Zambia

Letters From Lusaka #7: South Luangwa Continued ~ Walking In The Wilds At Nkwali

In 1992-1993, during the first years of Zambia’s multi-party democracy, we were posted to Lusaka, Zambia’s capital. Graham was charged with organising the distribution of European Union food aid to drought-stricken Zambians. (Part 1 is HERE, part 2 HERE, part 3 HERE, part 4 HERE, part 5 HERE, part 6 HERE)

July 11th 1993

After two days at Tena Tena camp it’s as if we have fallen into a dream. As Robin Pope drives us across the game park to Nkwali camp, he talks about the problems of elephants ring-barking and uprooting trees. Their drive to create more grassland where once there was open forest is gradually changing the ecosystem right down the nature of the soil. It’s something to ponder on. Then we see two village men cutting sheaves of vegetation, and Robin says the dry season is thatch-mending time and local people are allowed in the park to cut the grass.

I’m trying to focus on his words, but my eyes are scanning the landscape. We pass through a zone of recent burning. The place is alive with birds mopping up the roast remains of insects and other small creatures. There are crowds of storks and a flock of stunningly coloured lilac breasted rollers. Flashes of purple, royal blue, turquoise and unlovely squawking.

One thing Robin says penetrates the reverie. He happens to mention that the current paramount chief for the district is a woman. That gives me something to think about.

Nkwali Camp is on the banks of the Luangwa, outside the park, but within a designated hunting block. Our new temporary ‘home’ is very ‘open plan’, one of six cabins, with a high sheltering thatch, open at both ends, and a large unglazed window overlooking the river. Out back, the flush loo is housed in its own thatched cubicle, but the shower is open to the sky, the water heated up in an oil drum on a charcoal fire.

There are three other guests, and in late afternoon we are driven to a spot on the Luangwa where migrant carmine bee eaters flock to breed along the sandy bank. Again I long for a camera that might capture the startling flurry of colours – brilliant Titian reds with turquoise caps and rumps. Instead, I watch them until the sun goes down and wonder, will I always remember this?

That night in our cabin, it isn’t hippos that keep us awake, but elephants. In the early hours they gather in the trees all around us, come there to eat chinzombo fruit. Now they are anything but silent. There are rumbling bellies and crashing vegetation and much munching. The cabin seems to shudder. I’m relieved when just after 5.30, our English guide, Hugh, comes to call us for the morning walk. He tells us he had to do much clapping before he could exit his own cabin; there was an elephant mother and child outside his door. He found three more in the camp bar, eating the thatch.

In the early hours our cabin is surrounded by chinzombo chomping elephants

Nkwali camp bar as it was in ‘93. These days camp facilities are far more luxurious

I hear angry trumpeting from across the river, and find I am happy to not see the elephant visitors at close quarters. Even so, after breakfast, Hugh says we will go and look for them. Graham and I follow, along with James the ranger and tracker Reuben bringing the tea things. It’s a beautiful morning and we begin our walk through tall grasses, yellow hibiscus, white jasmine and orange turbaned Leonotis (Turkish pompoms) that sunbirds love.

As we go, we are watched by a young kudu antelope. Hugh says it is an orphan, but it has attached itself to a herd of eland. Next we are watched by ten Thornicroft’s giraffe, a subspecies found only in Luangwa. They move quietly around us. It is like walking into one’s own wildlife film complete with knowledgeable narrator.

There are blue helmeted guineafowl everywhere, the land all round resounding with their raucous calls. There are also yellow canaries and more sightings of eagle owls. We examine a termite mound that has evidence of an aardvark assault. Their heavy duty claws are built for demolition, and their thick skin impervious to termite bites and ant stings.

Hugh soon has Graham crumbling aardvark dung that has been deposited nearby, inspecting the contents through the wrong end of our binoculars, picking out beetle and soldier ant parts. We then taste the fruit of the ebony tree, the fleshy part reminding me of lychees; we pick up porcupine quills; learn about the towering vegetable ivory palm, whose nutty kernel is worked into small items like earrings and passed off as elephant ivory; regard the leaves of the mahogany tree that are stuffed into pillows to induce sleep.

James and Hugh between them test the wind and manoeuvre us into safe viewing distance of our early hours elephant visitors. Later Hugh finds a warthog hole and, stationing us well back, throws a rock in to dislodge the resident. Warthogs, he says, go into their holes tail first, enabling a speedy exit. This morning, though, the usual occupant is abroad. Instead, out comes a cloud of brown and mauve butterflies.

And then in early afternoon, after a scrambled egg brunch, it’s time to leave. We’re driven to Mfuwe airport, and soon we’re airborne above the Luangwa, and this time, thanks to something Hugh has said, I recognise features I missed before. The hippo trails striking through the bush from the river, their night-time paths to grazing. I think of the angry young bull who stayed out of the water too long. And I think about the fisherman killed by a hippo and wonder how it happened. And I remember a piece of vital safari wisdom I have read somewhere: never find yourself between a hippo and the water.

But now I realise I’m exhausted from the sights and sounds, the tramping, the bone jarring rides, the sleepless nights and early mornings. Come late afternoon, it’s a relief to find ourselves back in our little house on Sable Road. Perhaps none of it actually happened.

P.S. You can see the bee eaters here:

This year’s arrival of carmine bee eaters in South Luangwa – a short video clip

And the video after it explains the history of South Luangwa National Park and the legacy of game ranger Norman Carr who developed walking safaris and was passionate that local people should gain some benefit from tourism. Robin Pope trained with Carr and his company carries on vision for community orientated conservation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4Q-ikCUiwU

Seven for September

Letters From Lusaka #6: Of South Luangwa, Elephant Gardeners, A Charging Hippo

July 9th 1993

At 19,000 feet we look down on a red-brown world of low escarpments, ridges and valleys. The brown is the tree cover, the scattered miombo and mopane woodland loosing its leaves; the red, the earth exposed between parched grasses. From the cabin window the wilderness looks to run forever. Abstract the gaze and it could be copper sheeting, crumpled, etched and pecked: a visual metaphor for a land long plundered of this valuable mineral.

It is winter in Southern Africa, the dry season. Now and then ribbons of smoke drift up to us. Charcoal burners. The afternoon sun turns remnant streams to silver filaments. And then the plane banks and we’re over Luangwa. Sky blue shot with gold, the main channel looping between wide, pale beaches and exposed sand bars.

It is quite a sight. Even shrunk to its dry season flow, this river impresses. I wonder at the scale of it in rainy season spate. From above you see how it endlessly remakes itself, carving out new ox-bow meanders, stranding the old as stagnant lagoons that later, we learn, are called Dead Luangwa, Luangwa wafa, yet are important wildlife refuges at this time of year.

We are on the afternoon flight from Lusaka to Mfuwe – destination Tena Tena Camp, in South Luangwa National Park in Eastern Province. The park lies along the river valley, itself part of the Great Rift system, and covers 9,050 square kilometres. The southern park and its North Luangwa counterpart are renowned for their wealth of wildlife, not least 450 bird species as well the big game.

The camp is run by Robin and Jo Pope, he a Zambian zoologist, and specialist in walking safaris in Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe; she a British expatriate and zoology graduate. The full scale walking safaris last a week and more and we can afford only a long weekend, 2 nights at Tena Tena, and one night at Nkwali, the sister camp outside the National Park.

Our plane is a 50-seater. We are welcomed with slices of Madeira cake and shortbread, iced Fanta or Cola. Later, coffee is brought round in a big jug. Somehow it feels more like a train ride than a flight. Touch down, we are told, is in one hour fifteen minutes.

Mfuwe turns out to be a tiny airport, there to serve National Parks’ visitors. Sammy, a young African, Tena Tena’s trainee manager, ushers us, along with a Dutch couple, into the open sided Land Cruiser. Our driver is the camp cook, a South African girl. We’re told it’s an hour’s drive. The Dutch couple are repeat visitors and they are very excited. There is much loud chatter. It’s somehow blurring the landscape.

Soon we are leaving the tarmac for dirt roads, passing by homesteads of thatched houses. The roofs, made of thickly laid grass bundles, overhang red and white painted walls and are supported on tree posts. All around are well swept compounds. I also notice the refurbished granaries. After the previous years’ drought, this year’s rains have yielded good maize crops. There will be no further need of Graham’s services when his contract ends in September.

But then comes a dose of reality. As we lurch across a dried up stream, I see a village girl digging into the sandy bed, waiting for a cupful of murky water to well up. A new strand braids-abrades in my consciousness. Why does it take such sights to teach me my good fortune?

