Searching for clues...

Excerpt from the first draft MS for PIRATES (Cutting Edge Press) © Greg Cummings

For the first time since he could remember, al-Rubaysh felt safe walking down the street. No one in Bosaso recognised him. During his two days in port he had managed to carry out his enquiries in the open, audaciously and without the threat of drone attacks. Widespread fear among Majeerteen fishermen, aroused by the recent spate of attacks on pirate skiffs, helped loosen the tongues of those he consulted. The conspiracy to foment jihad in Puntland through a terror campaign at sea, a plan he’d dreamed up, was working fine. So far he had gleaned useful bits of information about Mehemet Abdul Rahman. Now he needed to connect the dots. 

It was eight o’clock in the morning and pedestrians were streaming through traffic, moving swiftly through the shadows of the old quarter’s cavernous streets. Every building on Osman Street, at least the corners and cornice mouldings, was painted a candy shade of pastel. Fragrant whiffs of frankincense poured through open doorways. And at each cross street a clutch of shops displayed sacks of fresh spices. Rubaysh was on his way to find an old man who once worked for the American. 

There was no need to bluff his way through harbour security today. He’d been told to ask around on the west side of the port under the shade trees, where the fishing boats were kept. In due course he found the old man leaning against his skiff and using a fishbone needle and nylon cord to mend a damaged fishing net. Tawny, weatherbeaten and misshapen, his true age was hard to fathom. He was wearing a pair of tortoiseshell Wayfarer sunglasses that when removed revealed a pair of pterygiums growing in the corners of the his eyes, the result of too much sun. 

“Good morning,” said Rubaysh, smiling and extending his hand in a salesmanlike manner. “Are you Mohamud Farole?”

“What do you want?” asked the old man, bluntly refusing the offer of a handshake. “I don’t talk to strangers.”

“My name is Aden Ali, and I’m from Hodeida Port Authority.”

“I know the port well. Never seen your face before.” While the old man continued to mend his tattered seine, fingers moving across the weave like ballroom dancers, his peculiar eyes never left Rubaysh. “Besides Hodeida’s nearly a thousand kilometres from here. What are you doing in Bosaso?”

“There’s a very simple explanation for my being here. I believe you used to do business with the American, Mehemet Abdul Rahman, also known as Johnny Oceans.”

“Never heard of him.”

“It’s just that, well, he died recently, and a container full of goods he arranged to have shipped here from France is now stuck in my port. Maritime authorities in my country have slapped it with a ‘deceased cease order’ until I can find someone in Bosaso to whom we may deliver it.”

“Why don’t you ask his widow?”

“Ah, so you did know him then.”

“Yes, I knew him.” Mohamud dropped his gaze. “Mehemet was a good man, a Majeerteen in all but blood. He helped many fishermen along this coast retain their livelihoods, so they did not have to become badaadintu badah.”

“Really? How did he do that?”

“With small loans that we paid back within a few months. I bought a smoking machine with mine so I could process my fish for export to Dubai. I don’t know another foreigner like this man. An American who would rather help us than kill us.”

“A great man indeed, this Mehemet must have been. Did you ever work for him?”

“Yes.”

“Doing what?”

“Why do you ask so many questions?”

“It’s a rather delicate matter, and I’m not actually at liberty to discuss it. Let’s just say the contents of Mehemet’s container have led us to believe he may have been involved with organised crime.”

“Mehemet was not a gangster.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because I used to run errands for him.”

“Errands?”

“To Djibouti. He would give me a package and I would take it there by boat.”

“What sort of package?”

“Always the same thing: a locked black box.”

“I see. And who was your contact in Djibouti? Who did you meet there?”

“An American Navy officer from Camp Lemonnier, who always gave me a different black box in return.”

Rubaysh’s eyes sparkled, and he began toying with his beard. “So Johnny Oceans was a spook,” he hissed. “Thank you, Mohamud. You’ve been very helpful. By the way, do you happen to know if the widow Khadija still lives at his same address, in Bender Siyaada?”

The Badaadintu badah

Excerpt from the first draft MS for PIRATES (Cutting Edge Press) © Greg Cummings

Excerpt from the first draft MS for PIRATES (Cutting Edge Press) © Greg Cummings

“Badaadintu badah,” Somali for “survivors of the sea,” was carved across the wall above the heads of the scores of prisoners confined in a five-by-five metre lockup in Bosaso Prison, next to the port. Their cell had no beds, no toilets, and just one small ocean-facing window, too high to reach on another man’s shoulders. The only other exit was a solid iron door, riddled with corrosion but nevertheless impermeable. On the rare occasions it was opened, the cross-breeze provided momentary relief from the stench of excrement, rot and sweat.

Eighteen pirates had just been brought in, all captured by the Combined Task Force 150 in the Gulf of Aden. The new arrivals were greeted with high fives, hugs and the knocking of fists: a fraternity of badaadintu badah. Whatever gangs they belonged to they had one thing in common: they were all Majeerteen fisherman. They did not fight among themselves, as they had vested common interests and a great sense of clan pride. It was against their code to behave as thugs when onshore. Every one of them could recite the litany of injustices that forced them to trade in their fishing nets for weapons, and hijack whatever foreign ships they found in Somali waters.

