During the day we had made an obligatory pilgrimage to Robben Island, the island prison where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated for eighteen of his twenty-seven years of detention. It was here that he wrote his Long Walk to Freedom. Fourteen thousand kilometers lie before us... just a wink at the great man.

In the darkness of this rat hole, shivering among the debris, we think back over the chaotic days that preceded our departure for three years of walking.

"Months of talking," Sonia recalls, "of persuading, counting our chickens, extorting promises, being taken for lunatics, casting off the moorings, and all that remains now is to push off, to take the first step. I'm already exhausted."

Months to constructing the project, giving it a meaning, of talking in the wind. We want to walk "in the footsteps of Man," from one end of the Great Rift Valley - the vast fault that makes a gash in East Africa - to the other. From the Cape Peninsula to the Sea of Galilee in Israel. To follow symbolically the first voyage of the first man, who left the cradle of humanity in order to spread to the farthest reaches of the globe. Of course, there was never "a" first man or "a" first voyage, and there are almost as many cradles of humankind as there are paleoanthropological fossils uncovered. Nevertheless, the oldest of them have been unearthed along the Rift, and that's why we want to join them together in one sweep, and thus travel back through space and time, site by site, from Australopithecus to modern man.

Our idea is to meet scientists at these sites who will give us insights into the specimens they have discovered. Who were these beings, already humans? Not quite. Why not? And what specifically is a human? Not small questions! A reflection on the process of hominization and therefore humanization against a background of diffusionism. Take it easy! It's as simple - as complicated - as a first footstep...

Over and above these fine ideas, this very theoretical thread, we especially want to walk through the heart of contemporary Africa, sharing the condition of Africans who are willing to take us in for an evening and an exchange before we set off again. We want to walk the real Africa, beyond clichés of cheetahs at sunset, and try to avoid the sinister triptych of guerillas, famines and epidemics. Africa must be elsewhere. It is here beneath our feet, and our whole project is at last reduced to its simplest expression, practical and concrete: begin! Read More...

One evening, on the outskirts of Tsitsong, at two thousand seven hundred meters of altitude in the tail of a storm that has been chasing us noisily all day, a man in rags, riding bareback a black horse, catches up with us:

"Dumela! O pela jouan?"(Hello, how are you?)

"Amonate!"(Super!)

"Do you want a lift?" (Now that's an odd one!)

"Inka dulla lewena manzibuya?"(Could we spend the night with you?)

And Retsilitsitse Letchamo Tchamo (that's his name) answers by raising his arms heavenward, his smile broad as the sun: "No problem!"

We follow him into the corn fields, he jumps down from his horse, disappears among the ears to collect dinner, and returns disguised as a walking bush, talkative and gesticulating. The whole family greets us. Several generations, neighbors, cousins, brothers, who knows, we get a bit lost in the tree, are piled into a little hut with a floor of dried cow pie and clay. No chimney. A pipsqueak does his best to blow on green branches that don't catch. The smoke is supposed to go out through the thatch. Just supposed to. Only the bottom thirty centimeters are breathable. Coughing hard, Sonia says to me: "I see why there is neither furniture nor chairs in the huts. Can you picture yourself sitting on a chair with your head in this ham smoker?"

At ground level, we take great gulps of air that smells of feet and stand back up like Weebles to rejoin the singing and conversation under the cries of laughter of the fifty or so eyeballs rolling in the penumbra like lottery balls in the agitator before the drawing.

By magic, out of night and another hearth, pops up a pot of léché léché, the national sorghum gruel. Vaguely red and sticky, it's not hard to get down with lots of slurp, gloop and burp! Fills in the cracks in your stomach. Then arrive the ears of corn, braised and deliciously smoked because the brat is still blowing hard as ever on his damp kindling.

Once replete, and our stories and tricks run out, we wonder how this entire bunch of people is going to sleep in this hut. The answer comes when Letchamo, full of thoughtfulness and attention, offers us his double bed in the hut next door. Outside it is raining cats and dogs. We go to sleep filled with love and gratitude for this little people of angels.

