by

GHANA AND EAST AFRICA SAFARI 2017-2018 – two

DAY 11 THURSDAY 30th NOVEMBER 2017. NAVRONGO, GHANA

The slightly tall stories of the man who rode two months and many miles from ‘London Proper’ on a motorbike, “ALL the way! Eh!”, to Navrongo, always confer on me a sort of superhuman status that makes me laugh. “Twice!” Always adds Wechiga. “Two good times!” Now that everyone is a motorcyclist – hmmm, of sorts – here, they consider the feat even more remarkable. It can be such a fun introduction.

This was market day once again, it rotates every third day in Navrongo. Wechiga and I were to go in the morning but somehow we never made it. Our days go by pleasantly, doing the small chores of travelling or neighbourliness and chattering away. Rhoda phoned to tell us of an exhibition of crafts in town that we might like, a small initiative by a private NGO who appeared to be just a couple of Swiss and German families trying to encourage better standards in craft work. There’s a conundrum at work here: better quality costs more in raw materials and takes longer, but no one has money to buy. Poorer quality, but the ‘ethnic’ look attracts the middle men. So it is that I see low quality basketwork from Bolgatanga hanging outside the trinket shops in Totnes at scandalous prices like £30 or £35; baskets bought in bulk down here for maybe £3 or £4 or less, and people buy them either because they think they are helping Africans or because they like the ethnic, handmade look. A young woman, called Georgina, had baskets on display the quality of which I haven’t seen anywhere. But how would I get one home and, frankly, what would I do with it? There were fine Kenti cloth weavings too, beadwork, clothing, smocks, handmade soap and an array of colourful items, including an amusing sculpture made entirely from discarded sandal soles. One woman had invented a way to weave into baskets some of the millions and millions of used plastic bags that litter the ground in every direction.

When I travel in Africa I see the futility of the efforts we may make in so called ‘developed’ countries to clean up our planet. We tinker with charging for harmful plastic bags, while Africa is submerged by the waste, stuck to every stick and thorn, eaten by and strangling the cattle, entering the food chain and for ever polluting the soil. We tinker with vehicle discharges, put fines on polluting engines, then export the worst polluters to Africa, where they blast filth and poison for decades to come. We have warnings and excitement about the overuse of antibiotics, issuing restrictive advice to our doctors for the weakening effects of the best wonder drug invented by man, that makes complex surgery possible, while in Africa everyone buys antibiotics over the counter from untrained pharmacists when they get a cold or any small ill. As the ‘developed world’ understands the dangers of smoking, the evil tobacco companies just peddle more and more of their nasty wares to Africa, where health provision is so low and no one will sue them for their cynical profiteering. The recent exposure of plastic granules in 92% of water samples tested around the world makes no waves here, where single use plastic bottles are the ‘new’ hygienic way to sell drink, and anyway the Coca Cola Corp have a stranglehold on the continent already. Any attempts we make to fiddle with all these pollutions are doomed to failure if such huge swathes of the world don’t even understand the concept of a food chain and what is happening to it. Thinking too much is a bit depressing here in Africa!

Rhoda was one year old, hanging on Akay’s hip, the day I arrived at the family house, her sister cowering behind the old lady’s leg, half fearful, half inquisitive. Rhoda’s 28 now, married to Godfrey, a quiet, steady man, says Wechiga. She is visibly pregnant, but no one will mention it – the excitements of new pregnancies are not celebrated in Navrongo, no announcements made. Wechiga heard by chance of his new grandchild, when Rebecca had already given birth. Perhaps this lack of celebration of birth – so unlike the noise made around death – originates from the old days when infant mortality was so high? I only hear of births in the family in conversation with Dennis, using his monthly 15 minutes of free air time for an international call!

‘Becca is beautiful. A most striking young woman with fine features and attractive dimples. Now she is mother of three month old Cyril (where DO they get these names?). Babies so small don’t interest me much, but my little playmate, Faith, is great. At five, he is smart and endlessly talkative. We picked him from his primary school on Wechiga’s small motorbike, riding away three-up to take a couple of beers in quiet bars, where he imbibed two bottles of sugary pop. Maybe that’s what made him so active later when, with a full stomach of plantain and beans (‘red-red’) on my roof, he was hyperactive and full of fun. A grand little boy, old enough to make sense, young enough to let his imagination rip in play, Wechiga’s ‘pensioneer’s child’, as he has been called!

DAY 12 FRIDAY 1st DECEMBER 2017. NAVRONGO, GHANA

The first Friday in December is a public holiday: National Farmers’ Day, an initiative to encourage farmers and the day on which is announced the National Farmer, and all the regional winners of the annual contest, with prizes from a new house, through pick-ups to smaller local rewards. Today is also the date for several, up to at least ten, Wechiga says, local funerals, so it’s noisy enough at night that it may turn into an earplug night. Sirens blare from fire engines and ambulances, there’s fake drumming everywhere, extreme-volume amplified ‘music’ that is mainly engineered bass beat rhythms and very boring. Making noise all night is a feature of funerals; big money will be spent this weekend. Many of the corpses have been stored two or three months in freezers down in Tamale. These days vast, lavish funerals are planned to show wealth more than respect. Mortuary bills alone would have kept the deceased in comfort during their waning last years. Sons and daughters ‘in abroad’ gather for these hideous events, having often ignored their elderly relatives, living in meagre conditions for years.

The old custom, by which I mean just 25 years ago, before the arrival of 24 hour power, freezers and embalming, was to get the body buried within a day or two – coffins unnecessary – and then perform the ritual funerals over the next months and even years, funerals rites being in complex extended stages.

I have seen tombs better and more commodious than the houses the dead inhabited, that would be better used as water tanks and in extreme cases could be swimming pools! Death ritual has now, like much else in modern Ghana, become a race to keep up with the Joneses, to demonstrate family wealth (that’s more often non-existent) and pomp and pride. The Catholic church does nothing to discourage this habit and makes big money from special masses and thanksgivings, lavish burials in the increasingly sprawling graveyard behind the discotheque cathedral and the now-reclassified old mud ‘basilica’.

As I write (on Saturday morning: I am too tired from the heat to write at night here) little Faith is drawing beside me. We are sitting on the cool concrete-formed benches in my round house, cool from the night. It WAS an earplug night. I awoke at 3.00 and decided I’d never get back to sleep with the repetitive bass beat drilling away at the night. I had woken with a fast beating heart to a loud explosion, another ritual that punctuates the nights of these huge funerals. Happily, the Adamba funerals are low key affairs. Perry has a very good family decree that the dead of this family should be in the grave within no more than a week. Akay, Adamba, Uncle Gwea and Grace are all buried nearby beneath the family fields and the burials took place as soon as the families had been notified.

*

Wechiga is his old self, the congenial fellow I remember so well. We spent our entire day sitting with his friend and second cousin, Ignatius, a well informed man who kindly converses in English while I am around. He’s a teacher, son of Wechiga’s cousin Cletus, whom I remember from the earliest journeys, but who went off the rails and abandoned his family, to end up dying in an Accra slum. In the years he was away, his family of small children lived with their grandmother in one mud room that Wechiga and his ‘brothers’ built. Now Ignatius has built an admirable bungalow next to the remains of that simple, charitable compound that the older brothers kept going for a few years as the children grew. The old grandmother, Abuga, is long gone and now Ignatius himself has at least four children. He has walled his yard with a five foot block wall and grows many trees, keeps fowls and enjoys the peace of his own hard efforts. A very decent man. A peaceful day spent talking politics – Brexit still an item of wonder, with Trump in the same brackets of political amazement: “WHY!!??? Eh! It’s even crazier than Ghana politics!?”

DAY 13 SATURDAY 2nd DECEMBER 2017. NAVRONGO, GHANA

Demon drink struck tonight. After a pleasant, cheerful day wandering about Navrongo with my old friend, he disappeared in the early evening to one of the many funeral houses. Mary and I called him back for his supper but he returned and instantly fell asleep beside his supper bowl and snored like an old drunk, unfed on the roof beside me. It turns out to have been a bottle of drink that I could not bring myself to drink in the afternoon, mixed with a calabash of fairly innocuous pito – sour local beer made from millet. There are only two or three sorts of beer in Ghana, made by a couple of major industrial breweries. The most popular is Club Beer, the old Ghana beer, but it seems to me this year to be sadly light and watery. They tamper with the recipes often. I prefer to drink Castle Milk Stout, when I can get it. From South Africa, it’s made under licence in Ghana and owned by the ugly multinational SAB Miller. In another cheating-the-people measure, Castle has been reduced recently from a bottle size of 625mm to a mere 500mm yet the price remains the same.

Wechiga suggested I tried another drink in the afternoon, which I thought to be another sort of beer. It turned out to be a disgusting concoction: ‘fruit flavoured alcoholic drink’, contents carbonated water, sucrose, alcohol and flavourings, mainly with E numbers. God knows what form of manufactured ‘alcohol’ they put in it to make up the 6% strength. It was utterly disgusting and I just couldn’t drink my bottle. Now no African that I know likes waste of booze or food, so Wechiga poured the rest of my pint bottle into his beer. A calabash of pito at the funeral house mixed badly and the rest was a spoiled evening.

At least I can forgive him this morning when he tells me it was not hard liquor, the unclassified strength home distilled stuff, called apoteshi. It kills so many people in this town, especially at this season when men have little to do and funerals are rife. Unemployment is high, male responsibility is low, drink is an attractive diversion. Ill health, accidents, family discord and abject poverty are the results in so many cases, often only alleviated by early death. Alcoholism is one of Africa’s major social problems.

*

Well, the rest of the day was fun. We managed to avoid most of the funeral activities, calling only briefly at one crowded compound to meet an old friend up from Tamale. You are expected to be seen at these lavish events, despite the fact that in a crowd of hundreds it seems unlikely you’d be missed! Most of these guests have to be fed. It used to be that the local community came together to cook quantities of local food but this has given way to outside caterers or packaged take-aways in polystyrene containers and the ever present plastic bags. Many ‘mourners’ come for what they can get, food and booze. Traditional drumming is now rare, replaced by gigantic speakers and a computer deck relaying mechanical music: repetitive, tedious base beat rhythms pounding out, where the local drums and whistles used to shrill and throb. When pride seeps into these traditional rites they lose much of their meaning and become shallow displays undertaken out of duty. This weekend, funerals are all over town and now loud hammering bass thumps and roars from every quarter. Next weekend will be worse, when there is a ‘society’ funeral that will attract big political figures from the south and all those who think themselves anyone in the whole country!

*

Itiel’s smaller brother, Jonathan, named after me almost five years back, has been terrified of the white man, despite taking such an interest in my comings and goings that he has hidden behind the house many times to watch me covertly. Encouraged to come closer, he would scream and wail. Until this evening. Now, suddenly, we are the best of friends and he clambered all over me as I watched Mary cooking supper over her charcoal and fire of sticks in the yard of Wechiga’s house. Doubtless, from now on he will shadow me with his brother and little chatterbox, Faith.

