Shelter Rock

by MP Miles

  At Calvary Hill Farm, a Rhodesian Air Force thirty-millimetre cannon shell casing had fallen from the sky, struck a chicken on the head and killed it. Much worse was to come. In November 1978, just four years before Ralph’s visit, forces loyal to Nkomo raided the farm. They kidnapped and badly beat three foreign visitors staying at Calvary Hill with the Baldwins.

  The situation at Calvary Hill Farm had stabilised since elections in Zimbabwe and independence. Nkomo had left Zambia to continue the fight, not against Rhodesians but against his fellow countryman Mugabe, with whom he had been unable to reconcile his ideological and, mostly, tribal differences.

  As Gordon showed him around and explained the history, Ralph couldn’t help wondering if the Baldwins had ever heard of the Grahams, or even bought fire extinguishers from RG Fire Systems Ltd. They were chalk and cheese. The Grahams would eventually return to a bungalow near Elstree or Maidstone and become ‘whenwes’: “When we were in Africa…” The Baldwins, however, were serious Africans and this would always be their home.

  Gordon and Ann had two sons, both at school in Lusaka. Ralph was a similar age, a great distance from home, and the Baldwins were Good Samaritans. They made him a deal. He could stay at Calvary Hill in return for help on the farm. There would be a compulsory church parade. Ralph didn’t think twice. Praying with a few chickens seemed a small price to pay for the chance to eat, sleep in a bed and plan his next moves.

  The pervasive feeling of peace at Calvary Hill, which Ralph assumed must be due to something spiritual, meant that eating and sleeping were easy. Planning, however, wasn’t straightforward, and he was cartographically challenged.

  He discussed his problem with the Baldwins.

  “I need to re-evaluate my position,” he told them at dinner. “I’m not too sure which way to go.”

  “God will guide you,” said Mr Baldwin and attacked his roast. They ate a lot of chicken.

  “Yes, of course he will, but how would you get to Nairobi?”

  “I would put my trust in the Lord.”

  “Excellent, excellent. But could you trust him to know if I need to get a Tanzanian visa before I leave Lusaka, or are they available at the border?”

  Mrs Baldwin stopped eating and stood up.

  “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

  “Hmm…” said her husband. “Isaiah?”

  “Jeremiah. 29:11.”

  Domestic conversations at mealtimes with the Baldwins were always spoken through biblical quotes and proverbs. Ralph tried to bring them back to his current dilemma.

  “What I really need is a good map of Africa. My atlas is so small. And old. It doesn’t even have the Tanzam on it.”

  Mrs Baldwin, a mother and attuned to small hidden clues, for once talked to him in English rather than Bible speak.

  “Ralph, you need to take care. It’s not the route that you need to worry about. There aren’t that many options. It’s some of the people you are likely to meet along the way that you need to be careful of.”

  “In journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren. Corinthians,” said Baldwin.

  “Only let me take care of all your needs; however, do not spend the night in the open square.”

  “Well said, darling. Kings?”

  “Judges.”

  “Bugger,” said Baldwin.

  At times they would throw verses at each other, like stones.

  When he went to his room a heap of maps littered the bed. Ralph scanned through the pile. With them he would be able to travel with confidence at different scales, knowing elevation and the names of key bridges over important waterways along his whole route. Ralph set about measuring distances.

  *

  Gordon Baldwin broke open a flat woody pod from a vine plant climbing the outside wall of a chicken shed and pulled out two large round beans. Away from the dining table and around the chickens, and especially when considering anything botanical, Mr Baldwin would talk the language of a farmer and not something written at the time of King James.

  “You know you can eat these. Morama beans. They’re a staple food in Botswana and Namibia. They boil or roast them. Very high protein content. I wondered if we could mill it into the pullets’ feed.”

