Heat

by Ranulph Fiennes

  Other riverine information included the fact that hippos are the cousins of horses and, clumsy though they look, they can charge at 30 mph, and they, of all the large animals of Africa, are also the biggest killers of humans. They kill more people than lions, buffaloes, crocodiles and elephants combined. They are also incredibly territorial and defensive of their young and they don’t like people – and nowhere are they more dangerous than on land.

  We set off at dawn with our boatmen standing at the back of our three mokoros, exactly as Livingstone had travelled. The balance was difficult. Louise sat behind me in the front canoe and we accused each other of causing every wobble. Louise was five months pregnant with our daughter Elizabeth, but we kept this a secret from the others and she paddled with the best of them.

  The river was low after a long drought and on the many sandbanks past which it flowed there were a multitude of birds which Russell identified as skimmers, waders, herons, cormorants, multi-coloured kingfishers, ibis, vultures and fish eagles.

  Our paddler Lemmy shouted, ‘Ippo’, and pointed to dark heads, like rocks except with ears. They looked at us suspiciously and then, to our relief, submerged.

  Around the campfire one night when the talk turned to Livingstone’s motives, Russell said, ‘In thirty years he only converted one African to Christianity, and that man later reverted. Yet he never grew disheartened by this because he loved Africa and the company of Africans. More than anything, I think, he liked the sheer animal pleasure of moving through wild, unexplored country.’

  Richard Grant, one of our team from faraway Colorado, wrote later that when the rainclouds went, ‘the sun came out and tried to sear holes in my skin. I’ve spent most of my life in hot places but nowhere has my white skin ever felt so worthless, so fundamentally impractical, as under that African sun.’

  At Mambova Island there were rapids where the boatmen told us to put away our paddles. We gripped the sides of our hollowed-out logs and thrilled as our skilled paddlers made it safely through. Villagers cheered from the riverbank. A topless lady washed a blue plastic chair in the shallows.

  Like Livingstone, we left our dugouts at the beginning of the much more serious Katambora rapids and went on a two-day bush walk around them. A local named Isaac Sitali, who used to be a poacher and knew the land well, was our guide. Russell said, ‘It’s the hottest day yet, hotter than a snake’s arse in a wagon’s rut.’

  We followed fresh tracks bigger than dustbin lids in the soft ochre sand and came upon an enormous bull elephant tearing branches off a tree and stuffing them in his mouth. We heard a thundering, crashing sound approaching through the forest. This was a great sight that I’ll never forget. Two separate herds, each of some four dozen elephants, advanced, seemingly in slow motion, although the little ones trotted, and the herds moved in parallel. This, Isaac told us, was to avoid confrontation between the males of each group.

  The noise of an aircraft nearby caused sudden panic, and with much trumpeting and raised trunks, both herds thundered off at speed, fortunately not towards us. These elephants were here, Isaac explained, because it was the last piece of untouched, unpoached forest along this stretch of the river.

  At our camp that night hippos grunted close by our tent and hyenas howled at the moon.

  For the rest of the journey we were back in our mokoros paddling through an area of protected National Park land with an abundance of wildlife. Hippos and crocs by the dozen, elephant herds on both banks, warthogs, kudus and all manner of deer.

  There was only one tense moment when a lone male hippo confronted us in a narrow channel, and we paddled with great zeal for the nearest bank to avoid him.

  On the last night when we were camping on an island a hippo waddled between our tents while we slept, leaving fresh footprints to record its visit.

  It was 48°C (119°F) as we paddled through the last rapids and around the last hippos and Livingstone Island came into view with the smoky spray of Victoria Falls behind.

  The British High Commissioner, various dignitaries and the media welcomed our arrival in a furnace-like marquee with a band, tables with white cloths and silver salvers groaning with goodies.

  After speeches about Livingstone we unveiled a fine bronze plaque in his honour on a rock overlooking the Falls. A kilted piper played ‘Amazing Grace’ nearby.

