by Roald Dahl
My boy was called Mdisho. He was a Mwanumwezi tribesman, which meant a lot out there because the Mwanumwezi was the only tribe who had ever defeated the gigantic Masai in battle. Mdisho was tall and graceful and soft-spoken, and his loyalty to me, his young white English master, was absolute. I hope, and I believe, that I was equally loyal to him.
The first thing you had to do when you came to work in Dar es Salaam was to learn Swahili, otherwise you could not communicate either with your own boy or with any other native of the country because none of them spoke a word of English. In those benighted days of Empire it was considered impertinent for a black man to understand English, let alone to speak it. The result was that none of them made any effort to learn our language, so we had to learn theirs instead. Swahili is a relatively simple language, and with the help of a Swahili-English dictionary and a grammar book, plus some hard work in the evenings, you could become pretty fluent in a couple of months. Then you took an exam and if you passed it, the Shell Company gave you a bonus of a hundred pounds, which was a lot of money in those days when a case of whisky cost only twelve pounds.
Sometimes I would have to go on safari upcountry and Mdisho always came with me. We would take the Shell station-wagon and be gone for a month, driving all over Tanganyika on dirt roads that were covered with millions of tiny close-together ruts. Driving over those ruts in a station-wagon felt as though you were riding on top of a gigantic vibrator. We would drive far west to the edge of Lake Tanganyika in central Africa and on down south to the borders of Nyasaland, and after that we would head east towards Mozambique, and the purpose of these trips was to visit our Shell customers. These customers ran diamond mines and gold mines and sisal plantations and cotton plantations and goodness knows what else besides, and my job was to keep their machinery supplied with the proper grades of lubricating oil and fuel oil. Not a great deal of intelligence or imagination was required, but by gum you needed to be fit and tough.
I loved that life. We saw giraffe standing unafraid right beside the road nibbling the tops of the trees. We saw plenty of elephant and hippo and zebra and antelope and very occasionally a pride of lions. The only creatures I was frightened of were the snakes. We used often to see a big one gliding across the dirt road ahead of the car, and the golden rule was never to accelerate and try to run it over, especially if the roof of the car was open, as ours often was. If you hit a snake at speed, the front wheel can flip it up into the air and there is a danger of it landing in your lap. I can think of nothing worse than that.
The really bad snake in Tanganyika is the black mamba. It is the only one that has no fear of man and will deliberately attack him on sight. If it bites you, you are a gonner.
One morning I was shaving myself in the bathroom of our Dar es Salaam house, and as I lathered my face I was absent-mindedly gazing out of the window into the garden. I was watching Salimu, our shamba-boy, as he slowly and methodically raked the gravel on the front drive. Then I saw the snake. It was six feet long and thick as my arm and quite black. It was a mamba all right and there was no doubt that it had seen Salimu and was gliding fast over the gravel straight towards him.
I flung myself toward the open window and yelled in Swahili, ‘Salimu! Salimu! Angalia nyoka kubwa! Nyuma wewe! Upesi upesi!’, in other words, ‘Salimu! Salimu! Beware huge snake! Behind you! Quickly quickly!’
The mamba was moving over the gravel at the speed of a running man and when Salimu turned and saw it, it could not have been more than fifteen paces away from him. There was nothing more I could do. There was not much Salimu could do either. He knew it was useless to run because a mamba at full speed could travel as fast as a galloping horse. And he certainly knew it was a mamba. Every native in Tanganyika knew what a mamba looked like and what to expect from it. It would reach him in another five seconds. I leant out of the window and held my breath. Salimu swung round and faced the snake. I saw him go into a crouch. He crouched very low with one leg behind the other like a runner about to start a hundred yard sprint, and he was holding the long rake out in front of him. He raised it, but no higher than his shoulder, and he stood there for those long four or five seconds absolutely motionless, watching the great black deadly snake as it glided so quickly over the gravel towards him. Its small triangular snake’s head was raised up in the air, and I could hear the soft rustling of the gravel as the body slid over the loose stones. I have the whole nightmarish picture of that scene still before my eyes – the morning sunshine on the garden, the massive baobab tree in the background, Salimu in his old khaki shorts and shirt and bare feet standing brave and absolutely still with the upraised rake in his hands, and to one side the long black snake gliding over the gravel straight towards him with its small poisonous head held high and ready to strike.
