Travels with Myself and Another (29 page)

An offering of whisky ingratiated me enough for a seat in Mr Popper’s lamentable living room and a greasy jam jar filled with my whisky and lukewarm water. At first we were alone and Mr Popper answered my questions with an ironical smile and “I coulden say.” “I havven an idea.” “I wooden know.” Slowly, timid as dikdiks, black children toddled in, to be patted by Papa or briefly held on his lap. Old Mr Popper was going strong, the smallest child looked about two years old. I counted ten but couldn’t be sure, perhaps the same ones came back for a second peek at the funny European lady. Perhaps a dozen older sons and daughters were out working in the tea garden. There was no sign of a wife or wives, nor any sound offstage to indicate that she or they were on the premises.

I didn’t revel in old Mr Popper’s teasing tactics and was about to depart in a huff because of the wasted bribe, when old Tom, softened by drink, decided to play fair. “Lady,” he said. “I’ll tell you the God’s truth. I don’t know a bloody thing about Africans and never will.” He could guess at what they’d do but that was all, and likely as not he guessed wrong; there wasn’t a hope in hell of understanding how their brains worked if, in fact, they used brains which he doubted. They used something else, different from whatever we used. “And they don’t know a bloody thing about us either.”

He knew more about game, wild animals; he reckoned he had a pretty good idea about them from long observation and they were logical, they behaved according to a sensible pattern. But wasn’t it lonely, I asked, to live among people who were forever strangers, as all the Europeans seemed to feel; wasn’t it also scary? Depends, he said, on the person; he didn’t like people anyway and as for scary he always kept a loaded gun handy and a good sharp
panga
and he guessed he could look after himself. When he got to be too old or too sick, he supposed one of them would poison him. He said this cheerily and I dared not ask if he meant his wife/wives and/or children but who else had he in mind? Waiting for ultimate poison in this dilapidated hole might depress anyone but old Tom didn’t look the least downcast, hat on head, enjoying the visitor’s whisky, relaxed in a Public Works Department chair with springs sagging beneath it.

He warned me against Lake Victoria; I was not to put even a finger in it. It was typical of Africa, 225 miles long and edged all the way by snails which carried bilharzia; bilharzia was a real bugger. That and liver flukes and loa loa. Africans were storehouses of parasites, crawling and creeping with bugs that would kill Europeans. You could hardly blame the poor bastards for being lazy, they were half sick most of the time. Awful place, Africa, not fit for human habitation. But, I said nervously, he had inhabited it for quite a while. That was because he didn’t like people. Africa was about the last place where you could keep away from people. This made little sense, in view of his private tribe. I uttered grateful noises, left my whisky, and Mr Popper accompanied me to the front door. Joshua had remained in the Landrover.

“That your safari driver?” Mr Popper asked, taking in Joshua’s tiny shorts and pointed shoes and sunglasses. I nodded. Mr Popper gave a great shout of laughter, wished me luck and closed his door.

As we bucked down the dust track from the house, Joshua said, “What is that Bwana, Memsaab?”

“He’s a tea planter.”

“He has plenty little totos in his house. Kenya bwanas don’t have African totos in their house.”

A Kikuyu Presbyterian pansy prude.

At Fort Portal—in the hotel grounds? at the entrance to the club?—the famous sign was painted on a board for all to see: “No dogs or natives allowed.” I believe that sign is what caused the downfall of the British Empire, though history does not support this view. It is an infuriating sign. It made me as angry as if I were a dog or a native. There was no need to offend Africans with signs; they knew they weren’t allowed in and never attempted to enter sacred white precincts so why insist in print.

The pious Victorians thought Uganda a fine field for the Lord’s work but less suitable for British settlers. The result was and remained a plethora of missionaries and few white residents. The whites were not landowning farmers, as in upcountry Kenya; they were managers, administrators, professional men. All counted, about ten thousand Europeans among some seven and a half million Africans. So long as they were protected by the British Colonial Service and the rule of law, they were all right, not a shipwrecked handful on a wide black sea.

