DAY 24 WEDNESDAY 13th DECEMBER 2017. NAIROBI, KENYA

Well, if it’s Wednesday, it must be Kenya!

Nairobi, I always said, was a city I desperately wished to avoid for the rest of my life. I’ve often called it the worst city in Africa. Today I have reconsidered and upgraded it considerably. Arriving direct from Accra, still pretty much a ‘third world’ city, I can see how improved is the infrastructure of East Africa. It’s another world. It helps that I am staying in a pleasant part of the city, residential and with a few High Commissions and international offices around. The traffic, although dense and heavy, is relatively well disciplined, polite and exceptionally quiet. There are pavements on most roads and a lot of people walking. You wouldn’t want to be in a wheelchair, it’s true, but with eyes peeled, you can walk without having to battle in the road around carelessly parked cars, hooting tro-tros and pushing vehicles battling for headway. The comparison with Accra puts Nairobi in a better light. People too are calm, well mannered and exceptionally polite – and ready to talk with an equality that I seldom find in West Africa, where I always represent the white man. Here in East Africa the exposure to white men has been longer and deeper. Few Europeans settled West Africa, the White Man’s Grave, with its malaria and endemic diseases, while much of the land in these countries was colonised and farmed by white men for the past 150 years. They introduced European ways and infrastructure that still stand these now independent countries in good stead.

Stepping out of the airport, with its friendly, efficient staff, was like arriving back in Europe. It was early in the morning: the sun was just up. I was through my visa application in minutes ($100 for a 90 day visa that allows me multiple entires between Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda), collected my bag and was stepping out into the cool morning (plunging to 15C degrees! A shock to my system after burning Navrongo). Taxi drivers were polite and let me pass and I went to an outdoor cafe for strong coffee and a breakfast of fried eggs on brown toast, served by an intelligent, polite and smart waitress. Some days ago I booked into the guest house Rico favours but I knew that check in time was not until noon, so I had time to kill. At 7.15 I negotiated calmly for a taxi to take me there, some 20 kilometres away, a journey that took an hour in packed but cooperative and courteous traffic. I had thought to leave my luggage and roam until I could get my room, but Lois, the charming, talkative receptionist gave me the key there and then. I dozed away the next four hours gratefully.

There’s not a lot to do in Nairobi, and getting about is not easy, especially after a sleepless night, so I just wandered locally in the afternoon, to the popular and smart Yaya shopping centre, a few streets away. With a food court and ATMs it served my purposes and I was delighted to find a bookshop with good, though expensive, maps of Kenya and Ethiopia. My maps from last year are old and tattered, aged things of Rico’s.

My day was made by the Nairobi Girls’ Chorale! Eighteen or so pretty young women were performing for free at the entrance to the shopping centre. Their voices rose in Christmas songs with that spine tingling cadence that is unique to African women’s voices. One young woman sang all the solos, with that rhythm and power that is so wonderful in African music, her voice soaring with that raw guttural harmony. Her control was that of a trained singer but she looked unaware of the effect her voice could have, pricking tears to the eyes and shivers to the spine. I listened for an hour or so, ecstatic entertainment that uplifted my weariness and thrilled me through and through. Wonderful! A great beginning to my East African safari. Wonderful!

*

Nairobi, at its 5000 or so feet above sea level, is temperate at this time of the year. Just a few miles south of the Equator, the sun is high and strong through the day, but this evening I need a jersey for the first time since I left Bristol. My small room in the guest house, a fine friendly place in which Rico is held in fond regard by Lois on reception and Nancy, the owner, is cool and I have a duvet tonight and the first hot water for weeks. It’s good to feel properly clean again after all the cold bucket baths of Ghana. Gone too is the constipation, a fact perhaps not unconnected with the return to flushing lavatories that actually even take the paper as well (rather than an unsightly cardboard box in the corner) and the lack of a seething mass of maggots below as I shit! Yes, I know the details aren’t necessary, but it’s all part of travelling life – armchair stories or first hand revulsion!

DAY 25 THURSDAY 14th DECEMBER 2017. KITALE, KENYA

The pleasure of old friends – and new ones – is what keeps me travelling. Here I am, after nine months, back in Kitale with Rico and Adelight and the lovely family of girls and young women who made last year’s journey such warm fun. I am made so welcome and privileged to be able to claim that I have friends all over the world. They have even used my visit to build me a small, simple ‘guest house’ in the garden. They’ve actually reformed and decorated the askari’s hut for me (an askari is a watchman). So for the next few weeks, on and off, I have a small home from home here in the family.

When it comes to small aircraft, I am like a small boy! Sometimes I think I’d have liked to learn to fly. I can see links between motorbiking and flying small planes: they both involve an essential freedom to move about, an independence, a fluidity of movement, a combination of man and machine. So I was thrilled when Adelight managed to book my flight to Kitale from Wilson airport in Nairobi, a small airfield that deals with hundreds of small domestic planes, local passenger aircraft and the ones that fly wealthy tourists off on their safaris, as well as many small private aircraft. Flights tend to leave in the early morning so I had to leave the guest house at 5.30am by taxi through the still dark, waking streets to Wilson.

The daily flights to Kitale, and many other outlying towns, are in small aircraft not much more than a minibus with wings and a propellor. We flew up in some form of Cessna, thirteen seats and a cupboard for baggage. Despite being told that I had a cancellation to get on the full planes, it turned out that we were only four adults and two children on board with a single pilot for the hour and a quarter flight. I bagged a seat behind the co-pilot’s seat so I could watch the instruments as well as the spectacular scenery of Kenya, especially that moment when you fly out over the edge of the great Africa Rift Valley. Flying at 10,500 feet with Kenya below, itself at 5000 and 6000 feet, the views are wonderful, even on a dull cloudy morning before the sun burns off the cloud and bathes the African landscape. We flew right past Longonot volcanic crater, a classic geological feature that might be fun to investigate sometime in the coming weeks. Flying over the lakes of the Rift Valley, you see the intense market gardening activity of this fertile region that produces so many of the products in European supermarkets, as well as plane loads of fresh flowers for world markets, with many acres of land under hot houses for large commercial operations. Far away to the north, the pilot turned and pointed out Mount Kenya behind the Aberdares range to me. Later you fly over forested areas, past the lovely Kerio Valley, dropping dramatically green and steep to the dry bush floor far below, where I shall return soon on my little blue bike. By the time you land at the small airstrip at Kitale Kenya has climbed to 5630 feet above sea level, to a temperate climate beneath the equatorial sun, for here I will crisscross the Equator many times.

Adelight, Rico and baby Maria were waiting at the airstrip to greet me as I clambered out of the sky minibus and collected my bag from the cupboard underneath – actually underneath the other plane that had flown up with us, into which my bag had been loaded. We had flown underneath the other small plane for a while, my pilot taking photos through the cockpit roof glass with his phone before it diverged and flew alongside much of the way, oddly small and insect-like against the huge backdrop of the African landscape.

Baby Maria is an addition to the family since I was here in March. She is Rico’s only actual child in Africa, despite the size of this cheerful, charming family. Maria is a happy baby, surrounded by legions of sisters and aunties here in the house. Currently five of the girls are at home: delightful Scovia, now 19, Marion, Rose, Bo and Sherri. We came home for a happy reunion and a simple family breakfast as the sun warmed off the definite chill of the morning, cool as low as 13 degrees.

Adelight and Scovia shopped in town (many hair extensions that Scovia will weave onto her sisters’ heads for Christmas fashion! and food and beer) while Rico and I sat in the now hot sun, parked in the busy town centre, catching up and watching the people. Later we furnished my simple chalet from bits and pieces around the yard and house and looked over my little blue bike (it needs a name: Rico suggests the Blue Mosquito!), that he has worked on while I was away, and Scovia cheerfully washed the other day. It’s been parked in his large garage and he has managed to procure a single seat for me. By the end of the last trip, I had become accustomed to the bike, but the seat was excruciating! Too narrow for long distances. While on contract with Medicines sans Frontieres in Congo, he managed to persuade them to release a wide single seat that he brought back, not without problems, partly caused because it was hurriedly stuffed into a plastic sack and plastic bags are not allowed to be imported in Rwanda, and Kenyan authorities tried to impose duties on entry. But he got it here and has cleverly made a new sub-frame and fitted the seat. I will make a test run tomorrow and I bet it will make this journey very much more physically enjoyable!

