So Who's Your Mother

by Tarquin Olivier

  In quietness, the other side of the wide ministerial desk, the Minister beamed the pleasure of power. We had a perfectly satisfactory discus-sion and the phone rang. He accepted the call as it was from the Father of the Nation himself, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, calling from his hospi-tal bed in the London Clinic. There had been concerned reports about his state of health. The Minister put on his serious expression and had five minutes of intense conversation. He lowered the receiver into its cradle as if it had brought most precious news, his eyes wreathed with smiles.

  ‘How is the Prime Minister?’ I asked in a worried tone.

  ‘He is very ill,’ he said, with deep satisfaction for he was next in line for the premiership.

  ‘What is he suffering from?’

  He put his finger-tips together in a series of taps, admiring his hands, feeling very alive. ‘He’s suffering from loss of blood.’

  Horrible man. Mujib recovered. About fifty thousand Bengalis and the world’s press went to Dhaka airport to greet him. As he stepped out of the plane he stood at the top of the stairs, wearing homespun beige trousers and long coat, and a similar cloth round his neck like a priestly stole. The cheers were an uplifting acclamation of his leadership in the strug-gle for independence, and the horrors that he too had suffered at the hands of Pakistan. He was now back in power over fifty-five million Bengalis, the symbol of rebirth, innocence and incorruptibility, the clear way to the future.

  Fourteen

  Riddelle was nearing her time. It seemed she had been pregnant for ever. The summer was hot and she had been suffering in the grotty flat. Larry and Joan took us to dinner at Overton’s Victoria, after drinks in the modern apartment he had bought in Roebuck House. It was under the penthouse which was occupied by Arabs. His drawing room was high enough for his favourite view across the rooftops, to the site of the National Theatre at last being built.

  Over dinner Joan was considerate towards Riddelle, stiff towards me, and miffed with Larry for being at his most effusive. We discussed names. For a girl’s name the only one he could think of was one which Joan had not let him add to the names for their second daugh-ter Julie-Kate. He suggested ‘Clavelle’. We loved it, like a fine key-board instrument.

  Bangladesh beckoned for attention but I pleaded with Pat Turner and he agreed to go on my behalf so that I could be present at the birth. We went to Queen Charlotte’s Hospital. A girl it was. In Tanzania both gynaecologists had been European but this was London. The gynaecol-ogist was a Guyanese woman and the midwife from Sierra Leone, both skilled and charming. Riddelle bore her pain soundlessly, twiddling a button on my shirt.

  In Bangladesh our designs for the other values were approved and I had some spare time. That summer at the1972 IMF meetings in Wash-ington David Rowe-Beddoe reported that ‘for some extraordinary reason’ it had been attended by representatives from the three High Commission Territories of Southern Africa: Swaziland, Lesotho and Botswana, now independent, but still using the South African rand for their medium of exchange.

  The Swazi High Commissioner in London arranged for me to meet their Minister of Justice at the Dorchester. He came down from his room, a teddy bear of a man, his mind miles away. I offered him tea. He said in a bass gurgle: ‘That would be lovely.’ He sat back in his armchair, undid his top trouser buttons to relieve his belly and looked almost cuddly. I asked whether the Swazi Cabinet had considered breaking away from the rand and having its own currency and issuing authority. He said no, but gave me the name and contact numbers of the Finance Secretary. A week later he wrote to confirm that his government was not interested in having its own currency. So I went to see for myself.

  In the British Airways 747 to Johannesburg there were half a dozen people I knew in first class. What I was up to was most secret so I told them I was on holiday. Jan Smuts Airport was grand and spacious, the motorways new and the city the acme of high-rise modernity. In the fourteen years since I had been there the main change was in the faces of the Africans. They were alert, no longer cowed, for under apartheid they had received the best education in Africa. Yet it was outrageous to see how many of them looked more intelligent than their white masters, and irritating to see the buses still segregated into ‘net blankes’ and ‘nie blankes’. I again forgot which was which and got on to an all-black bus. They gently asked me to get off. That night a telex from Basingstoke asked me to go to Cape Town where the Trust Bank wanted us to design new traveller’s cheques.

