AFRICANA BOOKS

Of Nkungu and Bwatu - Impressions of Malawi

2011-02-03T08:25:00.000+02:00

Africana Votes & Views #22

Chileka Airport could be anywhere in tropical Africa. The overwhelming impression is sticky heat, a maelstrom of perspiring humanity and shabby buildings. The immigration and customs people are courteous, and entry is painless; my host’s air-conditioned car awaits. We wend our way through haphazard, undesignated roads – some seriously damaged by a recent downpour and looking more like riverbeds than streets. Where the jumble of business premises and market stalls don’t line the roads, there are brick walls or high fences – except the few that have been undercut by the floods and have tumbled down.

The house is halfway up a lofty hill, which from afar shows the scars of human cultivation, as well as the havoc of erosion, with a few patches of primeval forest between. At first we drive on a public road – the Old Zomba Road – which still sports the odd patch of tar between boulders and gullies; bordered by sprouting fields of mealies and pumpkins. I am told each Malawian gets a free allocation of fertilizer and seed – they find their own spaces where they can plant their subsistence crops. Then the private driveway, of exaggerated rounded profile to shed the water, and to capture the washed-out sand and gravel – it snakes through natural forest with manicured lawns beneath. A mountain stream roars down a contained, granite-lined ravine, rolling large boulders in the spate; or trickling musically between pools when it doesn’t rain. The house is impossibly large, lofty, intricate – consisting of many afterthoughts and alterations. There is a bamboo forest at the rear, an attempt at a vegetable garden stepping up the slope, and a bougainvillea which has destroyed the pergola in front of the house, and which is now growing in and out of the cool, dark verandah, with a muscular stranglehold on a pillar within the structure.

Three large dogs and one smaller one roam the grounds. They sleep in a miniature stable out at the back of the kitchen. Occasionally during the day or night, one hears the baying of the pack in the woods. In the not too distant past it was hyaenas and leopards that made their occasional appearance. Now it might be a jackal, or even a stray bitch on heat. The deadliest animals around could be the snakes, of which there are plenty in the thick undergrowth and trees – but actually they are eclipsed by the mosquitoes. Despite smoke coils, insect repellents, mosquito nets and industrial-sized fans to blow the pestering hordes out of the windows, the question would seem not to be if one gets malaria – but rather, when?

On a cooler and cloudy day we take a drive to Mount Mulanje. This part of the country seems to consist of a gently convex, fertile, green valley, stretching as far as the eye can see, interrupted by scenic humps and spires of inselbergs interspersed between the tea and coffee plantations and maize fields. Mulanje is a brooding, majestic eminence grise, with its very own patch of climate draped over the peaks, slopes and tables – whimsically dumping a shower here and there to feed the foaming cataracts that streak the grey and green cliffs. Three times the height of Table Mountain and reputed to have a fiendishly difficult climbing-face of over a kilometer and a half in height. In winter frost is not uncommon on the higher plateaus, and snow has been seen.

The countryside bordering the road (and indeed all of Malawi that I travelled through) is suffering from a peculiar mania. There are brick kilns everywhere. Like Mayan temples and pyramids, each little brick building has its own pile of bricks, or an unfinished or a burnt-out stack next to it. Millions upon millions of bricks made with the rich red clay and the lush forests of hardwood, of which there are only odd trees remaining in the watercourses. It should be called “Bricklandia”. Not that the houses are that grand. The impression is of more half-built and ruined edifices than completed ones. The style is simple in the extreme – mostly single brick construction, with the odd flying buttress to support an unsteady architecture. Cement is expensive and often unobtainable, I am told, so this industry must have been one of the misplaced skills passed on by the early missionaries after Livingstone – and taken to extremes by the locals.

There are goats everywhere; often tethered in pairs, with a long thong between them – to slow them down if the urge took them to run into the road, perhaps? Strangely enough there are no cows to be seen in the south and I am told that there are still sporadic outbreaks of the bovine disease spread by the tsetse fly – nagana – as well as human sleeping sickness in some spots. Dogs also are largely absent and by the end of the day I have yet to see more than half a dozen skeletal pi-dogs.

Wherever there are no fields of sprouting maize interspersed with houses, there are villages. Under a huge fig tree in the main road, a horde of bicycles is parked .On the roads there is much two-wheeled traffic; anything from bikes piled high with elongated bags of charcoal, to a three metre length of rolled-up roofing sheet seeking a catastrophic conclusion with a passing motor vehicle. But most often these conveyances have a passenger or two – or three aboard. Housewives with children strapped to back, hip or front; bags of fresh produce or groceries dangling on either side and holding the occasional parasol providing a little oasis of shade. These are taxis. The luggage carriers are often tailor-made by the local smiths – but not for comfort, since they are spartan in the extreme, with a thin, plastic-covered foam padding providing some relief during the excruciating ride. The odd taxi even has a number or name at the back - or would that be the name of the perspiring pedaller?

A wild kaleidoscope of colour by the roadside – a clothes-market – known locally by the charming name of ‘Bendown’. Because the wares are mostly spread out across the ground, on sheets of cloth or grass mats: to shop, you have to ‘bend down’. These markets are not only useful to the locals, but even the well-off Europeans find the odd cast-off treasure from the noted fashion houses of Paris, London and Milan there, since the wares are donated in bulk by foreign charities, and have spawned a whole industry in Central Africa. Obviously China is also making inroads into this marketplace with their lookalike Nikes and Rheeboks, as well as synthetic tops shrieking American catch-phrases and brand names.

We buy a full rattan lounge suite from a young man by the side of the road. Two double-seaters, and two singles; well-crafted on a hardwood frame, in the style already popular in Victorian times. I am told through an interpreter that these have taken him about four to six weeks to make – he’s not too sure, as one day is very much like another. The asking price – about R800 ($113) for the lot. Maybe they grow the raw material themselves, but it still seems an awfully meagre reward for so much work.

Back at the house the thunder rolls over the hills and short, sharp showers fall. The dance of the fireflies commences at dusk, and I am transported back to the Transvaal Lowveld in the 1950s – the last time I can recall seeing this magical display in numbers. One static light signals frantically, suspended in mid-air, caught up in a spider’s web. Then as if by prearrangement, all is darkness out there and only the clicking of tree-frogs punctuates the murmuring of the brook.
Some days later our heavily laden caravan departs north, towards Chinteche. The lush landscape changes subtly, from the city’s urban sprawl to the almost ubiquitous scattered settlements that seem to line all main roads. The traffic, mostly pedestrian, manpowered and animal, is staggering. All of the nation appears to be on the move. The roads are quite good, but heavy rains inevitably erode the verges, and sunken bare ‘bays’ appear, ready to wreck the unwary travellers’ suspension. Best to be wide awake and ready for evasive manoeuvres.

Along the road thousands of strange bundles are stacked, tall plastic sacks, with a basketry bonnet to extend the capacity, filled with charcoal, each probably representing a sizeable chunk of hardwood tree – the National Energy Commission of the poor. There are unthreatening police roadblocks every now and then. They ask where one is going to, and where one hails from, but have no real interest in your answers. It is their task to control the movement of charcoal into the cities, I hear. A wise move; since complete deforestation of the rural regions is the likely alternative.

The landscape changes from scattered forest, to canefields, to cultivated lands dotted with innumerable Baobab trees. We cross streams, rivers, broad wetlands and eroded gorges with a trickle of water at the bottom. I am told that more than two hundred streams enter the lake, loaded with silt and nutrients from the highlands that loom not far from the lacustrine borders. This is an unexpectedly mountainous country, gashed by the southern end of the Rift Valley, which descends to more than two hundred metres below sea-level at the bottom of the lake, while the plateaus tower over two thousand metres high. We get our first glimpses of the lake. On the horizon the light cloud in the sky blends with the water. Low gallery forest sweeps down the slopes of Kuwirbi mountain, right down to the lakeshore. Sweeping white beaches, a few rocks looming like prehistoric monsters from the waves.

Seven long hours and over five hundred kilometers later – Chinteche town. We enter along the main road – and if you close your eyes as you sneeze, you've missed it. Yet if you turn off, there is a typical small African village; a bustling street, with 'fresh produce' markets, a warren of rickety stalls and steep alleyways; carpenters and tinsmiths working on their projects and further on the street is lined with shabby shopfronts. The preponderant impression is overcrowding; too many bodies jostling each other; too many products competing for display space. One emporium is truly noteworthy. One could call it a hardware store, yet clothes compete with toiletries, car spares are not uncommon and sit cheek by jowl with plumbing gear. Only two customers at a time though – there's no space for more – but you could stand on the veranda while the tailor shortens your trousers, or another repairman fiddles with your appliances or bicycle. We buy some eggs, a few more potatoes, some paraffin (kerosene). Then on to the house on the beach.

We are greeted by white-clad servants; the major-domo, Mr Chirwa, his apprentice son, Noel, and the gardener Hannock. While they unpack, I wander through the huge lounge and straight onto the beach and into the water thirty metres away from the verandah. My hostess, a friend and I walk along the long, curved beach; straight into the setting sun. Dugouts lie scattered on the sands like blackened, overripe bananas; the tang of spicy hardwood fires pervades the air, occasionally interrupted by the gagging stench of fermenting cassava drying on a flat rock. Fine seine-nets are laid out neatly to dry under thatched shelters; these are legal, with mesh of about an inch. From the size of the whitebait on sale at the markets, one knows that nets with a mesh that mosquitoes would have trouble getting through are also used.

Speaking of the latter, they are ubiquitous, voracious and seemingly on duty 24/7. My hosts use industrial-size fans which sound like Cessnas about to take off to 'blast the little bastards back onto the lake'. The theory sounds good, but I see no diminution in the numbers of hungry beasts circling us as we sit having our sundowners by the light of evil-smelling hurricane lamps. The much-praised repellents, coils and both spray and sticky gunge stick, seem to be greeted with roars of approval by the hungry hordes. Two fireflies greet us with joyous gyrations and the fat geckoes scurry over the white walls, snatching a rich harvest from the patches of light. Out of the dark penumbra of the hurricane lights, three indistinct spectres shuffle closer, each holding a lethal-looking machete. The security squad – average age about 75 at a guess. They pay their respects to the ‘bwana’ and ‘dona’ and deploy their forces over the property. These old men are minor chiefs, whose efficacy lies in the respect in which they are held by the locals, not their physical attributes or their lethal weapons. A novel idea, or maybe just an ancient convention from a kinder age.

Morning – and the first sight that greets me is a bloated raider, sitting on the inside of the mosquito net. I take revenge with the can of insect spray after donning my reading glasses. The battle lasts ten minutes and I harvest twenty fallen as evidence – but there may be more dead under the bed. You are always thirsty; only nine degrees south of the equator and at six a.m. the sun is already blindingly high and it feels like high noon as you sit, drinking your first cup of coffee on the veranda. Kids, barely into their teens, paddle past, perched precariously astride their distorted dugouts – the hollowed-out section of the tree-trunk far too narrow to accommodate their bodies. A group of shrieking naked black waterbabies tumble in the minuscule waves. This morning, out of a placid, unruffled lake, long rollers appear. In no time at all the roar of the surf is too alluring – I go body-surfing in four-foot breakers – lovely. The water is warm and you need to wade out a hundred metres to immerse yourself up to your chin. Lenses of cooler water pass over you as the swells pass. Distinctly soothing, but in the back of one's mind lurks the memory of a sixteen-foot croc patrolling the beach some years back, as does the image of a hippo rearing out of the depths behind an unwitting bather. You relegate those dark thoughts as you dive through the crystal-clear waters.

It is easy to morph into a lotus eater. Wake, drink coffee, watch the sun rise over the lake and the hint of blue hills on the Mozambique side of the water, watch the villagers fishing. Read a book or two, have lunch under the trees in front of the cottage next door, nap a little, go for a walk, cool off in the clear waters, make a slight contribution to cooking supper, do some serious damage to a bottle or two of wine and drop off again to the muted roar of the wavelets on the beach outside your window, listen to the patter of rain and the rumble of the thunderstorms as they pass. Twice a day sleek herds of picturesque Nguni cattle are driven past to and from pasture. If the weather is favourable, a crowd of villagers row out a seine net and pull it in for a few fish. If they are lucky, they come to offer us bunches of chambo for sale, as the local tilapia delicacy is called. The tropical evenings are spent on the veranda, overlooking the dark lake, bejewelled with coronets of moving, winking lights that the fleet of fishermen use to bring the fish to the surface. That is the pattern of the day.

We rouse ourselves to go on an excursion to the ‘capital of the north’, Mzuzu. The road northwards to Nkata Bay is a pretty, sun-dappled drive through rubber forests; tall, slim, trees, each with its oblique tattoo of cuts and collecting cup attached to the trunk. Children offer balls of raw rubber to the passing traffic – but who needs to break a toe on one of these? And yes – I saw a bunch of barefooted kids playing soccer with one of these toe-crushers in a village along the road. We drive up into the mountains. The vegetation is jungly; the slopes steeper, but everywhere the rich brown fields of cassava and maize are bandaged round them - until the next heavy rain washes away the terraces and the chocolate brew lands in the lake, leaving another furrowed hillside to erode further with each rainy season.

Mzuzu is reminiscent of what the Indian hill-stations must have looked like. It is cloudy and cooler. The streets are chaotic but a number of newer businesses are springing up between the myriad government agencies, Indian emporiums and all the tatterdemalion micro-industry that belongs to an African town – pardon, that should be ‘city’. We meet a friend of a friend at an establishment known as the Zoo - as in Mzuzuzoo – an establishment where voyagers meet, sleep, live, eat and especially, drink – while nights are probably blue with the smoke of chamba-weed.

The place is run by a skeletal, barefooted, grey-locked man in a tatty, faded kikoi; he has many miles on the clock and his eyes stare vacantly through you .Or maybe the boss could be his slightly more corpulent sidekick who keeps on rushing in and out for better reception on his cellphone, to hold loud conversations. Then there's the man staggering unco-ordinatedly about, half a pair of glasses held on to his head with a rubber band - or even the Rasta type with the only lively, wide grin in the place. The staff and clientele are indistinguishable to the casual observer – all seem to be doing duty behind the bar and in the kitchen as well as drinking and eating. The food's not too bad and has the added attraction of being cheap. ‘Sorry dudes, no mince today, the butcher's bust his mincer’. A lanky black familiar, the cat, occupies the last vacant chair at our table. Since we don't dish up anything in front of him, he sneaks onto our laps and plays interested spectator to the action on the plate. He is rewarded with a few short ends of generic sausage; after the meal he laps up leftover mash and crunches chips. Times are tough.

The walls are painted in gaudy, often discernibly mixed patches of leftover paint. Graffiti in many languages, pop art images, the odd photo of favoured passers-through. The furniture has graced many different habitations before. The toilet's plastered with flyers of places to go to – with inevitable comments added, ranging from ‘supercool’ to ‘bummer’. The sleeping accommodation varies from camping in the long grass out back, to an elderly caravan, a bed in a dormitory or the full luxury of a room. The friend's friend we met arrived ten years back from Burundi in a clapped-out 2CV Citroën, which made it as far as the corner of the yard. He and his girl lived in it for a month before scratching together some funds for better accommodation. Now just the faded red wreck remains hidden by man-high weeds, sinking lower into the red clay at every rain.

On the way back we buy some mushrooms from the kids at the roadside; the size of small dinner plates, R8 (just over a dollar) for five. They also have bowls of red bulbous ones, up to the size of a fist, but they don't look quite as appetising as ours. Just afterwards in the middle of nowhere we pass a long, low building proclaiming itself to be the Eassy by Day Grocery on one end, while the other half sez it is the Eassy by Night Bar. Stores and businesses in rural Africa have endearingly naïve and sometimes unconsciously humorous appellations.

We return tired out by the day's drive; my host has a moment's inattention to the track less than a hundred metres from home, and the truck slithers off the soft, sandy, raised road into the ditch. The 4x4 solution just doesn’t make the grade, and the vehicle digs itself deeper into the soft sand.Even some herculean efforts of roadmaking, pushing and a last-ditch attempt as night falls doesn't do the trick. The vehicle has to be left teetering on two wheels for the night, guarded by an ancient watchman, nodding the hours of darkness away, since it doubles as a cashbox for our finances. Next morning some innovative thinking by Mr Chirwa sees the truck back on the road.

We make another trip to Nkhata where rumour has it that a Honey Producers Co-operative is operating. With much difficulty, we locate a man who takes us there - a clearing in the jungle, right next to where a square kilometre of raw, red earth, and gargantuan piles of primeval forest logs are stacked to make way for a hospital. A bright young man greets us and explains his business to us. We stand in a room literally buzzing with activity – hundreds of bees trying to lick up each last trace of their stolen supplies. There are hundreds of litres of honey; most of it comes from the flowering of the ubiquitous mango tree, with a dash of jungle produce during the off-season – but this latter source of nectar is now threatened by the clearing and probable further development. We get our containers filled, and during this process, two bees do the Kamikaze thing by diving straight into the descending stream entering the bottle. Like a fly in amber they float entombed in their precious food.

We return, and for the first time I encounter roadkill; a dead dog. We nearly contribute another when a young goat makes tracks for our radiator – but is saved at the last millisecond by a smart about turn. I am told that road deaths for the country are higher than in South Africa – that’s some record to beat! Though villages and roadside settlements often have a faded 50 km/h sign posted, as well as having pedestrian crossings with stop signs – no one takes a blind bit of notice. Cars charge through at speed, children, animals, pedestrians and cyclists scatter in the dance of death. On the open road the speed limit is 80, but only the overloaded, elderly, smoke-belching matatus (minibus taxis) observe that; most others seem to travel one and a half times that speed. This on roads that follow the contours of a hilly terrain, much like an irrigation furrow; often with a colonial-era tarmac surface, which has crumbled under fifty years of tropical sun, not to speak of innumerable potholes and subsidences. Repair work is certainly in progress - large squares of surface have been excavated, ready for filling in – but when? Each completed patch has a number painted in white next to it – I am told this is to make tendering for the work easier, and it obviates false claims for work done.

Back at the house the new area chief comes to introduce himself. An unassuming, slight man, who takes off his sandals before joining us on the terrace – a hangover from the colonial era, still practiced. He sits down with us and is offered a Coke. A stilted conversation ensues, a trial for both parties, as we desperately search for common topics. The health, marital condition, number of children, previous career (greenkeeper at the bowling club in Blantyre) are explored; next the status of common acquaintances, a regrettable number of whom have 'passed', some due to old age, but many because of malaria, complicated by the high incidence of AIDS. As soon as decently possible, the ill at ease chief departs with mutual expressions of esteem.

Ominous mini-tornadoes of nKungu (minute lake flies) erupt from the lake after the passage of a light thunderstorm. Trillions of them form dark clouds, visible over the lake at a distance of several kilometers, which swirl, peak, subside and then reform, all the time preyed on by squadrons of swallows and martens. The chief had told us they would come ashore after new moon, but none of us knew exactly when that was. Another plague of insects looms. When I return to my room one night, my wet swimming shorts I had hung to dry outside the window are covered with what looks like pink sand. It is a mess of tiny flies. The nkungu have arrived. During the ensuing days, women and children run through the lakeshore woods, holding shallow baskets, which are swung in wild swipes to capture a caking of the tiny, nutritious prey. These are prepared and preserved in different ways. When asked whether nkungu are a blessing or a curse, Mr Chirwa said 'they are blest'. Another way in which the lake feeds the people on its shores.

We visit a carpentry shop in Chinteche. Massive panelled doors everywhere; window-frames, cabinets; quite well-made considering the basic tools that are used – all hand-tools, it seems. There are small anomalies and imperfections, of course; some joints though well crafted are not a snug fit, nor is the right angle unduly revered. The variety of local timber makes an old lumberman's mouth water. There is a wealth of tropical hardwood as well as softwood like rubber, casuarina and the odd cedar. Shades are from almost dead white through yellow and green-brown and reds to the darkest mahogany. My hands would itch to get stuck into some furniture creation again if I lived here. One drawback – none of the wood has been seasoned properly; your door might still have been growing a month ago, so some warping and the occasional split is inevitable. The speed with which these unsophisticates can work out a relatively complicated design's price, is breathtaking. The item is reduced to the requisite number of standard-sized planks required (of which they know the price off by heart) a ridiculously small amount is added for labour, and you have your quote in minutes. You agree to it. No written contract, order or signature – just a nay or yea, and if the work is not too large, you are told it won't be finished today – but you can come to collect it a day later. We take the main man along to the house to give us an in situ quote for some kitchen cupboards, window frames and a gargantuan outside diner. Our man quotes quite laughable prices and a seemingly impossibly short delivery time. When asked about this, he admits readily that a number of his competitors/co-operators are going to help – it will be a village effort.

Our afternoon swim is a bore – the lake is dead calm and warm though there are storms all about. Later a soft rain starts which cools things down and for the first night at the lake I need a sheet over me. The morning is cloudy and dead calm. Over breakfast I pluck up enough courage to get Mr Chirwa to ask the gardener, Hannock (who has some connection with the little fishing settlement a few hundred metres down the lakeshore – and thus usufruct of a bwatu, as the dugouts are known hereabouts) to give me an hour of his time as well as assistance should the inevitable capsize occur.

In no time at all the matter is arranged with the explicit promise of a payment of R8 (a little more than $1) to the boat's owner, and the implied carrot of a 'prizie', as a tip or bonus is known hereabouts, for Hannock. A few minutes later the (thankfully) largest dugout appears with the diminutive gardener at the business end. I gird my loins for action and prepare for several dunkings. He invites me to step INTO the bwatu, and to my surprise it doesn't immediately turn turtle; more credit to Hannock's seamanship. We head out and though, inevitably, I make the boat wobble, the water is so dead calm, that after a few strokes I boldly call for the paddle. No problem; I sit astride the leviathan and paddle away lustily. We zig-zag, we do a clockwise circle, then an anti-clockwise one for good measure. 'Concentrate', I say to myself; I alter my steering technique to wide sweeps with the paddle; the circling stops and we are off towards a small archipelago of rocky outcrops a few hundred metres away.

Every now and then the Titanic gets a whim to veer wildly, but I'm getting the hang of it and steer the beast through the perilous waters with only a minor bump and scrape over the submerged reef that has probably claimed dozens of lives. We return in triumph. Just prior to landing I hop overboard – just to see how difficult it is to get back again. No problem. Hannock gives me the reassuring news that capsized bwatus do not float. Malawian fishermen do not swim as a rule, yet on this Friday morning, the lake is full of naked squirts in dugouts, who should be on school benches – and the wind is rising. With such diversions it's no wonder that playing hookey is a national pastime.

Nightfall brings a heavy thunderstorm, the power cuts out repeatedly following lightning strikes on the electricity grid and the nkungu, while not in choking masses, are round us, omnipresent, in swirling swarms that make us flail, snort, spit and scratch. On the walls the geckoes rush about, tails lashing with excitement, bats and martins swoop round the lights and a lonely leaf frog vocalises his pleasure from the depths of a large potplant. Our table is littered with tiny corpses; it is best to overlook the contents of your wineglass as you drink – and to pretend your food has had a generous grind of black pepper. The alternative could be to get angry, go mad or hungry. You creep into bed by the light of a tiny headlamp, which you extinguish pronto and ignoring the somewhat gritty feel of the sheets, you determinedly go to sleep under your entirely useless mosquito net. In the morning the air is thick with the smoke from the ineffective mosquito coils and the fact that all windows have been shut for the past day; your mouth tastes like a rubbish pit in Bophal and you can hardly get your eyelids up. There has to be a serpent or two in every paradise. We saw several real ones, but it was more a case of insects in the ointment that proved to be trying.

A holiday has to end. We leave on cool and cloudy Sunday; the lake was just another grey expanse blended into the sky. Farewells over, largesse distributed, we hit the road, already crowded with worshippers returning home from the hundreds of churches belonging to dozens of denominations, including a few home-grown varieties, it seems. Revellers, either leftovers from Saturday night or the early Sunday barflies, staggered dangerously along the ragged edges of the tar road. Trade seemed brisk in most villages, but there were few tillers in the fields.

After a few hours I took over the wheel and my host could rest while I concentrated on my task. While the human traffic behaved sensibly in the main, some of the goats, cows and chickens displayed suicidal tendencies, seemingly hell-bent on ending up as Sunday dinner. Barely through the town of Salima, I saw what looked like a bundle of black and grey rags lying in the middle of the road. I moved over so as to straddle the obstruction, which the high-clearance 4x4 could easily clear. To my horror it suddenly morphed into an awakening goat, raising its head. A bump followed by several more; I slowed instinctively and looked in the rearview mirror to see the corpse rolling across the road. 'Don't stop – drive on', came the advice from my co-pilot, 'you only stop if you hit a person, in which case, contrary to urban legend, the locals won't kill you.' He related an incident in which he had killed a goat during an official trip while accompanied by a local politician. As he was unsure of what protocol to follow, he stopped the car and turned to his companion in a panic to ask how they would find the owner. That worthy told him to open the boot of his car, slung in the carcass and remarked blandly that 'it looked like a ministerial goat to him, now.' End of problem. An animal fatality, from chicken to cow, is best left to the locals to convert into fast food – the alternative could mean endless delays and inordinate claims for compensation.

A few more days on the steamy hillside above the city, then I am on my way ‘back south’ and the ‘warm heart of Africa’ is just a warm memory in this southerner’s heart.

(The above are personal impressions, with an odd explanatory note, nothing more. I saw a little of the lovely country, met a few people and much friendliness. I looked at a third-world country from the perspective of another, slightly more developed third-world country, which had very similar conditions a mere half century ago, and which I experienced then. It was a journey back in time.)

Wheels Across the Desert

2010-10-20T09:08:00.000+02:00

Africana Votes & Views #21

There are not many experiences that can compare with taking in a sunset over a vast arid landscape which dwarfs mountains and dunes; or lying down under a bejewelled black canopy that is only separated from one’s face by the thinnest sheet of an icy breeze; watching the fiery streak of meteorites – which once or twice in a lifetime you may actually hear arrive – in an explosion and a brilliant flash of light. Think of it as being a near neighbour to a cosmic catastrophe!

The other side of the coin is being squarely on the anvil of the sun-god, Ra, on a summer noon; no spot of shade except in, or under your broken-down or bogged motor vehicle; a little tingle of apprehension in the pit of your stomach; an extra measure of perspiration cooling your brow. Or while you wrap your face in stifling layers of cloth as you peer out at the ochre world of the sandstorm with slitted eyes poorly sheltered behind dark glasses. You love or loathe deserts; many people do both – just depending on the circumstance they find themselves in.

Back in 1967 I became the happiest man alive when my foreman woke me up after a long, cold night-shift on the drill, to ask me if I wanted to take on a job in the Namib. I spent the next three and a half years there, in the valley of the Khan River, being alternately fried and frozen, parched inland, or dripping in the coastal fog as we went on weekend fishing expeditions. I explored the mountains, the canyons, the dunefields and the saltflats. I drove my little Japanese station-wagon into improbable places – and mostly out again, though I had to walk once or twice, or wait an entire night for help on a deserted road. Then I was given a works Landrover, and I could choose even more difficult places to get stuck in. Finally I had had enough of the adventure and I came back to the Transvaal. Since then I have returned a dozen times or more to the Namib as well as the Kalahari, Namaqualand and Bushmanland. In addition I have read and collected dozens of books on desert travel, mainly through the Sahara and Sahel, the Northern Frontier District of Kenya and the Sudan, the Namib, Kalahari and Namaqualand, as well as the Australian and American deserts, the Gobi and Taklamakan in Asia and Arabia Deserta. So let’s have a look at some of what Africa has to offer by way of motorised travel.

In 1923 M et Mme Andre Citroën graced the departure of an extraordinary little mechanised column, consisting of five 10 hp ‘autochenilles’ or half-tracks from Touggourt in Algeria on a twenty-day epic first crossing of the Sahara to Timbuctoo in present-day Niger. At approximately the same time Prince Kamel el Din Hussein fitted out six ‘Box Fords’ and three of the Citroëns to explore the Egyptian hinterland and to establish a route to the oases at Dakhla and Kharga. They had less good fortune that the French to the westward – out of nine vehicles, only four made it back from the relatively short journey, as described by the British Transport OC, Major C S Jarvis in Three Deserts (John Murray, 1936), yet by the early 1930s a Hungarian nobleman, László Almásy, accompanied by three Britons was sent out by the Prince, and he had more success. He used an aeroplane as well as cars in his quest to find the legendary oasis of Zerzura, but instead discovered major prehistoric rock art sites, including the Cave of Swimmers in Jebel Uweinat, the highest mountain of the Eastern Sahara, and at Gilf Kebir. An English translation of his work was published under the title of The Unknown Sahara (1934), but I have only read a later German version. The film The English Patient is loosely based on some of Almásy’s wartime exploits.

Back to the Citroëns in Algeria. Once the possibility of this momentous north-south crossing had been confirmed, further plans were laid and another, larger and more ambitious expedition of eight of these tank-like little vehicles was dispatched in 1925. This time their target was to cross the Sahara and then the entire continent from West to East Africa. The two authors, Haardt and Audouin-Dubreuil, were each in ‘command’ of one of their fleet, and the book The Black Journey (G Bles, 1928) will give you disjointed chapter and verse, dreadfully ill-translated from flowery French, with numerous errors zoological and botanical (despite the presence of a naturalist and a geographer in the party). Of the great erg and hamada (sand & stone) desert they crossed, very little is described – due mainly to the inordinate respect the voyageurs had for the heat of the sun; they charged across the landscape mainly in the hours of darkness and spent the days huddled in a laager made with their vehicles and canvas for shade. On this trip they turned West at Gao and headed towards Lake Chad along the northern Nigerian boundary. The expedition’s subsequent adventures are described luridly as they progress toward the Indian Ocean in daylight, sparing the reader none of the indescribable hardships, dangers from cannibals and ferocious beasts. On the other hand one has to take into account that the administration of the Belgian Congo utilised some forty thousand of the locals ‘for a few months’ to chop a 700km open trail through the forests to facilitate the lads’ progress on their patch – for which much appreciation is expressed. Re-supply depots had been established by road, water and air during the previous two years, so the intrepids did not go without all home-comforts for too long. In Uganda they split up into four groups, who made their way down towards the coast at Mombasa, Dar-es-Salaam, Mozambique and even Cape Town, before they embarked to finish the journey triumphantly at Antananarivo. Altogether an ode to colonialism, mainly of the French variety, yet an important, but tedious little work to read.

As the authors mention, people were almost queuing up to repeat the experience. In no time at all a regular freight and mail service was instituted linking the Mediterranean and the French African colonies. The French geographer Emile Gautier commented in his classic work, Sahara, the Great Desert (Columbia University Press, 1935, rev ed) that the Western route was for people in a hurry to get to the Niger Bend, and he commented on the absurdity of camel trains being needed to establish caches of petrol in the early motoring years. Barely a year after the Citroën adventure, a 1,5 litre Bugatti four-wheeler made the trip. Sahara travel became all the rage; and as early as 1930, titles such as By Way of the Sahara: The African Odyssey of Three Men and a Grocer’s Van (Duckworth, 1930) by Owen Tweedy appeared, which heralded people assailing the desert with unlikely modes of transport and little hope of success – but the mere existence of the title does assure one of their survival of the experience. The charming book by Gordon West and his wife Joy, entitled By Bus to the Sahara (Travel Club, ca 1940) is in fact a misnomer, since they hardly got out of the Atlas mountains to Ouarzazate and Rissani – but it does prove that even public transport was to be had at the time. The allure of Tamanrasset and Timbuctoo, the splendid Ahaggar, Aïr and Tibesti Mountains, as well as great dunes, oases and achingly beautiful, empty plains brought the adventurous in droves. Once the minefields had been cleared or marked after WWII, a new wave of travellers hit the piste, and the fifties saw a number of quite entertaining titles appear in print.

One of these was W Macarthur, who whet his travelling appetite with a Cairo to Salisbury epic, as described in Auto Nomad Through Africa (Cassell, 1951) and an even more gripping book, describing a backbreaking slog he made with his wife in an elderly saloon car, entitled The Desert Watches (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954). Not all of these motorists were the stern martyrs of geography; an adventurous lady traveller, Barbara Toy, spent seven months puttering round the Lybian desert in her Landie, often with only the odd local as a companion. She visited battlefields, graves, avoided minefields and had the happy knack of being able to get along with the people she met despite a limited knowledge of the language. Her travels are well-described in A Fool in the Desert (John Murray, 1956). Another pair, the Marriotts, bought an ancient banger, an eighteen year-old taxicab with the best part of a million miles on the clock and attempted to coax the ailing beast from Algiers to Nigeria. As chronicled in their book, Desert Taxi (Travel Book Club, 1955), they almost made it, but the oomph went out of the car at Kano, and they had to leave it rusting in the savannah while they hitched a ride to the coast and salvation. A similar trip was embarked on by two friends in a little Wolseley 6/80 saloon – trying to break some sort of record, I seem to remember, which you can read about in Savage Sahara (A Wingate, 1956). Then there was a leavening of dotty sophisticates banding together with the likes of two Churchills, a scientist and six soldiers, who set out from Benghazi on The Great Saharan Mouse-Hunt (Hutchinson, 1962), taking in the Oasis at Khufra, Jebel Uweinat and the Tibesti in an extended U-turn. These travellers enjoyed getting lost, they didn’t mind getting bogged down in fech-fech and getting dirty – as long as the whisky, champagne and foie de gras was available at the end of the day – while for other travellers there was only a dwindling supply of water.

A classic of exploration of a different sort is Henri Lhote’s The Search for the Tassili Frescoes (Hutchinson, 1960). The author led a sixteen-month expedition to confirm a vague report of a soldier’s discovery of rock art in the Tassili n’Ajer. While he discovered a veritable gallery of Neolithic rock engravings, much of his work has been discredited, partly due to dubious recording methods, or due to the ‘alien influence’ theories he shared with his mentor, the Abbé Henri Breuil. The sensationalist publicity the art sites received was greatly to blame for the partial destruction by locals and souvenir-hunting tourists in subsequent years.

An enjoyable read is Jon Stevens’ book, The Sahara is yours (Constable, 1969). He describes a two-month ‘circumnavigation’ of this mother of deserts, accompanied by his wife and another couple in a second vehicle. Both cars were brand new four-wheel drives; the travellers chose their equipment with great care, though weight became one of their main concerns. Several chapters of the book are devoted to good, well-founded advice on travel conditions, advisable practices and precautions which would be useful to any would-be desert rat. In the preface he states:
‘Getting stuck in soft sand is no longer a nightmare – it is just an irritant. Carrying enough petrol no longer depends on monstrous tanks or heavy steel cans. By cutting down on the weight to be carried, the problems of long-distance desert driving have been halved, and you can travel in comfort and safety.’

That about sums it up – your comfort and safety depend your own planning, preparation, mechanical gear and the size of your wallet. One quality shared in almost every one of the above books is the insane urge to travel a certain number of miles/kilometers a day. Very few of the intrepid motorists seem to have stopped to sniff the desert roses, in a manner of speaking. Since the 1970s I seem to detect an almost nostalgic return to the modes of travel employed in the pre-mechanical era. There is a whole generation of books dealing with Saharan journeys by camel or even on foot; often in the company of Targui people with whom the traveller has no common language, retracing the almost forgotten caravan routes. Plenty of opportunity to get to grips with the sands of Sahara.

Now, south of the equator, we have the Karoo/Kalahari/Namib as our local equivalents of our great northern cousin. Perhaps not quite as daunting geographically; nor inhabited by fearsome tribes and lacking the sheer size of the Sahara. Nonetheless, a goodly number of travellers, both in earlier times and during the motorised era, have encountered similar travails. That great soldier, politician and adventurer, Deneys Reitz, tried his luck at entering the Kaokoveld by car round about 1930, after he had had a foretaste of desert driving in the company of one Carl Weidner of Goodhouse through South West Africa, Kalahari and Gordonia. By the time he reached Otyitambi, he had crumpled up his lengths of wire-mesh that were supposed to aid him through the heavy sand, and his vehicle was firmly bogged up to the axles. He had the good fortune to espy the smoke from the campfire of a Thirstland trekker nearby, and the latter helped him to make the rest of the trip more enjoyable by means of donkeys and light cart. The automobile was parked under a tree for a couple of months awaiting his return.

One has but to read the saga of the grounding of the Dunedin Star on the Skeleton Coast in 1942. A three-pronged rescue attempt, by air, sea and land was launched. The ships ran into trouble and couldn’t get near the beach in the rough waters; the Ventura bomber managed to drop much-needed supplies, but then made a forced landing on the beach and after some repairs got airborne only to crash into the waves, leaving the aviators no choice but to swim for it. Meanwhile a motorised column had been mobilised from Windhoek, and this little cavalcade of standard trucks, loaded to the gunwales with petrol and water, rode off into the sunset across a virtually unknown, trackless Kaokoveld. Amid much jubilation all hands and passengers were rescued and brought back to civilisation almost a month after the disaster. John Marsh wrote his ever popular book Skeleton Coast (Hodder & Stoughton, 1944) describing the whole episode. It has become part of the Skeleton Coast saga, and numerous reprints and enlarged versions are still readily available. In my schooldays, I happened to be great friends with the son of the radio officer on the ship, and you can be sure that I didn’t let that chance go begging to get a more personal reminiscence from Kilpatrick senior.

