The Last Train to Zona Verde (26 page)

Trevor said, “Making sure that sperm gets where it’s supposed to.”

“That was something,” I said.

Trevor said, “Wait. Give big boy ten more minutes.”

In less than that time, the lion woke from his doze, yawned again, padded over to the lioness on his right, and squatted over her, knees apart.

As the lion lay sideways and slept again, Trevor said, “He’s not done. Wait a little bit. You’ll see.”

Just as Trevor had said, the lion roused himself and mated again with the first lioness. After this third time, Trevor predicted there would be more couplings, at roughly ten-minute intervals. And it happened. Karen Blixen wrote in
Out of Africa
, “You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.”

“Every man’s fantasy,” Trevor said. Then, “Oryx.”

This sex and sleeping ritual by the three lions was taking place about forty feet from a herd of fifteen oryx, which were lapping at the edge of the waterhole along with a flock of Egyptian geese, two jackals, a file of ostriches, and two giraffes, heads down, canted forward on their wide-apart legs. And it was not a large waterhole; it was hardly bigger than a suburban family’s swimming pool. Oliver said it was rare to see all these animals, different species, several of them predators or natural enemies, sharing the water peacefully, if warily, without threatening each other.

At sundown we returned to our lodge at Okaukuejo in time to witness herds of tourists, hundreds of them, alighting from buses and streaming from their rooms. Within minutes they were jostling in the dining room, pushing in a rowdy line to flourish empty plates that they held one-handed at their sides in the fidget of discus throwers, ready to launch themselves at the buffet. They looked fierce, their red faces and bulging eyes gleaming in the heat. There is something terrible about a naked display of hunger, and its nearest passion is perhaps lust.

“Germans,” Trevor said, in the same tone as he’d said “Oryx.”

They were clamoring for the platters of roast kudu and sliced chicken, basins of pasta, piles of mashed potatoes, and green salad. Four women edged forward, attempting to jump the queue, and the crowd’s panting and uneasiness were audible, intimations of appetite, many of them sighing impatiently or muttering with bad grace, and there were words, too. You could not watch all this pushing without thinking of the order at the waterhole, the placidly drinking animals. Of the one million tourists who visit Namibia, most are German, the rest from other European nations, and nearly all swing through Etosha in bulky tour buses.

There is a rule in Africa: do not get between an elephant and the water. Trevor said, “Don’t get between a tourist and the buffet.”

At the floodlit, fenced-off waterhole at the back of the Okaukuejo lodge, mammals gathered at either side of the barrier, the tourists to watch and whisper, the rhinos and eland to lap at the water.

“Tell me,” Trevor said in a rhetorical tone, “what’s the difference between this and a zoo?”

We debated this point until we were shushed and reprimanded by a stern German for talking too loud.

We set out early the next morning to drive around the perimeter of the pan. Motoring for hours to spot animals is less interesting to me than happening upon them while en route to a destination. I
used to like the sight of hippos that crept past the schoolroom where I was conducting an evening class near Lake Katwe in Uganda, or the hyena that routinely pawed at my compost heap in Malawi at night when I sat reading. I preferred animals as background rather than foreground, like the glimpse of the hefty baboon on the road to Swakopmund, which appeared from the parted grass like a pedestrian, waiting to cross the road.

We came to a place called Halali on my map, but it was merely a dead end and a mud wallow. Nearby was a small cemetery. One of the strictest rules in Etosha was that no one should leave the safety of one’s vehicle. I mentioned this.

Trevor said, “But I don’t see anyone checking, do you?”

Being out of the car in this great flat sun-struck place was a liberation. The cemetery, surrounded by an old iron fence to discourage animals from violating the graves, contained the remains of seven Boers, their names and dates inscribed in old-style letters on the granite stones. All dated from the 1870s. These were people who had obviously died in this inhospitable salt pan on their way to Angola, during what was called the Dorsland (“Thirstland”) Trek, when hundreds of white South African farmers migrated north seeking greener pastures and more elbow room. One gravestone read
Joh. Alberts 1841–1874
— no doubt a relation of Gert Alberts, one of the instigators, and the leader, of the trek. It was the trekkers’ fate that they had to cross the Kalahari and hundreds of miles of Etosha Desert and Ovamboland before reaching the great Kunene River and the green uplands of Angola. Just as bad as the fierce animals were the Portuguese, who stipulated that in return for the right to settle, these Dutch Protestants had to convert to Catholicism. Still, many of the renegade Afrikaners ended up farming in Angola.

