John Ironmonger's Random Blog: Uganda

When I was eleven years old, I took a holiday with my mother on Lake Victoria. It was a sort of cruise, although the ship, the SS Usoga, was not, by any stretch of imagination, a cruise liner; it was a smelly, oily merchant ship on an endless tour around the lake. It did, however, have two passenger cabins. My mother and I had one. The other was occupied by a honeymooning couple from Ireland called Lynam. According to the East African Railways website - on Sundays the Usoga sailed clockwise from Kisumu: on Wednesdays, anti-clockwise. The overnight passage from Kisumu to Port Bell took twelve hours. After a two to three hour stop for cargo handling, the ship left Port Bell for the two hour passage to Entebbe. Entebbe was a short (one hour) stop, and from there it was an eight and a half hour passage to Bukoba in Tanzania. From Bukoba the ship sailed overnight to Mwanza where it arrived around dawn. Leaving Mwanza at 1030, Musoma was reached at 1900 from where, after a two hour stop, the final night passage brought the ship back to Kisumu at 0700. We must have sailed on a Sunday because we set sail from Kisumu and sailed the other way around.

In a perfect world Lake Victoria would be one of the great holiday destinations on the planet. The PR men would need no imagination. It’s a huge body of freshwater - the size of Ireland. When you’re sailing you spend much of the time out of sight of land. It’s an ocean really; a freshwater ocean. It heaves and groans like an ocean. Yet all around are the dark mysterious hills and jungles of Livingstone’s Africa. There’s a hint of the unexplored - the unexplorable - about the place. Ancient peoples live all around it; people who have made their living from the great beneficent lake for countless generations. Our most ancient ancestors of all probably hung out here for a few millennia, feeding off the very fine fish, luxuriating beneath the cool forest trees that overhang the bank, wading in the thousand little bays and eddies. Lake Victoria is as African as it gets. Wildlife abounds. Hippos swim languidly. Crocodiles bask menacingly. Antelope come fleetingly down to the shores to drink. Great birds flock. Tiny birds flick over the water seeking flies. Insects throng and swarm and buzz incessantly.

Halfway through the cruise, my mother fell ill. She was pregnant at the time (with my sister, Sally). When we got to Bukoba she was taken off the Usoga to a hospital in the town. I wasn’t allowed to go along. But I escaped the ship. I scrambled down a mooring rope and found my way to the hospital. I still feel quite proud of this feat, all these years later.

I wrote about this trip in my first published novel, ‘The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder.’ In the novel, Max and his friend Adam, travel on the Usoga with Max’s mother O. In Bukoba O falls ill and is taken to hospital. Max escapes the Usoga by sliding down a mooring rope, concealed within a cloud of lake flies.

I have no photographs of the trip. The photos are of my visit with my son Jon at the dockside in Ggaba near Kampala in 2011. The What3words will take you here.

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Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com

My novel ‘The Coincidence Authority’ features, in its closing chapters, a tough, overland trip by the eponymous protagonist, Thomas Post. He travels by bus, taxi, bicycle, and foot, all the way from Kampala to the north west corner of Uganda –a province known as West Nile. This corner of Uganda has been snipped off the country map by the Nile River, and is only accessible by a bridge to the far west of the country at Pakwach, or by a smelly, unreliable (but more accessible) ferry eighty miles away at Laropi (unless you sneak over the border from Sudan or Congo). This was a journey I first made around 1970 with my brother-in-law Doop when I was fifteen or sixteen or thereabouts. Doop was an engineer installing elevators into Ugandan hospitals. I went with him as his spanner boy to places like Gulu, and Moyo – remote communities, close to the borders with Congo and Sudan. The region has been a war zone for much of the past half century, although now, thankfully, it is at peace. Thomas Post, in the novel, crosses the river at Laropi, and I felt it was important to go back and see the region again; so in May 2011 in an effort to do the research, my son Jon and I followed in Thomas’s footsteps. We drove north from Kampala, and boarded the ferry to West Nile. The river is only about half a mile wide here. This is one of its narrowest points. It was a languid, surreal crossing, watched by hippos. Glorious.

Please check out my website to learn more about my books: https://www.johnironmonger.com

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