The Roads Between Us: A Journey Across Africa

04.19.10 | 11:58 AM ET

“Engine off!” yelled a policeman standing in front of our car, pointing his machine gun at the driver. “Get out!”

It was still dark, long before the sun would come up, and we had just started out from a city in southern Nigeria called Oshogbo. The taxi was packed with people heading north, when our driver tried to run through a checkpoint. Before he could make it, one of the policemen jumped in front of us.

“You’re playing with our lives!” an old man protested from the back. “You just pay the 20 naira, or he’s going shoot!”

The policeman, machine gun now cradled in his arms, came toward the car.

“Let me see your particulars,” he yelled at the driver.

MORE: Mapped—The Roads Between Us: A Journey Across Africa | Interview with Jeremy Weate: Off the Map in Nigeria

The driver turned off the engine and got out. Together, they disappeared behind the car, while the rest of us waited. Waiting was something I was used to by then, and time was something I knew I would be spending a lot of on this trip. I was on my way to Abuja, where I would take another car north to Niger. There, I would get on the Trans-Sahelian Highway, which is reported to be the one of the few—if not the only—completed legs of the Trans-African Highway network, a system which, in theory, will someday interlink the continent, revolutionize travel and trade, and usher in a new era of road-fueled prosperity so great, it is hoped, that Nicholas Kristof will be out of a job.

It is one of many schemes for improving Africa’s notorious roads, which take countless lives in accidents every year. The carnage costs countries around 2 percent of their GDP, while the delays, paperwork and the rest end up costing much more. Not unlike America’s interstate system, this highway plan entails nine tarmac corridors crisscrossing the continent. The impact would surely be huge, and could well have other less salubrious effects too. So this, at least, was the guise for my trip: an investigation into the state of transport in West Africa. I wanted to travel across one of these new roads to see where it might be taking the continent, and how it might change things for better or worse.

But I was starting to see there was another good reason to be here, too, something I hadn’t fully realized until I arrived. Back in Lagos, I talked to a woman who had recently moved home to Nigeria from the U.S. And while life here is not always easy, she had no intention of leaving.

“Now,” she said, “whenever I go back to the States, I feel like everything there is so easy and safe. There are no smells, no texture. It’s almost like you’re not really living.”

Her words had been running through my mind ever since. I thought about them when I looked out the car window at the burned-out husks of cars and buses. I thought about them as I smelled the mingling diesel and wood smoke. I thought about them when I tasted the sweet egusi soup at a roadside stop. I thought about them as I remembered the wrecks I’d seen along all the roads in Africa: The bus cut in half by a train, the minivan that plunged into a ravine, the young boy who’d been hit by a car and whose body was being picked apart by crows.

“The African road is about blood and fear,” wrote Peter Chilson in his book, Riding the Demon: On the Road in West Africa, “about the ecstasy of arrival: the relief of finding yourself alive at the end of a journey and the lesser relief of passing unscathed through another army checkpoint. The road is boredom, joy, and terror punctuated by heat in the air and under your feet. The African road is a world of extremes lived out with the punching of a foot against a gas pedal.”

Maybe that was it. Maybe I was looking for the feeling that life is something you must push toward, not just some couch to sit on. I recently read about an Indian tribe in British Columbia whose elders would order the entire village to move to a new location when life got too easy, too soft, because “without challenge, life had no meaning.”

There were challenges aplenty in Africa, and now that I was here on the road, I realized that I didn’t really care that much about infrastructure. I cared about feeling alive. And when arrival is not guaranteed, you feel it much more keenly.

In the dark the other policemen at the checkpoint milled around, while we all waited patiently, in silence. The three old men, one young one, three women and I all sat quietly, all staring ahead as if our time were some other kind of currency to be offered to those who demand it. There was no gunshot. In time, the driver reappeared, opened his door, got in, and turned the engine on. The policeman waved us through, and we drove on.

“Mr. Frank?” said a small voice. It was Zainab, the older of two sisters sitting next to me in a share-taxi going from Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, to Kano in the north.

“Yes.” I answered.

“Are you Lebanese?”

“No.” I said. It wasn’t the first time I’d been asked this.

“Then where are you coming from?”

“America.”

MORE: Part One | Mapped—The Roads Between Us: A Journey Across Africa | Interview with Jeremy Weate: Off the Map in Nigeria

Zainab and her sister Fatima talked about this for some time. They both wore headscarves, and were also going north, to the part of Nigeria where Sharia law is in place. The Muslim north is the now-famous part of the world where the underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, came from, and where violent clashes between Christians and Muslims are not uncommon. When I’d gotten into the share-taxi in Abuja, I hadn’t been sure what kind of reception to expect, and I wondered how feelings about my country might have changed with our Iraq adventure and the endless war on Islamic extremism.

