Zambia

Interesting The Things Your Stats Tell You

Actually this is probably just an excuse to post yet again this very old photo of me at Great Zimbabwe. We were living in Lusaka, Zambia at the time, Graham on a year’s attachment to the European Delegation, in charge of food aid distribution. You can read that story at the link.

Towards the end of this posting we drove down to Zimbabwe, and spent a couple of weeks touring around. Back in the 1990s it was a fabulous country to visit. We simply followed our noses, and drove on near empty, but well-kept roads, one of which brought us at last to Great Zimbabwe. We pretty much had the place to ourselves too. It was astonishing.

Anyway my stats of the last few days suggest to me that somewhere in the U.S. a bunch of students has been given a Great Zimbabwe assignment. I know this because they’re all opening a post I wrote 3 years and 2 blog themes ago: Abandoned: Great Zimbabwe. This happens periodically, although sometimes it’s Zimbabwean students searching for material on why the place was abandoned. It’s one of my perennial posts – not so much viral as chronic. Every year the traffic has doubled. Last year 1,311 people dropped in there.

But nothing gets as much traffic as my post on Karen Blixen and Denys Finch Hatton. Caught Inside A Kikuyu Garden. This was also written three years ago, and so far has clocked up 12,715 views. Of course I have no way of knowing if all these people have actually read the piece, but I find it intriguing. I also sometimes wonder what would happen if I had a ‘Karen and Denys’ blog, and didn’t bother to post anything else. Funny old activity – blogging.

Many Shades of Grey in Africa

Grey days in Africa can be incredibly dull. It is a strange effect: as if the light has been sucked out, but without it actually turning dark. This photo was taken around noon on a July day – Southern Africa’s winter. The sky weighed down in a way that was almost palpable; like walking through a Welsh sea mist, except it was dry; or as if you were looking at the world through gauze.

We had driven down from Lusaka in Zambia to spend a couple of weeks exploring Zimbabwe. The objective was to meet up with two Kiwi friends who were flying into Harare, and take them sightseeing before heading with them (via Victoria Falls) back to our house in Lusaka. The day this photo was taken we had just spent the night in one of the guest bungalows in Hwange National Park, and assembled a picnic of sorts in the Park shop.

Hwange Park has metalled roads which detracts somewhat from the notion of wild Africa, and so whenever a dirt track presented itself we took it. Even so, we saw very little game apart from some kudu. It was mostly dry bush, and more dry bush, which soon grew rather boring. In the end we pulled up by the dwindling waterhole in the photo, and ate our lunch.

The waterhole had been empty when we arrived, and then quite suddenly, as is usually the way with elephants, this small family group appeared. The photo looks like a water colour, or a colour plate in a vintage travel book. I only had my little Olympus Trip, and I often had it on the wrong setting. But the other thing about elephants (and I think this image captures it) is that even when you are there, and can see them with your own two eyes, and are close enough to catch a whiff of their musky hides, it is still hard to believe in them. They come and go like mirages, walking always on the tiptoes, their heels supported by fatty pads that deaden the sound of their footfalls. It is thus very easy to be sneaked up on by an elephant.

Of course if they’ve decided to do a little tree felling, since they like to clear land to encourage their favourite grass to grow, or are seeing off some deemed intruder, then you hear them alright. Indeed, there is nothing quite so alarming as a trumpeting matriarch, clearing a waterhole of potential threats to the family’s infants. On this day, though, all was dreamy peacefulness, and concluded surreally enough in the Game Reserve Hotel at Dete where we were the only guests, and the only food on the menu were pieces of very tough meat that took an hour to chew.

The next day, though, we woke to a new kind of dream – golden sun through a mist of coal dust that hangs like a heat haze over the vast Hwange Coal Field. And so we quickly turned our noses from the industrial smog and headed for the border and Victoria Falls.