I distract myself from inconvenient discomfort with the beauty of the mopane woodland. The trees are graceful and grow widely spaced, as if orchard-planted. The afternoon sun filters through, and I’m oddly reminded of an English beech wood; the suffused russet light on a late October day.

We are in the park now, and park is somehow the right word. There are green swards along the river’s flood plains where puku antelope graze. The disposition of trees in their winter tints suggests an overgrown country estate somewhere in my home county of Shropshire. Except the trees here are winter thorn acacias, lead woods, ebonies, mahoganies, sausage trees and baobabs.

Tena Tena sits on a high bank above the Luangwa, its six thatched roof tents sheltered by trees. The name means temporary home in Nyanja, and we soon learn that, according to park regulations, the camp may only be used in the dry season; no permanent structures allowed. So the whole enterprise (including the tents’ showers and loos) must be packed away before the rains.

The Farrell tent is under a Sausage Tree (Kigelia africana), a stone’s throw from the shelving river bank and within close hearing of much hippo grunting. We’re served tea and cake and told to take a siesta until late afternoon. At sunset we’re back in the truck, and being driven to one of the lagoons, where we stop for sundowner drinks and to watch for any wildlife. Our fellow guests, along with Dutch couple, are Jo Pope’s parents. The foursome are old friends. It feels like a family party, and again there is much noisy chatter. But then the light in lagoons is so breath-taking, it’s hard to be too irritable. Instead, as I watch a flight of Sacred Ibis on a tangerine sky, I long for a camera with rather more range than my little Olympus-trip.

The lagoons, Luangwa wafa or ‘dead’ Luangwa

Tena Tena dining room sheltered by a winter thorn

When darkness falls we set off across the park. Overhead a million stars. The universe. I find the Southern Cross and, not for the first time that day, wonder if I’m really there, seeing it. The truck is open sided with raised seats. But it’s chilly and dank by the river. I’ve put on all the clothes I have with me but, even with a thoughtfully provided rug, it’s not quite enough. Jo Pope stands beside the driver, wielding the spot light as we rumble into the night. When we brush by clumps of Vick’s bushes, their camphor scent sifts through the night air.

Out on the flood plains, the spotlight picks up hosts of wary eyes – herbivores – puku, impala, a pair of hippos lumbering out for their night-time grazing. We visit a hyena den. A young male cub comes out to look at us. On his second visit he whoops pitifully, a sound that makes the spine quiver.

As we head down riverside tracks, nightjars flutter up from the ground at wheel-height, plumage translucent when caught in the spot light. They look like giant moths. And while we’re focused on smaller things we also look down on elephant shrews going about the nocturnal business of bug hunting.

That night in our tent the hippo snorting is ceaseless. I believe I have scarcely slept when hot water is brought to the washstand outside our tent and the 5.30 wake-up drum sounds. Fifteen minutes later there’s a second drum call. The sky is steely grey with the first cracks of dawn. Breakfast is help-yourself tea, toast and cereals from a table by the river. There’s a camp fire to warm us up. As I stare down at the shadowy river, munching toast, I’m suddenly aware of the hippo just below me. It is on the bank, probably too close for comfort, but it’s too soon in the day to believe in such encounters.

By 6.15 we are again in the truck, bouncing on bone-jarring tracks. The light is gauzy so it’s hard to know if I’m truly awake when two hyenas approach through the scrub. They are so gorged on the night’s pickings they can barely move. They slump in the open while we watch.

This morning there are many birds to see, pretty Fischer’s lovebirds (bright green with flame coloured heads, yellow bibs), saddle bill storks, eagles, a hammerkop. Then comes a huge herd of buffalo. For a full ten seconds we see it, and then it melts into the bush as if it had never been there. Another mirage then? Later, we have more certain views of warthog, baboon, eland, wildebeest, Burchell’s zebra.

After an 8.30 tea break by a lagoon we head out onto an open plain. It’s an eerie place in the wintery light. A forest of wrecked trees spreads out before us, nothing but burned out trunks, white-grey spikes, strangely luminous. Our guide, Guy, says this landscaping is down to elephants and their driving ambition to have more grassland. They ring-bark the mopane trees which slowly die and then when a bush fire comes through, it finishes them off.

We drive to the salt pan, another strange locale, where salt water gushes forth at near boiling point. As we arrive, a flock of crowned cranes take flight with mournful mu-um cries. We inspect the spring and, it ‘s as we drive away, that we see the lions.

At the salt pans. That’s me in the back of the truck

They are lying in heaps under brown bushes, possibly seven in all. Guy says we will take a closer look, but we must keep quiet and stay seated within the profile of the truck. That way the lions will see only the truck, which presents no threat to them.

And so it proves. The lions could not care less. Sleeping time amounts to some twenty hours a day. There are many more hours to get through. We leave them in peace.

By now the sun has broken through the cloud, the day growing hot. Lunch is served under a massive baobab, perhaps a thousand years old, Guy says. While we eat coronation chicken and rice, he points out the old wounds on the baobab’s trunk. They were made by elephant poachers hammering in footholds so they could use the tree for a look-out post.

This baobab was once an elephant poacher’s look-out tree

That night on the drive we see a great eagle owl, two honey badgers, a genet and six porcupines. The porcupines seem to whiffle along, spines shimmying under the spotlight. Then there’s a moment when I look down from the truck into the dull yellow eyes of a crocodile. It is right alongside. There are two of them, each a metre or so in length, and they are shunting along a shallow channel.

It’s a surreal moment – looking in the eyes of a crocodile. Whatever is being registered there, you surely don’t wish to know. And then in the darkness, we find ourselves snarled up with elephants. They are crossing the track at a point where there are dense bushes either side. But they are moving slowly, since they are also browsing as they go, and there’s no knowing how many there are. But we see their huge shadows, and spot some smaller shadows, and then there’s always that odour. Musky. Earthy. Like nothing else. We quietly reverse and make a wide detour.

On Sunday morning we eat breakfast beneath a half moon and the morning star. At 6.30 we set out on a five hour walk. Sean, the South African zoologist is our guide. We also have with us a tracker with the tea things, and White, a national park ranger who carries a rifle. We set off across a dried up lagoon where the previous early evening we had glimpsed two leopard. It is a golden morning as we walk among sausage trees and lead woods whose leaves, we are told, are a cure for asthma. As we go, a grey headed bush shrike calls its mournful one-note call. It is a strange sensation to be walking rather than driving. For one thing, it’s hard to see very far ahead.

The sausage tree is considered sacred by local people

Sean is following buffalo spore, this with a view to establishing the exact location of the herd we had glimpsed the previous day. But instead of buffalo we come on a big bull elephant, standing alone in a woodland glade. He is rheumy eyed and elderly. Sean speaks softly and says the elephant is wary: he can make out our shapes but can’t tell what we are. We see his head held high, trying to catch our scent. The trunk lifts and twists, the tip moving like a periscope. We only need worry, Sean adds, if his ears fan out and his trunk swings sideways.

We are all right then. It seems he is not thinking of charging. Then a herd of impala appears behind us and starts barking the alarm. ‘I hope he doesn’t think we’re lion,’ says someone. We retreat quietly.

Now it’s the vegetation that holds our attentions. We walk through tall grass savannah. There are potato bushes, daisies with mauve flowers and salt bushes that we are told are crushed like sugar cane to produce salt. And then, against the distant tree line, we see the huge buffalo herd that had done the vanishing trick yesterday. And at the same moment the nosey impala herd backtracks to have another look at us.

Sean says if they bark again the buffalo may run. We step back among the trees just in time to see eight elephants, including a calf, moving quietly across the grassland, eating as they go. It’s like watching a silent film. We cannot hear them, and so then we are told that elephants effectively walk on tip-toe, the front foot supported by a bed of gristle much like a padded high-heeled shoe. We watch them go.

Sean kicks the dust to check the wind. He’s had it mind to show us some lion. Where there are buffalo, he says, lion are not far behind. But with all the detours, he gives it up and says we’ll have a tea break at a fisherman’s camp outside the park.

The camp is on the bank of a dried up lagoon. The fishermen who spent the night here are long gone, but their fire smoulders on, and one of our party tries out the bamboo sleeping mat. There’s a hippo skull for a neck support. There are also bamboo sheds with racks for drying the fish. Sean says some of the lagoons still hold bream, which are caught using dug out canoes and conical bamboo fish traps. In passing, he says it can be dangerous work; a few days earlier a fisherman was killed by a hippo.

We could take this last remark as a warning. Except we don’t.

