A Single Swallow

by Horatio Clare

  I stopped to take in the road and the space, the birdsong and the feel of the morning. A wide tarmac strip with a broken yellow line arrowed away from my feet to the horizon. Swallows were using telephone wires as a base, hurling themselves into the rain-freshened air and zapping about in the sun. I had seen them now and then on the drive north, but only fleetingly. This was the best view of them I had had since South Africa, and it seemed a validation. There were round hills and high clouds in schools, and a great brightness in the day. The collective noun for swallows is ‘a flight’, which seems a little pedestrian, compared with a murder of crows, a convocation of eagles and an unkindness of ravens. An exaltation would have suited this group, but larks have bagged that. A confirmation of swallows, I resolved, would be my private term for them.

  The passing of rain bought dung beetles onto the road, and a little later, gliding low over the car, yellow-billed kites. Hundreds of yellow-billed kites! You jink for dung beetles – they are motoring too, generally at an angle to your line of travel – but you slow right down for kites. Kites are magnificent soarers, gliders and turners but when they are panicked they flap. Compared to a swallow’s mastery of speed and superlative judgement of changing depths of field, kites are flying babies. To have one come through the window at even 30 kmh would be mutually fatal. It was their moment and their road and it only lasted for half a kilometre, and they were spectacular, but I do not believe I was the only driver who swore at them.

  At the first service station at Grootfontein all the newspapers were leading on the floods. Poisonous-looking expanses of brown, outbreaks of malaria, communities cut off, aid unable to follow the photographers. Travellers, loafers and all their attendants milled around the forecourt.

  ‘The problem with Grootfontein is nobody stops,’ said a boy. ‘You are all going through.’ He was about sixteen, with a quick, attentive look and a slower, philosophical smile. He wore the same cheap clothes that all those hanging about the forecourt wore. I wondered if he would simply stay there, hanging around Grootfontein, until he became one of the hunched old men sitting on the low wall by the road.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Would you like anything from the shop?’

  ‘Oh! I will have a Fanta. Thank you.’

  I went in for a paper and drinks.

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I am trying to save money to continue my education.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘With my art.’

  I looked down. I had thought a Fanta was a good way of buying my way out of buying something I thought I did not want. My mother and brother had visited Namibia a few years before and brought me back presents: a bracelet, made of wood and little discs of ostrich shell, and a carved Malakani nut, sometimes known as vegetable ivory. You find them all over Namibia, often decorated with animals, as this one was, and topped with a looped leather bootlace. He was doing it as he spoke to me, curling black marks onto the white and brown sphere of the nut. As I watched, in the time it took to swig a drink, a zebra was made out of stripes and a giraffe finished off with spots. The animals had an angular, electric quality. A critic might have seen echoes of cubism. Leg-scrapes had muscle and kick and line. I had decided a while ago that I would not, could not, fill my rucksack with trophies. Art was a different matter.

  ‘Rundu’, said the guidebook. ‘Steamy . . . tropical . . . across the river from Angola . . . cashpoint . . .’

  It would take the other half of the day to get there. In the middle of the afternoon an arch loomed over the road. There was fencing on either side of it and uniformed men milling around. I crawled up to it, trying not to look suspicious.

  ----------LINE OF DISEASE CONTROL----------

  The men manning it were very efficient and cheery. One took a good look at the Mousebird and I. We exchanged greetings and he waved us through. We rolled over mats which may or may not have been soaked with chemicals and drove into a world extraordinarily changed.

  The ranches had gone. The fences had gone. White and black Africa had gone, rich and poor Africa had disappeared from view. If there had been well-off families, or farmers with thousands of acres of beauty, wealth and worry, employing dozens of labourers, or great homesteads somewhere out of sight beyond the road, then there was no sign or trace of them now. The world as I understood it had gone. There were no more agricultural bakkies. The silence of the sky and the songs of the bush were gone. Now there were men, women, children, huts, goats, sheep and cattle. There were many schools and many more shebeens. There were convenience stores, one-room garages, little kraals of thorn, rough circles of homes, straggles of bush, tall trees, where bee-eaters and lilac-breasted rollers perched, and skittering children trying to keep goats off the road. To the south of the Line of Disease Control, cattle could be commercially farmed, sold and transported. Here, to the north, livestock could not be transported south, so something not much more profitable than subsistence farming had replaced agriculture as the west understands it. The Line of Disease Control seemed to have cut time. I saw no more whites.