 Maxamid Malik stood in the middle of a row of men with his back against a wall that abutted the ocean, where a light spray sometimes rained down on their heads. It was an exclusive spot. He led his own gang of pirates from a base on the Hafun Peninsula, two hundred and fifty kilometers away, on the other side of the Horn. He glared at the other prisoners with a fearsome expression, manifest by feral eyes, boney cheeks and thin grey lips. At nearly two metres tall he could scare the hell out of a ship’s crew even before he boarded. “How long can there be honour among thieves?” he asked, scratching his hennaed goatee, “when even the sea complains of starvation”

“Maxamid,” shouted one of the new arrivals, striding forward to knock fists with the lanky pirate, “we missed you in the Gulf.” It was Faraad, one of many who had set out from Hafun in a multi-gang flotilla a few days before, intent on launching a surge of attacks in the Gulf of Aden. He was short, with a stocky build and had a receding hairline.

“We were unlucky,” said Maxamid, “We sailed too close to the wind, and got nabbed near Abdul al Kuri, Who caught you?”

“American Navy,” growled Faraad, “near Aden.” 

“We were arrested by Puntland Coast Guard,” said Ibrahim, another pirate from Maxamid’s ranks who was standing next to him, “and they confiscated our skiff.” 

“What?” cried Faraad, “Those bastards never do their jobs.”

“They did not stop any other boats in the flotilla,” said Maxamid, “yet no amount of bribes could persuade them to change their minds about escorting us to Bosaso.” He paused to listen to the sound of hull and engines skimming across Bosaso port. “We were set up. And I have a pretty good idea who was behind it. As soon as I am released from here, I will rectify the situation.”

“God forbid, they will destroy our livelihoods, and we will die hungry in the desert.” 

The entire cell was suddenly silenced by a thunderous clang followed by a piercing creaking sound, as the iron door was unbolted and swung open. Then came an uproarious cheer. “What is it?” asked Faraad, who was too short to see the cause of the commotion.

“Time for khat,” snapped Maxamid.

History of the Dhow

Reprinted from Ancient Navigation & Sailing - http://nabataea.net/ships.html

For many centuries, boats that sailed on the Indian Ocean were called dhows. While there were many different types of dhows, almost all of them used a triangular or lateen sail arrangement. This made them markedly different than the ships that evolved on the Mediterranean. These ships had a characteristic square sail. The dhow was also markedly different than the ships that sailed on the China Sea. These ships were known as junks.

Unfortunately, there is almost no pictorial evidence of early dhows. Most of our knowledge of the dhow's early construction comes to us from the records of Greek and early Roman historians. Added to this, we can compare some similar hull constructions used in the later Roman period, after they had opportunity to learn from the Arab sailors. Along with this we can examine early shipwrecks, and lastly we can learn from modern day construction of dhows. It seems that dhow making is considered an art, and this art has been passed down from one generation to another, preserving, at least in part, the dhow's basic design and use. (Some modern dhow makers now nail their hulls together, and many are now making a square stern rather than a double-ended vessel.) By taking all of these into consideration, we can get an excellent idea of how the ancient dhow was constructed and what its sailing abilities were.

Despite their historical attachment to Arab traders, dhows are essentially an Indian boat, with much of the wood for their construction coming from the forests of India.

In Europe, boats names are based on the type of sail rigging the boat has. Thus, it is typical for Europeans to label all Arab boats as dhows. In the Middle East however, boats are classified according the shape of their hull. Thus, dhows with square sterns have the classifications: gaghalah, ganja, sanbuuq, jihaazi. The square stern is basically a product of European influence, since Portuguese and other boats visited the Arab gulf since the sixteenth century.

Older type vessels are now called buum, zaaruuq, badan, etc., and still have the double-ended hulls that come to a point at both the bow and the stern.

The generic word for ship in Arab is markab and safiinah. Fulk is used in the Quran. The word daw is a Swahili name, and not used by the Arabs, although it was popularized by English writers in the incorrect form of dhow.

The dhow was known for two distinctive features. First of all, it's triangular or lateen sail, and secondly, for it's stitched construction. Stitched boats were made by sewing the hull boards together with fibers, cords or thongs.

The idea of a boat made up of planks sewn together seems strange. Actually, it is a type that has been in wide use in many parts of the world and in some places still is. In the Indian Ocean, it dominated the waters right up to the fifteenth century, when the arrival of the Portuguese opened the area to European methods. A Greek sea captain or merchant who wrote in the first century AD reports the use of small sewn boats off Zanzibar and off the southern coast of Arabia. Marco Polo saw sewn boats at Hormuz at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. He took a dim view of them: "they were twine and with it stitch the planks of the ship together. It keeps well and is not corroded by sea-water but it will not stand well in a storm." (Marco Polo, Book I, ch xviii, translated by H. Yule, 3rd edition, London, 1903, I, p.108)

Later travelers reported seeing large sewn boats of 40 and 60 tons' burden and versions of fair size were still plying the waters of East Africa and around Sri Lanka in the early decades of the twentieth century.

