Walking the Nile Read online

  ‘So,’ said Amani. ‘Now you begin, no?’

  I stood and put the metal mug back in my rucksack. ‘Let’s start walking.’

  The spring that fed into the puddle that, in turn, disappeared under the dense foliage soon faded into memory. As the day wore on, the excitement of having left the source of the Nile turned into something new: the promise of movement itself. Just as the Nile begins with a tiny trickle of water, this year-long voyage was beginning with a few tiny steps. No more planes, buses or Land Cruisers; no more anticipation and worry; now, only forward motion. On foot.

  In the space of a few hundred metres, the forest seemed to alter immeasurably. Coming down the forested escarpment, we left behind the pines and eucalyptus. As we walked, the jungle grew more tropical, thick with oversized ferns and vines that wrapped around teak and mahogany giants.

  Amani had nominated himself our leader, though as we progressed I could tell that my first impression of him hadn’t been far off the mark. The difficulty in following a river from a forest source is that it keeps going underground, or gets hidden by the vegetation, ferns and thorn bushes that fill the jungle floor. Above us the canopy was so thick that it was almost impossible to see the sky, and it seemed that we were walking in a perpetual twilight. On occasion, I could hear where the water trickled. It was this tiny trickle that would become the greatest river on Earth, the life’s blood of civilisations that had risen and fallen since time immemorial. This elusive trickle gave life to six nations before it met the sea, but today it proved impossible to follow.

  It soon became evident that Amani was not practised at blazing a trail. His occasional entreaties – ‘This way!’ ‘Here is the river!’ – soon proved themselves little better than wishful thinking.

  At my side, Boston silently shook his head. ‘All he does is go east,’ he muttered. ‘He thinks, if we get out of the forest, he will see the river then. These Rwandans, they’re not jungle people like the Congolese.’

  I had known Boston for less than a week, though he came highly recommended by two friends, Tom Bodkin and Pete Meredith, who had availed themselves of his services in the past. Pete in particular had spoken highly of Boston’s skills; Boston had looked after the logistics of one of Pete’s own expeditions, to make a film about kayaking the Nile’s biggest rapids, a feat never before attempted. What they hadn’t told me was that Boston wasn’t really a guide at all. In fact, Boston had never had any formal training in anything, and I was quickly beginning to understand that he was a jack-of-all-trades wheeler-dealer. Whatever you wanted Boston to be, that was him.

  He was also the most outspoken man I had met in all my travels, and it was evident he was not going to pull any punches where Amani was concerned.

  Ndoole Boston had grown up in eastern Congo, at a time when that country had been rife with fighting and internal conflict. Boston was proud to come from a royal bloodline. ‘My great-grandfather ruled a tribe in the mountains west of Lake Albert,’ he had told me, before adding that, ‘He ate men. It was normal then. He was the king, and would eat whoever he wanted – men, women, enemies. It was usually enemies – but, if he had a lazy servant, he’d eat him too.’ Across the generations, though, savage cannibalism had given way to religion and Boston’s paternal grandfather, Mwalimu Ndoole Nyanuba, had been a Pentecostal pastor with his own church in rural Machumbi. Boston’s own father had rejected family tradition again, becoming first a professor of geography who passed his disgust for religion onto his son, and later an MP under Zaïre’s – later, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s – Mbutu regime. In 1993, as Boston told me, tragedy struck, when his father died under mysterious circumstances. ‘Poison,’ Boston declared as we followed Amani aimlessly through the forest. ‘He was probably murdered, although I’ll never know. That was the year I became a soldier.’

  After Boston’s father died, Boston became the head of his family. When he was only seventeen years of age, his mother encouraged him to take up arms and head out to fight the roving gangs that plagued eastern Congo and protect their family ranch. In no time at all, Boston had become head of his own militia, commanding some 300 troops, and it was with these men that he joined the then-rebel forces led by the future president, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, in 1996. Boston’s unit were instrumental in taking the cities of Kisangani and Lubumbashi from government forces, and bringing about the end of the Mbutu reign.