I felt a poke in my side.

“Mr. Frank?” This time it was Fatima, the younger one. “Is it true that the president of America can rule other countries?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Like Nigeria.”

“Can America rule Nigeria? No, it cannot,” I said.

After staring out the window for awhile, watching the land get drier as we headed into the Sahel, I felt another poke in my side.

“Mr. Frank: Is it true,” Zainab asked, “that one man threw something at George Bush—it was a shoe?”

“Yes, it’s true.” I said. “Actually, it was two shoes.”

“And that man is in jail?”

“No, I think he is out now.”

As we continued north, the girls continued to pepper me with questions, about my family, my country, their math homework. I asked them about themselves: They were 9 and 12, and were headed to a boarding school in Kano. Their father was some sort of businessman who had actually been to America. It was the kind of exchange I have always loved, and the kind I had been afraid might be a thing of the past: the friendly, curious probing of a world far away. It reminded me of my days as an English teacher in Tanzania, and of the innocence in that endeavor. I wondered about these girls, where their lives would take them and if they would remember me as I will remember them. A few hours later, when we pulled into Kano, I got out to get my bags, and Fatima came running to the back of the car.

“Mr. Frank!” she said.

“Yes?”

“Please take this small gift.”

She handed me a pink plastic bottle of perfume. It said, “Love Angel.”

“Thank you,” I said, and I wished her the best, and watched their two small hands waving in the window as they pulled away.

I remember so clearly the people I talked to as we bumped along together on African roads: the man heading home from the UK, with whom I changed money in the back seat; the guy who gave me a puzzled look when I asked where to put my empty can (Answer: Out the window); the young woman who rubbed my leg with her own, just lightly enough to make me wonder.

Usually, we first met in the bus park, where you went when you need to go anywhere in Africa. There, I piled into the vehicle going my way with a bunch of strangers. When no more people would fit, the doors were slammed, and we would be swept along on a river of asphalt together, our lives (and sometimes our limbs) briefly entwined. 

I spent several days in the Muslim north, and was met only with small kindnesses: In Maradi, an engineer I sat with paid for my meal without telling me and a coffee vendor refused to let me pay for my drink. In Kano, I sat down for tea at a roadside stand, and watched the vendor fry an omelet over a little charcoal stove. Then he handed it to the man next to me, who set it between us. 

“Eat!” he said.

I pointed at myself.

“Yes! Eat, eat! Eat very well.”

And so we ate together.

These were the things I loved, and the things that made it worth tolerating the necrosis I felt in my legs a few day later, as I headed down the highway in Niger, in a minivan with about 25 other people on a 13-hour journey across the empty, austere landscape to the capital Niamey. I stared out the window at country that felt a little like a game park with no game, like Tatooine with trees. The two-lane road was freshly tarmacked in some places, with bright painted lines. It should have been fast. But we hit a check point or speed bump at what seemed like every mile, so we couldn’t go much faster than the camels that once traveled this route. All I could really focus on was whether I’d have the full use of my lower extremities when I got there. It was impossible to turn my body any way other than to look out the window, so I sat and tried to will the feeling into my feet. I remembered the words of Shiva Naipaul.

“I sit absolutely still,” Naipaul wrote about being on a bus in Kenya in North of South, “trying to work myself into the trancelike state of mind which, I have discovered, is the sine qua non of long-distance journeys in this part of the world. It is a state of mind that combines fatalism, self-surrender and a steely determination to maintain one’s toehold of possession.”

I tried every maneuver to get the blood back into my toes, but it just resulted in a different parts losing circulation. So I tried to forget about it. I tried to look across the Sahel and conjure up that trance-like state. I stared ahead at the road, at the trees, at the far-off horizon. But just as I thought I might achieve it, the driver slowed for a checkpoint and a wash of clear yellow liquid ran down the windshield, and I remembered seeing two goats being strapped up there before we left. I remembered thinking PETA would not be pleased.

I also remembered thinking: Glad that’s not me.

Now, however, I wasn’t sure who had the worse seat.

Somewhere in the middle of the Sahel, deep in rural Burkina Faso, we pulled over to pick up some passengers. As the minivan slowed, a thin white stream of smoke started to pour out of the dashboard—just a trickle first, then in billows. The driver, a tough young guy in a ratty fedora with a toothpick hanging out of his mouth, pointed to the smoke, mumbled something and jumped out. 