Wechiga has been constructing his own block for the past four or so years. He has now roofed four rooms, basic rectangles of handmade concrete blocks with thin shiny zinc roofs. One room is now habitable, the next one used as a store at present, for water tubs and household items, the third for a huge mound of dried corn cobs, and the last will be his hall. They are connected by a covered space, where he keeps his motorbike at night and where Mary can cook in the rainy season. Building is a slow process in this economy, even with a white brother outside Ghana, and he has to be patient. Patience comes easily to Africans through necessity. One day perhaps he will have a fenced yard around his house, his chicken shed and covered work area. The bath house is a few sheets of zinc five feet high in a square outside, where we bath down under the sun. Water is now piped to a tank outside Perry’s sprawling rooming block nearby, from which Mary has to fetch the small family’s water in containers I can hardly lift. She pushes them on a bicycle the two hundred yards. Time was, though, when all the women of the house would carry large slopping bowls of water from a well more than half a mile distant. Then there was a well about 500 yards away, later, the well that I paid to be dug just outside the compound, then latterly a bore hole 300 yards in the other direction. So water by tap just a couple of hundred yards off is progress indeed.

DAY 14 SUNDAY 3rd DECEMBER 2017. NAVRONGO, GHANA

At 6.35 this morning I was awoken from fitful sleep by an insistent knocking on the door of my little round house. I arose, somewhat irritated, to find smiling Faith at the door. “Uncle, I am looking for the broom,” he said, all innocence as he pushed past me. “There it is,” I said, pointing to a long-handled Chinese sweeping brush, one of millions that have infiltrated Navrongo where people always bent to sweep with hand brooms. “No, Uncle, I want the one-one broom!” The small boy’s inventiveness was spoiled by the fact that he had stepped over the hand broom made of individual grass stalks tied with a ribbon, to beat at my door. Of course, all my five year old friend really wanted was an excuse to wake me on Sunday morning! It’s impossible to be angry with such curiosity and such big five year old smiles and ingenuousness. The ‘one-one’ broom!

I’d had a bad night with catarrh again. It happens to me often, especially when I travel to Africa. The dryness of the air is as bad as of that air con, which causes it whenever I get to USA. The roof of my mouth felt as if it had been sandpapered all day until I could take some pills, bought at a small pharmacy: ‘Dosage: as prescribed by the physician’, haha! ‘Do not store in above 30 degrees’, haha! These drugs are sold over the counter by untrained salespeople, stored in a shack made from a shipping container that is like an oven. The air temperature outside is at least 35 or 36.

We did nothing of much use the whole day. I couldn’t spend such a calm, unproductive day anywhere but in this intense climate, with my old friend Wechiga, sitting calmly drinking bad beer beneath a spreading mango of a quiet bar. It’s funny how many people still recognise me, or know of me in Navrongo. Many people stop their motorbikes (for no one walks any more) to greet and in the evening we were walking slowly home when a ‘Mama Camboo’ passed and a woman’s voice exclaimed “Eh, Navrossay, you are back! Welcome!” as the Indian tuk-tuk whirred past in a pother of dust. Neither of us had the slightest idea who the passenger was, but it is fun to be well known and special to be made so welcome.

The Indian style tuk-tuks, three wheeler scooters with a superstructure that covers two hard, bouncing seats for passengers, got their local name from the Ghanaian president, under whose regime the vehicles were brought to the country a few years ago: Joe Mama – as in ‘Mama Can Do’, now popularly ‘Mama camboo’. They are everywhere, along with the ‘Motorking’ motorbike trucks from China and the millions of small motorbikes, mainly, it seems, from Dubai. Walking is now inferior, in this town in which everyone walked everywhere just a few years ago. With loads on their heads, they would march mile upon mile to distant family houses or to bring their wares to market. Now the pervading scent of Navrongo is of leaking petrol and exhaust fumes. Children are ‘picked’ to schools on parents’ motorbikes and mopeds, the market lanes are choked with smelly machines and life has changed. Now everyone needs money for petrol…

The biggest difference between life in West Africa and East and southern Africa is certainly in hygiene and sanitation. In Lesotho, a poor country (but my favourite), a view of the expansive green hillsides is usually punctuated by hundreds of shiny zinc pit latrines, however poor the grass-roofed homes. It’s the same all over the east and south of the continent. However mean a dwelling, it has a decent, clean, well kept pit latrine. Here in Navrongo the worst few minutes of my day is my visit to the pit latrine that I caused to be dug outside the now long gone family compound, for the seven to ten inhabitants. I felt that a family with a white man should set an example and it became the only pit latrine in the area, where most people ‘free range’ and disease is facilitated. The surrounding bungalows now have septic tanks, but the big rooming house, occupied by perhaps twenty people, plus Wechiga’s small family, all use the old pit. It is almost full and I shall refrain from description. Small children are still to be seen ‘free ranging’ all around the decreasingly small fields and amongst the increasingly numerous houses. There are two broken down lavatories in the big rooming house, but no one bothered to carry the buckets of water needed to flush them, so they are disused. ‘Free range’ is still the toilet of choice. I date my acceptance in and of Navrongo life from my first evening in the old compound with Wechiga back in 1989. We didn’t know one another then, but I felt nature calling and realised I had no idea where to go. Having a piss was easy, but now..? So I knew I just had to ask. “Wechiga, where do I go for a shit?” I asked. He looked at me, slightly surprised, then waved his arm at the bare fields all around the compound. “Why, anywhere…” That, I felt, as I squatted between the stumps of the harvested maize field was where my adjustment to Navrongo began!

Not a pleasant feature of Navrongo life at all…

DAY 15 MONDAY 4th DECEMBER 2017. NAVRONGO, GHANA

Wechiga and I took to bicycles while his small motorbike was fitted with a new tyre. We rode to Nyangua and Paga, the town to the north at the end of Ghana, twenty-plus miles on a one-geared bike too small for me. This we did in the noonday equatorial sun. Mary was incredulous at the feat, for she is of the ‘pick me there’ generation and forgets how her grandmothers would walk for so many miles. She insisted on washing my sweaty tee shirt for me; I always do my own washing on these journeys, my shirt, pants and socks, in the shower or bucket wash down.

She set about washing. “Hey, be gentle!” I admonished, “that shirt has to be washed at least 45 more times before next March!”, for I carry only two tee shirts. I always remember a woman on the roof of a hotel in Bogota, Colombia, wrenching my shirt from me when she saw me washing so tentatively. When she had finished bashing, soaping, and squeezing, that shirt had shredded and had 44 holes in it! The joys and disadvantages of travelling micro-light.

We rode to the outlying village of Nyangua to visit the first and perhaps best of all the ‘projects’ I undertook in Ghana, mainly with the help of Biddenham village and a Bedford Rotary Club. The very poor village was attempting to maintain a school under a government provided steel shelter on poles, a ‘pavilion’ as they were called, and in a ruined mud block they had built for themselves. I brought money for the village to mobilise and make blocks and cement for floors and walls beneath the steel roof, enclosing three classrooms, a small office and a store. The village came up trumps and a year later they had a rudimentary school of which they were very proud. The village’s self image had risen and there was a new confidence about the place, for they had undertaken this work as a community. Because they now had a storeroom, the catholic church sent them food for school lunches – just provisions for basic rice and stew. More children attended school because families could see their children fed. The school prospered. That was all in about 1995, I suppose. I went back maybe in about 1999 and embarrassed government officials, belittled by some complete stranger from overseas, had built a second block of three more classrooms and they had, at last, a proper school and increased education in Nyangua. It was a great success story for me and for some years I became ‘Naygua’s white man’, to be greeted at every Navrongo market by hordes of uniformed schoolchildren and their parents.

Now, of course, all the old protagonists are dead and gone, reminding me how early so many rural Ghanaians die, and the story has faded from Nyangua’s people. But the school is still there, attended now by 223 children from kindergarten to Primary 6. What’s even more gratifying is that 300 yards away, Nyangua now has a Senior Secondary School! I doubt that would have happened without the £2000, I think it was, that I brought, and the determination of the village people, the chief, PTA chairman, assemblyman, and the head teacher, all of whom were in charge of the project. The current headteacher, Agnes, knew nothing of the story of the founding of her school. “Oh, furniture is now our problem!” She exclaimed, showing me broken desks everywhere. “We have been writing, but no one comes to help…” Typically, the desks are largely mendable, but in Ghana, mending is seldom an option: they must be replaced by new. A good handyman could repair the majority of desks, but he’d have to use drill and screws in the old hardwood, not the two inch nails that would inevitably be used. “How many of us have drills?” asked Wechiga rhetorically.

*

Weary but satisfied we continued back to our mango tree beer bar via Paga, most northerly town in Ghana, where is the border to Burkina Faso. We probably ride about 22 miles in all in the burning sun. A couple of beers were very welcome. Night-time temperatures perhaps fall to 30 degrees, but the days still climb to the high 30s. I am still drowning in catarrh, my usual uncomfortable penance for change of climate and the intense dryness of the air. So sleep, even in the eleven hours I seem to spend on my hot bed, is difficult, even with the window shutters pinned back by sticks and the old curtains caught up. Life’s not easy in Navrongo.

DAY 16 TUESDAY 5th DECEMBER 2017. NAVRONGO, GHANA

The last three or four days have been a struggle against the worst catarrh/ cold I can remember – since the last one, this being my Achille’s heel. I was in bed, exhausted and fractious, by eight last night, tossing and turning in desperate need of sleep, deprived the last three nights, my head bursting. Finally, about 2.00am the tide turned and I fell asleep. I am up late this morning after twelve hours on my bed – rested at last, still with the residue of cold. Wow, a battle! There was a short time in the late afternoon that I admit I felt my age and sacked all the cheery five year olds and their chatter so that I could lie on my bed and rest. Unheard of! Afternoon rest?

*

The Tono Project Area is the large irrigated region to the west of town. It was created many years ago by an early post-colonial government to bring employment and fertility to this dry northern land. By damming one of the branches of the White Volta, a lake was formed and concrete channels built to bring water to about fifty square kilometres of now wonderfully green land. It’s a relief to all the senses to go out there, where water burbles in channels refreshingly and the eye can rest on expanses of waving green rice, ready for harvest. Individuals rent garden spaces and smaller plots, while the commercial famers grow on bigger farms. In the past I have worked there with Wechiga and the family but it’s a while since he had his dry season gardens or farms. Once he entered the government service as a carpenter at the training college, where he’s now maintenance crew foreman, his farming time was limited. When I was first in Navrongo, he was a subsistence farmer taking carpentry contracts, mainly for roofing frames. Soon he’ll be a retired government worker. Maybe then he will start farming again, beyond the depleted fields, now mainly growing ugly bungalows, around the old family home. Wechiga knows a lot about growing crops and keeping animals, lessons learned from the life around him.

