Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
As we reached the shore, Boston whispered, 'It's because they all share their wives,
these dirty
Bugandans
.'
'Everyone knows it. If you marry a woman, you are entitled to her sisters - and, like-
wise, your brothers are entitled to your wife. No wonder they all got AIDS. Look at these
people!' Matthias was watching a group of fishermen spreading out countless fish on the
sand, to be salted and dried in the day's sun. 'Don't shake their hands, Lev, you'll catch
it!'
Matthias was smiling, but I couldn't bring myself to smile back. There is a gallows hu-
mour among Africans who speak of AIDS, but the thought that seven in every ten of the
people around me would live short lives because of this scourge didn't seem so funny to
me.
'They've come to accept it,' shrugged Matthias as he showed us to a boat. 'It's no worse
than malaria to them. If they die, they die. Most don't bother even getting checked.'
We spent the morning out on the water, fishing with one of the locals. As Kasansero
dwindled on the shore, I found myself glad to be away from it, drawn to the purity of
the lake. The water glistened pristine in the golden midday light. The stench, the filth, the
AIDS and the noise seemed irrelevant out on the seemingly limitless water. It really was,
as John Hanning Speke had described it, a tropical sea.
Back on the shore, the day's first catches were being landed. Crowds of ragged-looking
fisherman were hauling their nets in from the water, or dragging their boats up onto the
beach. The landing site hummed with the smell of newly caught fish. Great piles of tilapia,
the freshwater fish common in the shallower waters of the lake, were being sorted and laid
out, gills opening uselessly against the air.
Among the crowd one man in particular stood out. It was his eyes that drew me to him;
they betrayed indescribable sadness. He seemed to have noticed me too, because I had not
yet found my shore legs again when he made his way through the fish to find me. I got the
impression he had been waiting.
'Please, sir,' he began, in English, 'come and see my children.'
Still feeling groggy from the boat, and having had quite enough attention from boister-
ous teenagers on the beach, I was in no mood to see more children, but the man introduced
himself as Moses and there seemed to be an element of begging in his tone. 'Please,' he
repeated. 'I have one hundred and twenty-three to look after.'
I looked at him dubiously. Any man with a hundred and twenty-three children is either
a liar or mass fornicator on the scale of Genghis Khan - but those eyes told me differently.
I gestured for Boston, and followed Moses up shore, through the ragged crowd.
Moses, it turned out, wasn't a prolific womaniser, and nor did he have any actual chil-
dren of his own. He was, in fact, the overseer of Kasansero's AIDS orphanage and, as he
led us past piles of plastic bottles, discarded nets and stinking fish bones that littered the
