News from Ted
I’m still travelling through fairly civilised country – if you can call apartheid civilised – being handed on from friend to friend, and taking a day off in Hermanus, another delightful village on the South Coast. Just to remind you, these are raw notes – it would take a book to explain what they all mean.
Sunday 14th
Idleness. Paperwork. Walk on beach with ‘Fred’ – the fat labrador, who waddles off in all directions. Braai in wheelbarrow. Talk to Angela about magazines. To Anthony about “things.” Get address of his family in Swaziland.
Monday 15th
Leave Hermanus at 8.30. Difficult. Felt uneasy about Tessa. Dirt road to Caledon. Very mindful of sprocket. Town before Swellendam noticed loss of power. At petrol station, saw smoke from exhausts. Oil down in tank by at least two litres. Take rockers off before realising that oil return may be faulty. Curse, and reassemble. Oil return seems OK. Pipes stop smoking after a while. Fill up with three litres and take a spare. If piston is seized, what can I do about it anyway? Will try to get to Port Elizabeth. After a short distance engine is swimming in oil. Tighten up rocker box nuts. Keep going. Arrive at Riversdale and go to Wimpy. Grey haired lively gent comes over. Tall, Germanic. In fact old German family of paper makers, originally from Württemberg. At time of Gutenberg – Caxton they went to London, but Thames water was too acid. So they moved to South Africa, where they heard of chalky water flowing from mountains.
He has always ridden bikes – owned 20. Rudge, F.N. (1000cc four in line). Now Honda 4 – 750cc. Says it’s great, in spite of height. Asked me to sleep in their caravan in garden. Very pleasant evening. Cars, bikes. SABC (radio). Chapman (got off with Princess Margaret on Royal tours and was recently eaten by a lion.) [No idea what that was about.]
Flying in war, aircraft carriers (rescued pilots had to buy a drink for entire ship’s company.) Local school with white staff working for coloured headmaster – “If you told them that in the so-called independent countries they’d never believe it. Hell!” His name is Lunnan – or Lonnon – or something, any corruption of London. House in Truta road, Riversdale. Nice strong, smiliing German wife, youthful. Two children at ‘varsity’ in Stellenbosch. Younger girl at school. House big, ramshackle – bathroom in do-it-yourself chaos. Bechstein grand [piano]. Sleep very deep. Breakfast, eggs, and off.
Tuesday 16th
Riversdale to Plettenburg Bay. Check oil en route. Round about full mark – seems quite steady. Plett at lunchtime. Eventually find Jim Williams’ house “Maňana” Put up tent in garden. Cook a mutton chop. Bay is very beautiful. Housing is all posh suburban. People renting for holidays. Mid-afternoon overcast. Decide to buy torch batteries. In town I give Don’s friend Andrew Roberts a ring. Am asked over for a drink. Motley group of middle aged and elderly people have been playing bowls. Big new “West Coast” style house – built from a magazine picture. Rough plastering wasn’t right, says large wife Sally, who poured me an enormous Scotch (and soda) in new glasses, bought for their capacity. Sky is now overcast, and begins to rain. Then heavy wind, lightning, thunder. Only the palsied general and his very composed wife stay to eat. I offer half-heartedly to leave for my tent, and receive half-hearted invitation to stay. The old boy is hard to talk to. Half senile? Half stewed? She (the wife) certainly gets very merry. Clenches her fists over her breasts (she’s 63 and very fat) and cries out her “Valkyrie” passion for her children – shouts defiance of Dr. Spock. [Very influential on childcare at the time.]
One of her daughters is living with John Freeman [prominent British journalist]. The other is Colin Legum’s daughter [Legum was another famous anti-apartheid journalist]. Was she previously married to Legum? She declares it’s a pity her daughters aren’t here – she’d soon have me married off. Something desolate about this great, pretentious space with these two drifting around in it, collapsing with age. The servant lady next morning says they don’t get up till ten, says it with humour and a tinge of contempt. House faces a marshy inlet – there are heron, etc. In morning a cormorant dries out its wings.
7 hp Lister engine produces three and a half Kw. Has an alternator for lights and a generator for batteries.
Wednesday 17th
Ride back to Williams’ house to pack up things. Try oil level and find to my astonishment that it’s back up to top of dipstick, i.e. two pints have found their way back into tank. Very mystifying. Ride on comfortably enough through very comfortable landscape (except where two rivers cut down through tableland – chopped up by erosion like a waffle. In ravines it’s semi-tropical , with baboons, blue gums, and thick vegetation).
Then, after Humansdorp, I stop and something goes rattling around in the crankcase. Dire forebodings. I curse again. Why always short of the mark. Foolish. Why not? But the rattle vanishes as soon as it comes. Whatever it is has settled in the sump. I ride on, holding my breath, and get to Lionel’s Motors [about a hundred miles to Port Elizabeth] without further symptoms – although the oil level has meanwhile dropped right down again. Obviously the pump is not getting it back.
I was racking my brains as I rode to explain the symptoms:
1. Overheating
2. Smoky exhausts when first starting
3. Loss of oil from oil tank
4. Sudden and short-lived loss of oil from rocker boxes, etc.
5. Magical reappearance of oil in tank
I calculated that the best explanation was a moveable blockage in the oil return pipe above the T-junction that feeds the rockers. Then, extra pressure to rockers. No return to tank. Oil forced into combustion chamber via valves. [This last is nonsense]. Anyway, there was no such blockage. The pump was simply not working fast enough – rubbish in it had damaged the seat.
At Lionels the chief workman drains the sump and finds bits of barrel broken off, and the bolt head from one of the flywheel securing bolts. WHY! Is this the way it’s going to go?
Lionel Smith wishes he could get more bikes [Triumphs]. Complains of lack of service from England. Says we’re a second-class nation – but all with good humour.
Walked that evening from Red Lion to Docks and back (3 or 4 miles) Endless, soulless Main Street of super modern, clean high buildings. Not a thing of interest. Life is all locked away. Sign of a divided and insecure society? Street life is a good sign – hence Cape Town street-parties. Streaking also (perhaps?) [There was a craze for people to dash naked through public events, called “streaking”.]
Thursday 18th
No parts from Jo’burg. Talk to Sam Gozzoff [who?] again. He knows nothing. Spend day cleaning up, blowing out oil feed, changing chain and refitting wheel. Greasing rear wheel bearings.
Yusuf is the Malay foreman. Tall and ugly, with long hair and red woolen hat. Two front teeth missing and a strange “sing-song” intonation which makes his English quite unintelligible. Each phrase or sentence is pitched at the same note. The syllables tumble out without emphasis so that the phrase is like a single word. He has a most pleasing personality and a direct, affable approach. He has several other “coloureds” working under him, all long-haired with pom-pom hats, and one white apprentice also. He obviously does his job well and is respected. The white lad, Gary, thought at one time that he should have inherited the job, but Lionel claims to have no colour prejudice and put Yusuf in. Gary seems reasonably satisfied. He says he’s a Christian and does a lot to help the poor. [Apartheid created three classes – white, coloured and black. Coloureds were Indians, Malays, anyone in between.]
There are two Africans also. They are not supposed to do anything but the simplest work – repairing punctures and so on. This is the law, which defines which class can do what work, but the law gets overlooked where possible. One African keeps up a low, humorous monologue directed at one or other of the younger coloured guys – “I don’t want to hear you talking about God. You are the Devil. How can a dirty fellow like you know about God? You are just the Devil.” – or – “You asking me for help? No good all this helping. A man doesn’t always ask for help. A man has to help himself. Why don’t you do your own helping.”
In the “White Males” [bathroom] is an African with his hands in the Castrol cleanser tin. Yussef says “Look at this black man. He is not supposed to be here. If they catch him they put him in –“and he holds up his wrists in imaginary handcuffs. The African is grinning broadly. “I’m not a black man,” he says. “Yes, you are, you are a black man.” “No, no, I’m not a black man” – and so on.
There’s a pleasant conspiracy to defeat irksome laws. Yussef says he is all right with someone like Mr Smith – but it’s a bad country for a coloured man. You don’t get the job your talent merits.”
More next week. Have a good one!
From Pretoria, Lucas arranged to have the bike and myself shipped to Johannesburg. I had an introduction to some friends of Tony Morgan: Don and “Trish” Ord. He was a successful industrialist and also a yachtsman. They invited me to stay with them while I tried to find a passage from Cape Town to Brazil. All the shipping lines were in disarray due to the “oil war ”caused by Nasser’s seizure of the Suez Canal.
