Kiffy had a talent for painting. There were bushman paintings in the caves and protected kopjes around Whitestone. Many thousands of years old, these Kaffir paintings, as they were called, depicted hunting scenes. We all knew where they were and visited them often to contemplate the wild humans who had made them so long ago. The Bushmen of times past had been small, no bigger than we were, and so many of the paintings could only be reached by a child capable of squeezing through small openings in the rock or by traversing narrow granite ledges. It was common to come across snakes in these cramped passages—usually cobras. If we didn’t bother them, they generally just hissed and slithered away.
After a while, we began discovering new paintings. They were not in the same elegant and simple style of the bushman paintings we knew so well. Eventually, we discovered that Kiffy had created them during the school holidays. In time, Kiffy’s counterfeits improved, though it was always possible to tell his from the originals. I sometimes wondered if they would somehow later be discovered and deemed an unusual school of prehistoric art.
On Sundays we were allowed out for the day. We could leave the school grounds but were to stay within prescribed areas. Going home was forbidden. We had to go in small groups and indicate a destination when we signed out. A group had to include at least three students, so that if one was injured another could remain with him while the third went for help.
I loved these outings and took every chance to go exploring. One of my favorite places was a large granite kopje a mile from school. It was a hard climb to get to the top, but when you did, you were rewarded with a view over a cluster of lakes called the Hillside Dams. There were caves there, too, with paintings on the walls and shards of old pottery lying about.
One of the most challenging climbs brought you to a rocky crest that was sheltered beneath a stand of trees where it was pleasant to sit. It was a favored haunt for small antelope and also rock hyraxes, which resembled large brown guinea pigs. We called them dassies. There was also evidence of wild goats, which we sometimes saw, though more often we came across their droppings. Once Chris went up there with me and we named the place Goat’s Bog Island, “bog” being our slang for a latrine. I thought of it as a special place.
Although Rhodesia felt far removed from major world events, we knew that we lived in dangerous times, and that a nuclear holocaust could wipe out all life on earth. Chris and I swore a pact that no matter where we were, if the world ever turned completely upside down, we would meet at Goat’s Bog Island. I found this a comforting idea. When I mentioned it to Chris many years later, he had no idea what I was talking about.
Rhodesia held dangers of its own. It was not unusual for a student, or a member of his family, to be killed by an animal or in some kind of accident. Fatalities increased dramatically during the civil war, and many boys with whom I went to school died in unhappy ways before they were twenty-five.
When I was nine, a classmate named McClaren was told to report to the headmaster. He was terrified and didn’t want to leave the classroom. The teacher put her arm around his shoulder and led him out of the room down the endless corridor toward the headmaster’s study. When she returned, the teacher closed the door and explained to the rest of us that McClaren’s father had been eaten by a crocodile. We were to be kind to McClaren, as he would be upset.
We did our best to be sympathetic, though this was not a strong suit among young boys in boarding school. It wasn’t long before the taunts began. How had McClaren’s father been so careless as to have been eaten by a crocodile? McClaren took this hard at first but within a few days seemed back to normal.
I had my own close brushes with mortality. Once I fell off a wall onto my head, landing on some rocks about ten feet below. I was groggy and unsteady afterward. Since I was behaving strangely, I was taken to the sanitarium, our small school clinic that was run by a matron with little medical training. She was concerned enough to call my parents, and I was taken home. Waking up in my bed at home about eight that evening, I wandered around the house until I came to the drawing room where my parents were drinking whiskey with the neurosurgeon from town. They were discussing whether to open my skull to drain the blood that might have built up as a result of the concussion I had suffered. When I walked in, they looked relieved and helped themselves to another whiskey.
I had hepatitis at the age of ten. There were several cases of hepatitis at our school at the time. We were inoculated against various diseases at the beginning of term. Back then, the syringes and needles were reusable and not sterilized between use. Many boys were stuck with the same needle until it became too blunt to penetrate the skin. Whenever we saw a new needle being put on the syringe, there was a race to be first in line. Someone in the line ahead of me must have been infected, and I developed a desperate case of the disease. I was sent home when I became so yellow I was almost green. I was placed in my parents’ bed, where I passed in and out of a coma as my mother stood at the bedside weeping. I think I nearly died.
Another close call was the time I was poisoned. Meals at Whitestone were rationed. There was never enough to eat. I was always hungry. And I found some of the food inedible, especially the burned black beans that were served to us every Friday evening. They always made me vomit. But we had to eat what was on our plates or face the consequences with Miss Byerly. I would eat a few mouthfuls, go outside to be sick, and come back again for a few more mouthfuls, until the plate was clean. Regurgitating those beans was better than the sjambok.
In November or December, when the rainy season replaced months of drought, flying ants would appear. They were actually termites. During homework sessions the lights in the classroom would attract flying ants by the thousands. Some would land on the floor. We would then catch and eat them. You pulled the wings off and chewed fast so that they didn’t wiggle as they went down. They tasted like butter.
