So Who's Your Mother

by Tarquin Olivier

  Coincidences were part of his character. In 1957 he bought the ulti-mate explorer’s letter, left by Dr Livingstone at the mouth of the Zambezi in a bottle.

  It read:

  Kongone Harbour 25 May 1859

  To…

  Commander of Her Majesty’s Ship …

  Sir,

  We have been at the Luabo Melambe and Kongone mouths of [ 44 ] the Zambezi since the 18th in hopes of meeting one of H.M.’s cruisers with salt provisions for our crew, but none appearing we presume our letters to the Admiral and to the Captain of any Man of War that might be on the coast have suffered detention, or it may have been incompatible with other duties to comply with our request. We leave the Luabo tomorrow morning, and before going deposit this letter in a bottle ten feet Magnetic North from a mark (+) cut on the beacon of the island of this harbour.

  Livingstone then describes the discovery of a magnificent inland Lake Shire, and the advisability of keeping this a secret from the Portuguese, who were colonising Mozambique, until the announce-ment was made by Her Majesty’s Government. This letter gave Quentin the idea for our expedition.

  We carried with us many other documents, Livingstone’s published writings and journals and Baines’s original map of the Victoria Falls which Livingstone had discovered in 1845.

  The atmosphere in South Africa was difficult when we arrived in July 1958, even in comparatively liberal Cape Town. We dined with a friend, so-called ‘English speaking’, as opposed to the Afrikaners who were still referred to as Boers. He actually agreed with their policy of apartheid as the only way white farmers could save them-selves from having their throats cut. Many considered rural Africans to be savages, while the rest were servants, errand boys, or workers in ill-dressed groups. Many whites thought that even university-educated Africans could easily be subject to violent passions; hence the tension latent behind the dour quietness of African servants, referred to universally as natives, even by themselves. One was not supposed to say ‘please’ or ‘thank-you’ to them, though of course we did. Several times I got on to a bus for blacks and they asked me to leave. ‘Non-whites’ and ‘whites only’ were translated as ‘net blankes’ and ‘nie blankes’ which was easy to muddle. The Africans did in fact have the vote when South Africa was granted independence in 1923 by the British, so long as they could write their name, had an income of £50 a year or a house worth £75. In 1936 they were disenfranchised by the Afrikaners. With recent Independence the African National Congress took over with a full franchise and black rule. Since then it has to be admitted that more than 3,000 white farmers have been murdered.

  We gave a number of interviews to newspapers, especially Afrikaner ones, about our Livingstone Zambezi Expedition. This created good-will and opened doors. One night after dinner with one of our contacts we three returned to our long-wheelbased red Land Rover, parked under a streetlight. A native was wandering round it. Quentin thought he looked suspect so we gingerly got in. The native put his head through the front window, Quentin’s side, smiled and said ‘hello’ in a deep voice.

  Quentin took a deep breath and shouted ‘Petrus!!!’

  He flung open the door and danced around the man, waving his arms, spluttering and laughing, all teeth and wide-eyed for joy. I have never seen him so excited. This was the man Quentin had taken on board in Ovamboland, South-West Africa, on his quest for the giant sable. He was the only English-speaking native there, and now he was thrilled to see his old master again. He was handsome and had a cropped head. He had seen newspaper reports, pictures of us, our Land Rover, and noted the number. He had come to South Africa to make money so that he could return to Ovamboland and set up a shop, a trade usually carried out by Indians, a situation he disapproved of. He wanted to join us, and to make things even better he had become a car mechanic. This was irresistible. He became a crucial part of our expe-dition. A truly Quentin coincidence.

  We spent two days buying camp beds, blankets, lanterns, mosquito nets, loo paper, firelighters and for cooking, a kaffir pot which with its lid in place looked like an iron football on three legs. We bought jerry cans, enough for sixty-five gallons of petrol which cost only £9.05. My mother had given us a large medicine chest, complete with a chrome syringe and needles, pills and serums for everything – for her peace of mind, she said.

