Frank's Road

“That’s Frank’s road” the pilot of the small twin-engine Cessna said through my headphones, pointing down, as I sat beside him in the small noisy cockpit on the two-hour flight from Entebbe, Uganda back to Wilson Field, Nairobi. It was 1982, and in those first three years living in Kenya I had heard of Frank’s road many times and knew that the pilots of the small planes navigated by it. The sharp north-south slash along the landscape below was unmistakable.

Even beyond the small fraternity of Wilson Field pilots, the tale was widely shared. Frank Howitt was a British civil engineering contractor who had been building roads in Uganda a few years earlier. Through his network of friends in Kampala, Frank got wind of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin’s plans to “nationalize” all his bulldozers, trucks, graders, rollers, Land Rovers, and heavy equipment. Without any fuss, bother, or delay, Frank – together with his construction crew and all their machinery and equipment – simply drove north, making their own rudimentary “road” and ad hoc bridges as they progressed over 280 miles of rough countryside to cross over the border into Sudan. Frank then wasted no time in becoming a very successful building contractor in southern Sudan (now the independent country of South Sudan).

I was one the direct beneficiaries of Frank’s prodigious trek north; he became my contractor not long thereafter. As a young architect (my first career), I oversaw Frank’s construction of the six houses, offices, and warehouse that I had designed for the U.S. Agency for International Development to become their modest regional office complex on two sites in Juba, Sudan (the housing site later became housing for diplomats at the inaugural U.S. Embassy to that new nation). Over a three-year period, the work drew me to the dust, sand, intense heat, and harshness of Juba for weeks at a time. At the edge of the gently sloping construction site, I took whatever comfort and privacy I could from my very modest enclosure in Frank’s larger than usual tukel (a traditional southern Sudanese rounded mud and thatched house) along with several expatriate construction workers whom Frank had hired to train local staff. It was rough and tumble living, especially compared to the relative luxury of my comfortable home at that time back in Nairobi, Kenya. ?Juba, then a small strategic city and government center on the Nile, had the only paved airstrip in miles. The urban center and its environs was also the home of the exceptionally tall and thin Dinka peoples, whose herds of Aliab cattle with their massive horns took priority on all the roads. The Dinka were interspersed around Juba with a scattering of other African Nilotic tribes such as the Nuer and a few Shuluk people.? Sudanese Arab government bureaucrats, all Muslims, were assigned to Juba from the north and were not popular among the local Christian and animist Africans. At that time there were also many small aid programs from many European countries active in and around Juba, as well as itinerant UN aid and peacekeeping staff from numerous countries. Very few of these expatriates were older than 30, so the expatriate scene was very vibrant and very social. At that time in my life, Juba featured as the farthest edge of my known universe – a challenging African environment in a war-ravaged and exceptionally poor country, unlike anything I had ever experienced before. But then, those were the early days of what was to become my first decade in Africa; many other unique experiences would follow. ?

Dust and heat notwithstanding, Frank was right at home in Juba, as if he had sprung from the earth under our Bata safari boots. In contrast to Frank’s unassuming authenticity, those of us in his orbit each fancied ourselves as intrepid long-term residents of East Africa. In truth, we were nothing more than an odd collection of expatriate castaways whom fate, choice, duty, or ignorance had placed in an exceptionally remote location far removed from electricity, telephones, radios, paved roads, piped water, or other worldly comforts. After work, his tukel was frequently our gathering place. It was also my temporary home, and the long-term residence of a Welsh brick mason who officially called Nairobi home but who preferred to stay and work in Juba, and an English carpenter and cabinetry maker who left one wife back in Britain and later married a second wife – a beautiful tall young Dinka woman – even though neither he nor she spoke the other’s language. Whether wife number one knew about wife number two, or vice versa, was a question left unasked. Frank’s foreman and concrete specialist Werner Brach, a German who had moved to Juba from South Africa, and a German woman named Hilda made up Frank’s expatriate staff, although they each had their separate homes in Juba to escape to after a long day on site.

Frequently we were joined at the tukel by one of the Interfreight pilots whose weekly flights from Mombasa and Nairobi kept us provisioned, after a fashion, and by their local office manager, a young Belgian man who – thanks to his expertise with his crossbow – enjoyed high stature among the local Sudanese men. Sometimes there would be a missionary or two, other times an aid worker would join us, and occasionally an engineer or a journalist. We all had hours to fill and Frank was always happy to host us – although by an unspoken arrangement we all brought along the beer.

