The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari

10. The Hungry Herds at Etosha

ICROSSED THE BORDER into Namibia again, got a lift, and descended to the crumbly yellow middle of the country, staying first at a bush camp and then at a hotel. It was one of those inevitable transitions of travel — not travel at all, but stringent captivity and enforced delay. Months later, I couldn’t help but think of what Michael had said of Nathan Jamieson: “He died doing what he loved.” I wondered — and who wouldn’t? — in what circumstances that hopeful consolation might be uttered of my death, and whether it would be true.

The bush camp, north of Grootfontein, had only one other guest, except after dark when five large, well-formed eland crept through the thorn trees to drink at the waterhole near the lodge. The woman manager, who had seemed so taciturn, softened at the sight of them, as misanthropes often do in the presence of animals, saying, “Lovely, aren’t they?” The next day she brightened again, pointing out a golden oriole and a parrot-sized hornbill flitting through those same trees.

An American in charge of an aid program had agreed to meet me in Otjiwarongo, take me to Etosha Pan, and drop me on the road to Angola. From there I would be on my own. I saw the thin and sad widow Helena (“No fun here. No life at all”) again at the Grootfontein supermarket, and in Otjiwarongo stopped in to see Mr. Khan and buy more minutes for my phone. And, welcomed by these friendly people, I was reminded that in much of Africa there are so few main roads that people’s lives continually converge, and there occurs a repeating experience of crossed paths and familiar faces.

Otjiwarongo had seemed a welcoming enough place when I’d breezed through with Tony, the American diplomat and my traveling companion. But after a day and a half there it proved to be somnolent to the point of melancholy, or was this the predictable effect of a rainy weekend in a country town in Namibia? In the bar of my hotel a multiracial crowd howled at a South African rugby match on the wide-screen TV. Some were ranchers, as beefy as their cattle; others worked in the fluorite mine or were farmers. It was their day to drink. My bedroom stank of mildew. The desert rain fell intermittently from the sort of low grimy sky I associated with heavy industry, yet there was no industry in Otjiwarongo.

I asked the hotel clerk the way to the main street. She told me, and added, “Yes, go for a walk. But it’s Saturday. Be careful. There will be drunks.”

Into the drizzle I went, down the dirt sidewalk, past the one-story houses surrounded by high walls — and the perimeter walls made the houses seem more depressing than if they had been shacks. I scuffed through the litter to the only businesses that were open, the gas station and the Shoprite supermarket, where staggering boys and men shouted at passing cars, and at me.

“You!” one of the boys called out, and because he was in a group idling at the side of the Shoprite parking lot, I decided to ask him what he wanted. Seeing me approach, he skulked among the others, just as a singled-out animal in a herd might do, for camouflage and protection.

“Did you want to ask me a question?” I asked. But he was shy now.

“Where do you come from?” one of the others asked. He was glassy-eyed and a bit unsteady, yet did not seem threatening.

I told them where I was from.

“I want to go to America,” that boy said.

“What will you do there?”

“I can do anything.”

This prompt reply made the others laugh.

“And me, I want to go,” another said. “For work and for enjoying.”

“You can work in Otjiwarongo, or Windhoek,” I said.

“There is no work here. There is nothing here. We have no money.”

“Give us money,” one of the younger ones said.

“Maybe tomorrow,” I said, because they were growing in confidence, and insolence, and were now beginning to surround me.

“He is a clever man,” the first boy said. “He is telling us lies. He is lying because he is fearing us.”

Now I realized it had been a mistake to engage them in any sort of talk. I said, “Thank you! See you tomorrow,” and walked briskly away, down the empty road under the gray sky. I was thinking of the futility of such an encounter, because although we were in Namibia, they were boys I might have met anywhere in the world — aimless, idle, with little education and no work.

I walked for an hour and then returned by a different route to wait out the weekend. It was one of those empty interludes in travel, an airless unrewarding delay, when nothing occurs except a rising sense of loneliness and uncertainty, a darkening of prospects, the condition of being an outsider with all of a stranger’s suspicions.

To take the curse off the rest of the day I sat and read to pass the time — Melville’s Benito Cereno (ships, ocean, deception, mutiny). At such times I am so drawn into the detailed life of the novel that I am startled when I look up from the fiction and see gravel and cactuses and palm trees that remind me I am elsewhere.

