Jack of Diamonds

by Bryce Courtenay

  As we steamed south, the weather seemed to control its temper and the air over the Bay of Biscay was warm. By the time we reached Gibraltar, we were in our shirtsleeves and the ship’s officers had donned their white shirts and shorts. As we sailed down the African coast, the weather remained benign, the nights dream-like as the familiar northern stars changed to strange new southern constellations.

  We went ashore in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, and I was surprised to see how European the whitewashed colonial buildings were, and how smart – what is it about the French? Freetown, in Sierra Leone, on the other hand, was more like I’d imagined Africa, and was just as Graham Greene described it: a place where nothing happened in a hurry. Lots of black folk stood around, stray dogs panted in the blazing sun, and a few rattling pre-war trucks hooted at nothing in particular. I wished Joe could see the huge cotton tree under which freed slaves had gathered in the 1790s. Curiously, fruit bats slept in the tree during the day, seemingly undisturbed by the noise or traffic.

  When we arrived in Lagos, in Nigeria, it was pouring rain, which lasted the entire time we were in port. A black Citroen awaited Berihun and Fenet, but before going ashore, Fenet handed me a letter.

  Jack, we’ve loved your company on the voyage. This is to my father in Addis Ababa and is on diplomatic letterhead. If you ever come to Ethiopia, look him up. Who knows, we may be back home as well. Hopefully this posting isn’t forever and we’ll meet again.

  I looked up at her, thinking, Oh, God, why aren’t you single! ‘Surely you won’t be there forever?’ I said.

  ‘Ah, Jack, it depends on our families.’ She smiled. ‘If we’re all in favour with the emperor, good things will flow from on high; if not, Lagos may well be where our future children grow up.’ She spoke with a very posh English accent, and she, in particular, had been good company. I knew she’d fled Ethiopia at the age of five with her family and other elite Amhara families, following His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, King of Kings, Emperor of Ethiopia, Elect of God. Her family had gone into exile after the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1936 and settled near the emperor in Bath, in southern England, where Fenet received an excellent education, culminating in a first-class degree from Cambridge. I forget her husband’s exact credentials, but they were just as impressive.

  Peter Adams was as enchanted by Fenet as I was, and couldn’t stop taking photographs of her. I implored him to send me one and gave him the address of Mr Coetzee, the personnel manager of the Luswishi River Copper Mine, where I presumed I’d end up. It’s not often you want to keep a picture of a woman you can never have and may never meet again, but she was that good-looking, and I think I was missing Bridgett badly. I wished now, too late, that I had asked her for a photograph to console me through the next part of my life, which Mr Leslie had indicated would be a sexual desert.

  In the three days we were in port in Lagos, I didn’t venture ashore. Peter Adams claimed it was one of the few places on earth where he hadn’t taken a bundle of photographs, and described the mangrove swamps, biting insects, malaria, featureless buildings, lethargic people and endless rain and heat. ‘In other words, Jack, a shithole; the quintessential white man’s grave in Africa.’

  We arrived at Lobito in Angola – my destination – at about seven in the morning. I’d done my Angola homework in the New York Library, swotting up on its history. Apparently the Portuguese had been in Angola since the sixteenth century, exporting African slaves to Brazil, another Portuguese colony.

  I said my fond goodbyes to Peter Adams, who had been a generous companion and host, and stood on the wharf alone, with the Roybank towering over me and affording a little shade from the already blistering early-morning sun. It must have been around ninety degrees and the humidity one hundred per cent. Within a few minutes my starched white shirt was soaked and clinging to my back and chest. Jack Spayd, alias Jack McCrae and now Jack Reed, had arrived in Africa more or less intact, if you didn’t examine his left hand too closely.

  The plan, as I recall, was for the ship’s agent to transport me to the town of Benguela some twenty miles along the coast, from where the weekly train was due to leave in a few days for Elisabethville in the Belgian Congo, situated as far from the east coast of the African continent as it was from the west. It would be a long journey back, should I ever wish to see the ocean.

