The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World, and the Way We Live Today - Hardcover

Conover, Ted

 
9781400042449: The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World, and the Way We Live Today
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1400042445 ISBN 13: 9781400042449
Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

The Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing explores how roads literally and metaphorically bind the world and change its landscape, citing examples in such regions as China, the Andes and the West Bank.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ted Conover is the author of several books including Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) and Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and National Geographic. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is Distinguished Writer-in-Residence in the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. He lives in New York City.

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THE ROAD IS VERY UNFAIR

IN 1992, I TRAVELED TO Kenya because of something I’d read in the newspaper. A report on an international AIDS conference in Amsterdam briefly mentioned research suggesting that long- distance truck drivers might be spreading the disease, by sleeping with prostitutes along the routes they plied between central Africa and the continent’s east coast, on the Indian Ocean.

At the time, most Americans knew AIDS as a disease of gay men, junkies, and Haitians. Randy Shilts’s important and influential And the Band Played On (1987) focused on the role of a promiscuous flight attendant, Gaetan Dugas, in spreading the disease to several countries, suggesting that Dugas was the “Patient Zero” of AIDS among gay men. But AIDS was a developing story, and five years later, when I read the article on the conference, it was generally thought that the epidemic had originated among people unknown, possibly in central Africa, and that presumably it spread first not by air but by road.

My college roommate of two years, Doug Dittman, who was gay, had died of AIDS a year before I read the article. His partner, Mark, my other roommate, had become infected as well; and between Doug’s death and Mark’s illness, I found myself thinking about AIDS a lot. Other people seemed to be trying hard not to think about it (President Ronald Reagan resisted mentioning the epidemic for years), and that was something I wished I could change.When I read about the African truckers, a lightbulb went on: because of our own trucker culture, I thought, this story might interest American readers in AIDS in Africa (where it was expected to be much worse than in the USA). And it offered the chance to ride along on some trucks and see the life firsthand, which I always preferred.

A Kenyan doctor and immunologist who had co- authored the study I’d read about, Job Bwayo, met with me in Nairobi. Bwayo was a tall, soft-spoken, handsome man who had to contort to fit into the small white sedan in which he picked me up at my hotel. At the University of Nairobi, he introduced me to other researchers. Outside of town, we visited a clinic that Bwayo had set up at a weighbridge, where truckers had to stop, and— a crucial piece— he tried to set me up with a trucking firm. I was looking for a company that ran trucks from the coast to the interior of the continent and back again—the route along which, many believed, AIDS had spread from central Africa to the rest of the world. But the companies Bwayo had connections to were temporarily occupied with ferrying relief supplies up to Somalia, where a civil war raged. He suggested I might have better luck in Mombasa, the big port on the coast, where other firms had bases of operation, and so I went there.

After a couple of days in Mombasa having no success, I realized that the local yellow pages listed not just the main numbers of the big trucking firms, but also their fax lines and the names and positions of the top managers. I faxed off several letters introducing myself and explaining my mission, and the next day got a call back from the man in charge of a large Belgian-owned company called Transami. I was welcome to join one of their trucks, he said.

In fact, we soon discovered, the best prospect was a whole group of trucks that had left the day before, headed for Rwanda and possibly Burundi. I took the next bus out of Mombasa and caught up with the Transami convoy on the Kenyan border with Tanzania, at Isebania, where they were waiting to clear Customs. It was a cool, rainy Saturday, and scores of trucks were lined up along the shoulders of a muddy dirt road. Customs was closed for the weekend, and no one would be going anywhere until Monday. It took about an hour to find my truck (called Fleet 19, though it was a single vehicle). Tired and wet, I banged on the door. A man in his twenties rolled down the window, peered out, realized who I was— a radio message to a company rep on the border had alerted them—and opened the door with a smile. Obadiah Okello was tall and genial and, reaching for my knapsack, invited me into the cab. He was not, he explained, the driver. That would be Bradford Mulwa, who was “taking tea” at a tent across the way. Rather he, Obadiah, was the “turnboy,” or driver’s assistant, whose responsibility it was to guard the truck twenty-four hours a day.


Obadiah, Bradford, and I (along with four other semi- trailer rigs in the Transami convoy) traveled together for the next few weeks, slowly bouncing over the crumbling roads of westernTanzania, into war-torn Rwanda, and finally into Burundi, which was on the verge of its own civil war.The trucks stuck together mainly out of fear of robbery: they carried imported goods, manufactured items including roofing, chemicals, window glass, beer bottles, medicines, bicycles, tires, secondhand clothes, and electronics. Imported goods were by definition valuable, so much so that the triphad begun with a police- organized nighttime convoy of several dozen trucks. But once past Nairobi the police escort disappeared, leaving the drivers to their own devices.Adding to their vulnerability, the old British Leyland trucks (ours had served in the Falkland Islands war) were prone to breakdown, especially given their overloaded trailers.

For most of that first journey, there were twelve employees— five drivers, five turnboys, and, from the first breakdown in Tanzania, a mechanic and a supervisor who followed along in their own Toyota Overland Cruiser—and me. Obadiah was my favorite, and my main link to the others.

A Luo from the region east of Lake Victoria, he was opinionated and assertive (as Luos are said to be). Much of what he said seemed to require an exclamation point after it on paper. Regarding my sunglasses, which I often loaned him, he said, “Such nice goggles! So green!”; of the awful roads of western Tanzania, “The road has much corrugation!”; on the speed of Bradford, the driver, whom he felt drove overcautiously, “Haraka! Haraka! (Faster! Faster!).”

Many of his exclamations involved his dissatisfaction with Bradford. The two could hardly have been more different. Bradford, in his late forties, had spent thirteen years in the Kenyan army. They must have been formative ones: he was disciplined and reserved. Every morning he shaved and put on a clean button- front shirt. Where Obadiah was expressive, Bradford was taciturn; he had, as far as I could tell, three facial expressions: impassive, frowning, and, rarely, slightly smiling. In his twenty years of driving big trucks, he claimed never to have had a single accident, and he attributed this to being careful and following all the rules.

To Obadiah, however, Bradford’s caution was extreme, and maddening. “That man is slow, sooo slow!” he would say. “He is slow the way he drives and slow the way he talks. He is just too slow.” More often, he would complain to Bradford directly. If the road had opened up, for example, and it appeared to be smooth sailing ahead but Bradford was in a low gear, Obadiah would start up with his harakas, as though the driver required reminding. “Overtake that man!” he would instruct, when Fleet 19 came up behind some slower vehicle and the way was clear. Occasionally Bradford would glare at him in response, but more often he would simply ignore Obadiah, because he resisted hurry. And because he could.

Slowness was also the way Bradford handled being shaken down, whether by a Customs official or by a local policeman who had set out spikes on the road in hopes of extracting a small tip. Obadiah’s approach was to banter with such extortionists, joking and pleading poverty, trying to keep everything on a...

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Verlag
Alfred a Knopf Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2010
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1400042445
ISBN 13 
9781400042449
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
333
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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