Murder and mayhem on the Nun River | Vice Magazine, The Teetering on the Brink Issue
Meet my uncle. He’s a fifty-year old moustachioed, rum-swilling, adventure-seeking man of the world. He’s spent the last thirty years ostensibly engaged in geophysical exploration, but it’s really just a cover for him to gallivant around some of the wildest, remotest parts of this earth. He’s Bosnian-born, Australian-raised, and American-adopted. He speaks Spanish at home with his Ecuadorian wife. When I was twelve he sent me photos of a Bolivian on his work crew who’d fallen asleep under a tree and woken up dead in the belly of an anaconda, which found itself too full to move and was cut open by the crew. The man was small, blue, and fully dressed – he was even wearing his rubber sandals. When I was four or five I would get letters from the Amazon signed with a monkey’s paw print. That monkey once got drunk on beer one New Year’s Eve, jumping around the rafters til it fell straight down like a rock and vanished. They found it three days later drinking from a puddle by the side of the road with a raging hangover. My uncle has worked at the North Pole in winter in caravans on skis, he’s been to war zones, dodged rebels, and one time, in Nigeria, his crew accidentally killed a woman. This is that story.
“It took many days and firings to get the locals to wear hard hats. I was known as 'Mr Fire'. They used their hats to mix food (a cassava flour called garri), to sit on; many were lost.”
“The closest I ever came to death was in Nigeria, once, when we accidentally killed a woman.
“This was the 1980s, and Nigeria was real rough. We’d been working in the jungle, and had only been there for about four days. The only way we could get to our camp was to take a two-hour boat from Port Harcourt down the Nun River and then drive for about an hour and a half. Anyway, we were on the boat heading out, four of us and a local driver. The boat had no wheel, just two motors at the back that were steered by hand. I was sitting up the front of the boat and I saw a woman in a canoe, fishing. She’d thrown a net out and was sitting there, staring at us in shock. We were bearing down on her fast. I turned and yelled at the driver, ‘Wow, stop, look out!’ but he couldn’t hear me over the roar of the engines; he was looking out towards the bank.
“We ran straight into her. Snapped the canoe in half. The net just floated away. I heard a thump under the boat and everything started to happen at once. As we went over the canoe it hit one of the motors, and we juddered to a stop right there in the water. The motors were connected by a rope under the boat so if something like this happened we wouldn’t lose the whole motor, but it was hanging under the boat, dragging us back.
“Well, the driver was a local guy and he started freaking out. ‘Very bad, very bad,’ he kept babbling, completely terrified. About a hundred metres away on the riverbank a group of villagers had seen all this happen. They were jumping up and down, yelling and screaming, and when they saw us lurch to a stop they leapt into four canoes and started coming for us, waving spears and machetes. We saw them, and those machetes told us that they meant business. The driver went into hysterics. Charles the Peruvian guy says to me, ‘We must go, we must go, they are going to kill us.’ I take another look and see they’ve already gained thirty or forty metres. So Charles and I get down and start dragging the motor up out of the water. It must have weighed about a hundred, hundred and fifty pounds.
My uncle getting mobbed by candy-crazed local kids. “A visitor from Houston came and was giving out candy. When he got mobbed, he threw the candy bag into my lap,” he said.
“But we got it up and into the boat, moved the other motor over into the middle, and took off, slower than before. We got a little way away and then hit a submerged log. Dented the remaining motor. The villagers see this and start paddling with their hands, faster than ever, salivating to get hold of us. They were maybe twenty or so metres away and they started throwing their spears and machetes, bouncing off the boat. The driver was sobbing in the bottom of the boat, and we ducked and somehow managed to get the boat going again, damaged motor and all, and I took over the rudder and got us out of there.
“We eventually got to a village called Yenagoa, went to the police station, and made a report. The husband and son of the woman turned up very quickly, already with shaven heads, which is a Nigerian custom when a family member dies. The husband got right up in my face, babbling, eyes wide, crying. You could see the tick bites and bald patches on his head. We were there in Nigeria working for Shell so we had to call up headquarters in The Hague and report what had happened. The boat was impounded, the driver tossed into a cell, and that was that.
“A few days later we came back, paid a thousand naira to have the boat released, and then fixed it up. They were carrying the body up out of the water while we were there. It had been in the mangrove swamp until then. They had to wait for guys from another village to come and carry the body; nobody local would touch it, ‘Bad juju,’ they said. We gave the boat the works: windscreen wipers, steering wheel, fixed the motors.
Couple of weeks later we were ready to get going again but the problem was, no one wanted to ride in that boat. ‘Bad juju,’ they kept saying. They didn’t want anything to do with it. So there we were, with the best boat we had, and we couldn’t get it going. We asked around to find out how to fix this juju problem, and they told us no worries, they would call in the witch doctor to do a spell.
My uncle these days. The Nigerian shenanigans did nothing to dampen his love for the water.
“We arrived at the docks the next day and there was something like five thousand villagers there. This was huge; it was the biggest thing to happen in the area all year. The chief was there, sitting like a king on some old sofa they’d decked out into a throne. The witch doctor was a shrivelled old lady, long knotted hair, loincloth, and not much else. We’d paid a few hundred dollars for the ceremony and they gave half to the police right there in front of everybody, and we were ready to roll.
“The recipe for getting rid of bad juju involves a bottle or two of caicai, a local spirit, three eggs, and a tree branch. The witch doctor said a few words, broke an egg on the steering wheel, and took a healthy slug of caicai. Then she danced a bit on the boat, broke another egg on one of the motors, and had another couple of pulls on the bottle, before breaking an egg on the final motor, singing a song, and downing the rest of the bottle. And that was it, juju gone, and everyone was willing to come back to work.
“Not long after all this, I was talking to a guy, Richard, old colonialist English guy who had some kind of tax problem and couldn’t go back, had been living in Nigeria for a long time. He told me about the vigilante killings that go on in Nigeria – if someone steals something or has a car accident, crowds in the streets just set upon them and tear them apart. It wasn’t until then that I realised how close it was, and how lucky we had been. We’d only been there for four days. I was only 27.”
An edited version of this story was published in Vice Australia & NZ’s Teetering on the Brink issue, February 2011.
