A Nest of Thieves
RCA, Febuary1984
Central Bangui had the feel of a small French provincial town with a roundabout in the middle. We were diving around it, somewhat confused as to what direction to take, when a whistle shrilled. Startled, we stopped in the middle of the road. A policewoman with a glowering expression curtly waved us over to a parking space. We had been blocking the presidental convoy which even now rounded the corner with wailing sirens. It cost us a hefty fine.
‘The police here are well alert,’ I thought. If only.
We drove back along the same street on which we had entered the town. Soon the pretty houses were replaced by long rows of adobe huts. After a while, we passed a market. Piles of rotting fruit and meat gave off a pungent smell. We had arrived in the notorious “Kilomètre Cinq” at the 5 km border from the centre (a little like a Central African ‘8 Mile’, I guess…). Allegedly the area was crawling with thieves and for once the rumours were not wrong.
The tarmac turned into a dust track as we continued on to the campsite. The site wasn’t cheap, but it was peaceful and it would be home for a while.
At night a security guard patrolled the ground armed with a cross bow. He showed me his arrows which were razor-sharp and festooned with hooks and told me with a grin that he had once shot and killed a thief. He hadn’t been arrested because it was “only a thief”.
Nevertheless, Reinhold’s rucksack was missing the very next day. He had it left close to the fence and the thieves had cut a hole through the wire. Of course, he should’nt have left it outside, but I wondered how safe we and our stuff were behind the canvas of a tent.
As we would soon find out, the thieving happened at any time and in any location. We were sitting in an excellent pâtisserie in the city centre, overlooking the lorry through the big glass windows. Harald kept an eye on the legs of pedestrians who were passing behind it. Every now and then, a pair of legs would stop. Harald would walk nonchalantly towards the lorry and the legs would run away before he got to the other side. But when we had finished our coffee and went back we found that his Sudanese drums had disappeared from the floor under a seat where they had been hidden.
When we told the story to a few English guys that evening, they smiled sympathetically. They had parked their landrover in the same spot and left two people to watch it. One of them saw a hand sneak through an open window towards a bag that was lying on the seat. The other guy got out, grabbed the urchin and slapped him whereupon the kid walked off red-faced but as nonchalantly as possible.
I could not get my head around the people we met in the streets. There was something sinister about many of them. A gaggle of boys who followed Uschi and me around, shouted that they would cut off our arms, legs and heads unless we married them. I remembered Sandy and her unruly pupils. At the same time, I doubted that there was any threat of real violence. A lawyer I got talking to told me someone had threatened him with a knife at ‘km 5’ but had run away when he pulled out his own knife.
“They are cowards,” he spat.
The gangs hanging around the swanky “Rock Hotel” where we went to phone glanced menacingly at us but stuck to loitering around the lorry, some distracting the guard while the others snatched a few items here and there.
Much of the clutter we kept on the lorry eventually got nicked, but on the campsite our things were relatively safe. Saying that, I was one of the few who did not have anything stolen at all, but then I got on very well with the guys running it. They called me “sister”.
We had been in town for a month before Reinhold finally managed to sell the lorry. It changed hands for the equivalent of 10 000 DM and was shipped to Zaïre the very same day. Reinhold returned to the campside with a whole bag full of cash and, hidden in a camper van, handed me a generous share: 100 000 CFA — in 100 CFA bills. I paled. I had hardly ever seen so much cash at once and I had to get it to the bank. This lot barely fitted into my handbag.
To keep potential thieves at bay, I put on my army-knife but the only result was that it nearly got nicked by a couple of cheeky boys who had sidled up to my belt. At least it seemed to divert attention away from my bag. Perhaps my torn trousers convinced potential thieves that I wasn’t a worthy target. I walked straight into the bank with my stash and breathed a heavy sigh of relief in the air-conditioned chill as the door closed behind me.
The Central African Republic is the place to sell hardware. At the time, the currency was linked to the French Franc and could be changed into US$ without the slightest hassle. Soon the stash had shrunk to a few dozen bills which I kept safely hidden.
I was ready to continue the journey, but first I had to sell some of my stuff to lighten the load. I had never intended to backpack.
There was a ready demand for all sorts of stuff which we managed to keep away from the thieves and I was amazed at the prices people were willing to pay for relatively cheap clobber. Ulrike unashamedly sold a pair of knickers for 1000 CFA, but then I did not have particularly feminine underwear. Even though, I made enough money to get to the border. Or so I thought.
Zaïre, I had been told, was one of the most difficult countries to travel in. There was no public transport and if the rainy season started, there would be no useable roads.
The rainy season…
We had experienced some tropical storms in Bangui in which the entire sky appeared to be sucked up into some mouth of hell. Our tents veritably floated on mud. I will never forget Walter’s face who had been sleeping under his mosquito net when he was rudely awoken by the equivalent of several buckets of water and strobe lightning. But recently the weather had been dry.
Then there were the bandits.
In Bangui there were pickpockets and opportunists, but in Zaïre, so people told me, armed gangs would ambush lorries. However, I did not believe in these tales. Anyway, if I was caught in the rainy season, there wouldn’t be many lorries on the roads to rob.
Besides, there was no other way to travel overland than through Zaïre.
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Denni