KITALE AND BACK TO UGANDA

This year’s trip is different from so many others. I’m not riding far, exploring places I already know in more depth and consolidating friendships with my old friends and families. It’s a constraint of the pandemic, as last year, to some extent, but also just a change of emphasis from my footloose wandering journeys of old. I’d like to explore Tanzania, but the tedious business of PCR tests and visas causes me to stay nearer home for now. ‘Home’, a place where you feel you belong, the dictionary says. And this year I’ve just swung between the three familiar places in East Africa: my ‘base’ in Kitale, the family (and my ‘work’) in Sipi and my walking mate in Kessup.

I refuse to credit any of this change to slowing down for age!

*

Once at least in every safari I ride another of my favourite roads, a twisting bucketing 25 mile trail ride straight up – or down – the side of the Great African Rift Valley to or from the cool heights at Nyaru. Now I start out with the long winding tar road descent from Kessup’s plateau, the heat increasing as I drop into the great Kerio Valley once again, then I turn onto white dust and rock for a hot ride to the base of the steep escarpment. I cross a trickling river (‘Crocodiles have been seen in this vicinity. Cross with care’, warns a rusted sign) amongst the mess left by the fluorspar mines and begin the quickly cooling ascent to the heights of the highlands. It’s a rise of about 5000 feet, most of it achieved in about eight miles of rough ground. At the top, after a mug of chai in a dilapidated shack, I continue on a new road that teeters along the very top of the cliffs. Anywhere else in the world, there’d be lookouts and viewpoints all the way, but this is Africa, and it’s a mere practical route from village to village, with scant views through the thick clifftop vegetation. I have to struggle through bushes to even glimpse the vast valley below.

Then I turn onto a red rock road and wander through the Kaptagat Forest to the quaint, faded colonial hotel with its candlewick bedspreads and big log fire in the old brick fireplace in my room. I think I come for the log fire redolent of the forest cedars. It’s battered around the edges, is the Kaptagat Hotel, but I get a warm welcome from Ellen and the workers here: I’m ‘their’ mzungu by now. “I thought of Jonathan just the other day and tried calling your number, but it wasn’t picking…” It won’t, I have a new phone number each year.

*

Adelight’s a bit lonely, with Rico in Congo and all the girls back at school, college and work. She misses our nightly Scrabble contests. ‘Welcome, bro, most welcome’, she texts her reply to my message that I’m on my way. Her text continues, ‘Imagine, today I thought of buying ingredients for bread knowing that any time you will be back here.’ And so home to base once again in Kitale.

*

Some months or so ago, Adelight’s twin sister, Braxides, gave birth to a baby girl. Sadly, little Noreen was born with a hair lip. An admirable charity works to operate on these unfortunate children, called ‘Smile Train’. Surgeons move about the country carrying out multiple operations in different regions. Noreen had her operation at the Dreamland Mission Hospital in Kimilili, the town from which the family hails. On the day of the procedure, Adelight, Maria and I paid a visit.

Dreamland Hospital hardly lives up to its optimistic name, although for a mother with a baby with a deformed face, it may indeed fulfil its promise. It’s a basic place way down red dust tracks, a mile or so from the scruffy, meandering town of Kimilili. Comforts are few, the wards harsh and empty of all technology. The mothers stay with their babies for a week, in a concrete ward with nine chipped iron bedsteads, time-worn sheets and a faded blanket each. Every bed has a mosquito net, but there is no further furniture or comfort. A door at the end of the ward is signed to the washrooms. Open steel-framed windows, rather dusty, look out on yards with scant grass and washing lines and the morgue. This is African reality: and a reality for which many are deeply grateful. Eight cheerful mothers have bonded in the small ward, watching one another’s babies and living from a suitcase or assorted bags. They sit on their beds nursing babies, each with suture tapes across their upper lips, and drip connections in their tiny wrists. A three year old boy, in matching trousers and waistcoat, in for a second operation from a more serious deformity, stares at me with big eyes, fascinated by the mzungu visitor – as are all the mothers and babies! It’s impossible to imagine the relief and gratitude they feel for the minor miracles that have been performed on their babies, especially bearing in mind the stigma and ignorance that they face, frequently from the fathers themselves. As I have said at length: I have little time for many African men. A hair lip, albinism, birth defects, learning disabilities: they are all the fault of the mother… African men only transmit pure genes.

*

Thanks to Seth and the five pound tip I gave him last time, I am at another hospital on another ‘Thasaday’ for a PCR test. Adelight’s accompanied me this time; we’re going shopping in town and I’ve promised to buy her lunch. With the mix of accents, face masks and phone calls, it’s always a lot easier to leave negotiations to Adelight. Soon Seth, over the phone, has authorised my test. On Friday, Adelight phones Seth a few times: something’s wrong with my details, so I must meet him on Saturday morning. I think maybe it’s just that he wants to hand me the result personally and get his reward. I’m OK with that; he’s cut through a lot of red tape for me. So on Saturday, I load up the Mosquito for return to Sipi, and ride via the clinic.

While I wait for Seth – we’re waiting at opposite ends of the lab compound – I meet Sylvan, the security guard who’s let me in the gate. Neatly dressed, respectful and obviously educated, he’s a cut above the usual gate man in Kenya. He greets me politely, then asks, “Can you help me to any position..?” This is the desperation of a degree-holding, smart young man: he clutches at straws to find employment. For now, the only thing he can find is to be a lowly gate security man at a regional health clinic. Even a stray mzungu might be able to help. I apologise for my lack of influence and listen to his story. “I went to university and studied criminology, but there’s no work in Kenya. I have been for many jobs. Many of them say I am very suitable for their post, but they all ask, ‘So what can you bring for me?’” He will have to bribe his way to employment: a sad fact of corrupt Kenyan life. He is ‘a complete orphan’ and has no reserves to buy a job…

Seth arrives and opens offices to fill in and print out my Covid test certificate. He’s charming and friendly, especially now he’s off duty and has travelled in from Kiminini, out past Adelight and Rico’s home, to help me. When I tell him I have a box of plants and cuttings from Adelight’s compound on the back of the bike for Rock Gardens, he confesses an ambition to build his own small restaurant in Kiminini, and that he too enjoys gardening. He’s intrigued by my profession and we exchange contacts and agree we must meet sometime at his home. People here are SO very polite and interested in strangers. I know I’d be made very welcome in Kiminini. Maybe I’ll ride there sometime.

*

But for now, it’s back to Uganda. All the officials know me by now and it’s easy to pass the border. Except that… I have arrived at the same time as a large group of Big Men on a Saturday jolly to make speeches at the construction site of the new border post. There’s a fleet of expensive, over-engineered shiny cars and lots of suits. While I am completing my business on the Kenya side, they ride in Important Convoy over to the Ugandan side, all their flashers flickering with importance, watched by some women washing clothes in the trickle of river and some donkey boys. All this pomp and self importance is typical: they’ve MADE IT to power (and money) and intend to show everyone, even if they are only local women washing clothes in a river, a few donkey herdsmen and a few lowly officials. By the time I ride over the old weakening bridge that’ll soon be superseded by a six metre raised highway, they are in full flow beneath a gazebo by Customs. I am ushered into a dark, dingy office to wait until the speeches are done. When I say I’d rather sit outside in the sun, the poor official is mortified that I might embarrass him: “It would look bad…” So I must wait 45 minutes for the final stamp on my papers, in case a grubby mzungu lowers the tone of the gathering of Important People.

*

I get sodden on the road to Sipi. Thankfully, I am past the 40kms region of disgustingly dusty, unstable new road building, back on smooth tar. The rain is intense but it’s not cold here, so I carry on, with the road to myself. There’s not much I can do against a tropical downpour except put up with it. Fortunately, at this season it’s rare, but these high mountains generate their own weather. The rainy season is coming soon and these showers are a fact of motorbiking life.

It’s dry in Sipi and everyone’s astonished as they hug my wetness, thrilled as always to see me home at Rock Gardens. It’s a hive of activity, ‘work’men everywhere, although only a small percentage actually WORK. I am horrified at the standard of workmanship and the lack of pride. They’ve resprayed the cement walls of the round houses. They’ve just sprayed straight over the windows: there’s cement stuck all over the glass! It’d take a moment to wipe it off with a cloth, but the workmen are long gone. The ‘tiler’ has laid tiles in the new bathrooms: crooked and blathered in tile cement. But he too is long gone. A ‘master mason’ has made a hole for a new small bathroom window and left the walls encrusted in long-dried cement that could have been wiped off while wet, and done half a job in heightening the wall. It’s disappointing: no one has any pride, they just want the easiest day possible. I blame 40-plus years of astoundingly corrupt leadership that has knocked incentive from the people. After all, if those at the top sit on their hands and make millions, why should we work? What’s the reward? If all that matters is knowing the right people, why bother to have pride and ambition in work?

*

It’s fun to use my practical and creative skills on this trip. Rock Gardens is changing; Alex is beginning to see his dream realised. Within an hour, the cuttings I brought have been planted; some of them no more than inch thick bits of branch. The rainy season’s coming; they’ll make roots and grow. African sunshine will nurture all these young trees and shrubs, and Alex has a strict regime of watering every day. All the English seedlings are thriving already. Nasturtiums are rampant inside the bamboo fence. Shrubs give off heavy scents in the evenings. It’s becoming an attractive place. The roof of the first round room, ‘Jonathan’s Room’, has been fixed by the slow workmen: corrugated sheets beneath the thatch. The bathrooms are being worked on and the main drains to the deep cesspit being laid. It’s all done at Ugandan pace: men sit about and chat. The norm is to pay daily rates, not contract for a job, so the longer you take, the more you make. Alex is frustrated and I get angry.

We have the first full day to work by ourselves, but on Monday, no one much turns up to ‘work’. “Ha! They are afraid of the mzungu!” laughs Alex. I make them clean up after their work! Next day, I catch a ‘mason’ actually washing out the wheelbarrow and plastic bowls at the end of the day. I congratulate him and he smiles a little sheepishly, but my point’s made – at least while I’m around… Alex isn’t particularly practical and my design sensibilities and practicality mean changes. I point out that the 30 metre long trench they were digging when I arrived won’t work. There’s not enough drop on the main soil pipe and it’ll block within minutes, and it’s too long anyway, without a manhole. The ‘plumber’ should know this, but the blockage will happen after he’s gone and someone else will have to deal with it, so he’s not raised the problem. I do. Yes, agrees the useless plumber, it’d be better running it to the deep hole Alex has already dug for the eventual guest house cesspit, at the bottom of the gardens. And, yes, another manhole should be dug too. Oh! It’s so frustrating!

