Chad: Sortez!

The Chad border 1973

This is a story about a few tense days in N'Djamena or Fort Lamy as it was called then. Today it would be impossible to travel overland like we did in Africa in the mid 1970’s. Most borders are closed now because of a bottomless spiral of violence brought on by the despair of civil war or ethnic conflicts. The kidnapping of westerners by rebel groups for ransom is commonplace.

The first leg of our motorcycle odyssey through Africa was ending. It had taken us from Algiers on the Mediterranean, south through the Sahara to the oasis’s of El Golea and In Sahlah, and on to Tamanrasset and into Taureg country. We stopped in Agadez in Niger so I could check the bike andwe could stock up on supplies, mostly powdered milk, rice and sardines, before we continued on what would be the toughest part of our Sahara crossing. I went over every nut and bolt on the BMW and hanged the oil and all the filters. We filled up our tank and jerry-cans with as much water and petrol as we could carry and packed as much food as possible for the remaining thousand kilometers. We ploughed and spun our way through the deep sand and rutted tracks until we reached Kano in the Sahel of northern Nigeria where we put up our little orange pup tent and after a good rest and more bike maintenance continued east to find the ferry that would take us across the Chare River to the Chad border.

The sun beat down undiluted by clouds or a breeze. We had only a little water and not much food left, no local currency and the bike was running on fumes. There was no shade and Fort Lamy was said to be one of the hottest inhabited places on the planet.  We were dehydrated and we hadn’t eaten properly since we started our journey across the Sahara almost two months and five thousand kilometers earlier.

White skin was no asset once you crossed the straights of Gibraltar. I was used to bureaucracy from my time in India, so we were particularly careful regarding our visas and the Carnet de Passage for the motorcycle and always meticulous about getting the right stamp and signature. Every overland traveler or backpacker was used to being hassled at border crossings and had their own horror stories to tell.

Sometimes borders closed for no apparent reason or the right person might not be there that day to put the proper stamp in your passport. In Morocco Kersti had to cut off my hair because the authorities thought that people with longhair went there to smoke dope, so logically they wouldn’t do that if their hair was short. We were continually solicited for bribes and we didn’t carry a camera or anything of value because it probably would have been confiscated. We slept on the porch of the jungle outpost on the shore of the Ubangui River for a week, waiting for permission to enter the Congo, even though we  had valid visas. When I was on my way to Pakistan war broke out between Pakistan and India and I had to change routes. We waited two months on the island of Cyprus for Israel to open its borders after the Yom Kippur War. In other places visas were denied to Americans citizens simply because of a dislike for American politics. But those were just normal hassles. The dispute at the border to Chad was something different and could have been serious. It could have gotten me thrown into a central African dungeon, or worse, a shallow desert grave.

The officer in charge of the border station had a uniform and a gun and in Africa like any other place, that said just about everything that needed to be said about how the law was arbitrated.  Tall and gangly, he strutted   with the authority of someone with unquestioned power, even if his domain was just a provisional ferry landing in one of Africa’s forgotten countries. I should have known better than to try and reason with him. Kersti and I showed him our passports. There was no office, nothing official except his uniform, his perfectly shined boots and his weapon. He gave hers back.  He looked through his pilot glasses at mine with the American eagle embossed on the cover and without opening it, spit on it threw it down and trampled it in the dust. Kersti had a Swedish passport and there was never a problem with it. Swedes were international heroes because of their unwavering condemnation of the Vietnam War. To many of the peoples of the third world, Americans were seen as imperialist devils.

Even though it was meaningless, we pleaded with him until our French, which was adequate for discussing the trail, buying supplies and sorting out the practical details of travelling was exhausted.  I tried to tell him that we were just passing through Chad, that we had valid transit visas and that our destination was Bangui in the Central African Republic.

