Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (16 page)

It seems natural that something as rare and strange as a helmeted figure on a motorcycle approaching at speed should arouse whatever are the dominant emotions. Here I would have to say that the first emotions to spring to the surface are fear and resentment. In Wollo province, three hundred miles from my route, thousands are said to be starving to death, but I can see no sign of it. The livestock looks fat and grain grows everywhere, but the country is seething with rebellion and the Emperor's long, harsh and corrupt reign must be nearly at an end.

In a small village called Emmanuel just north of the Blue Nile Gorge, after another difficult day riding through heaps of loose stones, I am forced to stop by failing light. Small boys gather like flies, as usual, and a bigger boy who has learned some English, appoints himself my guide and protector. Their concerted efforts sweep me and the bike over the high threshold of a doorway in a wooden stockade. Within the stockade is a pinkly painted hut labelled 'hotel', and at last I am leaning back in a chair with my boots, grey from powdered granite, stretched out in front of me in a comic posture of relief.

At the bar on my right, on a high stool with her bare feet dangling, sits the proprietress in a pink dirndl dress and headscarf, chopping up mutton in a dour mood. Opposite me, side by side in identical positions, sit four nearly identical men staring straight ahead, staves clasped with both hands and planted between their feet, elbows resting on knees, polished knees spread apart to touch the neighbours'. In their shiny black woodenness they might have been carved from a single huge ebony log.

I have not yet got the taste for home-brewed corn beer and am drinking a warm and expensive bottle of Italian beer, waiting for a meal, when the teachers come in from the street. There are three of them. The boys must have told them about me, because they come in noisy with good cheer and obviously determined to entertain me and have a good time. They are an oddly assorted trio. One is a tall handsome Arab. One is a short, black, wrinkled and canny mountain man. The third is true African, with a smooth oval head balanced on his neck at forty-five degrees. The African is in a beige
gabardine
suit and the others are in traditional Ethiopian dress and shawls edged with a coloured stripe.

The African is already drunk. He squeezes up beside me waving his arms around me and pushing his face close to mine. His eyelids are papery and taut and the same colour as his suit, his mouth splutters saliva and his breath is bad. It is hard to like him.

'What are your opinions about South Africa?' he shouts. 'What can you tell me about this country? I am definitely short of opinions on this subject. What is your information?' and so on. He is so absorbed in his
questioning and posturing that there is no need for me to reply, mercifully, since I have nothing to say.

The others are more restrained, and show willingness to be light-hearted and amusing, but in spite of themselves their questioning becomes hostile and suspicious and turns to interrogation, with demands for proofs and evidence.

'Where do you come from?'

'Where do you live?'

'But that is impossible. You are British. How can you live in France?' 'How old are you?'

T cannot believe that. Show me your passport. I will not believe unless you show me in black and white.'

'What is this? Born in Germany? How do you explain this?'

'What is in that wallet? Show me. I will not believe you are not keeping a gun in there. A notebook? What kind of notes? Let me see what you are writing down about us?'

I refuse. Not because of what I have written, but because, by now, I am afraid of losing it under a flood of beer or vomit. The scene has a feverish significance that is heightened by the effort I have to make against my own weariness and to 'keep a good face'. The four peasants staring impassively, the sour woman ordering her skivvy about, and these three tipsy interrogators, their good intentions helpless against the tide of anger and frustration that wells up inside them, all that seems a quite excellent model of Ethiopia as I sense it from the road.

Food comes, and with it I hope for some relief. I have to struggle to stop too much of the African's spit from falling on my plate, but most of it is dribbling over his food as he scoops up the mutton with fistfuls of
injera
and stuffs it into his mouth. Then I start back in horror as I see his dripping hand head straight for my own mouth. He tries desperately hard to reach me with it, but I am ducking and weaving like Muhammed Ali, and he has to give up.

The other two are severely amused.

'It is a custom of hospitality in our country that you may show your love by placing your food in the mouth of your guest.'

That, I thought disgustedly, sums it up. Where else could a gesture of friendship become a repulsive act of aggression. In Ethiopia, for once, I allowed myself the luxury of a generalization. Two words described them all for me.

Fucked up!

In the south of Ethiopia, it is better. The roads are terrible again, but the people are softer and not so paranoid. Will it always be like that, better away from the highways?

The last stretch to the border of Kenya is partly a river bed, and I have seen some spectacular termite mounds, in red and white. The white ones, dotted all about the landscape, are like an outdoor exhibition of Henry Moore statues. Inevitably I think of Lot's Wife and the pillars of salt.

The Ethiopian mood may be mean, but the high landscape has been magnificent. Now I am going down again, into the African Rift Valley, and the desert provinces of Kenya and Somalia. Moyale is the border town. It is New Year's Day, and I am on the Ethiopian side, but a road engineer is in with the Kenya government brass and we get across for a celebration on the other side. Different world. Almost an English pub, drinking Tusker Ale and Stout, chatting with the D.C., struggling to catch the barman's eye.

The District Commissioner is a tall, stylish Kikuyu African called William. He tells me two things of great interest. One, that tourism is the only thing that will save African wildlife, since Africans themselves can see no advantage in keeping endangered species alive, unless it is to make money out of sentimental foreigners. Two, that Africans can't put up with 'hippies'. When an African sees five ragged Americans sharing the same bottle of Coke, he knows they all have millionaire fathers in Milwaukee, and considers he is being conned.

Next day I cross the border officially. Two busloads of Jehovah's Witnesses are coming back to Addis Ababa from a congress in Nairobi. All their belongings are strewn over the ground, and customs are going through everything mercilessly. Their literature is all being confiscated, huge heaps of tracts and books and 'newsletters' are ready for burning. It surprises me to see how prosperous they all look.

