Love Africa Read online

  Dedication

  To my camerado

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Frontispiece

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Epigraph

  One: Ithaca, 1990

  Two: The World, 1992

  Three: Evanston, 1993

  Four: Addis Ababa, 1994

  Five: Central Florida, 1998

  Six: Mazar-i-Sharif, 2002

  Seven: Baghdad, 2004

  Eight: Zanzibar, 2004

  Nine: Nairobi, 2006

  Ten: Somalia, 2006

  Eleven: East and Central Africa, 2007

  Twelve: The Ogaden Desert, 2007

  Thirteen: Nairobi, 2007

  Fourteen: Nairobi, 2009

  Fifteen: The World, Now

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  The biggest stories often start with a scrap of paper, a phone number and an obviously fake name. The first hint of this story came from my friend Louis, a French diplomat. Louis was a good source. He had wavy hair, a big, intelligent face, and a weakness for cinnamon liqueur, tall African women, and conspiracy theories. We were sitting on the balcony at Trattoria, an Italian restaurant on a bustling street in downtown Nairobi, having lunch. Most diplomats stayed away from bustling streets—and downtown Nairobi—so Trattoria afforded us a reliable degree of anonymity. We might have stuck out, two mzungus in the heart of the city, looking at each other across a table set with oil and vinegar and a red carnation peeking out of a chipped vase, but no one knew who we were. From where we sat, we could see the taxis and 4x4s edging past curbs painted in black and white. Crowds of people moved through the streets—university students chatting, holding armfuls of books, butchers in white coats, newspaper vendors balancing stacks of papers on their heads, lawyers from the nearby courthouse exchanging greetings in the distinctive Kenyan fashion, arms relatively straight as they shook hands, still clasping each other for a few moments as they chatted. In the doorways of the banks and forex bureaus leaned watchmen with wooden clubs tucked under their arms. They eyed the street cautiously. It was the daily Nairobi churn, lit up by clear sunshine beaming off the storefronts and windshields.

  Louis picked up his linen napkin, folded it into quadrants in a practiced European way, and blotted his lips, red from arrabbiata sauce. He gazed off.

  “Who knows what’s going on in the Ogaden,” he said, which meant, coming from Louis, something was going on in the Ogaden.

  When I got back to the office, I called around to aid workers and human rights people who might know something about the Ogaden Desert, the poorest, most remote part of Ethiopia. That led to a meeting with a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend in a flyblown café in Nairobi’s Eastlands where I could have easily disappeared. A wispy Somali man named Abdi Farah sat across from me, close enough for me to smell the frankincense smoke he used to perfume his clothes. It was a light but unmistakable scent that cut through the café’s other smells of sweat, French fries, and roasting goat meat. He had bright, playful eyes and scars on his cheeks. We were mutually suspicious; we also needed something from each other. Abdi Farah leaned toward me and scribbled out a name and number on the back of a faded café receipt. “When you get to Addis,” he said, “call this guy. Tell him Bob sent you.”

  Before I allowed myself to get too excited, I did a little more research. From a human rights contact of mine, I learned the Ogaden rebels were extremely well armed. Just the week before, I had banged out a quick story about how this same outfit had attacked a government oil field and killed seventy-five, but by the standards of this region, that hadn’t immediately registered as major news. Now I knew, from a military source, that the Ethiopian government was receiving covert help from the Americans. The Ethiopian army had sealed off the entire Ogaden Desert and was burning down villages and massacring civilians. It wouldn’t be easy getting in, the source said; there were checkpoints everywhere. That made up my mind.

  As I heaped my gear into a pile in the middle of the office floor—my satellite phone, my Internet transmitter, my bug sprays and mosquito nets and notebooks and cords—my hands were shaking from a combination of excitement and dread, though at times like these I honestly couldn’t distinguish between the two. I could see the story: secret atrocities; clandestine American involvement; an underdog war, with a religious edge (the Ethiopians were predominantly Christian, the rebels Somali and Muslim).

