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Red Nile
A Biography of the World's Greatest River
By Robert Twigger St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2013 Robert Twigger
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-5390-4
CHAPTER 1
Part One
NATURAL NILE
Beasts and beginnings
1 • The source
The strength of the crocodile is the water. Ugandan proverb
One should always begin at the beginning, and with a river that means the source. But where exactly is it? Despite, and maybe because of, a universal longing to 'find the source of the Nile', even now the exact location of the source is still disputed.
Searching for the real source of the Nile, in fact, is rather like visiting Stratford and discovering that the commercial attraction known as 'Shakespeare's Birthplace' is simply a nineteenth-century invention, and that, in reality, Shakespeare has several competing birthplaces. (According to the most informed, the real site of the bard's birthplace is now currently a car park.)
In antiquity the twin sources of the Nile – the Blue Nile and the White Nile – were often confused when it came to naming the true source. The Blue rises in Ethiopia, the White in central Africa. The Blue Nile, in the wet summer season, provides 85 per cent of the water that crosses the Sahara Desert and enters Egypt. But in the dry winter season the Blue Nile's contribution is negligible, less than 5 per cent, and the White Nile is the main provider. So in summer you could argue the Blue Nile is the source and in winter the White Nile.
Another definition, more acceptable, is that the source is simply the furthest point on the river from its end, from the delta on the Mediterranean where it enters the sea. The White Nile is by far the longest contributory branch and its official start is where it leaves Lake Victoria at the town of Jinja.
But rivers feed Lake Victoria too and the longest of these is the Kagera. A river of considerably greater girth and power than many European rivers, it makes the Thames look rather small and unimportant. Though it doesn't bear the Nile's name the Kagera is, in a sense, the mother to the Nile; 450 miles long, it is a mighty river in its own right. It is navigable in its lower stretches, but higher up it weaves through deep clefts and swampy patches occluded with papyrus. Higher still it takes on the vivacity of a mountain stream as it drains the western lake mountains that extend from the Ruwenzori range, known in antiquity as the Mountains of the Moon.
So the true source of the great River Nile, arguably, and most do argue this, is the source of the Kagera river. It was this that I had come in search of. It wasn't the first of my Nile explorations – I had been travelling up and down the river for some years, ever since moving to Cairo in 2004 – but it felt like the start of the current phase, 'the Nile-book phase' as I had come to think of it.
But the complications multiplied. The Kagera has several sources of its own, mostly in damp and hard-to-get-to forests. And river measuring – from maps and satellite pictures – is never an exact science. Do you, for example, measure along the inside curve, the middle or the outside? Presumably the middle. But what about when it went around islands – islands, which, in the case of the vast Sudd swamp in Sudan that the Nile traverses, actually moved?
On a previous expedition I had been involved in the tricky task of measuring long snakes, pythons that refused to straighten out. Pythons are strong – the best you can expect in terms of straightness is a wavy line, like a river; finding their length as they squirm is more art than science despite the technology of exact measurement.
A 2006 expedition that had gone up the Nile in powered rubber boats equipped with hang-glider wings for flying over rapids had measured their route as they went. From this practical rather than theoretical measuring we get the official length of 4,175 miles – 6,719 kilometres. This expedition had also made a diligent search for the furthest source they could find. It was this source I had decided to seek out.
It should have been rather momentous, plodding towards this most sought-after of places. Think of the history, I kept telling myself, but here, in the Rwandan Nyungwe Forest, the dripping Nyungwe Forest, I sensed nothing significant at all. At first. Not even the troop of olive baboons that sidled away could interest me. 'Them scared of bushmeat hunters,' I was told.
I thought I knew about rivers. I had followed one of Canada's longest, the Peace, from its finish in Lake Athabasca to its start in the pine-clad Rockies. I'd written about my three-season journey against its vicious current in my book Voyageur. I say vicious because the Peace river was plain mean compared to the strong but benign Fraser. Every river has a moral character, strange but true, and you find it at your peril usually by going against it, drinking it, pissing in it, watching it in its moods of repose and anger. If you ride with a river it's harder to get to know it. It's the same with people – you only find out the real person when you come up against them, anger them or they anger you, or you strive together against some joint adversity. If you submit to another and just get carried along you're more likely to go to sleep than learn anything. Not that I was going to do anything as crass as follow it geographically from start to finish, or finish to start as that group of adventurous folk did using powered hang gliders to jump over the rapids. I suspected that this would be about the dullest way to approach a river as rich historically as it was geographically. My own experience as a latterday explorer making long and difficult journeys where others hadn't been (in recent memory at least) was that the very difficulty in remaining authentic – ignoring handy lifts from pick-ups, stops in towns, going on local tours – actually kept you from interacting with, and keenly observing, the country you travelled through. It was like the whitewater rafting I was later to do during my Nile journey. Every raft experience was more like the previous one than different. The guides sought to turn every evening into a beach party with beer, boom-box and barbie tickling your senses with the scent of meat fat crackling over the glowing embers. The more a trip becomes a physical test the more you have to ignore the non-physical – everything else, really. But the Nile wasn't just a series of Class 5 rapids separated by a lot of boring flat water, it was a river of immense human significance.
