#LettersFromLusaka

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 #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

Tish Farrell

Writer on the Edge