  Then guides led us into the river and we waded out to Devil’s Pool, a deep roiling pocket of wonderfully cool water on the very lip of the Falls. I remember the all-powerful roar of the falling water, the dancing rainbows in the spray and a comment by Russell on the sad irony that Livingstone, who devoted his life to end slavery, died of dysentery in a remote African village eighteen years after seeing and naming these great falls and never learning that the slave markets had finally been closed down.

  Following his ‘rescue’ of Livingstone, Stanley’s subsequent expeditions were planned and executed with ruthless ambition. Using an easily portable 40-foot wooden boat, he circumnavigated Lake Victoria, checking off each riverine inlet and outlet. Then, trekking overland, he did likewise along the west and south banks of Lake Tanganyika. His subsequent voyage of 7,000 miles each way along the Congo (Lualaba) River proved that it flowed into the Pacific Ocean and not the Nile.

  As for his attempts to stop slavery, Livingstone’s death sparked renewed pressure by British voters on their government who reactivated Royal Navy anti-slavery manoeuvres off the East African coast, concentrating on Zanzibar.

  The slave trade in Zanzibar was dominated by Arabs, mostly of Omani descent, but Arab slaving had been active in Africa since long before the advent of Islam and along the east coast long before the Omanis established their coastal empire there.

  Although the British abolitionists are remembered as mainly missionaries like Livingstone, the effective operations on the ground were those of the armed forces.

  In 1814, a year before the Battle of Waterloo when the foreign ministers of Europe met to carve up Napoleon’s empire, the British representative, the Duke of Wellington, was asked what Britain wanted. To the surprise of their other allies, he replied, ‘An end to the slave trade.’

  From 1807, before Livingstone was born, until the middle of the century the Royal Navy liberated some 150,000 slaves at sea, sometimes landing at slaving ports to destroy slavers’ camps.

  As early as 1822, the Omani Arabs signed a treaty which proscribed the sale of slaves to Christian countries. To monitor this, the British and Americans sent Consuls to Zanzibar as observers. Nonetheless the treaty was largely circumvented and the trade continued.

  Obstacles to slave-trade control included the fact that the Americans and French refused the ‘Rights of Search’ to the Royal Navy, and there was a massive demand in the mid to late nineteenth century for ivory products, including from Britain. Slaves were needed in great numbers to carry this heavy commodity to coastal ports.

  In 1856 the makers of cutlery in Sheffield alone ordered 170 tons of ivory. Other popular goodies for the middle classes included billiard balls, dildos, chess sets, umbrella and door handles, crucifixes, napkin rings and combs. By the late nineteenth century over 200 tons of ivory was arriving annually in Zanzibar along with 25,000 slaves.

  The slave trade sustained Zanzibar’s ivory trade. The Arab traders and their African armed gangs, including many ex-slaves, took beads, cloth and guns to tribal chiefs in the interior in exchange for ivory and slaves which they brought back to Zanzibar by a number of routes.

  A common belief of missionaries, other than the few who reached the interior and actually witnessed the slave trade in action, was that the issue was a simple opposition of Good (the natives) and Evil (the traders). But slavery was an infinitely more complex issue and had been for centuries. The majority of individuals involved were the Africans themselves. They actually staffed the caravan-raiding parties, fought tribal resistance when necessary and provided the Arabs with their women as needed.

  Tribal leaders allied themselves with slavers in
their attacks on neighbours and, in return, gave their victims to the Arabs. Poor people sold their children as slaves. New chiefs bought slaves to bury alongside their predecessors to ensure that the late departed warriors were well served in the afterlife.

  The most famous slave trader of all, the ruthless Tippo Tib, was himself the grandson of a slave. His gangs operated over a region of more than a thousand miles inland from the East Coast.

  By the time of Livingstone’s death in 1873 there were various well-used routes for the slaves to be marched to the coast from the location of their capture. En route, in order to prevent escape, most adult slaves of both sexes were roped together in gangs and often with six-foot-long individual heavy beams of wood pinned around their necks.