The bike went to Jac’s Motorcycle Centre, 218 Market street, run by Sam Guzzoff. Given all the work that was done on the bike everywhere around the world I was not surprised to hear, when the journey was ended, that the Triumph people had been much more fearful for the bike’s survival than mine.
February 25th
Sam Guzzoff, sprightly, middle-aged, Jewish. In green safari jacket and trousers, Rides a Vincent. Takes cine film of birds. Big on amateur filming. Justin the mechanic, fuzz of blond hair, smokes Consulate. Complains a lot, but cheerfully.
Changed main bearings, con rod, pistons, valves, idler gear, oil seals, primary chain, sump filter. Rebored cylinders + 20. All pistons and rings + 20. Hepolite 7:1 compression.
[Eventually Don was able to locate a freighter that would be sailing to Rio de Janeiro from Lourenço Marques, in Moçambique, on April 27th. Meanwhile I explored.]
The Mine Dumps. Impressive slabs of bright orange-yellow, caked residue from the gold mine workings after the cyanide extraction process began – called slime. Previously process was alluvial and left natural sand. The sloping sides are deeply etched by rain rivulets, and in mass they certainly compare with the great pyramids. Great and costly efforts have been made for a decade to give grass a foothold on these spectacular monuments. Some are already green and fade into the landscape, while success with the others cannot be far off. The practical incentive is the dust that flies off them in the wind. For my part, I would greatly regret their disappearance. They are unique in shape and scale and in their astonishing colour. Like vast ingots they seem to be fitting monuments to Jo’burg’s early days. Perhaps my idea of varnishing them would be impractical but I wish an imaginative effort had been made to keep their original appearance. They are to Jo’burg what the Table Mountain is to Cape Town, rising up between buildings or seen as a surrealist back drop at the end of a street in Soweto.
[They are either gone now, or are going. I went on to visit a township exclusive to Africans, called Soweto. It became infamous two years later when police fired on students demonstrating.]
Soweto: regimented rows of brick cottages, single storey, tin-roofed. (like most houses – white or black). With dusty patches of ground, fenced in, blanketing the land. Nurseries are a delight. Children in coloured smocks, happy, orderly, non-destructive – fingering my nose. [Excited by its size – not that it’s all that big, but they see very few Europeans.]
Across the fence, grass ends. Arid patch with brick school and pupils, black girls in black tunics, white shirts, look drained of joy – still life. Houses have running cold water. Mostly electrified. Lights in high clusters, out of reach of stones. A man must have lived and worked in Jo’burg for 15 years to qualify for a house in Soweto. But authority still insists it’s temporary – thus resists any moves that might establish it (i.e. land ownership.} Most facilities provided by charity – swimming pools, nurseries, employment for disabled. Some nurseries built by state (but aided by private funds).
Football stadium. Children rushing with two fingers raised shouting “Up the Pirates”, a football team.
[Don was a keen sailor, like our mutual friend Tony Morgan. I went with him to Valdam.]
The club house. Brick boathouses cum holiday homes. Don’s all-night race in a Soling. Capsized twice. Huge artificial lake – one of so many spreading over Africa. Disturbing thought, but then remember how pleasant are the English home lands, yet how far from their original wild state – every acre worked a thousand years. Could Africa be like that?
Left Jo’burg on Thursday the 20th of March. i.e. 24 days with the Ords.
[I can’t explain why I made no notes during my three-day journey across the Transvaal. It is described in detail in the book, and I still remember it clearly. In Cape Town the Ords had arranged for me to be received by friends and I spent three weeks there.]
Arrive Cape Town, Saturday 23rd of March
Left Cape Town, Saturday 13th April
Spent morning packing. Sunlight on Prince Alfred. Letter to Jo still in typewriter on up-turned breeze block. Still hope, perversely, that she might call. Things spread on carpet. Small boys come to the porch and ask urgently for something in Afrikaans. I answer in English and they look quite disturbed. As they leave I realise they want some of the grape hanging over the door, which are already over-ripe. After a while, one comes back and fixes me with the one word “grape.” I pull down several branches and would have given him more but he decides not to push his luck and leaves with an armful. Eleanor comes by in “bakkie.” Offers to fetch green box from Hout Bay and gives me steak for lunch. While I’m packing, a blonde dolly with little boy in a Mini pulls up. She’s been admiring the Triumph. Do I want to sell it? She’d like to ride it herself.
I call London. Peter’s telegram has arrived saying he couldn’t get through – no reply to either number, which is ridiculous. Ask him to re-route the ticket money to Rio, at Thomas Cook’s or, failing that, to Barclay’s International, which used to be the London and South America Bank. Jo has not been back to him. Sad news. Peter is not going to US till Autumn. Will send carnet to L.M. [Laurenço Marques] c/o Augustratis
[My new friends in Cape Town decided to give themselves a holiday at a house in Hermanus, which is on my route East – about 100 miles on the coast.]
Finally, at 4pm I leave Cape Town – with a feeling for the place that must have been shared by many visitors. On the freeway to Somerset West pass through a pall of pine-scented smoke from a forest fire. Arrive in Hermanus. Louise is frying onions. Guy is asleep. Tessa, Heather, John, Angela, Anthony are still out. Dinner is smoked snoek with rice and salad. Delicious! Lots of Tassenburg [Wine]. Jokes, games, drunkenness.
I’ll be continuing my journey East to Laurenço Marques (now called Maputo) next week.
Leaving the hotel at Louis Trichardt I am hoping to get to Johannesburg, a good day’s ride away, but it’s not to be.
Thursday, February 21st
The unseen fate which has been working itself out inside my righthand cylinder since Alexandria, now manifests itself only 300 miles from Joburg where help is assured.
Just beyond Louis Trichardt the power suddenly falters, and an unmistakable sound of tinkling metal escapes the engine. The power picks up, but I stop to look. No idea what it is. Perhaps the chain has slipped over the sprockets. It’s very loose. Tighten the chain and drive on. Now power begins to fail rapidly until, after four miles, the bike simply stops, in first gear. There’s a strong smell of burning. Was it the clutch? It seems to have seized, because in neutral the bike won’t move.
[As I puzzle over the bike at the roadside, spectators start gathering round.]
Now I’m being really unimaginative, partly, I think, because of the supervision of two friendly Boers in the post office. I take the chain case off but everything is working just fine. Then it strikes me!! I forgot to readjust the rear brake. So, 3 hours later, I’m off again. But the noise in the engine is unmistakably unhealthy. Loud metallic hammering on every other stroke. Is it a push rod, a valve? I think of taking the top off right there. But the temptation to struggle on to Joburg is too great. At Pietersburg I stop again at a garage. Engine oil has vanished. I noticed it pouring out of the breather.
A big black garage proprietor says: “That’s a bad noise there, hey.”
Calls his foreman who identifies it straight away. “Sound’s like piston slap. The piston’s seized.”
“Can I go on with it?”
“As long as it’s not too far. You’ll use a lot of oil.”
It all adds up now, but I still don’t appreciate how serious the damage is because I don’t add the original breaking metal sound to the diagnosis. From Pietersburg to Naboumspruit is 34 miles. I stop to get oil but now the engine is too bad to start properly and I realise I must give up Joburg. It’s 4pm and too late to finish the job. I set up at the hotel and leave my stuff locked up in garage till morning.
Meet Keith Conway, a traveller in pharmaceuticals – small, neat man – could have been a grammar-school boy – bright enough (guess his age at 35). Came to South Africa [from England] ten years ago on contract. Stayed to form import business. Has house worth £34,000. Made up to 750 Rand [about the same in dollars] a month.
“I’d never have got there in England.”
Takes me to drive-in movie – “Jerusalem File” – Nicol Williamson stamping about making a fool of himself. Very low-grade experience. No sense of connection with the screen. Suburban anaemia. Convenience bleeds life grey.
A life of convenience, etc. Worth developing the idea.
Friday, February 22nd
Day spent replacing piston. It has shattered its skirt. Crankcase full of metal. Con-rod scarred. Sump filter in pieces – scavenge pipe seems off centre. Sleeve is ridged. Think of damage that might have been done in there. Now I’m grateful for that old re-conditioned piston. It ought to get me to Joburg. All goes well until I try to fit the gudgeon pin circlip. It drops neatly through the tappet hole into the crankcase. For the want of a circlip my Kingdom is lost. But the second flushing with oil brings it out miraculously through the sump. Next hang-up is refitting cylinder block. It won’t slide over the rings. At last I twig. Those rings from Cairo [I must have meant Alexandria] are oversize. Refit old rings and all’s well.