  I heard a toot and then a voice calling out, ‘Mr Reed, your car. Mr Reed?’ My escort had arrived. I turned to see a short, thin guy in his mid-thirties jump from yet another black Citroen. His skin was dark but not the really deep black I’d seen in the other African ports, and he wore a white shirt and linen suit at least two sizes too big for him. ‘I am late, senor; a thousand apologies!’ He adjusted his jacket by wriggling his shoulders, an action he’d obviously perfected, then hastened to open the rear door.

  ‘Not late,’ I replied, smiling. ‘Your name, senor?’ I asked, then added, ‘Obrigado, but, please, may I sit in the front?’ I had learned the word obrigado, Portuguese for thank you, from Peter Adams before going ashore as well as a few other useful phrases.

  ‘Luis de Silva,’ he replied, undecided about whether to close the door first or pick up my kitbag. I stooped to grab the kitbag in my right hand, then reached down with my left for the canvas bag of books. He must have seen my scarred hand because he exclaimed, ‘No, senor, I must carry!’ He looked shocked. ‘Front seat not good, spring not okey dokey, but if you want.’

  A spring had pushed up through the worn leather, but I pressed it back into place and slid onto the seat.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said with a grin. ‘Big bum!’

  He laughed, shaking his head. ‘No, no, senor, not big bum! You will see my fadder!’

  ‘You speak good English, Luis. I’m afraid I know no Portuguese.’

  He seemed pleased. ‘I am trying always, senor. Now we must go manager office before we go Benguela. Is okay?’

  I nodded. He was obviously making a big effort, treating me like some bigwig. I’d wondered about the customs officer coming aboard to stamp my passport. Captain Eggert must have exaggerated my importance on the ship’s wireless as we came into port.

  We drove no more than a couple of hundred yards, though in such oppressive heat I was glad we hadn’t walked. ‘We are coming here now, senor,’ Luis de Silva announced as we drew to a halt outside a nondescript single-storey brick building. A painted board on the wall beside its front door announced ‘S.L. de Silva – Shipping Agents’, followed by a lot of other information in Portuguese.

  ‘Oh, also de Silva?’ I said, pointing to the sign.

  ‘My fadder, Senor Reed.’ I followed him into the building, where a rattling, squeaking electric fan stood on a single leg several feet from the front door. It must have been a primitive form of air-conditioner, the fan blowing air past a large block of ice resting on a stand in a tin tub. The cold draught caused Luis’s oversized suit to flap as he stepped aside to allow me the full benefit of the ice-cooled blast. ‘Air-condition Angola,’ Luis announced earnestly. He then led me into an office at the rear, where a very fat, short man wearing a similar loose-fitting white linen suit and a red tie was seated at a large, untidy desk. He heaved himself out of the chair and made his way ponderously around the desk to greet me. He was a dead ringer for Sydney Greenstreet in the movie Casablanca, though without the fez. ‘Mr Reed!’ he boomed. ‘Welcome, most welcome to Angola. We are very, very honoured to be of service to you and the esteemed British Bank Line.’ He clasped my hand within both of his own and shook it vigorously several times, then announced, ‘S.L. de Silva at your service, no wish too big.’

  I wasn’t sure whether he customarily referred to himself by his initials or whether he meant the company, so I replied, ‘Obrigado, Senor de Silva.’

  He threw his arms wide and beamed at me, then glanced at his son, Luis. ‘Five minute and already he speak Portuguese! A cool drink for you, Mr Reed?’ he asked. Before I could reply he said, �
��Luis, Coca-Cola for the senor!’

  ‘Thank you, but could I have a bottle of water to take in the car instead, please? I’d like to get to Benguela and to my hotel as soon as I can,’ I said.

  With Luis again at the wheel we left a short time later for the thirty-mile trip to Benguela. The town, which didn’t seem large enough to be called a city, had a vaguely Mexican or Spanish air, with plenty of white stucco and red tiled roofs. There were several quite imposing stone buildings, including my hotel, which had recently been renamed The Salazar, in honour of the Portuguese prime minister, whom Luis referred to as ‘our prime minister’.

  I was surprised at the number of people I assumed were Portuguese and questioned Luis about them. ‘Oh, senor, we have been here a long time, but still lots of people come from Portugal. My family are here long, long time. But still we are European. Here also, Europeans run everything, the government, soldiers, army.’