For more shades of grey please visit Ailsa at Where’s My Backpack

The Night Guards, Downtown Harare

A big thanks to Yvette who is Paula’s guest over at Thursday’s Special for giving me the chance to post this photo again. Her challenge is street portraits, and this is one of my favourites, taken on a brief trip to Harare in Zimbabwe.

We were living in Zambia at the time, and had driven down to Harare to meet friends who were flying in from the UK to spend two weeks with us in Zim and Zam. At the time, life was a bit tense in Zambia. The first year of multi-party democracy had already yielded one attempted coup. Destabilisation by stirring up a crime wave was part of the strategy. The national football team had been killed in an air crash and left the country devastated (see link * below for this story). There was cholera in the townships and members of the unpaid Zairian army were coming down to Lusaka on looting sprees. It was thus a relief to find ourselves in a city where the atmosphere felt so open after Lusaka. This was in 1993 I might add. I know Zimbabwe’s seen some bad times since, and Zambia’s fortunes have greatly improved. Things can change so rapidly on the African continent.

But it’s the spontaneity of the security guards’ reaction that I love. I’d just crossed the road from the post office, and they were about to start the night shift and waiting for a lift. Smiling faces like these are what I remember most from our eight years spent living in Zambia and Kenya.

Letters from Lusaka part 1

Letters from Lusaka part 2

Once in Zambia: in memoriam*

Street Portraits Lost in Translation

on a knife edge at victoria falls

Hang-gliding over the hundred metre precipice at Victoria Falls is not to be recommended. Nor had I intended to take the plunge, my ‘sail’ being nothing more than a wet kanga-wrap, held up to fend off a tropical deluge. Somehow, though, circumstances (and a lack of sensible forward planning) had led us to the Falls’ knife-edge just as Zambia’s 18-month drought was ending, and the rains beginning. Even without the hang-gliding it was a heart-stopping moment.

The prolonged drought across Southern Africa was of course the reason for Team Farrell’s presence in Zambia in late 1992. The Team Leader, Graham, had been seconded to the European Union Delegation to manage maize flour and cooking oil distribution to foodless villages across the nation. We had only been in the country a couple of weeks when G was directed to go down to Livingstone on the southern border to inspect a newly arrived consignment of maize. His boss suggested he should drive down on a Saturday and take me too. Naturally Nosy Writer (that’s me) was only too pleased to head off on a several hundred mile safari.

Looking back, the diplomat’s suggestion that I should go was possibly a kindness in disguise. Nothing was spelled out, since we were newly arrived, and Bernard (aka the boss) did not wish to scare us before we had found our bearings. But security in the capital Lusaka was not good. President Chiluba, the newly democratically elected leader, had been in office for barely a year, this after ousting the incumbent of decades, Kenneth Kaunda.

Later it transpired that Kaunda’s army officer son, Rezi, had been intent on destabilizing the country, and was apparently behind the city’s upsurge in violent crime. On top of that, in neighbouring Zaire (now DR Congo) President Mobutu had not been paying the army, and so gangs of gun-toting soldiers would drive down to Lusaka for a spot of night-time car-jacking and house-breaking. In a nation of impoverished people, the diplomatic quarter was the obvious target. Better, then, that I should not be left alone. Not that I knew this then. Nor had G’s company thought to mention any of this before offering his services to the EU. As they say, ignorance is bliss.

And so one Saturday morning under a wide blue, and seemingly ever rainless sky we set off south. The road, once clear of the city, ran on mile after mile after mile with hardly another vehicle in sight. We passed through landscapes of rolling woodland, the tall-tree miombo which, at first glance seemed more like Europe than Africa. After nine months in Kenya the vistas, too, seemed curiously lacking in drama –until, that is, we reached Livingstone.

Our hotel stood beside the Zambezi, and after tea on the lawn in the English manner it was off to the nearby Falls. The photo above was my first view of them. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh, cry or simply stare open-mouthed. Where was the water?

The drought had much to do with it of course. But the other reason was that Zambia abstracts large volumes of water to run its hydroelectric plant.