So on Monday another trench is dug at right angles, and the mzungu directs its depth and direction. This one has a chance of working. But it means investment in the cesspit as well. It’s all about planning – or lack of it – a severe weakness in most of Africa: thinking ahead. Alex is better than most but always sees the cost, that he can’t afford. After breakfast on Tuesday we sit and have a talk. After all, it’s my investment too – the money’s mine. I persuade him that we should employ a capable contractor to build the main latrine and cesspit. He knows one in Kapchorwa, but the contractor charges £8 a day; the local bodgers only £2. I point out that we have just spent a day and a half trying to make good appalling work done by the locals; that most jobs fail and have to be redone; that he could save in cement alone the difference of using a knowledgable builder. He rings the contractor, persuaded and given permission by the finance department. He’s so reluctant to spend my money. A good failing, but a false economy.

*

A trip on Wednesday to Mbale, the local large town, 25 miles away down on the edge of the plains, was a frustrating experience. By slow, stop-starting matatu, Alex and I were going down on a shopping trip: looking for a door with a glass panel as the second room was built without a window, another false economy. We need pillows, artists paint brushes, coat hooks and floor paint. The frustration came in the fact that there are so few materials available; ask for anything just slightly off-beat (screws, coir doormats, masonry nails, wax floor polish, grey floor paint: “Grey! No… Only red, green and yellow.”) and I’m due for disappointment. The hardware shops are just small, ill-stocked lock-ups; a few dusty shelves of miscellaneous bits and pieces. Uganda makes Kenya seem like Europe: even Kitale has a large, well stocked hardware supermarket. It’s one of the most frustrating shops in existence with its system by which you must find a member of staff, select what you need from the displays, take his chit of reference numbers to the accountant, pay, then wait interminably while the goods are found in the basement stores and delivered to a collection point where all the goods are checked and rechecked. Indians in East Africa trust no one; Indian owners employ legions of security staff. They often own the biggest supermarkets.

We come back from Mbale with little for which we went and I’ve been angry to the point of shouting in the street, harassed by glue-sniffing street boys. In Kenya, local people will chase them off me, but in this scruffy, down-at-heel town, passers by are just amused at the angry mzungu: it’s not the respect I get elsewhere in Africa. We have a drink in a paint-flaking rooftop bar, served by a surly waitress who couldn’t care less and I tell Alex it’s the first time I’ve stopped in Mbale – usually riding through the madness of its boda-boda traffic, as we look down on a chaotic roundabout and the colonial clock tower topped by a rather sexually suggestive pair of cement coffee beans – and I hope it’ll be the last. Mbale is a largely Moslem town and there IS a difference in people’s acceptance of a mzungu…

A door with glass panels will cost us (me!) £63. A charming elderly gentleman called Jimmie runs the small factory. It has half-decent timber and circular saws and planers. They make some rather nice furniture, but the bedsteads and chairs weigh hugely, made thickly from heavy hardwoods. It’s a wonder there’re any trees left in Africa. I suggest to Alex that at the price of over sixty pounds it’d be better to make a small window and insert it into the walls we’ve just decorated smartly with Intercontinental Designer concepts of ‘African’ design. Jimmie has the wood cut to measure for me from a heavy plank and we take boda-bodas back to the matatu stage, Alex with the eight foot lengths of timber across his knees.

We squeeze into a battered matatu and return back to the mountains above and home.

*

On Thursday, Alex and I carried four eucalyptus trees from a plantation a quarter of a mile and 100 feet below Rock Gardens. He’s bought them from a clan member for £6, chopped them down ready for various building projects. Five trips down through the matoke plantations and shambas of the neighbours amuses them hugely. “Heh! You are killing your old white man,” people call. No one expects mzungus to actually work – after all, most of the mzungus they see are priests or Chinese foremen, aid workers or tourists. To watch me lugging heavy tree trunks, felled moments before and full of water, a banana leaf twisted into a pad on my shoulder, is a revelation. And of course, with about 1% of the population over seventy, it IS rather unusual! As for me, I feel the fittest I have enjoyed in at least a decade.

On Friday, we carefully break a hole in the second round house, constructed from split poles and sticks, filled with red mud and encased in cement render. “Imagine how big this hole’d have been if the local ‘craftsmen’ had made it!” I joke as we work, careful to preserve our decorative walls. By late afternoon we’ve inserted a decent window frame ready for the glass, for £6. At the same time I fit a bathroom window, ineptly made by THE local welder, into a huge hole that has been smashed out by the local ‘craftsmen’. So, we get in the professional contractor to discuss the main latrine and cesspit at the bottom of the plot. He appears to know what he’s talking about at least. “Let’s just do it once and pay more,” I advise Alex. “I’m fed up with trying to make good badly done local work.”

*

Keilah and Jonathanbean are growing up: cheerful, active children. Keilah has developed into a charming, warm-hearted little nearly-five year old and JB is becoming a wilful, noisy, busy bruiser. They are unsophisticated and – generally – delightful. On school days, they are collected by the school van around 5.30am and return at around 6.00 in the evening. They are 3 and nearly 5 years old! Imagine telling an English child that they must rise at 4.30 in the morning to bathe in cold water and go to school… Happily, they both enjoy school and are raring to go despite the middle of the night start. I’ve become very fond of Keilah on this visit: a sweet, endearing child. Both have completely lost their fears of the mzungu in their compound.

*

I’ve challenged myself to walk a lot on this trip. One day, Alex and I amazed everyone by walking to Kapchorwa! By road it’s eleven miles, but we went over the mountains, over high, cliff-topped ridges, hundreds of feet high like Toblerone, up and down, up and down for seven hours. All told, I think we walked 15 or 16 miles. Like William, Alex is a good companion for long hikes: he too likes people. I must wave and greet hundreds on such a walk, children running behind us in excitement, calling from way up the shamba-covered slopes, and rushing from houses to watch and greet a rare mzungu. In Uganda, there are people everywhere. We followed the edges of the Mount Elgon forest, a national park that crosses the border between Kenya and Uganda. I spent New Year’s Eve on the other side of the mountain in Kenya.

Mount Elgon is one of the world’s largest volcanic caldera, some 80 kilometres in diameter. It’s thought to have been originally even higher than Kilimanjaro (5900m) but collapsed during a violent eruption that emptied the caldera. It hasn’t erupted for 20 million years and it’s thought that when it did, it poured magma slowly from it’s crater, forming the waves of ridges that lead down from the now broken crater. Hiking here involves steep ascents and descents, an endless challenge indeed. “How often have you made this walk to Kapchorwa?” I asked Alex. He worked in this local town centre, in the best hotel, heartlessly sacked by the owner, along with most colleagues at the beginning of the pandemic – an exploitation from which my money has freed him. “NEVER! It’s my first time I ever footed here!” he exclaims, and we both share the pride of a walk that most people in Sipi would never consider nowadays, in the ‘pick me there’ culture that surrounds the ubiquitous boda-bodas.

*

Uganda feels to have changed in the five years I have known it. Or perhaps my knowledge is deeper by beginning to understand the culture, by coming to know this small family much more intimately. Uganda seems to have lost its way, to lack focus, to be sliding into a sort of moral stupor. Its median age of 15.7 years does nothing to help: there’s little life experience to guide moral behaviour – after all, youth has always known best, and there’s little control on their precocious immaturity here. There’s an increasingly reducing percentage of mature people to direct public morals by example and experience. Three quarters of Ugandans are below the age of 30; two percent over 65. It’s a land of the loosest of morals. Youthful hedonism is destructive; instant gratification is a preoccupation of youth, after all. Morality, constancy, loyalty are seen as unproductive. You get by by any means you can, to your own selfish advantage, independent of ethics or the law. The law’s corrupt anyway, all the way to the top: no one is held accountable, up to probably the most corrupt president and regime on this frequently corrupt continent.

Life’s certainly a struggle for all but a few Big Men and politicians. Prices are rising; there’s been little tourist income for two years; Climate Change is wreaking havoc with weather patterns and seasons; land gets scarcer as the population explodes; families with eleven, fifteen, nineteen children are struggling with basics, yet peer pressure and ‘culture’ insist that having more and more children is the justification of life. Women work like slaves; men are busy fathering children with multiple women and no regard for AIDS and HIV. This region of Uganda has the highest infections in the country. Schoolgirls barely into their teens are pregnant or already mothers. Babies are everywhere, in this ‘youngest’ country in the world (actually just beaten by Niger by point three of a year). Booze doesn’t help anyone. There’s a sense of fatalism about life. It’s a country out of control.

Short-termism is all. No one plans ahead. Nature is abused for short-term profit: few replant the trees they cut. Trees grow slowly, people don’t live long, firewood is a necessity, few think of the benefit that can accrue to future generations. Planning, thinking ahead, preparing for the future is something learned by education. Education levels were low in Uganda even before the pandemic closed all schools for just short of two years, longest in the world. It benefits the most corrupt regime and 35-year president to keep people poorly educated: they don’t notice when most of the foreign aid for dealing with coronavirus ends up in the bank accounts of the Minister of Health and three other politicians, now constructing luxury hotels. And this in a country with an average age of 15.7 (by comparison, the UK is about 41). Half the population is below the age of 14 years; that’s millions and millions of children who lost two years of education that they will never recoup, a time bomb that will affect life for a generation – that’s if they go back to school.

Uganda’s a litter-strewn land on a litter-strewn continent. The majority of this pollution is plastic, largely produced by the People’s Republic of China, who care not a jot for anything but profit, and a further inordinate amount is the product of Greed Corp, USA, (AKA the Coca Cola Corporation), to whom the same care for the planet applies. They manufacture almost all the soft drinks and polluting bottled water on the continent: look at the small print even on ‘local’ beverages and over-priced tap water in a plastic bottle and I will find they have been subsumed by the almighty financial power of Greed Corp. There’s no profit to be made in cleaning up the environment and no one knows the dangers of pollution of their soil, animals and bodies. It’s a state that fills me with helplessness and lack of hope for the future.

Of course, there are exceptions and Uganda is still a wonderfully friendly, cheerful place to visit. It’s just that I have been permitted to begin to see the culture from the inside now. What attracted me to Alex in the first place is interesting. On my first visit, six years back, I was leaving the country from Sipi, back to ‘base’ at Kitale. I had about £30 of Uganda money left from my safari round the country and I gave the bulk of it to Alex as a parting present, knowing already that I’d be back. I found out later that Alex had the wisdom to invest my gift in seed potatoes. The next season the weather failed for the second year and there was much hunger in Uganda: most had eaten their seed potatoes in the first crop failure, a prime example of the short-termism of so much of African attitudes. Alex was able to feed the family and help many of his neighbours. But then, he has a wisdom that is unusual. He plans for the future. It’s why I came back, and why I decided to sponsor his business here at Rock Gardens. It’s why I’m here now, working for his future too.