  There I stayed at the Mount Nelson Hotel, a lovely building with Georgian windows, a large garden with a pool and palm trees. Larry and Vivien and the cast of the Old Vic Company had spent a weekend there en route for their tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1948. After my meeting at the bank I decided to climb up to Lion’s Rock and across, further up, to Table Mountain. From there I was rewarded by a view over the whole city, the harbour beyond and Robben Island in the distance.

  Swaziland was described in Kipling’s Just So Stories, with its high, middle and low veldt. The capital Mbabane was atop the High Veldt, a small town for bureaucrats and politicians and students, with suburban houses and gardens all nicely done. The view over a valley led to twin peaks which had inspired Rider Haggard’s landscape descriptions in King Solomon’s Mines, where he exaggerated their size and compared them to the Queen of Sheba’s breasts, with snow tips for nipples; breathless reading for prep school boys. On a lower slope was a Swazi village of straw houses like tea cosies, surrounded by poor grassland, communally owned, therefore untended and overgrazed. There was a glistening hotel with a casino. I stayed at a country hotel which was more anonymous.

  Mr Stephens the Finance Secretary was an English-speaking South African, now a Swazi citizen. He was calm, clerical and informative. He remembered David Rowe-Beddoe at the IMF and the De La Rue cock-tail reception. He confirmed that Botswana and Lesotho had been discussing having their own national currencies. He noticed that I was wearing a Christ Church tie with cardinals’ hats, and told me that his opposite number in Lesotho wore one. He would be the man for me there, while in Botswana there was an English adviser called Jack Lyle, a very good man and yes, he had worked in Tanzania. I recalled having known him well. Together we had signed that country’s Permanent Housing Finance Corporation into existence.

  All this was promising. To help them break away from South Africa would be a splendid blow against apartheid. It would also strengthen their sovereignty and be an economic benefit straight away. I gave him a simplistic view of the numbers. A pound note costs, say, a penny to produce: one percent of its face value. A customer takes one from the bank and is charged a several percent rate of interest: pure profit for as long as the banknote remains in circulation. If you use another coun-try’s banknotes, they get that profit. Mr Stephens had not realised this. The conversation warmed up.

  I already knew a certain amount about Swaziland because it had more CDC projects per head than any other country. As Secretary of the Estimates Committee I had analysed every one of them. Our General Manager had fallen in love with the place. King Sobhuza II was Africa’s last traditional king. His face was heavily lined and he looked wise, with dark skin, moderately wide nose and lips, and two short feathers in his cropped hair. Swazis ascribed mystical qualities to him: the ability to disappear and become a rabbit. He had many wives and children, the First Wife being called the Great She Elephant. His word was law. Since Independence he seems to have spent time breaking undertakings he had given the British colonial power.

  Our High Commissioner asked me to stay for lunch. His Residency had a fine view of Sheba’s breasts. He was a Channel Islander, Mr le Toq. There was not much in the country that interested him so we dis-cussed books. I said my only business there was to secure a further order for Swazi passports before they ran out; no mention of currency.

  I took hundreds of pictures of the museum’s spears, ceramics and beads, and in the market even more beads with intriguing patterns. The official portrait of the king was a gift for the p
ortrait engraver and the watermark. I went from village to village. All the Swazis were welcom-ing and called after me when I left. The vivid cloud formations were made for landscape photography. The bookshops had calendars and books full of pictures.

  Mr Stephens was excited by my concept for banknote designs. His worry was over coinage, and how it could be differentiated from the coins of South Africa. I suggested a wild idea. The Swazi coins should be every other shape but round: twelve-sided, square, scalloped, and ten-sided. They would be more expensive than round ones but very attractive to numismatists. He liked the idea but wanted to see the differences in costs before commitment.

  There remained the question of naming the currency. We went to consult the Minister of Finance, a burly, soft-spoken Swazi, but with little knowledge of the language. He said we should use the name ‘Emalangeni’, but was unsure what the plural would be for the higher denominations. He would advise through the High Commission in London after consulting His Majesty.

