by MP Miles
Ralph set his rucksack down against the inside of the tree and touched the trunk. It felt soft, spongy to the touch.
“My name is Ralph. Thank you for having me,” he announced.
The girl brought a mat made of some woven fabric.
“You should use this to keep warm.”
A man shouted across the tree to her. The only word Ralph understood sounded like ‘Peters’. The girl answered him in a local language.
She looked at Ralph.
“He wants to know if you have any Peter Stuyvesant. Cigarettes. Anything to smoke.”
“I’m sorry.”
The girl shook her head at the man. He didn’t look disappointed. He smiled at Ralph and shook a long pipe at him.
“He wants to know where you are from,” the girl said.
“England.”
The old man, and some others, understood the word.
“Manchester United!” he shouted.
“United,” some chorused.
“Not really,” said Ralph. “Further south.”
A man brought the bucket from the other side of the tree and mimed Ralph to drink.
“What is it?”
“Chibuku,” she said. “Shake-shake.”
She took the bucket and drank.
Ralph looked in the bucket and saw an opaque thick brown liquid, foaming on the surface.
He lifted it up.
“United,” he said.
“United!” they all shouted.
He took a deep pull from the bucket. It tasted thick and sour, freshly fermented, and fizzed on his tongue. It seemed to amuse the others that he had tried it.
“What is this place?”
“This is The Tree of Life.”
“A baobab?”
“Practically all parts of the baobab can be used for something. It can provide food and water for people and livestock, shelter, clothing, medicine, tools for hunting, nets for fishing. Everything you need in life.”
A lady brought food. In South Africa the staple was called mieliepap or just pap, often eaten with soured milk for breakfast or with grilled meat from a braai. The same thing in Zimbabwe was a maize meal porridge. They called it sadza.
Here it looked like a stiff cooked porridge of ground maize but the Zambians called it nshima. It had the heavy consistency of mashed potatoes and they ate it with a tasty relish made from vegetables, fish or chicken. On the savannah, meat was often absent in the diet of cattle-keeping people. They would consume the milk and the blood but their animals were a hard currency, too valuable to kill and eat.
“Is the trunk usually hollow?”
“These trees are very old. Over time they naturally have open spaces in the trunk. Sometimes it is hollowed out in parts by men with a small axe. It doesn’t affect the tree. Many baobabs are used as village meeting places. One is a prison. Another is a bus shelter that can accommodate thirty or forty people. Usually they provide protection for animals or storage. There is a famous tree that an administrator, a Major Trollope, used as a bathroom complete with a flushing toilet.”
She lowered her voice.
“In some the dead are stored inside, suspended between earth and sky.”
Ralph took another drink from the bucket. It wasn’t so bad. She offered Ralph some nshima.
Ralph looked at her. She had shake-shake bubbles around her mouth.
“What’s your name?”
“Mutinta. It means… umm… ‘different’ in the Citonga language.”
“How is it that your English is so good, Mutinta?”
“My father is a doctor. He is in Lusaka, but we live here, in Pemba. Or wherever the cattle are feeding. I had an exchange with a church to study in America. I spent three years in Philadelphia at the International Baptist High School. I didn’t like it.”
Ralph tried to picture Mutinta in Pennsylvania, sitting in a garden chair instead of on the floor in the dust; drinking milkshake instead of home-brewed shake-shake; eating a burger made from a valuable cow instead of maize porridge. It wasn’t easy.
Ralph leant back and relaxed. He looked at Mutinta, wanted to hear her talk.
“The Tree of Life. So, what else can it do?”
“It makes medicine. A powder of the roots is good for malaria and the bark reduces fever. The leaves are good in a poultice for inflammations and insect bites. In Zambia we make an infusion and bathe babies with it to keep their skin soft.”
Two of the children, tired, came and sat beside her. Mutinta covered them with her chitenje, one on each side.
