Day 355: Mr Stanley, I Presume

21.12.09:

Woke up on the bus, which had come to a halt sometime earlier in downtown Nairobbery. It was 5am as I staggered into a taxi and asked the driver to take me to The Comfort Hotel. There I would meet Matt, who would be my cameraman for the last 10 days of The Odyssey 2009. Brilliantly enough, my contract is up at the end of the year so it’s going to be YOUTUBE TASTIC from then on, the only person with a say on what goes up will be big fat me. Woo!

More good news from the road: The Odyssey TV show (and yes, for us Brits, it will be called The Odyssey) is going to broadcast on the BBC next year. No obscure cable channels for this little Odysseus. Matt tells me that the Director General of the beeb has actually seen a chunk of one episode (the Cape Verde shenanigans) and it got the thumbs up. Infamy, here’s I come. BTW, my contract runs out at midnight December 31st, so past that date, ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO ME! Be prepared for more YouTubey goodness than you can handle BABY…YEAH! Incidentally, if any broadcasters want to commission my 2010 adventures (Odyssey Two), please get in touch.

WHOOSH!!

Matt has a habit of waking me up at some ungodly hour when he calls me from Oz (I don’t think he’s got the hang of time zones yet) so I thoughtfully repaid the favour by turning up at his hotel at such an unreasonable hour. He didn’t seem to mind too much, he was much more excited about the fire that happened last night. The building next door went up in flames – Matt was on the 6th Floor of the Comfort, given T.I.A. he was lucky to get out alive. A guy from Belgium apparently slept through the whole shebang. Luckily, Fireman Sam put out the flames before they engulfed the hotel and it was reopened a few hours later.

After brekkie (I had CEREAL!) it was ACTION STATIONS! I needed to get TWO African visa in just ONE MORNING to stay on schedule for Egypt in 10 days time. Could it be done?

We split up (like on Scooby Doo) – I headed to the Ethiopian Embassy, Matt to the Djibouti Embassy. At the Ethiopian Embassy I met up with Aengus Stanley, top chap from Ireland (who incidently DROVE here from Ireland, the nutter) who had contacted me through the website and had offered his assistance clambering over the obstacles Nairobi would no doubt throw up in our path. I was first into the place, got my form filled in within seconds and handed it over. But this being Africa, you can’t just pay your $20 over the counter, you have to pay it into a nearby bank, get a receipt and bring it back. Actually I had to do something very similar when I arrived in Mexico with Captain Johnny after visiting Cuba.

Aengus heroically drove me over to the bank, I got the receipt, then we rushed across town (as fast as you can rush in Nairobi) and met with Matt at the Djibouti Embassy. Djibouti’s claim to fame is possibly that it is the most obscure country in the world, but in this mad mission, it is utterly key to my nefarious plans. I filled out the form, flashed my passport, said I’ll be back. Matt booked a hotel for next Saturday and printed out my letters of accreditation from LP and WaterAid while Aengus and I high-tailed it back to the Ethiopian Embassy.

They kept us waiting, but only for an hour (which given T.I.A. Is lightning fast) and – oh yeah -that was one visa in the bag. Then Aengus took me back to the Djibouti Embassy, we said our goodbyes and I headed up the second floor of International House behind the Hilton Hotel to drop in my passport for Djibouti.

Come back in an hour said the girl on the front desk.

I could have kissed her.

Matt and I grabbed a coffee and had a smashing row about mmmmm mmmmmm and the mmm mmm mmmmmmms before heading back to grab our visas. We were DONE and it wasn’t even 1pm. Oh yeah.

The bus for the border was apparently leaving at 4pm. I’ve been here for seven months now so there was no way I was going to hurry for this one and I guess Matt learned his first lesson about Africa – trust no-one. Especially bus or taxi touts. We didn’t actually leave until 7.30pm. This annoyed somewhat, not because of the added journey time (according to Aengus, the roads in Ethiopia are much better than they say in Lonely Planet, so we should save time there) but because if we had known the bus wouldn’t leave until that time, we could have gone to Carnivore, the famous stuff-your-face-with-more-meat-than-Linda-Lovelace restaurant that everybody raves about. It was the only thing I really wanted to do in Kenya, but ho-hum.