"The earliest surviving example of a sewn boat, as we shall see, was found beside the great pyramid of Giza, but it is unquestionably a descendant of ancestors that go back to Egypt's primitive times. Sewn boats are mentioned by ancient Roman writers, from tragic poets to the compiler of Rome's standard encyclopedia, in ways betraying their conviction that such boats belonged to the distant past, the days of the Trojan War, of Aeneas and Odysseus. They were surely right in connecting sewn boats with an early age. They were wrong only in assuming that it had not lived on: marine archeologists have found remains of sewn boats that date from the sixth century BC on into the Roman Imperial age. By the fashioning of a hull by sewing planks together, despite its early appearance and continued existence, remained a byway. As the following chapters will reveal, the mainstream of boat building followed a different channel." (Ships and Seamanship in The Ancient World, Lionel Casson, Princeton University Press, 1971)

History of the Dhow

According to Hourani, fully stitched construction was observed by medieval writers in the Red Sea, along the east African coast, in Oman, along the Malabar and Coromandel Coasts of India and in the Maldives and Laccadive Islands.

Deloche summarizes the characteristics of pre-European influence, ocean going Indian ships based on pictorial evidence. They were double-ended craft. Prior to the eleventh century AD, the stern was raked, but after that time, a long projecting bow became the predominate characteristic. Hull planks were flush-laid and stitched with the stitches crossed and penetrating right through the planks.

Procopius, writing in the sixth century AD, tells us that ships used in the Indian Seas 'are not covered with pitch or any substance, and the planks are fastened together, no with nails but with cords.' (Ray, 1994, pg 173)

Some illustrations of stitching can be found in Sanchi sculptures of the second century BC, and paintings accompanying al-Harari's Maqamat of AD 1237. The thirteenth century AD account of Marco Polo is less than complimentary: "The vessels built at Hormuz are the worst kind, aand dangerous for navigation, exposing the merchants and others who make use of them to great hazards."





Illustration above: A possible reconstruction of early ocean-going dhows. Their main characteristics were sewn double ended construction, steering oars at the stern and a lateen rigged sail.



Illustration above: A possible reconstruction of a later dhow with stern rudders and a rope system of steering.
Contemporary records prove without a doubt that during the third millennium BC, Babylon carried on extensive overseas trade through the Persian Gulf southward to the east African coast and eastward to India. Hardly anything is known about the vessels used on these ambitious runs other than that they were very small; the largest mentioned has a capacity of some 28 tons. (Ships and Seamanship in The Ancient World, Lionel Casson Princeton University Press, 1971, Page 23)

A 'seagoing boat' of 300 gur is mentioned in a document of 2000 BC; see A. Oppenheim "The Seafaring Merchants of Ur." (Journal of the American Oriental Society 74, 1954, 6-17, especially 8 note 8. For the size of the gur, see Appendix 1, note 5)

Masts and sails 

In early times the masts and yards were probably made of coconut wood and teak, although a number of woods were used in later construction. It is thought that originally sails were woven from coconut of palm leaves, and that eventually cotton cloth became the favorite for merchants on long voyages. Cotton cloth was manufactured in India. Two main sails were carried, one for night and bad weather, and the other for day and fair weather. Sails on a dhow could not be reefed.

The lateen sail used by Arabs stops short of being completely triangular. Their sails retained a luff at the fore part in proportion to the leech of roughly 1-6 in the mainsail. The retention of this luff added a much greater area of sail to be hoisted than would a completely triangular design. During the Byzantine era the Lateen sail completed its evolution into a triangle, and this idea spread from Byzantium to the rest of Europe, where it developed into the varieties of mizzen sails which later gave European sailing ships so much flexibility. From there it was eventually developed in the west into all the types of fore-and-aft rig known to yachtsmen today, a form superior still to the lateen for sailing close to the wind.

It is assumed by some that the lateen sail developed on the Red Sea, and spread from there to the Mediterranean Sea and Persian Gulf. There is some evidence that a fore-and-aft lateen rig arrived in the Aegean Sea from the 2nd century onward, and in the Persian Gulf around this time.

The masts and rigging of the dhow was similar in all types of dhows, with added rigging in larger vessels. Masts were secured at the base by being slotted into a mast step, which fit over the floor timbers. The rigging of a typical dhow can be seen in the diagram below. Cables were often made of coir.



 
Sails

The lateen sail on the dhow looks triangular to the casual observer, but in fact it is quadrilateral and is correctly termed a settee sail. Was sail is made of several cloths, sewn parallel to luff and leech. Different types of sail were made according to the requirements: a sail wanted for reaching would be made less flat and with a fuller luff than a sail wanted for beating.


The lateen yard was normally very long in proportion to the mast and hull, and was sometimes made of more than one piece of timber. In this case, it was fitted with a strengthening piece, along the middle. Two holes were them made so that the halyard type could be secured to prevent it from slipping along the yard. On a yard of very great length a second strengthening piece would be fitted along the middle of the first.

Modern Dhows

There were a number of different types of dhows that evolved. Some of the types common during the last two hundred years are illustrated below.