I was glad when Oliver showed up in his four-wheel-drive vehicle. It meant a few days of companionship and the pleasure of being on the road again, as well as a chance to find out about his aid mission. His role in Africa involved giving large amounts of money away and supervising its use.

Oliver was the resident country director in Namibia of the American Millennial Challenge Corporation, an agency that financed foreign aid and development. The total fund was considerable, currently running at about $1 billion, and the projects were spread all over Africa — indeed, all over the globe, the dispensing of American taxpayers’ money in an effort to improve other people’s lives. One of the projects in Namibia was helping the tourism infrastructure. In an era of financial hardship for Americans, I wanted to know more.

“Oliver goes everywhere in Namibia,” I had been told. “He loads up his vehicle with food and water and extra gas and drives into the wilderness. If there’s no road, he drives up dry riverbeds. He spends weeks in the bush.”

He was young, mid-thirties, and quietly hearty. I liked his energy and admired his disposition. He biked and ran, even on the hottest Namibian days. He was married, with an infant son, and lived in Windhoek when he was not traveling. He had been associated with the Millennial Challenge for four years.

Also in the car was Trevor, a lanky, good-humored Texan whose wife was a medical officer in Windhoek, specializing in the administration of HIV/AIDS programs. Trevor was contemplating his next move, but was not sure what that might be. He was nearer my age, well traveled, ironical, and, as I was to find out, knowledgeable about African wildlife. His mellow mood showed in his loose and jaunty way of walking. He was a thoughtful person but not a worrier. He said he was just coming along for the ride, interested that I was eventually heading to Angola.

“Have you been up there?” I asked him.

He said no. Neither he nor Oliver had been over the border, nor did they know anyone who had. Oliver had been in touch with an Angolan on the other side who said he might be able to help me, but when pressed for a definite answer, the Angolan lapsed into silence and became unobtainable.

We drove north through small, narrow, road-straddling cattle towns, Hartseer and Vrindskap and Outjo, past the gravy-colored ridge of Fransfonteinberge, and after sixty miles or so we were rolling through the bush. The terrain was the unchanging semidesert and low thornbush that characterized much of Namibia, and it looked sterile until an ostrich strutted into view or a herd of buffalo shadowed forth to flare their nostrils. Passing not far from here 150 years ago, Francis Galton wrote in his diary, “The country is remarkably uniform, intersected with paths, and quite destitute of natural features to guide us. It is also slightly undulating, enough so to limit the view to a mile or two ahead.”

That was true today. The few Victorian travelers who had dared to march across these parts would find much of rural Namibia unchanged, because it is so thinly populated and undeveloped. Many of Galton’s descriptions in Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa, the account of his 1851 journey in what was then an unmapped country, would still apply to this enduring, crystalline, and seemingly steamrolled landscape.

Nowhere was that truer than at Etosha, which we entered a few hours later. Apart from the gate and checkpoint, it was as Galton had sketched it:

May 30th — We passed the grave of the god Omakuru … Came to Etosha, a great salt-pan. It is very remarkable in many ways. The borders are defined and wooded; its surface is flat and effloresced, and the mirage excessive over it; it was about nine miles in breadth, but the mirage prevented my guessing at its length; it certainly exceeded fifteen miles [actually more like eighty]. Chik said it was quite impassable after the rainy season, and it must form a rather pretty lake at that time. We arrived late in the evening at another werft [or werf: Afrikaans for the enclosure around a living area], on the south border of the grand flat, Otchikako-wa-motenya, which appears to extend as a grassy treeless estuary between wooded banks the whole way hence to near the sea.

Galton had gone north with two companions, John Allen and Charles Andersson, and a caravan of bearers following a file of heavily laden oxen. Galton was only twenty-eight, but he was high-spirited, in pursuit of David Livingstone’s Lake Ngami. At that time, European travelers in Africa, like Galton, were searching for the source of the Nile and denouncing the slave trade. For almost two years, Galton wandered up and down what is now Namibia, the first Englishman to report on it. He did not find Lake Ngami, but he penetrated deep into the country, very near what is now the Angola border (“four or five days’ easy journey ahead”), where slaves were routinely rounded up and shipped to Brazil from the Angolan port of Benguela. Galton noted the customs of the Damara, the Ovambo, and the Bushmen; he inquired about slave trading in Angola; he shot birds and big game; he crossed and recrossed the desert; and in the Victorian manner he asserted himself.

