Category Archives: Adventures

Kisenyi, part 1

Adventures, drc, Travelling in Africa, ,

On the eastern shore of Lake Albert is a small town called Kisenyi. To get there, we took a car from Fort Portal around the winding foothills of the Rwenzori and then, unexpectedly and for free, through a game reserve of long, dry-white grass, antelope, guinea fowl and thorn trees.

We reached the grubby port town of Ntoroko around mid-morning and headed off to find immigration and the ferry. Someone gave the immigration official a call and he came and stamped us out of the country. We were told we had to take the fast ferry, so we dutifully climbed on board and waited five hours for the boat to fill up.

It was a beautiful, hot, summer’s day with the water sparkling into the distance. Nearby, a moving line of men and women loaded all manner of supplies onto what looked like an over-sized wooden row-boat. Three small boys splashed and laughed and did back-flips in the water near the shore.

Towards late afternoon, we set off across the lake. Lake Albert is beautiful. A wide expanse of silvery water, with the occasional clump of greenery. In the distance, the silver water met the light blue sky, the horizon invisible. Fishing boats dotted the lake, dark against the shining water. Wooden boats, poled slowly across the water or still as a fisherman threw out his net. Some of the boats had what looked like shade-cloth structures in the middle, looking in silhouette strangely Japanese. People waved as we passed. Birds took off from tree trunks and glided away. The light was perfect on that first trip over the lake and the photographers among us virtually vibrated with frustration as we tossed around whether to risk what we’d heard was Congolese officials’ vehement dislike for people with cameras.

In the distance, the shadow of a mountain began to grow. As we got closer we saw what looked like a coastal resort or a fishing village. Cream and blue houses nestled in the green with towering hills beyond. We landed at a dock where many people were gathered below the rusted corpse of an ancient metal crane.

As we stepped off the boat, a border police-man took our passports and led us to the small, white and blue house that served as the immigration office. The office was simple and clean and the immigration official was relatively pleasant and polite. Before long, we were stamped into the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The original plan was to head straight for Bunia but it was getting dark and there was uncertainty about being able to find transport. I’m so glad we stayed. Not that we had anywhere to stay, but small towns are small towns, especially when you’re friendly, and the border police-man who had shown us to immigration quickly jumped in to help and hustle two of our group off to inspect the potential accommodations. The rest of us lazed in the late afternoon sun and watched the cows grazing and looked out at the lake. People wandered by and greeted these strangers before moving on.

We stayed that night at a very basic little guest-house, the name of which I never did figure out. The rooms were sparsely furnished but everything was clean and actually quite comfortable and there were mosquito net on the beds. We got three rooms at $10 per room, which would turn out to be one of the best prices of the trip, and for one of the nicest places.

I was tired, that first evening, and stressed because I wanted to contact home and let them know I was okay. I couldn’t sms because the text message services had been suspended after the DRC elections and roaming charges on MTN in a non-MTN country would be extortionate. Sorting out sim-cards helped, as did a good bucket-shower and good dinner. Dinner was great, actually. Ugandan food didn’t thrill me, but it wasn’t until that first meal in Kisenyi that I realised what I had been missing. The Ugandan food was bland. It wasn’t bad or offensive; it just didn’t taste of much. That dinner in Kisenyi was delicious: spicy cabbage and beef with plantain that wasn’t mashed and rice.

After dinner, I phoned home and felt much better. The phone reception in Kisenyi was great – possibly because the place we were staying was just near the cellphone tower. By 8 o’clock, I was climbing into bed and turning off the light in the room – which for some reason had a red light-bulb – and falling asleep to the gentle sounds of a lakeside town on a warm summer evening.

At 5:30am we were woken by the sound of drums. Loud and actually pretty good, they welcomed us to the day with intricate, delicate rhythms. We eventually figured it must be a church service. It was definitely unexpected but not unpleasant. It was early, however. I tried to drift back to sleep but the morning had started and the ducks and chickens and motorbikes were all adding their voices to the dawn. Slowly, the sunrise turned the world beyond the bamboo fence a gentle orange. Inside the room, tree-dappled light fell onto the white mosquito net. It was peaceful. The drumming had stopped and I could hear birds chirping and some sweeping in the yard.

