The Hard Stuff
January 2024 The South Sudan government ban sales of a gin that has been linked to several deaths. The governor of Central Equatoria, Adi Anthony, is quoted as saying, “Many young people, when they get drunk, hit their mothers with machetes.”
1985 I am working as a teacher in Yambio, Western Equatoria, a small town close to the border with Zaire, now Congo DRC.
My first experience of it was traumatic. The deputy headmaster, Anisa, was holding a party at his house and we all sat in a circle passing a bottle around. I took a small nip and felt the liquid burning my throat as it went down. I gasped, choked and managed to croak, "What the hell is that?"
They all thought this was hilarious.
"That, my brother, is Seiko Five."
No one knew why it had that name, but I surmised that since Seiko digital watches were considered a valuable rarity possessed only by highly privileged dignitaries, the link was the idea of luxury. That was hard to fathom. Seiko Five was an entirely local production, distilled from cassava root with variable, but always explosive consequences. The bottle continued its round until it was finished. I breathed a sigh of relief. Then another bottle was brought out.
It certainly got the party started. Within minutes everyone was laughing and dancing. The music was pirated cassettes from Zaire and Kenya: swooping loopy high-pitched electric guitars over a driving beat. Artists like Franco, Orchestre Malekesa du Zaire, and Mbelia Bel were the favourites. I'd never heard anything like it for infectious happiness, with a tinge of melancholic longing.
That night I got to know Rudolf, the Arabic teacher, and Yassin who was supposed to be geography but rarely managed to get out of bed. He was killing himself slowly with Seiko Five. Our school was a bush school close to the Zaire border although there were no roads into our neighbouring country, only footpaths. Despite the lack of communications, Zaire was considered the cultural powerhouse, the source of all things wonderful.
When I made it back to my hut, I lay down and prayed that the world would stop spinning. Outside I could hear Yassin singing, then banging on the door: "Uncle! Come on, I have a bottle. Let's drink together."
I pretended to be asleep.
In the morning I woke with a raging thirst and a thumping headache. I drank water from the terracotta pots outside and jumped on my bicycle to go to the market. I had only gone a mile when I discovered a hidden feature of Seiko Five: it was, like Pernod, one of those drinks that catch you on the rebound. The bicycle suddenly went out of control and I rode off the path into the bushes and fell off. I was drunk again.
From then on I was determined to find another, less devastating form of alcohol.
Rudolf had agreed to come and give me Arabic lessons, and we did study a little, but mostly we chatted, becoming good friends. I learned a lot about the life going on around me. This was Azande tribe territory and Rudolf was happy to dish the gossip. I learned which local officials were corrupt, who the best shamans were and what they could do, and that his wife refused to allow him to take another, as Azande tradition allowed. “But there’s man near here with 32 wives,” Rudolf complained bitterly. I also discovered that the best drink was not Seiko Five, it was Skol International lager. To the best of Rudolf’s knowledg, the only person sufficiently wealthy for this advanced luxury product was the school accountant, but even he had supply difficulties. Skol was, of course, Zairean, and it could be bought across the border in a market called Nabia Pai. That, however, was the easy bit. The real challenge was to get hold of empty bottles as the traders would only swap the full pint bottles for empties. They were rarer than Seiko watches.
Next day I went to see the accountant. I heard he liked Skol lager? Well, I was going to Zaire next weekend and I'd love to bring him some back. All I needed was all the empty bottles he possessed.
The accountant was a suspicious man. The smile fell from his face. Who had told me he had empty bottles? Was I suggesting he was a drunkard like that fellow Yassin?
Skol-drinkers are not drunks, I protested. Didn't President Mobuto Sese Seko himself consume it? Only top people could appreciate such a beverage.
At this his face softened. "If I could find empty bottles, and you did manage to replace them with full ones, wouldn't you just drink everything before arriving back?"
"Why would I do that? You could find a problem with my salary and refuse to pay me."
He liked that solution. Four empty pint bottles appeared. I made my pitch. I would ride to Zaire and bring back four bottles of lager. I would drink two and he would drink two. The empty bottles, of course, would still be his. No charge.
At our evening Arabic session, Rudolf shook his head. "Zaire is dangerous and Nabia Pai is a terrible place." He would not go with me.
So I asked my friend Bullen. He scraped a living by trading honey between markets: buying up plastic jetty cans in remote markets, then selling it in small amounts in Yambio market, at a decent profit. He was very happy to go to Nabia Pai.