[There’s some confusion here. The cylinders must have been re-sleeved in Nairobi.]
Do it all up – without scavenge filter – and it starts and runs. Thank heavens I think to check on oil return. There’s nothing coming back. It’s 4pm again. Garage shuts at 6 for weekend. No petrol or oil in South Africa at weekends. Problem of getting into timing cover is too daunting. For one thing, I have to get auto-advance out – and I’ve tried and failed before.
Ring up Lucas and Tish Ord [Don and Tish Ord were friends of Tony Morgan in Johannesburg]. Lucas Managing Director is called Crane. Sounds like a thin version of Mike Pearson [in Nairobi]. They know all about me. Think I’ve missed my boat. Suggest I come in by train. Looks like a weekend wasted. I settle in at the ‘local pub.’.
This night I meet Mike Macmillan. Stout fellow with small, vicious-looking boy. The explanation comes quickly. His marriage is painful. He says he only maintains it for the kids. Has a daughter of seven he calls his doll. She likes his wife. The boy, aged 4, likes him, and he takes him (Ian) on his trips. Buys a bottle of wine at dinner.
Note: I want an auto-advance extraction tool, and a suitable drift for gudgeon pins.
Saturday, February 23rd
After a night’s rest my feeling about the bike changes, I decide to have a go. It proves much easier than I thought. With my “universal puller” I manage to get the auto-advance out. Timing cover comes off easily, and the scavenge pump has metal bits obstructing the ball vale – just as the lad at the Triumph factory said would happen. Put it together again and it works. (But I haven’t checked that the rocker feed pipe is clear. Will this be my nemesis?) Now my only problem is to get petrol – and oil if possible – before Monday.
[South Africa, at that time, was on a strict petrol rationing system during the week, and none at all on weekends. There was a universal 50 miles per hour speed limit.]
No company this evening. Restless, sleepless night, but not awful.
Sunday, February 24th
No breakfast till eight. Then boss’s son gives me petrol. Off I go, for a blissful twenty miles, then all hell lets loose. I stop to consider. Now the other pipe (from the new cylinder) is smoking, but there is awful rattling noise as well. Maybe just the piston again. So off with the pot again. Now I’m becoming quite adept. Takes me four hours including half an hour of sanding and scraping, but after all that the rattle continues. So it’s a bearing. I go gingerly into Nylstrom, six miles away, but Nick the Greek at the Park Café is very friendly and finds a fellow with a “bakkie” [Afrikaans for pick-up] to take me into Pretoria. – using my petrol.
First we visit his house – which he built himself, very much in the style and the finish that Bill [my stepfather] might achieve. He has also built up his own business as a butcher (after being a blacksmith) and suffered a terrible setback when his wife was crushed and near killed in another Datsun when wind blew it over on the highway. After three years she has recovered all but her left leg which is still bound up. She is most cheerful and content with her recovery, and both pleasantly mature people.
Pretoria makes a horrible impression. Mader’s Hotel on Kruger Street is like sleeping in a railway tunnel. No dinner or drinks after 8pm. I’m ten minutes too late and have to go out for fish and chips. But the lively waiter at the hotel has two beers for me, enough to get me dozy and soften the roughness.
Remember the shriveled couple. He in safari jacket and trousers. She in sleeveless blouse, skirt, black framed specs. He has a face mud-coloured by sun and alcohol, grey haired, stooping and slovenly. Beckons me over.
“She likes you,” he says, pointing at the woman. Then after a pause, “You can sleep with this woman tonight.”
I excuse myself. He wanders off. She says, “He makes my life a torment. He is still in love with his first wife. He’s my husband.”
Next week: On to Cape Town
Doing housework on my computer I just now came across this little piece about my reception at the Triumph headquarters on the edge of Los Angeles.
It was 1975 and I had come half-way round the world. They greeted me with laconic enthusiasm.
For ten days they looked after me in considerable comfort. They put me up at a quite stylish motel called the Griswold Inn, and they gave me another Triumph to ride while they took my bike apart.
The mechanic who was working on it didn’t care for conversation. He didn’t seem to understand that I had a personal relationship with the bike and that I was anxious to know how and why it had given me trouble.
In particular I wanted to know why I had run through two barrels and various pistons and rebores, but nobody there appeared to find that anything but normal. It was astonishing, in retrospect, that nobody paid any attention to the air filter, which was nothing more than a piece of paper in a perforated box.
Most of my troubles were caused by bad stuff getting into the combustion chamber. I only heard of K&N oil filters after my journey had ended, two years later, but apparently they had already been on the market for one or two years. Presumably they would have made a big difference, but nobody there seemed to either know or care. In fact, the prevailing belief in America seemed to be that Triumphs were only good for a few thousand miles of fun hauling ass before they fell apart.
Anyway, the people in the office were really just waiting for the company to crash around their ears. My mechanic told me he already had a job lined up at Yamaha.
What they did do was try to get a little publicity. And they told me, triumphantly, that they had secured an invitation to the Petersen Ranch on the edge of LA.
Looking it up now I see that there are two Petersen Ranches. One of them is a long-established spread belonging to deeply religious ranchers, devoted mainly to cattle – Holy Cows, I suppose. That is not where Triumph sent me.
The other Petersen was a publisher of mainly automotive magazines who had done well enough to buy his own ranch. Apparently, I was told, there were people there riding dirt bikes who would be enchanted to meet a man who had ridden half-way round the world.
Brian Slark drew me a map to find the place. It was a very simple map with only three or four lines on it. It looked as though it was just around the corner. He didn’t explain that it was a hundred miles away.
It was a time when the highway engineers were experimenting with rain grooves on the freeways and they were not compatible with my tyres. Half the time it felt like riding on a skating rink and when I arrived at the ranch I was very ready for some warm appreciation.
What I found instead was a bunch of overweight, self-important middle-aged men on trail bikes, in suits that reminded me of the Michelin Man. Some of them had been World War Two bomber pilots. Clearly I had not been expected and they took no interest in me at all, until one of them peeled off from the group and asked me where I’d come from. I explained what I’d been doing for the past two years and he said, “Oh, Yeah, I rode down to Guatemala one time.” For him that was probably an adventure to brag about. For me it was a trip down the road.
I had a beer and left.
Back at the factory I did make friends with a couple of mechanics who were working on a bike to break a speed record. One of them, Brent, was a particularly pleasant and thoughtful man and when my time at the Griswold was up and I had my own bike back he invited me to stay with him for a few days before heading North. I seem to remember that they lived in a garage in Paramount. It must have been a very big garage. Thanks to him and his very gorgeous wife, I learned that it was possible to live a pleasant, rewarding life in Los Angeles, after all.
From there, at the end of June, I rode north to San Francisco and, as you may remember, my life took a quite unexpected turn.
With all the tough travelling behind me I’ve still got a long way to go to reach Cape Town, but I’m looking forward to an easy ride, mostly on asphalt. I spent a couple of days in the capital, Salisbury (now renamed Harare) and moved on to a motel in Umtali (now Mutare) on the border with Moçambique. Now I’m following the border down the east side of Rhodesia. I was advised to visit the Black Mountain Inn.
February 18th
From Umtali to Melsetter. At Black Mountain Inn talked to Van Den Bergh [Prop.] about farmers around Cashel [an area in the East of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe.] He tells me there’s one Afrikaaner called Baas M’sorri, He brings his labour in from Malawi on contract. (Malawi provides labour here and in South Africa) When the new labour arrives he puts each one in a jute sack and hangs him on the scales to weigh him. Then his diet is arranged according to his weight. He wears big knee-high boots as protection against snakes in the fields. If he comes across a ‘cheeky mundt’ (i.e. a Kaffir who gives lip) he stands on his foot and grinds it with the heel of his boot until the Mundt says “Baas I’m sorry” – hence the name.
Oom Ben Steyn is Afrikaans farmer – about 500 acres – born on the Trek seventy years ago. Lives as his forefathers did.
“African ladies? There’s no such thing. Just Kaffir bitches.”
The route is certainly a beauty. Rough in parts, though never difficult. Very green. Big granite (?) masses poking out, smoothed off by weather. Alongside the Chimanimani mountain range. Many birds – one with a brilliant yellow back that flaps its wings noisily as it flies and pokes about in the long grass (smallish, plump, black and yellow).
