2004 - Mimi and Toutou Go Forth

by Giles Foden

  By then it was about 3 PM, but there was no time for celebration. Belching smoke, the two locomotives tugged their eight-ton burdens further down the road, crashing and bumping and causing considerable consternation among the Africans who emerged from the bush to watch. Eyed at first with fear, then with wonder or simple curiosity, Spicer’s team pushed on up that seemingly interminable mountain road. The lorry went on ahead with a small team to erect tents and prepare the evening meal, lighting a fire to welcome the workers and ward off wild animals.

  They had almost reached the camping point, six miles from the railhead, when disaster struck again. Mimi ‘slocomotive slipped off the edge of the road and began to fall away, the earthwork sliding to one side, unable to carry the engine’s weight. Stuck at an angle, the tractor had to be disconnected from Mimi again and pulled by cable by the other engine until she was upright once more. The expedition continued a little further and then at last they could camp for the night.

  It had been an exhausting day and their troubles were increased by the discovery that the adapted trailers were starting to buckle under the weight of the boats, just like their predecessors. For once Spicer kept his cool, perhaps realising that his furious outbursts were bad for morale. He tried to remain calm and collected throughout the day’s difficulties, chain-smoking his personally monogrammed cigarettes—COMMANDER G. B. SPICER-SIMSON, R. N. printed in blue letters up the stem. He kept these in his revolver holster and also affected a long cigarette holder. Smoke wreathing his Vandyke beard, he went around encouraging the men, which they considered quite out of character.

  The days that followed were much the same, as they raced against the rains under the penetrating glare of the African sun. Curiously enough, says Spicer, ‘some of my men suffered from snow-blindness at this time,’ even though they were not far from the Equator. The fact was, he noted, ‘that the whole of the surface soil in the district is full of mica, and the brilliance of the reflection of the sun off that material produced the same effect as snow’. Moreover, ‘having cut down the trees we were deprived of their shade’.

  Another obstacle they had to overcome was wandering swamps—‘swamps which actually move about’, as Spicer mysteriously put it. They look like water lilies on the surface of rivers (the Belgians called them ‘water-cabbage’) and sometimes grew in such bulk that ‘they form a kind of barrage’ until the force of the water rolls them up and deposits them on the shore. ‘Sometimes when we had built our road we found that it was in the path of one of these wandering swamps, and the traction engines could not get through because their fire-boxes were so low that the fire would have been put out. Then we had to build another road round the swamp.’

  Tormented by insect bites, the expedition pulled and pushed their way through the bush. Up ahead the native carriers could be heard singing as they jogged along behind the lorry, carrying crates and bundles on their heads. The locomotives heaved and panted in their wake and yet more tribesmen emerged from the bush to stare at the steel monsters. Bringing fruit and vegetables and chickens and goats as gifts, they were held spellbound by the magic of cable and harness and the lurching, heaving motion of the tractors and Mimi and Toutou.

  Shankland goes into some technical detail about these locomotives, which had been made by Barrels of Thetford and Fowlers of Leeds. They could do 90 miles a day on a good road, apparendy, and had been customised for working in Africa. ‘To guard against sparks setting the bush alight,’ writes Shankland, ‘they had ashpans specially constructed to hold water, and baffles and screens fitted to the smoke-boxes. They seemed to have been well cared for, and every bit of brass about them glowed like polished gold.’ Although Spicer later described them as ‘ordinary agricultural traction engines’, Wainwright—who was in special charge of the tractors—cooed over the two machines as if they were a pair of oversized kittens.

  The engines were hardly kittens when it came to noise, however. Their growling, jerking passage, says Magee, disturbed ‘the slumbers of herds of elephants and other denizens of the bush…driving them from their lairs’. Bored with their tinned bully beef, some members of the expedition shot buck, wild pig and guinea fowl for the pot. At night could be heard, as if registering his own dietary interests, the roars of a particular lion—perhaps one of the black-maned ones for which the Katanga was once famous—who dogged their every step.

  After building yet more causeways and levering the engines out of the holes into which they invariably became stuck every day, Spicer’s men finally reached the village of Mwenda Mkosi on 28 August. They had covered the 30 miles from Fungurume in ten days. It was pretty good going, but they still had more than a hundred miles to go, and they hadn’t even begun the climb into the mountains yet.