It’s such fun to be back here in this terrific family atmosphere. Although so few of the young women in this house are related by blood, they form the truest family it’s my pleasure to know: little competition, no discord, quiet satisfaction with the little they have, happy cooperation, easy acceptance of the chores of the house and warm, delightful company together that extends to include their old white uncle too. Happy to be back, and very happy to be invited for Christmas again.

DAY 26 FRIDAY 15th DECEMBER 2017. KITALE, KENYA

The little Blue Mosquito has its new seat, cleverly fitted by my resident engineer, Rico. Rico is such a clever mechanic, adapted completely to the African way of making do and being inventive. To fit the seat he’s had to design and make a new sub-frame for it, adapting the fixings to suit the new, much wider, single seat. We’ve worked on the bike a bit today, new handgrips, refining the headlight – so that it shines at the road, not the starry skies. In a day or two we’ll fit the new drive sprockets and chain that I have carried all the way from Florida. It was very much cheaper to have them sent to Leslie’s house for me to pick up and lug back in my luggage than it was to purchase them in England. I will be glad to carry them no further.

Days pass very comfortably here in the cheerful house amongst the family of happy young women – now heavily occupied with the intricacies of hair weaving and extensions for the Christmas holiday. Scovia went to a salon and came back with a wonderful frizz of dizzy, wild curly extensions decorated with a few beads, a style that so suits her animated personality and her prettiness. She has given Bo a new style and is now involved doing Marion’s Christmas frivolity. It takes hours and hours to make these intricate styles. They have to come off again before school starts.

Adelight has started a tailoring business and now has a small shop in town, making shirts, blouses and what I’d call harem trousers from printed cotton fabrics. Caring for little Maria is, of course, very easy in this house full of young women. Seldom has a baby had more happy sisters and aunties to look after her.

DAY 27 SATURDAY 16th DECEMBER 2017. KITALE, KENYA

We’ve been working on the Mosquito today. It’s not a chore I enjoy, but I do understand that it is good for me to understand a bit more of its workings, and working with Rico, who is knowledgable and skilful, makes it good exercise for me. We have put new sprockets and drive chain, and even removed the rear tyre to put in a new spoke and messed with the headlight too. Funny how I feel so little empathy for mechanics. It’d make these journeys a lot more comfortable and confident if I knew I could fix problems myself.

DAY 28 SUNDAY 17th DECEMBER 2017. KITALE, KENYA

We all went as a family party to a private ‘resort’ fifteen kilometres out of town, set in trees with views of the distant Cheringani Hills. This part of Kenya is so green; such a relief after grey, dusty Ghana. Levels of development are much higher in East Africa too; there’s a sense of order and a discipline that is alien to much of West Africa. It’s much easier to travel here…

It’s so cheerful, to be part of this family for a time. The resort/ restaurant was well set up and we sat together at a round table beneath a shady umbrella beside a small swimming pool, that all the girls enjoyed; had drinks and lunch. This was my slightly belated birthday treat for Scovia, who turned 19 last week – I arrived on her 18th birthday last year. You know, I’ve never seen squeezed faces; heard dissent, complaints or meanness amongst these young women? They are content with what they have, which isn’t much in materials terms, but is a high prize in family and social terms. I am amused that there is even an empty room in the house right now, complete with two large beds. These young women prefer to sleep together in the other room, all five or six (or however many it becomes) sharing two large beds. They have large heaps of clothes, many of which they mix and share. They look smart and pretty but for them to have a few coins is probably riches. Imagine this in privileged Europe, where five children sleeping in one room, eating the basic fare that is here accepted as food, doing the household chores (by hand), having one TV for the household and NO ‘devices’, en suite bathroom, own TV and wifi, air-con in America and all the rest, would now be classified as near poverty! As I write, on a sunny morning on the porch, Scovia is washing all the floors (by hand), Rose is washing a vast heap of clothes, Bo is also washing floors, Marion is washing the dishes and tidying the girls’ room and little Sherri is folding clothes (from the last hand wash), all are intermittently playing with and attending to the equally smiling baby, as Adelight heads out to work at her new tailoring business. This is family life as it was meant to be, before we began to judge by what we own rather than what we are. Send your problem, disgruntled Western children to Africa: it’ll soon sort out the priorities!

DAY 29 MONDAY 18th DECEMBER 2017. KITALE, KENYA

Must get going soon! It’s easy to stay here and convince myself I am resting. Resting from what, I wonder? Well, yes, Ghana was quite hard on the body with its heat and dust, nasal congestion and sanitation-encouraged constipation (!) – but hardly hard work! No, I am just lulled by the comforts and pleasures of family life in Kitale. And I much enjoy the evening beers with Rico as the sun sets and we sit and converse while supper smells emanate from the nearby kitchen.

The Blue Mosquito is now ready for its 2018 journey and I should make a short trip to settle it down with its new chain and sprockets, seat and small repairs. All I’ve done so far is ride it about town. But somehow, the sun shines, I relax and days pass.

We do need to sort out the log book for my bike. It turns out that it was never sent from the licensing office in Eldoret, the next large city, when we applied on that terrible bureaucratic day a year ago. Before I leave the country this time, I need my papers in order. At present I have decided to keep the little bike longer. Once bought, and the money gone, it’s not costing much to keep a bike in Africa for future plans, whatever they are. I have become accustomed to the little bike, small though it is. I have come to appreciate the lightness of it and its versatility on bad ground. This afternoon I had to ride the old rail tracks in an industrial part of town (I was looking for the beer distributor in a vain search for stout, as a change from the local lager that I don’t much like) and at one point did a pirouette that would have seen me fall heavily from my bigger bikes. Thanks to the lightness of this little bike, I was able to throw my weight the other way and leap sideways over the rail in a fashion that impressed the gathered boda-boda riders, to whom my 200cc bike is a ‘big’ machine. In the kingdom of the boda-boda, the man with the 200cc piki-piki is king!

Already a month into my trip and the chill of English winter is just a thought that passes in a moment. By chance I happened on the weather forecast for Totnes today, and looked in mild interest to see a sunny day with a ‘feels like’ temperature of minus one degree. I sit under a blue sky in shorts and tee shirt. Haha!

DAY 30 TUESDAY 19th DECEMBER 2017. KITALE, KENYA

Things can be mended and repaired in Africa. At home I would probably have to throw damaged items away. Here I can find someone – or Adelight can find someone – to mend my pannier bags, after their hard journey last year that wore corners and pulled at stitching. I have with me also my small backpack. It has been to Africa for many years, mended many times. I recollect trying to get the previous one repaired in Yorkshire. It cost half the price of a new one to stitch in one new canvas panel. Today I spent £4 on revitalising three panniers for the trip to come.

Tomorrow I intend to set off on a short trip. I need to get back in the mood and settle down to my journey. I will be back for Christmas with the Kitale family – to which I am contributing the cost of a goat (expensive at this season as it is everyone’s preferred Christmas fare), but we have decided to buy other meats instead for a barbecue. I have also insisted on pineapples and ice cream!

Without that logbook I still have no proof of Adelight’s ownership of the bike. Last year I travelled with a receipt but I need to sort this out before I think of leaving the country. Now it transpires that Adelight’s contact at the vehicle registration department in Eldoret has been transferred to Mombasa… Bureaucracy is SO complex in so much of Africa. It’s the price I pay to have my own transport here. The other option was to bring my own motorbike from Devon – transport costs about £2000 one way and the newly privatised British ‘carnet de passage’ customs document at £750 or more for one year. Huh… I guess Kenyan bureaucracy is at least cheap, if arcane.

But it’s time to get moving, one way or the other.

DAY 31 WEDNESDAY 20th DECEMBER 2017. KESSUP, KENYA

A profound, deep silence in the velvet night is a gift that can seldom be enjoyed. I had forgotten how the night enfolds this place, perched on the very lip of the yawning Kerio Valley, a side branch of the great Rift Valley, that plunges outside my window, down from the tall eucalyptus and pine on the escarpment above this narrow plateau, down into the depths of the inky bush lands on the valley floor, where elephants roam and small dark villages are without electricity. Far across the abyss wink the lights of Kabarnet, a straggly town on the other rim of the Kerio Valley. To the north stretch desert-like lands far up Africa. When the power failed in the night, as it frequently does in much of Africa where demand so far outstrips supply, the darkness became almost tangible, the silence such that all I could hear was my own heartbeat.

If you followed my journey earlier this year, the name of Kessup might ring a bell. It was here that I arrived on January 8th after a shockingly hard ride on my bike, then new to me, exhausted by a rugged road through the Rift Valley, on my first real ride of the journey. I found the Lelin Campsite by chance, slept the best sleep of the entire journey on several occasions, and met my friend William, the ex-police officer. My silent chalet room (£15) has a huge view across the valley, dark and mysterious and filled with elephants and African magic – and I am in bed, and ready to sleep at 8.45, anticipating just the deep, satisfying rest that last year’s stays provided.

William I met by introduction as a sort of informal guide that the then guest house manager could provide for local walks. Usually I prefer to be my own guide and just see what happens, but in January I decided to meet William for a tour of the area. “I’m not very interested in the waterfall,” I told him, knowing it’s the usual fare on offer. “I’d rather meet the people of the village!”

So it was that I ended up taking several walks with William, quickly recognising that he was a man of integrity and bonding over beers and talk, as well as meeting so many of his friends and acquaintances and being welcomed into family compounds and homes across the plateau that forms the Kessup village. It spreads quite prettily between the steep cliffs that rise to the highlands behind, about 500 feet higher, and the depths of the valley below. Here on the plateau are many small shambas (farms) amongst dotted homesteads and trees. From my vantage point as I write at the large window looking over the misted valley, red dust roads wander the plateau towards the sharply defined rim, with a silhouette of trees where the shining morning mist hides the valley. Glinting through the silver haze is the islanded patch of the small lake that attracts the game animals in a reserve on the valley floor and I am beginning to make out a subtle darkness of the shadow that forms the opposite escarpment ten or fifteen miles away. The morning is still, except for the calls of pigeons that clatter on the zinc roof of my room. I appear to be the sole guest, my motorbike outside the door and breakfast no doubt being prepared by quiet Vicky, from whom I received the warm welcome reserved for old friends.

William was excited. We unloaded my Mosquito and repaired to a table beneath the trees overlooking the great valley to drink beer and catch up. William was a policeman but was so shocked by the criminal life of Nairobi and a vicious attack by machete, that slightly disfigures his thin face, that he resigned and returned to his small shamba in Kessup, where he ekes a living I’m not really sure how – just one of those African mysteries. He is an essentially very decent man, now 52, with good conversation and respected in his community. He is immensely proud of his daughter, currently training to be a nurse in Perth. Getting a child out to train abroad is a great achievement, incurring many sacrifices, but Lydia now sends William what she can afford from her probably meagre student nurse earnings. His wife, about whom I hear very little, is a policewoman in Eldoret, the nearest city, 30 miles away. There’s a son too, with a small IT business in Kenya.

William is tall and skinny, almost as tall as me. He looks sprucer and healthier than he did almost a year ago. It came out in our conversation that he seldom visits the bar that we frequented on my visits before. “I have given up the… this thing, the spirit. I don’t take it any more! I listened to your advice and I thought, my friend Jonathan advises me to stop; I should stop!” For William could down quantities of the strong local spirits while I drank my relatively nutritious beers. It caused me to tell him of all the strong young people I have seen die in Navrongo, the violent locally distilled liquors taken into empty stomachs and rotting livers. Africa has, as you will have read often in my diaries, a severe alcohol problem: perhaps one of the quickest threats to life here, but one that can be managed by individuals and not dependent on outside forces so I often find myself talking against it. Not against beer and local home brewed beers, all of which have some nutrition and vitamins, but distilled liquors with nothing but 40% (and various unknown) alcohol glugged down for its effect. Well, with Wechiga and William I have had some small success.

*

The ride from Kitale is uninspiring, but this IS African landscapes, something everywhere to watch as I pootle along at maximum 50mph on the whirring Mosquito. I’m taking just a short trip, going back for family Christmas, just to get back in the travelling mood. The little bike runs well and Rico’s new seat is a great success, infinitely more comfortable than the narrow torture seat fitted as standard. Well, the bike wasn’t meant for African touring, just for short journeys with off-road capabilities. With the new saddle and the pannier racks, Rico has turned it into a touring bike, albeit rather a lightweight, small one. But with my microlight luggage, it will do fine.

A frustrating logbook visit to the post office (I noted they have a numerical coupon system in the main crowded hall: “Ticket NUMber three thousand, two hundred and seventeen to winDOW oNE, please”). The licensing office is a tiny room out the back, perhaps 7 feet by 10 feet, into which is packed a huge desk, a large photocopier, a row of computer terminals in booths, six chairs – and anything up to eight or nine people waving papers. A couple of what I assume are officials, although it’s difficult to spot the difference from the jostling customers, enter things on computers, ask for random information to delay decision making and send you away again, defeated this time, to come again tomorrow with more papers. Now, despite the fact that we have a receipt, issued by this office, and signed by the previous owners, for the change of ownership to Adelight, the official says he must have the contact details of the previous owner and contact them to check, before the new logbook can be issued. I foresee a long, frustrating wait, especially with Christmas coming…

DAY 32 THURSDAY 21st DECEMBER 2017. KESSUP, KENYA

Below my window with its vista of the deep valley, away to the left and north of the view winds a red dust road, meandering between neat shambas and small houses over the flowing landscape of the sort of shelf that forms Kessup and Kewapsoss villages before it drops over the edge of the great crack in Africa. William and I wandered that way today, inspecting the tidy gardens and intricate rocky terraces, the fast flowing streams that make the ridge so fertile, and meeting the villagers wherever we went. I shook a hundred hands and was made most welcome everywhere under the high burning sun. Not many wazungu come this way, certainly not in such close contact, so I provide a magnet for snotty-nosed children and am visible from afar, greetings rising from all about the landscape. And of course, it’s just the sort of day I enjoy.

Onions, tomatoes, cabbages, kale, beans, passion fruits, maize, potatoes and a lot of local green vegetables I can’t name are cultivated here, water channelled and piped from the various streams that race from the escarpment above the plateau. Farming in Africa is hard graft, but people here are fortunate in the fertility of the region. There are few machines here, beyond the odd small grinding mill; work is done by hand with hoes and rakes, ploughing behind bullocks. At this season, before the rains come, people are nursing their seed beds and growing young crops in tidy plots, many of which straggle up the steeper hillsides, terraced in tiny beds held by dark, sharp volcanic rocks. But in Africa, if you have water, there is always plenty of sun – and things grow.

For an hour we sat amongst scrubby trees, on the dusty rocks, drinking bulsa with local men. Bulsa is similar to pito in Navrongo, komek in Uganda and a hundred other variants across the continent: a mildly alcoholic brew of grain, yeast and water. In Navrongo you drink fermenting millet; in Kewapsoss, fermenting maize. It has a faintly sour flavour – not much to my liking, but I drink it for solidarity, which is so much appreciated! It is a scummy liquid, thick with particles of grain that bubble gently as it works and leaves a residue in the bottom of the cooking fat containers that are the local mugs. At about 4% alcohol, at least it also has some nutritional value. I try to shut off my taste buds and slurp it down with what I hope looks like some pleasure as we talk in the shade, people passing or sitting around the shelter of sticks and zinc sheeting where Salima brews her mixture in sooty pans and dispenses from old plastic oil containers. We talk quietly, often an opportunity for me to answer questions about life in the West, seen only as luxurious and comfortable as portrayed in the ridiculous glitzy dramas that count for these farming folks as views of real life. It surprises them to understand that we too have to work for our money; the costs of living shock them and I try to make them understand that the relative wealth that we wazungu appear to bring to Africa is an effect of the difference in our economies, not from the amount I can pluck from those infamous money trees of the West. For me to provide four one pint plastic containers of bulsa for 75 pence is ridiculously cheap, but, I tell them, for me to buy my friends four pints of beer in the Church House Inn is wildly expensive… and I work it out in Kenya shillings… “…about 1900 bob!” The whole place goes silent in horror. I doubt anyone here earns nineteen hundred shillings in a week, most not in a month. Later, William needed a to make a small donation, just 50 bob (37 pence), and I learned that he had not a single coin in his pocket; a situation frequently common for Wechiga when we go on our ‘roaming’.

Questions come seem amusing, but I mustn’t laugh: “is Australia part of Britain?”, “is England the same as Britain?”, “are there hills? Is Europe part of America? Do you have cows? Do you drink bulsa?” I try to enlighten, for often these people have never before sat with a mzungu or had the chance to ask questions. Most wazungu they see are passing in luxurious safari vehicles or soaring above them on paragliders, for this is a place for ‘adventure’ holidays, where tourists spend huge money to fly above the little shambas, but seldom take much interest in local life below.

Rocky streams trickle and burble down the steep wooded slopes and large raptors circle above on the same currents that attract the paragliding crowd. The sun beats down and we are within a few miles of the Equator. Life is slow and calm, a few battered boda-bodas the only vehicles on these dusty tracks. Hoes hack at the red soil and water leaks from hundreds of plastic pipelines that water small fields where young tomatoes wilt and wait for their turn beneath the valuable locally engineered sprinklers. Children are on holiday for Christmas and play or watch cattle, calling to the passing white man from behind every hedge and aloe. It’s an attractive life, on the surface – until I am reminded of the harshness that lies beneath the bucolic, sylvan exterior. Fascinating to come and look and fool myself that I am ‘part of it’ for an hour or two, but even better to escape back to my own so much more comfortable life later!

*

We relaxed for a time back amongst the well tended terraced lawns and trees of the Lelin campsite. My en suite chalet room, a bit rough round the edges, costs £14.70 (about the same as those four pints in the Church House Inn…). I only once saw a tent: it seems to cater more to day-visiting conference groups. Then William and I set off on our afternoon ‘tour’. This time we climbed into the great green amphitheatre above the plateau, to attend the funeral of Zipporah Chesire, grandmother to some of the teenagers I photographed here last year and related to just about everyone, it would appear, in this place where family lines mix in complex manners. So, for the second time in a few days, I found myself gazing on another dead body, but this one in a simpler coffin on a hillside, being buried in the family compound – and having died only last Friday, not four months ago. Zipporah was despatched amongst her family and neighbours on a picturesque hillside, in a simple ceremony that owed more to tradition than pomp, pride and status than that last ugly, pretentious affair in Navrongo.

About two hundred people had gathered, sitting about on the dusty hillside with fabulous views of the great valley and the pine clad escarpment weaving away to our right. An extension cable had been snaked up the slopes – we crossed the knotted and taped joints for a couple of hundred feet on the sandy path – to facilitate many speeches, all in Kalenjin, a language that is a mystery to me. The deceased was born in 1947, ‘saved’ by one of the pastor-ridden business ‘churches’ in 2000 and died of asthma last week. Her coffin, complete with glazed window, sat under a billowing curtain on the edge of the compound slope, where a theatrically robed pastor led some sort of service when the speeches were done. Briefly, we all filed past the coffin and dropped a note into a basket to help with funeral expenses. “Oh, people will be happy!” exclaimed William later, “even a mzungu came to her funeral!” Meanwhile, of course, I felt a bit of a fake – but perception in Africa is quite different: I had honoured the family – as was obvious from the warm handshake and greeting I got, perhaps from a son, as I stepped away from the coffin having deposited my 200 shillings in the basket. “Oh, yes, it’s wonderful. It’s never happened in Kessup before. A mzungu at a funeral!” said William.

Soon at least four women had collapsed on the dirt (I fear the family crops suffered badly during the event, so many feet trampling the tiny fields on the steep slopes). Hysterical and fainting clean away they were carried off like sacks of maize and fanned by other women, one of them only regaining her senses twenty minutes later. Then some hymns were sung as the coffin was manhandled down to the lower terrace where a hole yawned in the red earth. A burial service was said by the ranting pastor and the coffin lowered and dust replaced. Food was then available – ughali (maize balls) and potatoes and some stringy meat I had seen boiling in a big sooty pan. But William said we could go now: duty had been done and we could quietly weave our way back down the rugged hill and relax with our beers and eventual supper. These two evenings, the wind has risen cooly from the valley, enough that William and I have sat in a shelter beside a tiny, comforting charcoal brazier.

An interesting day! Congenial and a small insight into how others live and survive – and die.

DAY 33 FRIDAY 22nd DECEMBER 2017. KESSUP, KENYA

Between Kessup, the main village of this plateau and Kewapsos sits another tiny village area, right beneath my eyrie up here on the hill. I can see the whole area as I write my diary, awake in the morning sun, green, with a few people walking the narrow red dust tracks between their neat fields; one man heaving a hoe to break the red sods turned by a plough, ready for planting. It’s a very quiet morning, just after eight, silent now the dawn chorus is over – for that sounds so much like a busy office of mobile phone ring tones these days, repeated burbles and bleeps, whistles, screeches and alarms. And then my sleep is shattered by the doves cavorting on the zinc roof. Happily, dawn doesn’t happen until about six or six thirty here on the Equator.

William and I walked into the view below my window, right to the lip of the steep drop that falls to the drier, hotter valley another thousand feet or more below. We sat for a time on the very edge of the slopes, the stiff breeze rushing up and over us from the valley, shaking the long grasses amongst which we sat. Emmanuel, one of our bulsa drinking characters of yesterday, sat beside me on another dry brown rock. I enjoyed Emmanuel’s company: I guess mid-twenties, full of questions, intelligent but only basically educated at the local schools. He shadowed me for the whole of our time in the villages, eager to know of life in Europe and ready to answer my questions too.

Bulsa is never far away in these rural areas, a gathering point for local gossip and idle minds. Inside a round thatched hut a number of locals were gathered drinking from an array of plastic containers. I squeezed inside and immediately spotted Vivian. Vivian is 22 and has a smile to match the very best. A pretty smile that lights her eyes and her small, open face. I had to have a photo, especially inside the dark hut, where the light from the small door reflected upwards to the faces of the drinkers. Unfortunately, this took some organisation, for two of the women were already drunk, noisy and foolish. Alcoholism makes some of my interactions difficult, particularly as I understand nothing of the local language. But William is a good translator and has come to know me quite well by now on our peregrinations about his homelands. Often it is he who suggests I want to take portraits of the people we meet. He’s well respected in the area, partly because he has managed to send his daughter to Australia, a feat very few young people here achieve. He’s unpretentious and quite wise.

So it took time for me to get the picture of pretty Vivian, time during which I sat outside on a rock beneath a banana tree with Emmanuel, joined by Vivian and others. I was touched by the way that Vivian had the confidence, on this her first meeting with a muzungu, to be fascinated by the hairs on my arms and the feel of my mzungu hair. It’s like William often says: I may be the first white man they ever touched, even shook hands with; the first foreigner they could ask questions. I find that something of a privilege, when they feel comfortable with me and welcome me as an equal into their homes. So much of travelling is just passing by, seeing the outside. Thanks to the Wechigas, the Alexes, and the Williams I meet along the way, sometimes I can see something of the inside of lives too, just a glance at least. And I can level the playing field between the false perceptions gained from the media, and show people that actually we have more in common than they imagine.