  I took the short flight to Maseru, capital of mountainous Lesotho, previously named Basotuland. That October springtime gave it more flowers along the roadside and up the wild slopes than I had ever seen; high-standing daisies of every colour, meadows filled with them, and the foothills crowded with red-hot pokers like guardsmen in scarlet tunics. There was a Holiday Inn staffed by young South Africans. The Finance Secretary Ted Waddington was in his office, both of us wearing our Christ Church ties. The only CDC project I remembered was an agricultural college, with pupils from all over east and southern Africa. The mountainous land did not lend itself to plantations and the Basutos were not adept at wealth-creating skills. So there, just as everywhere, education was the paramount need.

  Ted said the last thing the country needed was its own currency. The Ministers might well fall over me with enthusiasm, seeing the opportu-nity for corruption. I could see what he meant. The Prime Minister, Leabua Jonathan, was the caricature of a jumbo buffoon. There was an illustrated book to his glory. The most notable photographs were of him being received in Singapore in front of a line of Chinese stewardesses. Their expressions of disbelief at beholding such a smiling cretin were priceless. The other photograph was of him, chin in hand, gazing at the rump of a departing elephant. The caption was: ‘The Prime Minister contemplating the future of his nation’. With leaders like that.

  I told Ted my background and he understood that the last thing I wanted was to do harm. He also understood that ‘the readiness is all’ and said he had no objection to my assembling artistic reference mate-rial. So off I went with a rented car and my camera, trusting the map and braving the axle-threatening potholes.

  The principal historical feature was a plateau called Thaba Bosiu above vertical cliffs. It was a mile and a half long, half as wide, with a slight slope and a freshwater spring. It became the refuge of the Basuto people when they were besieged by the Boers. Under the leadership of their king Moshoeshoe in the 1850s they made deadly sorties with their shields and spears against the invaders’ rifles and eventually convinced them that their quest was not worth the cost. The Basuto people became a single polity. Under the king’s leadership they made their capi-tal in Maseru. After further skirmishes with the Boers he appealed to Queen Victoria and was granted protectorate status within the British Empire. Independence was granted in 1966. I stopped and asked a Basuto how to get to Thaba Bosiu. He was traditionally dressed, with a thick brightly patterned blanket over his shorts and T-shirt, and a conical straw hat with twin loops on top. This features in the national flag. He led me into a cave at the foot of Thaba Bosiu. Inside he introduced me to a middle-aged Lesotho lady in a cotton dress, with a red wig on the table beside her. She sat me down for a cup of tea. She said she was fighting for the World Bank to invest in a hydro-electric dam project which would be the source of electricity and irrigation. This sounded like a project for CDC but she was not sure. They were bureaucratic.

  Here in the middle of nowhere was this semi-educated woman, full of good will, the only real power in the valley. I said I was a tourist and had come to take pictures. She insisted I take one of her, put on her wig, took up a fountain pen and poised it over some papers. She wrote out her name and address and wished me luck.

  A couple of miles away was a pyramid-sized mountain, topped with a massive cube as wide as its thick base: the remaining core of a volcano. Further on there was a hinterland with almost unusable roads going west into a great valley with the Drakensburg Mountains far beyond.

  I flew to Gaberones, capital of Botswana, one time Bechuanaland, a low-lying and much hotter country mainly of bushmen and the Kalahari desert. The town was still under construction. Someone complained that we were giving independence to a building site. Again the hotel was a Holiday Inn, one of the few finished buildings. The main tourist attrac-tion was the big game reserve near Francistown in the north. Recently discovered copper was being extracted from the Selebi Kitwe mine, and fairly soon Botswana would out-produce South Africa in diamonds. The most important resource at the time was its people, not all of them bush-men by any means, but an enlightened body of men with the discipline and fair-mindedness to make it the first country in Africa to develop a fully-functioning democracy – which is still the case.