  In 2005, eight years before we met, Boston had fled the Congo. His flight followed months of targeted assassinations of former soldiers and activists like himself, and escalating violence against his family. His ‘home’ was now in Kampala, the capital of Uganda. Boston would accompany me on my journey that far, but there we would part ways, I on my journey ever north, Boston back to the comforts of his wife Lily and their three children.

  Around us, the jungle was becoming denser, and the trickle of water seemed to be ebbing further away. With it impossible to keep the river – if this could truly be called a river – in sight, the only really effective method was to look around at the mean height of the trees and estimate which way was downhill. By following invisible contours, I hoped we would stay abreast of the water. The theory seemed to work, albeit slowly, but by the time we stopped to refuel with lunch we’d covered only five hundred metres in a straight line, despite our GPS having logged a distance of 4km walked. We hadn’t completed our first day of this journey, and already I had a sign that I was actually going to walk much further than the 4,250 miles I’d planned.

  ‘We need to cover more ground,’ said Boston, with an ironic smile pointedly directed at Amani. ‘It is not even hard going! It reminds me of my time in the Congo, but there it is much thicker.’

  There was an element of malice in Boston’s voice, and I could tell that he was trying to provoke Amani in some way. Boston, the proud fighter, didn’t want to cede any authority to this skinny Tutsi who, he believed, was leading us in circles. ‘You know, Lev,’ he went on, ‘we Congolese are jungle people. We know the forests. Rwandans, well, they just look after cows. They know nothing of trees. Do you know what they call snakes in DRC?’

  I hadn’t a clue.

  ‘Go into any restaurant in Kinshasa and you can ask for two types of fish. Water fish and tree fish.’

  ‘What’s a tree fish?’ This sounded like the beginning of some terrible joke.

  ‘It is a snake. Everything is related to the trees in the Congo. Lev, I believe I should lead from now on.’

  As I tried to pick my way through the logic of this particular argument, Boston unsheathed the machete I had bought for him and encouraged us to take off. It was a sturdy army-issue panga with a comfortable wooden handle, not like the flimsy machetes that are for sale all over the African bazaars. Gripping it with an iron fist, he pushed past Amani and started cutting blindly at vines and branches. I gave Amani what I hoped was a conciliatory smile and, together, we followed.

  Boston’s path didn’t seem any better than Amani’s – but his panga was making short work of the dense vegetation, and our progress was faster. With Boston blazing the trail, too, we were able to stay closer to the occasional gurgle of water that marked the Nile’s first passage. In places the water didn’t seem to flow at all, and the only indication that we were following the mighty Nile was the soft earth underfoot. Sometimes this bog seemed to suddenly grow deeper and more expansive, so that we had no choice but to pick a way across. Thick and glutinous beneath the feet, it had the same effect as quicksand, and on more than one occasion I plunged into the quagmire up to my waist. As I wriggled, shouting profanities and grappling for Amani to help me, Boston seemed to float above the filth, keeping his boots as clean as the moment they came out of the box. He really was a jungle man.

  As Amani hoisted me from the quagmire for the second time, I fixed my gaze on those boots. A nice pair of desert Altbergs, they were the best money can buy. I knew it – because I’d bought them for him. He looked back at me from the undergrowth ahead, beaming. He was proud
of those boots, determined not to get wet feet.

  With Boston hacking away, I could better take in the wonders of the Nyungwe Forest. Amani might have been a poor bushwhacker, but he was good at one thing: it was Amani who first saw the colobus monkeys leaping through the trees above us like little black ghosts. By mid-afternoon, we had dropped a couple of hundred metres in altitude, following the natural contours of the valley. In a short distance, the stream had grown from a pure, clean trickle to a bog and then, as it filtered through layers of vegetation, it finally emerged as a fully-fledged little river. At the moment it was hardly a foot’s length across, but it was clean again and definitely flowing. Trailing my fingers in the stream, it felt as if the water – even more than me – wanted to be rid of its forested womb and head out into the open sunshine beyond.

