A Single Swallow

by Horatio Clare

  If breeding is not a success they will split up – and it is the females who seem to make this decision, changing nest sites, and therefore mates. If breeding is a success and both partners survive to return the following year, they may breed again, travelling together over 12,000 miles. However, the perils of migration take a terrible toll of bonded couples: only around 10 per cent of pairs seem to manage to breed two years in a row, with very small numbers managing three or four years, and only one recorded pair breeding five years in a row.

  And yet swallows are not always loyal. Both male and female swallows practise extra-pair copulation – they have affairs – and they are highly adept at it: between a third and a half of all nests contain a chick fathered by another male. For reasons which are unclear the most attractive male swallows (with the longest tails, in the best condition, which have the least difficulty finding mates) make the poorest partners and fathers, contributing the least to feeding and rearing chicks. Just as many males of both species father children with different females, so female humans and female swallows sometimes give up their offspring to other females – known as ‘fostering’, in human terms and ‘egg-dumping’ in swallows. The difference is that human females know they are raising someone else’s child, while a female swallow who suspects the egg in her nest is not hers will push it over the edge. Infanticide is common in swallows. Males will kill chicks in poorly defended nests, in the – usually successful – hope of mating with their mother.

  What swallows ‘want’, or, at least, their goal as suggested by their behaviour, is clear: to have as many offspring as possible. The aspiration of humans as suggested by our behaviour is more opaque, but perhaps only slightly, at least on Valentine’s night.

  By eight-thirty Juicy Lucy was dancing on the bar in a skintight ‘leopard-skin’, entertaining her troops, an overlanders’ truck. By ten we were all dancing on the bar. Mark and Margie had passed by, Margie smiling, Mark trying hard not to, clearly thinking Thank God the rest of the camp is empty and there is no one living directly opposite us.

  ‘Don’t you know what a springbok does?’

  ‘NO!’

  (I was clinging to the best seat in the house, hitting various bottles, and there was every chance of dancing.)

  A springbok – a small South African antelope, usually, but in this case the participant of a drinking game, as Lucy explained to the crowd – pogos to within a leap of the bar, exposes its white tail, looks right and left, shaking its tail, pogos the final leap to the bar, lowers its mouth (springbok have no hands) over its shot of Springbok (Amarula, amongst other things), and shoots it as best it can. Supported by the other Lucy, Lucy had no trouble persuading the group to drop their shorts and take part. Byron had done his bit, appearing in the leopard-skin in the first place, before ripping it off. Even a leopard-skin cannot match a good pair of pants. Lucy’s persuasion of the two most senior members of her clan, Adventurous Travellers if I ever saw them, summed up the role of tour guide on an overland truck.

  ‘YOU TWO CAN —— GET THE —— UP HERE —— NOW!

  It was not clear to me if that was true though, because they were holding each other up, laughing helplessly. It was a night for laughing and dancing and I forget all the songs except one. The chorus sounded like:

  ‘What if God was one of us . . . Just a slob like all of us . . . Just a some-some some-something ye-ah, ye-ah, God is Love, yeah, yeah God is Love . . .’

  I could not help but look around and ask What if God were one of us?

  And the answer was standing there, half-smiling, not quite wide-eyed, not at all drunk, despite my efforts, and beyond bemused: he looked hornswoggled. Earlier he had muttered: ‘There are two people – over there. I think they are women!’ and indicated the sundeck which overlooked the floating platform around the swimming cage, the dark Kovango and the water monitors’ reeds.

  Everyone called him something else but he told me his name was Joseph: he was the brother of the day barman (of the same name), filling in for the regular night man, who was off, and being given his first taste of the Dionysian side of the camp. The casual, raucous and extraordinarily permissive antics of the white world had perhaps not offended so much as shaken him: he smiled tentatively, nervously, as if witnessing something forbidden but unexpectedly funny.

  The next morning we said our farewells and I was given one pearl of advice for the road to Zambia.

  ‘Don’t hit an elephant.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Seriously, don’t hit an elephant. You will not come off best.’

  * * *

  1UNICEF to 2005.