We puttered to ‘the canals’ on the motorbike, complete with new tyre. I doubt I could find my way there now. I used to be able to take a bicycle and ride out to join Wechiga, knowing the narrow tracks between old mud-built compounds and family fields. Now they are all subsumed beneath strangers’ bungalows – for land is cheaper in this region so many have set up distant ‘second homes’ far from the cities. Crudely built grey concrete blocks with zinc roofs, the aspirations of modern Navrongans, are everywhere, sometimes still attached to the crumbling residue of the old mud compounds and wide dusty informal roads now bring battered cars and the legions of mopeds and Chinese motorbikes that are apparently necessary to move any further than a few hundred yards in modern Ghanaian life. In the past, every compound, with their organic development and soft brown smoothness, contained at least a couple of good looking conical grain stores with grass woven hats. On today’s journey I spotted only four.

Everywhere we meet with greetings, “Eh! Navrossay, you are back!” Navrossay, you may remember, is the name given to me at that New Year Party in 1990, when all the drummers came and the old men presented my with my two big traditional smocks and a new name they could remember. Navrossay means ‘Navrongo has accepted you’, and it really has. The welcomes are given with a warmth and integrity that is charming and that has brought me back so often to this dusty West African town.

DAY 17 WEDNESDAY 7th DECEMBER 2017. NAVRONGO, GHANA

In 1998 the two pound coin was minted. I had one in my pocket when I came to Navrongo that year and we cemented it into the step of my small round house to mark its completion. Many were scandalised that I should waste such a big sum, but now it’s the only way, without my travel journals, for us to identify the age of the building. I took what was then the traditional plan of two overlapping circles – a sort of squashed together figure of eight – that I had admired in some of the old compounds we visited. The inner, round room, was always used as the chamber, and the crescent shaped outer one as the entry or small hall. I diverted a bit from that and made the bedroom round, sweeping the outer curves into two straights, making the hall about square with a couple of curved sides. Instead of earth, which takes so much maintenance, we built from concrete block, with the roof a layer of concrete laid over zinc sheets on some sturdy 6X2 hardwood joists. There are seven small shuttered windows, a large vent in the bedroom ceiling, a single door and steep steps to the flat roof, were we sit of an evening, private behind the low wall in the starlit air.

When we built it we made two mistakes, one of which we couldn’t have known. The one we should have known was that I was building in a slightly boggy area that is puddly in the wet season – and part of my design, since I wanted headroom inside but to keep the squat proportions outside, was to dig down about a foot and then build up the seats and bed and a ring round the bedroom in cement. Another small mistake we made was to do the roof cement in two mixes, and there’s always been a crack across the neck of the building. In the rainy season the roof leaks and the floor tends to puddle, anything up to four or five inches deep. Of course, I never see this, as I always choose to come in the dry season, when the house serves its purpose admirably, the thick cement walls and ceiling keeping the interior delightfully cool through the day, although it does retain heat longer at night than the ugly zinc roofed blocks around now.

It’s now almost unique. In 25 years no one has rebuilt to the Navrongo vernacular style and my house is a quaint anachronism. It’s also much admired and often the way Wechiga leads strangers to his house. Now he has painted the outside white for me, it’s even more noticeable. There’re no women left who know the traditional painting techniques of which I was so proud in my house’s first years, after local women gathered and painted it in black and white triangles and shapes. The last time I wanted to upgrade the outer look, I had to direct the work myself, as the painters we had gathered for the day had no idea how even to start to paint a traditional round house like their mothers and grandmothers. Those things belong to museums (there is a small ethnographic museum by the mud cathedral) and old pictures already.

The mistake that we couldn’t then have known about was that we put it outside the old organic mud compound that I first came to know, thinking that one day it might get subsumed into the main compound. Of course that idea went out of the window with the bathwater when the compound was razed and replaced with the red zinc roofed square rooming block dominated by Perry’s blocky two storey, tinted window, multi-stairway structure, complete with large plastic water tank on the flat roof. My house is left alone, dwarfed by that block, faintly odd, with mopeds rushing by the windows and cars on the new dust road that sweeps past Adamba’s groundnut fields. If we had known that Wechiga would one day build his own block, we could have moved it east fifty yards and it could have been included in his eventual walled compound. “Oh, I look at your room and wish I could pick it and move it!” he exclaims sadly.

Still the funny white man’s house serves its main purpose as my dwelling for a few days in the year, and the flat roof is still popular – the only one now for a mile around – for drying Wechiga’s crops or for relaxing in the evening in the heat of the hottest season. Wechiga still enters to rest on hot afternoons, where he can be unseen and assumed to be away from home.

If we could have seen the future, we’d have done things differently, but that’s life…

*

On another market day, we did errands and sat under our shady mango bar with beer and conversation. My old friend certainly hasn’t let me down this year. He is his old cheerful and kind self. Still drowning in unpleasant catarrh, we don’t get a lot done in a day, in the still intense heat, but we enjoy one another’s company as always. Probably the next time we are together will be in 2019, when he’ll visit me.

There’s a lot of indignation around town about the murder of one of its sons down in Kumasi this week, a young man who, it appears, has been sacrificed – along with others unknown – to serve the late Queen Mother of the Ashanti kingdom in the next life. We think these beliefs are those of five thousand year old pharaohs and ancient kingdoms. It is still believed that she should be buried with the heads of several ‘servants’, although the practice has been ‘officially’ banned now in the 21st century. The king of the Ashantis has a home in the Home Counties near Henley on Thames, no less, and is a big apron in the masonic world, yet here are his subjects – who almost certainly all profess to be catholic and god-fearing, committing wilful murder for a belief from ancient African myths and story books. Beneath the surface, Africa can still be shocking.

 

by

GHANA AND EAST AFRICA SAFARI WINTER 2017-2018 – ONE

 

DAY 1. MONDAY 20th NOVEMBER 2017. ACCRA, GHANA

It’s sort of DAY 2 really. Never have I come to Ghana in such a round about route – and seldom arrived this tired. This is my 21st visit to this friendly West African country: a brief stop on my way back to East Africa where my little blue motorbike waits for more abuse and further journeys.

Coming to Ghana via Kenya was just one of those arcane quirks of airline ticketing. My alternative was to fly round trip to Ghana, spend a night or two at home and set off again for a return trip to Kenya. It’s so maddening that return trips cost so much less than multiple-stop flights. The only ‘triangular’ option (UK/ Ghana/ Kenya/ UK) I could find was with Kenya Airways, via their home hub, Nairobi. So overnight I flew to Kenya, spent three hours in the airport and flew on to Accra, my first flight across Africa in all this time, not that it was informative from 36,000 feet. This was the second night I spent crammed incommodiously into an airline seat of dwindling proportions: only last Monday night was spent flying the Atlantic once again. Bristol airport is becoming unpleasantly familiar.

What a relief to get horizontal at last, out in Perry’s western hills’ house, far from the bustle of airports, cities, traffic and noise, even if it does take over an hour of ceaseless city traffic to get there! This city has swollen so much in the years I have known it, suburbs sprawling over the dusty hills far from the centre. There’s been such changes in this land. When I first approached Accra, in early 1987, riding my motorbike from Yorkshire across the ‘bulge’ of Africa, to this place where I met the Atlantic Ocean again, it was described to me as “oh, it’s like a big farmyard!” The roads were potholed, the buildings rough and ready, the streets chaotic, and the air often filled with dust. The people, though, were unlike any I had ever met: they laughed and smiled, were friendly and noisy, colourful and lots of fun. That was the beginning of my love for Africa.

Tonight Accra is busy, modern and has new buildings arising everywhere. Most of the streets are paved, the traffic relatively disciplined, certainly for Africa, and huge strides have been made to clean and order the city. It no longer resembles a farmyard at all. The temperature is a pleasant 31C/86F. We can get within a mile or so of the house on tarred roads now. It used to be a ghastly test of stamina and cars on dust and ruts, bouncing over the degraded roads.

There’s no place for vanity in Africa! Approaching the immigration hall, I was accosted by a short, heavy-set woman, of the sort of square woman that seem reserved for employment in immigration posts the world over. Aggressively, she demanded, “where’s your yellow card?” I had no idea what she wanted and thrust out the passport that was in my hand. She took it and riffled to the personal details, looked briefly and returned in somewhat scornfully with the word: “Huh, aged…!”

It seems she wanted my yellow fever certificate. It is inadvisable for the over 60s to have the live vaccine and it’s a once-in-a-lifetime injection – despite the fact I have had two and only prevented from having a third (to update the ‘old’ certificate that runs out in a month) by the advice of the NHS.

Oh, how I chuckled as I queued for my immigration officer. ‘Aged’!! I SO MUCH enjoy travelling as an older person. Not just because of the yellow fever requirements, but because I can speak with anyone, offer no threat, am generally respected in Africa, considered to have mature opinions (!) and, as a white-bearded ‘old man’ on a motorbike, often beyond the average life expectancy age of countries in which I am riding, have become something of a wonder, an eccentric to be smiled at. But I have to put up with words like ‘aged’!

*

Next to me on the plane from Nairobi, sat a very sexily dressed young woman: tight body stocking with sewn in thigh boots, revealing top and a colourful jacket. She had the figure to do that. I find African women generally so much more attractive than white ones anyway. Apologising for my doziness, I explained that I’d been seven and a half hours on an overnight flight before this six hour flight. “Oh,” she said, “I’ve had a long journey too! I started in Harare.”

“How was Harare?” I asked enthusiastically, it being one of my favourite cities in Africa. In the past week life has been changing in wonderful Zimbabwe. In a very peaceful coup, the ruling party has finally overthrown the old dictator, Mugabe, after 37 years. This is largely because of the ambitions of his inadequate wife (the ‘First Shopper’) whom he was manoeuvring to be his successor, despite her lack of qualification, except a masters’ degree achieved in three months at the University in Harare: ‘coup by marriage certificate’ as it has been described. People back home, knowing my love and respect for Zimbabwe, Africa’s best educated, most cultured country, asked me if Africa would be ‘safe’ to visit (even though I am thousands of miles away). “Of course”, I kept replying, “in fact, I wish I was in Harare to see this! The people are so educated, they know that violence won’t help their situation. You watch, it’ll be a very well organised, well mannered coup. It will be a big party. Most of the country has known no other leader, but the old man has gone too far now, even his military support has turned against his wife as president.”

My neighbour, who hailed from Guinea, smiled widely. “Oh, it was such fun! It was like a huge party! We were dancing in the streets, cheering, singing..!” I was envious. I’d like to have seen this coup! I miss Zimbabwe.

Mugabe, though, doesn’t see that his time is up and he should go quietly into wealthy retirement while he has the option. He is resisting resigning, so impeachment – by his own ruling party – looks to be the only way he’ll go. Whether this quiet coup (naturally, the pictures we see in the Western media concentrate on tanks in the streets) will solve any of that delightful country’s problems, remains to be seen. I will go back next winter.

