The search for the source of the river Nile can be summarized thus:

Richard Burton and John Speke started from Zanzibar, in search of a “great lake in the mountains of the moon”, from where the Nile was said to originate.

The Egyptians believed that Isis, the goddess of fertility, sister and wife to Osiris the god of the dead, sat at the headwaters of the Nile. Ptolemy, the Greek geographer, placed Isis roughly in the middle of the African content, a place with a large lake, surrounded by snow capped mountains.  This two thousand year old Ptolemaic inaccuracy was the map guiding the two explorers.

They reached Lake Tanganyika, now in modern day Tanzania.  On the way, Burton mowed down a few locals, and obsessively took “measurements” of the men of various tribes along the way (the measuring instruments he had perfected while serving in India).  Speke, the more diplomatic one, coerced and bribed and also studied the flora and fauna. Burton was tall and built like a prize fighter. He carried deep scars on his cheeks, where once a Somali javelin had pierced him. Speke was shorter and deaf in one ear (a beetle had crawled in, and he had dug it out using a knife).  They were buddies, on a casual first name basis ( “Dick” and “Jack”).

At Tanganyika, Burton fell ill and dropped out.  Speke was going blind in one eye, but pushed further north with a small party, and reached what the locals knew as the “Sea of Ukwere”. He christened it Lake Victoria and promptly headed back to England, where he grandly announced the “discovery” of the Source of the Nile – Isis was unveiled.  Until then Burton had been the famous adventurer, the man with machismo, but now found himself out of the limelight. 

Speke was given funds to go on a longer exploratory trip. The slighted Burton made some noises that Speke was mistaken, and that the Nile really originated further south at Lake Tanganyika.  Few people listened. He grew a long beard, and went on a sabbatical to Mormon mecca – Salt Lake City. Here Burton quoted the Ancient Mariner upon sighting another lake – the great Salt Lake – ‘Water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink’.  After expressing his admiration for the practice of polygamy among the Mormons, he sailed back to England and married a staunch Catholic.

Speke navigated the Nile, reached Lake Victoria and named the waterfalls near the source as “Ripon Falls” after the main backer of the trip -- a Lord Ripon (who would later go on to become a Governor General of British India).  Speke returned from his successful second voyage – and Burton immediately challenged him to a one-on-one debate on the matter of the true Source.  It was to be a “duel for the Nile”. But, while out shooting partridges, Speke accidentally shot himself.  Burton quietly spread a devious rumor that Speke had in fact, committed suicide.

The source in Jinja has a concrete plaque indicating the spot where Speke stood gazing at Lake Victoria and the Nile.  There is a neglected golf club next to it, in which the English writer Evelyn Waugh once drank a cup of tea and noted: “…the only course in the world which posts a special rule that the player may remove his ball from hippopotamus footprints….”  The hippos and resident crocodiles drowned after a dam was built across the Nile in 1954 at Ripon falls.

341 Comments for  The Source

The market in Lomut is weekly, on Saturdays.
A battery powered haircut is 20 shillings (a dollar = 73 shillings). A goat is 500 shillings (if you buy 50 its 300 a head). A second-hand t-shirt is 150 shillings (the ones with football team names go for 200). A pair of 5,000 mile sandals (made of truck tire) go for 50 shillings. Onions are 700 a sack. Bartering is acceptable. I bought a bar of home-made soap for 5 shillings ("Menengai" brand), and a small bag of crumbly snuff for 30 shillings. Many people visiting this market have never seen an Indian before. One man places his hand on my forehead and asks me: where do you come from? There is a heated discussion between him and another man. They conclude I am either from Canada or from Europe.

54 Comments for  Barber Shop in Lomut, West Pokot, Kenya

In the morning I walked to ‘taxi park’. Taxi Park is a giant coliseum at the confluence of 3 hills, and is the main bus terminus of Kampala.  A tout promised a departure in five minutes.  He kept checking his wrist-watch.  The watch was symbolic, the glass had long fallen off, and there were no hour or minute hands, merely a second hand which furiously ticked away. We left in fifteen minutes.

We were out of town in ten minutes, or less. A smirking man sat beside me, his suit was dusty and he stared straight at the windscreen, or perhaps at the dashboard shrine – shared by both the Madonna on one side, and a portrait of Bob Marley on the other. Country music (‘The coward of the county’) whistled through the speakers.

Out of Kampala, the low hills began, and they brought with them the aromatic smells of wet earth, and the sound of chirping sparrows. We stopped. A woman got on the bus, carrying marks of domestic violence – a foot covered in a plaster-cast and a black eye.  Her nails were painted red.  When I looked again, they were just broken and bloody. 

Next to her was a student with watery eyes.  He scribbled intently into a ruled notebook, keeping rhythm with the movement of the bus.  There were small blotches of ink on his shirt, I looked closely and the blotches were holes in the fabric.

The man next to me hadn’t been smirking at all, he had the same look now, but it was one of heroic suffering.  Like someone suffering from constipation.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked him.
‘I am very much ok sah’, he said, pausing and then said ‘I am praying’.
A bible lay open on his lap.
‘Repent!’ he said quite intensely, for he had been whispering until now, raising an arm and an eyebrow at no one in particular, ‘Admit your sin! And change your mind! Lest he smite you down….’

Ora et Labora -- ‘Pray and Work’-- has been a powerful Christian philosophy since the time of the Benedictine monks.  But when you couldn’t get much work, you tended to pray very hard.

