Up to then I had been convinced that Kindu lay on the east side of the river and the boat was pointing north. The opposite was true. Not for the first time, I had experienced the strange impression to those born and bred in the opposite hemisphere of inversion. I had noticed it in Kitwe. Ask me to point to South Africa, or for that matter, merely Ndola, and I would point north to the Congo: ask me the opposite and I would do the opposite. For me the north was south, and vice versa.
(The same thing happens to our opposites. When years later I brought a Zimbabwean wife to England, and she went shopping with our small son in Liverpool, when she wished to return home to our flat in the south of the city, my wife insisted on boarding a bus for the Pier Head. My son tried in vain to get his mother to cross the street until she was at last convinced by the words on the bus. She may have been convinced but she was not reassured: in fact, she thought she was going crazy.)
I think this is because, as far as we northerners are concerned, the sun passes through the southern sky, and that is where we are aware of the light: in the south it is the opposite way about.
By afternoon we were sailing up the broad brown river, past the monotonous green wall on either bank. There were many islands in the river and, although the boat kept to the right bank, sometimes coming so close that we looked into the heart of the forest, like a green wonderland, the channel presented difficulties and a man crouched on a pontoon, dropping a plumb-line and calling the depth to the captain on the bridge; and like railway trucks, veering from side to side, the barges trailed behind. We saw canoes with men fishing. Otherwise, mostly the empty river and the blank forest. At one point, another river joined ours from the west, in the great drainage system of the Congo basin. The sunlight slept on its southern bank as it wound out of sight, incredibly remote, making the heart faint with loneliness.
People grew bold and came up onto the upper deck. Ladies sat in chairs while other ladies modelled their hair into balls, spikes, linking plaits, according to fashion or fancy. I sat in my deck chair with Martin Chuzzlewit (Barnaby Rudge parting company on the last train), and had already joined Martin and Mark on their similar voyage on the Mississippi. And as often I left off reading and gazed on the scenes around.
Before night we came to our first landfall - a palm oil station. The clearing hove in sight on the left bank and we swung across to reach it. It was a simple square half-mile or so cut out of the forest, with some works and simple company housing. On the bank stood masses and masses of drums of palm oil, like an army of black beetles or armoured Samurai; and beyond them a more intriguing sight. This was a mass of boxes piled up with a man leaning on each side like book-ends. These were the crates of beer and Coke bottles - the empties of the previous week, waiting with the palm oil drums to be loaded and replaced (except in reverse - the drums full and the bottles empty).
We drew alongside with the usual hooting, and I looked into the large crowd which had gathered for this weekly event. The thought crossed my mind that this would be a good place to escape one's creditors. In the crowd I saw a small blonde girl, about eight years old. She stood out among the black faces like a light or a lemon on a tree. Her skin alone was brown. She was not an albino (who are fairly common in Central Africa, more so than in West Africa), or she would have been as red and sunburnt as me: more so, in fact. She was a half-caste. But how so in this region where whites were almost never seen? I reflected, she could have been fathered by one of the mercenaries (les affreux) who fought through these parts (the dreaded Manyema) in '64.
I became thisty. Was there water? There was a large tank with a tap. This was full of river water. Fortunately, I had a cup with me, or rather, a copper tankard presented To Dr Durrant from his Colleagues at Kitwe, 1972. I filled my gift, hoping that the water had been taken on away from human habitations, as I did not wish to die of typhoid in these remote parts and have my tankard (my familiar article) left on my grave instead of flowers, in African tradition.
Then the unloading and loading began. Men like ants bearing the large palm oil drums along the duck boards, up and down, to and from the boat and the barges behind. This went on after dark by the light of kerosene lamps. They were still at it when I fell asleep in my cabin. Some time in the night I woke to see the engineer creep into the bunk on the opposite side.
Next day the sun came up on the right bank, blazing white among the trees. I ate some of my sandwiches and visited the water tank. The captain asked me if I wished to take a bath.