The place where the ‘bus’ (it was minibus) left from was as grotty as hell. The road was stacked high with trash, the buildings were concrete hovels held together with bubble gum and dirty shoeless street urchins begged for coins. I’m beginning to think Rwanda was just some fanciful dream. But it wasn’t. All Rwanda shows that it is possible for Africa, all of Africa, to dig itself out of the mess it’s currently in. It just needs good leaders, good governance and the political will. Why isn’t there a UN Charter of Good Governance?

Stepping off my soap box for a moment, it was dark when we left and after fluking my way through two of the unholy trinity of ‘worst cities in Africa’ (Lagos and Johannesburg) I wasn’t relishing the thought of being done over just because the bus was so late leaving. But not to worry, we made it out of Nairobbery in one piece with all our swag intact.

Sleeping on a minibus is tricky at the best of times (although I’ve had a lot of practice this year) but my word this one was a nightmare – the road was dreadful, utterly dreadful, and the driver had a nasty habit of slamming on the brakes at any given opportunity. This, don’t forget, is the main highway from the capital city up to Ethiopia and it’s made from rocks, dust and decades of human misery. Madness. Sheer madness. Aegnus told me that he got all the way from Ireland to the Kenyan border without a hitch and then from the border down to Nairobi he suffered three separate punctures.

Will we get up to the border without a hitch? I doubt it, but at least today I had a undoubtedly very successful day’s Odysseying.

Day 356: The Special Bus

22.12.09:

Groan. T.I.A. strikes again! The bus we’re on is equipped to ferry disabled schoolchildren around in Japan. It is not in any way shape or form designed to survive the horror that is an African highway. With a ground clearance of (let’s say) two inches, we bumped, scraped and scratched our way along the road at a respectable five kilometres an hour, dripping oil, water and brake fluid, busting our exhaust, losing fair chunks of metal as we plodded along.

We were supposed to get to the border at around 7pm that night. But by 9am we were still at least 24 hours away and going nowhere fast. After losing a couple of hours while the oil leak was plugged (with bubblegum no doubt) we were told that it would take us two hours to get to the next town. It took eight.

You see there is something you have to understand about quite a few Africans I’ve met on the road; they won’t necessarily tell you the truth, instead they will tell you what they think you want to hear. The trip was torturous. Crammed into the special bus, we picked our way along the road so slowly we might as well have been going backwards.

Usually in The Odyssey, this would be a pain in the ass. When you factor in my burning desire to get to Egypt for New Year to see Mandy again, this was nothing short of a disaster. When we finally reached the next town (it would have been quicker to walk) I dragged Matt out of that bloody minibus and we legged it to the main road.

The minibus would be leaving at 9am, the next day. At the rate we were going we would possibly reach the border in two weeks’ time. This was a rather unacceptable situation but luckily as I got to the main road there was a big truck loaded with cargo with a bunch of people sitting on top of it – if there’s people on board, then it’s public transport as far as I’m concerned. We paid $20 each and clambered onboard.

This bit of the journey was great. High up on top of this truck with the sun setting to the west and the wide expanse of Kenya all around, the wind in my hair and a goofy grin on my face. This is travelling!! The top of the truck was remarkably comfortable (and spacious!) and once the stars came out I had an unparalleled view of the celestial sphere. Wonderful.

The only thing that wasn’t wonderful was the fact that we didn’t make it to the border. At 10pm we stopped at a village a good three hours away from Ethiopia. We grabbed a room in the local guesthouse (grotty as hell, but only $2 – HEAR THAT COMOROS?) and settled down for the night – our journey would resume at 6am the next day.

Bah! Not an unmitigated disaster, but this is really going to make the next few days even more tricky than they already would have been.

Day 357: The Hard Slog

23.11.09:

Any time frame you are given in Africa, remember to add a few hours, or even days. Matt and I got up at 6am, just in time to jump back on yesterday’s truck and crack on towards Ethiopia. The Pixies blasting in my ears and the sun rising to our left it was possibly the best trip I’ve had in Africa so far. However, our man predicting that we’d be at the border at 9am was ludicrously over-optimistic and we arrived sometime after 11am.