It’s still fun to be the celebrity in this rural village, a phenomenon indeed, as they see the white man working alongside locals, carrying timbers up the hills to taunts of, “Eh, Alex, you want to kill your old mzungu!”; to walk amidst the choruses of excited children, running to look at the white man in remote villages that may never have seen one before; to be greeted with warmth, and often a cheery quip, wherever I go… But the more I see of it, and the life that people here must live, the more I am thankful for all my privileges, comforts and the possibilities I have to achieve my ambitions and realise my dreams; thoughts that leave a residue of guilt and discomfort that such inequalities are possible in our modern, connected world…

*

On my last day for now in Sipi, we dress the gardens, rooms, and 1818 cafe/ restaurant for photos for a brochure. I’ve promised Alex I’ll design it when I get home. We make the rooms look fine with bedclothes and flowers to compliment our ‘traditional’ decoration. I try to make two dining chairs look like a crowd; use the only two pillows in both rooms; pad out the local wooden settees with bedcovers that look like the cushions we haven’t afforded yet; get some passing young people to pose as customers; use cold tea from a flask to look like beer in artfully displayed glasses and make the place look operational and inviting. It’s set dressing, what I do for a living. It’s my project too by now, a lot’s invested in it, not just my money but my effort too. I can feel it in tired muscles. I hope we’ll succeed and the future will brighten for this small family.

*

And so, my 14 day PCR test allowance is up and I must return to Kenya, to base. It’s the 23rd of February; actually I’ve had just 12 nights at Rock Gardens thanks to the delay in the test result two weeks ago. I walk down through the matoke with Alex to goodbye his aunt Khalifa, his main family supporter, where of course, we must take tea; then I load up the Mosquito – Precious is sending a huge, heavy bunch of matoke to Adelight, a bag of local vegetables and one of the last pineapples of the season – mouth-wateringly sweet now: things that they have to give. It will amuse everyone as I ride through villages and past shambas on my ride back to Kitale: a mzungu transporting local matoke like a boda-boda.

*

Only twice have I felt my life threatened in Africa: both times by Ugandan driving. Once, a matatu veered across the road right into my lane. I had to swerve to the other lane; fortunately nothing was coming. On my journey back to Kitale I have to throw myself from my motorbike, landing both of us on the stony edges of roadworks, to avoid collision with a ten-wheeler road-making truck, dangerously driven by a Ugandan with no regard for my safety: he’s on piece time rates. I have no choice but to fling myself out of his way, missing the truck wheels by as little as a foot, in a cloud of dust. With a hefty branch of matoke bananas on the carrier, I need help, in my indignation, from a road worker to lift the machine, and courage to ride on.

*

I think back as I ride, around this project that I am helping to develop for the family’s independent future: we’ve made strides ahead on my two visits. The garden is going to be fine. The rainy season is coming soon and the young plants will flourish. Maybe one day this will be like a botanical garden, as Alex and I plan. The basis of a good business, with Alex’s forward planning and hotel training, is in place – or soon will be. He’s almost ready to market the green, peaceful guest house, now needing just a neat, two cubicle latrine, plumbing completed for the current two round thatched rooms, and furnishing and stocking the bar efficiently.

For 12 days I have been immersed in eastern Ugandan culture; I’m really coming to know it more from the inside now. And I’m grateful I can escape to the comforts to which I have become accustomed in my privileged years. I feel grubby: my fault perhaps because I’m reluctant to wash very efficiently in cold water in a bowl. There’s a warm shower waiting in Kitale – if the power is on. The bed in Jonathan’s House at Rock Gardens is wonderfully comfortable, with those old thick continental sheets that Precious promises to keep for my visits even when we purchase modern bed sets, but it’s really the only place that I find bodily comfort here: horizontal, in bed at the end of hard days of labour. The chairs are wooden or Chinese plastic; the grass is harsh and dry and full of ants; around the fire pit is smoky and I fidget from muscular tiredness; food is oily, although I have now prevailed and got Alex, and sometimes even Precious, to leave out the kilos of salt; the old latrine that we must replace is basic and really unfit for most guests – proud, car-driving Ugandans – ‘Big Men’ – and their lady friends would be far too proud to shit in it! It’s just about OK for the old traveller mzungu. The sun beats and burns my skin, and if I’m unlucky enough to be here in rainstorms, mud is everywhere – everywhere! “Oh, you wouldn’t like it in the rainy season!” Alex laughs. “You couldn’t walk here with the MUD!” I’m a bit fastidious for this life, and some days I look forward to the tidiness of life in Rock Cottage in Devon… It’s inevitable: I’m just not used to so many privations, aspects of life taken for granted here. I don’t think I could bring myself to cook over smoky charcoal stoves on the mud floor of the compound, eat with my fingers, slip in mud, carry firewood, be covered in dust when I work – every day of the rest of my life.

But the warmth and welcome I receive is unbounded, and it’s not just respect for a benefactor: it’s from most I meet, and especially from my small family. Keilah runs to hug her mzungu uncle on return from school; Alex is constantly working for my comfort, and Precious, despite being Alex’s intellectual inferior, is always warm and loving, but the pressure from her lightly-educated friends is hard on her: she should have more children, more possessions, more pride, they say. Alex has a difficult balance to maintain: and Precious always feels herself a stranger here: she’s from a tribe across Uganda, and tribal loyalty is still all in undeveloped Uganda. She’s looked down upon by locals. In so much of Africa – almost all – tribe comes before nationhood and holds back so much development. Ghana, proud to be the first to discard the shackles of colonialism on the continent, has made some strides to nationality before tribalism, but it’s a rare example. Tribal loyalty predates the largely colonial divisions of most nations.

Precious cries when I leave, riding away up the red dirt road from Rock Gardens. Often, Alex tells me, she’s afraid for my age. “Without JB, whaaat will we do,” she laments. “I weeesh he was only feeefty! He should not be aLONe! I waaant him to come and live heere! With us.” It’s heartfelt, but I couldn’t do it: I need more comfort and much more intellectual stimulation than I could find here as an old man. I need things no one here even knows about: books to read; operas to listen to; classical music, not the endless ‘thump, thump, thump’ of modern African (actually, global) engineered popular music. I need steamed vegetables, decent beer, country walks without the chorus of “MZUNGU! Mzungu!”, fun though that may be for a while. Then there’s the unremittingly tough goat meat, mosquitoes and things that bite, and the repulsive jigger – a dust mite larva that took up residence beneath my toenail that Alex dug out with a two inch thorn in a disgusting, explosive operation. I need trains that take me places, shops that sell what I want, access to medical confidence, release from barking dogs, privacy from being a ‘selebrity’ and release from constant attention for my comfort and company. I need sometimes to be anonymous, unnoticed. I need friends around me who understand me instinctively, culturally and socially, read my wishes and needs, understand my moods.

And yet, for all that, this travel in Africa has become very much part of my life and gives me a focus that I value, a framework for my opinions and interests. And it’s brought me friends who love me like family, treat me as a brother or father figure, await my company with so much more than mercenary interest, open their homes and families to me, care for my every comfort – as far as they are able in this privation… It’s humbling, thought-provoking and utterly genuine. It’s REAL generosity: giving what you can ill afford to give without even further sacrifice. It’s family.

But it’s hard, unbelievably hard, to live this way. I’m content to know I can escape to my comforts and familiar life…

A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF THE KERIO VALLEY BY ‘FOOTING’ AND AN ELEPHANT ENCOUNTER

Riding a motorbike is a different experience to driving, enclosed in a car, whatever wonders may unfold. It’s what’s kept me riding in Africa for all these years. I am exposed to the elements, part of the landscape, open to the people I pass. If it’s hot, I am hot; if it rains, I get wet; if it’s windy, I buffet about. It’s a tactile experience. I smell the aromas of the country through which I pass – bad ones too, if there’s a dead camel by the road. If the road is rough, I need to dance about, often standing on my foot pegs to lower the centre of gravity of man and machine. Of course, I am more at risk too, but that adds a certain edge to the riding. Nothing encloses me; it is an immediate sensation, a mixture of discomfort and exhilaration. And I am seen as a celebrity by those I pass and interact with, however briefly: an ‘old’ man riding like a youth. Sometimes feeling like one too.

One of the many added attractions to riding a motorbike about this area is the dramatic quality of the roads. I am descending back to the head of my favourite Kerio Valley, where this offshoot diverges from its mother valley, the Great African Rift that stretches from Mozambique to Jordan. I ride towards Kapenguria, a road I dislike, it’s narrow with broken edges that drop onto loose gravel and roadside craters, onto which crazed matatu and truck drivers attempt to push all the weaving, slow boda-bodas – and me. It’s a frightening road, but only for the first 35 kilometres. There’s no alternative that makes geographical sense, so I must run its gauntlet for now. I know that ahead, past the untidy town of Kapenguria, already at high altitude, the road rises further into cool, coniferous woodland and then plunges away into the depths of the Rift Valley with its endless deserts, curling and twisting downwards for twenty miles, from 2260 metres dramatically down to a mere 930 metres (still a higher altitude than most of Britain) – a contorted, twisting descent of 4350 feet.

Having caught up with my American colleagues by the magic lantern of the internet, and been assured that for now I can stand down, I take this safari northwards from Kitale in relaxed mood. Last March, right in the last three days of my journey, I discovered wonders I hadn’t found before. Then I had to run to beat a lockdown in Nairobi that threatened my departure from Africa. Even then, I promised myself that I’d take the ride again and explore more of the area along the fine escarpment of the Kerio Valley. These gravel and dust roads hardly exist on maps; it takes a questing spirit to go and find them. That, and a suitable off-road machine. Happily, I have both! I’m on my way back…

Down through the shady dark conifers: cedars and fir trees that stretch above local flowering shrubs – it’s a handsome descent – the road eventually levels off into a slow decline towards the valley floor, still beyond the tight confines of the Marich Pass, the final gateway to the northern deserts that reach away to far South Sudan and Ethiopia. It’s fine riding; a good road and little traffic, just those pesky Kenyan speed humps to watch for. They’re a national obsession in the Highways department, but they cause accidents too as most are unmarked, just sharp lumps in the grey surfaces of the roads. On my little bike I can stand up and coast over most, but it’s a dangerous assumption that I can do that for all: some are lethally steep and make my bike bounce up to hit my bum if I am unwary. Failing to spot one is serious. I must pay attention, despite the fine scenery that unfolds down these roads.

In time, the slopes of the dry scrubby pass fall back and I roll out onto the sunburned desert floor, where aloes and strange water-hoarding plants swim in the sweaty heat.

