The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  With setbacks like these – plus veldt fires, squalls, reedy banks that made it impossible to land – I made little progress. The worst difficulty of exploration, I learned, is that it is a tormenting isolation. There was no chumming it up with the blacks, naturally, and the need for sympathetic company would have been unbearable were it not for the terrier bitch I’d been gifted at the Wankie colliery. That little wire-haired lady was my only pal, my inseparable companion. I sympathised with Dr Livingstone’s affection for his dear Chitane, who drowned around these parts, they say. My Flossie had a marvellous nose and, though she could not save my journey, she saved my life in the end.

  Late in my travels, King Litia, a sort of deputy to Lewanika, sent me a favourite chief of his to catch a lift. The most I can say for this chief, Koko, is that he had ‘taking’ ways. Unhappy over the tough barter I’d driven for his ride, he upset my dugout on a swift side channel of the river, unaware that I could swim like a fish. The consequences, however, were dire: I came down with a bout of 104-degree fever. I ordered a rest for me and my men. That night, feverish and half-asleep, I heard Flossie growling, and saw a dark figure crawling on hands and knees towards us. I gave a shout. The fellow replied that he wanted fire. Not plausible! There was a fire positively roaring on the other side of camp. It was plainly an attempt to knife me. I threatened to shoot, and he cleared. It was Koko – he had not forgotten the indignity of his own ten-foot drop into the water.

  There are those who flatter themselves that they truly know the native. I would never make such a claim. The native is harder to understand than a woman. The more you know him, the less you know of him. The key is not to let his savagery in. To wit, I never whip a native unless he deserves it. A dog and a native are on a par: one should give them a good thrashing when they have earned it, but one should thrash neither until one’s temper has cooled. So when we arrived at our destination, I kept my calm, tied Koko to a tree overnight, and turned him over to the new district commissioner at dawn. I released the few boys I had left – I had lost several to crocs and fever and run out of rations to feed the rest – and spent two days in bed, fighting my fever and awaiting trial.

  During the hearing, darling Koko confessed at least five times that he’d have blotted me flat if luck had not contrived against him. The district commissioner, fresh from Oxford, was the sort who puts on a coat and cravat to visit a native queen. He asked me what I demanded for my trouble. Well, I demanded a hiding! The DC ruled thusly: ‘’Tis a trivial case. I shall dock his pay.’ I am giving you this as an absolute fact. Remember, it was a young country with a native population preponderating largely over a sprinkling of white. So Koko had his pay docked – and he shortly received it back in kind by pinching from my boss boy the handsome leopard skin I’d received from his king Litia! Koko, as I say, was a daisy.

  By then, the rains had arrived, in high dudgeon. I got back to The Old Drift two days later, famished and alone, soaked to the skin and flayed to the bone by a wet saddle. I headed straight for Mopane’s hotel. He greeted me, kindly did not poke at the wound of my failed voyage to the coast, and fed me what was left of lunch – a hunk of bread and a tin of Vienna sausages. After my modest repast, a hut was provided for me. It will be gathered that I needed no lullabying into the deep sleep that ensued. I was completely done up. So much for imperial exploration! Was this place cursed? Or was I?

  * * *

  I suppose I became a pioneer by default. When I first skittled here from Bulawayo, I had intended to settle across the river at Victoria Falls Town as soon as the railway bridge was complete – there would be great opportunities for those who got in early. I made my headquarters at The Old Drift for the time being. A year had passed since my first visit and the population was now fivefold but the place was still a mere trading post: a few wood and iron buildings and twice as many wattle and daub Kaffir huts.

  The crowd, however, had become practically cosmopolitan. Van Blerk ran a store for a Bulawayo firm. Tom King ran a canteen for the Bechuanaland Trading Company. Jimmy, an American ex-cowboy, hunted hippos and started fistfights. A Greek made a living shooting meat – he once killed nine lions, mistaking them for boar. Mr L. F. Moore, the English chemist, edited the weekly paper, the Livingstone Pioneer. Zeederberg was a contractor for the post; the great event of the week, prefaced by a bugle, was sorting through a pile of His Majesty’s mails, dumped from a Scotch cart onto the floor of a hut. A chap called ‘The Yank’ hung about, being lucky at poker, until his luck ran out. The only woman was the wife of a Dutch trader, an extremely jealous man and an expert in the use of a hippo-hide sjambok. He disfigured anyone who dared glance at his dour duchess.