The ever-popular Lawrence Green took part in several desert odysseys, which he described in a number of his books. One was the University of Cape Town’s Kalahari Expedition of 1936, mainly dedicated to studying Bushman ethnography, during which Green drove one of their vehicles – when he wasn’t helping to dig them out of the sand! Much of the trip is covered in his book Strange Africa (Timmins, 1974 repr) Another scientific expedition, this time through Namib and Kaokoveld, is described in his book Lords of the Last Frontier (Timmins, 1952) – one of his most popular books on the then South West Africa. The leader was Bernard Carp, an adventurous businessman who loved the desert in all its guises, and he too wrote a book about this and several other excursions, I chose Africa (Timmins, 1961). There is a dearth of books about motor travel in the Namib proper – mainly, I suspect, because for almost a century the mixed blessing of the presence of diamonds made it illegal to set foot on most of the southern coastal desert, then there was a patch of Game Reserve No 3 between the Swakop and Kuiseb Rivers (nowadays known as the Namib-Naukluft Park) and north of Cape Cross you were back in another Sperrgebiet, where the powers that be didn’t want you to get loose in either; the southern part of Angola is only now becoming popular as a fishing spot. In the latter few years restrictions have eased somewhat, and numerous convoys of well-heeled and wheeled city folk head for the sandy wastes. I suspect we shall be reading about these good people’s adventures when they grow a little older, if books haven’t totally gone out of print by then.

The great Karoo has some truly desolate stretches, but one is never more than fifty-odd kilometers from a small village or town. In addition, the whole region, as well as the almost featureless plains of Bushmanland and the more rugged terrain of Namaqualand, have been broken up into farms. The ubiquitous windmill raises its signature head above the horizons – so it is unlikely the unwary explorer will perish of thirst, even if his trusty vehicle should desert him in his hour of need. An entertaining book on this whole region is Carel Birkby’s Thirstland Treks (Faber & Faber, 1936) in which the young journalist tackles numerous dusty trails in his faithful ‘three-year old baby’ (Austin 7), which at times lacked the horsepower to tackle hills front-on, and had to be reversed up the inclines instead. Another charming little book I read many years ago was by a Miss I A Loadsman, entitled Little Roads of Africa (Afrikaanse Pers Boekhandel, 1950) in which she describes her travels in company with another lady, using a similarly unsuitable vehicle as Birkby’s, as they explored Gordonia and the faint tracks along the Molopo – if I remember correctly.

The Kalahari is an unforgiving desert in parts, with vivid red dunes, which start even south of the great river in parts of Bushmanland, and extend up as far as almost into the Congo. But the arid plains are broken by linear oases; large rivers like the Gariep, the Okavango and its inland delta, and the Zambezi, to name but a few. In the rainy season you might never guess that you are in a desert. All about is verdant and vast herds of springbok and wildebeest graze the knee-high grasses. Six months later a stony or sandy parched and shimmering waste is all that remains. As far as I can establish, the first motorised breach in this desert’s defences came during WWI. As part of the three-pronged attack by General Botha on the Germans in South West Africa, Col. C A L Berrange set out with his ‘desert column’, made up of the 5th South African Rifles, the Kalahari Horse, Cullman’s Horse and the Bechuanaland Rifles from Kuruman. While his men marched and rode, and supplies went mainly by ox-wagon, he had an advance force of motor-vehicles, which were used to ferry water-supplies across some hundreds of miles between the widely separated wells. The traverse to Rietfontein took some weeks, and on crossing the SWA border, they immediately engaged and routed the Germans. After that little affair they presumably used the trains, and the trucks faded into obscurity.

The eminent geologist and geographer E H L Schwarz postulated a theory that proposed flooding a part of the central Botswana depression and creating large lakes, which would change the entire climate of the region and make the desert bloom, in his book The Kalahari or Thirstland Redemption (Maskew Miller, 1920). It involved damming part of the Zambezi system and digging a canal across a slight ridge that natural forces had raised to create a waterway. The South African government was forced by public pressure to take his theory seriously enough to send out an expedition in 1925 under the aegis of the Irrigation Department, to investigate the possibility. While much of their equipment’s transport depended on animal-drawn vehicles, they did have a Dodge ‘screen-van with balloon tyres’ that did some sterling work. Although much useful cartographical work was done during the expedition, Schwarz’s theory was scuppered when it was found that his levels were faulty and that water would not flow uphill, and that creating another ‘Dead Sea’ in the centre of the Makarikari region wouldn’t necessarily turn the region into a land of milk and honey. Some of the work is described in Deneys Reitz’s No Outspan (Faber & Faber, 1943) as the author was involved in the aerial surveys in his capacity of Minister of Irrigation.

The year 1928 saw the Cameron-Cadle Kalahari Expedition, setting out, fitted out with two specially equipped Diamond T (Model 302) trucks. These two American gentlemen seemed intent on performing a battery of medical tests on the Bushmen they would encounter, but their way led them from Mafeking to Serowe, and from thence onwards to Francistown in a matter of two weeks. It is doubtful that they made much contact with any of the nomadic tribespeople, as they seemed to spend most of their time digging their vehicles out of the thick sand. During the same period W J Makin’s book, Across the Kalahari Desert (Arrowsmith, 1929) chronicled a trip made from Mahalapye to Ghanzi and from there up to Kazangulo. They employed Morris six-wheelers with success, and as far as I can recall, their main intention was to gather information on the Bushmen. In early 1930 a well-equipped museum expedition, named Vernay-Lang after its two leaders from the Natural History Museum in the UK and Field Museum in the US, explored a large chunk of inhospitable central Botswana and brought back thousands of biological specimen which were described in a number of Transvaal Museum Annals. Money was no object and the well-found project had a number of specially modified one and a half-ton Dodge trucks (which seemed to have been early desert favourites) as well as a Victory 6 Tourer, for the more luxurious conveyance of hunting parties in search of the large game of the region. None of the above can be called travel literature except in the broadest sense; they all had serious scientific or bellicose aspirations.

Two of the few books I have read dating back to the 1950s are the accounts by Frank Debenham, Kalahari Sand (G Bell & Sons, 1953) an American hydrologist who made two journeys into the depths of the central Kalahari to investigate water resources, and the wildly popularised The Lost World of the Kalahari (Hogarth Press, 1958) by that veteran spinner of tales, Laurens van der Post. The latter accompanied the former as guide and expedition leader, if my memory serves me right, although I seem to recall that our great explorer only had one previous experience of the Kalahari during a reconnaissance in 1950, and he had to rely heavily on local guides and translations across at least three languages. Debenham was utterly smitten by the desert, and his book echoes his enthusiasm. Van der Post uses the trip and its successors as a basis for a whole iconic mythology of the Bushmen, their culture, oral literature and dwindling status as a forgotten prehistoric people, as well as a number of novels on the theme. While there is a certain dreamy, poetic quality to his writing, I could never be completely reconciled to his books as being a factual account of anything – but the reader must make up his or her own mind about this ‘Bard of the Beyond’.

No doubt there are many more titles describing the passage of wheels in the deserts of Africa, so this is only a small selection of books that have impressed me in one way or another. If you need to broaden your horizons, there is a wide choice of reading matter available. The alternative is to find a few kindred spirits with four-wheel drives and the required wherewithal – and hit the sand rolling!

2010-10-20T09:07:00.000+02:00

THE ABOMINABLE ANTHROPOLOGIST

2010-09-11T15:21:00.000+02:00

Africana Votes & Views #20

At the tender age of five or six I was introduced to the delights of reading by a stern father who relied on unkind words and hard-handed corrections to steer me through the intricacies of pronouncing the words I could hardly see through the tears in my eyes. This I survived, and I was unexpectedly rewarded by receiving the keys to his library, figuratively speaking, together with the injunction that I was not permitted to eat while reading, and that my hands had to be clean. Further I was let loose on some eighty metres of bookshelves crammed with scientific works - on biology, geology, astronomy, as well as books on travel, exploration, ethnography, archaeology, art and suchlike.

The world was my oyster. I wasted no time in sampling its flavours across all the seven seas and all the continents. Among my favourites were three hefty volumes on the peoples of the world, entitled: ‘Die Grosse Völkerkunde’, (Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig, 1939) edited by Dr H A Bernatzik. This was armchair travel at its best, and while I was too young to appreciate the racist attitudes in vogue in Germany during the years immediately preceding WWII, which marred such works, they still gave me an overview of the wonderful diversity of appearance, cultures, arts and economies of homo sapiens worldwide. Another earlier work I still treasure is a hefty leatherbound tome by a gentleman with a most ungermanic name, ie R Parkinson, who wrote of his thirty years’ sojourn in German Samoa in the book Dreissig Jahre in der Südsee (Strecker & Schröder, 1907). This book was filled with the most amazing detail and photos of the islanders, and featured engravings of the most fearsome naked warriors and their weapons, studded with sharks’ teeth, or stingray spines, that made my eyes water just to look at them.

That fascination with all things ethnographical and anthropological persisted. Once I started work, I even studied the subject part-time for a couple of years. Supposedly I picked up a few generalities of the science, and I have since read many of the earlier books on the evolving theories on the antiquity of man as well as much on the varied habits of the beast worldwide. In the field of palaeoanthropology we South Africans have been especially spoilt, as a number of doyens of the science worked here during the opening years of those earth-shaking prehistoric finds at Taung, Makapansgat, Hopefield and other locations. Robert Broom’s little book Finding the Missing Link (Watts & Co, 1950) and Raymond Dart’s work Adventures with the Missing Link (Hamish Hamilton, 1959) and the Leakeys, Louis, Mary and Richard in East Africa fired the imagination and thrilled in a similar vein to Hollywood’s adventurer archaeologists of more recent years. Men of the stature of Bob Brain, Philip Tobias and Lee Berger carried on the good work, to name but a few – and as the finds of fossil ape, man-ape or hominin ( the latest jargon for our lot ) swelled, so did the theories of our evolution and development vacillate. The age of mankind became counted in millions of years – until new methods of utilizing the tool of DNA in all its ramifications turned the whole science on its head. Bewilderingly, true homo sapiens has become a relatively recent export from Africa; we spread in recurrent waves over the entire world and some authorities would have us arrive at our destination almost before we left our continent of origin. It has become most confusing and technical and there are times when I find myself longing for the good old days when one could hold the fossilized skull of ‘Mrs Ples’ in one’s hands and just revel in the distinction that this conferred on a 20th century teenager.

So let us get back to social anthropology instead. Here we are on safer grounds. From the times of the great missionary era, those worthies as well as their exploring coevals vied with each other to record strange tribal organisation, rites of passage, laws and rituals, witchcraft and religion. They certainly adorned their books with painstakingly engraved depictions of everything from hairstyles and adornments, to agricultural tools and weapons. So we find in such works as Speke’s Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (W Blackwood, 1864) and Grant’s A Walk Across Africa (William Blackwood & Sons, 1864) that about half of both books are devoted to matters ethnographical when they are not describing daily life in the kingdoms of Buganda, Bunyoro etc. Although the missionaries were mostly hell-bent on eradicating most of the aboriginal practices that they came up against, a goodly number thought fit to commit to print a catalogue of the abominations they found, which they often coloured with their Presbyterian mores and Victorian values. For instance, H H Johnston’s work on the missionary George Grenfell and the Congo (Hutchinson & Co, 1908) devotes one whole volume to the diaries that this worthy kept, dealing with the tribes of the region. So valuable stuff is to be gleaned from these sources as they were the only workers in the field of the period, and the theoreticians would only come onto the stage later.

Only during WWI were the seeds of systematic getting ‘the native's point of view’ through participant observation set as a standard of observation by one Bronislaw Malinowski in New Guinea, which he set down in his work Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). A rash of other noted sociologists and anthropologists expanded on this theme and developed it. As this is not supposed to become a reading list of academic proportions on the subject, let us leave it at that and concentrate instead on the authors and ethnographers of the subcontinent.

One of the earliest works that have passed through my hands has been the book Das Volk der Xosa-Kaffern im Östlichen Südafrika by the missionary A Kropf (Berliner Evangelische Missions Gesellschaft, 1889). I will not pretend to have read this worthy, but I did glean the fact that he did much pioneering work on the language and spent many years working among them, which supplied much first-hand knowledge on customs and beliefs. At approximately the same time G W Stow, a geologist by profession, made the study of indigenous peoples his hobby, and he assembled voluminous notes on especially San and Khoi tribes, which are still valuable source documents since they had the benefit of at least second-hand contact via interpreters with the few remnants of these clans and tribes at the time. After his death in 1882, Theal assembled his writings and edited them in the book The Native Races of South Africa (Swan Sonnenschein, 1905). While the book is obviously dated in attitudes and interpretations, it is quite readable, filled with personal observation and anecdote as well as snippets of oral history. Yet another of the earlier missionary/ethnographers was A T Bryant, whose main work was among the Zulus. He was the author of a number of linguistic and historical books, but in addition he wrote The Zulu People, as they were before the White Man came (Shuter & Shooter, 1949) as a valedictory work and a tribute to ‘the Zulu people, my lifelong companions and friends’. A rather more obscure missionary was one R Wessman, who wrote an interesting, scarce little book entitled The Bawenda of the Spelonken (African World, 1908), which also includes an account of the Mpefu War in 1898, during which the Boers defeated the Bavenda comprehensively and divided the tribe into three factions. Two more missionaries writing on the tribes of the Eastern Cape, were G Callaway and Dudley Kidd; the latter being an adventurous soul – once a railway missionary and chaplain among soldiers, within a wide field of endeavour – he wrote a trio of books on tribal life, culminating with Kafir Socialism and the Dawn of Individualism (A & C Black, 1908), a pioneer work on the economic aspects of African life.

While not really scientific works, G R von Wielligh’s three books under the general title Boesman Stories… (Nasionale Pers, 1921) give a vivid insight into the existence of these desert dwelling nomads in the Kalahari for a general audience. The Rev S S Dornan also wrote an interesting volume, Pygmies and Bushmen of the Kalahari (Seeley Service, 1925), which is a must for anybody interested in this region and its people. Still a most respected work is The Life of a South African Tribe, 2 Vols (Macmillan, 1927) by H A Junod, which deals with the Shangana-Tsonga people in the Eastern Transvaal and Mozambique, and there are several reprints available of the work. Claimed as the first book in Afrikaans on the science, the descendant of a missionary family, W Eiselen, wrote the book Stamskole in Suid Afrika (Van Schaik, 1929), dealing with initiation rites in tribal societies. Then comes the seminal work by that noted Namaqualander from the little dorp of Garies, Isaac Schapera and his The Khoisan Peoples of South Africa (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1930) – to this day a standard work on the subject – which was followed by a dozen or more books on the tribes of the subcontinent, with especial emphasis on his favoured field of study among the Tswana people. None of his works can be described as easy reading for the layman, but the Khoisan book is probably the most accessible of the lot, and required reading for any student of this ancient population group.

Yet another missionary, but this time one of the remarkable sons of a Gaika cleric and a Scotswoman, one John Henderson Soga, who devoted a half century to labours in Bomvanaland, wrote two important works: The South-Eastern Bantu (Witwatersrand University Press, 1930) and Ama-Xosa: Life and Customs (Lovedale, 1931) before his retirement to Britain, where he and his wife and son were the unfortunate victims of a wartime bomb (SESA, 1970-6). These books are difficult to obtain, and hugely expensive to buy, but well-worth reading and one wishes that someone would reprint them. Professor of linguistics, J A Engelbrecht, wrote a valuable contributions not unlike Schapera’s on The Korana (Maskew Miller, 1936), which records that widespread, vanishing people’s customs and language from Namaqualand into the Western Transvaal.

Lest I be accused of sexism, let me hasten to state that the work done by W H and Dorothea Bleek, as well as L C Lloyd, in recording the myths and legends of the Cape San, have had a great resurgence in popularity of late, but these labours are more in the realm of oral literature than ethnography, and fascinating as they may be to aficionados of the genre, I must plead ignorance on this subject. Quite different then are the various contributions made by Winifred Hoernlé, a trained social anthropologist who spent lengthy periods among the Nama in the Richtersveld between 1910–1922. Her scientific findings were published only very recently as The Social Organization of the Nama (Witwatersrand University Press, 1985), but a much more readable book is the rendition of her field diaries entitled Trails in the Thirstland (UCT, 1987) which has been edited by Peter Carstens, among others, a man who wrote a notable, later book on the same region.

The anthropologist is supposedly a student; an impartial observer, who records and attempts to place his findings within a universal framework of social and other theories. Experiments are not usually conducted using people like lab-rats. Enter the abominable anthropologist. Some years back I obtained two copies of a book entitled Namkwa (Jonathan Cape, 1978) written by a South African-German parasitologist cum anthropologist, Hans Joachim Heinz. On paging through it, I gathered that he had ‘married’ into a tribe of !Ko, and though the only critique I could find stated that it was ‘a self-indulgent book by an otherwise prolific scientist’ (Khoisan Bibliography), my curiosity was sufficiently aroused to read the whole thing from cover to cover. Unfortunately I don’t have it to hand right now to give you chapter and verse of the contents, but let me say that I was aghast at what the man had written. For whatever reason he had decided to share the lives with this nomad band, he joined them while in his mid-forties, that is, old enough to experience a mid-life crisis during which he got a letch for one of the clan’s elders’ teenage daughter, Namkwa, and persuaded or bribed Pop to let him ‘marry’ her. He then described in quite graphic detail, as I recall, how he restrained himself for a night or two before forcing himself on the kid against her will. In these enlightened days, we call that marital rape at best, and paedophilia at worst, but hey, who could say exactly how old the kid was anyway – they don’t carry birth-certificates. In due course a baby arrived, and the general trend of the book suggested that there was a rift in relations and a parting of the ways. More recent enquiries via the net suggests that he spent some forty years living ‘with the local community’. But Namkwa was only the middle one of his three wives, and the Botswana University Library site makes no mention of his son by her. He subsequently married yet another local lady, and the chapter was closed when he was murdered at his house in Tsanokoha in 2000 at the ripe old age of 83. Perhaps it would have been better all around if he should have stuck to his other speciality instead.

So from the serious and scientific, from the historical and linguistic, let us proceed to some slightly lighter fare. Not for nothing did Boswell write ‘there is reason in roasting of eggs, for of necessity man must think to season a dish for his consumption’. I came across a slim volume entitled The Anthropologists Cookbook (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977) edited by Jessica Kuper, the other day. No stewed missionary in this, nor braised rats or sautéed snakes; no, this is a seriously absorbing round-the-world tour of man’s ingenuity in making the local fare more interesting and edible. From making a cokentrice in mediaeval England (half capon, half pig), via roast puffin, to a wealth of strange foods from Africa, which may include yams, plantains, Palaver Sauce or millet. From the Americas the recipe that caught my eye was that of ceviche, a Peruvian raw fish dish that I am partial to making. In the book they state the caveat ‘do not touch the eyes or genitals after handling the chilies – the reverse precaution is unnecessary’! Yes, well I would suppose the quantity of chilies used would kill any bacteria present. While most of the Asiatic cuisine no longer sounds outlandish to most Westerners owing to the ubiquitous presence of numerous variations of the theme in restaurants worldwide, there are nonetheless some mouthwatering delicacies on offer. It is only really in Australia that I feel the editor has admitted defeat, limiting her descriptions on how to make damper (semi-charred, half-cooked dough wrapped round a stick – much beloved by Boy Scouts of yore) and ‘whistling steak’, ie meat so green and putrid, that it had to be soaked in running water for two days before being roasted and eaten. According to the book, it was not only perfectly safe to eat – it was also beautifully tender and delicious. Talk of hanging your game!

Even anthropologists have been known to be humourists. Some time ago the title The Innocent Anthropologist (Penguin, 1983) by one N Barley enticed me into delving among the mores and habits of an obscure tribe of hinterland Cameroonians whose name I disremember. I don’t often chortle aloud as I read, but this book very funnily describes the blunderings of a new graduate in a completely alien situation, in the company of a tolerant, bawdy bunch of backwoods folk, who wear very little besides broad smiles. Presently in the vogue among the so-called ‘reality programmes’ on TV are those that depict stone-age Papuan tribesmen being taken on voyages of discovery among twenty-first century Britons or Frenchmen. As an extension of my interest in anthropology, I have watched one or two of these documentaries – and yes, putting yourself in the ‘other fellow’s shoes’ can be most enlightening – especially when you are made to evaluate some of our own, more exotic customs, habits, foodstuffs, clothing and diversions by the standards of people who have entirely different priorities as they strive towards their own goals in life. The question that arises from that is: aren’t all tourists anthropologists to some degree? Don’t we travel to distant countries at much expense and discomfort to meet with different cultures and peoples, as well as seeing the sights? So maybe anthropology has an almost universal appeal in some form.

The Enigmatic Ornithologist

2010-08-24T17:29:00.000+02:00

Africana Votes & Views #19

Let’s face it, among billions of very ordinary people, most of average intelligence and abilities, there is always a scattering of truly extraordinary folk, people gifted with one or more talents that tower so far above their contemporaries, that they become legends. The enigmatic ornithologist you are being directed to is Richard Henry Meinertzhagen; scion of an influential London banking family and aristocracy; soldier, scientist, hunter, geographer, artist, spy, writer and, according to himself – cold-blooded killer. His varied career and numerous books, as well as his self-confessed infamies have spawned a shelf of publications about the man. None of these have I read; so I shall confine myself to the man’s wildly popular book Kenya Diary, 1902-1906 (Oliver & Boyd, 1957), which deals with Africa and which I started reading a few days ago; reluctantly at first, since it really seems to be the diary it purports to be – but then with increasing interest and delight mixed with incredulity at what I was reading. This was high adventure indeed in all its grisly details. I won’t pretend I didn’t sneak a little peep at the big G on the net to learn more about our writer – but more of that later – this is what I read in the diary.

Here was a stripling twenty-four years of age, a veteran of a two years as a bank clerk, a stint in Military College and a couple of years making himself unpopular in the Indian Army – installed as an officer of the King’s African Rifles (KAR). He found his Swahili, Sudanese and Masai troops ill-trained and undisciplined, a matter which he soon set right, while his brother officers were generally labelled as ‘rejects’ of low military abilities as well as poor morals, who were more interested in their harems than their duties. He felt that soldiers were unpopular in Kenya among the administrators, and fancied himself very much as being of a higher and more educated standard than ‘civil servants that were enlisted from the gutter … given unlimited power over uneducated and simple-minded natives… abuse their powers, suffer from megalomania and regard themselves as little tin gods’. He revels in exercising his considerable powers in exposing the corrupt, the inefficient, the amoral and illegal among the Europeans, and having them removed whenever possible.

The Africans were to feel his wrath in a rather more material way. While I am not able to judge the effect of the KAR and their early campaigns in the territory from other reliable sources, it would seem from RM’s diary that his detachment played a huge role in destabilising the region. They raided the Kikuyu clans’ villages and herds mercilessly, taking most of their stock and burning huts, not to speak of inflicting casualties running into the hundreds. When some of his men, missionaries or other Europeans were brutally murdered in retaliation, he struck mercilessly, exterminating entire villages, men and women, sparing only the children. In this context, he writes with pride that he insisted on discipline among his own men. Two of his Manyuema levies who were responsible for spearing a child and a woman in a raid despite his explicit orders got short shrift. They were shot by their officer on the spot, and three of their compatriots who fled, ‘were bagged … all three before they cleared the village.’ Rather reminiscent of a grouse-shoot on the English moors. RM maintained that while what he did was illegal and contrary to military law, which was why he did not report it to the High Commissioner at the time, he acted with a cool head, aware of possible consequences and ‘would do it again under similar circumstances’. A man from a hostile tribe, posing as a porter in his retinue was tried as a spy and summarily shot by our man. Meinertzhagen was all things to all men in Kenya if one takes his diary at face value. He was the law, the prosecutor, the judge – as well as the executioner and sheriff, not to mention the arbiter of the people’s morals. He records the odd feeble attempt made by his Political Officer, or other superior to keep him in rein, but the impression one gets is that he did exactly as he deemed fit. On the other hand, he is not shy of accusing his Political Officer of egging him on to continue raiding the Tetu people so that the former had ‘more captured stock to give him sufficient revenue to build his new station’ – strange and contradictory behaviour and utterances. But read on.

Once the Kikuyu had been suitably cowed and punished, Meinertzhagen was directed to attend to the Nandi tribes. According to his diary, the administrator at Nandi boma, Mayes, was responsible for most of the troubles with the tribe, and the two men seemed to take an immediate dislike to each other. In no time they were at each other’s throats because of Mayes’s alleged frauds and self-enrichment schemes, which RM naturally reported, managing to get the former removed from office and installed somewhere else. Still, troubles with the tribe escalated and as the administrative officers dithered, RM knocked his troops into shape for the inevitable conflict which was to come. A number of actions were fought and since RM was a very capable officer, he had general success, killing numbers of tribesmen and raiding their herds. A senior laibon (chief/witchdoctor) of the tribe, Koitalel, was the source of the insurrection, according to the diary, so plot and counter-plot is described as these two parties jockey for position and it all comes to head at a carefully orchestrated meeting, where both the laibon and RM have an ambush in place. RM relates his role in the meeting, during which the chief and a number of his followers are gunned down, but he cites a prior attack by the Nandi as starting hostilities. This single incident was to be the cause of Meinertzhagen reputedly being recommended for a VC (according to himself) as well as three separate courts of enquiry as the matter was seen in a different light by a number of people who condemned the underhand assassination of the chief as distinctly non-sporting and un-British. Though our gallant officer emerged innocent of the charges (which were supported vociferously by Mayes, the administrator whom RM had removed from Nandi), his reputation was definitely tainted, and in 1906 he was removed from Kenya by the Colonial Office as they felt the British Government’s reputation for fair dealing and honesty were being called into question due to his actions. From the diary, it is quite plain that Meinertzhagen feels deeply wronged and that he is highly resentful at having to leave Kenya – though he declares that he can’t wait to be rid of the place.

In some ways RM had extremely prescient views on African history, rather at odds with his role as the mailed fist of the British Empire in subjugating the Kikuyu, Embu and Nandi tribes. He had the temerity to suggest to the then High Commissioner that Africa belonged to the Africans, that someday they would be educated and armed and this would lead to a clash with the flood of Europeans that Sir Charles wanted to settle on the land. Less than a year later he records saying to Lord Delamere that Kenya ‘…is a black man’s country. How are you going to superimpose white over black?’ Later in the book he repeats a description of the first instance, saying that he ‘cannot see millions of educated Africans – as there will be in a hundred years time – submitting tamely to white domination’, which smacks more of an old man’s memories – and repeats thereof – written with hindsight of the very recent Mau Mau rebellion in 1957 – not from the fresh notes of a youngster of 1903. Rather more believable is his naiveté, when he writes, after having killed and looted the Kikuyu for the better part of a year, that he found them to be rather fine fellows, who would be ‘most progressive under European guidance’ completely ignoring the rancour they might feel at being dispossessed. Immediately after this statement, he does state, with remarkable hindsight, that they would be most susceptible to subversive influence and that he could foresee much trouble. Still, we are reassured that he had many friends among the Kikuyu, whose greatest asset was their cheerfulness and the fact that they bore him no grudge!

Kenya Diary is not just an endless recitation of military endeavour. RM describes the countryside in great detail. No wonder, since he mapped and surveyed large tracts and traced the watersheds and tributaries of important rivers and climbed several peaks. His maps are acknowledged as being of a very high standard, almost works of art, and a number of sketch maps are included in the book. Almost at the end of his diary, he spends some time on the Tanganyika border, where he intercepts and disarms some German soldiers who are trespassing – and then quite inexplicably, crosses the border to make the acquaintance of the German officers at Moshi Fort. Our intelligence gatherer leaves a few days later, considerably more informed as to German military capabilities, and within a few days he is able to neutralise a German spy, posing as an Austrian Count during his travels on the Serengeti. Not only does he manage to foil the man by burning his camp, he also abstracts two boxes of valuable documents, which contain maps and an assessment of the Voi-Taveta route – which RM states to have been invaluable to Smuts’s forces in 1916. One wonders why he would act thus, seeing that the Congo Act of 1885 resolved that British and German colonials would not blindly follow their parent states into conflict – if that should ever occur, since they had perfectly amiable feelings towards one another. In the book he bewails the fact that Mount Kilimanjaro has been left to the Germans, and notes that the chief of the Wachagga tribe was most unhappy with German rule and asked RM why the British didn’t throw them out. He hastens to add that he does not doubt that Britain will triumph – ‘we seem to get most of what we want – eventually’; such prophetic words.

At the ripe old age of 25, RM has some very interesting views on theology, religion and the afterlife; most unusual for a man in such a hazardous profession, moreover one who professes not to care too much whether he survives a fight or becomes a casualty – according to his diary. He does affirm that he ‘had full confidence in my ability to conduct myself as a good Christian’ – which may well have been true, but ability is not always what counts – intention, perseverance and delivery might have been better. We have his reassurance that prayer gave him great comfort and consolation, as well as giving him the strength ‘to do what was right’. A great boon to any arbiter of life and death in situations such as he found himself in.

As a hunter he must certainly be given some credit, though he admits to indulging himself in an orgy of blood-lust at the start of his Kenyan experience. Admittedly he had to literally feed an army of some 200 lusty warriors in a country where lines of supply and communication were nonexistent, so most of the hundreds of animals shot were used for that purpose. He was a proponent of the light calibre .256 Mannlicher – a popgun like the great elephant hunter William Bell used. RM did not have Bell’s expertise and anatomical knowledge though, and he records a staggering number of rhino and other large game including lions, that he shot at, which got away. The fact that a leading firm of sporting arms and munitions once supplied him with bullets that would hardly travel fifty metres without plopping to the ground, added to the excitement of the chase. Our man relates some very interesting experiences, as well as other hunters’ entertaining exploits and mishaps. One of his closest shaves probably came from shooting an eland bull – one of the mildest of antelopes. He broke its shoulder with the first shot at 50 yards, all good and well; but the buck was a standing target when RM inexplicably was prompted to break its hind leg at 30 yards with the next shot. Our foolhardy hunter then moved in to cut the massive beast’s throat – at which it tossed him a dozen feet, necessitating killing it with another shot to the neck, before retiring to nurse a broken bone in his foot. Not exactly a sharpshooter then.

Rather strange is his condemnation at finding a Wanderobo camp, where at least twenty-five skulls of rhino and other game littered the ground, thus testifying to their wanton destruction of natural resources, which is a bit rich coming from him – more especially so since the offending tribe is of the hunter-gatherer persuasion. He is also completely opposed to the capturing of wild animals and ‘condemning them to solitary confinement and squalid surroundings’. From the vantage point of a half-century later he admits that the Masai were able to coexist among enormous herds of game with their cattle, but that European methods of farming could not. In all, his hunting exploits make for interesting reading, and should appeal to followers of the genre.

He displays a different face when he advocates game conservation. At one stage he speaks of asking his moneyed father for a loan to purchase a huge farm in Kenya, so that he could turn it into a game reserve. Quite unbelievably he states that he never had any desire to kill an elephant, finding them delightful creatures that it would be immoral to kill, especially if just for the monetary value of their ivory. ‘It is a pity that an intelligent creature like an elephant should be shot in order that creatures not much more intelligent may play billiards with balls made from their teeth’. A statement worthy of a modern-day conservationist. He did not exercise the same restraint when it came to rhinos, and he describes a large number of more or less successful hunts. A couple of instances are described when he shoots a brace of rhino so that they end up lying against each other – yet a visiting medical man who shoots three rhinos on one outing gets a roasting for unsportsmanlike behaviour, as well as being in breach of the game regulations. Some inconsistency there, one could say. Cheetahs, leopards and lions also fell to his rifle, but after a few foolhardy adventures, he developed more than a healthy respect for the latter big cats, and on bagging one on the bare Athi plain with no back-up or convenient tree at hand, he says ‘I do not like lion when I have to face them single-handed in the open’. In company with a brother officer he indulges in a little pig-sticking using bayonets tied to bamboo poles – a sport much beloved of the military in India. This time they meet up with a lion and RM’s companion insists on trying his luck. Not unreasonably the horse balks, throws its rider into the lion’s maw, so to speak, necessitating our knight to come charging to his friend’s aid. Between his makeshift lance and the fallen pig-sticker’s revolver, they manage to dispatch the lion – according to the diary.

The vengefulness that he displayed against the tribes, when they killed his policemen, settlers or missionaries, was also extended to the animal kingdom. He writes with much relish of his revenge taken on a troop of baboons who had the temerity to kill his beloved dog who rushed into the middle of the troop that he was chasing for fun. He used a detachment of 30 troops; issued a 100 rounds of ammunition per man, and surrounded the offending band of monkeys during the night. In a battle lasting most of the morning, he managed to extinguish almost the entire adult population of monkeys of that group. Shades of the great generals!

Meinertzhagen had become interested in ornithology before leaving England. He pursued this hobby with great diligence in Africa, and he collected a huge number of museum specimens there as well as in other parts of the world later. He became a respected authority on the subject; wrote numerous articles as well as revered guidebooks on the avifauna of Arabia. Both insects and larger animals were also collected, skinned and dispatched to the British Museum. He made several discoveries of varieties of antelopes as well as data on their distribution. In addition he was the first European to collect and describe the giant forest hog, which was named after him. RM seemingly spent a lot of time doing game counts on his excursions across the plains of Kenya. There are a number of instances where he cites lists of exact numbers of half a dozen or more species – often running into the thousands. One is led to wonder how he managed to enumerate 1247 wildebeeste and 1465 zebra , this in addition to some three thousand other animals of ten more species, spread over an area of twelve square miles, as he did on a November day in 1903. On the other hand, Meinertzhagen gives the impression of being a stickler for exactitude and representing the facts as they were – come hell or high water; seemingly careless of whether the facts presented him in a less than favourable light. Even more puzzling is the apparent bravado with which he describes acts of recklessness, brutality, and cold-blooded ferocity. Speaking of a party he and a fellow-officer organised in Nairobi , RM says, ‘I think the real reason is that we are both rather perverse by nature and instinctively do the thing which we are least expected to do’. His one-time friend and colleague, T.E. Laurence, describes him thus, ‘Meinertzhagen knew no half measures. He was logical, an idealist of the deepest, and so possessed by his convictions that he was willing to harness evil to the chariot of good. He was a strategist, a geographer, and a silent laughing masterful man; who took as blithe a pleasure in deceiving his enemy (or his friend) by some unscrupulous jest, as in spattering the brains of a cornered mob of Germans one by one with his African knob-kerri. His instincts were abetted by an immensely powerful body and a savage brain ...’ (Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1926). Almost regretfully, I finished the book. It was engrossing, full of detail, action, anecdote – in short, I felt I had been in direct contact with a larger-than-life personality, of considerable intellect and talents.

Or not. A kind client, with whom I had discussed the aforegoing book and its author and this article, dropped in with a copy of Brian Garfield’s book, The Meinertzhagen Mystery (Potomac Books, 2007). An answer to my prayers, so to speak, and no time was wasted in continuing the search for some answers, which had already been hinted at during my preliminary search after data on the web. From the outset Garfield states that RM used to be one of his heroes; and that he first started to investigate his role in East Africa during the 1914–1918 campaign, in which the German von Lettow-Vorbeck ran rings around astly superior numbers of British and colonial troops under scores of generals. The reason – he was never there where the British expected him to be. Clearly a failure of intelligence. Who was the British Chief of Intelligence? None other than Capt. Richard Meinertzhagen. That’s where it all began, and among the numerous hymns of praise that were sung for our hero, slowly there emerged a solid body of evidence that Meinertzhagen’s exploits, adventures, military triumphs, diplomatic and intelligence work, zoological pre-eminence and personal reminiscences of history were a web of carefully edited fabrications concocted by a forceful and convincing actor, an overbearing personality, who charmed and fascinated people with wild tales of his life. In the words of Garfield, ‘he was a great scientist; he was a scientific fraud; he was a military hero: he was an incompetent officer; he was beloved; he was scorned; he was a killer; but he was not the mass murderer he pretended to be’. He may not even have shot anyone himself – though he was undoubted the author of the Nandi massacre – and many believe that this was the man who killed a servant in a fit of rage in India (of which event no trace could be found), the only man who was present while his wife conveniently ‘accidentally shot herself in the head’ during target practice – which many believed to be his work.

