Drink the Bitter Root. Gary Geddes
advice for a white man, and a warning I would think of often as I travelled through sub-Saharan Africa. It was not so much the statistical enormities that frightened me—800,000 butchered in a hundred days, for example—though these were terrible enough; nor abstractions such as greed, violence and corruption, which can be found anywhere. No, it was the personal stories, some shouted, some delivered in the faintest of whispers, others dragged screaming from the vault of memory. Alice, immobile, her heart turned to stone, describing, sotto voce, the atrocity she was forced to commit; and Nancy, sunlight reflecting off her mutilated face, highlighting the paler scar tissue, talking about forgiveness while I, presumably on her behalf, raged inside and plotted a slow, painful revenge on the perpetrators.
The reason I was in Africa had much to do with a notorious incident in Somalia fifteen years earlier, when a teenager named Shidane Abukar Arone slipped into the military compound where a regiment of soldiers from my country, Canada, were sweating out another African night on the perimeter of Beledweyne, a few hours’ drive northwest of Mogadishu. Someone had left the gate open. The officers and men of Operation Deliverance—ostensibly a peacekeeping mission whose aim was to put a lid on the widespread violence and looting, spinoffs of the civil war still raging in other parts of the country—had bedded down an hour earlier. At least that’s how it must have appeared to the young Somali, his face glistening in the moonlight and his hand, the one clutching prayer beads, unable to stop shaking. He saw bulk food containers, regulation gear, electrical equipment and spare parts for Jeeps and armoured vehicles. How much could he carry, especially if he were forced to run? Would it be food for his family or some item he could sell in the market? Shidane Arone was spared that decision, as his progress was being carefully monitored by one of the sentries on duty. Instead, he would discover the real meaning of deliverance, Canadian-style: hours of brutal torture and mutilation with cigarettes, metal pipes, boots, whatever his captors found readily at hand, his final utterance barely audible through the broken teeth and blood bubbling from his mouth.
The Somalia Affair, as it came to be called, is where my story wants to begin, but it is certainly not the beginning. The magnetic attraction of Africa started in my early teens with the example of medical missionary Albert Schweitzer, whose work amongst the Ogowe people in French Equatorial Africa convinced him that they were more deeply moral than Europeans. The life of Schweitzer, who had a thirst for knowledge and left behind promising careers in Europe as a writer, organist and theologian to study medicine and devote his life to this small community in the colonies, provided the stuff of dreams. Although I later abandoned my faith, or it abandoned me, the missionary zeal to do something of value never quite disappeared. So in 1964, while completing a diploma in education at Reading University in England, I applied for a teaching position at a Roman Catholic high school in Accra, Ghana. I was twenty-four. Shortly after the job was offered to me, reports started to appear in the international press that Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah, who began his political career as an idealist, a socialist and a pan-Africanist, had turned against the unions and was jailing dissenters, including a number of foreign teachers. I turned down the offer, not realizing at the time that much of what I read was Cold War propaganda and that Belgium, the CIA and various neocolonialist elements were plotting to overthrow Nkrumah’s left-leaning regime. But the sense of Africa as unfinished business, or a missed opportunity, remained.
In the decades that followed, I studied the works of Joseph Conrad, who had described the Belgian Congo as “the vilest scramble for loot that has ever disfigured the history of human consciousness and geographical exploration,” and whose classic novel Heart of Darkness brilliantly dramatizes the brutalities of this scramble. I also read Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and other African writers. Like any conscious observer of world affairs, I absorbed the plethora of disturbing media images of the so-called Dark Continent—gaunt faces of starving Biafrans, the Soweto uprising and bloodbath, the bloated bellies of children during the Ethiopian famine, the flight of refugees, the bodies of ethnic Tutsis hacked to pieces in the Rwandan genocide—and, more recently, a ceaseless litany of rapes, mutilations and murders taking place, with increasing impunity, in too many countries to name.
I felt both troubled and diminished by these realities and ashamed of my own privilege and inertia. I was equally uncomfortable with my ambivalent feelings about Africa, the only continent, other than Antarctica, I had not visited in my extensive literary travels. I’d written poems, articles and books about the Vietnam War, the Chilean coup and dictatorship, death squads in Guatemala, the U.S./Contra war against Nicaragua and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, events unfolding in sub-Saharan Africa remained an enigma and a challenge. I felt a growing urgency to understand first-hand what was taking place and whether aid and intervention were making a difference in the lives of ordinary people. And I needed to hear answers to those questions from Africans themselves.
At sixty-eight, I had the freedom to consider such a journey. I still felt as passionate about these matters as I had in my thirties, perhaps more so. I appreciated the sentiment of Jean Vanier, founder of L’Arche communities for the mentally and physically disadvantaged, who had written: “Now, I’m free to do what I like, and what I like is to announce the message: that people who are weak have something to bring to us, that they are important people and it’s important to listen to them. In some mysterious way, they change us. Being in a world of the strong, the powerful, you collect attitudes of power and hardness and invulnerability . . . It is vulnerability that brings us together.”
With its fifty-four countries and infinite variety, Africa defies generalization. If Somalia was to be my final destination, I needed to narrow the search, make it somehow manageable. I was tempted to begin in Bas-Congo on the Atlantic coast, the epicentre of the slave trade, using Heart of Darkness as a shadow narrative, following Marlow up the Congo River to Kinshasa, then heading east through sub-Saharan Africa to Mogadishu. This narrow cross-section of the continent, which includes the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Rwanda, Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia, had become its most troubled and volatile region. However, although I understood that the moral darkness Conrad so brilliantly embodies is restricted to no one group, nation or geographical place but is rooted in the human heart, his famous novel has been politicized by African and post-colonial scholars and dismissed as racist. I did not want to be drawn into that debate.
More to the point, news reports and logistics—with more than a dash of fear thrown in—were suggesting an alternative route. Commercial flights within the Democratic Republic of Congo, an area as large as Western Europe, were sketchy at best and definitely not recommended, so a trip that might leave me stranded in Kinshasa, far from the major conflict areas, made little sense. Somalia had assumed the mantle as the world’s most dangerous place. Along with international piracy, armed gangs had reduced the capital to rubble; rival clans fought an ongoing turf war whose main casualties were civilians. The only booming business onshore, aside from drugs and guns, was kidnapping. A Somali journalist from Ottawa who had set up a radio station in Mogadishu called HornAfrik had been murdered, and a female journalist from Alberta was being held for ransom. Four British Somalis who had returned to the country to set up an English-language school in Beledweyne—the hometown of Shidane Arone—had been summarily executed by Islamic extremists.
In need of advice, I consulted Jonathan Manthorpe, currently the Vancouver Sun’s international affairs columnist. He had served as foreign correspondent for Southam News in Africa for many years and was the first Western journalist to fly into Mogadishu after the fall of the Mohamed Siad Barre regime in 1991. Stroking his well-trimmed, 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