  The Finance Secretary was an Afrikaner called Quill Hermans. The Chief Adviser to the Treasury was my old friend and associate Jack Lyle. He told me the Reserve Bank of South Africa had set out propos-als a long time before, covering any High Commission territory’s decision to break away and set up their own issuing authorities and monetary regimes. Botswana, guided by Jack Lyle whose idea it was, would have been treated by the Reserve Bank of South Africa as gener-ously as Swaziland. Likewise Lesotho. All good news. After buying such picture books as there were I was keen to go home to Riddelle and the children after an absence of two weeks.

  For the first time in my life I was doing something I really wanted to do, which would benefit Third World countries, and I knew I could doit. At the same time the tenants of 31 Queensdale Road, the American philosopher Ted Roszak and his wife, were due to move out. With my legs under the table of the Bangladesh Central Bank, and the opportu-nities in Southern Africa, I felt confident enough to increase the mort-gage and build on serious additions to the house.

  We went to Brighton to see Larry and Joan. His health had really deteriorated. He had had a diseased kidney removed, had prostate problems, and thrombosis blew up his right leg to elephantine propor-tions. He should have grown replacement veins but after such a lifetime as his, the extraordinary outpourings of every kind of energy, his recu-perative powers were poor.

  He and Joan came to see our house and he was impressed. The newly plastered walls had dried and I had started painting them. Above the new garden drawing room the patio was sunlit with an ornamental fence, a table and chairs set ready for drinks. On cue our cat, Oedipus, crept out to join us.

  When Riddelle and I had put the children to bed and read to them, it was time for our own bath. The cat would join us. He contributed to our togetherness. As we lay facing each other in the water, knees protruding, he would tread fastidiously from one knee to the other, stepping stones, then having checked us over he would sit on the edge of the bath and purr, in perfect control.

  My mother let me take the grand piano. She still had my Balinese painting. She had made me promise to let her keep it. Now our new drawing room was crying out for it. I consulted my godparents. I had made a promise, after all. Sybil Thorndike said I should just give it time, and maybe drop a hint when my mother came to see us. Mercia Relph had no ideas. I asked Larry and he said: ‘What you do is this. You say: “Remember I promised you could keep the Balinese painting? You do? Well, I’m taking it.”’ Which is exactly what I did, saying it was his advice, impersonating his voice. She was gracious and compliant.

  After a milk run kind of visit to Bangladesh I dropped in to Swazi-land. Until our designs there were finished and approved we were vulnerable to our competitors. I went via C
alcutta, Bombay and Lourenço Marques, now Maputo, where I telephoned Mhlume Sugar Company in Swaziland, a major Commonwealth Development Corpo-ration project, now managed by my old boss at Kilombero, Mr Wevers. It was a grand reunion with him and his wife. Being a Sunday there was a staff party at the estate club. Wevers introduced me to everyone with almost fatherly pride. He showed me round the factory and estate, four times the size of Kilombero, and they had me to stay the night.

  The Swazi Minister of Finance came to Basingstoke with two dele-gates. Ron Turrell and his fellow artists had finished their most beauti-ful set of banknote designs. First I showed the Swazis our prelims, round the couple of dozen artists, then the portrait engraving, vignette etching, numbering, and machine engravers, followed by the computer graphics department. There was one distinguished senior portrait engraver there who assured them that it really did take fifteen years to train a portrait engraver. If there were a quicker way we would have applied it. After being bedazzled by the immense camera equipment in the photographic department they followed me into the prelims manager’s office and we showed them their own hand-drawn designs. Ron Turrell was there.

  They could not get over the splendour of his portrait of their king. The powerful eyes had seen countless vicissitudes of life. The lettering had been composed of spears. They loved the Swazi beads in the litho background tints. Across the centre of each denomination’s front were two opposed spears, hung with a machine-engraved doily. They asked that those be replaced with traditional tassels. Ron said he could do that while we had lunch. That was a meal charged with good will, nurtured by David Rowe-Beddoe and a few others. Afterwards I showed them the designs with the spear tassels in place and the minister signed his approval. We could now submit our prices and, once accepted, the long process of engraving and origination could start.