  There were two ‘bars’ where we drank and gambled away the hours. A gramophone screeched in one corner, while in another, merchants and speculators threw dice for drinks. In a third corner was a roulette table, the imperturbable croupier raking chips and filling columns of half-crowns, chanting: ‘Round and round the little ball goes, and where she stops there’s nobody knows! No seed, no harvest – if you don’t speculate, you can’t accumulate, and she’s off!’ There was a four-blind game of poker every night and sometimes a spot of vingt-et-un. Of other social life, there was none. No societies, no dance committees, not a dress suit in sight. A postprandial lying contest, chiefly concerned with lions and niggers, might take place, or we’d drum up a party for a hippo hunt.

  Amusements aside, fortune flipped lives as the storm flips the leaves of a tree. A smithy gave up for lack of funds; a cotton-gin man died of sheer starvation; a Hebrew stopped through and played impressive card tricks until we ran him out, our empty pockets flapping like flags. Any old drifter might come along with a week’s beard, months of wear to his trousers, and years of treading to his boots. He might leave in a worse bedragglement or he might depart in the finest of clothes, plus a quid in his pocket.

  Men came and went. Those who stayed tended to die. The dry-season heat was oppressive, and the thirst it engendered required a sedulous slaking. During the rains, November to March, the place was a right swamp. The mosquitoes gathered in hordes, humming like a German band, their stings sharp enough to penetrate an elephant’s hide: Anopheles, energetic and indiscriminate. Loafer, lord and lout were treated with strict impartiality in these parts, for the mosquito is a true democrat, and cares not what accident of birth has led you here, nor whether the blood it quaffs be red or blue.

  Fever was so prevalent at The Old Drift, no particular attention was given to anyone down with it. No need to bother with a medico with a monocle and white bags creased as a concertina. Just feed the victim drops of champagne or of Schweppes with a feather, bundle him up, and let him sweat it out until the shakes subside. I once wrote an editorial for the Livingstone Pioneer and this was my warning: ‘cursed is he who forgetteth his quinine o’ nights, for the shakes and the pukes shall surely take him’. Out of the thirty-one settlers that season, no fewer than eleven died of black fever or malaria. The next year was far worse, with a loss of seventy per cent. Pioneering isn’t all lavender.

  We called the place Deadrock. There was a funeral about once a week. One of the survivors would serve as undertaker. We’d knock together a coffin out of old whisky cases, douse the departed in quicklime, then encase him with black limbo or calico. The coffin was put on a Scotch cart hauled by oxen to the graveyard. The rest of the town marched behind, clad in slacks and rolled-up shirtsleeves, no coats. There were no Bibles beyond the mission, so the elected undertaker would recite fragments of the Burial Service, the other mourners filling in where they could.

  Once, a coffin got stuck halfway down because the grave was too narrow. The undertaker leaned in to see what was the matter and tipped right on top of it. We hoisted him up, then the coffin, and set about digging a wider hole. It happened again when our chemist, Mr Moore, disappeared into the bush, delirious, and was found days later in a dreadful state of putrefaction. When we lifted him, he simply
fell apart. The air was blue and thick enough to cut. At the burial, our appointed undertaker masked his nausea with gin, then fell in the hole because he was tight!

  There was a lot of drink at The Old Drift – understandable, what with the boredom and the savagery to keep at bay, to say nothing of the competitive sports: gambling, prospecting, surviving. But high as our death rate was, we were a cheery camp. If only I’d known the greatest threat to our beloved Deadrock was the railway bridge I had long anticipated. Where once we lived as brave pioneers, things were soon to become ‘civilised’ in the worst possible way.

  * * *

  When operations began on the foundations in 1904, I crossed the Zambesi to see what was what on its southern banks. I am proud to say I ate the first meal ever served at the Victoria Falls Hotel. This was at the start a long, simple structure of wood and iron, with a dining room and bar. At the most it housed twenty men, at 12/6d per day. Its logo was a lion and a sphinx – Cape to Cairo, Cecil Rhodes’s dream for a railway line that would run vertically up the continent.