Salimu waited. He never moved or made a sound during the time it took the snake to reach him. He waited until the very last moment when the mamba was not more than five feet away and then wham! Salimu struck first. He brought the metal prongs of the rake down hard right on to the middle of the mamba’s back and he held the rake there with all his weight, leaning forward now and jumping up and down to put more weight on the fork in an effort to pin the snake to the ground. I saw the blood spurt where the prongs had gone right into the snake’s body and then I rushed downstairs absolutely naked, grabbing a golf club as I went through the hall, and outside on the drive Salimu was still there pressing with both hands on the rake and the great snake was writhing and twisting and throwing itself about, and I shouted to Salimu in Swahili, ‘What shall I do?’
‘It is all right now, bwana!’ he shouted back. ‘I have broken its back and it cannot travel forward any more! Stand away, bwana! Stand well away and leave it to me!’
Salimu lifted the rake and jumped away and the snake went on writhing and twisting but it was quite unable to travel in any direction. The boy went forward and hit it accurately and very hard on the head with the metal end of the rake and suddenly the snake stopped moving. Salimu let out a great sigh and passed a hand over his forehead. Then he looked at me and smiled.
‘Asanti, bwana,’ he said, ‘asanti sana,’ which simply means, ‘Thank you, bwana. Thank you very much.’
It isn’t often one gets the chance to save a person’s life. It gave me a good feeling for the rest of the day, and from then on, every time I saw Salimu, the good feeling would come back to me.
Dar es Salaam
19 March 1939
Dear Mama,
If a war breaks out you’ve jolly well got to go to Tenby otherwise you’ll be bombed. Don’t forget, you’ve got to go if war breaks out …
Simba
About a month after the black mamba incident, I set out on a safari upcountry in the old Shell station-wagon with Mdisho and our first stop was the small town of Bagomoyo. I mention this only because the name of the Indian trader I had to go and see in Bagomoyo was so wonderful I have never been able to get it out of my mind. He was a tiny little man with an immense low-slung protuberant belly of the kind that women have when they are eight and a half months pregnant, and he carried this great ball in front of him very proudly, as if it were a special medal or a coat of arms. He called himself Mister Shankerbai Ganderbai, and across the top of his business notepaper was printed in red capital letters the full title he had conferred upon himself, MISTER SHANKERBAI GANDERBAI OF BAGOMOYO, SELLER OF DECORTICATORS. A decorticator is a huge clanking piece of machinery that converts the leaves of the sisal plant into fibres for making rope, and if you wanted to buy one, the man to go and see was Mister Shankerbai Ganderbai of Bagomoyo.
After three more days of dusty travelling and visiting customers, Mdisho and I came to the town of Tabora. Tabora is some 450 miles inland from Dar es Salaam, and in 1939 it was not much of a town, just a scattering of houses and a few streets where the Indian traders had their shops. But because by Tanganyikan standards it was a sizeable place, it was honoured by the presence of a British District Officer.
T
he District Officers in Tanganyika were a breed I admired. Admittedly they were sunburnt and sinewy, but they were not gophers. They were all university graduates with good degrees, and in their lonely outposts they had to be all things to all men. They were the judges whose decisions settled both tribal and personal disputes. They were the advisers to tribal chiefs. They were often the givers of medicines and the saviours of the sick. They administered their own vast districts by keeping law and order under the most difficult circumstances. And wherever there was a District Officer, the Shell man on safari was welcome to stay the night at his house.