By the time we leave the camp and head back to main river, the sun is hot. From some distance away we spot a bull hippo trying to return to the water. He’s left it late after a night out grazing, and has come back to the river where the bank is high and steep. Being out in the sun risks serious burning and he is growing increasingly distressed with every failed attempt to descend.

We think ourselves well out of range as we watch his antics. Sean says he is probably a young bull expelled from his group, unable to win a herd of cows for himself. Someone laughs at another botched descent. And he hears. And then he turns.

The bull hippo that charges us is on the bank under the small tree

Sean and White react at once. They move forward clapping their hands, but when the hippo keeps coming, White ushers us back towards the fisherman’s camp, telling us to take refuge behind a beached dug-out. Meanwhile Sean is still clapping. White joins him, rifle at the ready.

White guides us to a suitable refuge, then returns to the river to deal with the charging hippo

It is a nerve-wracking few minutes. But then after the initial rush, the hippo runs out of steam and veers off into the bush. We regroup and Sean says White was indeed prepared to shoot the hippo if he had not backed down. It’s a disturbing thought – that our safari-goer carelessness might have warranted the bull’s despatch.

But then we see the problem is not resolved. We are near the camp, yet now there is an angry hippo somewhere in the scrub between us and it. We have to do a massive detour. It’s approaching midday by now, and I’m starting to know how the hippo felt in his overheated state. I’m hungry too, and only briefly diverted by the sight of fish eagles and African skimmers. And besides, too, I have already seen enough of hippos for one day.

On Sunday afternoon we transfer to Nkwali. It’s outside the national park near Kopani, a good hour’s drive and we’re lucky to have Robin Pope as our personal chauffeur-guide. He tells us so much, but by now it’s becoming hard to process. Later, though, I find the things I learn that afternoon inform a short story, Mantrap, published first in the US children’s magazine, Cricket, in 2003, and then in later teen quick-read chapter versions for Evans and Ransom Publishers.

That night, in our new temporary home by the Luangwa, it is not hippos that keep us awake…

To be continued.

#SevenForSeptember

Letters From Lusaka #5 ~ The Road To Petauke And The Man With The Yellow Maize

Early in April 1993 Graham has another upcountry mission, this time to check on the arrival of maize at the Ukwimi refugee settlement area near Petauke, Eastern Province. The initiative, in an area north of the Mozambique border, is managed by the Lutheran World Federation, an organisation overseeing some 25,000 refugees in 73 villages spread over 300 square kilometres, an area that also includes several indigenous Zambian communities.

The incomers are village farming folk who have fled the civil war in their own country. Many among them share both language and cultural traditions with Eastern Province Zambians (i.e. communities historically divided by colonial map makers). At Ukwimi they are settled on parcels of land and given every assistance to become self-sufficient. In April 1993, with peace negotiated between Frelimo and Renamo forces, most recent cross-border arrivals in Ukwimi have been driven there by hunger.

It’s a 400 kilometre drive to Ukwimi HQ*, and another Monday morning appointment. We set out on Sunday at midday, leaving Lusaka on the Great East Road. The sky is overcast and it’s rather cool. As we pass by large dairy farms, among them Waterfall Farm owned by mining conglomerate Lonrho, the sight of green fields with Friesian cattle tells the brain we’ve somehow been flipped to Cheshire in the English Midlands.

But no. Now there are here-and-there banana thickets, palm trees with swollen boles and dishmop tops. And now we’re in bush country and the road stretching out. And now there are no other vehicles, but there are people, and we soon find that Zambians have many uses for highways beyond driving on them. We begin to see many people carrying palm fronds. It is Palm Sunday and the devout are walking down the middle of the road. And why not choose a smooth path.

Young lads sit on the road edge, leaning back, hands on the tarmac. They simply seem to sit and sit.

At Changwe there is a roadside trading centre with a few stores and a smart hacienda style bar and restaurant. We pass a bicycle race there.

At one point we bowl over a crest in the road and come on a big church gathering, filling both carriageways. People are singing and drumming. The crowd parts like magic and with great good humour, they wave us through.

Bush country flanks the asphalt, tall grasses on either hand and beyond them glimpses of shaggy thatched roofs, clusters of dwellings under thorn trees, small plots of maize. In places where the bush meets the tarmac there are hand-painted signs announcing the presence of bus stops, the gates to small farms: Mulenga, Mulaliki, Mulawzi; to the local medicine man.

We are travelling along a low ridge, to the south the land falls away in lightly wooded plains; to the north is a spine of blue hills. There are road-side stalls selling pumpkins and squashes of all shapes and sizes. There are wigwams of sugarcane, neat cords of firewood, sacks of charcoal. A woman walks by with a large zinc bath on her head. As she stops to adjust the load, a wave slooshes over the edge. The sight takes my breath away. I feel my spine contract.

And still there are few other moving vehicles along the road although we see many stranded broken ones.

Now the countryside is more hilly and densely wooded. There are roadside flowers, deep yellow daisies, pale yellow hibiscus, and a plant that looks like broom (also yellow). The villages have little thatched gazebos on the top of knolls with seats so you can look out to the blue hills. Meanwhile, the road that was good is not so good. There are big potholes, and to add to the driving confusion, some are filled with red dirt and others not. Where the road cuts through rock, it is carmine red and glinting with quartz.

We cross the broad expanse of the Luangwa River between wooded gorges. There is a suspension bridge opened in 1968 by former President Kenneth Kaunda. It looks sturdy enough, but a sign instructs drivers that only one vehicle at a time may cross, speed limit 10 kph. And so we cross.

About 50 km from Petauke we drive through a small village and fail to stop at the police check point. There is no one manning it. But ahead a khaki figure dashes from a roadside hut and waves us back. My heart sinks. We’ve had some uncomfortable moments at Kenyan checkpoints. But the young officer is charming. He apologises for not being in the road where we would have seen him. He had been growing too hot standing there, he says. We can see his point, but he still wants to see some I.D.

As Graham fumbles with his brief case, trying to find something that might serve, he says he works for the European Union. Ah, says the policeman, the man with the yellow maize. Some of your trucks have already gone through.

Graham says he is going to Petauke to check on their arrival. The officer smiles broadly and asks Graham for his name, salutes me with a “Madame” and bids us farewell, all without need of paperwork.

Further on at the turn for Petauke there is another road block. This time we are questioned by a young man who is clearly not a policeman. He tells us he is acting on his brother’s behalf. “Just to be friendly”, he says, “my brother needs to know who you are.” He is happy with Graham’s business card, finally retrieved from the brief case.

Now the roadside shopping opportunities include furniture, items parked in splendid isolation in the bush – a bed, a dining table, a row of Adirondack chairs.

Most striking of all is a lone Welsh dresser – the full deal, cupboards below, shelves above. There it stands, surrounded by elephant grass, challenging me, like one of the White Queen’s six impossible things before breakfast. And I wonder from what colonial or mission original was this piece so faithfully copied? And who does its maker think will buy it, here on the road to Petauke where so few people with the means to transport it seem to pass?

I’m still wondering when we check into the Nyika Motel and are shown to our bungalow. The bedroom walls are turquoise with orange paintwork, the chandelier green with most of its drops missing, curtains blue, the bedspread blue and black nylon, dark green cloths on the coffee table and sideboard – a colour scheme to jangle the nerves. But it does not matter. The place is scrupulously clean, with plenty of hot water, although we have to improvise a bath plug.

By now, the late day sky has seen off its gloom. There are magnificent cumulus cloud formations against the blue. We sit on the doorstep and watch the sun go down over the bush country, strange rocky outcrops to the south. There are rufous swallows, drongos, mousebirds, the bubbling call of the water bottle bird. The crickets tune up. There is lightning, wind in the thorn trees. I’m so glad to be there.

*Ukwimi HQ is now a Trades Training Centre for Zambians, the refugee centre no longer needed.

Letters From Lusaka #4: Of The Smoke That Thunders And Walking Over The Zambezi

It is early December 1992, barely two weeks into our Zambia posting, when Graham is despatched ‘on mission’, the European Union Delegation’s term for out-of-town business. He is told to attend a Monday morning meeting at a railway depot in Livingstone, some 300 miles south of Lusaka, a six hour drive away.

And the actual mission? To inspect a newly arrived shipment of maize from South Africa, via Zimbabwe, part of the 100,000 tonnes of food aid being brought in by the European Union. There has been talk of organised theft along the line of rail, of some local big man who has the power to divert trains to his own mill. It is thus important to check the consignment is intact.