  The chef at the hotel was a Frenchman, Marcel Mitton, a hunter and a former miner. The barman was an American from Chicago – an ex-prizefighter named Fred who refereed our frequent brawls. Arabs and coloured men served the guests with a servility bordering on sarcasm, then sent the Kaffirs scurrying to do their jobs for them. Management was a man named Pietro Gavuzzi, a Piedmontese who had worked at the Carlton and the Savoy in London, and then at the Grand in Bulawayo before coming here. You’d think he would have been better suited for life on the railway frontier but he was the sort of man who grew his own strawberries to garnish the dinner plates.

  While the bridge was being built, an outside bar called the Iron & Timber was set up for the workmen. A rough lot, even for the wilds, and they made the hotel uncomfortable for those more sedate and worldly. Gavuzzi was scared out of his wits by their antics. Whenever he came in sight of the Iron & Timber, he got chased round the premises. If caught, he was made to stand drinks all round. Once, the assembly collared him and tucked him up onto the mantelpiece, commanding him to sing. Warble he did, like a wood pigeon! Gavuzzi had not the knack of taking such fun fondly.

  The Italians around here generally went the pious route. The Waldensian missionaries – the Coïssons and the Jallas – built churches and schools, then retired back to Italy laden with children and wealth. They never went full native, as we say. That sort of consorting was frowned upon. I once met a Jewish trader with four native wives and a host of salt-and-pepper children – people regarded him as pretty low down. Any overtures from native men in the other direction led straight to the gallows. Nothing seethes the blood of most settlers more than the thought of racial contamination.

  Like most Europeans, Gavuzzi had brought a wife with him, an English girl. I knew at first glance that Ada was a shopkeeper’s daughter. Always slumping around with a hangdog look, slinging her daughter everywhere with her. That girl, Lina, a lass of five, had a vicious streak – this place had clearly got to her, as I soon learned directly.

  One night, I was in the hotel dining room, making friends with the top men on the bridge project – surveyors and engineers, that sort of personage. I was down with fever, but I had run out of prints, you see, and serving as forwarding agent for Mopane Clarke’s trading business had not proved lucrative. I wanted to open a photography studio on this side of the river. Withstanding the trembles and blur, I stood the occasional drink, downed several myself, and tried to charm the gentler men. Things were going swimmingly when in waltzed Gavuzzi with his funny hat and vest, to see a man about a bill. Ada, who did the accounts, was behind him, holding Lina by the hand.

  Now, it was a dizzy room already, tobacco smoke bitter in the air, half-naked Kaffirs careening about on errands, besuited Arab monkeys bowing over drinks trays. My fever was running amok, I was fagged out, and I could hardly hear – my head was a right balloon. Gavuzzi was an irritating man in the best of circumstances, and then he provoked me by cutting in. I shouted him off, he turned on his heel, and as he stepped away, I grabbed his hat, almost as a prank. It came off his head easily, but my grip went a touch too far and a patch of his hair came off with it, pulled up by the root!

  I stared at it in my hand, wondering if it was a wig and we were in Parliament. Gavuzzi stood in shock, his pate turning scarlet, then sat on the floor with a bark. Ada rushed over quick as she could, given her condition – she was expecting – and left Lina in the corner. Most whelps would have wept but Lina shrieked with fury and when an innocent native boy rushed by with a tray, she struck him! Knocked him flat! He was never right in the head again. He became an imbecile, forever smiling at the daisies.

  * * *

  So much for drumming up funds for a studio. But I managed to procure a contract to photograph the bridge during the stages of its erection. And that’s how I ended up joining Sir Charles Beresford Fox, the nephew of the bridge’s designer, on a voyage to the bottom of the gorge. We climbed down the workers’ ladders and then along the face of the sheer wall. It was perilous going, rocky and thorny. We got to within twenty feet of the base, tied a rope to a tree, and slid down. We wandered along the bottom, clambering over rocks the size of my childhood home in Cambridge. Then the gorge narrowed to a thin ledge hanging over a rushing torrent. No exit.

