by Al Venter
I was fascinated by the historical impact of the area, especially what that tiny band of settlers who had followed in the wake of Cecil John Rhodes’ dream had achieved. There were lots of stories of these rugged, tough pioneers, almost all of them frontiersman like Alan Wilson and his Shangani Patrol … and their bloody and terrible end under the spears of Lobengula’s Ndebele warriors. There was a great lore, a fine historical tradition in all those tales that were recounted around the fire in the evenings, and I was fascinated. It was the same when my grandmother introduced me to the history of the Zulu people and their tribal cousins, the Ndebele, who moved northwards into Rhodesia long before the white man got there.
Early Rhodesian Department of Information photo of troops on deployment in the bush. Photo: Original Rhodesian government recruiting photo
It was possibly these interests that helped give Neall the ease with which he later crossed racial and social barriers, some real, some imagined, but strong, for all that. Race, then, was a feature of life in South Africa in the days of apartheid, and, while far less rigid and formalized in the Rhodesia of his youth, he recalls today that you really couldn’t miss the innuendos that involved ‘them and us’.
Among some of the first of the historic tales that young Neall can recall hearing was one told to him in the late 1950s about what was to become known as the ‘First Chimurenga War’, or the first liberation struggle of Rhodesia’s black population. As with similar rebellions against white settler communities in German-ruled Tanganyika and what later became known as South-West Africa before the start of the First World War, Rhodesia’s Chimurenga was an uprising against the white settlers of Rhodes’ British South Africa Company.
Most of it, as I recall, was passed on to us young people from the victors’ (white) side … but then that is how history usually emerges, kind of like ‘to the victor the spoils’. They used to have military tattoos at the Bulawayo Showground, with re-enactments of the mounted patrols on their horses, all very well done and actually quite impressive. Then, the African Impis—the black warriors in their proud headdresses, hardened cow-hide shields and assegais—would surround them, and there would be lots of firing and yelling ‘and the whiteys would see their gats. [An Afrikaans expression, impolitely translated as ‘seeing their arses’.]
Those family picnics in the magnificent Matopo Hills also gave Neall what he calls ‘the start of my love for the bush’.
We looked for what we called the ‘Resurrection Plant’. You found it in Rhodesia on the hills; it never totally dies. It’s a growth that survives on top of a rock in the dry winter months, just a blackened twig, but you place that ‘dead’ twig in a glass of water, and in just a couple of days, its leaves begin to sprout … that’s the Resurrection Plant.
Neall had one older brother, Peter, whom he never knew: Peter had drowned ‘just before I was born—some six months before’. His younger brother Ian today lives in Johannesburg, while his sister Janine (they were born 18 months apart) is married and is in Australia. The family remains in contact and despite distance—he is in Afghanistan most of the time these days—they stay close.
When he was old enough, Neall was sent to Hillside Junior School, which soon enough taught him about the unpleasant consequences of human relationships going awry.
There was a gang of us boys; we used to cycle home together. But it was pretty brutal. If one member of the gang fell out, there would be a fight, either with the leader of the mob, or with someone whom he nominated, in a little ‘arena’ among the rocks. One might have had absolutely no quarrel with that individual, but one still had to tough it out and it could sometimes be quite vicious.
‘From that came my hatred of bullying’, he says thoughtfully. Is it too much of a psychological leap to wonder whether this realization would, in future decades, lead Neall Ellis to feel no qualms about meting out swift and terminal justice to those, such as Foday Sankoh’s brutal killers in Sierra Leone, whose behaviour had taken them beyond the bounds of normal humanity?
In other ways, growing up in Rhodesia was a marvellous, privileged existence, with a vast hinterland waiting to be discovered and unending promises for the future. There was barely a family who didn’t have at least one servant—some of Neall’s wealthy friends had four, or even six, one for the garden, perhaps two for the kitchen, a domestic worker for bedrooms and cleaning and perhaps a driver who would take the children to school each morning and fetch them later in the day. It was an idyllic life.
That their country was landlocked didn’t keep them from the sea either. Families would sometimes drive, or take the then extremely efficient rail link to South Africa’s Indian Ocean coastline and its Natal beaches. So many families would gravitate to Cape Town during the Southern hemisphere summer holidays that there was even a resort near Simonstown which was for many years called Rhodesia by the Sea.
For the young Neall, however, holidays generally meant a much shorter journey. His maternal grandmother, Petronella, had divorced Neall’s Hyams grandfather and married Dougal Nelson, a Scot. They lived in Tzaneen, in the Northern Transvaal (now the Limpopo Province of South Africa), and farmed citrus fruits and bananas. They also made a home from home for their visiting grandchildren, a welcome that Neall still recalls with delight. The same applied when the Nelsons sold the farm and moved to Mooketsi, after grandmother Petronella started having health problems from smoking too many of the then-popular Springbok cigarettes.
Life was not always tranquil, however. One day in Tzaneen, he remembers, they were playing and his sister had the role of ‘madam’ and he was the ‘garden boy’.
