by Giles Foden
Having sold their fish, the boys in the boats were up for fun. They sped round and round the Liemba, gunning the outboards on their whalers and calling out ribaldries at the girls on board. Plumes of exhaust hung in the air. It was a bit like a big party in the night now, but also still like a kind of fight as people jumped from craft to craft, clambered up and down, stuffed fish cutlets into their mouths or tried to catch bananas thrown up from the boats below and throw coins back.
Perhaps 30 boats were visible on the turbulent black water, caught in the Uemba’s spotlights. Most were dugout canoes; some were wooden rowing boats. There were also five or six Boston whalers carrying between 20 and 30 people each. Powered by roaring outboards, they kept ramming the dugouts out of the way to get a better position alongside the Liemba. Furious arguments were taking place.
A man in a red loincloth had his rowing boat knocked over; perhaps not quite over—I struggled through the crowd on deck to get a better view. Water was pitching in…The man was standing up and howling, just on the edge of the pool of light. I watched as he slowly sank. As an afterthought he started bailing frantically, but it was no use. The boat started to slip beneath the waves and he jumped out. I caught a glimpse of his arms waving in the spotlights.
Young men jumped out of other boats to swim towards the sinking one. They grabbed it and started to shove it from side to side. Eventually enough water was slooshed out over the gunwale for the man in the red loincloth to climb back in. With more bailing, buoyancy returned. His boat had been saved. It was a small victory for civilisation, but such scenes were rare. The noise and mayhem continued for a good hour—all at a banshee scale, echoing out across the waves. The Liemba’s lamps shone out over it all, casting crumpled sheets of light over the chaos.
Finally the fog-horn sounded and the boats scattered. Once the anchor was raised, with an unutterable midnight rattle, we continued on our way.
An hour later and the Liemba cast anchor again. At about 3 AM, with the same attendant chaos as before, my own station had arrived at last. I climbed down into the whaler that would take me to dry land. I feared for my footing as I leaped into the rocking black hole. The driver gunned up the engine and we sped off into the night. As the lights of the Liemba receded into the distance, we soon began to struggle against larger and larger waves.
Each time we whacked down on to the lake, water spurted in through cracks in the gunwale. A veil of grey-black clouds rolled in. Moonlight, its intensity rapidly decreasing, now provided the only illumination. A storm was coming in and I was in a leaky boat in the middle of a very large lake.
The rain came down fast and hard. The driver’s assistant, a boy in a spotted bandanna, was feverishly bailing away in the depths of the boat with a cut-out plastic bucket. Either side of him, through the driving spray, I could just make out my fellow passengers. They included a bearded Afrikaans brewery manager and his family, three village women in shawls, two bespectacled Japanese tourists on their way to a chimpanzee reserve and a sullen young Tanzanian soldier in full camouflage and slouch cap. In one hand the soldier held his AK-47, its magazine bound with gaffer tape, in the other a pineapple.
It was two hours before we approached the military post which was the soldier’s destination. By now I was soaked to the skin. The storm was at its roughest and the driver could hardly control the boat as—swinging from side to side between heavy waves—he tried to hold steady by the shore and not run aground. All around us, protruding ten feet above the waves, were large tussocks of leafy cane. Their shaggy shapes had a fierce and occult aspect, as if they were sentinels of the kind of lost city in search of which Rider Haggard’s explorer Allan Quatermain set out, leaving the placid English countryside behind him. ‘The thirst for the wilderness was on me; I could tolerate this place no more…’
Holding his rifle above his head, the soldier pitched over the edge. The black water covered him up to his shoulders. He staggered forwards. I could not see the land he was heading for, just darkness and the vicious storm. The wind gusted down between my freezing ears and wet hair, hellhound loud. At one point the whaler seemed to squat in a trough of water, like a fat man going down on his haunches.
Before the soldier could be consumed by the dark places of the night, while his outline was still visible to us, struggling through the water, the boat turned and we headed out once more into the interminable lake. I began to worry about my own landfall, whenever that might be.
