Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (7 page)

Work started on the new Bujagali dam in October 2011 and the official last day of rafting was 27 February 2012, so what I saw will now be gone. Well, the first three miles will be gone, but the rafting company were keen to persuade me that they will simply move operations downstream and that the rapids there are almost as good.

I’m no fan of dams, but I can still admire the incredible nineteenth- and early twentieth-century confidence that goes into building them. In fact the Owen Falls dam, built in the 1950s, was conceived by British hydrologists as part of an ambitious plan to control the entire Nile from source to sea. In 2006 it was discovered that fifty years before there had been another, top-secret plan by the British to use the Owen Falls dam to turn off the tap of the Nile to force Egyptian President Gamel Nasser to hand back the Suez Canal – which he had just seized. They didn’t do it, though they persisted with their ambitious meddling for a few more years. It included constructing a 200-mile canal through the giant Sudd swamp, damming the Blue Nile and other grandiosities. Not much of this was completed at the time and the Nile is yet to be controlled. British plans to tame the river took no account of the independence of Sudan and Uganda and Egypt. To further complicate matters, this was the schizophrenic independence obtained within borders decided by previously hated colonial powers; wars and pestilence must needs follow.

The old Ripon Falls in Uganda, the exit point of the Nile from Lake Victoria discovered by John Hanning Speke in 1862 and confirmed by Henry Morton Stanley in 1875, would have been a charming place. But I was too late to see it. I made do with seeing a dam.

The Owen Falls dam has that diarrhoea-coloured concrete that all dams in Africa seem to acquire. The idea of the dam had been mooted as long ago as 1904 and was encouraged by Winston Churchill in his 1908 book
My African Journey
. ‘What fun’, he scribbled, ‘to make the immemorial Nile begin its journey by diving through a turbine.’ What hateful, careless words, I thought, as I gazed at the sorry-looking structure that submerged not only the touching plaque to Speke but also the twelve-foot Ripon Falls as the water now backed up into Lake Victoria. I’m suspicious of big dams, though small dams seem acceptable. Fish can get around small dams without a problem. Speke wrote about the teeming quantities of fish leaping up the falls to ascend into Lake Victoria. Alas, no more; at the Owen Falls dam it was deemed an unnecessary expense to make a fish weir. Passenger fish used to make their way up the falls into Lake Victoria. And the resulting explosion in Lake Victoria’s Nile perch population is almost certainly due to the damming of the river. To want to limit a great river – what folly and arrogance, and yet it shows an admirable freedom from fear: fear of nature’s revenge, fear of God’s revenge for meddling with His world. I must admit to being partisan. I had long been poisoned against Churchill by a great-uncle who had fought with the White Russians and spent a year in Moscow’s Lubyanka prison (he despised Churchill for sending the Cossacks back in 1945 to be murdered under Stalin’s orders).

We’ll run into Churchill again – when he fought in the ‘river war’ of Omdurman – but for the time being I stare at the dam spewing out water like a beast that has been ignobly caged and is now allowed freedom but is damaged and scared to the core. The dam, completed in 1954, was partly paid for by Egypt as a portion of the water held back could be released to ease the low winter water levels (obviated later by the building of the Aswan high dam). The Queen of England attended the Owen Falls dam opening. That makes you think – no modern dam would get the Queen, and Prince Charles, I am sure, would oppose its construction rather than celebrate it. Reports tell us a rogue hippo charged the royal enclosure but no one was hurt. The dam is half a mile wide, a hundred feet high and raised Lake Victoria by three feet, it is estimated. I can’t ignore its colour. Not rust, not dirt, but some sort of continental concrete rot, very unhealthy. How long can a dam last if it isn’t looked after? I’d been on a dam in Canada and it had developed holes in its earth barrage, holes big enough to swallow
the wheel of a hippy camper crossing the top at the wrong time. They filled the holes, rescued the hippies; but how long can you keep playing catch-up with water, with holes, with rust, with time? The Nile is getting more dammed by the year. The word is appropriate, the echo no accident. The river is damned in many ways, not just by being hostage to rust and holes. Things fall apart in Africa faster than elsewhere. The desire to maintain and rebuild, as exemplified by the people of Coventry and Dresden, is largely absent. It is not an unusual sight in east Africa to see a tractor abandoned because it has run out of fuel. I can sympathise; part of me wants to discard my bicycle when it gets a puncture. You can get too owned by things, too owned. And dams own you – and one day, when the easy money runs out, they will stop rebuilding them.