  The water and I both got our wish when, in the late afternoon, we emerged from the Nyungwe. The forest ended suddenly, snatching us from the close darkness under the canopy to the bright sunshine of fields and mountains. It had been silent in the forest, save for the gurgling of the river and the occasional sniping of Boston and Amani, but now there were new sounds: the lowing of cows.

  After leaving the sweaty humidity of the forest, it was a relief to be welcomed by the sight of this open plain. From the trees the stream trickled down, through small waterfalls, and seemed to be revelling in its first touch of daylight. With Boston’s panga back in its sheath, our feet followed the water. The first sign of life was a single large cow, wading in the long grass at the bottom of a hill. On the hillside were the first signs of human habitation. Neatly furrowed fields and a few banana trees stood before the distinctive shape of a track leading south. At the bottom of the track, still clinging to the stream, several small huts hid behind a stand of tall brown-and-white eucalyptus trees.

  It dawned on me that what I was looking at was the first village that depended on the Nile.

  ‘Come on,’ said Amani, with renewed vigour. ‘These are Batwa. Let’s speak to them before they run away.’

  Amani had already set off when I realised who he was speaking about. Outside the huts were the outlines of four diminutive people.

  ‘Pygmies,’ said Boston as he watched Amani stride ahead, shaking his head in what I thought was reproach. ‘Do not believe what this man tells you. He is a government agent.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘The Twa were in this country long before Hutu and Tutsi,’ Boston told me. ‘Amani will not tell you that.’

  I followed Amani to the edge of the village, where he was already in conversation with the Batwa men outside their huts. Only one of them appeared particularly small, and none of them looked concerned at our approach. They simply sat on a grassy bank, looking rather nonplussed at this band of sweaty pedestrians who had emerged from their forest.

  As I approached, their leader, a man a little more than five feet tall introduced himself as ‘Kazungu’.

  ‘Isn’t that what you call white people?’ I asked Amani.

  ‘No,’ Amani replied, ‘that is Muzungu, but it means the same thing. Look at him – he is lighter than these others.’

  The village was nothing more than a collection of five small huts among the banana trees. As Kazungu led us around, Amani translated his story in fits and starts. At my side, Boston occasionally snorted. I made daggers at him with my eyes. No matter what spin Amani was putting on this story at the behest of his government superiors, I still wanted to hear it.

  ‘Kazungu’s fathers lived in the Nyungwe. They were forest dwellers. They did not grow crops like they do now. They hunted and foraged. But, after 1994, things had to change. Education for all!’ announced Amani. ‘The Batwa came out of the forest to join the one Rwanda.’

  Amani was veiled in how he spoke about it, but he was making a tacit reference to the event that still, in spite of everything else, defines Rwanda: the genocide of 1994, which had both put this beautiful country on the world map, and changed its history forever.

  Since 1990, Rwanda had been engaged in a bloody civil war. The Hutu-led government was desperate to suppress the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a rebel organisation largely made up of refugee Tutsis based across the border in Uganda. Some of these refugees had been settled in neighbouring countries for a generation, but still considered themselves to have fled from the country that was rightfully theirs. For three years a war was waged between the two, until a ceasefire in 1993 seemed to bring an end to hostilities. It was not to last long. A plan was being prepared that would eventually see a power-sharing government in place in Kigali, but to many Hutus this felt like a concession too far. Tension was high, and a delicate balancing act would need to be performed to ensure peace.

  It didn’t come. All that was needed to trigger something devastating was a smoking gun, and it came in early 1994. On 6 April, a plane carrying the Hutu premier of Rwanda was shot down on its approach to Kigali, killing all on board. To prominent Hutus in the armed forces, this was nothing more than a political assassination. On the very next day, the genocide began in Kigali and spread rapidly outwards to consume the whole of Rwanda. Soldiers and police quickly executed prominent Tutsis in the capital and, within hours, roadblocks had been established to contain refugees. Systematically, the Hutu police and militias swept Kigali and, checking the documentation of every citizen to ensure ethnicity, began a genocide that would go on to claim an estimated one million lives.

