‘Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path, and leave a trail.’ –Henry David Thoreau
There was a definite red line on my map. If I had shown you that part of Zambia that connected northern Malawi with western Tanzania on my map, you would have agreed that you were looking at a definite red line. You would have also acknowledged that a red line on this map meant a road. That’s how you would have known exactly how to get from one place to the next. You would have followed the red line.
The red line on this map wouldn’t have helped you, however. Even if it was a road, and it wasn’t, there was no traffic. None. The guy that drew that red line on the map should have been fired. Before he drew it.
I spent my last 8 kwacha on a 1918 German East African coin, while eating my rice porridge, and drinking the tea that the kitchen girl had put far too much sugar in, after she had put in far too much condensed milk. I was carbohydrate-loaded enough to begin my hitchhiking effort through that finger of Zambia that was supposed to take me into western Tanzania. I said bye-bye to the Rest House owner and my little gnomes, and walked to the Zambian border, the top of the red sun turning yellow on my right arm. It was going to be a hot one.
My first insight should have arrived with the closed Customs office, and the Immigration guy who had to fetch him from his hut.
“Not a lot of traffic through here, neh?” I asked.
“Ehhhh.” They both said, the way they agree with you in Africa, without accurately committing themselves to the actual meaning of the question. They simply want you to get the answer you’re looking for. My second insight should have arrived with the word ‘shortcut,’ uttered behind me as I left.
I began to walk and, as I continued past fewer people and no vehicles, I began to irrevocably commit to the red line. The heat that shimmered off the distant ground was mirage-grade. The smell of smoke from unseen far off fires hung heavily off my face. I walked. Every infrequent rondavel I passed was usually empty or, if occupied, produced slow lazy waving black arms from the shade, like anyone they saw would have been a celebrity. Or maybe it was a warning. I walked more. My water ran low as the sun rose high. I eventually ran out and began to scout for a well. I was so parched, I couldn’t clear my throat enough to ask the emaciated old man if I could have some amanzi. I just pulled the bucket up and tipped its muddy contents into my canteen. The smell was fecal; black things moved within it. I thought for a second or two about cholera and bilharzia. By the third second, I had swallowed it all, and was pulling up another bucket. My throat cleared enough for me to thank my benefactor. He waved a weak wave and turned back into his rondavel. I walked the red line in front of me. My stomach began to churn faster than my steps. It was probably the water, I thought. I decided to stop thinking and just walked. A small benevolence occurred, in the form of only the shade I found near the red line all day. Under a thorny acacia, an ancient black lady brought me some biltong and mealie meal dip. Dried jerky was almost the last thing I needed, but I revived and, thanking her with a hoarse ‘Asante-sana,’ walked back out into the blast oven. My stomach cramped up in Swahili, and my legs cried back in sympathy. Gradually, as the rays of my torment grew longer and softer, I spied fires on hills in the distance. And vultures, now closer overhead. I looked at my map in the fading light. There were no villages marked along the ninety-two kilometers. There was supposed to have been a road. And there were no marked settlements. Maybe he got that wrong too. I kept walking.
The sun goes down quickly in Africa. Like a pinball spiraling into a hole. It was black in a minute. Then the noise started, first with insects and then working its way up the food chain. I’d been here before. But there was no Gwaii River Hotel to break my fall. I was on my own and, this time, it was Darkest Africa. My stomach growled, or maybe it was something else. I could still make out shadows of animals, bigger than my parent’s dog, darting in every direction, but so far, not in mine. I wasn’t thinking about the lions, although I could hear them. Lions were clean. I was thinking about the hyenas. Sneaky, filthy things, hyenas. Not like lions. I was humming to myself now. I was walking faster, but it wasn’t as if I was going anywhere. And then I was.
Off in the distance, on the right side of the red line, was a red dot. It was a fire. I walked and hummed a little louder. I could smell it, I could smell this fire. The hyenas were close, but I felt their hesitation, as I came to a path off the red line leading to the fire. I walked into the clearing singing ‘Stout-hearted Men.’ I was the only one glad to see me.
****
Big men were sitting around the fire. At least until I surprised them. Some of them had big sticks with sharp bits at the end. The ones that didn’t ran off to get some.
“Anyone here speak English?” I asked.
“I do, a little,” said one. That would be fine.
I told him about the red line and how some men lie. He told me he knew all about that. He had worked in the mines in South Africa for twenty years. It was usually white men, he added. I agreed with him, as I believed most mapmakers were, indeed, white men. He introduced himself as ‘Steven.’ I told Steven I was very pleased to meet him and, unlike many of the other white men who had lied to him in his past, I meant it with all sincerity.
The other big men seemed gladder to see me now, seeing that I hadn’t harmed Steven, or brought them any other bad omens. Steven asked if I would like to spend the night in his small village. I told him it would be a pleasure.