  After much suffering on the journey, sometimes for many weeks, they would reach the nearest coastal slaving port where they were jammed on board dhows, seldom more than 30 to 35 metres long, for the journey to the island of Zanzibar. Each dhow carried between two hundred and six hundred slaves, all crammed below decks on specially constructed bamboo shelves with about one metre of headroom. There was not enough room to sit, kneel or squat, just a crippling combination of the three. Sometimes slaves were closely packed in open boats, their bodies exposed day and night to the sea and the rain. They were thirsty, hungry and seasick and many died of exhaustion. Meals consisted of a daily handful of rice and a cup of stagnant water. Sanitation was non-existent and disease spread rapidly. When any illness was discovered, infected slaves were simply thrown overboard.

  Shortly before the dhows reached Zanzibar, the slaves were inspected. Most could not straighten their legs for several hours, all were weak and dehydrated, and the many dead bodies found collapsed on the benches were disposed of overboard.

  By the time the (lucky?) survivors were dragged up the filthy mud shoreline to the slave lines by the so-called Customs House for collection by their ‘importer’, they were dazed, even traumatized. Many were then branded with a red-hot iron. They had been wrenched from their homes and often their families, abused and beaten, led off in gangs to an unknown future, witnessed death, starvation and violence on the march, forced to watch torture, mutilation and rape, and all this before their grim seaborne voyage to the hellhole of Zanzibar.

  Almost as hot and health-sapping as Muscat, Zanzibar was, for a European, a posting to be avoided at all costs, but if the Foreign Office in London sent you there, you could hardly say no. At the time of Livingstone’s stay there in order to prepare for and launch his expeditions to the interior, the resident British Consul was John Kirk, a Scotsman who, unlike his predecessors, had actually travelled inland, witnessed the savagery of the slave trade and was as determined as Livingstone, with whom he had worked and travelled for long periods, to stamp it out.

  The Zanzibar of his day was a violent town. Further north of the Customs House was the Sultan’s palace, and along the beachfront nearby were many fine-looking houses where the rich traders lived. But behind these lay the dark shanty town of Malindi with its warren of alleyways. The island was bounded on one side by a creek and elsewhere by the sea. Along the creekside hundreds of dhows were beached. At night, fighting between rival slaver gangs often broke out and as the evening breezes died down foul smells of decay, faeces and rotting flesh pervaded the town. The beaches were strewn with refuse, offal and the corpses of slaves which were torn at by stray dogs, since nobody would bury them. The narrow streets were filthy and disease-ridden, horned cattle roamed there, as did aggressive gangs kicking at diseased and dying slaves who crawled groaning along the gutters. Malaria, syphilis, smallpox, cholera and dysentery were endemic and killed off the majority of Europeans posted to the town, including a number of John Kirk’s predecessors. There were no competent doctors.

  Few Europeans brought their wives with them. They kept mistresses, drank heavily and soon died. Somehow Kirk’s wife, Nelly, managed to share his life and his work there.

  Islamic law was largely observed, adulterers were beaten through the streets with clubs and more serious crimes were dealt with by mutilation or public execution.

  Sultan Barghash was not the ultimate power in Zanzibar, for he would soon have been ousted or murdered had he upset the cabal of Arab slaving clans that formed an unofficial parliament. He was also badly affected by elephantiasis, another disease endemic in the town which caused victims’ legs and genitals to swell, and this was difficult to hide under normal clothing.

  Burton recorded, ‘The scrotum will often reach the knees; I heard of one case measuring in circumference 41 inches, more than the patient’s body, while its length (33 inches) touched the ground. There is no cure . . . ’

  John Kirk, under orders from the Foreign Office and especially the influential Bartle Frere, was determined to get Barghash to sign a lasting agreement to ban all the slave trade in his Sultanate. He understood the limitations to Barghash’s powers, so he acted with cautious but patient determination during the years of his miserable posting. Only the presence of his wonderful wife Nelly kept him sane.