We dress our breakfast putu papa with sugar and milk still warm from the cow. To get us to stay, Letchamo wants to kill a chicken, yet we always have to get going again. What can we say? That if we had not got going the morning before, we would not have met him...

As we take leave of Letchamo, we take leave of his gaze. It is a fleeting microsecond that brings him into our personal history. It's strange, a gaze we will never cross again! Yet we have lived inside it for a little while. Into how many souls are we going to plunge this way like thieves?

Departure: four o'clock in the morning. We share the last swallow. Objective: water. Throat knotted. Head heavy. We know it is not far away, but it is not here, and that is all that counts. It is wanting. Few words. Saliva is dear. The voice is already deformed. A little falsetto voice. The ears begin to buzz, early sign of acute dehydration.

At sunrise, we find the river. Dry. It's not serious, there's another one in five kilometers, in one hour. Tick-tock, tick-tock, keep going... I look for it far off on the road. There is the bridge, there is the water. Don't run. Remain dignified. We are saved. The river approaches, the bed is becoming visible, and turns out to be... dry!

Impossible! The bed is the size of a large river. Not a hole in the sand? No one has been to dig? Then there is no water! Lose one's last resources digging? We drag on. It's the every-man-for-himself, we are staggering. We have to get to Nyamapanda, ten kilometers, two hours. Suddenly, in the distance, a woman crosses the road.

She is a woman like millions of others in this country, except that this one has a pail on her head. God in person. A miracle! A mirage? We yell, we run flat out. She stops and turns around. We rush up, she has understood, hands us a calabash, honor to the ladies!
And glou, glou, glou!

I see my wife reborn, each swallow swells her with life. She starts to breathe again. It's my turn!

And glou, glou, glou! Bestial music! Ineffable sweetness! Milk and honey. Better yet, water. All is abolished in a second. We have not suffered. You only suffer in the present. We split with laughter like nuts. Our bellies are going floc! floc! Our little lady is moved. She knows what thirst is.

"Zita rako unonzi ani?" (What is your name?)

"Lucy."

Our savior's name is Lucy. She is middle-aged, in rags, marked by life, alcohol and blows, but her smile is pure as the sun. She is a princess, an Eve, a mother of men, an apparition. A wink at our paleo-anthropological trek. The reminder too that it's to such encounters that for eleven months we have owed our survival.

That is our weakness. That is our strength.

A lesson in humility for our calves. They do not progress by pride or will, but thanks to the simple and natural hospitality of the Africans at whose houses we arrive every day exhausted and thirsty. Without them, without this humble chain of solidarity, we could not have walked more than two days. Financial support? We have none. Saviors? At least one a day, in the person of the most modest and poorest African peasant, but one rich in heart. That is our survival. That is our daily lot. That is our treasure...

"You're telling me that AIDS is a cultural phenomenon, not an economic one..."

"Oh, what big words! I am a doctor, I am talking about facts. What is certain here is that the transmission of the virus is the result of particular sexual behaviors and habits. So you can call that cultural if you want, but it has nothing to do with living standards."
He pauses for a minute.

"Oh, I see where you're headed. The titles in Europe on the theme: 'Africa is dying of AIDS because it is poor. Give some money!' Don't talk to me about them! Still those idiotic journalists! Those guys who turn on the television, read the dispatches on the civil wars or visit refugee camps, that's their perception of Africa.... That's why what you are doing is good. But to come back to a reality that contradicts the simpletons, there is a cruel paradox: in Africa, AIDS progresses at the same time as the level of education and financial means. It's the 'sugar daddy' phenomenon: with a little money, the office worker, the professor, the civil servant or even the anti-AIDS activist - and this is what particularly pisses me off - can afford, with a few kwachas, the charms of the girl of his choice. They have nothing to say about it. It is not really prostitution, it is a current practice that takes advantage of poverty. Therefore it is cultural and a bit economic, it's above all about ass..."...