  ‘No African soldiers?’

  ‘No, senor.’

  I soon got the idea: Europeans were those who ran things and owned land, no matter their colour. Still, as Mr Leslie had indicated in New York, black people were at the bottom of the social ladder here, and, as I was soon to learn, pretty well everywhere in colonial Africa.

  After I’d checked in, Luis drove me to the bank to change sufficient currency to buy a train ticket to Elisabethville, and pay for my hotel and some appropriate clothes. ‘Can you take me to a good tailor, too, please? I need a couple of tropical suits made,’ I said.

  ‘I will take, there is one who makes clothes for where you are going, senor.’

  The tailor, a Senor Candido, spoke tolerable English and had evidently made it his business to outfit Europeans heading to the centre of the continent. I asked him to measure me up for two white linen suits; not too baggy, I stressed. He politely enquired where I was going and, when I said the copper mines near the border of Northern Rhodesia, shook his head vigorously and tut-tutted, explaining that white linen suits would be entirely unsuitable, and that he would make me three khaki bush jackets with long khaki pants for formal wear, and at least five pairs of khaki shorts and short-sleeved shirts. ‘It will cost the same, senor,’ he offered. He looked down at my shoes. ‘Shoes good,’ he announced, then, indicating a point just below his kneecap, added, ‘Long sock khaki pulled up so, you also must have.’

  My clothes would take three days to make, which was fine. If I missed a train to Elisabethville, there would be another, and I would enjoy regaining my land legs exploring Benguela and trying to spot as many of the local birds as I could. I knew nothing about African birds other than the flamingos I’d seen long ago in the Riverdale Zoo in Toronto. Once I’d been in the town for a few hours, Noel Coward’s ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’ sprang to mind, because from noon to three o’clock in the afternoon the town shut down, all businesses having closed for siesta, and everyone went home for a nap; a very sensible idea, if you ask me.

  Each evening, Luis would drive from Lobito to take me back to meet his friends, then drive me home to The Grand, now known as The Salazar, around midnight. Luis’s friends were a pleasant lot and I decided that, unlike Fenet’s posting to Lagos, a few years spent in Lobito might be quite pleasant. However, I was reminded of how things really stood one evening, when I returned with Luis de Silva to The Grand. ‘Jack,’ – he had finally gotten round to using my first name – ‘that man in the hotel when we came in, he the PIDE, the secret police.’

  The Irishman John Philpot Curran is credited with the phrase ‘the price of freedom is eternal vigilance’, but, in this case, it was ‘the price of tyranny is eternal vigilance’. I wondered why the authorities needed to keep the people under surveillance when, as far as I could tell, Angola was a peaceful and law-abiding place, but I couldn’t know what might be concealed under the seemingly benign social surface.

  The weekly train left on my fourth day ashore. I was informed that the train trip to Elisabethville could take three days; an inordinate length of time, I thought, for continuous travel over a distance of 1200 miles. ‘Why does the journey to Elisabethville take so long?’ I asked one of Luis’s friends who worked on the railway. He explained it was a single line, and nothing was allowed to interfere with the ore trains coming from Katanga province in the Belgian Congo and the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt. The weekly passenger train was obliged to pull off into sidings at fixed times to let the ore trains through. ‘Sometime if the ore train is late, you must wait three, maybe four, maybe even more hours,’ he explained. ‘Also, the mountains. Sometime you have to change to the big locomotive. Very slow, and burns a lot of wood.’ It had never occurred to me that a locomotive might burn wood instead of coal, but this was Africa and the tropics, and wood was in abundant supply.

  Ah well, I thought, I’m travelling first class, I’ve brought lots of books, and I’ll have plenty of time to read. Maybe King Solomon’s Mines by Rider Haggard? A corny thought.

  The railway station at Benguela had a distinctly European look, with a raised platform, which was hardly surprising, given that the railway was developed by a Scotsman, Sir Robert Williams, who was an associate of Sir Cecil Rhodes and largely responsible for the discovery of the copper deposits in the Katanga province. The railway line followed the old slave and trade routes through from the centre of the continent to the coast.

