ssese-seminal thoughts from a stormy lake in africa

Wrapped in a yellow plastic bag, we were being tossed about on the angrier waters of Lake Victoria. Walls of water crashed and lightning flashed. Mr Ssenkoko narrowed his eyes at me through blades of rain and said “Are you Jewish?”

Up till then I’d been feeling a bit over-excited, perhaps. There’s something oddly intoxicating about knowing you’ll probably die and so flinging one’s fate to the winds and tides and things. Up until the yellow plastic, I’d even been teasing Philip who had had his cape belled out, hen-style, over his cameras to keep them from the wild weather. He was also wearing a particularly funny hat.

Ssenkoko’s question knocked my laughter right out of the boat. What was that supposed to mean? I shook my soggy locks.

Mr Ssenkoko was the manager cum tour guide of the professor’s mosquito ravaged lodge or camp on one of the Ssese Islands, a group of 84 bejungled isles scattered over the north-west waters of Lake Victoria.

The professor was from Kampala International University and, the day before, we’d been driving though the city, on our way out to the lake. What was that?

“Ah yes…” the professor murmured, waving a vague hand at a distinctly off-kilter tower veering dangerously off a hill we were passing. “…It didn’t – ah - quite take off”. We were going to see some of the Ssese islands. Although we only had a couple of days in which to do it, we wanted to go. And the professor had been kind enough to offer to host us.

The tower is the top of a mosque commissioned by Idi Amin in Uganda’s murkier days, but had been miscalculated somehow. Its builders had silently persevered, fully cognisant of the fact that their lives were more at stake the more the tower lean became obvious. One day they abandoned the oddly angled tower and escaped.

At Bukukata on the shore, we stood at the little harbour having our photographs taken by some newsman in front of a ferry. I expect our calm faces appeared in something like the Bukukata Beholder a day or so later while we were being dashed about on the implacid lake.

The ferry wasn’t for us. A taxi boat was. Yamaha powered, it roared off with us and many others, a cargo of bicycles and vegetables. It sped for an hour and a half between the water hyacinth mounds, towards the myriad alluring islands that kept appearing and disappearing behind veils of a descending mist. The bottom of our bucking taxi was awash with black water and banana skins.

Buggala, the largest Ssese island, waited for us in the dusk. Then for another 45 minutes we went by fast van, through a darkening forest of monkey shrieks. At the professor’s place was an open-sided, thatched dining pavilion and bar, some separate buildings housing a kitchen and the people that worked there, a water tower and four almost completed holiday chalets. Although my bed sported a mosquito net, I suspected that the thousand-and-one powerful mosquitoes clustering around me could sort out a little obstruction like that.

At supper, at the pavilion, we were introduced to Mr Ssenkoko. He kept slapping his head like someone enjoying a great joke. Except that I could see, by the light of our lantern, over a not-quite cooked chicken, that Mr Ssenkoko was not the amused sort. Under his own cloud of stingers, he was haughty and dignified, as much as the Professor was absent-minded.

Next day, even after the fruitily delicious breakfast and Ugandan coffee, Mr Ssenkoko seemed in no great hurry to get us onto the lake. The weather didn’t look wonderful but the real reason was that he didn’t want to say there was no boat. There also turned out that morning to be no transport with which to fetch one.

These drawbacks took time to resolve themselves as the sky came down lower and lower. Finally, a boat at the ready, Mr Ssenkoko fetched a huge yellow plastic sheet and stated we were to do exactly as he told us on the water.

We couldn’t see the first island to which we were headed so I asked how long it would take.

“ One hour, because we are controlled by horse power.”

It seemed as if we and the mounds of waterweed were the only things on the eternal dark water. With the first huge lightning flash we hit a beach. Rain pelted us. Up the short beach and towards a group of small houses, each with a canoe in front. There we stood in the rain in front of a closed door.

“Why are we here?” I yelled through the storm. Mr Ssenkoko ignored me.

To Philip he said, “Are you blind?” He indicated a poster on the door and on the poster was a picture of Mr Ssenkoko. It was an election poster and read: Councillor for Bufumira Sub-county, Kalangala District.

Then, seated in blue easy chairs inside, under a blue shade-cloth, at a long coffee table, decorated with blue doilies, we watched Mr Sssenkoko eat a plate of matoke (steamed and mashed savoury banana) and drink a cup of tea. There was a lace curtain across a doorway leading to two rooms beyond and a toothpaste tube on the floor. The squall seemed to be passing over.

Philip was interested to know what all that white was in a distant tree.

“Bards”, said Ssenkoko. I stared at them.

“I think he means buds”, I whispered.

“No. Bards”, Ssenkoko corrected me loudly. “They fly here for the drying fish and settle in that tree.” There were indeed vast beds of little shimmering tilapia and the big white bards above studied them intently.

As soon as we reached the boat, the rain flooded down. It had metamorphosed from a squall to something with much more serious intent. Philip and I had no idea where we were headed if it weren’t into the devil’s maelstrom. But it wasn’t long before another island reared out of the weather.

We ran blindly and got to a stone house or store room that had recently been burned. It was full of charcoal furniture. However, Ssenkoko rushed out soggily again, saying, I thought I heard, that he’d “try to find Madam Tropista”.

