The Last Train to Zona Verde (46 page)

Nigeria posed a more serious problem, but also a north-south divide. The Muslim-dominated states in the north — directly on my route — were tormented by the Boko Haram movement. The name
in the Hausa language means “Western education is sinful.” The group’s official name is Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad, which in Arabic means “People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad.” In these northern states in Nigeria, ruled by
Sharia
law, the Boko Haram jihadis attacked Christians, Christian churches, non-Islamic schools, and just about anyone wearing Western clothes — trouser-wearing Nigerians and foreigners too.

I first heard about this hostile organization during my stay in Lubango, and had made notes to myself on its looming threat on the Day of the Dead, when I began seriously to wonder whether my trip was worth the trouble. Ever since I’d crossed the Angolan border, the question “What am I doing here?” had flashed in my mind. It was not a lament; it was a puzzled inquiry — most thoughtful people on earth ask themselves this question on a regular basis.
^*
I had kept going, as this narrative shows, hoping for an answer. But around the time I was making my decision to put my head down and take the road north, Boko Haram became active again.

A tortuously argued op-ed in the
New York Times
by the historian and Africanist Jean Herskovits, “In Nigeria, Boko Haram Is Not the Problem,” explained that Boko Haram was “a peaceful Islamic splinter group” that had been exploited “for electoral purposes.” Video footage of the violent death in Nigerian police custody in 2009 of a Muslim cleric had radicalized the movement, though Herskovits pointed out that the “root cause of violence and anger in both the north and south of Nigeria is endemic poverty and hopelessness.”

She warned that, not mullahs and zealots, but criminal syndicates claiming to represent Boko Haram were terrorizing Christians, setting fire to their homes, and bombing hotels and markets, all to
destabilize the country. We should not be too quick to label this Islamic terrorism, she wrote, or to hasten into “a rush to judgment that obscures Nigeria’s complex reality.” The complex reality was a narrow-minded president named Goodluck Jonathan, a southerner and a Christian, his corrupt politicians, and the Nigerian people, growing poorer and more numerous daily.

A rush to judgment was the last thing on my mind. But what about the reported violence? After I read the piece, which smacked of special pleading, I kept close track of Boko Haram outrages. Six days after the op-ed piece appeared, 20 people were killed by jihadis claiming to be Boko Haram–related. A week later, 174 murders, and two weeks after that a dozen more, all sectarian. Nigerian troops became involved, killing 20 Boko Haramists. And then, at weekly intervals for the next three months, there were suicide bombs, arson attacks on schools and churches, and targeted killings — the murder of Christians in Maiduguri and Jos. Thousands of deaths by now in the cities and on the bus routes of my proposed trip.

Professor Herskovits had argued for patience but perhaps had not anticipated the multiple massacres that followed her strangely mollifying piece. More recently, a number of scholars have warned the U.S. government against branding Boko Haram a terrorist organization because doing so would “internationalize the sect” and raise its profile, making it bolder. As a Nigerian terrorist group (or a collection of criminal gangs), the thinking went, it was dangerous only to Nigerians.

But, it seemed, dangerous to Western travelers too. The scholars’ line of reasoning (they wanted, among other things, to be in close touch with the Boko Haramists) seemed to me tendentious, self-serving, and unhelpful. If the root cause of the killings was not Islamic jihadism but “poverty and hopelessness,” there would be many more murders, because Nigeria was poor and hopeless. And for a traveler like me who had no choice but to pass overland through northern Nigeria, it hardly mattered whether I was threatened
by a Western-hating jihadi or the armed members of a criminal syndicate, both of whom used the name Boko Haram.

Travelers often become celebrated for risking trips through dangerous places. I had taken risks in my time, and endured my own version of the anthropophagi, and the men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders. And so I was faced with the ruined Congolese cities and the fanaticism of northern Nigeria. It struck me that if I proceeded on my way, it would have been a travel stunt, like riding a pogo stick through the desert. A daredevil effort, and to what end?

