Juba redux

It’s been a little over a year since I was last here in South Sudan – or anywhere in Africa, for that matter. You know that feeling you get when you didn’t realize how much you missed something until it was right in front of you again? That sort of warm-fuzzy feeling?

I’m totally not having it.

It started out well enough. Passing through Nairobi was the same as always: sort of like a toe in the pool of Africa. It’s the kind of Africa you see on glossy tourist brochures, the Africa of carved tusks and ebony furniture and strikingly backlit masks (the anodyne, tourist-friendly kind, not the authentic, scary-as-shit kind). This Earnest Hemingway Africa really only exists in tiny pockets of the east and south. It’s a good way of easing yourself into something exotic, but it’s not much of a reflection of the continent.

Juba, of course, is the real deal. And as we flew in, I rather wistfully thought I had missed it. The vast, flat expanse of dry land spackled with scrub, the desultory little dust tracks connecting a constellation of nowheres… In the middle of this ocean of nothing, Juba suddenly appears, marked by its distinctive jebel – a small, craggy mountain that erupts from the land like the dorsal fin of some great subterranean beast. The city around it is a network of rust-coloured roads separating shiny tin roofs and dusty concrete slabs. The airport is a parking lot of UN helicopters and prop planes, with nary a commercial aircraft in sight – except, perhaps, Ethiopian or Kenya Airways. In Juba, even the intrepid Turkish Airways fears to tread.

It’s a ritual I know well. The hatch opens to a salty clay smell and the vaguely disquieting clamor of rollaway stairs. One descends to a tarmac so aggressively hot that it feels like a clothes iron being held about an inch from the face. And then one steps into the terminal building – a single concrete room – and lo, the real fun begins. A shouting, shoving, sweating throng, passports flapping like butterflies, porters jousting each other with luggage carts, demonstrating an almost religious devotion to the idea that two objects can occupy the same space at the same time. By this point, one is feeling slightly less wistful, and slightly more stinky. One flees to wait in the car while the long-suffering driver fetches one’s luggage. (I know, I know – but you’d do the same.) The car is the same as always – a white landcruiser with a fat codan antenna on the hood. Through its dusty windscreen, one observes a traditional African ritual: aimless young men in knock-off soccer jerseys offering advice on how to park a car. Turn now! Sharper! Now straight back! Every male in Africa is an authority on parking. Curiously, however, they do not always agree. But I digress…

One then arrives at a concrete block with an improbable name – in this case, the Glory Hotel. Oh, the Glory. The walls of one’s room, presumably white at one stage, now appear to have been scrubbed with steel wool. One’s mosquito net is torn and stinky. One’s faucet may or may not work. One’s toilet does not bear mentioning.

Remind me which part of this I was feeling wistful about? Perhaps tomorrow will tell. But somehow, I doubt it…