Investment Biker Read online

  We sat in a café and drank big brown bottles of African beer, impossible to order on the street back in a strict Islamic culture. A wave of relaxation spread over us as the paraffin lamps flickered in the dark and black faces smiled in our direction. After our jitters about being Americans in Arabic North Africa, it felt incredibly good to be here.

  Pierre had found a local girl whom he bragged was his for the price of a half-bottle of whiskey and a pack of Marlboros.

  Like Tamanrasset, Arlit was a place to swap stories, get your vehicle repaired, and buy spare parts. We spent a day there, reconnoitering and pulling ourselves together. The next hundred and fifty miles south were over a well-paved road, we learned—an amenity that was created because the local uranium mine needed to ship out its ore, and that, as a by-product, developed the general prosperity of this region.

  The town stayed open all night, its lamps gleaming a welcome, as its principal occupation was serving foreign travelers.

  Tabitha didn’t feel well. She had a fever, and over our first day here it got worse, making her woozier and woozier. She tossed and turned much of the next night. She took some aspirin and finally got a couple of hours’ sleep.

  We decided to stop here another day to give her some rest. The evening was passed in several cheerful cafés where we drank Cokes, sodas, and beer and ate shish kebab and goat cheese.

  The next morning we drove to Zinder, three hundred miles south. Tabitha felt worse, by now gulping aspirin and forcing down fluids. To give her more rest, we stopped a couple of days here, too. She still had a fever, which I was afraid was a result of heatstroke, perhaps from the Sahara, perhaps from walking around in the sun in Arlit.

  Entering Nigeria we hit one of the worst border guards we’d ever encountered, a large fellow in a green uniform whose badge identified him as Lieutenant Ibrahim.

  “Well, you’re American,” he said in a snotty tone, “so I’m going to treat you the way I’d be treated at Kennedy Airport. I’m going to search you completely, because that’s what you do to us at Kennedy.”

  He was right, I thought.

  When the lieutenant saw we had BBC radios, he said, “Are you listening to it in Hausa?” the local language and in which the BBC did indeed broadcast. As Nigeria had been an English colony, he spoke fine English.

  Staunching my impatience, I said, “No, we don’t understand Hausa.”

  He became indignant because, after all, he understood our language. He wanted to know which tribe we were.

  “We’re not in any tribe.”

  This made Lieutenant Ibrahim yet more overbearing.

  By oversight I showed him the carnet that didn’t have Nigeria stamped on it.

  He became furious that it didn’t list his country.

  “We’re the largest and strongest country in Africa,” he ranted. “We’re not a Third World country, we’re a world power, a rich world power. You’d better understand that.”

  He checked every single document we’d thought to bring: the international certificates for the motorcycles, international driving permits, certificates of vaccination, entry visas, proof of ownership of photographic equipment, travel insurance forms, carnets, and passports.

  Seemingly disappointed at our preparedness, he and his men searched us completely, examining every item on our bikes. Fortunately, we didn’t have to bribe them, although we left a carton of cigarettes on the counter, which promptly disappeared. He gave in. With a disgusted wave, he let us through.

  By now we had begun to realize that guards like this Hausa would force us to budget an entire day for crossing each border, an extra two weeks to cross Africa alone.

  Tabitha was still feverish, still taking aspirin. As we moved on through Nigeria, we encountered one military checkpoint after another. Each one ate up long stretches of time. As the guards checked our papers and our bikes, I frequently questioned them: What was the point of these stupid inspections? Didn’t they know they were driving away travelers bringing much-needed hard currency into their economies?

  As Pierre hadn’t had the foresight to obtain visas in North Africa, he wound up needing more money for bribes than he anticipated. I wound up forking over more for his expenses than I had expected, but it seemed worth it to have the safety margin of extra supplies.