  Several days later, my wife, Courtenay, and I checked over our shoulders before ducking into a taxi in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital. She perched the small bag with video equipment on her knees. We were headed off on a long drive east, toward the Ogaden. The road threaded through the cool misty highlands and flattened out into dry, fruitless plains. For two days we drove, until the lights of Jijiga, the last big town before you hit the desert, disappeared behind us.

  Then we started walking.

  We had a guide, Musa, a college student working undercover for the rebels. My first words to him were: “Bob says hello.” We followed Musa up sandy hills, down sandy hills, through swirling rivers the color of chocolate, the water warm and rich with sediment, strangely soft against our skin. The sky was coated with stars as we moved stealthily through profusions of bushes that bloomed in the dark and yielded a smell like lemongrass and basil that clung to our nostrils and our wet, sticky clothes.

  When we finally reached the rebel outpost, located on a small hilltop, Musa took us back to the radio “room.” It was a single wire twisted around a thorn tree connected to a crackly CB. There we met the rebel leader in this part of the desert, who also used a nom de guerre: Commander Peacock. He was squatting on the ground, holding the transmitter in his left hand, shouting in guttural Somali, clad in cracked old boots and disintegrating camouflage. When he saw us, he slowly stood.

  “Welcome to the war,” he said.

  Now, at this point, if you’re wondering if we were absolutely insane to march out into the middle of the desert and place our lives in the hands of a band of freshly bloodstained outlaws led by a man named Commander Peacock, I can offer an explanation: the transitive property of trust. Reporters deposit their lives in it all the time. People I’d trusted had hooked me up with people they’d trusted who hooked me up with people they’d trusted. Peacock and I were simply two terminal points on a long line drawn by trust.

  This is one of the things I’ve experienced most deeply in Africa, and I’ve felt it from Khartoum to Kinshasa, from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic: that chain of connections, the surprising openness, the ease of movement—and I’m not talking about going from A to B, because it’s still hard as hell getting most anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa. I’m talking about movement across worlds. There’s this notion, lived just about every day out here, that nothing’s easy but anything’s possible. I had been dazzled by my first hit when I was eighteen, captivated by the spirit, the energy, the differences, the feel. I realize now that those words conjure up nothing specific in anyone else’s head, but behind them are some of the brightest memories of my life: walking along Lake Malawi holding a stranger’s calloused hand, moving through villages with packs of people, the sandy paths littered with mango peels, feeling so connected to strangers it was like there was a set of jumper cables running between us.

  It was this feeling that made me hop around from newspaper to newspaper for more than ten years until I got the one job I had always wanted, East Africa bureau chief for the New York Times (it’s a lofty title; there were no other correspondents for thousands of miles). I was put in charge of news from a dozen countries, a huge chunk of territory lying across Africa’s waist. And I had a camerado to help me decipher it, process it, survive it. To my surprise and joy, Courtenay had retooled from public defender to video journalist, which meant the two of us could go anywhere a scrap of paper or a fake name could take us. Whatever I had in my heart, I was now doing it.

  We followed Commander Peacock to the edge of the camp. He pointed his rifle out at the desert and said, with the slightest flicker of amusement in his eyes: “If they put ambush, never run.” He patted his hand down, to mean “lie flat.” Courtenay and I exchanged a quick glance. We’d covered a lot of rebels—rebels terrorizing the hills of eastern Congo, fighting for autonomy in Darfur, shelling the towns of Burundi. This region, overly militarized during the Cold War and then basically dumped by the West when it ended, has more than its fair share of antigovernment feeling. But Commander Peacock seemed different. He had a gravelly voice aged far beyond his twenty-seven years and dusty dreads growing out of a receding hairline. He was tall and slightly bent, with questions coming out of questions.

  “Mista Jifri, how is your condition?” he’d ask me over the next several days, and when I’d say I was fine, even if my feet throbbed from all the walking, he’d let loose:

  “Mista Jifri, are you creationist or evolutionist?”