  Quentin’s leading contact was Major Piet van der Beyl, the United Party’s Shadow Minister for Native Affairs. We went to the Legislative Assembly, an understated building of about 1920 with sub-tropical gardens and views beyond of Table Mountain and Lion Rock. We were shown into the visitors’ gallery and watched the debate below. The National Party Prime Minister Dr Verwoerd, who had codified the orig-inal apartheid policies for separation of the races in South Africa, was making an impassioned speech in Afrikaans, banding about the words ‘propaganda’ and ‘bantu’, the word Afrikaners used for black Africans. We saw our Major and sent a note down to him by white messenger. He was about fifty, tall, with finely bred features and a suit of studied elegance. He read our note. took out a pen, held a fastidious hand on a piece of paper and started to draw something. We guessed it was a map. He waited for the session to end and we met him in the lobby. He apol-ogised for the delay and said the Prime Minister had been attacking him.

  He showed us round the building and into the Senate. It was rather dark and smelt musty, not so much empty as dead. With irony he said. ‘I see the Senate has risen.’

  A few days later we headed east to his 300,000-acre farm ‘Fairfield House’, near Bredasdorp. His family had been in South Africa for three hundred years. His wife was a dark-haired English beauty. They had a whitewashed classic Dutch colonial house with curved gables. He showed us his collection of guns, a pair of Purdeys, a room with the heads of lions, buffalos and many antelopes. He was followed by an adoring Great Dane which on its hind legs would have been as tall as he. There were dozens of caricatures, a photograph of him rowing for Cambridge and the framed document of Germany’s surrender of South-West Africa in 1917 which had been handed to his father.

  There was a small herd of a rare antelope on his estate: bontbok, which he was keen to show us. In his open Volkswagen we hurtled across the veldt in a shuddering test for the car’s suspension. He was a ferocious driver and all the while he regaled us with his politics which he considered liberal. To summarise: his neighbours may be white, coloured or native, whatever, he would raise his hat to them, but he considered that non-whites were different in likes, moral philosophy, outlook and smells. Physical contact was wrong. He would not like a black in his club, nor as a son-in-law. However feudal he sounded, the Africans on his estate looked us straight in the eye in recognition. This was a pleasant change from the suffocated looks in Cape Town, under the shroud of apartheid.

  On a mountainside of wild herbs and flowering aloes we saw five bontbok grazing. We stopped fifty yards away and they looked over at us, their coats reddish-grey with patches of white and chic little horns. Quentin filmed them. Van der Beyl said a bit of a chase would do them good so we headed for them. They ran, jumped with their delicate legs high in the air as they hurtled up a slope that was too steep for us. We stopped and looked at the evening sun, the reddening brown earth and rolling green hills with a few high cactuses like pillars, in the distance a wagon with a team of bullocks driven by an African, and a large herd of sheep.

  The Garden Route took us to Port Elizabeth where we turned north, away from the Indian Ocean, to Grahamstown. There we met Profes-sor Smith, a reserved and learned man who had identified a great fish, the coelacanth, caught near the Comoro Islands. He kept one in a coffin-sized bath filled with formaldehyde. The creature was rectangu-lar, five and a half feet long and a foot wide, one of the earth’s very oldest – 170 million years – and the first to have articulated forelimbs with elbows and small fins on the end of them. It was nicknamed ‘Old Four Legs’, the seaborne precursor to all limbed creatures.

  Our onward drive was the first to give us the feeling of bei
ng a team on our own. Petrus sat behind us with all our kit crammed up to the roof behind him, all wedged down by our Dunlopillo mattresses. Next to him was the medicine chest, a typewriter, all our books and maps. We three sat in the front, the middle man with the gear lever between his knees. That main highway was then only two lanes wide, with gravel shoulders. Whenever a car came the other way we slowed down and waved to each other. Every hundred miles or so we stopped, refuelled, drank from our canvas water bags, peed, and Petrus had a cigarette. Then we changed places in the front seat. We had left Grahamstown early and climbed to the top of a high hill in second gear. We looked down on clouds lying over a valley ahead. At around nine o’clock they vaporised and we saw a huge plain surrounded by mountains. We coasted down and after fifteen miles climbed the next mountain range with little cumulus clouds above it.