Graham’s boss, Bernard, suggests he drives down the weekend before. He further suggests that I go too. It is a chance to see Victoria Falls, he says, and not to be missed. Later I suspect he is also being kind. We’ve scarcely adjusted to Lusaka living and he will not unnerve us by spelling it out: that Lusaka’s diplomatic quarter is a regular target for cross-border armed raids by unpaid members of President Mobutu’s Congolese army.

But on the Saturday morning as we leave the city under big skies, I’m not thinking about this; only of the journey ahead, of what we might see.

Once out of the city we head ever onward on the South Road. The single carriageway is wide and straight with few pot holes, and for the most part empty of traffic. After nine months of bumping along the ragged tracts of the Nairobi-Mombasa highway, stuck behind fumy trucks, it is sheer luxury. On either hand the savannah woodland runs green and lush and reminds me more of central France than of Africa. At Kafue we cross the wide expanse of the Kafue River, wooded uplands all around. But as I find later, this is the only significant landmark until Livingstone some five hours later.

A view of Zambian savannah miombo woodland, Southern Province

We pass through neat small trading centres – Mazabuka, Monze, Kalomo, Zimba. Sometimes we glimpse thatched roofs through the roadside vegetation. Sometimes there are lads holding out fistfuls of mushrooms, their caps big as dinner plates. But over all there is a sense is of quietness, an undramatic treescape sparse in humanity.

And then we’re in Livingstone, once Zambia’s capital, back in the days when Northern Rhodesia was a British Protectorate. In 1992 it strikes us as little more than a village. Its wide main street has a colonial air; all is neat; tree-lined pavements, arcaded stores; whitewashed, zinc-roofed, verandaed bungalows. When we check into the Intercontinental Hotel the time-warp feeling thickens. We are served afternoon tea on the tree-shady lawn, watched by ducks, guinea fowl and vervet monkeys.

By now I can wait no longer. The light may be poor, the sun blanked out, but there’s a world wonder to see, and the hotel’s garden path takes us right there…

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. It is too hard to absorb, this bare basalt cliff. The mighty Zambezi reduced to a trickle.

The long drought has much to do with it. But Zambia also abstracts large quantities of water to run its hydroelectricity scheme. Graham then tells me the best view of the Falls is on the Zimbabwe side of the cataracts, and that if we’d remembered to bring my passport we could have walked over the bridge to see them.

Ah, well. Another time perhaps. We walk along the path beside the waterless precipice, but this alien landscape soon has me thinking of Tolkein’s Mordor; I expect the eye of Sauron to burn through the cloud any second. We give it up and go back to the hotel.

The Falls as seen by David Livingstone in 1855. Engraving from Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa 1857

It was David Livingstone who named the Falls after Queen Victoria. This was in 1855, and probably he was the first European to clap eyes on them. Of course they already had local names, Mosi-oa-Tunya, the smoke that thunders, being the Tonga people’s name for them. These somewhat reclusive farming folk inhabited much of the Zambezi Valley including the portion now occupied by Lake Kariba. It’s pleasing to learn that the UNESCO World Heritage citation at least gives precedence to the Tonga name.

In theory our hotel room has a river view, but all we see is a vast expanse of dry bed with odd clumps of palm trees and scatters of huge boulders. But on Sunday afternoon, under a bright sun, I notice people picking their way across. I persuade Graham we should join them.

We’ve hardly started out when a boy appears from nowhere and offers to guide us ‘to the best Falls’ viewpoint.’ And so we follow, but it’s not easy going, picking our way around oily pools and stagnant crevices, clambering through a maze of mammoth boulders, trying to ignore piles of fresh elephant dung.

We are so busy watching our feet we don’t notice the storm clouds gathering. And when I do, I’m suddenly nervous. I’ve read about flash-floods engulfing dried up river beds. I keep glancing upstream as if that will do any good. I worry, too, about rounding a boulder as big as an elephant and meeting an actual elephant.

Then the rain comes and that’s all I can think of – the fat freezing drops that stab the skin. (How can African rain feel so cold?) We follow the boy to cover, crouch under trees on Livingstone Island, the very spot from where the explorer had first viewed the Falls in 1855 (see the engraving: island in the foreground). For ages we crouch with the boy under dripping trees until, thoroughly cold and soaked, Graham asks him if the good view is much further.

No, no, it is close by. We make a final dash. And here it is. The view:

Not much to see with spray rising up and rain pouring down. Except there we were on the knife-edge with a 300 foot drop below. I quickly take this photo, and stow my camera. Then hold my kanga-wrap (which I’d brought to keep off the sun) over my head to stem the downpour. And it’s then a sudden gust of wind snatches the sopping cotton. I feel the slight lift and step back in shock. I’ve had more than enough of Mosi-oa-Tunya.

So has the boy. We turn to see him sprinting away without waiting for a tip, and now I really am worried. Leaving without his kwacha? What does he know that we don’t? Watching him go, my heart sinks. The hotel looks very far away, the boulder-strewn riverbed between us and it, increasingly nightmarish. Overhead the sky is black, now and then fractured by great shafts of fork lightning. We slip and slide on wet rocks. More phantom elephants. More imaginary flash floods. More scrambling out of megalithic cul de sacs.

Of course it’s all panic and little substance. After a hot shower and a bottle of Mosi beer back at the hotel, it seems like a great adventure, though we do wonder if the part of Livingstone Island where we’d sheltered was in Zambia or if we’d entered Zimbabwe without the necessity of passports.

That night I am taken ill, probably the start of an amoebic assault that is later diagnosed in Lusaka. And so the next day when Graham has to visit grain depots, first in Livingstone, and then two Red Cross grain stores on the way back to Lusaka, I am happy to sit in the car and doze. It will be another seven months before I finally see the western cataract of Mosi-oa-Tunya.

Maize consignment safely arrived in the Livingstone depot

Letters From Lusaka #3: Of Security, Kabulonga Howling And News Of A Coup

We soon discover that our household security provision falls short of official standards. European Union and British High Commission employees are advised to have internal security gates installed, external security lights, roof siren, alarm buttons, window bars, a pack of Dobermans and ridgebacks, a two-way radio and armed twenty-four-hour guards. The fortification of a property may cost around £5,000.

Somehow we survive without most of these devices, although the top of our garden wall, which also forms the rear boundary of the compound, is quite high and is further cemented with shards of broken glass.

The nights, though, can be nerve-wracking. Rounds of automatic gunfire are common after dark. Some European locals, we are told, have made a ritual of standing on their front lawn at 9 pm every night and shooting off their sporting rifles – just to let “the thieving bastards” know what’s what. These are the same people who will tell you that, when they are not trying to relieve you of your worldly goods, the Africans are really very charming.

But gunfire aside, it is anyway hard to sleep in the perpetual gloaming of the security lights dotted around our compound. The insects, too, grow louder as the night draws on, and then the dogs wake us.

I call it the Kabulonga Howling. For reasons unknown, it begins with a single canine, a lone keening which then swells from compound to compound in a relayed dog lament until finally a monstrous crescendo resounds across the suburbs. But once howling pitch is reached, it quickly subsides, and instead we are left with the beat of Zambian dance music, thrumming away beyond our perimeter wall.

We have no idea who lives beyond our glass-spiked rampart. I have tried standing on the brick barbeque in the back yard, but I still cannot see over the wall. Instead, I often hear a Zambian boy badgering his little sister whose name is Lorna. Lorna is always being ordered to do something or other. There is meek compliance in her little voice. It is the lot of many Zambian women to defer to men. Already I feel sorry for her.

One day I find an arrow in the back garden – a stiff plant stem tipped with a bent Mosi beer bottle cap. For a moment, as I examine this makeshift missile, I think of Robinson Crusoe finding unsettling signs of life on his confining island shore.

By day, Graham leaves early for the EU Delegation. It is only a five minutes’ drive away. I begin to tend the back garden, sowing beans, courgettes, carrots. Things quickly sprout, but the land snails are as big as my fist. I write and read, although finding books is a challenge. We can find no bookshops in Zambia since the nation can no longer support a publishing industry. Once a week we drive down to the British Council on Cairo Road to borrow books from their library. We do this, ignoring white Zambians’ warnings that our Suburu will be car-jacked if we park anywhere downtown. Whenever we go to the library, most of Zambia’s students seem to be there, studying hard. Every seat is taken. It is hard to gain qualifications in a land without books.

One of the parking boys who minds our car whenever we visit the British Council library. In ten months of parking on Cairo Road neither the car nor any of its parts go missing.