*

I’m not heading far this afternoon, just 70 miles or so to a guest house at the edge of the limitless valley floor, amongst the sand and rocks and aloes. It’s a long-established place started by an Englishman and his Eritrean wife years ago. It’s a shady place filled with the mature trees and the landscaping that we Brits seem compelled to bring to Africa. I stayed here back in 2001, sharing the encampment with the last evening of a school group from Gloucester, watching overweight pale teenagers clumpily dancing the local Pokot tribal dances round a big fire. Last year I stayed a night with the late David’s Eritrean wife, Mama Roden, drinking her buna (the elixir of the gods: Ethiopian coffee), eating a tasty Ethiopian supper and conversing about the changes we have both witnessed in African life, in my case for 35 years. Now she is abroad but I find companionship with Kate, an Englishwoman in her 50s, who’s been working with Oxfam at home. Her husband works with the Foreign Office in the aid sector, both disillusioned by the way British foreign politics have slid into meanness, selfishness and drawbridge-pulling-up and trying to work out the last decade of her working life in something that will bring more satisfaction. I’m glad to find a few tourists filtering back to help the beleaguered foreign earnings of Africa. I’ve spotted a handful this year, to last year’s total of three young Englishmen working from their computers, who’d escaped without question during ‘strict lockdown’. “No one even asked! And Heathrow was heaving!” I remember them telling me when I expressed surprise to find them here, having escaped myself a few days before that lockdown. “Huh, they can’t afford to stop travel, it’s just the spin they put on it…” They were dismissive of British politicians too…

*

Next morning, I set off on my promised safari, on rocky, dusty trails round the base of the great escarpment, here perhaps 4000 feet above me. I have a great sense of freedom here; of delight to be experiencing this again; an anticipation of the trails in front of me today: the desert shimmering endlessly to my left, the scrub-covered steepness to my right, rising into a bright, hot sky. In Sigor, the first village on my ride, it’s market day, mainly local vegetables and shoddy, brightly coloured Chinese goods and men driving flocks of knotty sheep and wayward goats along my road. I cause a stir as I pass, everyone turning to look at the old white bloke bouncing through town between the untidy shacks alongside the dust trail.

Here and there I bump through washouts, dry now and for some weeks to come. The rock road is rough and dusty, wriggling its way through this parched landscape. There aren’t many people about; scant villages, just a few people sitting here and there beneath shady trees, turning in surprise to see a mzungu biker passing, returning my waves. I am a mystery to them, as, largely, they are to me. What’s it like to spend your life in such harshness, relying on a few goats, an odd cow or two, with basic education, little awareness of anything much more than a few miles away – except the inevitable Football League matches? I’ve no idea, as I pass through in moments, leaving them to their sixty-one-point-four average years of this privation, as I ride away with all my privileges. Already ten years beyond that average. A wave, and I am gone, discussed for a moment and forgotten forever. It’s philosophical stuff that I ponder as I ride! I’ll never know the answers. Thank god.

I come at last, after 42 kilometres and about an hour of this rough trail, to an area I remember from last March. I’m relieved to recognise it, as I have felt a bit lost for a while, although the mountains rising on my right give me confidence. As long as I keep round the base of these steep slopes I am heading into the Kerio Valley. What I recollect is a disaster area of huge boulders and broken trees, disturbed terrain and devastation. I weave my way over the rocky mess, thinking about the natural disaster that overtook this valley bottom three years ago: a terrible landslide that took over 200 lives in a few minutes, as a huge section of mountain, loosened by tree felling, swept horror downwards from the steep escarpment. It swept all before it, even a dormitory of schoolgirls. I remember my shame that this occurred at the same time that there were floods in UK, in which no one lost life, but many lost (mostly insured) Stuff. Of course, the media in England had the cameras and reporters and it made the world news night after night, even to be seen here in Africa. Meanwhile, nearby, families disappeared; orphans were created in moments; livelihoods were lost; a whole generation of schoolchildren perished. But that was in remote rural Africa so it didn’t count.

Here I can still see – three years on – the devastation. When I stop for tea, the people who suffered this trauma still remember it as if it were yesterday. No one came to help them clear up; no services were mobilised; no emergency was declared: they just had to pick up any pieces left and cope as best they could. A community largely wiped off the face of the earth. I can see the scars today.

*

“Are you back from Uganda?” asks a young man when I stop for sweet chai and a chapati from a makeshift grubby tent in Karena village, just above the disaster area. Ten months on, a mzungu on a motorbike is still remembered. “Do you still have that map?” I sit for half an hour, chatting to the gathered young men who have nothing better to do. I tell them that this was my best ride last year, so I determined to repeat it. “I’m going back up the tar road to Chesoi. It’s one of the best roads I’ve found in all Africa!” It is too: this spaghetti-twisting road that rises three thousand or more feet in the next 15 miles. I search the world for roads like this. And then, when I least expected to find it, I found this magnificent zig-zagging contorted road. It makes no sense: it just goes up the mountainside, partially blocked by landslides that have been colonised by vegetation as big as bushes and small trees, unmaintained, between a rough valley-bottom rock and dust road, to a broken once-tar meandering strip thousands of feet high above. A road to nowhere that should be a feat of road design but makes little sense. Multiple hairpins with corners steep enough that they tax even my versatile, light little bike, labour upwards for no apparent reason. I suppose some vainglorious politician thought it’d be a vote catcher once upon an election…

Still, I love it! It’s amazing as I first-gear upwards on the steepness. The valley expands, plunging ever downwards on my left, then my right, the escarpment soars skyward on my right, then my left. Here and there, the road has collapsed, one level dropping tarmac directly down to the broken tar below. Roads like this should be in record books, but here on the remote edges of the Great Rift Valley, they don’t get noticed. Doubtless, the politician who inspired it is long out of office, or elevated to the untold wealth of national government and doesn’t care any more about his remote constituency. A vanity project mouldering on the precipices of the Rift Valley. Wonderful beyond compare for a wandering, adventure-seeking mzungu motorbiker.

Then comes 20 kilometres of horribly pot-holed, broken old tar through magnificent scenery. Last year I described this as a delightful parkland, reminiscent of the background of 18th century paintings: a sort of Gainsborough fantasy landscape. It’s charming and beautiful, mature trees and sweeping meadows, flowering shrubs, light and shade, greens beneath a sky of speckled clouds. My road weaves and meanders through the splendour, up here on top of the world. I just love it. It’s worth coming back.

I reach the remote town of Chesoi, balanced on the edge of the escarpment. Young men laugh at me. I call: “Kapsowar…?”, my next destination, and they indicate upwards to the right with big smiles and waves. I turn right… Funny, I’m sure that last March I turned left… It was counter-intuitive at the time, as the road dropped away, and I knew Kapsowar was miles away up on the heights. Still… they all waved to the right, uphill…

I turn right, uphill.

It’s perhaps an hour later – and I am getting very tired, despite the fine scenery – that I feel intuitively that I am wandering deeper and deeper into countryside that doesn’t bring me to Kapsowar. I stop two elderly gentlemen for information. “Oh! You have gone the WRONG way!” they exclaim, as a cheerful drunk festoons my handlebars with convolvulus. (William tells me later that this is considered a blessing in this region). “Oh, the WRONG way! But if you go on, you will come to the tar road in 13 kilometres. Keep left at the next junction. Where are you from? How old are you?” The questions come happily as an election vehicle flies past in a dust cloud, wardrobe-sized speakers deafening us with pounding ‘music’ and filling the rural landscape with a hideous cacophony. I shake friendly proffered hands and ride on. The drunk stumbles off chuckling at some inner joke – maybe me. I keep left at the next junction, but it’s the first of dozens. I am LOST, entirely lost on these narrow red dust tracks in the back of rural beyond. It’s cool now too: the sun’s gone, the clouds have rolled over the heights. I keep asking my way. It’s always “Not far!” – but it’s always actually VERY far.

Time’s moving on. Children are returning from school, many of them so astonished to see a mzungu – they probably never saw one before – that they don’t even wave. I am riding through deep rural extremities here. Well, last year I did promise myself that I would explore more of this region; I just didn’t plan to be doing it now. I’ve had a bad neck ache for days and now have a stonking headache, and am not really in full adventure state. I’m tired from a great deal of trail riding on which I hadn’t planned and the fun’s going out of it…

Then I am in a deep forest. It’s magnificent, even though I’m not fully in the mood. Great sweeping meadows flow beneath old old trees; the trail, bumpy and hard riding, is contorted and complex. I slip and slide, bump and bucket. But it IS magnificent, even if I am lost and far off route. I just wish the sun was shining (the clouds are thick and threatening now) and I didn’t have this pounding headache. Every time there’s a junction, there’s no one to ask. I have to double back a few times. To all I repeat my mantra: “I am going to Iten! But I seem to be lost!” Most exclaim and tell me I will meet the tar road. “Not far!”

Huh. ‘Not far’! Eventually, late in the afternoon, after many mis-turns and riding through the smallest of hamlets, weaving my way past endless tiny shambas, watched by amazed countryfolk, I DO find the tar road. I even recognise it. I am WAY further from Iten and Kessup than I expected. I still have another 35 miles – at least – to ride. At least now I know I have tar roads – and those bloody speed humps, most of the way. I stop on a steep hill and text William that I am still on my way and will be with him in about an hour.

“Eh, you were TIRED! I’ve not seen you like that!” My head’s pounding. My neck’s aching fit to sever as I pop Paracetamol and drink my beer. “Sorry, William, I don’t think I can walk down to the valley tomorrow as we planned. I need an easy day!”

I’ve ridden 115 miles, of which over 60 were hard trail riding. I am utterly exhausted. I am in bed by 8.00pm and sleep for eleven hours.

*

Next day we saunter in Kessup Forest, if ‘saunter’ can really describe an eight mile walk that starts with a scramble of 1000 feet up to the top of the escarpment. “The goodness is, (here comes one of William’s favourite shibboleths) that we both like to walk!” The forest is nationally protected, so it’s full of old trees and thick underbrush. It’s cool in the shade. Shrubs are bright and the paths faint. Not many come here; there’s nothing much to exploit, just some firewood from fallen trees, fair game. Not much fodder, and habitation is a way off, so it’s silent. In four hours we meet no one. We see no wildlife either, not so much as a lizard. We are surprised, but perhaps the animals are suffering too from the lack of rain. People’s onions are wilting in the shambas below and William hasn’t planted his tomato seeds yet. “I don’t want to waste them; they won’t germinate. Maybe the rains will come early. We are praying they come by middle of next month.”

We mislay our way soon after we leave the clifftops, but here we’ll never really be utterly lost as there’s always that yawning valley to the east. Finding the trickle of the Kessup River, we pick up our trail again and slowly wander back to the steep path down to Kessup after six hours on the mountain top. William’s an easy companion and this is a ‘gentle’ day in preparation for our planned descent back into the valley tomorrow. I’m spending more time this year ‘footing’ the landscape, and coming to appreciate it more through this slow intimacy.