The DO in Tabora was called Robert Sanford, a man in his early thirties who had a wife and three very small children, a boy of six, a girl of four and a baby.
That evening I was sitting on the veranda having a sundowner with Robert Sanford and his wife Mary, while two of the children were playing out on the grass in front of the house under the watchful eye of their black nurse. The heat of the day was becoming less intense as the sun went down, and the first whisky and soda was tasting good.
‘So what’s been going on in Dar?’ Robert Sanford asked me. ‘Anything exciting?’
I told him about the black mamba and Salimu. When I had finished, Mary Sanford said, ‘That’s the one thing I’m always frightened of in this country, those beastly snakes.’
‘Damn lucky you happened to see it behind him,’ Robert Sanford said. ‘He was certain to have been killed.’
‘We had a spitting cobra near our back door not long ago,’ Mary Sanford said. ‘Robert shot it.’
The Sanford house was on a hill outside the town. It was a white wooden two-storey building with a roof of green tiles. The eaves of the house projected far out beyond the walls to provide extra shade, and this gave the building a sort of Japanese pagoda appearance. The surrounding countryside was to me a very pleasant sight. It was a vast brown plain with many quite large knolls and hummocks dotted all over it, and although the plain itself was mostly burnt-up scrubland, the hills were covered with all sorts of huge jungle trees, and their dense foliage made little emerald-green dots all over the plain. On the burnt-up plain itself there grew nothing but those bare spiky thorn trees that you find all over East Africa, and there were about six huge vultures sitting quite motionless on every thorn tree in sight. The vultures were brown with curved orange beaks and orange feet, and they spent their whole lives sitting and watching and waiting for some animal to die so they could pick its bones.
‘Do you like this sort of life?’ I said to Robert Sanford.
‘I love the freedom,’ he said. ‘I administer about two thousand square miles of territory and I can go where I want and do more or less exactly as I please. That part of it is marvellous. But I do miss the company of other white men. There aren’t many even moderately intelligent Europeans in the town.’
We sat there watching the sun go down behind the flat brown plain that was covered with thorn trees, and we could see the sinister vultures waiting like feathered undertakers for death to come along and give them something to work on.
‘Keep the children a bit closer to the house!’ Mary Sanford called out to the nurse. ‘Bring them closer, please!’
Robert Sanford said, ‘My mother sent me out Beethoven’s Third Symphony from England last week. HMV, two records, four sides in all, Toscanini conducting. I’m using a thorn needle instead of a steel one so as not to wear out the grooves. It seems to work.’
‘Don’t you find the records warp a lot out here?’ I asked.
‘I keep them lying flat with a pile of books on top of them,’ he said. ‘What I’m terrified of is dropping one and breaking it.’
The sun had gone down now and a lovely soft light was spreading over the landscape. I could see a group of zebra grazing among the thorn trees about half a mile away. Robert Sanford was also watching the zebras.
‘I keep wondering,’ he said, ‘if it wouldn’t be possible to catch a young zebra and break it in for riding, just like a horse. After all, they are only wild horses with stripes on.’
‘Has anyone ever tried?’ I asked.
‘Not that I know,’ he said. ‘Mary’s a good rider. What do you think, darling? How would you like to have a private zebra to ride on?’
‘It might be fun,’ she said. Even though she had a bit of a jaw, she was a handsome woman. I didn’t mind the jaw. The shape of it gave her the look of a fighter.
‘Perhaps we could cross one with a horse,’ Robert Sanford said, ‘and call it a zorse.’
‘Or a hebra,’ Mary Sanford said.
‘Right,’ her husband said, smiling.
‘Shall we try it?’ Mary Sanford said. ‘It would be rather splendid to have a baby zorse or hebra. Oh darling, shall we try it?’
‘The children could ride it,’ he said. ‘A black zorse with white stripes all over it.’
‘Please can we play your Beethoven after supper?’ I said.