“And you can make things with it. Like string for fishing nets, or sacks from the soft root bark. You can completely strip the bark from the trunk without hurting the tree and make anything from the fibres: rope, baskets, mats, cloth, fishing line. You can’t do much with the wood. It’s spongy and won’t burn. It’s good for making canoes or fishing floats.” She poked the embers of the fire with a stick. “It’s better to burn these dry husks that surround the fruit. The smoke keeps away mosquitoes. Or you can put it in your pipe if you run out of tobacco.”
“As good as Peters?”
She laughed.
“I don’t know.” She pointed to the old United supporter. “Ask him.”
The children under Mutinta’s wings looked at Ralph. They wore a mismatched selection of oversized cardigans and hand-me-down shorts and little rubber boots. Their hair had been closely cropped so that he couldn’t tell if they were boys or girls. They had beautiful large eyes and smiled easily.
He suddenly remembered his earlier shopping trip, the smiling street vendor in Pemba. From the top of his rucksack he pulled a dry box of Christmas crackers. He had the attention of the whole tree now, inquisitive eyes in the gloom watching him with curiosity. He took out two crackers and gave one to each of the children with Mutinta. They rolled them in their hands, the shiny gold and red foil glinting in the firelight. Ralph positioned their hands, one on each end of the cracker, and helped them pull. A crack like a thick stick snapping echoed inside the tree. The children screeched with excitement. A yellow paper hat and a small plastic aeroplane fell to the floor. The bucket of shake-shake hung motionless between two men. Mutinta picked up the toy and the paper hat, unfolded it and took it to the old man with the pipe. He took the hat from her, studied it, and with some ceremony put it on his head, his wide face beaming in the half light. They had a long discussion about the model jet. In the end Mutinta found a flat rock and put it on the ground in front of the old man. He placed the toy on the rock, turning it for a view from every angle. The other children gathered around Mutinta. There were twelve crackers in the box. Mutinta made sure that different children experienced the excitement and shock of pulling a cracker, then she would take the hat and the toy to the old man.
Seven serious proud men, drunk on shake-shake, and three old ladies with no teeth, sat at the other side of the tree, crowned kings and queens in a round court. A treasure trove of small gifts sat on the flat rock. The aeroplane, a whistle, a thing that made a whooping noise when you pulled one end, a small spinning top, a square with sliding naughts and crosses, a compass the size of an old penny.
*
In the quiet darkness Ralph felt Mutinta come and lie next to him. The children had fallen asleep in a heap, like puppies. The men snored and twitched the other side of the tree, the shake-shake bucket on its side, empty.
She whispered to him.
“Tell me about England. Is it like Philadelphia?”
“Parts of it are probably a little like that. Where I live in the south it is cattle country. But not like here. The land is always green and the cattle always fat. Some of the people too.”
Mutinta thought of her trip to America, the way she had to sit close to people she didn’t know, the nauseous smells from food like the kind you would give to old people.
“Will you fly from Lusaka with Kenya Airways?”
“I am travelling on foot to Kenya.”
“Do you know the way?”
“I have a rough idea.”
She thought for a while.
“Will your father be worried about you?”
That, thought Ralph, is a very good question. He hadn’t been in contact with his father since leaving Johannesburg. He wasn’t sure that he could remember much about their last conversation. He thought he’d told him that he would tour around, check out the sights. Now he realised that his father would be very worried about him. It upset Ralph to think that he might be anxious, and he made a mental note to contact him from Lusaka, even if only with an airmail bluey telling him of his plans. Ralph felt a little homesick. He put it down to the Chibuku beer.
He turned and looked at the dying fire. Mutinta put her arm over him. He looked into the fire thinking of home, and it took a long time before he could sleep.
When he woke in the morning he noticed that the fertiliser sack door to the tree had been hitched open. Harsh sunlight made a bright yellow column over the floor. He lay in the shade alone, not a sign of Mutinta, the old man or the children. Suddenly he didn’t want to be in the tree. The tree felt unwelcoming, dark and cold. Outside he could see the sunshine and a beautiful bright morning after the rain. He got up quickly, desperate to leave.