Let’s go back to RM’s arrival in Kenya. Verifiable evidence places him in the position of staff officer, third or fourth in command of the KAR detachments. Annual reports of the KAR show that RH held command of small detachments only during brief intervals when he led them from one post to another. None of the bloodbaths he describes during his punitive measures against the marauding Kikuyu can be found in the records – this during a time when the one or two casualties during reprisals were noted scrupulously in KAR reports. Only the Nandi massacre was true up to a point – the difference being that in all probability a fellow-officer, Sammy Butler (a life-long friend of RM – which might account for the deafening silence from that quarter), had machine-gunned the laibon and his retinue before RM even reached the venue, a plan that documents show, had been devised by his superior officers, who conveniently let RM take credit. This killing of some twenty-five Africans was enough to cause severe discomfiture and international scandal for the British Colonial Office, and resulted in RM’s recall. For the rest, his bloodthirsty exploits were of his own manufacture, but became part of ‘accepted history’ of the savagery of the British colonialists, so that they are still quoted extensively as facts in support of agendas for or against governments, racial groups etc.

Meinertzhagen was recalled, as previously mentioned, and he had to kick his heels around a London office for a few years until his lobbying resulted in the War Office relenting and sending him out to South Africa in 1908, we read. His diary (not Kenya Diary) indicates that he passes some examinations and is promoted to Major and is given command of mounted infantry. Once more his diary records a heroic episode, but, in fact, his promotion only occurred in 1915 – seven years later. Obviously his duties in South Africa and later Mauritius were not to his liking. He returns to London and then spends some time in the Mediterranean, Middle East and far East. This is where one of his most infamous ‘murders’ was recorded as having taken place – at least in his diaries. In a fit of rage at seeing his polo ponies maltreated by a syce, he beats said servitor to death with his polo mallet. He manages to convince his superiors that it would be best to hush it up by burning the stable and body – and hey presto – another myth has been added to his reputation. While it cannot be entirely disproved, none of the other diaries and reports of fellow-officers and officials make any mention of the event; we have only RM’s word.

Next we have our man as intelligence officer on the staff of the invading British force at the circus that the battle for Tanga was to become. I am no militarist, so I will not comment on the conduct of battle between thousands of landing forces and a few hundred askaris with a sprinkling of German soldiers; it just sounds like a complete fiasco. RM couldn’t resist a little creativity, and manufactures his ‘Boys’ Own’ version of a sortie, in which he manages to lose twenty-four of his twenty-five Kashmiris, besides shooting another couple of his men for showing cowardice! Once again there is no record of this besides in RM’s diaries. The respected General von Lettow-Vorbeck, who was to become a personal friend of RM in later years, mentions swapping lead with RM in his memoirs – but he too had to rely on the anecdotal evidence that he was fed by the latter, since it was night-time and he couldn’t possibly have seen who was sniping at him. After the smoke of battle had cleared, almost twenty percent of the British force were hors de combat, (more than the entire German forces in Africa) against a tally of sixty-nine disabled German troops. General Aitken was relieved of his post, and the War Office singled out the intelligence work of the force as the greatest contributing factor to the rout. Guess who?

During the ongoing war, RM’s intelligence reports which survive, clearly demonstrate that he had no idea that Lettow-Vorbeck was intent on leading British forces a merry dance, and tying up as many soldiers in his pursuit as possible, even though he could not hope to win a war in that fashion. RM’s diaries tell a completely different story – but why was none of this ever mentioned to his superiors? Instead he presented beautifully crafted reports, detailing an incredible amount information (that had been to hand since the beginning of the war from public sources), accompanied by his wonderful maps. He initiated the distribution of counterfeit local rupees – which were so poorly made, however, that they were used as kindling or wadding for the German artillery rounds. He was reputed to have launched a large force of African ‘spies’ against the Germans; a small problem emerged, though. Most of them were Nandi, and these lads harboured quite a grudge against our man – so what on earth would motivate them to help their British overlords as personified by their particular bête noire? Not a resounding success then. Among the other choice episodes chronicled by our man in his voluminous diaries is an improbable aeroplane flight to dizzying heights which no one had achieved with the then extant aviation technology (not to mention the scarcity of oxygen at an altitude of 17 000 feet plus). He rounds off his experiences in that theatre of war by cleaning out a machine-gun nest by hand-to-hand combat, culminating with the braining of the German Captain with his own knobkierie. Shortly afterwards he is invalided out of Africa – a decorated lieutenant-colonel.

That almost concluded Meinertzhagen’s connections with the African continent. After the convenient death of his wife, he is left with independent means and enabled to travel widely in the quest of ornithological data. He visited various parts of Africa on field trips during the latter part of his life, but his reputation for cloak-and-dagger episodes were acquired elsewhere – and there are many of those chronicled in the book. He plays a leading role in the creation of the state of Israel; he came within an inch of assassinating Hitler; he is deeply involved in anti-Communist espionage. A number of crucial episodes of that period’s political history are propped up by verbatim fictional accounts from our man, which are accepted because ‘oh, everyone knows that!’ Each episode becomes a building block of this persona who charms, captivates, appals and scandalises the people he comes into contact with during the rest of his life.

He becomes a scientist, an award-winning, lauded ornithologist, with a slew of publications to his credit; recipient of a medal from the British Ornithologist’s Union; but as early as 1919 he was already barred from the British Museum as it had been established that he had purloined bird specimens. He was reinstated at the plea of his relative by marriage, Lord Rothschild. Not even the discovery of rare colour plates from a priceless book in the British Museum, which were found in his possession, led to a public prosecution. Subsequently his scientific stature came increasingly under scrutiny, and to his ardent followers’ horror, it was discovered posthumously that of the twenty-thousand or so specimens of birds which he left to the British Museum, many were stolen from museums and other collections, while distribution localities that he had claimed, were fictional and some of his written work was plagiarised from others’ unpublished writings – in short, Meinertzhagen had perversely created havoc in a whole branch of science in which he had claimed pre-eminence for decades. This was all to emerge only once he had died – though vague suspicions had already preceded his departure.

Here was a man who seemed compelled to see how much he could get away with; who spun yarns so wildly improbable that they were likely to invoke the scorn of those who disbelieved his lies – as well as the aversion of those who believed his tales, because to them he was a vicious killer. An Indian ornithologist friend, Salim Ali, said of RM: ‘Though possessed of many admirable qualities, he had the distinct streak of the bully in his make-up and could be unreasonable to the point of brutality at times.’ His literary legacy is based on some eighty-two volumes of carefully typed ‘diaries’ covering his entire life – much of the contents carefully edited, altered, added to and falsified – and therefore easily verifiable and found to be wanting in even quite simple elements of the truth. Even his typewriter, which he declares as having bought and used in typing his first field-diaries from 1906 onwards, had a font that was only designed in 1918. The fictional character that had been built up by its creator over the decades, ensured that he became ‘easy to suspect but difficult to accuse both because of his standing and because proofs were elusive.’

From Garfield’s book emerges a character of such complexity, solipsism and narcissist personality, that the biggest question remains: why was he not exposed? Therefore, as beguiling as Meinertzhagen’s books may be, they come with a health warning: Reader Beware – Gullibility Crisis Ahead. If at all possible, read in tandem with Garfield’s book.

GREAT AFRICAN TREKS BY THE LADIES

2010-06-30T09:46:00.000+02:00

Africana Votes & Views # 18

Who can actually lay claim to the title of being an ‘explorer’? In the last fifty years or more, the title has increasingly been misused, being applied to individuals who have chosen slightly different routes to an iconic and much-visited goal; those who have used unusual conveyances or unorthodox methods of progress and a few ‘professionals’ who have mustered armies of men and convoys of heavy machinery at great cost to prove that there is no such thing as an impassable route. However, could one really say that a person who undertook to skateboard along the N1 from Cape Town to Johannesburg – a marathon journey certainly – has contributed anything to the sum of knowledge of mankind, geography or the natural sciences? I doubt it; therefore this essay is not going to be entitled ‘Lady Explorers of the Dark Continent’, though a few undoubtedly were just that, while others were adventurous travellers of great courage, entertaining writers, well-off tourists, symbols of growing female emancipation – or even long-suffering wives who were dragged along as ‘camp comforts’ by their unfeeling husbands – presumably.

So where do we start? Of the latter sort mentioned, there must have been a few unrecorded heroines during early Victorian times and I would not like to put my head on the block as to who was the first. One unfortunate comes to mind – Mary Livingstone, daughter of the Moffats at Kuruman. She had the singular misfortune to marry the great missionary/explorer in 1845. She often accompanied him on his early travels, despite the Moffats’ protests as she was heavily pregnant with the first of their five children in 1847. A mere five years later, the Livingstones were in the wilds on the Zouga River, a tributary of the Zambesi. Mary was extremely ill; she gave birth to her fifth child (her fourth having died shortly after birth at Kolobeng) and her doting husband finally came to realise that dragging a woman and four children through the bushes in a constant state of pregnancy might not be the ideal way of conducting a relationship. He brought her back to Cape Town and shipped her and the children off to Britain. Much relieved, he was able to devote himself to traversing the subcontinent for the next three years. He returned to Britain in 1856 and penned the Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (John Murray, 1857) His wife’s contributions did not merit a single line in the book. It took some serious prompting by John Murray to remedy that state of affairs in the next impression, with a page which tells of their marriage. That he managed this by adding two more pages 8* and 8**, after the original page 8 – rather than resetting/repaginating the entire book – is tribute to the prudence and ingenuity in matters of economy on the part of author and publisher. Their last child was born in 1858 while Mary was with her parents back at Kuruman, after which she returned to Scotland for a short while before being summoned by her lord and master once more to join him on his almost farcical Zambezi Expedition. The reluctant exploratrix died scarcely three months later at Shupanga in Mozambique, of malaria, possibly exacerbated by the alcoholism she had become a victim of. At this stage, the great man could actually bring himself to write:
‘About the middle of the month Mrs. Livingstone was prostrated by this disease; and it was accompanied by obstinate vomiting. Nothing is yet known that can allay this distressing symptom, which of course renders medicine of no avail, as it is instantly rejected. She received whatever medical aid could be rendered from Dr. Kirk, but became unconscious, and her eyes were closed in the sleep of death as the sun set on the evening of the Christian Sabbath, the 27th April, 1862. A coffin was made during the night, a grave was dug next day under the branches of the great baobab-tree, and with sympathising hearts the little band of his countrymen assisted the bereaved husband in burying his dead. At his request, the Rev. James Stewart read the burial-service; and the seamen kindly volunteered to mount guard for some nights at the spot where her body rests in hope. Those who are not aware how this brave, good, English wife made a delightful home at Kolobeng, a thousand miles inland from the Cape, and as the daughter of Moffat and a Christian lady exercised most beneficial influence over the rude tribes of the interior, may wonder that she should have braved the dangers and toils of this down-trodden land. She knew them all, and, in the disinterested and dutiful attempt to renew her labours, was called to her rest instead. Fiat, Domine, voluntas tua!’ That’s right David, pass the buck (though it is writ that the great man never got over his loss and blamed himself – as he should)

An explorer in her own right, without a doubt, was Florence Barbara Maria Finian von Sass Baker (those names are a bit doubtful – just depends which source you use). She was, of course, the reputed slave girl, rescued by Samuel (later Sir Samuel) White Baker from the clutches of an oriental Pasha in what is now Hungary – a story which may have gained a little romance in the retelling. She became his inseparable companion, aide, lover and wife, and insisted on accompanying him when he started his explorations into the origins of the Nile in 1861. In his own words,
‘I shuddered at the prospect for her, should she be left alone in savage lands at my death; and gladly would I have left her in the luxuries of home instead of exposing her to the miseries of Africa. It was in vain that I implored her to remain, and that I painted the difficulties and perils still blacker than I supposed they really would be: she was resolved, with woman’s constancy and devotion, to share all dangers and to follow me through each rough footstep of the wild life before me’. That’s what she did, and then some.

As her adoring companion states:‘Possessing a share of sangfroid admirably adapted for African travel, Mrs. Baker was not a screamer, and never even whispered; in the moment of suspected danger, a touch of my sleeve was considered a sufficient warning’ - and ‘Mrs. Baker was dressed similarly to myself, in a pair of loose trowsers and gaiters, with a blouse and belt--the only difference being that she wore long sleeves, while my arms were bare from a few inches below the shoulder.’
Although she was able to speak a number of languages, which came in handy during their exploits, it is a great pity that she left the writing to Samuel in describing their epic trek to Lake Albert, in his book The Albert N'Yanza Great Basin Of The Nile; And Exploration Of The Nile Sources. (Macmillan And Co., 1866). It may be that she only acquired fluency in English through constant communications with Samuel and later his children from his previous marriage, to whom she became greatly attached. It was only on the later expedition to end the slave trade on the upper reaches of the Nile that she kept an interesting diary and wrote numerous letters, which present her side of the story. These are included in the book Morning Star (Kimber, 1972); a compilation by Anne Baker, wife of a great grandson of Samuel. Not that the latter was sparing in acknowledgement of his wife’s sterling qualities and contribution to overcoming their travails. They were scarcely off the mark when the Bakers faced down an incipient mutiny. Baker writes,‘How the affair would have ended I cannot say; but as the scene lay within ten yards of my boat, my wife, who was ill with fever in the cabin, witnessed the whole affray, and seeing me surrounded, she rushed out, and in a few moments she was in the middle of the crowd, who at that time were endeavoring to rescue my prisoner. Her sudden appearance had a curious effect, and calling upon several of the least mutinous to assist, she very pluckily made her way up to me...’ and by sheer effrontery, the Bakers managed to get the mutineers disarmed. This type of problem kept on dogging them during the northern part of their journey, and they had several more similar experiences of the same kind. Each time Flooey stood by her man; almost at the end of their epic journey, Samuel relates: ‘Parrying with the stick, thrusting in return at the face, and hitting sharp with the left hand, I managed to keep three or four of the party on and off upon their backs, receiving a slight cut with a sword upon my left arm in countering a blow which just grazed me as I knocked down the owner, and disarmed him. My wife picked up the sword, as I had no time to stoop, and she stood well at bay with her newly-acquired weapon that a disarmed Arab wished to wrest from her, but dared not close with the naked blade…’ – certainly no shrinking violet. When Kamrasi, king of the Bunyoro, suggests that Baker might like to swap wives with him, Florence gave him a tongue-lashing in Arabic, which the king understood only too well, though he knew no word of that language. He apologised hurriedly, offering the excuse that it was a customary courtesy in his country.
Illness and even starvation was a constant worry. At one stage she was felled by sunstroke while battling her way through an almost impenetrable swamp and Samuel, himself fever-stricken, writes: ‘Almost as soon as I perceived her, she fell, as though shot dead. In an instant I was by her side; and with the assistance of eight or ten of my men, who were fortunately close to me, I dragged her like a corpse through the yielding vegetation, and up to our waists we scrambled across to the other side, just keeping her head above the water: to have carried her would have been impossible, as we should all have sunk together through the weeds. I laid her under a tree, and bathed her head and face with water, as for the moment I thought she had fainted; but she lay perfectly insensible, as though dead, with teeth and hands firmly clenched, and her eyes open, but fixed.’
She only recovered consciousness some days later, and of their final arrival at Lake Albert, Samuel writes: ‘My wife in extreme weakness tottered down the pass, supporting herself upon my shoulder, and stopping to rest every twenty paces. After a toilsome descent of about two hours, weak with years of fever, but for the moment strengthened by success, we gained the level plain below the cliff. A walk of about a mile through flat sandy meadows of fine turf interspersed with trees and bush, brought us to the water’s edge’ - and again later - ‘It was with extreme emotion that I enjoyed this glorious scene. My wife, who had followed me so devotedly, stood by my side pale and exhausted – a wreck upon the shores of the great Albert lake that we had so long striven to reach’ Honour given where honour was due, to be sure.
Their expedition had almost as much trouble with their own men as with the tribespeople among whom they passed. Baker’s perceived racist actions and high-handed manner have deprived him of much of the renown and respect due to the pair’s dogged pursuit of geographical exactitude. In his defence it must be said that they were extraordinarily unfortunate to be in the company of and to meet with some truly horrible people along the route. The Bakers returned from their travels and finally married ‘properly’ back in England, after which the disapproving queen reluctantly knighted the old sportsman, though she could never bring herself to meet with Florence.

Almost at exactly the same time (in fact they met the Bakers at Gondokoro) another real explorer, Alexandrine Tinne, the daughter of a rich merchant family from the Hague, indulged her fancy for parts unknown, and in company with her mother and aunt, she determined to explore the upper Nile. Alexine, as she was known, was the richest heiress in the Netherlands, which meant she had the resources for the job on hand. First and foremost she accumulated some ₤800 in small coin (banks being in short supply where she intended to go), loaded it alternately on ten camels, or filled one of her flotilla of three boats with cash when travelling by water. After leaving Cairo, they made leisurely progress to Korosko, where they disembarked and prepared to cross the Nubian Desert. Their caravan consisted of 102 camels, four European servants and some forty-odd menials under an Arab chief. Near Berber they rejoined the river as it was less fatiguing. Throughout this journey, Alexine sent letters describing their progress to a relative in England, John Tinne F.R.G.S, who compiled a slim volume entitled Geographical Notes of Expeditions in Central Africa by Three Dutch Ladies (T Brakell, 1864). Without too many problems they managed to reach Khartoum and this is where they encountered the Bakers, who had just returned from Abyssinia. Alexine decided that she wanted to do a little exploring up the Sobat River, the last major tributary of the Nile to enter from the east; so a steamer was chartered to facilitate progress. Besides sampling quantities of fish and game, such as giraffe and elephant meat, no great discoveries were made and they returned to Khartoum in November.
At this stage they met up with two German scientists, von Heuglin and Steudner, and a Baron d’Ablaing who were easily persuaded to share in the bounty on their next excursion, which took on serious as well as scientific proportions. They made the mistake of trying to explore the Bahr el Ghazal region of the Nile, to see how far west they could penetrate, hoping to discover one or more posited lakes in western north-central Africa, which were also sources of the White Nile. This was a mammoth task – a far cry from the previous leisurely excursions with all luxuries and support within easy reach. All the members of the expedition suffered greatly from fever; first Steudner died, then Mrs Tinne, as well as Alexine’s aunt and two maidservants, the latter three even after they managed to get back to Khartoum. While the distraught Alexine stayed in Cairo, von Heuglin published two works dealing with the geographical and zoological results in Die Tinnésche Expedition im westlichen Nilgebiet 1863–1864 (Gotha, 1865) and Reise in das Gebiet des Weissen Nils (Leipzig, 1869) and a number of new plant species were described by various botanists in Vienna under the title of Plantes Tinnaennes.
In 1869 the inveterate explorer fitted out a caravan to cross the Sahara from Tripoli to Lake Chad. In Murzuk she met the German explorer Gustav Nachtigal, however the latter wanted to explore the Tibesti mountains first, while she wanted to head further south. It was to prove her undoing. For reasons still unknown, but suspected to be due to factional politics, she and several of her companions were murdered by Tuaregs. Alexine Tinne is not well-known in English circles, since only a little has been written in that language about her and her travels, but she certainly has a huge and well-deserved reputation in the Netherlands. There are a number of romanticised works in English, German and Dutch about her explorations, but only one thesis by Antje Köhlerschmidt does justice to her: Alexandrine Tinne (1835–1869) – Afrikareisende des 19. Jahrhunderts (Magdeburg, 1994).

Another dutiful wife was Jane Moir, who was married to the co-founder of the African Lakes Company, which was engaged in fulfilling the vision of Livingstone in the then Nyasaland, ie civilising the African by means of missionary endeavour and trade – as well as eliminating the pernicious slave trade that was the scourge of Central Africa at the time. The Moirs set off on an ulendo (safari) from their almost palatial Blantyre home in 1890, and embarked on the little steamer, the Domira, for the fairly pleasant journey up Lake Nyasa, stopping halfway at the mission at Bandawe to embark some porters. Here our traveller encountered the first taste of rough weather and huge waves which threatened to swamp the boat, before they made it safely to Karonga at the northern end of the lake. The party walked the next 240 miles during the three weeks that followed, before embarking once more at Abercorn in an open steel sailing boat captained by A.J. Swann, a colonial official on treaty-business, to complete the voyage to Ujiji, midway up Lake Tanganyika. She describes her experience in a collection of A Lady’s Letters from Central Africa (James Maclehouse, 1891 & Central Africana 1991 repr.) What distinguishes her from other travel companions is the fact that she put a camera to good use, and took a number of the earliest photographs in the region, only two of which appear in her book, though her husband made more extensive use of her photos in his work After Livingstone (Hodder & Stoughton, 1923), and some were published in The Graphic in London.
While Moir pere discussed matters of economics and diplomacy with the local slaver cum chief (who is described as a rather civil and pleasant person, though a blackguard under the veneer), Jane was languishing in the company of dozens of slaves, handmaidens, concubines and two Muscat wives of the chief – none of whom had any language in common with her. Understandably she was not hugely entertained, but the couple had perforce to wait until a dhow could be repaired sufficiently to load the ivory Moir had obtained and for them to start on the return voyage. As before, all went idyllically for a few days until a storm brewed up and once more the passengers and crew were in mortal danger of foundering. In the dark of night they were forced to run westward across the lake under bare poles until they managed to shelter in a shallow lagoon on the next afternoon. They cautiously bay-hopped south for four days until the storm abated, when they could cross the lake eastwards once more. Now they exchanged the ‘deep sea for the devil’, as it were. Near the mission station of Karema, the winds once again rose and they were blown ashore among a warlike tribe, the Attongwe. While the crew refloated the boat, the Moirs tried to stay on friendly terms by exchanging presents with the Africans, but as dusk fell, an attack was launched and Jane found herself scrambling aboard while her crew tried to push the dhow out into the rough seas. Suddenly she became aware that her husband was still in the water trying to reach them, and she made the crew return in the face of a growing fusillade from the shore. They retrieved Fred in a hail of bullets, during which her helper beside her was hit and her double terai was adorned with two splendid bullet-holes as a memento to this brave act. The rest of the lake journey was painfully slow in the face of adverse winds, but from Abercorn onwards the journey was only marred by occasional fever of which Jane makes light; reaching the northern tip of Lake Nyasa (Malawi), where they were most hospitably received by the Wankonde tribe in their beautiful villages. They had to wait another ten days for the lake steamer, and once more Jane was dreadfully ill ‘having a horrid fever, which left me looking like Gorgonzola cheese’, before reaching home some four months after their departure. Jane Moir’s book is no great literary work, but in parts it is quite interesting and one can but admire her understated account of some five hundred miles afoot as well as some weeks afloat on the two deepest African lakes which have some of the most fickle weather and sailing conditions.

In chronological order we now come to the greatest of the Victorian lady travellers, whom I can only call la belle dame des Voyages d'Afrique – Mary Kingsley. Although largely self-taught from her father’s considerable library, her lectures and written work became immensely popular, so she is relatively well-known both as a writer and scientist/explorer – also being mislabelled a feminist. Her stance on the Christianisation and colonialisation of the Africans brought her into conflict with the church and the Empire Builders as she found justification for institutions such as polygamy in African society, as well as debunking the concept that the African was the intellectual inferior of the European by virtue of his race. The loss of her parents at the age of thirty provided her with a measure of independence and a modest income, which permitted her to set off on the first of her travels to the Canaries and later Loanda. Here she learnt the basics of survival among native tribes, and decided on a course of action for future exploits.
The year 1894 saw her back in West Africa, better equipped and supplied to follow her passion for ‘Fish and Fetish’, as she calls her quest. Obviously Mary was an engaging person; people seemed to fall over each other to try to aid and abet her in her efforts; British, Portuguese and German administrators, soldiers, missionaries of all denominations and most especially the traders that put their lives on the line on that fever-afflicted coast and inland, as well as their black staff manning the ‘factories’, as the trading posts along the malarial rivers were called. Her hefty work Travels in West Africa (Macmillan, 1897) launches immediately into a lively description of the scene and especially peoples of Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and Fernando Po, where her ship’s voyage ended the first stage, though she seems to have visited all the countries fringing the Bights of Benin and Bonny. One of the great shortcomings of her work is the lack of a map to show her routes, as it is extremely difficult to follow her course from her descriptions using the names then current. Her main travels and scientific researches were along the course of the Ogoue River in what she calls the Congo Français (Gabon), she spoke no French and certainly had very little knowledge of the Fan (Fong) indigenous language. Instead she established cordial communication with all and sundry in English, German and an enthusiastically acquired command of Pidgin. She certainly did not explore the geography of the river and its tributaries – that was fairly well-known and often traveled by Europeans – but some of the short-cuts she followed led her through dreadful swamps which could sink her up to her neck in a matter of a few steps, necessitating laborious extrication by her companions. Other great obstacles were the steep ravines that had been filled with storm-felled jungle trees to a depth of six to ten metres. One false step could precipitate a person through this jumble of slippery, rotting wood to the valley floor below. To escape unscathed from these mazes could be enormously complicated and dangerous. In comparison, learning to paddle her own dugout on a rapidly flowing river during her missionary hosts’ siesta-time, is one of the funniest episodes graphically described in the book. Mary also writes in her customary understated way, that she had to beat an enterprising crocodile about the head with her paddle when it tried to join her in the craft. On another instance she was taking a midnight stroll as she could not fall asleep in her village accommodation on an island and suddenly she found herself in the midst of a small herd of grazing hippos. With remarkable sang froid she poked the obstructive beast in front of her behind his ear with the ferrule of her umbrella to shift him out of the way so that she could proceed. She also proved her mettle during a fight between a village dog and a leopard. The leopard stood no chance at all once Mary had ‘fired two native carved stools into the melée’ after which she was forced to break an earthenware water-cooler on the poor beast’s head to get it to change its mind about attacking her. Inevitably there were disagreements with the locals over matters of custom or trade, but Mary not only charmed the Europeans that came her way; she genuinely liked and got on well with the West Africans, especially the Fan, who had a bad name for cannibalism among the whites. She stood firm when it was needed, she reasoned and even wheedled when it was politic to do so – and she yielded only when an impasse was evident. No opponent was shot; neither was she attacked. Her most dangerous moments came from the violence of nature and the occasional man-trap that was set at the entrances of the villages she visited – but there was nothing personal in that.
Not content with conquering the pestilential swamps, impenetrable jungles and raging rapids, she next sets her sights on conquering the 4000 m high peak of Mount Cameroon. Completely under-equipped she sets off on the six-day hike, and before long her party is suffering from thirst, hunger and freezing temperatures. Mary, though having to leave her last companions huddling together under their blankets in the streaming rain, gropes through the swirling cloud and howling storm to find the cairn at the summit – more by touch than by sight. Thoroughly satisfied, she commences the descent. The only country in the region that receives barely a mention is the Belgian Congo, and she shares my non-existent esteem for the owner as well as his administration. On the other hand the Germans and their colonial efforts in the region get the Kingsley stamp of approval.
A large proportion of her utterly entertaining and informative work consists of describing ‘Fetish’, which would be classed as ethnographical details of indigenous culture in present-day terms. Even this I found eminently readable (though I do have more than a passing interest in the subject) and other readers of the book I have spoken to, have concurred with me. There is a small section on her zoological discoveries, but this was written by a German scientist and can safely be ignored by all but the most ardent ‘pisciphiles’. A relatively alarming number of deaths among her compatriots and other Europeans are noted, which gives the reader some idea of the health and hygiene along the coast. A whole chapter is devoted to the ills and parasites that afflict the human condition; enough to make one wonder what made any man (and Mary Kingsley) want to disembark on those shores. Nonetheless, her book is my all-time favourite Victorian travelogue and I can heartily recommend it, taken in short doses, to anyone from nine years old to ninety – regardless of sex, race, creed or literary tastes.

The last, but certainly not least of our assemblage of notable ladies, would be Mary Hall. She wrote an entertaining and informative tome on her experiences: A Woman’s Trek from the Cape to Cairo (Methuen, 1907) and she was certainly the very first pioneer tourist to traverse the length of the African continent hard on the heels of Ewart Grogan. Despite her achievement, and possibly because of her common name, I have been unable to find any background on the lady. She seems to have been a termagant of mature years; a seasoned traveler; accustomed to making progress come what may – in addition to being a gifted writer with a fine descriptive turn of phrase, a photographer who developed her own glass plate negatives in transit, so to speak; a discerning observer; a stern disciplinarian, yet a fair judge of men and their frailties. Above all she was a dauntless soul who would tackle an unknown route with some dozens of strangers of a different culture and language than her own, without a single firearm for her protection, relying only on a small terrier-like canine for personal protection. Except for fowls, goats and the odd bovine, no wild animals were injured, nor were there any fatalities caused among the tribespeople along her route. The one exciting episode with enraged warriors she faced with extreme coolness, sitting perched on her trunk under a tree, while she explained politely to the affronted chief and his howling horde that it had not been her intention to offend, and that her guilty askari would be punished. Needless to say, she and the chief parted the best of friends!
She obviously had the means to tackle the journey while preserving some comforts of civilisation; her folding bathtub, wardrobe, bed, tent and machila (or hammock) are ample proof of that. Every morning she would walk for an hour or two before it got too hot, but she was not a good climber, nor did she ford a stream afoot, while she had willing bearers to hoist her aloft, or a canoe to transport her. She paints a charming portrait of her progress up hills (facing backwards in her hammock, so as not to have to look at the empty skies) and down into the valleys (facing forward to enjoy the view) – seemingly determined to miss nothing of the passing scene. Like Grogan, she did her jaunt in two stages. 1904 saw her touring Southern Africa, and in the following year she set off from where the steamer had dropped her off at Chinde, in Mozambique. She made her way upstream by boat and then took to her hammock for the hike towards Lake Nyasa (Malawi). Here she assembled a volunteer force of porters, as well as two young locals, one of whom could speak English, while his companion knew some Swahili – which was going to facilitate matters linguistic through their east African leg of the journey. Admittedly, being a lone lady traveller did single her out for extraordinary treatment by all missionaries, administrators and military men along the way. Time and again the overwhelmed gentlemen would vacate their quarters for her and try to provide her with as many comforts as were available, so she was never out of touch with Europeans for any great length of time. Neither did she have to carry ten camel loads of small change like Alexine Tinne – since she used the African Lakes Company, the British colonial outposts and even the German administration as bankers along the way.
Mary avoided the malarial swamps between Lakes Edward and Albert by cutting cross-country from the top end of Lake Tanganyika across to Lake Victoria, from where she took to the water for a ride to Port Florence. Here she entrained and enjoyed the novelty of a moderately comfortable ride to Nairobi and back, missing a sighting of Kilimanjaro due to the weather. Back at Entebbe, she decided to try a rickshaw to Butiaba, since evidently there was a fledgeling road already in use. From there onward she embarked on one of the sources of the Nile and despite swarms of mosquitoes (which she seems to have kept at bay by sheer willpower, for she suffered not a day’s illness during her entire trip), she concluded her jaunt to Cairo in fine fashion – taking a mere nine months, compared to Grogan’s triple that time. On her arrival at Khartoum she notes that ‘coming from the south after months of privation and spare living, it seemed to me that the hotel was replete with every comfort available’ and that she wished only to have recorded in detail her experiences in the more unknown parts of Africa, therefore she will skip the thousand miles between Gondokoro and Khartoum, as well as the railway journey between the latter town and Cairo – which is within reach of the ‘ordinary tourists’ – among whom she does obviously not include herself. A formidable achievement - and a fitting conclusion to this tribute to six decades of lady travellers, from pioneering explorer to first tourist.