For now, though, it’s a quick revisit to Ghana. Perry’s eldest son, now working for him in his insurance company in Accra, Philemon, whom I first knew aged about two, collected me from the airport and I dozed a couple of hours in the office until Perry arrived to take care of me – a couple of welcome beers at an outdoor club bar, a Chinese meal at an upmarket city restaurant and the drive home to an empty house out on the quiet western hills, a house I have watched develop over twenty five years, from the lone property in the bush, to a house surrounded by the half finished palaces of ambitious businessmen. As the house grew – as money was available – it filled with young people, the relatives and dependents that aspiring Ghanaian middle class people have to take in. Now the next generation is growing and moving independently, grandchildren arriving and the bungalow, with its five fairly basic bedrooms, is empty again. Perry’s wife, Rose, is away helping a new mother – (young Romannus’s wife) with a newborn and Perry and I have the house to ourselves.

It’s a bit warm and sticky, I am exhausted – but my sixth consecutive winter trip as begun.

DAY 2. TUESDAY 21st NOVEMBER 2017. ACCRA, GHANA

Awaking from a quite warm, fairly sticky night, I realised that I had hardly moved since I fell on the bed. All these long flights take their toll. But I awoke to a hot sunny day and a calm breakfast with Perry, just the two of us rattling in the big bungalow. Some small girl had been in at five to boil water and eggs for our simple breakfast, and long since gone away again. Perry had a meeting until twelve, then, he said, we’d maybe go to the Aburi botanical gardens on the hills north of the city, and visit Anutua, his first-born, now mother of two small boys. On the way out of town we’d buy my air ticket to the north.

Buying said ticket turned out to be less easy than we assumed. First the office was gone; second, no one could tell us where to; third, at the airport, there was no parking available and I had to leg it to the busy office; fourth, having waited in line and ordered my ticket, the airline’s credit card machine only accepted debit cards, entailing a long hot walk down ramps and around car parks to a cash machine where I froze my credit card thanks to bad information on the transaction. Fortunately, I have two cards for just this eventuality, one of the many frustrations of transacting financial business in Africa. Finally, dripping sweat, I had my ticket – about £67 to fly the hour north to Tamale, avoiding probably eight hours on the road. “Oh, you are too hot!” said Perry, “we’d better go for a beer before we set off!”

Well, I guess I knew then that our plans would disintegrate! When sociable Perry meets his tribesmen and women at Maggie’s Place, plans get forgotten. We stayed talking with a cheerful lady, an ambassador for Ghana in Europe and were joined by other ‘big’ people from the northern tribe. I believe one was a brother of the president. Amongst such people, Perry now moves – and does his business. It’s always been an inspiring story, this boy from illiterate parents (but with one of the wisest mothers I ever knew) and humble beginnings in a mud-floored primary school, largely self-educated through his own unswerving determination, and chance and seized opportunities; through various insurance companies, where he rose to MD; to running his own insurance brokerage, catering to the ‘big’ people of Ghana. Soon he turns 60, official retirement age in Ghana and I realised that I have known him just about half his life, for we first met at Christmas 1987, when he became our chance guest for an English Christmas, organised by an old Commonwealth charity, the Victoria League. Certainly a meeting that changed the course of my life, for there the seeds of my involvement with this continent were sown.

So I must settle into a different mode now, African patience; my pace slows and I have to accept a calmer attitude: things take the time they take, credit cards don’t always work and not much goes to any plan I may make.

The ambassador spent half an hour working and communicating with two phones in hand. It’s normal here to share the attention of anyone you are with, with multiple incoming and outgoing calls to people you can’t see, sometimes in languages you don’t understand. It’s risky to start telling any lengthy story, for you are unlikely to complete it! This is the continent of mobile phones, 650 million of them, more than in Europe or North America. My only retaliation would be to buy a wifi connected phone myself: concentrating on a phone is the new convention, whereas taking out my book would be impolite.

As the ambassador completed her calls, she said, “Right, my work is finished, why should I punish myself any longer?” and wrenched her elaborate wig from her head with a sigh. Later, Perry admitted he had been a bit shocked. I suggested he should feel complimented. It’s so confusing for a visitor, this wig business! Doubtless, I will meet her again sometime, probably sporting a totally different look – and inevitably I shall reintroduce myself, to a woman with whom I sat a couple of hours and shared two bottles of wine she had imported…

Later, after we excused ourselves and aborted our visit to Anutua since the traffic by then was its usual early evening chaos (as opposed to the morning, noon and evening chaos), we went quietly to another beer bar, the Prison Service Club, where we drank beer last night. We joined a young woman at a large table, where she was alone. It’s like that in friendly Accra: you can do that sort of thing, and end up in conversation – even to a goodbye hug for me an hour and a half later. Chatty Henrietta is a lawyer, “probably a junior one,” exclaimed Perry somewhat disparagingly some time later, but she was cheerful company and obviously at ease with two strangers, as she began to remove the woven extensions from her hair and drop them in a carrier bag. Two in one evening!

By now – four pints of beer and perhaps a quarter of a bottle of wine inside me, plus a pretty good fish dinner at the first bar – food quality standards are rising fast in the big city as it pretends to a cosmopolitan air – I was wobbly on my feet. I’m still tired of course, from two nights in the air this week. Now we had the hour’s drive back to the hills in still congested traffic. How does Perry still drive so well by this time of day? I’ll never know, but he does.

Whenever I come back to Ghana, I am reminded just what fun the people can be. Meet them with a smile and it is without exception returned. Be it a complete stranger in traffic, one of the legions of salespeople at traffic junctions and lights, children from school, vendors and everyone else: always eye contact and a smile. I love it.

Another remarkable thing, especially bearing in mind that I was in Florida only a week or so ago, is to see people shaped so naturally, the shape that humans were meant to be. Watching the lithe, hardworking Ghanaians, I am struck by how so much of the world has lost the basic shape of their bodies. Here I can SEE bone structure and muscle. It helps that people are relatively scantily clad. Women often wear shape-hugging dresses, and often not a much of them. Men wear shirts and slacks or shorts. Little is left to the imagination beneath layers of voluminous fabric, let alone layers of pendulous fat, as in Florida, where the only shapely people I saw were at a vegan food festival (probably the best advertisement for veganism that I saw). Here in Africa, neatly proportioned bodies, shapely breasts, comely hips, curvaceous bums – and on the men, handsome shoulders and narrow hips. And most have a spring in their step and an easy elegant posture – perhaps it’s the posture that does it, for we have forgotten the importance of standing erect so much – frequently with loads on their heads. As we slow in traffic jams and approaching lights, I watch with amusement the bobbing trays, bowls, bags and bundles of the vendors weave and race between the crowds of waiting cars. For a few minutes, all is shouts and sales pitch, items as diverse as juice and car mats, melted ice cream and dog leads, greasy snacks and decorative fans, wall maps and razors, newspapers and bath towels, all are jiggled at our windows in the hope of a quick sale.

Accra is fun and crazy, a great introduction to sub-Saharan Africa for anyone who’d like it. It is safe, exceptionally friendly and has all the essence of ‘Africa’. In our new ‘review’ culture, I recommend with five stars

DAY 3. WEDNESDAY 22nd NOVEMBER 2017. TAMALE, GHANA

Most of my time in Ghana, which must amount to at least 18 months over thirty years and twenty one visits, is spent in the dry north of the country, up here in and above Tamale. Tamale, the largest northern city, is 400 miles north of Accra on the coast, and Navrongo, the town in Africa that I know best, is another 100 miles further north, almost on the border of this rather rectangular land. Rectangular, of course, in memory of the arrogance of the white man and the carving up of Africa into colonial parcels in the great competition that usurped every indigenous culture for thousands of miles in every direction from here, and the cause of so many of Africa’s modern day ills, for those arbitrary lines split tribes apart, favoured one tribe above another and created unrest that has lasted for over a hundred and fifty years on this beleaguered continent. Such internal tribal wrangling created hierarchies and jealousies that still tear apart these countries. Tribalism only recedes slowly: I still see it all around me on my journeys, in the favouring of tribal brothers and sisters in the work place, politics, business and in the residue of distrust as I move between district loyalties. Very slowly, particularly in a well adjusted country like this, the ‘Father of Africa’, as Ghana likes to think of itself, allegiances are converting to political parties and tribalism is just a little less important, still existing through language and culture, of course, and through preference in employment and so forth, but I notice some more mixing of marriages in modern times: family ties that will break down the tribal order in time.

Ghana is fortunate: it was the first African nation to become independent of its colonial shackles in 1957, through the efforts of the revered Kwame Nkrumah and his colleagues. I’ve always maintained that that is the reason that Ghana has high self respect and a strong ‘Ghanaian’ culture: most Ghanaians’ first allegiance is to the country, with their tribe a definite second. It may well be the reason that Ghana is so much more stable than much of Africa: their national pride, their identity is so strong. They have become a peaceful nation, well respected in the world. It’s no coincidence that Barack Obama visited Ghana as his first African country, or that Bill Clinton was the first American president to set foot in sub-Saharan Africa in Accra (!), even that there’s a George Bush highway in Accra (not many of THOSE about the world) in commemoration of his visit too. Barack Obama stood in Parliament House and addressed Africa. He said that other African nations should take a look at Ghana and learn. He stood at the podium, while behind him sat the ruling president and three former presidents – all of them still living in Ghana, not exiled and hugging Swiss bank accounts. Only today, the Ghanaian president addressed African heads of state in London, saying that up to £10 billion of aid and development money was being corruptly diverted by officials across the continent every year, without which criminal activity Africa, with its wealth of resources, would not even need the help of the outside world.

On which note, I must be happy for Zimbabwe, for the 37 year tyrant finally ‘resigned’ from power today, to save his face and probably many of his millions of corrupt wealth as impeachment was begun in Harare by his own party. The fact of Grace Mugabe being lined up for the next president was just a step too far for Zimbabweans. The removal of the Mugabe family may not solve their problems – the military and the ruling party still have a lot of power – but it opens the doors to new horizons, watched carefully by the world, following one of the most well mannered, well planned peaceful coups in modern African history. Well done Zimbabwe!

*

“The temperature at Tamale is a little hotter than Accra, at 38 degrees,” the pilot informed us as our small jet, only three seats wide, descended over the red dust and dry scrub of this northern area. The city – not a favourite of mine; I only come to visit my ‘son’, Dennis and to meet my new ‘grandson’, Hezekiah, Heze for short, it seems. Of course, I’d come to visit my cheerful, generous ‘sister’ Gladys too, and now Dennis’s delightful wife, Emmanuella. Nothing else about this grubby, dusty, busy, predominantly Moslem (only about 20% of Ghana is Moslem) small city attracts me.