The dining room was also used as an auditorium and had a stage at one end. When I was in the fifth standard, about ten years old, we were rehearsing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I was Mustard Seed, one of the fairies. During rehearsals, I noticed some red crystals on the dining room table that looked like gelatin. They tasted awful. It turned out I had eaten fly poison. I ended up at the Bulawayo General Hospital. On recovering and returning to Whitestone, I was beaten for being so greedy as to eat from the table when it was not mealtime.
I never did play Mustard Seed, because shortly thereafter I contracted brucellosis and was once again confined to bed.
Brucellosis is an illness caused by drinking unsterilized milk or eating infected meat from animals. The first signs I had this disease were fevers and sharp pain in my left hip, especially at night. My hip joint was infected. I was sent home, and my left leg was put in traction. This was excruciating. I had twice-daily tetracycline injections. Sometimes I would cry out in the night in pain, which never abated. Either there was no pain medication or I was never given any. Though he must have been tired and faced a full day’s work ahead, my father would hear me and come in to sit by my bed until dawn, when the pain became easier to bear. After three months of bed rest, I was allowed to walk again, but only on crutches or using a “caliper,” an instrument of torture disguised as a leg brace. It put all of my weight on a steel ring pressed against the bone on my inner thigh.
There was a bright side to this experience. My mother told the local butcher in Bulawayo, a Mr. Barnes, about my confinement. He came to see me one day. Before coming to Rhodesia, he had been a famous magician in England, known as Senrab the Magician. (Senrab was Barnes spelled backward.) He offered to teach me magic and visited often. Magic appealed to me. During the endless hours I spent by myself in bed, I became adept at manipulating small objects, making them disappear and then reappear. I think this may have given me some fine motor skills that later served me well as a surgeon. I remained friends with Mr. Barnes until I left Africa.
CHAPTER FOUR
SERONDELLA
During holidays, especially i
n the Rhodesian summer that began in October, my family lived at our vacation house in Chobe. The Chobe River is the major tributary of the Zambezi River, which forms the border between what were then Northern and Southern Rhodesia, now Zambia and Zimbabwe. The point where the Chobe joins the Zambezi is a junction of four countries. The countries’ names have changed, but during my childhood to the north of the converging rivers was Northern Rhodesia, and to the south was Southern Rhodesia. On the west was the Bechuanaland Protectorate, later Botswana. Across the river from Bechuanaland was the Caprivi Strip, which used to belong to Southwest Africa. It is now part of Namibia. Smugglers and others who had an uncomfortable relationship with the law favored the area of closely mingled boundaries.
The forestry commission owned a large area south of the Chobe River, in Bechuanaland. This was wild country, unchanged for millennia. Wildlife including elephants, lions, and buffalo roamed freely. When the forestry commission left the area, the houses they had on the banks of the Chobe River went up for sale, and my parents and some of their friends bought them.
It was a two-day journey from Bulawayo to Chobe. We’d leave at dawn and drive all day to the Victoria Falls, a distance of about three hundred miles. The way was difficult, as it was a so-called strip road. Rather than pave the full width of two lanes in either direction, it was cheaper to build a single lane consisting of two parallel strips of tarmac on which your wheels traveled. To overtake another vehicle, you moved to the right, so that your left wheels remained on one strip as your right wheels careened over sand and gravel. The vehicle you were passing did the opposite, to the left. This was particularly hazardous when large trucks pulling trailers were involved, as the trailers swung wildly when making the transition from tarmac to dirt and back again. When a vehicle approached in the opposite direction, you each had to swing off to the left, the wheels on the right remaining on the strip. Driving halfway off the road raised thick clouds of dust, so that it was often difficult to see where you were going. Windshields were routinely cracked by flying pebbles. Accidents occurred frequently.
I remember a little gas station at Lupane, a town about halfway to the falls, where we liked to halt for a stretch to get gas. A black man in overalls pumped the gas by hand. It was a peaceful rest stop in those days. Years later the retired Catholic bishop of Bulawayo and a nun were shot dead in a guerilla ambush at Lupane.
It was hot. Our cars were not air-conditioned. The thin, brown African dust poured in through the windows and settled into every crevice of the car. The road was sometimes winding. Everyone grew a little carsick as the day went on. Herds of elephant or other animals crossing the road frequently forced us to stop. One of our friends was killed going to Chobe when he hit an eland at high speed. The large antelope weighed nearly a ton and had crashed through the windshield. Both the eland and driver were found several hours later with the bloody head of the antelope resting on the dead man’s lap.
You could see the great plume of mist rising from the Victoria Falls when it was still twenty miles ahead—the “smoke that thunders,” the Africans called it. We stopped there for the night, usually at one of the rest camps by the Zambezi River above the falls. The camps consisted of thatched rondavels, round huts with wooden doors and windows, containing camp beds. We made time to visit the statue of David Livingstone, the Scottish explorer and missionary who was the first white man to lay eyes on the falls. There were few tourists then, but the old colonial Victoria Falls Hotel existed largely for them. The Falls Hotel was too fancy and expensive for us. I much preferred the rest camps, anyway. You could watch hippos at play in the river, and sometimes elephants would wander through the camp in the evening on their way to drink.
