by Paul Theroux
"Too many people are catching fish on the lake," said Professor Christopher Magadza, head of the University of Zimbabwe's Lake Kariba Research Station. There are thirty registered fishing companies as well as many people fishing illegally.
Paddling downstream from the dam, I was accompanied by flights of birds—reed cormorants, darters, oxpeckers. The hippos in the channel snuffled and blew; some tiger fish jumped completely clear of the river. Baboons gathered in the limbs of tamarind trees to eat the seeds they particularly like. In his Trees of Southern Africa, Keith Coates Palgrave suggests that the river's tamarinds tell a story. These trees were brought as seeds to the Zambezi from India by traders carrying spices, tamarind among them, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
At dusk, I drew my canoe out of the water at a small sandy island and pitched my tent. In the morning, the river level had dropped so much that my canoe was now thirty feet from the water's edge. During the night, the hydroelectric plant at the dam had decreased its power output—possibly to conserve water in the lake—and the reduced flow meant that the river was now lower, with mudbanks this morning where there had been water yesterday.
I dragged my boat out and paddled on. Though there is much more human settlement on the Zambian side of the Zambezi, animals do not distinguish one country from another, and the swimmers—elephant and buffalo and hippo, rather than lion and hyena and baboon—often emigrate to find the best feeding grounds.
One late afternoon below Chifengulu I saw a commotion in the middle of the river, many heads and flapping ears. When they came to a sandbar and clambered out and crossed it, I was able to count them—forty elephants. They were big and small, swimming from Zambia to Zimbabwe, enormous bulls up ahead and cows behind, nudging the baby elephants. The current was swift once they descended into the deeper water, and the babies hesitated, needing encouragement.
I was downwind, but even so I stayed well away. They were panting from the effort. They took little notice of me because they had a larger obstacle ahead, a steep muddy bank rising from deep water. It meant they had to climb, to maintain their balance and tramp upward. This made for a turbulent exit, as they crowded near the bank and splashed and struggled.
The Zambezi made the elephants more elephantine—blacker, bigger, the water streaming from their flanks making their hides shine, and their tusks were washed a brilliant white in the river. It was a procession of gleaming black hides and bone-white ivory, and something about their heavy breathing and the way they were winded from this crossing made them seem hard-working and vulnerable.
Not long after, I discovered just how vulnerable elephants can be in the Zambezi.
"This is like a tour of carcasses," Mark Evans told me as he drove me in his Land Rover a quarter of a mile from a side channel of the river where a large elephant lay dead, its tusks hacked off. Mark had been a bush guide and ranger in Zambia game parks for most of his adult life. Even so, he was shocked. "Three killings in the past three days."
At first light, we had heard dozens of shots from what Mark guessed was an AK-47. It was clearly a poaching incident. The rangers were called, but by the time they showed up the poachers had killed the elephant, hacked one tusk away, cut off its head, and rolled it over to get at the second tusk. Later, when we saw it, the corpse was covered with vultures, and for the next five days and nights it attracted wild dogs, hyenas, lions, and even crocs from the river which had gotten wind of it.
For more than five hundred years the elephants here have been plundered. Muslim merchants, "Swahilis" ("coastal" in Arabic) from Zanzibar and Kilwa, were well established at Tete by the end of the fifteenth century, trading cloth and other goods for ivory. One tusk produced three billiard balls; two tusks were needed for a piano. Timothy Holmes wrote, in The Journey to Livingstone, "Every keyboard entailed one elephant killed and at least two slaves to carry the tusks."
In spite of what I saw, the ivory ban has generally been a success. The number of poaching incidents has diminished. Elephants have perhaps suffered more from a loss of habitat caused by an irregular and smaller flow of the river. Before Kariba Dam was built, this vast area below Chirundu was a floodplain, but now that it no longer floods and renews the soil, the land is less fertile and consequently supports fewer animals.