Independence was due in seven months, it was almost on top of them, and they saw it as danger. The dowdy Memsaabs and the beefy Bwanas on the hotel verandah sounded overwrought, talking too much, too angrily. Between pink gins, they kept saying they’d rather burn down their club than let these black baboons be members. They predicted bad trouble: without Europeans, to oversee and direct, the economy would go to hell; kiss the coffee and cotton exports goodbye; the idea that Ugandans could govern themselves was madness.

All countries have a feel which you sense at once by some emotional osmosis. Uganda felt claustrophobic. It is the smallest of the East African countries, the size of the United Kingdom, nothing by African measure, and landlocked. Where Kenya felt light and spacious, this place felt too lush, too green, the landscape itself closing in; and crowded as indeed it is. Kenya is three times as large and has three times fewer bodies per square mile. (Though at the present moment, African populations are multiplying with the speed of minks which isn’t going to do anyone any good.) Forty tribes live in Uganda. As a unified entity, Uganda didn’t really exist until the end of the First World War, no time in terms of history. Before that, the tribes were hostile and given to war; they had not become trusting friends fifty years later. Like Joshua, I was not enamoured of Uganda; it made me uneasy.

Joshua was glum and I, as usual, bent over the wheel watching the road. I didn’t see, I felt a change, and thought some kind of violent African storm was building up miles off to the west. The dusty flapping canvas roof of the Landrover limited our view. That distant black wall looked bad, rain like never before, and I had not noticed any side curtains for the Landrover even if we could figure out how to put them up. The black wall stayed oddly in place. I stopped the car to get out and diagnose the situation.

The black wall rose, from flat scrubland, straight into the sky; either a trick of light or a fact, a single perpendicular mountain that stretched along the horizon. And had no summit; the side of this mountain or range of mountains soared out of sight. Stupid, of course I couldn’t see the top, it was covered in cloud. Above us and all around, the sky was clear blue. I stared harder; not cloud, snow.

“Joshua, binoculars, quick!”

Yes, snow, a snow field as long as the mountain.

“My God, what is it?” It was too strange, too unexpected, it wasn’t like any mountains I had seen anywhere, beautiful and unreal, a dark dream of mountains. As I watched, cloud drifted down, lower and lower, leaving only a black rim along the sky.

The
Field Guide
and the map told me what I had been seeing: the Ruwenzori, the Mountains of the Moon. No wonder it looked like nothing else.

“Africa is too big, Joshua. Everything in Africa is too big. People were never meant to live here. It should have been left to the animals. They came first. It’s their place.”

“Memsaab?”

“See that over there, that black thing against the sky?”

“Yes, Memsaab.”

“Gorillas live there.” And right for gorillas. According to those who know, like Leakey, Ardrey and others, our species evolved from the ape here, in Africa, in this zone of Africa. I think it was an evolutionary intrusion; this wasn’t our territory, it belonged to the animals. I wasn’t sure any more that the Africans belonged here; they’d been around since the very beginning and they hadn’t had much effect on the place.

A mile inside the Queen Elizabeth Park, the road sign said: “Elephants have right of way.” How to take that? As a joke or a suggestion that tourists were crazy enough to dispute passage with elephants? Joshua spotted them. Africans have eyesight like built-in binoculars, I don’t know why.

“Look, Memsaab!
Tembo!
” Off to the right, in single file, a herd of elephants plodded slowly towards the lake. The soil was red, the elephants were dark red from their daily dusting and rolling. I watched them through binoculars with reverence. They inspire that emotion if you can watch them in safety. The lion is supposed to be king of the beasts but I have never seen any lions that were a patch on elephants. These stately animals followed their leader and turned to cross the track.

“
Tembo
coming!” Joshua whispered. “Go away, Memsaab!”

“They’re not coming here. Be quiet.” I was relying on accepted doctrine: you are safe in a car, protected by the petrol smell, and if you don’t tangle with elephants they won’t tangle with you. The enormous bodies moved over the earth without a sound, padding down the dry lion grass and thorn bushes. There were about twenty of them, including babies and young ones, led by the matriarch. They disappeared into the trees at the left, giant ghosts.

“How wonderful,” I said.

“They got much
tembo
here, Memsaab?”

“Yes.”

“Lions?”

“I hope so.” The
Field Guide
said there were lions in the Kigezi park-land, wherever it was, which had developed a propensity for climbing trees; I looked forward to that.

“You going to the hotel, Memsaab?”