  Tabitha was still sick. I was sure it was just a little sun. I suggested she eat as much salt as she could and drink a lot of liquids—sodas, bottled water, whatever. Although she needed rest, we were afraid to stop in Nigeria because we were having so many problems with military checkpoints and visas. Despite her fever, we both wanted to get to Cameroon as fast as we could, and put these checkpoint problems behind us.

  We hit a terrible section of dirt road for the last five miles of Nigeria, and it took quite a while to drive across it. Water had run over the road, which had then dried like a riverbed. The surface was hard, rutted mud with potholes a foot or two deep. We had to pick our way across it.

  Even though we’d just been through the Sahara, Maroua seemed even hotter, even more suffocating. Here we found the first decent hotel we’d seen since Algiers. It even took credit cards, which was a help because we’d been burning up cash since Algeria. Its clean, new rooms, air-conditioning, swimming pool (with water in it!), and modern bar made me a little giddy with disbelief; nor could we believe it had hot water until we took showers. To an American it would have been the equivalent of a nice Holiday Inn in a small American city, but to us it was the Ritz. Despite the toll on Tabitha’s health, we decided we had made the right decision in pushing through Nigeria.

  Tabitha had developed a cough, and the first night here it got worse. She took more aspirin, but the pain was so overwhelming that it didn’t help. Whatever was in her chest had now gone into her ear, giving her a piercing earache. By now this had continued, on and off, for nine days, and she wasn’t winning the battle.

  “I’ve got to get some help,” she said. “This thing is getting worse.”

  As it turned out, we were lucky. We had pushed on to the right spot. Next door was a private clinic run by a Chinese couple named Chang.

  I took Tabitha there. Dr. Chang wanted to run some blood tests, thinking she might have malaria.

  Having heard stories of used needles in African clinics transmitting AIDS, Tabitha was apprehensive. However, Dr. Chang had a drawer full of disposable needles, all nicely wrapped in sterile cellophane, so she accepted his care.

  This Chinese doctor not only had modern equipment but a private room. It wasn’t much more than a cement-block cube with a bed, but it had an air conditioner and a bathroom.

  I brought fruit and sodas, held her hand, and soothed her. She stayed in bed for forty-eight hours, right through Christmas Day.

  After hitting me up for a few extra bucks, Pierre found himself a cheaper hotel, where he entertained a different local girl every night. I mentioned the possibility of AIDS, but he laughed and brushed aside my warning.

  Dr. Chang diagnosed Tabitha’s illness as a bronchial infection. He gave her a course of antibiotics. He was delighted to have our hard currency. I was amazed that the bill wasn’t more—just a couple of hundred dollars for the antibiotics, the room, his care, everything.

  Maroua turned out to be an interesting place, and I was glad we spent nine days there resting.

  We became friendly with a shaggy-blond expatriate German called Dietrich Reinhardt, owner of an inn and a restaurant, with whom we spent several evenings.

  Back in the seventies Dietrich had stumbled on a mode of making big money in Africa. He drove cars down from Europe and sold them at a profit. Over several years he had made twenty-odd trips, sometimes transporting two cars at once. For a while he earned a large premium, then other sellers piled in, which always happens in a market with a big profit. Once the premium was driven out of the business, it made no sense to continue.

  In their mid-thirties, he and his wife now ran a restaurant, souvenir shop, bar, and inn. He also owned an auto-repair busi
ness that catered to travelers. They had an easy life, with two children and lots of servants.

  However, it was clear from discussions with them that their business was drying up. Travelers weren’t coming through as they once had, nor were the automobile smugglers. During the late eighties, African travel had became more and more difficult. Currencies had deteriorated; restrictions grew more burdensome; and as African economies got into trouble, wars had spread and deterred tourists.

  These countries learned from the West only too well how to stick it to visitors. In the old days you drove up to an African border and sailed right in, possibly leaving a tip of a carton of cigarettes or a bottle of whiskey. In those days many travelers didn’t have visas or the right papers. They might have been running from trouble in their own countries, or they might have been misfits starting their lives over.

