Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (60 page)

Every village they passed ‘had been burnt to the ground, and as I fled from the country I saw skeletons, skeletons everywhere; and such postures, what tales of horror they told! . . . A beautiful yellow covers this spot on the map, with a fringe of red spots with flags attached, denoting stations of the Congo free state . . . the whole system is bunkum . . . the stations marked do not exist; and read, mark and inwardly digest: I have to pay a licence
to carry a gun
in the country.’

A year before Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
was published in serial form Grogan witnessed scenes that could have been lifted out of the novel. The culprits were raiders from the Congo, encouraged by the amoral Belgian experiment in using murder and slavery to extract rubber and ivory from the forest. Askaris, or Force Publique soldiers, armed by the Belgians, led a riot of theft and murder into the surrounding territories. Behind them came the Congo cannibal tribes such as the Baleka, or Bareka. According to Grogan’s researches they were ‘well made and pleasant featured, averaging not more than 5ft tall. Their possessions – baskets, shields, knives etc. – are very crude, and their dress consists of air and an occasional scrap of hide, human or otherwise. Whether they have a definite country or not, I cannot say; some natives told me that they have, many days’ journey west of Kivu, while the majority say that they lead a nomadic existence like
a flight of locusts, eating up just as effectually whatever they come across.’

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An Army of the Lord . . .

‘Look at what I do,’ said the river, and flowed. ‘Listen to my ways,’ said the river, and roared. ‘And you say it is my fault that I have eaten this person?’ said the river when a man drowned
. Ethiopian proverb

Fast-forward a century. The upper Nile regions have seen colonisation and then the retreat of Europeans following independence in Uganda, the Congo and Sudan. In the school in Uganda (the school my bookbound letter referred to) named after the explorer Samuel Baker, students have achieved fame of a different kind, notoriety even, as abductees into Africa’s largest child army. Just as the rootless Bareka recruited young warriors in the time of Ewart Grogan, so Joseph Kony of the Acholi tribe – who have never been cannibals, unlike the Azande (formerly known as the Niam Niam) – has specialised in kidnapping young people, some barely in their teens, in order to fight for a state independent of the Bugandan authorities in Uganda.

Since Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army have been leading a nomadic existence in the same corner of Uganda/Sudan and the Congo for over twenty years, their success at achieving statehood is limited. During that time, on their path crisscrossing the White Nile, back and forth, this army of children, now grown older, has been accused of every kind of atrocity. Mainly they stand accused of abducting children to become wives and soldiers, beating peasants to death with millet pestles, cutting off the lips of those who betray them and the legs of those who ride bicycles, since the bicycle is the fastest way to relay a message of an attack happening and therefore sabotaging it. Joseph Kony has a thing about bicycles, no doubt the result of numerous cases of their deployment as vectors of early warning. When the journalist Matthew Green sought to interview him, a tube Green had with him containing sting-relief ointment was nearly the cause of trouble because of its resemblance to bicycle inner-tube repair solution. Kony has, not surprisingly, been routinely portrayed as a nut. Green, in his book
The Wizard of the Nile
(never mentioning but nodding at
The Wizard of Oz
), is shocked when he finally meets the man by how ordinary he is. Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler provoked similar reactions. Reports that Kony was a monster were circulated by the government of President Museveni in their quest for money from the coffers of the West. It is always implied that Kony’s barbarism is somehow linked to the colonial experience of the early twentieth century. And yet it seems naive to assume that a mere sixty years of colonial domination could really have much impact on a landscape and people thousands of years in the making. Kony remains an enigma. In fact in the only interview he has ever given he was interrupted when he tried to explain his mindset: that in the bush they have no medicines but plenty of spirits, and it is the spirits which tell them what to do and what to eat in order to get better. Strip away the cultural trappings and he is talking about intuition, how, when we are emotionally detached from the outcome, we can tune in and obtain insights that benefit us. Most mathematicians and physicists report such ‘magic’ in the way they arrive at their theories.