Charming, loquacious Dennis , who looks upon me as his father and mentor, was waving widely from the airport perimeter, his real father, with whom relations have always been strained – the reason for the estrangement being that Dennis is so like his ebullient mother and grandmother and Frank is a dour, rather critical character who sees their generous cheer as trivial and beneath their (his) dignity, without recognising their extreme popularity amongst all their wide circles. Both Dennis and Gladys have that instinctive integrity that is of such value and a somewhat uncommon virtue.

Frank now has a car (nowhere much to go in it, except church (a mile away) on Sundays, but it is a Ghanaian symbol of success these days, surpassing the bicycle of the 90s and the mopeds of the 2000s. There is no hope for the planet…). Back at the increasingly fine bungalow, sister Gladys ran in excited greeting, attacking like a bull in a giant hug, dancing and exclaiming. Little Heze, shy of the strange white man, watched intrigued. He’s a delight, an engaging, active, cheerful child of 20 months, old enough to be interesting to his not-very-baby-oriented white ‘grandfather’. Doubtless, by tomorrow he will overcome his shyness. Emmanuella is back at her studies, training towards a masters’ in midwifery here in Tamale. Dennis is a teacher, now progressing to teach in JSS. They have a rented home a mile or two from Gladys’ house. ‘As befitting my status’, I am to stay at the family house, where a bed had to be bought before my last visit, especially for me, despite the fact that I’d be equally – if not more – comfortable on a mattress on the floor…

Ghana is certainly moving forward. There’s so much new building and so many new roads, dozens of times more cars, endless traffic; there’s a new smartness visible: the country has been cleaned up since even my last visit two and a half years ago. The acres of rubbish and litter, the plastic and mess is largely gone or going, people look more prosperous, the environment a trifle more cared for. As everywhere else, this economy is difficult for young graduates; employment prospects narrow for the increasing numbers of well educated young people. Ghana has long been a pretty equal country, insofar as any African country really respects the overworked, undervalued female population. Women occupy positions of power and enjoy tertiary education, and have relatively equal rights – while at the same time, of course, bringing up the children, keeping house, washing, harvesting and all the other things that basically lazy African men consider beneath them.

DAY 4. THURSDAY 23rd NOVEMBER 2017. TAMALE, GHANA

Every time I go away, I forget just how improbably HOT the north of Ghana can be. The day was a little cooled by a thin cloud layer, but at night, when the electricity dies in not infrequent power cuts in the early hours, I am left in a muck sweat on top if the bed, at which time all the mosquito bites of the evening warm up and torment in a slow agony. But this is how so much of Africa lives: the water supply came on briefly around 2.00am and I heard Gladys get up to fill buckets for the day. “Those who overslept and stayed on bed, they will have no water!” she exclaimed as she cooked breakfast. At least she enjoys tap water here. It’s not so common… These days, in so many African countries I visit – and doubtless all the rest – demand far outstrips supply for the basic utilities. Generation of power, here in Ghana, used to come from the Akosombo Dam, the biggest earth dam in Africa, that encloses an expansive lake and was foresightedly constructed by the first post-colonial government. But now, countries upstream on the Volta Rivers have built their own dams at the same time that demand is ballooning, for now electricity reaches much of the country and everyone has been made dependent on power. In the late 80s electricity ran for just a few hours, from dusk until eleven, it was in Navrongo, I remember. The local diesel-fuelled generator roared away up the Hospital Road, and at 11.00 we were cast into (what I saw as) thankful peace and blissfully dark darkness, when the stars exploded above. It’s not like that any more… Perhaps that is really the STORY of my travels and acceptance in Navrongo – the incredible changes I have seen.

Some of them have brought good to the populous, but the baby went with the bath water and the erasing of the old culture, which placed its values on mutual support and a light ecological footprint, is to the detriment of the world. So much was good – along with plenty of ignorance, I must admit. The headlong race for change and aping the materialism of the West has brought many social and environmental problems. But this is life. We race towards the apparent riches without assessing the hidden costs. I am almost apprehensive to see Navrongo, a place that meant so much to me, for I know I will hardly recognise the place again. I am sure I have witnessed the biggest cultural changes in northern Ghana of the past several centuries in my 30 years’ of visits. I put it as high as that.

*

We visited Dennis’s school, where he now teaches computer technology and literacy in a poor, predominantly Moslem school, where most of the students today seemed to be girls. Ghana is officially a Christian country, so school time complies with the working week and teachers can be of other faiths. The school is poor, set in a dusty part of the sprawl of ‘suburbs’ beside a small mosque. Classrooms are standard government issue, basic block and tin-roofed rooms with plastered blackboards. Dennis considers himself fortunate to have five fairly elderly computers with which to teach. His colleagues gather beneath a tree between the two blocks at a shaky table as their staffroom.

The arrival of a white man inevitably causes commotion. Photos are demanded – no reluctance on my part! Excited girls in cotton school uniforms and head shawls clamoured for pictures with the white man. There’s little of the reserve most of us associate with Islam: this is still cheerful Ghana after all. Seems I began to work on my next photo book and collection for my crowded walls today.

Little Hezekiah is at a school not far away, and already at 20 months, is familiar with being collected on Dad’s small motorbike. Dennis takes care of him in the afternoons, so we carried him back to Dennis and Emmanuella’s rented rooms – a sixth or so of a square, single storey block around a small concrete yard. There’s a living room, bedroom, bathroom and store room, the latter currently occupied by a small girl, Hege, aged ten, from Emmanuella’s village, who helps attend to Heze in exchange for her food and education, a common arrangement for large families. The kitchen is in the outer corridor of the block. All is tidy and clean but simple. There’s the inevitable TV, a sound system, easy chairs and low table. Possessions are relatively few, clothes kept tidily in bare wood wardrobes and beneath dust cloths. The block is amid many others, and small mosques abound out in those half rural, half suburban areas of red dust. It’s probably quite noisy even though it is far down sandy paths from any road. People come and go on small mopeds and cars, in such an area, are rarities.

We whiled away the hot afternoon under a tin shelter of a nearby beer bar, Heze and the little girl playing nearby. I don’t get much done in a day in this climate and I sleep – or try to when there’s a bit of cooling fan – far more than at home. My body will adjust a bit to Ghana’s furnace, but it takes its toll on energy levels, does this intense equatorial sun. Most of my energy goes into a vain attempt to cool down!

DAY 5. FRIDAY 24th NOVEMBER 2017. TAMALE, GHANA

I doubt the Taliban would much approve of the ‘looseness’ of Tamale’s Islamic interpretation, which is, of course, all in its favour. All children, girls and boys, are educated equally, pretty young women wear figure-hugging dresses, even if they still sport a low hemline – but many wear tights to cover their legs instead. Most wear the traditional headscarf, that often slips to a neck scarf, pulled loosely back now and again. It seems a healthy adaptation of a sometimes oppressive religion. And now they have Islamic pop music with unforgettable lines like, “Everybody say inshallah… boom… boom… everybody say inshallah…”! No, not Taliban material at all. These folk actually dare to enjoy themselves.

Travelling encourages happenstance, often the reason for so much of the fun on my journeys. Frank, a man of few friends who sleeps by seven at night and dislikes socialising, seldom goes out with Gladys of an evening. His sociable wife, my ‘mad sister’, is his opposite entirely. Psittaceous, is a word that we discovered in the dictionary years ago, when Dennis was a teenager; a word he loves to use about his mother. It means to be parrot-like and I notice my online dictionary doesn’t include it, and I wonder just how we discovered it! Maybe in the days of the paper dictionaries that I used to bring to articulate, loquacious Dennis we were sharing our love of words. His Jane Austen-like letters were one of the things that early attracted me to my ‘son’ and I miss them in these lazier days of email and phone-speak. Anyway, Gladys doesn’t get out much of an evening, and hardly gets to enjoy a beer in uncritical company, so I suggested that, despite the fact that I have five days on syrupy soft drinks thanks to having two molars out last week and now having to endure a course of antibiotics, it was an opportunity to get her out.

We went to a nearby bar, a cut above most but under cooling trees and apparently mosquito-less. We were early, but something was going to happen: people were gathering, mostly Moslem, dressed to the nines, coming and going in the darkened yard. Then floodlights sprang on and I could see an audience gathering in the further yard, no one drinking alcohol, it seemed (certainly not in public). Gladys turned her chair next to mine to watch the crowd. “Let’s go home, it’s nothing for us,”said Frank, but Gladys and I were determined to find out what was going on. We love to watch people and there was to be a talent contest, the bar-girl told us.

Frank slept, slouched in his chair as the place filled. Traditional drummers had gathered and now they began to drum noisily, thankfully overcoming the horrid rap music from Nigeria that played at huge volume. At nine, a compere arrived on the stage area. We were about to witness Miss Adama 2017, a contest in traditional dancing from the upper areas of the country: ‘Strictly’, Ghanaian style! Contestants would be eliminated and this was the semi final. Next week the final comes on at the sports stadium, pity I can’t take Gladys…

The performances were great, each of the nine dancers introducing her dance, then dancing in various regional, tribal styles that they had learned at the nearby Centre for Culture, an old Tamale institution. They were judged on their presentation, their fine, sometimes wild, costumes, use of the stage and so on, by a panel of judges. It was amusing and entertaining. Gladys beamed and exclaimed, and translated where necessary, although, as is common in Ghana, English is the language of all such events. A couple of the young women were outstanding and all entered into the fun and glamour of the evening. The crowd cheered, clapped and ululated.

It all ended soon after ten. “We can go now to avoid the crowd!” Exclaimed Frank, waking from his doze, three hours past his bedtime – so we did…

*

Earlier, Dennis and I went to visit Gladys’ school, at Saka Saka, a relatively wooded part of town, where she has been headteacher now for a few years. How proud her late mother, Akay, would have been. She’s a popular woman, much loved by her fellows and pupils. The cheerful children are excited when a white man comes and pandemonium erupts, with an unselfconscious naïveté that is delightful. All is smiles and noise and a song from them all is always forthcoming, as are the chanted rote greeting: “Good afternoon, sir, how are you?” yelled out with gusto as they all stand politely.

*

Later, Dennis and I sat under a shady tree at one of the club houses that belong to any institution with staff quarters (‘quarterziz’ in Ghana-speak). This pleasant expanse is that of the Volta RIver Authority, who control the hydro electric supplies of Ghana. Little Heze played happily around us. Dennis a good father and his son is devoted to him. In untypical African fashion, although I do see signs of change, he bathes his son, changes nappies, even put him on his back for a time yesterday in the manner of West African mothers! The little boy is cheerful and full of smiles and very active. At only 20 months, he appears to understand much of what is said to him already and loves to dance to music. A show of traditional dancing on TV prompted him to jig and dance for a long time with a wide smile. He’s a delightful little boy.

DAY 6. SATURDAY 25th NOVEMBER 2017. TAMALE, GHANA

There’s a sort of condensed essence of this continent to be found in its seething markets that I love, but I can’t roam there with Wechiga or Dennis, only with my sister, Gladys.