While we strolled around this small cemetery in the middle of empty glittering Etosha, Trevor suddenly said, “Elephants at two o’clock.”

They were tiny in the distance, perhaps a mile away, swaying out of the shadows of a wide grove of trees as though leaving a low building. They moved slowly and at times gingerly, like barefoot children on gravel, because, Trevor said, the broken stones were sharp enough to press into the soft pads on the elephants’ tender soles.

We watched, and within half an hour more than forty elephants had gathered at the wallow. Most of them were mothers with babies, some male elephants bullied by the bigger females, and all of them active — rolling in the mud, trumpeting, spraying themselves with squirting trunks of water, the little ones stumbling in the deeper puddles. And there we stood, beholding the marvel of this sudden herd. Seeing so many sociable elephants together while we stood gaping was our reward for visiting Etosha, and I could not help but think of the tamed and obedient, and perhaps resentful, elephants at Abu.

Deeper into Etosha the land was flatter and without any trees, and as the day grew hotter the whole of the pan was blinding white and lifeless.

We came to Namutoni. Francis Galton had been here too, when it was known as a reliable waterhole, “a reedy boggy fountain … We were received very hospitably and had a tree assigned to us to camp under.” He also complained, “We traveled through everlasting thorns and stones for nine hours, and offpacked at wells — wretched affairs that we had to sit up half the night to clean and dig out.”

Some miles to the southeast of Namutoni was Otjikoto Lake, which Galton called “that remarkable tarn, Otchikoto … a deep bucket-shaped hole” filled with water. The local Ovambo told him the dark magical stories associated with the lake, “that no living thing that ever got into it could come out again.” Hearing this, Galton and his two mates stripped off their clothes, descended the bank to the water, and went swimming. Thus they “dispelled that
illusion from the savage mind under the astonished gaze not only of the whole caravan but quantities of Bushmen who lived about the place.”

The fort at Namutoni was a set of square whitewashed battlements and watchtowers in the desert that could serve as the backdrop for a foreign-legion movie. Indeed, a foreign legion had once manned it — the German soldiers of the Schutztruppe, which repelled various attacks on the garrison by the Ovambo people in 1904. Ovambo Chief Nehale, who ordered and led the attacks, is remembered by Namibians as one of their earliest anti-colonial heroes. The seven Germans of the Schutztruppe who repulsed the attacks are remembered by the Germans for their colonial heroism. After the attacks, which destroyed most of the structure, the fort was rebuilt and enlarged in 1906 to its present form, and like everything else the Germans built in the colony, it was handed over to the South Africans less than ten years later.

At Namutoni, over cheese sandwiches, Oliver and I swapped stories of the Peace Corps. He had been a teacher in a rural village in Madagascar.

“One day the mailman came with a letter addressed to me,” he said. “Funny — I didn’t get much mail. This was from someone in a town about twenty kilometers away. It was a very short note saying, ‘I would like to see you.’ It was from a girl I had said hello to at the market there. How did I know that? Because she included a picture of herself. She was sitting under a bridge — naked.”

I said, “I can’t top that.”

Trevor said, “We want to know more.”

“I thought you might,” Oliver said, looking inscrutable.

As we had only one more day together, I asked Oliver over dinner about the Millennial Challenge Corporation. Passing the lodges at Etosha — they were large and sprawling and some could accommodate hundreds of tourists — he had mentioned that they were being
upgraded. “The staff quarters are going to be moved over there,” he had said as he drove around the rundown workers’ housing. “This is all going to be cleaned up.” Oliver knew the plans and the people involved, and he’d said that one of his tourism projects in the country was being funded with Millennial Challenge money.