  Every twenty miles or so there was a little town at a crossroads, two or three shops, maybe a small inn with a notice about a forthcoming dance, a Standard Bank, estate agent, Old Mutual Assurance and then more miles of road, eventually with the towering rock Drakensberg Mountains and Basutoland.

  On the border above a corrugated hut flew the Union Jack. A Basuto official came out, unsure which way to put on his hat. We told him we were from England and he waved us through without checking anything. We drove on to the ramshackle capital Maseru and stayed in a hotel made of round brick-built rondavels. The windows had blaz-ingly coloured curtains of local fabric. The dinner was good and the African serving girls efficient and friendly, so different from South Africa, like equals. One of them asked whether we had much trouble with elephants in England, and was England bigger than America. We went outside and stood in the freezing porch to admire the crisp full moon. The watchman asked; ‘Is the moon verybig? As big as London Town?’

  Johannesburg was preceded by huge mounds of yellow slag cast aside from goldmining. After the hundreds of miles we had driven through, land that was for the most part empty, the city’s high-rise buildings seemed out of place. Now it was our red Land Rover which was the odd kid on the street, covered in dust and with canvas water bags flapping from the side, amid the fleets of well waxed saloons.

  We had to drive on to Pretoria, the administrative capital, to obtain permits for Petrus to accompany us outside South Africa. Major Piet van der Beyl had briefed the Civil Service and after a couple of days we were given an appointment with a Mr Lindique of Internal Affairs, in the imposing Union Buildings Secretariat. He was tall and daunting. He had powerful deep-set eyes, with jutting forehead, nose and chin. His suit was scruffy blue worsted. His voice was quiet, and he spoke softly with a heavily Afrikaans accent. He did not shake hands but bowed. The fingers of his right hand were mangled. Straight away he advised that normally it would take three weeks to obtain a permit for Petrus. Quentin showed him some of our press cuttings in nationalist Afrikaans newspapers and he was impressed at the amount of support expressed for the Livingstone Zambezi Expedition.

  He looked Petrus up and down, examined his native pass. He went behind his mahogany desk and we all sat down, except for Petrus who stood behind us. He telephoned the police in Cape Town and read out one of our newspaper articles in Afrikaans. The police confirmed that Petrus was a good man. He then questioned Petrus in Afrikaans and was satisfied. He arranged for him to have a passport with exit visas for Mozambique and Angola. No visas were needed for the two Rhodesias and Nyasaland. (Now Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi.) As he said farewell he added that he was taking a bit of a chance: ‘Oim tiekin aye beet of aye chornce.’ What he had done was remarkable. Petrus was given a white man’s passport, with no mention of race.

  On Sunday 20 July 1958 at eleven in the morning we left Pretoria. We felt our real journey had started, along undulating scrubland beneath a dark blue sky with bright white clouds. Our altitude was 3,000 feet. Far ahead were the Zoutspansberg Mountains. We stopped on the gravel shoulder for a quick snack. Dave being an American, and I, having had my boyhood in the States, had peanut butter sandwiches. Quentin howled his disapproval and had his strawberry jam the other side of the Land Rover.

  The pass through those unfertile mountains was narrow. There were hardly any other cars, the few trees stunted, the fields of maize barely alive. By mid-afternoon we were through the pass, reaching down towards the lower slopes. There was an African village of mud rondav-els thatched with straw, and the world’s most prehistoric-looking trees, like pachyderms plonked on their rumps, spaced like a convoy of motionless ships: great baobabs with trunks and branches shaped like pyramids, as if swollen by elephantiasis. They looked as if they were upside down, their roots jutting high into the sky. In later journeys I saw them as far north-east as Tanzania, and in Senegal on the extreme western point of the entire continent they grow on a slope which comes to an abrupt end at the Atlantic, the rough sea pounding black cliffs. Baobabs to my mind delineate the heart of black Africa.

