As Petrus cooked breakfast over the embers we strolled in pyjamas and bare feet. There were some dry old elephant droppings. I picked one up; it was round, five inches in diameter and two and a half inches high, rather like tinned components made of crushed straw and twigs. A crash just ahead of us was such a shock that we found ourselves with neither effort nor decision springing up some thorn trees. It was a bull rhino, upwind of us, looking bleary-eyed and hung over, but then they always do. He had not seen us. His fat bum bucketed away – at a dainty trot for a ton-plus creature.
That was all very well. Our Pavlovian jumps had launched us up thorn trees with spikes an inch long, our feet and hands were badly scratched, pyjamas caught up and torn all over the place. There was no Pavlovian serpent to scare us down to the ground with a leap, so in a state of pain and fear, we picked our descent, assisted by much filthy language.
In Northern Nyasaland there was the Scottish mission at Livingstonia, on a high plateau 3,000 feet above the brilliant waters of Lake Malawi. Far across its shimmering surface were the Livingstone Mountains. He had never been there but he would certainly have approved the mission. Ever progressive, the Scots had built Central Africa’s first hydro-electric power house in 1901. They fed us, gave us baths and bedded us. Noth-ing like it after weeks of life in the bush. Their generosity put us on our best behaviour. They directed us to the District Commissioner at Rumpi and he pointed us to Lake Kasuni where there were twenty-four hippos.
We arrived there in the evening. The air was drifting with smoke left over from the dry grass being burned off, black all the way to the hori-zon. Africans do this in the dry season so that young green shoots sprout for their cattle to eat without needing water. In the middle of this burnt out plain was a mile wide lake surrounded by a hundred-yard strip of soggy emerald green grass where we camped. We could see the tops of the hippos’ heads and backs half a mile away, hear their puffing and deep bass barks and their reverberant humming.
In my diary I wrote:
Monday 8 September, 8832 [to show the miles we had driven so far] At night. The others are in bed asleep. The fire is alight and I am at a table writing by a paraffin lamp. The air is cool and soft, crickets shrilling intermittently. A grass fire glows in the distance. The night is clear and moonless, the lake is still, but all along our side of it the hippos are lapping at the sodden grass. They are quite near. The far side of the lake the natives are having a party, beating drums. I got into pyjamas and went to bed.
The hippos seemed to be coming nearer. I could hear them belch and fart. Perhaps the sound was more defined at night. In a state of enchantment I fell asleep.
I awoke with a start at 4.55 to hear the hippos champing very near – it seemed like fifty yards. It was completely dark and the grass fire in the distance had died down. Quentin sat up as well and we both strained to see how close the hippos were. We heard them breathe. The more we tried to see the less we saw, and the grunts, sighs and chewing came nearer and nearer. Quentin thought we should go the other side of the Land Rover but Dave and Petrus were still asleep and we couldn’t leave them.
It grew lighter and we could just see them returning to their lake. When we got up and went to look we saw their huge messy footprints were only just over thirty yards from us. Had they, with their extended family, been alarmed by us at night, or in daytime come to that, we would probably have been killed. More people are killed by hippos than by any other creature in Africa.
The Kariba Dam between Northern and Southern Rhodesia was under construction to create an extensive lake, control the unmanage-able flooding of the Zambezi and generate massive hydro-electric power. South Africa persuaded Portugal to do the same in Mozambique, build-ing a dam at Kebra Basa, as Livingstone had called it, now Cabora Basa. There the second longest river in Africa surges through a twenty-mile narrow defile. A feasibility study was under the guidance of two young Portuguese engineers to determine the positioning and specification of the project to create a lake forty miles wide and 180 miles long. We wanted to see the gorge itself, which was fourteen miles away from the ‘Missao de Fomento a Povoamento do Zambeze’. The engineers did warn us that the road was tricky, indeed for many miles invisible. They gave us a man who had walked the trip but never been in a car.