Fortunately by the time it arrived, another two hours later, the sun had risen. I could see the beach where I would camp for the next few days. From here I would make my forays to villages along the shore of the lake, enquiring after Spicer and the Holo-holo. I had heard that the tribe was now almost extinct.
The storm had knocked the stuffing out of me. But sitting on the sand drinking coffee, facing the Congo over the water, with the towering shape of Mount Kungwe behind me, I began to feel confident again. For a moment, surrounded by stunted acacias on the stooping lakeshore, the leafy ones looking like ‘umbrellas in a crowd’, as Burton wrote of the same place in 1860, I could even imagine myself one of those old-time explorers.
Dawn became day. I looked out at the lake, sipped some coffee, then made some more, spooning in the powdered milk straight from the tin. It was a taste from childhood that I had forgotten. Caffeine notwithstanding (and there isn’t much in African coffee, all the good stuff being exported), I turned in and slept for most of the new day. It had been a long journey. Tomorrow I would begin scouring up and down the lake in a boat with an outboard, to interview the oldest man in each village. I would ask him about his memories of the battle between Uingereza and Ujerumani or the First World War, as we like to call it. The Great War, as it was dubbed by those who lived through it and never expected to see its like again. A conflict in which Spicer’s expedition was only the smallest of sideshows—a ‘naval action in miniature’, as the man himself described it.
Rising sheer from the lake, Mount Kungwe is the mountain that Spicer saw when he arrived on the other side. If you want good fortune, you must sacrifice something to its spirit, Mkungwe, or at least pay him homage. Perhaps Spicer should have done so. It was opposite here, across Kungwe Bay, that he watched the Götzen through his binoculars and refused to go out and fight. It was under this mountain that he metamorphosed from hero back to eccentric failure.
Why did Spicer lose his spirit? Why did he decline so rapidly after the initial successes with the Kingani and the Hedwig? At first I just thought he was a coward, as well as a braggart and a fantasist. Then I made a discovery that changed my perception of events. On Sunday 26 September 1915, Captain Noel Spicer-Simson of the Royal Garrison Artillery 21st Anti-Aircraft Section was killed in action in France. He was Spicer’s younger brother (born in 1881), and it seems certain that some time during the expedition he would have been informed of his loss.
News of Noel’s death, whenever it came, may put the whole story in a different perspective, but by the time Spicer gave his lecture at the Royal United Services Institute in 1934, his decline had been airbrushed over. He claimed that he had summoned the seaplanes to Tanganyika and even goes so far as to suggest he flew on them: ‘One morning, however, when we went over to bomb her [the Graf von Götzen ] she was not in harbour any more.’ His inactivity during this period is forgotten, too: ‘For the next three weeks we were feverishly searching every bay, harbour and mouth of a river along the Lake from end to end, being fired at from the coast because the natives had got it into their heads that everything afloat was German.’ This description suggests the strong feeling and physical restlessness which are the customary attributes of the classical hero, as opposed to the social or moral qualities of the imperial hero, that Spicer so clearly obviates—but the fact is, he was just lying on his bed in his room at Bismarckburg the entire time.
After a few days in Kungwe’s shadow, I was beginning to feel like a failure too: no one seemed to know anything about the naval hostilities that had c
aused such a stir in 1914–18.
I found battles of another kind, however. The area round Mount Kungwe is one of the last strongholds of wild chimpanzees on earth and the Kungwe group are especially known for their fierceness. One afternoon, coming back from another fruitless search for remnants of Spicer and his expedition, I watched a group of 30 chimps kill a red colobus monkey, screaming with excitement as they did so. I could hardly look as, tearing it to pieces, they began eating it in the trees above me. I tried not to think of it as an omen. Sometimes things are just what they are.
§
At the Askari Monument in Dar es Salaam the roads radiate out like the spokes of a wheel. Images of British and African troops stand out in metal relief on a granite plinth in the centre of the roundabout:
To the memory of the African troops who fought, and the carriers who were the feet and hands of the army: and to all the other men who served and died for their King and Country in the Great War 1914-1918. If you fight for your country, even if you die your sons will remember your name.
