Niger River Project

The Journey from Hell Part 2 brings us to the town of Jebba. Frankly, there’s very little reason to come to Jebba. It’s a small industrial town on the banks of the Niger, with a now closed paper mill and a hydro-electric dam that seems to do very little to ensure Jebba, only about a mile away, has anything resembling a constant supply of power; like almost everywhere else in Nigeria, power blackouts are frequent, lengthy and, much to the dismay of most Nigerians, tends to come during crucial televised football matches.

From our point of view, the only thing that puts Jebba on the map is the fact that it’s home to West Africa’s most significant memorial to Mungo Park and Richard Lander, the Cornishman who around 20 years after Park picked up where the Scot left off and successfully traced the Niger all the way to its termination in the Gulf of Guinea.

The morning after we arrive in Jebba, Victor, a 15-year old from the dingy little hotel where we’re staying, offers to take us to the memorial. First, though, and for a reason I’m unclear about, he insists we visit the nearby paper mill. I’m not particularly interested in looking at the huge behemoth factory that dominates Jebba’s skyline. But there seems to be no turning Victor, so we fall in step.

Our route to the mill takes us along Jebba’s now almost totally unused rail lines. Like most things in Africa that were built with one purpose in mind but no longer fulfill that purpose so are used for something else, the tracks are today used as a handy footpath by Jebba’s locals. Even motorbike-taxis manage to bump and bounce their way over the sleepers.

Wandering down the lines trying to defy the stultifying humidity that now prevails, we come across the hulk of an ancient looking steam train. Now gathering dust and weeds in some siding, the engine clearly hasn’t been used for many years, but I have a weakness for old steam trains, so we stop for a look.

As we’re poking around, I notice a fenced enclosure next to the train, overgrown with a tangle of bushes. It barely warrants a second glance, but my eyes are drawn to a sign hidden behind the bushes on which I can clearly see written “Mungo Park”. I peel back the foliage. Behind is a hand written sign bearing a message, most of which is incomprehensible except for a reference to Mungo Park and the SS Dayspring.

I pull back more of the foliage next to the sign and find a group of strange metal objects. Most of these are unrecognisable except for one, which is clearly the propeller screw of a ship.

Suddenly, the significance of what I’m looking at becomes clear. The SS Dayspring was a steamer brought up the Niger to Jebba by James Baikie, a Scottish doctor who led the first successful trip up the river in so far as none of his crew died. Baikie had recognised the value of quinine in combating malaria (though malaria was still an unidentified disease at this stage) and ordered all his men to take it twice a day. Baikie’s discovery meant that the curse of the White Man’s Grave was finally broken, and as a result the British conquest of the Niger – and eventually Nigeria – gathered pace.

Sadly Baikie didn’t have so much luck with his journey from Lokoja, his base downstream, up to Jebba. When he and his crew reached the town, their boat hit a hidden rock and sank. Everyone escaped and made it to dry land, but they had to wait one day less than a year for another boat to come and pick them up.

I find it sobering to thing that it is a relic of this ill-fated journey that I have uncovered in a group of bushes behind a fence in an anonymous town in Nigeria. Ok, so it’s just a propeller, but it’s a real, tangible link with a piece of British history that has largely been forgotten.

This sense mounts when, after a largely pointless attempt to visit Victor’s paper mill, which is shut, we hop on moto-taxis across town for the day’s main act, the Park/Lander memorial.

I’m half-expecting this to be in a similar vein to the SS Dayspring relics, shoved in a forgotten to gather dust. But quite the opposite is true: the memorial turns out to be a huge stone obelisk on a hillside overlooking the Niger on the way in to Jebba.

We scramble up the hill to the tower. It’s about 50-75 feet tall in a pale honey-coloured sandstone. Despite its size, the monument is unimpressive, plain save a plaque on one face bearing the inscription: “To Mungo Park, 1795, and Richard Lander, 1830, who traced the course of the Niger from near its source to the sea. Both died in Africa for Africa.”

