Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Horatio Clare
Dedication
Title Page
Preface
Chapter 1: South Africa: Travelling Companions
Chapter 2: Namibian Roads
Chapter 3: Somewhere Like Zambia
Chapter 4: Congo–Brazzaville: A Quiet Little Place
Chapter 5: The Confines of Cameroon
Chapter 6: Nigeria: Gulf of Oil, Coast of Slaves
Chapter 7: Niger: A Quiet Little War
Chapter 8: The Walls of Algiers
Chapter 9: Moroccan Tricks
Chapter 10: Gibraltar to Madrid: The Rock and the Line
Chapter 11: South to North: Barcelona to Calais
Chapter 12: A Swallow Summer: England and Wales
Index
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Copyright
About the Book
From the slums of Cape Town to the palaces of Algiers, through Pygmy villages where pineapples grow wild, to the Gulf of Guinea where the sea blazes with oil flares, across two continents and fourteen countries – this epic journey is nothing to swallows, they do it twice a year. But for Horatio Clare, writer and birdwatcher, it is the expedition of a lifetime. Along the way he discovers old empires and modern tribes, a witch-doctor’s recipe for stewed swallow, explains how to travel without money or a passport, and describes a terrifying incident involving three Spanish soldiers and a tiny orange dog. By trains, motorbikes, canoes, one camel and three ships, Clare follows the swallows from reed beds in South Africa, where millions roost in February, to a barn in Wales, where a pair nest in May.
About the Author
Horatio Clare is the author of Running for the Hills, Sicily: Through Writer’s Eyes and Truant: Notes from the Slippery Slope. Running for the Hills was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award and shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. A radio producer, contributor and journalist, Horatio has written about Ethiopia, Namibia and Morocco, and now divides his time between South Wales, London and Lancashire. He was awarded a Somerset Maugham Award for the writing of this book.
www.horatioclare.co.uk
ALSO BY HORATIO CLARE
Running for the Hills
Truant: Notes from the Slippery Slope
Sicily: Through Writer’s Eyes
Dedicated to the memory of Deon Glover
A Single Swallow
Following the Migration from
South Africa to South Wales
Horatio Clare
Preface
SOME YEARS AGO I sat on the tarmac at Bole airport in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, talking to a soldier. We had been chatting about not much for a little while when his officer approached. This man’s skin was very black and his eyes were hot, red and suspicious. He shouted at the soldier in Amharic, and then he barked at me:
‘Where are you from?’
‘The UK,’ I said, ‘I am British.’
I was squinting up at him against the light. My face was sunburned.
‘No,’ he said, angrily, as if his suspicions had been confirmed. He jabbed a finger at me.
‘You are Russian,’ he said, scornfully.
I stuttered. The officer was right, in a way. My father’s mother was a White Russian who fled the revolution, with her mother. She met my grandfather in Shanghai. Over half a century later Russian soldiers, ‘advisers’, had come to Ethiopia to assist the Marxist dictator, Mengistu: this officer must have recognised their fair hair, their sunburned skin and Slavic features in me. As I struggled to pacify the officer I felt a deep blush, as much in me as on my skin. Nothing I could say would erase my face or the story it told him. It was the only time I have felt the fear and humiliation so many have known, of being condemned for the tribe you belong to, of being unable to escape or disguise your ethnicity and the perceived sins of your people.
Yet, for all the bitterness this man felt against the Russians with whom I shared an ancestry, and for all his evident suspicion of what I had been doing – talking to his soldier, spying, perhaps, inveigling myself into the confidence of the farmer’s boy who I had discovered behind the dusty uniform and the hefted gun – I was doing nothing more subversive, as I sat on the tarmac, waiting for a plane, than watching birds.
‘There are no frontiers in the sky,’ my mother was fond of saying, quoting T. H. White, who gives the words to a goose in The Sword in the Stone. I was brought up to believe that all people were equal. Opposition to prejudice and discrimination was a family tradition, I told myself, proudly, when I was young: my father had been banned from South Africa, where he grew up, for opposing the Apartheid regime. As a child of the Cold War I covertly supported the Russians, when I learned I was quarter Russian, and though I had never been to South Africa, I believed – romanticising freely – that the blood of a South African freedom fighter ran also in my veins. My parents divorced when I was seven; seeing little of my father made him all the more heroic to me.
An imagined Africa was part of the landscape of my childhood. We lived high up on a sheep farm in South Wales; we had a hill at our back, rearing over the house, and a view across the valley to a range of mountains which carved the far skyline into waves, cuts and crests.
‘It looks just like Africa,’ my mother said (she had been to Kenya), and then she quoted Karen Blixen: ‘“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills . . .”’
And we had visitors from Africa, too. They nested in the Big Barn and perched on the telephone wire; they filled the whole summer with their comings and goings and their twittering calls.
‘Look! The swallows are back!’ we said, when they arrived, and ‘Ah, the swallows are going,’ my mother announced, with a kind of mourning, in the autumn, when they gathered on the wires.
She marvelled at the great distances the birds would travel, and wondered at what they would see, on their journey to Africa, and we bade them farewell, and hoped that they would return safely.
