Northern Rhodesian territory was managed by the (British) South Africa Company from 1891, and while I was there, something great was to happen: independence.
I was sent to the North West Province – a large area, approximately five times the size of Wales. Northern Rhodesia was in the last throws of British colonial rule and was soon to become Zambia.
Pre-colonial, it was the African dream of Khoisan hunter-gatherers, migrating Bantu, Tonga people and the Nkoya. More came through the centuries until the nineteenth, when the Europeans eventually added to that influx with Francisco de Lacerda and, of course, David Livingstone, who would name Victoria Falls after his Queen and describe them famously as “scenes so lovely [they] must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight”.
Cecil Rhodes then led the British South Africa Company to scout for minerals, which they did find, along with copper metals. The British colony of Northern Rhodesia was established, but by the fifties, after more laws to alter and change the territories, opposition from the people grew and demonstrations rose against any further control by the British. Then the sixties came and Northern Rhodesia was the centre of turmoil, which would characterise the federation in its last years.
Northern Rhodesia became the Republic of Zambia in October 1964, but at independence, despite its mineral wealth, Zambia had problems. The main problem was the “few trained and educated Zambians” available to run the government and the economy was dependent on foreign expertise. Was I part of this foreign expertise invasion? Was I here to save Africa? On that note, the scariest thing you can say to an African is “Hi, I’m white, and I’m here to save you.”
It was interesting to see the old colonial ways. I was sent to Kobompo, a small town on the Kobompo River, and it was full of hippos. You could see them clearly and it was all rather scary, as the hippos had a reputation for being quite aggressive, territorial and ill tempered, especially the females, who were protective over their young. The crocs were frequent victims of hippo attacks, but I wondered about humans, as we mainly travelled around in canoes made from dugout trees. I was later to find out that the hippo is considered the most dangerous apex mammal of all Africa. Sometimes, I guess it’s not good to read the guidebooks. I was in the boat with my pink skin and straw hat, quite blatantly a guest to them, so perhaps I was just lucky… again. One night I went on a crocodile hunt. A large male croc had been terrorising the villagers and they decided to try to kill it, and invited me along. We went out on the river in a dugout canoe to try to find the croc. The idea was that we would see the reflection of the croc’s eyes with a torch, and quietly drift up to it and shoot it from close up through one eye. Any shot from further away would probably have bounced off the croc’s skull and not penetrated the brain. I was also told that after shooting it we’d have to quickly haul the beast into the canoe and tie it down before its nerves kicked back in. I was pleased we didn’t find it, as I didn’t much fancy being in a dugout canoe with no stabilisers along with a thrashing crocodile.
In fact, there were only five white people in Kobompo: the district commissioner and his wife, a single young district officer – who was partial to the local African girls, the community development officer with whom I was housed, and myself. I really believed the homosexual thing was following me around… D’Arcy Hayne, the community development officer, had a young African boy he used to take to his room to ‘teach English’. However, he never bothered me. Despite the fact that we were now living and working in a soon-to-be independent Zambia, the district commissioner and the district officer still wore their white uniforms with white-feathered helmets, likely a British pride they cared not to shake off too soon; very colonial rule in image, very proud – and very sick, looking back. We shouldn’t, I suppose, have been like that.
I stayed in the North West Province for seven months. D’Arcy had an old 1950s Vauxhall Victor car and we had to push it each morning to get it started. We used to get up at 5am each day to get to the Community Development Hall. It was where all the young African girls were doing their domestic science courses – the ones that I found out, too late, were all being shagged by the district officer. D’Arcy told me one morning when we were pushing his car.
I remember the sunrises; they were just wonderful. I had not been in the tropics before and I had never seen such a huge sun. It was everything I had dreamed of Africa: a giant globe in the landscape that would plunge into the deep each and every nighttime, then return again each day with colours that would dazzle me, delight me, make me want to write home about. But I didn’t, because there was no one to tell. Instead, I lived in the now; it was hard not to in Africa.
I did a survey of why the local youths were leaving the villages to go to the Copperbelt towns. This required me to mainly cycle, which I was used to from my time on the bicycle in Gloucestershire, or occasionally drive a jeep into the bush with an interpreter to speak with the villagers. I recall one interesting incident.
My interpreter and I were cycling along a sandy track when we heard the drums a long way from the next village, even from where we were on the track. The drumbeats were so loud it was as if the track itself was shaking, and we could feel the vibrations travel through the bicycle wheels and into our legs. We followed the noise. When we got there, we found a woman on all fours. She was barking like a dog and all of the villagers were sitting in a circle around her, with the men beating their drums as she crawled and barked. She had a spell placed on her by the witchdoctor, a man covered in face paint and the feathers of sky birds. Her crime had been to publicly ask, after a baby had been born, who would want to be born into this world. Because the baby had died, she was blamed. Naturally, the villagers thought the baby had heard the woman, with its baby ears, and had chosen not to live because of her and what she had said. The woman was forced to drink the local honey beer. After barking and hopping around like an animal, in an attempt to exorcise the evil spirit, she would be cast out into the bush where she would not survive. It was an amazing and terrifying scene, but there was nothing I could do to prevent it happening. Nothing at all. I recently watched the magnificent film Blood Diamond where the character of Danny Archer manages to summarise the continent with nothing but an acronym. It manages to work, somehow; it was how I felt at the exorcism. T.I.A. was the acronym he used: This. Is. Africa. There is nothing you can do but accept it for what it is. Africa.