“Is it worth it?” Apsley Cherry-Garrard asks at the end of
The Worst Journey in the World
, in talking about the doomed polar trek by Robert Falcon Scott in the Antarctic. Is life worth risking for a feat, or losing for your country? To face a thing because it was a feat, and only a feat, was not very attractive to Scott; it had to contain an additional object — knowledge.

Traveling north through chaos — what would I find that I had not already learned? As an oil state, Nigeria much resembled Angola in its corruption and destitution. Lagos and Kinshasa were larger versions of Luanda. The rural areas on my route were blighted: idle youths, ailing villagers, beggars, rappers. The lessons I had learned so far were that an itinerary of urban squalor is unrewarding; travel is difficult, and sometimes impossible; a foreign traveler represents wealth, an opportunity for the thief or “social bandit”; and the repetition of squalor is ultimately so futile in its frightfulness as to be banal in the retelling. I imagined my onward journey to be no more than spirited slumming, the usual ordeal of rank smells and bad food, but without a redeeming feature, a toxic tour through the bowels of West Africa, along the Côte d’Ordure.

It takes a certain specialist’s dedication to travel in squalid cities and fetid slums, among the utterly dependent poor, who have lost nearly all their traditions and most of their habitat. You need first of all the skill and the temperament of a proctologist. Such a person,
deft in rectal exams, is as essential to medicine as any other specialist, yet it is only the resolute few who opt to examine the condition of the human body by staring solemnly — fitted out like spelunkers, with scopes and tubes and gloves — up its fundament and trawling through its intestines, making the grand colonic tour. Some travel has its parallels, and some travelers might fit the description as rectal specialists of topography, joylessly wandering the guts and entrails of the earth and reporting on their decrepitude. I am not one of them.

Forty years ago, when I planned my
Great Railway Bazaar
trip, I had considered taking the train from Turkey into Iraq, traveling south from Mosul to Baghdad and onward to Basra, where I would cross into Iran. “What’s Basra like?” I asked a friend who’d been there. “It’s not the asshole of the world,” he said, “it’s eighty miles up it.” So I went to Iran by a different route, and I have spent my traveling life avoiding such places. What had I learned? That proctology pretty much describes the experience of traveling from one African city to another, especially the horror cities of urbanized West Africa.

But the scientific inclination is not enough. Some artfulness is required. To chronicle this anguish, you need to be a traveler with a taste for ruins, someone who takes pleasure in them, as Giambattista Piranesi (1720–1778) did in eighteenth-century Rome. He was the inspired artist whose wayward brilliance lay in depicting the cracked remains of an ancient civilization, meticulous etchings of ruination, down to the last decayed detail. His dark etchings of crumbled, toppled-over, and scattered Rome were sold as souvenirs for visitors to the city. Travelers at the time, making the Grand Tour — English aristocrats, and writers such as Smollett and Goethe — seized on them, because Piranesi had found a way of bringing a vision of lost glory, even of splendor, to these scenes of antique devastation.

That was what was needed, proctologist and Piranesi, science
and art — a strong stomach and a fascination with decay, and disorder, and hopelessness, and township anarchy.

There is something constricting and claustrophobic about the traveler’s being limited to cloacal ruins and urban dead ends. I had become a traveler to be free to wander, and on some of my most difficult trips I had felt liberated by the space and light. I have seldom been a traveler in cities. I have generally avoided them — all cities, not just in Africa, but also in Asia and Latin America. I am by nature a city hater, finding urban life nasty, hidden, and hard to penetrate. To me, even the greatest cities are places of loneliness and confinement where people are strangers to each other.

Why would I wish to travel through blight and disorder only to report on the same ugliness and misery? The blight is not peculiar to Africa. The squalid slum in Luanda is not only identical to the squalid slum in Cape Town and Jo’burg and Nairobi; they all greatly resemble, in their desperation, their counterparts in the rest of the world. A squatter camp in California is in every detail a duplication of a squatter camp in Africa, and worthy of close examination by a traveling writer for that reason. But I am not that writer, neither so committed to discomfort nor so noble-hearted.