As he reached for his rucksack something on the top sparkled in the light through the door: a compass, the size of an old penny, a present from Mutinta to help him find the way.
Eleven
Nels drove through the Zambian town of Monze on the road towards Lusaka with the sun setting in his rear-view mirror. By necessity he’d been creative with his travel plans, his options limited due to his South African passport not being welcomed, or even accepted, in most African countries.
He’d driven at dawn not through Zimbabwe but to Gaborone in Botswana, just four and a half hours from Johannesburg. Botswana was reliant on South Africa for trade and communication with the rest of the Continent, and a fifth of all the males in the country travelled to the goldfields of the Witwatersrand to work in South Africa’s mines. It made the President of Botswana slightly more pragmatic than his neighbouring leaders. Other than a few San bushmen in the Kalahari, it was a land of a single tribe, the Tswana. It made his country poor but peaceful, and he wanted it to stay that way. Visas were not required for South African citizens.
A new all-weather road linked the capital Gaborone to Zambia via a ferry over the Zambezi River near Kasane, at a point where four African countries touched borders. It was a rugged, lonely, twelve-hour drive. Botswana was bigger in area than France but with a population only slightly greater than Marseille. Nels was impatient, and leaving his car at Gaborone airport he flew to Kasane, via a pit stop at the bar of Riley’s Hotel in Maun, with an ex-Army colleague who transported cash by air for Barclays Bank.
Nels had known the pilot Albert Smith for years. Together they had drunk and fought in hot and dusty barrooms across southern Africa. Smith’s chequered professional flying career had come to an end when Wenela Airways, who regularly crammed African labourers onto canvas seats and flew them to work on The Rand, crashed a Skymaster soon after take-off. Smith hadn’t been flying that day but Wenela ceased operations overnight and he’d taken what work he could find.
Together, in a faded Andover loaded with paper and coin for the bank, they’d flown over a broad empty tableland, seeing only cattle-raising and meat-packing stations dotted over the desert and salt flats. At Kasane, Nels had rented a car and driven fifteen kilometres to the new ferry, the old one bombed and sunk by the Rhodesian Air Force in the Bush War.
In the queue for Zambian customs on the other side of the river he’d paid a fixer twenty-five dollars to do the paperwork, and another twenty-five to compensate for his stupidity in leaving his US passport in the hotel in Gaborone. The fixer had taken his money and smiled. He knew the difference between an American and an Afrikaans accent.
He’d then had a slow four-hour drive through Livingstone, scanning both sides of the road. It had been a long day, his eyes now gritty and tired. Nels was only three hours from Lusaka.
*
Ralph had walked thirty-two kilometres that day on an empty stomach and felt faint from hunger and lightheaded with thirst. There seemed little chance he’d find anything to eat or drink. He should have looked for something in Monze, the last place he’d walked through, but he’d been reluctant to stop, fearing he wouldn’t get going again. The road had forked about two kilometres out of town and then run straight as a gun barrel towards Lusaka. Wiggly dusty goat and cattle trails meandered away from the road on both sides between round mud-walled cottages with thatched roofs. He’d covered a further five or six kilometres in a daze before realising that the sun was setting quickly behind him, his long shadow walking ahead. Ralph checked his map. He wouldn’t make the next town before nightfall: Magoye, still twenty-seven kilometres away. He should camp.
A large baobab stood alone, its branches in leaf. Ralph remembered Mutinta and her advice to him the previous evening. A baobab, The Tree of Life, provided both food and water.
“You can eat the roots in time of famine,” she’d said, “but the leaves are better, like spinach. They make a great soup.”
Ralph looked at the tree. Spinach-like soup from baobab leaf might be his only option. He’d need water.