When we moved down to the foot of the mountain the house we bought had an attic with an unsafe floor, broken windows and swallows’ nests on its beams.
‘It was one of the reasons I chose it,’ my mother said.
She often said she would like to be a swallow when she died, which I understood: in the back of your mind, in a dreamy way, you could not help but want to go with them. In your hand a swallow weighs little more than a full fountain pen, yet twice every year it makes a journey of a scale and precision unmatched by our mightiest machines. Theirs is an extraordinary existence, even by the standards of birds.
The Cold War ended, and apartheid was swept away. I no longer ‘support the Russians’, and have grown out of claiming my father’s deeds as my own. Although our valley is little changed, the farm I grew up in is no longer a ramshackle smallholding but a comfortable home for a retired couple. The buildings have been modernised: only the Big Barn is still as it was, and every year the swallows still come and go. But though the lives of the children of our valley are now more pressured and less isolated than those of my brother and I, at root the expectations of the young, and what is expected of them, are perhaps much as they were. If we do not stay on our farms, and eventualy take them over from our parents, then we are supposed to go out into the world, make our fortunes – or at least our own way – find someone to love, and put down roots. By the age of thirty-three I had not honoured this tradition. I had not settled down with anyone, nor had children. I had no home of my own.
One bright morning in the late summer of last year, I opened an upstairs window and startled five swallows on a wire. They were only a couple of feet away and
taken completely by surprise. In the instant before they leapt into the air I saw them in vivid detail: the red patches, like the masks worn by medieval knights, covering their faces and chests; their dark blue backs, creamy underparts and the marbled span between their long tail feathers. That was all it was, and I did not know it, but everything that followed began then.
Within a couple of days of seeing the birds I had a plan, a scheme for an adventure and an education. In January the swallows would be in their wintering grounds, thousands of miles away in the heat of the South African summer: I resolved to fly to South Africa, find the birds and follow them all the way home. I would trace the flight of migrating birds between the South Africa my father came from and the Welsh hillside where my mother raised me. I would test the beliefs that I had been taught: that people, regardless of creeds and colours, are equal; I would rely on the best of the oldest of humankind’s traditions: kindness to strangers. By devoting myself to one thing, these birds, I fantasised that I might discover – or at least understand better, in microcosm – something of the working of the world. And beyond this, by following swallows, I hoped to put down a marker on my own life, something to separate the boy-man I was from the man I wanted to become.
I spared no expense on preparation: everything I had I threw at visas, vaccinations and equipment for the expedition. At the same time I embarked on a crash-course of research into swallows. It soon became clear that I had had no idea of how extraordinary were the creatures I blithely planned to follow, or how powerful, old and strange are the relationships between us and them. As they gathered on the wires, ready for their departure, I stared at them, and wondered what they were saying.
CHAPTER 1
South Africa: Travelling Companions
South Africa: Travelling Companions
I AM INKONJANI, the lightning bird, the breaker of cliffs; I am the bird that brings the rain. My name is Nyankalema, the one who never gets tired; I am Tififiliste, I am Ifilelis, you have heard me say my names. I am Giri Giri, a magical charm: if you could catch and eat me you would be protected from car smashes, plane crashes, boating accidents and train wrecks, proofed against all the perils of the road – but only for five years!
For I am the snapper-up, the here-and-not-here. Through me Isis crossed from life to death to visit her murdered beloved, Osiris. (One night several thousand years ago I fluttered around his remains, walled up in his column in Byblos.) I am sacred, holy, a sign of God’s grace. I put out the fire in the Temple in Jerusalem – have you not seen me scoop up water as I go?
My name is Sisampema (in Kwangali) and Lefokotsane, and Malinkama, as they know me in South Soto. Swael is my Afrikaaner name. The Shona people say ‘Nyanganyena!’ when they see me (you have nearly heard that before), like ‘Nyenga’, which the Tsonga people say. (The Tsonga also call me Mbwalana – in many languages I am called two things.) The Xhosa call out ‘Udilhashe!’, ‘Ulelizapholo!’, and they must be very fond of me, or know me well, because they also know me as the Lightning Bird and say ‘Inkonjane!’, which is my Zulu name.
Here in the south of Africa I am intaka zomzi, a bird of the home. None of the Nguni peoples would ever harm me, because I bear a message from their ancestors. Life in the next world is richer, better: none who honour me should despair.
‘The Zulus say,’ my father said, thoughtfully, when I told him my plan, ‘that those who follow the swallows never come back.’
That frightened me. I began to think of ways around it: perhaps the Zulus mean that if you follow them from what is now Kwa-Zulu Natal you will not go back to Kwa-Zulu Natal. Well that is all right, I am not going to Kwa-Zulu Natal, I told myself. But I could not help thinking about it.
Somewhere on a cape of Africa, in a tropic of half-imagined time, where proud people lived in kraals, ruled by leaders great and terrible, Mzilikaze, Chaka, who led them to the wars in impis, whose footsteps shook the earth itself, one day someone, perhaps a young man, told his family he was going to follow the Inkonjani and went away with them, just before the summer ended and the storms of winter came. Saying farewell to his friends and passing on foot from village to village, whatever trail he left of memories and encounters, whatever snatches of news came back to his family, if he had one, or to his friends, if they lived, nothing of him survives but a certainty in a saying. Those who follow the swallows . . . He cannot have been the only one.