‘Absolutely,’ Robert Sanford said. ‘I’ll put the gramophone out here on the veranda and then those tremendous chords can go booming out through the night over the plain. It’s terrific. The only trouble is I have to wind the thing up twice for each side.’
‘I’ll wind it for you,’ I said.
Suddenly, the voice of a man yelling in Swahili exploded into the quiet of the evening. It was my boy, Mdisho. ‘Bwana! Bwana! Bwana!’ he was yelling from somewhere behind the house. ‘Simba, bwana! Simba! Simba!’
Simba is Swahili for lion. All three of us leapt to our feet, and the next moment Mdisho came tearing round the corner of the house yelling at us in Swahili, ‘Come quick, bwana! Come quick! Come quick! A huge lion is eating the wife of the cook!’
That sounds pretty funny when you put it on paper back here in England, but to us, standing on a veranda in the middle of East Africa, it was not funny at all.
Robert Sanford flew into the house and came out again in five seconds flat holding a powerful rifle and ramming a cartridge into the breech. ‘Get those children indoors!’ he shouted to his wife as he ran down off the veranda with me behind him.
Mdisho was dancing about and pointing towards the back of the house and yelling in Swahili, ‘The lion has taken the wife of the cook and the lion is eating her and the cook is chasing the lion and trying to save his wife!’
The servants lived in a series of low whitewashed outbuildings at the back of the house, and as we came running round the corner we saw four or five house-boys leaping about and pointing and shrieking, ‘Simba! Simba! Simba!’ The boys were all clothed in spotless white cotton robes that looked like long night-shirts, and each had a fine scarlet tarboosh on his head. The tarboosh is a sort of top-hat without a brim, and there is often a black tassel on it. The women had come out of their huts as well and were standing in a separate group, silent, immobile and staring.
‘Where is it?’ Robert Sanford shouted, but he had no need to ask, for we very quickly spotted the massive sandy-coloured lion not more than eighty or ninety yards off and trotting away from the house. He had a fine bushy collar of fur around his neck, and in his jaws he was holding the wife of the cook. The lion had the woman by the waist so that her head and arms hung down on one side and her legs on the other, and I could see that she was wearing a red and white spotted dress. The lion, so startlingly close, was loping away from us in the calmest possible manner with a slow, long-striding, springy lope, and behind the lion, not more than the length of a tennis court behind, ran the cook himself in his white cotton robe and with his red hat on his head, running most bravely and waving his arms like a whirlwind, leaping, clapping his hands, screaming, shouting, shouting, shouting, ‘Simba! Simba! Simba! Simba! Let go of my wife! Let go of my wife!’
Oh, it was a scene of great tragedy and comedy both mixed up together, and now Robert Sanford was running full speed after the cook who was running after the lion. He was holding his rifle in both hands and shouting to the cook, ‘Pingo! Pingo! Get out of the way, Pingo! Lie down on the ground so I c
an shoot the simba! You are in my way! You are in my way, Pingo!’
But the cook ignored him and kept on running, and the lion ignored everybody, not altering his pace at all but continuing to lope along with slow springy strides and with the head held high and carrying the woman proudly in his jaws, rather like a dog who is trotting off with a good bone.
Both the cook and Robert Sanford were travelling faster than the lion who really didn’t seem to care about his pursuers at all. And as for me, I didn’t know what to do to help them so I ran after Robert Sanford. It was an awkward situation because there was no way that Robert Sanford could take a shot at the lion without risking a hit on the cook’s wife, let alone on the cook himself who was still right in his line of fire.
The lion was heading for one of those hillocks that was densely covered with jungle trees and we all knew that once he got in there, we would never be able to get at him. The incredibly brave cook was actually catching up on the lion and was now not more than ten yards behind him, and Robert Sanford was thirty or forty yards behind the cook. ‘Ayee!’ the cook was shouting. ‘Simba! Simba! Simba! Let go my wife! I am coming after you, simba!’