He sat on the bonnet next to Petrus. They spoke a lingua franca called ‘lapa-lap’ which Petrus had picked up during our week in Salis-bury. They pointed out to us the faint tyre marks of a Portuguese jeep. There were many dried up drifts where flash floods had hurtled, some so steep that we had to hack a way down with hoes and a spade. A car was exceedingly rare there and attracted Africans from far and wide when they heard the engine in the silent dry heat. They clapped their hands and waved, and sometimes even helped us push. When they did we gave them cigarettes. They were always full of questions.
Elephant grass ten feet high loomed ahead. The guide walked in front and divided it as if swimming the breast stroke. The entire world disappeared on either side of us between the towering green stems. An hour later (about half a mile) there was a clearing and an exceptionally deep drift. I went out to recce among the trees and dry creepers.
A sharp tingling struck my back. I scratched and it got worse. Much worse. Unbearably. I tore off my shirt and rolled on the rough ground and the piercing sensation spread to my chest and arms. I rushed back to the others but they could see nothing. It attacked my legs like a million ants stinging. I thought I would go mad. From the medicine chest I poured witch hazel over myself but it made no difference. I lay on the ground again and rolled over and over as it crept into my eyes and hair. Then after ten never-ending minutes it went away. Our guide said they called it ‘ulili’. Microscopic hairs blow from a sausage-sized bean when disturbed. The Portuguese call it ‘monkey beans’ and Livingstone ‘cow itch pods’. An indication of the explorer’s stoicism was his only complaint that they were ‘annoying’. An understatement beyond belief.
We peered down the drift and saw it was filled with dangling pods, no hope of avoiding them. That crossing was sheer hell for all of us. Our guide, suffering like the rest of us, said that parents would send their children through them if they were naughty.
A few hours later we had to cross a flowing river five yards wide, two feet deep, with a bottom of mud. ‘Lungil’ said the guide: soggy. We decided to face the problem the next day, collected dry wood, put out our beds and Petrus cooked. The guide said it was excellent lion coun-try, supposing that we had rifles. The only weapon we had was a bread knife and the security of a camp fire. There were no roars that night, only the intense trilling of the cicadas high in the trees.
We had somehow to make a bridge. A hundred yards away we came across an entire African village of eleven huts which had been gutted by fire. The stakes were still strong so we gathered them in armfuls, relay-ing loads over to dump them in the river and pile them up. We had breakfast, packed, refuelled and Quentin drove across our bridge, reached the other side and ground up the bank. He promptly turned round. We thought he was mad. He drove back over it in an exercise of glee. It worked each time.
Further ahead the mountains closed around us and we had to go round immense boulders. One upward slope was so steep that in low gear ratio, the engine tugging with the strain, it felt as if we might roll over backwards. The trees hung over our windscreen with their white bark vertically above, and the occasional flowering cactus like bunches of thorny organ pipes. The road ended. We took some picnic things in baskets, Quentin’s cameras and thermoses of water, and set off on foot. The only sound apart from us was the hoarse coughing of baboons.
Out of the blue fifteen Africans arrived, their shorts in shreds, saying they wanted to help us. We said we preferred to carry our own things. They could so easily have run off with them. They told Petrus they had never seen white men before. He assured us we could trust them so we parcelled out our things, glad of the relief. We followed them down a steep dry riverbed between the shoulders of a gorge. Our skin was soft-e
ned by continuous sweating, our finger nails black from scratching the detritus from ulili-tortured flesh, limbs and bodies bloodied from thorny creepers.
We faced the Zambezi at an elbow of deep calm water fifty yards wide, with a welcoming stretch of sand. Upstream was the end of a cascade and below us we could see the river tearing off in a torrent. Where we stood was calm in the concentrated high noon of heat, reflected down on us from more than a hundred feet of white rock cliffs on all sides, scoured clean by floods. The trees above them were choked with the dead branches torn away upstream by raging floodwaters and deposited up there in the months of long rains.
We tucked into lunch. The Africans accepted some fruit from us and sat discreetly away. We undressed and threw ourselves into the river, isolated by the rapids from the danger of crocodiles. Getting clean again was a relief. Even the itching stopped. Afterwards we lay to dry and the Africans roared with laughter. I suppose we lay there for an hour, exhausted, and slept. When we awoke there was no doubt we had caught the sun. Our chests were pink. An African called over to Petrus and spoke seriously to him. He had said that we, having changed into a pink colour, should stay there with them until our colour changed back, otherwise the white girls would not have us.