*

So now we are going to ‘foot’ back into the depths of the valley we gaze down into like a map below, as we eat our supper on the Kessup plateau. At least ten miles away, across the blue haze of the valley, I can see the Tugen Hills as I sip my Tusker mixed with Guinness. We’ll head for a village called Barwessa, William says. He doesn’t know that side of the valley either, past the elephants and crocodiles. It’s an adventure for him too. “The goodness is, we like the same things!” We’ll find someone local to guide us to the river bank. I can see the Kerio River glinting far away from my perch here on the escarpment edge. “We can wade across.” Pity I once saw those ugly crocodiles upstream! But I am assured it’ll be puddles or slow moving shallows. I guess I’ll see the crocs coming in time, chomping their prehistoric jaws.

*

We set out about ten thirty. It’s cloudy today – a relief for me, for we’ll be without much shade, exposed like flies beneath the searchlight bulb of the equatorial sun for hours. It’s uncompromising, this landscape, and we’re challenging the climate. We’re going to walk back down the unfinished road that we walked UP last month. We can’t see how the engineers can ever hope to connect the two lengths of bulldozed gravel: the missing bit – about 300 feet in height – is on the steepest slopes and of friable rock and dust. For that part we have to take to a shortcut trickle of a trail through the prickly pears, aloes and scrub, slipping downwards on the grey dust. There just doesn’t seem enough room for the connecting part of the ‘road’, and if it’s not constantly maintained it’ll fracture and collapse on these rocky angles. We’re in no hurry today; we know where we will stay tonight. But it’s still about 15 miles to hike today.

Anne is the pretty cook at the Kipoiywo guest house, which we discovered last month. She’s a good cook too. Her husband, Colin, is here this time. He comes from the top of the escarpment, not from this community. They’ve already three children under three, only youths themselves, probably in their early 20s. The two small boys are ecstatic to have a mzungu visitor, screeching in delight and invading my basic oven-hot room with a bed its only furniture under a burning zinc ceiling. It’s probably 100F degrees in here at the end of the afternoon; and it won’t cool much until the early hours of tomorrow. They throw themselves at the bed, touch my skin, investigate my few belongings (I’ve just carried them for 15 miles downhill by 3000 feet, so I was careful what I brought), and interrogate me in screeches in a language I don’t comprehend. But they’re charming and I can’t be angry with their inquisitiveness and thrill, despite my weary condition. I’m the first mzungu they’ve seen.

*

There’s little food down here in this parched dry season world. William’s carried a woven bag of my favourite green vegetable since we bought it for 50 bob from a farmer this morning. It’s called nightshade, and looks as if it could be a relative of our nightshade, or even the potato. But this one is tasty and Anne cooks it well, with some oil and tomatoes. It’s a bit like spinach but with many small leaves off a central stem, not a vegetable I’ve seen anywhere outside East Africa. William goes off with a boda to fetch beer from a bigger village along the white dust road. He finds six small eggs and some tomatoes. We sup off scrambled eggs, Anne’s delicious chapatis – she really makes the best I’ve eaten – and the green vegetables. We must adapt to local resources, notwithstanding our long hikes.

William talks about the chicken he wanted to buy up top. “We could have saved 100 bob! (70p). They are EXPENSIVE here!”

“Yes,” I say dryly, “and we’d have carried it for six hours, stressed and flapping and shitting down my back!” For William had suggested we could hang it from the straps of my little backpack. He laughs loudly at the image I conjure and assures me he was only joking. But I know if I’d conceded, we’d have walked 15 miles with an unhappy, fretting chicken shitting down my shorts. You don’t buy dead chickens here, and certainly not ones vacuum packed in plastic, you just dangle them by the legs… It’s just the way things are. Feathers and all.

*

We stay the next day. A lithe young Masai stops to chat as we take our leisurely next-morning milky tea beneath a shady tree. Only chapatis this morning. There’s nothing else available. The sun’s already hot in this low-lying inferno. The Masai wears car tyre sandals, and a colourful chequered cloth. He’s got no ounce of excess fat, just smooth, almost girlish skin and polished chin and cheeks. Even his head looks polished. His narrow face is not handsome but he carries his body with the relaxed ease of one used to endless walking. And I don’t mean the kind of walking I am doing: this boy spends his life walking, the modern traditional peddler, selling beaded bracelets, leather belts and a herbal mixture: a sort of tonic, William says, from a grubby five-litre plastic container. He seems to carry nothing but his few wares – and a mobile phone. He walks without stopping to the most remote hamlets and habitations looking for sales of a few bob a day. Then he finds a place to sleep and carries on tomorrow. An odyssey that may last for years, I suppose. A bunch of handmade cattle bells hangs from his hand. William pumps him for information about our walk across the great valley tomorrow. He can do it in three hours. “So maybe we will take five…” William tells me with a chuckle. The Masai walks off, soon swallowed by the spiny trees and crackling undergrowth, something slightly mythical in his rootless existence. All hail, the wandering Masai.

*

The customary African demon raises its head here in Kerio Valley: ALCOHOL. The Achille’s heel of Africa. I’ve seen many die and very many more lose all sense of self respect and decency. It’s a major problem of Africa. There’s so much of it down here in Kerio Valley. It’s probably the main reluctance I have about going back to Navrongo in Ghana too, which provided such a framework to my life for thirty years, and where still lives one of my closest friends, my dear brother Wechiga. Some years back, it came to the point where I would not go to town after lunchtime, for I knew I would see only misbehaviour and suffer from educated people begging for more hard alcohol: the white man an irresistible ‘touch’, for we are all so rich from our money trees. People sensible and respectful in the morning are talking nonsense, begging further alcohol and harassing me after a small amount of very intoxicating hard alcohol, home produced and unregulated. It’s costing lives, families and development. Yet no government dares to expose it or attempt to control it. They’d lose votes of course. This way they just lose voters… A day fending off alcoholics – for that’s what many have become – becomes irritating. My usual adaptability and acceptance reduces: I hate this.

Largely, it’s a problem of the useless African men who hold back this continent so much, doing little useful but fathering children with their scattergun approach: sex with any woman, like the proud cockerels. With no more responsibility for the consequences too. The women do all the work, unless they too join the legions of drunkards, in which case children go hungry and miss school. People on the very edge of poverty spend what tiny resources they have on this poisonous hard alcohol, wirigi, then try to beg for more as they become addicted. In this hard, hungry drought-scoured valley it’s a problem of depressing proportions. “Oh, you have assISTed me a LOT!” exclaims William many times as we walk between groups of drunkards. “You made me leave this wirigi! And the cigarettes.” He knows he is much healthier and stronger than he was five years ago when we met. Would that I could influence these desperate communities burning up in the sun and avoid the frustrations from drunkards that I now associate with the villages of the Kerio Valley.

*

On Sunday there’s no food but two cold chapatis and half an unripe mango for breakfast. William’s walked for half an hour before I get up, looking for eggs. We must make do. It’s not a lot on which to walk for the next six hours in the scorching sun. For today we intend to walk right across the valley floor to the foot of the hills to the east. I’ve looked down into this valley for six winters, not really knowing the landscape.

Edward, William’s sort of uncle’s cousin or something, the man we walked with last month, is going to come with us and show us the way, for there’s no defined path through the thick scrub and bush. And there may be elephants in there… Real live pachyderms…

I fill my three water bottles early. By afternoon, the water from the borehole tank is hot as bathwater. Here, even the nights are hot as the fires of hell. By morning, the water is still tepid. What a place to live. I lecture Colin, Anne the cook’s husband, angrily. Last evening he cheated me of 200 bob (£1.40 – a considerable sum here: it’s the pay for a day’s labour) implying that he needed to get supper supplies. He arrived home four hours later rolling drunk, having left Anne to cook alone, care for her three very young children and look after the two guests. There was discord in the house; we ate late, and he stole our remaining ripe breakfast mango. Later, Edward tells us he is a ne’er-do-well; he’s stolen money from the hotel owner, but he comes back to force his ‘rights’ with his gentle wife. Of course, no African would countenance the concept of marital rape. They just laugh at the idea. Who knows why Anne made such a poor choice, one that will perhaps ruin her life and leave her lovely children in poverty? Who can tell? It’s the cause of our lack of breakfast too. She hasn’t even money for chapati flour.

The status of African men… the majority raised and indulged by mothers, their fathers frequently having cleared off like those cockerels to find other women to despoil: that’s the root of this evil. Boys are always favoured. They grow up knowing they are better than their sisters: the inferior sex that is provided to work for men. Few men take responsibility for their offspring and many descend to deceit, drink and womanising.

We deduct the 200 bob from our small bill (the rooms were just £3.40 each), but I secretly give it back to Anne as a tip before we leave. Why should she and her toddlers suffer for her useless husband’s misdemeanours? The sooner she sacks him back up the mountain, the better.

*

We walk away along the white dust road. It’s 10.30 and the sun’s already high and hot. It’s so hot that despite my litre water bottle, various quantities of water that we beg from mud and stick homes the other side of the river, a bottle of juice we scavenge from a small shop, two mugs of tea and two pints of beer, I don’t urinate for 23 hours! THAT hot! Oh boy, it’s HOT!

For an hour we follow a dusty track made by lorries bringing river sand from the valley floor. As we walk, I ask Edward what crops he grows on his shamba, which is quite deep in the valley. “I had fruit trees, like the ones where we got the mangoes yesterday, but more than a year ago, elephants destroyed my trees. I have filled in all the forms for compensation, because the National Reserve is supposed to maintain the electric fences to keep the elephants from our tribal lands, but they don’t care; they say they have no money. Even until now, they say the papers are still in Nairobi…”

“They will be there for ten years!” exclaims William in disgust at the power of authorities to procrastinate.

“…unless they settle our claims and mend the fence before the rainy season (now within weeks) we won’t be able to plant again.” It’s a hard life, stuck between the harsh climate, marauding elephants and African bureaucracy.

The sandy track turns sharply; we branch off directly into the low bush and push our way for several kilometres through dry thorn bushes, whipping branches, crackling drought-suffering bushes and beneath small, weakened acacia trees eastwards. It’s hard going and painful. I draw blood frequently, embattled by vicious thorns. Sometimes I must crouch under trees like bags of needles. The scrub fights back. Branches like whips attack me from every direction. I’m tired and SOOOO hot. The bush isn’t thick enough to prevent the searing overhead sun at under half a degree from the Equator in this burned up ghastliness.