The Falls as seen (and ‘discovered’) by David Livingstone.

Engraving from Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa 1857

G told me the best view of the falls was across the border in Zimbabwe, and that if we had remembered to bring my passport we could have walked across. Most frustrating.

Instead, we walked along the path beside Zambia’s waterless gorge. But trailing through dead vegetation while staring at the stark basalt cliff face felt more and more oppressive. It made me think of Tolkein’s Mordor. We gave it up and went back to the hotel.

Our room theoretically had a river view. In reality all we could see was its empty bed, with huge boulders and clumps of palms here and there. But on Sunday afternoon I noticed that people walking across it. “Let’s go,” I said.

The sun was shining when we set off, and soon we were joined by a boy who appeared from nowhere and offered to guide us to the best Falls’ viewpoint. We duly followed, picking our way round oily looking rock-pools, mammoth sized boulders, and piles of fresh elephant dung.

We must have scrambled on for nearly a kilometre when the sky started to turn grey. I began to feel nervous, glancing upstream and expecting a wall of water to come rolling down. Or to walk round a boulder and into an elephant.

And then the rain came down. Fat freezing drops. We made a dash for cover, which happened to be some trees on Livingstone Island, the very spot from where the explorer had first viewed the Falls in 1855. We crouched for ages under dripping trees until at last, thoroughly soaked, G asked the boy if the ‘good view’ was much further. On discovering that it wasn’t we made a final dash. And here it is. The view:

Not much to be seen for the spray coming up, and rain coming down. I took this quick snap, and then held up the sodden cotton wrap that I had been wearing earlier to fend off the sun. As I stood on the knife-edge the sudden gust of wind that filled the wrap was enough to lift me towards the abyss. I stepped back in shock. I’d had more than enough of Mosi-oa-Tunya (the smoke that thunders). So had the boy. Soon he was sprinting away without even waiting for a tip, and that really had me worried. What did he know that we didn’t? We slipped and slid, back the way we had come. More phantom elephants. More imaginary flash floods. More getting lost in outcrops of giant boulders. It seemed a long, long way back to the hotel.

It was not until several months later that we finally got to see the Falls, this time from the Zimbabwe side. On this occasion we only got drenched from the spray, while I took yet another wet and misty photograph, but thankfully avoided all inclination to hang-glide.

The Smoke that Thunders

Letters from Lusaka I

Letters from Lusaka II

Once in Zambia – in memoriam

Daily Post Photo Challenge: adventure for more bloggers’ photo-adventures

Grouchy Hippo, Laid-out Lions

It always seemed astonishing to me that, should you be lucky enough to locate them, you can simply drive up to dozing lions and take their photographs. Even if you sit doing this for half an hour or more, they will barely deign to register your presence. These big cat shots were all taken in Kenya, but it was while we were living in Zambia, and visiting South Luangwa, that our young South African guide briefed us on the proper protocol when encountering lions.

At the time we were driving around a Luangwa salt pan where we had come upon a pride of lions lying about in the thorn scrub. The guide told us that as long as our profiles remained within the frame of the vehicle (in this case an open-topped safari truck) the lions would not give two hoots about us. To them we would appear to be part of the truck and from which they perceived no particular threat.

Out on the Luangwa salt pan, me in the back seat. The lions had been spotted earlier before the sun came up.

Not a good photo, but the light was poor and I had only my Olympus trip.

However, I was scarcely reassured by this newly acquired knowledge of how-not-to-upset-a-lion when the next day, at 5 a.m., the same guide took us on a hike through the bush. It is all so very different on foot. For one thing, it can be hard to see far ahead, what with all the tall grasses and potato bushes. The guide, though, seemed perfectly relaxed. He had already led us to within thirty paces of a browsing elephant, and assured us that it was entirely peaceable since its ears were not out, nor its trunk thrust to the side in charge mode. He had explained, too, how elephants move silently, in effect walking on tiptoes, the backs of their feet cushions of fat. For a time I kept looking behind me. It had never occurred to me before that something as large as an elephant could sneak up on me.