  Ralph and Mr Baldwin had been walking through rearing sheds, checking automatic feeders and drinkers, looking for dead birds, monitoring ventilation. Inside the sheds, a mat of yellow chicks scurried over a litter of dried guano and wood shavings. They would eat constantly from open red troughs and drink from plastic bell-shaped red buckets, positioned so that the birds would never be more than two metres from food and water. Somebody must have worked out that red would be an attractive colour to a chicken, blood red. Tubes with a corkscrew-shaped auger inside were suspended off the floor, the clattering noise of them switching on to refill the troughs bringing chicks scurrying to feed. They probably didn’t need to eat, thought Ralph, they just had nothing else to do, the noise of the feed tubes the most exciting part of their short sixty-day life in the dim, calming light.

  Even with huge fans in the roof, the smell of ammonia soon became overpowering. Outside, Ralph breathed in the fresh air.

  “Tylosema fassoglensis,” said Baldwin, holding the bean pod for Ralph to look at.

  “I looked at those maps you put on my bed. I’ve covered 4,180 kilometres from Cape Town.”

  Baldwin looked at the weeds growing around the base of the shed.

  “Hmmm. How much of that did you have to walk?”

  Ralph had measured off the distances. He’d taken a local train from the centre of Cape Town on an hour and a half long ride to the beach at Strand. He’d done 1,233 kilometres with Franz and Zac in a beat-up Peugeot travelling from East London to Johannesburg. He’d had a very quiet two and a half hour ride out of Johannesburg and around Pretoria with an Afrikaans-speaking bar owner who eventually got fed up with him and turned him out at a town called Naboomspruit. And he’d ridden in regal splendour in the Grahams’ Range Rover from Victoria Falls to Pemba. He’d been in a vehicle for 1,763 kilometres.

  “I’ve walked over half of it,” Ralph said proudly. “Two thousand four hundred and seventeen kilometres on foot.”

  “How many days’ walking is that?”

  “Seventy-six days.”

  Baldwin had found something interesting. He pulled brown scrub out of the way of a green plant.

  “What are you going to do now?” Baldwin asked.

  “Well, I could turn around and go back. It’s 1,789 kilometres to Johannesburg.”

  Ralph could do that. He could retrace his steps. He would have seen Victoria Falls at least. He could watch the rest of Africa out of a small window from thirty-nine thousand feet with sternly smiling cabin crew.

  “Or I could carry on to Nairobi and join the plane there.”

  Baldwin had found a twisty herb with a clump of succulent green roots. It had a flower on a tube with a swollen base. The end looked like a cage, dark purple and hairy on the inside with yellow spots near the base.

  “From here to Nairobi via Dar es Salaam must be three thousand kilometres,” said Baldwin.

  Ralph corrected him.

  “Three thousand and forty-seven if you go on the railway to Dar es Salaam then by road to Nairobi through Mombasa.”

  “So, it’s one and a half times further to go on to Nairobi than it is to go back to Johannesburg.”

  “It’s roughly seventy per cent further.”

  Ralph had been pedantic with the numbers but he’d spent half the night working it out. A corporal instructor in the cadets had once told him that with time and distance pro
blems: ‘Remember, son, if in doubt, tabulate.’ Ralph had produced an impressive table on the back of his vaccination certificate. He knew all the numbers but the question of which way to go still wasn’t clear to him.

  “You would take the Tanzam train from Kapiri Mposhi to Dar es Salaam?”

  Ralph thought about his finances before replying. He had spent about a hundred US dollars since leaving Johannesburg. For six weeks he’d spent just over two dollars a day. He still had three-quarters of his earnings from the film shoot at Kyalami, Elanza watching him work and laughing at his Afrikaans. Some enquiries he’d made in town before coming out to Calvary Hill suggested that a third-class ticket for the whole route to Dar on the Indian Ocean would be ten dollars, maybe half that if he changed money on the black market and not in a bank. It seemed very cheap. Ralph didn’t imagine the Chinese who’d paid for the railway would be seeing a return on their investment anytime soon.