I persuaded Gladys to leave her kitchen and come out for lunch in town with Dennis and I, a rare treat for this poor hard worked woman. On seeing the menu, Gladys exclaimed. “Eh! It’s expensive! Wow! Eh!” I was back to my usual conundrum of trying not to see how cheap this was for me – as a lunch date for three! A huge quantity of fried rice with a small portion of guinea fowl, a dish of chicken with cashew nuts, vaguely Chinese, and a plate of potato chips with a small Guinness (for Dennis, still to Gladys’ disapproval, even now he’s 35), a shandy for her and another tedious soft drink for me – all came to 82 Cedis = £14… It’s difficult not to look wealthy, and become a source of so many demands. Frank actually thought I’d pluck an iPad from the European money trees for him. After all, in Europe money just litters the ground, doesn’t it? A brief lesson in the price of a pint of beer, a gallon of fuel, my shoes, my monthly electricity bill – a damned iPad – shocks, but there’s still this concept of how wealthy I must be, not knowing that I have a 20 year old car worth £150, while he has a car costing £9000 here in Ghana! Anyway, Dennis’s iPad, second hand, cost £100 in Accra, a price I can’t hope to equal.

So Gladys and I walked the streets and the rough market lanes, squeezing between towers of goods on rickety tables, dodging bowls on heads at my eye level, coughing in the fumes of a thousand mopeds and Indian-style three wheeler tuk-tuks, (copied by and made in China) the new vehicular plague on Africa. There are smells of petrol, spices, food, rotting meat and soap; piled dry goods, tins and containers; sacks of rice and foodstuffs; draped vibrant cloths and cheap tee shirts, jewellery and second hand clothes, babies on backs, thrusting bicycles festooned with merchandise; dangerously sharp-edged tin awnings, potholes and puddles of god know what; whirring sewing machines, chatter and music, more tinny treble than melody, and the calls of children selling water, and babies screaming. There is colour and interest everywhere; it’s a perilous place for an inquisitive visitor, all uneven and full of obstacles, full of novelties that distract and smiles that mirror mine.

Then a terrible moaning fills the air, constituting worship in this Islamic town. A ghastly wail wavers upwards into the dusty air from a thousand speaker cones strung from peeling plaster minarets on low-rise mosques. How can anyone praise their god so drearily, no one muezzin in tune throughout the town? It’s a dismal intoning of ritual drone with no feeling, no joy, no tunefulness, a miserable noise quite unlike the brazen cacophony of the Middle East.

We were looking for printed cotton fabrics, the famed West African dazzling wax print cloths, draped in kaleidoscopic walls in small tailors’ shops and booths and piled in teetering criss-cross piles at the roadside, ranged in pyramidical displays on head bowls. It was fun to select and spot the ones we liked – and thought my dear friend Leslie, with whom I stayed and worked happily in Florida these last couple of months, might enjoy. Gladys is so popular, so gregarious and so positive that it became most enjoyable work, despite the heat, the noise, the dust. We bundled our purchases into my little backpack (that’s been mended in Tamale for several years) to add to the delicious ripe pineapple (£1, much of that cost being transport from the south), the tins of condensed milk, a bag of greasy ‘bo fruits’ a form of local doughnut, stodgy and fried in oily fat, and some ‘Tutenkamen fish’, my name for ugly, curled dried and smoked fish that look like an artefact buried for five thousand years beneath the Egyptian deserts.

It’s not surprising that I can sleep for ten or more hours here in Africa, so much of my energy going into trying to keep cool; my days filled with observation and here with sociable activity. I can sleep from 9.30 until 8.00 with no trouble, long hours after most of Ghana has arisen and been at work since before dawn.

DAY 7. SUNDAY 26th NOVEMBER 2017. TAMALE, GHANA Continue reading →

by

EAST AFRICA SAFARI 2107 -SIXTEEN

HERE’S THE END OF THIS YEAR’S TRAVEL STORY! Uploaded at Schipol Airport, Amsterdam. So VERY odd to be amongst all these – really rather ugly – white people.  Home in a few more hours. THEN the adaptation begins…

DAY 86 SATURDAY 4th MARCH 2017. KITALE, KENYA

I’m always so happy when I face down my fears! I’ve been debating with myself for some days whether I would ride back on that terrible road from Sipi to Suam border and so back to Kitale – or take the tame option of the tarred road and the major East Africa Highway border post. I awoke (after great sleep again at Sipi) to a sparkling, glorious day. Rain looked extremely unlikely, certainly before afternoon, by which time I would have hopefully negotiated that deteriorated rock and dust track – all sixty miles of it. In a couple of weeks’ time it will be all but impassible when the rains come in earnest. For today it was just damp, settling some of the dust of the pitted, rutted, rocky surface.

It always amused me how the old always slightly exaggerate their ages: “Oh, I’m in my 90th year!” instead of, “I’m 89.” But today I found myself saying to myself, ‘not bad for someone who’s almost 68’! How fickle we are! But it WAS a hard physical ride and tonight I will sleep well. Sixty miles of exercise, moving quickly about, wrestling with the bucking bike, bouncing and leaping over long rocky patches, gripping the bars through ruts and dirt – and looking at the astonishing views at the same time as avoiding a million obstacles, inert and alive. A terrific ride! How I used to enjoy trail riding when I lived in Yorkshire: a couple of miles of this sort of riding seemed such fun. In Africa it goes on for hours, miles and sometimes days.

On a road like this, the discomfort of the little blue bike is outweighed by its lightness. This would have been hell on my BMWs. This ride was so much more fun than the first time I took that road, six weeks or so ago. I have come to know the capabilities and foibles of the little blue bike and now ride it with much more assurance. It’s still uncomfortable, but that’s a fact of the narrow seat, for which during the next ten months or so, Rico and I can find a solution – a single, wider seat perhaps. The bike has proved to be reliable if unexciting, and the addition of the two bulkier tyres and the second hand shock absorber has certainly made me more confident of getting over these rough tracks and roads.

How high I was riding I don’t know. Mount Elgon, which I was circuiting, is Africa’s fourth highest, and Kitale is at 2000 metres-odd, so much of the day has been spent around and above that altitude. The sun beat down from a deep blue sky, the rain clouds of yesterday truly a thing of the past. But the rainy season won’t be long now. Each day brings showers; it’s been drizzling since I got home to Kitale. I arrived plastered in filth as I did when I arrived at Sipi some weeks ago. The dust adheres to my beard and neck and fills the linings of my helmet, covers the front of my jacket and my pannier bags. My boots are red, and so’s the little bike. But it was FUN! A thoroughly good day, and especially so because I was dubious about coming back by this hard, difficult route and almost copped out and rode via the tarred road. Happily, I didn’t allow myself to be beaten.

*

Back at home most of the girls are on their half term, making the house lively and cheerful. Lovely Scovia is here today as well as the others. Little Shamilla runs excitedly and leaps into the arms of her newest uncle. It’s a delightful family, warm, welcoming and accommodating. I am made SO welcome in their cordial, open African manner. I’m just another addition to the extended family and I fit in comfortably with my traveller’s adaptability. I mean, Adelight was a bit concerned that if I do come for the next Christmas holiday, and if Rico’s sister and husband make it too, where would I sleep? “Put me back in the garage office as now!” I declared. “I love it out there. It’d be my bedroom of choice in this household.” It’s private, quiet (except for bloody cockerels, but they are an African penance) and undisturbed. Actually, even before supper, as I write, I am looking forward to creeping under the net and covers tonight. I feel satisfyingly tired. ‘Not bad for almost 68’ though! Haha.

*

The immigration officers didn’t spot the date mistake on my visa this time, and the customs officer who should have explained all the ins and outs of the temporary carnet several weeks ago, seemed content just to withhold the paper given to me by his opposite number three days ago. It seemed that bureaucracy was thus served. I asked no further questions. The Ugandan customs officer wasn’t even there, so I had to persuade someone just to stamp the paper and write ‘Suam border’ on it. It’s all such tedious nonsense. Just keep smiling… No one will ever read these papers anyway. You know, I’ve travelled in and out, and around 21 African nations, some of them many times, and I have never yet paid a bribe to any official. I’m quite proud of that achievement.

DAY 87 SUNDAY 5th MARCH 2017. KITALE, KENYA

There’s little that even I can write about a day spent sitting on the porch reading! Most relaxing, and enjoying the last few days in which I can sit about in tee shirt and shorts for now. I only ventured out once: a ride to town to purchase two large juicy pineapples – the queen of tropical fruits to my taste – (£1.20 each) and a litre of ice cream (considerably more expensive at about £6 for processed sugar and grease!) as a treat for all the girls. These girls – Scovia, Marion, Rose, Shamilla, and Yvonne the almost mute house-girl, have few treats, even in this well organised, generous household. So much so that Rose, who is supposed to return to school tonight, has put off her return until tomorrow for the sake of pineapple and ice cream – and the obviously much enjoyed company of her ‘sisters’. Shy, charming Rose, found on the street and now a member of such a real family. That’s very moving; just one of the inspiring stories that never make their way out of Africa. One of Adelight’s junior brothers is staying just now too, waiting to get his papers to go to college. Doubtless Shammi’s little friend Jape (half Dutch) from the next compound will join in the party. What would be a ‘sleep over’ in Europe is just the flexibility of families here in Africa. One extra is seldom even noticed, even in the two communal beds all the girls share – by choice – in their room with its heaps of clothes piled together. In England we exclaim at the ‘hardship’ of children having to share a room and even a child’s room without an en suite bathroom is becoming defined as relative deprivation. And as for not having a TV in their room – well, that’s poverty. These girls share their beds and don’t feel any grievance. Seven or eight of them (for Yvonne, the house girl becomes part of the group), aged six to twenty, share two six foot square beds and appear content with their lot, happy to be together, sharing also friendship and cheerfulness that I seldom witness amongst privileged, complacent children of my European experience, with their comforts, material possessions, constant diversions, pernickety diets and complaints. A dose of African life would make them much better, more generous, less selfish, manipulative citizens. Just as well I am without children, perhaps!! They’d be ‘removed’ by the ‘authorities’ as ‘deprived’. Haha. I am so fond of these children, representatives of most of their fellows throughout the continent, for here children are generally happy for what little they have, polite and respectful – without being necessarily subservient – to their elders, positive, cheerful and caring towards each other, and filled with the fortitude that always impresses me so much in African life.

DAY 88 MONDAY 6th MARCH 2017. KITALE, KENYA

My 2017 African journey almost over, there’s not much to do but sort out what stays in Kitale for my next trip and what comes home. Delightful Scovia washed my riding jacket (eight changes of water!) – now cleaner than at any time since I bought it five years and five African trips ago. Scruffy and faded, it is still serviceable, as are my old, very faded trousers (bought in South Africa in 2002), washed by Rose, along with my backpack, veteran of MANY African journeys, even mended a few times in Ghana.