  This dreamy quality was with us all the way to the customs post at Beitbridge. Two Afrikaner officials waved us into their office: ‘Whites Only’, so Petrus stayed in the Land Rover. They were amazed to see his passport, said they had read all about us, stamped everything and wished us ‘Tot sins’. Over the border the British Rhodesian official like-wise, with a ‘Cheery bye’.

  We drove through a huge ranch, our headlights catching high trees on either side. Two magnificent kudus leapt across the road, their long corkscrew horns laid back, their eyes terrified, then some zebras; not noble, more like ponies in striped rompers. We camped, and heard them making singing noises. After we had gathered enough dead branches and made a fire Quentin sat on his stool, advising Petrus on cooking with the kaffir pot, ‘Now add some salt.’ One of his favourite activities. For the first time we set up our camp beds, laid out our Dunlopillo mattresses, pillows and woollen blankets, climbed into our pyjamas, took it in turns to clean our teeth, Petrus included, and hit the sack. At dawn it took us two and three-quarter hours to get up, wash, rekindle the fire after finding more dead wood in the bush, cook, eat, pack, refuel and leave. Clearly we would have to do better than that.

  Salisbury was on the up and up. There was no apartheid legislation. It was unnecessary. The splits between the races were incontrovertible. The only blacks in the club were behind the bar, as is still the case in the southern United States. The whites were all settlers, as in South Africa but much more recent, many of them very big men. They wore shorts, long socks and sandals, and usually a short-sleeved shirt, its pocket with a packet of Matinée cigarettes. They were considerate and help-ful. Every skyscraper had been built in the previous seven years. The rate in building investment was one million pounds a month. The city had a vigorous spirit.

  Even the most educated Rhodesian whites spoke with curious vowel sounds. The ‘ah’ sound became ‘awe’, as in ‘How now brown cow, grizing on the green green grorse’. And ‘a form is a plice where kettle are kipt’. (Cattle are kept.) The suffix ‘min’ can be added anywhere as a sign of familiarity; as Macbeth would say: ‘Is this a digger, min, that I see before me, min?’ and Lady Macbeth would reply: ‘Yes, min.’

  We filled out our camping inventory from Salisbury’s wonderful shops, salespeople for the most part black or Indian, customers mainly Indian or white, and drove off north. Granite boulders call kopjes rose up on all sides above the rich vegetation. At the Mozambique frontier post a Portuguese welcomed us. No customs, no search, a friendly stamp on our passports. It seemed the Portuguese ambassador in London had set news buzzing about our expedition.

  Near the provincial capital of Tete there remained the walls of a seventeenth-century Portuguese fort, overlooking the mighty Zambezi. The river was fully a mile wide, brown and smooth. It had built up its volume over the fifteen hundred miles from its source. Now in the dry season it was at peace.

  The town itself was of dinky two-storey concrete houses painted in pastel colours. There had once been some gold mining, long since exhausted. The Intendente of the whole Tete region, Mr Peralto, made
us feel under-dressed in our khaki, with his long blue trousers and white shirt. He had been to Oxford and Cambridge to study British colonial administration before his recent promotion. The hierarchy went: Governor, Intendente, Inspector, Administrador (equivalent to a District Commissioner), Secretario, Chefe de Poste and, lastly, aspi-rante. He delegated a driver, a well-educated African, to lead us in his jeep upstream to an old Mission called Buroma. The driver had passed his exams and become a ‘civilizado’, giving him all the rights of a Euro-pean; an enlightened Portuguese policy, all too rarely put into effect.

  We drove between lush fifteen-foot-high mopane trees, like young beeches. There were wide shallow lakes filled with flowering lotuses, and waders with spindly legs and toes on floating leaves, dipping their beaks into the water. The surrounding trees showed signs of being flooded to a height of five feet, with mud stains on their trunks and dead grasses stranded in their branches.