So Who's Your Mother

by Tarquin Olivier

  Buroma had beautiful 1885 colonial buildings and a gabled church on higher ground set well back from the riverbank. The White Fathers welcomed us, led by Father Martin, a Jesuit. The White Fathers were an organisation of missionaries founded in 1868 in Algiers. There they had had to be accepted by Arabs, so they donned white robes and Arab headdress for work all over Africa. In Europe they wore black. For many decades they prospered. Lake Tanganyika was once described as a large expanse of water surrounded by White Fathers. Since African independence they have been disbanded for lack of support from Europe and the dangers of unprotected life there. At Buroma they put us up in a large room. Quentin had the double bed, Dave and I used our camp beds and Petrus to our shame had to sleep in the Land Rover.

  We changed, then went into the whitewashed refectory. We stood at the long wooden table as the twelve of them softly spoke grace in unison, the only food visible being bread and water. We sat and Africans helped us to delicious soup made with oleaginous mixes of cabbage, followed by helpings of game birds, vegetable, cheese and heavy red wine. They were all keen historians. Father Martin was blunt in claiming that the British had tried to take the glory for discoveries which had really been Portuguese. He showed us a book written in Livingstone’s day by José Luis Lacerdo claiming that the Victoria Falls had been discovered by Portugal years before 1845. If so, I suggested, they had kept it very quiet. Exactly, he said, just as Livingstone had given instructions that his alleged discovery of Lake Shire in 1859 should be kept secret from them; as if they had not already known about it. Throughout history, he said, England had played grand-mother’s footsteps with Portugal, in India long after they had settled in Goa, in Malacca where the Dutch and then we had pushed them out, and we had struggled to catch up by creating Hong Kong only a few hours along the coast from their colony of Macau. He was concise, articulate and good-humoured.

  Our next stop was a hundred and sixty-five miles west along the Zambezi, a tiny place called Chicoa, where the Chefe de Poste was Señor Ariano. The village had one good house for him and his wife, and a couple of outhouses for their servants. There were three or four shops. The earth road was needlessly wide, seemingly designed for centuries to come, leading from nowhere to nowhere. demarcated along its edges with whitewashed stones. Ariano had no resources other than his fair-mindedness as a magistrate and his common sense. He was respected for settling the myriad conflicts of interest arising in any rural community. His wife gave lessons in the local language to those who were interested, mainly children. They did their best with no visible support. Sweet people, their favourite phrase being ‘mas o meno’, more or less. Nothing too serious.

  The country became more beautiful. Lotus lakes gave way to sudden closed thickets of jungle, with strong creepers tumbling from a canopy of trees of cathedral height. We stopped, got out and gazed upwards in the diffused light, and down at the dark patches of mildewed under-growth, thick damp leaves, pungent smells, the great trees’ roots cradled in decay, as if the whole balance of nature had stuck. A hundred yards further on there was lively dappled light and birdsong.

  We camped on the Zambezi which was now only half a mile wide. There was a flat rock on shore. We threw off our clothes and dived in. We shouted at Petrus to join us. He undressed behind the Land Rover, then ran into the river, arms waving, his head thrown back and mouth wide open in a rictus of happiness. When we were back drying ourselves with our towels he was still dancing around in a state of nature. This went on a bit long and Quentin took out his camera, hoping that modesty would tempt Petrus back into his clothes, to get on with collecting dead wood for the campfire. Quite the contrary. He gave high leaps like a gazelle and Quentin took an excellent shot of him in mid-flight.

  After we had eaten dinner Petrus said he had noticed that we had been ‘cut’, all three of us. He wanted to explain to us why he had not been ‘cut’.

  ‘Mass Quentinkeynes,’ he began, ‘I tell you I went to the doctor to be cut.’

  ‘Really? Why did you want to be cut?’ Quentin sipped some water. ‘Because Mass Jesus Christ was cut. The missionaries taught me. But in Ovamboland none of the boys are cut. And if one of them comes who is cut and he bathes and everybody looks at him, and the girls, and they point at him and laugh, and he hides himself.’