Eventually, we were all up and about. We headed to the centre of town and ate a good, if slow, breakfast before getting onto the back of boda-bodas and driving off to Bunia. It would be nearly ten days before we returned to Kiseyi, ten days in which we saw so much and travelled so much. Kisenyi was as much of a joy on the return journey as it had been on the way out.

Gulu

Adventures, Travelling in Africa, Uganda,

I don’t know what I expected. Something different. Something less ordinary.

Two of us sat, on a Wednesday night, and watched people cautiously, nervously moving up and down the road in the flickering light of a garbage fire. An hour earlier we had been sitting on the flat rooftop of a run-down hotel, watching the world fade to night as the bats flew over, waves and waves of dark outlines against the sunset sky.

But nothing is as one-dimensional as it sounds. We watched that fire from just outside the Chinese-owned supermarket that sold cold sodas and packets of biscuits and chewing gum and sweets. A few doors up the road was Coffee Hut, where foreigners gathered for chocolate milkshakes, proper coffee and wireless internet. Not too far away was the bus park and the Tropikana Inn, where we stayed.

The Tropikana Inn. Our rooms, our suite really, was on the second floor. Four en-suite single rooms off a large, tiled lounge area. From the lounge, a door led out onto the balcony that ran the length of our apartment and looked out across the road over a row of shops and a pool-bar and on the other side to an open courtyard where they fetched water and did the laundry. There was no running but otherwise it was clean and comfortable. With doilies. So many crocheted doilies. In the evenings, we watched as people sat outside the bar across the road at little tables drinking beer and played pool at the outside pool-table. The beer adverts on the pool table weren’t the same as at home but they were very similar. There was a table on that balcony, where we sat most evenings, writing, journaling.

Gulu never turned into a place of deep conversations long into the night. I guess partly because we were tired. It was hot. And muddy. I still have orange dusk on some of my clothes – I think it’ll never come out. During the day, we visited various groups and places and people. We watched a group of local dancers. They were good but they expected to be paid for the privilege of watching them, which left a bitter taste in my mouth. I enjoy traditional dancing (in small doses) and I’ve seen a lot over the years, but I object to being expected to give people money, being expected to pay not because they assume I think they are amazing but because they assume that I am from another country and therefore should feel sorry for them.

Another day we visited farmers. Jimmy. A young farmers who cares for his cow with his wife and their three children. He was busy putting in a biogas unit when we visited. The biogas unit will produce electricity from the cow manure so that they don’t have to use wood to heat and light the house, which will be particularly good for his daughter who suffers from asthma. Their little homestead is surrounded by shoulder-high millet and other green, growing things. They grow to eat, though, and buy in to feed the cow.

Later that day we visit a diary. And then walk to the bank. Another day we visit a clinic that also runs a women’s microfinance project. One afternoon we were at a home for disabled children, chatting to the guy running the place, when a crazy man whisked us off in his white landcruiser to visit a farm he was running to supply the home with food. It was one of the craziest, and one of the most interesting, bits of visiting Gulu. This man has been there for years and years and knows the history from the inside. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t think like a settler, but he is a less distracted by the recent past than some. He tells us how his rice crops were ruined by the elephants. How, when the war came people stopped paying attention to the game reserves so the population of wildlife grew too fast and now elephants rampage through farmland destroying crops all over the place. He fed us freshly picked groundnuts, straight from the ground. He showed us their beehives and brick-making and how cassava grows. He drove like a maniac. Sitting in the back of the landcruiser, bumping and bouncing along awful farm-roads while someone explained the name of a river in the local language.