Adelight and I went to town independently today. It’s difficult to coordinate there with her business and shopping but by coincidence I was riding out of the supermarket car park as she began to back her vehicle out of her parking space. We laughed together and I invited her for lunch in town. She’s become a friend over these weeks, a warm-hearted, very able woman and good company. We have enjoyed getting to know one another and look forward to an easy reunion in ten months, all being well. There are vague plans afoot to spend the Christmas holiday up at Lake Turkana, and the family all seem to hope I will be with them. And that’s fine by me! “Oh, you’ve become part of the family!” exclaims Adelight.

At the internet cafe, where I am well known by now, I booked a room online for my stay in Nairobi on Wednesday. It’s double my budget at about £33, but it IS only 2km from the airport for my departure at 08.50 on Thursday. It’s a day flight, which I much prefer, getting me home in the evening, and allowing me, perhaps, a glimpse of my favourite Sahara from 36,000 feet. So good not to miss a night’s sleep as is so common. It looks as if 2017 will be another year with frequent flights, with the American project firing up soon after I get home to Harberton this week.

It’s been so good to have a home base for this trip, as indeed I had for the past four journeys in Africa. I love the fact that I have friends all over this wonderful world, people who appear glad to see me when I turn up after years of absence, just, of course, as they would be in Devon. But the economic scales are unfairly weighted in my favour, over so many of my friends, especially those in Africa…

Well, it just means I have to come to see THEM..!

DAY 89 TUESDAY 7th MARCH 2017. KITALE, KENYA

This evening I packed up the little blue bike and left it in Rico’s garage, hopefully to use again at the end of the year. It needs a new chain and sprockets and I will try to find the replacement parts for the starter motor, although I must say I hardly miss it already.

Scovia came to me this morning and said, “Uncle Jonathan, I have… well, I have a sort of favour to ask… Would you take me and my friend back to school this afternoon?”

Well, it’s difficult to refuse 18 year old Scovia anything, frankly! She’s such a delight and, I admit, my favourite among the girls. So at four she and her (fortunately slim) pretty friend, Sophie clambered onto the bike, with attendant bags, and we set off, a mzungu boda-boda once again, to her school, some ten kilometres down the road, away from town. Well hidden, down a mile or so of dirt road, it’s a decent, well cared for set of buildings, but no doubt discipline is tight and old fashioned: it usually is in African schools. The majority are harsh boarding schools with no comforts, but education is taken seriously by pupils and teachers alike, and they know the hardship is a necessity in these cash-strapped countries. Their dormitories will be Dickensian, the food basic and the conditions hard. But you’ll hear no one complain seriously. It’s just the way it is, and education is the only way forward, so all pupils are grateful for that which they get. Once again, African fortitude wins over what any European student would consider impossible privation. The girls laughed and enjoyed riding with the mzungu, a cheerful fifteen minutes. Once at school, it brought back all my dislike of school though. They were almost an hour late (there’d been a heavy shower earlier and I reminded Scovia that that was her best excuse!) and were advised that some punishment would be meted out. I always hated the arbitrary discipline of school regimes. I can see now that the seeds of my independence were sown a long time ago.

*

In the past couple of months I have ridden two kilometres shy of seven thousand: 6998kms or 4374 miles on the little blue bike. Apart from the broken teeth on those cogs, it’s been reliable, once I found a new spark plug and shock absorber. I’ve not liked the small 200cc engine power, but I haven’t really minded riding so slowly I suppose, just missed the extra power. The seat has been prodigiously uncomfortable, especially as I lost fat from my backside as I always do on these motorbike journeys. I hope Rico and I can adapt it to a single seat before I use it again.

My bag is packed – only the one, including my big riding boots. My jacket, trousers, helmet and some of my aged clothes can stay in the pannier bags now stored atop the cupboards in Rico’s garage office, that doubles as my bedroom. I’ll bring home the one bag and a small carry-on. This trip I really trimmed down my luggage – never very extravagant – to an absolute minimum. When I met the Irish couple, back at the Rwanda border, I was horrified at the incredible bulk of luggage they had festooned round their two bikes, the sat-nav gear, the astonishing ‘armour’ they wore over their heavy riding gear, and the bundles and bales that appended their rear seats. Those bikes must have been hell to manage. I certainly wouldn’t want to negotiate the Suam border road with that lot, even when I was thirty years younger! Loading up alone must take an hour a day… For me, loading up now takes about four minutes.

*

Since December I have been saying, “I must go to the museum!” I finally made it today. It’s a dusty, fly-blown place that makes me understand the distaste that so many have for museums. It’s stuck in about 1950, I’m afraid. A collection started by a colonial army officer, bequeathed to the State with money to build a museum – and then left to vegetate with no further investment. I was the first to sign the visitors’ book since the 15th of last month, and was accompanied – as is often the case in African museums – by a guide, pointing out the obvious. Benjamin, after about fifteen minutes and several dowdy cases, asked what I did for a living. “Design museums,” I said with a smile… The ghastly taxidermy (never a thing of beauty) was threadbare and had moulted (about forty years ago, by the look of the bedraggled specimens) and bottles held sad-looking dead snakes in preservative, and pins faded butterflies to yellowed board.

Outside is a much-vaunted ‘nature walk’ that has been preserved in a shallow valley virtually in the heart of town. It’s home to birds and monkeys and resounded to the racket of a mad yelling mullah or preacher, amplified so that it filled the ‘natural’ space of the dusty, decrepit valley walk. As usual the ‘nature walk’ was a comprehensive display of plastic detritus and discarded single-use plastic bottles. It would take a couple of days to dredge the place of all this filth – but no one (except the likes of me) even SEES it, so who would think of cleaning it up?

In a few hours the journey home begins. Another – my fifth consecutive – annual trip to Africa is almost ended. I have to readapt to ‘normal’ life. Trouble is, after SO many journeys THIS has become pretty normal too! I’m never sure which takes more adaptation now. On the whole, I think England is the bigger challenge…

DAY 90 WEDNESDAY 8th MARCH 2017. NAIROBI, KENYA

Well, I won’t make that mistake again – going to Nairobi! I will do anything required to avoid it. I’d rather spend a week in Eldoret, until now my least favourite Kenyan city. Nairobi is an utter, total, unmitigated shit hole! Sorry, but it really is. Knee deep in filth and tattered plastic, stagnant green puddles of offensive odour, broken roads, dust, heat, virtually stationary traffic, shacks, shanties, jerry building and ugliness. It is beyond anything I have seen in Africa – and I’ve seen a few vile cities round this continent, but nothing to compete with Nairobi. It’s utterly foul. I now remember riding hundreds of miles out of my way to go round it in 2002 in one direction and stopping a few hours one side so I could ride right through and stay the other side when I rode in the other direction. Must have been a reason. Now I know what it was. Nairobi is contemptible.

Perhaps it’s fitting that the worst few hours of my journey occurred on the last day.

*

The day began early with an airport to be at by 8.00. Kitale airstrip, to be precise, a small airfield only about three kilometres from the house. We see the small planes banking away over the house most mornings. Today it was my turn to fly out. How I enjoy small aircraft. This one was a fifteen seater, a little wider than my car, probably the same width as Rico’s Land Cruiser. A few cupboards under the body for the bags and three seats across, with the pilots sitting up front in the same cabin. I love flying this way. And flying at only 11,000 to 12,000 feet is such fun too, when the land is at 6000 feet as it is in much of Kenya. I had the seat behind the co-pilot; it would have been better on the left side as it happens, as the main views of the spectacular Rift Valley escarpments are on that side, dropping away like something in an Imax film underneath. Kenya is a fine country over which to fly, the evidence of its volcanic origins very obvious in its pimply surface, dotted with extinct volcanoes. There are huge tracts of forest but most obvious is the extremely manmade landscape, with so much of the country cultivated and dotted with a million small shambas as well as the giant commercial farms of big business, ugly acres of hot houses to grow roses and flowers for the European market and the beans and vegetables we so thoughtlessly purchase in our supermarkets, ignoring the air miles – and the fact that the best land is given over to growing luxuries for western tastes when Africa needs nutrition so badly. Several jumbo jets filled with flowers fly from Eldoret to Europe every morning of the year.

The flight lasted a little under an hour and a quarter, a terrific experience in this single prop plane piloted relaxedly by the Asian pilot, checking his phone as we flew, like every other driver in Kenya, and a Kenyan co-pilot. The Kenyan was obviously in training and brought us in to land at Wilson Airfield, Nairobi’s second airport – brought us in a bit bumpily, needing a bit more training.

Then I had the unpleasant task of bargaining with taxi drivers, sharp, greedy capital city dwellers. In the end I found David, whom I didn’t find very sympathetic, telling me stories to justify his rip off prices that I refused to swallow. He demanded 1400 Kenya shillings (£11.20) for the ride. It was actually about 16kms (10 miles) but I adamantly stuck to my best offer of 1200. All the journey he was rattling on about how far it was as I listened irritably. My accommodation of tonight did take a bit of finding, it’s true, but I had the phone number and he talked with Carolyne, my hostess. When we arrived at Carolyne’s tidy gated community amongst the filth and grot of residential suburban Nairobi, I handed him a 1000 and a 200 note as I had agreed. He was still talking so much, still justifying his demands and verifying his honesty etc etc, that he didn’t look at the notes and handed me change of 200/-, thinking I’d handed over 1500 and he could still get 1300. I didn’t enlighten him, I’m afraid, that he’d just handed me change for 1200, not 1500. If he’s so hard done by as a business man, he should concentrate! Anyway, 1000/- is still a rip off price! And anyway, I didn’t like him much…

*

This homestay is pleasant enough, a family home in a middle class, not very spacious gated community, seemingly surrounded by foetid dereliction, a couple of kilometres from the airport perimeter, but I like Carolyne’s reason for doing this work. She is supporting a couple of random village waifs through school, as well as her own two small children. Many people are latching onto this money making enterprise, a room or two in the family house for passing tourists, especially if they live not too far from the international airport.

However, the concept of spending several hours stuck out here didn’t seem so attractive, so I decided to head for the city. Wish I hadn’t… At the entrance to the gated community, I waited across the road with a couple of other fellows for a matatu. As it arrived, I realised that I didn’t know quite where I was, so I asked the man next to me to enlighten me. “It’s Tassia,” he informed me. Only it wasn’t – but it took me uncomfortable hours to discover that. It took a hideous hour and a half to get to town in a matatu and a hot bus that stopped every few hundred yards to drum up more passengers, and then entered the gridlock traffic of Nairobi. At last, deciding I could walk faster, I got down and did just that. Oddly, the city centre is orderly, if crowded, and strangely quiet, just the hum of conversation and music from shops. If the rest of the city was like its heart, it might, just might, be acceptable. But it’s not! The rest is a dump.