  Perhaps the most terrifying thing was that Hutu civilians were later pressurised to take up their own guns and machetes and join in the slaughter. So it was that Hutus turned on Tutsis across the country, and Rwanda was defined forever as a place of genocide. The killings lasted a hundred days, brought to an end only by the mobilisation of the RPF across the border and a military campaign that moved south, from Uganda, capturing first the north of the country and, finally, Kigali itself. We would reach Kigali in about a week’s time, if the walking was good, crossing the killing fields to reach the centre of the tragedy itself.

  I looked at Amani. He was still talking, but I was thinking less about the Batwa and their village than Amani himself. He was, I knew, a Tutsi by ancestry. I wondered what his experience of those hundred days had been like, how many friends and family members he had lost, what it now felt like to be living in a country carrying those fresh scars. Those were all questions Rwanda itself was trying to answer every day.

  ‘Since 1994, we do not have ethnicity. All Rwandans have the same language, the same history, the same culture. There is only one ethnic group – the Banyarwanda. We are all the same, and we are all Rwandans. It includes Kazungu and his village here. That is why they came out of the forest.’

  ‘So they were forced out?’

  Boston felt it was time to interject. ‘In Rwanda, you cannot even remember. You cannot say my father came from here, or my grandfather came from here. Talking about those kind of things – it is not allowed.’

  It sounded draconian to me, but when I asked Kazungu – through Amani – if he and his people missed the forest, he just shrugged. ‘In the village,’ he said, ‘we can grow bananas, eat potatoes, eat beans. We can even own a cow, or a mobile phone – if we are rich enough.’

  ‘There are Batwa in Uganda also,’ said Boston. ‘They lived in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. But the government forced them to leave. Do you know why?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the forest was needed for gorillas. Can you believe?’

  ‘It makes all Rwandans feel like Rwandans,’ said Amani. We had reached the middle of the village, and one of Kazungu’s headmen was approaching with a plastic bucket. When he set it down, I saw that it was filled with honey and pieces of comb.

  Kazungu said something to Amani. ‘It is for us,’ he began, ‘to give us strength for our walk. It is wild honey. They sell it on the roadside for fifteen dollars a kilogram.’

  Reaching into the bucket, I took a spoonful of the hard yellow substance. No sooner was it in my l
ips than I regretted it.

  Picking bits from my teeth, I looked round to find Kazungu’s face open with laughter.

  ‘Lev,’ began Amani, not unkindly. ‘You have to get rid of the wax first . . .’

  The stream grew wider as, renewed by our taste of wild honey, we walked into the afternoon. Downstream, the valley broadened and the perfectly clear water ran between manicured fields of sweet potato and maize, small tea plantations and – higher up – pine forests that disappeared into high cloud. Amani was keen to point out how almost all of Rwanda’s land was put to use to feed its people. Agriculture was one of the ways society held itself together since the dark days of the genocide. ‘Rwanda,’ he kept saying, much to Boston’s chagrin, ‘is about co-operation and setting differences aside. This above all else.’

  The constant reminders of how the disparate peoples of Rwanda were compelled to unite were beginning to grate. Boston’s silence was telling. Yet, as evening approached and thoughts turned to making the expedition’s very first camp, another stark reminder of the past was about to appear.

  We had come fifteen kilometres out of the forest and, by the time dusk drew near, we’d reached the plantations outside the village of Gisovu. On the hillside above, overlooking the vibrant greens of the riverside, stood a high-walled compound, with crumbling watchtowers in each of its four corners and an intimidating metal gate against its south-west walls. As Boston, Amani and I set up our small, blue tents, my eye was constantly drawn to this imposing fortress. Even at a distance I could tell that its walls were pockmarked, not just with natural decay but with the unmistakable marks of bullet holes – vicious reminders of the past.