Shelter Rock

by MP Miles

  “So, about Nyerere’s farms,” suggested Ralph.

  “Shhhh.”

  The whole crew in and on the bridge repeated their captain’s command.

  “Shhhhh.”

  Ralph waited quietly for his turn and then recklessly moved a bishop into battle a long way forward from his own foot soldiers, a move to harass and unnerve with no clear view of what he might achieve.

  Winston grunted. The boy steering had turned away from the wheel, leaning against the binnacle and concentrating on the board with his head in both hands. Winston countered with a challenging knight that took first blood, an innocent sacrificial pawn, and the boy relaxed and glanced forward through the spokes at the lake ahead. Chess, still like draughts to the boy, meant that the more white pieces the captain cleared from the board the better. The crew collectively exhaled. Ralph realised he wasn’t playing Winston, but the Independence, the ship and her crew.

  Ralph thought he’d try a different tack.

  “Have you always been captain of this ship?”

  Winston thought for a moment before answering, a pawn hovering in the air.

  “As a great man, not my namesake, once said, ‘What matters is that the individual feels more complete, with much more internal richness and much more responsibility’.”

  Winston considered what he’d just said.

  “I don’t think I’ve paraphrased him.”

  *

  After the initial excitement of the dynamic opening moves, the game settled into one of attrition, Winston and Ralph exchanging pieces in rapid-fire exchanges that delighted the crew, both looking to exploit a weakness.

  Ralph thought of a less contentious question.

  “This is a curious chess set. Do you need to have the pieces secured to the board on such a heavy ship?”

  Winston looked up from the game. They were approaching Kasanga, a village on the Tanzanian side, wooden dugouts launching from the beach like partridge from cover.

  “Anchor!” Winston shouted.

  The bridge cleared in a scurry of bodies fore and aft.

  “I’m sorry,” he explained. “Duty calls. Please stay here if you like.”

  A wind had picked up from the north. Small waves widely spaced coursed down the lake in neat parallel lines. Winston headed into the wind and rang the telegraph to stop. As way fell off the ship he looked sideways at the shore through a bridge window rather than ahead. At the instant a pole on the beach became stationary against a bare tree on the hill behind, he lowered his raised hand. The anchor chain clattered through the hawse pipe, paying out in noisy bursts as the ship started to drift backwards and the chain pulled free from the pile deep in the hold. Winston raised his hand again to the foredeck crew. A rusty dog thrown over the chain seized a link like a bone in its tired jaws, and with a groan the Independence took up the slack and came to rest.

  Cheerful boatmen immediately surrounded her, hanging on to the hull and squinting as they looked up into the sun which sparkled on the water around them. The crew bartered for fruit and yams with the boys in the canoes, although many seemed to have nothing to sell.

  Women dressed in black embarked and camped in a circle around the windlass on the foredeck, like a coven of witches around a cauldron.

  “Ahmadis,” explained Winston.

  It was the first Arab influence Ralph had seen in Africa. Winston peered through a smoky circular Perspex panel in the bridge window. At one time it would have spun around furiously, throwing rain and enabling a clear view.

  “They’ll get off at Ujiji.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Ujiji was the start of one of the main Muslim slave trade routes to Zanzibar. It’s at the top of the lake just south of the Burundi border. Near Kigoma. About two and a half days. Depending on the wind.”

  Winston watched the women settling down in their own space at the bow, protected by a high bulwark with an overhanging lip.

  “They have an interesting interpretation of Islam. They wish to revive the forgotten Islamic values of peace, forgiveness and sympathy for all mankind. They have one of the most active missionary programmes in the world, especially here in Africa.”

  “So, you are just giving them a lift up the lake? Like me?”

  “They could go on the Liemba but they feel happier travelling with me. Fewer prying eyes. And Ahmadis are sometimes persecuted by other Muslims as heretics. I do a public service where I can. I’m like British Rail but with less industrial action.”

  “Have you been to Britain?”

  Winston ignored him.

  “Ahmadis have a fundamental belief in angels. They are messengers from God to human beings, sometimes appearing to man… in one form or another.”

  He knocked an old, slightly conical, graduated clear plastic tube, cloudy with age. A red disc on a spindle fluctuated wildly halfway up the inside of the tube.

  “Wind’s getting up. We need to be in a snug berth before dark.”

  He pulled a chain in the ceiling. A whistle blustered over the choppy Tanganyikan water, short long long short, and a Blue Peter stiffened in the strengthening African wind.

  *

  By nightfall a fresh gale howled down Tanganyika. Two to three metre waves chased each other into the darkness, heaping up and streaking white foam. The stars danced wildly across the sky, the whole of heaven and earth blown around by an angry wind.

  The Independence had anchored for the night in fifteen metres of black water behind a fist of land coming off the Tanzanian coast, south of a small fishing village called Kirambo. At sunset a thick snubbing line, fat as a forearm, had been attached to the anchor chain. It creaked painfully in the fairlead as the ship, blown beam to the wind, lifted the chain clear of the water far ahead before swinging back the other way.