Publish and/or be Damned

2010-06-27T16:04:00.000+02:00

Africana Votes & Views #18

So you have written a work of deathless prose, a work of great historical importance, a gripping novel – maybe something a little more whimsical, erudite or arcane. Let’s face it, the chances of finding a publisher who is willing to risk even a moderate portion of his working capital on an unknown author, who is going to need a huge amount of publicity to get his work, however good, to fly, is pretty slim. So the next possibility is to self-publish, a practice often snidely referred to as ‘vanity publishing’. There are any number of concerns out there on the web who will be ecstatically happy to handle your manuscript (hereinafter referred to as MS), thump it into some sort of shape, print the finished product on the first paper that comes to hand, put a lick of glue at the back of the textblock and slip it into a softcover not of your own choosing. For payment, naturally, that is you pay, and they will deliver a product which you can proudly exhibit on your bookshelf and try to persuade friends and others to buy – or not, as the case may be. Alternatively you can do it the hard way, and come away with a book that will, at least for a short period during this time of immense changes that happen in every field you can imagine, make you immortal.
Let’s start with subject matter of your MS. If you have a chunk of change burning a hole in your pocket; you are certain you won’t need it to buy a child a new motorcar, or a Zimmerframe for yourself – why, then you can pretty well do as you please, since the object is not to make money. Ordinary mortals have to keep an eye on the budget – therefore the cardinal rule number one is: find a need for a book, and fill it with your effort. Figure out a marketing strategy. Don’t just ‘think’ Exclusive Books, PNA or any of the other large chains are going to do you that favour. They won’t, ordinarily. Don’t aim too high; a modest print run is wiser in our small local market, and printing a second impression should you be successful, is a better option. We will have to return to this later when considering costs.
So let’s imagine you have you MS about as ready as you think it’s going to be. You have proofread it three times and ironed out all the typos, spelling mistakes and errors of fact. WRONG. Get someone else, preferably a person with professional proofreading skills to repeat the exercise. I’ve never yet heard of anybody being able to pick up all of the mistakes of their own making in print. Be prepared to pay for this invaluable service, it’s worth it. Once that has been done you are ready to actually do a virtual desktop publishing job (DTP) providing you have any of a computer and one of a whole raft of MS-Office lookalike programmes at hand. What you need to do is to pick the size of paper you want (Hint: don’t get too fancy, it costs money to print a book on non-standard sized paper) By this time you will probably have approached some printing firm, you have intimated to them that you want to print en edition of roughly so many books, and generally they are only too happy to help you along on this question. Follow their guidelines, and set up a blank file, having unlimited pages, printed two-up next to each other, as would happen in a book and that is the first step.
Next come margins. There are supposedly certain conventions which expound the dogma that the top margin must be a certain size (relative to the height of the page) while the bottom margin should be that size plus/less a percentage; the inner margin of the left hand page should be another size, and the outer margin on the same page yet another size – which is a mirror image of the right hand page. During the past sixty years I have seen them all, and I can tell you when a layout pleases me, and when it doesn’t. That’s about it. I hate to waste paper with huge margins and tiny blocks of text; the obverse applies. Make sure the text is comfortable to read without needing x-ray eyes to see the end of the line as it disappears into the gutter, as the middle part of the book is named.
Spacing is another point to be considered. Single spacing is hard on the eyes; it makes it difficult to keep your place. Double spacing always makes me think the author ran out of material for his book and wanted to make it look more important than it is. So round about space and a half would be fine; but one can play with the finer points of that on a computer. Closely allied to spacing is the font. Yes, I know there are all sorts of really charming Elizabethan, Gothic, Papyrus etc fonts, but all of these get tiresome to read in a full-length book. Stick to a nice simple font like Times New Roman or Garamond, in a size between 10 and 12 points, preferably something with a serif, so the letters don’t look too naked. While we’re on the subject of fonts, you can adjust the character spacing as well, but since you are hopefully going to justify your text both sides ( as this article is) leave character spacing out of the equation if at all possible. Crowding too much into a space again makes it difficult to read – not the sort of thing you want to do to your customer and best friend. It can be used in things like appendixes or indexes, when you are pushed for space, and if you squeeze your text a little, cut down on font size and line spacing, you can easily save yourself a page or three, which means your book will finish off with roughly the required number of pages divisible by 32 (known as a signature, or gathering). Alternatively you might have to wield the figurative red crayon and cut down on your verbosity to get a snug fit. You are now ready to get your computer to grab your entire MS, copy and paste it into the prepared format. Voila, we have a putative book.
So you’d like to illustrate your book. If your artistic talents are that way inclined, do your drawings, etchings or watercolours, scan them at the finest resolution you can get, shrink them to the size required and cut and paste them into your textblock at required intervals. If you want a talented person to do the artwork for your book, choose someone who will have empathy with you and your work – and choose a person you can afford. If you want a lot of photos with little blocks of text here and there, you are entering dangerous waters. To get a good balance is not that easy, numerous books look like a dog’s breakfast after such efforts. Most publishers pay book designers hefty fees to apply their particular talents to that task. On the other hand, you can always take the easier route and put a batch of ‘plates’ here and there in a book, consisting either of single images or several per page – but it is the old-fashioned way of doing things. Just be 100% certain that the colour photo you are about to adorn your book with is of the highest quality – like with proofreading, get a second opinion. Nothing spoils a good book as easily as a rubbish photo. Full-page illustrations should all face in the same direction if in landscape format, ie on either left or right hand page, the top of the picture is on the left, so you don’t have to turn the book this way and that when reading. There is an alternative format if one wishes to include a lot of illustrations in that aspect, by turning out an ‘oblong’ book, in which the hinge is on the short side. Remember that this format is usually most difficult to store on shelves, though.
Now let us consider the ‘prelims, those free endpapers, half-title, frontispiece, title page, contents, preface, dedication etc. Most modern softcovers, don’t have endpapers; many don’t have half-titles; that is a matter of individual taste. However, many self-published books start off with the title page, which often does not contain much information. You need at least a title; then possible a more explanatory sub-title in slightly smaller font underneath that, and below this the author’s name and possibly the illustrator’s as well, if that person has played a significant part in the book. Somewhere near the bottom of that page, one or both of the following should appear: a date of publication, and the name of the publisher, if there is one. The verso of that page should carry the following information, especially if you have published it yourself: Published by John Citizen, Pofadder, South Africa, (possibly a contact number or e-mail address, and the date should be reiterated and the edition should be stated, eg 2008 1st Edition. Then a few lines further down centred for easy identification you need an ISBN number, which you can obtain by phoning………………… at the State Library in Pretoria. The same person will then send you a sheaf of forms to complete in which you describe your book, and which also tells you that you have to send off copies of your work, free gratis and for nothing to all the holding libraries in the land – that’s about 8-12 copies. On the bottom third of that page you affirm that you are the owner of the intellectual rights of the work, unless you have included quotes or passages from a previously published work, in which case you had better have that author’s permission in writing that you may use the passage, and you acknowledge that they have graciously given you their permission. Most self-publishers have had some help from altruistic friends, authors or publishers – so it is only proper to thank them in print under the heading of ‘Acknowledgements’. Then underneath that you might like to add a dedication to some person for some reason. A page of contents is usual, but avoid anything that lists Chapter 1, Chapter 2 etc etc (which I have found in a surprising number of professionally published works), rather, the contents page should be descriptive to give the prospective reader a foretaste of what is to come. You might like to do the same with your illustrations; but while they will assist the bookseller and cataloguer in a hundred years time to decide whether the book is complete, it is mostly not done in modern publications. Your prelims may or may not be included in the pagination of the book, but beware – printers have been known to make a hash of it by starting the numeration of pages from the free endpaper onwards! I know from experience.
Now let’s look at the rear of the text. Your story has come to an end; all the t’s have been crossed and the i’s dotted. Not so fast. If your book is a factual one, which seeks to enlighten the reader in any field whatsoever, then it needs an index. Indexing is a dreadful, repetitive job for people who have special skills; so it is best left to them. You might have used a lot of foreign words – in South Africa, Afrikaans words creep in and if you are going to have foreign tourists reading your work – well, then you’d better explain yourself with a glossary at the end of the book. If you have leaned heavily on the writings of other writers, it is useful to give a full list of the publications you have used. There is a format for this, easily learned by perusing a reputable book which has such a bibliography at the end. These last few items are one place where you can scrimp on the size and spacing of font and lines, as people tend to search for one or two words, they don’t get tired from reading large quantities of tiny font. Just one thing left to do – list the fact that you have appended an index, a glossary and a bibliography at the front of the book on the contents page.
Almost all factual books on historical and other matters have footnotes at the base of the text here and there – mainly to explain something or to give a reference as to where a fact was found. Your computer programme should be able to handle it, but it can get a little tricky. Pre-set the size of the font one or two sizes smaller than your main text, and you can even use another font to make it quite obvious that the reader has strayed out of the main narrative. Footnotes can also be added in a bunch at the end. This means you have to read the book with a finger stuck in the textblock further on to be able to access a footnote when you need it. I find that irksome, but tastes may differ; you can never please all the readers, so you might as well please yourself. Often a book will need a map to enable the reader to follow the action or to place a locality. You can’t just photocopy a map from the nearest atlas, as that image belongs to someone. No, either you have to get stuck in and draw the thing yourself, scan it, put in the required placenames by hand or per computer programme, or once more you have to hunt down some talent and pay them a commensurate amount for doing that small thing for you. It’s your choice.
Right, so now we have a textblock in the rough, so to speak. At this stage you need to make a final decision as to what paper you want to use. Get samples of everything that the printers offer. Decide whether you want a glossy, dead-white, or something a little more organic. Print on a sheet; both sides so that you can check whether the paper is opaque enough to prevent the print on the other side from showing through, check the quality of the printing on the weave with a magnifying glass to see if it has broken up unduly. On the other hand does the printed sheet look grey? Then you almost certainly have a really poor print job on paper that owes more of its existence to a mine than a tree. You need to decide whether the illustrations need a special paper, for instance dead white high-gloss for photos, unless you are going for sepia shades of black and white on a yellow or light beige, or whether your drawings look at home on the same grade of paper as your print. Whatever you do with your colour illustrations, get a proof which also states what paper is going to be used, so that you can check that the innate colour of the paper doesn’t alter your tones in the final appearance of the pictures. Decide on the weight of paper to use – find out if it is available in the correct quantity right now. The paper has been chosen, now the nice person from the printers must tell you exactly how thick your book of xxx pages with yy plates and two maps is going to be, because otherwise you won’t be able to proceed with the next step.
What about a cover? You have a firm idea of what you want your cover to look like. Wonderful! You have taken a stunning photo ten years back, which you would like to use for a dustjacket/cover. Or you are one of those gifted people who can actually do their own artwork. Converting an image into a book-cover is not a job for an amateur. To get the titling correctly spaced, the spine labeled, the blurb aligned properly on the back or on the flaps of the dustjacket – all of these are once more in the preserve of the specialist graphic designer. You’ll pay dearly for the service, but at least you will have a real idea of what your effort is going to look like before you go and throw some real money at it. If there is any chance that the work will be sold at any jacked-up emporium, then you’d better go on-line and buy yourself a bar-code that can be incorporated on the back cover of the book – it makes it look more professional and easier to sell to the big boys, if you should get lucky. Again you have to decide on the weight of paper or board, as it is called, to use on the covers.
Now you speak to your friendly person at the printers. You enquire about the options. Get an idea what it would cost to produce the textblock in different quantities, say 300, 500 or 1000, find out what the difference in cost would be for a ‘perfect-bound’ versus a sewn book. You will be surprised how much cheaper it gets the more you print. Then get a quote for what a softcover binding would add to the cost; alternately explore the cost of having your publication machine-bound in hardcover, with a dustjacket added on, or with a laminated cover. Now the expense starts to climb. Most people bail out at about this stage and decide they can only afford to publish a softcover. Why not? The world is full of softcover books; it won’t hang over you like a criminal record if you go that route. There is one way out of this financial dilemma. Tell the printers that you will not pay for any overruns (you’d be surprised how inaccurate these people can be, 10% more or less is nothing to them), but offer to take a set number of textblocks without covers off them, say 20-50. These you can then hand over to a friendly bookbinder, who can hand-bind them at great expense, and which you may present as priceless heirlooms to family and friends or sell them as de-luxe editions at a hugely inflated price.
Are we ready to go? Not by a long stretch ! You now get a ‘proof’ of the cover, printed exactly on the same sort of board, as they call the thick paper that is used. Tell them you want it laminated, or embossed, or not as your heart desires and your finances will allow – get a couple, just so that you can play with them. Let’s say you are happy with the cover. Now you request a proof of the book. This should arrive in loose sheets, and you apply yourself once more to ‘proof-reading’. It is almost guaranteed that you will find errors. Without any reason that you can fathom, your faithful computer has taken a dislike to the printer’s machine and between them they have decided to alternate fonts on even and odd pages, to kick footnotes into the middle of a page, your pagination numbers appear anywhere and your index doesn’t bear even the faintest resemblance to what you had given them. It happens. Deal with it. Use very bold red markers and point out exactly what is wrong, glue or staple on little scraps of paper bearing instructions and throw it back at your ever-friendly printer with a snarl. He won’t mind, because this happens all the time. He will then make the necessary adjustments and you will get another proof. You will (of course) have kept a photocopy of the previous proof so that you can now track down one and every amendment you have requested. You find that all is well and the printer has done his job – or has he? No, you start from the beginning and proofread once more, because it is equally likely that in fixing the previous batch of errors, he has now committed a few others. You send the results of your researches back to him and request (hopefully) a set of ‘galleys’, which nowadays actually just means a sort of final proof. Yes, you read through that one once more and eradicate that last misplaced comma, full stop or whatever – just look hard enough and you’ll find it.
Most printers will want at least a deposit from you at this stage, and it’s not an unreasonable request; but do hold back 50% of the full payment until after delivery of the finished product to your satisfaction. Read your contract, know what you are letting yourself in for. Ideally it would now be best for you to find out exactly at which small hour of the morning your book will come hot off the press, and you insist that you wish to stand there while they run off your thousand copies at a breathtaking rate. That way you can pick up any major snarl-up as the first few books come off the press and are assembled. It’s not an easy decision to make, since it is heart-attack territory, and it is no guarantee that you will pick up an incipient problem in the dim light of the factory environment between all this lethal-sounding machinery. Hopefully you will be the proud parent of your own literary baby a few days later.

Cape to Cairo

2010-04-27T08:59:00.000+02:00

Africana Votes & Views #16

It was of course Cecil John Rhodes, whose lifelong ambition it was to colour the map of Africa with a broad splash of red from north to south, signifying a string of British colonies, and thus hegemony, stretching from the Cape to the shores of the Mediterranean. It was a goal he pursued by fair means and foul through the latter part of his life – and he all but succeeded. More importantly he inspired generations of would-be Empire-builders.
Whenever great endeavour, courage and persistence is the subject of talk among travelers, sooner or later the name of Ewart Scott Grogan is almost certain to be mentioned. This epitome of British imperialism was the man who is mostly credited with the phrase From the Cape to Cairo (also the title of his book published by Hurst & Blackett, 1900) – and his epic trek has become the Holy Grail of large numbers of would-be explorers and travelers, who have followed in his footsteps on foot, by boat, by automobile and by aircraft. So let us have a closer look at the gentleman.
Grogan was born in 1874 into a well-off family with numerous siblings. From tender years onwards he showed much promise and achieved some impressive results in his sporting and scholastic career. During his short stay at Cambridge, his ‘high spirits’, practical jokes and escapades brought him into conflict with this august institution as well as the law and finally caused him to be expelled, after which he spent a short time at Slade Art School – which he left on a whim. At age 22 he arrived in Rhodesia, where he found ‘well-bred Varsity men rubbing shoulders with animal-faced Boers, leavened with Jews, parasites, bummers, nondescripts and every type of civilized savage’ – obviously not people to his delicate taste, but then, he ‘knew that it is good to be an Englishman’. He was just in time to throw himself enthusiastically into the fray of the Matabele Rebellion, which introduced him to the atrocities of war. He survived and before departing back home, he distinguished himself in Beira by knocking down and killing an armed assailant in a dance hall. Feeling in need of a little diversion, he went to visit a friend in New Zealand, where he met his future wife, as well as some stiff opposition from her stepfather, who did not fancy him as son-in-law material. This became the impetus for the great journey. If he made it, he would have proven himself and he would get his girl. Grogan’s biography, The Man from the Cape (Evans Bros, 1959) written by an adoring nephew, Norman Wymer, gives all the background, as well as the subsequent role he played in the colonisation of Kenya and the application of vigilante-justice to errant servants on the steps of the colonial legislature.
Back to the Great Affair. Funding for the journey was provided in the main by Harry Sharp, a mere acquaintance at the time, but a man who had some means, and who wanted a hunting trip and some adventure. It is a misconception that the pair set off on foot from Cape Town; in fact they took the train to Bulawayo and a coach to Beira. A number of months were spent in pursuit of lions in Mozambique, and the pair managed to bag a dozen or more, and left at least another score wounded cats in the bush before setting off towards Lake Nyasa. This was the real start of the trek, which was to take them over a year to reach the sources of the Nile, mostly on foot, but also by boat and later by machila as both men were brought down by malaria and dysentery. The Central African region had been ravaged by internecine struggles between the tribes, as well as expeditions from the Belgian Congo, who were trying to establish their king’s suzerainty over the uncertain border country of no man’s land. The pair struggled on across and past the Great Lakes, until Sharp had had enough by the time they reached Katwe. He returned to the coast and Grogan carried on alone. One can’t fault his courage in attempting the daunting task he had set himself; so our man muddled through by virtue of sheer effrontery, judicious application of the kiboko (shambok) and boot. His trials did not prevent him from taking out a license to shoot two elephants ( after which in some mysterious fashion he seems to have become entitled to shoot a few dozen, though not all fatally – as would be expected from our marksman). He had a fairly narrow escape from the clutches of the Dinka tribe in the Sudan, but thanks to the judicious application of dum-dum bullets at ranges up to six hundred yards, as he relates with some relish, he survived the journey as far as Sobat, where he once more met up with the British gentry and could continue the trip in the comfort he so appreciated – by boat to Cairo.
The book is well-written in a self-deprecating, tongue-in-cheek way, full of sarcastic remarks and opinions, which present the author in a less than favourable light according to present-day standards. He remains a legend, whose trek has been imitated in one way or another by hundreds of adventurers who have taken to the roads, waters and winds on foot, by boat, by automobile, by motorbike, by aeroplane and by seaplane and for all I know even by balloon or dirigible. Certainly there are dozens of books I have either seen or read on the subject.
Now the behemoths of the steel tracks would tackle the route. The railway, as probably visualised by Rhodes, and certainly advocated by Grogan at great length and with some intensity in his book, also steadily made its way up and down the continent, ever trying to join up. Leo Weinthal’s record of every bit of information, be it geological, geographical, engineering, technical and human, was contained in five volumes entitled The Story of the Cape to Cairo Railway and River Route from 1887–1922 (Pioneer Publishing Co, 1923) – a rare and precious work, which I have never yet held in my hands in its entirety. Even the few fragments I read in the odd volumes that have crossed my path; the painstaking detail shown in the whole volume of maps that accompanied the work – spoke volumes of the Great Affair, the romance that attaches itself to grandiose works such as the Suez Canal or the Three Gorges Dam.
A book which sought to follow in Weinthal’s footsteps, and to bring the history of this great line up to the end of the 20th century was George Tabor’s The Cape to Cairo Railway (Genta Publications, 2003). Unfortunately it failed dismally, mostly due to an unpardonable number of errors of fact and sloppy editorship, though it did provide some interesting anecdotes about the grand hotels that were dotted along the route.
The early flyers also eyed the continent covetously in the years just after the Great War. There were huge obstacles that needed to be overcome; the terrain was virtually uncharted, there were no known landing fields or refuelling depots. However the idea got momentum and the Daily Mail offered a ₤10 000 prize for the first successful flight; even Winston Churchill gave his stamp of approval in the British Parliament. Eventually, in January 1920 the first plane, a Vickers Vimy piloted by Cockerell and Broome, were off, but could not last the distance, and had to abandon the flight at Tabora in East Africa. The South African entry, flown by the pioneers Sir Pierre van Ryneveld and his co-pilot Sir Quintin Brand, sponsored by Smuts’s government, were successful and landed at Cape Town some 45 days after their departure from Brooklands. These early pioneering flights, as well as the number of notable crashes, are ably described by John Godwin in his book Wings to the Cape (Tafelberg, 1971). Another worthwhile book, which deals with the development of civil and military aviation in South Africa is H Klein’s Winged Courier (Timmins, 1955), though it doesn’t deal primarily with Cape to Cairo flight. That notable long distance aviator, Sir Alan Cobham, crowned his flight round Europe by doing the Cairo to Cape in several long-hops using a De Havilland 50 – and for good measure, back again. This resulted in a slim volume entitled My Flight to the Cape and Back (A & C Black, 1926) which was remarkably devoid of incident; but then, all one could say of flight in the early days was that it was noisy, dangerous and gave you a lot of time to say your prayers. A few years later Sir Alan was back again with the largest seaplane in the world, a Short Singapore, in which he flew right around the continent of Africa, only landing in British Colonies for good measure. This little jaunt was described in Twenty Thousand Miles in a Flying-boat (G G Harrap, 1930) and proved to have a little more meat on the bones. Sandwiched between these two books was the effort by Messrs Mittelholzer, Gouzy and Heim, who flew their Dornier-Merkur seaplane from Switzerland down the Nile, thence via the Great Lakes to the Cape and recorded their findings, as well as some fine aerial photography in their book Afrika-Flug (Orell Fuessli, 1927).
Surprisingly, automobile transport is only third in line. Once motoring became the vogue, there was no stopping the Cape to Cairo crowd. I won’t pretend to know the authors and titles of all the books dealing with the dragging of underpowered and unsuitable four-wheeled conveyances through the swamps of Africa, but a couple do come to mind. The intrepid Stella Court-Treatt relates the epic of one of the early traverses in her book Cape to Cairo: the Record of a Historic Motor Journey (G G Harrap, 1927), in which their party of six Britons boarded a Crossley automobile and with the aid of several dozen spans of draught animals and a number of whole tribes of indigenous peoples, actually made the trek. This historic journey took them all of seventeen months – which though an improvement on the thirty-odd months of Mr Grogan, was not exactly at breathtaking speed, even for cars of the day.
Just a few years later G Makepeace tells in his book Capetown to Stockholm (General Motors, SA Ltd, 1929) of slogging it out with the aid of a pair of Chevvy's. This was intended to be a publicity stunt worthy of a 21st century advertising agency for General Motors products, but it turned into a real adventure. So it went on through the decades that followed. Every form of the machine you could think of was used; from aged London taxis, to Baby Austins and ancient VW Kombis in later years. I actually met a few of these intrepid people between 1959 and 1980 – but most of them had very little fun along the way, and if they had written books, why, I think they might have been very little fun to read as well. Of course, there were other means of transport, and also some well-told tales.
One of these was Anthony Smith, who tells us in his book Smith and Son (Hodder & Stoughton, 1983) of buying a Triumph Tiger Cub motorbike in Cape Town in 1955, taking three months to reach Cairo, and then parking the beat-up old crotch-rocket in a damp, downstairs corridor among the household junk, while he married, fathered a son, and generally got on with life. So one day he and his youngster met up with this mechanical marvel and dad is coaxed into telling sonny that he drove the thing all the way through Africa. ‘Past lions and things – at about sixty miles an hour’ – a phrase that obviously would intrigue a child of tender years, who would like to test the bike at that speed there and then. So father stalls a bit and makes a half-promise that maybe someday they could take it out and ride down Africa; past lions and things at sixty miles an hour.
So when Adam, the son, finishes his schooling in 1983, dad utters that fatal question, ‘OK, so what about Africa?’ To which son replies, ‘Yup, why not’ and the rest, as they say, was history. The book is not just a wearisome enumeration of miles and miles of heat and dust; nor is it about the feeling of freedom of the road that biking and the wind through your hair is supposed to bring, nor the difficulties and the breakdowns; rather it is an exploration of a relationship between a father and his son, with the aid of two elderly machines and several thousand miles of hot, wet, dry, dusty and colourful continent. A thoroughly enjoyable book, even for a person like myself, who has hated the two-wheelers cordially since mounting my first moped at 13, graduating in stages onto a Lambretta at 19 and then having a looong gap until I once more climbed onto a Chinese imitation British 1950’s military sidecar combo with my sister and a chauffeur for a celebratory outing on my sixty-somethingth birthday. My eyes still water and my backside hurts at the memory of our trip round the peninsula – but hey, it was something I had promised myself one day – just like Smith and son.
One other mighty traveler I cannot omit: some dozen or more years ago a man rang me to enquire whether I had a copy of Livingstone’s great work Missionary Travels – I did have a poor example, but he was quite happy to come and collect it. My tiny shop was invaded by a much larger-than-life Kingsley Holgate, a man who had to turn sideways as well as bend his head to come in through the door. He had just done his first traverse of Africa, and needed to read up a little on the great traveler who had preceded him. I was able to help with a couple of books and we had a lively conversation. In the ensuing years I followed his adventures around the African continent by means of television documentaries, and finally his book appeared, entitled Cape to Cairo, (Struik, 2002), being his whole family’s adventures along the waterways of Africa. While it is not a great feat of literature, nor an epic journey, since they had boats, outboards, 4x4s galore and all the kit that goes along; they did have to battle the demons of bureaucracy, the shadows of war and the zing of malarial mosquitoes. For that I salute the great man and his companions.
One of the latest offerings in the genre is Sihle Khumalo’s book Dark Continent – my Black A*se (Umuzi, 2007). The irrepressible 30-year old from Durban decides to celebrate his birthday in style. He gives up a well-paid job, perks, and comfortable flat in a secure complex, leaving his girl and 16-month old daughter to brave the public transport system and potholes between the Cape and Cairo. Almost at once his venture runs into trouble when the airline staff went on strike at Durban, necessitating a very lengthy bus-journey to Bellville to catch his pre-booked connection to Namibia. From there on things can only get a*se-numbingly worse. Khumalo describes his travel companions, the differences in culture and infrastructure with insight and good humour. The further he gets away from home, through Zambia, then Malawi, up into Tanzania, the slower his progress, and the more difficult it becomes to communicate.
Yet there are many unforgettable moments along the way. Victoria Falls and the memories of a prior bungee jump off the steel bridge; sundowners overlooking Lake Malawi after an impromptu barbecue on Lizard Island; the basic honesty of some of the poorest people on earth, and the dawning realization in the hell-holes of the slave dungeons of Zanzibar, that the ‘[Arabs had] screwed Africans in a big way. They took away our dignity and pride and converted our forefathers, including women and children, into goods with a monetary value. Not that the African kings and chiefs were innocent. It is well-documented that local traditional leaders used to barter their own subjects or captive members of other clans with the Arab slave-traders’. I have heard local academics denying that bit of truth quite vehemently a short while back.
The further north our lad gets, the more difficult it becomes to communicate with first the Swahili speakers, then the Amharic and later Arabic linguists. Until he passes out of Ethiopia, the women also got more beautiful by the mile it would seem – or was that in obverse proportion to his distance from home? His luck holds, and he manages to get his visas for the war-torn Sudan and Egypt and lurches over some abominable tracks in matolas, boksies and buses (one made from an amalgamation of a bus-body and a truck-front) with some astounding bureaucratic hold-ups into the bargain until he can board the train for Khartoum. From there on it was almost plain sailing except for a sandstorm in the two-day desert transit. The antiquities of Egypt fill him with wonder and he reads a book in the Bibliotheca Alexandria to end off his momentous experiences. He looks back on the continent’s starving, sick, dying and naked poor, and he struggles to understand how the so-called liberators have been turned into dictators or heads of one-party states, how they have allowed their countries to deteriorate so much and how they could neglect their people in such a fashion.
On a much lighter and entertaining note I would like to end this contribution by paying tribute to a distant relative of Grogan – yes, the artist/cartoonist Tony Grogan – who authored and especially illustrated the book Between the Cape and Cairo (Central Africana Ltd, 1995). The artist spent two lengthy holidays in Malawi, and his humorous portrayals of the people and scenes of the ‘Warm Heart of Africa’, are interspersed with cartoon comparisons to some of the scenes he envisaged his illustrious precursor to have encountered, as well as what the modern equivalent situation would look like. A lovely work to page through at the end of an exhausting journey along the length of a continent.

Great Lakes and Great Rivers of Africa

2010-03-09T08:52:00.000+02:00

AFRICANA VOTES & VIEWS #14

The reconnaissance of the Great Lakes Region and the sources of the Nile form an engrossing chapter in the exploration of the Dark Continent. The great river, which was the parent of the Egyptian civilization, has intrigued men from ancient times. The Greeks and Romans tried to travel up its length, but were defeated by the papyrus swamps of the Sudd, and during Ptolemy’s rule it was recorded that another probe was turned back by the gorges that cut through the Ethiopian highlands.
It was those redoubtable voyageurs, the Portuguese, who penetrated into the hinterland of Ethiopia in search of the fabled Prester John during the 15th and 16th centuries. One of them, the Jesuit Pedro Paez, correctly identified a stream which flowed north into Lake Tana as the highest source, although there are many more affluents and tributaries that join the lake and the river that issues from it to become the Blue Nile. The Scottish traveller James Bruce of Kinnaird followed in their footsteps and journeyed the length of the Blue Nile to it confluence with the White Nile in 1770. His five-volume work Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772 and 1773 (J & G Robinson, 1790) describes his experiences, but I have not read anything more than a very short summary of its contents due to its length. His larger-than-life adventures were received with some incredulity by his readers; it is said that they even inspired the Baron Munchausen stories as a satire of his work, but except for ridiculing the Portuguese accounts as phantasy, Bruce made a valuable contribution to the knowledge of the river and the region.
The next was Burton, an explorer and traveller of note, a scholar and fine linguist, as well as a competent writer of dozens of books. On the other hand he often acted in high-handed fashion and thought his opinions and findings as the only ones worthy of consideration – even though he was proven wrong in several of his geographical deductions. He offered a place on his staff to the relatively inexperienced Speke, who had already accompanied him on a disastrous short inland expedition which was described in the book First Footsteps in East Africa, during which their expedition was attacked and both men suffered grievous wounds.
On their second, more successful journey, during which they headed too far south, they became the first Europeans to see Lake Tanganyika. While Burton was incapacitated by illness, Speke did a little exploring on his own, first roaming across and up Lake Tanganyika, and on a second sally, he chased down reports of another large lake – known as the Nyanza, or Ukerewe. Speke was ecstatic about his find. He interrogated a number of Arab traders and slavers, local chiefs and tribesmen, did a few calculations about the altitude of this immense body of water which stretched to the northern horizon, and came to the not entirely erroneous conclusion that he had found the source of the Nile. After and absence of six weeks, the two explorers got together again and Burton would have none of it. He notes: “.difference of opinion was allowed to alter companionship. After a few days it became evident to me that not a word could be uttered upon the subject of the lake, the Nile and his trouvaille generally without giving offence. By tacit agreement it was therefore, avoided, and I should never have resumed it had my companion not stultified the results of the expedition by putting forth a claim which no geographer can admit, and which is at the same time so weak and flimsy that no geographer has yet taken the trouble to contradict it.” Burton was outraged on their return to read that Speke had pipped him into print with a quite readable account in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Sept/Oct/Nov 1859 issues, entitled variously, Journal of a Cruise on the Lake Tanganyika, and Capt. J H Speke’s Discovery of the Victoria Nyanza Lake – the supposed Source of the Nile in two parts in which he described his momentous find and expounded his theories.
Stealing Burton’s thunder enraged the latter to incandescence and coloured his entire account of Speke’s contribution to the expedition. In his second work on the sources of the Nile, The Lake Regions of Central Equatorial Africa (Harper Bros, 1860), he continually derides his companion’s weak state, lack of linguistic capability and ability to carry out tasks such as mapping. The latter book is not an easy read. Burton is fond of judgemental pontification on the people he meets with, their customs and character, on even the slightest acquaintance, and even on the evidence of travellers’ tales. His books are laced with obscure classical references, horrendous Victorian verbosity and strange words – thus we read about “horripilatory tale of the dangers” and “ichthyophagous people” and suchlike.
Hard on the heels of the aforementioned book, I worked my way through Speke’s tome, entitled Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (W Blackwood, 1864). Speke was certainly a better raconteur than his companion Grant and he had the added advantage of better health during the two-and-a-half year expedition, which enabled him to get about, hunt and explore the countryside. On the other hand, as leader of the great endeavour, he bore the brunt of the endless negotiations and hold-ups with rapacious warring chieftains, whom he had to placate with endless extorted gifts to make progress. This became so serious that he ended up almost completely impoverished in the three kingdoms of Karague, Uganda and Unyoro, and during their stay the explorers had to rely on masquerading as the ‘Great Queen’s children’ to gain enough status to impress the kings Ruwanika, M’tesa and Kamrasi, to ensure their safety as well as their eventual release to complete their mission down the Nile. Their lengthy enforced stays at each of these three courts describe much interesting detail of the people’s lives, as well as the despotic rule, especially of the homicidal tyrant M’tesa, whose casual killings were reminiscent of the worst excesses of Chaka in the latter part of his rule in Natal. Speke’s findings on this journey, though confirming the egress of a large river at the northern end of the lake, did not manage to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s of the problem, since he did not follow its entire course to confirm that this river became the sole source of the Nile – as it proved not to be in the end Curiously, Speke’s book contains appendixes with data on the geographical fixes, their Zanzibari staff (many of whom deserted), lists of all the animals killed during the journey, as well as the collection of plants made by Grant – which one would have expected in the latter’s book.
His companion, Grant, on the other hand, is a poor writer. The first half of his book, A Walk Across Africa (William Blackwood & Sons, 1864) is a jumble of diary entries, notes on native customs, elementary natural history, bare-bones hunting incident, and above all, difficulties with the native tribes and his porters. All these are seen through a haze of Indian army experiences that the writer compares them to. In one sentence he can jump from elephants via serpents to beeswax – with very little connective tissue. Often his stray sentences seem to have no foundation in what he has been relating, nor does he build further on the subject matter proffered. He is portrayed by some biographers as a loyal companion to Speke; a man with winning ways who used his personal magnetism or charm to smooth their passage through the warring clans of inland East Africa. I could find very little evidence of that – rather that his men deserted repeatedly en masse, he had endless disputes with his bearers as well as the tribespeople. Admittedly he had the misfortune to be seriously ill for many months of the journey in addition to which he and his partner Speke often split the party, so that each lacked the other’s support, and this may have had an unfortunate influence on his writing.
The latter half of the book, once he reaches Ruanda and the kingdoms that make up Uganda, is much better. He develops a reasonable narrative style, his observations are in some semblance of order and actually paint a coherent and informative panorama of these interesting tribes and their customs, as well as depicting the personalities of their tyrannical rulers. Grant’s contribution to botany was apparently very significant on the journey, but very little mention is made of it at first, and it is only in the latter chapters that this becomes somewhat more evident, as do the descriptions of the fauna and the countryside. Grant did not see the egress of the great Nile from lake Victoria via the Ripon Falls himself, but he hastens to explain that this was due to his ill-health, not because Speke did not want to share the glory. The two explorers were fortunate in managing to complete their expedition down the great river with relative speed and good fortune, compared to their painful progress up to Lake Victoria Nyanza. The last part of the long journey down the Nile, mostly by boat, is glossed over in Speke’s book, and is more fully described in Grant’s. They meet up with a number of missionaries, traders, as well as three European ladies, and Samuel Baker (accompanied by his ‘unmentionable’ wife Florence, to whom he was not yet married), who helps them out of their impecunious state and whose party takes up the standard, so to speak, and carries on the exploration of the Great Lakes region.
The Albert N'Yanza Great Basin Of The Nile; And Exploration Of The Nile Sources. (Macmillan And Co., 1866) is one of my favourite books on the subject. Samuel Baker’s descriptions of people, places, hunting experiences, as well as mutinies, tribulations and illnesses are an engaging read. In his preface Baker pays tribute to his companion (later wife) Florence, or ‘Flooey’, as she was affectionately dubbed. He writes ‘Should anything offend the sensitive mind, and suggest the unfitness of the situation for a woman's presence, I must beseech my fair readers to reflect, that the pilgrim’s wife followed him, weary and footsore, through all his difficulties, led, not by choice, but by devotion; and that in times of misery and sickness her tender care saved his life and prospered the expedition.’ – well said. What emerges from the book is that Florence saved her man’s life on several occasions, when she outfaced his attackers, and on occasions even took to arms in his defence. Baker, on the other hand, returns his wife’s devotion and tenderly cares for his gravely ill wife when she lapses into a coma, probably due to a severe attack of malaria when almost at their goal. Of their arrival at the lake he writes movingly: “My wife in extreme weakness tottered down the pass, supporting herself upon my shoulder, and stopping to rest every twenty paces. After a toilsome descent of about two hours, weak with years of fever, but for the moment strengthened by success, we gained the level plain below the cliff…. it was with extreme emotion that I enjoyed this glorious scene. My wife, who had followed me so devotedly, stood by my side pale and exhausted - a wreck upon the shores of the great Albert lake that we had so long striven to reach.”
Their discovery of Lake Albert Nyanza slotted another jigsaw piece into the puzzle of the source of the Nile, as the Bakers took some time to travel around the lake. However, they did overestimate the contribution that this reservoir of water made to the flow of the Nile, and a further piece of the puzzle was only found some years later. This intrepid pair of explorers bore great difficulties and onslaughts on their health and physical safety, before returning to a rather lukewarm reception in Europe. Sam married his Flooey, and he received his knighthood a short time later, but good Queen Victoria could never bring herself to approve wholeheartedly of the Bakers’s ‘irregular liaison’. Some years later he returned to the Nile and led a military expedition to wipe out the slave trade along the upper reaches of the river – a task in which he was partially successful.
Between Lake Albert and Lake Victoria, there was, of course, yet another body of water. The shallow, digitate Lake Kyoga is covered mostly by waterlilies, hyacinths and papyrus – easy to overlook, and quite difficult to find reliable information about. The Britannica can’t make up its mind whether it was discovered in 1875 by one Charles Chaillé-Long, an American, who was the second western explorer of Lake Victoria, or an Italian explorer of the upper Nile River system, one Carlo Piaggia. In any case, a chunk of the Victoria Nile flows through it.
Enter John Rowlands, aka Henry Morton Stanley. Probably my most un-favourite explorer, this American journalist already had one unsuccessful expedition under his belt by the time he was dispatched to find Livingstone – of whom more later. He had the funds to travel in style with all the equipment an explorer could wish for, as well as two hundred porters to carry it all. Stanley made himself a name for brutality and less than exemplary respect for human life – which reputation is being re-examined in later times; I can’t imagine why. After uttering his famous remark, he joined Livingstone in exploring Lake Tanganyika and he did make a contribution in that he decisively proved that Lake Tanganyika had no connection to the Nile. How I Found Livingstone; Travels, Adventures, and Discoveries in Central Africa (Sampson, Low, Marston and Company, 1872) describes this little venture. A couple of years later he took on the mighty Congo River – but that is another story – except that I could mention that he wiped out better than two thirds of his expeditionary force. A few more years on and we see this intrepid voyageur in the Congo once more, this time in the service of that indescribable excuse for a human being, King Leopold, to wrest a private fiefdom for the monarch from the locals.
In 1886 he once more entered the fray when he led an expedition from the Congo to ‘rescue’ Emin Pasha, the governor of Equatoria on the other side of the continent, in the Sudan. With just short of a thousand men our hero tackled the forests, rivers and mountains; rescued the unwilling Pasha and emerged with a vastly curtailed retinue some four years later. Several scandals resulted from this expeditionary tour de force, but there were also two important geographical findings: the existence of the Ruwenzori Mountains, and the presence of yet another lake in the chain, Edward, which empties itself via the Semliki River into Lake Albert. The whole fiasco is ably described in two volumes of In Darkest Africa (Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1890), as well as a whole slew of other books by other expeditionaries and later critics. Thankfully he gave up exploration, became a British MP and was knighted for his services to humanity and the British Empire. Wow!
One of the later explorers of note in the Great Lakes region of East Africa was Joseph Thomson. He graduated as a geologist from Edinburgh and found employment as assistant to Keith Johnston who was to lead the Royal Geographical Society’s expedition to explore the region between Lakes Nyassa (Malawi) and Tanganyika which would establish the answers to several outstanding questions of catchment areas and drainage from the lakes. Johnston died of dysentry a few months into the journey, leaving Thomson, then a stripling of some twenty-one years of age, to tackle the journey with his 150-odd porters. With remarkable coolness and tact he led the expedition across some five thousand miles in fourteen months, without the loss of a single further life, nor did his party have to fire a shot in anger. His journey is described in the book To the Central African Lakes and Back (Sampson Low, Marston & Co, London, 1881) in a most readable fashion. His writing paints a vivid picture of a young adventurer on the loose, marvelling at nature, struggling with problems and loneliness, but supported in the main by his African staff, and a generally hospitable population.
He only ran into trouble at the far end of the journey, while investigating the outlet of Lake Tanganyika into the Lukuga River, which drains into the Congo and finally the Atlantic. Here the warlike Warua tribe robbed him and some thirty followers of almost all they possessed and it was only with extreme personal courage that he managed to extricate his party without bloodshed. Thomson’s motto was said to be He who goes gently, goes safely; he who goes safely, goes far – and gently he did go. On his return journey he was also the first European to see Lake Rukwa, though from the heights of the precipitous bank he was on, he was not able to do a full survey before returning to the coast at Bagamoyo.
By the early eighties European traders were clamouring for the exploration of the shortest route from the sea to the headwaters of the Nile. Thomson had acquired a taste for adventure and exploration. In 1882 the Royal Geographical Society asked him to report on the practicability of trekking through the Masai country, which no European had yet been able to penetrate beyond Mt Kilimanjaro. A little earlier a German expedition, led by Gustav Fischer, set off with the same route in mind. By great courage and resourcefulness he succeeded while Fischer failed in his attempt. He describes a half-hearted attempt to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, reaching 9,000 feet, from where he turned back after 7 hours’ climbing, compelled to give up his intention of penetrating above the forest region. Thomson then left. Chaggaland and travelled through what is now Kenya, giving us the first description of the north face of Kilimanjaro. He carried on through Laikipia to Mt Kenya, crossed the Njiri desert and explored the eastern rift-valley, traversing the unknown region lying between Lakes Baringo and Victoria Nyanza, which he reached in1883 The account of this adventurous journey was published as Through Masai Land (Sampson. Low & Marston, 1885)and it is a classic of modern travel. His later career was to take him to West Africa, as well as entering the employ of Rhodes, for whom he explored the region north of the Zambezi, making treaties with the local chiefs on behalf of the British South Africa Company.
Last but by no means least one has to mention that Beau Geste of the Victorian era of exploration, David Livingstone, in the context of the discovery of the great lakes and rivers. After he had already made a very significant trek across the width of Africa from Sesheke to Luanda, and returning from Luanda to Quelimane, described in Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (John Murray, 1857) he led an ill-fated expedition to open up the Zambezi River. He was not the ideal man for the job, being better suited to tackle the wilds on his own with a small band of followers, than being in charge of an unwieldy band of explorers with differing opinions and priorities. In 1859 they were the first Europeans to reach the shores of Lakes Shirwa (Chilwa) and Nyassa (Malawi), the most southerly of the Great Lakes, and though they could not succeed in opening up any river routes, a number of important contributions were made to several branches of science. The book Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and its Tributaries (John Murray, 1865) is more of a defensive work of this failed venture.(brother Charles collaborated allegedly, but he was mpore of a disruptive element)
The exploration bug had bitten Livingstone, and in 1866 he also felt he had to try to put his mark on the origins of the Nile as he believed the source of the great river to be further south than Burton, Speke, Grant and Baker had established as being from Lakes Albert and Victoria. He consequently set out along the Rovuma river and did valuable work in exploring and mapping the region for a number of years, reaching Lakes Mweru, Tanganyika and Bangweulu, near which latter place he died. The posthumously-published volume entitled The Last Journals of David Livingstone in Central Africa (John Murray, 1874) concludes the famous explorer’s life work.
This, then, is a summary of a great chapter of African exploration. The full course of the Blue Nile was only explored in the 1960’s by the Brit, Blashford Snell; the first to navigate the entire length of the White Nile was a South African, Hendri Coetzee, in 2004. Satellite images and other modern technology have solved all but the few riddles hidden in the dark depths of two of the world’s deepest lakes, Tanganyika and Malawi, but there is romance in all of these tales.

