greying beard, he sized me up with the amused intensity of a sage. “First advice? Keep moving. Don’t stand around looking lost or confused. An injured animal is fair game in Africa.” Jonathan described flying into Mogadishu, not the main airport but a nearby airstrip favoured by drug lords and their couriers, which was considered safer. The cost of protection—you had to hire a technical, a pickup truck with a mounted machine gun and several armed guards—had spiralled when the major news agencies started covering the war. Security at Mogadishu airport had been taken over by a vicious and unscrupulous gang known as the Airport Clan. Jonathan recalled a German colleague who, nose in the air, had turned down the services of these local thugs only to be deliberately shot dead ten minutes later as he left the airport in the back of a rival pickup. By the time our meeting ended, it was clear that I’d have to reconsider not only my starting point but also my final destination. If Somalia was too dangerous, I might at least visit the breakaway Republic of Somaliland, the former British protectorate that, having given up its newly acquired freedom to become part of Somalia in 1960, had reclaimed its independence thirty-one years later in response to the travesties of the Siad Barre regime. The republic was also home to two of the most important poets in the Somali language, Hadraawi and Gaarriye, both of whom I hoped to interview.
I resolved to start my travels in Rwanda and Uganda, the latter a one-time British colony, the former a place where English was increasingly spoken. From my base in Africa’s heartland, I could move west into the Democratic Republic of Congo, then north and east into Sudan, Ethiopia and Somaliland. I would take Jonathan Manthorpe’s advice and make as many contacts on the ground as possible before I left, to keep from wasting my time and to avoid getting shot.
But first there were other shots to consider. The doctor at the travel clinic in Victoria rubbed his hands and ushered me into his second-floor office across from the shopping plaza, looking as if he had struck gold. Flipping through a chart and checking off each section, he seemed intent on immunizing me against every conceivable ailment except plague. I felt myself growing weaker by the second. The doctor glowed as I recited my itinerary. I had imagined Ebola, sleeping sickness and malaria, but he had a much larger repertoire in mind: new and old tuberculosis, dengue fever, flu, typhoid, yellow fever, meningitis, diarrhea and two kinds of hepatitis. I considered asking if any of his clients had ever run out of the office during the consultation process. Instead, I made a joke about him providing the medical equivalent of a suit of armour.
“Exactly,” the doctor said. He unwrapped a surgical kit with two types of thread for closing a cut with stitches: light thread for the face, heavier thread for the body. “And don’t feel embarrassed to ask them to use your own needle.” None of the ghastly scenarios that came to mind featured a benign “them” within miles. When I got up to leave, he was still scribbling notes on a piece of paper.
My wife, Ann, peered at me with raised eyebrows over her cup of herbal tea as I described the visit. “You mean he didn’t offer you an AK-47?”
I finished the preparations for my trip to sub-Saharan Africa, sending off several dozen e-mails to the contacts I’d been given. When it was time to go, I placed a small envelope of instructions on my desk, including a revised will. I’d spoken to each of my daughters the previous night by phone. I picked up the backpack and small carrying case I’d assembled and lingered over a sad and difficult farewell with Ann. I had with me on my computer the image of Shidane Arone’s bludgeoned face, photographed by one of his torturers, the perfect symbol of what the West had been doing to Africa for almost two centuries. That photo would help to clarify my purpose and steel my resolve.
two
Orphan and Worm
I WAS EN route to Kigali, by way of Entebbe International Airport in Uganda. My research had unearthed an irresistible fact: that Entebbe was the final point of departure in Africa for Princess Elizabeth when, after hearing of the death of her father on February 6, 1952, she returned to take up her new life as queen of England and its colonies. The official telegram never reached her at the hunting lodge in Kenya; in fact, she did not hear the news until the BBC broadcast was relayed to her in the nearby Treetops Hotel. Her return home via Sunyani and Entebbe airports was delayed by a thunderstorm. I remember that day so clearly. I was not yet twelve years old, oblivious to the wider world, and had just crossed the intersection at Fourth Avenue and Commercial Drive in Vancouver on my way to Grandview Elementary School when a tall policeman put his hand on my shoulder and announced that the king had died. I must have had a blank look on my face, or been daydreaming, for he went on to explain that this momentous occasion meant school was cancelled for the day. I ran home and exploded into the kitchen, grinning from ear to ear, to announce the news to my stepmother.
“No school, no school! The king is dead!”
My stepmother was not much older than Elizabeth, who was assuming the throne at age twenty-five. I don’t know which was more of a shock to her: the king’s death or my irreverent behaviour.
If the passing of George VI did not go unnoticed in my family, it was even more significant news for liberation movements in Africa already gathering momentum for independence and an end to empire. India had shed the yoke. Colours and boundaries were shifting on the postwar maps, which included the recently created State of Israel. And it was Israel—for its original displacement of Palestinians, and then the prolonged occupation of their lands after the Six Day War—that would bring the small lakeside settlement of Entebbe once more into the news, in a daring raid that galvanized world attention.
I HAD BOARDED my connecting flight to Uganda at London’s Heathrow Airport. As we flew south over France and Spain, my mind was full of images of that famous raid and gun battle at 2300 hours on July 4, 1976, when a team of elite Israeli commandos, faces masked, rolled out of Hercules C-130 transport planes and drove at high speed in a black Mercedes and several Land Rover vehicles across the tarmac to storm the Entebbe airport terminal. The rescue mission had been set in motion on June 27, 1976 , after flight 139—an Air France Airbus A300 en route from Tel Aviv to Paris with 258 passengers and 12 crew on board—was hijacked in Athens by two Palestinian and two German militants and diverted first to Libya, then to Entebbe airport. Ugandan president Idi Amin, sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, lent ground support to the hijackers. After the non-Jewish passengers on flight 139 were set free, the hijackers threatened to kill the rest if their demand for the release of fifty-three Palestinian prisoners, forty held in Israeli jails, was refused. The secret Israeli rescue mission flew south all day below the radar along the Red Sea, through the Rift Valley and then west across Lake Victoria. In the bloody gun battle that took place during an audacious night raid lasting less than one hour, all of the hijackers were killed, along with three hostages and one commando, and another ten hostages were wounded. While rescuing the hostages, securing the airport and refuelling, the commandos killed at least thirty Ugandan soldiers and destroyed eleven Ugandan MiG-17 fighter planes on the ground. Idi Amin expressed his displeasure at the invasion by ordering the murder of flight 139 passenger Dora Bloch in her hospital bed in Kampala and the slaughter of hundreds of Kenyan nationals residing in Uganda, whom he regarded as enemy collaborators. Four years later, a bomb exploded on New Year’s Eve beneath the dining room of the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi, killing thirteen people, belated payback against the hotel’s Israeli owners for the Entebbe incident.
In a few hours, I, too, would fly in over Africa’s Great Lakes region, once thought to be the source of the Nile and the meeting place of Stanley and Livingstone. The contrast could not have been greater between the cordial, highly publicized meeting of the Welsh-American journalist and the famous Scottish explorer, and the violent, clandestine encounter between Israeli commandos and Palestinian hijackers, but the two events had one thing in common: both were a form of high-stakes international political theatre being played out on African soil. The stakes in Africa now were no lower, though the site of violence had shifted from Entebbe to northern Uganda, neighbouring Sudan and the Democratic