Our guide then spotted a herd of buffalo. This pleased him because he said that in Luangwa lions preyed on buffalo and the big cats were thus never far behind. And so keeping a careful watch on which way the wind was blowing our scent, he and our accompanying park ranger, White, set out to find some. This involved much careful manoeuvring, first around a small group of passing elephants, and then around the buffalo herd.

Clearly, being on foot, the keeping-one’s-profile-inside-the-vehicle strategy would be quite useless. We had no vehicle. Instead we were told to stake out likely trees to scramble up. I eyed the leadwood and sausage trees doubtfully. A few decades had passed since I had done any tree-climbing. I did not think I could do it – not even to escape a charging lion or buffalo.

Later I was to read a white settler tale of how if you were ‘treed’ by buffalo, they would lick any appendage you had not managed to haul high enough into the branches, and go on licking until your flesh was abraded to the bone. I’m glad I did not know that then. I already knew that buffalo were probably the most dangerous beasts in Africa, and it did not do to cross them- ever.

In the end we did not find lion. I was both disappointed and relieved. By then we had been out walking for several hours, and had only stopped for a tea break. The late morning sun burned down overhead, and we headed back to camp along the Luangwa River, me thinking mostly of breakfast. The members of our small party chatted amiably, enjoying the shimmering meanders of the river. We might have been walking in a city park for all the care we were taking. It was lucky, then, that we had White, the park ranger with us. It was he who drew our guide’s attention to the big bull hippo further along the track. The great beast was attempting to negotiate a shelving river bank, and having some difficulty. Several times he slithered half way down, but could not bring himself to take the final plunge.

The guide said it was most unusual to see a hippo out of the river so late in the day. They liked to be back in the river before sun-up, this after the night spent foraging for grass. He was clearly upset, but we were still some way off, so we stood and watched. Some of us were even laughing at the hippo’s dilemma. The bank was simply too steep. His huge bulk gleamed an angry red under the sun.

Then someone must have laughed too loudly, for suddenly the bull gave up trying to slide into the river. With a bellow he swung towards us and came charging down the path. While White took up a position behind a thorn bush, the guide urged us to move several hundred yards back along the path, across an old lagoon to where a fisherman’s big dug-out had been beached. We were to stand behind the dug-out until he came for us.

We did not need to be told twice. The boat looked reassuringly substantial, although it reminded me of the guide’s earlier tea break tale. We had stopped at a fisherman’s old campsite, and it was there that he told us how a fisherman had recently been mangled to death by a hippo. As we reached the dug-out I vaguely wondered if this boat had belonged to the poor man.

Meanwhile the ranger and the guide, held their position behind the thorn bush, and began to clap very loudly.

For too many seconds the bull came on. The ranger had his rifle at the ready. The guide kept clapping. Then at the last moment, the hippo ran out of steam and veered off into the undergrowth. There were sighs of relief all round. When the guide came to round us up, he informed us that White had been more than ready to, as he put it, part the bull from his brains, but they were nonetheless glad that this had not been necessary. Apart from being scared, the incident made me uncomfortable. I saw then that safari-going had its responsibilities, and was not simply an exciting jaunt. If White had been forced to shoot the hippo it would have been because we were intruding at a moment when the bull saw himself at great disadvantage. Who could blame him for charging?

The hippo when first sighted. You can just spot him under the tree on the right. Thereafter, I was running not snapping.

The dug-out refuge point, and White leading us back to the path, the hippo now vanished from sight.

Watching more peaceful hippo near our camp.

Back in camp it was of course a case of ‘travellers’ tales’. We could sit around over a late breakfast, talking of all the things we had seen that morning, and especially of our near miss with one very angry hippo. At such times, and as so often happened in Zambia, life did not seem altogether real.