  2UN Human Development Report, 2002.

  CHAPTER 3

  Somewhere Like Zambia

  Somewhere Like Zambia

  IN CERTAIN PARTS of Africa, in the game parks where there are still large numbers of wild animals, a good way of finding swallows is first to find an elephant. Ideally, several elephants, in grassland, and on the move. As they go, swaying along, in the gentle, heavy-hipped way they have, like fat ladies lost in thought, elephants will disturb and put up a great many small insects from the grass. The swallows know this, and so they follow the beasts, and hunt.

  ‘Come on then you elephantine chickens, come out and fight.’

  The endless DANGER! ELEPHANTS signs had worn me out. Another storm came up with a fantastic bang, lightning landing like artillery, much too close. The road was dead straight and dead empty. There were only tall trees and occasionally clearings on either side. This part of the strip is a game park and the wartime convoy habit is dying hard.

  Byron had said there were hobbies along here, loads of hobbies, but of course until you have seen a bird once it is doubly difficult to see it for the first time. I wished Byron was there.

  The Mousebird beeped disconsolately, I swore at her, changed gear, and began singing ‘Fairytale of New York’ to keep my spirits up. All my self-containment was drained: it was a lonely business, leaving half a dozen people who had become fast friends, and taking the wilderness in exchange. I muttered to myself, scolded the car and sang the song’s tune again, changing the words. ‘ “’Twas the day after valentines, in Caprivi, and the signs said mind el-ephants, but there weren’t any anyway” . . . Holy mother!’ There were elephants. Six young bulls, right next to the car. They were standing under a tree, sheltering from the storm and all but winking as we sailed past; I saw their eyes; one elephant looked right at me, through the windscreen. Its expression was amused and happy: that elephant was eating, chewing ruminatively, pressed up against its fellows as they waited for the rain to pass.

  I met another, later. He stood in the road just long enough to stop us, a quarter of a mile short, before ambling off to the south. I craned to see him as we passed his spot, but though the cover there was not thick he was quite gone.

  I spent the night in Divundu, a steamy dump of a border town with persistent and hungry mosquitoes. The car had a wash in heavy rain and I shivered in a sort of caravan that reeked of damp and rot. I cleared out the Mousebird, brusquely. I knew no good way to leave a beloved. Someone was making a great pilgrimage up from Windhoek to take her home but I felt jealous rather than bad about it. Life would be lonelier without her. The way our possessions reflect our personalities and pasts back at us is an effective screen, a defence against the indifference of existence. We were a well-adjusted little unit, and I would have felt better about going into Zambia with company, albeit inanimate. I did not know anything about Zambia, except that it was one of the world’s poorer countries.

  It was a clear hot morning. Three irritated young women, and a mother and child, distressed because they were leaving Dad in Namibia, were waiting for a ride that had not shown. They allowed me to join them. When the driver turned up, the voluminous boot of his van was stuffed with ill-concealed cans of contraband petrol, which was cheaper in Namibia than Zambia. He was working as a white-water rafter at Victoria Falls, he said, and smoking a lot of dope, I judged. He got
us through the border very quickly, the officers remarking that I was lucky I had got my visa in London as Zambia had just slapped a stiff, hard-currency price-increase on its rate to Brits.

  Zambia did not look so different from Caprivi, except that there were more undulations in the road, and everything was broken, except the airport. We went there first, to drop off the mother and child. In Livingstone signs, buildings, roads, kerbs and pavements were all broken. There was a tatty, ragged, transitory air to the place, as if people were here despite themselves: the tourists for the Falls, and the migrants for refuge from Robert Mugabe. Half the town’s prostitutes, according to BBC news, were Zimbabwean. There were stories of trucks backed up for miles on the other side of the border, with nothing moving between them but girls.

  The pool at the Jolly Boys backpackers’ hostel was surrounded by miserable-looking girls; young Scandinavian teachers. Jollity was in short supply, thanks perhaps to an absence of boys, and also to the vast amount of kwacha required to buy a drink. There are no coins in Zambia. This means that everyone always owes someone change, and the smaller notes in unrippable and often soiled plastic are gold dust. Because computers had not yet taken over, barmen spent their shifts with furrowed brows making pencil entries in ledgers and juggling debts, loans, orders and 1,000 kwacha notes.