He called out to one of the rondavels, and two women emerged cautiously. He gave instructions in Swahili, and they reentered the dwelling, returning with short stick sweeping brooms. They went over to and into another round mud hut, and I could hear sweeping. I just sat by the fire through all of this, nodding every so often in the direction of the remaining big men, who I thought might still have had some reservations. What, after all, would have been the issue? One moment you’re sitting with your mates around a fire after a hard day in the middle of Africa and, in the next, some white guy crashes in out of nowhere. I wouldn’t have been terribly impressed either.
The women left the hut and Steven beckoned me to enter. I was amazed. I had never been inside this rondavel. The first thing that hit me was how cool the air was, then how clean. There were painted colored designs on internal architecturally molded clay features with various obvious functions. There was a clay bed base covered with a straw mat, an integral clay side table, a clay fire pit, and clay storage area. Steven invited me to sit on the straw mat. The women returned with food, in the form of a corncob, and rice with a little tomato- all of which they sprinkled with sugar, in a flourish. I was humbled and relieved. I reached into my Cape Mart diver’s bag and pulled out a book. It was Houseboy by Ferdinand Oyono. I presented it to Steven, with my thanks. He talked while I ate. I asked who the chief of his village was. He said he was. He told me I had walked forty kilometers that day. He told me it was a long way, and that he hadn’t believed me at first. He said I should sleep. I’m not sure I heard him. I don’t remember him leaving.
It was the softness of the whispers and suffused light through the door that woke me next morning. Steven shook both my hands together out along the path I came in on. The men stayed back a bit, but all the women stood up close, with crossed arms and a foot turned out sideways, leaning on one leg.
“Tanzania is fifty kilometers that way.” He pointed upwards with his right hand, like he was trying to remember. I thanked them and headed out onto the red line. When I turned back, a hundred meters later, they were all still in the same position, just making sure.
After an hour I had passed only one other person- a boy riding slowly on a bicycle with two flat tires. It was the only vehicle I was to ever to see on the red line. When the air went from bake to broil, I begin to sweat but then, thinking better of it, couldn’t be bothered. I walked instead. The water from the rare well I encountered tasted like the dysentery that would follow over the next two days. I ate the cream of tartar fruit from the Baobabs to ease my thirst. They were fat here, but the tens of thousands of gallons of water, contained in their thirty-foot diameter trunks, were otherwise inaccessible. Some were almost eighty feet high and thousands of years old but, with no rings to count, you would have needed radiocarbon dating to be certain. I had left my cyclotron at home.
In the middle of the afternoon, I sought shelter in a small collection of huts, hearing from one of the young boys that there wasn’t another before the border. They made me welcome. They provided what they didn’t have.
The clouds on the horizon next morning were coming to fetch me. Big black rollers out of the west. I thanked my hosts and set off at a quick march towards the storm. When the rain came, I could have been back in Nicaragua. It was impossible to find your hand in front of you in the downpour. The only advantage was that I didn’t even have to look for privacy when the cramps and diarrhea hit. There was no one there and, even if there had been, they wouldn’t have been able to see me through the deluge. It was a different rain than in Nicaragua in one respect. It didn’t want to stop. Finally, after two hours of torrential falling water, the sun steamed it all away. I was soaked below the skin. My fingertips had those white pine tree folds that used to amuse me in the bath when I was a kid. My boots left behind small bubbles with each additional step down the red line. It was late in the day when I finally reached the town on the Zambian side of the frontier. I made a mental note to modify the exceptional Rule of Hitchhiking: You always get a ride. Except when you don’t.
The officials would have been happy to see anyone, but it was also Independence Day, and they offered me a tumbler of local brew to commemorate our arrivals. It took the edge off the ordeal, until it met the cramps in my midsection. I pulled my passport out of my waist belt. It was sopping wet. They stamped it anyway and wished me luck. I was about to need some. Tanzanian immigration was munching sugarcane. He chewed quickly with his mouth wide open, stopping only long enough to tear off another few inches with his molars, like a beaver making a dam.
“Eh, your passport. Eet ees wet,” he said, somewhere between mastication and expectoration.
“I know,” I said. “It’s been raining.”
“You must take bettah care of eet,” he chastised. I told him I would try.
“Your passport eet ees wet and eet cannot be used. You must go back to Zambia.” Great.
He took a ten-dollar bill, as wet as my passport. I asked him where I could change some of my other wet money.
“The petrol station has the best black-market rate,” he said, munching.
I went to the petrol station and was escorted into a room in the back. Behind the desk was a black acromegalic giant, in a sports jacket the size of a tent. The black-market rate was as good as the sugarcane extortion official had said. I checked into the Mwasonga Hotel, the only accommodation in Tunduma. I went into the communal toilet. I had just walked ninety kilometers with dysentery and now had shivering chills. Underneath all that in front of me was supposed to be two footprints and a hole in the ground, but I couldn’t see it, and I was just too intimidated to try. I had already travelled one road that wasn’t there. My father told me first. Sometimes you just must keep it inside.
…..
Image: Dall-E/Adobe Spark remixed