Illustration above: A baghlah with a modern square stern. Illustration taken from Paris' Souvenirs de Marine, 1882.




Illustration above: a Cuch dungiyah. Illustration taken from Paris' Souvenirs de Marine, 1882.



Illustration above: a sewn fishing badan, from the 1830's.



Illustration above: A cargo badan in the 1830's. Drawing first published in Paris' Essai sur la construction." Note the double keel pieces and the rope system of steering on each of the two above dhows.



Illustration above: A baggarah with a rope steering gear in the 1830's from Paris' Essai sur la construction. The hull of this small boat is very similar to a battil, but the stern-piece is continued in a straight line instead of the club like shape of the battil, but lacks protection despite it's high stern post. This vessel is also known today as a shahuf, and is often used as a fishing vessel along the coasts of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Yemen.
Summary

Dhow shipbuilding is a very ancient trade. In various places around the world, ship building techniques and styles developed until they were successful. Once they reached this stage, schools of shipbuilding, with their various skills and knowledge solidified certain styles of boats. These styles changed very slowly over the centuries as ship building techniques were often closely guarded secrets. Ship builders took special pride in their particular style of building.

Thus, three styles of ships developed in the ancient world. On the Mediterranean, triremes and trade boats shared similar styles, with small square sails, and outboard steering oars. On the Indian Ocean, dhows, with their triangular sails and stitched hull design dominated the waters. On the China seas, Chinese junks, with their tall forecastles, multiple masts, and unique sail rigging and sternpost rudder existed for centuries.

Each of these seas was separated from the other, some by landmasses, and some by dangerous striates and massive cultural differences. Bridging the gaps between these civilizations were other smaller civilizations that daringly took goods and knowledge from one sphere to the other. In Arabia, the Nabataeans played this role. In Asia, sailors with their lashed-lug ships seemed to have played this role.

It was only when ship builders saw a proven improvement that they would adapt it into their own design. Thus, ship design changed very slowly over time, allowing us to fill in the gaps in shipbuilding knowledge, but looking at previous designs and later designs. Changes in shipbuilding technique also point to nautical contacts between these three great shipbuilding spheres. Added to this, it must be accepted that many if not most dhows were built in India, and sold to Arab traders.

Dhows and the Nabataeans

As mentioned in my paper Who were the Ancient Arab Traders, the Nabataeans were known as seamen, and at various points in history totally dominated the shipping that was taking place on the Red Sea. While they originally obtained their boats by piracy, they must have either bought boats from India, or constructed or remodeled them themselves. It is interesting to note that some nautical historians point to the Red Sea as the probably place where the lateen sail was first developed. Perhaps the Nabataeans played a role in its development, since the lateen sail would have made it possible for them to bring the frankincense harvest up the Red Sea to their port at Leuke Kome. (See Sailing and Navigation) Whatever the case, dhows were the preferred boat for transporting cargos on the Indian Ocean, and they dominated this scene for almost two thousand years.




Bibliography
Casson, Lionel, Ships and Seafaring in Ancient Times, British Museum Press, 1994, London

Flecker, Michael, A ninth-century AD Arab or Indian shipwreck in Indonesia: first evidence for direct trade with China. World Archaeology, Volume 32(3): 335-354 Shipwrecks, Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2001

Griffith, T., Marco Polo: The Travels, Wordsworth, London, 1997

Hourani, G. F., Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1995

Manguim, P. Y., Southeast Asian shipping in the Indian Ocean during the first millennium A.D. In Tradition and Archaeology, (eds H. P. Ray and J.F. Salles), State Publishers, New Delhi, 1996, pp 181-198

Paris' Essai sur la construction, 1930

Paris' Souvenirs de Marine, 1882.

Ray, H. P. and Salles J. F., Tradition and Archaeology: Early Maritime Contacts in the Indian Ocean, State Publishers, New Delhi, 1996

Tibbetts, G. R., Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean before the Coming of the Portuguese, London: Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1981

Vosmer, T., 1997, Indigenous fishing craft of Oman, International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, 26(3): 217-235

The Chase

Excerpt from the first draft MS for PIRATES (Cutting Edge Press) © Greg Cummings

Continued from Chapter One...

“What do you want here?” demanded the old askari on one side of the large iron gate.

“You know very well,” protested the equally elderly woman on the other side.

“Hapana! ” yelled the askari, “You cannot enter! Afendi does not know you, and you will not pass through this gate.” He was a tall, dark Acholi, from the same northern Ugandan tribe as Idi Amin, dressed in colonial-style khakis - short-sleeved shirt and shorts. He stooped over the peep hole in the gate, and wagged a bony finger at the woman on the other side, who stood back from the smell of his breath but refused to leave.

“Who’s at the gate Aturu,” asked Derek Strangely, shuffling out of his bungalow into the blazing equatorial sun. He wore only a purple kanga, and was followed by his dog Rafiki, a mongrel of mixed origin, like Derek. It was mid morning.

“She must not enter, afendi,” replied Aturu, standing to attention. 

“Is it Agnes?” asked Derek, approaching the gate.