“Get out! Get out!” yelled the man next to me.

I jumped out. 

We stood by the side of the road, waiting for the smoke to clear. The man’s name was James. He was small and wore oversized glasses that made him look like a miniature version of MC Hammer, circa 1987.

MORE: Part One | Part Two | Mapped—The Roads Between Us: A Journey Across Africa | Interview with Jeremy Weate: Off the Map in Nigeria

James was on his way home from Niger to Ghana, where he planned to sell the cow hides he’d bought. He spoke both English and French, and was one of the few people I’d met who traveled fluidly between Francophone and Anglophone West Africa, which were regarded by many as alien worlds. One young Senegalese told me when he went to Ghana, he felt like he “wasn’t even in Africa any more.”

When the smoke cleared, the new passengers’ bags were thrown on top, and the driver motioned for us to get back in.

“This road,” James said to me in a conspiratorial tone as we drove on, “used to be full of armed robbers. Now the army patrols it. But the road from Ouaga to Mali is still very dangerous. Many armed robbers! Don’t take small cars. Take the big moto. In small cars sometimes the driver is on the inside, if you catch my meaning.” He cast a suspicious glance at our driver.

“I catch it,” I said.

“Do you like business?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I like business.”

“I love doing business. Any kind of business. I am a businessman. There is only one kind I can’t do, and that is killing people. But any other business, I can do it! There was one business I was doing, and I was arrested twice in Cape Verde. I spent one year in jail there.”

“What business was that?”

“That business was drugs.”

“The money must have been good,” I ventured.

“Yes,” he said, and smiled at the memory of how good it was. “But I don’t do that business any more, because I don’t have contacts. But if I got contacts again, I would just go do it. Because, you know, there is no easy way in Africa.”

I finally got off the bus in Bobo-Dioulassu, a town near the border with Mali, and checked into a small hotel. Bobo was a leafy, pleasant place, filled—somewhat unexpectedly—with tourists. It was there that I saw one of the few Americans I’d seen since leaving home: a young woman traveling with her British boyfriend. They were sitting on the hotel terrace, looking glum.

“Mind if I join you?” I asked.

“Of course,” said the man, who was slightly more cheerful.

“So how are you liking Africa?”

“Well,” the woman said, “to be honest it hasn’t been quite what we expected. It’s pretty dirty. And we thought it would be cheaper, like India.”

“Yes,” he added. “India is incredibly cheap.”

“Africa is really, really expensive,” she said. “We’ve been couch surfing for the last month. That’s saved us a ton of money.”

“Have you met many locals?” I asked.

“No,” the girl said. “I mean, everyone says you fall in love with Africa because of the people, but we don’t speak the language, so it’s hard.”

We chatted for a little longer, but I suddenly lost my heart for it, so I said goodbye and headed out into the streets. Africa was a hard place to travel, and to live in. I knew that. There were crooks and thieves. You had to think fast, and move faster, unless you had to just wait. 

But then, whenever you least expected it, you always found a bit of sunshine, a smile or a joke or a gift that restored your faith in everything. To me, that is worth so much. I often feel like the world looks at Africa and loses hope. I look at Africa and find it.

I walked down the street, which was lined with trees, as if the road had left the Sahel, and dipped back into the tropics. Bobo was full of cars, and motorcycles and push carts loaded with goods. The streets were full of aspiring tour guides who hung around the massive market in the middle of town, all of which seemed to spill over into the surrounding streets. 

After a bit, I passed a small shop selling wood carvings. It was dark, and a group of men sat on a bench out front drinking hot tea from tiny glasses. They waved to me and held up a glass, offering me one, so I went over and sat down. We chatted a little, in a pidgin mix of French and English, and ended up talking until long after the tea was gone. And as I walked through the dark streets on my way home, I thought that even if Africa is a hard place to be in many ways, it is the easiest place in the world in others.

It’s never a good sign when the bus won’t start. But that was how our day was going, not far from the Senegal border, where I’d finally arrived after several days of traveling from Burkina Faso through Mali.

Surely, it couldn’t get any worse.

“All the men! Outside!”

There were many men—and women—on the bus from across the region. There was Aliwaliou, the thin trader from Guinea with stomach problems. There was Omar, the soft-spoken teacher from Ivory Coast. There was Yousof, the eager businessman from Timbuktu. And there was Kennie, the loud, friendly Nigerian on her way to anywhere but Nigeria.