One is on tricky ground pointing out the good points of a mass killer and child abductor, yet the point is, as Hassan al-Turabi (the intellectual behind Sudan’s Islamisation in the late twentieth century) is quick to point out: Africans did not drop an atomic bomb, ignite Dresden or build concentration camps. We conveniently forget our own near history when we rush to condemn another nation. We, in Europe, simply have better machines for killing. Not that one wants to condone evil-doing; more to the point, one doesn’t want to inhabit that murky ledge where evil-doing captures our imagination. For my own purposes it is germane to point out that Kony is merely the most prominent, or most visible, of a tradition of witchdoctor leaders that characterises the preferred African political set-up. In France one could say they have witchdoctor intellectuals; in America the self-help gurus and entrepreneurs are the witchdoctors – by that I mean people who hand down a complete recipe to every one of their followers, content to interfere at a micro-level in the lives of those followers and mostly lacking in any sense of self-doubt or any desire to rid themselves of said followers. Instead of witchdoctor you could read guru.

Joseph Kony is still in the bush, leading his child army in ever decreasing circles from Uganda to the Congo and probably back to South Sudan now that it is in a state of war against North Sudan. Kony has received money from the North to help destabilise the South before,
and no doubt he will again. It is quite conceivable that he will live out his entire life as a vagrant warlord – perhaps the last of the great warrior chiefs of the upper Nile.

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First football match in the upper Nile

He who does not recognise a hint will not understand even if told plainly. But do try!
Ethiopian saying

Kony’s most trusted men all come from his own tribe, the Acholi. But what kind of people are they? Perhaps there is something to be said for the football theory of national identity – or perhaps not . . . Some believe that the way a nation plays football reveals the inner qualities of the country, though it is of course an untestable hypothesis. But here goes.

The tribe of Joseph Kony, the Acholi, were largely unknown to the outside world until the arrival of missionaries in 1902. The Reverend Albert B. Lloyd wrote that this proud and warlike tribe were adorned with iron and ivory rings, the lower lip pierced with a rod of glass, bottle glass polished smooth, about four inches long. ‘This gives a most curious effect, especially when the wearer is angry, for he will draw it up, and thrust it outwards, like the sting of a hornet.’ He described at length the hairdos of the ‘young bucks’, featuring a cone of matted hair with an empty cartridge case stuck in at the top. On the crown of the head, just behind the cone, was fastened a curved spike of ivory, the point bent towards the front. The spikes varied in length from two to six inches. On their wrists many young men wore circular blades made from steel and padded against the wrist with leather. This kind of weapon was well known further north and east but never further south of Acholi country. Kony’s army still wore such wrist knives in the twenty-first century.

The Acholi carried a ‘peculiar knob-kerry’ – a long stick with a thick ring of iron shrunken on to one end. It weighed two pounds ‘and the indentations made on the craniums of the people with this weapon are quite common in every village’. Again the knob-kerry’s use has been supplanted in the present era by the similarly effective millet pestle.

Lloyd and his fellow missionary, ‘both being fond of football, conceived of the idea of introducing the game to the Acholi’. Neither missionary knew much of the Acholi language, so it was impossible to explain what the rules were. They hoped that by example the young Acholi warriors would pick it up as they went along. At first the Acholi men looked at each other as if to say, ‘Is it a fight or fun that we are after?’ As soon as someone could do so, the ball was grabbed. Then that man was seized, carried off and shaken until he released it. The goalposts were forgotten, the sides all mixed up and ‘bumps and bruises rained upon us . . . in the first half-hour we spent much more time on our backs than on our legs’.

If a player received a cut that was too big to be ignored, the traditional remedy was to stitch it up with a long thorn pressed through the flesh and bound at each end with a fibrous thread. As soon as the wound healed, this was removed. An even more ingenious form of stitching was to use the so-called bulldog ant, whose large mandibles do not release their grip even if the ant is killed. Drawing the flesh together the ant is held firmly and allowed to bite, puncturing the two sides of the wound and drawing it together. The ant’s body is then twisted off. A line of such ant heads holds a wound together until it has healed – about the time the ants’ heads begin to disintegrate. Almost certainly one can see Kony’s men, without modern sutures, resorting to such methods today.

It gradually dawned on the Acholi, gashed and wounded from their efforts at football, that the object was not to fight but to enjoy a game, and that to kick the ball through the goalposts was the main point of the thing. ‘Some of the men were beautiful runners and with their long legs could accomplish much more than we civilised folk, with all our clothing and heavy boots, could hope to do.’ Football became an established event at 4.30 p.m. every day, except when the drums of the village announced a drinking bout. Lloyd would then declare football ‘off’, as ‘the young bucks would come out to play full of drink and in no fit state to take their exercise quietly’. He was able to conclude, ‘I shall long look back with pleasure upon the really splendid games we had, after Acholi boys had learned that no bloodshed was necessary.’

