The Black Nile

"While this kind of journey hadn’t been made in ages, the origin of the trip wasn’t terribly romantic, at least not at first. I was wrapping up two years of freelancing in South Asia and the work I’d done in the region felt diffuse, insubstantial. I’d written good stories while hopping around Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, but there were no home runs. I thought the next time out I would try to focus on one big thing, a subject that would hold my attention and a reader’s attention in a lasting way. And then I came across Moorehead’s book, The White Nile , and I thought, ‘This could be it.’ The White Nile had not been travelled since the 50s and 60s because of the Sudanese civil war and similar unrest in Uganda. But the civil war was just coming to an end and, at least in theory, one could now make the journey in something like safety. It’s a mash-up of travel narrative non-fiction, contemporary history and political reportage. The idea was to write a book that would be fun to read and the more nutritional components would be less noticeable. It’s very much an on-the-ground travel narrative, but it’s also a look at people emerging from decades of war and wrestling with what comes next. Who are you when you’re no longer fighting? What are you when you’re no longer a victim, or when you’re less of a victim? The course of a travel narrative is often shaped by the logistics of getting from A to B and by the people you fall in with on the way. I spent several weeks on a barge navigating the Sudd marshland in southern Sudan – the Sudd is massive, as big as England – but the vessel was crewed by soldiers from the rebel army. The barge had this strange dual identity. It was used for humanitarian aid during the war but when the fighting got hot, and the aid workers were forced to flee, the barge became a warship; it took part in ambushes. I had a companion for the first third of the book, my best friend from the United States. He had never been to the developing world, and I think it was valuable to see Uganda and Sudan through new eyes. I had a plank-board boat built and we paddled it from just north of the source of the Nile for about 100 miles to Lake Kyoga in the centre of Uganda. I had hoped to tow the boat across the lake and keep paddling from there, but we were absolutely wrecked after four days on the river. The wind bears down from the north and the Nile was low and there was no current to help us. Nowadays there are surprisingly few vessels plying it. No one is using the river in the way it was used in colonial times, when a series of ports and railheads connected Mombasa with Cairo. Those trade links don’t exist any more. Fishermen know the river a kilometre in each direction because that’s the territory they fish in. But they have no reason to know what lies beyond that. It was fun, miserable and tiring. Sometimes frightful; it had been a long time since I’d had to take cover from gunfire. And it’s tiring to do these things alone. I speak transactional Arabic so, while it got me by, there were fewer opportunities for human connection in northern Sudan. Because for the most part my journey is along the African Nile. In the popular imagination, the Nile runs from Egyptian monument to monument, but this is only a small part of it. It’s an African river. Questions of race loom large in Sudan; the issue is extremely complicated. And because oil has such a role in the region and in the book – all this together made it The Black Nile ."