Later, we relaxed with beer on the sunny lawns of the guest house, the spectacular view before us. The place was busy today, Joseph, the cheerful fat cook, preparing huge cauldrons of chicken and vegetables as Vicky, a delightful worker I know from last year’s visits, and Nicolas, the barman, peeled sacks of potatoes. Joseph, in a big blue apron and white shirt – quite the international chef – stirred his pots with a long wooden spatula, laughing at my interest. He was cooking for 50; a Christmas party for the local government workers. “Huh! At OUR expense!” harrumphed William as we watched them all line up, in suits and ties, for a group photo behind us. William has little time for the corruption of Kenya. He saw plenty of it in his time in the police…

I found a little more of William’s life story as we gazed at the great valley. He separated from his wife a few years ago and he has, as well as his daughter in Australia and the son with a small IT business, another daughter and son still in school. His daughter in Australia provides for the two younger children and sends William bits of money from time to time – no doubt when she can afford it from a student nurse’s salary. William is a Catholic and a believer – we’ve had some good conversations about my lack of belief, matters on the whole difficult to discuss in Africa. He owned a matatu (minibuses driven by commercial drivers – badly!) that he gave to his wife in settlement when they parted ways. I really have no idea how William makes ends meet – a frequent mystery to me on this continent – except that, as he tells me, his needs are simple, he grows a bit of maize and vegetables to eat and is an essentially humble man. His home is very basic, with a recent addition of electric supply, thanks to his daughter. The final attack in his police service, when he ended in hospital for some weeks, with a possible brain operation hovering, obviously made him reconsider many things. He lives a simple life here on his shamba with four cows, two soon to give birth, and his small gardens. A beer when he has money is his treat now that he’s stopped drinking the hard alcohol.

I have promised to return to visit William later in my journey, but for now I shall ride back to Kitale for Christmas, via a rural road I didn’t use before.

DAY 34 SATURDAY 23rd DECEMBER 2017. KITALE, KENYA

Being chilled enough to stop to put on not just a jersey but my fleece jerkin Continue reading →

DAY 18 THURSDAY 7th DECEMBER 2017. NAVRONGO, GHANA

Wechiga can be such a good host, an instinct he perhaps learned from his mother. This has been one of my most quietly enjoyable stays in Navrongo, thanks to his calmness at present, helped of course by his taking a long annual leave of about six weeks to coincide with my visit. Today we had a day like those we used to enjoy many years ago, riding out to pay respects to extended family members in the more rural areas, from which Akay herself hailed. Out there, a few miles from the now petrol-smelly town, just a bit of the old Navrongo that I used to admire so much still survives in the open, warm welcomes to simple, largely earth built compounds round their cattle yards and sculpted chicken coops. Nowadays though, every compound, however mean, touts a satellite dish. Twenty five years ago I watched the crowds of small children that would gather round a battery driven 12″ TV in a candlelit compound to watch the cheapest programming, on the one channel, most of which they couldn’t even understand as it wasn’t even translated from the original Dutch or German! Now there are multiple channels of absolute crap from the world – cheap glossy soaps from India and China, melodramas from Nigeria, dramas from Brazil (all flatly dubbed), materialist American trivia and homegrown junk TV too.

But not to spoil a ramble out in the villages with one of my own soapboxes… Wherever you visit water or food is instantly offered. People are probably wealthier than they were twenty five years ago, when I often felt I was eating the family’s own portions, but the gesture of generosity is still the same. People out there rely on their small farms and marketing for their sustenance, rather than rental incomes; there are less strangers and everyone shares the same cultural values. That’s what has gone nearer home, where I am surrounded by people from other tribal backgrounds renting rooms and bungalows and going off to work or study during the day, knowing nothing of the habits and traditions of those they live among.

We went to Pungu area, just a few miles from town to visit Balloo, the tailor in the market who is a cousin of Wechiga’s, and continued with him to visit other relatives on Akay’s side in a large mud built compound nearby. The old lady is mother of our neighbour, Cassia – herself, rarely here, one of triplets – the wife of Jorayam, another of Wechiga’s cousins. The old lady has a room in the old style, just as formed the old compound here. It’s a rectangular house of mud block, plastered with smooth mud; a low door, the flat roof supported on teak logs that are exposed on the underside. Into the crevices are tucked many twists of plastic bag containing small items, and a carving knife was lodged away from childish danger. The usual calendar curled on the wall with various religious bits and pieces and a Chinese battery clock with an irritating ring and, oddly, a selection of old handbags that already had seen better days before they suffered the depredations of Navrongo’s climate. Best to see for me, though, was the old lady’s piles of clay pots and collection of calabashes, just like those that Akay valued – the same pots that were thrown into and smashed in the pit that remained after the well collapsed here outside my round house when the original compound was razed. In these pots the old ladies kept their valuables, pots piled one on another, seated on moulded mud supports. I was so happy to find this disappearing scene as we ate rice and stew, three of us from the same pot, the sun burning down on the smooth cement outside while a sow and eight piglets rooted in the corn husks of the yard: evidence that not all is swept away of the old traditional life.

We rode off, to be stopped by shouts from a path side kiosk, where a group of elderly men sat, somewhat inebriated, insisting we join them for a beer. The usual dry season booze problem, but they were good willed and cheery, if very noisy. By now a chicken hung miserably from our handlebars, feet tied with fibre from a local plant, spinning and bouncing, suspended around the mirror – a traditional gift from one of the houses. Time was when we’d come back festooned with chickens and cockerels from our distant visits to pay respect to relatives. I even received one from the Paramount Chief one year, a signal honour that much impressed Uncle Gwea, a deep traditionalist. Now people appear to be more cagey with their generosity. It’s a different economy from the one in which you relied upon one another for communal support; with the rise of nuclear families and people living far apart among strangers those old customs don’t support the way they did and it’s every man for himself.

*

This will be my last day of peace so I was pleased for the opportunity to witness a vestige of what I came to respect so much in the old Navrongo culture. It clings on tentatively in distant villages. Tomorrow I will see the other side of Navrongo culture, the new one: an over-layering of a pastiche of old funeral customs by money and a show of wealth and importance. Tomorrow will begin the huge funeral of the poor mother of the MP who died back in September. What’s left of the woman will be brought back here in a vast opulent coffin and a blaze of glitzy glory, pomp and noise. The big men of this community will arrive in shiny RVs and expensive smocks and regalia to make abeyance, not to the deceased’s, more to the position of her son, a cabinet minister in Ghana’s government. Wechiga tells me that already the funeral grounds are said to be like a cattle market of presentations: cows, sheep, goats and everything expensive. It’ll be a political event on many levels; the place to be seen in town this year…

*

Still dosing myself as the world producer of mucus, my old friend and I repaired to our mango tree bar for a while, picked ‘the boy’ from school and spent an hour in the yard with the four and five years olds playing happily and noisily around us and a quiet hour chatting on my roof beneath the stars, blurred now by the seasonal Harmattan dust blowing from the Sahara. I’d like to remember Navrongo by this day for now, not by tomorrow when I shall probably witness the increased shallowness that the old traditions have assumed.