  We parted ways, feckless Fox pushing on while I headed back, having taken the snaps I wanted and wishing to get home by nightfall. As soon as I lost sight of my companion, a terrific explosion went off, sending rocks in all directions, one squarely at my head! Thankfully it missed and landed with a crash fifty yards away. Workers on the other end of the gorge had apparently set off their final blast of the day. By the time I got to the rope, I was too spent to climb. Willy-nilly, I was spending the night in that gorge.

  I tied myself to a ledge and settled in. It was weird beyond description to lie in the dark, sensing the Falls without seeing them. The spray condensed and ran over me in rivulets. The mist floated round, moaning and whining, a faint whisper, a deep groan, the great roar swelling to thunder then dying again to a sibilant hush. I’ve often wondered how the guttural shout of the Falls can sometimes break off to sudden silence, like a thunderclap in a clear blue sky.

  I lay there, thinking of all I had accomplished in Africa and all I had not, of Sir Charles and Fred ‘Mopane’ Clarke and what an extra ‘e’ on a name can do, of the suffocating grace of the high-born. Climbing down here for a mere spot of money had nearly brought death upon my head. I won’t say my life passed before my eyes that night, but I barely slept for bitterness. When dawn broke at last, I raced up that rope.

  I staggered the half-mile to camp and demanded a whisky and Fox’s whereabouts. Turned out he’d had a far worse time than I. He found our rope but his hands slipped and he fell about a hundred feet. Fortune snatched him from death’s jaws – he landed on a ledge. They’d had to crane him out. No broken bones but an awful shock, from which he never quite recovered. Meanwhile, I had already been reported dead, and the news sent back to Bulawayo. A truer freedom I never knew! Far better to be a dead man walking than a man on the run. An American born in the Kingdom of Hawai’i eventually dethroned me as Orpheus of the Gorge. When he climbed down, he was actually struck by a boulder from a blast – it only crushed his foot but he died the next day.

  * * *

  The railway was completed in 1904, the bridge in 1906, and the years following brought a host of official settlers. The British South Africa Company – Rhodes’s imperial machine – owned The Old Drift and decided to move it to a sandy ridge six miles away. A drier, healthier spot, to be sure, but more importantly, closer to the rail. They renamed the town Livingstone, marked out 200 stands, some for government and some for settlers, and christened it capital of North-western Rhodesia. We dislocated pioneers could choose land wherever we liked, 6,000 acres at 3d per acre, and five years to pay it off. I got a permit for 2,000 acres but not wanting
to compete with crafty old Mopane, I set up a curio shop across the river at Victoria Falls Town.

  Decades later, they moved the capital of what became Northern Rhodesia 300 miles north to another dusty old town. This one was called ‘Lusaaka’ after a village headman and was built on a place called Manda Hill, which means graveyard: rather a fall in stature from ‘Livingstone’, I’d say. I tried to take the old permit I had bought in 1904 to the Lands Department Office in that new capital city. Could I perchance have my land in Livingstone? They laughed me out of the building. Ruled out by statute of limitations. Hardly startling – the white man’s reign in Africa was already dying out by then.

  * * *

  After I set up my shop, I went back home to marry Kate. We’d known each other umpteen years but she insisted now was the time for the shackling. A poker game won me eighty pounds, enough for the fare home. I must say, the English countryside seemed cramped quarters after my years in the veldt. My siblings barely recognised old P.M., emaciated and with a face-fungus in patches, reach-me-downs hanging off me – a fairly disreputable wisp of humanity I was! I received strict orders to scrape off the beard and make haste to the outfitters, cash in hand. The assistants took a peek at my ‘slops’ and offered me the lowest price. ‘Nothing better?’ I asked. Up we went by degrees, the timorous Tims and I. Finally, it dawned on them: the tough had money to burn. Out came the luxury goods!

  We married on 15 February 1906 at Great St Andrew’s Church, Cambridge. Shock and dismay that the daughter of the Cambridge Clerk of the Peace had tied the knot to my bedraggled self! The Zambesi may as well be the Lethe: one plumb forgets the millstone the question of money ties around the neck in Merrie Old England. I was in such a dither that I neglected to give Kate my elbow as we left the vestry, which I suppose only proved my ‘country manners’. We honeymooned in Devonshire, but I was determined to sail back to Africa, where we could live in proper style.