At first. But just as I glimpsed the puddle that I knew immediately was the source a strange sense of contentment came over me. It wasn't the exultation I had anticipated long ago when making plans, buying tickets, telling people. Rather it was a sense of wondrous contentment, and, at the risk of ridicule, it was not unlike the sentiment I first felt visiting Legoland. The sheer size of the tiny Legoland world (all built out of Lego – mountains, towns, cities, harbours, jungles) on my first visit made me feel awe mixed with cosiness, a kind of pet-owners' generosity of spirit – a world in your palm, but still a world.
And the source of all this was a small puddle in the middle of the jungle in Rwanda. I had forced our guide, called Pius, using my cheap yellow eTrex GPS, which I already thought of as a dear friend, to follow a route he thought both improbable and pointless, through strange bushes equipped with a thousand thorns and up and down ditches and over rotten logs soft as pie crust to get to the spot explorers earlier that year had decided was the real true source of the Nile – in their eyes – as it was the longest distance from its end in the Egyptian delta that flows into the Mediterranean. I sat by the puddle and produced to great interest and some hilarity my secret weapon, my piece of business, my magic. Si-105 was a mini-pump filter that was guaranteed to clean fifty-five litres (twelve gallons) before it was used up. It was about the size of a big tube of toothpaste with rubber pipes that allowed one to suck up water from a tree bole, for example, or a handy crevice. The great thing about Si-105 was the built-in filter over the sucking end – it sort of flared out and had a micromesh net over it. This stopped the thing getting clogged, something that had happened with previous pump water filters I had used. The idea was simple, diabolically simple – I would drink my way down the Nile, imbibing it at every point of interest, historical, psychological, mystical and any other significance I could think of. I'd be able to make fifty-five samples, more than enough. I hoped I wouldn't get ill – but hell, no pain, no gain, and I knew of no other way to discover the river in all its pride and glory. Except one – swim it. I already had my sweaty Gore-Tex boots off and was dangling my toes in the slime. I removed them before I started pumping, recalling a story told about Orde Wingate, the enigmatic Abyssinian campaigner who insisted on rushing to the head of his military column when they arrived at a water hole – and stripping off and dunking his behind in the water ... before any of his men could take a drink. But that was at the other source – the Blue Nile.
The water came out clear and enticing. I thought Pius and his friend Peter would be vaguely insulted. Instead they gave broad grins and were keen to share the half-litre or so of liquid I managed to pump into my Sigg water bottle, another friend (you cling to travel kit, turn the everyday into the iconic as a way of normalising the new and unexpected).
It had been my ambition like the venerable Roger Deakin, who swam his way across England, to swim and drink my way down the Nile. I stuck to it, for a while, and then it began to seem a bit silly. Why risk getting ill or eaten just for a book? It served its purpose I suppose, it got me moving, really looking at the river and seeing it as the main source of water and movement for the entire region – since earliest times until this century, when air travel and mineral water served up from wells drilled deep into the Nubian aquifer began to take over. And even now it is really only the rich who can afford to ignore the Nile's bounty.
I intended to meander. That was important. I eschewed, out of epistemic necessity, the purely linear way of approaching the river; that left the vaguely historical, the psychogeographical and the purely personal and meandering. History was definitely my major resource. Psychogeography was less promising; while I applauded the works and methods of the psychogeographers, I knew such occidental urbanity would be chewed up and utterly masticated by the immensity of Africa. As for the neat interpretations of psychology, they tend to become dwarfed and tortured into mythology when they leave the comfortable confines of the Western city, the cosy suburbanalities of the campus. What sort of psychological analysis can one apply to Lord's Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony, who had his men remove the lips of children who displeased him? Or to Napoleon invading Egypt in 1798 with his sights set on Persia, India and the world? Or to the first Sultana of Egypt, Shajarat al-Durr – who murdered one husband in his bath and pretended another was still alive when he wasn't? The personal and meandering had always served me surprisingly well in the face of other such enormities. I hoped, with such a long meandering river in my sights, it would serve me well again.