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Short cut: the Jonglei Canal

The small path may be small but it can bring a person to the big path
.
Sudanese proverb

Though the Acholi now occupy the northern part of Uganda, the tribe originated in Bahr el-Ghazal, in the region of the great swamp of the Sudd. Like the Mountains of the Moon, the Sudd is one of the places on the Nile one keeps circling and returning to, crucial to the Nile narrative.

To recap, the Sudd acts like a regulatory cistern at the heart of the Nile. Man sees it, like anything natural, as poorly designed, over-engineered and full of redundancies. Yet the Sudd has a function beyond wasting the river’s water; it smooths out the White Nile’s flow and serves as a meteorological magnet for central Africa, yoking in weather and wildlife, preserving the region from the irreversible trends of desertification. But the Sudd, from the point of view of Victorian mechanical man, was simply a big marsh. It ought to go. God’s work needed some trimming. Especially now that the river had finally been dammed.

After the explorers and slavers and the wars came this final solution. It was seen as a British–Egyptian project as the whole of the Nile was now under British jurisdiction. If a series of dams could be erected from the source to the sea, then the old problem of flood and famine would be abolished. Sir William Garstin, a tough engineer who made the first real river survey of the upper Nile (the early explorers always cut off the corners of the river, going overland when the going got too tough in the canyons and gorges), discovered that the real source, in a hydrological sense, was, as we have already mentioned, not Lake Victoria but Lake Albert. This was because the swampy lakes between Victoria and Albert did not actually increase the flow – the same amount entered Albert as left Victoria. So the first dam could be built at Lake Albert and this could become a giant reservoir with ease, as Lake Albert had very steep sides. But the big problem was that all this stored water would then have to pass through the Sudd – the world’s biggest swamp. This meant that a great deal of it would be lost.

Garstin had already traversed the swamp, leading men in an incredible effort to clear the first waterway through it. This involved attaching cables around huge acreages of papyrus and literally tearing it out.
In many places the fabled Nile was only three feet deep. But once a way had been forced through the Sudd it became increasingly clear what the real problem of the Nile was: the sheer size of the Sudd.

The Sudd swamp is bigger than England, and it’s all marsh, a giant sump for the White Nile pouring out of Uganda. Its name comes from the Arabic
sadd
, meaning ‘block’ or ‘barrier’, and for centuries the Sudd was precisely that.

Wetlands are like fallow fields, floods, deserts, all the things we can’t quite see the point of except that they look nice. The Sudd, too, it is now conceded, might have a point beyond being a giant bog that wastes the valuable water of the Nile. But its ecological virtues were less appreciated a hundred years ago when the idea of the Jonglei Canal was first mooted. This straight canal, 225 miles in length, would provide a short cut from the top to the bottom of the swamp, cutting the wetlands out in a giant loop. Now, with the disasters of Lake Chad and the Aral Sea – both dried to a tenth of their former size – it can be seen that draining a marsh is not an isolated move. And all the consequences of such a move cannot be known since every wetland is different, has different dependent ecologies – human and otherwise. One navigates the Sudd through a series of cuts made in the vegetation. Sometimes, in the past, more often than not there were moments when the Nile was completely blocked. When Samuel Baker penetrated south down the Nile in 1864 he cut through such a wall of vegetation that he accidentally drained that section of marsh, leaving his boats high and dry. He escaped from this predicament by building a dam of clay and timber behind his boats, enabling them to float clear again. Baker’s channel was cleared again by dredgers in 1911 but closed anew during the First World War. Only after the Second World War was a permanent series of cuts through the swamplands finally made. After these blockages one reaches the 300-mile stretch known as the Bahr el-Jebel. The view from the rusty motorboat deck hardly changes the whole way as vegetation twelve feet high blocks the view on either side, apart from the odd tantalising entrance to lagoons. Jonglei, a village originally of only a few huts, was chosen by the British hydrologists of the Egyptian Irrigation Department to be the site of the great canal which would bypass all the above by slicing through the drier land on the right-hand side.