“A man whom I had taken from Chapupa’s werft became impudent,” he wrote. “So I took active measures upon his back and shoulders, to an extent that astonished the Ovampo and reformed the man.”

There were a few roads in what was Etosha National Park now, but the rest was bush and water and a salt pan. Galton, who first brought Etosha to the notice of the English-speaking world, would have found much of the area familiar. Twenty-five years after Galton’s visit, a young American trader-wanderer named Gerald McKiernan camped at the edge of Etosha and wrote in his diary, “It was the Africa I had read about in books of travel. All the menageries in the world turned loose would not compare to the sight I saw that day.”

In prehistory, Etosha had been a vast inland sea and still gave that impression, as if at low tide the sea drained away, leaving the sand and crusted sea floor exposed as flats to glitter under an empty sky. Much of it was now a pan, part of it with year-round water and other sections seasonal lakes. In the open areas it was a vastness of blinding white, and it shimmered as far as the horizon and was so thoroughly bleak it seemed that we had landed on a planet made entirely of crushed coral.

Farther east the land was more varied, with occasional clumps of trees and some parched but wooded glades, where svelte springboks sprinted and white rhinos lowered their armored heads and fitted their wide shovel mouths to the ground to tear at brown grass.

“Giraffe at ten o’clock,” Trevor said. He raised his binoculars to his eyes and frowned under them in concentration. “And another. With a baby. Beautiful. She’s saying, ‘I think I’ll try the leaves on this branch up here.’ ”

Two-toned herds of zebra with stiff, upright, brushlike manes trotted together shoulder to shoulder, then lifting their knees broke into a clopping gallop.

We came to a waterhole where three honey-colored lions lay sleeping, their fatigued bodies slackened on the gravel in the late afternoon sun.

Oliver said, “Siesta time.”

Trevor said, “Wait.”

We watched for a while: two slender sinewy lionesses and a broad-shouldered male lying between them with a fluffed-up mane like teased hair.

Trevor said, “Big boy is stirring. He knows what he wants.”

Yawning, the big lion got to his feet, tossed his mane, and padded over to the lioness on his left. Then he squatted in a regal pose behind her, raised his noble head, and thrust himself against her. This took but seconds. As he returned to his sleeping spot, the lioness he had covered rolled over and raised her dangling hind legs and shimmied on her back.

Trevor said, “Making sure that sperm gets where it’s supposed to.”

“That was something,” I said.

Trevor said, “Wait. Give big boy ten more minutes.”

In less than that time, the lion woke from his doze, yawned again, padded over to the lioness on his right, and squatted over her, knees apart.

As the lion lay sideways and slept again, Trevor said, “He’s not done. Wait a little bit. You’ll see.”

Just as Trevor had said, the lion roused himself and mated again with the first lioness. After this third time, Trevor predicted there would be more couplings, at roughly ten-minute intervals. And it happened. Karen Blixen wrote in Out of Africa, “You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.”

“Every man’s fantasy,” Trevor said. Then, “Oryx.”

This sex and sleeping ritual by the three lions was taking place about forty feet from a herd of fifteen oryx, which were lapping at the edge of the waterhole along with a flock of Egyptian geese, two jackals, a file of ostriches, and two giraffes, heads down, canted forward on their wide-apart legs. And it was not a large waterhole; it was hardly bigger than a suburban family’s swimming pool. Oliver said it was rare to see all these animals, different species, several of them predators or natural enemies, sharing the water peacefully, if warily, without threatening each other.

At sundown we returned to our lodge at Okaukuejo in time to witness herds of tourists, hundreds of them, alighting from buses and streaming from their rooms. Within minutes they were jostling in the dining room, pushing in a rowdy line to flourish empty plates that they held one-handed at their sides in the fidget of discus throwers, ready to launch themselves at the buffet. They looked fierce, their red faces and bulging eyes gleaming in the heat. There is something terrible about a naked display of hunger, and its nearest passion is perhaps lust.

“Germans,” Trevor said, in the same tone as he’d said “Oryx.”