All the time I did this survey I was staying in the African villages, sleeping in straw huts and eating the local food. This was mainly cassava, made from a root, which needed to be soaked for days to eliminate the impurities in it and then pounded. Africa was proving to be a magical place for me, and each day would bring with it the suspense and surprise of new adventures, ones I had read about in the big boys’ adventure novels. I was living in villages with locals and helping them, if only in a small way. It was ironic that I had Ken Senior to thank for all of this, the man who had molested me. I recall another incident in one village, where all the youths had been locked away to perform their coming-of-age rituals, during which they would be circumcised, likely without anaesthetic, possibly with blades not too sharp, or not too clean. T.I.A.
I managed to buy three leopard skins from the villagers. This wasn’t easy because the local people, with their ancestors’ history of colonial rule, were all quite suspicious of me with my blonde hair and straw hat, and were reluctant to sell the skins. Mostly, they thought of all white men, even a youngster like me, as figures of authority and didn’t want to get into trouble. When I got back to the UK, I sold the skins to a furrier on Regent Street for £150. It was a small fortune for someone on a student grant of £4 a week and I remember how I bought myself a nice blazer with that money. I felt proud to have journeyed to the far corner, to Africa, to sleep in huts and return with those animal skins, to sell them and dress myself in a fine jacket. I remember that night standing in front of my long mirror. I felt like a genuine adventurer and entrepreneur, like a character in a Wilbur Smith book.
Perhaps my enterprising father was looking down on me. Perhaps he was watching me. Perhaps.
My next job was to organise a famine relief scheme on the border with the Congo. After the establishment of the First Republic of the Congo, there was a civil war for independence in Katanga, which bordered the North West Province of Northern Rhodesia. The agriculture had collapsed and people were starving. My job was to distribute grain.
While on the border with Katanga, I went hunting with the local Irish missionary where I shot at a herd of gazelles. One of them fell; it fell so hard I could hear its bones rattle and break like dry twigs. The herd cleared and the one lay alone on the hot African earth. I didn’t feel sad, but felt connected to it somehow, as if what was happening had pulled me into the hunting world that I was surely part of. It had pulled me into Africa and the pulse of Africa was beating and I could feel it now, in my hand – the one that gripped the trigger I was still squeezing. On closer approach, the animal was twitching, and the closer we got to it, the more it seemed capable of twisting its neck, perhaps managing a ferocious bark. However, the Africans, with the Irishman and I, took no risk. They loved the gazelle and wished it no pain. They pounced on it and clubbed it until it died. Later, when they were skinning it, it emerged that the animal was pregnant and its clinging onto life now became so clear: there was a perfectly formed foetus inside it. All was now obvious to us and it made for an interesting story – even for the hunters. It made me sad but the Africans needed the meat, so I forgave myself again.
On another occasion, I raised my rifle to a magnificent roan antelope – one of the largest species of the savannah. It stood there proud with huge horns, staring me down as if trying to tell me something. I thought of the gazelle and I wondered if there was an unborn inside this great antelope. I was also intimidated by its thousand-yard stare. My rifle dropped and the power I was feeling in my hands quickly vanished, burying itself in my stomach, and the electricity in my face was gone too. I couldn’t shoot and I lowered my gun. I would never hunt again, I told myself. But Africa is a different world, and in different worlds there are different rules.
The Gaboon viper is one of the most beautiful snakes in the world, but also one of the deadliest and people die within minutes of being bitten by one. It is not a very long snake, but wide. We came across one while driving on a remote track. It was sunning itself on the road and was probably asleep. We stopped the jeep and jumped out to look at it. I put my gun above its head and shot it, and I didn’t even hesitate. It seemed to represent something very different to the greater mammals of the plains: the gazelle and the Grant’s zebra, the elephant or even the spiny mouse. This cunning reptile was sly, knowing and wicked. It was reptilian in all its character. I wanted it dead. I wanted its skin.
Driving around, we would often see snakes on the road. The local technique was always to brake hard and slide over them on the dirt road, so as to kill them, otherwise the tyres could make them flip up into the underside of the car and possibly enter your vehicle. Once I was driving along and a black mamba stretched right across the road. It was so long I couldn’t see either end of it. A couple of times I had snakes in my house, usually green mambas, and ants – a big problem too. You could be found standing on an ants’ nest and wouldn’t feel them until they were all over your legs and body. You would have to take all your clothes off to get rid of them. In Africa, ants can kill a man, and even a horse. They climb all over it, and at a signal that is released throughout the group, probably via the queen, all bite the horse in unison and it dies of a great shock. These ants were fascinating to watch performing their tasks, carrying items ten times their own size. Sometimes there would be an army ant trail a foot wide stretching across the road or in the bush, led by two or three scout ants. The anthills could be as tall as trees, and were quite a different ant breed to the simple ant of the English wood.