DAY 19 FRIDAY 8th DECEMBER 2017. NAVRONGO, GHANA

In many ways my expectations for the funeral were confounded, at least by the part of the proceedings I witnessed as the sun went down this Friday evening. Shallow..? Perhaps. Ritual and tradition..? A qualified yeeesss… Showy and glitzy..? Undoubtedly. The old traditions overlaid by the trappings and show that wealth brings? It was certainly that. It leaves me puzzled. The old traditions are still there, but so too are the ostentatious trappings of modern Navrongo, in which making a show, being seen; making things bigger than anyone else, than the previous funeral have all become so important. The modern Navrongo confuses me: if I hadn’t come to know the habits of a quarter of a century ago, perhaps I’d think all this is the culture…

It turned out, on hearing a huge call, “Navrossay..?” across the compound, that Perry and his wife actually had arrived, unknown to us all, late last night, after a fourteen hour drive from Accra, usually about eight hours, but the route that must be taken to avoid the damaged bridge is long and arduous, potholed and devious. The bridge – it turns out that a survey declared it unsafe, so it was closed without any warning, cutting off much of the north of the country, except by long, expensive routes – is causing much confusion and the increase of prices of many commodities, most of which will never, I bet, return to their previous levels. The other routes available are also afflicted with armed robbers. Whereas the central road, via the bridges, has had military presence deployed to deal with this threat, no one has thought to divert the police or army to protect travellers on the other routes! So it was that some time after Perry passed last night, a gang attacked the vehicles in which Kofi Adda, the MP and son of the old lady to be buried was travelling. Unfortunately for the armed robbers, the vehicles were travelling with an armed guard, one of whom rolled down his window, apparently to negotiate, and shot dead the robber toting an AK47 (cheap after Ivory Coast battles). The rest, youths armed with machetes, fled into the bush. The body was thrown into the back of one of the pick ups and carried to Navrongo for identification: summary African justice. Sadly, in these material days, robbery and break ins are rife. In my early visits we could roam about, leaving doors and bicycles unlocked. Now, with so many strangers about, we must be on our guard. Shaming the family is no longer a deterrent to a life of crime.

*

In a shiny white fibreglass coffin, heavy with chromed furbelows, large enough to be launched and sailed across the Atlantic, the remains of the old lady, who died, remember, back in early September – over four months ago – was brought back to Navrongo in a fanfare of sirens, car and scooter horns and drumming. She, or what was left of her (and I couldn’t help wondering how much WAS left!?), was ferried in the back of a blaring health centre ambulance all the way from the Tamale freezers in slow, clamorous convoy, the coffin squeezed across the interior, driven by a driver informally dressed in red tee shirt and with garishly bright underpants (his trousers were around his hips in that odd fashion) as he helped to unload the boat-sized coffin). The car was reversed into the yard of the old lady’s house, an original Navrongo house in the town centre, for her late husband’s father was one of the first Navrongans to ‘make good’ and he and his brother built the first ‘storey buildings’ in town, small blocks on two floors, with roadside balconies; built of mud and tree trunks, that must have seemed things of wonder like skyscrapers in those far off days. Now they disappear into the roadside melange of crude zinc-roofed shops, garish kiosks and mobile phone company livery.

As the car backed in, the yard filled with the thump of local goatskin drums and the deafening shriek of shrill whistles. Added to the siren of the ambulance, now feet away, confined in the narrow yard, the effect was extraordinary, almost hypnotic, and I had one of those ‘I’m here’ moments, when you sense the physical knot of excitement – now rare moments for me in Navrongo. People crushed around – I was with some of the socially ‘big men’ with chairs to one side of the yard, all of us dressed in traditional smocks, in which I am happy to disappear into the crowd, although as the only white man it’s impossible to hide.

The coffin was shuffled out of the car and carried into the house, accompanied by mind-numbing noise. We stood and sat to receive a conga-line of handshakes, depending on social standing. Many said, “Eh, Navrossay, it’s a long time!” Some of them I managed to recognise, including, by good fortune, the MP, whom I last met when he was in power as Minister for Youth and Employment, now a cabinet minister in charge of Water and Sanitation (I could have a conversation about Navrongo’s filth and poor sanitation!). Around us, young men splashed water to settle the dust of hundreds of feet; people greeted and spoke into inevitable phones, despite the cacophony. The inner yard was by now filled with noise, drumming and whistling, as women attended the coffin into an inner room. “Come, we can go now,” said our friend Lawrence, a retired Ghanaian ambassador under another political regime. We rose to leave, until Perry, conscious of precedent, reminded us we should first pay respects. We were important guests and the formalities must be observed.

Hands behind me pushed me forward, into the crush and noise of the inner yard and into a room decorated with flashy festooned silver and black drapes. Now the coffin was open and we reverentially circled the waxwork within, the remains of the old lady, long dead, her thick glasses balanced on her nose in a parody of life. I was reminded of filing past the yellowing Mao Tse Tung in his crystal coffin. Carefully copying others I bowed my respect and emerged into the now even noisier yard as the wardrobe-sized speakers had sprung to life, drowning the town centre in bass beats that shook my stomach. Happily, we moved away to the yard of the MP’s bungalow for refreshment – whisky, beers and tizet (starchy, gluey ground millet balls) and chicken. There we stayed a couple of hours, Perry and Lawrence kindly trying to return the conversations to English, ultimately failing as we all drank more and more. By 8.15, when the group began to ‘wind down’ I was ready to go. For the last part of the evening, as conversation waned, I counted ten of us around the table. Of those eight were on phones or tapping and swiping away at ‘social media’, one was asleep and the other – me – wishing he had either a wifi connected phone or the ability to doze off like my neighbour!

These days, ever popular Perry is sensitive to my needs, isolated by my lack of Kassem language, and offered me a ride home before he went back to join his colleagues. I’d have walked, but that is not Navrongo etiquette, so I took the ride home in his big Honda CR-V and he and Rose turned round and went back to the booze and chatter while I had a charming conversation with two small girls, passing in the night. Arabella and Pearl are 8 and 13, full of questions about my little house and life in England. “Take me to your country!” are constant demands. It is everyone’s dream to pick from the money trees in white mans’ land. To travel here explains much of why so many are willing to risk all in emigrating to what they see as the riches of our life. All they ever see, and all they know of our life, is portrayed in the mythical world of TV and drama and the seldom truthful stories of the ‘been-tos’, those who have been to Europe and come back with apparent riches, often despite severe privations during their stays, but able to look rich by the strength of small savings in hard Western currencies.

By nine I fell asleep, snorting, sneezing and wheezing in the dust-ridden night, after an interesting day during which my welcomes were genuine and warm and Arabella and Pearl’s innocent curiosity reminded me of just why I have continued to come for all these years, despite my cynicism of some of modern Ghanaian life. Wise Wechiga once said, “we watched you whites eating sugar, so we think it must be good. Now we want a taste of it too, even though we have no dentists. We just want to taste what you enjoy, even if we lose our teeth…”

DAY 20 SATURDAY 9th DECEMBER 2017. NAVRONGO, GHANA

“Is it too early for..?” and Perry waved his hand at the table where whisky, brandy and Guinness bottles stood. It was 7.30 – in the morning. To ribald laughter, amusement that I could be quite so quaint, I commented that usually my cut off point was at least 6.00 (in the evening) before I take such hard alcohol. But I am in Navrongo… I observed the custom of the country, even at this early hour on an empty stomach. It isn’t the first time and probably not the last but at least I don’t do this very regularly and my liver will, I hope, outlive most Navrongans’. Then, of course, I sip my drink like an elderly dowager, while everyone around me pours two fingers and gulps it straight down in one and soon pours another. With any level of nutrition this is hardly a good idea; with Ghana’s nutrition levels it’s plain dangerous.

That was how the day started. By nine Perry was off to funeral duties that ended some time in the early hours. For this funeral even the Vice President of Ghana came, flying in in a helicopter (doubtless at considerable expense to Ghana’s struggling tax payers), and about eighty Members of Parliament – about a third of the house, were in attendance, along with many of the country’s dignitaries. At the funeral grounds all were fed and watered – fifty crates of beer and a bottle of Black Label whisky for every one of the 35 tables (the remains – if any – of which were pocketed by guests). After all this, everyone drove their huge cars at speed on the moped-crowded, potholed roads of town. Wechiga and I agreed to avoid the tarred roads on our roaming around town today. Drink driving, while technically against the law, is the norm, and when you are a big enough personage, the authorities are easily bribable anyway.

