of the Nile, where the world's longest river emerges from Africa's largest lake, should rank as one of the great scenic spots on earth. But because of the dam two miles downriver, "the beautiful cascades" of Ripon Falls have disappeared beneath the waterline, so now no one spot stands out as the precise beginning of the Nile. Gazing down from the tidy park that overlooked the Nile, I watched a flock of long-necked, brilliantly white birds wheel lazily across the river before settling back among the branches of a half-submerged tree. On the far bank, swaying in the light breeze, were row upon row of rubbery leafed matoke trees, which provide the banana-like staple of the local diet. Off to my left, Victoria Bay, calm and spacious, curled out of sight to meld seamlessly into the great lake. Without question, this remained a place of uncommon beauty and peacefulness. Yet a feeling of loss and incompleteness was inescapable. What this cosmic site on the earth's surface looked like before the coming of industrial man could now barely be imagined. Churchill provided an inkling: here the Nile was "a vast body of water nearly as wide as the Thames at Westminster Bridge, and this imposing river rushes down a stairway of rock . . . in smooth, swirling slopes of green water."

Leaving the park, I stopped to chat with the young man who had sold me my entrance ticket. Neatly dressed, wearing flimsy eyeglasses with black plastic frames, he lounged beneath a tree with a friend, taking refuge from the midday sun. Yes, he agreed, this was a very beautiful place to work, but day after day, week after week, it sometimes got boring. Spying his newspaper on the ground, I asked why he did not bring a book to read. It was a foolish question, but his answer was polite.

"It is very difficult to obtain books in Uganda," he explained. "Our shops are usually empty. And any book for sale costs a great deal of money." When I marveled at how lovely this place must have been before the dam, he was again a step ahead of me, seeming to read my mind and discern my unspoken assumptions.

"Yes," he smiled, with the enchanting gentleness I found to be so common among East Africans. "But the dam has done much good for us, giving us electricity."

"You trade one for the other," I said.

He beamed with the pleasure of having communicated perfectly across our cultural divide. "Yes! You trade one for the other."

Compressed in that brief exchange is the essential dilemma facing the human species as it approaches the 21st century. Can the material strivings of the entire human family be reconciled with the need to protect the planet's already strained ecosystems? Of course that young Ugandan deserves books, and electric light to read them by. And if he must, he will accept a great many aesthetic and environmental woundings in return for such benefits of progress. But must he? Can prosperity be achieved only through the kind of ruthless "development" that has turned so much of the Third World—from the industrial hellholes of China to the clear-cut forests of Brazil—into environmental wastelands? Can we not learn to choose technologies that help us work with, rather than against, nature, and thereby preserve as much of it as possible in its original, wild state?

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