Sam's Best Shot

by James Best

  Mastering delayed gratification demonstrates self-control, and can predict better outcomes in education, professions and life generally. It was a skill I was interested in developing with Sam, but I was also conscious of not wanting to push him too hard. Sam sat at the back of the bus looking longingly at the unopened can of Sprite in his hand. I loosened the criteria a bit. ‘You only have to wait until midday, and then you can drink it and not get the automatic six.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘11.30 a.m.’

  He squirmed through the half hour, but he made it. Proud of himself, he drank the Sprite and the rest of the truck, myself included, smiled with relief.

  As Tuhafeni steered the truck out of town, I noticed a large government development being built, once again, by a Chinese construction company. Throughout our two months of travel, we had frequently seen Chinese-funded developments. Even in Lesotho, the roads were being upgraded by Chinese companies. Apparently this is a continent-wide phenomenon, and it’s not only China, but also Brazil, Russia and India investing in African development. These countries are referred to by the acronym BRIC: they’re all rapidly developing economies increasingly looking beyond their own shores for financial opportunities. Some economists see them threatening the global dominance of G7 economies in the next few decades.

  Witnessing it on the ground, I wondered whether this was potentially just a new wave of economic colonialisation for Africa. I suppose foreign investment is a healthy thing, but considering what happened with colonialisation the first time around, I couldn’t help but think it would be preferable to see Africans driving change in a developing Africa.

  At lunch, Sam got talking to a fellow traveller, Peter, who had an extensive academic background that included arts, biology, cognitive psychology and IT. I started the ball rolling by asking him what the mathematical term was for a one followed by a hundred zeros.

  Peter and Sam replied in unison: ‘A googol.’

  Peter knew it just because he knew it. Sam knew it because it was the origin of the name of Google.

  Sam turned to Peter. ‘What year did Google start?’

  Peter thought about it. ‘Mid nineties?’

  ‘1996.’

  Peter nodded and raised his eyebrows, impressed. ‘Yes, that would be correct.’

  Sam and Peter then discussed, in a friendly but competitive fashion, the release dates of various Windows programs, the origins of the computer, the history of Nintendo and a whole bunch of stuff that no one else on the bus had any idea about. Sam was enjoying the challenge of talking to someone who knew a lot about what he liked. When Sam gets on a roll, he gets on a roll.

  The truck churned up the kilometres, interrupted only by police checks; foot-and-mouth disease stops where we walked our muddy shoes through gooey black water, presumably to stop the virus hitching a ride; cows meandering onto the bitumen; and our third border crossing in four days.

  The border crossing into Botswana was the most spectacular I’d ever seen: beyond the cyclone-wire fences elephants gathered beneath huge baobab trees, a fish eagle perched on a nearby tree and buffalo grazed on the vast river valley stretching into the distance.

  We asked Tuhafeni if we could walk up to the fence to get a closer look at one of the elephants. ‘That would not be a good idea,’ he replied.

  ‘He’s behind a fence,’ I said.

  ‘That fence is nothing to him. He is a wild elephant. He would sweep it away in a second and kill you.’ It was a convincing argument. We stayed put.

  It turned out to be so picturesque because Chobe National Park was immediately across the border. There was wildlife everywhere. Chobe National Park contains one of Africa’s largest concentrations of game, but unfortunately it also seemed to have one of the largest concentrations of tourists, usually rich ones. The village in the park was complete with a supermarket, ATM and currency exchange, and a large resort. It had decent wi-fi, so Sam was happy. I winced to think how much it was going to cost us to upgrade to a room here for two nights. I consoled myself that we’d soon be able to live on diddly squat in Malawi.

  That night, Sam saw the resort’s impressive buffet and took off for it, like a moth to a flame, with me in hot pursuit.

  ‘No, Sam, we’re not allowed to eat here!’

  Sam stopped and turned. ‘Why?’

  ‘That’s for rich people.’