  ‘What about in Cape Town?’

  ‘The doctor in Cape Town didn’t cut me.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Well, sah. Other day morning I went to the doctor and tell him I want to be cut. He say am I sure, and I say yes, man. I am sure because Mass Jesus Christ was cut. So the doctor makes me take off my clothes and lie on a bed in a very cold room. Air condition. He goes into his room to get his things. I shiver. He comes back and looks at me. He lifts my man with his finger and thumb. Then I see he holds a very big knife in his other hand. I sit up. Are you going to cut me with that thing, I say. Yes, he say, it is very very sharp. Then I look at the knife and see it is sharp, then I look at my man. I begin to think; no, man, I don’t want to be cut, no man, not like that. And I put on my trousers and went away from him. He was smiling but I left fast.’

  ‘How about Cape Town. Do the girls laugh at you there?’

  ’In Cape Town there are many different people and they all bathe together and nobody laughs.’

  We had been told by the White Fathers of a village called Chafombo where there was a Chief Chapoto who had a car. He had paid them a visit in Buroma. We wanted to find out more. Just before the Southern Rhodesian border there were vehicle tracks leading south into the high grasses, between intermittent trees. Some had branches ripped off which put us on guard against elephants. The broken branches became more frequent and we saw traces of green paint on a tree trunk. Then another. We started to use the trail of broken branches as our guide. More green paint. In an hour we came to a hilltop and in the valley beneath there was an old green car, stopped and rusted beside a poor kraal of rondavels. We headed down to it and got out.

  The car was a complete wreck. Petrus managed to lift up the bonnet.

  ‘Very very sick,’ he said.

  A sweet old man came out of the kraal. He told us in hesitant English that he was Chapote’s cousin and that the chief was in the mountains hunting elephant.

  The huts were rudimentary and some of the straw roofs collapsing. Chickens limped around aimlessly. It was unbearably hot and dry, pervaded with the sweet smell of rotting food remains. He showed us into the shambawhere many of the tired maize plants had been torn up by elephants. Two old women were rummaging for some moth-eaten cobs. He spoke of the terrible lack of water, and showed us a dried up river bed. The only source of water was a hole dug in the sand, where two feet down there was a puddle with a broad green leaf growing in it. He said how the children often died and there was no doctor for hundreds of miles. We asked why they carried on living in such a place.

  His face wrinkled sympathetically. ‘We are all born here and so were our fathers. It is our place, sir.’

  Back in the kraal he offered us eggs, both with soft shells. We offered him a few coins but he said it was far too much. We insisted and he accepted with tears in his eyes. We asked if he had a bucket. He brought one and we filled it with water from our jerry can. He cupped his hand and had a sip.

  He said that in the mountains there was a wild tribe called ‘Madana’. They wore skins and string ‘from the trees’. They were armed with spears, but did accept the occasional elephant hunter so long as they could share the meat. Chapota’s village was one of the poorest we saw and the old man said there were many like it.

  It is fair to wonder why the Portuguese had done so little to develop Mozambique; for water a well-digging programme at the very least would have saved thousands of lives. It was such a huge country, and so very far away from Lisbon, itself under-resourced, subjected to the dictator Salazar. However it must be said that they had maintained peace, a great improvement on the internecine wars so constantly described by Livingstone, and peace nowadays
is no longer a concept which leaps to mind when considering Africa.

  We had been warned that crossing the Zambezi would be difficult. The far side was joined by a great tributary, the Luangwa, which flowed between Northern Rhodesia with its little town of Feira, and Mozam-bique’s village of Zumbo. The Zambezi River’s edge in this dry season was a quarter of a mile out, beyond level sand. There was a broken down jetty but no sign of a ferry, only a contraption of four dugout canoes strung together. We ignored this and blew our horn, hoping to attract attention in Feira. A boat with an outboard motor headed our way, the breeze dancing in wavelets against its prow. It was driven by a smiling Portuguese aspirantecalled Luis Lacerda.