I wandered the streets for a time and took a late lunch in a restaurant, and then, with nothing much attracting me to the endless mobile phone shops that seem to make up most city centres these days, especially in Africa, I thought I might as well head home, which’d probably take me another hour and a half. Carolyne had instructed that I should look for a matatu number 33C opposite the State Archives. Well, I found a BUS 33C and told the tout I wanted Tassia. I mounted and had the worst ride of my considerable experience, with ‘music’ so loud that I rode with my fingers in my ears for the next one and a half hours – much of it, it transpired, in the wrong bloody direction! The bus shook and vibrated to the intensity of the sub-bass of the disco-sized speakers. I have said before that if you want to put me in a lousy mood, put me in noise. Wow, did I get bad tempered! Then it appeared I was going across country on dire ‘roads’ heading back to town and should have alighted way back and found another matatu. Huh! By then I could have hit everyone around me, most of whom seemed amused by my predicament, angering me more! I had my phone with me, by good fortune, as I’d been going to leave it in Kitale, but decided I might as well have it with me whenever I return. I called Carolyne for directions and had to backtrack half an hour on the appalling road amongst the worst slums I have seen outside India, back to a major roundabout where I could eventually find a small matatu for Baraka Estates, which is where I had set out from, not Tassia, as my informant had claimed. The journey home took no less than two and a half ghastly hours through the shittiest city I have witnessed in a very long time – and I have seen some shitty cities… Never again.

*

So my safari comes full circle and it only remains to fly the four thousand six hundred-odd miles back to Bristol and a bus to Devon. For those miles I am in the hands of the professionals, not matatu drivers.

DAY 90 and a half THURSDAY 9th MARCH 2017. FLYING HOME WITH KENYA AIRWAYS/ KLM

Once again at 11,000 metres. I seem to spend quite a lot of time up here these days. Goodness, I am happy to leave Nairobi behind and be travelling away from it at 500mph! What a dump! Even getting to the airport, and I was almost within sight of it, was so stressful. The traffic is thick, discipline non-existent and then there are multiple security checks in an order unknown anywhere else in the world: all passengers have to go through a security screen out at the perimeter of the airport, while cars are checked. Then bags are screened on entering the terminal, before check in. Then there’s passport control. Then there’s another full screening of passengers and hand luggage. Then there’s ticketing at the gate. If it wasn’t for the necessity to travel on that road to Jinja, I think I’d fly through Kampala/ Entebbe next time. It’s not much further from Kitale than Nairobi… Maybe I will anyway!

*

So, up here, a quick look back at the past twelve weeks. What’ll I be happy to get away from – other than ghastly Nairobi? Wet, lethally slippery bathroom floors: all bathrooms in East Africa seem to be ‘wet rooms’, with showers that continue to dribble for hours after you shower, soaking the lavatory, clothes and floors; loo rolls that shred into confetti as you pull them; tissue paper ‘Colonial’ bread, of which the British Empire should be so ashamed – it’s perhaps worse than the British versions: Mother’s Pride, Warburtons et al; Blue Band marg – I’d as soon eat axle grease; mosquitoes; waking up in tired, stained rooms; eating with my fingers; endless crappy, wall to wall, lowest quality TV, volume too loud and frequently tediously and emotionlessly dubbed into American; searching for a place to sleep…

It’s not a serious list of grievances. I’ll miss more than I am happy to leave: the almost universal sense of goodwill to strangers that I hope these pages have expressed; being a kind of celebrity just by being a mzungu on a motorbike passing by; sunshine and warmth; constant activity; new sights and experiences; writing this journal – and the wonderful sense of not knowing what tomorrow will bring, one of the sensations that still keeps me on the road after all these years.

I have frequently fallen into the lazy terminology of writing ‘Africa’, which is a continent of 54 diverse countries. Of course, I can pare that down to meaning sub-Saharan Africa or ‘black Africa’, but even this includes South Africa and its white tribes. I hope you read into my lazy six letter description: ‘Africa’, those countries I have visited south of the Sahara, now 17, I think. Perhaps then you can begin to see the pattern of why I lump all these different peoples together, for there are some universal qualities: living in the NOW; warmth to strangers; and general fortitude in the face of privations, borne with the acceptance and philosophy that it’s just how things are – poverty and conditions few of us have ever suffered, and in many cases never even imagined. There are old cultural mores and social habits that survive almost everywhere, good and bad, despite the incursion of Western influences: giving what little you have; receiving as well as giving from the heart (such a difficult lesson for Westerners to learn, used as we are to counting the cost); kindness and compassion; the oh-so-admirable extended family unit that even extends to absorb a passing mzungu; extreme politeness and a general lack of aggression (although this can be bottled up and flare into ghastly conflict, tribal war, sectarian violence and even genocide on unimaginable scales…). Then, of course, there’re the smiles! Where else do I see, hour after hour, day in day out, such positive, smiling people as I find on my African journeys?

*

Highlights..? Spending time with my old and firm friend Rico; becoming friends with his lovely wife – and the Rico Girls; walking in the villages and meeting people with William in Kessup and Alex in Sipi; riding the road in western Uganda from the best hotel at the White Horse Inn in Kabale; the salt pans at Katwe, one of the most extraordinary sights I have seen on the continent; the road in and out of the Rift and Kerio Valleys between Eldama Ravine and Kessup; the rough and rugged Suam border road; the ‘old road, over the mountain range near Fort Portal in western Uganda; discovering the Ugandans – said to be the friendliest people on the continent, and I have no reason to contest that; Lake Kivu, especially around Kibuye in the west of Rwanda; the Rwandan countryside; enhancing my understanding of the Rwandan genocide, truly a fascinating insight into man’s inhumanity under the evil manipulation of propaganda, lies and evil men (watch out America. The scale my be different to what happened in Rwanda in 1994 or Germany in 1933/4, but the rhetoric is astonishingly similar…).

The Rwandan genocide made me think long and hard about morality and religion. Some of my comments on religion have been a bit strong. You can’t witness, for 12 consecutive days – the time I rode about Rwanda – the horrors of that episode without reflecting on the cynicism, manipulation – ‘evil’ – perpetrated; the endorsement of evil by clever politicians based on race and tribe, exploiting old doubts, enhancing present fears, the organised generation of hatred, without wondering how it could ever happen. Rwanda made me think a lot about the role of religion and religious leaders too, for you cannot gaze at all those hundreds of human skulls and broken bones preserved as a memorial, punctured by bullet holes, crushed by rocks, disfigured by machetes, and not wonder how this can be done by people of conscience and professing to be – as virtually every African I have ever met in all these years – Christians, Moslems and believers in god… How can you bash an innocent baby’s head – maybe the child of your neighbour and previous friend or workmate -against a wall and still profess belief? And what worth is a god that can ‘forgive’ these acts? I cannot square the evils done in the names of religion with any worthwhile belief any more, and I have seen the results of much of that evil in my world travels, but seldom more powerfully and shockingly than in Rwanda.

Mankind has no grander than animal nature, dress it up how the philosophers will, survival of the self and the genes the primary motive.

It’s also a sobering to reflect on the state of mankind and what we have done, and continue to do, to our small, fragile planet. Uganda brings that home forcibly. The ‘youngest’ country on earth by population, with 49% below the age of 14, 78% under the age of 30, and a mere 2% reaching 65. The average number of children per woman is almost seven. Given that Uganda stays the same size, land gets less productive as it gets more tired, water is in already short supply, there is no recycling of waste, the forests are disappearing adding to global warming, and health care and education resources are already strapped to breaking point, what future has Uganda? What future has mankind’s continued existence on the planet, for Uganda is not alone in this profligate madness. One thing I know now is that in a couple of generations, those alive then will despise their grandparents for their excesses, their lack of restraint and their mad egotistical folly. The planet in 100 years will not be a comfortable place to be, with wars and conflict over basic resources like water, clean air and fuel. Travelling in Africa convinces me that our race is doomed to the fate of the dinosaurs.

If it doesn’t just poison itself first. The filth and waste, particularly of plastic, peddled by corporate greed; the encouragement of addiction to various pernicious chemicals in food processing – you should see Africans spoon in the sugar and drink HFCS-filled soft drinks, and remember that dentistry is basic on this continent, for one example; the unsafe, immoral manufacturing practices in the name of wealth for a few at the expense of the masses; the uncontrolled use of pesticides and fertilisers; the wiping out of so many indigenous species, so many of which play important roles in the balance of their habitat; the filth belched out of old, unmaintained vehicles that rises into the fragile atmosphere, along with the encouragement of cattle breeding, one of the worst greenhouse gas producers; the incorrect, uncontrolled sale of invaluable antibiotics for every ailment; the self-medication for ‘malaria’ that weakens any prophylactics and cures on this mosquito infested continent (to the gleeful profit, no doubt, of multinational drugs companies); and the general despoliation of what was once such a wonderful landscape – mainly through mere over population…

No, travelling in Africa, for now, is wonderful in its way, but I wouldn’t want to be doing this in a hundred years. I have seen the best.

*

My trip took me 7000 kilometres on the little blue bike, adding my little bit to global pollution, I suppose… I used 214 litres of petrol at a cost of about £180. The little bike was cheap to run once my initial huge investment was done. It achieved about 34km per litre, or 96mpg. My longest ride was 306kms (190 miles) – (too far!). I spent 52 nights in hotels, ranging from £4.38 to £16.75, plus the two nights in Nairobi at £24 and £33. The average for the 52 nights was £13.20 per night, invariably with breakfast included. I handed over £685 to various East African hoteliers plus those £55 in Nairobi.

The bike set me back £1905 to buy and a further £395 to set it up for the ride. On top I had to spend £82 on legal stuff to get it registered and insured and £112 on various repairs on the road. So the bike cost me altogether £2606. The rest of my entire spending: living expenses, hotels, incidentals, came to about £2570 taking off these bike costs. My KLM airfare was £591. The whole 91 days has therefore set me back about £3160. I hope to recoup a good deal of the £2606 bike expense when I eventually resell it. Life at home would have cost almost as much, I bet, but my household bills were kindly taken of by lending my house out! Once again, I prove that for us OAPs it’s probably as cheap to live in the sun in winter!! And Africa beats the Costa del Sol hands down for me.

And it keeps me young! I have been extremely healthy throughout, despite drinking and eating almost anything put in front of me. I stayed on the little bike for 7000kms without incident, except on day two of my ride when I tumbled into a sandy embankment and got my foot trapped beneath the pannier, requiring embarrassing assistance from a passing lorry. But on that occasion, I fell because the rear wheel had shaken completely loose with the bumping of the dirt road – and my bad maintenance, it must be said.

I’ve lost my customary inch and a half from my waistline, which is good and feel fit and healthy from sunshine and a LOT of exercise. There’s little real stress to these trips beyond minor irritations like finding places to sleep or worrying about breakdowns. I have been entirely independent and just loved that sense of NOT KNOWING WHAT TOMORROW WILL BRING!

All being well, there’ll be more trips in amazing Africa before too long.

9th March 2017