  After surveying the diners, most of whom were now watching us as Sam’s loud voice and bouncing walk gathered attention, he corrected me, again way too loudly: ‘It is for rich OLD people.’ How to Insult Fifty People at Once, by Samuel Thomas Best. I tried to bundle him out of the dining area as he continued. ‘It is for old people. They are old. They have grey and white hair. Even more grey than you, Dad.’

  Make that fifty-one people. Sam pointed at some poor guy. ‘Look, white hair!’

  We awoke before dawn to be loaded into one of many open four-wheel drive trucks. The drivers constantly chatted with each other on the two-way radios, to direct everyone to wherever the interesting animals were. It was very cold in the open truck. There were animals everywhere—giraffes, warthogs, hippos, hyenas, monkeys, birds—but the driver was trying to track a lion. Occasionally he’d slow the truck, open his door and lean out as the truck rolled along to examine the sandy track. I thought he was bunging it on at first, but it was authentic; he was a real bushman.

  We drove past a thousand-head herd of buffalo and a congress of baboons. The two species have a synergistic relationship: the baboons are sentinels high in the trees and shake fruit down for the impalas, which, with better hearing and vision, can alert the baboons to approaching predators. This cooperation collapses during famine and drought, when baboons steal and eat newborn impalas. The natural world is brutal.

  There were radio reports of a sighting of a leopard at the far end of the park. We were the fourth of eight trucks to arrive, which all collected at the bottom of the tree, from where glimpses of the leopard’s coat and face could be seen with binoculars through the dense foliage. Apparently, after she’d killed an impala, a pride of lions had chased her up the tree and taken the kill for themselves. Jackals and vultures hovered, hoping for a share.

  I felt like a vulture, too. The leopard was engaged in a life-and-death struggle, all the while being gawked at by a herd of strange primates in noisy machines. Eventually the trucks departed, one by one, leaving her alone to her fate.

  Sam was struggling with the cold and his facial rash was bothering him. He huddled in the vehicle wrapped in a blanket, legs drawn up onto the seat and staring into space. He only occasionally looked out to the animals at my prompting. Sam can’t use binoculars well so he never saw the leopard. He did, however, like the baby baboons clinging onto their mother’s abdomens, and the monkey trying to steal biscuits from our group when we stopped for a cuppa.

  After the tour we had a break to recharge, both our electrical appliances and ourselves. I let Sam play his DS; he’d had a very early start to the day and seemed tired. In the afternoon, we were meant to go on a river cruise. I wasn’t sure whether he was up to it or not. But when I asked around about what the trip was like it was strongly recommended, so I pushed through and took him.

  Sam became angry and argumentative as we waited on the dock. I was worried he was going to get physical, but he managed to reel it in, just. The boat, carrying more than fifty people, had the same touristy feeling as the morning drive. For much of the three-hour tour Sam was struggling; he lay on the floor of the boat, stimming by flicking his fingers in front of his face or staring into space. He shouted to me about banknotes or other obscure obsessions while the guide was making announcements about the wildlife, or when we were meant to be quiet so as not to spook the animals. I was beginning to regret my decision to come.

  I gave him my notebook and pen and he proceeded to draw his favourite obsessions: Harry Potter, Super Mario, gaming consoles, the alphabet, numbers and notes and coins from different countries. It took h
im over an hour; it was like a form of meditation. Psychologists would call it self-regulation.

  But when the boat approached a large pod of hippos Sam looked up. While honking a warning, the alpha male breached and bared his massive gaping mouth and teeth. It’s hard to appreciate how big a hippopotamus can get until you see a large male up close and personal. He was bold as brass and probably stupid enough to attack the big boat, but we were certainly safe.

  Sam loved it, as well as the long line of elephants perambulating up the banks of the river as our launch glided alongside. Soon a buffalo, stranded on one of the islands on the river, decided to try to swim to another island. The islands were safe havens from predators, but when the grass ran out, the buffaloes had to get past the crocs to move on. As the buffalo took off, a croc a couple of hundred metres away saw an opportunity and set off in pursuit. It was touch and go whether the buffalo would make it, and Sam was fascinated by the life-and-death race, cheering for the buffalo. He made it!

  As the sun set over the river and the flat expanses of the valley beyond, the sky lit up in myriad colours, reflected in the waters below. The river cruise ended up not being too bad, despite the poor start. I made a mental note that this was not the first time this had happened with a tired Sam on the trip; a floundering start but finishing with a wet sail.

  CHAPTER 14

  Zim

  We were heading to Zimbabwe to visit Victoria Falls the next day. I was in two minds about it, given the political state of the country: while the situation had improved, and the Zimbabwe side of Victoria Falls provided better views, it was still unnerving to take a young lad with autism to such a troubled place.

  Tuhafeni had last visited Zimbabwe—or Zim, as it’s commonly known—eleven years earlier, and was still bruised by the experience. While escorting a group like ours, he’d been fleeced of all the tour company money by bogus demands from the border guards. They’d held him in a police cell for ten hours, trying to squeeze more out of him. Eventually, finally convinced that he had indeed run out of money, they’d released him into the night.

  Understandably then, Tuhafeni seemed on edge the next morning. We all did. He had visited the border the previous afternoon to make sure all the paperwork for our visas and the truck was organised. We filed into the immigration office. A portrait of Robert Mugabe dominated the room. The immigration officials weren’t smiling, in contrast to every previous border post. I was chastised for not having the immigration form in my passport and the correct money, in US dollars, for the visas. It cost us thirty dollars each, except for the Englishwoman who had to pay fifty-five; the price of colonialism I suppose.

  Flustered, I awkwardly retrieved the immigration form and notes as Sam observed that I was being a dork. He was right, of course. ‘Chop, chop, hurry up,’ they said, which became retrospectively hilarious during the ensuing delay. An official scowled at Sam, who was stimming in the corner of the room. It soon became clear there was a problem. What a surprise. It seemed the man who had spoken to Tuhafeni the previous day had been mistaken: the fee for our tour group was twice what had been quoted.

  We moved outside where we languished in the glaring sun for over an hour. Sam played with the sand while Tuhafeni tried to keep his cool. The group postulated on the reasons for the delay. Corruption? Maladministration? Just toying with us? Eventually the border officials waved their hands and said we could go. A visibly relieved Tuhafeni hit the pedals and we zoomed past the boom gates. It was corruption, of course; they had just been trying to rip the company off.

  At the dusty, dirty town of Victoria Falls, we stopped to ask for directions to our accommodation. As soon as we pulled up, a man approached the windows trying to sell small wooden carved statues. Another waved Zimbabwean banknotes in an attempt to change money. The notes I saw were for five billion and twenty billion Zimbabwean dollars. Sam was impressed. At the resort, our room was expensive, basic and poorly lit, the staff edgy, the security intense. The whole feel of the country was different to anything we had previously experienced. I was on high alert.

  I managed to Skype Benison. ‘We’re in Zimbabwe,’ I told her.

  ‘What?’ she said, in alarm.

  ‘At Victoria Falls, on the Zimbabwe side.’

  She frowned at me through cyberspace. ‘I didn’t know you were going there. Be careful.’

  Victoria Falls, by far the largest waterfall on the planet, had long been a planned highlight of our trip. We’d been in Africa over two months now, but the moment of our first sighting of it had seemed to rush up on us, just as the broad and mighty Zambezi rushes up on the nearly two-kilometre long gaping chasm in the Earth’s surface, over which a million litres of water plummets every second.

  The water, falling over the one-hundred-metre drop, creates a roar that you have to shout over, a force that literally thumps you in the chest, and a beauty that, as Livingstone described it in 1855, was ‘so lovely [it] must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight’.

  I was in awe. Sam was too. We all were. You couldn’t help it.

  But as we cruised along the cliff opposite the falls, the viewing points became progressively wetter and Sam became progressively more bored. He’d liked the falls, but he wanted out, telling me he’d had enough, he’d seen enough of the falls, and that he wanted to go back to the hostel. I made a deal: he’d get a bonus half point for the day if he completed the whole five-kilometre walk and went to all the lookouts.

  ‘Make it a whole point,’ he said.

  ‘Half is plenty.’ We negotiated as I followed him up the soaking path. ‘All you have to do is walk. That’s not hard.’

  ‘Half a point is weird and odd. Let’s round it up to a whole point.’

  He wore me down and I relented. A whole bonus point it was. As we exited the vast and sodden cloud that surrounds the falls and re-entered the sunlight, now all drenched, we visited the last viewing point on the cliff-top walk, which looked over to Victoria Falls Bridge, spanning the second gorge. The job done, Sam took off back up the path we had just come down. I half jogged after him. Well, there’s nowhere for him to go, I thought to myself.

  But then I came to a fork in the path: the left turn was a shortcut to the exit, the right another path to viewing points along the cliff. I went left, and soon passed an African couple resting on a bench. ‘Did a teenage boy just come past here?’ I asked.

  He hadn’t. Bugger. Adrenaline pumping, I jogged to the exit. He hadn’t been sighted here either. I asked the woman at the exit to not let him out. Over the next quarter of an hour I worriedly explored the maze of paths around the lookouts before finally hearing he’d returned to the exit. It hadn’t been as bad as the previous instances of losing Sam, but it had still not been pleasant.

  Our group dined at the restaurant at our accommodation, not wanting to venture out the gates at night. It was scary enough during the day. A group of male singers appeared in the dining room, singing traditional songs in tribal dress. They were very good, but we waited for the inevitable request for money for the unsolicited performance. Did the facility get a kickback? Probably.

  They sang a fascinating African version of ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’, which brought the song full circle: it had started in Africa, had been taken to America on slave ships, and was now returned home. The last song was ‘Shosholoza’; the song I had heard so often in South Africa had originated in these parts.

  The group had decided to splurge on a fifteen-minute helicopter ride. It would be expensive but unmissable. So the next morning we were bundled into the helicopter company’s minivan and driven to the heliport.

  We were drilled on the safety protocols and procedures and Sam started to worry. ‘I am not going to die. I am not going to be chopped.’

  ‘No, Sam,’ I assured him, ‘just keep calm and keep your head low as you get on and off. I’ll look after you.’

  As we approached the incredibly loud rotors, Sam sank lower and lower. He was practically crawling the last yard o
r two but I got him aboard okay. With headphones and mike in place, away we went.

  Neither Sam nor I had ever been on a helicopter before. Within two minutes we were doing figure-eight loops over the smoke that thunders. As the helicopter banked, dipped and climbed, we were alternately pressed into the windows, and then away, thrust forward and then forced back into our seat. It was a rollercoaster hundreds of metres in the air.

  From that height we could appreciate how the wide flat river was compressed first into a deep narrow gorge before the washing machine-like waters, frothing and swirling, would tumble through the subsequent series of gorges gouged out of the arid landscape. Wild rapids raced down alleyways, zigzagging into the distance.

  Sam was remarkably calm and cool, and smiled the whole time, as he so often does. But as soon as we landed I had to stop him running to the safety of the terminal. Fair enough. The whole experience was a complete buzz.

  That afternoon we went shopping in town. The first hawker approached us even before we’d passed the security guards and boom gates that marked the boundary of our resort.

  ‘Hello, sir! How are you?’ he yelled over the boom gate.

  I didn’t respond.

  ‘You want white-water rafting? Bungy? Zimbabwean billion-dollar bills? Change money? Taxi?’

  No response. I was used to being hassled, but not like this. His street colleagues queued up, one by one. They were also more aggressive and persistent than I’d been used to. When I ignored them, the tone became insistent. They walked beside me for minutes at a time. To them I was a big bag of money, bigger than anything they could imagine.

  Sam had the perfect manner for street hawkers. He didn’t have to pretend to ignore them, it came naturally. He didn’t even notice them. I tried to follow his lead.

  By GDP purchasing price parity, Zimbabwe is the second poorest country in Africa and indeed the world, second only to the Democratic Republic of Congo. The resource-rich country had been devastated by corruption, mismanagement and violence since Uncle Bob came to power in 1980. He’s been rated as the second-worst dictator in the world after North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Zim is also consistently ranked as one of the world’s most corrupt countries.