And not only is there a lack of books, but newsprint, too, is hard to come by. Newspapers sell out quickly each day and I have to rely on Graham bringing the Delegation copy home at lunch-time for quick scan through. Soon we hear that four Zambian Daily Mail accountants have been arrested for ripping off their own company’s limited newsprint stock and selling it to a rival newspaper.

Then there is the challenge of household shopping. Our local shop is Kabulonga supermarket where I frequently search the shelves to strains of Michael Bolton’s The Lady in Red. A beautiful girl in cobalt blue chitenge and matching head-cloth tied with great flourishes, is often on the till. She has the poise of a princess.

It’s basically a matter of buying whatever is there and then thinking of something to do with it. Treats include cartons of delicious Ceres grape juice, and jars of sweet pickled beetroot imported from South Africa. The local yogurt comes in big tubs, plain or strawberry. Other staples include corned beef and South African wine. On the other hand, there is never a shortage of cleaning products, all heavily perfumed. At Christmas we see them parcelled up into apparently enticing gift packs along with small bales of second hand clothing.

We bought our bed from traders in Kamwala Market

There are of course shopping opportunities everywhere along Lusaka’s streets – cigarette and used clothes stalls, a man selling bread, another with his scrawny hens, fish from a freezer connected to nothing, caterpillars dried or roasted, large woodland mushrooms the colour of cygnet down, little pyramids of tomatoes. If I buy two piles of tomatoes from the young woman in the photo, she gives me an extra tomato as a “special gift”, and then wraps the lot in computer print-out. It’s one of those frequent incongruity moments.

I also walk down to the Maluwa Co-operative in the hopes of something more interesting than beetroot and corned beef. Again, I never know what I will find there: perhaps, if I’m lucky, a good mission-reared chicken in the cold cabinet, or button mushrooms, some Gouda cheese, broccoli, new potatoes, French beans, bunches of roses. If he catches me walking, an elderly white Zambian in a pick-up, (his ‘boys’ in the back), always insists on giving me a lift. He means well, and it is easier to comply with his desire to save me from imagined predations of Zambians than to argue.

Maluwa Cooperative Store

But I like it out on the road. There is so much life outside the high walled, razor-wired residences of the elite. People greet me. One day a taxi driver, trying to mend his broken-down car, stops struggling with things mechanical and offers me a lift. For a second I’m rooted to the spot. I note the rear tyre lodged on the back seat. Does he think if I say yes the car will conveniently right itself. He looks a touch sheepish when I smile and say no thanks. I like his style though: never miss the chance to cut a deal. As I step out again on the dirt road that has lost its asphalt, my footprints join the countless prints of others in the red dust.

Graham spends his days rushing round to meetings with aid agencies. There are fears that donations of free maize will dissuade farmers from planting their own crops, despite the good rains. Too much free maize is also likely to depress the economy, and this must be avoided. Much is given out as payment for working on public enterprises such as road building or making bricks for the building of clinics. Unemployed women, in particular, are keen to do such work. Receiving a sack of mealie meal, sugar, beans and cooking oil in return for their labour gives them independence from menfolk who might otherwise take any cash earnings. Graham also has to travel down south to Choma and Kalomo to oversee the distribution of EU maize by the Red Cross. There are more trips out east and to the Copper Belt.

Villagers coming to collect cooking oil and maize meal from the Red Cross.

A farmer shows Graham his empty granary.

In March Graham comes home saying there is a bit of flap on. Brussels has phoned the E.U. Delegation saying that the BBC has reported a coup in Zambia: is everything all right there, they ask. The diplomats scratch their heads. No coup has been observed out in the suburbs. But then a few days later it is clear that something has happened. Major Rezi Kaunda, son of the long-serving and recently supplanted, ex-president, Kenneth Kaunda, has been arrested. He is reported as being under armed guard. Further details explain, somewhat bizarrely, that he is sitting in the yard of Woodlands police station with his flask of tea and a radio. Fourteen plotters in all have been arrested both in Lusaka and the Copper Belt. These include the editor-in-chief of the Zambia Times.

Later we hear that an incriminating document, The Zero Option, has been seized. It gives detailed plans of how members of the UNIP opposition old guard, led by Rezi, intend to make Zambia ungovernable by fuelling a crime wave, infiltrating the unions and government departments. It is mooted that this campaign of destabilisation has already been instigated and is responsible for the alarming crime wave.

President Chiluba has only been in office for a little over a year. His Movement for Multi-Party Democracy defeated Kenneth Kaunda in the first democratically held elections since Independence in 1964. Kaunda Senior had been in power all that time, but on defeat, chose to bow out gracefully. Meanwhile Frederick Chiluba claims that he is on a clean-up mission of this potentially rich, but now run-down state. He declares a limited State of Emergency while order is restored.

We all breathe a sigh of relief. No need for the emergency evacuation that the High Commission is so unlikely to provide for us. Besides, Graham still has much work to do, and there’s so much I still want to discover. One thing I am itching to know is how this copper-rich nation, with its deposits of sapphires and amethysts and airy upland mopane forests is one of the poorest on earth. Why are its impoverished, beleaguered but hard-working peoples being so ruthlessly ‘structurally adjusted’ by the World Bank? I am beginning to suspect that the spirit of Cecil Rhodes is restless and abroad once more, but that, as they say is another story.

A view of one of the stands at the Annual Lusaka Agricultural Show. The 1993 show slogan is ‘Produce to Prosper’. Better, if less catchy, would be ‘Produce and get fair pay from multi-nationals.’

To be continued…

Letters From Lusaka #2: of roving armies, the cholera season and making a new home

While we are still ‘living’ at the Pomodzi Hotel, and Graham is away at the European Union Delegation, getting to grips with his mission while walking a tightrope of diplomatic protocol, I do the unthinkable as far as white locals are concerned. I walk out of the hotel grounds and down a couple of avenues to the Ridgeway Hotel. One of Graham’s Natural Resources Institute colleagues, a regular visitor to Lusaka, has told me the place has a good gift shop, and that there may be a chance of finding some local books.

I set off on the basis that as I am not travelling by car, I will not be car-jacked. I am not. The gift shop is wonderful, brimming with Zambian craftwork. I buy a beautiful Tonga basket and a small olive-wood elephant for luck. I have it still on my Bishop’s Castle mantelpiece.

I’m disappointed to find no books at The Ridgeway, but I do find a map: a Lusaka street map one side, Zambia on the other. At last we can properly see where we have landed. I study the country’s boundaries, trying to make sense of the colonial cobbling that created a nation whose North Province lies to the east of its Central Province. (The British were here in erstwhile Northern Rhodesia for the copper).

The country nestles in the heart of southern Africa between eight countries. In outline it resembles a foetal chick curled on its back within a protecting shell. In reality, though, I soon learn that Zambia has no such protection. It simply has too many borders and not enough military personnel. In 1993 there are only some 300, 000 taxpayers in a population of eight million, which is not enough to pay for more soldiers. The north-west border with Democratic Republic of Congo is lethally porous. Members of then President Mobutu’s own unpaid armed forces regularly drive into Zambia’s Copper Belt and conduct armed pillaging campaigns against innocent drivers and householders. Sometimes they come as far south as Lusaka.

We are told that when driving at night, we must never stop at red traffic lights (locally called robots), since this is the moment that car-jackers will choose to pounce. Over in Eastern Province the threat comes from the conflict in Mozambique as RENAMO guerrillas cross the border to shoot up Zambian buses and steal food. In Western Province UNITA fighters from Angola’s war terrorize Zambian villagers. Famine, then, is only one cause of death; there are many others, and the mineral resources that Cecil Rhodes sought so hard to control through his dark-hearted dealings with local chiefs are high on the list.

Then there is malaria and tuberculosis, and as the rains bucket down through December, the cholera season begins. Overflowing septic tanks and pit latrines are polluting the city’s boreholes. At first, oblivious of such dangers, we eat out at downtown restaurants. We are down in Livingstone, near the Zimbabwe border, Graham checking out the contents of grain stores, when I am stricken with amoebic dysentery. Again it is the Delegation secretary who comes to the rescue and directs us to the mining companies’ private clinic, downtown on Cairo Road. The diagnostic facilities there are impressive, the British-born doctor patronizing. But after a three-day course of very large pills, I recover. I am lucky. Of course I am.

Six or so houses share the gardens, including a very small pool.