  I guided the Mousebird down the middle of the road, two thirds of her in the left lane and the rest in the right, hoping to maximise swerving options. The days of 120 km/h solitude are replaced with second-to-second choices about eye contact, waving, slowing and speed. There is also a great variety of hitchers. I picked on Danny because he was alone, a little way past a busy area, under a tree. When he saw that I was a single white man he stopped waving and smiled uncertainly.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I asked.

  ‘I am going towards Rundu.’

  ‘I’m going there. Jump in.’

  ‘Yes – but I have a goat.’

  ‘Bring your goat!’

  Danny is not a very big boy. He takes the forelegs and I the hind; both sets are tied together. The goat is beautiful, chocolate-brown with cream and dark eye makeup. It cries out pitifully as we manoeuvre it into the boot. I am used to sheep in the backs of cars but my only dealing with goats was a white, long-haired young brute called Shenkin, mascot of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, which I was sent to interview as Work Experience for the Western Mail in Cardiff – Shenkin and the band of the Fusiliers being part of the pageant of Match Day. I questioned Shenkin via his handler and then took a breather, aware that lighting up on the hallowed turf of the old Arms Park was about as fat a payment as Work Experience could offer. When next I considered Shenkin he had my notebook in his mouth.

  ‘This is going to be a good meal, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, this is a female. She is going to have kids.’

  She is much better behaved or more fatalistic than a sheep. Once we have shut the boot, plunging her into darkness, the heartbreaking cries fall silent and there is no banging.

  ‘Where are you going with her?’

  ‘I am taking her home . . .’

  ‘You just bought her?’

  ‘Yes, today.’

  ‘How much was she?’

  ‘Four hundred dollars.’

  (About £25.) ‘Is that a good price?’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  I thought Danny was reticent because he was so young and shy, and because I was asking questions too curiously. He had a rare, slightly strained smile.

  ‘My father has died. We are having the funeral.’

  ‘Oh God, I’m – sorry. Did he die recently?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you have brothers and sisters?’

  ‘Yes but my brothers are away.’

  ‘So you are the head of the family now?’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  He is not yet thirteen, I guess.

  ‘How did your father die?’

  ‘He had a pain in his stomach.’

  ‘Did he go to hospital?’

  ‘Yes, but he died.’

  ‘I am very sorry, Danny.’

  The boy ducked his head, smiled faintly and continued to look out of the window on his side. We passed another shebeen. They are small cubes with dark inte
riors in which beer is sold, not much bigger than the table football you can sometimes see through the door.

  ‘Are you a tourist?’ he asked me.

  ‘Yes . . . sort of. I am a writer. I am following swallows.’

  ‘Following what?’

  ‘Swallows – little birds, they come in the rainy season? You know, little blue and white birds, they fly very fast, like this [zig, zag] . . . if I could see them I would show you them, if we keep an eye out we might see some . . . they spend your winter in Britain, my home, then they come here for your summer.’

  ‘Yes.’

  After a while I said, ‘Your English is very good. Do you go to school?’

  ‘Yes, thank you. I learned it.’

  ‘At school?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And do you still go?’

  ‘To school?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Because you are very busy at home.’

  ‘Yes, very busy . . . my home is here, by the big mopane tree.’

  ‘Right! Stop up there then?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  We turned under the mopane and stopped. We lifted the goat out of the trunk. I was amazed, almost disappointed, to see that she had not soiled it; any ewe would certainly have left some tokens but all that remained of the goat were a few fine brown and white hairs. There were some huts set back from the road about 50 yards.

  ‘Is that your house?’

  ‘Yes, they are having the funeral there.’

  ‘Do you want me to help you carry the goat?’