  The Reinhardts loved their life, but things were getting tougher. Their kids were growing up. They didn’t want to raise them here because Africa didn’t look as promising as it had when they were in their twenties, back when the continent was an adventure.

  That was the problem with the life of an expatriate. Usually, an expat was dodging something. The Western expatriate in Africa was often a big fish in a small pond who did well because he didn’t encounter much competition. Since the days of Lord Jim, expats had found they didn’t have to run too fast.

  Now Reinhardt was looking for a way out. He was going to be in a terrible bind when he had to go back to Germany.

  Once Tabitha was back on her feet, we went out to a posh French restaurant near town for a bang-up meal.

  It was called Le Saret. We had a wonderful meal yet a sad experience. For forty-five years the French owner, Luc Phillipe, now in his eighties, had maintained the equivalent of a first-class Parisian restaurant, complete with white-liveried waiters with impeccable manners, French wine, and everything cooked to a fine French turn.

  Monsieur Phillipe and his wife had brought everything from France—the culture, the manners, the dishes, the cutlery—and now the business was finished. The game hunters had stopped coming, and after the independence movement came, the tourists had slowed, too. He had tried to entice his son into the business, but his son had gone to Hollywood to make movies.

  After his wife had died he closed the restaurant for a while. Now it was back open and he was trying to sell it, but in a year or two it would be gone. Nobody was going to buy this white elephant of Parisian lavishness on the rim of the Sahara.

  Like many others, Monsieur Philippe was going to lose his life’s work. Throughout this trip, we heard this story over and over. No matter what a person built, no matter how wonderful the house, the museum, the culture, the country, it was going to disappear. There was nothing permanent. We visited dozens of once-powerful cities like Carthage that had been overrun and knocked apart, scores of once-stately homes that were now in ruins. No matter how magnificent the castle, in two hundred, five hundred, one thousand years, its ruins will be overgrown with vines. No matter how vast and powerful the empire, the country, the company, or the dynasty—it won’t last.

  Monsieur Phillipe would run his restaurant until he couldn’t any longer, probably until he died, when it would be taken over by the state. The state would run it into the ground because no Cameroon bureaucrat could manage it Monsieur Phillipe’s way. He had had some good years, and that was all there was and all there could be.

  The papers here were full of the bloody revolt in nearby Chad.

  Marauding soldiers had broken into the national parks and zoos and machine-gunned the animals and eaten them. In Angola the faction backed by the United States was having pitched battles with the dreaded Communists. Zaire would break down into a bloody shooting match any year now. So many conflicts remind me of barroom brawls on Saturday night, important to the drunken combatants but rarely to anyone else.

  Despite these nearby troubles, I was optimistic about the future of Cameroon. The democracy movement here was beginning. The country had an educated, civilized population. In the 1990 World Cup, Cameroon got to the quarterfinals, the first African country to do so.

  At some point this country, with its abundance of natural resources and an educated and outward-looking population, would be quite an investment. It would help a lot that the country was officially bilingual, speaking French and English, and that it was absorbing progressive information from not one but two outside cultures. The population was not only aware of the outside world but was encouraged to know about it. This was rarely true in dictatorships.

  At the right time, an investor here could put his money into agriculture, metals, lumber, and food production. He should buy into any company that is well financed and sells to its neighbors down south, such as South Africa and Botswana, or north into Europe.

  Cameroon was also small, which meant there weren’t so many tribal factions. Borders here would probably not have to be redrawn, or at least not as extensively as those in the rest of Africa.

  Many borders in Africa were artificial, drawn by colonialists going off into the woods on a horse and deciding where a country should begin and end. For example, Zambia had only 7.8 million people but twenty-five different tribes. A glance at a map made you wonder how the country had been formed. There was no geographical or ethnic sense to its boundaries. They were just where Cecil Rhodes happened to go.

  In the same way that the USSR would split up and the borders in Eastern Europe would be redrawn until they made ethnic sense, here in Africa there would be upset until its borders were drawn in accord with natural geographic and ethnic divisions.