  I only mention Benguela station because it was the first place where I saw a definite division between the races; or, at least, the classes. White-jacketed porters stood on guard at either end of the two first-class carriages, beyond which stretched the other, somewhat battered-looking, carriages with rows of hard seats to accommodate those folk not entitled to call themselves European. They seemed a far happier lot, laughing and calling out to each other, every carriage window crammed with black people reaching down to buy food from vendors and chatting excitedly with the folks who’d come to see them off. I noticed several people boarding the train carrying baskets of live chickens.

  Sitting primly in my first-class compartment I realised that happiness and laughter could be found in abundant supply just two carriages beyond my own. I felt suddenly very lonely and miserable.

  The trip to Elisabethville in the Belgian Congo took three stop-andstart days to cover a distance of 1200 miles or, if you like, we averaged less than twenty miles an hour. Tedious wasn’t the word.

  Finally we arrived in the Congo, a country of roughly fourteen million people, once regarded by the king of Belgium as his personal estate, but now a Belgian colony and the treasure house of middle Africa. Rich in copper, of course, it also had huge deposits of cobalt, zinc, tin, silver, gold, manganese, coal and uranium (‘Little Boy’, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, used uranium from a mine in the Belgian Congo). There were also gem and industrial-grade diamonds. Any African caught mining for alluvial diamonds was summarily shot, according to a fellow passenger I met in the dining car: a Belgian, who referred to himself as a colon or settler. There was no trial or warning, simply a revolver to the forehead. Bang!

  It was early evening when I arrived in Elisabethville. I booked into a cheap hotel and then went out for a walk. Some of the buildings seemed to owe more to Europe than Africa, although I really couldn’t say with authority, as the closest I’d been to France or Belgium was nearly landing on the beach at Dieppe. Other buildings seemed more colonial, but all of them looked exotic and interesting to a boy from Cabbagetown.

  However, as Northern Rhodesia and the Copperbelt were only about 150 miles away, I decided to push on the following morning, arriving in Ndola just before noon. I had barely stepped onto the platform when two teenage boys ran up to me, pushing several other kids aside. One pointed to my bags and said, ‘Bwana, we carry for you, only one shilling.’

  ‘Can you take me to a bank first?’ I asked.

  ‘We take,’ the smaller of the two African lads said.

  ‘Do you know the offices of the Luswishi River Copper Mine?’

  Both shook their heads; t
hen the taller one said, ‘No, not here, Ndola this office, bwana.’

  ‘We show you bus to that mine,’ the smaller one said, then, flashing a brilliant smile, ‘maybe go bank, show bus.’ He pointed to my luggage and said, ‘All one and six?’ I could see the extra sixpence was a try-on. They knew a sucker when they saw one.

  I changed twenty-five US dollars into Rhodesian pounds at Barclays Bank and the two lads, lugging my kit, escorted me to the mine bus terminus. I gave them each a shilling and they seemed well pleased, racing away down the street, shouting happily. It was a nice cheerful welcome.

  The bus to the town of Luswishi River turned out to be a Volkswagen Microbus owned – as I was to learn – like just about everything else, by the mine. On the driver’s door was painted ‘Rhodesian Selection Trust’ and under it ‘Luswishi River Copper Mine’. I’d never before seen anything like this vehicle, where the driver sat right up against the windshield with no engine between him and the road ahead. I glanced through the rear window to see eight seats, all but two piled high with parcels and bits of equipment, obviously collected in town to take back to the mine. The engine was presumably situated somewhere under the floor at the back. There was no sign of the driver and when I tried the door it was locked. I was beginning to wonder if the two young black guys had conned me when a white guy stepped out of a nearby shop and paused to light a cigarette.

  ‘Excuse me, can you tell me if this is where I catch the bus for Luswishi River?’

  He drew on the cigarette, exhaled, then, squinting through the smoke, answered in a twangy Australian accent, ‘No, mate, that’s the old Bedford, but it’s for the black blokes. Need a ride?’

  ‘Well, yes, and thank you.’

  ‘No problems.’ He reached the van and unlocked the driver’s door. Turning to me, he said, ‘Noel . . . Noel White, I work for the mine – communications.’ He extended his hand.