After a fortnight’s dispiriting search for a bolt-hole away from the Pomodzi, viewing sprawling premises we can’t afford, the Delegation Secretary suggests a vacant house on a small compound in Kabulonga. It is small, red brick, single storey with a sheet iron roof that, during the rains, resounds as if someone is firing bullets into a host of upturned buckets. The kitchen and bathroom are 1950s basic, but the spacious living room has French doors opening onto a tiny high-walled garden. There is a big avocado tree in the corner where African sparrows come twittering in to roost in late afternoon. Above the perimeter wall, when it is not raining, arcs the blue Zambian sky. To the rear, the kitchen gives onto a walled back yard and a patch of grass. There are two bedrooms, and a tiny study. Outside the front door is a communal garden and terrace – garden seats set by a small swimming pool, a tall palm that rustles endlessly in the high plateau breezes, a sweet scented frangipani tree. No house overlooks any other and there are shady walk ways in between each property.

Produce including delphiniums and ginger lilies from the local co-operative on Sable Road

The gardens are tended by a gentle young man called Stephen Nyangu. His name suggests erstwhile connections with the Nyanja royal clan. But Stephen’s situation is a far cry from tribal pre-eminence. He sweeps, mows, weeds, plants, prunes and waters six days a week, from seven in the morning to five in the afternoon. Then he cycles the couple of miles to his compound home in Leopard’s Hill Road where he lives with his wife and four children. The gardens he cares for bloom strangely under sub-tropical skies with tea roses, violets, pansies, Sweet William and Madonna lilies. He also washes all the cars and hefts all the dustbins to the big compound gate to be emptied once a week. For this he earns twelve thousand kwacha a month, about eighteen pounds. He has no leave beyond national holidays, and after work he runs a cigarette stall.

Stephen Nyangu works day and night to keep his family.

On my first day in our new home, it is Stephen who knocks on my door.

“Good morning, madam. My name is Stephen. If there is anything you want me to do, I am just out there.” He gestures in the general vicinity of the pool. “Call me.”

He is the only person on the compound who bothers to introduce himself. In ten months we scarcely see any of the other tenants beyond the Sikh couple who live next door. They nod to us. They have two much pampered, miniature Pomeranians and a maid called Isa. Isa looks a good-hearted soul and she works in several of the other households on the compound once she has done her daily tasks for the Sikhs. These include much furious chopping at seven a.m. Perhaps she is chopping for the Pomeranians. When she is left in charge of them for three months while their owners go on leave, she grows so fed up with their insistent yapping that one day she yells SHUT UP. And so shocked are the indulged little canines, that they do just that. I want to hug Isa.

I further decide that my house is scarcely big enough to justify even a once-a-week cleaner, this despite the constant slick of red dust that blows in every day. I thus do my own housework.

Our compound is in Kabulonga, the heart of the diplomatic quarter. Our next door neighbour is the Egyptian Embassy. At night the guards fire off rifles. We never do know what is going on there, and sometimes it sounds like a siege. Our compound is one of the least fortified on the road. The iron gate has open railings instead of sheet metal armour plating, and our day guard, Sammy, always leaves it unlocked anyway during the day, while he plays draughts with a neighbouring house-guard. He’s a bit nonplussed by my habit of going out on foot, and at first dashes from his game to open the gate as if I were a passing vehicle. We soon come to a silent arrangement whereby we greet each other, I open the gate for myself and he keeps on with his game.

There is a sense of excited liberation as I step out onto Sable Road. I never meet another European walking here on this lovely tree-shaded avenue.

Sable Road in the dry season.

To be continued

Letters From Lusaka: notes from an aid nomad’s life #1

This is an edited re-run of an old post – and a much longer read than usual…

October 1992 and I’m expecting to start a new life in Medway, Kent, but instead I find we are off to Lusaka. It is hard to take in. I am barely back in England after nine months in Kenya where we lived out of a Land Rover, plying the Mombasa Highway. My heart is still in the Ngong Hills, the knuckle-shaped peaks that were my last view of East Africa before the plane rose through the clouds and headed for London via Bahrain. In that moment I find myself weeping for the loss of the Ngongs, recognising, with a twinge of shame, I would never weep like this for my homeland.

Due to ticket problems I have to travel back to the UK alone. G will follow the day after. When we say goodbye at Nairobi airport there is no inkling of another overseas contract. Yet two days later when we meet up in England, the first thing G says is: how would you like to go to Zambia?

Zambia, I echo blankly. How would I know if I want to go there? But with barely a pause, I say yes; I’m up for it. I’ll find out later if I’m going to like the place. Besides, whatever happens, it’s bound to be interesting.

When we tell friends and family where we are going, they also look blank. Zambia, they say. What did it used to be? It is only months afterwards that I see how loaded is this seemingly simple question, how unfathomable the answer. What indeed did Zambia used to be – before it was Northern Rhodesia – before David Livingstone passed through it in search of lost souls and the Nile’s source, and claimed the falls known as Mosi oa Tunya (The Smoke that Thunders) for Queen Victoria; before the south’s Zulu Wars that pushed many displaced communities across the Zambezi?

We’re expected to leave within the month, but due to various administrative foul-ups, this stretches to two. It gives us time to unpack our Kenya life, catch up on dental work, have the jabs we have not already had, say hello and goodbye to relatives, and to get married. This last event takes place briefly before a handful of guests in a Bridgnorth building society office where the registrar has occasional premises. Our little marriage party finds itself queuing for attention alongside Friday morning withdrawers and depositors. It all seems fittingly bizarre for a life that no longer fits the norm.

Lusaka’s main street, Cairo Road, looking south

At this point I am still no wiser about our destination. In these pre-Google days there is little time for research. To my annoyance, too, I find there are no handy books on Zambia, not in the public library, nor in the bookshops. By the time we come to leave, we have only the sparse Foreign Office briefing notes to go on. They speak of the climate and the kind of clothing we will need, and of the possibility of having to take a driving test if we want to drive in Zambia.

No clear picture of the country emerges. I am becoming increasingly irritated at the lack of information, as well as at my own ignorance. How can I, an English woman, not know a thing about a land that Britain ruled and exploited for over sixty years, a land we only quitted in 1964 while I was in still at school? Why wasn’t it on the curriculum along with Cicero and Chekhov? How can the existence of a former protectorate pass so swiftly from the protecting nation’s consciousness? How can it become so very unimportant?

Then suddenly it’s too late for righteous indignation; it’s all down to family farewells, and wondering if the right things have been packed, when there is no way of knowing what the right things should be. Of necessity, it becomes a matter of travelling hopefully and telling ourselves that the contract is for ten months only. And ten months isn’t long, is it?

So, November 1992 and we fly into Lusaka with the rains. It seems like a good omen – to arrive with rain. There has been severe drought over southern Africa for at least a year. Crops have blown to dust, rivers run to sand, and the granaries lie empty. In remote districts, we later learn, villagers have been surviving on a diet of wild mangoes. To add to their misery, the wildlife is hungry too. In one district villagers have been barricading themselves into their homes. The local lions have developed a taste for canine flesh and are breaking down house doors at night in order to snatch the dogs from the midst of their terrified human families.

And of course, this is why we are going to Zambia; famine is taking us there. G has been seconded from the Natural Resources Institute in Kent to the E. U. Delegation in Lusaka to supervise the distribution of European Union food aid to starving Zambians. The country’s then new President, Frederick Chiluba, tells the Head of Delegation that he does not trust his ministers to do the job. The consignments of maize meal and cooking oil must therefore be distributed through church missions and the Red Cross. Zambia is a big country, the size of France and the Low Countries combined. G will be in charge of logistics: checking the contents of grain stores, getting trucks on the road and ensuring that loads reach their intended destination. His boss at NRI is sure he is fitted for the task, although he has never done anything like it before.

Food aid awaiting distribution in a Zambian warehouse.

In Kenya, as a crop storage specialist, he had been dealing with another kind of food crisis – the spread of a voracious pest that gobbles up maize – the Larger Grain Borer. This beetle is a native of South and Central America, and (ironically) came to Africa in the 1980s in a food aid consignment from the United States. It has no natural predators in its new homeland and, across a continent where maize is many peoples’ staple crop, it also has all the food it can eat. If a grain store is infested you can hear the jaws of these tiny creatures gnawing the cobs to dust.

In Zambia we find the beetles are already there too, spreading out into villages along the line of the Tazara Railway that links land-locked Zambia to the port of Dar es Salaam. The Chinese built the line in the 1970s to provide Zambia with an external trade route through Tanzania after Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence in Southern Rhodesia cut the country off from all points south. Now the Tanzam is a handy vector for crop pests and thus, through such unintended consequences, is the frequent folly of donor good intention compounded. It is the sort of thing that happens in African countries all the time. It makes us question then (as we will do many times over the next few years) the ethics of our presence on the continent.

