A Drink of Dry Land

by Chris Marais

  I remember three things from that Angola training camp: Cuddle’s bagpipes, singing Welsh coal mining songs for beer in the Officers’ Mess and, after three weeks of lousy food, finding out that the cooks had kept all the best meat cuts for themselves. Dealing with those cooks was difficult because they had protection from the brass and could run quite fast.

  Four cramped train-days later, we arrived at Grootfontein. I was the only one in my group who had been there before. I told them all the old stories, about what a cute little camp this was, the deaf Major, the hookers at the Meteor Hotel, and so on. Even gave them a rundown of my lovely tyre store, which had been my domain four years previously.

  So what had happened to my little camp? What was this massive, sprawling city before me? The sign said Grootfontein, but the village had grown into one massive troop displacement complex. Thousands of tents lay before us, jets roaring above, trucks lined up in their hundreds, armour pieces in full array, rows upon rows of riflemen running this way and that. It was like a Hollywood epic. The only thing is: Hollywood and the CIA had left the building.

  The war had turned serious while I wasn’t looking.

  They gave us brand-new trucks, German Unimogs, piles of ration packs and pointed us in the general direction of Luanda. I’ve no idea where we went, because then we operated on a need-to-know basis. No one thought we needed to know. Except for the thing with the tanks. Which, in fact, we didn’t need to know.

  Some guys from Military Intelligence choppered down and told us all about the new-fangled Russian tanks we could expect to see bearing down on our positions shortly. They had fearsome guns, impenetrable armour and could see at night with infra-red sights.

  That’s it. I’m pissing off home, I said. Began gathering up my few things and walking south. Ten minutes later I found myself back in our base, having marched off in a semicircle. I was a human boomerang.

  At night, we used to lie in trenches on guard, two guys at a time, talking about the Russian tanks. All we had was one machine gunner and a drunken mortar man. Between them they might just have been able to scratch the side of the Russian tank.

  Every day, we moved positions so nobody could get a fix on where we were, including ourselves. Cuddle’s bagpipes were banned in the bush, so we gave him all our ratpacks and there was a hot meal waiting for us each evening when we returned.

  I was totally night blind. We all discovered this one night on patrol when I led the boys in the wrong direction, fell into a donga and knocked myself out for a couple of hours. I woke up in total darkness, nearly wet myself and went back to sleep again. By the light of an Angolan dawn, I saw I was only five metres out of camp. No more night moves for us.

  Bob the Birder was almost worse. He would spot a double-crested-triple-billed necktwitter in a tree, haul out his Roberts, confirm the sighting and then follow it for the rest of the afternoon. Not realising that he was actually leading us all after the bird and away from the patrol path.

  The only shot I ever fired in Angola was a panicky round loosed off at an Angolan steer. Our lieutenant decided we needed fresh meat after our ratpacks failed to drop out of the sky.

  So we found this herd of cattle and chased a steer across the road at the back of the Unimog, where the lieutenant was waiting, perched on the tailboard, his rifle at port. He shot the animal, it fell down and he motored off in the Mog to get more support and a big knife. It was barbecue time. I was left in charge of the Angolan steer.

  I had a smoke, whittled some wood, thought about writing a letter and then, suddenly, the beefer came alive again and charged me like Angry Meat from Hell, with his eyes distended, his jaw flapping and his horns aimed at my chest. I dropped him two feet from me and stood there shaking. War is hell.

  The braai afterwards was even less of a success. Our leader had shot the fellow in the spleen, so the meat was off. Cuddle made us a Dog Biscuit Delight and we all spent the afternoon on our truck, tanning in rifle oil. And then we were given two days’ leave at Calueque Dam, got drunk and were thrown into detention for the rest of our time.

  “So now let’s go off to Grootfontein,” I said to Jules a lifetime later, as we finished our snack and headed for the car park. “I have to put some ghosts to bed …”

  Chapter 26: Grootfontein and Beyond

  Back to the Meteor

  Grootfontein’s Meteor Hotel, my weekend refuge in the early seventies, had become a one-star Travel Inn while my back had been turned for 30 years.