“I don’t know this woman,” he said, slamming shut the peep hole.

“C’mon, Aturu, let Agnes in.” 

“Hapana! I cannot!”

“Jesus, Aturu, she’s my maid.” A pair of White-bellied go-away birds flew in to roost atop the tall olyusambia tree growing in the property opposite, and started cackling.

“I’m not opening for this woman, afendi. Even if you give me kibokos.”

“Fine. Then stand aside! I’ll let her in.” Derek pushed past his askari and tried to unbolt the doorway that led through the gate, but Aturu had padlocked it. “The key, Aturu...” The askari smiled broadly; he was missing most of his teeth. Rafiki barked at him, but he stood his ground. Then Derek stepped up closer to him and sniffed. “Have you been drinking?”

“No sah!” said Aturu, still grinning through a misshapen rift across his wrinkled face.

“Well then, give me the key.” Reluctantly the old northerner reached into his khaki shorts and produced his greatest possession: the key to the padlock that opened the gate to Mr Derek’s house in Kampala. With it he wielded great power.

Derek opened the gate, and Agnes barged through and rounded on Aturu. “What’s wrong with your problem?” He tried to dodge her blows, protesting loudly in his defense, but she continued her assault. Rafiki circled the squabbling Ugandans, barking incessantly. Derek simply turned and walked back to his bungalow; he was used to the routine by now.

He had recently made some adjustments in his life. One of them was taking on full-time domestic staff to help him feel more secure at home. But his askari was proving a handful. There is such a thing as too much security. He sat down on his sagging sofa and examined his dilapidated living room. A clean patch of wall, as big as a window marked the spot where a map of Congo used to hang. 

On his driveway was another empty space where his black-on-black Land Rover Discovery III had once been parked. Without Pedro to drive it, nor to stop him, Derek had sold “The Blackback” to the first Big Man who came along. He no longer had any need for a safari vehicle. After all the negative publicity that followed his ordeal in the Congo, no one wanted to hire him, not even to guide their day trip to Lake Mburo. The money from the Blackback had been barely enough to support him since. 

The cacophony at the gate had died down and, and Rafiki was curled up at his feet. The only sound was bird life, an overabundance of it coming from every power line and treetop. “At least the power lines have some use,” thought Derek, pointlessly aiming his remote at an inert television on the other side of the room. Avian life was about the only entertainment he could rely on these days. With over a thousand species ranging through the country, it was hard to avoid an interest in ornithology in Uganda. There was one particular bird, a Common bulbul that perched outside his window every morning before the sun was up and began singing, “Get straight to it Strangely! Get straight to it Strangely!” like an insistent nanny. He made a point of never rising before hearing it.

“How the hell can I get straight to it, when there’s no goddamn electricity?” was his usual response. Uganda’s relentless power outages were the main bone of contention for anyone living there. Derek found them especially hard to endure in the morning, as he was never fully awake until he’d drunk a mug of black coffee. Brewing it over a coal fire was just too complicated and time consuming. And neither Agnes nor Aturu ever grasped the concept of a good cup of Joe. 

Power cuts in the evening, however, were much more bearable. He would simply hang a paraffin lamp in the starflower tree next to his veranda, sit down on the grass with a cold Club, and watch a billion stars twinkle. “They don’t call it the Dark Continent for nothing.”

Derek’s phone rang. It was not a number he recognised. “Derek Strangely.” 

“Yo, Gorilla Man! How’s it hanging?”

“Who’s this?” asked Derek, stroking his black and silver beard.

“Johnny Oceans.”

“Dive bwana? No fucking way! I thought you were dead.”

“If that’s true, then Kampala’s hell. Meet me at Fat Boyz in twenty minutes.”

“I’m on my way.” Derek quickly dressed in a pair of jeans, T-shirt, and flip flops, and headed out the door, tying his greying hair back in a ponytail while issuing instructions to Aturu to feed Rafiki and get some more charcoal. 

“But afendi, it is my job to guard the gate. You can send Agnes for charcoal.”

“Not now, Aturu,” barked Derek, closing the gate behind him to howls of protest from Rafiki. After taking a few short steps he was accosted by a boda boda, one of Kampala’s omnipresent motorcycle taxis. “Jjebale’ko sebo,” said Derek, greeting the driver in accordance with the Bugandan custom of exchanging niceties before proceeding with anything.

“Kale sebo nawe jjebale,” replied the driver.

“Take me to Kisamenti,” instructed Derek, donning his Ray ban Wayfarer sunglasses.

“Kisementi, Kamwokya?” asked the driver.

“Eh-heh!” replied Derek, jumping on the back. The ride was a far cry from the luxury of the Blackback but he didn’t care much. Boda bodas were the poor man’s helicopter in these parts. When they reached the end of his street, the driver arced into Kira Road and sped down the hill, cutting around vehicles and pedestrians like a sun-addled bat. 