We set out one evening on our Chinese bicycles, following a beaten earth footpath through open woodland. Black and white colobus monkeys bounced across the track ahead and when darkness came there were choruses of frogs. Our way crossed the watershed between the Nile basin and the Congo. Traditionally the Azande do not live in villages, but small clearings in the forest. There would be a grain store, beautifully constructed from clay and thatch on stilts, underneath which was a fire. We slept on the ground near one such fire belonging to his grandmother, Ruta. The old lady had somehow managed to reach the age of 80 living through endless wars, deprivation and poverty. She had a small clearing for cassava plants, another for peanuts. There were a couple of mango trees, a palm laden with orange nuts, and some chickens. The only items not from the forest were a cooking pot, some cloth and a machete. Ruta saw these things as luxuries since they had not existed when she was a child. Bullen himself had never been to school, but he was an intelligent man, full of questions. What caused thunder and lightning? How far away were the stars? The old Azande answers to such questions did not satisfy him like they did Ruta. She believed that lightning was a fabulous bird and thunder was its wingbeats. The world was controlled and organised by tricksters, impish cunning animal spirits like Ture who often appeared as a blue duiker, a tiny deer that played jokes on hunters.
In the morning we rode into Nabia Pai. The first person I saw was a man wearing tree bark loin cloth. "That was how we all used to dress," explained Bullen, "Before the churches brought tee shirts and pants."
Next was a stack of dried hands, dozens of them. "Chimpanzee hand. Very tasty."
They looked like the hands of concert pianists, with long delicate fingers.
The trader saw my interest and ran off to bring the skin of a giant python. Bullen bought dried meat of a waterbuck. Word was sent out that I wanted Skol lager. We sat on little wooden stools and drank sesame beer from big pots then were offered different meats: crocodile, hippo and blue duiker. Bullen wouldn’t eat the duiker - too dangerous to tempt fate and annoy that trickster. I bought some wood carvings but declined a pouch of river gold. A messenger arrived to tell me that there was no Skol lager at all. It was hard to imagine such a city product in this remote rural backwater, but there were signs that Nabia Pai connected to the huge hinterland that was Zaire. Women were wearing dresses made from cloth that was decorated with the face of Mobutu, the dictator, and his famous wife, Mama Bobi.
We waited, but no Skol appeared. We set off back to Sudan. The track was busy with people walking and Bullen had a word for everyone. Sometimes he'd be convulsed with laughter at a comment, but he complained that he couldn't translate properly. "That man said, 'Your hair is floating.'" And off he went again, bursting with joyous chuckles.
As the afternoon took on the golden hint of sunset, we were riding quickly along a long straight section of track. I was in front. We passed a few teak trees and the path was covered in dry leaves. The movement was fast. Down in the leaves. A whiplash of brown and gold. My feet shot up off the pedals instinctively. The pedal hit the snake on the head, stunning it.
I shouted a warning to Bullen, but he had already seen it. "That one is very bad," he said, giving it a wide berth. I got off my bike and went back, cautiously. The snake was about four feet long with a stout muscular body as thick as my upper arm and a skin dappled and decorated in intricate diamonds of brown. It moved slowly away. That was my first dangerous beast: a puff adder.
My second was the accountant. I gave him his bottles back, but he did not believe my explanation. "I knew you would drink them all."
I pointed out that they were the same bottles, but he refused to accept it.
That night Rudolf was worried. "That man is bad," he said. "And you have made him your enemy." And so it proved to be.
Twenty years after my time in South Sudan, I was living in York and my partner Sophie became friendly with a woman who was married to a Congolese academic. We invited them to dinner one night and shortly before they came, they rang to ask if they could bring a Ugandan student who had worked in South Sudan. Over dinner I discovered that he had spent time in Yambio, working as with the UN relief mission. After I had left, the war had come ripped through the area had things become chaotic.
I went through all the names of the people I had known, but none rang any bells for him, except one. Rudolf.
"The Arabic teacher? Was he your friend?"
"Yes. A good friend."
"I'm sorry. Rudolf fled from the fighting with his wife and went to Central African Republic. I heard he died in a refugee camp."
*
I love writing these stories from my past travels, but it does take time, especially when you lost grey matter to Seiko Five. Rather than do a paid subscription, I just ask for occasional one-off tips…
"She believed that lightning was a fabulous bird and thunder was its wingbeats."
I think she was right.