The bird life is hardier and more constant: Egyptian geese, the small jewel-like malachite kingfisher, the seven-foot-tall Goliath heron, the lily-trotter (African jacana) actually tittuping on the water hyacinths, the stately fish eagle; and even when one cannot see them, one can hear their distinct cries—the blacksmith plover with its unmistakable tinking like a hammer striking metal, the lonely whistle of the boubou shrike, the spotted dove calling out "Work harder!" and the bratty voice of the gray lourie, snarling "Go away! Go away!"
"There were once rhinos here," Mark said. "There are now virtually none at all. The world demand is great. The Chinese grind the horn and sell it as an aphrodisiac. The Omanis use rhino horns for dagger handles."
He then added a sentiment that I heard often on the Zambezi: "Tourism actively discourages poaching. Rhinos feel safer near the camps and lodges where the poachers don't dare to go."
Poaching of Zambezi elephants has caused countries to join hands across the river. Ambrose Charumbira, senior scout at Mana Pools National Park in Zimbabwe, told me that he and his men had held meetings with the Zambian Park Service to eliminate poaching. The fact that poachers were heavily armed was the greatest problem. When apprehended they offered resistance, and as a result rangers on both sides of the Zambezi had died in the struggle to eliminate poachers.
In the evening the lions that had fed on the carcass of the elephant padded to the river to drink and digest their food. I saw them from my boat, licking their chops and looking sated. I was safe enough, twenty feet away in the water, since lions seldom enter the river.
I drank the river too. Though I was hesitant at first, only wetting my lips or sipping it, I eventually developed a taste for it on my long trip downriver. On the hottest days I dipped my cup into the water and guzzled it without ill effects.
The Zambezi has a different character and personality every ten miles or so: the placid upper river becomes the tumbling river of falls and gorges, swells into Lake Kariba, flows swiftly through more gorges, and widens again above Chirundu, site of the Otto Beit Bridge. The bridges at Chirundu, Victoria Falls, and Tete are the only ones that can take motor traffic.
Two more days of paddling past Chirundu brought me to a section of the Zambezi that on the Zimbabwe side is Mana Pools. This national park is another area that was closed during the war of Zimbabwean independence. Mana Pools—mana means "four" in Shona—is full of wild game. During the dry season, when the pans in the bush have evaporated, the larger animals make for the river to slake their thirst.
I was paddling down this section of the Zambezi with Alastair Macdonald, a Zimbabwean guide who knew the river well. One day we pulled our canoes into a wooded shore of Mana Pools and walked about half a mile into the bush. Then we sat behind a downed tree and watched. Four elephants plodded past us. We followed them back to a boggy area adjacent to the river. Gathered near it were more elephants, some waterbuck and eland, three zebra, some Cape buffalo, as well as baboons, herons, and wild dogs—eight species peaceably sharing one source of water.
Below Mana Pools there are places where the river is a mile wide. One day, paddling near the middle of a broad stretch of water, we saw an enormous black mountain of seamless storm cloud advancing toward us. Fighting the sudden strong wind that preceded the storm, we made for the closest bank. The wind whipping against the current created a short breaking chop that began to slop into our boats. Within minutes we were swamped, our canoes like brimming bathtubs. Instead of trying to bail, which would have been useless, we kept ourselves upright by bracing with our paddles as we stroked.
The incentive for staying in your boat midstream in such a Zambezi storm is the certainty that crocodiles are attracted by de
licious dangling legs.
"Crocodiles are opportunists," Alastair said as we draped our gear over hot red rocks to dry in the blazing sunshine that followed the storm. "I saw a croc bite someone's paddle about a month ago. Must have thought it was edible."
The red rocks were the first of many that we encountered as we traveled downstream to Mupata Gorge, in places so narrow I could have thrown a stone from one side to the other. On the Zambian side I saw small clusters of mud huts and some good-sized villages—men in dugouts fishing with nets, women working in gardens growing corn, children lugging brimming buckets from the river to water the crops. There are no villages on the Zimbabwe bank. This lower part of the Zambezi has been divided into hunting areas where in the dry months hunters—foreigners mostly—go on big-game safaris.
"I take hunters out sometimes," Alastair Macdonald told me. "I know it's not politically correct, but hunting is one way to manage the animal populations. And it's profitable for the Zimbabwe government."
