We Rafiki Three & Lake Bunyonyi

We awoke early, terribly early, and took a taxi to the Post Office. In Uganda, the Post Bus is perhaps the only mode of transportation reliably short on near-death experiences. One regularly plied the road to Kabale, our drop-off point for a jaunt to Lake Bunyonyi. We were excited; the lake was purportedly free of bilharzia and situated in a cool climes. After three months of siphoning Ethiopia’s Biblical suffering, the quiet lapping of a high-altitude tarn sounded deliciously inviting.

We sat around in a maze of paint-chipped P.O. boxes as the city’s sallow haze lifted and the sun peered over the skyline. When the time came, someone would ostensibly direct us to the bus. As I sat nodding off on the belly of my backpack, a middle-aged man with a curly shock of whitening hair climbed out of a taxi. We began to chew the fat. He was going to Gulu to work on some species of academic work.

“I used to study African History at Madison,” I offered.
“Oh, and who are you,” he crooned.
He asked the question with such a nauseatingly cloying intonation that I had to check my gag reflex. I glanced at Lauren and Beth, seeing both of them shudder. What did he expect me to say? “I am Dr. Wanker McShithead,” passed through my mind, but instead I said, “My name is Dallas. I’m nobody.”

He quickly lost interest after oozing out his name, first and last, and turned to Lauren and Beth. “And what about you?” Lauren gave him a short, standoffish bio. Beth told him she was going to law school. “Mmmm,” he purred, “and what school are you going to?”

“Harvard.”
“Oh.”

That shut him up. His school was a few ratchets down the academic totem pole. I attempted to make further conversation, but once I admitted that I was unfamiliar with his work, his face, which had the self-conscious mold of somebody perpetually peeking in a mirror, began to tune out. We had some mutual acquaintances, and just as I began to talk of my professor who specialized in pre-colonial Buganda, he turned away from me mid-sentence.

A slender man dressed incongruously, for Africa, in an effeminately striped form-clinging shirt and jet black tapering trousers sashayed over to Dr. Wanker and initiated a ritual of schmooze. He sported a ruthlessly manicured mustache set off against the cadaverous white of his upper lip, an eyelash-thin strip of wispy fuzz that he caressed lewdly as he talked. He was a bizarre sight for this part of the world. All in all, he looked like a hybrid of Eurotrash and professional pederast. He extolled Dr. Wanker on the strength of a recent paper. The academic hero’s head grooved smugly to the tune of his deification. It was appalling; the whole thing reminded me of the gay bar pick-up scene in Traffic.

We split ways, I absolutely thrilled at my abysmal failure in the hallowed halls of academia. It helped me remember why I was always so depressed at University. I was glad that I would never have to act as if I held either of them in esteem.

We were misdirected until we finally happened upon the bus to Kabale and pulled out of the lot. I can’t give much in the way of scenery because my only moments of consciousness involved the splashing of drool on my hand and one embarrassing jolt during a nightmare about insects. My entire spasm was watched with bemused detachment by Beth.

“Sorry, I thought I was covered with bugs.”
“It’s okay,” she returned. “After three months in Ethiopia, I can only imagine there would be bugs in your dream world.” (Not verbatim--Ed.)

After seven hours of drooling and several stops wherein roadside hawkers jabbed spears of rancid nyama choma through the window, the bus finally trundled into a rain-soaked Kabale. We disembarked to the raucous solicitations of sundry taxi drivers. The girls had reserved a car through Byoona Amagara that was supposed to convey us to the boat launch. Unfortunately, for us, every driver claimed that he was Dennis the driver, not one of the half-dozen impostors. To make matters worse, each claimed that he had come to pick up ‘Monica.’

“You are Monica?” one of the men asked me.
“Yes, despite appearances, I am a full-blooded woman inside.”
“Who sent you?” Lauren countered.
“I sent myself!”
Wrong answer.

At length, we decided on the most insistent Dennis who quoted the same price that the girls had been emailed. He was an affable enough fellow, and the months of travel had deranged me enough that I deemed myself capable of gallant violence should he try to hold us for ransom or whatever people worry strangers will do to them in Africa. We dragged our bags into the car and began lurching through pot-hole puddles.

I had noticed a couple words of Swahili in the hubbub of and decided to bounce some sentences off Dennis.

“Unasema Kiswahili?”
“Yes!”
“Kuna majira ya mvua sasa? It’s the rainy season now?”
“Yes! I must pick up some pineapples!”
The girls snickered at the non sequitur. I fell silent.

We pulled into a sorely pockmarked road where we indeed picked up some pineapples and moved on.

“We have very bad drought here,” Dennis said motioning toward the farmland. Was he out of his mind? The congestion of vegetation was spilling from leafy hillsides onto the road. An Ethiopian drought and Ugandan drought were evidently two very different things. Uganda, so far, had been eminently more arable than Ethiopia where gray dust was the general farming medium. Here, banana trees flourished in eruptions of green propellers, avocados hung heavily from trees, and rich red mounds of soil teemed with young vegetables. Plus it was raining.

We pulled up to pier where we were greeted by a phalanx of dock workers. I ducked into a drop toilet whose previous users were apparently unfamiliar with the concept of aiming. When I returned to the launch, a dopey-faced madman in raggedy wardrobe appeared ex nihilo and performed a sad, bow-legged dance without the benefit of rhythm. He then asked me for a cigarette. I made the mistake of giving him one. This launched another inscrutable series of dancing movements punctuated by the aimless jabs of his walking stick. After his second disquieting performance, he rattled on about how much he loved to dance.

“I am dancing! I am dancing!”

Then, of course, he asked me for money. I denied him remuneration for the spectacle of debasement. He grew quiet and sidled up to me conspiratorially, nodding toward an African woman standing a couple of feet away.

“You want?” he asked brandishing his walking stick.
“What?”
“You can!” he yelled as he began to pantomime beating the woman with the stick.
“You beat her? You shouldn’t beat her.”
“No, no, no!” he returned indignantly. “But you…” and he recommenced his stick-beating charade.
“You think I should beat her?” He nodded eagerly.
“Why would I want to beat her? Besides, it was International Women’s Day two days ago. I don’t think it’s really in the spirit of the holiday.”
He gave up this course and began pursuing another, again in reference to the hapless African woman. He put his fist to his mouth and made the universal fellatio sign in a display much more graphic than it needed to be.
“No,” I said to his slurping. “I don’t need that.”
He looked dejected. Then he asked, “You have friend?”
“Yes, I have two friends,” I said pointing to the girls. They had detached themselves from the pageant as soon as it began.
“Hawa ni rafiki zangu.”
“Rafiki?” he said salaciously.
“Ndiyo, rafiki wa tatu, sote.” Three friends, all of us.
“Rafiki?” he muttered in amazement.
Lauren looked over to him and said, “Yes, all of us rafiki.”
At this the madman burst into a teary-eyed joy, his arms outstretched in triumph. “All three of you rafiking!”
“Yes,” Beth replied, “we are rafiki.”
“F--ing! You three f--ing!” he blurted out.
“Yes, we are rafiki…” I began with hesitation. “Are you saying rafiki or…”

But it was too late. He slapped me on the back, waved his arms in the air, and capered around the launch point in a state of euphoric delirium. I turned to the girls, both of whom were averse to idea on some pretty intransigent principles, and sighed,

“I think rafiki became f------g.”