His zeal cranked up, Philippe continues: "In the short run, it's a big wave of orphans that's going to inundate all the social systems and paralyze the country. These kids will not be raised, they will protect each other in bands and will be exponential vectors of AIDS and anarchy. But the worst is that Malawi is the country that has the most infected parliamentary representatives in the world. So as far as an example goes, try again later! Even President Muluzi trumpets on large publicity panels intended more for western observers than for local populations: 'Malawians, change your behavior.' Apparently he is not Malawian or else he doesn't think it concerns him. He should have said: 'Let us change our behavior.'"

This afternoon, a poor father in rags comes out of the furrows to tail us. At first we take him for a beggar, but he speaks impeccable English. Jeremiah Moses never went to school. He is thirty-five and is most amiable. He knows the Rift, understands the sense of our trek, the origins of Man, reads the Times or whatever he can find, with a dictionary in one hand and a pen in the other. He is more up on the news than we are, knows the French Revolution and the Second World War: a perfect autodidact.

Indigence is a disease, not a destiny. Poverty is a mental depression, an abandon, an abdication, a negligence, more than an accounting category. I think back to the dignity of Franck Lucius in Mozambique and, contrariwise, to a guy who admitted to us with a laugh this morning that he had lost four of his six children, without knowing the cause, without worrying about knowing why. He doesn't give a damn. He didn't bear them, and he doesn't lose any sleep over it.
But Jeremiah has a problem he wants to tell us about. Another problem of money, we expect. Not at all. A matrimonial problem. He is seeking advice.

"I already have three children and don't want more. I know I couldn't provide for them. But my wife wants to keep going. What should I do? I think I am going to divorce her."
"Divorce would not help! Your next wife will want children too and the previous one will keep on with someone else, thus increasing your problems.... You should convince your wife to use the contraceptive pill... "

"What is that?"

"It's a pill that allows you to have normal relations with your wife, even more easily and more often, without the risk of having children. And above all without the risk of getting AIDS from other women."

"Then it's like a condom, without the condom! I like the idea! And where do you get it?"

"At a pharmacy. It's not free, but there are birth control centers, you know, the 'Banja la Mutsogolo' blue clinics, if you explain your situation, they will surely find a solution."

In the evening, it starts raining curtains. Our tent is flooded. We take refuge in the tembe of Joseph's mother. In the slop, the kraal suddenly becomes much less bucolic. Everything is leaking, everything is dripping in the total darkness. We are on ill-arranged branches covered with cow skins crawling with fleas. They too have taken refuge in the only place that is fairly dry. We bump into everything, cover ourselves with soot, butter and dirt, like all the objects we touch. So I can extend my legs at the end of our flea bag, I clear the foyer of its ashes and dust the whole place. We try to find some sleep, between the drops, between the fleas.

At dawn Joseph comes to see us, utters a hideous cry and disappears. What is going on? Have we turned blue? We palpate ourselves. Nothing! Sonia explains: "He must have planted a splinter in his foot."

Suddenly, Raphael runs in like a whirlwind and exclaims, devastated, pointing at the empty foyer: "What misfortune! Where did you put the ashes?"

"I threw them over the bush."

"Oh! Oh! Oh! Wait here, I'm going to tell Joseph that you didn't know."

We remain speechless. He returns.

"In the Barbaig tradition, to throw out the ashes of a foyer is to declare you want to kill the master of the house and take his wife... "

Oops! We go right away to apologize to Joseph who is already comforting himself with glassfuls of asali, while Noumounchou in her corner is clucking timidly. Dear Barbaigs, forgive the barbarians that we are!

