"It's your fuel injectors," the mechanic confirmed, while children came to look
at us, studying us from sideways glances and little smiles, one finger tucked
in the corner of their mouths. Some were dressed in khaki school uniforms,
others in underpants that didn't necessarily correspond to their gender; at
least one little boy was wearing nothing at all. No one asked us for anything;
no one held out an outstretched hand; no one tried to reach into our vehicle.
They were just interested in watching us. We stayed there for four hours in
the hot afternoon sun, watching the shadows lengthen and the market close up
operations and the women go home. And the mechanic and his friends got to work
on our car. Their tools consisted of one misshapen flathead screwdriver, a
cheap steel socket for removing spark plugs, a loose gilette razor blade, and a
couple of tubes of crazy glue from the market. But it was enough. As we left
the border post at Prékété and continued south, it was
clear immediately something was not right. Our Land Rover was no longer firing
on all cylinders, and struggled as soon as we shifted gears; the movement was
jerky rather than smooth. We pulled over, lifted the hood, and began assessing
the problem. The engine was getting decent but not great spark, and the plugs
were almost but not quite clean. An emissions control hose had come open after
the rattling on the dirt tracks of Pendjari had caused a plastic coupling to
shatter. But our big problem was a tankful of bad gasoline – maybe the
10 gallon container we purchased from the park mechanic, or maybe from the time
we filled up in Djougou, the first big gas station upon leaving the park (not
including the one in Natitingou, which had no gas). Either way, we had clogged
fuel injector jets and needed help. Moreover, the corrugated dirt tracks had
rattled loose part of our exhaust train and hot exhaust gases were escaping up
into the floor pan of the back seat, causing the carpeting to sizzle and
causing an awful smell of melted rubber.
We stopped first in front of a little mud-hut village, home to a handful of
farming families. "Have you got trouble?" they asked, coming shyly out to the
roadside to see what we were doing under the car. The children stared at us
and our fancy vehicle with straight faces until we smiled broadly at them, and
they erupted into broad grins in return. "There's a mechanic down the road who
knows something about vehicles," they suggested.
"We're going to give it a try," I answered. "But if it doesn't work, I guess
we'll be back. Can we sleep here with you?" I was joking in order to keep the
friendly conversation going and show we weren't careless traveling strangers.
But this is Africa: my suggestion made perfect sense.
"We would be honored to have you as our guests," was the reply.
We limped a couple of kilometers down the road to Agoua, population 1000 at the
most. The little village huddled around both roadsides. There were enough
adobe structures to form streets and narrow alleys that trailed back from the
little roadside market. We pulled up at the edge of the market to the home of
the town mechanic. Beside our Land Rover women tended small fish that fried
noisily in a broad wok filled with deep red oil. The mechanic came out, was
joined by friends, brothers, passersby from the market, and a dozen people more
until suddenly we were a small epicenter of interest and activity.
"It's your fuel injectors," the mechanic confirmed, while children came to look
at us, studying us from sideways glances and little smiles, one finger tucked
in the corner of their mouths. Some were dressed in khaki school uniforms,
others in underpants that didn't necessarily correspond to their gender; at
least one little boy was wearing nothing at all. No one asked us for anything;
no one held out an outstretched hand; no one tried to reach into our vehicle.
They were just interested in watching us.
We stayed there for four hours in the hot afternoon sun, watching the shadows
lengthen and the market close up operations and the women go home. The men
gambling at the market's edge never left their wooden log seats to interrupt
their game. And the mechanic and his friends got to work on our car.
Their tools consisted of one misshapen flathead screwdriver, a cheap steel
socket for removing spark plugs, a loose gilette razor blade, and a couple of
tubes of crazy glue from the market. But it was enough. First they tried
gluing the pieces of the shattered connector with super glue and a paste of
ashes, but the plastic didn't hold well enough. So they made me a new one. I
was astonished as I watched the town metalworker copy the little plastic T.
First he chipped out sheets of thin steel with a hammer and chisel; then he
rolled them around a steel rod of the diameter he needed. He cut another
length of steel tube and drilled a small hole in one side into which he
inserted the other, hand-formed tube. Then he soldered the whole thing
together in a splash of bright sparks from a soldering iron that looked like an
electrical hazard.
He worked with three other men, one of whom held various pieces, another who
brought little scraps of metal from inside the house. But he did the soldering
himself, using a little soldering rig that had been beaten to pieces. Bare
wires poured from the seams, part of the steel frame had shattered; it was
plugged into an electrical outlet bare on three sides with wires poking out
like whiskers. Working the steel holding rod with a bare foot, he flipped a
pair of Ray Bans down over his eyes and casually held up a greasy pair of
welder's goggles with the other hand.
At first glance I was not impressed with what looked like bits of junk and
scrap. But at the end of one hour, what he produced was a steel replica of the
plastic T we'd shattered, a thousand times stronger than the original made to
fit exactly.
Meanwhile, two other men fashioned a protective cover from a piece of scrap
aluminum that looked like it had been plucked from someone's roof. With a
small claw hammer they pounded it into shape and wired it into place over my
leaky exhaust system to deflect the hot gas. The kids followed our every move
with increasing daring, grinning at us with bright eyes.
Culturally, I was disappointed that a solderer with such talent still lived in
a house of crumbling adobe and worked barefoot in the red sand instead of in a
proper workshop with well-maintained equipment. Where was the sense of
investment and progress? Same went for the town mechanic, whose entire tool
box seemed to consist of the few battered implements with which he serviced our
Land Rover. Wasn't one of the developing world's biggest problems failure to
plan for a more prosperous future, invest in better equipment, take pride in a
sense of order and cleanliness?
But it was mean-spirited to criticize a group of men who was helping us out of
our predicament using such ingenuity and precision and I soon saw it from
another perspective. This was the lesson of Agoua for me: that Africans can do
a lot with the little they have at hand, make magic out of nothing, create what
they need using what I would have called junk. No wonder they are able to coax
another fifteen years of life out of trailer trucks abandoned by the
"developed" world ages ago, jury rig bashed up transistor radios with wire
antennas and knobs cut from plastic spools, and keep patching things into a
little more life. I still wish they'd invest and prepare, but that's my
worldview, not theirs, and who am I to criticize, coming from a world where
recycling is an afterthought, not a way of life?
For my fuel injectors there was to be no roadside cure. But pulling at the key
the engine sputtered to life, and we limped back to the capital only a couple
hours after we'd intended. Which is to say we arrived a little late but a
world wiser. This is the lesson of Africa, that when you have very little it
is all you need, and it is reason nonetheless to be grateful.