  We used to call this place “Four in One” for the fact that, at the fag-end of a Saturday night, there would usually be four soldiers fighting amongst themselves for the attentions of one preening local woman of indeterminate age and origin. After a few months of Fort Grootfontein, anybody in a skirt looked like Hollywood to the likes of us desperate dog-biscuiteers.

  After we dropped our gear in the best room in the house, Jules and I ventured out to the courtyard, the ancient site of some of my finest teenage drinking bouts. We even sat in Bokkie Corner, where my mates and I used to count the beers – and the days left in this man’s army. I felt nothing. There were no lingering traces of S’ar Major Mole, Corporal Kat or Vermeulen, our tyre store tenant. Just a very friendly waiter, some toasted sandwiches and a cold beer.

  “OK, I’m ready for Hoba,” I said to Jules a while later.

  Let me tell you about Hoba. Just outside the town of Grootfontein lies the largest object to have landed on Earth intact from outer space. She’s a fabulous, 60-tonne meteorite made of iron and nickel, kind of square and hulking, wedged into a limestone deposit on the farm Hoba-West, but she’s a celestial body, the real thing.

  Her rivals reside in New York City and in Mexico. In the 1890s, the famed Arctic explorer Admiral Robert Peary brought the Ahnigito Meteorite home from Greenland. Peary rather hopefully estimated its mass at 90 tonnes, but it weighed in at just over 30, half the size of Aunty Hoba. Next in line is the Bacubirito Meteorite of Mexico, weighing 24,5 tonnes. Many thousands of years ago, a meteorite much bigger than Hoba and her contenders landed in Arizona, but it broke up into little bits. It made an awfully big hole out in the desert, but left very little of itself behind.

  Strolling past Hoba without knowing the story, you might not think much of her. To many geologists, however, Hoba has become something of a Holy Grail, because she comes from out there, possibly forged by the early beginnings of our solar system. They say Hoba could well have been a minor planet that suffered a meltdown maybe 300 million years ago, perhaps after a brush with another planet. No one can pinpoint the date of her arrival on Earth, blazing through the atmosphere to land up here in northern Namibia, but they say it’s somewhere between 30 000 and 80 000 years ago. Whenever she landed, the Hoba Fireball (as she was then briefly known) must have given Earth’s audience one helluva lightshow.

  “It is all too easy to envy the ‘Namibians’ of the time their good fortune in being spectators to the grand finale of Hoba’s space flight,” said Michael Brittan in his book, Discover Namibia. “Yet the awesome happenings must have prompted much spiritual supplication among the tremulous populace, to say nothing of the trail of psychological scars which it may have left. It must be remembered that the saga of civilisation still tells of a time when meteorites which fell to Earth were believed to have been sent by the gods.”

  Whichever way you look at it, Namibia is indeed a country of fallen stars. You’ll find little meteorites in southern Namibia and on display in Windhoek. This is serious Big Sky Country. Lawrence Green, of course, calls the meteorites “shrapnel from the sky”, and digs out another priceless anecdote surrounding the phenomenon.

  A Nama chief living in the Bethany district once sold a meteorite (For Sale: Namibian Stones – nothing’s changed) to a passing smous (trader) for a barrel of rum. The meteorite was so heavy it broke the trader’s wagon and had to be left behind in the bush. The chief reclaimed the meteorite and sold it a number of times to unwitting passers-by, who would also find the weight un
bearable. Finally, someone came along with a really strong wagon and dragged it off.

  And although you can see marks on her where people have taken a sample or two, no one’s managed to drag Hoba, the Alien Queen of Namibia, from her limestone bed.

  After our rather monastic cell (with communal showers and toilet) in Fort Namutoni, the room at the Meteor Travel Inn came over like top-drawer Las Vegas. The bed went on forever, we had our very own en-suite bathroom and, praise be to St Christopher, there was a TV set. I ran off across the road and shopped at the bottle store for whisky and lime schnapps. I also found a place that sold rolls, ham, biltong and corn chips. We flung ourselves on the bed and had a royal boarding-school pig-out feast in front of the TV.

