Close to the Sun

by Stuart Jamieson

  Me with a tigerfish at Chobe.

  In later years it became possible to reach Serondella by car. Then we would go for drives along the riverbank in the evenings. This was hazardous and always exciting. Elephants, unaccustomed to humans, became outraged when their evening passage across the road for a drink at the river was interrupted. They frequently made false charges at us, flapping their ears, stamping their feet, and throwing dust about while trumpeting loudly. We were never hurt, but the danger was real enough. Once, one of our neighbors went down to Kasane for the day in a truck and was forced to stop on the road coming home that night when elephants blocked the way. They surrounded the truck, one elephant pounding on the hood with her trunk. When the neighbor finally got back, he found that several Africans who had been riding in the back of the truck were no longer there. We mounted an expedition in the morning and returned to the spot. The Africans were discovered up in trees, cold and miserable but uninjured.

  Some evenings after a day’s fishing upriver we would rope the boats together and drift home as the sun set. It was peaceful and lovely, the water lapping at the boat as the river gently carried us along in the fading light. My parents would have their whiskey as we watched the elephants bathe in the river while giraffes, buffalo, and many kinds of antelope came down to drink.

  To be safe in the bush, you had to know the rules and stick to them. We never swam in the river because of the crocodiles and always kept a wary eye out for them when close to the riverbank. We never walked out of the house at night because of the lions.

  Even during the day, it was not safe to stray far from the house. Accidents did happen. There was a crusty old forester named Ledeboer who lived near Serondella and who boasted of being the only man in Africa to have been mauled by lions on three separate occasions. He’d survived, but at a cost, having lost an arm and a leg. His remaining hand had only two fingers. Actually, he couldn’t blame the leg on a lion, as it had been taken off by a crocodile. Ledeboer didn’t have many more parts to lose, but he was cheerful about it.

  Crocodiles were an ever-present danger. Africans did their washing and bathing at the riverside in crescent-shaped enclosures constructed of logs set into the mud. Although this gave some protection, it was always possible for a crocodile to get onto the bank and then enter the enclosure or to take advantage of a loose log to force its way in. Late one night, an African brought the mangled body of a young boy to my father for help. The child had been taken by a crocodile while he was swimming, and his father had gone into the water to save him. There was a struggle until the father dug his fingers into the croc’s eyes, and the boy was let go. Sadly, the child was dead by the time my father saw him. It wasn’t unusual for visitors to seek medical help from my father. He always cared for anyone who was sick or injured. He never asked for anything in return, though maize or chickens were sometimes brought in as payment.

  When I was about fourteen, I learned to water-ski. My parents would not have approved if they had known what I was doing. My brother and I devised a method using two boats that we thought was safe, and which most surely was not. One of us would get in the water with his skis alongside the chase boat. The ski boat would take off, and the chase boat would follow the skier. If he fell, he would be picked up immediately. The danger was an added incentive—we learned to ski quickly on the Chobe. I still remember skiing past sandbanks crowded with basking crocodiles, which slid into the water as I went by. I didn’t know if they were startled or hungry. I eventually stopped letting Chris drive the chase boat because he would tease me by not picking me up right away and instead slowly circling and laughing.

  My father, my brother, Chris, and me with my dog, Annie.

  My father had a great friend at Chobe named Pop Lamont. Pop had been a game ranger in the early days of the Kruger National Park in South Africa. This was before rangers used Land Rovers. While on patrol one morning, his horse was eaten from under him by lions. He managed to escape on foot while the lions busied themselves with the horse. When I knew him, he must have been in his seventies. He lived in a shack near the river with an African woman and her children. That they were his children was understood but never mentioned. He wore a big bush hat that covered his closely cropped gray hair. Pop almost never wore a shirt, and his sagging chest and back were like leather.

  Pop had a maize field behind his shack that he protected fiercely. He kept an old rifle in his shack and an ancient shotgun that looked like a blunderbuss. One time Pop ran out of patience with a marauding elephant and shot it in his garden with the rifle. He cut off the tail as a memento. Soon the local Africans arrived with wheelbarrows to cut up the meat. When I went over there, they had cut a hole in the thick skin and were inside the abdomen, passing out morsels of liver, kidneys, and intestines to their families, who loaded it all into wheelbarrows.