A license to shoot a buffalo is $3,000, an elephant costs $5,000, a leopard $6,000. There are no guarantees.
"The best hunter on the Zambezi is the hyena," Alastair said. "They're much more successful than the lions or the leopards."
I drifted along with the clusters of floating hyacinth—some like tiny islands—under the high Zambian escarpment. This ridge diminishes from a great green fortresslike wall to an assortment of low hills farther downstream. On my last day of paddling I reached Kanyemba, the place where three countries meet: Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. I could see a hill just past the point where the river twisted into Mozambique. The town beneath that hill is called Zumbo, which was settled by the Portuguese in 1715. After almost three hundred years of continuous habitation, Zumbo is still just a little town on a bend of the Zambezi, where the river descends the central African plateau to the coastal plain in Mozambique.
The Zambezi flows for almost five hundred miles in Mozambique, though for upward of thirty years two guerrilla wars, one after the other, closed this hinterland. First there was FRELIMO'S decade-long struggle against the Portuguese. After independence in 1974 an anti-FRELIMO movement called RENAMO was formed, supported mainly by white South Africa and an assortment of right-wing well-wishers, some of them American. In the RENAMO war millions of people were either killed or displaced, bridges blown up, communications shattered, roads closed, towns and villages depopulated by massacres. Because of this civil war, the Mozambique Zambezi, from Zumbo to the delta in the Indian Ocean, and the main tributary, the Shire River, were inaccessible to outsiders as well as to many Mozambicans. Throughout the war, the interior of Mozambique was a heart of darkness.
That was a great shame, for this part of the Zambezi is important historically. Livingstone sailed a paddle steamer upriver from the delta to Tete and also up the Shire, the first Westerner to do so, raising his hopes that the whole river could be navigated. The Shire tributary was never explored by the Portuguese, because of the hostility of the Africans on its banks.
The Zambezi and the Shire had allowed Livingstone to penetrate the African interior with all its marvels—Lakes Shirwa and Nyasa, the country we know today as Malawi, the labyrinthine marsh on the Shire with its abundant elephants, and the mountain Morumbala, "Lofty Watchtower," a solitary four-thousand-foot-high sentry post in this riverine fastness. Yet the widespread famine and the crocodiles caused one of Livingstone's men to call the Shire "literally a river of death."
One hundred years later, with the armed struggle on the lower Zambezi and the Shire, that was also true. The rivers remained no-go areas even after a peace agreement was signed between FRELIMO and RENAMO and hostilities ended in 1994. In the dry season of 1995 the first descent in a motorboat down the Shire and into the Zambezi was made by an expedition led by Captain Chris Marrow. Captain Marrow, an Englishman, supervises an aid agency, Mariners, that is dedicated to reestablishing ferry and barge services, virtual lifelines, on the Zambezi in Mozambique.
Two months after Marrow's expedition, Alastair and I kayaked down the Shire from Nsanje in Malawi through the marshes and into the Zambezi. We were able to accomplish this only with the help of two Malawian paddlers, Karsten Nyachikadza and Domingo Mon, who guided us in their dugout.
"Don't walk far," Domingo said when he saw me heading into the bush to relieve myself. "There are bombs all over."
He meant land mines. The peace agreement had been signed, but there were still thousands of mines that had not been removed. They remain a problem, and the roads are terribly muddy, treacherous, and unreliable. Every bridge I saw in rural Mozambique had been blown up—some had been replaced with flimsier and more functional spans, others had not been replaced at all. The entire north-south railway network that had crossed the Zambezi was a rusty ruin. Whole towns had been demolished. I saw the roofless houses, the old scorched and windowless villas, the deserted farmhouses, the tipped-over locomotives.
In spite of this, all the waterways are open. The Zambezi is once more a wide thoroughfare through Mozambique's heartland. The trouble is, it is hardly used except by small dugouts and the occasional motorboat.
"We go to the Zambezi all the time," Karsten Nyachikadza told me in Chichewa. His own language was Sena, and he said he felt right at home in this region, for the Sena nation overlapped Malawi and Mozambique.