“Yes. I’ll get a room and then drive around, for an hour or so.”

“I stay in driver’s room.”

“Why Joshua, don’t you want to see the animals? That’s the whole point of the safari.”

“Better I stay in driver’s room.”

Mweya Lodge was built on a bluff above Lake Edward, an attractive stone building with the usual wealth of flowering vines and comfortable rooms, but shabbily kept like everywhere else in Uganda. Joshua deposited my suitcase and scuttled off in search of a room far removed from ambient animals. When I announced my plan of sightseeing, the manager said it wouldn’t be a good idea alone, as I might get lost on the tracks and why not go out on the launch in the Kazinga channel, plenty to see and the best hour for it. There was plenty to see, especially the inside of the mouths of yawning hippos and elephants drinking and spraying themselves with evening shower-baths and monkeys performing acrobatics and all the birds whose names I didn’t know.

I was eating dinner at my solitary table when a handsome youngish man, grey-haired, wearing a red bandana around his neck and an aura of film star, spoke to me. Would I like to come out with him and his friends tomorrow? A scene for a movie had just been made here, a famous movie if I could remember the name. In this scene elephants stampeded and the daring Game Warden or whoever the hero was, drove through the dangerous milling mass for some unclear noble purpose. The star’s double, the stuntman who actually played the scene, was the chap in the red bandana, a white hunter.

He said that the movie stars shivered with fear all through the film-making, they were scared to death of the animals. In the course of this trumped-up stampede, an elephant had been hurt and he had to find it tomorrow so that he could shoot it and put it out of its misery. I said indignantly that I didn’t think any movie was worth killing an elephant for and he looked at me with amusement. It was a silly thing to say to a man whose business was shooting animals.

His friends turned out to be a dark-haired girl, giving off waves of adoration. We three sat in the front seat of a Landrover and as we drove into the bush, searching for elephant, the white hunter told stories of derring-do, close escapes and the like, in which he modestly figured as the man who saved the day. I disliked him before we found the elephants, after which I detested him. He had explained the formation of herds, the females with young separate from the male herds and the old males who go off on their own and eventually die from hunger because their teeth are worn down to uselessness. We came on a herd of females and their young in a field at the edge of forest. The white hunter drove round them quickly and said, “Sally’s not here.”

“You know them all?”

“Every one,” he said. “Sally’s a mean old lady, I’ll have to track her on foot. Want some fun?”

Before I could say no, he started to race close to the elephants, banging on the horn, and the elephants reacted, the “aunties” gathering to protect the young and the babies, the other females flapping their ears and raising their trunks, ready to charge. I was of course speechless with fear, having no wish to die so that this show-off could impress his girl. The elephants were trumpeting now and he went on circling them until a big female charged, stopping short as we sped past.

“Bluffing,” said the white hunter. “This is nothing to what we had before, we must have had a hundred of them in a fine old tizzy.”

As far as I could see we had an adequate stampede going right now and I hated it and objected to it. What point was there in frightening these splendid beasts; surely harassment would only drive them farther away from man and cars so that we tourists would never have a chance to see them, or else they would get the idea that cars were hostile and begin to charge innocent drivers. The white hunter was laughing happily, his adoring girl was open-mouthed in admiration for his nerve, I was sweating with dismay and outrage, and then an elephant charged and did not stop and our hero stepped hard on the gas and drove off, saying, “Not bluffing that time.” So now I knew, lucky me, what a medium-size elephant stampede was like. Doomed to see elephants in the company of lunatics. All I wanted was to watch them with love and respect, at a reasonable distance.

“Enjoy it?” he asked the girl pressed to his side.

“Oh it was too thrilling, Richard,” she breathed.

“You, Memsaab?”

“No,” I said stonily. “I don’t even enjoy baiting people.”

We parted with frozen politeness at the Lodge. I hired an African Park Ranger to serve as guide and drove quietly with him, seeing buffalo and more elephant and lions at a very reasonable distance, lolling under but not climbing a tree, and baboons and monkeys and I found this resembled museum visiting in that you cannot look at too much for too long, fatigue and blindness set in. The first sight of those silent elephants had been the best, the empty silent land around them, the surprise. I was ready to leave in the morning and sent word to Joshua that he could emerge.