  He took us and our night things on board. Being in the centre of that river revealed its grandeur, so huge that our gaze seemed to follow the curvature of the earth before it turned a far distant corner. As we approached the landing place we passed some hippos wallowing in the shallows, their huge pink and black heads breaking the surface, their eyes looking unfriendly and intruded upon, nostrils distended then snapping shut as they submerged. Once on land we heard them resume their base throbbing barks, their hums resonating with contentment.

  Luis’s straw house had a sitting room with a fire where he cooked our dinner: cabbage soup, fish he had caught in the river and his garden vegetables. We went to our beds replete.

  At one in the morning I had a most vivid dream. I awoke with a start and prodded Quentin in the next bed, pointed, and said in a panic: ‘Quentin. There’s a hippo!’

  He awoke. So did Dave. I then realised I was looking at a window and not a hippopotamus. This made them both laugh, outright, and they had not stopped before I went to sleep again.

  There was no ferry. Eight Africans laid heavy planks across the four dug out canoes and hammered them in so as to fit the spread of the Land Rover’s wheels. We emptied it totally to reduce weight and Quentin drove it on to the Heath Robinson contraption. There was no alternative. The canoes gave a little but held, with six inches free board. It was early. We thought that so long as the river remained flat calm all would be well. The Africans pushed off and the raft with our red Land Rover was under way. They paddled. We watched from the bank. One of the Africans shouted that a canoe had sprung a leak. Four of them disappeared under the Land Rover and tried desperately to patch up the canoe. There was a lot of shouting. A breeze lit the surface of the water. The Land Rover was a hundred yards out, the canoes out of control, starting to revolve in the strengthening breeze. The men baled out, paddled harder and eventually made it across. We loaded everything into Luis’s boat, and went over to his house.

  He then took us upstream to Feira to meet the British District Commissioner. The DC’s wife told us he was on tour, walking on foot round his region. It was normal practice for every DC to make a yearly tour of his region on foot, with some African staff, so as to pick up all the gossip and monitor the progress on the projects agreed upon: school building, road development, installation of running water from wells, and agriculture. He had five white men on his payroll. His wife seemed happy, bringing up her small children in the bush. They had a swim-ming pool which was a stunning pale blue, and electricity. Their hous-ing was properly built of concrete and wood, and their office, called the Boma, was being replaced with a much larger concrete building under construction, complete with vault, generator, fans, lights and so forth. Her husband was fluent in all the dialects. Schooling was being intro-duced to secondary level and in the recent budget there was provision for a big mechanical road leveller. His own main task was the adminis-tration of justice, the maintenance of peace and management of his staff.

  That day, learning about the British Colonial Service, became a key day for me. I had found out what I wanted to do for a living. The desire for self-sacrifice, so common in the young, clasped me. I wanted to be of service, as these people were, to Africa. They were totally different from the white settlers who went there for the sake of enriching them-selves, no doubt being of immeasurable help in advancing the locals, but mainly for their own good. The concept of actually being of service to Africa had a greater appeal for me than anything I had considered.

  With the Land Rover still unloaded Quentin sped us next day to a mission called Miruro, several miles away. We roared up a steep murram road and there, in the middle of miles and miles of stunted bush was a whitewashed church and refectory. It had been built by the Germans in 1910, seven years before their African colonies had been taken away from them: Tanganyika, South-West Africa (Namibia) and Togoland. Now the mission was in the hands of the White Fathers, utterly remote. That this tiny pinpoint in the wilds had been selected for the sake of religion seemed to have given the place a divine sanction, alone in the wilds.

  Padre Jesus and his companion Padre José had fifteen Africans in their care, all learning Portuguese, keen to pass school certificate so that they would qualify as ‘civilizados’. The students were bright as buttons in their bush shorts and shirts, whether writing essays in the refectory, hoeing the vegetable garden or irrigating it from a nearby spring. To live like that, teaching your faith, surrounded by the unpeopled wilds of African nature, seemed a wonderful calling.