“How do they provide water?” he’d asked her. He recalled her answer as she had fed him maize meal nshima washed down with a bucket of shake-shake.
“The hollow trunks can be carved out by hand in three or four days and used to store water. A hole is drilled through the trunk to get the water out and a bung put in. A medium-sized tree holds about 1,500 litres but a large baobab could hold five times that. The water will stay sweet for several years if the hollow is kept closed. You can channel water in to it to keep it topped up by making an opening just above the axil of a branch. Some people dig away the soil around the tree and line it with rocks to make a shallow pool for rainwater to collect in and then take it up to the top with a bucket and rope and tip it in an opening at the top. In the dry northern provinces of Kenya it became the only way to cross otherwise waterless country, and an organised chain of water trees stretched across the Kalahari for Bushmen. If anyone left the bung out they would be killed. These trees have a long history of helping travellers.”
Ralph, encouraged, walked towards the tree. With luck there would be a pool of collected water at the base, leaves to pick and boil, and shelter inside a hollow trunk. The headlights of an approaching car conveniently illuminated the way in the quickly fading twilight.
*
Nels’ eyes blurred as he stared ahead down the straight road. It was nearly dark, his headlights creating fuzzy yellow shafts of light in front and on the sides of the narrow two-lane highway. A railway paralleled the road, a constant fifty-metre-wide strip of bare scrub separating the two for the last five or six kilometres and continuing into the distance.
Nels decided he’d done enough. The chance of anyone walking around alone at night was very slim. He looked at the railway line and realised he’d made a mistake. It was most likely that the boy had taken a train. Ralph could be miles away, possibly already out of the country.
Nels swore, slowed, and steered the car carefully over the scrubland between the road and the railway in a wide careful U-turn. His headlights showed the railway tracks hidden under long brown grass and a trail through the scrub to a big old baobab standing at a crossroads of dry dirt paths just twenty-five metres the other side of the railway.
Something moved against the tree, something white in the car’s lights. Nels stared and blinked his eyes, forcing them to focus.
Nothing stirred.
He stopped the car short of the railway tracks and turned off the engine. The night wa
s still and quiet. He stood in front of the car, leaning against the hot bonnet, hearing the engine ticking beneath him as it cooled.
Nels walked slowly towards the tree down the beams of the headlights, fine dust floating around his feet. The baobab was wide, too wide to see around unless he circled the trunk.
He stood very close to the tree and sniffed the night air. There was a tangy smoky smell. He looked around for village cooking fires but saw nothing, no sign of flickering light. It was as if the smoke was inside the tree.
Nels shook his head. That was impossible. He was tired.
He ducked under a heavy branch nearly touching the ground and walked to the trunk, stumbling into a shallow ditch lined with flat stones that wound around the perimeter. It was half full of water.
There was nothing to see. Just a heap of white fertiliser sacks piled against the dark side of the trunk.
Cursing, Nels strode to the car and slammed the door behind him, the rear tyres kicking clouds of red dust into the taillights as he accelerated back onto the highway.
*
Gordon and Ann Baldwin were known throughout the region as religious and industrious poultry farmers. Their farm at Calvary Hill stood beside a straight road out of Lusaka that ran to the satellite station over the high plateau, an area of flat land made into small fields cleared from scrubby bushes. Twenty-five kilometres from the bustling capital it was quiet and peaceful, almost contemplative, an avian retreat.
It hadn’t always been that way. During the Rhodesian Bush War, the guerrilla leader Nkomo had been in exile in Zambia with his Zimbabwean African People’s Union. In September 1978, Nkomo laughingly took responsibility for shooting down a civilian Rhodesian airliner near Kariba with a Soviet ground-to-air heat-seeking missile. The Rhodesians retaliated the following month, their air force attacking ZAPU camps within Zambia and effectively taking control of Zambian air space for the duration of the raid. Rhodesia maintained that it hadn’t been an act of war against Zambia.