So I am between dams, so to speak, having just spent six hours going downstream and forty-five minutes coming back, via a cleverly welded lorry with seats way up high on its back, like a tortoise with a seat on its shell. I am eating a chapatti rolled around an omelette, one of the best things to eat in Uganda if you are in backpacker land as I was at the Explorers’ Lodge in Jinja.

I did my swim, well, my wade, with extreme caution at lunchtime. I am not a brave swimmer. I am a functional splasher. I once swam a mile – when I was thirteen – and haven’t since taken it very seriously. I like swimming in clear water because of the optical illusion. I don’t mind the cold as long as I have a hat on: it’s the secret of rushing into icy sea and being tougher than anyone else – keep your hat on. But the Nile here is as warm as . . . well, it isn’t warm, it’s rather chilly (though the air temperature was around 28 degrees), like a bath that has been allowed to cool, colder than you thought it would be.

The place where we stopped was a little inlet which Henry our river guide assured me was safe. He told me that there were no more hippos or crocs in this part of the river, though there were plenty lower down. No one joined me wading out like John the Baptist, though earlier the six young(ish) adventurers I was rafting with were all keen enough to jump off a high rock. I chickened out on account of wearing glasses, which I suppose I could have taken off but it didn’t occur to me. I was also the only one in trousers; everyone else was in shorts. Somehow tombstoning in long trousers seems a bit silly, and I had vague worries too about such things as trapped air. Anyway now I made up for it by striking out in natty bermudas that I hoped would not attract a croc
or a hippo or a baboon. Despite Henry’s assurances, the Jinja golf club still allows a free hit if your ball has the misfortune to land in a hippo’s hoofprint.

But hippos were not what worried Henry. He told me, ‘I’m more careful about baboons than any other creature we come across along the river. More than crocs for sure, and actually more than hippos. A baboon can tear your jaw off.’

‘But surely you have to provoke them first?’

He laughed, ‘The crocodile likes to take people who are injured. Hippos – well, you just need to watch their territory. But baboons – they’re smart
and
nasty, when they want to be.’

I had heard something about baboons in Jinja. A troop of them had staged a sit-down protest in the road after a big female had been hit by a driver. Eyewitnesses had stated that the driver had swerved maliciously to kill the female, and the troop would not leave the road – even when offered sugar cane. They were mourning the alpha female of the group. Since males transfer out of groups and females remain, the alpha female is the repository of the troop’s knowledge of the area. They were mourning her because it was a real loss.

Baboons are brainy, they mourn their dead, and they are Nile creatures par excellence along with the hippo and the croc. The ancient Egyptians recognised the baboon in the figure of Thoth – god of wisdom, of writing, of bringing the gods together. He is depicted with a baboon’s head.

I had seen in a rock cave deep in the Egyptian Sahara other evidence of baboon worship. There, painted perhaps two millennia before the desert dried out some 4,500 years ago, were baboon bodies without heads. It was like the mirror image of Thoth. And we know that the people who formed the nucleus of settlers who originated from what we know as ancient Egypt came from this same drying-out Sahara around 5,000 years ago. Even more mysteriously I’d discovered that the same headless baboon paintings could be found in caves in Botswana.

Some form of explanation was required. It might be this: a species of hominid,
Homo rudolfensis
, was driven into extinction by baboons, by competition with this Nile-dwelling primate, over a million years ago. Perhaps it was a near-run thing between baboons and early
Homo sapiens
too.

There is a compelling reason to believe that all our unfounded fears are the vestigial fears suffered by previous incarnations, evolutionary
forms. We deprive fears of their power by noting and observing them. Drawing pictures of them. In the end we may grow quite fond of them, give their form to something we venerate. Perhaps the baboon-bodied creatures painted on rock were tribute paid to an ancient enemy.

This was an intriguing river meander, a sort of baboon version of Bruce Chatwin’s thesis that a giant cat,
Dinofelis
, had threatened early man with extinction. Baboon paintings link directly with Thoth, though any connection with the Nile is indirect. The ancient Egyptians had a god of the flood, Hapi, but the Nile itself was simply known as Iterw – the river. Osiris, the Egyptian god most associated with the afterlife (and interestingly depicted as a greenman, thus linking up with greenman myths in Europe), is sometimes associated with the Nile, but the river’s sheer ubiquity seems to have caused the ancient Egyptians to overlook it.

All scribes worshipped Thoth, as he invented writing. So, in a book containing the written stories of the Nile, Thoth is the god to invoke here. The god who brought us, just as the Egyptians did, writing – as well as the hermetic tradition (Hermes was the Greek version of Thoth) of hidden knowledge, wisdom, mysticism, alchemy. It was Thoth who made sure that neither good nor evil had a decisive victory over the other.

There is an ancient Egyptian story which refers to a text known as the Book of Thoth. This book contains a spell allowing one to understand the speech of animals. The book was originally hidden at the bottom of the Nile, so the story goes, guarded by seven serpents. An Egyptian prince tried to steal the box containing the Book of Thoth, but when he did, calamity rained down upon him, his children and his children’s children. The message was simple: the knowledge of the gods is not for humans to obtain except at their own peril.

The baboons were skulking by as we drifted off that afternoon. No need to purify this water: I tasted its riverine stinkiness when Henry purposely flipped the raft on ‘Easy Rider’, a big friendly wave of a Class 4 rapid, a glossy green tongue of powerful water ending in a confusion of white foam and laughing people in helmets and orange lifejackets. Before this burst of excitement we’d watched a baboon troop, perhaps about thirty, loping along the bank like young thugs in an urban graffiti zone, looking for action, unworried, bigger than you’d think.

7
•
Red sweat

The hippo coming out of the great lake licks the dew on the grass
. Ethiopian proverb

Baboons may be the most feared by river guides, but the lumbering hippopotamus is supposed to kill more people. Yet, when I delved into the statistics to find the Nile dweller that was the most deadly, crocs also came up. And then I began to think – how exactly are these stats compiled? Some places, such as southern Sudan, don’t even know how many people are resident, let alone how many are bashed by hippos or gnawed on by giant crocs. Leave the dubious numbers behind and wade on, paying due attention of course to both hippos and crocs.

Though there are plenty of Nile crocodiles on the Nile even in Egypt – most of them being stopped by Lake Nasser – there are no longer any hippos. They were once so widespread as to be worshipped by the ancient Egyptians, along with the baboon-headed Thoth, and feared – Menes, the first ruler of the First Dynasty, the first Pharaoh in effect, was snatched and killed by a hippopotamus. The last one disappeared on the lower Nile in the early twentieth century after the construction of the first, British-designed dam at Aswan in 1900. Flaubert saw hippos when he travelled up the Nile in 1849, though the last hippo in Cairo probably died in the very early nineteenth century.

The hippo, or
Hippopotamus amphibius
, still lives on in the upper regions of both the Blue and the White Nile. It may not be as endangered as we think. The drug lord Pablo Escobar bought four Nile hippos in New Orleans and kept them at his Hacienda Nápoles estate about sixty miles from Medellín in Colombia. When he was captured in 1987 the hippos were left to run wild over the estate. By 2007 there were sixteen inhabiting the Magdalena river and causing trouble to both humans and cattle – attacking both and inflicting deep wounds with their two-foot-long tusks. Though hippos are vegetarian, mainly eating bankside grass, under stress they can become carnivorous despite being incapable of digesting meat properly. By 2009 the hunt was on for the leader of this renegade group of hippos, a highly aggressive male called Pepe by local law-enforcement agents. It was almost as if Escobar’s life was being replicated by his outsize pets. Finally Pepe was cornered and shot by police authorised by the local government.

That hippos are dangerous is attested to by every raft guide you’ll find on African rivers. A cursory check of YouTube reveals startling footage of a hippo taking on and beating a large Nile crocodile. A croc would only try and eat a dead hippo; a live one would be too dangerous. In general hippos are feared more than crocodiles by man because of their greater aggression, a product of extreme territoriality. A bull hippo requires about 250 yards of bank, which he will defend to the last. Large flattened runs through the undergrowth at the river’s edge are the places not to stop for a picnic – you may meet a hippo in a headlong rush aiming for the water he must defend. Females can also be aggressive, but less so, though it is hard to tell the sexes apart as they are of similar size.