The dining room at Tena Tena camp, beside the river and under a rain tree

Letters from Lusaka: Part II

In 1992-1993, during the first years of Zambia’s multi-party democracy, we were posted to Lusaka, Zambia’s capital. The Team Leader was charged with distributing European Union food aid to drought-stricken Zambians. (Part I is HERE). For the first couple of weeks, and the irony was not lost on us, we lived in the 4-star Pomodzi Hotel, in air-conditioned luxury.

Notes from an aid nomad’s life in Zambia

While we are still at the Pomodzi 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 the visiting NRI chaps has told me that it has a good gift shop, and there may be the possibility 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. I buy a wonderful Tonga basket and a small olive-wood elephant for luck, but there are no books. I do find a map though – Lusaka one side, Zambia on the other. I study the country’s boundaries, trying to make sense of colonial cobbling that created a nation whose North Province lies to the east of its Central Province.

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. 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 Zaire is lethally porous. Members of 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.

Pomodizi Hotel

We are told that when driving at night we must never stop at red traffic lights (locally known as 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.

AIDS awareness down on Cairo Road.

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, G 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.

We like our little house. It is 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 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 wall, when it is not raining, arcs the blue Zambian sky. To the rear, a small kitchen gives onto a walled back yard and a patch of grass. There are two bedrooms, a tiny study and a bathroom. 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.

Home in 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 on Sable Road 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.

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 of the compound, is quite high and is further cemented with shards of broken glass.

Sable Road in the dry season.

The nights, though, can be nerve-wracking. Rounds of automatic gunfire are common after dark. Some European locals, we hear, 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 all 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.

Expatriate living: guard house and armoured gates.

I call it the Kabulonga Howling. It begins with a solitary keening which swells into a relayed dog lament that spreads from compound to compound until a monstrous crescendo resounds across the suburbs. Once reached, it quickly subsides, to be replaced by the insistent beat of Zambian disco music, thrumming away beyond our perimeter wall. We have no idea who lives behind 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, and my heart aches 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 I examine it like Robinson Crusoe finding unsettling signs of life on his confining island shore.

By day G. drives off early to the EU Delegation. It is only 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 studying hard, filling every seat. It is hard to gain qualifications in a land without books.

Newsprint , too, is hard to come by. Newspapers sell out quickly each day and I have to rely on G. 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 the strains of Michael Bolton’s The Lady in Red. A beautiful girl in cobalt blue chitenge and matching head-cloth that is tied with great flourishes, is often on the till. She has the poise of a princess.

When it comes to shopping, it is a matter of buying whatever is in stock and then thinking of something to do with it. Treats include cartons of delicious and imported Ceres grape juice, and jars of sweet pickled beetroot. The local yoghourt comes in big tubs, plain or strawberry. Other staples include corned beef and South African wine. The supermarket smells of countless forms of perfumed cleaning products that at Christmas time are parcelled up into gift packs to make the ideal gift, along with small bales of second hand clothing.

There are plenty of roadside artisans. We bought our bed from traders in Kamwala Market

There are of course shopping opportunities everywhere along Lusaka’s streets – cigarette and second hand 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.

I also walk down to the Maluwa Cooperative 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.

But I like it out on the road. There is so much life there outside the high walled, razor-wired residences of the elite. People greet me. A taxi driver trying to mend his broken-down car offers me a lift, presumably in hopes that if I agree, his vehicle will conveniently right itself. I grin and say no thanks. I like his style though. As I step out again on the dirt road that has lost its asphalt, my footprints are impressed in the dust among the countless prints of others.

G. 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. G. 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 Red Cross food aid distributers.

A farmer shows Graham his empty granary.

In March G. 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, but 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 Best. 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, G. 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.

Zambia is often called ‘the air-conditioned state’. It comprises an upthrust, tilted plateau some 5,000 feet above seal level. The natural vegetation is mopane woodland. This view was taken along the Great East Road.