This last sentence has a great impact on me. Explorers, particularly those of Park’s ilk, are generally remembered for their glorious triumphs over adversity. In truth most probably were driven by a certain amount of hubris, a desire for recognition and fame, but it’s easy to overlook other more modest motivations.

Park’s diary, for example, is an essay in humility, the author’s ego never getting in the way of his objective, unsensational reporting of what he found. The lasting impression is that Park had a genuine passion for what he was doing and for the Africa that he was revealing to the world; the inscription on the obelisk overwhelmingly cements this feeling.

The only aspect of the memorial that doesn’t quite fit is its location in Jebba. Park only made it as far along the Niger as Bussa, about 150km to the north. This was where Lander picked up the trail, so there’s no real reason for the monument to be where it is.

We get to the bus station around 0930 and identify the beaten up vehicle going to Lagos. We wait for the two remaining passengers to turn up. This takes two hours.

Meanwhile we shelter from the sun on a bench owned by a general store shack and watch juggernauts and goats mingle on the highway.

The vehicle is a Toyota people carrier – fit for 14 at a push; we manage to cram in 19. Us three together with a seemingly old man (who could in fact be 45 or younger) were the last to turn up, so occupy the cheap seats on the back row. I find myself over the wheel arch, a fold down seat in front pins my knees near my chest leaving one of my feet toeing the air for somewhere to rest.

It’s a war of equal forces – my fists and knees against the back of the seat versus the lad in fronts’ body weight. I let my mind wander over the highs of the past few weeks; it’s the only way negate the pain.

Three hours into the battle and the chance to swap with the comparatively diminutive Youssef cannot be turned down. I manage to wedge a knee under the seat in front, the other invading Youssef’s space, but he forces a smile and a ‘No pfroblem’. Youssif’s got a strange habit of pronouncing all his ‘p’s as ‘f’s. It makes understanding him sometimes an impossible feat.

We continue for over five hours without a break, everyone hunkering down in the cabin, fumes from the open back door (our ruck-sacs more out than in) contributing to the general malaise. The driver weaves a route round potholes and seems to be playing a game of ‘smooth-road-chicken’ with the oncoming traffic, most of which is heavy road freight.

It becomes evident that our fellow back seat buddy has been conned into joining us: they told him we were going his way just to get his money. It’s a fine homecoming for someone who’s just returned from the arduous 1,500-mile pilgrimage to Mecca and back.

At dusk we come across a convoy of stationary vehicles – mostly tankers – a crowd of jumpy looking bystanders, and an incongruous cafe/shack doing swift trade in coffee and cigarettes.

There’s been an armed robbery a short distance up the road: nobody knows exactly where, but until traffic’s seen heading our way, we’re all going to sit it out. We still have camping equipment if needed and we contemplate an unplanned night under the stars. It’s an apt time for many to wash and pray, but we search the heavens instead with our GPS and plot our co-ordinates. It’ll be interesting and, who knows, potentially valuable to know where these robbers, allegedly from Chad, were hiding out.

After about 40 minutes there’s general clamour and adrenalin induced action, and it’s clear that we’re going to make a dash for it. Moonlit shapes and shadows are vapourised in the flood of lights, the sickly palour of the beams seeming a symptom of the asphyxiating fumes with which we are suddenly engulfed.

We weave again through the potholed road; bushfires in the distance and then close-by, add to the post-apocalyptic feel. “This must be what a gun-run through the steets of Baghdad must feel like”, I say to Ben handing him my digi cam and he shoots a great image of the fires reflected in the bus’s glass while leaning out the side window.

It’s not long till we reach the sanctuary of Jebba, and we’re grateful for the proximity of the hotel. We both spill out from the vehicle’s interior, staggering as muscles try to operate without blood. It’s been a ten-hour slog in severe discomfort through notorious bandit country, but we’ve made it. As we’re frequently reminded, whether prompted or not: “that’s Nigeria for you!”

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