The next day we travel out to meet with someone who works with the diocese here. The church is different to an aid agency because it stays. He talks intelligently, coherently, about what has happened here over the last decade, about the war and the refugee camps and the reconstruction. He is concerned about the impact it will have on the local economy when the NGOs pull out. One morning we went past a place where the Japanese foreign aid agency is helping people grow rice. They’re all here. We play a game of NGO-spotting, trying to write down all the names of the many, many NGOs that work here. We spot the Invisible Children sign, months before the disastrous #Kony2012 debacle. Some of the signs are old, in disrepair, as NGOs begin to pack up and leave. It is 5 years since the war ended. Near the market at the bottom of town is bright new shiny Uchumi supermarket.

In between all this is orange dust and hot summer sun, chapati for breakfast and innumerable bottles of water. We eat plantain and millet and I have stew while the others eat beans. I try to find food that is a little more familiar or a little bit tasty. The whole town seems to have run out of Stoney. We find a Lebanese Restaurant called Cedars and that awful Will Young song follows us around. In the evenings we drink beer – Nile and Club – and hope for rain to wash out the music from the bar across the road that gets louder and louder through the evening.

We left on the early post-bus. We had been looking into the option of travelling straight from Gulu to the DRC border but eventually decided was that meeting up in Kampala would reduce the chances of missing each other and/or the bus at a strange random crossroads in the north. So we woke at 5 and by 5:30 set off down the sleepy morning roads of Gulu.

Thoughts on not liking Rwanda

Adventures, Ideas, Travelling in Africa,

East Africa was never on my list. A few years ago, when I put Southern Africa at the top of my list of places to see, East Africa wasn’t even in my mind. And yet East Africa has dominated my recent travels. Uganda, DRC in December/January, Kenya and Rwanda in March/April. The most recent East Africa trip has been a mixed experience: Kenya was a joy and a revelation. Rwanda was miserable.

It’s a terribly unfashionable thing to say it. Rwanda is voluntourist heaven. It is the place every hippie aid-volunteer wants to go to save poor helpless Africans, while fitting in a little gorilla trekking and ooh-ing and ah-ing over the history of the place (i.e. ’94 and nothing before). I know all that and it makes me sad because I really didn’t like the country.

Rwanda is South Korea. Except without the development or the thousand-year history. It is damp and hilly and nauseatingly green. I’m told the north is beautiful (where have I heard that before?) because it is all mountains and lakes. The East wasn’t anything particularly special. A lot like South Korea; a little like Uganda. Lots of cassava and bananas. The people could be South Korean, too, in their attitudes. The very poor are pretty desperately poor and wishing, humbly, for opportunities. Everyone else keeps telling you that no-one in Rwanda is desperately poor and going on and on and on about the goodness of the government. Every second building is NGO/Aid agency branded, but the government is given credit creating development, for stopping the people from starving and for saving Rwanda from that big bad unnamed threat that keeps everyone doing what they’re told. Everything bad is someone else’s fault and the great achievement of the Rwandan government is feeding a tiny population of 10 million in one of the most fertile countries in Africa.

The government controls everything. Every family has a “performance contract” with the local authorities. The government decides what will be grown (and where and how and how much). The government controls access to land and inputs, so people grow what they are told. Everyone is organised into government-mandated cooperatives, that belong to government-mandated unions, that feed into government-mandated federations, one for every sector. Everything is centrally planned. The government’s decisions appear to be driven more by pride and a fierce – if somewhat delusional – determination to be self-sufficient, than by reality. The government decides to create a dairy industry, so increases productivity dramatically by handing out high-quality dairy cows and building milk collection centres (MCCs), at significant cost, in a configuration that the market would never support (too many MCCs, each serving far too few suppliers), all paid for by international donors. “Now we have a dairy industry”, you are told proudly (by people who are not milk producers) but the market doesn’t exist. When you ask questions, you’re told that markets will be found or created (with a vague suggestions that the other countries will be expected to make this happen). Told with a frown because you haven’t show the requisite respect for the amazingness of the government.

And once a month, every Rwandan is required to perform forced labour – umuganda – to show his or her patriotism, with the added incentive of men-with-guns in case they’re not sufficiently patriotic. While commentators and analysts laud as amazing the development the West’s guilt money has succeeded in buying, poor farmers make do with mud, white-elephant development schemes and total government control.