Black Mountain Inn is delightful. Van Den Bergh and wife quit business world – he was export manager for Pye in Far East, then Cambridge – to find different life. Been there only a short time. Says he would never have believed such bigotry could exist – but only in the fringe rural districts, and especially among Afrikaaners.
[All the whites in Rhodesia seemed to realise that Black independence was coming. But when?]
Ven Den Bergh says, “Yes, the Rhodesian whites are flabby. The police are in here getting drunk all the time. The army’s the same. If they ever came up against a really motivated black army, well, they’d roll them up.”
“When first we came here we went to the butcher to get meat for the servants. ‘Oh, you mean boy’s meat,’ he said, and produced this chopped up bone and gristle and sinew. It’s cheaper than dog’s meat. So we thought we couldn’t give them that, and we bought proper steak. Well after a while there was a mutiny because we weren’t giving them the proper meat.”
“Independence? It’ll take about ten years.”
I did pass Oom Ben’s house, but I didn’t stop. Didn’t feel like it. It was a beautiful sunny day – and the chance to ride this route without rain was the main temptation. But I saw him on his verandah, just as Ven Den Bergh promised, though whether he had his binoculars on me I don’t know.
[Four years later the Inn was a ruin, rafters exposed, walls cannibalised for bricks, ruined by Frelimo and Zimbabwe freedom fighters. At Melsetter I came across some Asian immigrants. They showed me their art work, which was novel if not exactly beautiful. It’s done by sticking noodles on a piece of board and spraying it with gold paint.]
Noodle art
Small boy, 11, says: “You know, the Porks (Portuguese) are funny people, boy! You have to go in secretly and kill a few terrorists and then you tell them on the telephone after.”
Hutchinson (Grandfather was once Governor of The Cape), says” My date is 1980. There’ll be African government by then.”
[He was exactly right.]
[I went on to visit the famous Chirinda forest.]
Seen in Chirinda Forest: Bright red millipedes on rotten wood, three inches long. Small monkey in treetops, and a red squirrel. Trees whose roots seem to intertwine to form the trunk, only merging together at a considerable height, say 60ft or more, relatively close to the canopy. The Big Tree, red mahogany, 200 ft high they say. A liana twisting up full height of the forest. Heard deep “Chuk-chuk” sound. Monkey or bird? Bottle bird which holds same pitch.
The biggest tree was said to be 200 feet tall.
February 19th, Chipinga to Zimbabwe
Murray McDougal Drive round Lake Kyle. Nice scenery. Dam. View from top of ruins is excellent. Family of Hyrax [Well-furred, rotund animals with short tails – Wikipedia] live up there and will sing for you if you’re lucky. Have white oval markings on upper eyelids. Slept out in tent. Met Joachim from Frankfurt, who has been through South America and Africa (via Congo).
On way stopped at African village in Tribal Trust land. Most attracted by site – rocks and boulders piled in a natural rock garden in immense scale Cattle, goats, maize (and tourism, I suspect). Many hands outstretched. One dumpy lady rushed off for her big copper pot and stood in front of me and put it on her head too hastily because it nearly fell off and she had to stand crooked to keep it up there. The sideways slant to her head gave a comical look to her anxiety.
February 20th, to Beit Bridge
Fort Vic is the exact architectural expression of a tourist trap. Coming in from S.A. its road broadens right out to embrace you and then funnels you in to the snack bars and curio shops.
“Get yourself something unique. Something Arty!!!”
Swirling, towering column of storks in sky on the road to S.A. grouping for the return to Europe.
[The border crossing to South Africa is at Beit Bridge.]
Beit Bridge: I am a prohibited person, because I don’t have a ticket out. I pay over 350 Rand (£250) on deposit, and 2 Rand for their trouble. Get a printed notice telling me I can appeal against being a prohibited person. It seems an odd label to stick on someone you let into your country.
Then the customs. He’s another plump lad in white gym clothes. He has dull blue eyes and a thin voice which swings out of control into upper registers. First he packs me off to pay 50 cents for a road safety token. On my way back I see three of them gathered round my bike. But I’m so accustomed to people gathering round it that I assume it’s mostly curiosity.
“Now Sir,” says Billy the Kid, [trying to adopt a stern voice] “Have you any meat, plants, fire-arms, drugs, books or magazines, cigarettes or tobacco?”
“Yes, I have a book on Christianity.”
“Chris-ti-anity!” He’s incredulous.
I ask him if he’s heard of it, but he doesn’t hear my question.
“Have you anything else to declare?”
“No.”
“Then WHY Sir,” he pounces heavily, “do you not declare the sword?”
Ah, the villain is snared, foiled, as good as beheaded. I never thought of the sword.
He shows me a dagger he took away the other day. He’s proud of it, and the sword is obviously a far greater prize. He speaks of it with awe.
“I shall have to take it away from you, Sir. I am very sorry.”
(He didn’t sound a bit sorry – delighted in fact that his duty could be so rewarding).
I explain about its sentimental value, that it isn’t even mine, and so on. The Kid is reluctant to allow a weakness to develop but his rank is zero – he hasn’t got a single identifying strip on his vest, unlike the broad gold braid on every other shoulder.
“How will I get it back,” I ask.
“We shall see if we can wrap it and send it under seal – and at your expense to Brazil.”
I could tell he was improvising.
“Why can’t I collect it in Customs at Cape Town?”
He felt the ground slipping away. His neighbour at the next desk, who is obviously deputed to keep an eye and ear open for the young whippersnapper if he gets out of control, says, “Why don’t you go and ask your father?”
Father, you might have guessed, is the boss. (“Daddy, I want to be a Customs Officer like you and confiscate my life away!”)
A party collects in his office to inspect the weapon with enthusiasm.
“How can we stop the natives, if we let you in with this?” says No 2.
“See if you can seal it into the scabbard,” says Dad, “and then wrap it up well so no one can see what it is.”
Off we go. The Kid has his orders. He’s happy again. He can carry them out to the last serif of each letter, and with a little imagination he can even add to them.
“Come over here, Sir, please. Now you see, I am going to wire the hilt to the scabbard, and seal it. You see there is a number on this lead seal. If this seal is broken you go straight to jail.
“What would happen,” I ask, “if someone should happen to steal it from me?”
“You go straight to jail,“ we call out in unison.
Then follows the farce with the brown paper, string and sealing wax.
He dances about trying to get the drops of burning wax off his face and legs.
“Usually we get the natives to do this,” he explains.
Finally he attempts to exact a deposit, otherwise “how do we know you will declare it in Cape Town?”
But this is too much for No 2. Who shakes his head, repeatedly.
“You can go,” says the Kid.
[I gathered my stuff together and rode off. It was only a short way to the nearest town.]
Spend night at motel in Louis Trichardt.
Restaurant with glazed kitchen in middle of the restaurant floor. Black cooks supervised by white man. All white guests, of course, looking on as they eat.
[It was my first encounter with apartheid. I was quite shocked. The diners were all perfectly pleasant-looking middle-class people. They thought it quite normal to watch black people imprisoned – because that’s what it looked like to me – in a glass cage, like an aquarium, overseen by a white warder. In the following months I never got used to it.]
Next week, to Cape Town and beyond.
February 8th
A rainbow spanned the Victoria Falls
Lusaka to Livingstone. Good sunny day with light cumulus, developing to storm clouds in late afternoon but generally off the road. Felt a real sense of the beautifulness of this earth, and as I contemplated the rich pasture land stretching out in all directions to the sound of lowing cattle, and remembered the thousands of miles since Nairobi (and before in Ethiopia) I find it hard to imagine so many people huddled together in Western cities, cribbed, cabined and confined. Thought of the good young men I have met (few girls) who would live peaceful self-sufficient lives out here, not driven to meddle and distort the pattern through mistaken and misshapen idealism.
There is so much fear in the cities, so little faith in the earth. How people love to tell and shudder at horror stories. Africans walk barefoot where a Londoner would expect to be attacked by any of a thousand venomous species. Me too. I’m ashamed of my cautious toe-dipping attitude – and excuse myself by the kind of journey I’m on.
Yet this journey must teach me that man can go free in this world – and the city, which was once a haven and has now become a prison is a habit. Indeed city dwellers, viewed in this light, look like a crowd of old lags, recidivists, huddled together in fear and trembling of the freedom that lies outside.
Remember the couple of Africans who were dancing by the roadside. I snapped my fingers as I passed and they smiled broadly.