Kids at the Annual Lusaka Agricultural Show. 1993’s slogan is ‘Produce to Prosper’. Produce and get a fair price from multi-nationals would be my preferred slogan.

Elephants, E-books and Enticing Reluctant Readers

Two at once challenge – DP : Reel Talk and Frizztext’s EEE

Everyone who comes to this page is a reader. Bloggers love to read as well as write: poems, flash-fiction, memoir, novel excerpts, reportage, long pieces, short pieces; it’s how the blogweb works: exchanges to entertain, enchant, enthuse, encourage and elucidate.

Some of my stalwart followers and followees boldly read and create in second and third languages, which for me who only has proficiency in English is a great source of admiration and envy. And if that’s not enough ‘Es’ already, I have some more. But first a question: what about those (old and young) who find reading a struggle? What about those who find a page loaded with text a total turn-off, or the average sized paperback too daunting in scale to broach?

And to answer my own questions, this is where the book cover below comes in, because one of the things I do besides loitering in cyberspace is to write good stories for unkeen teen readers, (or for anyone else I can corner for that matter).

The title of this new edition of my very short book Mantrap clearly begins with ‘M’ ( which means you can look forward to more mentions further down Frizz’s alphabet.) So what is it doing here now? The elephant is of course the excuse I needed to write this piece, also the fact that Ransom Publishing will shortly be bringing out an e-book version for Amazon Kindle and Apple, as well as a paperback edition. It is part of their Shades series. Full details of this and other books in the series can be found HERE. The series is being printed as I write this and will be launched in August.

Interest-wise, the stories are aimed at readers of twelve years and upwards, but whose reading ability is deemed to be a few years younger. The text is a piece of short fiction but presented in a novel format i.e. 6,000 words divided into several chapters, and over 64 pages. There is plenty of white space on the page.

Ransom publishes a wide range of fiction and non-fiction for all ages. Personally, I think the Shades’ quick-read formats are ideal for just about anyone who wants a good story, but has limited time to read it. You can slip these nice little books into your pocket. However, this is not so much a sales pitch as an explanation: the why, where and how this story about ivory poaching came into being. There’ll be an excerpt at the end.

I can also tell you precisely where the Mantrap story began – under a baobab tree. And here it is, the very one:

The fact that it was in leaf at the time was perhaps auspicious. Baobabs are usually bare. This one could be a thousand years old. We stopped under it for a noonday picnic after a get-up-while-still-asleep and go on a dawn game drive. The location is South Luangwa National Park in Zambia. It is a glorious place with parkland vistas, much shaped by the local elephants who knock down the thorn trees, but rarely the baobabs, to encourage the growth of their favourite food – grass.

The other great shaper of the territory is the mighty Luangwa River as it endlessly carves new meanders through the bush country.

As the river shapes a new channel, so the old meanders are left behind, some becoming stagnant lagoons where hippos wallow amongst the cabbage weed. The local people call such places Luangwa waffa or Dead Luangwa.

But back to Mantrap. It was while I was standing under the baobab, and peeling a very English hard-boiled egg, that our guide happened to point out the narrow strips of wood that had been driven unobtrusively into the tree’s hard, smooth trunk.

“It’s a poachers’ ladder,” the guide told me. “Ivory poachers. This tree has been a look-out post for years.” He went on to tell me how earlier that week an elephant had been killed nearby. The tusks had been taken, but then later, when the coast was clear of poachers, the local villagers had come to grab the meat.

My spine tingled: horror and pity, and not only for the elephant. I knew that rural Zambians were in a poor state. This was the reason why we had come to Zambia. Team Leader Graham was responsible for the logistics of delivering EU food aid to drought-stricken villagers. (See Letters from Lusaka.) Also, elephants and other game can destroy a farmer’s whole crop in a single night. The conservation of wild game, then, and the protection of neighbouring people’s livelihoods are matters not easily resolved. Game parks across Africa generally do not have fences. Animals move about at will, and many farmers are maimed or killed by buffalo, crocodiles, hyenas and elephants. Their families rarely receive compensation.