Our shared evenings stretched well into the night, helped along by beer that was never very cold. Dust and insects filtered down from the thatched roof above us. As young people far from home are prone to do, we filled the emptiness with our jokes and our stories of various exploits and conquests, and what we each construed to be “wild adventures” in the East African back country, or in the various cosmopolitan yet quintessentially African cities of Nairobi, Mombasa, Kampala, Khartoum, Addis Ababa, or Dar es Salaam. While we competed among ourselves for attention, Frank would sit back, his gruff and deeply weathered face usually impassive and seemingly as old as time. No one seemed to know how old Frank was; his white hair attested to the fact that he had been around for a very long time. He had even served in the Kenya Regiment back in the day. That was enough gravitas for us. From what we could stitch together from his tales, Frank was born in Uganda to British parents, and had once as a young man spent two weeks in England – and had never returned to the UK again. Eastern Africa was his home. He must have had a British passport, but the one time that I flew with him (on an ancient DC-3 freight plane) from Nairobi, Kenya to Juba, Sudan, he was welcomed upon arrival by the southern Sudanese officials offering warm Swahili greetings; he was waved through the simple airport building with no formalities at all. “Jambo, mzee!”. Hello, old man! His passport stayed in his pocket.

On such Juba evenings as I am thinking back upon, while he quietly mused and slowly imbibed his beer, the twinkle in his bright blue eyes that he was renowned for was always present, even in the pale gleam of a kerosene lantern. Some nights he barely spoke at all, presumably lost in his thoughts. Fortunately for us, those nights were few. More often, Frank seemed to wait patiently for his chosen moment; once he started to speak, no other voices were heard – other than our exclamations and frequent laugher. With the backdrop of noisy African insects and the many invisible creatures who scurried about in the surrounding African bush at night, Frank had us in his thrall.

Who could tell a story like Frank?

Yes, it was a given that some – perhaps many – of Frank’s stories had been embroidered at the edges over time. Some could have been complete fabrications for all we knew, or perhaps it was the beer…but in truth it really did not matter. Frank had a way of speaking that was simultaneously soft yet gruff, folksy (in a “Kenya cowboy” vernacular) yet gravelly. He spun stories whose veracity defied disputation; it never occurred to any of us to ever question any aspect of his narration. The stories were just too damn good. Each was filled with so many poignant observations, wry commentary, eccentric yet believable characters, and localized references. Often they were replete with exotic sounding placenames like Kapoeta, Yambio, Rumbek, and Lokichokio. We sat deeply invested; the night was always his to own. And what a performance; I don’t ever recall hearing the same story twice, although bits and pieces of context and backdrop would, of necessity, reappear. This was Frank’s world to tell, and we couldn’t get enough.

Sadly, over the years I have forgotten many of his remarkable tales…but not all of them. Here is one of them – indeed my favorite - his quest for King George’s house.

Over years of working in southern Sudan, Frank kept hearing from disparate sources about the existence of the ruins of a palatial home, reputed to be the intended emergency refuge of King George V in what was then Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, had the First World War ended badly for the British Empire. Having encountered this story independently from several Sudanese people all over the region, Frank was finally determined to get to the bottom of it. With his maps and his roughly scrawled notes from all his previous times hearing of this fabled building, Frank – together with several of his close “Kenya cowboy” (white male Kenyan citizens, of a certain age and disposition) – made a proper safari of this quest, packing their Land Rovers with tents and provisions to last several weeks. After nearly three weeks of disappointments and dead ends, with their essential beer supplies almost gone, it seemed time to relinquish the quest and dismiss it as a fable.

Still, it was such an oddly persistent fable – Frank had one more village to visit. Grudgingly, his friends consented, with the clear agreement that this was the last attempt they would make. And so, at that village (the name or location of which Frank would never disclose), he did what he always did, and asked to speak with the oldest person there. Frank and his men were taken to an ancient Sudanese man, who listened to them with surprisingly alert eyes and with great interest. With a nimbleness and energy unexpected in one so elderly, he promptly admitted to knowing all about King George’s house, and offered to take the men there straight away. After a very short walk, they arrived at the ruins – only the brick and concrete foundations remained – of a house that was clearly colonial in design. With a grandiose flourish, the elder duly presented King George’s house.

Frank and his weary friends were more confused than ever – the remains were clearly British, but hardly regal. It would take several more months of research for Frank to track down the answer: the house was the remains of the residence of the British colonial district surveyor from the early 1900s, a gentleman named George King.

Today, you won’t find Frank Howitt mentioned on the Internet, nor in any obituaries that I could locate. I wasn’t able to find a photograph of him either, although perhaps there is one among those many trays of photographic slides that I intend to sort through some day. His absence from the historical or literary annals is unfortunate; someone as large and colorful as Frank at least deserved a proper biography. Perhaps I should have written it – I certainly embraced the notion of authoring such a book from time to time over the many years since I last spent any time with Frank. As with many such good intentions, they came to naught. I never made it to the Nairobi home that Frank shared with his sister Dulcie Spencer to suggest such a project, and I only later learned that Frank died due to a form of cancer (of the blood, reputedly) back on May 6th of 2013. His sister Dulcie has also since passed away. That chapter is closed.

These days, the thick forest in Uganda has reclaimed all trace of Frank’s fabled road. I wonder if pilots who now fly those skies have even heard of it. In time, my own memories and those of others who were touched by the warmth, larger-than-life character, and the many adventures of Frank Heathcote Howitt also will vanish. The world will be diminished at that loss. Frank, wherever he now is, is probably just shrugging it all off, while he reaches for another warm celestial beer.? ?