February 9th
The Falls. The knife edge. Rhodesia – “the enemy”
Late afternoon on the Zambesi. African fishing. One man catching tiny fish. “Whitebait.” One had a bream.
“The Shadow of your Smile,” from a red Datsun pickup. Man who caught several small catfish and bream, and a “croaker” – croaked as he pulled out the hook and snapped off its spines. Bishop bird, and a bee-eater (scarlet bill). Distant grunts of Hippo. Long neck and beak of water bird floating past. Sahimia is weed that floats on the surface of Zambesi, choking up the Kariba Dam.
February 10th
Gentle encounter with official at Livingstone Bridge.
Which side has closed the bridge?
“Both sides.”
[I already knew that the bridge was closed. The only way to Southern Rhodesia was through neutral Botswana, which was reached by driving twenty miles or so downstream along the so-called Kaprivi Strip.]
Away down the road to Kazangula. A highway for Jongolola and Dung beetles. No traffic at all. The ferry, two flat bottomed floats. Group of soldiers sitting on the Zambia side. “No, the ferry has not fallen down.” Botswana immigration – and a glimpse of churned up mud and water where the road out is. Worst fears confirmed. Zambian customs sell me a few Rhodesian coins. Botswana takes them back for an insurance policy, good in SA also though. Off I go, skating on mud. But road improves, and so does my riding. But I’m concentrating so heavily I miss the left turn. After six miles I realise I’m wrong and turn back. Stop at a village, brick huts and singing group. Leader and chorus. Leader has voice like Durante – sings one line, chorus responds, like hot gospel.
Right road soon gets me to customs. Rhodesians in white cotton uniforms – tunic and elasticated shorts. Two men, young and plump, with strained voices. One comes in carrying a gun tight against his chest, like a regimental colour, but as though the slightest movement would set it off.
“Do you have Rhodesian Third Party Insurance, Mr. Simon?”
“No. Can I get it at Victoria Falls?”
“Trouble is, the road from here to Vic Falls is bad. If you had an accident, you might not have a leg to stand on.”
There was a graveyard for famous old locomotives. I can’t remember their name. Can anyone help? I think it began with a G.
Road is bad to worse, but there’s no rain and again I find the dirt much easier to ride. At speed it slides though the little patches of slurry fast enough to get a grip again before much deviation is possible.
See a sable in middle of the road – scimitar horns sweeping back – by arching its back it can kill a lion attacking its hindquarters.
Then little kangaroo type animal – which turns out to be a Springhare. The Falls on Rhodesian side are spectacular view, but there isn’t the intimacy with them that you get on the Zambian side.
February 16th
Salisbury, Saturday. The city, neat as a new pintable, with its well-ordered traffic lanes, freshly painted facades, White men vindicating the much-mocked values of a thousand minor public schools, whose old boys can find here what Britain has so manifestly lost; a decent life for a decent chap prepared to pull his weight (and throw it around a bit too.)
The African in Salisbury is not prominent. He mans the lifts and minds the counters, cooks, cleans and irons, calls you Baas and Sir and keeps his differences to himself. It’s no less British for being ODI and would be even without the prosperous (and surprising) presence of famous British companies like Dunlop and Lyons and Thos. Cook & Sons. Of course, they will explain that it’s not actually Dunlop at all but Dunlop (Rhod) Ltd, or some such fiction.
[Rhodesia, under Ian Smith, was holding out against the inevitable tide of Black independence. Trade between the UK and Rhodesia was supposedly forbidden. Coming into White Rhodesia from Black Africa was a little shocking. I found I didn’t like the white faces I saw; they looked narrow and aggressive.]
I am bewildered. Since Nairobi I have been seeing double – two images – the European idea of Africa superimposed on an African life. At times one image blocks out the other.
Next week: On a long and paradisical road to prohibition.
PS: I thought I’d add a little postscript, to express my concerns, not that I have any particularly brilliant insights to impart. Simply imagine, if you would, that we’re sitting at a bar, or over a coffee table.
It’s just that watching Trump play with his toys I find it impossible to keep quiet.
I am quite certain he decided long ago that Ukraine will have to sacrifice a large chunk of territory, and the sooner the better, so that he can start having profitable transactions with Putin, whom he admires.
Zelensky is just an intolerable nuisance. So anything that distracts the world from Ukraine and Zelensky is welcome.
The two years of the destruction of Gaza – which are as much Trump’s campaign as they are Netanyahu’s – have been very useful in that regard, but people have started looking at Ukraine again, so something else had to be done.
His assault on Iran has certainly been a new distraction, with the additional advantage that in order to rescue the world’s economy from its consequences Trump has been able to let Putin sell more oil and give him a new source of income. We are now at the brink of a huge disaster.
It becomes increasingly irresistible to make comparisons with Hitler. Like Hitler Trump sees himself as a master of the geo-political game, but without even Hitler’s credentials.. The people he has gathered around him resemble, more and more, the Führer’s gang of Goebels, Göring, Himmler, Speer, Riefenstahl, etc.
Meanwhile from Trump’s point of view Western Europe is just a pathetic sideshow, good for pageantry and magnificent state visits, and useful mainly as a scapegoat.
Like Hitler, Trump will surely, ultimately, be his own undoing, but must we all be brought down with him?
I’d been riding on this TanZam highway for two days, but my notes don’t reflect the chaotic nature of it. Because of the war in Angola this road had become provisionally the only outlet and supply route for Zambia – copper to the Indian Ocean and oil to Zambia. Much of it was dirt and in the process of construction. There were many diversions around culverts, the oil tankers were driven recklessly, drivers on drugs to stay awake and there were wrecks all the way along – it was a hell run and a challenge.
January 30th
From Mbeya to [Zambian] border. No petrol, no money. Meet embassy wives at Zambian customs and cadge petrol off them. They tell me about “the Catholic Fathers” at Mpika. Petrol crisis continues into Zambia. So does cloud and rain. Fill up at Isoka (several kms off the road) but fail to fill reserve tank. [This is nonsense. There was no reserve tank, as such. The rain must have gone to my head.]
Ran out [of petrol] before Mpika. Get some off a van, resting at wayside. By now realise towns are not going to have facilities. Opt for “Catholic Fathers at Levimkila.”
[I shared with most travellers a general dislike of missionaries in principle but had to admit that most were very well-meaning, and very useful to people like me.]
Meet Tom and Katrin Hughes. Invited in – visit hospital – “Our Lady’s Hospital”– nurse there says people are undernourished – sheer lack of food turns their hair red. Called Murasma. Much TB. Kwashiorkor. Mainly ignorance. Patients on double treatment – hospital and witch doctor. But if someone dies, they blame the witch, not the hospital.
Tom and Katrin think they have it too good. Expected a rough ‘bush station’. Mixed marriage – i.e. (Protestant) him, and (Catholic) her. – from Falls Road, Belfast. Talk of wonderful old people (priests and sisters). One rolls up (sister) on Honda. With helmet. She’s sixty something. Loves it there. Very brisk (as always)
The rain and the road are numbing my senses. Can’t really trust the bad impressions I’m getting. People less appealing here, physically. Old people clap hands to show respect. Smoke goes straight up through thatched roof of huts. People walk around in the rain quite unconcerned by it, sometimes with transistor radio pressed against chest under straw hat.
Said to be 10,000 Chinese here on railway. Look much yellower than I remember. (is it climate or contrast?) Said to be totally unapproachable. Wear pale blue overalls, sometimes coolie hats. As I drive slowly past worksite on main TanZam road, one in darker overalls pointed angrily/sternly up the road in very dramatic gesture.
Rain this day torrential. Thunderstorm near Serenje, so low, heaviest rain I’ve seen. Wanted to visit Nsalu caves (rock paintings) but didn’t dare ride dirt road in rain. 21 kms. Oppressed by total lack of pleasant shelters. Only “bottle stores” run by moody people. Who wants to drink beer or Coca-Cola after riding through a chilling thunderstorm and soaked to the skin?
February 1st, Ndola
Calculated today that I could drive to Cape Town in 8 days, so the original date is still within reach after all. Astonishing!
[Before the “oil” war, I had booked a passage on a liner to Rio. Now almost all shipping had been cancelled.]