Now to our original purpose: retracing Livingstone. In volume one of his ‘Zambezi Expedition’ journal he wrote:
16 September 1858. We wooded at Shiramba, about four miles above the spot pointed out as the great house. All is deserted now and we saw no living thing except a small brown antelope. While the men were cutting down a lignum vitae I walked a little way to the Southwest and found a baobab which Mr Rae and I, measur-ing at about three feet from the ground, found to be seventy-two feet in circumference. It was hollow and had a good high opening into it. The space inside was nine feet in diameter and about twenty-five feet high. A lot of bats clustered round the top and I noticed for the first time that this tree has bark inside as well as out.
Elsewhere he commented about the baobab’s unique ability to protect itself by growing bark when hollows develop through age, unlike the beeches of Burnham. Yet again he drew attention to his fasci-nation for baobabs: ‘though it possesses amazing vitality it is difficult not to believe that this great baby-looking bulb or tree is as old as the pyramids.’
We mentioned this journal entry to the Intendente at Tete. He knew all about the tree and told us that Livingstone’s initials were carved in the hollow. He gave us detailed directions how to find it, which took us half a day. There were so many baobabs, huge old ones, and we exam-ined every one, none with a hollow. Then ahead of us we saw a vast array of swollen upper branches reaching into the sky, seemingly the height of Tower Bridge. The tree loomed larger and larger, its smooth grey whale-sized branches at ungainly angles, vast knuckles bursting into stubby short ones and with small walnut-sized leaves, in magnifi-cent defiance against flood, drought or the passage of time. We approached with deference.
It did have a hollow. The proportions we measured were precisely the same as Livingstone’s had been a century earlier. The cave-like hollow was still about twenty-five feet high. Perhaps he had camped there, alone with his British team of men and his Africans, because his wife Mary was recuperating from fever in South Africa and was not to see him again until a couple of years later in Tete. Inside many initials had been carved, one dated 1890. We looked carefully at each and took photographs but there was no ‘D.L.’ Perhaps the Intendente had exag-gerated. There was no mistaking this extraordinary tree.
We had a rather sad lunch and went inside the cave-like hollow again to have a last look. Quentin pointed at something three feet above ground, carved in the bark. It was a monogram four and a half inches high, blackened with age. We called Petrus and Dave to come and have a look.
In England Quentin went to see Professor Frank Debenham who said this was the most important Livingstone find for many a year, which Quentin quoted in an article in the Daily Express. He claimed to have discovered it and never acknowledged any guidance from the Intendente. Perhaps a weakness integral to explorers. However he did persuade the Portuguese to build a proper wrought iron fence round the tree with a historical note and a gate. Livingstone had also carved his initials in the bark of a tree on an island in the middle of the Victoria Falls, but with the growth of that tree they have become indecipherable.
The three greatest changes since Livingstone’s time are first and fore-most the abolition of slavery. His books illustrate the grotesqueness of that human tragedy, the piteousness of men, women and children in their dozens in leg irons, yoked together in their tens of thousands, by Arabs sometimes using one tribe to capture another for sale in the Middle East.
The second, in 1958, was peace. A hundred years before the Zulus from South Africa used to present themselves to the Portuguese colonists in full battle order, in ranks carrying spears and shields to demand tribute. And there were the constant outbreaks of violent hostilities between the local tribes set on proving their manhood. In 1958, before African independence, peace was absolute. It would have been possible for us to traverse the whole continent on foot, unarmed. Will that blessed situation ever return?