He narrowly missed a traffic cop, a stout woman dressed in khaki, black beret and boots standing at the side of the road, who did not even blink. Despite the fact few Ugandan motorists demonstrated any grasp of the Highway Code, this traffic cop wasn’t interested in trying to enforce the law. Like so many in her profession, extortion was her racket. She was looking out for drivers in expensive cars talking on their mobile phones. Before long, she had pulled one over, a big man in an AUDI. “Another Ugandan Driving Imbecile,” quipped Derek, looking back over his shoulder, as she cheerily sidled up to the unfortunate motorist’s window. 

“Where are you from?” asked Derek’s boda driver as they sped away. 

“Canada,” replied Derek, “but I’ve lived my whole life in Africa.”

“Then you’re an African,” laughed the driver, “My name is Boda Tiger. And your name?”

“Mr Derek.”

Ducking into the vortex behind Tiger’s back, long enough to keep his flame lit, Derek sparked up a joint. He took a long, thick toke, held it in for a few seconds then blasted the smoke back out again in a fit of coughing. He was careful to keep the blunt cupped in his hand, lest one of the many traffic cops along the road spotted it’s distinctive trumpet shape. Not that any of them would bother chasing him. In all likelihood they lacked the air time on their cell phones even to call it in. Nevertheless, there was no mistaking the aroma emanating from the back of Derek’s boda. 

Through pie-eyes and Wayfarers he surveyed his surroundings. In the vivid light of a clear morning, the city looked like an old master’s painting to which children had been allowed to add daubs of their own brightly coloured paint. He marveled at the panorama, as three of Kampala’s seven hills came into view, each one crowned with a communications mast rising above some minister’s gimcrack folly, looming over a clutter of orange rooftops that increased in density towards the valley, as though the literal consequence of an economic landslide. Brilliant sunshine and stark shadows gave everything a vividness that was almost too intense to bear.

He thought about Pedro, his erstwhile driver, rastafarian partner-in-crime, at this moment in time, riding his softail and growing his dreadlocks on the Mexican coast, after vowing never again to return to Africa. Things just weren’t the same in KLA without him. 

He spotted a large Billboard featuring one of his former girlfriends, gazing back at him with those familiar bedroom eyes while sucking salaciously on a sweating bottle of lager. Consequently, he did not notice the police officer coming up behind him on the back of another boda, and was startled by the hand that suddenly gripped his right shoulder, causing him to jerk to the left, free of its hold, then send his boda boda fishtailing. “Stop!” cried the afendi, who was wearing the blue madoa doa camouflage of the regular police - the busting kind - and about to attempt another lunge, “You’re under arrest!”

“It’s the Po Po!” shouted Derek, flinging his burning spliff into a gutter, “Tu wende!” Tiger rapidly accelerated out of reach, then began to weave through the traffic at high speed. The afendi remained in hot pursuit. “Listen, sebo,,” said Derek, clasping the motorcycle’s rear metal rack with both hands, “do whatever you have to do, but I will pay you twenty thousand shillings if you outrun this fool.” Without looking back, or even in any direction, Tiger responded by making a sharp right, clear across a busy thoroughfare, narrowly escaping a collision with an on-coming mini bus taxi, then swerving to the left into Old Kira Road. With no hesitation. the pursuing boda made the same erratic move, and sped after them down the hill. 

“Turn right here,” barked Derek, and Tiger veered hard through a narrow gap between a wooden phone kiosk and a ramshackle scrapyard, then down a bumpy road that led into the mud-clogged, lunar landscape of Kamwokya (pronounced Kam-wo-cha), a clamorous shanty town wedged between Kololo hill and the swamps below. Driver and passenger swayed savagely from side to side, as they zigzagged through the slalom run of potholes, people and livestock. Dodging a work detail of boys filling in the rifts in the road with rocks and soil, they narrowly missed another boda driver who was involved in a melee between two shop owners, then swerved to avoid an infant who’d wandered into the road crying. 

The backstreets were crowded with more animal life than human: half a dozen cows, a goat on a rope that ran directly across their path and throttled himself, a gaggle of geese that chased after them until dispersed by the blue afendi still hot on their trail. Even kaloles took flight, those ungainly, lappet-faced storks that rummage around Kampala’s dumps like ugly spies, but are among the most graceful flyers in the African sky. Tiger burst through a line of laundry, then sped back out on to the main road, immediately hitting a speed bump that sent them skyward after the storks.

In the brash equatorial sunlight Kamwokya was a riot to the senses: the sight of village belles in drab clothing sashaying between yellow Mobile Money cubicles and illustrated hair saloons, the odour of roasting goat fat and open sewers, the flavour of exhaust from the taxi ahead, the din of car horns clashing with DVD stalls, and the bump to the ass of potholes within potholes. 

Their boda barely missed a matoke seller sitting straight-legged by the road, beside half a dozen sizable bunches of dark green bananas, then sped past hardware stores, iron gate makers, butcheries (the preferred local spelling), a pork joint where a dozen young men were huddled around two pool tables, the Pleasure Hotel, Valey Inn, a stall displaying piles of mattresses and plastic containers that tumbled in their slipstream, scattering rainbow-coloured wares all across the road. It was all a haze to Derek, even as they passed a group of pretty young women shouting, “Muzungu! Muzungu!”, as he remained insensible to everything but the pursuing afendi on the boda behind, now caught up in a mess of mattresses and containers. 

