It might have been a little over the top for Paul Mukonyi to express his outrage at conditions in economy class by coming within a hair’s breadth of causing a British Airways Boeing 747, loaded with Bryan Ferry, Jemima Goldsmith-Khan and several hundred less important persons, to crash nose first into East African soil over the Christmas holidays. But wasn’t the young Kenyan doing what many of us would love to be able to do (albeit once the aircraft is safely back on the ground), namely, personally bop the odd airline on the beezer for what they sometimes put us through?
British Airways is relatively civilised, compared to what some of Africa has to offer its citizens.
Yes, I have written about the vagaries of Air Afrique before, and you can take my word for it that I have been gritting my teeth to avoid writing about it again, since it is of necessity my equivalent of the Zola Budd township taxi, taking me up, down and around this continent every couple of weeks.
Regrettably, because of its monopoly of some of the most important intra-African routes, Air Afrique is the first and last resort of the modern African traveller.
The lack of comfort (worn-out seats, at least one non-functional toilet on each flight, seriously indifferent food – and no whiskey) and the generally unfriendly level of service on those long hauls would be enough to bring out a case of air rage in the average saint. But Air Afrique is somehow always able to bring out that little extra edge of sadistic torment that makes everything else you’ve suffered at its tender mercies seem like chicken feed in comparison.
In mid-December, after an exhausting year of voyaging, I checked in for what I thought would be a relatively uncomplicated eight-hour flight from Dakar to Douala, to join my family for a much-needed rest.
Like the airline’s other seasoned travellers, I had learned to take in my stride the inevitable delay on leaving Dakar, multiplied by the usual unexplained delay in moving on from our second scheduled stop at Abidjan, and felt relatively buoyant to have arrived at Cotonu, a mere hour-and-a-half away from Libreville, where I was to catch my final, short connecting flight to Douala. Then it all fell apart.
As the hour-long stopover came to an end, we leapt excitedly to our feet and started to rush for the exit as the usual disembodied voice came over the airport loudspeaker: “Would all passengers on Air Afrique’s flight to Libreville please …” And then we froze as the voice continued, “return to the aircraft and remove all your hand luggage.”
As we stumbled obediently towards the slumbering Airbus, I asked a crew member why we were to remove our luggage. “The plane has been diverted to Jedda,” he said. “Please hurry up and get your bags.”
(See what I mean about wanting to bop some part of an airline on the nose, but not knowing where to start and where to stop?)
“Why?” I asked.
“You will be taken on another plane, it’s not a problem,” he replied, gesturing vaguely to another part of the airport apron.
We stared disbelievingly at “the other plane” when we got to it, dragging our hand luggage and watching the rest of our baggage being offloaded from the now Jedda-bound aircraft that had brought us this far. The plane we were expected to board had no airline markings. It was an old Russian Yak-22, and it looked like it hadn’t been expecting to go anywhere for a long time.
The crew – two Czech pilots, a couple of Russian stewardesses and two token Africans who would serve us old sandwiches, dressed in a variety of uniforms (none of them belonging to Air Afrique) – were hastily preparing themselves for an unexpected departure.
Something made me look at the wheels of the plane. Every one of them was thin on tread and heavy on canvas lining poking up through the cracks. You wouldn’t be allowed to take a bicycle out on the streets in that condition.
I nudged a fellow passenger. “Are we going to risk our lives on this thing?” I asked. He looked at me. And then we both shrugged and dragged ourselves sheepishly on board, like the rest of the paying passengers. Who would there be to complain to, even if we had the heart? We just wanted to get to our journey’s end.
My hat off to the pilots for bringing us down to a feather-light landing at Libreville (on those tyres, they had no other option.) But the changeover had taken too much time and we climbed out of the old Yak in time to see our Douala-bound aircraft rumbling down the runway and heading north without us.
We stood on the apron, jumping up and down like lunatics, screaming at the impassive Air Afrique representative, who told us that he was just a local boy doing his job, what did we expect him to do?
In the end that eight-hour flight took three days. The airline has never apologised and only barely saw to our enforced stopover accommodation in Libreville because we were so angry and so persistent.
The worst is that I cannot say that that was the final straw, because I will be forced to travel on the same airline again, and very shortly.
Everything will remain the same and yet another African institution will continue to be the whipping boy and laughing stock of the world – and I won’t be able, or even remotely willing, to defend it.
Yes, there is plenty of reason for rage in the African skies. If African air travellers finally stand up and revolt, Mukonyi’s assault on that relatively innocent British crew might well turn out to be only the tip of the iceberg. And none of us will be the winner.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza