by James Best
Graham, a South African, commented how Zambia and Zimbabwe had completed a role reversal in the last fifteen years, with Zimbabwe’s economy now even worse than Zambia’s used to be, and Zambia on the rise.
Tim, a stonecutter who’d fled Mugabe’s regime when the farms were taken, worried that if South Africa went the way of Zimbabwe, the whole of southern Africa would collapse.
Some days Sam and I would cruise down to the local supermarket to buy bottled water, snacks or toiletries. Ancient taxis with peeling paint and broken door handles would toot as they passed us, their drivers hoping for a flicker of interest. Sam was becoming more accomplished at negotiating the unpredictable traffic on the broad dusty boulevards. He was nearly able to do it by himself. Close, but not there yet.
One day as we walked to the backpacker hostel, Evans drove past in one of the taxis and hollered, ‘Hey, Mr Sam, I have saved you a bag full of caterpillars.’
Sam beamed at Evans and pointed at him. ‘No!’
Near Jollyboys, I paused to buy some bananas from a street barrow. Reasonably healthy looking bananas sat on top of cardboard sheets, while a reasonably unhealthy looking man in a threadbare suit and thongs sat behind the cart. Very pleased to get the sale, he didn’t have the right change and ran off down the road to another local guy to change some money.
Watching their exchange, I realised he was mute. When he ran back I noticed a dense cataract in his left eye. ‘Keep the change,’ I said.
The next morning as part of his schoolwork, in an exercise that sat halfway between English and religion, I set Sam the challenge of describing himself in hundred words or more. He came up with the following:
Description of Samuel Thomas Best
Personality: Funny, Kind, Noisy, Cheeky, Relaxing and Happy.
Appearance: Brown Hair, Tall, 14 years old and Pale Skin.
Likes: Playing Video Games and watch VHS Tapes and have Software.
Dislikes: Charlie the Cat*, Being Hurt, Errors, Losing in Video Games, Coming Last Place in Mario Kart and Data being deleted.
Examples of Good TV Shows: Simpsons, South Park, Family Guy, Pokémon, Futurama, Drawn Together, Cleveland Show, Beavis and Butthead and American Dad.
Examples of Good Movies: Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Pirates of Caribeen, Shrek, Hunger Games and Batman.
Example of Good Games: Mario, Sonic, Legend of Zelda, Kirby, Pokémon, Metal Gear Solid, F Zero and Grand Theft Auto.
Sport: Tennis, Golf, Bowling, Boxing and Swimming.
School: Maths, Geography, Science, TAS and Religion.
*Charlie is our cat. He and Sam have an ongoing dispute.
That afternoon, the funny, kind, noisy, cheeky, relaxing and happy boy and I ventured to Livingstone Island for high tea. I had stuffed up the timing of the trip to the island, and we were running late. Kim, a Canadian co-owner of Jollyboys, kindly gave us a lift to the departure point: a ramp at the rear of the five-star Livingstone Hotel, on the banks of the Zambezi at the edge of the city.
‘So how is the tourism business going?’ I enquired in the car.
‘Oh, okay, I suppose. Tourism is so fickle. We’ve been hit hard by the Ebola crisis. Also the Japanese market has evaporated, especially since ISIS beheaded that poor fellow. They’re just too afraid to leave their country now.’
Kim had a sixteen-year-old stepson and a two-year-old daughter. She knew about Sam and was curious about our trip and its purpose. ‘Are you sure he’s going to be okay on the island?’ she asked. ‘Don’t let him too close to the edge.’ I was concerned about safety on the island too, and was determined to keep Sam close to me, although I thought Sam would likely be more afraid of the current and cliffs than I was.
At the hotel, tame zebras grazed on manicured lawns, a bizarre backdrop to the five-star hotel and the river. Alex, our guide, met us at the ramp.
Sam cut to the chase. ‘Are there hippos? Are there crocodiles? Am I going to die?’
‘Well, I don’t think so, but we’ll see how we go,’ Alex teased.
Livingstone Island was no bigger than a small football field, an outcrop that defied the massive torrent that surrounded it on all sides. It perched astride the edge of the falls, halfway along the precipice, marking the eastern edge of the main falls. Livingstone had first seen the falls from this island in 1855, the first non-African to do so, and named them after his queen.
