Journey Without Brakes
Published by The Psychiatric Eye, Royal College of Psychiatrists. Photograph by Thomas Sammut
‘You see boy, you see. These people are very wicked!’
Two hours east of Fajara, The Gambia. Mr Njie had driven his seven-seater Toyota Picnic through an Army checkpoint without stopping. I snapped awake to the sound of Mr Njie barracking two soldiers for their impudence in having required him at gunpoint to pull over and account for himself.
We were heading for the chimpanzee rehabilitation project, 260 kilometres up the River Gambia. A Frenchman I’d met near the port at Banjul had piloted his six metre yacht upriver almost as far as the camp but became entangled in fishing nets and had turned back. When last I sailed a dingy I performed an involuntary gybe; the main sheet levitated and flicked my spectacles from the bridge of my nose into the Adriatic. I would get there by road.
Trouble was the brakes on Mr Njie’s car did not work. I understood then why each time we entered a village he wove around the road blaring his horn.
‘You see Adam, it is better to lose brakes than to lose horn!’
He berated the soldiers into letting us past – offering neither explanation nor apology.
The ferocious sun baked the dust and sand on the inland road to Janjanbureh. I cringed and tensed in the passenger seat, bracing for impact round every turn.
We arrived at Baboon Island, shaken but not maimed, and I was shown to the canvas safari tent in which I would sleep.
The procedure was clear: you go to the river, you board a small boat. You see the chimpanzees. You eat fresh fish at the waterside lodge. You walk in the night looking for bush babies. You do not find them.
As I sipped Julbrew and watched malachite kingfishers flash across the water from the lodge, Mr Njie’s mechanic came down from Basse to work on the car. Departing for the coast the next day, it was clear the brakes remained shot. I had a 24-hour on-call in the MRC hospital to get back for and there wasn’t an alternative taxi within a hundred miles. We pressed on.
Eventually Mr Njie’s tactic of screaming insults at other drivers, children and livestock yielded bitter fruit. One accosted man gave chase in his van, overtook us, and forced us off the road – not appreciating we hadn’t brakes. We almost collided with his old Mitsubishi as we lurched off the tarmac onto the sand.
There followed a lively and frank exchange of views in Wollof which lasted several minutes before Mr Njie decided it was time to be off. He swung out past the van and nearly obliterated a motorcyclist attempting to bypass the rumpus.
Mr Njie drove cabs in New York city for a decade, sending remittences home for his children. He’d returned to oversee their education. He had brought back Manhattan’s famed pugnacity, and it risked getting us killed.
I asked him to stop yelling at people. Grudgingly, he agreed.