A sum of over £25,000 was raised in donations to the funeral today! Plus all those cows and sheep… Of that the catholic church (richest organisation in the world… OK, I won’t get off on that rant now) made well over £8000, plus all the money they will have accrued from the collection baskets at interminable funeral masses from the poor public. It cost the country thousands of pounds in security and travel. I wonder just what percentage of the guests had even set eyes on the old lady that died – back in September? This funeral custom is an expensive business: millions of Cedis and thousands of hours of lost work time is expended on them every weekend; classes close because teachers are ‘at a funeral house’; shops close; officials consider paying respects to colleagues’ distant relatives of more importance than their work responsibilities. Well, I suppose it is ingrained in the cultural expectations of the country, but it does seem a costly business to an onlooker.

“Today will be BEEG harvest for the church!! MILLIONS!” Wechiga, while believing strongly in god, has (as I see it) a healthy cynicism about organised religion and all its business aspects – including the greedy charlatan ‘pastor’ businessmen that his wife, Mary, likes to follow.

*

Dust fine and thick as fog settled on the landscape, making the equatorial sun glow dimly like a full moon. Everything now smells of dust, my clothes, my mosquito net, the pillow. While it tempers the extreme heat to an almost bearable level, it is replaced by the discomfort of breathing and thick catarrh. Life in West Africa’s not easy.

Wechiga and I spent the morning fixing Rebecca’s screen door and then roamed about once again, content with our own company and not to be disturbed, despite it being a busy market day with giant funerals around. It does at least seem that funeral activities are migrating towards weekends. A text from Dennis told me that he had attended the out-dooring of a new baby, followed by a lengthy wedding ceremony, complete with mass, then a long funeral mass with about three thousand attendants, and still to come was the burial of that schoolmate and colleague. I’m glad I don’t have to spend my weekends in such duties.

DAY 21 SUNDAY 10th DECEMBER 2017. TAMALE, GHANA

“Fella, fella, gooood morning,” shrill all the small children in their ritual greeting to any white man, at any time of day. It’s one of the charms of life here in Navrongo. I am often attended by a trail of small people, but one of my pleasures on this 21st visit has been the company of my little smiling chatterbox friend Faith, who has accompanied Wechiga and I to Tamale today for his first adventure. Little boys should always be about five, by my choice! His excitement at the prospect of seeing his first aeroplane knows no bounds.

You either learn a certain patience in Africa or stay away. Often I have to put up with long hours of being excluded by my lack of language and most plans just don’t go the way you make them. We were late getting away, since Perry had assumed I would be leaving with him tomorrow for the ride to Tamale airport, so the hospitality at his house continued through the whisky and beer, tizet and soup to freshly slaughtered hens and guinea fowls toasted on a small fire of sticks. They’re palatable if the bird is young enough, barely ‘roasted’, directly in the flames of dried millet sticks, charred by the smoke that rises to mix with the fog above, and blackened and stringy. Not easy for weak European teeth. By 1.30 we finally left, walking to the roadside with Faith’s five year old legs slowing us a bit, to a puttering ‘mama camboo’ to the transport yard for a shared taxi to Bolgatanga. There we needed patience – two good hours of it, as we waited for four more passengers to join us in a comfortable, six seater people-mover on the two and a quarter hour ride down across the smokey, dust-shrouded bush lands to Tamale. The car was £1 more than the vastly less commodious minibus next to us, but finding four more willing to pay that extra pound took a long time: as long as it took to find eleven passengers for the torture minibus. Eventually we rolled south through the haze, as Faith fell asleep, sprawled across me, his heavy head on my arm for the next two hours. It was a comfortable ride (for Africa), although enduring the same Nigerian music video, on 3 minute 20 second repeat, for two hours, thankfully at fairly reduced volume.

It was dark by the time the lights of Tamale glimmered out of the haze. Here just a few degrees above the Equator, almost at the winter equinox, the day is just about half and half. We are staying with Gladys, always noisily excited to see us.

DAY 22 MONDAY 11th DECEMBER 2017. ACCRA, GHANA

Little Faith had a very exciting day. He’s an intelligent child who may well have picked up the innate wisdom of his father, and of his grandmother, Akay. His English speech has improved even in the two weeks that he’s been my small companion. Toady his cup was full, and I’d enjoy hearing the stories he will take back to Navrongo about the aeroplanes at Tamale airport. We arrived to find one loading on the apron, and the airport is a small affair – although it has gained ‘international’ status by providing flights to Mecca for the largely Moslem population of the Tamale region. He watched from the perimeter fence, 150 yards distant, as it taxied away and took off on the single runway and rose and dissolved into the dusty sky. Then with great excitement he watched me walk across the apron and enter another plane. Dennis had joined Wechiga, and they waited long enough for my plane to roar down the runway and rise into the air before heading back to town. Now, no doubt, the five year old wants to be a pilot!

*

So I said farewell to my two good friends – and my five year old mate – and returned to Accra. Perry, meanwhile, is battling his way south via the eastern route, across the Volta Lake on one of the old pontoons. It’s a route I haven’t taken but I could not risk not getting back in time for tomorrow’s flight to Kenya, so I booked my flight soon after arriving in the north, just in case. Well, it made for a pretty effortless way to travel and only added £75 to my bill.

Back in Accra, I posted a couple of packages from the airport post office, shocked by the cost of postage in Ghana. My cotton smock cost £14 to post home, as I don’t want to carry it to Kenya: it’s too bulky for a microlight traveller. I sent the printed cotton cloths to Leslie in Florida, postage at £37 being about double the cost of the 2.5 kilos of cloth. From the busy airport road I picked up the first tro-tro I required for my journey out to Perry’s house in the hilly sticks. When it turned out that the packed and battered tro-tro, twenty two passengers packed in with driver and ‘mate’, numerous bags, babies, head bowls and luggage, in what you’d consider a 12 seater minibus, would carry me all the way to crazy Kaneshie Market, one of the most chaotic places, way across the city, I decided to stay on board and not stop at Perry’s office for a ride with his son Philemon. It’s often the way that my obsessive independence, and consideration of others, albeit they are my juniors – and in Ghanian society my juniors are expected to serve my every whim to their great inconvenience – often this independence goes against Ghanaian hospitality. But I can’t help it: I had nothing better to do than battle through the traffic indignities with the poorer populous of this cheerful, helpful country. My ecological ideals revolt against the concept of someone driving me fifteen miles in ghastly traffic, when there’s a perfectly good alternative of public transport. Actually, ‘perfectly good’ is an appallingly inaccurate description! But it’s the option for the people and I am not very proud – which does count against me in the ‘first class’ society of this country. Bouncing cross country over potholed tracks that may one day be roads, is all part of the journey for me; part of my travel story.

By a remarkably uncomfortable, but quite efficient series of three dreadful tro-tros, I made it home to Perry’s bungalow on the hills, which was one of the first in the area, a quiet, airy place in those days, now filled with extraordinary, bizarre mansions of a million individual styles, if ‘style’ can be used with any more accuracy than ‘perfectly good’ for the transport options.

Perry, who stopped for a brief breakfast with us as he passed Tamale at 07.30, already over a couple of hours from Navrongo, is still ‘on the way, coming’, as Wechiga would say. When we last spoke he claimed to be making progress. I reckon the easy but expensive ride in a small plane, even weighted with an hour and a half in city tro-tros, was more comfortable than what will likely be fourteen-plus hours in a car on degraded roads. (NB. Later. It turned out to be 22 hours! Thank god I came by air. Perry and family reached home at 2.00am, largely because they kept company with their friend, owner of a big status car, but an inexperienced, deeply nervous driver. I rode with him a mile in Navrongo and was frustrated the other day by his elderly timidity and nervousness. I couldn’t have stood chaperoning him for about 550 miles of degraded roads at night..!).