  ‘No . . . someone will come.’

  ‘OK then.’

  We both hovered for a moment.

  ‘Danny,’ I said, suddenly, ‘you’re such a bright boy. Please – you must try to go to school . . .’

  He looked at me with such a strange look, something like pity. We shook hands and smiled. I drove away.

  I came to Rundu in the late afternoon, apprehensive about it and excited. It was the gateway to the Caprivi Strip, a region about which the guidebooks had been tentative and gnomic. It was closed off by the Border War (when South Africa fought the Marxist liberation movement in Angola), then opened to convoys, then shunned again when four French tourists were killed in 1999 (supposedly by UNITA, Jonas Savimbi’s Western-backed, mercenary-rich, anti-Marxist, above all pro-Savimbi militia, long after UNITA had lost their fight for Angola.) The strip itself is one of the most wonderful colonial perversions.

  Even by the insane, bandit laws of imperial cartography, Namibia ought to be a rectangle. The South Atlantic and the magical, diabolical Skeleton Coast to the west; then the Orange River, more or less, to the south; then a straight line up through the Kalahari – jutting slightly to account for the Okavango swamp and Botswana – takes you to the horizontal northern frontier with Angola, formed by the Kunene River, home to the most ferocious crocodiles in all Africa, and the Kovango River. But in 1890 Queen Victoria’s men gave a long flat pencil of land running between the Kovango and the swamp to Bismarck, allowing him to link his vast, boiling wastes (the Kaokoveld desert is a truly extraordinary and still near-impenetrable world) to the Zambezi, which runs eventually to the sea on the other side of the continent. It was not a gift but a swap: Victoria’s subjects got undisputed claim to Zanzibar, prince of spice islands, a prize so rich her ministers also threw in Heligoland – some North Sea rocks – as a sweetener. And Heligoland surely swung it: on paper it is otherwise hard to see how it was a good deal for Germany, partly because of the small matter of Victoria Falls, at the end of the strip, where the Zambezi commits suicide in a giant inverted volcano of sparkling tortured water and roaring rock, which effectively stymies navigation.

  The upshot is that Namibia looks like a child’s attempt to make a paper rectangle, a distracted child, which did not bother to tear off a last strip jutting off the top right corner: Caprivi.

  Rundu is a left turn off the main road, low buildings, lots of people and heavy heat. The guidebook says something about a place to stay by the river. The main street has a curl, a division, and then you hit the river road. There are various signs promising lodges. The road down to the one I chose was rough: the Mousebird coped easily with its gradients, broken surfaces, floodwashed gravel and holes, but though we did it several times there was always something interesting between the top and the bottom – a half-nasty spin, a scrape. I missed the turn and ended up at the beach. There were two or three cars and one or two people, listless in the heavy, yellow, riverine peace. I asked someone, who pointed just uphill. We spun around, scuttered back up and turned hard right through an open gate onto a sand track. There were bushes, little lodge huts, a shuttered bar/breakfast room almost overlooking the river and no sign of anyone at all.

  There was a choice between full sunlight or slightly too cool, too deep sand, so we stopped where we were. The owners’ house (‘owner-occupied, delightful German couple’ or something,’ etc.) was set back in bushes a little way above the gate. I walked slowly. The front door was shut but everything else was open; a radio played along with the breeze. At just this height above the water in just this much shade it was halfway between very hot and perfect. This is exactly where the colonisers always seemed to live – in the speck of space which nature has made most appealing to people.

  A girl came eventually and checked me in, unlocking the bar, pulling out a book, filling in a line, giving me a key to a hut. The floor cooled my feet; there was a double white bed, a huge mosquito net and a television showing ghosts replaying football in a storm. (African Cup of Nations – the final is tonight!) She was in her early twenties, perhaps, and bemused. I feared she did everything. I was loathe to unpack, to dirty the loo or derange anything, but I did, a little, starting with the aerial cable to the TV. The ghosts disappeared but not the storm. I went looking for food.