They were clamoring for the platters of roast kudu and sliced chicken, basins of pasta, piles of mashed potatoes, and green salad. Four women edged forward, attempting to jump the queue, and the crowd’s panting and uneasiness were audible, intimations of appetite, many of them sighing impatiently or muttering with bad grace, and there were words, too. You could not watch all this pushing without thinking of the order at the waterhole, the placidly drinking animals. Of the one million tourists who visit Namibia, most are German, the rest from other European nations, and nearly all swing through Etosha in bulky tour buses.

There is a rule in Africa: do not get between an elephant and the water. Trevor said, “Don’t get between a tourist and the buffet.”

At the floodlit, fenced-off waterhole at the back of the Okaukuejo lodge, mammals gathered at either side of the barrier, the tourists to watch and whisper, the rhinos and eland to lap at the water.

“Tell me,” Trevor said in a rhetorical tone, “what’s the difference between this and a zoo?”

We debated this point until we were shushed and reprimanded by a stern German for talking too loud.

We set out early the next morning to drive around the perimeter of the pan. Motoring for hours to spot animals is less interesting to me than happening upon them while en route to a destination. I used to like the sight of hippos that crept past the schoolroom where I was conducting an evening class near Lake Katwe in Uganda, or the hyena that routinely pawed at my compost heap in Malawi at night when I sat reading. I preferred animals as background rather than foreground, like the glimpse of the hefty baboon on the road to Swakopmund, which appeared from the parted grass like a pedestrian, waiting to cross the road.

We came to a place called Halali on my map, but it was merely a dead end and a mud wallow. Nearby was a small cemetery. One of the strictest rules in Etosha was that no one should leave the safety of one’s vehicle. I mentioned this.

Trevor said, “But I don’t see anyone checking, do you?”

Being out of the car in this great flat sun-struck place was a liberation. The cemetery, surrounded by an old iron fence to discourage animals from violating the graves, contained the remains of seven Boers, their names and dates inscribed in old-style letters on the granite stones. All dated from the 1870s. These were people who had obviously died in this inhospitable salt pan on their way to Angola, during what was called the Dorsland (“Thirstland”) Trek, when hundreds of white South African farmers migrated north seeking greener pastures and more elbow room. One gravestone read Joh. Alberts 1841–1874 — no doubt a relation of Gert Alberts, one of the instigators, and the leader, of the trek. It was the trekkers’ fate that they had to cross the Kalahari and hundreds of miles of Etosha Desert and Ovamboland before reaching the great Kunene River and the green uplands of Angola. Just as bad as the fierce animals were the Portuguese, who stipulated that in return for the right to settle, these Dutch Protestants had to convert to Catholicism. Still, many of the renegade Afrikaners ended up farming in Angola.

While we strolled around this small cemetery in the middle of empty glittering Etosha, Trevor suddenly said, “Elephants at two o’clock.”

They were tiny in the distance, perhaps a mile away, swaying out of the shadows of a wide grove of trees as though leaving a low building. They moved slowly and at times gingerly, like barefoot children on gravel, because, Trevor said, the broken stones were sharp enough to press into the soft pads on the elephants’ tender soles.

We watched, and within half an hour more than forty elephants had gathered at the wallow. Most of them were mothers with babies, some male elephants bullied by the bigger females, and all of them active — rolling in the mud, trumpeting, spraying themselves with squirting trunks of water, the little ones stumbling in the deeper puddles. And there we stood, beholding the marvel of this sudden herd. Seeing so many sociable elephants together while we stood gaping was our reward for visiting Etosha, and I could not help but think of the tamed and obedient, and perhaps resentful, elephants at Abu.

Deeper into Etosha the land was flatter and without any trees, and as the day grew hotter the whole of the pan was blinding white and lifeless.

We came to Namutoni. Francis Galton had been here too, when it was known as a reliable waterhole, “a reedy boggy fountain … We were received very hospitably and had a tree assigned to us to camp under.” He also complained, “We traveled through everlasting thorns and stones for nine hours, and offpacked at wells — wretched affairs that we had to sit up half the night to clean and dig out.”

Some miles to the southeast of Namutoni was Otjikoto Lake, which Galton called “that remarkable tarn, Otchikoto … a deep bucket-shaped hole” filled with water. The local Ovambo told him the dark magical stories associated with the lake, “that no living thing that ever got into it could come out again.” Hearing this, Galton and his two mates stripped off their clothes, descended the bank to the water, and went swimming. Thus they “dispelled that illusion from the savage mind under the astonished gaze not only of the whole caravan but quantities of Bushmen who lived about the place.”