MORE: Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Mapped—The Roads Between Us: A Journey Across Africa | Interview with Jeremy Weate: Off the Map in Nigeria

Together, we’d arrived in Kayes at midnight the previous day, then slept on rented foam mats, under the stars in the bus park. The next morning we dutifully got on the bus, and waited for the driver to blast the horn, rev the engine and start rolling forward, so anyone who wanted to go could jump on. Instead, the driver turned the key, and the engine rolled and died. He did this a few times before he stood up and made his announcement.

We climbed down, walked around behind the bus, and started pushing. Omar was standing next to me. He smiled.

“Now you are an African!” he said and laughed.

We pushed. The bus inched forward. The driver popped the clutch, and the engine roared. The horn blared, the bus rolled forward, and we all ran around and jumped on, as we crossed a wide river and drove on toward Senegal, where we stopped at the customs office. Usually this meant a quick stop for paperwork and payments. But as I listened to the driver talk to the officer, I could tell there was a problem. I could hear words like border and closed and tomorrow, none of which seemed like good words to hear. 

There was some grumbling as we climbed back on the bus. Some of the other passengers said the border was, in fact, closed. Others shook their heads in disgust. I didn’t really believe it. I thought this must be a formality—probably a kind of bargaining, some bid to raise the rates on an unspoken price. You can’t just close a border, can you?

The driver turned around and started driving back across the river into Mali. He pulled into a dusty parking lot, turned the engine off. Everyone started climbing down.

“Why can’t we cross?” I asked Aliwaliou.

“There is an election,” he said, “so they have closed the border. We must wait until tomorrow.”

“So what can we do?”

“Nothing,” he said, and shrugged. “We wait.”

I looked around the parking lot just off the main road. It was surrounded by low, one-room brick houses, shops and food stands. There was literally nothing to do.

I walked around till I found a shop where they hooked my phone up to a car battery to charge it, then went back to the bus. There, I saw Yousof sitting with three Mauritanians, and a guy from the Gambia. They were eating mutton and baguettes, and motioned for me to come share, which I did. Later, Aliwaliou and Omar and I walked down to the river while two of them argued about the meaning of Barack Obama’s election.

It was strange. It all should have been maddening, infuriating. And yet it wasn’t. In my memory, that afternoon was one of the best times on my entire trip. It may even be one of my fondest memories of Africa. All afternoon and evening, there was nothing to do but talk, sit, eat, and watch Jean-Claude Van Damme on a TV powered by a whining generator that kept shutting down during the good parts.

The reason, I think, is because of something Kennie said. Early that afternoon, I’d sat down with her. She spoke hardly a word of French, but was having a fantastic time laughing with two women who spoke no English.

“You know,” I said, “the bus isn’t leaving today.”

“Yes,” she said. “They say there is no way. The roads are closed. But it’s okay, because like this, I am making friends. We are family now. The road is closed, but the road between people is open.”

The Nigerians appeared at dawn—six of them. They were young, in their early 20s, all men. They stood in the road like they owned it. One of them was singing—something hip-hop, something Nigerian.

I don’t know where they came from, but I was sure they hadn’t been on our bus the day before: They were too loud, too brash to go unnoticed, and the only loud person on the bus yesterday had been Kennie.

We’d all gotten up early after a long night on the Malian side of the border, spent lying on thin reed mats laid over rocky dirt. A little ways away, the television ran all night, while the generator whined like a chainsaw, powering bad movies: “Matrix Revolutions,” “Hard Target,” some bottom-barrel Indian action film.

But now we wanted to go. Everyone stood around, drinking tea, waiting to get on the bus, and eying the newcomers suspiciously. It seemed to underline again how separate French and English-speaking Africa were.

MORE: Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Mapped—The Roads Between Us: A Journey Across Africa | Interview with Jeremy Weate: Off the Map in Nigeria

At 7 a.m., the bus rolled onto the road, stopped and the driver blasted the horn. I had just ordered a Nescafe from a vendor, but the bus was rolling and everyone was running for it. I took a last sip, set it on the table, and ran too.

This time, we barely even stopped at customs, then drove into the border town where the Nigerians got up, leaped off the moving bus and disappeared into the crowd. Were they going to catch another bus? Was someone picking them up? I had no idea.

We stopped at the immigration office, where we piled out, handed over our passports and waited.

“Is this everyone?” the immigration officer asked, looking around suspiciously. We all looked around too, like we didn’t know what he was talking about, and no one really said yes or no. He went back into the office, where there began a heavy “clunk” of his stamp on passport after passport. Names were called. Passports were retrieved. 

I sat down next to Kennie while we waited. She was going to Dakar, she said, because she heard it was a good place—a place she could start a new life. She didn’t know anyone there, but she had to do something.