African Hunting #2

2010-01-30T16:34:00.000+02:00

Africana Votes and Views #13

Let us revisit this month, the hunting (or should that be killing?) fields of Africa, as well as a few diversions to other continents around the world. Let us mention, with due respect and reverence, those names which have gone down in the annals of the chase as truly great. Where best to start, but with the slayers of that noble, great beast, the elephant.

As already mentioned in my previous Votes #4, “Karamojo” Bell must be adjudged the man with the largest number of African elephants to his credit, which number amounted to 1011 animals (of which only 28 were cows shot in self defence or for rations). What does make the feat remarkable are two facts: firstly that he walked/ran down each of these animals on foot, averaging some 73 miles per animal and using up 24 pairs of boots per annum, and secondly, that he employed a 7mm or .276 calibre rifle to do the majority of his work. There was skill in his hunting; dogged tenacity and endurance, but in the end it comes down to a ledger of profit and loss, with so many pounds of ivory bagged during the year, and so many expenses on the debit side. His attitude can be gauged from his remark about his most unpleasant experience: “Travelling hot-foot 8½ hours at six miles per hour on an enormous track in wet season to find a tuskless bull. Killed him to prevent a recurrence!” Mais naturellement, what else could a gentleman do? In his spare time he did a little meat-hunting, popping off, on one occasion, 23 buffalo out of a herd of 23 with a pepped-up .22 rifle – “to see how effective the tiny, 80 grain bullet would prove, but also for meat”.

To put Bell’s achievements into proper perspective, one should, of course, mention in the same breath that four military men (Maj. Rogers, Capts. Galway, Skinner & Layard) who were stationed on the tiny island of Sri Lanka (Ceylon) managed to mow down the stupendous numbers of 1500, 1300, 1200 and 1000 elephants respectively, using nothing more than smooth-bore sawn-off 16-gauge guns during the early 19th century. I wouldn’t have believed that the island held that many pachyderms in between the teeming millions of people, but hey, I read it in a book (Big Game Shooting Records, E. N. Barclay, Witherby, 1932).

Nor does Bell’s little effort at buffalo hunting make any dent in the all-time slaughter records of American bison – to the tune of Frank Carvers’s year’s total of 5500, Buffalo Bill Cody’s tally of 4280 and A C Myers’s little bag of 4200. These three guys must have been serious competition to the best harpooners of blue whales in the heyday of whaling – even if only in terms of actual biomass exterminated. But wait – my authority has managed to exceed even those numbers for big game – in the personages of the Elector Johann Georg of Saxony, and his son of the same name during the 17th century. These two blue-blooded aristos managed to top 35 491 and 43 649 head of red deer respectively, the weights of some of which went way over 700lbs – so work out that little sum, friends! In the same chapter the reader is regaled also by the fact that one of the Johann Georgs refused the crown of Bohemia –“because the Bohemian stags were inferior both in numbers and size” – Ach, mein Gott, – Johann, you have my sympathies!

So merely as a little diversion from the main theme of great African hunters, let us delve further into the histories of the chase. During the early Middle Ages, men, in this case mostly of noble blood or landed gentry in the case of the Brits, were the only ones permitted to slay any beast (with the exception of people of conflicting interests and opinions, of course, as these could be topped by any common ceorl or villein). These latter low classes took their life in their hands if they developed a taste for venison that rightfully belonged to their lords and masters. Since the pleasure of hunting was only sporadically interrupted by spells of government and wars, it followed that the nobles could expend an uncommon amount of effort in the chase. In addition it gave them something to brag about when they foregathered at the round table of an evening, devouring the best of boar and Burgundy. In early days gone by, the hunter was only armed with a bow, a lance or a knife, with a pack of baying curs as assistants, and hunting was a strenuous and somewhat risky adventure. Enter the crossbow, and later the arquebus (or better variations on the theme). Suddenly it became desirable that the hunter should be stationary, while the quarry was moved towards him. The low classes were given employment to chase all that moved to move towards the line of “guns” waiting in ambush – and hey presto, we have the birth of the Big Bag. If you encircled a few hundred square kilometres of forest with enough peasants (who would camp and make fires at night to keep the game from breaking out), within a couple of days you could push a satisfactory assortment of some tens of thousands of small and large game past a few dozen marksmen, who’d whiled away the time drinking Champers and playing cards until the action started. The nobility of Europe vied with each other to see what they could tally up. There is even an account of a King of Italy chasing hundreds of his peasants into the Alps between 6000 and 12 000 feet high to chase down some chamois and ibex within reach of his artillery.

Naturally the Prince of this, the Archduke of that, the Baron of the other, and assorted Freiherrn, Comtes etc, liked to let those of similar interests know where they stood on the ladder of achievement, and so there was no shortage of hunting literature. The next generation, and the next, and so on, read of their predecessors’ glorious experiences, and within a short time (geologically speaking) you end up with the likes of me or my son, equally hunting mad and slavering at the leash to be let loose on the dwindling wild life of this planet. Small problem – we are not part of a numerically insignificant noble elite, and almost anyone can afford a precision instrument, to wit, a powerful rifle and scope. The rest, as they say, coupled with an inordinately fecund species of primate overrunning the world and ripping up prime habitat, is history. Forgive the diversion, but I was lured off the main subject by this wealth of information which I wanted to share.

Back to the great Nimrods of the Dark Continent: one James Sutherland achieved some 447 elephant bull kills in ten years, which he reckoned to be some sort of world record. He only got bitten by the bug somewhere round about 1902 in Mozambique. His passion led him northwards and until shortly before World War I he made Tanganyika his headquarters. Sutherland wrote quite an interesting book entitled Adventures of an Elephant Hunter (Macmillan, 1912), full of his observations on natural history, as well as hunting experiences and the lives of his native companions. In one respect he differed radically from Bell. He preferred rifles of the heaviest calibres that could be purchased at the time; yet he had a number of narrow squeaks with his prey turning on him in the thick bush in which he hunted. In one instance he got tossed and landed on the wounded beast’s back, while on another occasion he took a well-earned rest on a dead elephant, before hiking back to camp. The elephant was never found, as it obviously woke up from its prolonged bout of anaesthesia and decamped. Proof that Sutherland was not as expert an anatomist of the elephant as was Bell, but the former’s attitude to hunting the great beasts was similar to the latter’s in that each kill represented pounds, shillings and pence in the bank – and that there was no end to the supply of quarries for their guns.

A gigantic, but romantic Scot of great ineptitude is next under the lens. Roualeyn Gordon Cumming found the hunting of the great stag on the highlands was not enough to fire his blood, so he came to South Africa for a five year stint of hard labour, killing the braw and wee beasties i’ the bush. Of his experiences he wrote the widely acclaimed and oft reprinted work Five Years of a Hunter’s Life in the Far Interior of South Africa (John Murray, 1850 et al), which is quite entertaining for a while, but tends to get wearisome as the great Nimrod struggles manfully to down the gigantic beast “from half-past eleven till the sun was under, when his tough old spirit fled and he fell pierced with fifty-seven balls”. Another time it took a mere thirty-five and thirty balls respectively. No one could say Cumming didna have the balls. I mean, at 4 ounces each, someone must have been carrying the better part of 7 kg of lead in their pouch – or was it in their sporran – on that first occasion mentioned. And then to write about it? I would have been too ashamed to confess to keeping an entire mining sector occupied in my efforts to obtain a little sport, but not our man. To be fair, the seemingly huge numbers of corpses achieved were spread over five years – and then condensed into 756 pages, but he would have presented himself in a far more favourable light as a hunter and sportsman if he had left the rifle in the gunroom and confined himself to sticking a sgian dubh into a royal stag, or something. Needless to say, his bag of elephants did not place him in the hall of fame.

Yet another wee Highlander was the third son of Viscount Strathallan, one William Henry Drummond, who wrote The Large Game and Natural History of South and South-East Africa (Edmonston & Douglas, 1875); a learned-sounding title, but in fact a quite entertaining account of five years’ hair-raising adventures in Zululand and Swaziland, during which he hunted mainly buffalo, as well as a few elephants and smaller game. I read the book quite recently, and must admit that I became quite interested in it. His natural history observations are pretty good, as far as I can judge, and I became utterly amazed at his courage – no, foolhardiness, in rushing in where people a hundred years later, armed with modern magazine rifles, would hesitate to tiptoe in pursuit of wounded buff. It is difficult to gauge how many animals fell to this hunter, as there always seemed a goodly number of (mostly black) hunters in his company, and with everyone blazing away into the bushes, it must have given one the uncomfortable feeling of being in the middle of a swarm of bumble bees. Nonetheless they floored large numbers of buffaloes daily, with not too much loss of life and limb among the humans. Drummond returned to South Africa later and served under Chelmsford, being killed at Ulundi in 1879.

A man who had a great reputation, which far exceeded his actual achievements, was Arthur Neumann. An interesting person, who had a chequered career, from farming, prospecting, trading, later becoming a magistrate, before being lured by the great quarry. He scrimped and saved for years before outfitting his own safari, with which he explored and hunted with the Nderobo tribe near Mount Kenya for three years, and explored north towards Lake Turkana (Rudolph). Neumann at first also hunted with large calibre rifles, but he was introduced to the military Lee-Metford, which he tended to prefer even to his Martini-Henry as a “finishing weapon” from the start. His liking for the light calibre, which he adopted for all his hunting, took a knock though (pardon the pun) when he was seriously injured by an elephant cow after his .303 jammed in the thickets bordering the lake. A lengthy period of recuperation followed, after which he slowly and painfully made his way back towards Mombasa – still managing to bag his three best tuskers with his popgun, even in his half crippled state, on the way home. He lived to write Elephant Hunting in East Equatorial Africa (Rowland Ward, 1897) and the volume was so well-received by the public, that he became an instant Nimrod of Note, though in all likelihood this retiring man’s bag never exceeded a hundred elephants by many. What struck me on reading his book was the sheer number of rhinos that he killed – mostly as rations for the hungry Ndorobo and surrounding tribes. Neumann was different from some of the other hunters I have read about, though, in that he genuinely hated to kill these animals unnecessarily, or for sport alone, when there was no chance of the meat being used. He didn’t rate them as particularly dangerous, nor did he think they were difficult to kill.

William Finaughty, on the other hand, was a man who won little renown during his lifetime, though he richly deserved it. It was only due to the services of an American, who met the old man in 1913 shortly before his death, that his Recollections of William Finaughty – Elephant Hunter (Privately published by G. L. Harrison, 1916) appeared, and that we have learnt about his exploits. He did most of his hunting from the saddle in the more open country of Matabeleland, but he wasted a prodigious amount of horseflesh due to horse-sickness in the process. He hunted primarily with a muzzle-loader firing a four-ounce slug, and managed the feat of slaying six beasts with five bullets, when he noticed the fifth animal had his bullet lodged under the skin on the far side, cut it out and with the recycled lead he got another bull with the next shot. Although the record of his bag is not complete, his tally on record is well over 400 animals.

Talking about cannons on the loose among the herds, the notable Sir Samuel Baker, who wreaked havoc among the fauna of Ceylon, who stalked the noble stags of Scotland and who explored and hunted the length of the White Nile, must take the prize. He persuaded the firm of Holland & Holland to make him a single-barrel rifle, weighing 20 lbs, which fired a half-pound explosive shell at its target. He notes briefly that he only fired this calibre about 20 times in all – each time with satisfactory results. I should b— well think so! On the other hand, my sincere homage does go out to the old warrior for his true grit (I have unbounded admiration for Mrs Baker, who accompanied him) in exploring the source of the Nile, as well as for his hunts for sambar stag and wild boar in Ceylon – armed with a knife and aided by a pack of hounds to bring the quarry to bay, which he would then despatch with one stab to the heart. Wow.

Let us not forget some of the early Boer hunters. Mostly we have to rely on the reports of their fellow-enthusiasts to inform us of their exploits, since they left no written records. In the case of Petrus Jacobs, we only know what F C Selous had to relate with regard to his mode of hunting. He loved to hunt from horseback for the sake of the sport, and was reputed to have shot between 400 and 500 elephants, as well as a hundred-odd lions, one of the latter of which chewed him over considerably, so putting him out of action for two months before he was able to remount to resume his pursuit at the ripe old age of seventy-three. Truly, they were men in those days. In his books Jagkonings (1945) and Veldsmanne (1958) J von Moltke records a number of interviews with surviving descendants and friends of notable hunters of yore. They mostly hunted in Botswana, Damaraland and Angola during the latter half of the 19th century. As ivory hunting was very much the cash cow of the place and period, individual tallies weren’t kept by the hunters, so we read that the van Zyls (father and two sons) killed 130 and 190 elephants in successive years, while their most infamous exploit was to chase a herd of 103-odd elephants into a swamp and finish off the entire lot. Von Moltke ascribes this to mercy-killing, since the jumbos were unable to free themselves, while my British source calls it “the most wanton butchery of elephants in the history of South Africa” – you can make up your own minds about that, but sport it surely was not. Another seemingly great hunter, one Frederick Green, also active in the same region at the time, was most respected by his Boer colleagues, but he left no record, so nobody has any idea whether his reputation is anecdotal or real.

Among the other heavyweights are, of course, the rhinos. Somehow their horns lacked appeal during the great hunting era of the 19th century, and most of the great hunters shot them in staggering numbers, purely, it would seem, because of their nuisance value, or at best for carriers’ rations. The Swedish trader/hunter C J Andersson probably put a sizeable dent into the rhino population of Namibia; he records bags of “scores” of these animals in Lake Ngami (Hurst & Blackett,1856), his best tally being eight beasts killed at a waterhole during one nightly vigil. Not unlike dynamiting fish in a pool – especially since another dozen or so other heads of game bit the dust that night as well. W C Oswell seemed to enjoy hunting rhino, and while no numbers were recorded in the book by his son, William Cotton Oswell, Hunter and Explorer (Heinemann, 1900), it does mention that Oswell and a companion kept a starving tribe of six hundred souls alive for a couple of months on this strong diet. The aforementioned Finaughty, in addition to his sizeable bag of tuskers also managed the odd baker’s dozen of rhinos on at least one day when the elephants stayed away. Towards the end of the 19th century rhino horn suddenly attained popularity – possibly due to a population explosion of Middle Easterners reaching puberty thus needing ornate daggers hafted in this material – or maybe due to a suspected drop in population in India and China, which required some rejuvenation of the male libidos in those parts. Whichever, suddenly traders were arming the tribesmen with blunderbusses and sending them off after the hapless animals, of which there seemed to have been an almost inexhaustible supply until the 1930s, when the game clearances to eradicate Nagana in Zululand almost spelled an end to the genus Diceros in Africa.

The king of beasts, the lion, should certainly be considered when one chronicles the great hunters of yore. However, it is difficult to get to grips with exact numbers, since all too often hunters were canny enough to have a back-up rifle nearby, not to speak of packs of baying curs, trackers and gunbearers armed variously with rifles and spears – because lions are fast and deadly, especially when wounded. So while we read that a certain Paul Rainey killed over two hundred, one Clifford Hill “had been in on the death of 160 lions”; Sir Alfred Pease was a famous hunter with a bag of about 135 lions, Petrus Jacobs killed more than a hundred in his time, and Selous was no slouch himself when it came to hunting the big cats – most of these men had the odd bit of help here and there, making it difficult to apportion exact numbers. What is probably not widely known is that the great conservator, James Stevenson-Hamilton, of Kruger National Park fame, had an individual bag of in excess of two hundred lions that he hunted, sometimes accompanied by a tracker or two, on foot, armed mainly with a .303 rifle (Big Game Shooting Records, Witherby, 1932). All in a good day’s conservation, they might say.

I have left that Beau Geste of the African hunt as last but not least. Frederick Courteney Selous, although not the man with the biggest bag of anything in the annals of the genre, was certainly one of the most fêted of hunter-writers of the late Victorian era. He was the British gentleman, the adventurer, the Nimrod, the naturalist and finally the soldier and fallen hero. His early life was not entirely blameless, as he was prone to trespassing, poaching and brawling in his youth, which almost resulted in his arrest. He was fortunate to be able to leave England at an early age, determined to make his living as an elephant-hunter. His first twenty years were spent in southern and central Africa, hunting, exploring, trading and guiding others. It is said that he also managed to acquire three wives and several children during his illustrious career (in addition to getting married properly to an English bride, and having a few more children).Two books were published during this period: A Hunter’s Wanderings in Africa (1881) and Travel and Adventure in South-East Africa (1893). Selous’s bag of elephants is tallied at 106 by one writer (E N Barclay, 1932) – a far cry from the stupendous bags mentioned previously, so in all probability his trading ventures had more of an influence on paying his bills. Estimates for his entire bag of larger animals is just over a thousand, and the Selous Collection in the Natural History Museum in London has over 500 of his specimen in their collection. However, it is unlikely that any other hunter managed to amass such a diverse collection in his lifetime. Selous was not just a bloodthirsty noble let loose on the fauna of a continent, but undoubtedly an able writer, a reliable observer, and a skilled hunter who deserved a good measure of that iconic stature and esteem in which he was held. Although I read most of his books (repeatedly) quite a long time ago; I remember them fondly and they would be among the first of the genre that I would advise anyone to read.

Hippos, though reputed to be the most dangerous mammal to man on the continent, do not seem to figure largely in bag totals. The reason is simple – they were considered as food, not a worthy quarry. True, they often presented only a small target to the marksman, as they raised their nostrils and eyes above the surface of the water to breathe, but they were in another element, and the hunter could sit with impunity on the bank of the river/lake and take potshots at whatever rose from the depths. Very few hunters would have had the temerity to take on a grown hippo on land at night, and numerous were the boats upset and people killed in the waters when they trespassed on the territories of the countless “river horses” that populated most African waters. Millions were exterminated between the time van Riebeeck landed at the Cape and the present day – but they were just so much rich flesh – and hides that were ideal for the manufacture of sjamboks, instruments much in favour for disciplining errant servants and local tribespeople.

Leopards, although dangerous and iconic large cats, did not seem to make it into the record books. Although their skins were sought-after trophies for the home and library floor, the relative ease with which they could be killed by a man wielding nothing more deadly than a spear – no, even by some men with bare hands alone – meant that no great kudos accrued to the hunter from a kill. While the same did not apply to the Indian leopards, some of whom became noted maneaters and killers, making them very worthy adversaries, not to be tackled with impunity, the African cats only became deadly to man once wounded. A fair number of Nimrods misjudged these bantamweight killers and paid the price after wounding them and following them into thick bush.

There we must leave the successful and notable hunters of the last two hundred years. There are still many more who made a name for themselves in the deserts, bush and forests of the continent, and possibly we shall revisit some other guise of the same subject at another time.

WAR BORES

2009-12-29T18:02:00.000+02:00

Africana Votes & Views #12

Men have this fascination with war. The noble pursuit of one’s fellow-man with lethal intent must have a similar fascination to driving a thundering behemoth of a machine down the railway or racing track, launching oneself into a melée consisting of thirty grown men and one oval ball with possible fatal consequences, scaling impossibly high pieces of frozen rock while suffering semi-permanent damage to extremities from cold and to the brain from anoxia – or sneaking up to elephants’ backsides in the bush to tweak a hair from their tails and chalk a cross on their haunches (I kid you not – I know such a band of foolhardy knaves). So what is it that so enchants the male persona with dangerous pursuits? The presence of testosterone is popularly blamed for this thraldom to the pursuits of Mars – is it then the presence of periodical quantities of progesterone or estrogen that leads the fair sex to queue up for their dose of Mills and Boone romances?
For those putative warriors who have either laid down their armoury or have never been fortunate enough to get within smelling distance of burning cordite, there are books on the ‘Art of War’, such as written by one Chinese sage, Sun Tzu in the 6th century BC – and still acclaimed as one of the most influential works on military strategy; in addition to tens of thousands more volumes, offering the vicarious (and safe) enjoyment of the thunder of battle, the niceties of strategies, glorious feats of courage and self sacrifice – all without the attendant stench of death. As the good Horace wrote Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori... – yeah, well tell that to the fatherless children and the widows – not to mention the scarred souls and bodies that survive the turmoil. My one parent had survived the Russian campaign as a mental and physical wreck; the other had squeaked through the relentless bombing of the German cities; I remember living in a cellar in an entirely flattened suburb of Hamburg just after the end of the war. During the next half century or so, I was part of a relatively fortunate generation, most of whom did not have to go to war. Even that grizzled old warrior, Papa Hemingway, conceded that ‘he knew how boring any man’s war is to any other man’ (Across the River and into the Trees, Scribner 1998), and so it was with me. I must confess to having lost my taste for war-books of any kind by the time I was about fifteen, which is not to say that I haven’t read the odd volume touching on the genre every now and again.
So how about the conflicts that have raged about this continent of ours? One could start at the very beginning of the European presence at the Cape, when the august Viceroy of India, Francisco D’Almeida, conqueror of Kilwa and Mombasa on the east coast, got more than a bloody nose from the local Khoi tribesmen. Despite their armour and superior weapons, his trading/raiding expedition ran into trouble in a village near the estuary of the Salt River when they tried taking stock and hostages. The unsportsmanlike Khoi retaliated using their cattle as living shields, and managed to stone, spear and club the good Viceroy and some fifty to sixty of his men (depending on which source one takes) to death. Apparently the 1510 episode left a bad taste with the Portuguese, and they tended to give the Cape a wide berth, so leaving a vacuum which the Dutch and English were prepared to fill.
Fast forward a couple of hundred years during which period the Dutch had established themselves at the Cape (not entirely unopposed by the Khoi tribes), and the wars and alliances between the European powers started to make themselves felt as the French, Dutch, Spanish and English took irritating turns at allying themselves with each other and against each other. Saldanha Bay became the theatre of a number of such confrontations, which are ably chronicled in Jose Burman’s Saldanha Bay Story (Human & Rossouw, 1974), but none of these skirmishes were battles in the true sense – except to those few unfortunate souls that perished in them, and the main loss was ships and cargo. The next battle worthy of the name was in 1806 when the British under Baird and Popham sailed into view to wrest the Cape from the Dutch under the command of Janssens. This was a properly planned, well executed expedition consisting of a whole fleet with some six and a half thousand men, and was focussed on a stretch of sandy coast a few miles north-west of Cape Town. Here the Brits landed at Lospersbaai (nowadays Melkbosstrand) and a short, sharp battle followed, lasting about half the day. The motley aggregation of German, French, Dutch, Javanese, Khoi and burghers, numbering less than two thousand souls, was outgunned and withdrawn by Janssens, little knowing that he actually had the upper hand in that the British were in dire straits from the heavy going in the deep sand and lack of water. According to a number of accounts I haven’t read, like D W Krynauw’s Beslissing by Blouberg (Tafelberg, 1999), which is a very thorough archivist’s take on the event, and M R D Anderson’s Blue Berg – Britain takes the Cape (Privately published, 2008) which comes complete with dialogue; this conflict had all the elements of classic battle, and it certainly was one of the deciding moments in the history of European involvement in the subcontinent.
Although the first three ‘Frontier Wars’ in the Eastern Cape occurred during Dutch rule between 1779 and 1803, these were relatively minor affairs occasioned by European farmers expanding eastward and being resisted and raided by the various Xhosa-related tribes. The forces deployed were mainly burgher commandos, and their effectiveness was not decisive enough to put an end to tribal excursions for any length of time. The nineteenth century imposed the pax Brittanica on the Cape, as noted above – on the other hand, maybe it didn’t, since the Eastern Frontier continued to be a festering sore on the flank of the colony. The 4th war broke out in 1811, bringing British troops and military science into the fray alongside the commandos, and a number of forts were established. The conduct of these wars, the military manoeuvres, the fine soldierly activities (interspersed with hunting episodes) have been written about in great detail. A few books I have read include some material on these wars, such as J E Alexander’s Voyage Round the West Coast, and a Visit to the Colonies of Africa… in which he includes some of his war experiences on the frontier, before departing up the West Coast through Namaqualand; E E Napier’s Excursions in South Africa (William Shoberl, 1850) which work embodies the author’s experiences as a supernumerary officer in charge of irregulars during the War of the Axe; T J Lucas’s Camp Life and Sport in South Africa (Africana Reprint Library, 1975) in which he relates much ‘exciting work’ which enlivens the lot of a colonial officer in the thick of the fray. On a more serious note, A J Smithers’s work The Kaffir Wars 1779–1877 (Leo Cooper, 1973) tries to put all nine wars into perspective, including the lamentable episode of Nonquause’s prophecy and the cattle killing, which led to untold misery, starvation and the breaking of the power of the Xhosa nations, as well as the last insurgency of Kreli and Sandile, which brought to an end a century of war.
Also during this period, the Koranna wars raged along the northern frontier of the Cape. Very little glory accrued to any one during these obscure cattle-raiding skirmishes and reprisals, and once more the forces consisted mainly of burgher commandos and policemen, opposed by a bewildering array of tribal and clan alliances. The only work I have seen which endeavours to present the whole history of the eleven years of conflict between 1868–1879 is T Strauss’s War Along the Orange (UCT, 1979) – a fiendishly difficult book to get hold of – and I wrote a chapter on the main outlines of the wars in Life & Travels in the Northwest 1850–1899 (Yoshi, 2008).
A noteworthy war followed hard on the heels of the frontier wars. The Zulu War was no sporting skirmish, nor a cattle-raiding expedition. It was a full-on challenge to the might of the British Empire by a numerous and warlike nation that still had vivid memories of its military genius-founder Chaka as precedent. Some forty thousand trained warriors proceeded to give the Brits a bloody nose at Isandhlwana by overwhelming the garrison. The famous defence of Rorke’s Drift followed – where the redcoats held at bay an overwhelming force of Zulus, winning eleven VCs for gallantry. In another clash at Hlobane Mountain, the Zulus repulsed the British as well as a Boer commando, but at Kambula the fortunes of war went the other way. Finally, the battle of Ulundi, the burning of the royal kraal and the capture of King Cetshwayo signalled the end of this conflict. There are a number of works by military historians who have analysed the war in detail; or if a blow-by-blow account is required, who better to consult than the Illustrated London News of 1879. Of the more modern works, D R Morris’s Washing of the Spears (Jonathan Cape, 1966) gives some background to the rise of the Zulu nation and its fall after the war, and in a similar vein is R B Edgerton in his book Like Lions they Fought (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1988). For detailed accounts of the two heroic battles, R Furneaux’s The Zulu War – Isandhlwana and Rorke's Drift (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1963) is probably your best bet.
The next lot to take a swipe at the hapless Brits were the Transvalers. They had been unceremoniously annexed through Shepstone’s machinations, and despite trying to get the decision reversed through diplomatic channels, this was not to be and the burghers decided besiege various British units to prevent them from getting reinforcements from elsewhere. Engagements at Bronkhorstspruit, Laing’s Nek and Ingogo caused heavy losses to the British, and presidents Brand of the OFS and Kruger of the Transvaal, pressed their advantage by diplomatic efforts to gain some concessions with regard to their independence while offering some face-saving clauses in exchange. Unfortunately the correspondence ran into some delays which led to the Battle of Majuba – a decisive loss and blow to the colonial power, which was now forced to back-pedal, un-annex the Transvaal within six months and leave the Boers to plough their own furrows. T F Carter’s work A Narrative of the Boer War (Remington, 1883) is probably one of the best early works, though I found it considerably more indigestible than Oliver Ransford’s Battle of Majuba Hill (John Murray, 1967).
Then came the second Anglo-Boer War. No half-hearted regional scrimmage this time, but instead what was to become the first ‘modern’ war, pitting the military might of the most powerful empire of the age against the local knowledge, bushcraft, speed and marksmanship of the burghers of two small republics. The conventional phase of the war was soon over. The republics just couldn’t defend their towns and cities, nor could they consistently defeat the ‘Khakies’ in pitched battle, and their laying siege to a number of towns occupied by British forces just diluted their efforts. The latter phase of the war, the guerilla-war, was to become an epic struggle between will-o’-the-wisp bands of ragged and ill-supplied men, and the ever-growing forces that tried to shut them down. I don’t know just how many books have been written on this war – and are still being penned or revived, or excavated out of old diaries and reports; it could run into the thousands. I have no intention of reading them, so you, good reader, are on your own. There are regimental histories, there are officers’ accounts of their exploits, there are military experts who dissect every tactic and deployment, there are voluminous histories which attempt to cover every phase and every theatre of the conflict, there are technical treatises on munitions and armaments, on communications, or medical advances – and then there are some truly touching personal documents.
One of these is Deneys Reitz’s Commando (Faber & Faber, 1929). A remarkably well-written personal experience of the entire war from the perspective of a callow youth, scarcely off the schoolbench, straight into the barrage of shells at Talana. From then on the reader follows almost every major event of the war, often under some of the most charismatic and able leaders, like Smuts’s great ride across the Cape, and the war in Namaqualand in the company of berserkers like Maritz. Certainly the work deserves its reputation as one of the best narratives of war and adventure in the English language. A number of young foreigners joined the ranks of the Boers, mainly for the adventure a war promised, one suspects. One of these was the Frenchman Robert de Kersauson de Pennendreff, who was sworn in as a burgher of the ZAR by the old president himself. Though full of enthusiasm to get to grips with the war, he was soon disillusioned as he failed to gain acceptance from his co-belligerents until he managed to learn the taal. He took part in many of the major battles and was even entrusted with a personal mission to inform president Kruger in exile in Holland of the state of the war back home. No great literary work this book, Ek en die Vierkleur (Afrikaanse Pers Boekhandel, ca. 1950) but rather a day by day diary of a young adventurer. A slim volume, Woman’s Endurance by A D L (A D Luckhoff), published by SA News Co, 1904, brought home to me the horrendous conditions in the Bethulie concentration camp for women and children, where the author was chaplain to the inmates. The worthy padre recounts the suffering of mothers and their dying offspring with such empathy that I had a hard time getting through the sixty-odd pages, even with a wad of tissues to hand. No wonder then that the poor man couldn’t last longer than six months in his position. There are several other good books on the same subject, but I haven’t felt an urge to tackle them. Bill Nasson’s work, Abraham Esau’s War (Cambridge, 1991) examines the lot of the ‘coloured’ people in the Western Cape, who tended to be used as auxiliaries by one side – and as traitors by the other. They lost out during the war, and they did not benefit by the peace. I can claim to have read all books that were written about the war in Namaqualand, Bushmanland and the West Coast, but that is because of my general interest in the history of the region.
Sieges tend to form the subject of some interesting writing – possibly because adversity brings out the best in humanity. The Siege of Kimberley by T Phelan (M H Gill, 1913) is such a title; chronicling the lighter humorous moments and disasters that afflicted mainly the civilian population, while the technicians and engineers of the diamond mines cobbled together the Long Cecil cannon, with which they could reply to the Boers’ artillery. P Burke’s Siege of O’okiep (War Museum, 1995) is more of a military evaluation of the Boers’ siegecraft, though not devoid of its lighter moments, such as Maritz attempting to blow up the whole town with the aid of a train loaded with dynamite (which derailed and burnt instead of exploding), or the boys having a little fun with jam-tins full of dynamite being lobbed onto blockhouses’ and forts’ roofs. The siege of Ladysmith was also the subject of a whole shelf of books, of which I have only read one a while back, by H Watkins-Pitchford, Besieged in Ladysmith (Shuter & Shooter, 1964). The author was a renowned veterinary surgeon, and the book offers a different view in his letters from the besieged city to his wife; an interesting personal document.
A few novels dealing with aspects of the war have also come to my notice. C L Leipoldt’s Stormwrack (David Philip, 1980) portrays the ramifications the war has on the different elements of the population in the Cederberg village of Clanwilliam, which was only quite peripheral to the main conflict. W C Scully was so enraged at the treatment meted out to townspeople in the Cape by their own government who saw rebellion and collaborators round every corner, that he went on a crusade which bordered on treason. He wrote a thinly disguised novel, The Harrow (Nasionale Pers, 1921), the MS of which he hung on to until almost twenty years after the end of the war – because of his bitterness against his own countrymen and government. But enough of this war – there are plenty to follow.
1914 was the year the world went mad; and for very confused reasons, not quite evident to my unmilitaristic mind. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany went to war against his cousin George V of England, because some crazed bloke had shot one of his Austrian archducal buddies in a foreign country, i.e. Serbia. Before you knew what was happening, the entire extended family of both monarchs had joined the fray on one side or another, as well as a gross of other countries who weren’t even related by marriage. So it was on this subcontinent; a portion of the populace supported old Blighty, while the other half harboured grudges from the Boer War and reckoned we should have joined hands with the Germans in South-West. Before you know what, you have the 1914 Rebellion going at full tilt and men are shooting at brother, father or uncle along the northern border. Strangely enough, only the Afrikaans writers seem to feel strongly about this domestic squabble, and I have yet to find a book which gives all the details in English. So I am left at the tender mercies of the doughty Gen. J C G Kemp, who is not exactly an impartial observer in his book Die Pad van die Veroweraar (Nasionale Pers, 1942) to guide me through the sands of the Kalahari towards the German forces. Once the South Africans have been committed to wresting their colony from the Germans, there is much more material available – some of it quite readable if one likes to hear the whine of Mauser bullets and feel the grit of sand between the teeth. Books like E M Ritchie’s With Botha in the Field (Longmans Green, 1915), H F Trew’s Botha Treks (Blackie & Son, 1916) and W S Rayner & W W O’Shaughnessy’s How Botha and Smuts Conquered German South West (Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co, 1916) should satisfy the most ardent war historian’s appetite, especially since they cover the southern as well as the northern campaigns.
Once South-West had fallen, our local generals turned their attention to Tanganyika, where the renowned general P E von Lettow-Vorbeck was showing more talent than was deemed prudent to be on the loose in the East African bush. Although his book My Reminiscences of East Africa (Hurst & Blackett, 1919) consists of mainly the military niceties of his campaign, it is eminently readable, and I suspect that many of his opponents appreciated reading of his exploits as I did. There are a number of semi-arid to dry histories of this part of WWI, and I can only claim to have read two small contributions entitled inaptly On Safari by one F C (F Cooper, Juta, 1917) in which he sketches the discomforts of bush warfare as a gunner under the generalship of Smuts, and C Martin’s Corporal Haussman Goes to War (Privately published, 2000) in which charming little account said corporal betook himself and his Triumph motorcycle to ride in the war against the Germans.
World War II was an entirely different kettle of submarines. Yes, we do believe some German subs cruised off our shores, and it was rumoured that German seamen came ashore for smokes and a drink now and then, but that was about as close as the action got. Our troops were shipped off in large numbers to East and North Africa, where they fought talented generals like the Duc de Aosta and Rommel, among other redoubtable warriors; got hammered at Tobruk; flew in the Battle of Britain and escaped from various Italian concentration camps. Naturally there is a large body of literature concerning such important events; however, since I had a brother-in-law who had been party to some of the above actions ‘up north’, I was quite happy to listen to his tales of hair-raising escapades and improbable anecdotes, and I have somehow never had the urge to read a single book on the South African involvement in the war. Once again, gentle reader, you must pilot your own way through this literary minefield.
Lastly we come to what I classify as the ‘Bush Wars’ in my catalogues. They include everything warlike from the beginning of the end of the colonial era in Africa until the present civil wars raging up and down the continent with monotonous regularity. A number of my schoolmates could hardly wait to finish their matrics before they rushed off to join some bunch of ‘dogs of war’ led by one or other psychopath; to make unreal amounts of money in return for unspeakable deeds – or so I had it verbatim from one I met after he returned a haunted and shivering wreck from the Congo. Then, too, I had colleagues at work later on, men who had been sent to the Caprivi, and on into Angola – who would confide in me after a few drinks, some of the inhumanities than men do to other men in the heat of battle or in the cold fever of revenge. None of these encounters awoke any interest or vicarious enjoyment of what they had experienced, so I have read none of the Contacts, nor Mr Stiff’s offerings, nor ‘Mad’ Mike Hoare’s or dozens of other worthy additions to the genre – with one exception – a little book entitled Pionne, by one Bertie Cloete, who happened to be a neighbour of one of my friends. He relates his experiences as a young ‘Troopie’ in training camp and at the front in the north of Namibia; the traumatic Bush War against unseen enemies, and the horrendous things that were witnessed. A gripping read – but quite sufficient for my needs.
This was a difficult subject for me to write on and I hope any shortcomings will be excused. I have chosen to end this year, the first twelve numbers of Africana Votes and Views, with a subject I do not appreciate, but which will be with us as history and possibly future fact unless mankind undergoes a fundamental change.