In many ways, Rwanda is the exact opposite of South Africa. The new histories of the two countries began in exactly the same year – in Rwanda with a terrible genocide, in South Africa with a negotiated revolution. Over the past 18 years, Rwanda has built a little feudal system. In every small town in the country, you’ll see two shiny new buildings – the government offices and the Bank of Rwanda – while the people farm tiny plots on the hillsides. Most of the cars on the road are government officials going to check up on their subjects. We run into a team going out to assess the progress of farmers. The government officials are accompanied by an army guard, wearing camo and carrying a gun. Development imposed for the good of the people. Rwanda has a forced public health insurance scheme and it appears to be the norm to take contributions from even occasional wage-labourers without their consent or permission. It is unclear what happens to the many people who do not have an income. Everyone is expected to be grateful and pleased with the benevolence of the state and the president. Everyone is expected to give to others. Cooperatives build their own schools, instead of waiting for the government.

Rwanda is peaceful and secure and controlled. South Africa is not. South Africa is fractious and unsettled and argumentative. The country has a high crime rate and high inequality. Development is facilitated, not imposed, which results in endless disagreements and criticisms. The market system is regulated free market, so individuals can choose to grow or do what they like, even if the government thinks it’s a bad idea. Land, barring communal land (but even that is contested), is privately owned and controlled by individuals. The constitution firmly puts individual human rights before idealistic notions of “the good of the people”. The economy is booming. Construction happens everywhere. The government runs a social safety net programme using cash transfers to allow the poorest of the poor to protect their own interests and decide their own future, even when it’s not the future others think they should choose. Complaint and criticism is free. Taxpayer’s money is invested in public goods like roads and schools and hospitals. Unions argue with labour, civil society argues with everyone and the ANC argues with itself.

Equally striking is the difference between Rwanda and Kenya. I suppose, if I am completely honest, Rwanda was always going to be at a disadvantage on this trip because Kenya was so amazing. Apart from the obvious differences – Kenya is gorgeous grassland, Rwanda oppressive lush tropical hills – the attitudes are so different. With the exception of the very poor, who spoke hesitantly and were shut down or corrected as soon as they strayed from the party-line, the Rwandans I met exuded an uncomfortable mix of resentment and pride. They were prickly and unwelcoming. No questions could be asked, no challenges posed. Their interest in any country other than their own was only in showing how far superior (and independent) Rwanda is. The Kenyans I met were funny and honest and interested and interesting. They were more than happy to talk about what they were doing (and anything else that was asked) but in return they wanted to know about other. They were hungry for opportunities and saw possibilities everywhere. They were comfortable with difference and debate. The media in Kenya is critical and professional. Perhaps most importantly – and I’m starting to think the sign of a healthy democracy – satire and sarcasm and the ability to laugh at the folly of the powers that be, are alive and well in Kenya. If oil were discovered in Rwanda, I have no doubt there would be a decreed day of national celebration (possibly involving community members rebuilding roads and planting parks in honour of the government’s benevolence). In Kenya there was outrage, celebration, debate, discussion and an investigation into whether a government minister got rich off the deal.

I suppose, ultimately, my frustration with Rwanda comes down to differing approaches to life. Some people believe in security above all else and feel that the answer to conflict is to enforce a pretence that we all get along, possibly assuming that one day everyone will be so used to political correctness they no longer bother to question. They must love Rwanda. Like South Korea, it runs as directed and there is no need or room for fundamental questioning. I don’t believe it. Security in this context is a constraint, oppression. Time spent in places like this makes me long for freedom and dissent and the room to make mistakes. Those who hold up Rwanda as a model for Africa should keep that in mind. Rwanda’s security and peace and “perfection” are bought at the price of her people’s freedom. As the Arab Spring so clearly demonstrated, just like the former-soviet revolutions 30 years before and to some extent the end of Apartheid, that is a price not worth the prize for many, many people.