  As they entered Mwenda Mkosi—a typical kraal of straw-roofed huts arranged in a rough circle—the trailers carrying Mimi and Toutou finally collapsed. Spicer had anticipated this. He ordered Wainwright and Cross to bring forward the locomotives’ fuel trailers and raid them for their undercarriages. It meant the expedition halting at the village for a while.

  They made their camp near a river, about half a mile from Mwenda Mkosi. Every evening Dr Hanschell led a party of Africans to draw water in five-gallon oil drums, which were then boiled over the camp fires to make tea and to fill their water bottles. These were covered in felt to keep them cool and they were the men’s constant companions for the next few weeks, knocking at their thighs as they walked. Tea, which they all sat round drinking on folding tables and chairs, was the highlight of the day. ‘Tubby’ Eastwood had acquired a chimpanzee during the journey, which he christened Josephine. The Paymaster’s servant, Marapandi, would often find himself serving tea and bread and butter to Josephine as well as Eastwood.

  The bread, says Shankland, was not very pleasant because the self-raising flour that was part of the expedition’s supplies was no good. ‘Eastwood made inquiries around and found that not one of the party knew how to use it. Spicer was indignant. He called them a bunch of land crabs and asserted that every seaman knew how to make bread, with self-raising flour or without. He gave the cooks precise instructions how to do it, but the result was the same—hard biscuit.’

  Spicer shrugged it off as he shrugged off everything else, with a wave of his lion-handled fly-whisk. All that mattered now was getting through to Lake Tanganyika. Every night the ngoma or African tom-tom broadcast this single-minded goal through the primeval forest, as one man’s manifest destiny was related from tribe to tribe. The story of Spicer’s mission went through ever more fantastic permutations, mile after mile, beat after beat, until, by the time it reached the Holo-holo living on the lakeshore, Spicer had been elevated to something like a god.

  SEVEN

  While they were held up at Mwenda Mkosi some expedition members pursued other tasks. Tyrer, the Piccadilly Johnny with the monocle, was sent on ahead to make further surveys of the route. Meanwhile, the lower ranks were put to work splitting up the 20 tons of meal that had hitherto been carried in the steam engines’ trailers. The carriers, who now numbered almost a thousand, would each have to bear an extra load. Meal (known asposho) was made from the ground root of the cassava plant and was their daily food ration.

  According to Magee, many of the tribes that supplied the porterage were former cannibals, though the tone of one caption in his National Geographic article bears all the hallmarks of imperialist fantasy: The ordinary diet of the native consists of a manioc or cassava flour made into a paste, and a meat stew concocted of everything, from ants and grasshoppers up to man. Indeed, ‘food that once talked’ is a special delicacy, though indulged in but secretly and rarely nowadays.

  As well as food, the porters had to carry a great many boxes and crates. These included Spicer’s folding X-pattern camp bed (complete with mosquito net) and several washstands with enamel basins and canvas covers. There was also a large tin bath with a lid and canteens for plates and cutlery. Cups and plates had covers of green baize to prevent breakages. E
very night large ‘chaguls’—canvas water-bags about the size of a Labrador dog—were hung in the trees filled with leftover water from Dr Hanschell’s boiling operation. There were also the guns to carry, which were stored in padlocked steel boxes.

  The doctor’s medicines added to this considerable load. A typical medicine chest of the period contained:

  Quinine bihydrochloride in 5 grain tabloids.

  Potassium permanganate solids.

  Boracic acid and zinc sulphate solids.

  Iodoform powder.

  Tincture of iodine.

  Aspirin tabloids.

  Zinc ointment.

  Epsom salts.

  Lint, cotton-wool, iodoform gauze (unbleached), bandages, scalpel, dissecting and dressing scissors, artery forceps, silk ligatures, surgical needles, a glass syringe, a one-ounce measure, a probe and a vulcanite dredger.