  The supermarket was playing host to a small party of exotic foreigners. Nobody else seemed to pay them much attention. I tried to work out where they were from, which meant eavesdropping. They were better-looking than they are supposed to be and younger than I had been led to believe was now the norm. Their truck looked good.

  It used to be said that the overlanders partied their way around, sleeping it off as Africa rolled and bumped tiresomely past. Now, it was said, the demographic had changed, and the trucks were full of retired Adventurous Travellers, beadily sharing knowledge about humans, humanities, earth sciences and is that or is it not a Bearded Vulture?

  These looked businesslike, buying supplies, and sexy, in their cottons, straps and tans, wearing that quasi-pained, pointedly-not-pushy expression you might see in Sainsbury’s on a Saturday. They were of a type, and I and many others in Rundu’s supermarket stared surreptitiously at white women.

  It was a strange meal; self-catering courtesy of the ladies behind the meat counter at the supermarket: a warmed chicken leg, some sort of bread and something to drink, taken on the veranda. Every time I dropped a crumb a line of ants switched direction and picked it up. I went for a walk by the river later: not very far, because it was hot, and cautiously, just because. Later still I went for another drive, vaguely wondering where the sewage farm might be. Angling the car away from the river, gracefully switching sides to avoid schoolchildren (many schools do two or more shifts, so there are three big changeovers, morning, noon and night) I came upon the millipede.

  Blacker, shinier and meaner than an escaped bicycle tyre, it was trundling in a dead straight line three-quarters of the way across the road, on our side. Three impulses hit me at the same time: public service (take the monster out), self-preservation (offer it a drink?) and something else, which escaped me in a whistle of amazement and made the Mousebird veer wildly.

  I am not sure if it was the millipede, the final of the African Cup of Nations, the threat implied by the vast and beautiful double mosquito net or the amazing near-silence, but I left that camp and drove through the gloom to another lodge, a bit further down.r />
  Around the television the atmosphere was unhappy. Cameroon, the Indomitable Foulers, were playing Egypt, the Indefatigable Pounders, for the championship. Regardless of the fact that Cameroon wanted it so badly that all of West Africa, southern Africa, and indeed Black Africa wanted it too, the barman, being Namibian, was disgusted with the whole thing, because South Africa had underperformed so thoroughly that they had contrived to be knocked out in an early round – which rather killed the atmosphere in the otherwise empty bar.

  Mine was a hot wooden room, beyond the wall of which was another solitary man in an identical room. I ate warm rice, noted that some sort of local government conference was taking place and tried not to laugh, the next morning, as the black staff took their wonderfully lethargic yet painstaking time misimplementing the harried orders of their white manager. His anxiety should have been catching. Without anxious hard work, you could see him agonising, the conference attendees would not get the five-star service to which they were entitled, regardless of creed, colour, price or facilities. Yet his staff simply refused to contract his anxiety, or work at anything like his pace. And then there was rain.

  The heat of Rundu, the proximity of the river and the thick green morning were completed: the rain was all you could really hear and all you wanted to look at. Even 3 feet into cover it caught you; huge drops bursting into smaller drops, billowing into spray. It crashed into us and splashed under us as we headed down the Caprivi Strip. The plan was to go just under halfway along it, turn right and cross the Botswana border, gateway to the famous Okavango Delta, a swamp so enormous that there simply had to be swallows there.

  Instead, by following the Mousebird’s nose down the strip, following signs to Botswana and taking a left, we became first distracted by, then entangled with, an extremely poor road.

  Barely 40 yards into the bush the track disappeared into an untroubled pond of brown water. We battled on. The paths divided in an unsettling fashion, sandy high road versus vegetable low road, but the Mousebird would not daunt. Some very large vehicles had done that track but I would not have been in one, not with the narrow causeway before us now. Something which looked like a collapsed bridge passed, then we came to another, which two men were building. Over a hill, down a dale, and we were in. The track turned into a soft loop. There were thick trees, the wooden wall of something that promised a bar, and beyond that the unmistakeable presence of a river. A huge green truck was parked in the shade, beside a couple of sober green bakkies.