Materia Medica

2009-12-09T09:21:00.000+02:00

Africana Votes & Views #11

The ills that afflict the human condition must be an eternal subject of interest to most people. Just listen in when a bunch of ‘mature’ people get together – first up on the agenda are the aches and pains that are experienced, as well as the miracle - or other cures that have been found.
So we’ll have a look at medicine in the Dark Continent, as well as a few related matters. I’ve always thought of the personage who used to be known as the District Surgeon, as a romantic figure who drove a clapped-out Ford or Studebaker sedan over unspeakable tracks in the Bush, with a black orderly/assistant next to him, and a rifle handy on the back seat among the paraphernalia of his profession. This was the Bundu Doctor, and I met a number of these worthy gentlemen in the flesh during the mid 1950’s.
It was with great delight that I actually found a book with just that title only a month or two back, written by a pukka sahib, Colonel (Dr) J Whitby (R Hale, 1961) covering his experiences in Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe, whence he had been posted after extensive duty in the Far East. I immersed myself in the book without further ado, expecting a bizarre array of cases, circumstances and humorous anecdotes. Despite the title, I was a little disappointed. Although the good doctor had a truly sympathetic touch with sufferers from a host of maladies, his writing is infused with racial stereotyping, generalisations ad nauseam, military and colonial attitudes and a fine disregard for the spelling of place-names. His chapter on witchcraft and the results on the affected tribespeople is of interest, and his description of setting a patient’s broken leg via radio instructions to a panicky wife, is an absolute howler, while one or two episodes described smack of being ‘bundu legends’.
The author spent time in his mobile surgery in the ‘doctor’s bogie’, a special wagon hitched onto the train that traversed the country from south to north. It would stop at every small station and the ailing populace would flock in for treatment, often necessitating the bogie’s being left behind in a siding to be hooked up by the next train. Altogether the book is a fair reflection of life in the colonies in the late 1940s, and it paints a good picture of the little settlement of Maun in the Okavango, as well as the Zambian Copperbelt.
Subsequently he was to enter the services of WNLA as the Medical Officer who checked out the avalanche of humanity absorbed by the Witwatersrand gold mines, only to be spat out when their contracts had expired. He devotes more than a whole chapter to the methods used by this organization, as well as the many benefits that the Africans enjoyed due to the system, which operated from a numbers of centres in the Caprivi, Barotseland, Southern Rhodesia and Mozambique.
A medico of an entirely different calibre is Alberto Denti di Pirajno, who wrote two books: A Cure for Serpents (Andre Deutsch, 1955) and A Grave for a Dolphin (1956), on his experiences. The good doctor starts his first book with charming reminiscences
among the Berber and Tuareg people of Tripolitania. None of the dour medical details, but intimate cameos of a kaleidoscope of patients, interspersed with snippets of local folklore and flavours from the Arabian Nights. While his treatments might not always have had the full endorsement of the British Medical Association, his cure for impotence, to which the title of the book refers is certainly a novel one which smacks of the time-honoured sleight of hand used by quacks to extract demons or extraneous objects from the patients’ bodies. An endearing quality of Pirajno’s writing is the lack of judgmental pontificating – as he cheerfully treats prostitutes, beggars, villagers or pashas, acknowledging their common humanity.
His next appointment was in Eritrea, this time as Regional Commissioner, but he still had to deputise occasionally for the MO. A hunting trip into the inhospitable desert; a bevy of beautiful women weaving their intrigues; tribal feuds and hashish smuggling all feature in this eventful period at Massawa, before he was transferred to the capital of Asmara for a spell before WWII. The book ends on a sombre note as the good doctor had been posted to Tripoli as the city’s governor and he had to surrender it to Montgomery’s forces.
The second book is a strange tale of a foundling Venus, a love story, of dolphins and of magic – very difficult to classify as to genre – but not really particularly relevant to the author’s medical career. Nonetheless, a most readable offering, which left me with more questions than answers.
A little less colonial, but still a chronicle of pioneer doctoring in the wilds, is Con Weinberg’s Fragments of a Desert Land (Timmins, 1975). He was decanted fresh from Medical School into the small village of Gibeon in 1926, where he was installed as relieving District Surgeon. There was one automobile in town; alternative transport being horseback or on foot. The nearest hospital was in Windhoek, over three hundred kilometers away, and he notes that while there was a telephone in town, one had to shout very loudly into it to make oneself heard in Windhoek!
Weinberg also had his medical caboose, still of pre-war German vintage, which would be hitched onto the passing trains and he would be transported to hold clinics, or to attend to emergencies up and down the line between Keetmanshoop and the capital. While I was reading this, I repeatedly bumped into shadows of my own family history, as my grandfather had been the travelling medic during the construction of the railway line between Luderitz and Keetmanshoop some twenty years earlier – possibly even working in the same caboose, and almost certainly sharing quarters with the author in Keetmanshoop. An entertaining book, full of incident and written with enough skill to let one feel the grit of the sand between one’s teeth.
Medicine in tropical Africa during the 20th century has been overshadowed by the monumental persona of Albert Schweitzer; theologian, musician, philosopher, missionary and doctor. By 1905 he had already achieved great stature as an authority on church organs and music, as well as being a professor of theology. He felt called to become a doctor so that he “might be able to work without having to talk….but (by) this new form of activity I could not represent myself as talking about the religion of love, but only as an actual putting of it into practice”. He qualified as a surgeon and doctor seven years later and wasted no time in departing, accompanied by his wife Helene, for Lambarene on the Ogowe River, Gabon.
Though he had been promised a mission building, this was not to materialize and his first patients were treated in a disused fowl-house. WWI came and Schweitzer and his wife were briefly interned as German citizens by the French, but his deprived patients caused such a furore that they were soon set at liberty. It was during the war years that Schweitzer had time to philosophise, and he founded the concept of ‘Reverence for Life’ as an embodiment of his faith and work. Nonetheless he returned to Europe for a spell and only resumed his work at Lambarene in 1924. He funded most of his work from his own income as a lecturer and musician and the hospital grew to some seventy buildings in the next forty years of his labours. He received numerous honours including the Nobel Peace Prize, and died in 1965 and was buried at Lambarene.
I have no idea how many books have been written about the man and his work. Two I have worked through are G Seaver’s Albert Schweitzer, the Man and his Mind ( A & C Black, 1948), and C R Joy & M Arnold’s The Africa of Albert Schweitzer ( A & C Black, 1949). The first is somewhat heavy reading, as are Schweitzer’s own books, Civilization and Ethics, My Life and Thought, The Decay and Restoration of Civilization, which cover his philosophical work, his biographical writings: Memoirs of Childhood and Youth, From My African Notebook, as well as his two most popular and readable works On the Edge of the Primeval Forest, and More from the Primeval Forest. Whether one likes philosophy or religion, or one merely stands in awe of the man, his humanitarianism and towering intellect, one should try to read one or the other of his works.
Just as Schweitzer battled the horrendous tropical scourges that afflict the inhabitants of West Africa, so did Michael Gelfand in South Central Africa. He wrote a goodly number of books dealing with subtropical medicine, as well as traditional healing and witchcraft practices among the tribespeople of Zimbabwe. The Sick African (Stewart, 1943) is too clinical for the lay reader, but Medicine and Custom in Africa (E & S Livingstone, 1964) is an account of the 'medical anthropology' of Africa, in which he examines the history of healing and materia medica, as well as occult practices. In another quite interesting title, Livingstone the Doctor – his Life and Travels (Basil Blackwell, 1957) he gives a critical evaluation of the great missionary/explorer’s medical role during his African sojourn. Another work, Mother Patrick and her Nursing Sisters (Juta, 1964) paints a faithful picture of the first attempts at providing a medical service to the new colony that was Rhodesia; as does the book A Service to the Sick (Mambo Press, 1976) in which he relates the development of medical treatment for Africans between 1890 and 1953. Medicine and Magic of the Mashona (Juta, 1956) delves into more ethnographical fields, as does Witch Doctor (Harvill Press, 1964) for good measure. As far as I’m aware, his last book in this vein to appear was The Traditional Medical Practitioner in Zimbabwe (Mambo Press, 1985), but the indefatigable doctor also collaborated with P W Laidler in writing South Africa, its Medical History (Struik, 1971). Gelfand’s books certainly belong onto the shelves of anybody interested in indigenous medicine and ethnography, while all collectors of Rhodesiana should follow suit, more especially since he also wrote a handful of other historical works.
There are a large number of little memoirs written by and about doctors in private practice in small towns and in the cities of the subcontinent. I can’t claim to have read that many, since a little medicine tends to go a long way with me. The best tales are usually those which are light on technical detail and rich in human tapestry. One of the former is D Gamsu’s Adventures of a South African Brain Surgeon (Hugh Keartland, 1967) which is ill-named, since it is more of a whodunit, recalling the most memorable manslaughters, murders attempted and successful as well as fraudulent claims for injuries never suffered. It reads more like Benjamin Bennett than Chris Barnard. Speaking of the latter, one needs to have been born in Beaufort West to enable one to wade through the pages of this flamboyant heart-throb of the female gender (if he is to be believed). Much more charming was the little volume entitled Salt River Doctor by B A Mackenzie (Faircape, 1981), or Dr Dingle’s cheerful memoir And the Doctor Recovered (Timmins, 1959). One of my firm favourites is C Louis Leipoldt’s Bushveld Doctor (Jonathan Cape, 1937) in which he describes his years after the end of the Boer War, ministering to the needs of the poor rural Afrikaner and especially their children in the Northern Transvaal. Many of these waifs were miserably ill-nourished, malaria and bilharzia-ridden, and in some cases scarcely able to assimilate any knowledge during their school hours because of their physical condition. A thoroughly engaging social document of the times.
There is no shortage of historical material on the theme. The Victorian medical men – and women – were not reticent about their activities. Some of the good doctors cured men’s bodies so that they could indulge in scientific adventures with the proceeds, as Emil Holub did. He intermittently dosed, patched and otherwise cured prospectors at the Diamond Fields for years before amassing enough funds to be able to lead three expeditions to the upper reaches of the Zambezi, where he made a name for himself as an explorer and recorder of strange peoples, animals and plants; which he ably describes (at some length) in his two-volume work Seven Years in South Africa (various German and English eds). J W Matthews’s work Incwadi Yami (Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1877 & Africana Book Society, 1976) is in a similar vein, based mainly on the Diamond Fields, but the author prefers at least a modicum of the comforts of civilization, so he did not take to the wilds. Still, a lively and entertaining book on conditions in the ‘Wild West’ of South Africa. Another book dealing with this period and region is Lure of the Stone by W M & V Buss (Timmins, 1976), which chronicles the career of our own ‘Lady of the Lamp’ Sister Henrietta Stockdale, who was instrumental in bringing some relief to the diggers who were struck down by the major killers of the time, pneumonia, typhoid, typhus fever and dysentery. Sister Henrietta nursed and taught others to nurse for some two decades, right through the siege of Kimberley, and comes across as rather a martinet from this short biography, which reads something like a medical Who’s Who of the times.
Speaking of those times – the Anglo-Boer War was a period of intense medical activity, on both sides of the conflict. While the British potentially had a well-equipped medical service, with staff, equipment and medicines, they had not reckoned with the far-flung nature of the conflict across the subcontinent. The Boers, on the other hand, were short of trained personnel, which was in part supplied by sympathizers from a number of European countries, many of whom left memoirs of their years in the field. A vast amount of this information has been assembled by Kay de Villiers in his monumental work on the history of military medicine in the Anglo-Boer War, entitled Healers, Helpers and Hospitals, 2 Vols (Protea Book House, 2008). For anybody with an interest in the conflict, these works are an absolute must; the reader interested in medical history will find a feast, and the student and researcher will find much well-researched and documented fact, and even the casual browser will find a wealth of interesting anecdote, to be dipped into time and again – a tour de force in this genre.
There are the stories of the men and women who healed their fellow man. Then there are the stories of the institutions. The South African Institute for Medical Research has a very special place in my heart, because my mother worked there and in the serum laboratories at Rietfontein; so I have spent many hours wandering round the corridors of the august edifice designed by Sir Herbert Baker and built on Hospital Hill, as well as among the animal cages during my youth. M Malan’s book In Quest of Health (Lowry, 1988) traces the history of this world-renowned institution from its earliest beginnings due to fears of infectious diseases among the mineworkers in Johannesburg. During the period between the wars, extensive research was done with plague, relapsing fever, histoplasmosis, sporotrichosis, bilharzia and numerous other diseases, but what brought the institute to world attention was the production of a controversial vaccine against poliomyelitis, that dreaded killer of children in the early fifties. My sibling and I were probably among the first batches of schoolchildren to be inoculated with this virus, so once more it is of personal interest – but more of polio vaccine later. Lately the institute is engaged in research into the immunology of the AIDS pandemic. The book is no easy afternoon’s read, but for the interested layman and medico, a serious contender for their attention.
Certainly there are a number of histories of hospitals and medical schools, but none better to mention here than the definitive work on the history of Groote Schuur At the Heart of Healing (Jacana, 2008) by Anne Digby and Howard Phillips. The authors have written a scholarly yet very human history of this iconic institution and the caring people who staff it from the most menial positions to the top consultants. They trace the rising fortunes of the hospital when money poured in after the blaze of the spotlights had focused on the revolutionary heart transplant successes, and the gradual decline in funding during the latter years, as management struggled to come to terms with the integration of patients and staff in the New South Africa.
Lastly, to return to polio vaccines, and the rumours that it might be an ‘escaped’ plague – an experiment that went wrong. For readers who really love a challenging read, I would suggest you try E Hooper’s medical whodunit entitled The River (Penguin, 2000). The author is a medical sleuth, hot on the trail of the root cause of AIDS - epidemiological detective work; a truly remarkable attempt to trace the possible origins of the world pandemic, as well as its diffusion, from postulated beginnings with a live polio vaccine derived from chimpanzees (who have become acclimatized to their own form of SIV), which was supposedly distributed among Central African villagers. Probably there are huge holes that need to be plugged in the theory, but I have to admit I was hooked from beginning to end, though the medspeak left me bewildered on more than one occasion.

And now I am going off to have a drink to your continued good health!

PAGE RAGE

2009-11-30T08:31:00.000+02:00

Africana Votes & Views #10

The time has come to share with you all, readers and writers alike, some of the characteristics, failings and foibles of authors and publishers, that absolutely stick in my craw and refuse to be ingested without a Herculean struggle.

Some of my pet aversions are purely personal - such as my dislike of dustjackets or dw's as they are often referred to. I love the feel and look of a book attractively bound in cloth, paper or leather-covered boards instead of a slithery plastic-coated concoction in garish colours, frequently bearing advertising, bar codes, pictures of authors, their biographies and forthcoming attractions, over the cheapest possible machine binding job you can get. The dw costs a great deal to produce, I believe; money that could much better be spent on materials and binding of the volume it covers. Once the book has been read a few times - or even just removed from the shelf and replaced again, the dw starts getting first edgeworn, then a few tears appear, making it tatty or scuffed; a few more passages from hand to shelf and extended rips appear, and possibly even a chunk is torn off to scribble a telephone number on or to be used as an instrument of cleansing - making a description of torn & chipped inevitable. Readers have become brainwashed to the necessity of having dw's to such a degree that such deficient pieces of scrap paper are occasionally pasted down onto other sheets so as to reassemble to best ability the jigsaw puzzle they have become; they are lovingly encased in plastic protectors, (as if this confers de facto virginity to them once more), and more disturbingly, crime has raised its ugly head with forgeries starting to appear on the market, courtesy of high quality copying machines. Ag shame!

Even the fundis of the bookworld differ on this subject. That bible all bibliophiles should possess, John Carter’s ABC for Book Collectors, (Oak Knoll, 1992 6th Rev ed) has the following to say: Professors Tanselle and Gallup…have spoken up for the recognition of the jacket as, in bibliographical terms, an integral component of the modern book, yet that this insistence sometimes becomes rather hysterical is also true. On the previous page he says: …dustjackets were – and functionally still are – ephemera in the most extreme sense: wrappings intended to be thrown away, before the objects they were designed to accompany were put to use. My pet hate is in good company – I rest my case.
Let us linger on the exterior of the book. How about size? The first book that leaps to mind is Rourke & Lincoln's tome Mimetes (Tiyan Publishers, 1982). This book weighs in the region of 8 kg, and my colleague who has a copy, informs me that it is about 70 x 50 cm in size. His classic comment was that "All the publisher needed to do is to sell four legs along with the book to make it into a coffee-table". A A Balkema published a few so-called 'elephant folios' in his time - reprints of Angas' The Kafir's Illustrated, and Daniell's African Scenery and Animals; themselves no lightweights and only a few centimetres smaller in each direction. Problem is, you need to have a clean table, big enough to hold the thing, you must have both hands free to turn the page (for fear of tearing it) and preferably you should have someone with good eyesight standing on a chair next to you, who would be able to bend over the book far enough to be able to read the text at the top of the page which is not within range of your bifocals. Then you have the problem of storage. No bookshelf will hold it, as it would protrude far enough to snag every passer-by, leading to eventual damage. You can put it on top of a cupboard to gather dust and fishmoths, but that way you can't enjoy the book, and the same goes for putting it into a drawer for safety. When I have copies of these monstrosities in my shop, they are stood on the floor, leant against this wall and that one; being turned about weekly, so that they don't develop a permanent slouch. Meanwhile I pray that no stray tomcat will come in to mark off the outer limits of his territory in time-honoured fashion against the priceless volume.
Seriously though, size matters. A book of a thousand pages or more is fine as a reference book, not as a bedside companion. If you would dare to fall asleep while reading one of these lying down, you could end up with facial surgery. The abovementioned dw's are another plague while reading larger books in a prone position. They tend to slither and slide out of their jackets, while the wrappers themselves are not immune to the abrasive qualities of bunched-up bedclothes. Then there are softcover books; at best a necessary evil, which to me will always reek of 1950's shilling dreadfuls like Peter Cheyney's Dark Wanton or Dangerous Curves - but not Wolpoff's six-hundred page quarto tome entitled Preliminary Publication of Paleoanthropology (McGraw Hill, 1994), which is a textbook that is intended to be consulted often and enthusiastically. To add insult to injury, there is that pervasive practice of cheap and nasty bookbinding called 'Perfect Bound'. Anything less perfect is difficult to imagine. The pages of the book are assembled, clamped, ruthlessly guillotined on all four edges if necessary, a lick of sticky, hot gunge is applied to the long side, and a softcover sleeve is applied with some pressure to make it all stick together. Hey presto - you have a book. Or do you? The unsuspecting purchaser doesn't always look at the spine, or the construction, especially if they are bewitched by the resounding title on the cover and the promise of virgin literature on the pages, so they take it home and read it. The monstrosity might survive, one two or even a few more readings, then suddenly a page drops out, the another, then twenty or thirty, as the space-age glue hardens, dries out and loses its tack - rather like space-shuttle glue holding on ceramic heat-shield tiles - you remember the scenario?
One last peeve concerning the book's exterior: since I read books in a number of languages, I have perforce to browse shelves on which the titles are displayed in various ways. Generally I prefer a label or a horizontally broken-up and printed title and author. That is good if the shelf is in front of me, at eye-height. It is an unfortunate fact that my eyes are fixed in my face and do not run up and down my body on tracks at will - meaning that inevitably, the book I want to look at, is at the height of my knees or lower, and if I bend down, the title is upside down, which at my age, shape and station in life, does not facilitate browsing. If the title is too long or the book is thin, the other convention is to have the wording run from left to right, if one is holding the book front cover upwards in front of one. Not so the Germans; they run the title from right to left - as does Anderson with his book Blue Berg - Britain takes the Cape (Privately published, 2008) as well as a few other authors in various languages that I have run across. This makes for cricking noises of the neck, something that all browsers of boxes of books on the tables at charity and other sales have experienced, as the books' titles are displayed this way, and then face about. Most vendors just don't seem to realise the basic fact that they should try to make the browsing of their stock as painless as possible for their clients - thus achieving maximum sales. Instead it becomes a circus of cerebral contortions until the hapless buyer gives up in considerable discomfort.
All sorts of sizes are problematical. Why produce an A4 softcover of fifty pages, when you could just as easily fold the text in half and have an A5 which will stand properly (even in softcover), and on the spine of which you can legibly inscribe a title and an author? What does one do with an oblong quarto, or even an oblong folio? You either have to have a special shelf with extra depth to prevent the problem mentioned above with those whoppers, or you have to park the offenders on edge, spine upwards, where you also can't read the title as it is obscured by the shelf above. At the other end of the scale there are tiny books, some no higher than 100 mm, about half the height of a normal octavo. These tend to get lost among their tall companions on the shelves, like toddlers in a crowd of grown-ups. Equally bad are books which pretend to be octavo in height, but their depth is half that of a normal book, making them a bastard-size which is just asking to be squeezed to the back of a shelf, thus making it impossible to find.
From the exterior, which is after all, only skin-deep, let us delve into the innards of the beasties. A well-designed, considered publication is most desirable; preferably on paper that looks as if it could have had a tree or vegetable fibre as a parent material instead of some of this fashionable shiny junk that owes most of its components to a mine, that won't burn properly, weighs more than a brick, and refuses to take printers' ink without fading to some anaemic grey. Paper should be of sufficient bulk and opacity to prevent the print on the other side from interfering with the text. It should be slightly matt, if at all possible not the dead white which reflects any incident ray of light causing eyestrain to the reader, rather shading into ivory - but avoiding fancy bubblegum colours so beloved for the kiddies' library - or even worse, what I call negative printing, that is white font on a shiny black background as favoured by publications like the National Geographic Magazine and other glitzy productions. Trying to read a nine point font of this type with artificial light is nearly as bad a trying to read the tiny white English subtitles in a Bollywood film production filled with people dressed in white robes, striding through blinding sunshine. Fancy fonts may have their place on greeting cards, advertising signs and directions to the nearest toilet in public places, but they make reading a chore when it should be a pleasure. I don't profess to know much about typography, but an 11pt Garamond, Ariel or Times Roman or suchlike, with a decent spacing between lines, say single or one and a half, means that even those who are not fortunate enough to have 20/20 sight can enjoy the read.
I have been told by reliable sources that there are conventions in publishing. I attach so little importance to these that I can't actually remember exactly what they are - but here goes. Your top margin is, let's say X mm, then your bottom margin should be bigger, say X+5 mm, on the left hand page your outer margin should be Y mm, while the inside margin should be Y + 3 mm, and the opposite should apply to the facing page. All this is surely based on some deep-seated logic which evolved somewhere in the 15th century, but I fail to see the relevance to anything except individual aesthetics. What I do remember is the completely irrational rage I felt the first time I looked through one of those Scripta Africana reprints. Here is a set of so-called de luxe editions (poorly bound) with a poor facsimile of text lifted from a page 22 x 15 cm (including margins) and plonked down in the same size in the middle of a page the size of a toilet lid, resulting in margins about half as wide as the text, or more, all round. What a waste of paper! Other volumes from the same publisher, like Conan Doyle's The Great Boer War, go to the other extreme, and you have the same large pages with huge blocks of text and very small margins. On the other hand, I must admit to binning books which have ten millimetre margins at the spine, and being bound so tightly that you would need stalk-eyes to be able to read the text to the end of the line, since you can't open the thing wide enough to make out the last word. Talking of which, I have just seen the most awful product that it has ever been my misfortune to view: a combination of three books in one, entitled History of the BSAP 1889-1980 by Gibbs & Phillips (Adcraft Publishing, 2000), which sports 5mm wide margins top and bottom of the page, while the side margins are about ten mm wide. That is taking economy to ridiculous lengths.
One can understand the amount of physical effort, trial and experimentation that was needed in days of yore and lead slugs for type, to obtain text that was properly justified on both sides. However, I can refer you to numerous books on my shelves, that were published in the 18th century, which are all perfectly set out - so why was it that some indolent slobs of typographers were permitted or encouraged by their bosses the printers and publishers, to foist a bunch of untidy, unfinished-looking prose on the purchasers of their wares? In this regard, our own Guus Balkema was a prime offender, with several shoddy works among a goodly number of workmanlike volumes. I seem to recall trying to read an experimental book once, which was printed like modern poetry - lines of any length, no punctuation, no capitals. Talking of which, I abhor correspondence which I have to read, written without using capitals. Aw, come on, it doesn't take that much effort to press the shift key. Whenever I get a missive like that, I am tempted to reply in full upper case. It's damn nearly as difficult to read - don’t ask me why, but my brain must have become fossilised in 'standard mode'.

There is a justification for breaking up text on a page into narrow columns, like in a newspaper. I have been told what it is - but I forgot. Whatever it was or is, books are not newspapers, so there is presently no need for this. A very beautifully produced book I have recently looked at (and sold) had this type of configuration. On each landscape small quarto page there were three columns divided by vertical lines - but the text columns aren't justified, making the whole thing look ragged, though in all fairness stretching and squeezing the text alternately to make it fit in between the tramlines would have looked pretty awful too - so why columns? I believe it is easier to place illustrations using this configuration, but here lies another problem for me; imagine an ordinary page, divide it vertically into two, then spread a picture across the middle, with two blobs of text in two columns on top, and again at the bottom. Now how do you read this? Do you read the first blob, top left, then skip the picture and read the blob at bottom left - or do you read the top left, then go across the page to the right hand top blob, read that, and then go back to the bottom left, then the bottom right? See what I mean? You can imagine how lost I can manage to get on pages with multiple columns and multiple pics like in an encyclopaedia.

Now let us tackle the main course of this discourse: the contents of the book. In these days of computers and instant gratification software, not to mention the Internet, Google, Wikipedia etc, there is really no earthly reason for getting one's facts horribly wrong - repeatedly. To err is human, and I have heard that the completely fault-free book has not yet been produced, and I can believe that. In spite of two proofreaders an editor, a slew of publishing staff and my own very earnest attempts at eradicating every possible typo, erratic spelling of names, punctuation, footnotes and pagination, there are a minimum of three mistakes in something I produced last year. I won't bore you with the details, but I'll whisper them in you ear if you ask me personally. So, I start reading a book with an open mind. To illustrate my gripe, it would run something like this: on page ten I find a misspelling of a Latin botanical name, two pages later there is an omitted letter in a word, three pages later the author tells me that a certain person was born in Austria when he came from Switzerland, and on the next page he finds that the spelling of Bovril is beyond him and he doesn't know the difference between it's and its. Well, you can imagine that my confidence in the author's research is by now shaken, and my ire is stirred. By the time I reach the twentieth mistake without having had to consult a single reference book, I discard the book as 'complete rubbish and paper-waste', CRAP for short. One of my ex-clients springs to mind; after much purchase of books as references, he produced a book on the stirring annals of the building of the railway line between the southern and northern extremities of our continent. I do not remember the exact number of his transgressions, but they were legion. His piece de resistance was the spread of pages on which he portrayed a perfectly clear picture of a Lake steamer, with its name proudly displayed for all to see on its bows, he then spelt it differently in the picture's caption, and to top it all he found another two spellings for the same vessel's name in the next few pages. Elsewhere in the book he would have quaggas running around the jungles of central Africa, and he had a type of pony climbing trees under the misconception that the word meant civet cats or something like that. That sort of sloppiness would be inexcusable in a Victorian novel meant for boys under the age of thirteen, not to speak of a book purporting to be a serious history.
Especially authors dealing with historical subjects need to check and recheck their facts, and especially spelling. One such author who brought his work for me to sell on his behalf, chronicled the valiant exploits of a distaff military ancestor. Now what I know about matters military is dangerous - but I picked up mistakes in the spelling of an international incident, a renowned engineer, an iconic machine-gun as well as a batch of typos and one glaring factual faux pas - all in the space of half the book. I lost all confidence in any information he presented. To be sure, the author was very grateful to have these problems pointed out to him, but that should have happened before the book got into print. Another beautiful production, a quasi-scientific botanical work on a region that interested me greatly, was sent to me on publication and I started devouring the contents with great enjoyment. Much to my disappointment, lack of proofreading became all too evident within the first fifty pages, with some dozen or two mistakes being spotted and this spoilt the whole, otherwise very worthwhile effort, which represented years of work. When in doubt, get someone to proofread the thing, then get someone else, then ask your worst enemy, then your best friend - then pray that the printer doesn't make a hash of it. When all else fails, put your computer to work and ask MS Word to do a spell-check - trust me, it works wonders, though I must admit to the basic human failing of having the inability to spot my own typos, even if they are underlined in red by the programme.
As I get older and crankier, I frequently find myself in a quandary as to whether a word should be ending in -ize, or ise, such is the pervasiveness of the American word, both spoken and written, that one begins to wonder who has the etymological right of way in this and many other aberrant versions of common words. After all, what is correct, is merely a matter of opinion in the compilation of dictionaries. However, if spelling should not be an entirely arbitrary matter, open to the whims and vagaries of any who would put pen to paper, then surely a similar courtesy should be afforded to foreign languages. I am in full agreement with writers who insist that English doesn't have adequate words to express the nuances of words like weltschmerz, schadenfreude, zeitgeist, soupçon, raison d'être, cris de coeur, praia and a host of other choice, foreign mouthfuls that one can choose from; but then one should at least take the elementary precaution of checking the spelling. If an author doesn't have a dictionary of say, Amharic, Finno-Ugric, or Bulgarian - help is at hand - Google has an idiot's manual programme which will actually translate in a very rough-hewn way almost anything you enter into the search form, or give you the correct spelling thereof. Which does not mean you can go ahead with that typically British insouciance and permit your literary creation to state emphatically something idiotic like der Sonne scheint und die Mond strahlt, since some languages actually use gender-specific articles, and the sun is feminine while the moon is masculine to all good Germans, although the exact opposite applies in France and Spain, while the English have managed to neuter both heavenly bodies by some Anglo-Saxon alchemy. John Buchan, who happened to be one of my early favourite authors (though his corona has waned a little with the passing of decades), managed to imprint himself indelibly on my youthful brain with a supposedly German injunction uttered by his spy: 'Schnell, schnell, der Boot' in The Thirty-nine Steps.
Maps are a necessary adjunct to any book which deals with history, exploration, natural sciences, even biographies and a host of other subjects. A book with maps as endpapers is not to be despised, as long as the scale is adequate, and the legend is legible. A map, or multiples thereof loose in a pocket at the rear of the volume, is a risky business, as all too often they/it go AWOL, and the incautious purchaser ends up with a deficient work, of little value. This happens regularly to bookdealers, believe me. On the other hand, a map folded three times horizontally and eight times vertically unfolds into a huge and unwieldy thing requiring a double bed or a large dining-room table to be spread out properly. In addition it needs to be made of the flimsiest material so that all twenty-four thicknesses of it don't exceed the total thickness of the book, so as you unfold his diaphanous creation, you are greeted with the sweet, low sound of tearing paper, as the right angle at the hinge parts under the strain of your amateur ministrations. I've repaired dozens of maps with Japanese tissue on both sides - so I know all about it. On the other extreme, the canny publisher has shrunk his map to a mere fourfold size of the book, but in the process the font labelling the rivers, mountains and dorps has shrunk to about 2pt, which means that even with a microscope you cannot make out the letters between the fibres of the paper. I've tried that as well - promise.
Lastly, let us consider the crowning glory of the book, the illustrations. Finely crafted colour plates by virtuoso illustrators and artists will always enhance the look as well as the value of a book. From early woodcuts, to coppergravure and steel, on to the different lithographic techniques, many of which resulted in intricate and finely reproduced work (with the inevitable poor examples scattered among them); from simple sketches, cartoons and vignettes to elaborate hand-coloured plates - there was sure to be something that would delight and charm almost any discerning viewer in an illustrated volume - but alas, no longer. The advent of photography has obviously revolutionised printed illustrations. From the poor, grainy, black and white images, to remarkably fine sepia and collotype reproductions and on to the early colour photographs to spectacular modern photography as cameras and chemicals reached their zenith of development, right into the digital age, when computers can embellish, edit and indeed, create scenes for our edification. Why then is it seen fit to produce large, so called coffee-table books, consisting mainly of illustrative material with very little text to flesh out the pages, in which almost every page consists of a photo containing a large expanse of out-of-focus foreground and background, with about half of the actual subject matter (totalling maybe 5% of the surface of the picture) actually properly visible ? If any feature of a book is guaranteed to evoke page rage in me, this is it. This is not arty; this is not clever; this is ineptitude on the part of the photographer; this is sloth or carelessness on the part of the editor and publisher, and it is an abomination in my eyes.
There, I feel a lot better now that I have got all of that off my chest !