  At Mwenda Mkosi Dr Hanschell was frequently consulted by the locals, who came to him in droves. ‘When they heard of the Great Medicine Chief,’ recalls Magee, ‘the natives nocked from their villages, bringing their sick and their lame with them. But the doctor could attend to only a few, as his supplies of hospital requisites was limited’. Fortunately, adds Shankland, ‘the adult natives mostly wanted purging pills [laxatives]. Those who had tried them brought their friends along for some, explaining with expressive pantomime their wonderful effect. Each received a large white pill and a small blue one with a cup of water, and the others watched solemnly while he swallowed them.’

  A good deal of shooting took place. The doctor himself bagged two guinea fowl and more intrepid souls brought back bigger game, including eland and impala and the blue wildebeest or brindled gnu (Connochaetes taurinus), which was a feature of the region. It is probable that some zebra were shot and their flesh fed to the porters. Zebra fat was also used as a dubbin substitute to grease boots on safaris and perhaps some members of the expedition kept the animals’ skins, which were not only pleasing to the eye but had some domestic use. They would have taken some curing, however. A Tanganyika government handbook dated 15 years after the expedition notes that ‘The hide looks well on the floor, but it requires endless labour to reduce it to pliability.’ It adds that ‘The noses make pretty slippers.’

  Buffalo was another favourite and Spicer hoped to bag one when he set out from camp one morning with a shotgun in one hand and a rifle in the other. He said he would be back for lunch, but as Shankland reports: ‘He wasn’t. By and by, about three in the afternoon, Dudley took out a search party and found him not far from the camp, sitting on top of a large anthill. His clothes were torn, he was badly scratched and in a vile temper.

  ‘‘Why has nobody heard my shots?’ bellowed Spicer from his mound of dried earth. ‘Doesn’t anybody keep watch?’’

  It is astonishing that he caught nothing whatsoever, for as Magee’s article points out, in those days it was ‘a simple matter to step out into the teeming jungles or prairies of Africa and obtain an unlimited supply of game for food’.

  Spicer’s inability to bag any game at all was yet another reason for his men to laugh at him behind his back. The situation was given added piquancy by the fact that he had lately been setting up targets for the men to fire at, to improve their aim when the day of battle finally came.

  ‘It’s easily seen,’ Spicer had remarked to Dr Hanschell while watching them, ‘that none of these men were trained in sail. When I was a midshipman in the training ship Volage, I would stand on the quarterdeck with a rifle and shatter a botde, six times out of six, that was swinging from the weather yard-arm.’

  One day—the doctor told Shankland during the long interviews they conducted in London’s Muswell Hill in the early 1960s—a young ox was brought into camp. Spicer took it upon himself to shoot the animal, calling for Waterhouse to bring him a rifle and load it. Various members of the camp accumulated to watch the slaughter. Spicer’s first shot, taken from a standing position, disappeared into the nearby bush. He crouched closer to the oblivious beast, which was munching grass about three yards away, and fired again. The shot hit one of its horns, making it vibrate with a thrumming noise.

  Turning towards Spicer, the ox ‘lowered its horns and waved its tail in the air. He got up, very red in the face, stood right in front of it and fired a bullet into its forehead at point blank range. It fell to the ground at his feet.’

  ‘It’s just the same with buffalo,’ said Spicer as he handed the rifle to Waterhouse. ‘You’ve got to face up to them. It’s only when they lower their heads to charge that they expose the vital spot!’

  They stayed for five days at Mwenda Mkosi before the trailers were ready. During this period Dr Hanschell was called out to treat a Greek pedlar who had come down with tick fever and was laid up at a Belgian government rest house. He made the eight-mile trip on a bicycle and was chased by a pack of baboons for almost the entire journey. He was terrified as they bowled along beside him, grunting and baring their teeth. But he arrived safely and gave the Greek—‘a tall thin bearded white man with fierce glaring eyes, yellow face and long black finger-nails’—an injection, then collected the ticks stuck to the walls in a tobacco tin.

  Back at camp, he told Spicer of his ordeal with the baboons. Spicer was unsympathetic and launched into a tale of how he used to shoot them from his survey boat going up the Gambia River, to prevent them raiding peanut plantations, which they dug up with their claws.