So over the border and into Nation 129: Ethiopia. A nation that has had its fair share of publicity, but for all the wrong reasons. The only African nation not to suffer the horrors of colonisation, one could argue that Ethiopia proves that Africa would be just as stuffed up as it is now whether the damn whities had bothered invading or not.

Before I go on, it’s possibly important that you know the difference between the era of slavery and the era of colonisation. They are two very different stories with a gulf of some eighty years separating them.

Because history is so badly taught in schools (no linear progression – we just jumped from the Egyptians to World War I to the Romans to World War II to the Vikings to Henry VIII to the Normans with gay abandon) it’s easy to think that the dastardly Europeans rucked up in their ships some time in the past, enslaved the population of an African country and set about selling them off like cattle to toothless banjo-players in Alabama.

What really happened was a little more complicated than that.

Before the invention of Gin & Tonic, there was little reason for Europeans to stay in the tropics. With Malaria rife and Europeans having no naturally selected resistance to it, any trip to a mosquito coast would be a one-way ticket to go join the choir invisible. But after the discovery of quinine, the stage was set for the exploitation of the world – Asia, America and, eventually, Africa.

For the first couple of centuries of European interference in Africa, there was no colonisation. There was just trade. Ships would turn up loaded with iPhones and Nintendo Wiis and trade them with the local chiefs for slaves and novelty beer hats, then bugger off to the Americas (at this point it would be remiss of me not to point out that a greater number of slaves were taken to The Caribbean to work under British slave-masters, so you can put your toothless banjo-player away) to sell these poor guys for a handsome profit.

Okay, the first foray into the realms of colonisation in Africa was in 1652 with the crazy Boars rucking up in South Africa, but let’s ignore that for a moment and, yes, one could argue that Sierra Leone was colonised when William Wilberforce and his mates bought a bit of land in present-day Freetown to stick the freed slaves that fought for the British against the Americans in the US War of Independence. After The British finally came to their senses in 1807 and abolished slavery, (unlike the French, Spanish, Portuguese, Germans, Arabs, Yanks and Africans who continued to practise it with gay abandon (some African countries [cough- Mauritania] still do)) Sierra Leone was used to drop off slaves from ships that had been intercepted by the British Navy en route to the Americas.

The Cape of Good Hope may have been annexed by the Brits in 1806, but it would be another seventy-nine years before what has been called ‘The Scramble For Africa’. Precipitated by journalist Henry Morton Stanley (as in Dr. Livingstone, I Presume) and his travels around central Africa under the sponsorship of the evil King Leopold of Belgium, The Scramble For Africa was undoubtedly the crime caper of the century and one which would have put Ocean’s Nineteen and a Half to shame.

In 1885 the European powers met in a brothel in Berlin, baked a cake in the shape of Africa and sliced it into almost 50 bite-sized chunks for themselves before coffee and cocaine snorted off a naked prostitute’s bottom. Things were much more civilised then, you see.

Much of North and West Africa was gobbled up by the French, Central Africa largely went to the Belgians and East and Southern Africa was largely annexed by the Brits. Germany got a few bits and bobs including Togoland and Tanganyika, Portugal got Angola and Mozambique while the Spanish, having conquered almost all of The Americas were (seemingly) happy with just nicking Equatorial Guinea and Western Sahara.

The greatest heist in the history of the World? I have no doubt about it.

But there is something else going on here – each country’s experience of colonisation was markably different. In the same way that it’s easy to count Africa as one country (as I hope you have seen over the last seven months, it’s not!), it’s easy to see the history of Africa as one big shared history in which all the colonial powers were proper rotten to the territories they invaded – however, that’s not entirely the case. Some were more rotten than others. It would be fair to say that the Belgians probably have the most to apologise for – their conduct in The Congo is up there with The Holocaust as the greatest crime against humanity in the history of the world, but the Brits weren’t blameless, killing 26,000 white Afrikaner woman and children in the world’s first concentration camps in the 1899-1902 Boer War.

Even so, each country in Africa experienced a different form of colonialism to its neighbours, yet all (with the exception of Botwana) collapsed into chaos once the colonial powers pulled out. In countries like Angola, were the Portuguese pulled out overnight leaving just three university graduates in the entire nation, it’s not hard to figure out why the Angolans spent the proceeding thirty years was spent gleefully massacring each other. In countries like Rwanda, in which a successful ‘divide and rule’ policy had been adopted by the Belgians you could almost draw a straight line to the genocide that came close to destroying that nation back in 1994.

But then what’s the story with Sierra Leone? What’s the story with Liberia? Both were set up to be free states in which their citizens could live in harmony. There was no abrupt and inept pull-out, no divide-and-rule tactics to set one ethic group up against another (well, maybe a little in Liberia), there was no rhyme nor reason for the horrific events that took place in the late 90s, just the same old story of greed and corruption that plagues this continent like a reaper of utmost grim.

But my biggest question is what the hell is the story with Ethiopia? Spared from the full horror of slavery (unlike West Africa) by its position near the East coast and spared the tyranny of colonialism, it’s post-colonial history (not that it was colonised) is one of war, war, war a bit more war and a few famines thrown in for good measure. WTF Ethiopia? You should be the glittering jewel of East Africa, the proof that Africa’s modern-day problems are all the fault of colonial greed and reckless European abandon.

Sorry guys, but I’m going to put my cards on the table right now. It’s time to stop the blame-the-past game. In less than twenty years, countries like Poland, Romania and Bulgaria have shrugged off the repressive fifty-year colonialism of the Soviet Union and are now productive kick-ass members of the European Union. India, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore… all ex-colonies whose economies are booming while nearly all African economies are operating at the level of a barely audible whimper. Ever driven an African car? Used an African mobile phone? Played an African video game? Worn some clothing ‘Made In xxx, Africa’? Nah.

There is just one group of people that are responsible for the frankly laughable state of modern Africa and that’s the African politicians who are happy to run this great continent into the ground while they feather their own nests of golden straw and Fabergé Eggs. Yes, shit things happened in the past, but that is no reason for shit things to happen today. History is there to stop us repeating our ancestor’s mistakes, not as an excuse for making more of them. Africa today is on the verge of a precipice, and when brave men and women stand up to fight the powers that be, it’s about time we in the West gave them the support they deserve.

Africa is indeed a stain on the conscience of the world, not for what was done in the past, but because of our failure to do what needs to be done today. Band-Aid was actually a very good name, for charity only puts a sticking plaster over the problems of modern Africa. It is only by decisive – and smart – action on behalf of the UN and other inter-governmental bodies that the cancer that is deep-routed in almost all African governments can be cut out and the people here can, for the first time in history, be free. The shame we feel in the West about our colonial past should not hold us back. If we continue to fail, the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 will look like small fry compared to the horrors that our grandchildren will be intrigued and sickened to know why we didn’t anything to prevent.

Anyway, back to The Odyssey…

Matt and I crossed the border into Ethiopia around midday, and there we tried to get the first bus to Addis Ababa, the ship I need to be on is leaving on Saturday, so it was fairly important. Unfortunately, all the buses for Addis leave at 6am (bit silly as the border is not even open then, but hey-ho) and the only bus that was of any use at all was one that was heading as far as Yabello, a town just a hundred kilometres north.

Hoping against hope that there would be an overnighter to Addis from Yabello, we clambered aboard this local bus which was fairly yuck and we had the misfortune to be sitting on the back seats so we found ourselves more crammed in than is usual. It took a good five hours to get to Yabello, but at least the road was now sealed (well done Ethiopia, one less mark for Kenya, methinks). We seem to have found ourselves back in the realm of ubiquitous checkpoints, but we only had a few minor problems with the police, and we managed to get all the way to our destination without paying a bribe.

Arriving in Yabello around sunset, we found that there was no bus until tomorrow. I think Matt was just happy to see a fairly nice hotel (three days of The Odyssey will do that to a mortal man), but ha ha it was full and so we wound up hiring a tent (for more than the cost of a room, I might add) and camping for the night on the strangely verdant grounds of the hotel. (Verdant because it was watered pretty much continuously which was a bit odd considering THERE’S A DROUGHT ON, but hey-ho the grass seemed happy enough.)

That night we met a couple of fellow backpackers, Silvia from Swizerland and Asier from Spain. They had been touring around Africa for 16 months now (blimey!), and their favourite place was Madagascar (told you it was good!). They’d be joining us on the bus tomorrow up to Addis so we shared a couple of beers and arranged to meet for the bus at 6am.