  “Mista Jifri, why Mexico too poor. It next to the US, no?”

  “Mista Jifri, how does car insurance work?”

  I was really only able to answer the first one.

  We covered at least a hundred miles, looking for the Ethiopians looking for us. Peacock appeared to know where he was going. He sometimes flashed me a goofy sideways grin that seemed to acknowledge that being a rebel fighter loping through the desert was a quixotic way to spend one’s life, but fuck it, it was interesting. He spoke passionately
and repeatedly about creating an independent homeland for his people where the oil and gas resources went to build schools and the children’s bellies weren’t swollen with worms—standard rebel fantasies. The rebels were eager for ink, which is why they had invited us out here, but I knew what they were up against. The Ethiopians were one of Africa’s most ruthless regimes. They had MiGs, helicopter gunships, tens of thousands of infantrymen, and now the CIA helping them too. As I trudged behind Peacock, trying to keep up with him and scribble in my notebook and not trip on a rock, I dashed out, “Heavily armed dreamers.”

  Courtenay was impressed. “Look at these guys,” she said. “They’re carrying all of our shit, they’re happy we’re here, they’re blowing up people, but at the same time, they’re so nice.”

  I’m sure she did like them, but in that comment there was a subtle condemnation of me. We had been dealing with some painful fragments of our past, and even though we still shared moments of tenderness, that faith that two people draw from, and share from, was nearly gone. It had seemed as if going on this trip would recement our bonds, or maybe tear us apart. Some couples have a baby to save a marriage. We went into the Ogaden. It was a gamble, not made any easier by the hunger, the heat, the danger, and most especially the thirst, a very greedy thirst that stalked our every step. We walked for hours most days through thick thorn trees whose bone-white needles constantly cut us, the sun burning down, searing every inch of our exposed skin. The only water was the rare stream or mud puddle, and there was only so much we could carry. At each day’s end we were left with empty bottles and splitting headaches, our pants streaked with white salt stains, our urine like syrup.

  “You need to do something about this,” Courtenay said to me one blazing afternoon.

  “What do you want me to do?” I croaked back. “I’m thirsty too.”

  “Don’t be a pussy,” she hissed. “Do something.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. But get me some fucking water!”

  The soldiers around us kept their eyes riveted to the horizon. They pretended they hadn’t heard her. It grew so quiet, all I could hear was everyone’s boots digging into the sand and the clinking of bullets in bandoliers bouncing on backs. This was a nomadic culture where women were dutifully wrapped in cloth all day like marble statues, never to be unveiled; they spoke when spoken to, if they were spoken to. Every once in a while, they were beaten like dusty rugs.

  I walked to the back of the line and sheepishly asked Peacock if he had any extra water. It was a serious taboo out here to ask for another man’s water. Peacock smiled knowingly and poured me most of his bottle. I jogged obediently back up to Courtenay, who took it from me, closed her eyes, and tipped it back like a can of beer. She handed me back the empty bottle and walked off. I wondered if that counted for anything in her mind.

  This wasn’t the only reason we decided to leave three days later, but I knew I shouldn’t push it. We had spoken to dozens of rebels and villagers, collecting accounts of every abuse imaginable, and we’d probably get only more of the same. Soon enough the rebels might actually run into the Ethiopians, and who knew how that would go. It was time. Courtenay had gotten her video; me, my notes. My dirty-paged notebook detailed everything that I’d heard and overheard. It contained maps, organizational charts, code names and numbers. It was like a guidebook to the insurgency.

  As we said good-bye, everyone was quiet. Peacock assembled the rebels into two straight lines. We exchanged a few final words.

  “Peacock, man, if you ever come to Nairobi, I’ll take care of you.”

  We both laughed. It was an absurd thing to say; Peacock said he wanted to die out here, and there was more than a good chance he would. But it was all I could think of. And I did mean it.

  We hugged, my cheek against his tattered uniform. And Peacock being Peacock, he somehow arranged a dump truck that was working in the area to give us a lift to the nearest town.