We duck under the broken electric fence that is supposed to keep the wildlife in the national reserve.“We are in the reserve now,” says Edward. I should be paying over $50 for this! It’s even harder going and excruciatingly uncomfortable. It seems to just go on and on; no real route, just pushing through the knife-edged growth. ‘Mr Currter’, the ugly old white shirt I bought for these expeditions, is constantly catching on thorns and I have to extricate myself and my small backpack. I’ve a grubby tee shirt over my head, held in place by a sweat-stained baseball cap: both are frequently entangled. Often, I suspect we are going round in circles: the two mountain ranges to east and west are invisible from amongst the underbrush. We’ve passed a lot of monkey prints as we walk, big ones, although we’ve seen no wildlife, but now we’re stumbling over large quantities of elephant dung; some is fresh, from last night. Elephants are close by. The reserve’s last head-count tallied 210 elephants.

Edward’s walking quietly, looking ahead where he can, spotting lots of fresh elephant footprints. When he picks up their direction, each time he diverts. We avoid any shady trees we see ahead over the underbrush, where elephants might spend the day. Twigs whip; thorns catch. I stumble on, punctured. We spot the bones of an elephant in a small clearing. “Probably poached…” says Edward as we inspect giant bones like something in a museum display. We hear a branch break not far away. “Elephants,” whispers Edward. It’s quite exhilarating; we have no idea quite where they are. Or, I suspect, quite where WE are…

The ground briefly opens out and ahead is an area of thick mud: an elephant-made dam about thirty yards around. It’s churned and scarred by giants’ footprints. We rather tiptoe across where it’s thick and dry. Then to the left, about 80 yards away, a huge elephant pauses in tearing leaves from a tree and turns to watch us. He’s a big tusker. A giant. Off to our left, there’s another, about 50 yards distant. Huge. “Keep moving!” William and Edward both insist, as I scrabble with my camera bag, preventing me from getting a picture, which I regret all day. It wouldn’t have hurt to delay for twenty seconds, but Edward and William communicate their nervousness to me. William’s never actually seen a real live elephant up close before. “NO! Only from FARRR away! Eh, they were BIG!” William exclaims over and over for the rest of the day, excited by his close view. “HUGE!” Perhaps Edward is more afraid of the rangers than of elephants, but they too are probably far away, for we are in a remote corner of the small reserve, unlikely to be spotted as trespassers.

There are no more alarums on our walk to the river that weaves through the valley. It’s a trickle now, no crocodiles down here! Not in this very dry season. It drifts languidly over mud. We rest under a thorn tree and I splash warm water over my sweaty body. Then we paddle across to the other side. “No elephants here,” says Edward. “These people are hunters. The elephants don’t cross the river from the reserve. They know.” We leave Edward here to make his way back between the elephants to his home amongst the elephant-ruined trees of his shamba.

*

The other side of the river is flat and desiccated. It grows little more than thorn trees and water-storing aloes on its packed red dust surface. And it seems endless to me. The water bottles are empty until we find two women living in this back-of-beyond-inferno in mud and thatched houses. The younger one wears an incongruously glittery stylish necklace, white against dark skin. What do they EAT, William and I wonder? Only goats survive here. We plod on and on. I need more water! Much more… We trudge on; just red dust and scarce patches of thin shade from flat-topped thorn trees. We slog across a heavily-eroded mud-scape like something from science fiction film, towards Barwessa, an ugly mess of shacks and lock-ups that passes for the local town. As we enter the scruffy village, I am followed by a Pied Piper band of fascinated youngsters. They’ve never seen the like. I can’t say I’m surprised… A sweaty old mzungu, scratched and gasping for air, in a disgusting over-sized ‘Mr Currter’, now brown with filth and pitted with thorn holes. No, I’m not surprised at all that I attract a crowd of onlookers. And quickly we can see that Barwessa doesn’t provide much other excitement to its inhabitants. The first two we meet are pissed as rats… The rest look depressed, slightly glazed.

The only places to stay are airless, dingy and grubby. ‘Not good enough for William’s Mzungu!’ I’m much more adaptable than he imagines, but I agree that Barwessa holds no attraction. So we hire a boda-boda to take us 20 kilometres to the main cross-valley road, where I suggest that rather than struggling to look for accommodation when we are so tired, we take a matatu ‘home’ to Kessup, only 30km away. We phone ahead: “Put beer in the fridge! We are on our way coming.” And we ride the curling hill up to Kessup, supper, an oh-so-grateful wash and beer.

“We accomplished our mission!” declares William proudly, at least as satisfied as I am. I am fortunate in a companion who enjoys the exploration as much as me. “The goodness is, we both like to walk!” I don’t think anyone quite believes we ‘footed’ from Kessup to Barwessa, a distance of about 25 miles across the burning valley. But we did. Even William is tired. “We meet tomorrow. I go and sleep.” And he wanders away to his dilapidated wooden house carrying a plate of roasted potatoes left from our supper for his breakfast. “Eh, those elephants! They were BIG!” he says over his shoulder, still excited. “HUGE!”

I walk to my small room that hovers on the edge of this stupendous view, now hidden by night. Only a few weak solar lights and fires prick the felt-black below, reminding me that people actually make their homes on the near edges of this inhospitable void. All beyond is like pitch as far as the opposite hills, outlined faintly against the lighter sky. North eastwards, any lights of Barwessa are hidden by a shoulder of the near escarpment, drunks still probably stumbling about its single gloomy main street. To the south east, points of light glint fifteen miles off in Kabarnet, the only town of size on those opposing hills. In the big shadow between, elephants browse in the darkness. I have a new understanding of the landscape below my room; of the Kerio Valley, junior scion of the Great African Rift Valley.

William goodnights Vicky in the smoky kitchen shack as he passes. “Eh, they were HUGE!” I hear him exclaim. The awe of his first elephant encounter will stay with him for a very long time…

MY UGANDAN FAMILY

The loosely called ‘road’ that connects my two East African families was one of my favourites in all Africa, with its dramatic trail riding and views into half northern Uganda from its mountain shoulders, the hot, hazy northern lowlands reaching to infinity, punctuated by the pimples of ancient volcanoes. It was friendly too: an avenue of excited children calling, “Mzungu! Mzungu!” and ripples of waving hands. Not many mzungus go this way – for many years, not many vehicles at all. It was only passable with tenacity and suitable off-road machines, or local vehicles battered beyond caring.

But for two years now, the Chinese have been busy building a debt-sodden highway across the fabulous scenery. Most of the excitement’s not there any more, and the old rocky trail is a mess of red dust, broken rocks, huge bulldozers and a livid red scars across the mountainsides. Now I must slither and drift through red dust, inches thick, for 40 kilometres and then cruise on wide flat featureless tarmac for the other 100. Villages have been ripped apart to push through the new expanses of tar. The rough, rugged trail riding pitches and features are gone – with the sense of satisfaction and thrill. Soon there’ll be a six metre high bridge and new international one-stop border offices at little, remote Suam border, where the ragged colonial bridge for now still rattles over the trickle below, the date 1956 stamped on its remaining concrete post. In a month or two even that will be gone. Only one small satisfaction remains: I am still the only mzungu through the post this year.

One thought occurs, however: maybe this is a good thing for this old African biker? ‘At my age’ I’m not really supposed to be doing this sort of adventure riding – not that I care a jot how I am ‘supposed’ to behave – but the road should be complete and smooth easy tarmac by the time the 75 year old Mosquito rider requires it… That could be an advantage, I suppose – although the 75 year old would probably find MUCH more satisfaction in the 90 mile rugged trail ride it used to be!

*

So now I arrive in Sipi reasonably fresh, ready for the onslaught of welcome at Rock Gardens, the idiosyncratic guest house/ beer garden and restaurant I am helping Alex and Precious to develop, its name inspired by Rock Cottage in far off Harberton. I ride the last kilometre down red earth tracks, knowing that they are waiting. The gardens are now fenced by bamboo and a new thatched gate has been erected. It’s beginning to look professional: I’ve seen a lot of these gates in South Africa, where tourism is big business and usually white-owned. Here it’s a bit more homespun: the quality of timber and tradesmen limits what’s possible.

Alex, grinning widely, swings the crooked gate open: Precious comes running, ululating with delight (she thinks I am so old, that every time she says goodbye, she’s convinced I’ll never make it back!) and throws her not inconsiderable bulk at me, such that I almost fall. Little Keilah, who has now grown to a delightful, pretty five year old, launches herself like a torpedo at me. Jonathan, nicknamed JB, who calls himself Jonathanbean Cheptai, hangs back, reluctant; the mzungu still a bit frightening – but that changes over the next three or four days. I am welcome home.

‘Jonathan’s House’, round and thatched, is decorated with blooms from the slowly developing gardens, towel folded into fans by Precious, decorated with nasturtiums and marigolds, from seeds I brought from Devon, as if in a big Kampala hotel, where this young couple trained and met. It’s basic but charming: the bathroom just a rough cement extension with a plastic bowl, jerrycan of water and an old curtain. The bed is locally made from tree trunks; the sheets once very expensive – wonderful linen sheets long ago loved and laundered in Europe.

In the evening Alex makes a fire and we chat and catch up. I’m so fond of these two, and now their cheerful children too. Keilah has gained confidence since last year, and is now chattering like any five year old. She’s bright, despite the long school closures. Little JB repeats everything she says; they are close companions. JB slowly warms to his mzungu grandfather, after we kick a bottle about together and run races across the garden.

The weather is poor: there’s rain around. It shouldn’t be here at this time of year, but the whole planet is in disorder now. On the second night we have torrential rain. Recently, Alex had Jonathan’s House rethatched. It looks fine.

At 3.00am I’m awoken by splashes on my face… I quickly see that my room is like a shower bath. Drips cascade everywhere. The thatch just doesn’t work! With my head torch, I scurry about, showered by cold drips, packing my belongings into my pannier bags and shoving them beneath the plastic table. Water’s running down the walls and puddling the floor. Only in the very centre of the room does the shower leave a dry patch into which I can pull the big bed and continue the night sleeping wrong way round on a dry quarter of it. Poor Alex, such disappointment that the new thatch is useless. So many set backs. So much hope and ambition. His only support a mzungu who respects his integrity, tenacity and determination.

*

In January I come to Sipi expecting sunshine and brightness. I travel light and wash as I go. In this climatologically crazy year, I am confounded. In four days all my clothes are either grubby or still wet, festooned about the garden awaiting some drying sun. My fastidious nature hates all the mud. No one else appears to notice: they’ve always lived with this red mire. The children are filthy, our feet are red; it gets on the bedsheets. It spreads across the bedroom floor, however hard I try to avoid it. Cooking and washing up are done on the floor, on the mud. It gets wetter and wetter, and then comes the unseasonal rain again. I slip and slide with distaste.

I move to the other round room: only the middle of the bed has suffered from a leak in the thatch. We dry the mattress and bedding in some brief sunshine, move the bed and I hope for the best. We’ll have to get the thatcher back to sort Jonathan’s House. Pity to waste (my) money thus when there’s so much more needing investment at Rock Gardens.