At first I wondered at the sheer brass of it, this work signed ‘Myranda, Sculptor, 1927’. It seemed like a violation—one that compounded the injustice of making the black man die in a quarrel in which he had no part. Then it struck me that in the last line there may have been some exhortation, conscious or not, never to let it happen again, or even to revolt against colonialism.
I later discovered (from Kevin Patience’s book Königsberg: A German East African Raider) that the words were written by Rudyard Kipling—an author whose relationship with colonialism is much more complex than often assumed—for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Ironically, the monument stands on the site of a statue of Herman von Wissmann, the German explorer whose wife was commemorated in the Hedwig von Wissmann, the ship Spicer sank in Kungwe Bay.
Tanganyika’s Africans were still a subject population when this monument was brought out from London. They didn’t get independence until 1961. Perhaps the only good thing about the War in this part of the world was that it taught Africans that the mutual cohesion of Europeans—that racial solidarity which was one of the foundations of imperial power—was nothing but a myth.
Being several, the Europeans were vulnerable. They were not invincible. They did not have to be worshipped. And time would cast a cold light on the heroes as well as the sham heroes. For as John Iliffe has pointed out, even ‘Lettow-Vorbeck’s brilliant campaign was the climax of Africa’s exploitation: its use as a mere battlefield.’↓
≡ A Modern History of Tanganyika (1979).
§
With the help of local guides, I continued my search along the lake for old men who might remember something—anything at all—of the First World War. One day we had been walking in single file for a couple of miles inland towards the village of Kalumbe, when we entered a forest of palms. I was being stung by insects, but these astonishing palms made up for it all. As sturdy as English oaks—almost as wide as them at the base, but tapering at the neck—they seemed to march towards us in a steady stream. There must have been thousands of them and this was a hopeful sight—it was good to see they had not yet been cut down.
My guides promised me it was not much further. Every now and then the forest opened up to reveal human dwellings. Black and scarlet chickens strutted across the path, heralding the revelation of a hamlet or small village. Here a woman crouched in her hut—stirring a basin of ugali, a coarse white porridge of maize meal, with a wooden spoon. Here were three more, peering into a drum of boiling palm oil. Always the women working. The men just sat around—but still they had the power and held on to it.
The man I came to see at Kalumbe could tell me nothing. He shook his head sadly. No, he did not know any history. Too long ago.
Everywhere it was the same. The oral tradition in Africa is in crisis, a trauma brought about by the advent of modern technology, the growth of towns and the spread of Aids, which has devastated two generations of Africans now. In every town you see the coffins piled up in the marketplace, their newly planed red wood still wet with sap. Of the young men that remain, few want to listen to tales of the past. They want computers and radios and mobile phones. And they want to leave: to accelerate into the global future. Nairobi! London! New York!
It is—I grumbled to myself, tramping back through the forest to the lake—not so very different in Britain. How many young Britons know anything about the First World War or even think of it at all?
I strode through a village full of pye-dogs with foxlike ears and amazing patterns in their coats. Black and white and chocolate. Yapping away ten to the dozen, they seemed to be the village’s only occupants.
We came out of the palms into open country and immediately the temperature rose. There is a difference, a discernible difference—I said to myself, I told myself, wiping my face. It is that we in the West have been writing down our history for centuries. Most Africans have no access to books at all and in most cases the right books do not exist anyway. The living history Africa is losing was once passed down by voice, structured on the genealogy of the tribe and on records of military victories and migrations. It lived in the telling, not in the tombstone of a book; and now that the habit of telling has gone, the history is passing away.
From the boat, on the way back to the campsite, I saw bushbuck on the beach, hippopotamus in the water. A croc slid off a rock. At one point I went onshore to look at a place where a Belgian barge carrying cement sank in the 1950s. The cement bags had petrified. They looked like strange rock formations now. Clambering about among them, I found a lump of quartz about the size of a football. It was full of veins of gold, or so I reckoned. I carried it back to the boat, stumbling on the faux-rocks, wondering whether my gold was genuine.