  We hopped out at Degehabur, a smudge of a settlement on the desert’s edge, about an hour away. The main road was dirt, lined with slanted shacks. Courtenay was wearing her yellow linen shirt and a pair of shapeless flesh-colored nylon camping pants that we called the “sexy pants.” We walked up to the gate of a guesthouse, one story, about twenty lonely rooms.

  The proprietor took my wad of moist bills and handed me a tiny key that looked like it fit a suitcase lock. He barely said a word, faintly smiling. I was so pleased we had made it this far, I wasn’t thinking straight. And I was still new—I hadn’t been in this job even a year, I didn’t know the contours of this region or the brutality and trickery pooled in forgotten places like Degehabur.

  I would’ve never guessed that as Courtenay and I crossed the courtyard, the comforting sound of her nylon pants swishing behind me, our new proprietor friend was slipping out the back door. And as we plopped down the bags in our room and I began to rummage through my backpack, I hadn’t the faintest intuition that a platoon of Ethiopian soldiers from a nearby army base was storming out of their barracks.

  “Hey,” Courtenay said. “Where’d you put the shampoo?”

  “I’ll find it,” I said back. “Let me just take a quick leak.”

  “And please get something to wash some socks in. Mine are disgusting.”

  I stepped into the courtyard, searching for a plastic bucket. Right as I spotted one in the corner, a green pickup packed with soldiers zoomed through the gate.

  Three men jumped out, their tightly laced boots hitting the pavement hard.

  “You!” one of them shouted in clear English. “Get in.”

  He shouldered his assault rifle and shook it wildly in my face. My mouth went dry.

  “Get in truck!”

  More soldiers clattered into the courtyard. They carried assault rifles, belt-fed machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades. They were probably no older than Peacock’s troops, young twenties, but they looked like grown men, well-fed, crisp camouflage, none of that childlike smileyness in their eyes. They formed a tight ring around me, weapons drawn, and closed in. I didn’t know what was happening, but I knew one thing: they were in that bulging-eyed, unreachable state human beings morph into right before they kill. If I opened my mouth, they’d shoot me. If I didn’t move quickly enough, they’d shoot me. If I moved too quickly, they’d shoot me.

  I climbed into their truck.

  Good things take time, growing, maturing; they need tending. Think of a garden of orchids, or for that matter, a marriage. Bad things happen fast, like a bone snapping. Courtenay stepped out of the room seven seconds after I had left it to find me encircled by a platoon of Ethiopian soldiers, the same ones the rebels were fighting, rifles raised at my chest.

  “What the hell is going—”

  They grabbed her by the arm and yanked her toward the pickup.

  The soldiers jumped in, guns banging against the sides. They ordered us to sit on the floor, in the back half of the truck. I kept trying to tell myself that maybe they’d just drive us to a police station, lock us up for a few hours, shake us down for a bribe, then let us go. Just as long as they leave our—but no, that happened too. Before the driver gunned the engine and the guesthouse disappeared in a swirl of dust, the soldiers ransacked our room, ripping our bags out. We weren’t headed to a police station. I started to feel faint. And I still had to pee.

  I glanced over at Courtenay. She was wearing a red bandanna around her neck, like a scout. The Ethiopians stood above her, rifles angled at her skull.

  The truck idled for another moment and then jerked forward with a roar. These men could kill us, they could do whatever they wanted to us; any illusion of control over our own lives, our own bodies, had been wiped out in an instant. We were hurtling down a bumpy road to an unknown destination, the gray, gravelly desert slipping past us, and I started to hemorrhage energy simply trying not to freak out. And still I was freaking out. I had gotten Courtenay into this, and now I couldn’t get her out of it. If we survived, would she lose even more faith in us? Was this where my love of Africa had taken me? I know that a privileged white man falling suddenly—and inexplicably—in love with Africa is a cliché. So much so the French have a term for it, le mal d’Afrique, the Africa disease. It puts you under a spell and/or kills you. Maybe so. But I had worked hard to get here, and it took half my life.