Around the World in 50 Years (46 page)

When the officer demanded $50 from me, I told him, in my most forceful French, I had already paid for my visa.

He looked unimpressed: “Money, money, money.”

I told him the Chadian ambassador in the U.S. had assured me I did not have to pay more money to enter Chad.

He looked at me as if I were a simpleton; “Money. Money.”

I asked him to show me the regulation that required me to pay.

He looked at me as if I was a troublemaker.

I told him I would pay him only if he gave me a signed receipt.

He choked with laughter and shared the joke with two of his colleagues who were waiting for their cut of the loot.

I flipped over my passport and pointed to the business card that I had, for this very purpose, inserted under the clear plastic protective cover. It bore an engraving of the White House and stated that Albert Podell was Barack Obama's “Presidential Partner.” I emphasized that the building—my home base?—was
“La Maison Blanche dans Washington.”
(The president had sent me ten of these impressive cards in 2009 to thank me for having been a large and early donor to his campaign, and this was the first time I'd used it for anything other than picking up women.)

The price of the bribe dropped to $15.

I had only a 20, which I gave him, and asked for change. For this I got the biggest laugh of the day and a wave to get-the-hell-out, now.

Corruption like this is endemic in Africa. It is unfair, wearying, invasive, disheartening, and destructive. But it can be turned to good advantage, as we later did.

To secure a visa for Chad, I'd booked our first night at the overpriced Novotel La Tchadienne, one of the few establishments that could provide the letter of invitation required for the application process. The hotel was a mere shade of its glory days, when French tourists thronged to Chad for some fun in the sun and sand. It was French to its core—the room contained a full dozen complimentary condoms of the Prudence brand, with its straightforward slogan, emphatically applicable to this AIDS-ravaged area: “Abstinence, Fidelity, or Prudence.”

After we had hobnobbed with the rich and powerful by the Tchadienne's large but freezing pool for a day, we moved into Spartan quarters at a local missionary guesthouse, where my Cornell cohorts Carl and Karen had worked for the past 13 years.

I had chartered a plane from a local flight service to fly Andrew, Carl, Karen, and me down to the edge of Lake Chad, but it turned out to be such a windy, dusty day in N'Djamena that our plane was not allowed to take off. The airport lacked the instrument needed for this kind of weather, and it was not expected to be delivered for three months.

So as not to waste the day, Carl and Karen took us to visit one of their many Chadian friends, Colonel Aran of the Presidential Guard. He graciously received us in a heavily carpeted large tent in his family compound, where his three wives served us glasses of delicious, scalding, sweet mint tea, while several of the younger of his “about 20” children snuggled in his lap and sneaked peeks at the foreigners as the colonel regaled us with his quintessential African story.

Twenty years before, when Aran had been a wild young kid, he joined Idriss Déby's 2,000-man Patriotic Salvation Army (MPS in French), helped him overthrow the government of Hissène Habré, and became a member of Déby's inner circle. He later grew dissatisfied with Déby's administration, defected from it, and joined the United Front for Democratic Change (whose unfortunate French acronym is FUC), an anti-Déby rebel movement operating from Sudan. After two years of rebelling, followed by some delicate negotiations, Aran rejoined Déby's government as a highly placed colonel in his Presidential Guard and actively fought against his former FUC buddies during their attack in early February 2008 (when my plane could not land in N'Djamena). It is not possible to find a U.S. analogy. The closest might be if a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army or Weather Underground joined the president's Cabinet, then defected to the Branch Davidians or the skinheads, then rejoined the government and was appointed deputy director of the Secret Service. But, again, TIA.

The colonel and I managed some quality face time, aided by fluent translations from Carl and Karen, and we bonded as kindred spirits, after which he ardently advised me to “take a wife or two, so you have someone to massage your rheumatism in old age.”

He then invited us, and two of his brothers, and two of his children, to travel—all in Carl's 4
×
4—two hours east of the capital to watch the horse races scheduled for that afternoon in his brother's village.

It was a turn-of-the-century scene, a thousand Arab men—only men—lining the race route, dressed in spotless white cloaks, with white scarves pulled across their noses and mouths to keep out the desert dust and keep alive an ancient tradition. I saw some superb horsemanship during the four races, each about 800 yards along a large oval track of hard-packed dirt outside the village. One rider fell off his horse, one horse fell on his rider, one loser protested the result until the announced winner was disqualified, after which a few fists flew among those who felt wrongly deprived, and a good time was had by all.

Back in N'Djamena, it was evident that Chad was in sorry shape. The capital was utterly listless—little activity, little joy. The people looked traumatized, which is understandable after several decades of rebellions, civil wars, genocide in Darfur, unresponsive governments, distrust, oppression, and widespread corruption. Andrew did not react well to this atmosphere and, after walking only two blocks with me, excused himself and rushed back to the safety of the guesthouse. What the hell was wrong with this tough guy who was supposed to be protecting me?

We eventually needed to avail ourselves of Chad's culture of corruption. The regime—ever wary—required foreigners to register within 72 hours of arrival. We'd arrived on a Thursday and we'd sought to register on Friday, but wherever we went—immigration, the police, the French Embassy, the Ministry of the Interior—no one knew where the rare tourist should go to register. Then all the government offices closed early for the weekend, leaving Andrew and me with glaring gaps in our passports where the immigration police had rubber-stamped a form that was to be filled in when we registered. They had warned us that the penalty for failing to register was severe, including detention. If we were not allowed to fly out on Sunday because of the missing registration, our ongoing itinerary would be a shambles.