VICTORIAN/EDWARDIAN FICTION IN S A

2009-10-04T16:37:00.000+02:00

AFRICANA VOTES & VIEWS VOL 1 # 9

Let us consider the Victorian novel as placed in a South African environment. After all, so many of the soldiers, administrators and business-people were educated men; men who could write a fair description of an outlandish scene, people and their habits. So where and when did writers start using the subcontinent’s veld as a backdrop to their works of imagination? No, I’m not going to put my foot in it and declare this or that author and title to be able claim primogeniture, as such; that is too dangerous, and just asking for a rebuttal by someone with a better knowledge of the genre than myself. What we shall do is to browse around the shelves; revisit old favourites, and discover a few which are gems, and many that are not.
To date I have not come across any early books for the very young with a local backdrop or from the pen of a local writer. It would seem that the classic nursery tales, rhymes and fables of European origin were thought to be quite sufficient, or alternatively it may have been judged that the rough, colonial scene was not fit for the tender hearts and ears of Victorian sprouts. So it is only in the first decade of the twentieth century that we find a collection of adaptations from native tales by E J Bourhill and J B Drake, called simply Fairy Tales from South Africa (Macmillan, 1908). I can find no further information on the two authors, except that the introduction ends with the legend ‘Barberton, Transvaal, 1908.’ Speaking of introduction, this one goes to great lengths to explain the way of life of the black people, how each little tribe had its chief (hence all the kings, queens and princesses in the tales); how a man’s ambition was to have an impi of warriors to fight for him in his many battles; how they hardly ever worked except for a little cattle-herding, as work is what wives were put on earth for; that they had two or more wives, for whom they had paid lobola, and how they only lived in the idyllic surroundings of the Eastern Transvaal, Natal and the Eastern Cape. All a little patronising and full of generalisations and most certainly not PC – however, I must applaud the writers for a labour of love that might have been a very worthwhile introduction for a European child into another culture and belief system at the time. The tokoloshes might have become fairies, the chiefs great kings and the ntombis are all princesses; while the unspeakable cruelties and bloodshed are glossed over skilfully so as not to shock and offend, but something of the flavour of tribal legends has survived, and the book is a milestone of sorts in Africana Literature.
Catering for slightly older tastes, the institution of boarding-school life, so dear to the heart of the Englishman, doesn’t escape the colonial writers’ guild either. I cannot profess enough interest to have scoured the shelves in search of the subject, so I can’t speak of its full extent in the subcontinent, but I did run across one quite readable little effort by one ‘Natalian’, actually a gentleman by the name of Albert Weir Baker, who seemed to have been more famous for writing on serious subjects, such as the ‘effects of liquor on the natives’, ‘the evils of Freemasonry and its incompatibility with Christianity’ as well as a personal statement of faith, when he was director of the South African Compounds Commission. The book in question was A South African Boy; Schoolboy Life in Natal, (Marshall Russell, 1897). While the plot made no lasting impression on me (at a distance of some 12–15 years of having last read it) it was entertaining enough to keep me at it throughout, and I found it reflected the flavour of schooling in what must have been a vastly different environment from even what I experienced some sixty years later.
Some of the earliest works written to appeal to young minds, which I read, must have been those classics by G A Henty – With Buller in Natal, The Young Colonists, and With Roberts to Pretoria are three with a South African flavour that come to mind. All jolly good fun, British imperialism, courage, honour, adventure and the like; the baddies, ie Boers/Zulus etc got their come-uppance and the young hero either settled down to a long, productive and esteemed existence, or else he returned Home and became a sitting MP or JP or something. During my pre-teenage years I could find no fault with these adventure yarns, but even then the basic similarity of the above stories, each in a slightly different Victorian historical scene, came to my attention, and their attraction waned.
R M Ballantyne was another notable Victorian who wrote books with African, and in three instances South African background. He was a scion of a reputable firm of printers and publishers, and had the great good fortune to do an early stint of work in Canada, which stood him in good stead when he decided to devote himself to writing juvenile literature. While a large number of English-speaking people will have read at least his most famous work, Coral Island (1857), he wrote more than a hundred books, mostly characterised by meticulous attention to detail (said to stem from his making one colossal error about the thickness of a coconut shell in Coral Island) and he tried whenever possible to write from personal experience. Of his South African books, Hunting the Lion and The Settler and the Savage are pretty standard fare, while his third book is, in fact, the story of his Six Months at the Cape (1879), a light-hearted reminiscence of an extended vacation in the Eastern Cape and Karoo; an interesting and entertaining read for readers of all ages. The rest of Africa is not ignored, and we can find another half dozen or so novels, set in the Dark Continent. One of these, dealing with slavery, Black Ivory (1873), was in all likelihood inspired by David Livingstone and his crusade against this evil, as the author wholeheartedly endorsed the latter’s views. Ballantyne inspired not only generations of youngsters, with the dictum ‘that he believed that boys must be trained up from boys to be true men and not just left on their own to be boys’ , he also inspired other writers, among whom was Robert Louis Stevenson, who reputedly incorporated several of Ballantyne’s ideas in Treasure Island.
Almost certainly the next in line were those wonderful books by H Rider Haggard. She, King Solomon’s Mines, Alan’s Wife, Allan Quatermain, Ayesha – and dozens more titles that flowed from this talented man’s pen. His phrase of ‘She who must be obeyed’ has passed into the English language as all that stands for female authority over the hapless male of the species. Haggard spent a while in the Transvaal, where he had a position under Sir Theophilus Shepstone in the years leading up to the First Anglo-Boer War. During this period he met a number of the hunter-adventurers, like Selous and Burnham, on whom his most endearing character, Allan was based. There was romance, tragedy, battle, adventure and lost treasure and lost civilizations galore – but I have a sneaking suspicion that old Haggard actually had talent. While I find the MGM versions of King Solomon’s Mines and Mogambo a bit insipid after two viewings of Deborah Kerr and Grace Kelly each doing her vapid siren-thing, even separated by some thirty years; but I can still read his description of that noble Zulu warrior, Umslopogaas, swinging his deadly war axe and picking off enemies at will while chanting that wild war-song; and get a thrill from the heroic prose. Two of his books, Swallow (Longmans Green, 1899), dealt with the Great Trek, and Jess (1887), were probably aimed more at the fair sex, I seem to recall, being the adventures of young heroines. His books did not all end well, or tamely, nor did they always promote British suzerainty over the remote regions touched upon. I seriously doubt that they were intended to portray life as it was lived in the second half of the 19th century, but they were imaginative, well-written adventure yarns, which deserve to stand next to classics like Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
Still on the subject of juvenile literature, let us consider that phenomenon which is Jock of the Bushveld. Not a Victorian novel, you will say – well, almost, would be my reply. Though it was published in 1907, the experiences which led to the writing of the book were during Fitzpatrick’s years on the Eastern Transvaal Gold Fields from 1884 onwards, and when he accompanied Lord Randolph Churchill to Mashonaland in the late 1890s. Although presently not considered PC, as it reflects terminology, social attitudes and racial stereotyping which were common during the period, it is unlikely that even attempts at sanitising a book of such stature will succeed in killing off its popularity. This book has a genuinely wide appeal. Although written for the ‘lickle people’, ie Fitz’s children, there is enough meat on the bones to arouse every hunter’s and bush lover’s enthusiasm – anybody who wants to experience the flavour of the Gold Rush, the smell of the campfire, the heat of the fever-stricken Lowveld and the rough camaraderie of the men of the trails and tracks. The book certainly has enough literary merit to survive for many more generations. A less widely known work of fiction, which predated Jock, was published in 1897. It consisted of a number of short campfire-stories, quite readable and entertaining, entitled The Outspan – probably the best of a number of such volumes from different authors of the period.
Just from the above three authors and their dozen-odd books one can already see a theme developing. The subcontinent was portrayed as a blank canvas for adventurers; scope for explorers, prospectors and hunters. There were wild beasts aplenty, and wild people too, that would need subduing. So primarily the backdrop was portrayed as being attractive to the young would-be adventurer; there were riches to be found and fame to be won. South Africa was a man’s country, and a steady stream of hunting, travelling and soldiering books emanated from the gentry that forsook the shores of old Blighty, so perforce the tellers of tales had to follow the same paths, with their inventions ever surpassing reality. While a few hardy ladies followed in their footsteps, the raw environment did not endear itself to the female novelist as a backdrop.
A Victorian lady who entered the early literary fray was Harriet Ward, wife of an officer stationed on the Eastern Frontier. Her first effort was Five Years in Kaffirland (Colburn, 1848) in which she faithfully describes the ‘War of the Axe’, and displays great sympathy for soldier and colonist alike. This was followed by her editorship of a minor work on The Past and Future of Emigration, before she launched into a work of fiction, which was very much in the male domain of the ‘wild frontier, peopled by savage warriors and an intrepid bunch of colonists’ entitled Jasper Lyle; a Tale of Kaffirland (G Routledge, 1851–2). I have to admit that the lady’s style, plot and execution was not to my taste and some forty to fifty pages of her work were sufficient for the day for my needs. Nonetheless, I recall that her book did present life as it was then with a touch more realism than was generally incorporated in the fiction of the period by her male counterparts.
Olive Schreiner can be considered a rare exception with her books Story of an African Farm (1883) and Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, but while the former faithfully describes the dreary lot of womankind and tackles the issues of the period, the latter was not just another tale of derring-do in the wilds with a political agenda thrown in for good measure, but a rather wearisome allegorical satire against the greed of one C J Rhodes in nabbing an entire country from the inhabitants. So one could say that Schreiner was the first to break out of the adolescent view of the Dark Continent and who painted the human canvas within the strictures of culture rather than physical environment.
Another fine craftsman of the adventure yarn was John Buchan. Although his book Prester John did not appear until 1910, the writer’s experiences during the last phases of the Boer War, and his later travels around the Transvaal, gave him the rich background into which he placed the young Scottish lad, David Crawfurd, who became embroiled in an uprising of the black tribes under the leadership of the messianic John Laputa. The setting is absolutely authentic; the two main characters are utterly believable and the plot is not that far-fetched that it could not have happened somewhere in Africa under British colonial rule, although some of Buchan’s work is nauseatingly jingoistic and racist, with archetypal villains – Jew, Levantine, Bolshevik, Portuguese halfbreed, Boer drunkard, Fuzzy Wuzzy and Boche or Hun – leaping off every other page. I have to concede that he writes a mean adventure yarn, which involves the reader sufficiently to make the book enjoyable almost a hundred years after it first appeared. His other books, though featuring a touch of South African flavour in the personages of Richard Hannay and the aviator Pieter Pienaar, have very little to do with Africa, and are thus outside the focus of this essay.
It would seem that a number of sportsmen, after having had their fill of the chase, decided to settle in their upholstered chairs and to allow their memories and imaginations free rein. One of these was the renowned naturalist and hunter, Henry Anderson Bryden, a great friend of Selous’, with whose cousin, Percy, he collaborated on a volume entitled Travel and Big Game, in addition to a number of hunting, natural history and historical books. In his latter days he also decided to branch out into fiction, and the result was the rather disappointing volume, From Veldt Camp Fires (1900), a rather nondescript collection of anecdotes. I read it recently, and apparently he wrote a few others, Don Duarte’s Treasure (1904) and The Gold Kloof (1907), which I have not seen to date, but I doubt that they contributed much to twentieth century literature.
A little earlier, similar tales were penned by one Captain Alfred W Drayson, who found enough time in his busy military schedule to embark on several hunting trips in the Eastern Cape and Natal. His real-life adventures are ably described in the hunting book Sporting Scenes among the Kaffirs of South Africa (G Routledge, 1858), even though the finish of his book left a lot to be desired due to the ghastly colour plates that adorned its pages in greasy splendour. Obviously his imagination became inflamed with all he had seen and heard, so he followed up his success with a series of books filled with ‘sporting narrative and daring adventures among savage beasts and hardly less savage men’, such as Tales at the Outspan (1865), White Chief of the Caffres (1887), Diamond Hunters of South Africa (1889), and From Keeper to Captain (1889) – the latter being the only volume I have actually looked through. Generally fairly standard adolescent fare for the period, but one does glimpse a few passages where the soldiers’ and hunters’ lots are sketched without the addition of excess purple prose.
The able historian, Joseph Forsyth Ingram, started off his literary career with an eminently collectible work with the snappy title of The Land of Gold, Diamonds and Ivory – being a comprehensive handbook and guide to the colonies, states and republics of South and East Africa (W B Whittingham & Co, 1889). It would seem as if Ingram assembled a wealth of material which he was unable to place in his tour de force, so he was motivated to offer his readership a collection of tales under the title of Story of a Gold Concession and other African Tales and Legends (W H Griffin & Co, 1893). The book is a strange mixture of fact, legend and pure fiction, which is very difficult to classify. The first tale, after the title of the book, is obviously fiction as it deals with the fate of a crazed prospector and his fabulously rich gold find in the Lebombo mountains of Swaziland. Another such prospector’s tale, this time set in Natal, also smacks of a fertile imagination. Then follow a number of tales with a tribal setting. Some of the personages mentioned are historical, and the stories run very much along the lines of a Victorian reinterpretation of African fireside tales. Lastly, there are a few oddments, about Paul Kruger, an Arab slaver, and hunting trips along the Pongola and Zambezi rivers. An odd assortment indeed. After this brief flirtation with fiction, he returned to write another three books on the early history of Natal, Pietermaritzburg and Durban, respectively; each a serious and sought-after work of Nataliana.
The institution (one hesitates to call it a firm) of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge also played a role in publishing a number of, presumably inspirational works, on a number of subjects, which one would not necessarily associate with devotional teachings. There were biographies of numerous missionaries, and heroic descriptions of their good works; one described the Herculean task of shipping a motor boat cross-country from the Cape to the Vaal River and then on to Mozambique; travels in the Transkei after the great famine caused by Nonquause’s prophecy; Mrs Charlotte Barter’s lone travels in Zululand; African language primers and dictionaries; works with some ethnographical pretensions, as well as a little piece of fiction, by a Charles Henry Eden, entitled An Inherited Task (1874), sketching the miseries of life as a missionary in Natal under the rule of Shaka. This author too, had a serious geographical work on the continent to his credit, while he also wrote another romance entitled Ula in Veldt and Laager (1879).
Lastly, let us consider one of my all-time favourites – William Charles Scully. In some of my other writings I have already waxed lyrical about his engrossing autobiographies, as well as his sole hunting title, Lodges in the Wilderness (H Jenkins, 1915). But Scully had a lively intellect and imagination, as well as having his work bring him into contact with many different people under varying circumstances. His work as a magistrate probably gave him a certain number of leisure hours, not least in Namaqualand, where, if his autobiography is to be believed, he was almost marooned in his house due to his feud with the mine manager. Whatever the reasons, he wrote three works of fiction before the turn of the century: The White Hecatomb (1897), A Vendetta of the Desert and Between Sun and Sand (both 1898). The first book consists of a number of short stories with an Eastern Cape background, as he had been stationed in various locations as magistrate for a number of years. From these years among the tribespeople, another book, Kafir Stories (1895) also emanated, and it is considered to be one of the early records of black folklore. The latter two novels are based on his Namaqualand and Bushmanland stints. The former is an adventure yarn of revenge and pursuit into the inhospitable wastes across the Gariep, while the latter is a romantic tale of the love between an itinerant trekboer’s daughter and a young Jewish smous, set in the now ghost town of Namies, near Pofadder. Both are well worth reading as they give the reader a fine snapshot of the meagre society and landscape that they have been set in. Another volume of short stories was to follow in 1907, entitled By Veldt and Kopje, and after many years of self-imposed silence due to his disgust with the way the British treated the Cape Boers during the war, he finally sent The Harrow to the publishers in 1921 – a book which castigated British authority and military to the utmost. In 1923 his last work of fiction, Daniel Vananda, was published. This can be called a precursor to Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country, with a similar theme, that of a rural African running afoul of European culture, with dire results.

BOOKSENSE - A SHORT GUIDE TO HANDLING YOUR FAVOURITE BOOKS

2009-08-30T12:11:00.000+02:00

AFRICANA VOTES & VIEWS VOL 1 # 8

This is a short, basic manual to keeping your library in a good condition. It does not pretend to be a comprehensive course in librarianship, conservation or archival methods – it is purely some commonsense and knowledge that I have garnered from many people, but most of the information came from my late wife, my friends Cyril Adriaanse and Peter Coates, both of whom worked at the SA Library, my sister Dr Cora Ovens (a lifelong librarian) and Frank Johnston a bookseller from Central Africa, where the bugs bite bigger and better.

Know thine enemy: The three main culprits under our South African conditions are a) Moisture b) Light c) Biological attack. There are many more, but most of these are found in association with the first three, so let us investigate these threats.

Of the tens of thousands of books that have been presented to me by prospective sellers, the greatest number of no-no’s have been books which have been exposed to moisture. In its grossest form, the volume has been dunked, or had water poured over it; there are water-marks across the pages; colours have run, the textblock is rippled; at worst, the pages are stuck together. A more subtle exposure to damp can result in the textblock absorbing so much water from the edges inwards, that the margins of the pages display a ‘high tide’ mark right around, in extreme cases. A hot steamy climate has the further effect of ‘foxing’ the pages of books, that is, the growth of those unsightly brown blotches that seem to get worse year after year. The quality of the paper that the book is made of, has something to do with the degree of foxing, since badly bleached and insufficiently sized paper is most prone; but the micro-organisms that cause the discolouration will grow on even the best cotton-rag paper, or a modern high-gloss paper, given enough time, heat and atmospheric moisture.

Mould is, of course, biological and the companion to severely drenched books. The remnants of this will also stain paper, mostly with green, blue or black shades – all equally unpleasant to look at. I have heard of desperation measures applied by an archivist to his precious documents when they were under a leak in the roof – he bundled the whole lot into a clean deep-freeze. The sub-zero temperatures prevented mould from forming, and slowly the moisture was evaporated from the paper and deposited on the walls of the freezer as ice, leaving the documents in reasonably good shape. It works the same way as putting a slice of bread in the freezer, forgetting about it for three months and then pulling out a dessicated piece of toast. I haven’t tried it myself, but it might just save a precious book. I wish I’d known the trick when we moved into a rented house in White River, Eastern Transvaal, some decades back. All of my books were standing in the lounge in tea crates. Our neighbours invited us over for supper, during which time a small tornado blew the roof off our house and dumped about 150mm of rain onto our goodies. I seem to recall I chucked away several hundred good books. All one can do with an area of mould on a page, is to brush it away gently, without inhaling the stuff. It really is not good for the lungs.

So, water and heat are bad, especially in tandem. What about cold? Well there seems to be some consensus among librarians that a chilly environment is really good for books, but most users would complain loudly if they had to wrap up in anoraks and shawls to do their research. In practice, seventeen degrees is a reasonable compromise – but a very far cry from a Bloemfontein or Johannesburg winter when it can get to way under the zero mark, or an Empangeni or Kalahari summer, when you’re pushing the mercury at forty plus, with about 95% humidity thrown into the bargain in Natal. What do they say?: climate is what you expect; weather is what you get. So you deal with whatever our fair country dishes out by way of ambient temperature. Most of us don’t go as far as airconditioning for our library, but it’s a thought. On the other hand, it’s not essential to be uncomfortable in your reading room, even if you are surrounded by books; to have frozen toes, nose and fingers while you are trying to concentrate on some work, or recreational reading, is no fun. I have a little fan-heater tucked away under my desk – just so that I can kick the switch to on when the cold bites a tad savagely. Talking about heaters though, there is a caveat – fireplaces, though comforting to the body, a treat to the senses of smell, sight and hearing – are a strict no-go area. Unfortunately one only has to look at the ceilings of rooms with open fireplaces to see what happens. A little smoke always escapes from the open hearth, and if there are books in the room, they not only absorb smoke and tars like blotting paper, which then react with cloth, paper and leather in a number of complicated and unwanted ways, but the books smell of smoke. Speaking of which, I have to act the reformed smoker part and thorough spoil-sport: smoke from cigars, cigarettes and pipes descends gently onto any exposed part of a book which is in the same room, it glues itself onto all the abovementioned materials with tenacity, and stinks, forever, quite apart from darkening and damaging bookcloth as well as the edges of the textblock.

Dry heat is probably the least problematic condition to deal with. Although certain older, and certainly most inferior types of paper, get brittle in a dry, hot climate, as long as the books are handled with care, they will rehydrate when the ambient humidity rises again. Leatherbound books do need some special care under those conditions though, since even opening such a volume under those conditions could cause the hinge to break, resulting in very expensive damage. This does not mean one should apply liberal dollops of dubbin or saddle soap to those ancient treasured tomes. There are a number of good products available, unfortunately mostly from overseas sources, which further complicates matters, since a number of these substances are in liquid, flammable form, which precludes the bibliophile importing even the tiny amount needed per mail. In effect you have to find a runner, who will smuggle the stuff out in their personal toiletries, disguised as after-shave or something, when they return from their holiday in Britain, Germany, or USA. The British Library does sell a solid wax, though, and this is best applied very sparingly with a soft cloth to the leather, especially at the hinges. Books so treated should be left to stand separate from their shelfmates for a few days, to prevent any possibility of them sticking together. The liquid lotions ( I use a brand from Germany, which my late wife smuggled into South Africa) one applies by wetting a sponge slightly, squeezing it repeatedly until it foams and then applying it in even strokes to the leather. It is left to dry, and then the book is buffed lightly with a soft cloth.

Now let us deal with threat no 2 – that wonderfully abundant sunlight, which makes our country such a bright, cheery place to live in – in general – sunburn, melanoma and severe ‘sunning of the spine and covers’ apart. Any sunlight is taboo on the bookshelf, except possibly if sanitized by passing it through some total sun-block film on the window panes – if that should exist. Even if filtered through a semi-transparent curtaining material, the ultraviolet is still present in quantities that will at first bleach, and in time, totally destroy the cloth covering the boards of your books. Even sunlight reflected off water or a light-coloured painted surface, still has some destructive force left in it. The old builders and architects had good ideas during Victorian times – they surrounded most houses with wide verandahs or stoeps, which gave shade to the walls and interior of the house, as well as keeping stray sunbeams from intruding through the apertures. Nowadays we like to live behind walls made of glass, or sliding glass doors, under skylights or in houses with interior courtyards and patios. This new lifestyle results in much more exposure to the potentially harmful effects of the sunlight on your furnishings and other property viz your library. Without getting paranoid about it, choose a south-facing room where possible, or at least a wall that gets no sun, not even a passing sweep in the late afternoon. If you must face any other direction, you must have some form of blind, slatted, or rolling, if you don’t want to be in deep gloom behind dark curtains.

A last word on sunshine: if perchance you should leave a book out in the sun (as I’m sure we have all done on occasion) and you come back to find that the top cover has curled beautifully like a calamari steak ten seconds after it has hit a hot pan; all is not lost. Generally it just means that there has occurred a sudden imbalance of moisture content between the outer and inner layers of the cover, causing the outer (dry) to shrink, while the inner (ambiently moist) has remained roughly the same as it was previously. Do not try to rehydrate the poor cover by some precipitous means such as spraying it with water. The best cure is to put the book back into your library and to leave it alone for a couple of days. The covers’ moisture content will balance out again in a few days, and once the book has been returned to its place on the shelves, it should resume its correct shape. A similar effect is found occasionally when endpapers are replaced. If too much glue is slapped onto the inside face of the cover before the paper is applied, the paper is wetted, and expands. Once the glue dries, the paper shrinks and you have a book with permanently bow-legged covers. Not much you can do to that except to start over again.

Biological attack is next. I am sure there is no book collector alive that has not been rewarded by the quicksilver flash of a fishmoth (aka silverfish, Ctenolepisma longicaudata and several other species worldwide) slithering out of the just opened book and almost miraculously disappearing from sight again. The signs are there, usually on the edges of the endpapers, where the textblock doesn’t lie quite snugly against the boards due to the bookcloth having been folded over; or where a map is folded into the textblock; an exposed edge may be riddled with holes. Even some covers don’t escape the attentions of these voracious beasties, as they manage to chew away the starchy size between the threads of the bookcloth, leaving faint whitish trails which almost look like scratches. A very helpful Iziko website suggests you make a mixture of the following:
5 parts gum Arabic
5 parts sodium fluosilicate
4 parts flour
6 parts sugar
40 parts water (enough to make a thick paste)
Stir for hours (since the sodium fluosilicate hadly seems to dissolve at all) dip strips of card into the mixture and leave to dry. Hang them up all over your bookshelves. If you have difficulty finding the latter ingredient, you’re in good company; if you do find it, the chemist will be strangely reluctant to give it to you.

Other sites’ suggestions range from sprinkling whole garlic cloves (!!), to salt, boric acid powder or diatomaceous earth around your library, or leaving rolled up damp newspapers (which the silverfish are supposed to frequent for a drink, supposedly) and then burning it the next day without unrolling. Of course, you would never know how successful you have been, would you? Jokes aside, my conservator friend says crushed mothballs, sprinkled in a thin line on the shelf behind the books, keeps silverfish away – if you don’t mind the characteristic smell of naphthalene, or the fact that this lingers on the pages of the books, might make you sneeze when you read – and increases the combustability of your home, as it is volatile and forms a flammable vapour. I rather like the smell; it takes me back to my childhood, when granny took out her double fox-furs and slung them over her shoulders to keep out the cold on a winter’s day. Choose your weapons. Or you can ignore the pests.

One doesn’t hear too often of bookworms any more. Actually they are beetle larvae; from the death-watch beetle, Xestobium rufovillosum, or the furniture beetle, Anobium punctatum and I am certain, a whole horde of other species native to Africa. The tell-tale tracks of these are small holes, sometimes less than 1mm in diameter, running often at right angles through hundreds of pages, mostly near the spine. I only once, in the spirit of investyigation bought a book which had been infested with this plague. However, when I took it to pieces trying to find the culprit, I had no luck. Most likely the larva had pupated and flown the nest. Obviously if one sees little heaps of sawdust on one’s bookshelves, prepare to go to war with a vengeance. Infested books can only be successfully treated with fumigation using some really dangerous stuff, so best to leave it to professionals.

Termites are a scourge in the southern United States nowadays, primarily since their houses are constructed mainly from wood; less so in South Africa since we have stopped living in wattle and daub huts with cattle-dung floors. However these stealthy invaders tunnel away so craftily, from floor up into the vertical supports of bookshelves, from where they will branch out laterally into stopes to reach pay-dirt – to whit, the books. The only way of detecting them is to turn up your hearing aid, so that you can hear them as they chew away on dark nights (honestly) or to read your books frequently, so to discover their mining activities before an entire seam of books has been reduced to hollow shadows of their former selves. I recall a passage written by, I think, one Annie Martin in her charming book Home Life on an Ostrich Farm (G Philip, 1891) where she describes these repeated termite incursions and subsequent loss of her bookshelf. Her solution was to suspend a shelf by means of four wires from the ceiling beams, thus robbing the insects of their tunneling route. Only problem was, her brak roof then leaked copiously, right above her bookshelf. Makes one wonder how any books survived the African onslaught for longer than a hundred years or more.

A real home-wrecker is the cockroach. I’m talking of these large black, flying jobbies, the size of a small bat – which issue from the city sewers and drainpipes when darkness falls. There is no warning; suddenly you have a book that almost looks as if a rat or a small Chihuahua had been chewing at it. The cloth is in tatters, or patches of it are eroded to a latticework of threads, and it’s a matter of re-binding if you want to save your treasured collectors’ item. It is almost impossible to guard against them. Keep your library doors and windows closed at night; if there is a bathroom, plug the drains; above all, be watchful and whack the damn things whenever you see one. For all the above living pests, I do the following: every three months or so, I buy a couple of packets of Fumitabs from the chemist. These ominous looking (and smelling) globs come in foil-packs of three. They contain some pretty potent poisons, so don’t lick your fingers after handling them. Place one or two of the family-sized pills on a brick in each room, depending on size, seal all airbricks and other apertures in the room, light them, and scarper quickly. They emit a choking smoke for a few minutes, after which they self-extinguish. You may then leave the house for the rest of the day, making certain that your dog/cat/canary/child have all left the building. Do not leave your wors in the kitchen to defrost, or your bread, or any other loose comestible which you intend to partake of. Everything is bathed in deadly fug, and hopefully some six or eight hours later you can come back and reoccupy your home after opening all the doors and windows. Problem solved – for a while. One of my clients from Zambia has just sent me this hot tip – he recommends Bayer’s "Max Force", a cream injector syringe which enables one to run a bead around the bottom edge of a book case which keeps them at bay. I shall certainly try this as soon as I can lay my hands on some.

Rodents are not normally a real threat to books in modern homes. Those occasional lovely little grey house mice that some years ago wandered into our house and set up home in the fibreglass insulation of the kitchen stove, confined themselves to the crumbs of the table, so to speak, until the cats made short work of the whole family, which had increased to seven at one stage. They would take turns in popping up out of the spiral plates (cooled) of the stove during meals – as if to see what was on the menu. Anyway, rodents don’t eat books unless a famine strikes; at worst they may convert one into nesting material, or they might test their incisors on an edge, leaving characteristic chisel-marks. Free range pet birds, such as parrots, can be a menace too, according to a colleague who was asked to value a severely nibbled collection of books. Dogs have the delightful habit of lifting the odd leg here and there to demarcate their territory, while cats spray with wild abandon when the moon is right. Both are to be distinctly discouraged in a library unless they are adequately trained in human etiquette.

Now for some more general, and probably very obvious hints on book handling and storage. Metal shelves are best. That’s official; but I don’t care, I like wood, proper wood. Luckily I used to be a sawmiller, so I gathered a whole batch of strange timbers, Kiaat, Chestnut, Camphor, Cedar, Cypress, Cherry etc, all of which have been used to manufacture the shelves all over my house and business. Most of the shelves have no backs, but they are fastened to the walls by means of sturdy bolts ten millimeters away from the walls, as I suffer from a fear of falling bookshelves. This means that even if one of those occasional Northwest gales should occur, which has on one occasion been so strong that it drove the accompanying rain right through a double brick wall in my lounge (on the wall where my books are); the water could run harmlessly down the walls and onto the floor, without getting the books wet. It doesn’t need a disaster to wet your books. Walls are damp structures all too frequently, and books act like blotting paper. If your shelves are against the wall, nail a strip of timber along the back of each to keep your books from touching the masonry. If your bookshelf is backed, see that there is a space between the wood and the wall to allow for ventilation.

Don’t jam your books in too tightly. It’s not good for them, and it’s even worse when some ham-handed person insists on using a probing digit to extract a volume that is tightly jammed into place. Hence ‘slight damage to top of spine’. Better that the book should come to you willingly, that it should slide out of and back into its place. On the other hand, having gaps in your collection, resulting in the classic picture of a few upright volumes with one or two leaning at any angle against them, is not ideal either. The leaning books tend to get a permanent cocking of the spine which is difficult to remove once set in place. Best then to use a bookend, but if you haven’t got any, a pile of horizontal books will do just as well to hold the others upright – and the titles are still readable on the spine. Books should not be inanimate ‘collections’ for display purposes only. They should certainly be taken out, handled, opened, browsed through, and replaced. Within bounds, this is good for a book and I am not about to bring on the white cotton gloves – but clean hands are essential, and if you smoke a pipe, this most definitely applies, since the finger or thumb you use to tamp your ‘baccy down, leaves a horrible mark on a page as you turn it. The handling means that the volume is inspected periodically for damage, which may be caught in the early stage and remedied, the pages are aired, which helps to protect them against foxing, and the work could even be left standing on edge overnight (between some supports if it is a large book) with the pages slightly ajar as it were, if there is even a suggestion of a musty odour.

Heavy, old books should be opened and read in a book-cradle. Opening them on a flat surface puts a strain on elderly bindings, and could crack the glue used on the back of the textblock. Large folio size volumes are the most difficult to handle under the best of circumstances. A big table is a prerequisite; but in some cases the books are so large, and the paper so heavy and fragile, that one should think about using both hands to turn a page – one at the bottom corner and the other at the top. Even moderately large books can be damaged by the reader who persists in wanting to turn a page by inserting his thumb somewhere round about the middle of the bottom margin, and flipping the page from right to left. This frequently results in tears on the bottom edge of the page near the spine. The correct manner is to feel your way into the textblock at the top right hand corner of the open book, insert the hand fully and help the page over to the left. Left-handed people had better get used to this – there’s no alternative – except taking up Hebrew.

Dust is another, albeit minor, enemy. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath, and also into every nook, cranny and book, if you leave it in any place for long enough. Let us say your library has matured for another year, loved and admired, and occasionally perused in part. A little housekeeping is indicated, say once a year, or maybe every two or three. A feather mop will do at a pinch, but it’s going to be a sneezy, wheezy sort of job, really only fit for outside the house; which in turn, is not ideal for the books. So technology should be called in – a vacuum cleaner, of the small, hand-held sort, one with a little doodah at the business end, which has got a nice soft Führer moustache, with which to kiss your books. If the item to be cleaned has a dustjacket, lay the book down, open the front cover, flap back the dustjacket, use said vacuum cleaner to remove dust, dead insects etc from covers, replace dustjacket, close book, turn it over and repeat the performance for the back cover. That way you have examined the entire book. But wait, the edges of the textblock, and especially the top edge, gather large quantities of dust, which eventually seep in between the pages and so dirty the entire volume. So once again the vacuum brush is employed, either while the book was lying flat with its dustjacket flapped out of harm’s way, or after the first action is completed, one takes the book and vacuums the entire textblock edge, taking care not to damage the precious dustjacket in any way. This is a lengthy process, best handled by a minimum of two people, who enjoy each other’s company and have something to chat about as they go about this exquisitely boring task.

Lastly, let us consider a little library hygiene of a different sort. Ordering your collection in some fashion so that you can actually find that reference book that you need right now, or that beloved novel that you incautiously (as even friends can’t be trusted to return books) want to lend to your best friend who has come to visit. The librarians devised the so-called Dewey system (or rather Dewey did), which is all very good, and those accession numbers on the spine, which so grate the buyers of antiquarian books who buy library discards, are all good, useful stuff. Problem is, nobody except librarians can be bothered to swot up a book of some hundreds of pages, and to memorise all the guff within. So one reverts to an alphabetical order. Ah, but there are so many different subjects – best one keeps each of them separate, in alphabetical order, so one allocates a few metres of shelf space here for this subject, followed by another few metres there for the next. Uh, small problem, Subject A has a few large folio volumes, which only fit into the shelf earmarked for Subject D; the same applies to Subject C. So already Subject D looks like a dog’s breakfast, three subjects in it, either with dividers between, or in general disarray – but at least alphabetical. Problem is, how do you remember five years on which subject has a few books tucked away on an odd shelf among a bunch of other stuff? Then there is the problem of allocating a volume to a certain category. Take the category art - possibly antique furniture, being a craft should be in another, or maybe it should be in architecture, as the objects are found in houses, or maybe even in history. There is no hard and fast rule as to what is right or wrong. One has to please oneself, but some order is essential, as is some record of what you own. Almost every month clients clamour to buy books, that I can positively prove to them, they have already bought from me a few years back. So frail is the human mind; mine included. Which is why I have invested a certain amount of money and time and effort in maintaining a database record of every book that I have in my possession, as well as its whereabouts. That’s still not infallible – but it helps. If your collection contains a treasure or two – or many, then keep some sort of record of what the value is, in case some form of public transport should prematurely curtail you natural span. It will help your executors in disposing fairly of your assets after your demise, and it will prevent your lovingly amassed collection from landing on the dump.