I entered the bathroom and shut the door. Immediately, I was in complete darkness except for streaks of sunlight which entered round the door and through the cracks in the walls. I got used enough to the obscurity to run the water into the huge bath from its mighty tap: the water was cold so there was no need for two. The bath was plugged with a most curious device, a large hollow cylinder which fitted into a simple drainage hole. Strangely enough, I was to see another such bath plug later on my leave in a hotel in Aviemore, which has long since, no doubt, been tarted up out of recognition. And soon I was in my deck chair with Martin Chuzzlewit, the river and the forest.
And so it went on monotonously. Suns rose and set like fires among the trees. There were one or two more palm oil stations, with the same crowds and activity as before. At other spots, we stopped where people could buy food. I stepped ashore to stretch my legs but found nothing I could eat. At a larger place, Lowa, there was a tavern where one could get beer. A large lady sat beside me and tried to engage me in friendly conversation, but as she spoke no French and I had no Swahili, we made no progress. In fact, the only conversation I had was on the third and last day, when a plump girl who could speak French told me about Kisangani (the old Stanleyville, next stop but one) and recommended the Hôtel Stanley.
At one point on the second day, a gang of about thirty soldiers with FN rifles scrambled onto the boat, bound for some place downriver. They came onto the upper deck. As well as myself, there were the usual strays from the lower deck whom the captain seemed prepared to overlook, but he drew the line at these soldiers. He boldly ordered them below, rifles and all, telling them that the upper deck was reserved for first-class passengers, and they meekly obeyed. He was a tough little character, a sort of black Billy Doughty, equally fearless, if stouter. When one considers that a few years before, the soldiers would probably have shot him, thrown him to the crocodiles, taken over the boat themselves and run it into the bank, one could see that things had improved (for the nonce, at any rate) in the Congo.
On the third day we reached Ubundu, the end of the stage. After that, the river became unnavigable at Stanley Falls. One took a train from Ubundu to Kisangani. It was night and the captain recommended me to the home of the priest, the only white man in the town, and the usual 'Scania' led me there. Here I found a small Luxembourger in his white cassock. He was very pleased to welcome me, explained that he had already dismissed 'le boy', but prepared me some food himself. The last of my sandwiches were going green after three days and I had thrown them overboard and gone without lunch.
The father sat beside me while I ate. He talked as if he would never stop: how long since he had last had talk with a fellow white? I had difficulty following his eager stream of French. He told me about 'les événements' of '64, and described with unChristian glee how the mercenaries had whipped the Simba rebels - 'paff! paff!' I could understand his feelings, when one remembers what the Simbas did to the missionaries.
He showed me to my bedroom, complete with mosquito net. (Yes, they had provided one on the boat in my 'first-class' cabin, and, of course, I was taking antimalarials.) I offered to pay for my keep but he refused. In any case, I left the customary two dollars by my bedside next morning, but afterwards realised that 'le boy' no doubt appropriated them. (Ah well, ye who now do bless the poor!) The father drove me to the railway station in his Land Rover, where I caught the train to Kisangani.
The train arrives at Kisangani on the left bank of the river, and to cross one has to ta
ke a canoe: not the small canoes I had seen in West Africa or on the river so far, but sixty-foot vessels with seating on either side facing inwards for as many as a hundred passengers, driven by an outboard motor. In one of these I sailed across the mile of water.
Kisangani (or Stanleyville as it was called by the people who built it) was the loveliest city I saw in the Congo. It was admitted on the West Coast, even by the Brits, that while we built shanty towns, the French and Belgians built European cities (I was to discover later the same was true of the Portuguese); and while this aspersion is not true of our people in East and Southern Africa, it must be admitted that Kisangani was a small piece of Paris, planted 1000 miles up in the jungle. As well as the handsome Continental streets with their pavement cafes, there was a lovely promenade along the riverside. I found the Hotel Stanley and booked myself in. And when I unpacked my case, I discovered I had left Martin Chuzzlewit on the train.