  The Ahmadi women had retreated from the bow during the three-hour passage from Kasanga, the Independence pitching into the sea as it ploughed north. They fluttered like distressed birds under the bridge. Ralph had been outside with the intention of talking to them but had found it hard to walk against the wind on the leaning deck. He’d returned to the smoky chess game inside, the heavy watertight door caught by a gust and slamming shut behind him like a mortar.

  Winston stood at the wheel, unconsciously balancing himself with the roll of the ship as he looked down the deck toward the bow, illuminated by a white riding light strung below a black ball that twisted and untwisted recklessly in the gale.

  He had been master since old Georgolidis had retired himself, before his drunkenness had forced the issue, but the sea hadn’t been Winston’s first calling. His career switch had shocked many but not those who knew him well. His tutors at university, and his colleagues at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Independence Avenue in Lusaka, were not surprised. They understood the perfect world order a good captain could create with a seaborne command. The ship Independence was a self-supporting commune, its members reliant on one another. Winston had discovered, to his great surprise, that no matter how skilled each individual crewman, how dedicated they may be to the cause, a commander was still required to coordinate their action, to conduct the orchestra. Decisions that had to be taken for the efficient running of their little world could not be decided by committee. People liked to be led.

  With this realisation his life changed, and his politics. He found that his crew worked best when they had ownership of their own part of the machinery of the ship. They worked better when there was competition from other crewmen who could do their job and take it away from them. When they were productive in this way the ship reached the top of the lake quicker, carried more cement, made more profit. With their profit the crew could own things: clothes or food or decorations for their cabin. Aboard ship these things didn’t lead to inequality, or greed, or selfishness.

  The ship, his small state, did not need to be directly cont
rolled by the crew to be happy, efficient or productive. Winston’s lifelong belief in revolutionary socialism had been replaced by ship capitalism. It didn’t make him particularly happy to have come to that realisation. Some sort of violent overthrow of the captain class would have been so much more exciting.

  Ralph walked up to the bridge.

  “I went to see the ladies but it’s difficult to even stand out there.”

  Winston glowered at him.

  “Why?”

  “Well, it’s blowing pretty hard.”

  “Why did you go to see the ladies?”

  Ralph looked out of the bridge window, not knowing what to say. Crewmen started lashing down deck cargo with straps and fighting to control wayward tarpaulin sheets.

  “Did you want to understand their culture?”

  Ralph looked at him.

  “Maybe learn something of their struggles in life?”

  “I just wondered if they were all right,” said Ralph.

  “You know nothing about them but you had a concern for their welfare.”

  Winston relaxed and felt sorry for him. He was being unfair. Ralph was just a boy.

  “Are you religious?”

  “I don’t know. I think I’m trying to find that out.”

  “Come, let’s finish this game. I’ll tell you all about our other passengers.”

  *

  “I’ve been to your country,” Winston told him.

  “Really? Where?”

  “Oxford mostly. Balliol in particular. After Zambia University I was a Rhodes Scholar.”

  “What did you study?”

  “Beer. And Politics, Philosophy and Economics. Rumour has it the three are related. Sorry, the four are related.”

  “Did you enjoy it?”

  “I enjoyed the beer.”

  Winston reflected on stone quadrangles founded in 1263, the medieval hall, the ‘Old’ Common Room, and football on Master’s Field. There had been a resident tortoise named after a German Marxist, with a student minder known as Comrade Tortoise.

  “I enjoyed the competition. It was useful to discover that I wasn’t the cleverest person I knew. I enjoyed singing songs over the wall, taunting Trinity. We were radicals; they were bourgeois snobs. I still remember the Gordouli.”

  “What year was that?”

  “1974. How old were you then?”

  “Eleven.”

  “It was the time of the three-day week. Coalminers go on strike so you save electricity by only working in your satanic mills for three days instead of five. Not so good for industrial output. Not what Adam Smith had in mind. A State of Emergency existed in Northern Ireland. The Labour Party tested a nuclear weapon. Oops. Kevin Keegan scored twice for Liverpool in the FA Cup. Monty Python broadcast their last episode on BBC2, and five previously all-male colleges of the University of Oxford admitted women undergraduates for the first time. But sadly, not Balliol. Not until 1979.”

  Winston had focused Ralph on the left side of the chessboard as he talked.

  “You see, I understand your world. Allow me to educate you on mine,” he said.

  There was a threatening move coming that Ralph couldn’t see, and Winston was distracting him.

  “Long before you Western Europeans took slaves from Africa to the New World, my continent had been bled of its human resources. For at least a thousand years, starting in the ninth century, enslaved Africans had been sent via the Red Sea, or ports like Zanzibar on the Indian Ocean, or across the Sahara, to be sold in Muslim countries. Maybe seventeen million of us to be slaves for Muslims.”

  Ralph was countering with no attacking plan, a momentum building.