Tiger was careful to avoid the shit-mottled, viscoelastic waste water flowing in and out of people’s shops and homes, and decelerated as they approached a five-metre wide stretch of it where the road dipped below the surface. Barely clearing their feet, they proceeded cautiously through the slough, swerving at the last moment to avoid a well-known, car-sized pothole concealed beneath it. 

The pursuing afendi was not so careful, and drove straight through the middle, hitting the hidden pothole with an impact that caused him to be soaked from head to toe in sewage, and brought the chase to an abrupt end. Derek and Tiger stopped to high-five each other on the other side of the puddle, then drove off through the throng of market goers. “At least it’s Friday,” said Derek, relaxing his posture. Friday was market day in Kamwokya, and he knew the police officer and his driver would easily find a change of clothes. Still, he dreaded the next time he ran into that afendi.

As they approached their destination his thoughts turned to the phone call he’d received thirty minutes earlier from the American. After fourteen years everyone had given up on ever finding Johnny Oceans, dead or alive. Now, suddenly, he was back. But from where? Derek was keen to find out and, as Tiger pulled into the Kisementi car park, he searched for his old friend through the dazzling reflected glare of countless automobile surfaces surrounding its drinking establishments. “There he is,” he cried, spotting a man seated on the front terrace of Fat Boyz Bar & Grill, which boasted “Warm Beer - Lousy Food”; there was no mistaking that Roman nose. 

Continue reading this chapter...

The Reunion

Excerpt from the first draft MS for PIRATES (Cutting Edge Press) © Greg Cummings

Continued from The Chase...

Derek paid Tiger, then dashed up the steps to give his long lost friend a heartfelt hug. Johnny Oceans had a full head of black hair, a pukka shell choker around his neck, and a large, rugged black watch around his left wrist. He was well-tanned, physically fit, and dressed in a turquoise Hawaiian shirt and jeans. Except for an expression of inner contentment, he looked much the same as he had a decade and half ago. “Wherever you’ve been hiding, its obviously done you the world of good, rafiki,” said Derek, grabbing a seat. A waiter arrived to take their order. Oceans asked for a Coca Cola, and although it was still not yet midday Derek ordered a cold Club beer. 

“The last time I saw you was 1998,” said Derek. “We were out scuba diving on the Malindi-Watamu bank, about twelve kilometres off the Kenyan Coast, totally baked, I seem to recall. You signaled you were going to surface.” Derek laughed, thrust his thumb upward a few times, then shook his head in disbelief. “I continued on my solo dive for another ten minutes, ten goddamn minutes, but when I got back to the boat you had fucking vanished. No clue, no note; nothing!”

“I thought you’d be OK,” smiled Oceans. 

“Drifting on the open sea with no fuel, hapana, I was not Ok. I was in fucking peril. Luckily, Azziza Nshuti came along in her speed boat”

“Who?”

“Madame Nshuti, the Congolese smuggler. Jesus, where have you been? 

“Is that why you didn’t report me missing for a week?”

“Listen, man, there was no way I wanted to get caught up in that ordeal. Johnny Oceans, member of the notorious DeVini family, Meyer Lansky’s gaming connection in the 1950s, disappears and I’m the last person on earth to see him alive. Uh-uh! No thank you. And besides, I thought you’d show up sooner or later. I just didn’t expect it to be fifteen years later.” 

A cloud eclipsed the equatorial sun, followed by a refreshing breeze that transformed their shirts into fluttering flags and took the heat out of the day for an instant. Then the sunshine returned, plastering the walls, awnings and car park with a blinding light that soaked up the midday shadows like a sponge.

“Did those gorillas give you a hard time?”

“You have no fucking idea! It was like Godfather meets Lord of War. The day those gorillas arrived on the Kenyan Coast is still fresh in my memory like it was yesterday. I remember Azziza was about to catch her flight back to Kinshasa and the two of us were just chilling in the sand. I spotted them through the heat haze, a hundred metres away, tramping up the beach towards us, side by side: the three Wise Guys. Only a gumba from New York shows up at a beach resort in a rayon track suit.” 

“What did they say to you?” asked Oceans, chuckling.

“Oh, you wouldn’t believe the charm offensive. The fat guy, sweating profusely and dabbing his jowls with a hanky, asks in a high-pitched voice, ‘Are you Derek Strangely?’ I say, ‘Yeah.’ Then he asks, ‘Who’s the mulli?’” Oceans could not contain himself after that, and doubled over with laughter, extending his hand all the while to indicate Derek should hang on before continuing his story. “Not a good move,” continued Derek after his friend had regained some composure, “Madame Nshuti was no mulli.” 

“What did she say,” asked Oceans, wiping the tears from his eyes.

“Let me see if I can remember her exact words. She stood up - she was an imposing woman, with stunning good looks - and she said, ‘It’s clearly a joke that you men are called wise guys. But if you want to last a day in Africa, you’ll be wise to show the locals more respect.” Then she left for the airport, without even kissing me goodbye.”