  Within minutes of those awful flickering images, I wanted to jump back in the bakkie and head out to the desert again. After two months of swerving about The Mystic (our new collective name for the Kalahari, Namaqualand and Namibia), reality bytes of Hurricane Ivan, the fox-hunting issue in Britain and the war in Iraq were too much to process. We switched off the TV, put Little Feat’s Waiting For Columbus album on the laptop sound system and staged the famous Meteor Travel Inn Strip Gin Rummy International Challenge.

  Later, we immersed ourselves in very hard water that the soap turned chalky white.

  “Look, I’m finally bathing in the milk of asses,” my rather schnappsy wife called from the bathroom. All was very well here at the Meteor, and my army ghosts kept a discreet distance.

  The next day Jules and I went in convoy up the Great White to Rundu. With the faintest of hangover headaches, just like we used to in the old days.

  We soon hit the Makalani Palm Belt, which ranks up there with seeing your first Tropic of Capricorn baobab back home in South Africa. Once we crossed the veterinary disease control point (the rinderpest gate) we were in the land of the Kavango. Each thatch-hut village had its own craft speciality: giant clay pots, male busts, big birds.

  We met David Punga, who specialised in wooden aeroplanes, helicopters and luxury motor vehicles. Inside one of David’s large cars were two startled wooden passengers. David reached inside, set the speedo dial at 100 km/h and we all fell about laughing. The passengers found nothing funny in it, however.

  “We used to drive this road with our big trucks and our sunglasses and trade our overalls and our bully beef for huge carved drums and very exotic masks,” I recalled to Jules. “We were tourists with FN rifles.”

  But nothing from those days could spoil the mood in the bakkie right now. This Kavango drive was a jolly experience. We stopped and met Paul Jack, a guy on a bicycle carrying an enormous load of firewood. He told us the Kavangos were the friendliest people on Earth, smiled for a photograph and carried on cycling northwards.

  We reached the bustling river town of Rundu just after lunchtime. We drove past bars with names like Club Serious and dusty suburbs with dirt yards, skirted a busy marketplace and made our way through indigenous and blue gum forests to Sarasungu River Lodge, our home for one night.

  From our chalet, I could see the Calais Village across the Kavango River in Angola. I remembered buying many pairs of the well-known Calais takkies, locally-made canvas boots we all loved to wear as we sat in the shade of a Cuca shop somewhere in the bush, drinking Portuguese beer with a shot or two of that head-banging Aguardente liqueur. All so exotic.

  We went out on the river in a little motorboat, and the air was hazy from spring burning in the bush. The good citizens of Calais were all having their evening baths in the river. The smell of carbolic soap wafted across the water. Some kids called out, some saucy girls flashed their breasts, some waved, some turned away in modesty. The children of Angola, from a distance, looked like the happiest Huckleberry Finns on Earth. Then we drifted closer, and I saw a one-legged youngster with a crutch, trying to keep up with his mates on the riverbank.

  “Lots of landmines still on that side,” said our guide, a young lodge manager called JP. I fell silent for a time, crumpled back into my own memories.

  There was a thriving, informal cross-border business on the go. Ferries, both mekoros (wooden canoes) and motorboats, were taking people backwards and forwards across the river. We floated past a trucking camp on the Namibian side. The vehicles were parked under trees, the drivers were lighting fires and stray dogs were stretched out hopefully on the sand nearby. Fishermen passed us, hauling in their tiny catches. We let out a few optimistic lines, trawling for bream or tigerfish, but with no success. It hardly mattered, once the seal on that first sunset beer was cracked.

  I remembered Rundu as a pretty nervous place, back in the seventies. There was the matter of that ongoing war, to be sure. But, as I later discovered, Rundu was also the centre of a massive cross-border smuggling operation that involved rhino horn, elephant ivory, drugs and guns. Shady sorts in a sunny place, as the saying goes.

  Now it came across as a very busy yet isolated town, with Namibians and Angolans all mixed up together in social, linguistic and economic ways. The Dodgy Gang was probably still in town working those old smugglers’ routes but, as we found out over Texas-sized T-bone steaks that evening, other issues were in play.