  Kirk was well aware of the awkward history of Britain vis-à-vis slavery. For over three hundred years Europeans had used slave labour from Africa to develop their colonies in North and South America and the Caribbean. Britain during that time had become the greatest beneficiary and the most extensive practitioner of the traffic. But it was also the British who first developed an intense moral repugnance against what they most of all had encouraged and practised. They felt a particular guilt about this ‘of all evils, the monster evil’, and in 1873, urged on by the death of Livingstone and consequent political pressures, Parliament sent warships to blockade the Zanzibar slaving fleets. This was Kirk’s moment. The key was to persuade all the slaving clan chiefs to agree to a new and final ban on the trade, not just the Sultan. With subtlety and great diplomacy, Kirk succeeded, and once his document was agreed by all, signed by the Sultan and sent back to Frere and the Foreign Office, Kirk applied the agreement with a relentless determination. On 8 June 1873 a proclamation was posted on the wall of the Customs House: ‘To all our subjects . . . know that we have prohibited the transport of raw slaves by sea in all our harbours and have closed the markets which are for the sale of slaves through all our dominions. Whosoever therefore shall ship a raw slave after this date will render himself liable to punishment and this he will bring upon himself. Be this known.’

  The trading of all slaves was now forbidden and the slave market, the oldest institution in Zanzibar, was closed by Sultanate soldiers and the auctioneers were forever forbidden to return.

  So Kirk, Frere, Livingstone, William Wilberforce and many others were finally successful in helping to shut down the Zanzibar-based trade. On the African mainland slave trading carried on until the time when the Germans were defeated in the First World War and Britain took over as the East African colonial power and crushed the trade altogether.

  I was lucky to get the chance to travel up the length of the Nile a century after the age of its explorers and of those who put a stop to the river’s evil trade in people. One of our hovercraft, Baker, is still somewhere on the banks of the river at Bor, and Burton now resides in the Portsmouth Hovercraft Museum. And the five of us will always have our memories of the mightiest, hottest river on Earth.

  CHAPTER 11

  Fiend Force

  Back in England, my poisoned finger received long overdue therapeutic treatment, but a friend in Dhofar sent me a letter warning me in confidence that things were not going well for the army there and, as a warning to me personally, that there were bad internal troubles with my Recce Platoon.

  So, with my finger still swollen and twisted, but in view of the worsening situation in Dhofar and scared of being thought a coward, I left Ginny and my mother and went back to SAF without delay. After all, a broken leg might be a reason for prolonged leave, but a bent finger would merely be considered an excuse.

  I flew straight to Salalah. Then, in the Beaver, out to the nej’d desert and
Thumrait, where the men of Recce were awaiting my return.

  As the plane bumped to a halt, some thirty half-dressed soldiers came running out of the huts. They grabbed my bags and my rifle, jostling to shake my hand and all talking at once. I felt a real flood of emotion and affection for these men. The warmth of their welcome was unexpected, and I treasure it now in my memory over forty years on.

  After much coffee and gossip and talk of their ambush successes and near escapes, the sun went down and I walked outside the camp with Salim Khaleefa to hear the not-so-good news.

  In my absence a new sergeant had taken the place of Abdullah. Nobody liked him, even though he was of the Hawasana tribe, as were most of the platoon. The Baluchis hated him for he openly despised them. ‘They no longer sleep and eat among us Arabs as they did.’ Salim shook his head sadly.

  However, fate was kind to us for very soon after my return the sergeant left the platoon of his own accord and Salim Khaleefa took over again, as he had from Abdullah. He spoke with the Baluchi moolah, and inter-ethnic relations soon returned to their old amicable state.

  The platoon medic, used to dealing with stubborn wounds in conditions of extreme heat, applied a foul-smelling ointment and daily dressings to my finger and soon killed the bacteria. I no longer needed antibiotics, but the finger remains crooked to this day.

  Soon after my return, the colonel in Salalah decided to mount a major attack on a system of caves near the Yemeni border, which Tim Landon’s spies had confirmed as the adoo headquarters in Western Dhofar. No army unit had been there before, but one of our companies was already holding a high, barren ridge called Deefa which overlooked the Dhofar coast some thirty miles to the south. The area between Deefa and the sea was mixed thorn scrub and forest cleft by steep valleys.