  Pop routinely fired off his shotgun at the baboons that were a constant nuisance. One day he told me that he’d hit one in the hindquarters and it had fled “doing the Twist.” I was puzzled—I’d never heard of the Twist. When Pop explained that it was a dance popular with young people and the subject of a number of songs, I was surprised that he knew about it. Apparently he listened to his old radio at night when he had the batteries to power it. We had a radio, but it was seldom used other than by my father to listen to news and sporting events. I knew nothing about Western popular culture. I’d heard of Elvis Presley but had never listened to any of his music. Hearing Pop explain the Twist reminded me that there was a large world outside Africa about which I was utterly clueless.

  Whenever we were at Serondella, my father would invite Pop for dinner. He would arrive around seven, walking to our house in the dark with a clean white shirt on, probably the only one he had. He wore pressed trousers and shined boots, and, of course, his hat. I think he felt obliged to dress for dinner as best he could. After the rest of us had gone to bed, my father and Pop would sit up late into the night talking about the early days of Africa—meaning the early days of white people there. They smoked and drank whiskey by the light of a hurricane lamp while the insects beat against the veranda screens. A few always managed to get in, and they circled the smoky lamp casting moving shadows across the faces of the two men as they told stories. Pop looked forward to our visits. I think he was always sorry to see us go.

  Sunset at Chobe.

  Africans in the bush around Chobe often met with accidents, as they had beyond memory. The only white person I remember getting killed at Chobe was a man named Charles Trevor, who built the Chobe River Hotel in Kasane. Trevor and his wife, Ethnee, came to Kasane in 1959. Since there were few visitors then, a hotel had seemed a dubious enterprise. At first it consisted only of a cluster of huts, rondavels with thatched roofs. Originally an engineer, Trevor built a pontoon boat that could carry two cars or a truck across the river to keep the hotel supplied. The boat was fashioned from empty forty-four-gallon fuel drums fixed to a wooden deck. It was propelled by two outboard motors. This was for many years the only way a car or truck could get to Kasane from civilization, and it was a great boon to us as it permitted us to bring a car all the way to Serondella.

  The hotel was just one of Trevor’s unlikely schemes. He installed an old Studebaker engine on a paddle boat he called the Chobe Belle. He would ride in it up and down the river in the evenings, an African helmsman at the wheel. You could hear it coming a long way off. Trevor sat in a deck chair with a bitters-laced gin and tonic—pink gins, they were called—watching the elephants drinking along the shoreline as he cruised noisily past.

  The first addition to the hotel was a bar, which opened on August 26, 1960, with a big party. All the white people in Kasane were invited. I still have the menu, which was signed by all twelve attendees, including my father. The others were local officials and a handful of guests staying at the lodge. Though I was there, I was not invited to lunch. I had just turned thirteen. I spent the day fishing from the bank of the river, waiting for my father so that we could trave
l the twenty miles upriver to Serondella before the dark made it too dangerous to be on the water.

  Trevor was later killed while taking two women tourists up the river by boat. They had stopped on an island we called Crocodile Island for tea. One of the women walked a few steps from the shore and stumbled onto a nest of bees. African bees, known in Europe and America as killer bees, are fierce. When disturbed, they attack relentlessly. The bees descended on all three. The women survived by lying in the water and breathing through their straw bonnets. Trevor jumped into the water, too, but had to come up for air and was stung hundreds of times. He managed to get the visitors home by boat but then fell desperately ill. My father was the only doctor within two days’ travel. I went along with him to Kasane as he looked in on Trevor daily. But there was no improvement, and Trevor was finally flown out of the bush to Bulawayo, where he died of kidney failure.

  Trevor’s wife had a son by a previous marriage, Robert Holmes à Court, who used to visit us at Chobe. He was in his early twenties, tall and lean, always with a taste for adventure. Robert owned an Aqua-Lung, and to our astonishment he would swim in the river with it. He must have come face-to-face with crocodiles many times. Perhaps they didn’t know what to make of this strange underwater creature.