On Saturday morning, while we'd been waiting in vain at the airport for the sandstorm to abate, Carl, aware of our problem, had undertaken some reconnaissance and, within ten minutes, had found a senior police officer who offered to meet us at the airport the next day—his day off, he emphasized—to grease some palms and facilitate our departure.

Because Carl is both a good Christian and a guest of the government, he did not resort to outright bribery to secure our freedom, as when you specifically pay an official to achieve a certain result. Instead, using his extensive knowledge of Chadian culture and mores, he conveyed to the cowboy cop, without mentioning money or any amounts thereof, that the cop's intercession on our behalf would be appreciated. “Highly appreciated.”

On Sunday morning, with our bags packed and those empty forms burning holes in our passports, Andrew and I and Carl rendezvoused with the cop, who made the rounds of his colleagues for 30 minutes, after which we were whisked through immigration with VIP dispatch as every official in the area pointedly looked the other way. I wouldn't try this technique at JFK, but it's SOP in much of Africa and enabled us to stay on schedule and, via Addis and Nairobi, catch the Midnight Special flying to Mogadishu.

Mogadishu was a blast, but, fortunately, not literally. Although widely deemed “The World's Most Dangerous City,” I was pleased to find that, after some 30 years of battling warlords and radical Islamists, it was returning to some form of normality. Two months before, Al-Shabaab had been driven out of all but two northern sections, with so many jihadis killed that they were no longer a match for the 9,000 African Union (AU) and UN soldiers protecting the town.

I visited the spot where the helicopter from
Black Hawk Down
went down and saw some of the heavy parts of the chopper embedded in the clumps of cactus. I walked along dazzling Lido Beach, a world-class strand of wide white sand bordered by war-shattered villas with not one surviving roof or window in a mile. In the reopened outdoor market in the heart of town I found an authentic, Somali-style stool to add to my African stool collection, then at ten. I visited a large IDP (Internally Displaced Person) camp where, despite having nothing but a few pieces of cardboard and plastic garbage bags over their heads for improvised tents, and only getting one meal a day from the refugee organizations, the people—mostly women and children; their husbands and fathers are dead—were exceptionally warm and accessible, eager to pose for photos, and delighted to see their digitized images.

But before you conclude that this sounds like a safe, ordinary, tourist trip, let me note that Andrew and I always had two hired guards walking in front of us with AK-47s locked and loaded, two similarly armed guards walking behind us, plus one guard on each side, all wearing flak jackets, plus two security chiefs beside us, inside this protective square, scanning the roofs and sweeping the alleys with binoculars for killers or kidnappers, all trailed by two specially equipped, bullet-resistant 4
×
4s that were in constant contact by walkie-talkie, ready to pick us up instantly if any incident unfolded, the entire entourage guarding me and Andrew (at $770 a day) from the second we left our residence to the moment we returned.

Andrew Doran, who accompanied me to the Savage Seven, and is trained in martial arts, sits with three of our six heavily armed Somali guards in Mogadishu. We rode in a bullet-proof window-tinted SUV while the guards both preceded and followed us in pickup trucks, searching for snipers and IEDs.
Andrew Doran

Mogadishu was hardly likely to win a Safe Cities award anytime soon, but the expat who headed our security provider optimistically opined that, “Mog is coming back. My construction business is flourishing. Mog might soon be a boomtown. Those wrecked, abandoned houses on the beach may be worth a million bucks in a few years. You can buy one today for next to nothing. You'll see. You'll know we've made it as soon as Mickey Dee, KFC, and the Russian hookers move in.”

A representative of the AU Mission, which provided the troops to clear the jihadis out of the country, told me that two of Mog's main markets had just reopened, people were “streaming back” to their homes, roads were being repaved, houses rebuilt, and Mog was “experiencing a resurgence.” The prime minister summed it up: After 20 years of competing warlords, pirates, tribal extremists, and religious fanatics, “Somalis are sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

But the rest of the nation was not in the control of the government or the AU; it was lawless, with seven million people facing starvation. Their only alternative—making the long, difficult, and dangerous journey to the refugee camps on the borders of Kenya—was not viable because those camps were already filled to over 500 percent of capacity, and the process of getting food to them was rife with corruption. Yet, despite this, the moribund economy was coming to life in a few spots as nomadic Muslim shepherds sold hundreds of thousands of goats and sheep to the northern livestock markets, from which daring Lebanese and Saudi traders exported this prized halal meat to Mecca to feed the annual two million foreign pilgrims.

From Somalia I flew, alone, to Juba, the capital of South Sudan. Andrew had become increasingly weird and paranoid. He declared that, despite our earlier agreement, he would not go with me to South Sudan, but would travel on his own to Kenya and take a “safe” tourist safari with a guide. When I asked him what was wrong, he became angry, insisted he was fine, and refused to disclose more. I had no idea what was causing his atypical behavior, but had no doubt that something was significantly amiss. He agreed, albeit reluctantly, to meet me in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, in ten days, to begin the long journey through guerrilla country.

South Sudan was then in the final stages of the euphoria that followed its independence, still less than six months old, and before the inevitable hangover hits and reality bites, as it must. Wherever I looked, I saw T-shirts and signs proclaiming the glory of freedom and the elation of liberty, but I saw no tangible signs of reconstruction or advancement. Every billboard was tied to independence, from those advertising that freedom meant having a cell phone to those declaring that
WE SAY NO TO VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN IN OUR NEWLY INDEPENDENT NATION
—but those women were the only ones toiling in the heat. And I was shocked when I learned that a larger number of South Sudanese teenage girls died each year during childbirth than were trying to complete primary school!