The Millennial Challenge Corporation had been started in 2004 during the Bush administration, a consequence of the frustration of people who saw USAID and other agencies pouring money into countries with no tangible results and little oversight. The money either disappeared into the pockets of local politicians or financed projects that were never finished. Anyone who has spent even a short time in a Third World country has seen this waste of money and the futility of a great deal of foreign aid. Africa is the happy hunting ground of donors, also of people seeking funds. The classic African failed state is composed of a busy capital city where politicians on large salaries hold court and drive big cars; dense and hopeless slums surrounding the capital; and the great empty hinterland, ignored by the government and more or less managed by foreign charities, which in many cases are big businesses run by highly paid executives.

In 2007, Oliver, with his Peace Corps zeal, had started working for the Millennial Challenge Corporation in the area of “project appraisal.” The following year he became deputy director in Namibia, and in 2011 was appointed the resident country director.

“How much are you giving to Namibia?” I asked.

“A little over three hundred million — but let me explain,” he said, because hearing the large number I had started to snort. “The grant is administered in stages over five years, in what we call a compact. And before a country qualifies for a compact it has to pass the eligibility requirements. It takes two years for a country to go through the process. This isn’t handing over money, the way it was done in the past. It’s a rigorous process.”

“What sort of requirements, apart from ‘We need money’?” I had my notebook out and was writing down his replies.

“There’s three categories we measure them by. Ruling justly. Economic freedom. And investing in people. If these don’t exist, no money. Each of the categories is broken down into seventeen indicators — like land rights, civil liberties, control of corruption, freedom of information — and they have to be low- or middle-income countries. Botswana doesn’t qualify, because they already have money. After the coup in Madagascar in 2009 their compact was terminated.”

“So a country simply applies, and hopes to qualify?”

“We can help a country to qualify by giving a threshold grant — fifteen or twenty million. They’d use this to sort out their policies. That creates a pathway to getting a compact that ranges from two hundred to five hundred million. Like I say, Namibia qualified for three hundred million.”

“What’s the limit?”

“Tanzania got seven hundred million for roads and energy and some other projects. That’s spread over five years. They’re now three years into it, and it’s working out.”

“Almost three quarters of a billion for Tanzania! They don’t even like us!”

“Remember when George Bush visited Tanzania in 2008?” Oliver said. “It was a very successful visit. He made promises to them.”

“I also remember the 1960s when the Tanzanians claimed they were Maoists. They got the Chinese to build them the Tan-Zam Railway, which is now falling apart,” I said. “Anyway, who gets the money? I mean, are American companies hired to do the work — say, on roads?”

“A U.S. company successfully competed for the energy project in Tanzania. I think I can say that we’re achieving U.S. development and foreign policy objectives.”

I mentioned that I had read in a Namibian newspaper that a Chinese company in the country, financed by American aid money, had underpaid and cheated its Namibian employees.

“You saw that, eh?” Oliver said. It had been a front-page headline. “Chinese government firms once qualified for this money, but that’s not the case anymore.” But he added that less than 10 percent of Namibia’s grant went to American companies. Most of the money went to Namibian or South African firms.

“So we’re giving money to foreign companies to do the work. And we used to give it to the Chinese?”

“It’s an open bidding process,” he said. “And we do audits. There’s no evidence that contractors are misappropriating the funds.” Slightly exasperated by my questions, he said, “You wouldn’t believe how much time we spend in monitoring these grants and double-checking.”

“Still, it’s a ton of money.”

“But there’s constant evaluation of performance. We don’t take people’s word for it, or list numbers as USAID once did — meaningless numbers. We invest money in monitoring, in making sure the money is used the right way, looking at the target, and the performance against that target.”

And, he said, sometimes a Millennial Challenge compact is in place and something changes that queers a development deal. Malawi was a recent example. Its government signed on to a $300 million compact for investment in the energy sector, but not long after the signing there was a demonstration in Malawi’s capital against the government’s human rights abuses. Nineteen demonstrators were shot dead by the army and many were injured.