*

Poor Uganda, it’s such an appalling mess. One of the most corrupt countries on the African continent, an absolute basket case politically, that begins to show cracks in the social attitudes of its very friendly people, now troubled by so much. The cause of this social disquiet works down from the top. With no example of leadership, except the disastrous selfishness of leaders determined, above all else, to stay in power for their own egotistical vanity – and wealth, the people begin to follow the current. They are lost and rudderless; they see greedy men looking out for themselves and the social fabric begins to unravel. Museveni, the notorious president of Uganda, leads a deeply corrupt government, and has done for over thirty five years – so far, having ousted the previous president in a coup ‘because he had been in power too long for the good of the country’. The problem with these people is their overwhelming narcissism that leads them to think they become saviours. Elections here are an unhappy farce; I watched the last one myself, a year ago and saw with my own eyes (even with my camera) agents handing money to voters as lie upon lie was told.

Now I see this unhappiness surfacing amongst some of the friendliest people on the continent. There is jealousy for those who try to get on, even be it by their own hard graft: the assumption is that they are progressing by dirty means, as so many at the top are seen to do. Envy erupts and mutual support ebbs away. Neighbours begin to report neighbours, to hassle one another, to steal, argue, spread gossip, to undermine.

It’s a warning of where narcissistic leaders, mendacity, misinformation and one-rule-for-us can take a nation…

So I feel so sorry for Alex, a young man of integrity and principle, struggling to make a go of his life and provide for his – small – family; and sorry for so many other Ugandans with similar modest desires and ambitions, ‘hampered’ by, and in the current climate often despised for their honesty… “I lie awake sometimes and think, without you, what would we be?” For I have supported this family through the past two even more than usually troubled years.

*

Some days back, Alex’s maternal grandmother was hit by one of the millions of dangerously ridden boda-boda motorbikes, a blow by the mirror that toppled her. She was taken to hospital but didn’t speak again, and died a day or two later, aged 85. No police get involved and the family pays the hospital fees. There’s discussion, Alex tells me, about the retribution the rider should pay, but as he’s of a similar clan, he may get away with his recklessness.

So on Sunday, there’s a vast funeral. I attend as a sort of surrogate grandchild – even encouraged by all around me to stand when the grandchildren are mentioned, and at one point welcomed by a daughter of the deceased in her speech, and thanked for ‘loving us’. I join a crowd of perhaps five or six hundred. It’s interminable, and all in languages I don’t comprehend, but it’s interesting culturally too of course. We sit beneath pointed gazebos ranged around a lumpy field on hundreds of hired white plastic Chinese chairs. A raucous PA system with a DJ relays awful pop music so loudly that the huge speakers distort. Preparations for feeding this enormous crowd with rice, potatoes, beans and scraggy beef continue behind the coffin. Boys relay the food in plastic dustbins, stainless buckets, washing up bowls and a few fancy serving dishes. We eat from plastic plates and some of the lucky ones get a bottle of plastic water or a bottle of pop. The food is surprisingly good. There’s an MC to introduce all the speeches, and Africans given a microphone love the sound of their own voices. I must sit through 24 various speeches, all unintelligible, plus addresses by various priests and politicians – THEY never miss out on these gatherings. “This will cost MILLIONS!” says Alex. “Millions.” Later, he estimates about £2000 – a king’s ransom in Uganda. “A waste! All pride, when the family needs the money, but you must put on a show like this!” There are so many noughts in Ugandan currency that I get utterly confused, but it’s also an economy where pennies matter to all but politicians.

Meanwhile, the corpse lies in a mauve coffin festooned with golden plastic furbelows under a tent amongst the family mourners. We must all come and open the jack-in-a-box lid to look at the poor deceased beneath her glazed window, like a specimen. The lid pops up and down – I think she’s been made to look too young – the chatter continues around, the music blares. People are dressed in mismatched clothes: a few in finery, but most in their ill-fitting secondhand clothes, unpressed and a bit ragged. Very few can afford new items; they rely on our waste. I count five face masks, and ‘social’ distancing is impossible in this throng, and against all Ugandan social norms.

*

Uganda, to compound all its problems, is hugely overpopulated. That’s not what most Ugandans believe: they exist to make babies, it seems. The country has the second lowest median age in the world at 15.7 (beaten only by Mali at 15.4). In my lifetime the population has ballooned from 5 million to 50 million – and growing fast, estimated to be 100 million by 2050. Shocking statistics. The average Ugandan woman gives birth seven times, and even educated women have multiple births. There are babies and children everywhere. Few people reach my age – less than 2%. Only a few educated young people understand how this affects their economy. Alex and some of his friends, many of whom I have met over my visits, work tirelessly, and voluntarily, to expound the messages of smaller families, healthier families and better educated families, but it’s a seriously uphill task in a land of downtrodden women and largely amoral men.

The late Yamangwa Jane, Alex’s grandmother, whom I met a couple of times, had 11 children. She had 81 grandchildren (81!), 136 great grandchildren and 23 great great grandchildren! She was only 85 years old. For me to go back to my great grandfather, I must reverse just short of 200 years…

“Come, let’s go to the back, on the hill,” suggests Alex after almost two hours of speeches. “The church service will begin now.” Alex is no fan of organised religion and the money collecting antics of the church officials. I remind him of what happened when Precious and I attended another funeral in a distant village. A self-proclaimed pastor ranted endlessly and neither of us understood the language (Precious hales from the other side of Uganda, a country with many languages). “Let’s go, we are bored!” she whispered. As the only mzungu amongst several hundred people it was impossible to make a discreet exit. We slid off our benches and sidled away… and caused an exodus of other attendees! At least 40 more people followed our lead, just waiting for the excuse. The pastor was livid, furiously condemning ‘infidels and non-believers’ for their behaviour. I didn’t understand that either until Precious told me later, laughing.

This time, no such disgust, and I was able to retreat to the big hill with its fine view of northern Uganda stretching below the escarpment into the lowering sun. At last, another hour later, we could slip away behind the trees, hopefully forgotten but having given respect by my attendance. Enough was enough: cultural interest has its limits.

*

On day four, we set off on a long hike, along the steep curling edges of the red rock escarpment that drops away towards the vast plains and lakes of central Uganda. There’s mist wreathing up from the valley. There’s a cool dampness still around on the breeze, but it’s humid too, difficult to get my body temperature regulated by outer clothes: I am backwards and forwards between a chill short-sleeved shirt and damp sweaty thin jumper. Shortly after we set off, we are joined by Del, a young fellow who decides he wants to accompany us. He walks the fifteen or more miles in tee shirt and flip-flops. Alex thinks perhaps he wants to improve his English, but if so he’s pretty tongue-tied most of the eight or nine hours we are walking. A nice enough lad, he doesn’t say much but appears to enjoy his day.

We wind our way through matoke (savoury banana trees) and coffee bushes. Tall eucalyptus shimmer in the cool damp breeze that’s rising from the valleys below. I pant up some steep red earth hills; we’re over 2000 metres high, the air is thin. Villages are scattered and remote. In the largest we take to mud footpaths, still mired by yesterday’s heavy rains. It’s slippery going. We divert to visit an elderly couple, some clan relation to Alex. They live in a comfortless earth and stick home with some plank sheds around. The old man, says Alex, is a veteran of WW2, in the Middle East. He’s 87, he says, born in 1935, so he’d have been 12 at the end of that war. I work it out that he must have served in the Suez conflict. “Yes, Suez Canal” he agrees proudly. He’s astonished to have a mzungu visit and his wife, bent almost double with age, immediately starts to prepare tea for her visitors, but Alex demurs: we have a long walk and will come back another day. The old man points our way through the matoke. We walk on.

Soon we find we are walking into the valley. We’ve gone wrong. Alex asks some boys with cows, and they point directly up to the red cliffs 300 feet above us. We clamber and slip up a trail through small shambas, farmed at acute angles. It’s a hard life, scraping a living from land like this. Near the top there’s a roughly made ladder, fifty or sixty feet straight up the cliffside. It’s a metre wide and made of sticks held with four inch nails. We climb up and weave through tiny fields over the final curve of the steepness to the rim of the cliffs. For some miles now, we follow the rim of the impressive cliffs and look back to where we started at Sipi, a distinctive hill several miles away across the contortions of the cliff faces. We must have walked about eight or nine miles by now, it’s the best walk I’ve taken here. Alex dreams of bringing guests here for exploration. I warn him to check they are athletic and not afraid of heights. We’re close to the edge, and it’s a long drop; water sprays up on the stiff wind from a delicate fall that we cross. It’s magnificent. I don’t get to these places by motorbike: I have to work for these thrills.

We ask our way from a farmer. “Hah! I don’t speak this language,” says Alex, who speaks many Ugandan tongues. We are no more than ten miles from Sipi and the farmer is almost unintelligible to him. At last we can look down on our destination, 500 feet below. We’re visiting Doreen again, one of Alex’s sisters. He has eight siblings. “…By my mother,” he expands. “There are three more by other women.” Alex has determined that Keilah and Jonathan will be all his family. “I want to educate them well, not at government schools. I don’t want them to have the life I have led. Two children is enough! Enough!”

We’ve walked to Doreen’s shamba once before in the valley and motorbiked here too, along the curling earth roads at the escarpment base. But this is the best way we’ve approached. Our winding clifftop trail brings us to the top of two steeply angled ladders, down the cliffs, about 110 feet high, I estimate as I count the steps. They’re well maintained, professional jobs, obviously by the local council, but I can’t imagine lugging 30 or 40 kilos of vegetables or firewood up these ladders, as local people do – mainly women…

We scramble down the final earthy slopes to a welcome from Doreen. A neighbour calls out, “Eh, Jonathan! You are back!” No mzungus come to these remote villages – except mad ones who enjoy a challenge. Neighbours come quickly to greet and offer us food.

We are just in time. It’s been cloudy all morning and we’ve watched the mist wreathes and rainfall in the valley, curtains of wetness emptying the clouds below us; but now they are drifting upwards on a stiff – cold – wind. It drizzles on Doreen’s zinc roof as we sit in the earth-built room and drink sweet coffee grown on her own shamba by Leonard, her pleasant husband. We don’t stay, promising to return sometime. It’s already “going to four” and we’ve still a very long walk back, at least seven or eight miles, including that awful clamber straight up the mountain right at the end. The rain catches us along the road and we run for shelter under the corrugated awning of a house. Rain thunders on the roof and drops in mini explosions in the soon-flooded muddy puddles. It’s cold: Alex and I have thin jumpers, but Del’s forearms are goose-pimpling in just a tee shirt. “We’d better find him some mtumba clothing,” I suggest to Alex, but the trading centre is a mile or two ahead. “I’ll go and buy umbrellas!” Alex says, and slips and slides off into the rain. “You’ll get soaked!” I call after him. “Oh, I am an African! I’m used to it.” Fifteen minutes later the torrents abate and Del and I can follow him down the now very slippery road. I’m happy I’m not on my Mosquito, yet still boda-bodas go past at speeds I wouldn’t consider – and I wouldn’t be freewheeling down hills as is their universal habit (to save a few pennies of fuel at the cost of no engine braking or lubrication), relying on weak, badly maintained brakes and bald tyres on this ice-rink of muck. They are awful riders and many accidents happen.