"What are the problems we'll have on the river?" I asked. "What about hippos?"
He laughed. There weren't many hippos, he said. The people had eaten most of them during the war. The crocs would not bother us. I was touched when he said, "The people are good."
"No problems, then?"
"The wind," he said. "Just the wind."
Each day in the afternoon it came—the same prevailing easterly that I had cursed upriver—and this headwind slowed Karsten and Domingo's big dugout and even turned my kayak into a clumsy weathervane at times.
Some of the most dangerous aspects of the Zambezi are almost invisible: the wind, the mosquitoes that carry malaria, the biting tsetse flies, and the innocent-looking fruit called buffalo bean, which causes painful welts on the skin. There are also spiders, scorpions, and at some of our riverside campsites big wet frogs that position themselves near anyone sleeping in the open and jump with a gulp and land in a great smothering flop on your face.
We camped at the edge of riverside villages—always asking permission—woke each morning at four-thirty, folded the tents, and packed the boats. We set off before five, at first light, paddling and drinking river water and peeling the small mangoes that were just being harvested on the river. We had lunch in the boats, too, and pushed on until the wind came up. Then we looked for a likely village, introduced ourselves from our boats, and were welcomed ashore.
That was when we pitched our tents, broke out our food boxes, built a cooking fire, and had a proper meal—a pot of the plain starchy flour mixture, nsima, that we ate with fish or vegetables. As soon as the sun set and the clouds of mosquitoes descended, I crawled into my tent and listened to my shortwave radio. The days were so strenuous I was usually asleep by eight o'clock.
We threaded through the Ndinde Marsh, heading toward the Zambezi on waterways as narrow as creeks, with tall grass brushing us from both sides. The "vast herds" of elephants that Livingstone saw in and around the Chiromo Marsh no longer existed—indeed, though the bird life was vigorous and there were many crocodiles and some hippos, we saw few large animals along the Shire. They had been killed or displaced by the people who inhabited the small villages on the banks.
"We're going to the Zambezi!" Karsten called out confidently to the people on shore or in dugouts as he shoveled at the river with his lollipop-shaped paddle.
The people greeting us here were a community of marsh-dwelling Africans, perhaps two thousand of them, all of this same sprawling Sena nation whose precarious settlements were not on any map. There was no road, no school, no church, no hospital here. When they wanted to sell fish or buy nets or cooking pots, they paddled upriv
er to the markets in Malawi; when they bartered their fish for bags of sugar, they loaded their flotilla of dugouts and made trips in Mozambique, sometimes as far as the Zambezi.
"We don't need passports, Father," Karsten said.
The Sena come and go, downriver, from country to country, without passports—without even saying where they are going. But I was more conspicuous. At the international border, the tiny riverside depot of Megaza, with its mud huts, its abandoned collection of ruined river-boats, and its clouds of mosquitoes, I had to go through the strict formality of Mozambique customs and immigration. This was done in the open air under a mango tree. There was a commotion in the tree—ripe fruit dropped onto the official table. It was a rat in the branches, nibbling the fruit, and it kept interrupting the proceedings.
After that, and for many miles, we could see Morumbala, which is more a plateau than a mountain. There were farms and fruit orchards at the top, we were told. How had the Portuguese gotten up and down the mountain, I wondered.
"They were carried by Africans," the villagers said.
We saw abandoned houses and plantations, remnants of the Portuguese colonial presence, at many places on the banks. We camped in Sena villages, which seemed as remote today as they were in the time of Livingstone. Certainly people's lives followed the traditional pattern, the men fishing in the river to the cries of the masked weaver birds, and the women and girls grinding corn: that rhythmic thud of the pestle and mortar was like a heartbeat on the river.
After five days of heat and mosquitoes on the muddy, slow-moving Shire, I looked up one noon and saw the river turning a corner, entering the Zambezi—clearly the Zambezi, for it was half a mile wide and moving swiftly, tumbling down from Tete on its way to the sea. And soon I heard the chugging of an engine, the first since leaving Nsanje.