The speedboat zoomed across a swirl of eddies and rapids towards the ominous edge, demarcated by a wall of mist and an increasingly sonorous roar as we approached. You wouldn’t have wanted the engine to fail. As we approached the island, I informed Alex about Sam. A father of two, Alex was professional and responsible. ‘Right, we’ll get onto it. We’ll not take any risks with Sam. Don’t you worry.’
The boat crept into the reeds on the upriver shore of the island and we disembarked and trooped up the muddy path through the dense trees and shrubs. Mist started to drench our clothes, and we were handed heavy green canvas ponchos in preparation for our walk to the edge. Alex personally escorted Sam and me. We manoeuvred Sam to within a few metres of the edge; I started to get nervous, but Alex was cautious, carefully instructing Sam where to place every footstep while tightly gripping his hand.
As we sat on the rocks, the air resonated with the sound of the relentless tumble of millions of litres of water roaring past. I smiled. It was like sitting astride a great beast. The river felt alive.
I teased Sam about his green poncho. ‘Hey, Sam, you look like Yoda.’
‘No, I look like a dementor!’
I grabbed his upper arm and teasingly nudged him in the direction of the edge. ‘If you were a dementor you could fly over the edge.’
‘No! I don’t want to go over the edge.’ He laughed, in on the joke. Alex patted him on the shoulder through the thick, drenched poncho. ‘Don’t worry—you’re not going over the edge, Mr Sam. I’ll make sure.’
We escorted Sam back to a large tent where the group were to have lunch and Alex offered to take me back to the edge alone, to walk across the rocks to a pool literally on the edge of the falls. Sam could stay at the tent where other staff could keep an eye on him.
As we crossed the rocks, I spied a small wooden plank bridge, just underwater. Alex explained that we needed to cross this to get to the edge. If you slipped, there was nothing to stop you going over. No barrier, no rope, nothing. Alex leant in and asked me carefully over the roar of the falls, ‘Are you afraid of heights?’
I gulped. ‘No.’
‘Are you okay to go across? I’ll help you, but don’t go if you think you might panic.’
I hesitated for a few seconds. ‘No, I won’t panic.’
We inched across the slippery board hand in hand, like two giant green molluscs, moving sideways only centimetres at a time. It was hard not to lean away from the threat of the falls, but Alex’s firm grip kept me in check. On the other side we sat on rocks at the edge. I crawled forward and, lying flat on the wet rock, poked my head over the edge of the falls and looked into the white wet abyss below. I could only watch the torrent crashing down for a few seconds at a time before having to turn away to keep the vertigo in check.
Back at the lunch venue Sam was patiently waiting. The Dementor and I were seated in a separate tent apart from the others. While I had greatly appreciated the extra service offered to Sam and me by Alex, we could still eat with people! But their intentions were good; they were just trying to help us out as best they knew how.
On our last day in Livingstone, I saw a poster on a tree advertising the services of a Dr King Tunga:
We are helping the society healing different diseases like madness, epilepsy, manhood management and hard on medicines, business luck, enhance your love, recovering stolen properties, healing STIs, swollen legs, chambu, charms able to make you rich through the spirit of your ancestors, asthma and many more.
Despite Dr Tunga’s impressively wide range of skills—and the fact I was personally concerned about a couple
of the maladies on the list—I decided against a visit.
CHAPTER 16
Jungle Junction
Our next stop was a place recommended on the backpacker’s grapevine: Jungle Junction. The hostel, situated on an island upstream on the Zambezi River from Livingstone, sent a guy called Fergus to pick us up in a beaten-up LandCruiser. It had a cracked windscreen, broken side mirrors and doorhandles, there were panels missing and the rear door latch was held together with a coat hanger. Oh, and there were 451,000 clicks on the odometer.
Manchester United and Futbol Club Barcelona stickers festooned the windscreen, reflecting the African obsession with European football and, in particular, the English Premier League. On the way out of town, Fergus picked up two female teachers from a college. The three Zambians in the front seat chatted, joked and laughed in their local language, Tonga, while modern African music played on one of the teacher’s mobile phones. It felt good to be moving again.