Cairo Road looking north

That November morning, then, as we make our descent through grey skies into Lusaka International Airport, I note only how flat and tamed the landscape looks: large square fields of European-owned ranches (Lonrho, for one, is a big player here); service roads and farm buildings laid out in orderly grid patterns. It is also very green and looks more like France than the Africa I have come to know. I suppose I feel a little disappointed. It is bush country that I have fallen in love with, the smell of it triggering some ancient genetic memory that tells me that such landscapes mean home.

Once down on the tarmac, and as a matter of courtesy so we will not get wet in this welcome downpour, a bus arrives to ferry us the short distance to the low white terminal building. Our fellow travellers are European businessmen, each shouldering his laptop bag. By contrast, a tall African in a well-cut suit emerges from the First Class cabin wielding only a shiny new golf club. It seems utterly incongruous, as if he has just stepped out of a London taxi after visiting a golfing shop rather than flying half way across the world. It crosses my mind that I like his style.

By now I am both jet-lagged and deeply anxious about the forthcoming immigration process. Still fresh in my mind is the stony-faced inscrutability of Kenyan officialdom when I twice visited the notorious Nyayo House immigration department to extend my three-month travel visa; I recall the hours left in limbo, sitting amongst distressed Somalis and Ethiopians, all trying to secure sanctuary away from troubled homelands. But suddenly I see it’s not going to be like this. The officers, as they take their seats at the immigration desks are all smart young women. They are laughing and chatting and, when we hand them our passports and paperwork, they are still smiling, and at us.

Next we have our first, but fleeting taste of the diplomatic life, as G’s new boss steps up and introduces himself. His name is Bernard. He is French, frenetic and instantly engaging. He whisks away our paperwork and deals with it in minutes. There is then a worrying delay before we can claim our bags. Bernard tells us that British Airways on this route are well known for leaving cases behind in London. Finally, though, we have our luggage and are propelled into Bernard’s Peugeot, Bernard talking non-stop. He apologises for his poor English, saying that this is his first posting to an English-speaking country. Mauretania and Madagascar were his previous postings. Worryingly, he adds that he hopes we will speak some French. Beside me, looking wan, G winces; he does not fly well. He can barely speak. When he does, it is to utter a customary response in KiSwahili. I’m beginning to feel hysterical.

Soon, though, all smooths out as we cruise along the Great East Road into Lusaka. There is little traffic (not like Nairobi), and the place has a small-town provincial air – wide streets lined with jacarandas shedding mauve petals and acacias with russet coloured flowers, red-roofed villas. We pass the turn to the University of Zambia, the entrance to Lusaka’s agricultural show ground. The side walks are filled with people walking – young men in loose shirts and smart front-pleated pants striding out, country women in ankle-length chitenge wraps, city girls in high heels and sleekly cut frocks, and who seem to flow along the street. There are roadside stalls selling garden surplus – mangoes, tomatoes, okra, spinach.

EU Delegation, Lusaka

And I am just thinking that I can cope with this when we swing into the grounds of the five-star Pomodzi Hotel, and Bernard’s car is instantly lassoed in chains whose ends the hotel porter quickly padlocks to an adjacent post. I have never seen nor imagined anything like this. Bernard explains that this is a necessary procedure even though it will only take a few minutes to escort us to reception. I see that other guests’ cars are similarly chained. It is then that my one sure piece of Zambia information surfaces.

All along we have been ignoring it, that in that year of 1992 the country has a big security problem. Some months later the reasons for this become clear, but for now I am struggling to absorb this apparent evidence of an expected car-jacking – in broad daylight, and in such orderly and upmarket surroundings. I gaze, bemused, at the tail-coated porter who is now ushering us into the hotel foyer. After the humid warmth of outside, the hotel is frigid with air conditioning. The reception area is cavernous, all grey-white marble. A trolley appears and our cases are stacked upon it. They look shamefully shabby in these austerely smart surroundings. The porter politely motions me towards a comfortable armchair while G registers. This always takes ages, and by now it is lunchtime and I am hungry and yet too tired to want to eat. Then suddenly there are Englishmen everywhere. They seem to issue as one from the lift.

“Hello. I’m David…Peter…Tim…Paul…Alan. We’ve not been introduced but…”

As welcoming committees go, it is well meant but too much, and I wonder if I’m responding sensibly. They turn out to be G’s fellow consultants from the Natural Resources Institute in Chatham, Kent, out on short-term missions relating to crop storage and food security. They include G’s head of section, the man who seconded him to the E.U. Delegation. He’s just off to Zimbabwe, and hardly have we reached our room than the phone rings, and G is summoned to an impromptu meeting and a trip round a Lusaka grain store that has flooded, none of which has anything to do with his present posting. He goes off looking terrible while I collapse on the bed, trying to come to terms with my new surroundings.

Here we are back in Africa, back in the so-called developing world, here to help deal with a food crisis. Yet now I find myself in a room that has more of comfort and opulence than I’m used to in England. There is a huge colour television that shows American and British world service programmes. There is a telephone by the bed and another beside the lavatory. The ivory tiled bathroom has abundant hot, clean water and piles of soft white towels. The flask of drinking water is chilled. We have our own veranda. The room service menu offers club sandwiches, burgers and steaks. A polite notice on the writing desk requests guests not to tempt the staff by leaving their valuables unattended.

This is a hotel designed not so much for travellers and tourists, but to cater for the expectations of international entrepreneurs. Its luxury is hard to reconcile with the hardship that G has been brought here to relieve. This is only the first of the multiple contradictions that we will encounter over the next ten months. We learn not to dwell on them, and so become part of the contradictions.

Now in Lusaka, we find ourselves dropped into a diplomatic no-man’s-land. Although G works for a British government institution and has been deployed by them on official business, neither the EU nor the British High Commission want to altogether acknowledge our presence in the country. We gather that the BHC has some bee in its bonnet about the cost of air-lifting us back to the UK in the event of some great ill befalling us. This is a puzzling response when all G asks for is some anti-malarial pills. They are not keen to give us any, since this establishes responsibility.

There is also a problem about finding us somewhere to live, this despite the fact that both missions have their own staff accommodation. We have been sent out with a stash of travellers’ cheques to pay for ten months’ rent and to buy a car, but house rents in Lusaka are twice the allowance we have been given. A Delegation secretary, a white Zambian, takes pity on us and directs us to a small company compound of eight houses where local Zambian Europeans and Asians live.

There is one house vacant, and we can just about afford it. The accommodation is very lowly by diplomatic standards, and full of dog-haired furniture, but we still manage to upset BHC consular etiquette because the compound has a swimming pool. Only officials of the higher orders may be allocated houses with pools. BHC staff kindly let us know of our gaff at social functions, although we wonder what it has to do with them since they were so unwilling to acknowledge our existence. Clearly the swimming pool has got under somebody’s skin.

Our house on the Sable Road compound and a glimpse of the undiplomatic pool

Home for ten months.

Then, when we are among EU Delegation officials and their white Zambian staff, we are constantly regaled with tales of car-jackings, house break-ins, muggings and murder. At his house, Bernard has been newly issued with a gun and a short-wave radio to summon security in case of attacks by the locals. We presume that we are not important enough to warrant this scale of protection. When, after some weeks, I return to Zambian Immigration to renew my passport, and once more am treated with only good hearted African courtesy, I consider switching my nationality to Zambian.

To be continued…

Dreaming Upstream Zambezi

There were many things we saw and did while living in Zambia and Kenya that were hard to process – even head on; even when fully present. It was as if the actuality dial in one’s brain kept sliding out of tune, sparking dissonance: am I here or am I simply observing myself here, courtesy of an imagined translocation from the pages of some hyper-real travelogue. I mean to say, how could I possibly be taking a sundowner boat ride up the Zambezi. How had I come to this place where I never expected to be?

We were living in Lusaka, Zambia, at the time. That posting had been unexpected too, notice given only on the day we exited Kenya after ten months there. Suddenly Graham was on another short-term attachment, this time to the EU Delegation, managing the distribution of food aid to drought-stricken villages. Then one day an old school friend, en route from the UK to New Zealand, wrote suggesting he and partner make a visit, but he could only get incoming flights to Harare. OK said G. We’ll drive down and pick you up.