“I’m so sorry, dawg…he he...You got to remember, those paisans had never before left the Tri-state area. To them Africa was somewhere east of Bronx Zoo.”

“Yes, well, as the last person to see you alive, I ended spending a lot of time with your paisans. Bobby, Jimmy, Petey, Tony… Do you have any relatives with names that don’t end in ‘y’?”

“Sure, Sal, Luca, Rocko...”

“Well, your gumbas took over the Blue Marlin Bar for a whole fucking week, and ran up a huge tab which they never paid. They complained about everything - the lack of sausage and peppers mostly - and did whatever they fucking pleased. The matatus flipped them out; they wanted to whack the drivers of those damn bus taxis. And the bugs; they fucking hated the bugs. One time Petey got up in the middle of the night and started shooting at the goddamn geckoes on the walls of his room. I told him geckoes keep the bugs away, but he was having none of it.“

“Oh man, I wish I’d been there to see that.”

“I fucking wished you’d been there. I tried my best to entertain them, being a safari guide and all. But those wise guys had no interest whatsoever in going on safari, not fishing, diving, seeing any of the sites. All they did was drink alcohol all day long, that is when they weren’t trying to muscle-in on the local forex racket. That didn’t go down too well. Swahili Muslims don’t take too kindly to being called pigs. Your boys even asked me if I wanted to be their coke mule.” 

Oceans stopped laughing, shook his head with incredulity then said, “That’s my family, Derek, not me…”

“So?” asked Derek, taking a slow swig of his beer during which he eyed his long, lost friend inquisitively, “I’m curious to know what had happened to you. Did you go back to the old country, lay low in your ancestral village while things blew over, or what?” But Oceans steered clear of the subject, glancing around at the other people on the terrace to see if anyone was listening in on their conversation. 

“Let me tell you something,” he said, moving in closer, “When my Uncle Dino started out in the business in 1920s he was just a kid, working as a craps casino dealer at Rex's Cigar Store, in Steubenville, Ohio. Before long he was the youngest ‘bust out’ man in Steubenville.”

“What’s a ‘bust out’ man?”

“He’s the guy whose job it is to switch crooked dice in and out of the craps games, the sort of Baboo the gangsters who ran the rackets hated, that is until they hired him to ward off undesirables, hustle the spacones with lots of money to burn, and break lucky winning streaks.”

“Was he a cheat?”

“More a montambanco, what you call in English a mountebank. The whole family’s like that. It never really dawned on me until I moved to Kenya in the Nineties to manage Nyali Casino for Uncle Tony, Dino’s brother. Typically, some guy I’d never seen before would start playing the tables, and Tony would tell me to go talk to him. ‘Why should I talk to him when he’s an asshole?’ ‘Because he’s a big spending asshole, that’s why.’ Uncle Tony knew everything about the financial status of every American gambler alive. And when their luck ran out, he knew just how much credit to extent to whom.“

“Sounds like a worthwhile talent to have in the gaming business.”

“Yeah, but it could be used to devastating effect. I remember one night when only a handful of hard-core gamblers remained in the casino, including two brothers from New York. One was playing with high stakes in a closed game at the blackjack table, and losing excessively; his brother had already lost a shit load of money. Before long they both came up and asked Uncle Tony for credit. ‘You're OK,’ he snapped at one of them, "but not him," jabbing his finger at the other, who walked away in humiliation. Later that night the brother he snubbed hung himself, and Uncle Tony ordered one of the casino workers to plant $10,000 on his body before informing the other brother, to make it look as though his gambling losses were not a factor in his suicide, that he had other motives for taking his own life. When the surviving brother failed to pay his debt after he returned to New York City, who dunned him for the payment? Who else? The mob!” Oceans drank back the last of his soda, and burped. “I had to get the fuck out!”

“So? Where did you go?”

“You really wanna know?”

“Damn straight!”

Oceans stood up and surveyed the bar, beat his chest a few times nonchalantly, the smiled back down at Derek. “I’ll tell you everything, but not here. C’mon, we’re going on safari.”

Under Stars

Journal entry, written at a refugee camp in Ethiopia, aged 23 © Greg Cummings

Sun, Nov 17th ‘85

As a crescent moon sets in the west wrapped in whisps of cloud, Jupiter follows closely like an older brother. The mountains open up to devour them, and the stars become brighter - a choir of a billion worlds rising to a crescendo of light, like the chorus of Beethoven’s choral movement from the Ninth. Now the moon is a Cheshire grin brimming on the edge of the black mountains; Jupiter, it’s one eye released from a wink, behind. A wink and a grin ‘good night’ and the chorus of the sky erupts.

Camp Bete's agents are asleep in their tents - “From Jarusalem with Love” - sunk deep in a pool of dreams from another place far away - a starker reality. The sporadic voices of refugees in their village under the stars, sing a distant rhythm of life, a promise of a more hopefull life, but the end of a different promise. Like the Cheshire grin of the moon now burried, the chorus of a greater calm now stronger, these brief journeys of salvation must wane, and the celebration of life, the ebbing formal flux of existence, must become itself again.

A Hyena whoops in the distance.

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