  “So, of the three thousand,” Baldwin continued.

  Ralph helped him out.

  “And forty-seven.”

  “Of the 3,047 kilometres to Nairobi, how much of that is on the Tanzam?”

  “One thousand eight hundred and sixty-three kilometres.”

  “Over half of it?”

  “Roughly sixty per cent of it.”

  Baldwin studied the plant.

  “You don’t know how you would get from Dar es Salaam to Nairobi through Mombasa, but for the rest of it you have a lift organised to Kapiri Mposhi with these people…” he hesitated, “the Grahams? I don’t know them, although they may have heard of us. Someone in town probably told them I have a brother with a knighthood. I can’t stand all that snobby English nonsense. I thank God I’m just a chicken farmer. Anyway, from Kapiri you will be on the train. That part will be easy at least. There won’t be any problems with the Tanzam.”

  Ralph nodded.

  “This is Ceropegia nilotica,” he held up the plant. “See these umbels of tubular flowers? We are at 1,170 metres at Calvary Hill. Unusual to see them at this altitude. ‘I am prepared to go anywhere, provided it be forward.’ Do you know who said that?”

  Ralph guessed at something biblical.

  “Caleb?”

  Baldwin stopped talking and lifted the plant to Ralph, to wave him off.

  “Livingstone,” he said. “Keep going. Go all the way to Nairobi.”

  Ralph had hoped to hear just that. It would be a long way through a darker Africa than he had travelled up until now but his health remained good, he had some money and he had a workable plan.

  “Just don’t go to Uganda. We have missions there and I don’t hear anything good. Idi Amin has gone but thanks to him it is still a bitter and suspicious place.”

  He examined the nilotica seriously.

  “God will be with you.”

  *

  Angel leant against his desk and looked at a map on the wall. Zambia looked like a dumpy capital letter L but turned on its side, its borders a mixture of wiggly lines that followed rivers and made straight connections across desert and swamp. He walked to the wall with his head tilted on one side and put his finger somewhere near the middle: the capital city of Lusaka.

  Angel held out little hope of any help in Zambia from official channels. The country was an authoritarian one-party state. People voted yes or no for a single presidential candidate on the ballot paper, Kenneth Kaunda, the founder of a peculiar African socialism and friend to other communist Eastern European benevolent dictators. This legal dictatorship allowed the ANC to use Zambia as a base for their offensive operations. KK was South Africa’s bête noir.

  Angel’s one chance was with a contact he’d made while at the University of Witwatersrand and had carefully nurtured since then. David Mwansa was from Kasama in the Northern Province of Zambia, a nephew of the Chitimukulu, the paramount Chieftain of the Bemba people. As an economic strategist he had been a guest lecturer at Wits during the period that Angel had taught languages while working on his doctorate. David now shared his time between being head of the Mwansa clan, a director of Grindlays Bank and an untitled position at ZSIS, the Zambian Security Intelligence Service.

  Angel used the formal iciBemba greeting when he called.

  “Mulishani?”

  “Angel, what a surprise. The devil himself.”

  “That’s very funny, David.”

  “How are things?” he asked. “Still oppressing your brothers? Been busy cattle-prodding a few natives?”

  Angel had heard the rumours as well. An electric cattle prod gave a stronger shock than a stun gun but from the end of a long stick, a torture device said to be employed by the South African Police.

  “Not lately, David. How are your ANC friends? Tell Mr Tambo we enjoyed his little speech.”

  Angel checked the calendar on his desk. It was 8th April. Three months earlier to the day, President Oliver Tambo had celebrated the 70th anniversary of the ANC’s founding at a gathering in Tanzania. He had declared 1982 to be the year of massive action against apartheid.

  “I’ll pass that on, Angel,” he replied. “And how are things in Cape Town? I hear your record-keeping isn’t as good as it once was.”