And so began a fantastic make-shift safari – out of Zambia into Zimbabwe – crossing the border (and downstream Zambezi) at Chirundu then heading south for Harare. Then on further south through Masvingo to Great Zimbabwe. After that a loop west and north through Bulawayo, the Matopos and Hwange National Parks and back to the Zambezi and the Zambian border at Victoria Falls. And so one evening we found ourselves on a sundowner cruise, ambling upstream between Zimbabwe and Zambia. But then again perhaps that wasn’t really me.

I couldn’t end this final ‘up’ post in Becky’s inspiring month-long challenge without a downstream view too. Look out! Here we go – up and over the knife edge – Victoria Falls – Mosi-oa-Tunya – The Smoke That Thunders. Way-haaaaay…

Square Up #31 A big big thank you to Becky for helping to keep our spirits up all through January

Once in Zambia: in memoriam

Mara boys 2

On the Road in Africa

You could say that both this image and the survival of its medium (old film) is fleeting. The original photo was taken from a passing Land Rover on a dirt road. As you can see, I’ve been playing about with it. But it struck me, too, that there is a deeper meaning here. Life can be all too fleeting in the non-industrial world, and especially on bad roads. See for instance Jujufilms , a blog that shows both the dark side and wondrous vivacity of Nigerian life.

But this reminds me of another kind of disaster. When Team Farrell was living in Zambia in 1992-3 there was too much dying going on – from famine, TB, malaria and cholera. And then there was one especially tragic event that touched all Zambians. Our passing connection with it began when we did something that we have never done since – we went to a football match. On 30th January 1993 Zambia was playing Namibia in the World Cup qualifying round at Lusaka’s Independence Stadium.

The reason we were in Zambia was because in November 1992 Team Leader, Graham, had been seconded from the Natural Resources Institute, Kent, to the EU Delegation in Lusaka to manage the distribution of European food aid to upcountry Zambians. There had been a bad drought in southern Africa during that year, and President Chiluba, who had recently succeeded Kenneth Kaunda in the first multi-party elections since Independence in 1964, did not trust his ministers to distribute the maize flour and cooking oil fairly, or even at all. Instead, he said, international donors were to use Missions and NGOs to reach the starving villagers. And so this was Graham’s own mission – organising food deliveries to far flung corners of the Zambia.

Famine, though, was not the only problem at that time. There were guerrillas from Mozambique spilling over Zambia’s remote eastern borders to predate on poor villagers. Then from the north came the unpaid members of Mobuto’s Zairian Army. To make up for a lack of salaries, they would drive down into the Copper Belt, or even as far as Lusaka, for a spot of night-time looting and pillaging. (It will be remembered that Mobutu was another dismal world leader put into power by Western governments). Last but not least, Son of Kaunda, doubtless suffering the loss of the family power-base, was plotting a military coup. All seemed precarious, then, a situation made much of by British-born locals and EU diplomats who never tired of telling us of their hair-raising confrontations with rapacious gunmen stealing even their curtains, or how our Suburu would surely be car-jacked if we were silly enough to drive into the city.

Going to a football match, then, suddenly took on an element of foolhardiness. It was one of Graham’s colleagues, David Walker, visiting Zambia for a short stint of crop storage consultancy, who said we must go. And since his enthusiasm was so infectious, go we did, although it took much persistence to get tickets; none of the European Zambians had any idea how we might buy them; nor could they imagine why we would want to. It was Wilfred, the EU Delegation’s driver who told us when and where to go for them.

And so, come match day, on a hot Saturday afternoon, we set off in the Suburu that was ‘bound to be car-jacked’. Independence Stadium is a little way from the city, out on the Great North Road. There were no signs, only two brick gateposts in the middle of nowhere. We simply followed the trucks and pick-ups jammed with excited fans, and the thousands and thousands of pedestrians. It was a real family outing – mothers, fathers, children, alert but placid babies tied to their mamas’ backs.

When it came to parking, Graham soon struck a deal with two boys to ‘guard’ the car. A young police woman politely asked if, Madam, could she see what I had in my basket, and briefly explored our picnic. Soldiers checked our tickets. And as the ugly concrete stadium filled, the Namibian team entertained the crowd with a synchronized warm-up to rhumba rhythms. The only dint in the general good humour came when a Zambian team official began to announce line up changes over the PA system. The whole stadium groaned. “Now just listen!” said the official in the manner of a thwarted school teacher. And everyone did, while he spelled out the reasons for the substitutions.

At five minutes to kick off, the presidential motorcade swept round the ground, releasing the diminutive President Frederick Chiluba in front of the grandstand to greet the teams. The military band struck up the national anthems, the President was installed in his executive armchair, and the TV camera woman atop her scaffold was ready to roll. Zambia needed four goals to qualify. There was a general air of speculative optimism: was it too much to ask? But fifteen minutes in, with the first goal scored, everyone was certain. Their heroes would not fail. This was the team that had thrashed Italy 4 –0 at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. This was the team set on winning the first Africa Cup of Nations trophy. They were going places, taking with them, Zambians’ highest hopes.

It was not the greatest match. There were groans, then laughter at many missed chances. Being no football expert I would have to say that the Namibian team’s best moment had probably been during the rhumba warm-up. But when the fourth Zambian goal was scored the stadium exploded with cheers of delight – everyone on their feet, babies held above the crowd so that their infant eyes might witness the scene of victory. A man in front of us then threw up his arms and began to dance. And when that was not joyful expression enough, he turned, shaking our hands as he moved along the row. “My own young brother,” he said in disbelieving tones. “It was my own young brother who scored the fourth goal.”

The match won, the fans left quietly. We returned to the Suburu that had not been car-jacked, and paid the boys their kwacha. Leaving by car, though, was not so easy. We found ourselves locked in a vast sea of humanity. As we slowly edged forward, people rested their arms on the car window sills in a companionable way, exchanged a few words with us. Finally, a kind policeman waved us out onto the Great North Road where we joined the dash of fan-filled trucks, the smelly old bus that was transporting the military band back to barracks, and finally the Zambian team bus, that pulled alongside before overtaking. “My God!” Graham cried. “We’re in the procession.” We gave the team a cheer. It had been a thoroughly good-hearted afternoon.

Three months later the entire Zambian team was dead. On 27th April they were on the way to play Senegal when their plane crashed off Gabon. We had been out of the country when it happened, and returned to a nation that had had the stuffing knocked out of it. President Chiluba declared a week of national mourning. The radio played only funereal music and, on the 3rd May 1993, Zambia’s team and Zambia’s hopes were buried in state on ground near Independence Stadium. The tens of thousands of people who attended wept. The President wept – real tears, not like the ones his predecessor was wont to weep.

“Today we inter our heroes,” he said, “but we do not bury their dreams and aspirations.”

And so the building of a new team became a touchstone for the greater struggle of building a new nation. I thought of the man who had danced his joy and shaken our hands, and wondered how he was. Cool Britons that we were, we had not asked his brother’s name.

Now, twenty years on, Zambia is a nation on the up, and when the Zambian people finally receive the full value of the mineral wealth extracted from their land by international companies, they will surely do a lot better. But when it comes to the 1993 disaster, the families of the dead team and air crew still do not know why the crash happened. The aviation report is yet to be released. Somehow it means the grieving just keeps on going.

Heroes Acre Memorial, Lusaka

Francis Alisheke / zambianfootball.net Wikipedia Commons gabon+pyra.jpg

Memorial to the 1993 Zambian team. Both photos: Lusaka Times

Footballers
Efford Chabala (goalkeeper)
John Soko (defender)
Whiteson Changwe (defender)
Robert Watiyakeni (defender)
Eston Mulenga (midfielder)
Derby Makinka (midfielder)
Moses Chikwalakwala (midfielder)
Wisdom Mumba Chansa (midfielder)
Kelvin “Malaza” Mutale (striker)
Timothy Mwitwa (striker)
Numba Mwila (midfielder)
Richard Mwanza (goalkeeper)
Samuel Chomba (defender)
Moses Masuwa (striker)
Kenan Simambe (defender)
Godfrey Kangwa (midfielder)
Winter Mumba (defender)
Patrick “Bomber” Banda (striker)

Coaching staff
Godfrey “Ucar” Chitalu
Alex Chola
Wilson Mtonga (doctor)
Wilson Sakala

Others
Michael Mwape (FAZ Chairman)
Nelson Zimba (public servant)
Joseph Bwalya Salim (journalist)

Crew
Colonel Fenton Mhone (pilot)
Lt Colonel Victor Mubanga (pilot)
Lt Colonel James Sachika (pilot)
Warrant Officer Edward Nambote (fitter)
Corporal Tomson Sakala (steward)

Tish Farrell

Writer on the Edge