The earth is becoming intensely citified. “The megacity will be at the heart of twenty-first-century geography,” Robert D. Kaplan writes in
The Revenge of Geography
. But the world I grew up in was not a world of big cities, and I began my traveling life hoping to find differences in landscapes and people, not repeated versions of the metropolitan experience. I don’t mock the effort. I am not equal to the task. The traveler in cities needs to understand cities better than I do and not be disgusted by their chronic deficits; that traveler needs to care more, to be more expert in some areas, more innocent in others, more hopeful. Anyway, the successful city dweller is gifted in coping with the horrors, the stalkers, the foul smells, the loud music, the casual rudeness, the foxy habits of taxi drivers, the
absence of trees, the menacing faces, the noise, the squawk of voices — many of them screams; the rumble and whine that is unceasing — the night drone too, along with the nighttime light; the physicality of it all, especially the closeness of the crowds, the lack of elbow room, the daily experience of bumping against other people, which is a constant violation of your space and your body, the physical rubbing against strangers that amounts to frottage, known colloquially in New York as “subway grinding.”

That life is not for me, either to travel in or write about. It has nothing to do with my age. Now Africa is a continent of huge, unsustainable cities, and the majority of Africans are themselves city dwellers, having forfeited their poor villages for much poorer slums. It is impossible to travel overland in Africa by public transport — as I did from Cairo to Cape Town, and now from Cape Town to Luanda — and not make a circuit of the cities, awful places where there is nothing to learn except what you knew already from the worst neighborhoods of your own country.

One remedy for the revulsion in such travel is that of the French aphorist Nicolas Chamfort, who wrote, “Swallow a toad in the morning and you will encounter nothing more disgusting the rest of the day.” I have spent a life of travel sleeping in strange beds and dining on sinister food, and I have only mildly objected, because it is in the nature of travel to be uncomfortable, if not scared silly. But insult is another matter, and gratuitous insult is objectionable for being unrewarding. You can stay home and be insulted; you don’t need to go ten thousand miles to be jeered at. There is no revelation in being yelled at, heckled, cursed, or pestered, as began to happen with greater frequency on my trip. I think this harassment is the fate of many women traveling alone in male-dominated countries — most countries, that is — and I sympathize with women, usually burdened with a child or a backpack, for having to endure it.

It is undignified and tedious for anyone to have to battle his way onto a dirty bus. Yet I pitched in and found that pushing and being
shoved and biffed by impatient oafs is not the worst of it. If, at the end of the journey, after nine or ten hours of travel on the miserable bus, with its piss stops and children with the squitters and chickens dying in baskets and shouting passengers and its inept driver — finally needing to elbow your way off the bus — if, then, the traveler sees nothing new, it is a pointless journey too, and no one would want to read about it. I found more and more, in these cheated places with diminished resources, that I had to fight for a seat, and I became less and less willing to do so. The single woman, the older traveler, the weak-looking or undersized stranger, the loner, the wanderer at night — all are taken for easy prey, and bullied or fleeced. The only lesson is:
caveat viator
, traveler beware, and perhaps ask again, “What am I doing here?”

My answer did not amount to a manifesto for staying home but rather an essay on other directions, since there are so many places on earth worthy of a traveler’s effort and more likely to evoke a traveler’s bliss. I am not too old for this, I am more patient than ever, but I am temperamentally unsuited to chronicling the gutter life of the African slum that necessitates my swallowing a toad every morning. There is nothing to write about it that I have not written already, and at length. Such places are transit camps filled with people who have been abandoned by their fattened and corrupt governments. Such places might, as Kalunga Lima predicted, one day explode in a blaze of fury, the spontaneous combustion of enraged, cheated people. I know enough of the score-settling and fickleness of uprisings to avoid them.

But I have no idea what will happen to these sprawling cities and slum areas. My feeling has always been that the truth is prophetic, and if I write accurately about the present, seeing things as they are, aspects of the future will be suggested. I was somewhat heartened by the progress made in ten years in the townships of Cape Town, how the shantytowns and squatter camps had been upgraded to habitable settlements. This was largely due to the efforts of sympathetic
and innovative well-wishers, both South African and foreign agencies: the installation of water and electricity, the improvement of houses and roads, the novelty of indoor plumbing, the building of schools.