 He screamed “sortez” baring his teeth and spitting out the word together with a stream of saliva. In desperation, not knowing what it was that provoked his anger and aggressiveness, we asked a group of Frenchmen waiting for the return boat if they could help us explain the situation to him. They moved away, deaf and cowering, trying to become invisible. He was uncompromising and ranted on again, screaming in a shrill voice that didn´t match his stature or physique, “Sortie, sortie” this time if it was possible, even louder. We tried to convince him again that we had valid transit visas, but he pointed to the north, back across the river and just repeated “sortie”. We were in no-man’s land. We didn’t have visas to re-enter Nigeria or Niger, and Kano the nearest town, was four hundred kilometers away over rugged desert trails. We didn’t have a plan B and there was no use reasoning with this man. Finally we said, “okay we’ll go back”. Impossible of course, but we’d wait until he was gone and then continue into Fort Lamy and wait until a bank opened on Monday so we could change money, fill up the tank and jerry cans, buy food and head south to Bangassou on the Ubangi River. Not a chance. After a few hundred yards there he was again, chasing us in a Jeep and this time he was rabid. He frothed,” I’m going to arrest you and take you to Jail”. Fortunately I knew only one French curse, merde, which didn’t fit, so instead of calling him something that would have enraged him even more, I replied “Good, let’s go. Maybe I’ll meet somebody there with some sense”, and when he turned his back I gave him the finger, my adrenaline making me completely oblivious to what the consequences of going to jail might be or confronting an armed, authoritarian man in uniform.

We followed him through the alleys and paths of Fort Lamy’s native quarter and in among its huts and shanties and milling life. I realized as soon as I saw the jail that it was a place where we weren’t eager to be guests. The sergeant in charge sat at an unvarnished wooden desk in the middle of an otherwise spartan room. His kaki uniform remained crisp and pressed despite the heat. He was trim and well shaven, a seemingly mild man, out of place in those austere surroundings. Behind him there was an unpainted cement cell, a naked cubicle with bars, looking as if it had been borrowed from the set of an old Hollywood western. A gang of rag-tag prisoners jumped up alert and interested in us, the two white strangers whose plight might give them a little diversion. We showed him our passports and in a voice that was still pumped up, I said “try to make this guy listen”, and pointed to the scowling border guard, a dark cloud looming in the doorway. The officer raised his brow and made a discreet gesture with his palm that said ”take it easy”, “maybe the calm before the storm”, I thought, but then he said to our relief that our papers were in order and that we could continue. “Allez, Bon voyage, bon chance”, he added, and as easy as that handed back our passports. Bon chance. Our good luck was meeting him.

It was Saturday evening. We wouldn’t be able to change money and get on the road again until  Monday morning. We went looking for a place to put up our tent, hopefully far enough away and secluded enough in case this madman decided to come looking for us again. We needed something to eat and saw a hand painted sign “eggs for sale”. Kersti waited with the bike and I walked up the stony path in search of dinner. I saw a young man with his back partially obscured, hunched over a bench in the shadow of a small shed. I tried to get his attention and startled him. He swung around with a drawn knife nervous and quick like a mamba about to strike, and held it up to my breast. I took a step back and said “non, non, and continued in broken French, “I only want to buy eggs, I saw the sign”, and managed to calm him down and get him to put the knife away.  The scene at the border crossing seemed to be repeating itself.

In the early nineteen seventies Chad’s capitol, Fort Lamy, hadn’t changed its name to the Arabic N’Djamena. That would come first after the end of the civil war when the northern Muslim factions had taken control of the government. Back then it was still just a sleepy military outpost in one of the poorest countries in Africa, with dusty unpaved streets and unadorned single story buildings. There was war in the north and it was unstable in the eastern provinces that bordered on Darfur in the Sudan because of growing strife between Arab nomads and ethnic Africans. We were unaware of all this at the time. The only thing we knew was that there was a tangible hostility in the air, perhaps foreboding of all the sorrow and suffering that was to come to the continent, and we weren’t going to stay in Chad longer than we had to.