Chinese build a neat railway. Those sections visible might appear in a painting. Stone buttresses to carry line across the road, built of square blocks, outlined in black (protective paint?). Chinese labourers in coolie hats with chin straps, on trestles. Dull green trucks in convoys carrying wood or sharp road metal, five or six at a time driving at a sober 40mph at respectable intervals – unlike the hairy driving of the big Tanzam trailer trucks on piece rate. Regularly along the road, dirt roads disappear into the bush, sign-posted in red on white painted sheets of flattened iron, in English and Chinese – “Quarry of 4th sub-unit” etc. Inspection is vigorously deterred. Tourists going off the road are sent packing if they encroach. Newspapers like the Times of Zambia (Lonhro owned) exhort the Zambian people to guard their railway against terrorism (by whom?)
February 3rd
[I found shelter with a missionary couple, called Bland, off the road to Lusaka.]
Within three miles of the Blands, a terrorist camp. One morning (Saturday) a machine gun battle. Farmers all came rushing into white houses for protection. Frelimo from Moçambique, Angola, Rhodesia – subsidised and supported by K.K [Kenneth Kaunda – president of Zambia]. But with less enthusiasm now, since their leaders seen living it up in Lusaka. Government officially denies their presence. Police much too frightened of them to interfere. Interlopers either warned off – or interrogated first and then sent off – but not violated.
[The Blands took me to visit a nearby village to see how they lived.]
Zambian family compound near Chikankata. Tonga (or Tonka) tribe. Six huts – plus maize store and chicken house. All basic ploughing machinery and oxen to draw it. Husband was away at court. Three wives, two of them had six children each.
Drum about two feet tall, beautiful sound. Pot cooking on fire in kitchen hut.
Mortar for grinding up maize with sprinkling of water. Has a narrower depression at the bottom into which stick [pestle] fits.
Tallest of wives and most elegant produces dancing gear made of strung bottle tops and a hat made of paper and feathers.
The rains – November to March. Heaviest in December and January. On a good day sky clears after dawn with only a little high cloud (Nimbus?) scattered over the blue. The sky does look bigger in Africa – even where the terrain is uneven. Perhaps cloud cover is higher – perhaps clarity or colour have something to do with it. As morning runs its course whisps of cumulus appear and grow, concentrating in one area and swelling to monstrous proportions looking finally as though an apocalyptic explosion had taken place in total silence. The base of this towering construction, which now looks as substantial as any ogre’s castle, is heavy and black as soot, and hangs threateningly, seeming to distend and sag even further to the ground as one watches. Eventually it’s enormous load is too much for the buoyant cloud above and it slides to earth in a diagonal avalanche, obliterating everything in its path, as lightning lances slash and rip the invisible skin that was strong enough to hold a river in the sky. As the day proceeds, the grayness usually spreads and becomes general, but it may be confined to one area, while the sun shines over and round the cloud playing on the spray and cumulus to produce beautiful prismatic effects. The roads gush with rivers of murran-coloured water, and cars send sheets of it flying over each other. People congregate under shop awnings, but in the country cyclists and people waiting for buses simply resign themselves to a soaking. Life goes on damp and soggy. The rains are too long for life to stop.
Next week, at the Zambesi, I crossed the line, from black to white. It’s a remarkable transition that poses many questions. I hope you’ll come with me.
After a few days in Mombasa, Malindi and Lamu, I rode on to the border at Lunga Lunga. In a strangely fearful mood.
Monday, January 27th
Rain stops. I drive on. No more tarmac. Packed sand. Looks like slippery trouble after the rain, reinforcing my expectation of disaster but it proves easy enough after all, and dries out quickly. But my thoughts stay morbid. A man walks past with a panga [like a machete] I imagine what would happen if he struck out with it. Mentally I kick out at him. It slices half my foot off. I develop an macabre and quite fallacious tale about a motorcyclist, white as death, riding up to a hospital gate and falling off the machine in a faint. Only when they have carried him in and pulled of his boot do they find half his foot missing. “We never knew how it happened because he died without becoming conscious. Lost too much blood.” As I ride I am stuffing the truncated foot into my boot to make the heroic ride, trying to imagine the pain. Only now, writing this does it occur to me that the panga would have taken half the boot off too.
[Today I find these gruesome fantasies quite astonishing.]
It seems clear, as I ride along, that all these thoughts and reactions proceed from some mechanism inside me – some permanent reservoir of anxiety which every now and again rises up and floods over. But where is the spring that feeds these black waters, and what unseen process releases them? I wonder whether I have ever been as aware as I am now of what is going on inside me. I have long ago recognised the converse – those times when light and dry and confident, I have felt free of fear and even been able lately to consciously communicate that feeling to others. But have I known myself in that other state, and what wounds have I inflicted on others thinking that mine was a normal, reasonable attitude.
[I rode on to Tanga and then, later in the day, embarked on the main highway through Tanzania, stopping for the night at Mwebwe.]
January 28th
The day brought no disasters. Even my five-shilling bed at Mwebwe had no fleas. The mosquito net allowed me to listen to their insect whine just a foot away from my face without flinching. But I dreamed, fearfully, of a huge, unpleasantly dominating man who constantly interrupted otherwise innocuous or cheerful scenes to threaten me with homosexual demands.
There have been such dreams before, not often but very potent (“There’s a stain on him somewhere”). [This was a dream I had in my childhood.] Thinking on about the day and the night as I rode on to Morogoro, it occurred to me for the first time that perhaps in my childhood I had been the subject of some such attack. So many things fit into place with such a hypothesis (my recollection of a fearless childhood up to the time I went to hospital in Shrewsbury – followed by pronounced fears, irrational quailing before masculine authority, etc.) I suspect it. But it could be true. Would my mother have any idea at all? I shall write to her, gently.
It occurs to me also that on the same day I had a recurrence of the skin rash which moves around from back, shoulders, arms, to thighs and belly, is evidently not a local thing but probably connected to general state.
(Another memory: The headmaster at Gunnersbury Prep. School wanting to punish me in the bathroom for sending for elbow grease. How terrified I was, naked.)
From Mombasa to the border, road was good. Through palms, tall ferns, villages. Dirt road from Lunga Lunga to Tanga – same sort of open leafy country. [Picked a sample cashew nut from tree.]
I was amazed to see that the cashew nut grows outside the fruit. In Brazil I discovered that the fruit itself, which I have never seen in Europe, is quite delicious when stewed.
Tanga, on sea, port, has open streets. From there the road passes endless sisal plantations. – all unusually green. Overcast. Mountains to the right up to Kirogwe, then over hills down to Morogoro where mountains again on the left.
One hour in bank to change £5 cheque. [There wase just one endless queue to get to the cashier].
Met Creati, the m/cycle man who had bought all the Triumph spares from Dar.
[Apparently the Triumph dealer in Dar es Salaam had closed shop and sold his spare parts to Mr Creati who was so impressed by my story that he kept reducing the price.]
Sells me speedo cable for 50/-. No 40/-. No, have it for 30/-.
[Odometer stopped working on road to Mombasa, at 5,904 miles.]
Add on to reading for reaching Mombasa – about 25 miles, plus 150 to Malindi and back. Then Mombasa – Tanga – Morogoro 307 miles. New speedo cable in Morogoro. Reading at 5,904.
Mikumi wildlife lodge in National Park. Stopped on road in to stare at elephant by roadside, which stared back with mouthful of grass. Lodge very attractive, swimming pool, overlooking watering hole. Elephant, zebra, bush pigs, vultures by pool. 100/- full board. (got a resident’s rate; 50/- bed and breakfast)
Maribou storks assembled outside the Mikumi Lodge, Tanzania
Met an Indian from Zanzibar, small, neat, heavy shock of black hair brushed forward over intense face. Left Z after revolution with British passport. [He thought it entitled him to go to the UK.] Went to Kenya High Commission who confiscated his passport– “You won’t see that again.” He believes they burned it. That was in 1963. His life’s ambition – or dream – is to float off Zanzibar coast on a raft and try to reach Australia. Wants to make it 12 feet wide, 44 feet long, from Mangrove wood.
Two Canadian engineers working on transmission lines alongside the new Tanzam highway. Last section being built from Morogoro to Ngerengere.
One of them talked knowledgably about Tanzania. Says: 11 million people – country has no known wealth (no minerals or oil yet found.) Nyerere [the president] is absolutely honest. Some tribalism (i.e. Some ministers appointing members of own tribe.) But not serious as compared with Kenya. No starvation, but primitive diet. Mostly maize. Per capita GNP $60. Some efforts towards co-operative farming.
Two American embassy wives asking well-meaning questions.