  I remember a day when Robert threw eggs at some elephants to prove how close he could get. One elephant took exception to this treatment and managed to catch him. Trumpeting and shaking her great head, she tossed him several yards with her trunk. As he lay on the ground with his wind knocked out, the elephant tried to gore him. Robert held on to the tusks as she tossed her head trying to throw him in the air. Finally, he escaped by scrambling beneath her legs and into a bush. The elephant soon tired of searching for him and ambled off. Robert came away with only few broken ribs, which my father taped up while explaining how foolish the young man had been.

  My best friend at Chobe was a man named Payeese, who was the chief of the local village across the river on the Caprivi Strip. He was also a witch doctor. A big black man with a long, curly black beard, he spoke no English and dressed only in a pair of torn khaki shorts. He wore a necklace of crocodile teeth. His own teeth had wide gaps between them, and some had been filed into points. Payeese visited us every day in his makoro, bringing fish he had netted. I spent many hours with him. He taught me how to make fishing nets and to paddle the makoro standing upright in the back.

  Payeese gave me a steel-tipped fishing spear that I thought was the most marvelous thing I’d ever owned. One night I took it out in the shallows in a boat. My flashlight swept over the water and then caught a pair of eyes at the water’s surface. There was a roar and a splash as the hippo exploded from the river and charged the boat. I threw the outboard into reverse, but it got stuck in the shallow water. As the hippo rushed at me, I tossed the flashlight away from the boat, and the hippo tore after it. When he realized I was still around, he turned to charge again. I managed to free the engine and escaped by inches.

  Payeese was later killed by a hippo that overturned his canoe. I was devastated, and for a long time I had to remind myself every day that he wouldn’t come paddling up to Serondella again. I still have two karoses, animal skin blankets made from a rare Bechuanaland antelope, which he gave to me.

  When the Chobe was in flood every April, the fishing was bad. But one year the high water made the rapids between Kasungula and Kasane navigable, making it possible to reach Serondella by boat. Luis Preme, a man of all trades who lived in Kasane, picked us up in Kasungula, on the Northern Rhodesian side. We traveled in three boats up the river. The trip took most of the day, as we threaded our way through the unfamiliar rapids and the all-too-familiar hippos. I was in the last boat with a cache of stores and a delicate-looking female visitor from England, who was staying with us. An African who worked for Preme drove the boat. Halfway there, the engine quit. The boat drifted slowly backward downstream until it wedged itself in some rushes by the riverbank. A large crocodile slid into the water, and a few curious hippos popped their heads up to see what we were doing.

  I wasn’t especially worried. The driver and I both had plenty of experience getting balky outboards started again. But it was imperative that we do so. The other boats had gone on ahead and wouldn’t have returned for us until the next day, since dark was approaching. After cleaning out the fuel line and the filter, I tried to start the engine and couldn’t get it to catch. The African then tinkered with it a bit. After pulling on the start rope until he was tired, the man, who couldn’t speak English, started shouting, “Bloody fucking thing, bloody fucking thing.” As he heaved on the start rope one last time, the engine roared to life.

  Our English visitor looked shocked by the language but was relieved to not be spending a night on the river. I asked the driver in Shona why he swore like that. “Swearing?” he said, apparently mystified. “Oh no,” he said at last. “Those are the magic words Mr. Preme always says when the engine won’t start.”

  Diamond smuggling was common in Chobe. I believed that Mr. Preme was involved in this illegal activity, because he once asked my father to take a packet of diamonds on our return to Bulawayo. My father refused. Webb, the superintendent of police, whose job it was to stamp out the illicit diamond trade, was also involved. I suspected my father knew Webb was implicated because of an exchange between them I once overheard at the bar in at the Chobe River Hotel. My father addressed him as Mr. Webb.

  “My friends call me Webby,” he answered, sounding annoyed.

  “I know they do,” said my dad.

  I was shocked. I had never heard my father be rude to anyone. I asked him about it later, but he refused to discuss it. The law must have finally caught up with Webb, because he later shot himself in his office.