It was sundown and too late now to re-cross the river. I did so next day. I noted the train was still in the station: these things do not move about Africa in the restless spirit of Europe. I went into an office where the usual bored clerk sat behind a large desk.
'Pardonnez-moi! J'ai laissé un roman anglais dans le train.'
He opened a drawer and pulled out the book in question. He studied the title.
'Comment est-il appelé?'
'Martin Chuzzlewit, de Charles Dickens.'
I signed for it, he handed it over, and the property of the Kitwe library was saved.
I had meant to take the next river boat: a considerably posher one, I understood (and hoped) for the next stage of 1000 miles (ten days) to Kinshasa, but through some confusion I missed the connection and had to travel by air. Otherwise, I could wait two weeks for the next boat to arrive: too long, I felt, to hang around Stanleyville.
So the following afternoon found me taking a taxi (not a 'Scania') to the small airport, a mile out of town, where the Belgian paras landed in '64, too late to save the hostages in the city.
As we flew out, I looked down on the Grand Forest: the ocean of tree-tops, clearings which contained small villages of thatched huts, the great rivers that glinted like reptiles. Then the swift tide of night ran in and all was swallowed in blackness.
At Kinshasa I stayed at the famous Memling Hotel. I strolled about for a day but found it a less lovely town than Kisangani. The planners had taken no aesthetic advantage of its site on the great Stanley Pool, which was lined only by docks and warehouses.
After two nights I boarded a Sabena jet, which flew overnight to Brussels, and got a connection next day to London. I had been abroad two years.
PART THREE - RHODESIA
1 - To Rhodesia
I now knew that Africa, or rather the African work, was my vocation, and as the reader will have gathered, I was aiming at permanent settlement, by which I mean wife, home and family. For reasons already outlined, I decided this was not possible in the expatriate situations north of the Zambezi. This left only the true settler countries of Rhodesia and South Africa.
South Africa seemed to me too 'civilised'. In work, I was a loner: at least I wanted to take on as much responsibility as possible. This may not sound like the altruistic motives we attribute to Livingstone and Schweitzer (who in truth were the most monstrous egoists), but as Schumann said: nothing of value is achieved in art without enthusiasm; and he might have been talking about medicine too.
Now, South Africa struck me as being suspiciously overdeveloped for my purpose. Hadn't Dag Hammerskjöld exclaimed: 'This is not Africa: this is Europe!'? I could see the place over-run with specialists, and the bush doctor like a GP in England. This is not to say that British GPs are not excellent people in their way; but their way was not my way. In fact, there were some wild parts in South Africa - notably among the 'homelands'; but they were not ‘countries’, where I could settle, more black backwaters. Besides, South Africa is rather a foreign country to an Englishman - very tight and Teutonic. Rhodesia, I felt, was altogether more relaxed and British. For to realise my complex ambitions, I needed people of my own kind. If I had been by nature a monk, work alone would have satisfied me, and nothing would have suited me better than an up-country mission hospital in the Congo. But I wasn't and it wouldn't. So I decided Rhodesia it was.
Rhodesia was then in a tricky position: an international pariah, after the Unilateral Declaration of Independence of 1965. I decided that as a doctor, I could stand aside from politics, and this I mostly managed to do. I was there as a settler, a serious person - no longer a sojourner. This, as with the other settlers of those countries, seemed to me its own justification.
People advised me to take a car as they were hard to come by in the country. In my ignorance, I chose a Fiat, which turned out to be unlucky as the most popular models were French and Japanese, and gave rise to difficulty in the matter of spares. Taking a car meant going out by sea, so I booked a leisurely twelve-day passage with Union Castle, and left on the Oranje from Southampton.
The voyage out was certainly more commodious than air travel, even steerage. There were all the usual facilities of such a voyage: swimming pool, deck games, bar, dancing in the evening, spacious dining-room and lounge, and no more then two to a cabin. And three good meals a day.