“Nigeria is no good,” she said. “There is no progress. I need to change my environment. I like to see new things. And anyway, to stay in one place is not progress. But, you know, to make progress is not easy.” 

After everyone had their documents, we climbed on the bus, and started down the road.

The bus turned back the way we’d come, and just as we were about to reach the highway, I looked out my window to see the Nigerians running at top speed. One by one they jumped on the bus.

No sooner had the last one boarded than a policeman on a motorcycle raced around the bus from behind and pulled us over. Four of the Nigerians promptly jumped off and ran away again. Two others stayed to argue their case.

The rage inside the bus was palpable. All the bottled up frustrations, all the anger, all the helplessness seemed to bubble up at that moment. Yousuf, the business man from Timbuktu, got in one of the Nigerian’s faces and screamed. Aliwaliou yelled at the other. Soon everyone was yelling, and it felt as though the crowd was on the edge of becoming a mob.

“Nigeria is the worst country in Africa,” Omar said to me.

One of the Nigerians looked at me. “Can you translate?” he said. “Can you tell them we paid the driver, and he has our passports?” 

I shrugged, as if I would love to help. Then Yousuf came onto the bus and sat next to me. “Nigerians are very dangerous!” he said. “Very dangerous!”

Another of the Nigerians came over to me. “What is wrong with these people?” he asked. “Tell them they are just making things worse.”

Personally, I loved Nigeria, its literature, its films, its music. But that energy, that brash confidence, didn’t go down well in the quieter corners of the continent.

One by one, the Nigerians came back to the bus. There was more yelling, more vitriol. The Nigerians made some phone calls, and after two more hours of haggling, all the fees seemed to have been paid, and the policeman got on his motorcycle and drove off. The Nigerians took the wooden seats in the aisle, and the bus rolled on.

In three hours, we had gone less that a mile, but finally, we were getting somewhere.

A silence descended as we headed into Senegal. We wound around through low hills on a good road before it straightened out and turned very, very bad. The concrete had disintegrated into a million tiny rock pillars. Sometimes the bus shook so much I could barely see. We slowed to a crawl, and the frame made terrible noises—groaning and creaking. After a loud crack, the driver stopped. We all got out.

“This is how it is in Africa,” said Aliwaliou, with a shrug.

“It’s because of bad organization,” Omar added.

“No, it is because of bad leaders!” said Aliwaliou.

“Africa tires me,” said Kennie.

We stopped in Tambacounda for lunch, and as we sat eating, one of the Nigerians bought me an orange soda. They seemed like nice kids once I got to talk to them. They were glad to get out of Lagos, and were just looking for something else, all headed to Cape Verde and maybe beyond. In the end, all they wanted was what everyone on the bus wanted. While scale and goals might be different, we all were on this road looking for something different, something more, something better. After all, isn’t that why this road was built, and why roads are being built across the continent? Isn’t that why any road is built: So we can reach the promises at the other end?

The bus drove all night, and eventually I drifted off. Around 4 a.m., we stopped and I looked out the window. Our surroundings were strange. We were on some kind of expressway, surrounded by something like a suburb.

Far off, I could see the lights of Dakar. We’d pulled over to let Omar and a few others off. Their bags were thrown off the top of bus, and he came on to say goodbye. I waved through the window as he walked away, then waited for us to move on. 

Nothing happened. Looking up front, I could see the hood was up, and the driver was banging on something.

Yousuf made a joke about not having the right papers to go on. Aliwaliou suggested we push the bus the rest of the way. One of the Nigerians said maybe it would cost another $5 for the rest of the trip. Kennie, who was in no mood for joking, did not take the delay well.

“If this journey is not complete,” she shouted at the front of the bus, “I will go to the police! I paid to go all the way to Dakar!!! All the way!”

The driver got back in his seat. 

“All the men!” he shouted. “All the men outside ... and the boys!”

We all got out and went around to the back of the bus. Cars whizzed by us on the freeway. We pushed. The bus crawled forward. The driver let out the clutch once, twice, then three times. We kept pushing. On the fourth try the engine caught. The driver revved the motor. A loud cheer went up, and the horn blared in the night.

The bus park was completely deserted when we arrived at 4:30 a.m. Wearily, we stood in the dark while the driver untied our bags and threw them down. 

As we collected our belongings, we exchanged phone numbers and emails. We hugged like lifelong friends. Then one by one we picked up our things and walked on, into the streets of Dakar, where we slipped into taxis and rides that took us on again to wherever each of our roads would take us.

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