  The Scandinavians wafted in and out of their dormitories, clutching passports and cash like virginities. They were stalked, hopelessly, by older and drunken Brits, South Africans and one or two white Zambians, who held and held forth views on racial and gender politics and the state of Africa, particularly Zambia, which no self-respecting liberal could tolerate for a second. I nodded, smiled, said please and thank you and wondered where the swallows were.

  ‘We’ve got fuckin’ hundreds of them. There’s been a German couple staying with my mate who are doing research on them. I’ll call him, he’s got a microlight. I’ll call him. Hey, Steve, there’s a guy here who’s into swallows. Yeah, swallows. Hey, can I give him your number . . . ?’

  ‘Where does your friend live?’

  ‘You can’t miss it. North of Lusaka, first left.’

  His name was Peter. We straggled out into the darkness to look for food. Pot-holes lurked like crocodiles in broad reaches of darkness. Peter soon decided that the bars were too empty, the women too proper, and he was not hungry. Like everyone else, he was counting his kwacha.

  ‘I run a trucking firm. I’ve got one truck here, stuck in the mud, and I’ve got another the driver is saying is broken down. They’re probably trying to sell the load right now. I tell you, this place, it’s fucked.’

  I decided to leave Peter’s friends and their swallows to their own devices.

  To see the wonder of the world that is Victoria Falls you sign in, hand over dollars and pass an ugly statue of Dr Livingstone apparently hewn from solid copper. You decide whether or not you need a raincoat and boots, and then follow one of the little paths towards the noise.

  Perhaps Victoria Falls is the ultimate triumph of the British Empire in Africa; you are told its other names and they are all older, truer, sound more beautiful, say more and show more, but Victoria Falls is as mighty as English itself and as surreal as the great White Empress hurling herself off the greatest cliff on the continent and plunging to her death with all her petticoats billowing. The locals call it Mosi-Oa-Tunya: the smoke that thunders.

  A man sold me a statue. She was beautiful: the first Queen of Victoria Falls, he said. I asked her name. Mukuni, he said, named after her people.

  ‘So they should be called the Mukuni Falls!’ I cried.

  ‘Yes!’

  In fact he named her after the first Chief Mukuni who came down from Congo in the eighteenth century, conquered the Baleya people (who were originally of the Rozwi culture in what is now Zimbabwe) and founded Mukuni village, which is to this day presumed to have been the largest village in the area when Dr Livingstone arrived. The rest is history, or rather politics, as there is still a Chief Mukuni of Mukuni and you may visit him there and mix with his people, the Toka-Leya, many of whom are artists.

  She was a tall, slender woman, and weighed less than 100 grammes. Her people call the falls Shungu Mtitima and perhaps her name was actually Bedyango, the high priestess of Mukuni, who has final say on who will be the next chief. But this was a wise man, so he gave her to me in return for a little understanding, not too much, and I carried her from then on, neatly swaddled in the middle of my emergency toilet roll, believing her to be the true queen.

  I began the business of organising my next transport. Hiring a car took a day and a half, a small fortune and multiple trips to the airport, half of them through magnificent downpours. The rain was always preceded by a thick green-red smell, which seemed to steam as if from cracks in the earth; then the sky turned grey-black, sometimes shot through with silver-white sun lances, and it would seem even hotter, under the cloud, and then the rain would come.

  I was not much enamoured of the car. White with a fake velour-like interior, it was made God Knows Where, but was unmistakeably Japanese. It was all electric. A boot lid that would cut your fingers off if you were careless, automatic transmission, quite a lot of oomph and no doubt thirsty, it had Grande or Classic or something in curly-wurly writing near the bank of its red and gold tail-lights. Power steering, with a ride like a feather mattress sliding down a spiral staircase, sod-all clearance and, it felt, twice as wide as the Mousebird (God help us if Livingstone’s pot-holes were anything to go by) there could be only one name for it: the Pimp.

