January 19th – 21st: Sao Tome to Abuja; Abuja demo; Abuja to Abidjan
Another long water crossing to Nigeria the next day. Before we get close to shore we encounter the Harmattan. The aircraft plows through a sky of dust blown by winter winds from the Sahara far to the north. The Harmattan is a seasonal event and for four months of the year parts of western Africa live beneath this pall. Visibility is reduced to less than a mile and the sun is transformed into a baleful red eye suspended in the enveloping dun haze.
We have come a long way to get to Abuja, the site of the next demonstration flight. We don’t see it until we are a mile from the runway on final approach.
Abuja is the capital city of Nigeria and in many respects it defies my expectations. We have heard stories about Lagos - Nigeria’s lawless port city to the south - that evoke apocalyptic visions of anarchy, teeming poverty, and Thomas Hobbes’s judgement on life without society; that it would be, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Here in Abuja, armed guards have been hired to escort us between the airport and the Hilton, which seems more like a barricaded compound than a hotel, but the city is new and growing and does not feel threatening - other than the chaotic traffic, which is normal for Africa.
Despite the armed soldiers tailing us, our van is often cut off by careening death traps on wheels and pickups whine by with gunmen lounging in the back. Otherwise, Abuja seems ok. Our armed gunmen are friendly and pose for photos with their AK-47s. People are welcoming. Despite our concerns about Nigeria, it’s just another day in Africa.
I also expected Nigeria to be a lush land of rainforest, but under the spell of the Harmattan it is a desiccated husk, sucked dry by the sibilance of the Sahara whispering like a seductive parasite far beyond its borders.
The searches and metal detector gauntlets guarding our hotels have become routine, but here our sales rep warns us of the SR-71 Blackbirds – high-end prostitutes - that slide invisibly through such security precautions and descend on the unwary at night, prowling the lounges and restaurants in flocks.
At the airport the next day for the demonstration flight, Nigerian army and Navy and Air Force officers mill about the hangar in starched gold-buttoned uniforms, bedecked with medals and bars and visored caps. Nobody can decide who is going on the flight and people climb on and off the aircraft as we wait in the heat, repeatedly revising the passenger manifest. Finally, everybody that has been approved climbs aboard and we taxi out beneath the dead sky and launch into the Harmattan.
Due to the low visibility, we have to file an IFR flight plan and I don’t know how accommodating ATC will be, but once we are clear of their zone they give us a large block of airspace to work in and leave us alone. At six thousand feet we cannot see the ground. Using the moving map on my iPad I follow a highway and Mick uses the haze penetration capabilities of the mission systems to track vehicles through four thousand feet of obscurity below us. When we are back on the ground everybody seems impressed. We remove the S.C.A.R. pod from the wing, reconfigure the aircraft and pack the pod and all our equipment into it, readying to depart the next day.
We will be making our way along the coastline of Western Africa instead of flying directly from Nigeria to Algeria for the next demo. There are too many security concerns in Niger and Mali. Between Nigeria and the Canary Islands - where Konstantin will leave us and we will pick up another member of the sales team - we will pass through nearly a dozen countries in two days of flying. But next, we will be stopping for a day off in Abidjan.
The flight to Abidjan in Cote d’Ivoire is a monotonous vision of the Harmattan with unbroken brown below and the alluring faint blue of the sky faintly seeping through from above, as if no matter how high we climb we draw the curtain of dust up with us, never breaking free of it. We stop for fuel in Accra, Ghana, but see nothing. The same in Abidjan. More cities marcescent beneath the pall. Blighted leaves awaiting the return of the sun.
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