  Rested and well, we took off south. The roads weren’t too bad, and we could make fair time. A thousand miles later, stiff and sore, we pulled into Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, a former French colony, after an exhausting twelve-hour day of driving. We had camped out the night before, so we were keen to get to civilization.

  We arrived after dark on New Year’s Eve and checked into the Novotel. Dazed and weary, wanting a hot dinner, we went next door to Le Tropicana, which turned out to be a nightclub boisterous and stylish enough to have been located on Paris’s Left Bank. A Western-style New Year’s celebration was in full riot, including champagne, special French dishes, whistles, streamers, blowers, and oddball party hats. Our weariness miraculously fled after a couple of glasses of champagne. We stayed up till the small hours, dancing, trading party hats, and blowing whistles with the best of them.

  Like many Third World countries, the Central African Republic had prospered in the big commodities boom but now had collapsed. Its buildings sagged and poverty was everywhere. Like rats sensing a sinking ship, the savvy Indian and Arabian merchants who turned up in Africa wherever there was prosperity had sold their businesses and fled.

  The police hadn’t been paid for three months. Walking to a restaurant at night, we often had to pay a bribe to those who stopped us to examine our passports. They called it a cadeau, a “gift.” One to five dollars satisfied them. Had they insisted on more, they knew we might report them and get them into trouble.

  The C.A.R.’s biggest problem was its currency, yet the problem was the opposite of the one troubling so many other African currencies—it was too hard. Decades ago the currency known as the CFA had been pegged to the French franc, which itself was now pegged to the deutsche mark. If the C.A.R. could assign a value to its currency now, its government might peg the CFA at a fraction of this rate, but the CFA had been set when commodity prices were high. Changing the value of the currency now would be hard to accomplish (as all of Francophone Africa discovered when the CFA was devalued by fifty percent in early 1994; I suspect the problem is not yet solved completely).

  Since world commodity prices were denominated in dollars, the country had received a double whammy. As the dollar had declined 60 percent in value against the deutsche mark, the C.A.R. was receiving that much less in value than twenty years before. On top of this, commodity prices had come down dr
astically, often by 50 percent. The hard truth was that the C.A.R. now often received 20 percent of its former effective income for its products. To make matters worse, the C.A.R. maintained large police and military forces, which produced nothing of economic value for the country.

  What an odd place! In a city with dirt streets and without phones were a number of fine French restaurants that served meals as exquisite as those in Paris and New York. Because of the absurd currency, the prices were the same as in Paris and New York, too.

  Here in January we even drank fresh Beaujolais nouveau. At Freddy’s, the restaurant that became our favorite, I fell in love with capitan lasagna, a dish made from a giant river fish that looked like a grouper. Afterward we ate sherbet laced with vodka, which Freddy called colonels. We were in the depths of the Third World, light years away from Marseilles, the last place we’d had such meals, yet Cuban cigars and espresso topped off several sybaritic evenings.

  Bangui, named after the nearby rapids of the Ubangi River, was being flooded with immigrants from the countryside come to town for jobs. Its modern blocks and broad avenues were shaded by mango trees and scarlet-flowered flamboyants, while its central market bustled with commerce.

  The black part of town, called Kilometre Cinq, was fabulous, its nightlife justly famous for its wildness. Bars, restaurants, and discos were full of every kind of exuberant activity. We went out on New Year’s Day. The town was booming, nightlife throbbing at noon.

  Pierre had a field day, squiring a succession of comely African girls to the honky-tonks. He hit me up for an increase in his rates, which I wouldn’t give him, but then he wheedled an advance out of me.

  In visiting government offices to obtain permits and visas, I came to the conclusion that the Central African Republic was still a French colony, albeit a secret one.

  For every black administrator there was a Frenchman in the next office or at the next desk to whom many matters were referred. French officers were “advisors,” the same word used in the Kennedy years for our military in Vietnam.