January 29th
Drove on alongside the Great Ruaha river (muddy red) and then across a range of low mountains. Mountains steep-sided, forested, green. Baboons, very beautiful land. Mostly overcast. Some sun at lunchtime.
Off road and up to Iringa for lunch: sambusa, kebab and chai (1 shilling, 70 cents).
First rain shower. Drive on. More heavy rain. Then on and off. Villages very sparse, small, primitive, offering nothing. Meant to stop at Igawa but couldn’t see anything there to keep me. Pushed on to Mbeya. Heavy rain, desolate, big rock barriers gathering heavy cloud, becoming more wild and mournful as light fades. Polaroids deepen gloom. [I was still wearing Polaroid goggles, for want of anything better.]
Everything drenched. Me too.
To Mbeya as night falls. Guest house like seaside boarding house. 50 shilling bed and breakfast. Very expensive, but friendly. Finnish agricultural research officers experimenting with different methods of maize production. Area unexploited. Says southern highlands could feed the whole of East Africa. One acre can produce 6 tons of maize properly farmed (or three tons maize, three tons weed). Asians everywhere travelling “on business.”
[I found the rain very dispiriting. As I said in the book, I think I “missed” Tanzania.]
That’s all for now. I hope I’ve taken your mind off current events for a few happy minutes.
The heat on the road to Mombasa melts the patches on my inner tube, and I’m stuck.
Kibwezi, 18th and 19th January
Could have been just another place. Jumble of buildings on a dirt road. Buses pulling in. Stalls selling fruit and a few vegetables. Main store on the corner (Asian of course).
[I cursed myself for not having what I needed to repair the tube, because of the heat. I got the bike to a BP station and found a post office to phone Lucas. The operator, in his tiny kingdom, treated customers like his subjects.]
Post office was a small room next to the store, with old standard switchboard and a tetchy African gent playing the plugs, very sharp with his customers.
“That is the correct method to deal with this matter.”
[Lucas agreed to send a new tube by car next day. I looked around for somewhere to sleep and chose the “Curry Pot Hotel.”]
Two ‘hotels’. Mine had big front bar with splendid cash counter with bars. Tables, chairs, usual girls with headscarves, loose overalls (blue), and swinging big legs around in loose easy way they have. Smaller room behind, then inner yard, more tables and chairs, one paraffin lamp, rooms off it. “Gents” is a bed of charcoal in cement bay. Lots of corrugated iron, painted. My room is painted silver. Mattress in plastic cover. Pillow too.
Experience transformed by the three men who befriend me. The “insurance” man – plump, floral, on his Yamaha, rescues me in my punctured state. Takes me to Paul Kiviu at BP station where I also meet the policeman, Samson. Two nights in town, drinking endless Tuskers, talking. Very animated first night. Girls are afraid of me – never slept with “Mzungo.” [Swahili word for white man.] One says she’ll come back but doesn’t. Paul works hard to convince them. Second night more philosophical, melancholy – apart from brief flurry of argument about insurance.
Pius, the insurance man says, “Snake bite is not accident because the snake means to bite you.” So, not covered by insurance. This outrages Samson. We invent examples of accidents to prove Pius wrong. But he insists, any misfortune caused by a live thing cannot be an accident.
“What if someone falls on me from the top of a building?” I ask.
Paul reveals his ambition to irrigate his shamba.
“Employment is a bother,” they all agree. Samson will marry in August.
Paul Kiviu, Samson Ndolo, Pius William Mouka.
“Employment is really a bother.” Samson stretched his legs further under the tin-topped table loaded with empty Tusker bottles, and sank lower in his seat. Black night filled the courtyard behind the Currypot Hotel & Restaurant, and a gentle melancholy washed over the four of us. Paul, the BP garage manager at the Kibwezi junction, nodded his head with its little curly brimmed felt hat.
“Oh it is a bother indeed,” he agreed. “You see, this fellow is not free. He is going round town even after his duties are finished and some person may come at any time saying his attendance is sorely needed in case of a sudden crime, or it may be a fatal accident and what and what.”
Paul had his own reasons to deplore employment. His presence at the petrol station was required every day, Sundays included, from seven to seven, although once a month he managed to visit his wife at the farm thirty miles up the road to Nairobi.
“You see I had to leave this company for two hours this evening. I was forced to go, isn’t it. Some stores came for the canteen, so I must go to search the stocks. This can happen at any time, and I don’t know if I have a job tomorrow.
“What is needed here is a thousand and five hundred shillings. Then I can build a tank for water and then I must have a pump and some pipes and I can put water on my farm and grow many things.”
“It is a bother all right,” said Samson. His voice was now almost disembodied. He wore navy blue trousers and shirt with matching cloth covered buttons over a black skin. Faint paraffin light, reflected off the painted corrugated iron walls of the hotel, failed to reach him and his sold, big-boned body dissolved in the darkness like a ghostship in fog. Only the insurance man was plainly visible now. He had a bright flowered shirt flowing over his fine round belly and his pumpkin face gleamed in the lamplight.
[Eventually, that evening, they found a girl who was willing to take a chance on a Mzungo, and a description of the event is better left to Jupiter’s Travels. Next morning the new tube arrived, and I was on my way to Mombasa.]
First rain fell on me. Saw ten elephants under a baobab tree in Tsavo park on way, and a few giraffs. Baboons at an abandoned gas station. Playing with their children.
From Nairobi speedo works for 328 miles, then stops.
[As I entered Mombasa I drew up alongside two European volunteers in an open car.]
Met Kai and Buran in mini-moke. Straight to Castle Hotel for seven course lunch at 14/- [shillings]. Room at Jimeey’s Hotel. Everyone says how hot it is – don’t feel it myself for a day or two, then everything gets sticky.
The Sunshine Club in Kilindini Street. 3/- for a beer. Smashing girls, tested weekly. Good band with soul singer. Acrobats after 11pm. Extramural fees up to 20/-. Many sailors. Best food at Arab-style Duka. Kima chapati with egg 3/-.
Boy who howled outside hotel window for an hour, dribbling with effort, carried off struggling and howling with hands tied behind his back.
Boy with so-called polio legs. [His legs look terribly twisted and deformed.]
“I’m not asking for help. I merely want to find a kind person to appreciate my problem. I have GCE in (various subjects) and have to look for help where I can. I believe God will look after me. You cannot understand now but one day when you also are in trouble you will see. Etc, etc. How can I want a cigarette when I am starving. Even though I haven’t a cent in my pocket I will not ask for money, only some food. But if I had my fare to go back to the shamba I would not be forced to look here for help. 4.50 is all I need, etc.“
Given a shilling.
“Now give me a cigarette.”
Walks off and [as his legs miraculously become normal] starts to dance down the road.
[I spent a day at the brilliant, sugar-white Mombasa beach.]
The beach at Mombasa Beach Hotel. White sand. English, Italian holiday makers.
[Overheard.]
“We do 60% of the BBC’s work, and all for Weekend. I usually get to the office about 7 or 8 but I often don’t leave until 9 or 10. But I go home to bathe and change and then go out to a party or dinner. I absolutely refuse to go home to bed.”
[This is where the fishermen at the Muthaiga club go for their marlin.]
[I went on to visit the island of Lamu, famous for woodcarvings.]
[While there I met the only person on the whole of my four years who was making a journey something like mine.]
Ian Shaw, 25, New Zealander, been travelling 4 years, first on Yamaha 250, now on 350. Through Far East. Thailand, Malaya, India, now Africa. Fell off through speed-wobble in Thailand. Rolled 100 feet and skinned himself like potato. Hospital stretched him out and poured salt over him. Then washed him and put on mercurochrome. Then sent him off. Drove as fast as he could to make maximum miles to Malaya before setting rigid. Attacked and chased by Karachi mob. No reason. Threatened with shooting and incarceration by Tanzania police. Sleeping sickness in Botswana – thought it was malaria. Now thinks he may have bilharzia. Looks very fit and strong.
[Although we never met again, I visited his home in New Zealand on my second big trip. He was away, but his wife was at home. Just a few weeks ago, as I am copying out these notes, his wife called to say he had just died. She sent me a recent picture of him, fifty years on.]
Back in Mombasa spent one and a half hours trying to sell my shillings back to the Kenya Commercial Bank. [Strict currency controls at that time.]
Two nights with Kai and Henning had been pleasant and relaxed. At the Sunshine until 4am first night, finally taking back with me the persistent lady called “Marg” (to no purpose), and ferrying her back to her sister’s room next morning – a room in a thirties bloc called “Warden’s Court”– grey angular building with steel frame windows on unpaved ground. Sister sprawled on bed, face down. Afro wig on chest of drawers. Room clean, painted but stark.