From the back seat, Sam pointed out a sixty-five kilometres per hour speed limit road sign, a new one to add to his mental collection. We left the bitumen after an hour or so and, with what remained of the side mirrors turned in, we bumped down a narrow bush track on non-existent suspension while the thorns of juvenile teak bushes and African balsawood trees scraped against the windows. The track led down to the Zambezi River valley. The teachers exited with their supplies at a small primary school in a village on the banks of the river. Apparently Sam and I were visiting the school the next day.
At the river’s edge, we piled into some balsa dugout canoes, operated by oarsmen who stood in the back with a single long oar, used for pushing or rowing. Sam was in one canoe, I was in the other. I tried to explain Sam’s challenges to Godfrey, the oarsman on Sam’s canoe. ‘He may not understand you completely,’ I said. ‘Sam is a bit different.’
Godfrey calmly nodded. ‘Okay, sure. Just stay still, Sam.’
‘Are there hippos?’ Sam asked.
Godfrey leant on his long oar and pushed off from the muddy bank. ‘Yes, but we’ll stay away from them.’
As we glided down the smooth waters, the honks of hippos echoed through the reeds. Elephants grazed on the bank. We reached Bovu Island where a white Zambian man, Brett, had set up the magnificently relaxed Jungle Junction. Sam and I were the only guests when we arrived, which was both good and bad: good that we had the facilities to ourselves, bad that it limited the chance for Sam to talk to strangers.
Bovu Island is also referred to as Simaleu Island after a Mr Simaleu. The story goes that many years ago he found a dead hippo on the island and tried to remove her uterus as material for some black magic. Unfortunately for Mr Simaleu, she was not in fact dead but asleep, and no doubt awoke in a surprised state. She contracted her private parts, trapping his arm inside her, and marched to the water, dragging Mr Simaleu behind her to his impending doom. With an axe in his free hand, and options running out fast, he did what he needed to do: he chopped off his trapped arm, and lived to tell the tale.
In the afternoon, Godfrey took Sam and me on a sunset canoe ride, a chance to have a fish from the canoe. Sam only reluctantly agreed. He doesn’t like fishing. The first time he caught a fish, from a boat when he was about ten, he was so frightened by the flapping white streak on the end of his line he promptly tried to jump out of the boat himself.
On the water, I lamely tried a few casts of the lure but I was really just going through the motions; I didn’t want to risk Sam jumping out of the canoe in these waters. The sunset over the Zambezi was heroic: we could glimpse the western orange sky here and there through the wild vine-filled jungle on the banks. A cacophony of insect noise and birdsong emanated across the swirls and eddies of the mighty river. Godfrey kept us clear of the rapids, where Muriel Spark’s ‘rocks that look like crocodiles and crocodiles that look like rocks’ ominously sat. He pushed hard on his pole as we inched upstream in the reeds and shallows, struggling against the incessant current.
As we turned and headed back for Jungle Junction, gliding easily now that the current was our friend, Godfrey mentioned to me that Brett had told him Sam was autistic. ‘My sister is autistic,’ he added, as he glided the canoe in the current.
‘Really, how old is she?’
‘Twenty-five.’ He paused. ‘So does Sam go to school?’
‘Yes, he’s in year eight.’
‘And does he shout at people?’
I wondered where this was going. ‘Not very often.’
‘My sister doesn’t want anyone near her. She lives by herself.’ Godfrey was clearly interested in Sam and the fact that he went to school, and could excel at maths and computer science. ‘People in the village think my sister has autism because she has been bewitched. Perhaps her father or someone else put a curse on her. She is actually my half-sister.’
I decided this wasn’t the time or place for a lecture on autism causality.
At dinner, we were joined by Brett in the dining hut: a thatched roof built around a giant African ebony tree. We chatted about autism, science and Harry Potter as I pushed Sam to eat a meal that was challenging for him: chicken cacciatore, rice and vegetables.