  Five

  We drove more than 13,000 miles on our expedition, the last month with just Quentin, Petrus and me because Dave had to return to college in the States. The rhythm of our days was largely the same. Quentin said there was nothing he preferred to driving across the wilds of Africa. With each other for company we hardly made more than brief acquaintances with anybody else. Despite his experience over the years I would not say that he was an expert on the people, their history, culture, nor indeed the animals we saw, filmed and photographed. He did have a passion for all of this, but only in the manner Rousseau described: he sensedeverything. His supreme interest was in collecting Victorian explorers’ letters, their books, everything written about them, and the first pictures published of big game.

  We went to the great Zambezi Delta, up to Mozambique Island, via Nampula to Nyasaland, then drove up the length of Nyasaland, across Northern Rhodesia to the source of the Zambezi at Kalene Hill, fol-lowed it round into Angola and back eastwards to end at the Victoria Falls and Livingstone.

  There were quite a few highlights. First the light-hearted ones, involving pachyderms.

  On 12 September while going to Fort Jameson, Nyasaland, we drove through a little known area called Lukusuzi, a place elephants went to have their young. The bush trees were much higher than normal, up to fifty feet, wider spaced and nearly leafless. Many of them had been pushed over by elephants, some across the road which had not been used for two years.

  There was a shallow valley spreading away to our left. In the front wing-mirrors we could see plumes of the dust raised behind us, drifting down into it. Half a mile away there was a herd of ten elephants, with a few very young ones. We stopped, left the Land Rover and walked towards a granite kopje, a hundred yards short of them. We climbed it, settled down and took some telephoto shots. One of the babies was so young he was still hairy. The image of a family at peace. A big bull rose on his hind legs and with his left forefoot leant against a sizeable tree, its trunk about ten inches thick. He lurched a few times and the roots yielded. Its crown crashed to the earth and the herd ambled towards it, not all that impressed, and plucked a few leaves.

  The bull paused. I watched through the binoculars as he raised his trunk, like a periscope pointing in our direction, the nostrils tasting the air. They were downwind of us. We had thought our scent would blow over them. It hadn’t. The bull trumpeted and three of them charged. The creatures were so huge they seemed to move in slow motion, trunks trailing over their shoulders, ears held back as they gathered speed. The rest of the herd hastened away.

  We fled, leaping down the kopje, and sprinted towards the Land Rover, a diminutive rectangle of red. I waited a moment for Quentin who was bad on his feet and he whizzed past me. As I ran I turned and saw the three bulls, heard their massive
soft feet only eighty yards away. The adrenaline made me feel like Mercury, a winged man, effortless. My mind carried vaguely related misgivings – of my father in the Garrick Club years later being asked what his son was doing, and him replying that I had been trampled to death in Africa by elephants, and his friend being intrigued. Well at least it was different.

  I turned again and they were only half the distance away and just then a sudden change occurred. What was it? It was the wind. It had swung round and blew from behind us. I heard the trees bending before it. Our scent shifted and the bull elephants followed a false direction. Their poor eyesight and the wind had now saved us. We kept running running running until we slapped into the Land Rover as if it were life itself. For days our lungs ached.

  We camped outside the Luangwa Reserve near a large pool. The flat muddy bank had the spoor of rhino. We wandered round to collect dead branches. Petrus lit a fire while I did all the unpacking and Quentin selected the tinned food for dinner. As we ate we heard an elephant trumpet twice, not a frequent sound but here they were testy because of their young. It put us on edge. Then we heard some hyenas. We laid our beds right beside the Land Rover in case elephants disturbed us, taking care to close all the doors and windows so they would not be attracted by the smell of the fruit we had bought. We stacked the fire as high as we could, put on pyjamas and went to bed.

  At dead of night a deafening scream twenty yards away was coun-tered by a colossal bellow. Two bull rhinos crashed into each other and the fight was on. We were instantly in the front seat, door closed, Petrus behind us. Outside, bushes were being flattened, water splashed, then thudding hooves stopped abruptly and there was silence, except for their stertorous panting. That faded and after a minute of nothing we grew self-conscious huddled together in pyjamas. We went back to bed. That happened three times and after such a disturbed night we slept until seven.