  ‘We saw hundreds of them,’ he said. ‘I got tired of firing at them with a rifle, only one round at a time, so I changed over to my double-barrelled shotgun. I bagged so many with buckshot that I had a letter of commendation from the Governor. I preserved the pelts of the finest in Cooper’s Sheep Dip—there’s lots of it out in the Gambia you know—and I had a fur coat with a little cap to match made of them for my wife. It was the envy of all the other women! None of them could get one like it!’

  The Greek pedlar—or smous, as they are known in South Africa—turned up at Mwenda Mkosi village a few days later, bringing imitation wrist-watches, tinned meat and old clothes. According to Shankland, one of the expedition’s bearers bought a gold-laced tunic that had once adorned a hussar.

  ‘Who’s that dirty stiff walking about the camp?’ asked Spicer, on seeing the pedlar.

  Dr Hanschell explained about his mercy mission into the bush.

  ‘You don’t deserve much credit for keeping a thing like that alive!’ said Spicer, walking away.

  Falling into conversation with the Greek, the doctor asked him if he understood the mysteries of self-raising flour. He did and showed the cooks, and thenceforth the bread rose and the expedition’s diet improved.

  Spirits rose, too, on 2 September when the ox-teams arrived, having been driven all the way up from South Africa:

  Three columns of dust were seen coming along the road, [writes Shankland] and out of the dust three wagons appeared, each drawn by eight pairs of oxen. They were magnificent beasts with wide upturned horns which measured six feet from tip to tip. The leading teams were driven by a tall young Boer wearing a broad-brimmed hat, open shirt and long dust-coloured trousers. He walked beside the first wagon, shouting continuously and cracking a long whip: it was so long that he could reach any of the oxen without leaving his position. A Zulu ‘Voorlooper’ walked in front, guiding the team by means of a leather thong, or ‘riem’, attached to the horns of the leading oxen.

  As luck would have it, the trailers were ready on the same day the oxen arrived. This time without the benefit of Monsieur’s crane, Wainwright anxiously supervised the lifting of Mimi and Toutou on to the trailers, which were now made up of parts from three separate vehicles. Mimi was first to be swung up in slings from tripods.

  Using block and tackle and the steam engines’ cables for traction, Wainwright carefully lowered the ropes in his pulleys until Mimi hung above her newly fashioned carriage and then, ever so gently, settled her down.

  The following morning, Mimi and Toutou went forth: although not at
the front of the caravan, but at the back, for they were the slowest of the party. The lorry went first, ferrying back water from streams up ahead in case the boilers should run out. Next came the African porters with their supplemented loads, chanting as they planted one foot in front of the other, followed by the askaris marching at an easy pace—then the extended families of both: wives with babies wrapped in cloths on their back and young children capering and calling out. The oxen came next, then finally the traction engines pulling Mimi and Toutou, puffing away as they thundered over the uneven ground, which a dozen labourers busily strewed with branches in a vain attempt to improve the going.

  One thing that gave them trouble was the ant-lion, a small ant-eating insect. It dug cone-like holes in sandy ground into which ants would tumble. Unable to climb up the rolling sides of the cone, they would then be consumed by the horned and whiskered bandit which emerged from the bottom of the hole. Spicer was fascinated by them: ‘These holes would measure as much as 3½ feet in diameter, and were usually of some depth. Occasionally they were near the surface and, if any weight was placed on them they gave way. The danger was that, if a wheel dropped into one of these holes, the propeller shaft of the boat, which projected well below the stern, might be damaged. Eventually we got the natives to tap the ground ahead; with their finer senses, they could scrape off the surface growth, thus marking the places to be avoided.’

  Despite the irregular surface, the new trailers held firm. The cables took the strain and the two giant Scots, Tait and Mollison, walked alongside, making sure that the limbs of overhanging trees did not clip the boats’ rudders or tear loose the forecastles. Further up the ragged line, the Boer driver cracked his whip, yelling in Afrikaans when the oxen slipped and floundered. As the party moved forwards, the men and animals and machines made a procession several miles long, the smokestacks of the tractors and dust-clouds from the oxen marking its passage from afar. And so all day long, and for days afterwards, Mimi and Toutou went forth.