The band of asphalt goes from east to west. It comes from Arusha and beyond, from the Swahili coast; it goes toward the center of the world, the crater of Ngorongoro, the gate to the vast plains of the Serengeti, the country's principal currency resource. The entire planet dreams of passing over this band of asphalt, on its way to the earthly paradise. And many do. Norias of shiny Land Cruisers go by with their precious cargo of tourists. Many are sleeping. Jet lag. They are all tidy in their brand new khakis. All pale from an elsewhere without sun. This is not sarcasm. That's the way it is. It is true that they look fragile. Here, two worlds watch each other go past. Africa in rags, dreaming of material prosperity and complexity, and the prosperous North that dreams of original purity and simplicity. We are at the crossroads and are looking for a friend whom we met the last time: Habiba.

She's a little wisp of nothing at all who carries her corner of Africa at arm's length. We had landed in her greasy spoon by chance, famished and fainting with heat, knowing we would make a side-trip to Arusha. We had worthily celebrated under her corrugated iron the end of our crossing of the heart of Tanzania, of its jungles infested with lions and tsetse flies, awkwardly seated elbow to elbow with poor wretches on tottering benches before a greasy dish. And our love for her had come with small steps, silently, stealthily. It had begun, once she was over her surprise at seeing two Whites sit down in her dark, crowded hut, with our usual spiel. Second surprise: the muzungus spoke Swahili! Peals of laughter were echoed back. On Habiba's back, a severely handicapped little girl was tied up in a dirty loincloth. Habiba was cooking right on the ground scattered with rubble, crouched before a fire which another girl was energetically fanning. Each time she took hold of a plate, an egg or her can of rancid oil ill-stoppered by a ball of plastic bag, she pivoted on her heels, threatening to trepan her little daughter on detached pieces of metal sheet. She had laughed at our worries. But she had a blind knowledge of her cramped hovel. She has been living there for twenty years, night and day. Sonia had taken the little one. Habiba had been quite moved by this. Here, no one touches the handicapped. It's bad luck. Friendship had moved up a notch. She had served me tomatoes with lemon juice, our first tomatoes in a long time. In Arusha, we had counted our teeth and our money! Eight teeth spoiled by lack of tomatoes and other things.... She had understood where we had come from, and knew what we had been through. I had swallowed down all the tomatoes like a boor, while Sonia was going goo-goo with the baby. Habiba had served her some more in a sort of collusion: "Ah, men! They're all the same!"

Every now and then we see bunches of guinea fowl that cackle noisily at our approach and disappear in tight rows, single file, with a comic way of flattening their two sides while rounding the back, pulling the head in and hiding the feet; a gait that makes them look like black disks rolling through the bushes at ground level. Suddenly, we come upon an ostrich. We see it from behind, a big ball of black feathers with a reddish rump, perched on two stilts. With one movement, it lifts its long neck, turns its head, takes a few slow steps, unfolds its short, white wings; it doesn't appear worried, looks us over gently and, at some mysterious call, hightails it away, its head held high and stationary. Its gait is unreal and light, its head floating above the body, and yet the ground resonates under its strides like a drum covered with velvet. Sonia is moved to tears.

"Our first wild ostrich! I would never have imagined it would have that effect on me! Yet we saw dozens of them in Ngorongoro! Not to mention the breeders from South Africa! Why is this one so different when we are on foot...?"

What is true of ostriches is true of every form of encounter, and also of men. Walking magnifies and embellishes everything whereas the auto trivializes and falsifies everything. The auto reifies the world. It is an intermediate state between television and reality, just a little less comfortable. Walking brings a different gaze, direct from the scene; it isn't the object that changes, it's the way it is approached. It does not make things more authentic - the ostrich is still an ostrich seen from a car - it makes them more real to us, more experiential. It metamorphoses the walker, not the ostrich.

Our azimuth soon converges with that of two morans who popped out from nowhere. They are apparently going in the same direction we are, toward the angle of the southeast shore of Lake Natron. These are initiates, draped in their flamboyant red toga, armed with a spear, a double-edged sword, a club, and a staff. They come up to us with no hurry or timidity. Their names are Paulo and Maya. Guardian angels, sent by ours. They are younger than their appearance, from a distance, would make you expect. We inform them of our intentions. It doesn't seem to impress them. We set out together, improvising a course in the Maasai language. Paulo has been to school, he can speak Swahili and bits and pieces of English. He is tall and svelte, he does not have pierced ears and does not wear the traditional braids. I question him.