I swung the hoe and although it was unintentional, it was a vicious blow and I cut open her head. My granny could be rather a fierce woman and I recall running away and hiding in the bush … but grandmother represented overwhelming odds and it was futile to resist and she meted out swift justice, much more efficiently than my mother… .
He has many happy memories of his time there as well:
We would always spend our school holidays there. On the farm we drank fresh milk but not much else but good food and healthy living: there was no electricity, no television, only Springbok Radio to listen to.
He well remembers the British series ‘Men from the Ministry’.
Meantime, other interests also took his fancy. ‘Grandmother possessed a fine collection of classical music—all old 78 vinyl records—which we played on a battery-operated gramophone’. Neall’s eclectic tastes in music remains a feature of his life.
‘Those were great times. We used to go into the bush and collect kapok, a form of vegetable down, from the seedpods of the kapok trees to fill our pillows.’ He also learned to collect mushrooms—while discarding unsuitable varieties—and today, in his sixties, he can still be seen running around when circumstances allow and inquiring from local residents about spots where edible mushrooms might be found.
‘Yes, I am rather interested in mushrooms. If I go into the Knysna Forest, I’ll pick them to eat, or to dry for cooking later.’
From Mooketsi, young Neall could look out of the kitchen window towards the Modjadji Hills and marvel at the lightning strikes flickering around the surrounding peaks. They were caused by the incredible electrical storms, which are always a summer feature of the region. ‘Perhaps that’s why I don’t mind loud bangs’, Neall comments thoughtfully.
Neall’s uncle regularly hunted for guinea fowl and bush pig, all of which supplemented the family’s regular diet.
‘He took me out into the bush with him. Grandmother had an old Richards and Harrington single-barrel shotgun with a hammer action that could nip you sharply if you weren’t too careful. There was also a .22 Savage rifle: I’ve still got them both,’ says Neall, who from the age of ten was allowed by his grandmother to go out alone and hunt.
Wildlife in the area was not always for hunting and eating. ‘I’ll never forget the snakes, particularly at Mooketsi … cobras—lots of them and puff adders. There were als
o twig snakes and boomslangs …’ he recalls thoughtfully. ‘A black fellow who I got to know quite well taught me about snakes, and also my grandmother, who had a reference library of her own with some quite old books, and I learned a lot about these creatures from them as well.’
As he reminisces, life—and death—could be pretty rough at times, and in those days people simply had to learn from a young age how to accept responsibility and look after themselves … and, of course, others.
One time, one of the labourers’ wives got bitten by a snake—I was about 14 at the time—and grandmother gave me the snakebite serum and told me to go and find out if the woman had actually been bitten by a poisonous snake and, if so, give her the necessary injection. Not that I’d ever used a syringe before … I realise now that had I actually injected her, it would probably have been the worst thing to do. For a start, I had no idea what species of snake it was, or even if there had been a snake to start with. I’m sure she lived, even though I didn’t give her the serum, because nobody complained.
Snakes weren’t the only danger in this remarkable Garden of Eden south of the Limpopo. ‘Grandmother had her own flock of geese and they could be formidable. There was a big gander called Shake and he guarded his flock with a passion … he’d nip you on your backside if you were slow and it was amazing how painful the bite could be’, Neall recalls.
There was also a large reservoir that was used to store water for the farm, where the young Ellis siblings used to swim. ‘But it was full of algae … and water scorpions and the little buggers used to bite you.’
Likewise, he says, there were some real scorpions—lots of them—and they were notorious for their ability to inflict one of the most painful of wounds. ‘I got stung by a scorpion on my foot, when I was barefoot at night; I heard a dog cry out—he must have been stung first—the next moment it got me. From then on I’ve hated scorpions.’
Back in Rhodesia, in 1962, Neall was sent to Plumtree High School, on the border with Botswana, which in its day was regarded as one of the best educational institutions of its kind in the region. ‘For me,’ recalls Neall, ‘it proved to be more of a “school for sadists”.’
Pupils were forced to undergo two-year periods of what they termed ‘initiation’. We call it hazing today and most of it is totally irrelevant to its supposed purposes of teaching new entrants how to live in harmony among themselves and with their supposedly more responsible elders. In his first pupils’ residence as a boarder—Hammond House, he recalls:
We weren’t allowed to have any hot water for those first two years … even though it got so cold during winter months that the bird bath outside froze solid and the outside water pipes would ice up. The seniors were allowed to beat us as well … or at least, it was kind of accepted that they had the freedom to do that.
In his view, it was no better that what was referred to as the ‘fagging system’ which had become institutionalised in many English Public Schools. In truth, he felt it could be both demeaning and painful at times …
Those bastards were absolutely dominant, a kind of law unto themselves. Although the masters were aware of what was going on, they did nothing because it had always been part of the “traditional system”. When I tried to protect some of the others, particularly a few of the younger boys, I reckon that was possibly the worst thing I could have done, because then the entire cabal descended on me.
On one occasion, when the pressure became too severe, he even ran away from school. ‘It just became too much for me to handle. Remember, I was still basically an immature youngster and, to this day, I react strongly to anybody who is a bully. Perhaps that is why I am invariably with the underdog, and have been so throughout my life.’