  At supper, we complimented the Sarasungu owner, John Craill, on his very reasonable rack rates.

  “After the French tourists were killed, I bought the place for a song,” he said. “So I feel no need to rip people off.”

  Few people living in Rundu or further along the Caprivi Strip, especially those involved in tourism, would forget the events of 3 January 2000 in a hurry. A French family of tourists – two parents and their three children – were attacked on the Trans-Caprivi Highway about 50 km east of Bagani.

  Bandits in uniform opened fire on the Bidoin family’s rental campervan, killing Michael (18), Aurelie (15) and Cecile (10). Their parents, Claude and Brigitte, both teachers on the French island of Mayotte, were critically wounded.

  Just before this tragic and merciless killing, armed men in uniform shot at a minibus and a bakkie not far from the Omega military base in the Caprivi. The wounded drivers of the vehicles, which were loaded with foreign nationals, somehow managed to reach Andara Catholic Hospital, where they received some basic treatment before being flown to Windhoek. The drivers, who worked for a Danish non-governmental organisation, underwent operations for multiple gunshot wounds to their legs and were eventually stabilised.

  The military commander at Bagani told the media that his men were preparing to drive out to the scene of the first shooting when the French family’s hired campervan was discovered in the middle of the road with its headlights on.

  “The soldiers who found this vehicle saw a woman running, holding one of her arms,” said an officer. “They came closer and saw a man badly wounded outside the van.”

  Inside the campervan, they discovered the dead bodies of Claude and Brigitte’s children. They had died of multiple bullet wounds. Their parents, who miraculously survived, had each taken at least half a dozen bullets to various parts of their bodies.

  Various armed groups were blamed in the media blizzard and shock that ensued. It was Unita forces fighting the Angolan MPLA government, some said. Others accused rogue Angolan government soldiers of the attacks. Whatever faction spawned the killers, the result was disastrous for the entire region. A carefully cultivated Caprivi tourism flower that was just about to bloom was lopped off at the head. Four years later, when we passed this way, the after-effects were still being discussed. Tourist numbers were gradually starting to climb.

  “In fact,” someone down in Swakop had told us previously, “the attacks in the Caprivi affected the whole country. The rest of the world just heard the word ‘Namibia’ and took us right off their itinerary.”

  The Caprivi Strip, this “crazy, colonial finger” stretching eastwards into the underbelly of Angola and, eventually, Zambia, is the creation of nineteenth-century Germany, which longed for access from its sandy colonial possession in the west to the Zambezi and the trading ports of the In
dian Ocean. To those mapmakers back in Europe, it looked like a no-brainer. Unfortunately, they failed to notice a “smallish obstacle” called the Victoria Falls. Anyhow, the Zipfel (as some would affectionately call it) is now part of Namibia, even though it doesn’t look very Namibian at all.

  We continued to Andara Mission, passing huge piles of gathered thatch on the roadside. We looked briefly for a historic watermill and a tree bearing the name and date Hendrik van Wyk – 1879 with no success. Lawrence Green notes that after this ill-fated Dorsland Trekker had been killed by a local Mbukushu chief, “his grief-stricken widow, realising that there was no escape, lit a barrel of gunpowder, killing herself and the baby, the murderer and a number of tribesmen”.

  “Why do they call this place Popa Falls?” Jules wanted to know when we arrived at the famous body of water. “Popa Rapids, maybe, or Popa Narrows, yes. But not Popa Falls.” She was right. This was where the Kavango River dropped a few metres in a series of tumbling rapids, no more.

  We paid our N$20 entry fee to a jovial barman at the restaurant, walked past the camping grounds and discovered a security guard in a deep sleep, waded in the waters until we got bored and went back for a beer.

  While long-tailed glossy starlings fossicked around near a leaking tap, we sat in the shade drinking beer and eavesdropping on a very loud cellphone conversation being conducted by a pork-chop-eating South African businessman behind us. To be reminded of the commercial pressures of Johannesburg so far out here in the middle of nowhere was not comfortable. We decided to escape this nasty experience and take our chances with whatever the Caprivi Game Park had on offer.

  Chapter 27: Rundu–Impalila Island