While organising the famine relief, I was staying in a remote and empty hunting lodge. It was dusk and a herd of – I counted – thirty elephants lumbered past the lodge, and across the nearby river. There were babies holding the tails of the mothers with their trunks and the first and last elephants made magnificent trumpet calls as they crossed the river. Seeing wildlife for real and not in a game reserve was a thrill – quite different to the donkeys in the Margate field. Everything was different in fact: the animals, the sunsets, the smells, the sounds, the oranges and browns. It was primitive and tribal; it was real and it was something we were trying to change.
My final job in the North West Province was to be an election officer at the first democratic elections for the country to become Zambia. As I drove around, I had got used to the children shaking their palms at me and shouting “Kwacha! Kwacha!” (Freedom! Freedom!), but there was never any feeling of danger or violence. In fact, the only thing I saw in their eyes was light, hope and a zing for life. I wasn’t worried at all. The villagers there walked for days to get to the polling stations and they were illiterate, so there were three tins with photographs for them to vote. The one for UNIP, the favourite party of Kenneth Kaunda, had a lion on it. The others were of a corn on the cob and a hoe. Kenneth Kaunda won.
The final five months of my year’s VSO were spent at the other end of Zambia, in the Northern Province, on the border with Tanganyika. I worked with an Outward Bound professional called John Pitchford to build and open an Outward Bound school, and John was the warden of the school. Outward Bound schools were a Scottish creation, aiming to train the characters of young men through a month of tough expeditions and physical activity – a bit like being a marine for a month, but in Africa.
The site chosen for the school was near a town then called Abercorn, now called Mbala. It is above Lake Tanganyika, which we used for many of our expeditions, and also near the Kalambo Falls, which at 772 feet of single drop is among the highest of waterfalls in Africa. One of my favourite things to do, on occasion, was to sleep on a flat rock at the edge of the falls. When you sleep in the wild, you must pee walking backwards around your sleeping position before laying down, as they say it keeps the ants out.
Lake Tanganyika is an African Great Lake, 418 miles long and the longest fresh water lake in the world – so massive, in fact, that it touches four countries: Tanzania, the Congo, Burundi and Zambia. It drains through the Congo River system and it moves all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. Part of the East African Rift, it covers a staggering 13,000 square miles with a depth that makes it the second largest rift lake in both Africa and the world. It was the scene of two battles during World War I and Che Guevara used the lake’s shores as a training ground for his guerrilla forces in the Congo. He was said to have attempted an overthrow of the government from his camp.
The port near Abercorn was called Mpulungu. It had an old tramp passenger ferry, the SS Liemba, regularly sailing up the lake into Tanganyika and the Congo. German colonialists – when they controlled German East Africa, before World War I – were said to have brought the ship on a train from the Indian Ocean. The lake was 3000 feet below the surrounding escarpment where Abercorn/Mbala was situated, and the Outward Bound students and I used to regularly make the climb.
John Pitchford and I built all the assault courses at the Outward Bound school by hand and then, finally, when we were ready, the new President-elect, Kenneth Kaunda, came to open the school. I have a great picture of me and him standing up one of the rope ladders we had built.
The participants on the courses were mainly African lads who worked for the mining companies on the Copperbelt. They were the first crop of African executives-to-be for the new African nation, and together we would go on long expeditions, some days walking over forty miles through the bush. The boss’s wife would make a delicious chocolate cake and thinking about that was often the only thing that kept me going through the heat – that, and a cold Lion lager in a copper mug. It was fun sweating through all of my clothes by the end of each day, feeling fighting fit and strong in my legs. I taught life saving (I had been to a tra
ining course in Lusaka) and also rock climbing (I had not been trained, and I was terrified) and one time I climbed up a rock face with the students roped up behind me. I got to a place where I could not go up, back down, or sideways. I was stuck, so someone had to drive for miles to the position above me, then lower me a rope down. I had to hang on for a long time, dealing with all kinds of ugly thoughts with the sun on my back. Once I had the rope on me, I had the courage to continue the climb up and we all completed it. But it was scary; at one point, I thought I was going to die. I didn’t like rock climbing at all.
At this point, I had moved and was living in a nice wooden house. It had a wonderful garden full of frangipani, paw-paw (papaya) and guava trees – the perfect place to relax. There, I had a caretaker called Cement and one day he had to leave for the Copperbelt. He left me in the care of his wife, who was beautiful and young and shapely; she was about eighteen. He never returned home in the time I was there. For weeks I was with this exotic African woman, who would stand around in my kitchen, often very provocatively. African women seemed to have a way of tilting their hips naturally, in a very inviting way, and I’d often feel the animal in me return in that kitchen. Looking back I don’t know how I resisted. She seemed interested in doing something with me, but in spite of her seductiveness and her African curves, I didn’t have the courage to make the first move. There was no communication between us, because she didn’t speak any English, which might have made it easier for me had I gone for it. Truth be told, I was totally inexperienced sexually, and later I regretted not being bolder. All these years later, I still think of it and have considered it a missed opportunity in my development as a man. Cigarini… come on!
Johnny Cigarini Page 4