The fort at Namutoni was a set of square whitewashed battlements and watchtowers in the desert that could serve as the backdrop for a foreign-legion movie. Indeed, a foreign legion had once manned it — the German soldiers of the Schutztruppe, which repelled various attacks on the garrison by the Ovambo people in 1904. Ovambo Chief Nehale, who ordered and led the attacks, is remembered by Namibians as one of their earliest anti-colonial heroes. The seven Germans of the Schutztruppe who repulsed the attacks are remembered by the Germans for their colonial heroism. After the attacks, which destroyed most of the structure, the fort was rebuilt and enlarged in 1906 to its present form, and like everything else the Germans built in the colony, it was handed over to the South Africans less than ten years later.

At Namutoni, over cheese sandwiches, Oliver and I swapped stories of the Peace Corps. He had been a teacher in a rural village in Madagascar.

“One day the mailman came with a letter addressed to me,” he said. “Funny — I didn’t get much mail. This was from someone in a town about twenty kilometers away. It was a very short note saying, ‘I would like to see you.’ It was from a girl I had said hello to at the market there. How did I know that? Because she included a picture of herself. She was sitting under a bridge — naked.”

I said, “I can’t top that.”

Trevor said, “We want to know more.”

“I thought you might,” Oliver said, looking inscrutable.

As we had only one more day together, I asked Oliver over dinner about the Millennial Challenge Corporation. Passing the lodges at Etosha — they were large and sprawling and some could accommodate hundreds of tourists — he had mentioned that they were being upgraded. “The staff quarters are going to be moved over there,” he had said as he drove around the rundown workers’ housing. “This is all going to be cleaned up.” Oliver knew the plans and the people involved, and he’d said that one of his tourism projects in the country was being funded with Millennial Challenge money.

The Millennial Challenge Corporation had been started in 2004 during the Bush administration, a consequence of the frustration of people who saw USAID and other agencies pouring money into countries with no tangible results and little oversight. The money either disappeared into the pockets of local politicians or financed projects that were never finished. Anyone who has spent even a short time in a Third World country has seen this waste of money and the futility of a great deal of foreign aid. Africa is the happy hunting ground of donors, also of people seeking funds. The classic African failed state is composed of a busy capital city where politicians on large salaries hold court and drive big cars; dense and hopeless slums surrounding the capital; and the great empty hinterland, ignored by the government and more or less managed by foreign charities, which in many cases are big businesses run by highly paid executives.

In 2007, Oliver, with his Peace Corps zeal, had started working for the Millennial Challenge Corporation in the area of “project appraisal.” The following year he became deputy director in Namibia, and in 2011 was appointed the resident country director.

“How much are you giving to Namibia?” I asked.

“A little over three hundred million — but let me explain,” he said, because hearing the large number I had started to snort. “The grant is administered in stages over five years, in what we call a compact. And before a country qualifies for a compact it has to pass the eligibility requirements. It takes two years for a country to go through the process. This isn’t handing over money, the way it was done in the past. It’s a rigorous process.”

“What sort of requirements, apart from ‘We need money’?” I had my notebook out and was writing down his replies.

“There’s three categories we measure them by. Ruling justly. Economic freedom. And investing in people. If these don’t exist, no money. Each of the categories is broken down into seventeen indicators — like land rights, civil liberties, control of corruption, freedom of information — and they have to be low- or middle-income countries. Botswana doesn’t qualify, because they already have money. After the coup in Madagascar in 2009 their compact was terminated.”

“So a country simply applies, and hopes to qualify?”

“We can help a country to qualify by giving a threshold grant — fifteen or twenty million. They’d use this to sort out their policies. That creates a pathway to getting a compact that ranges from two hundred to five hundred million. Like I say, Namibia qualified for three hundred million.”

“What’s the limit?”

“Tanzania got seven hundred million for roads and energy and some other projects. That’s spread over five years. They’re now three years into it, and it’s working out.”

“Almost three quarters of a billion for Tanzania! They don’t even like us!”

“Remember when George Bush visited Tanzania in 2008?” Oliver said. “It was a very successful visit. He made promises to them.”