Thirdly, and sadly, was the difference in activity levels in the coun-tryside. Livingstone’s books are filled with etchings of Africans building boats, attacking wild game, refurbishing houses, making weapons or pottery, skinning an elephant, fishing, hoeing their shambas, playing an orchestra of xylophones, gongs or pipes of Pan and drums. It is still possible from the shapes on the hills and mountains in the background of these pictures to identify exactly where they were done in real life today, and to compare what was with what is. In 1958, nothing to compare; the people left behind looked less healthy than they had. The desertion had been by buses with sides painted ‘Lonrho’ or ‘Ulere’ over-stuffed with Africans wishing to seek opportunity in towns hundreds of miles away. Leaving behind emptiness.
On our way to the Indian Ocean coast we paid our respects at the tomb of Livingstone’s wife Mary, near Marameu. She had succumbed for the final time to malaria. She had rejoined her husband on the Zambezi at the end of January 1862, the height of the rainy season, on the Luabo mouth, the southern end of the hundred-mile-long Delta, together with a dozen or so intrepid men, mainly from the Universities’ Mission, and two other wives. They were held up for months in feverish conditions of downpour, a constant frustration in tropical Africa which not only immobilised movement but destroyed health.
Livingstone had become increasingly fired up: ‘I have a very strong desire to commence a system of colonisation of the honest poor [selected from Britain]. I would give £2,000 to £3,000 for the purpose. Colonisation from a country such as ours ought to be one of hope and not despair to parts of the wide world where every accession is an addi-tion of strength.’
He received rebuffs from London to any and every such ambition. They pointed out the fatal experiences they had had long before when trying to settle the Central American coastline of Darien. But he persisted, his vision becoming more vivid, of Christian colonies, the spread of arts and civilisation, the cultivation of cotton and the disap-pearance of the slave trade. Hope rose further in the person of Bishop Mackenzie. He had gone with a friend to rescue the captured slaves who were the husbands of local women left behind. They managed to free them, but on their way back to the coast their own canoe was upset and sank with their medicine chest. Both men were smitten with fever and died.
Livingstone wrote in despair to the Bishop of Cape Town: ‘The blow is quite bewildering, the two strongest men so quickly cut down, and one of them, humanly speaking, indispensable to the success of the enterprise. We must have the will of himwho doth all things well … I shall not swerve a hairsbreadth from my work while my life is spared.’
He and his wife returned to Shupanga, in mourning. Then she became ill and died, vomiting every quarter of an hour, which prevented any medicine from taking effect. Dr Stewart wrote: ‘He was sitting by the side of a rude bed formed of
boxes, but covered with a [ 66 ] soft mattress, on which lay his dying wife … and the man who had faced so many deaths, and braved so many dangers, was now utterly broken down and weeping like a child.’ She was buried with her head-stone under an enormous baobab in Shupanga, where a Franciscan friar in 1889 founded the Mission of Immaculate Conception.
We were now nearing the Zambezi Delta and beginning to wonder whether we would find anything concerning the letter which Living-stone had left in a bottle and which had led Quentin into setting up our expedition. About this, and in happier days, Livingstone wrote of shooting water buffalo, seeing a flock of flamingos and many white ibis walking along the sandbanks. His companions collected eggs of peli-cans and gulls. Acute hunger prevailed at Tete which made the locals keen to follow him in the hope of finding food. He wrote: ‘Their will-ingness I look upon as the effect of the influence of the gracious spirit in their minds, and I hope it is a pledge that He will bless me in opening that country too and O may it be for the promotion of divine glory!’
His religious devotion was formidable. Retracing his footsteps and reading his accounts of a century before induced a sense of wonder at the man.
In returning to Luabo he became more earthly. He wrote; ‘Without seeing a man of war it is probable that my letter may have been detained too long at Quelimane and that the vessel of which we heard at Melambe was the Lynx, returning from the Cape after the Mozam-bique voyage. We expect to hear tomorrow at Mazaro if there is mail for us by her.’
We did spend a number of days in the Delta, courtesy of Sena Sugar Estates, on one of their paddlesteamers transporting barges stacked high with sugar cane to be processed in their mills. By speedboat we traced the outlet to the sea which Livingstone had indicated, but a comparison of earlier maps with the ones we now had showed that the shape of the islands had altered beyond recognition. We could learn nothing more about Quentin’s letter-in-a-bottle.
So Who's Your Mother Page 9