DAY 23 TUESDAY 12th DECEMBER 2017. FLYING EAST OVER AFRICA

Flying east ACROSS Africa is a new experience, not that flying any which way at 37,000 feet feels any different, except for the line drawn on my map of the world. I am now on a five and a half hour flight to Nairobi. I am so pleased that I am not flying home, and then after a couple of days, flying back to Africa, as seemed likely thanks to the vagaries of international ticketing – especially happy as Somerset recorded a temperature of -13C last night.

My last hour in Ghana was stressful! After a relaxed day with Perry in his old congenial way, tired from his long journey, we wandered Accra, drinking a few beers until it would be time for my ride to the airport. He put me in the hands of a friend from Navrongo in the club house to which we had repaired for the final beers, for the friend would be passing the airport on his way home. Kotoka airport is pretty close to the city centre. But there the trouble started. The traffic of Accra in the mid-evening is often choked and chaotic but I have never seen it like this evening. At one point the friend, Bob, and I sat in a jam for half an hour, moving less than three hundred yards. I was getting stressed! Finally, in desperation, my host yelled at a passing motorbike rider and I leaped from the car and threw myself upon the stranger’s mercy and pillion. “Get me to the airport, please!” A motorbike can travel in Accra traffic where cars are trapped. Dominic, for that was the stranger’s name, rose to the occasion. We dashed and weaved through the traffic, falling in behind a police car with flashing lights for some of the way. A mile up the road, we discovered the blockage: a police petty cash Christmas collection point. Well, they would have told you they were doing their duty, checking papers, but I knew this was just pre-Christmas corruption. Dominic tried to weave through the police cordon: not the wisest move… It took ten minutes of fast talking, smile fixed on my face: “please may I speak with your senior officer?”; I am sure my friend didn’t mean to be disrespectful, he was just helping a stranger in need”; “Now, please, officer, can you be a good Samaritan and let me catch my aeroplane..?”

It worked in the end. I have travelled all these years in Africa and never yet paid a bribe! Not a bad record, I can tell you. The smile, the chatter, the appeal to their better nature, their uncertainty at just who this white man may be, not to mention the biblical ‘good Samaritan’ reference – it usually works. Dominic got me to the airport just twenty minutes before check in closed. He was well rewarded with a fiver, big money for him tonight – and he was just a passing private biker, not even a taxi bike. A good man helping a stranger.

So a final Ghana drama for 2017!

*

Visit 21 to Ghana… What to make of it..?

I have seen changes in Ghanaian life such as have never happened in history; changes affecting not just the few, but everyone and their entire way of life. I have been unusually analytical on this journey and reached some conclusions.

Young people, Arabella and Pearl were prime examples the other night, ask why my little round house has no electricity and I have to explain to them that even 19 years ago when I completed the building no one, not one home in the area, no institution in town except the hospital, had electricity. Just 19 years ago! They are open mouthed in wonder, taking for granted the changes I have seen within a short generation here, two decades that have seen the aroma of Navrongo change from attractive groundnut oil to sour petrol and moped fumes. Should I come back in another twenty years it will be choked with cars and commerce, always trailing a little behind the West – in progress and loss.

I have moved away from Ghanaians in my aspirations in life – or Ghana has moved away from me. My visits are generally somewhat disappointing to me now. Much of what I see here I find less worthy than all that I came to know two decades ago, perhaps seen then with the romanticism of feeling myself getting inside such a different culture. But I see now I could never be part of another culture when the only language we share is English – their second – and then only those bits people choose to translate. I can observe and note but I can’t really judge.

I found myself pondering the other day why it is I get so few visitors these days in my little round house? Time was, my mornings were busy with greetings and ‘sittings’ with neighbours and relations, an endless stream, often overlapping with one another, coming ostensibly to greet the white man but doubtless too to hear and spread the local and family gossip. I wondered if they have just become blasė about my visits, or bored by my presence, or just antipathetic to the family or me. My only morning companions to interrupt my diary writing – for Wechiga attends to his various animals and chores while Mary prepares the hot water and omelettes over her fire of sticks as I write – my only disturbances these days are chatterbox four and five year olds.

It’s taken a while for the likely truth to sink in. Everyone, but everyone, is ‘connected’ via their ubiquitous mobile phones, seldom out of hand. They constantly scroll their messages, chatter loudly (I never end a story here before interruption by some remote stranger demanding more urgent attention). The more quickly literate text with remote strangers even as they converse, (I saw a cyclist texting on Hospital Road the other day. Think about it: two hands and no eyes on a road busy with market traders: quite a feat! Drivers do it constantly). Everyone messages and checks on Watsapp and Facebook. This is the gossip channel now, this new ‘social’ media that has stopped face to face social intercourse even in this community, where it was such a huge part of life, and where the formalities of greeting and paying respects have become just a wave from a moped. That’s what happened to my busy, friendly mornings.

TV and media, and now the targeting by the invisible algorithms of the internet on their social media platforms, tell Africans that materialism is the only way forward. It increasingly gives every young person the universal dream: “Take me to your country”, where – the rest of the myth goes – life is so easy, the money trees so fruitful and possessions give status. I have had so many conversations on the universal aspiration to get to Europe. It helps me to understand why Africans risk their lives to get across the Mediterranean to the magical lands of pleasure and plenty. When your entire social value system changes in 20 years and education is generally low, how can you hope to adapt knowledgeably? How can my few words about the pressures of materialist Western life, of loneliness and cold, prejudice, lack of rights and unemployment sound like anything more than protection of my own riches, when I can afford to visit them, but they cannot hope to visit me, not to even mention the protectionism of the British visa system?

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I am disillusioned how few of my liberal attitudes have rubbed off over the years on those around me in Ghana. I had a revealing conversation with Dennis and Gladys one night. There was a discussion about same sex marriage in the Ghanaian parliament, reported on TV news – well, ‘discussion’ is hardly apt…

“Homosexuality is WRONG! It is an abomination!” said Dennis and Gladys vehemently. The majority of Ghanaians, and indeed Africans are deeply sexist and homophobic.

“God made men first and then women!” So goes the religious dogma. Women are always second.

“No!” I argued. “If your god did indeed make men and women, he also made up to ten percent of humankind with other sexualities. It’s a fact! Did he make them to be unhappy? Is THAT your god?” But my argument falls on deaf ears, indoctrinated as my friends are by a deeply misogynist church.

Ghana lets me down more often now than it used to do. In this case, as an example, I don’t ask for agreement from educated people, just consideration that there are other views than the medieval church dogma written by men. The attitude here is that homosexuality is ‘learned’, a lifestyle ‘choice’, and can be ‘taught’ to young boys by corrupt homosexuals. “Well,” I am afraid I retorted, “your priests are deep into THAT! The abuse of boys in your church has even brought apologies from the pope himself!” It was a cheap jibe, I know, but my frustration was running deep against how little my liberal attitudes have rubbed off in twenty years. According to Ghanaians, men were created first, women second, as a sort of afterthought. Women exist for the gratification of men’s lust and for making babies. The idea that women may have sexual rights, needs or desires is considered nonsense and the concept of marital rape would be laughed out of court. Even educated women accept that they are inferior to men. It’s just in the genes, encouraged since childhood and shored up by a deeply male chauvinistic church. Liberation, even to the small degree it is happening in the West, is far far away, far, far away…

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Maybe I analyse too much of the minutiae of the life around me and have become too critical to enjoy it as I used to. By taking my own moral stand all I do is alienate myself a little more on every journey. So the question becomes: do I maintain integrity to my own beliefs, or do I compromise and act out a part in which I don’t believe? I would have a more comfortable time if I did the latter, but it’s against my nature not to be honest: one of the qualities I admire most in others. Maybe I am better left with my memories of what I admired than my disappointments in the changes I see. It’s all very well for me, as Wechiga would say, I ‘have tasted my sugar and enjoyed it’. Should I try to deprive others, even when I know their teeth will fall out and there are no dentists..?

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Well, it’s after midnight, flying eastwards at 37,000 feet. Towards Kenya…