“I also remember the 1960s when the Tanzanians claimed they were Maoists. They got the Chinese to build them the Tan-Zam Railway, which is now falling apart,” I said. “Anyway, who gets the money? I mean, are American companies hired to do the work — say, on roads?”

“A U.S. company successfully competed for the energy project in Tanzania. I think I can say that we’re achieving U.S. development and foreign policy objectives.”

I mentioned that I had read in a Namibian newspaper that a Chinese company in the country, financed by American aid money, had underpaid and cheated its Namibian employees.

“You saw that, eh?” Oliver said. It had been a front-page headline. “Chinese government firms once qualified for this money, but that’s not the case anymore.” But he added that less than 10 percent of Namibia’s grant went to American companies. Most of the money went to Namibian or South African firms.

“So we’re giving money to foreign companies to do the work. And we used to give it to the Chinese?”

“It’s an open bidding process,” he said. “And we do audits. There’s no evidence that contractors are misappropriating the funds.” Slightly exasperated by my questions, he said, “You wouldn’t believe how much time we spend in monitoring these grants and double-checking.”

“Still, it’s a ton of money.”

“But there’s constant evaluation of performance. We don’t take people’s word for it, or list numbers as USAID once did — meaningless numbers. We invest money in monitoring, in making sure the money is used the right way, looking at the target, and the performance against that target.”

And, he said, sometimes a Millennial Challenge compact is in place and something changes that queers a development deal. Malawi was a recent example. Its government signed on to a $300 million compact for investment in the energy sector, but not long after the signing there was a demonstration in Malawi’s capital against the government’s human rights abuses. Nineteen demonstrators were shot dead by the army and many were injured.

“So we put an operational hold on the compact,” Oliver said. “And then the Malawians hosted Sudan’s al-Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court.”

“And what happened?”

“The MCC questioned Malawi’s commitment to the principles.”

“So no money?”

“No money.”

“That’s how it should be.” But I was not sure what “investment in the energy sector” meant — perhaps speeding the flow of foreign oil, or subsidizing it, or creating alternative sources. One of the problems with the whole discussion was the vagueness of the terms. Even the millions seemed like abstractions.

I remembered the tourist herds at the Etosha lodges and Oliver’s showing us the places to be upgraded. Were U.S. funds invested in Namibia’s tourism industry?

“Yes.” And Oliver elaborated by saying that the tourism project allotment was $67 million, which was for the improvement and management of Etosha National Park and to help in marketing Namibian tourism. The intention was to promote Namibia as a splendid, game-rich, tourist-worthy destination. Some of the money was allotted to develop an interactive website for the Namibia Tourism Board. It was also used to help Namibia in the areas of conservation, ecotourism, and poverty reduction in households within conservancy areas.

All of this was well intentioned in terms of development — even if vague in description — and laudable in the efforts made to ensure the funds weren’t stolen or wasted. If the money was misused, the grant would be cut off. But money for tourism? Many tourist destinations in the United States, which get nothing from the U.S. government for infrastructure or websites or training, would have been glad to get the $67 million grant Namibia had been awarded. Places I knew well got no money from the government to prop up tourism — Hawaii got nothing, Cape Cod got nothing, but they struggled along. Maine’s tourist industry was still in serious trouble in the aftermath of the 2008 economic slump, with high unemployment, high gas prices, and a lack of awareness outside New England of the delights of Downeast Maine, one of the noblest and best-preserved seacoasts on earth.

Were the hard-pressed residents of Maine, many of whom worked in the state’s hotels and restaurants, contributing to the improvement of the Namibian tourist industry, helping to lure the herds to Etosha and the Skeleton Coast?

“Let’s say I happen to be a Maine lobsterman,” I said. “I get up at four-thirty every morning, go out in my boat, and haul hundreds of traps. Some days, fuel is so expensive and there are so few lobsters that I lose money. But I keep hauling, and steering my boat in circles. I pay my stern man. I pay my taxes. I’m wet and cold most of the time.” Oliver was smiling, knowing what was coming. “What would you say to my friend Alvin Rackcliff of Wheeler Bay, in Midcoast Maine, about the use of his tax money to attract tourists to Namibia?”

“I’d say we’re trying to help create countries that are stable,” Oliver said as I scribbled.