  The traveller showed up at the hostel around supper time. He was so wiry and quiet he was almost difficult to see; he achieved a beer in seconds and eased himself onto the list for the cook’s supper, though in theory it had closed a while before. Roan is a chef, a snowboarder, a Kiwi, about twenty-four, and he was coming to the end of three months on the road: Tanzania, Kenya (‘It’s a great time to go to Kenya,’ he said, phlegmatically: the country was in flames and the whole world was wondering if either Kibaki or Odinga could see a way out), Malawi, Zambia, and, next, Caprivi. He was on his way to Canada, via South Africa.

  ‘Man, I’d love to see you in three months’ time!’ he laughed. ‘You’ll be thin, covered in shit, you won’t care what you eat, you’ll be obsessed with your ass – it gets really out of hand, like someone says woah! I just did a beauty – like – you can go and see it if you want, it’s still there! And you’re like no, really . . . And you’ll be so at ease with your body. I am. I’d tell anyone anything now.’

  We played pool and drank. Roan showed me how you find south using the Southern Cross.

  ‘You take the long axis of the cross, there, and carry it on: that’s one line. And see below it, those two bright stars? They’re the pointers. So you draw a line bisecting a line between them, and carry it on until you meet the line from the cross. Below that is south.’

  In the end we did an exchange. Roan got my still almost pristine little guide to Namibia and South Africa, and he was pleased to unload a battered Africa on to me, which I eviscerated with a steak knife. The whole of East Africa from Egypt to South Africa went, except for Ethiopia, and I also saved the first or last pages of countries like Zimbabwe and Mozambique which have borders with countries through which these north-west-bound swallows approximately pass.

  The plan was to drive north-east to Lusaka, Zambia’s capital, break, drive north through the Copper Belt, get as close as possible to the Democratic Republic of Congo, peer at it over the border and attempt to answer the following questions.

  Could one obtain a visa for the country at the border? If not, was it possible to fly direct from Zambia to Kinshasa in the DRC without a visa for the DRC (starting in London, you have to begin looking for DRC visas in Brussels, and I had not) on the basis that one was really going to Brazzaville in the Republic of Congo, just a short boat ride from Kinshasa across the mightiest river in Africa?

  Should any of these be possible, I would still be sticking
to the supposed flight plan of Hirundo rustica. However, it seemed unlikely. Tim Butcher, author of Blood River, a recent book about the DRC, had set his heart and years of preparation on coming through Congo in one piece. The writer of an article for the New York Times took a train which sounded fantastic, but she was there for a month while I had a week at most. One blogger wrote an hilarious piece about obtaining a DRC visa from Zambia’s northern border, which involved days and days and days of the dullest work there is: sitting still in great heat, waiting.

  Which would leave, I feared, one option: Brazzaville via Addis Ababa, courtesy of Ethiopian Airlines, but I did not have to face it yet. All around, thousands of swallows were either preparing for it or beginning to migrate, or were already far over the northern horizon, on their way.

  It was eight-thirty in the morning and I was going too. The hitcher wore a pale grey suit and smart shoes.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Sorry – hello! Would you like a lift?’

  He climbed in.

  ‘I am going just into town.’

  ‘Right!’

  We set off. Automatic transmission and assisted steering do have points in their favour; the acceleration was good and unlike the Mousebird, the Pimp did not make any audible objections.

  ‘So what do you do?’

  ‘I am a person seeking employment.’

  Fingers dive hopefully into a sheaf of papers in a folder. A CV tries to emerge, but I prevent it.

  When I dropped him off the person seeking employment gave me a wave and a brave attempt at a smile. Zambia’s unemployment rate is estimated at 50 per cent by the UN; life expectancy is less than forty. I was an old man, suddenly, in Zambia. The person seeking employment was not much younger than I, and I did not hold out much hope for him in Livingstone. Tourism has declined in recent years and the most recent employers to open offices in town were western NGOs and charities. I saw hundreds of people dressed for work on Africa’s roads, but from then on I wondered how many were seeking employment.