"At the government school," he replies, "they tell us that our culture is bad, and that it is bad to have your ears pierced... "

"And what do you think?"

"Here, it bothers me to be a bit different from my brothers, but when I was in school, they would have made fun of me if I had had pierced ears, they would have called me a donkey, since the ears of a donkey are notched so they can be recognized. One thing is sure, I am happier here, dressed ol karasha, with my spear and my brother. I feel at home."

"Is Paulo a Christian name?"

"Yes, in my family we are both Christian and Maasai, Enkai is the god who gave us all the livestock in the world, and Jesus is his son: the chief of shepherds, the good shepherd of all humanity."

His "brother" Maya is a skipping little squirt who is wearing the traditional braid gathered in the back into a point. His temples are shaven very high and on his forehead a little fringe comes down, also pointed. His ears are deeply notched. The loop of flesh thus created is weighted down by two copper weights that swing on his shoulders at each step. He has more jewels than Paulo, he has not been to school and is not a Christian. He believes only in Maasai wisdom. He conceives a friendship for Sonia and instinctively places himself to her right as if to protect her from danger, as a bodyguard would do in a crowd for a star. My star.

We approach an immense parasol acacia. In its beneficent shadow are seated an old man and a small group of newly circumcised young men. ...

John turns toward us: "He has seen Whites only three times in his life. The last time that Europeans sat under this tree, it was during the English period, when he was a young moran. He is very happy to see you. I told him what you are doing, and he is very impressed."

The moranillos have returned. The water begins to boil. The old man watches me pouring the contents of the packets into the water with a disapproving whistle.

"What's the matter. He thinks these are worms?"

"No! He says that your wife should be doing that."

I burst out laughing. Sonia, Alexandra and Baptiste are already sleeping. The bush is anesthetized by the heat and light. Not a breath of air, not a sound disturbs this stifling silence. John breaks it with a glacial slice: "For three nights they have been hearing lions in the vicinity, he advises us not to sleep alone tonight. He also says that they are the last inhabitants in the Magadi valley, there is no trail to the north, that they have no contact with the northern Maasai because they belong to different clan. They are even rather enemies... "

Stretched out on his right side, the man lays his head on a tiny wooden headrest and observes my anxiety. In one movement, he takes the lobe hanging from his left ear, raises it and puts it like a rubber band behind the pinna, so it will stop tickling his neck. He has chestnut irises with pale blue circles around them, like many old Africans. He tells me that he misses the time when the Whites administered the country, since they were more tranquil and managed their own affairs. Today, he says, the Maasai are divided by politics, they tear each other up.

All at once he hands me his club and a long staff from the same source. John's eyes are opened wide. I do not know what that means. I question him with a glance.

"He is giving you his symbols as chief, it's a great honor! This straight club with a small head is called an olkuma orok, and the staff an ésiré."

I am bewildered and sputter: "Why?"

"He wants you, by your trek, to bear witness to our plight..."

This evening, we land at Kerio 2, a shantytown put up in open desert, where displaced Turkanas survive. Kerio 1 was carried off by El Niño. Hundreds of people drowned in the middle of the night in this desert by the flooding river. The height of absurdity. Of horror.

Theophilus Loburo is a young student from Lodwar, the capital of Turkana country, and he speaks very good English. He receives us in his home, in a vast courtyard where the most fantastic of lectures is being improvised before a dozen students as thirsty for knowledge as the desert plants are thirsty for sap. They want to know everything. Why are there earthquakes? Why the Rift? Why the wind, the sandstorms, the stars, the moon, day, night, lightning, it's all there. Seated in a comfortable chair, like an African elder, with all this flock at my feet, I use my stick and point out the constellations, trying to remember my physics courses, my readings of Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking. They are in seventh heaven. Gravitational force, centrifugal force, the Coriolis force, satellites, the speed of light, the axis of the ecliptic, the sound barrier, the expansion of gases, plunge them into unfathomable delights, they drink in my every word.