  “The Atlantic slave trade took about the same number, depending on who you listen to, but was much more intense. You’ve got nothing to be proud of. It may have been the English who banned the slave trade, when you could afford to do so, but up until then you were the biggest shippers of slaves across the Middle Passage to pick cotton or cut sugar on your estates in the West Indies or the American colonies.”

  Too late, Ralph saw open space on the right of the board. Winston’s Queen stretched her fine legs and moved gracefully from one side to the other.

  “In the end it was about money. African lives suffered to make profit for Englishmen. Engerman gives the contribution of slavery to the British economy as five per cent of your national income. I think that’s low. I believe old Williams had it right. Profits from the slave trade and from your sugar colonies directly financed your industrial revolution. After all, the development of James Watt’s steam engine had been funded by Caribbean plantation owners. The ports of Bristol and Liverpool grew on the back of slave trade ships and their merchants. Your fine industrial City of Manchester was based on the manufacture of cloth from slave-picked cotton. Birmingham became the biggest gun-producing town at that time, making muskets to trade for slaves. And all the while London’s lucrative coffee houses consumed slave-cut sugar.”

  Winston looked at the board. Moved a final piece.

  “Mate.”

  *

  By morning the wind had blown itself out. The Independence hauled its anchor in a flat calm, the only evidence of the previous night’s storm a floating trail of plastic sheets from the fishermen camped ashore around the anchorage.

  They had been lucky with the weather. At times Winston had been sheltering somewhere along the east or west bank for up to a week waiting for the wind to die down. The length of Tanganyika meant that after a fetch of 673 kilometres waves of six metres could be produced at the southern end of the lake, waves big enough to break the back of a laden ship at anchor in the shallows.

  Winston and Ralph looked over the guardrail.

  “Looks deep. Is it?”

  “Second deepest in the world. Second largest reservoir of fresh water in the world. Nearly twenty per cent of all the world’s fresh water.”

  Winston spat down the side of the ship. He turned back to Ralph but looked through him, gazing at the top of the lake now visible through the haze.

  “There’s something I want you to remember. I quote, ‘Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. That is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary’.”

  “The same great man?”

  Winston nodded.

  “Che Guevara.” He pointed west. “He was over there in the Congo. Teaching Marxist ideology and the theory of guerrilla warfare to troops that didn’t really want to fight.”

  He hesitated.

  “There’s something else. Something I didn’t tell you last night.”

  The water of the lake looked deep and still.

  “Not many Europeans ventured into the interior of Africa to actually capture slaves. The risk of disease was too great for them. Slaves were bought, traded for guns and cloth and alcohol.”

  A tear filled his eye that wasn’t solely from cigar smoke.

  “They bought the slaves from Africans. Africans sold Africans into slavery.”

  Winston held Ralph’s arm.

  “You need to know that before you travel further.”

  His grip tightened.

  “You need to remember that in Uganda.”

  Clouds gathered to the north. There would be more wind.

  Fourteen

  Bujumbura’s Boulevard du Port led from the dock where the Independence had berthed into Burundi’s steaming capital.

  Tall Tutsi women walked majestically down wide tree-lined avenues and underneath the verandas of French colonial houses, their pace necessarily slow. The rainy season still had two months to go and the heavy wet air remained a physical weight to push against.

  Ralph dripped into the centre of town down the chaussée of a previous president and the rue of an independence hero. The central market
area had burst its banks, and vendors of soap, penny sweets and old clothes flooded onto the sidewalks of neighbouring streets.

  He threaded his way through the African market smells of charcoal and shrivelled vegetables, old fish, rotten animals, the living and the dead, politely acknowledging the calls of all those who wanted to sell to him and smiling at the maimed beggars, pickpockets and whores.

  Unable to find what he was looking for in the town centre, Ralph eased off when he got to the government ministry buildings and ran easily with a tide of people behind him down narrower streets heading west, his wallet hanging comfortingly around his neck on an old bootlace, lying against his chest under a faded tee shirt.

  He ended up wet with sweat and back where he’d started, slightly south of the commercial port, looking over the lake from a noisy bar that was filling up fast at the hour before sunset with French and Canadian voices. The Cercle Nautique bar and restaurant at that time of the day had a shifting population. Expat aid workers discussed in acronyms real progress being made at the grassroots level. Idealistic young administration staff in a chic tropical mix of worn jeans and African women’s clothing demonstrated that they had become fully embedded with the culture by going native with the suave local driver from the agency office. Language teachers with a two-hundred-dollar qualification had a pretty ‘private lesson’ hanging off their shoulder. Engineers who had spent the first six months of their annual contract assessing, as they’d expected, the high level of inefficiency in local services were scouting around during the last six months for the next field post in Laos, Papua or Tashkent. They came and went, leaving little wake and no discernible mark of their quiet passage, so that even the barmen at the Cercle Nautique wondered if they were in Burundi for any reason other than to buy Heineken or Amstel.

  Ralph bought a plate of mélange. He ate rice, potatoes and strange coloured vegetables, while watching hippo come out of the lake for the evening, and then wandered to the bar.