From Moyale begins the last long run to Nairobi, three hundred miles of scorching semi-desert and then the Equator. I'm very excited. There is a real road this time, part of a big new highway, but unsurfaced. It is heavily corrugated most of the way, but somehow that doesn't bother me so much any more. Halfway along, the luggage rack on the back of the Triumph fractures, whipped to pieces by the vibration.

I'm standing there wondering how to get my stuff to the next stage to repair it, when a Peace Corps man comes along in a pick-up, and carries my luggage on to Marsabit for me. There a gnarled Danish woodwork instructor with a workshop helps me to weld the rack together again. I begin to understand that in Africa, somehow or other, there is always a way.

This country is not properly desert, but savannah. There are bushes and low trees, and there is game. Already I have seen ostrich with
glorious pink plumes, and then, just before Marsabit, I come across a herd of giraffe. When I stop, they observe me quizzically for a while over the tops of the trees, and then gallop away. I am absolutely spellbound. The only other kind of movement with which I can compare this incomparable sight is that moment when a big airliner, having just taken off, seems to hang over the end of the runway in complete defiance of nature. The giraffe glides through the air as though in free fall.

A hundred miles from the Equator, the ground begins to rise out of the desert. On 5 January, and only thirty miles from the Equator, I find it hard to believe my eyes. I seem to be travelling through the south of England, Sussex maybe. The air is cool and fresh. There are flowers in the hedgerows. On either side, well-kept farms, with gates, cows on green pasture, and country cottages with lawns, and on the gates, painted wooden signs announcing Smith, and Clark and Thompson. At Thompson I cannot bear to go any farther and on impulse I turn into the driveway. It ends in front of a cottage built partly of stone, partly of wood. There is a dovecote on a post, a lawn with
rose beds
, a stream running past. Beyond the lawn, like a picture postcard in the sky, is Mount Kenya under snow. An African servant receives me. The master and mistress are not home yet. Please to wait, and have some tea. In a chintz armchair, among English country furniture, like a very self-conscious bull in a china shop, I wait and marvel.

Arthur Thompson and his wife Ruth seem not at all surprised to find me sitting there. They talk to me for a while, and invite me for the night. He was a soldier, from Northumberland, older, grey-haired, ulcers. Speaking with a trace of Geordie mixed with colonial he puts much emphasis on the 'classlessness' of the white community here. She is younger, plump, pretty, strong-natured. They grow maize, wheat, barley, pyrethrum, have eighty Jersey cows, a thousand or so sheep. All on three thousand acres.

'Had a good life for thirty years,' he said, 'but it's nearly over now. The Kenya Government is bound to buy us out soon. They're settling Africans out here now.'

Where to go then?

'South Africa looks good. I can't see Europe letting that go. If they do there'll be no way round for shipping. Too important strategically. I think Rhodesia's bound to stay white for the same reason.'

Wishful thinking, but it is January 1974. Even the Portuguese are still in Africa.

Thompson is direct, but not bitter. He does not strike me as a bigoted man. He feels for his land, like a good farmer.

'It's not suitable for settlement, for Kikuyu farming,' he says. 'There's not enough rain. The Kikuyu needs rain. His method is to exhaust a

patch, then move on and let it go back to bush. He goes round in circles. A round hut. Then the woman grows yams round that. Outside, in a bigger circle, the man grows maize, and round that he hunts.

'But without irrigation, he'll get nothing up here, and the land will be ruined.'

True or false? I cannot possibly know, but I do feel his concern, and that I know is genuine. He is still reclaiming land washed out before he arrived, even though he is certain never to profit from it. I feel his identification with these acres, and wonder how he could ever tear himself away. All over Africa the white man is being pulled up by the roots. Weeded out. There will be much pain.

Next day I'm in Nairobi! Halfway through Africa. Another magic milestone. Like all milestones, something to look forward to, something to look back on, but at the time, nothing more than a pretext for indulgence. Hotels, Restaurants, Drinks, Showers, Banks, Clubs, Publicity.

London to Nairobi. Seven thousand miles. Something to shout about.

None of this means anything to me. Nothing of my journey means anything to anyone here. We are engaged in a conspiracy, pretending to understand each other. Isn't that what makes the world go round? I meet a man I once knew in London. He is rubbing his hands together over the same deals, pickled and preserved in the same urbanity. Nairobi and London are joined by a silver tube that swoops through the pasteurized ether, and the same stuff pours out at each end.

I dress for the Muthaiga Country Club, a functioning relic from the days before the tables were turned. Anyone can join now, but in practice it's much the same blue-eyed crowd, still enjoying the privileges without the power.

Dark polished wood, spacious rooms, parquet floors and pillars, and a wine cellar still intact.

'Well, old chap, they say your boat's in absolute shite order.' Game fishermen, New Zealanders, talking about the Marlin off Kilifi.

'Whatever they say, life's still pretty colonial here. The Africans pretend to object, but . . .'

Smoked Sailfish and Lamb's Kidneys Turbigo for lunch, with a good claret.

At my hotel in the afternoon there are three people sitting near me, an African, an Indian in a turban, and an Asian woman.

She: Look, you can see, one eye is higher than the other.

Asian: Well, your nose is crooked.

She: Yes I know, it was a bad accident I had. Very bad. Now I have the feeling when I look that one side is higher than the other.

African: You should take a hammer and straighten it.

She: You shouldn't think it's so funny.

African: It's better to see something than nothing. But if you lie on the ground I'll give it a good kick.

On the terrace at sundown the Africans in grey flannels and short-sleeved shirts have been sitting at a small table since lunchtime, with beer coming at the rate of three or four pints an hour. They are speaking Swahili larded with English phrases and words. 'Anyway, let us compare this thing', or 'We must analyze that thing'. Rather the way we used to think it smart to use French.