As we ate we were suddenly joined by a genet, perched on the railing beside me. Her body was the size of a small domestic cat but with her thin tail she was a metre long. Despite appearances genets are not cats, but are actually related to the civet. Her blonde coat was checked with dark brown markings, her tail striped. She eyed the three of us, and then the chicken. Before I knew it, a chicken bone on my plate was gone, and up with her in the tree. She was fast, very fast. Sam ate his chicken a tad quicker.
Our thatched hut was set away from the bar, restaurant and office. We had lighting in the room until the generator went off but no other power apart from at the office. The hut sat on stilts over the water. There were toilet facilities up a path but Brett suggested weeing off the verandah at night was probably safest. There was no Diesel here to protect us from hippos.
Elephants trumpeted. Hippos honked, stomped and splashed. Cattle mooed off in the village. A small something landed on the roof. A large something trampled in the reeds near the verandah. All that separated us from the river was a mosquito net and five wooden stairs.
Before dawn the hippos started up a ruckus. I crept out onto the verandah. In the dim moonlight I could see their hulking silhouettes a stone’s throw away, but I sure didn’t throw any. I reminded myself again that they can’t climb stairs and retreated inside.
Dawn lifted the mist from the Zambezi, the vapour rising off the fast current looking like a pot about to boil. Squadrons of reed cormorants glided by in tight formation, a large hadeda ibis, resplendent with his emerald-green sheen and ruby beak, hark-harked for a mate as he lazed on a hanging branch, a pied kingfisher shot from the reeds. The northern waters tumbled east to the rising sun in their relentless journey to the falls.
After breakfast we headed over to the village, a short canoe ride across the channel on the northern side of the island. Godfrey showed us through the village, a scattering of huts over a dozen or so acres, housing one hundred and thirty-six people at last count.
The village, with no electricity and water carted by bucket from the river, was authentically traditional. I had promised Brett and Godfrey that Sam and I would take my laptop over with us and give a lesson on the basics of word processing to the teachers in the primary school.
At the school, the kids were being taught outside in the sun, under a Zambian flag on a pole. The lessons were in Tonga and they spoke little English; that skill only became possible if their families could afford to send them to high school in Livingstone.
What the children lacked in English they made up for in enthusiasm. Fascinated by seeing themselves on the monitor of the movie camera I was carrying, they tumbled over each other and Sam and me to get into frame, yelling, screaming and laughing as they did so.
As the children broke for lunch the three teachers—Maureen, Marita and Alice—sat in a
classroom with Sam and me. I showed them the basics of using a keyboard and a mouse, and cutting and pasting. Sam gave them a display of what could be done with word processing when you’re fast. They very much appreciated the lesson, but I wondered how many years it might be before a school like this would get a computer.
After the lesson we waved goodbye to the throng of jumping children and made our way back to the village. Cruising up the track behind us was Godfrey’s sister, Manga, the one with autism, and her friend. This was going to be interesting.
Manga was certainly wary of us and aloof, but shook Sam’s hand and said hello before walking on ahead of us to her hut, next to Godfrey’s.
‘So what does she do?’ I asked Godfrey, as we strolled along the dusty track.
‘She fishes and sells oil. She is very good at fishing.’ Manga, just ahead of us, heard him and half-smiled. As she moved further away, Godfrey explained that she was very skilled at catching fish using a simple wooden pole, a piece of string and a worm on the end. She would sell the fish to people in the village, but only particular people on particular days. No one knew why, but she never relaxed her self-imposed rules.
She would also buy a large quantity of oil from a wholesaler before dividing it up and selling it to the villagers in small bottles. Once again, only to certain people on certain days. And she never made a mistake with the money. She lived alone, with only minor support from her family, and spoke well, although only when she felt like it.
‘Do you think she’s content with her life?’ I asked.
Godfrey stopped walking and turned to me. ‘Yes. I do.’
It was fascinating to see how an autistic woman, probably one who would be classed as high-functioning in a developed world environment, coped in a village in Zambia, and also how the village coped with and reacted to her. After a while Godfrey started talking again. ‘You know, every now and then—say, every few months—she just takes off. Just walks. She can walk all the way to Livingstone. Sometimes she turns up at the police station there, asking for a lift back.’