Nellis’ philosophy is basic. People who browbeat or intimidate those who are weaker than themselves, he maintains, are at the bottom of his chain of ethics and deserve harsh retaliation. ‘The unfortunate thing is that I tend to get emotionally involved in such fights, which has often placed me in a bad situation.’
Academically at Plumtree—which was what his schooling there was all about—Neall Ellis was regarded as being fairly ‘average’, and he admits that only some of the sports caught his fancy. ‘I tried cricket and rugby … and even some hockey, but none of that was for me. However I did well in swimming and water polo.’ Perhaps his sessions in his grandmother’s farm reservoir did end up paying a few dividends, because Neall ended up belonging to the school swimming team and getting his colours for water polo.
With his school days almost at an end, there were some serious decisions for the youthful Neall Ellis to make. The short-lived Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland had collapsed in disarray, with majority rule being quickly implemented in Northern Rhodesia (which was to become Zambia) while Nyasaland transmuted into Malawi. Everybody could see that Southern Rhodesia wouldn’t be far behind. However, with its far larger white ‘settler’ population (the majority of white residents were born there, rather than having emigrated from abroad), this was not a simple matter, as Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence in November 1964 was to show.
Typical Rhodesian security force patrol in contested area: normally a ‘Stick’ was composed of four soldiers or police reservists on active duty. Author's photo
With a limited armed guerrilla ‘struggle’ now underway, Neall was initially faced with the possibility of joining the Rhodesian Army. Had he done so, he would have served with many of the boys from his school. However, his father opposed this course of action and instead he went back to South Africa, this time to try his hand at a law degree course at the University of Natal.
While he should have spent more time than he did on his academic studies, his options rested largely on participation sports, which was why he got involved in canoeing, judo, weightlifting and rowing fours amongst other activities. He also began to show an interest in underwater pursuits, taking up diving and spearfishing as extracurricular activities.
His ‘other’ extra-mural activity centred on his girlfriend Barbara (or ‘Babs’, as everybody called her) back in Bulawayo. That meant hitchhiking back to Rhodesia every long weekend, no mean task at a distance of almost 1,000 miles. The good life couldn’t last, of course, and the end result of all these pursuits was that the aspirant sportsman didn’t even sit his last exam. ‘My father was mightily unimpressed’, he recalls.
At that point, young Neall was accepted for an officer training course in the Rhodesian Army, which meant he would be based at Gwelo. As the Rhodesian Army was looking for quality rather than quantity it was a particularly tough regimen:
We had two colour sergeants who, as the saying goes, ‘protected our interests’. One, by the name of Simpson, was a particularly hard customer from Yorkshire; the other, Nortje, an Afrikaner, was somebody we all regarded as a terror—he was also our drill sergeant. Nortje would march us until some of the guys dropped, but curiously, after that initial three-month of basics, he turned out to be quite a pleasant sort of fellow.
The routine was hard, with daily inspections to keep us on our toes. There would also be a lot of time spent on the range, polishing our so-called shooting skills. Having used firearms in the wild for almost as long as I could remember, I was pretty good at it. Still, we had our hiccups, and Nortje would taunt us with the comment: ‘I know what’s on your mind … you guys all want to shoot me, well go ahead and fire and see how I react’. He would also warn the men: ‘but beware if someone makes a mistake!’
Group punishment was termed ‘wildebeest’ and was a brutal rough-and-tough, no-option drill. Essentially, it consisted of the entire squad running around like lunatics through a routine that resembled something between a jungle gym and an obstacle course, the only difference being that we’d have to perform all the requisites while hauling each other across our backs.
One day, our mentors decided that we were to be instructed on crowd and riot control. We were teamed up with a Territorial Army cadet officer group and were delegated t
o perform the basis for controlling a riotous crowd, the Territorials being the crowd. It was all pretty realistic training as the other side was allowed to throw rocks and bricks and a few heads were cracked as a consequence, as might have been expected.
The culmination came when we were herded into a squash court— about 40 of us jammed into a relatively confined space. The doors were jammed shut and two teargas grenades were thrown in. It was the cruel and mindless act of a psychotic, but we were hardly in a position to argue. Obviously, there was immediate panic and some pretty desperate efforts to get clear of the place because we quickly discovered that the gas masks didn’t have the requisite filters. We got out eventually, but it was a massive effort because we were all fighting, literally, for survival.
I was as sick as a dog afterwards, but there were others who collapsed, moaning and crying real tears. Still more of the group were vomiting … it was horrendous, but then the military in those days was full of the kind of sadistic bastards who would subject us younger guys to mindless trials. Then, if things really did go wrong, they would shrug their shoulders and move on and do the same thing again at a later date. To this day, when I smell tear gas I react badly. The worst part was that it was an unusually hot day and we’d all been sweating from the effort with the rocks and bricks. That meant that whenever we touched our bodies, the chemicals in the gas gave us a severe stinging sensation.
As an officer cadet, Neall Ellis had several personal problems of his own. He was busted for fighting in the corporal’s bar, which he had no authority to enter in the first place, and, as a result, he was charged with assault and being drunk. That little episode took place towards the end of the course, after about nine months of training.