“She’s important in the tourism business”, he informed us later, as we plodded back to the wet boat. Just as we’d pushed out, a brilliantly clad woman with whirling hair and a big wet dog materialised out of a swirl of mist on the shore. Madam Tropista?

On the way back to Buggala, the water kept disappearing from under the boat so that we seemed to be travelling through a black sky as much as we dipped through the immense watery troughs of Lake Victoria, the biggest lake in Africa. I realised we were going to be pitched overboard at the very least. It was then that Mr Ssenkoko wrapped us in his length of yellow cling film. Where we all to go down together in a bright bundle?

The mosquitoes would have been disappointed. As it happened they got me instead of the bottom of the lake. Next day, Philip and I were lying sprawled on the back of a fast-moving truck under a singing canopy of equatorial palms, colobars and humidity. We were going back and we were dry and eating a big fish with our hands.

An earthquake an hour

My memories of Sun City were of the inescapable sound of clinking money, and of the way it was always meant to be night even during the day. On your way to the breakfast patio, through dark rooms lit by flashing red neons, you’d pass women cleaning the carpets, wearing shimmering disco outfits.

The resort’s casino hotel has long been eclipsed by the glitzier Palace of the Lost City, which is indeed something to behold.

A two and a half hour drive from Johannesburg brings South Africans and loads of foreign tourists to the Sun City resort. Sun City also serves as a convenient gateway to the Pilanesberg game reserve that is situated within a real 1 200 million year old volcanic crater. However, the resort’s original reason for being was as a gambling Vegas-themed mecca. Today the resort’s description says it is rather focused on what they term the African Experience. The Palace of the Lost City has, as its own theme, the fantasy of a rediscovery of some ancient but idyllic African civilization.

Near the entrance gate to Pilanesberg we had our first glimpse of the spires of The Palace of the Lost City suffused in Disney-gold morning light.

As I got out of the car I looked up and really thought I saw a giant kudu leaping out of a lotus flower on the corner of a tall tower. I held onto my briefcase more tightly. It felt solid and reassuring. Our car was whisked away over a little lake and we followed our bags being trundled around a mighty fountain gushing, rather surprisingly, out of super-ginormous black sable antelope horns. There were maybe fifty people of many nationalities who probably noticed anything remarkable about water gushing from ends of animal horns, no more perhaps than the way it comes out of demons’ mouths in the rest of the world. They were taking still and moving pictures of their partners and friends and the extraordinary fountain was a mere backdrop.

There was more clicking and whirring in the grand loggia where Reception seemed dwarfed by domed and painted ceilings, zebra-striped lofty window frames and the grandest arrangement of St Joseph lilies in creation. There were vast tapestries featuring animals from Africa and even Madagascar, I noticed, for there was its famed indri lemur keeping woolly company with some local springbok and hippos. On the marble floor lay a small Japanese boy. He wailed.

“Have you noticed that on every piece of anything, something is killing something else?” said Philip, the photographer as he and I explored the interior. No expense or hunger for blood has been spared on the wallpapers, the tapestries, the drapes, the carpets, the mosaics or even the lampstands and shades. Recognizable or fantasy animals, big and small, are hunting or being hunted wherever your glance falls.

Outside are the fake ruins of old temples, supposedly ancient carvings, illusive grottos. Waters spew forth all over the place. Beyond the so-called Palace hotel is its ‘Grand Pool’ with more gushing water and jungly gardens and a place named The Valley of the Waves.

As though guarding the Palace is an immense bridge, lined with numerous stony, towering elephants, leading eventually to The Entertainment Centre. It is labeled The Bridge of Time. Every hour there’s a powerful booming and much billowing of smoke from the elephants’ direction. The bridge then rumbles and shakes to simulate the feeling of an earthquake. You hear that booming bridge wherever you are in the resort grounds.

It competes for noise level with The Roaring Lagoon. The Roaring Lagoon is part of The Valley of the Waves, which has what looks very like a natural beach and water that comes up to about an adult’s waist. After a mighty echoing roar, 1,8 meter waves appear every 90 seconds for 30 minutes. Otherwise the water is on “bob cycle”, as one of the lifesavers informed me.

We watched. The water was packed with bodies. More lazed over the surrounding grassy slopes. There was a pre-teen sunning herself in her cute bikini, peak cap and earrings, smoking a cigarette. There was an earthquake. She didn’t stir. I checked my watch. Eleven. Alongside was a valley full of people bobbing, facing The Roaring Lagoon to see when it would release their next series of waves.

Next day we took the Palace of the Lost City lift nine floors up and a further few flights of stairs, to The Kings Tower. There one can’t help but be impressed by the size and thematic assiduousness of the surroundings. It was there, too, that I was able to confirm my bizarre giant kudu sighting. Directly below me, on each corner of the tower were four mighty African kudus, all in mid-escape from four giant Indian lotus flowers.

Next to me was a group of visitors up from the Western Cape, I guessed by their voices. Their little boy was naturally impatient to be able to see what they were looking out at, so he was lifted onto the parapet.

“Lion King”, he asserted as gazed out.

“Lion King is not here,” sighed his mother. I glanced at her. Only the adults round the place seemed to be confused about what The African Experience was about. All the kids seemed to get it immediately.