Apart from very rare exceptions all the swallows of the north flee south before the winter. Born in the high latitudes in early summer, they fly through an autumn which heats and brightens to a sea, then becomes a desert. The south-bound route for British birds runs in a rough line from Brighton to Barcelona to Cape Town, cutting corners around the Gulf of Guinea. (If the map of Africa is an elephant they go straight across its ear and slide down its trunk.) They fly over plains of permanent sun to forests of constant rain; across glades and hills and wooded worlds of mist, through the valleys of rivers, some copper, some green, to the grasslands, the vast savannahs towards the end of the land, and the veldts and the vleis of southern Africa. Here they base themselves near lakes, marshes and rivers, where they roost.
Arriving in November at the beginning of the southern summer, the swallows remain in the south until just before the onset of winter in February and early March. They spend their time here eating, travelling a bit and roosting in large flocks. They court a little, and compete perhaps for food, though the southern African summer does not lack flies. They certainly do not prospect for nest sites, mate, build, lay, incubate, rear young or defend territory: all this they save for the north.
To follow the birds from south to north I constructed a route plan entirely based on two sentences, from the best and most recent book on swallows from a British perspective, The Barn Swallow by Angela Turner.
The return migration in spring is more direct [than the southerly autumn route]. There are then more records from Algeria and Tunisia than in the autumn and more from the central Mediterranean between the Balearics and Italy. British Barn Swallows move north through Europe along the eastern coast of Spain and the western coast of France . . .
My route, based on the paragraph above, should therefore link South Africa, Algeria and Wales, bearing north-north-west.
The swallow pages of The Migration Atlas of British birds include a map showing Africa and Europe, and a curvaceous, red, many-tailed arrow joining the Republic of South Africa to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This is a computer-plot, made from joining the dots of ring recoveries. (Trapping swallows, ringing them and recording where those rings are recovered, either on birds trapped for a second time, or found dead, is still the only way in which ornithologists are able to track their movements.) I stared at it, imagining a vast wind-tunnel of swallows hurtling diagonally up the globe.
Our two species, swallows and humans, have lived alongside each other throughout recorded time. The earliest recorded instance of swallows and men living together is a 15,000-year-old nest in a cave in Derbyshire – a cave which was also inhabited by man. Amazingly, we who live and work by information superhighways do not know very much more about swallows than did Gilbert White in 1789, when he recorded the then common speculation that they spent the winters clinging together in the mud at the bottoms of European rivers and ponds. They were supposed to join claw to claw, beak to beak, and slide down the reeds in which they roosted. In his dictionary Dr Johnson defined ‘Conglobulate’ as hanging together in clumps, as swallows were supposed to do. The stories that gave rise to this belief remain a puzzle. Two hundred years before White, Olaus Magnus wrote:
when winter cometh [. . .] in the northern waters fishermen oftentimes by chance draw up in their nets an abundance of Swallows, hanging together like a conglomerated mass . . .
There are stories from Germany which go further, telling of birds recovered in this manner which came out of ‘hibernation’ in the warmth of a fisherman’s house and flew around the room before expiring.
How can this be explained? A kind of cryogenic lightning, like the icy winter of 1682–3, which froze the Thames for two months? Perhaps speculation is half the pleasure of the amateur birdwatcher; if so, we must thank professional ornithology for the other half.
The swallow and martin family, Hirundindae, occur almost everywhere on earth except for the polar caps. In the northern summer the Barn Swallow might be found anywhere in Eurasia, from the furthest west of Ireland to the Central Himalayas, and has a North American cousin, very little different, which breeds from Hudson Bay to Baja California and migrates to Mexico. They all follow the same seasonal tides, coming and going, breeding in the north. There are a great many kinds of swallow along the migration route of the Barn Swallow: Mosque Swallows, Angolan Swallows, Greater Striped Swallows, Red-Rumped Swallows, Pearl-Breasted Swallows, not to mention the swifts and martins. Some of these creatures travel half the world twice a year, others do not migrate, but merely shuffle around their preferred parts of the globe.
Swallows do not yet submit to satellite tracking: they are too small and fly too far for the technology of the time of writing. Ornithologists do not yet have a transmitter which would last the time the migration takes, and still allow the birds to fly – the batteries are too big. The only way to follow them, therefore, is to go with them.
But they are fast, so fast: 4 metres per second in low gear, 14 metres per second at top speed. Depending on wind, route and inclination they can cover 300 kilometres in a day. They can do the entire trip in twenty-seven days – perhaps less. My plan was to leave South Africa with the vanguard of the migration, and to arrive with the main body, or even with the tail-enders. In this way I hoped to travel with the migration, rather than trying to keep pace with individual birds. My timetable was built on a departure from South Africa at the beginning of February and an arrival in Britain around the middle of April, when most birds should be making their landfalls.
A Single Swallow Page 1