Spent day recovering. Read a Victor Canning detective tale about an unconvincing Irish millionaire called O’Dowda and his improbably beautiful stepdaughters.
Sewed up my trouser hems (at last) and wrapped up sand, millipede, and silver box for Jo. Then bought food for two Danes and American and made a terrible mess trying to cook it on their electric Glowworm stove.
Later went out on a night trip to Fort Jesus – marvellous effect by night – soaring ramparts on hewn rock base with rounded crenellations, sloping back slightly, seeming quite impregnable. – can walk right round it – nothing to break the 16th Century mood – and then round Mombasa port – copper ingots from Zambia, rolling stock, freighters, and a tanker berthed and brightly lit, drums of chemicals strewn around, very little apparent supervision. Road winds between sheds and sidings for about a mile. Yugoslav trucks and trailers. Effect is to draw Africa together.
Remember massive derricks on freighter – forest thick. Locomotive with cyclops eye. Kikuyu guard. Tall suave – “You can pass”.
Leaving Mombasa, Monday, 27th
Left next morning, reluctantly, in cloudy weather. Mood of uncertainty developed into deep anxiety – quite inexplicable – which grew worse. Realised that this was a phenomenon to deal with and explain. No apparent rational basis, but undeniably I felt unsafe, threatened. Thought of Ian Shaw’s episode with Tanzanian police – “I can take you out and shoot you, or a I can put you somewhere where nobody will ever find you. We are the law here.” Was it that? Unlikely. When had I felt similar mood before? During second week in Nairobi just ten days before – though had done nothing then to precipitate it. Temptation to read omens, foresee disaster. Should one submit and delay action? Weather is unsettled, very humid. Hot waves of fetid air blow across the road from areas of forest recently drenched by showers. First time I have smelled that tropical hothouse vegetable smell. I drive very carefully, gingerly – anticipating accidents where I would not normally. On the ramp of the ferry at the southern exit from Mombasa.
Some drops of rain hit me, and I seem to be heading for black saturated cloud with dark streaks of rain below. Then road veers away at last moment and circles the gloom. Can’t help reading supernatural significance into it – a general reprieve. Lightens my mood but does not dispel it. At the border I am still uneasy, particularly as I am telling (for the first time) a modified story of my identity and purpose. I am a builder bound for Botswana. No idea of going further south.
[The newly independent post-colonial countries are deeply suspicious and hostile towards anyone with connections to White Rhodesia and South Africa.]
Kenya customs man engages me in an elaborate conversation about my journey, my views on Kenya, on Britain and the effect on it of losing its colonies. I am very wary. It sounds like a polite political screening. The policeman at the gate observes the sword and says it is an offensive weapon and therefore illegal. He is smiling and full of jokes, but I still feel he might do something about it. On the Tanzanian side the examination is more cursory. I am asked to show my traveller’s cheques. A slight schoolmasterly fellow in a light suit and specs suggests that he change my Kenya money. There will be no need to record it on the document, since I will be spending it immediately, no doubt. He is obviously going to cash it on the black market himself and wants no record of its existence. I let him get away with it gladly, feeling that it may buy me some protection. Against what? I don’t know, but the feeling of precariousness is still with me, and I feel the need of any security. He is a lousy advertisement for Nyerere [President of Tanzania] however. Then the storm breaks, and a short deluge descends on the tin roofs.
I have missed my last opportunity to buy petrol 30 miles back. The Michelin map has let me down. There is no longer petrol at Lunga Lunga, due to lack of business they say. A Mercedes drives up – TZ plates, and I solicit a couple of litres from two tall, well-dressed Africans. “You’d better wait and see if they let us through first. If not, you can take the whole car.”
Afterwards the driver lets me siphon a litre or so but stops me then. I have only a five-shilling piece and offer it to him. He takes it saying it’s not much use to him – but it’s worth more than twice the petrol he gave me.
That’s all for now. See you next week.
Yesterday Lucas flew me to a remote tribal area, home of the Turkana, north of Nairobi and close to Lake Rudolph. This is my second day.
Lodwar, January 10th
[Outside the hospital, on the sand with Doctor ”Jerry” who invited me here. We’re waiting for the flying doctor who does operations.]
Outdoor surgery. Doctor arrives in LandRover. Soon a woman arrives with her baby boy. But no interpreter. Crowd gathers. Finally, George [the interpreter] gets there. One child on point of collapse with TB, malaria. Very far gone. Will die. Others with mild cough, OK.
“I can tell the healthy ones now from their skin and general appearance. Use methods of diagnosis which are old-fashioned in UK now.“
Old lady eyes almost closed and full of sticky liquid. “They leave these things so long.” An infection that gradually closes the eye until they turn up and scrape the lashes on the eyeball, causing inflammation. She will wait until the Flying Doctors do the next batch of eye ops.
Little boy has his mother worried because his testicles are the wrong shape. Jerry lays him in the sand. Sits him up, and lays him down again. Then: “Tell her it’s all right. There’s nothing wrong. It’s only the shape of the skin.”
Old woman has headaches, then her left arm goes numb.
“Arterial disease is almost unknown here. They hardly ever get old enough.”
Fifty is old in Turkana. The patients are made to queue up by George.
Jerry insists on words like “patient,” “prognosis,” etc. They seem very strange here.
He looks at them one by one, while the others look on curiously, perhaps one minute, five at most. On the back of some obsolete buff forms, torn in half, he prints her name as spelled out by George. The words usually mean “under the fruit tree” or “by the river” or “in the big rain.” And record the circumstances of birth. Then he scribbles his diagnosis, a treatment if it’s straightforward. And tells them to come in next day.
He can handle most things that turn up but has a hard time getting blood to pull back the really desperate cases. He lost a small boy the day before for want of hydrocortisone and has a limited arsenal of drugs. On the other hand, they work much more efficiently where the recuperative well-springs have not been muddied by exposure to drugs before. He thinks the Lodwar hospital loses about the same proportion of patients who could theoretically have lived as a good Western hospital – but the reasons are different.
Pain threshold is much higher. They hate hanging about in hospitals. They insist on sleeping outside on the pathway or in the sand.
No graves except for special cases. Bodies are thrown out for hyenas and vultures. Very little concern for suffering of others, except in family. People die in the ward and nobody thinks to call the doctor. Father will come in and shove sick child off the bed to make room for himself.
Native medicine is extensive. If there is internal pain or deformity the skin is cut around the affected area, in many small incisions, half inch long. Doctor can often follow the course of a growth by these cuts and the newness of them. They have their natural remedies too.
[Immanuel, in the straw hat, is the son of the Mzee, or Chief. He loves pranks, interfering with the fake authenticity. The other “Westerner” is a hospital assistant.]
Immanuel and the Mzee: “With one spear we can kill a lion or an elephant or a giraffe.” Accurate at 20ft. “The Turkana will never change their customs. We want more schools so that children can get good jobs in city and send money back to their parents. But they will never forget their tribe. Only the bad ones.”
“If any other tribe tries to overcome us we will beat them.”
Invincible. Killing another man adds no particular glory or lustre. A little extra respect, but nothing compared to ownership of animals. No indication that a person’s life can be improved other than by material things.
Immanuel says girls have to be very careful not to give the impression of greed. Before marriage they avoid at all costs letting a man see them eating, often going without food for long periods if men are around. If by chance she is seen, she will try to marry immediately before the word gets out.
The most respected men have up to 15 wives. Immanuel’s father has 500 cattle, 1000 goats, plus camels, donkeys etc.
Remember how the girls walk, leather skins polished and rounded to the shape of their buttocks, switching from side to side. There is obvious pride in being able to do this well. They move always in a very girlish way, a movement one only sees among professional dancers in Europe in folk ballet. The pronounced arching of the back, which is natural to Africans, has much to do with it.
[I was flown back to Nairobi the next day.]
Nairobi, Friday January 11th
To the movies to see “All cops are ???”
Could have been any British cinema, but for the pepper on the peanuts. Pretty ugly impression of life in London (Battersea).
[I spent another week in Nairobi. With the bike nicely serviced, and with a new set of pannier bags across my tank and new tyres and innertubes, I set out for Mombasa. Then 150 miles down the road, at Kibwezi Junction, I had a puncture, which led to even more intimate relations with the native population.]
See you next week, Cheers.