They are young and uprooted. Straddling two cultures. Unable to survive in one, unable to live in the other. Useless everywhere. They are in suspense, terrified by the complexity and harshness of a world that refuses to open up to them while they have irreversibly turned their back on their roots. Knowledge is modernity's first poison. Gentle and fatal for the innocence of traditional life. They are nevertheless the Kenya of tomorrow.

Kate Fereday (Eshete) came to Ethiopia nine years ago after seeing, at the end of a television newscast, a short piece on the distress of street children. "I sold everything, house and car, left my position as division chief in an electronics company in Plymouth, in England, to come work in humanitarian organizations based in Addis and in which I rapidly realized that the money I was collecting in charity sales was spent on wages, on administration and on 4x4's which were useless in the streets of the capital."...

"I left Addis and founded Kindu Erdata, an association for rehabilitation of street children. Erdata means 'help' in Amharic. After a while, I had opened seven hostels for eighty orphans in several of the country's large cities, but I very soon abandoned this kind of action which is not adapted to the children's real needs. Today, I have changed focus to 'financial support at home' for almost two hundred former street children, reinserted, thanks to godparents, in their families of origin which didn't have the means of feeding them."

"How does that work?"

"With twenty euros a month, given to the mother or the aunt or the grandmother if the first has died, the whole family benefits from an improvement in the living conditions. Most often, these families have no fathers."

Kate has thus gone from hostels to reintegration into family units because she realized the savings she could achieve in rent, cooks' wages and operating costs. She calls this "family reunification."

"Thus, for the annual operating costs of a hostel for ten children, I realized I could now 'reunify' fifty children separated from their families, and thus be even more effective! Moreover, these children grow up in their own world and not in an artificial family unit, in a group of desocialized children where violence and injustice are reconstituted." ...

Indeed, who can better raise a child than a mother, once she is given the means?...

Kate has dozens on her waiting lists, waiting simply the opportunity to return to their families to receive like daily bread the ration of essential love, waiting for a sponsor. Others are HIV-positive and have been rejected everywhere. Except by Kindu Erdata.

On Sunday 1 June 2003, we celebrate our best shower on the continent: it is at Reys, forty-eight kilometers before Wad Medani. You must know that there is a curse in Africa that makes all showers lack something, something apparently insignificant but which makes the operation difficult and acrobatic, sometimes even dirty.... A good shower is the result of a successful combination of innumerable components. I am not talking about plumbing or running water, that would be asking too much, no, a good African shower is a smooth cement square in a place that closes, far from the latrines. Because most of the times they are in the latrines, above the same pit.

The slope has to be calculated and the drain not be plugged, that there be a light overhead, nails on the door to hang your clothes on, a bucket of pure water with a cup to pour water on your head, a plastic or twine stool to sit on, a bar of soap and a soap dish to place it on when you've used it, a dry towel and flip-flops for getting out, and finally, luxury of luxuries, a clean change of clothes loaned by our hosts so we won't have to put our stinking clothes, which have been washed at the same time, to take advantage of the opportunity.

It doesn't look complicated, but there is always one or more unavailable ingredients missing in this recipe, that make the whole thing a wrestling battle, an equilibrium ordeal, a painful pleasure. Tonight, our 885th night, we combine them all for the first time at the home of Ajeb Abd el-Rahman. "Choukrane bezef, Ajeb!" Sated with pasta and tomatoes, dressed in fine cotton djellabas, stretched out in the gentle evening wind on beds set up under the stars with clean flowered sheets, we sleep the sleep of the just. Luxe, calme et volupté. Happiness is as simple as a shower.