  Life in Chobe sometimes owned a haphazard quality, as it did throughout southern Africa. Chance and fate were often in charge. In 1951, after they completed filming on the movie The African Queen, Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn visited Chobe. The DC escorted them. On the road outside Kasane, their vehicle was charged by a bull elephant. Though they were probably safe, the district commissioner shot the elephant there on the road and was celebrated for saving the life of Katharine Hepburn. The huge corpse lay on the road for months, a stinking mess. To go around it, a detour was made. The bend in the road near Kasane is still there, though few would remember how it came to be.

  One year during the April floods at Chobe, when I was sixteen, my friend Richard Calder and I took a boat downriver on a fishing trip. An African drove the boat through the morning mist as Richard and I trolled. We stopped about two hours after dawn, having caught our breakfast. Nothing tastes better than fresh bream cooked over a campfire. We put ashore and started collecting firewood. I heard Richard call out to me. Something in his voice didn’t sound right. When I found him he was bent over, reaching for a log but seemingly frozen in place. As I came closer, I saw why he wasn’t moving. It was no log at all, but a huge snake, thicker than a man’s arm. I could not see either end of it. Then it moved.

  It was a black mamba, poised to strike. The black mamba is the deadliest snake in Africa. It can swim and travel on land faster than a man and can lift a third of its body off the ground to attack. Its bite is known as the “kiss of death,” because it is always fatal. Death takes only minutes. The snake is actually gray, but the inside of its mouth is black. When a mamba is about to strike, it raises its head, opens its mouth, and sways.

  The snake swayed slowly from side to side. Its unblinking eyes were fixed on us, its head some four feet off the ground. The open mouth was like a black pit, with two pale fangs exposed. Neither of us moved. I don’t know why the snake didn’t strike. After what seemed like an eternity, the mamba dropped its head, slithered off, and went down a hole in an abandoned termite hill twenty yards away.

  Richard and I collapsed in the dust. It took a minute to recover. And then we went after it.

  We were interested in snakes. In fact, we regularly collected snakes
for the Bulawayo snake park, which paid by the foot—the rate depending on how long and how venomous the snake was. We knew a black mamba this size would be worth a small fortune. We knocked off the top off the anthill and poured a pint of petrol from the boat’s engine down the hole. This had worked for us before, but nothing happened. Just as we were turning to get more petrol, the snake shot out of the hole. It looked at us, then took off in the opposite direction. I ran alongside it, beating the ground with a stick, trying to force it into the river. I had to run hard to keep up. The snake didn’t hesitate at the water and began to swim across.

  The river was about a quarter of a mile wide. We ran to the boat; Richard and I got in. The African refused to join us. We had reached the middle of the river when we caught up with the snake. We circled it, wondering what to do next. The snake tried to climb onto the boat. If it came to a choice between the crocodiles or sharing the boat with a black mamba, I was prepared to take my chances with the crocodiles. At the last moment, we managed to push the snake back into the river with an oar.

  I fashioned a noose from some rope, attached it to the end of a fishing rod, and got it around the snake’s head. We had it. Now all we had to do was get it back to Serondella and then to Bulawayo. We forced the mamba into a keep net we used for fish, and there it stayed, apparently safe.

  No one was happy when we brought the mamba back to the house. Richard and I assured my parents that it would be impossible for it to escape. We put the keep net in a tin trunk and locked it. The mamba could go several weeks without water, and longer without food. From then on whenever there was a creak in the night, I would sit up in alarm, listening for a snake slithering through the rafters or a heavy plop as it dropped onto someone’s bed.

  When the time came for us to leave, my parents went ahead. I had my driving license, and we had come up in two cars, taking the ferry across the river. There was the problem of how to get the snake into Southern Rhodesia. We put the keep net into a large crate labeled “eggs” that we used when bringing supplies up from Bulawayo. If anyone at the border was so inquisitive as to open the crate, the inspection was likely to end then and there. As it turned out, we were waved through without any difficulty. We took the snake to the Bulawayo snake park. It measured fourteen feet long—the largest black mamba ever recorded. We were handsomely paid.