  On 20th March a powerful bomb had exploded behind a court in Cape Town that housed the personal files of thousands of Africans. It was part of an ANC campaign to create confusion by destroying the administrative records of black people. No one had been injured.

  “We are still picking passbooks out of the trees, David.”

  David Mwansa laughed.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure of this call, Angel?”

  “I’m looking for someone in Zambia,” Angel said.

  “Angel, you know I can’t help—”

  Angel cut him off.

  “It’s okay. It’s nothing political. He’s not an ANC member. It’s an Englishman; well, an English boy actually. He’s lost.”

  “He’s lost or you’ve lost him?” asked David.

  “Both,” said Angel.

  David was suddenly interested.

  “A white English boy?”

  “Most of them are,” said Angel.

  “What’s so important about him that NIS is involved?”

  Angel would have liked an answer to that same question.

  “Nothing important,” he lied. “We’re doing a favour for someone, a political someone.”

  “You just said it was nothing political.”

  “You know how it is, David. We serve and don’t ask the reason why.”

  “Hmm.”

  Angel thought he’d change the subject.

  “He crossed into Zimbabwe at Beitbridge on foot just over a month ago – 5th March.”

  “He’s walking?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Extraordinary. Is he still alive?” asked David.

  “I believe so.”

  Angel thought about it. Perhaps David was right. The boy had been alone in Zimbabwe for thirty days, at a time when the country was recovering from a violently tribal civil war. He may well be dead in a ditch. He shook his head to clear the thought and his braids rattled.

  “My question is, David, how would he travel north through Zambia?”

  “North?”

  “To Kenya.”

  “Do you have a map?”

  Angel jumped up from the desk and stood in front of the wall.

  “Go on.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t make any difference if he crossed into Zambia at Victoria Falls or north of Kariba.”

  Angel traced it on the wall map.

  “The dam?” he asked.

  “Yes. Either way he’d come through Lusaka.”

  “And then?”

  “Going north there’s only one way.”

  “Tanzania,” said Angel.

  “
Correct.”

  “And how would he do that?”

  “I’ll ask around if you like. See if I can find something out. But only because it’s you, my brother.”

  “Natotela, David.”

  “My pleasure, Angel.”

  Angel went to put the phone down.

  “David!” he shouted.

  “Yes, Angel, I’m still here.”

  “How would he travel to Tanzania?”

  “There’s only one way, Angel. On the railway.”

  Angel could see the black line on the map. It started north of Lusaka heading north and east into Tanzania then onward to Dar es Salaam on the Indian Ocean, close to the Kenyan border.

  “He’d take the Tanzam,” said David Mwansa.

  Twelve

  Ralph looked out of the carriage door at the ground, the train moving fast even though it was going around a long gentle curve. Local men began jumping off and rolling in the dust.

  A train guard put his head out of the door and looked ahead.

  “End of the curve. We’ll speed up soon.”

  A man a little older than Ralph stood beside him, speaking English.

  “You’ve got to jump, mate.”

  Ralph looked out of the door, the speed already increasing.

  *

  Ralph had spent a night on the floor of the Sikh temple in Lusaka waiting for a ride north in a van delivering fire extinguishers to Kapiri Mposhi, the driver a silent moody drunk.

  The train station at Kapiri had been huge, silent, a temple to Chinese engineering or a great hall for Chairman Mao’s people, and completely empty of rail passengers. A Zambian Police Force band, resplendent in white, played to an empty ballroom.

  Ralph found a ticket office. There were two trains: an express left at 10.00 that night and took thirty-six hours to reach Dar es Salaam; or a stopping train left the following morning at 10.35 and took forty-eight hours. Ralph calculated that the slow train would have to average 38.8 kilometres per hour. It seemed sufficiently fast when he’d been walking less than that distance in a day. The slow train also went through the Selous game park during the day, providing a free safari. Ralph took a third-class ticket for the following day and rented bedding for the trip. The ticket officer took his money with a bewildered smile. There were no beds in third class.