His name was John, and he was training to be a preacher.
Because, people needed saving: ‘People have to get right with God.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the bible says so’ (John 3:3 - Except a man to be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God)
The bus staggered across a ridge and a small forest, and then parked outside a bar.  Its walls were burnt brick, and the roof was twisted sheet metal. A despondent Vervet monkey sat perched atop, eating a piece of sugarcane.  There was a billboard for ‘Tyson Waragi’ (Grappa di Uganda – the grappa of Uganda, a drunken Italian in Kampala had told me).  Men in stained overcoats grilled meat on charcoal braziers.

The student had no money, but he was going for his brother’s wedding in Jinja.  The tout slapped him in a fit of irritation, and made to kick him out of the bus. This made the passengers very cross. A cap was passed around for a collection, and the student’s bus fare was paid for with a heap of coins.  The student had lunch on me. He said he would be okay. The tout sulked.

We passed Mabira, a stretch of road cloaked by a dense tropical forest on both sides. It was past mid-day, but the lofty trees threw long shadows. John the preacher, revived by lunch, turned to evangelizing me, with small talk. My path to salvation could begin if I bought a book from him.
I looked at the book, and it had an alarming title: “Faith for Earth’s final hour”.  Faith was a leering man with a big bushy moustache posing on the back cover – someone by the name of Hal Lindsey.
‘If you are not with Him, you are with the Devil’ said John, trying his most lively marketing speech.

The stretch through the forest, and the preacher’s prattle reminded me of something, and I wrote in my notebook – paraphrasing Dante, Canto 1:
            “half-way upon the journey of our life,
            i found myself within a shadowy forest,
            for the straight pathway had been lost”

‘So you think, if I buy the book, I’ll be on the way to getting saved?’ I said turning to the trainee preacher.
‘Yes!’ he said, switching on his smirk.
‘But if you read John 2:12, Jesus himself says: “My house shall be one of prayer, but you are making it a den of thieves”… ’ – I said, reminding the preacher of the time when Jesus had lost his cool and started beating up people.  He had come to Jerusalem during Passover and found merchants and money lenders hawking livestock within the temple. 
“Merchants in the Temple!!!” -- he had yelled and whipped every one of the them without remorse.

The smirk was turned off again, and the preacher abandoned me.

I got off at a cross-road just after Owen-Falls dam. There was a broken signboard pointing to ‘Kenya’ in one direction, and ‘Rwanda’ in another. Rwanda, pointed towards a gas-station with an attached fast-food restaurant.  I walked to the town centre.

42 Comments for  Bus to Jinja

The government building was like a mausoleum. Reaching room no.28, meant climbing through a jumble of stairs and creeping past various idle and interrogative stares, to finally reach the sanctum sanctorum. The Ministry of Planning spans two buildings -- connected by a system of bridging staircases. It explains why the building has two identical 2nd floor addresses – 2 buildings mean 2 second floors.

Room no.28 was a steamy kitchen – an old man boiled water in a big sufuria.

Did I want some tea? He asked, very kindly.
"No, I am looking for Mr.____ ?"
"He is in room 28. The other Room 28"

I waited in the other Room 28. The red rexine sofa squeaked upon the slightest movement. So I sat very still, also because, I was watched over by the domineering bust of the president. It had a stout fiberglass torso – painted in shiny gold.

On my right were two men, reading the newspaper together. The excited topic of discussion was a prophecy by one of Uganda 's church leaders – the Holy Spirit had appeared to him in a dream, and warned that one of the contenders for president would die a horrible death. At the same time, the Holy Spirit had jumped into a rival Pastor's dream – this time urging his flock to vote for the president. Either way it was hopeless, the men concluded, there was nothing they could do.

On my left was a blonde-haired man who nodded ‘hello' with a French accent. He jabbed away earnestly, on the keyboard of a compact computer perched on his lap.
For a while, I flipped through the Kampala phonebook. It is a skinny volume, though the section for vices (‘Massage Parlor') in the Yellow Pages is much more bountiful and varied than Nairobi's. And Idi Amin is still a popular name.

The French man proved talkative. He spoke grandly of a ‘business plan' he was preparing for the government. It revolved around: the coffee plant, a mammal known as the civet cat which ate the coffee -- and the cat's droppings which apparently yielded great smelling coffee. Lots(‘beaucoup' ) of silver was at stake. The coup de grâce was a special machine to extract the coffee from the droppings ('remove the coffee from the sheeth' ).

That evening walking out of my regular coffee house, I stumbled and fell. A very short man with big arms patted me up, handing me my books and papers. He wore a battered motorcycle helmet. Before I could thank him, he skipped away, vaulting himself onto a parked contraption with dangerously sharp edges, three wheels and a handle bar. Within seconds he was gone, thundering away in a cloud of smoke, arm raised up in stately goodbye. I remembered then, he was the cripple who begged outside the coffee shop.

37 Comments for  Visitations and some Coffee

The escarpment is steep, and the steaming hissing engine finally gives up. The train lurches to a halt. Soon, a man dressed in semi-official clothing appears in the compartment. He is in a uniform, neither dirty nor clean, and on his feet are aging rubber slippers. "We are calling for another injin!" he says. There is an old man outside on the grass along the tracks. He is beating a stretched out sheep-skin.

72 Comments for  Rift Valley