In the morning, we crossed the Zambezi gorge over the spectacular Victoria Falls Bridge into Northern Rhodesia. The bridge’s gleaming steel arch carried cars and trains more than four hundred feet above the river. It had been proposed by Cecil Rhodes as part of his grand scheme to link Cape Town to Cairo by rail, and though he died before the bridge was completed, it remains one of the great civil engineering achievements of the early twentieth century.
We drove to the town of Livingstone, where we picked up supplies. Heavy stores, such as forty-four-gallon drums of gasoline to run the boats, had been sent on ahead. After loading the car with groceries, enough for several weeks, we set off on a forty-mile drive over a dirt road that ran parallel to the north bank of the Zambezi. We were often halted by animals crossing the road on their way to the river. Eventually we left the main road, taking a small track that led to the river’s edge. This brought us immediately across the river from Kasungula, in the easternmost part of Bechuanaland. There we unloaded the car and banged on an iron bar to signal the boats on the other side. Presently a small fleet of makoros, shallow canoes a foot or two wide and about twelve feet long that had been hollowed out from tree trunks, crossed the mile-wide river to collect us.
The boatmen, wearing ragged shorts but little else, stood barefoot at the back of each canoe with a long paddle, roughly carved from a tree branch, as we wove our way through the hippos in the water and the unseen crocodiles below. We sat on the floor of the makoros in puddles of water, careful not to move, as the sides of the boat cleared the water by about one inch and capsizing would have been all too easy.
An open truck waited for us on the other side. It was loaded by many willing hands. We rode in the back of the truck from Kasungula to Kasane, a small village that was the official border post ten miles on, though there was no real border at that time. This stop was a formality to let the authorities know that we had arrived in Bechuanaland. Kasane had a police post and an English district commissioner—a DC, as they were known—because Bechuanaland was a British protectorate at that time. There were fewer than a dozen inhabitants. Small whitewashed huts with thatched roofs served as offices and sleeping accommodations, and across the dirt track a two-person jail had been fashioned by putting a door on a hollowed-out baobab tree.
From Kasane it was another half day’s drive in the truck over sandy roads through elephant country that brought us to the cottage we called Serondella. Though Chobe is now popular with German tourists dressed in expensive safari outfits, it was then one of the most remote and wildest ends of the Earth.
The house sat thirty feet above the river’s edge, high enough to be safe from crocodiles and floods. The Chobe is a big river, in places some two hundred yards across. There were huge mahoganies and other shade trees near the water, and red bougainvillea climbed the walls of the cottage. Away from the river, the grasslands stretched toward the horizon, which was interrupted here and there by umbrella-like acacias.
The cottage at Serondella.
Monkeys played on the corrugated iron roof of the house. It was a simple dwelling that had belonged to a forester. It had no electricity. There was a large, screened-in veranda that served as the living room and dining room, and several bedrooms inside. In the back was a kitchen with a wood-fired stove. The kitchen was always hot. We had a large water tank that was sometimes pushed over by elephants too lazy to go down to the river to drink. The water had to be boiled to make it drinkable. We stored it in canvas bags that were hung outside. Hot water was provided by a “Rhodesian boiler,” a horizontal forty-four-gallon drum connected to the house plumbing and supported above an outdoor fireplace. It was a remarkably efficient system: the fire was lit half an hour before hot water was required. We had a houseboy named James who did the cooking and cleaning. The floors of the house were polished red cement. In the mornings, James would tie brushes to his feet and shuffle around the house singing.
There was game everywhere. Elephants came into the garden to eat the bananas off the trees, and lions prowled up and down the dusty track behind the house at night. Their grunting as they hunted kept us awake. The river was thick with hippos, sometimes submerged and other times peering serenely at us with just their eyes and ears above the water. Their distinct woofing in the evening signaled the cocktail ho
ur for my parents. Hippos sound close by, even when they’re not. As it got dark, we lit kerosene lamps and listened to the sounds of the bush coming alive in the night.
The boats were kept hauled out onto the riverbank in our absence. Relaunching them was a big job, as they were built of heavy teak and mahogany to make them harder for hippos to turn over. Our main fishing boat was a flat-bottomed barge. We would sit in the boat on deck chairs under an awning to protect us from the hot sun. We fished every day. The best times were in the early mornings or evenings, but we spent most of the day on the water, exploring the river or taking the boats to different parts of Chobe, where we would picnic and watch the animals. Though the north and south banks were in different countries, it didn’t matter where we stopped. Nobody cared then. We had guns, but they were only for protection. We never shot anything, even for food.
We fished with spoon-type lures that had one side painted red and a six-inch hook trailing behind. We made these ourselves. We caught bream, for eating, and powerful, toothy tiger fish for fun. There were also two types of catfish. The vundu could be up to 120 pounds in size. It was not unusual for me to catch a fish larger than I was. Reeling in a big one could take an hour. Sometimes a fish eagle would swoop down and pick up a fish as we were bringing it in. Then there was a tug-of-war as the eagle rose into the sky, stripping most of the line off the reel until the bird realized it was hopeless and dropped the fish back into the water with a splash.
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