We, however, belonged to the fortunate segment of the world’s population that had no shortage of food and also the leisure to take a few days holiday, staying in a small tented camp run by Robin Pope Safaris. On the way to our campsite from Mufuwe airstrip we crossed a dried up river where a girl was digging deep into the sandy bed in hopes of scooping out some water. In the gardens of a nearby farmstead, the maize was blown to dust. It was hardly surprising that there was a poaching problem in the district. People were starving.

But then to my mind, there’s a big difference between hunting antelope and small game for the pot, and particularly when the park and surrounding licensed hunting blocks occupy the local people’s former hunting territory, and the obscene and pointless slaughter of elephants solely for their ivory.

Yet the temptation to some locals must be enormous. They have families to support, children to send to school, medicine to buy. Big business cartels, especially in the Far East, are apparently more than glad to arm and fund local hunters in the pursuit of ivory and rhino horn. This means that park rangers are at great peril. Many are murdered in their attempts to protect wildlife so tourists like us may come and stare, and snap away.

One way to combat poaching is to give people good reasons to protect the game. Robin Pope’s Safaris have pioneered schemes to involve local communities in conservation.

Helping communities to gain from tourism

So these, then, were some of the things I wanted to explore in my story. What emerged was a life-and-death adventure that had its beginning the moment my fingers touched the rungs of the poachers’ ladder.

Here then is an excerpt – the opening scene. It is dawn in Luangwa. Hunger has finally driven Danny and his father, Jacob, into the National Park to hunt antelope. But Danny is a schoolboy, not a hunter; it is not surprising that, in his panic, he makes a mistake – a mistake that lands them in the clutches of a corrupt ranger who has a far more dangerous quarry in mind.

Chapter One: The Kill

“Impala. A small herd among the sausage trees. Jacob stopped dead and held up a warning hand. Danny froze on the spot and this time, without a sound, dropped behind a potato bush. He peered through the leaves, fixing on a big ram. He was about twenty paces away, grazing the yellow grasses, his harem of females all round. Danny’s eyes stung with longing. There was that beautiful ram. So near, and yet so far. The smallest sound might send him bolting. Out of reach!

Danny willed Jacob to shoot. Now, Dadda, now. Then nearly howled when the ram raised his lyre-shaped horns and sniffed the breeze nervously. The ram had scented them. He had. Danny prayed and prayed. Please let our luck change. Please let Dadda shoot. Then we can get out of here. Before the sun comes up. Before the park rangers start their patrol. Before we’re caught and sent to jail…

And finally, here’s a short clip that shows Luangwa in all its rain-soaked glory. One of the earth’s most beautiful places, and over four hundred species of birds.

Links:

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/07/29/reel-talk-writing-challenge/

http://flickrcomments.wordpress.com/2013/07/30/eee-challenge/

Which Way in Africa: It’s Often Hard to Know

http://www.ceephotography.com/2013/07/10/cees-which-way-challenge-week-1/

More views from our time living in Africa. For more of the stories behind the photos, you can follow the links.

Village path, Shela, Lamu Island, Kenya

It is easy to get totally lost in the by-ways of Stone Town, Zanzibar

Or totally bogged down during the rains. This road is in Kenya’s highlands in Central Province, taken when we were out on the farms surveying crops for smut fungus.

Village path down to Tiwi Beach, Mombasa, Kenya

Sable Road, Lusaka, Zambia, where we lived in 1992-3. This was taken in the dry season.

Heading for Uganda from DR Congo. Or maybe not…

http://www.ceephotography.com/2013/07/10/cees-which-way-challenge-week-1/

Letters from Lusaka Part 1

Notes from an aid nomad’s life in Zambia

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.

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.

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, 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.

Home on the Sable Road compound.

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…

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/07/07/daily-prompt-travel/ Daily Prompt: Rolling Stone

Tish Farrell

Writer on the Edge