2 • A high-speed journey down the Nile
Where there is the Nile they do not wash by using water drip by drip. Egyptian proverb
The problem with any book attempting to tell both a geographical and a historical tale, or a linked series of tales, is that geography starts at the source (if we are talking about rivers) and ends at the sea, while history can zip up and down the river a couple of times each generation. Certain spots attract more history than others – Cairo, obviously, and also the dark jungles of the upper Nile – but, whatever way you cut it, any history of the Nile involves knowing a lot of geography before you can even start. Otherwise, as one zips up and down the river, following, say, General Horatio Kitchener on his mission to avenge Gordon and at the same time steal the Nile from the French pushing in from the Congo, one needs to know where one is. The names of places. The rapids, waterfalls and tributaries. Maps help a lot, and we have included a few in this book, but you still need a solid mental picture of the river before we start. Hence the instant jetboat and Cessna plane descent, taking, I hope, no more than ten pages and keeping you fully engaged in what is actually a very, very long river with its fair share of longueurs between all the very exciting bits.
First, for those who have never seen the Nile, what is it like? I'll never forget the disappointment I felt on seeing the mighty Mississippi in New Orleans. Muddy, dull, forgettable. It didn't help that I had just been mugged on the viewing platform. My main thought was: it ain't that wide. I was expecting something like the Brahmaputra – so wide you can't see the other side, something more reminiscent of a great lake or the sea than a river. Nope, the Mississippi is ordinary, like the Thames at Deptford, the eminently missable Mississippi. (I'm talking about New Orleans here – it widens out elsewhere.) In Cairo, when the Nile filters around mid-river islands, it too can look rather narrow. But get down to the riverside and the grandeur, the stately calm of the river, is all too apparent. This is a river that has been places – and with its unhurried air it seems not a jot tired of its journey, not yet at least. It is a fast river, a continent-crossing river – fast compared to a big English river. There are parts where the river widens out – Lake Kiyoga north of Lake Victoria, in stretches in Sudan and Upper Egypt – but this is never a river like the Congo and the Amazon, rivers watered along their entire length by tropical downpours. The Nile spends most of its time crossing desert or dry savannah – it is less of a drain than a life-bringing irrigation stream. There are no big cities south of Egypt on the Nile, apart from Khartoum. It is a clean river and looks clean. Oh you get rubbish in the canals, and a few beaches and washing places in Cairo, places where, even today, women take pots and pans down to the river to wash them; there may be Coke bottles and plastic bags. But there is nothing like the garbage you see on the streets around the overflowing skips (which replaced the highly efficient donkey-cart-driving rubbish collectors who were deemed too 'old fashioned').
But what of its character? I have written that all rivers have a moral character. This is indefinable, but appears to those who spend a long time in their company. The Nile's character is sui generis, one of dependability. For all its floods and famines and small tantrums, this is a river you can rely on. It won't rush you to your death if you fall in. It will carry you along, perhaps to the shore. I should say I am talking about the lower Nile here – the mixture of the White and the Blue. And, despite its cataracts and waterfalls, the upper White Nile too has a similarly dependable feel. The Blue Nile is altogether wilder and more unpredictable. The character of the Blue Nile is unlettered wildness, the wildness of a falcon or bird of prey that can be yoked into work but never entirely trusted. Turn your back on the Blue Nile, one feels, and it will drown you.
Now we have the several sources to skim over and observe: the Blue Nile rising in Ethiopia – at Lake Tana, or, rather, thirty miles from Lake Tana; the White Nile in that part of Africa where a great many countries seem to get drawn together: Uganda, Kenya, Sudan, Congo, Rwanda. The sources dominate men's imaginations, but they are only a small part of the river's identity, an identity largely forged by the terrain the river travels through. With its huge summer flood, literally pregnant with water, the Mother of the Nile would have to be the Blue Nile. But we'll start our quick journey with the broadly agreed beginning of the White Nile, the father of all the Niles. The Kagera river, the ultimate source of the White Nile, snakes its way from the montane jungles of Rwanda to the west coast of Lake Victoria. But where does the water actually come from? Just as the Blue Nile is charged by the monsoons that pound the Ethiopian highlands, the White Nile receives its rainfall from the south Atlantic gales that arrive burdened with moisture on the African coast. Meeting no real resistance until they strike the mountains of the central rift, the rain falls and is channelled north. The precipitation that hits the mountains lower in the chain around Lake Tanganyika drains into the Congo basin and back into the Atlantic. Interestingly Lake Victoria, being only 300 feet deep and over 25,000 square miles in area, is actually a net loser of water – more flows into it than flows out – the rest being lost to the wind as evaporation.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Red Nile by Robert Twigger. Copyright © 2013 Robert Twigger. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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