“I don’t think Alvin would care too much about that. He’d say” — as Alvin said to me once — “human life means nothing in Africa.”

“It’s less than one percent of the total U.S. budget,” Oliver said.

“It’s still a lot of money. Alvin is heavily taxed and works very hard and he’s pretty old. But he needs to keep working.”

“Aid builds good relationships,” Oliver said.

“Alvin would want to know what Namibia is doing for itself.”

“Each country contributes, up to a half of the total,” Oliver said, then, seeing that I was impressed, he added that low-income countries were not required to contribute any money. “Look, it helps make countries viable. It builds infrastructure. Ghana is a good example of how loans and investment help. We had a successful compact there.”

At this point Trevor piped up. He had been listening intently throughout my needling interrogation. He said, “How about these politicians in Windhoek who are living like kings? Why are we giving free drugs to the country if they’re spending money on themselves for luxuries?”

“Namibia has had regular elections since 1990,” Oliver said. “As well as tourist-based development, we’re doing education and agriculture. Hey, it’s five years, and we keep checking that no one steals.”

“I get it,” I said, because of all the foreign aid programs I’d come across, this one seemed to be operated in the most efficient way. I remembered the highly critical book Dead Aid, and asked, “What does Dambisa Moyo think about it?”

“She’s skeptical. She’s taken some shots at us,” Oliver said. “But the whole idea is that we shouldn’t be here forever. There shouldn’t be a long-term-donor drip feed.”

I was persuaded that the Millennium Challenge Corporation was doing its work well. (And to put the $67 million figure in perspective, soon after my talk with Oliver I heard on the radio that the European Union and the IMF had voted to give a 110-billion-euro bailout loan to Greece, to help write off its debt.) I liked the idea that the MCC would cut off funds to countries that did not live up to their word, and that tyrannies did not qualify. The best news was the close monitoring of the projects and the cash flow. Some nations benefited, and were perhaps grateful and more stable as a result. What did all this mean to the U.S. taxpayer? Not much, I felt.

What did it mean to sorely taxed and hard-working Alvin Rackcliff in Maine? He was well over eighty now and still fishing, still hauling traps. I could see him in his yellow slicker, gloves, and rubber boots in his lobster boat, Morning Mist, laughter ringing in my ears.

“If you believe that, Paulie,” he would say, “you’re crazy as a shit-house rat!” Or perhaps, “The only free cheese is in a mousetrap.”

The next day, Oliver dropped me off in the town of Omuthiya, which was so small it did not appear on my map. We met his friend Moses there. Moses was an Ovambo, from Oshikati, near the border. He said he’d take me fifty miles up the road to Ondangwa, where there was a hotel.

I thanked Oliver for enlightening me about his projects, and for putting up with my needling questions, and thanked Trevor for his good humor.

Trevor said, “We’re going to miss you, man.”

“You’ll be fine from here on,” Oliver said.

I threw my bag into the back of Moses’s truck and climbed into the front seat.

On the road, Moses said, “You’re going to the border tomorrow?”

“Yes,”

“You’ve been to Angola before?”

“No.”

“You speak Portuguese?”

“No.”

“You have friends there?”

“None.”

Moses was a handsome man, but his scowl gave him a fierce mask. He held the steering wheel in both hands, hanging on, ruminating.

“What do you think?” I asked.

He turned his scowling, pained face toward me and said, “It’s a nightmare!”

Moses didn’t know the half of it, nor did I. Though I was not aware of it until a month later, that day in Namibia, or perhaps earlier, in one of the hotels where I had used my credit card (I had used it only fourteen times in Namibia, always for hotel bills) my personal information was stolen. My name and numbers were printed on a duplicate card, identical to mine (“It’s easy,” the fraud squad told me), and beginning on my last day in Namibia, and for the next month, this duplicate card was used in more than a hundred fraudulent transactions.

Some of the purchases were substantial ($4,000 worth of furniture from OK Furniture in Windhoek, almost as much at Edgar’s Furniture); some were tiny (a $3 meal at an Olympia Quick Shop, $20 for beer at Shoprite). Much more furniture, lots of sunglasses from the Sunglass Hut, numerous computers, a used car, tinted windows, new alloy wheels, $800 worth of new shoes, and many supermarket bills. The total came to just over $48,000 — U.S. dollars.