Each table seated about a dozen people, and at mine we had two unofficial entertainers we came to call 'Old Bill' and 'Young Bill'. These two were English South Africans: I think Old Bill had spent his early years in London but was otherwise as South African as Young Bill, a curly-haired young fellow of about twenty-two, who was born there.
And both Bills were rebels.
Your English South African rebel, as I have hinted, was not as fierce as the kind the Boers produced themselves, but was probably more entertaining. Old Bill and Young Bill spent every mealtime winding each other up over the shortcomings of their country and its system, and as much time in between as they found themselves together.
I first came upon them at it in the bar during sundowners when Old Bill was going on about their own prime minister, John Balthasar Vorster.
'The bugger wanted to drag us in on the side of the Nazis when the war broke out.'
'They put him in prison,' commented Young Bill.
'Prison! They should have shot the bastard.'
Some of the people at our table found this sort of thing less amusing than I did: one young English girl especially, who was emigrating, and did not want to be put off; wanted to judge for herself, as she said.
'They won't let you,' sneered Young Bill. 'You'll be brain-washed in six months.' He seemed to overlook his own remarkable exception, as well as his ancient companion's. Old Bill was about sixty.
At breakfast some sort of news-sheet was delivered to each place, which, besides world news, was heavily loaded with tidings of South Africa. Young Bill would peruse this as soon as he had secured his fruit juice and corn flakes, eager for more fuel for his revolutionary flame. So did old Bill, but he was slower off the mark, being incommoded by age and a fumble for spectacles. So Young Bill was usually first with the latest outrage. His style was satirical rather than angry: he laughed while Old Bill growled from his deeper disillusion.
'Ha! Ha! Listen to this one!' from Young Bill. 'Betsie Verwoerd says white parents should stop letting black nannies carry white kids on their backs, as they get used to the smell and break the Immorality Act when they grow up.'
A few mornings later he nearly choked on his cornflakes and had to extract one from his nose before he could share the fun.
'O Christ! What next! They are going to introduce apartheid donkeys on Cape Town beach.'
Now all this was very jolly, but the table next to ours seemed entirely booked up by the South African rugby team, to judge by its heavy Teutonic-looking occupants who, although they could not catch every word, seemed to be picking up unwelcome vibrations from our table. Electricity built up amongst them like a thundercloud, and one morning came a warning flash.
The most articulate of them (the rest seemed more devoted to deeds then words) growled at Young Bill. He ignored Old Bill as either beyond redemption or, being rather behind us in social advancement, they were not in the habit of molesting old men.
'We know what you're up to, Bill.'
Young Bill looked superior. 'I thought I was enjoying a private conversation,' he drawled, retracing the ship's course, so to speak, in his accent a few thousand miles towards Oxford, the more to annoy his interlocutor. His appeal for privacy was also a new departure for him.
'You're trying to put them off our country.'
Young Bill ignored them. It says something for South African standards that he came to no physical harm and was still on board at breakfast each morning.
I danced with a rather lovely Greek-looking girl who had been in Rhodesia. She described Gwelo (which was my destination) as a 'blink wunce tahn' - ie, blink once as you drive through and you don't see the town. There were such towns in Rhodesia (and in South Africa); but if Gwelo did not measure up to her Johannesburg, I do not think that is a true description of the capital of the Midlands Province.
(Incidentally, a 'town' in those countries is anything down to a garage, a hotel and a couple of houses, as long as it is occupied by whites. A 'village' is something with mud huts.)
And one morning we were in the magnificent harbour of Cape Town, viewing Table Mountain through a forest of masts. I looked over the gunwale at the quay below. I could hardly believe my eyes. In West Africa and Zambia I had seen whites, blacks and Indians. Here were men of all colours; and even when I got ashore I saw 'white' men in whites-only bars with crinkly hair, 'white' men with flat faces, and 'white' men with thick mouths. (I was seeing, of course, 'Coloureds', people of mixed race, but the mixing seemed to spill over the official boundaries.) In my first letters home I was writing that apartheid was not only immoral and unworkable: it was meaningless. This was a naive first impression, no doubt.
Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa Page 17