We set off again with the lump of quartz in the bottom of the boat. The outboard spewed its wake behind—chaotic white foam. I looked back at it and realised I was in the remotest place I had ever been; remote in time, it seemed, as well as in geography. As we made our way back to the campsite and the mountains of which Kungwe is chief, the landscape grew greener and more populous. Splinters of quartz and granite gave way to lush expanses of bush and the occasional village.
I was watching one of these groups of thick mud huts roll past in the distance when the outboard motor started to spit out puffs of blue smoke. There was a series of puttering coughs, then one great big puff followed a last valedictory hack. And then came silence. The motor had conked out.
While the boat-driver, Abu, tried to fix it, I read my copy of Burton’s The Lake Regions of Central Africa. Only a large ship passing us marked the difference between his time and my own. I saw that it was not the Liemba, but a freighter taking fuel to Burundi, where, it said on the radio, there had been fighting this week. Its wake sent us back, rocking to and fro. At that moment something connected, the outboard kicked, and we were on our way again. During the journey, a plane flew low over us, heading west. It was a UN aircraft, Abu told me, taking supplies to Uruguayan troups stationed in Congo.
The following morning, at the village of Lagosa, I found Mr Malyamungu. He was ancient, a tiny man in a flowing red robe under which was a dirty T-shirt with CHIMP HAVEN on it. Moustaches—long, thin and twirled—poked out either side of his nose, exactly in parallel with the drooping straw roof of his hut. He sat in a deckchair, smoking cheroots and we spoke through two translators: from English into Swahili, then from Swahili into Tongwe, the local language.
Mr Malyamungu told me that as a young boy he had narrowly escaped conscription by the Germans. ‘My father was a powerful chief and he avoided it,’ he said through the translator, trimming another cheroot with his penknife. ‘Yes, during that time I heard of some small boats that chase the Liemba. But they never catched her. They were sinking two other boats of the Kijerumani.
‘I was growing up at this time and I cut wood for sitima [steamer].’ That is, he collected timber for the Götzen’s wood-burning engine. ‘The Kyerumani and after the K
ingereza would ring a bell on the cable and we would go out into the forest with our machetes and bring bundles of wood to the station.’ There was great competition to get the woodcutting contracts. ‘Sometimes there was fighting between groups and people were killed.’
Had he ever heard of Bwana Chifunga-Tumbo, the Englishman in a skirt? ‘I have heard of that man, but I never saw him.’ Later, he added, another white man had come and told them not to be afraid, the War was over and the Kijerumani and the Beljiji could not hang them any more. Did the Germans and Belgians really hang them? ‘Yes, they hung us and they whipped us and were very cruel.’
Crueller than the British? He put out his cheroot by crushing its glow between finger and thumb. ‘Yes, but the Holo-holo were the cruellest.’
I asked him about Holo-holo fetishes. ‘Those people who made those statues are gone away now,’ Mr Malyamungu told me.
In 1915 thousands of Holo-holo were settled along the Tanganyikan shore of the lake. They had originally sailed over in canoes and established discrete family units down the lake. Now there are scarcely any on either side of the lake. In his book Aux Rives du Tanganyika (1913), Bishop Adolphe Lechaptois—the senior White Father of the area—argues that this depopulation was in part caused by the Holo-holo practice of killing newborn babies: ‘Since the Europeans took over the government of this land, this custom has disappeared to a large extent. But in the remote villages, too far away or too small to be visited by the authorities or the missionaries, the practice continues in secret, only instead of throwing the babies into the lake or exposing them in the bush, they are made to disappear by the simple process of sticking a needle into the brain.’
A later bishop, James Holmes-Siedle—writing in 1948 about a trip down the lake in the Liemba—calls the Holo-holo country the Southern Wilderness, ‘because the whole place is practically uninhabited’. He adds that there had been recent cases of ordeal by poison among the tribe. A census taken in the same year listed 4,410 Holo-holo in Tanganyika.