Alex comes the other way, swinging Chinese floral umbrellas. He’s bought three for £6. “I made the seller reduce because I was buying three!” We twirl our way down the muddy slopes through the local village, idlers calling cheek about the old white mzungu, only some of which Alex translates, but most that make him laugh. Who cares? I’m such a celebrity ‘footing’ my way through these rural areas. For many, I am the first mzungu they’ve been close to. We are often told that I am the first mzungu visitor when we go to people’s homes.

One cheerful insult Alex translates: “Eh, these mzungus! So much money they have nothing better to do than go walking!” Of course, no mzungu has to work for his money, he just picks it from the mythical money trees up there in the global north. Not one African really understands that there’s an appalling distribution of wealth in my country too: four million unemployed, homelessness, lack of rights and gig economies. We’re all wealthy and living in luxury. It’s what they see on ridiculous TV soaps and ‘reality’ TV. And we make the stuff we sell them – few make the difference between Chinese mzungus and European, and now there’s even an influx of dreadful Chinese soap TV to add to the Brazilian, Mexican and other low quality dramas. The better stuff – even the dire American productions – are more expensive for the broadcasters, who want to fill the minutes between the adverts and propaganda as cheaply as possible.

“Oh, take me to your country. I want to make money,” is the most common demand made of me in Africa. How can anyone wonder about the desperation of immigrants taking to leaky boats and risking their lives, when all we show them is this profligate wealth and wonder? We peddle lies to sell Stuff but don’t have the honesty to respond with any sympathy to the resultant ambitions to reach our gold-fringed borders.

Sorry for my tirade, but you see, I am here, and I somehow understand the visions Africans have of life in our privileged lands. I am such a rich mzungu: no one understands that my apparent wealth involves choices.

The walk home is more or less dry, but those last heights make me flag at the end of a fifteen or sixteen mile hike. With the ragged footpaths greasy after heavy rain, there’s always another hill above. “We are almost there!” exclaims Alex, as another steep rocky clamber comes into view. At this time of year, we should have been walking in hot equatorial sun: it shouldn’t be wet at all, even here on the high slopes of Mount Elgon. What’s happening to our fragile planet?

*

Uganda’s schools have been closed for 83 weeks. Almost two years. The longest school closures in the world. By a government who just don’t care. Education levels were low in this country before the pandemic, they are now set back again. Many schools will never reopen as they have been sold by their landlords for trucking depots, accommodation blocks, warehouses, housing development. All non-teaching staff resigned when their pay stopped, and found other ways to scrape a living. Many parents will not send their children back to school because when schools opened last year, and they paid fees, the government summarily closed them again within less than a week. Parents had no compensation – and their children no education. Alex lost Keilah’s school fees. And no one has money in Uganda, except a few. Multi-billionaire Museveni doesn’t care. It’s a fiefdom run for his and his cronies’ benefit. Many suspect that he inflated the coronavirus statistics to get more support from Western governments, but none of that support trickled down to vaccinating the people…

“Some of us have been vaccinated,” said Milton, an erudite friend of Alex’s brother Cedric at the big funeral. “We’ve had two shots, and when they offer a booster, we’ll be there. But many people resist. They’ve been influenced by the myths and stories and they think the vaccination will bring the antichrist to their bodies!” He laughs ironically. “The antichrist, in a vaccination!” It’s so easy to manipulate the uneducated. Most of those vaccinated are the educated.

We laugh at the idea of the antichrist in a vaccination. “And look around,” I say, surveying the 500 or 600 funeral crowds. “Almost every person is clutching a phone! If the antichrist is coming, it’s already in those devices!”

“Yes, data-mining, algorithms, your fingerprints, ID, facial recognition, propaganda, marketing – all stored in some ‘Cloud’ available for any use or abuse…” Milton and Cedric are both employed for their IT skills. “And I think in total our vaccination rate is about 3%…” No one cares. There’re no role models. And everyone is more influenced and manipulated by the phones in their hands than sensible argument.

*

Now schools are open again at last, and we all take little Jonathan to register for his first day at school. The teacher asks his name. “Jonathan Bean Cheptai,” says Alex. “Is that B-E-N?” asks the teacher in some confusion. It’s a private school; Alex has no faith in the government schools, and the Shalom Nursery and Primary School is more than ten miles off, in Kapchorwa, the local rather scruffy town. There are two school minivans, packed with toddlers and small children. One travels as far as Sipi, and Keilah is collected shortly after five in the morning! School actually begins at eight and ends at three thirty. Keilah is five years old. Little JB, at three years, will have the same day, returning in the late afternoon. They eat basic food during the school day and Jonathan will join the ‘Baby Class’, along with about 60 or 70 (very appealing) toddlers. Having a mzungu visit is exciting and I must shake 100 small hands. A considerable part of the smaller children’s school day will be spent in play and activities, watched over by three very patient teachers, cheerful women: they’d need to be. The school buildings are somewhat shanty-like; poorly constructed timber walls under zinc sheets. The playgrounds are the same red mud as everything else around here. Everything has the same patina of dust and mud, even the hundreds of children packed in the few classrooms. Yet this is one of the best schools in the district. Little government money or development reaches these places. They don’t care about their people, just themselves, entrenched by propaganda and lies…

Once evil men gain power they buy loyalty around them and it’s very difficult to unseat them…

Sadly, after two days at school, Jonathan was back home with a hacking cough.

*

For five hard hot days I pitched into the development of Rock Gardens. After all, it’s my investment too. I’d like Rock Gardens to have the finest gardens in Sipi – which won’t be difficult, as no one here bothers with gardens. Alex was stuck on the fact that he had to have exotic plants (expensive) until I pointed out that local plants and trees are exotic to me. So why not fill the garden with avocado trees, mango trees, matoke trees, bananas, coffee bushes (which have a delicious aroma when in flower), camellias, acanthus, orange trees, lemon trees? They all grow locally, and if we plant them as a garden, not a plantation, they can give shade and colour, and fruit – and many of them cost nothing, or not very much. Add a few more exotic palms and he will have a veritable botanical garden! So we’ve been planting like fury, while I have undertaken huge earthworks to make vehicle ramps, raised stone flower beds, pathways, a fire pit and a flight of stone steps. Alex is full of dreams but gets diverted easily by his enthusiasms. I have been focussing him: on things that make him money or make a good first impression. I am a scenery designer after all. A beer garden, washing lines dismissed to the back of the roughly half acre plot, shade for mzungus, flowers, tidiness. Litter burned.

Most Sipi workmen are terrible. Quality of workmanship is abysmal. Commitment to work is poor. Turn your back and workers sit down and drink. No one cleans up after themselves. There is no pride, just take the money – for a bad job – and go. The norm appears to be two working to four watching. Tools are old, basic and blunt, if there are tools at all. Screws don’t exist: you hammer in a nail, without drilling first. Timber is curling and twisted, almost fresh off the tree. Everything is done with a panga (machete), hammers and hoes with loose heads. A nail suffices as a chisel. I can see that what Alex – not a particularly practical man – needs is an old mzungu workman! I can do in a day, even with the heat, what Ugandan ‘workers’ do in three. And do it a lot better.

I’ve been fortunate to have a quiet young man as helper, Fred. He works hard and even thinks for himself. We have literally moved part of the mountain and Rock Gardens WILL be the best beer garden in Sipi, with a homespun, ethnic feel. Things grow fast in Africa if we keep away the goats – and one of the projects Alex completed successfully last year was to fence and enclose his complete compound from wandering animals and short-cutting locals, to improve security and protect his garden.

Two young men passed telling comments: “Huh! This place started as a joke!” But their implication was that now it’s a serious venture and they could see something of the vision Alex has nursed for so long. Sadly, anyone who works for a dream is seen as somehow deluded and vainglorious here in Sipi. There’s a deep cynicism and pessimism amongst the neighbours that work is not worthwhile. After all, the ‘Big Men’ don’t work much. Poor Alex.

*

Unfortunately, three days before I leave Sipi a villager about 300 yards further down the red earth road, is inconsiderate enough to die. He’s been a thorn in Alex’s flesh for years, spreading jealous suspicions of cheating and petty corruption impossible to Alex’s open honesty. Yet still he must attend the funeral house. And no one will work in the area on the burial day, so work will stop at Rock Gardens.

So, the man died. Bad news for me! Death equals disco in Africa nowadays. As in Navrongo, Ghana, where 30 years ago I remember drumming and whistling through the nights after a death, that has now regressed to a rented pounding PA system relaying thumping pop ‘music’ for four endless nights as the corpse lies, presumably quietly decomposing, in a painted coffin with pop-up lid until burial. It’s a ghastly travesty of cultural tradition that probably began as a belief in warding off evil spirits or something similar.

Nights in the Discos of Death. Such a cheapening of culture.

*

Precious and Alex and the children wave until I turn the corner of their red earth track and start down the hill on my way home to Kitale. I’ve been 12 days at Rock Gardens and we have transformed its landscape. The burial that has disturbed my sleep so efficiently for three nights will take place today. Many people will pass Rock Gardens.

Alex emails later: ‘am very happy of the great work you shortly did during your stay. Oh yes, much pictures taken by rich men and just wondering. The place looks beautiful. Yes, a joke is turning into reality and we will keep focussed’. We’ve discussed often that his customers should be the ‘rich men’: professionals and business people who want a quiet, peaceful place to drink in a nice beer garden, eat a few snacks, have meetings or office parties, weddings and events, with the added option of a few paying guests in what he plans will one day be five rooms.

The ride back round the mountain to Sipi is exhilarating and fun, trail riding at its best for the 40km of still rough road. Leaping and dancing about with a smile on my face, I am once again thrilled to be here, gazing down into the expanses of northern Uganda. Maybe in two years, I will be able to fly along on smooth tar, but for now the dusty enjoyment is exciting. I am at one with my little trail bike, behaving as if I were 30 again, people waving and exclaiming as I pass their shambas, earth houses and trees blathered in dust from the roadworks.

I wish Alex so much success. If he becomes independent, can educate his charming children to a positive future, and keep his small family content, I shall have achieved and left something very good in Uganda.