THOSE BL...D MISSIONARIES

2009-07-29T17:02:00.000+02:00

AFRICANA VOTES & VIEWS VOL1 # 7

Love them or hate them, revile them or praise them – missionaries played an immense role in the colonisation of Africa, as well as in the introduction of European culture, ideas, practices, prejudices – as well as vices, to the indigenous populations which they came to uplift and enlighten. These fervent spreaders of the Gospel, often themselves ill-educated men with but a few artisanal skills, braved a hostile environment among alien peoples whose languages they could not speak, whose customs appalled and whose very mode of existence was an opposite to the settled agrarian life of northern Europe whence these teachers came. They were ill-equipped with materials and funds, practical knowledge and teaching skills – yet they taught their flocks simple agriculture, carpentry, building, language, and later reading and writing. They struggled valiantly to assimilate local languages, in the quest of that Holy Grail – the testament in the vernacular, to make it intelligible to all their parishioners.
Mostly they were supported by wives; often all too short-lived, as they succumbed to illnesses or childbirth. When one reads of the last days of some of these worthy women, one can only marvel that any were to be found who would trek alongside their menfolk into the howling wilderness of the hinterland. Some widowers then married Khoi or slave women, who became valuable aides in the exchange of culture in both directions, however much the practice was frowned on by the government or society of the day.
Above all, the missionaries wrote. Firstly they had to report back to their mission societies, either in South Africa, Moravia or in London, from whose records much of the regional histories can be reconstructed, or if they were fortunate enough to be able to return to their homelands on retirement, they sometimes penned their memoirs. It is mostly from these writings that we know today how life was lived then, how people found food, water and shelter; how they celebrated, how they mourned; how they played and how they warred with each other. Imperfect the records may be, filtered through the dour dogmas of the faiths these men professed, and coloured by their narrow views, but the reader should find information, adventure, natural history, ethnography and yes, entertainment and humour among the ‘missionary labours’.
Georg Schmidt was the first of this illustrious band to come out to the Cape. Although he was not of the ‘official’ reformed church, he was found acceptable to the establishment and settled first at Riviersonderend, and later Baviaanskloof, which became known as Genadendal. Although his baptismal practices brought him into conflict with the establishment, he spent seven years in South Africa, and though his converts were few, his reputation probably eased subsequent entry by other Herrnhut brethren into the country. This simple farmer’s diaries and letters are available in the book Dagboek en Briewe van Georg Schmidt (Wes Kaaplandse Instituut vir Historiese Navorsing, 1981). A hiatus of almost fifty years followed before the next batch of Herrnhuters established themselves at Baviaanskloof, where their work flourished during the changes of government from Dutch to British, not without some suspicion by the European community, but also earning some commendation from notable travellers such as Lady Anne Barnard and the governor, the Earl of Caledon. In 1808 the Moravians were permitted to open a station at Groene Kloof, or Mamre, as it became known.
Meanwhile, a South African Missionary Society had also been founded by interested locals, and the renowned London Missionary Society entered the field. Before the end of the 18th century, two men, Kicherer and Vanderkemp, assisted by Messrs Edwards and Edmonds respectively, went to work in the northern Karoo and in the Eastern Cape. Although Kicherer made much of his work among the ‘Bushmen’, his efforts scarcely reached the few remaining tribespeople, nor did he convert any. He did parade a couple of converted heathen in Cape Town and even Europe, but from the book by Karel Schoeman J J Kicherer en die Vroë Sending 1799-1806 (S A Library, 1996), it would seem as if he had very little taste for the heartbreaking slog of teaching the nomadic flotsam that inhabited the region between the Zak and Orange Rivers, and that he preferred the lecture halls of the great cities. Vanderkemp achieved fame, or rather notoriety at Bethelsdorp, near Port Elizabeth, where he lived and worked in the same humble circumstances as his converts, and even married one – as did one of his fellow missionaries, one Read. The former's controversial career is described in the book Doctor Vanderkemp' by A D Martin (Livingstone Press, 1948).
By 1810 there were a number of workers in the missionary field of the subcontinent; the Albrecht brothers, Anderson, Edwards, Kok and Seidenfaden pioneered briefly in the north, while two men who left a lasting impression on the region, Ebner and Schmelen, also arrived at this time. The former wrote one of the first ‘missionary memoirs’, which appeared under the snappy title Reise nach Sued Afrika und Darstellung meiner waehrend acht Jahren daselbst als Missionar unter den Hottentotten gemachten Erfahrungen ( L Oemigke, 1829). While the book is a chore to read, even to one who has no problem with Gothic font and antiquated German language, in between the pages of pious drivel and biblical references, there are signs of a man with keen observational powers, intellect and the ability to paint a vivid picture of the Namaqualand scenery and people during the period 1812–1820.
During this time, the LMS sent a couple of inspectors to tour the pioneer mission establishments, and to report on how the directors’ money was being spent. One of these was the irrepressible Dr John Campbell, who travelled widely and left an endearingly breezy record of his journey (which predated Ebner’s book by many years). Travels in South Africa (1815 & 1822) proved to be a hit with a public hungry for news of the opening of the pearly gates for the heathen. The book was reprinted several times in the next few years, expanded, and even published in a miniature ‘pocket’ version for the use of scholars and travellers. It remains an eminently readable work to this day, and is even available in a recent reprint.
The good Reverend Latrobe did a similar task for the Moravian brethren when he visited Mamre and Genadendal in 1815. He then penetrated further east and chose a new site for the Enon station in the Uitenhage region. His book, Journal of a Visit to South Africa (1818 & Struik 1969) has endured as a classic work on the Southern and Eastern Cape, as Latrobe was an educated, tolerant, kindly and observant man, as well as a writer of considerable talent. His book is prized for its illustrations, which he takes pains to explain ‘were all made on the spot’ probably using a camera obscura, and though they seem to have been redrawn by others, Latrobe’s artistic talents would appear to have been considerable. The book is essentially a humanist’s record of the people that he met with, their way of living, their culture or lack thereof, described in a gently humorous vein, which should entertain most readers as well as supplying a record of the Cape of the period.
Back to the early workers in the field. Johann Heinrich Schmelen, who accompanied Ebner, as recorded above, worked at various missions in Namaqualand and Namibia during an eventful career spanning some thirty years. Unfortunately none of his writings have been published, and we are limited to the few scraps of information contained in books such as H Kling’s Onder die Kindere van Cham (Nasionale Pers, 1932), W Moritz’s Auf dem Reitochsen quer durch’s Südwestliche Afrika (John Meinert, 2004) and U Trueper’s The Invisible Woman – Zara Schmelen (Basler Afrika, 2006). His main legacy is the mission station and settlement at Komaggas, which survived even the apartheid era as a ‘coloured reserve’, as well as the oldest extant building in Namibia, at Bethanien – the so-called ‘Schmelen House’. With the aid of his Nama wife, he did succeed in translating a Dutch catechism into the Nama language, even though the ‘click’ sounds he transcribed were not successfully rendered in the printing of it. Schmelen’s experiences told in his own words would have made a memorable book, I feel.
The Wesleyans were among the next few prominent churchmen to make their mark; both Shaws – Barnabas and William – were fated to do important work, and to leave written records. Barnabas settled at Leliefontein and started a station among the Nama who had been granted a reserve there by Governor Ryk Tulbagh. He had to contend with the nomadic lifestyle of his flock, and managed to introduce them to agriculture – a not altogether wise choice, with hindsight, since the poor soils, scanty rainfall and growing population made this type of economy unsustainable – even in present times. Shaw wrote a book after his retirement, Memorials of South Africa (Mason, Hamilton Adams, 1940 & Struik 1970), which is almost readable – depending on how interested one is in the practical aspects of changing an entire economy of a people. The mission proved to be an important way-station for missionaries on their way to the interior, and numerous others who worked there left records of their sojourns.
William Shaw came a few years later with the Sephton party of 1820 Settlers, and worked among them for a short time before embarking on an almost fatal missionary venture to the pestilential swamps of Delagoa Bay. He returned to the Eastern Cape and spent the next thirty-odd years establishing a network of Wesleyan missions, of which he became superintendent. He did valuable work in establishing educational facilities, and became involved in the politics of the region in the aftermaths of several frontier wars. His book The Story of my Mission in South Africa (Hamilton Adams, 1860) did not manage to capture my attention in its entirety, though I read a few chapters to get the ‘feel’ of the author. Possibly it would be a different story for readers with a greater interest in Eastern Cape matters.
The next few decades saw a proliferation of missionary efforts. The London, Rhenish, Berlin and Paris Missionary Societies, as well as the Wesleyans, all entered the fray, so to speak, and while relations among these Protestants were usually cordial and co-operative, some sniping and poaching of converts did start. Messrs T Arbousset and F Daumas, from the Paris Society, settled in Basutoland and in 1836 they set out on a journey to explore the regions to the northwest, between the Vaal and Orange Rivers. Theirs was no missionary enterprise – their book Relation d'un Voyage D'Exploration au Nord-Est de la Colonie du Cap De Bonne-Esperance (Arthus Bertrand, 1842) is a work of considerable value as it contains much reliable information on the natural history, as well as on the tribes of the region and their ethnography. While no thrilling read, it is worthwhile to have a look at the modern English reprint Narrative of an Exploratory Tour to the Cape of Good Hope (Struik 1968), especially for first-hand accounts of the founder of the Basuto Nation, Moshesh, as well as the rise of the Zulu nation, Mantatise's Tlokwa, the Bechuana and other tribes they came into contact with.
The year 1817 also saw the arrival of a number of worthy men, among whom several made a lasting name for themselves. One was a callow youth, James Kitchingman, who wended his way toward Namaqualand and Namibia in the company of Robert Moffat. He was one of the less hardy souls who found the tough region and nomadic flock more than he could handle, and he departed within a short time for the kinder climes of Bethelsdorp, where he did considerable work during several stints until his early death. The Kitchingman Papers by le Cordeur & Saunders, eds. (Brenthurst Press, 1976) are a trifle tedious collection of writings which are probably of more interest to historians interested in his correspondents, Messrs Read and Philip.
Moffat, on the other hand, is a completely different proposition. He also earned his spurs in Namaqualand, but before long he was off to Great Namaqualand to the kraal of the Nama robber-chief Afrikaner. After a short and uneasy partnership with the aforementioned Ebner, he explored the country to the east, which later became known as Griqualand. Moffat displayed great leadership in rehabilitating Afrikaner, and by establishing a mission at Lattakoo among the Batlhaping under the chief Mothibi. In 1823 the missionary assumed the de facto generalship of a combined force of Griquas and Bechuanas who beat off a huge force of Mantatise’s pillagers and inflicted heavy losses on them – so altering the balance of power in the entire region. He firmly established the mission at Kuruman, and this became a hub of civilization, exploration and in time religious conversion. He also became a political power-broker between tribes and the British, as well as using his influence to exclude the expansion of the Boers from the republics eastwards and north. His book Missionary Labours and Scenes in Southern Africa (John Snow, 1844) does not make for the easiest reading, as like most of his brethren, he is inclined to sermonise. He does, however, include a wide scope of history in the narration of his personal story, and some of the passages are descriptive writing of a high order, with even the odd humorous glimpse.
It is almost obligatory to mention Livingstone at this stage – connected as he was to Moffat through his marriage to the latter’s daughter. During my younger days I avoided the great man’s writings like the plague. I could never understand why he was called a ‘missionary-explorer’, since those two titles are not compatible. If you explore, you beat your way through the jungles or slog through the sands of inhospitable deserts; if you are a missionary, you stay put, plant pumpkins and pray with the locals while trying to learn the lingo to translate the bible – period. I would have forgiven him the odd weekend jaunt, or 19th century long-leave equivalent thereof, but after he got a whiff of travel fever, he was off trailing that unfortunate woman and kids for a spell, before dumping them in England so he wouldn’t have them hampering those heroic footsteps. So caught-up with his own importance was our Davey, that he forgot entirely to mention his wee wife or his nuptials in what was supposed to be his biography. It took a gentle nudge from his publisher, John Murray, to put that right, resulting in the hilarious situation that subsequent impressions of the book have the thrifty Scottish solution of three page eights following each other, thus obviating the expense of needing to redo the entire typesetting of the book.
All-right, so he did a little dilettante converting when he stopped for long enough, but for a couple of decades he was much too busy earning fame and his place in the resting-place of kings. Then, at a time of having nothing better to occupy me, I read Missionary Travels and Researches in Southern Africa (John Murray, 1857 and dozens of reprint versions) of which I happened to have a tatty copy in stock at the time. To say that I was surprised would be putting it mildly. I was touched by the miseries and heartbreaks of the slavery he describes, I was engaged by his indomitable spirit that persisted against hunger, disease and dreadful travelling conditions, while his descriptions of the country traversed and the people he met with, kept me interested for all but the inevitable ‘and so I preached a sermon and we sang and prayed etc etc’, which was, after all, his stock-in-trade. It was only after reading the work that I could understand how the man had managed to become the beau ideal of missionary endeavour, the champion of the poor, enslaved and oppressed, the teacher of the ignorant as well as the magnetic beacon that would inspire others to plunge into the wilderness that was the centre of Africa. He’s still not my favourite man of the cloth, but hey, he publicised his professed trade better than anyone else did; he awoke compassion in people, and great good came from his life. Try reading him sometime.
By the middle of the 19th century missionaries were two a penny. In addition to those groups already mentioned, the next fifty years also saw the entry into the field of the Americans, the Anglicans, the Scottish Presbyterians, the Norwegians and the Catholics. It would be a very difficult and lengthy process to review the millions of words that made it into print by the efforts of these worthies. A number of them became astute politicians (perhaps they were born to it), and as their circle of influence spread among their parishioners, they grew powerful and assumed duties and rights which were not theirs over their little fiefdoms. They took it upon themselves to travel to the Cape, to lobby the government – yes, even as far as Britain they went, to try to persuade the old queen’s men to annex their sphere of influence, or to declare a protectorate over it. One such man was John Mackenzie, who laboured at Kuruman, a successor to Moffat. His work-rate was prodigious, his influence vast, but the various books written by him and about him are more of a picture of political machinations than missionary work with human beings. The volume written by his son, entitled John Mackenzie, South African Missionary and Statesman (Hodder & Stoughton, 1902) has a fitting epitaph for him: ‘to have been the man who first forced Great Britain to face her God-given task of controlling the destinies of the entire region from the Cape to the Zambesi’. Ja, well, no, fine – didn’t Mr Rhodes have similar ideas? If Mackenzie influenced the southeast of Bechuanaland, his colleague J D Hepburn struggled to play a meaningful role towards Lake Ngami. His book, Twenty Years in Khama's Country (Hodder & Stoughton, 1895) gives an interesting picture of the country and its people, but the poor man strove in vain to come to terms with the powerful chiefs like Moremi and the almost legendary Khama, and finally he had to decamp back to Britain to nurse his disappointment.
I have kept my most favourite piece of missionary literature for last. One Benjamin Ridsdale, a young Wesleyan minister, arrived in the Cape at the end of 1843, and he was almost immediately despatched via Leliefontein towards Nisbett Bath (Warmbaths, Namibia ) with his wife. Here was a lad with a cheerful outlook on life, who was not shy to enthuse about having a picnic in a lovely spot, or describing his antics when they had to cross the Gariep on a swimming log. He claimed to have been the first to sail on the Great River in a boat assembled by him with whatever materials he could find, and powered by a scrap of sheeting flapping in the breeze. The young minister slaved away in the torrid heat, often sustained by no more than a bowl of milk that someone saw fit to give him during the day, and the pair endured for four years before his health could no longer take the strain. Ridsdale and his wife had endeared themselves to their flock during that time by unselfish devotion, hard work and a real effort to understand their nomadic ways, and the scenes he describes of his departure in a mutual flood of tears is quite touching. His Scenes and Adventures in Great Namaqualand (T Woolmer, 1883) has become a prized rarity available at eye-watering prices, but for those who can put up with it, you can buy a horrible softcover scanned reprint from Kessinger, USA, as I did. – just to have an occasional read of a few pages of thoroughly heart-warming stuff.
This essay is not a history of missionary endeavour; neither would I condemn their efforts to obtain basic human rights for the fragmented, downtrodden and displaced people among other, strong, traditionally ruled nations in the subcontinent; nor is it an endorsement of the perceived benefits of conversion to another belief-system and a break-down of traditional ethics and morals. Rather, I hope to have given the interested readers an idea of what they are likely to find between the covers of the books written by some extraordinary – and some very ordinary people – who were also pioneers, travellers, explorers, ethnographers, biographers and historians, without whom the early literature on the Dark Continent would be much poorer.

FOR MAN MUST EAT

2009-07-01T14:53:00.001+02:00

AFRICANA VOTES & VIEWS VOL 1 # 6

I have a secret addiction - cookery books. I must confess here and now that I don't actually READ them, page after page, but rather prefer to handle them lovingly, to flip through the pages (often stained with spatters of grease and droplets of food) picking up a word here and there. Once my attention has been captivated, I dwell lovingly on a whole recipe, combine the ingredients in my mind, savour the aroma, imagine the taste, sigh contentedly and pass on to the next culinary delight. It is rare that I cook a recipe exactly as it appears in a book. Since I am perforce a bachelor, my shopping is not terrible methodical, and too often I find that I haven't got one or the other ingredient called for - so something else will have to do; at times a dish ends up being something completely different from what had originally been intended - occasionally resulting in a serendipitous combination that is consigned to the 'Repertoire de Moi'.
South Africans are spoilt for choice. We are placed at the crossroads of the greatest culinary migrations of mankind; our population has been swelled by cooks from all over the world flocking to our shores in their droves. The foodstuffs that are available consist of indigenous crops, classical European staples, exotic Middle and Far Eastern spices and fruits, as well as the cornucopia of the New World. What more could one want? From 1890 onwards, a steady stream of cookery books became available, from the simplest primer for the newly-wed to a book featuring fancy restaurant dishes.
Aunt Allie Hewitt's ground-breaking book, 'Cape Cookery - Simple but Distinctive' (Darter Bros, 1890, & D Philip, 1973) claims to have the distinction of being the first in line, though I would ascribe that honour to A R Barnes' 'Colonial Household Guide' (1st ed Darter Bros 1889)which predated the former by a scant year. No matter; Allie's book is delightfully introduced by her grand-nephew, Robert Ellis, and he paints a loving picture of the little, fierce old lady slaving away over her hearth. While the fish recipes (mostly of the boiled variety) don't exactly stimulate the gastric juices, when it comes to the meat dishes, she comes up trumps with (now) exotic foods like korhaan, porcupine or beef muisjes. Her bredies, 'bobotees' and 'sassatees', mutton hams are sure to be of interest to those who wish to taste the early Malay influences on Cape cooking. The choice of vegetable dishes is slim, it seemed to have been a case of 'rys en aartappels' with the odd stewed-to-death veg melange added on Sundays and feast days. However, when it comes to sweet dishes, she really shines. 'Macaroons for a regiment' starts with 500 almonds - you can imagine the rest. There are Most Bolletjies, Matabele and Boer's Birthday Cake and a wealth of konfyts, chutneys and the like. Altogether a worthy book for any serious collector of the genre.
The book mentioned above, 'Colonial Household Guide' by A.R.B (Mrs Barnes), who refers to herself as a 'housewife of the Colony', contains a wealth of information for even the most inexperienced cook. Starting off with good Olde England standard fare of the times, such as a cuppa tea, a boiled egg, potato chips and bubble & squeak, she swiftly progresses to more ambitious projects such as kidneys and ham, stewed oxtail and even exotic stuff such as Scotch Haggis. Obviously Mrs B. was raised in the school that thought Brit was best, especially when it came to cooking. She does, however daringly branch out a bit with some local fare, such as 'cabbage brede', 'wild buck to roast', 'baba' (barbel fish, which she claims is similar to eel, and I concur heartily), but almost all the dishes contain only the main ingredient, fat, water and salt - possibly a dash of pepper. Her vegetarian side dishes are several pages of European veg, invariably followed by the word - 'boiled'. Where she does open a window into the past is with her pastry and bread recipes. Again she starts with basics - the construction of an outside oven, the firing of it and temperatures needed to achieve optimum results. A number of yeast and sourdough recipes follow, as well as one for unleavened bread.
There is a wealth of recipes of Victorian sweets, from puddings to tarts, buns to cakes, biscuits to compotes and jellies. In this subject she is most diverse, rounding off her list of delights with some fine pickles and preserves. From creation to destruction. The reader can pick up handy tips on the extermination of all manner of creepy crawlies and fungi, as well as the eradication of spots, stains and rust-marks, after which she gives a beginner's class in how to 'Cowdung Wash' your kitchen floor for that aromatic antiseptic look. Mrs Barnes would instruct the newcomer to the colonial kitchen in such arts as 'drenching horses through the nose, without killing them' or more robust pastimes such as 'killing tigers', and occasionally she comes up with bizarre abilities, such as how to make ice using hot water and refined nitre (??). This one I'd really love to try and I would appreciate it if one of my chemically inclined clients could elucidate how this process works. Many pages are devoted to the ills that would have inflicted the colonists, and especially their children, and there are a goodly number of simple remedies to aid the reader.
While the book has only a curiosity value as far as most recipes go, the whole gamut of tasks that are taken for granted in the late 19th century kitchen are a true eye-opener, and I can heartily recommend the good lady's work to all enquiring minds as well as those who enjoy a good laugh. Nonetheless a valuable social history document.
The next culinary writer whose work appeared in print, Hildagonda Duckitt, wrote two books that have remained classics for more than a hundred years. Her first, 'Hilda's Where is it of Recipes' ( Chapman & Hall, 1891), was the result of collecting recipes, both local and English, in ingredients and flavours, from among the extended circle of acquaintances which frequented her social circle. Her cooking skill, simple descriptions and mouth-watering results must have gladdened many a family's table at the Cape. Her second book 'Diary of a Cape Housekeeper' ( Chapman & Hall, 1902) is a much more personal document, which allows us a peek into the Cape Kitchen at the end of the 19th century, as well as sketching life on the family farms at Constantia and Grootte Post, between Mamre and Darling.
Hilda divides her culinary year into seasons, and recommends fitting dishes to suit both availability and climate and she does not shy away from advising you to wear your winter flannel underwear in July, while March is described as 'often very hot and trying' - and so it would be if you are slaving over a huge cast-iron stove in a farmhouse kitchen. Nor does she disappoint when it comes to a few hints on invalid care - in fact she recommends that every woman who expects to live in some out and beyond place, should 'spend a few months previously in nursing training, so as not to be entirely ignorant of the elements of what good nursing means!' She obviously had a tender heart for the beasties too, since she has included a chapter on 'to spare animals unnecessary pain', ie how to kill anything from a crayfish to a calf. In this book she has become more chatty and for anyone interested in the art, it is a pretty good read, even if only taken in small doses at bedtime. For those interested in Hilda's background, Mary Kuttel, one of the descendants of the Melck family, who were great friends with the Duckitt's, edited a little Balkema reprint of selections, entitled 'Hildagonda Duckitt's Book of Recipes', which is a little easier to find than the original books.
A little oddity is next. The printing firm D F du Toit and Co, in Paarl, were the publishers of the first dictionary of Afrikaans - then a language in the process of being born - when they issued the 'Patriot Woordeboek' in 1904. However, they published a recipe book a few years previously in the same language. It was entitled 'Di Suid Afrikaanse kook- koek en resepteboek, byeenversameld en geskrywe deur mejufvr E J Dijkman' (Patriotpers, 1891). The only copy I have ever seen had no title page, nor a front or back cover, the spine was missing as was the last page or two - but it still found a home with a client who was as mad about cookery books as I am. Unfortunately I can't recall much about the contents, except that the recipes tended to be good, plain burgher fare, imported from Europe in the main, but showing a few glimpses of country life and culinary arts that were transmitted back into the cities after the great era of pioneering had passed. This little volume was also reprinted a number of times in the Cape Dutch/Afrikaans language, and even in the changes of the title one can see developments in spelling that occurred during the period 1891-1922. The book proved popular and was either translated or rewritten by the redoubtable Mrs Dijkman herself in the English language under the title 'Mrs Dijkman's Cookery and Recipe Book' (Paarl Printing, 1905).
From the relatively large numbers of cookery books that have passed through my hands since I became interested in the art, it would almost seem that Mesdames Barnes, Hewitt, Duckitt and Dijkman satisfied the market for advice in the kitchen during the last decade of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century. I have only come across two new publication on the subject in the latter period - Mrs M ( P W) de Klerk's 'South African Cookery Made Easy' (Juta, 1912), and F G Oakley's 'Homestead Cookery '(Maskew Miller, 1917). The former is full of standard starchy fare, cakes, biscuits, puddings, breads and the like, with only a hint of the exotic such as 'Mossbolletjies' or 'Boer biscuits' - until one comes to the selection of Breakfast dishes, when she surprises with offerings such at 'sasaties', 'hotom' (actually just plain flour porridge) 'poor man's friend' (quite an elaborate dish, I'd say) and 'Turkish Dolmans'. Some of her tips on curing and smoking of meat and fish are not to be despised, while her cool drinks and liqueur recipes leave one a little puzzled, since her 'Apple Cider' contains nothing even vaguely resembling that fruit as an ingredient, nor does Boston Cream contain any of the latter part, as one would expect.. As refreshing drinks, one can imagine better solutions than Toast Water, Lemon Kale or Oatmeal Water for that hot summer's day - but then possibly our taste-buds have been altered by global warming. Mrs de Klerk also does her bit for the health of the nation, advocating such remedies as 'a bottle of gin combined with the grated peel of a black radish and a bunch of stinging nettles' for the agonies of gallstones. Hm, yes, I'd say the gin alone ought to do the trick of putting one into a stupor. She has advice if you should swallow anything from a wasp to a coin or a fish-bone - or if you need to loosen a rusty screw - Mrs de Klerk is at hand.
Ms(?) Oakley's ingredients, though, have a much more local flavour. We find Cape crayfish, kabeljau and snoek in the first few pages; Rhodesian eggs, ostrich, penguin and plover eggs just a few pages later. Here is treasure indeed among the unassuming pages. Even her vegetable dishes are full of innovation: beetroot fritters, celery cheese, curried cucumbers and vegetable curries make an appearance, while carrot and parsnip salad is another unexpected dish. Fruit salads appear among the traditional puds, and even treats such as marula jelly, 'kie apple chutney' and paw-paw seed pickle (this one I've got to try out!) among a host of interesting concoctions. She concludes her really interesting little book with two unusual items to try, namely condensed milk and melon butter, before she adds the obligatory few household hints - but one can see that her real enthusiasm is for cooking. Reading through these recipes was a revelation to me, and henceforth I shall dip into Mrs Oakley's work more often.
We have come to an end of an era. World War I has come and gone, and so has the good life for many people, in Europe as well as the colonies. Presumably recipes have adapted to the times - no longer would they start with the familiar Victorian or Edwardian phrase "Take five dozen eggs…." and so on; families were smaller, ingredients became more diverse. Sometime in this period, a volume appeared by a lady with the imposing name of Susanna Johanna Elizabeth (nee van Hoogenhouck) van Tulleken. I have been absolutely unable to find any record of the first editions of her 'Practical Cookery Book for South Africa', which was in its 28th edition by 1951, or of the Afrikaans edition entitled 'Praktiese Kookboek vir Suid Afrika' of which I have a copy, sans title page, but with a foreword by Isie Smuts dated 1922, in which she applauds the first appearance of the book in that language. Possibly some of my learned clients in the library business can remedy my ignorance in this regard - I've not been able to trace her in SABIB.
Gen. Louis Botha cake, Gen Hertzog teekoekies and Gen Smuts teekoekies all certify the good lady's patriotism, but the local flavours only really start among the seafood dishes, where crayfish, snoek, even unspecified 'riverfish' and a dozen recipes using oysters, which are fried, poached, braised and stewed to a sanitised death, which would lack appeal to modern palates, I would think. Her poultry recipes are fairly standard, but I would mention that in her book, as well as many of those previously mentioned, pigeon features quite regularly in dishes. Looking at the huge flocks populating our cities, I do wonder that no enterprising restaurateur has stationed hordes of small boys armed with 'catties' to supply some of this 'unnatural bounty' to the tables of the discerning diners. She offers a plentiful selection of meat recipes, mostly fairly standard fare, and here I see biltong make an appearance, as well as wors - but either 'net wors' or 'bees en varkwors' - not a boerewors recipe in sight. Her veg dishes show some interesting variations the modern vegetarian would approve of. Among bean fritters, a dozen dishes using green mealies can be found, kale, marakkas, spinach, parsnips, kohlrabi, pumpkin and aubergines are all used to varied and good effect - a good balance to the inevitable stodgy meat and starch components of the meals. There is a plethora of sweets, conserves, pickles and sauces - too many to mention - but then there is soap as a separate subject. I was surprised to read about all the varied materials one could use, ie potatoes, prickly-pear leaves, ostrich eggs, pumpkin, resin, sour milk and even mealiemeal porridge! After a quick gallop through the pages, I can well see why this remained a firm kitchen favourite for many decades.
Another writer made her appearance during that period. The modestly entitled 'Household Science Cookery Book' (CNA, 1914) by Porterville lass, Jeanette C van Duyn, was obviously intended as a serious contender on the cookery scene. Its material was painstakingly assembled by the author while she wrote a column for the Transvaal Agricultural Journal. The first edition's three-hundred page content had swelled to six hundred pages only six years later in a subsequent edition, and Ms van Duyn wrote a whole slew of other learned works on preserving, canning, sweet-making and so on. Where or how Ms van Duyn metamorphosed into Mrs H M Slade, I cannot say, but 1936 saw the 6th edition of her work under a new title, 'Mrs Slade's South African Cookery Book', under which name it appeared until the late 1950's, after which the good lady had another change of name and the book became 'Mildred Slade's Cookery Book' (Timmins, 1976). In general, I would say that van Duyn/Slade's work is clinical, focussing on correct preparation, classic dishes, with very little 'homey' flavour, though I did find a Boerewors , Pierneef biscuits and the odd interesting combination like beet and pea salad. A worthy teacher of the culinary arts she may be, but her tomes, to my taste, lack the 'sizzle of the steak'.
So we come to a new chapter in the culinary arts in South Africa. I am not suggesting that there were no chefs active in the subcontinent, but rather that there was no male star on the firmament until C Louis Leipoldt wrote his 'Kos vir die Kenner' (Nasionale Pers, 1933). In this guise I first came across the man in Lawrence Green's books a goodly number of decades back, for Green was a foodie of note, and the gastronomic expertise of Leipoldt and his Congolese assistant Tito, features in half a dozen or more of the writer's works. It was only relatively recently that I actually held a copy of this precious and rare work of Africana in my hands for the first time. Suddenly I was in a different world. Leipoldt didn't try to teach you basic cooking - he assumed you knew how to do that; he wanted to teach you to appreciate, savour, capture the nuance, enhance the flavour - and try the odd ingredient you had never considered as a comestible before. In a brusque preamble the author states that as most culinary terms have Latin and French origins, he will explain these terms, and in fact he creates an entire Afrikaans vocabulary to encompass the processes of the art. Then a short injunction to warn against the substitution of substandard or lesser ingredients - and we are off into the mysteries of soupmaking.
Almost immediately the recipe for 'Suringsop' and 'Wateruintjiesop' catches my eye. Not your everyday ingredient, even though the tart leaves of the Oxalis species is well-known to most of us who chewed them as children, and some of us might have even rinsed the little bulbs before we popped them into our mouths. Nor does the chef shy away from the indigenous foodstuffs, which have been a mainstay of the Khoisan people for thousands of years. Though possessing a strange smell (which should be ignored), there are half a dozen dishes containing tortoise or turtle meat (which is not to be recommended as the beasties are protected species nowadays), monitor lizard is deemed fine fare, though he seems to have missed out on snakes - most likely so as not to offend the more delicate sensibilities of his readership. Flamingo breast rubs shoulders with Frascati eggs, penguin jostles with pilaf, while the common tinned sardine can be found as a starter - or as a savoury after the main course. The man blows away any preconception you may have had about what is and what is not fitting. Who would dream of deep-frying paw-paw pieces in batter ? Would any cook believe that mustard, sugar, vinegar, ginger, nutmeg or tomato sauce were all fit accompaniments for a piece of avocado? Almost every other page delivers a culinary knock-out blow.
As Lawrence Green noted, Leipoldt's knowledge of local fish and the dishes one could conjure up from them, must have been enormous. From the now almost unknown Dageraad, 'Bottervis', 'Kliptong' and Maasbankers, the author urges us to try even such bony offerings such as Yellowfish from the rivers, or in contrast, a sumptuous, steamed crayfish pudding. His treatment of octopus and perlemoen is much gentler than I have read elsewhere, as he speaks of 'tapping it gently with a wooden hammer until tender', before simmering it gently for an hour over a slow fire. Neither the garden snail nor its relative the alicrock are ignored, and mussels are prized along with raw oysters. A few wise words on wine and its indispensability on every table and in every kitchen follow among a number of other drinks recipes - not least among which is one for 'Wine and Milk' which are boiled together, after which it is left to cool, the clear liquid on top is poured off, and the remainder is drunk (??) For all South Africans who are able to read Afrikaans, and who are curious and adventurous in the matter of food and its preparation, I can really recommend this as a book which can be browsed through for years. There is, of course, also a smaller work in English by Leipoldt, entitled 'Leipoldt's Cape Cookery'. The manuscript was discovered among his papers by his executors after the writers death in 1947, and this was published in 1976. Most of the material has been gathered by the author from other sources, and he states that the recipes have already been used in his previous book. Of interest is his introduction to Cape Cookery and a page or so on the Malay influence - which he was able to appreciate at first hand, since he had travelled widely in the East.
This is where we must stop for now. My original intention was to introduce a few of the earlier 'kitchen goddesses' and their works, and instead I have rambled on until the 1970's. On my desk more than a dozen cookery books have been piled for over a week; next to them eight weighty volumes of bibliographies and a few other works of reference had also to be consulted. Enough – but here are still many more worthy writers' works to be discussed. So we shall have to make another date for a further stroll through the kitchen bookshelf.

FOR MEN MUST WORK

2009-06-08T11:20:00.000+02:00

AFRICANA VOTES & VIEWS VOL 1 # 5

Since work takes up a large slice of our waking hours, it is fitting that you and I should show some measure of interest in it - besides which it helps to pass the 45-odd years that you are going to be stuck on the old treadmill, beavering away to earn your daily bread. However, I seriously doubt that a person with a fascinating career in insurance broking, undertaking, housekeeping or equally repetitive work, will feel as captivated by their vocation at the end of a useful and industrious life, as someone who, say, has run away from home at an early age to join a circus, eloped with an exotic dancer and slaved on a potato plantation in the pestilential jungle of some far-off land, before taking to the high seas to promote the trade in bootleg sardines, followed by a spell as a hanging judge in a small town in the western USA - or some equally bizarre modus operandi for earning an honest income.
I can count myself among the lucky in that my career-path has changed radically every seven years or so of my working life; partly due to serendipity, partly because I have a really short attention span, requiring new challenges to keep boredom at bay. Still, I enjoy reading descriptions of working careers in a host of categories. Civil engineering might not be to everyone's taste, but you have to admit that there is something grandiose in the idea of a fine bridge spanning a foaming torrent, a sweeping pass hugging the perilous flank of a looming crag or even the building of an unusual habitation. Ben Uys’ book, ‘My Friend Adventure’ (Timmins, 1960)describes a whole slew of such projects that the author tackled during a varied career. He built a number of bridges from Namaqualand to the Northern Transvaal, as well as irrigation works. His modest book includes a number of other interesting interludes, such as riding transport for the Germans in Namibia during the Nama War, a spell as a sawmiller, he washed gravel for diamonds and recruited labour for the mines. A good yarn, full of interesting anecdote and personalities.
The next dam builder gets to be a lot more technical. Henry Olivier’s book, ‘Damit’ (Macmillan, 1975) is not for the faint-hearted in engineering matters. The author writes well and his material is interesting, but the human factor is dwarfed by the scale of his gargantuan projects. Along with a number of pioneering schemes worldwide, he was principally involved in many of the African mega-projects, like the Owen Falls hydro-electric scheme on the White Nile, the great Kariba Dam, the entire early Orange River Scheme and Cahora Bassa Dam in Mozambique. If earth-shaking human activity rocks your boat – this book has it.
Roads and their builders have a romance and fascination of their own. Our country can boast a number of prominent pioneers in that department, starting with Andrew Geddes Bain, who was originally an saddler, but found this too monotonous and became a hunter and explorer, before becoming embroiled in the 6th Frontier War. A short spell of farming was cut short by an about-face of government policy which deprived him of his farm. This is the point when Bain turned to road construction, for which he showed extraordinary aptitude, and a number of iconic passes were constructed during the next twenty years under his supervision. Bain was an immensely talented man, and he achieved much in the fields of geology, palaeontology as well as writing and art. His ‘Journals of A. G. Bain ‘ edited by Margaret Lister (VRS, 1949), as well as numerous other books and articles testify to his lasting monuments in the subcontinent.
His son, Thomas, had some forty six years in the service of the government ( with only a month holiday in the entire working life !!) and the number of projects he executed brilliantly are legion. Probably the best known book about his work is by Pat Storrar – ‘Colossus of Roads’ (Murray & Roberts, 1984), but this short resumè, though an interesting read, hardly scratches the surface of the great man’s endeavour. A later book, which appeared in 2002, by my friend Graham Ross, entitled ‘The Romance of Cape Mountain Passes’ is a much expanded and well-researched volume on all the roads in the province – in the reconstruction or construction of which the author often had a hand.
From construction let us go to destruction. Though I am not a supporter of the art of shortening my fellow-man by means dexterous or mechanical, I do read the odd military work – and find it fascinating to boot. One that immediately comes to mind is Major P J Pretorius’ book ‘Jungle Man’ in which he describes his spying activities in the Rufiji delta, which led to the sinking of the German cruiser, the Königsberg during WWI. Another is Kenneth van der Spuy’s ‘Chasing the Wind’ (Books of Africa, 1966). The author got into aviation during the box-kite stages, so to speak, and during the early days of WWI graduated to chucking buckets full of darts and jam-tins full of explosives at enemy troops below him, and firing off revolvers and sawn-off shotguns at opposing aviators. In the author’s own words “ I was beginning to enjoy myself “ – and so he should. Happy days indeed before the advent of atom bombs and ICBM’s!
Another work I read recently was David Tyndall-Biscoe’s ‘Sailor, Soldier’, in which he chronicles his great-uncle’s military and naval experiences on a wide front, from the bloody battles of the futile Mahdist war in the Sudan and Egypt, to the Matabele Rebellion and the Anglo-Boer War. Taken from the diaries of the long departed old warrior, the book is a must for those who revel in the movements military, of men and ships, the deployment of guns and the spilling of gallons of gore. The book does not mince matters, but it does a fine job of mutilating words.
Building empires is another fascinating job, so popular during the previous two centuries. There were those of the ilk of Rhodes and Jameson, to be sure, and even Bismarck could be jollied into partaking a little of the colonial cake by the likes of Lüderitz and Peters, but with these gentlemen it was more of an obsessive-compulsive disorder than a form of employment. No, I’m thinking more along the lines of a ‘Chirupula’ Stephenson, who set out as a callow lad to do something related to stringing a telegraph line across the lastest of Mr Rhodes’ acquisitions in Central Africa ( or so I seem to recall). He ended up buying himself a ‘local princess’ for the princely sum of ten bob, married her (as well as another lady from a different tribe – or was it two of ‘em?) acquired large tracts of land, and farmed/ranched with the assistance of his descendants and almost the entire tribe he had, so to speak acquired through marriage and become the chief thereof.. Now THAT’S ENTERPRISE for you! He immodestly describes his life’s work in ‘Chirupula’s Tale’ (Geoffrey Bles, 1937) as does K S Rukavina in ‘Jungle Pathfinder’ (Hutchinson, 1951) – in a more fuzzy, romanticized way.
A most admirable man, on the other hand, was Stewart Gore-Brown, who carved a pocket empire out of the Zambian bush on the shores of Lake Shiwa. An English gentleman to the core, with an unhappy romance overshadowing his entire life, he built his African Dream, a manor house on the heights; he experimented expensively with a number of pioneer farming ventures and later entered politics, earning the respect and admiration of colonialists and Zambians alike. Christina Lamb’s work, ‘Africa House’ (Harper Collins, 2004) does credit to the man and his works, a treat to read.
Hans Merensky, on the other hand, acquired fame for his skill at geology, and in particular his uncanny ability to sniff out Mother Earth’s riches. His missionary parents seem to have had little influence on the young man, and after a fitful start at finding his niche, he settled in on his geological path – to whit, at the coalface of a mine in Silesia – literally. This was the sort of apprenticeship students faced in those days and this was followed by technical studies. After completing his degree, he returned to Africa, and was soon fossicking round the Western Transvaal Bushveld. This was to culminate in the discovery of the immense lode of platinum, later dubbed the Merensky Reef, which stretched for dozens of miles. Just a few years later he played a pivotal role in realizing the discovery of the Namaqualand diamond finds. He was the man who figured out the relationship between the fossil oyster beds and the presence of diamonds – something that other prospectors like Cornell, Carstens and Reuning had not connected.
Merensky’s empire, though founded on mineral riches, was something quite different though. It lay on the slopes of the misty mountains of the Woodbush Range, in the kingdom of Modjadji, the Rain Queen, and it was called Westfalia. This acquisition was followed by a whole string of other estates in Germany and elsewhere in the Union and Namibia. Each farm was dedicated to one or other activity, but Westfalia became a sort of personal experiment; firstly with teaching sustainable agriculture to the African inhabitants, and later with a number of crops which he thought might be suited to the subtropical climate and high seasonal rainfall. The lack of sufficient permanent water led to an investigation of how to conserve this precious resource – and he constructed a huge dam, which even today (in its enlarged form ) is of great importance in the region. He planted tens of thousands of trees, to combat soil erosion on the steep slopes, as well as to enrich the topsoil with life-giving humus. A whole book could be written on the man’s life and work – and so it was, by Olga Lehmann in her work ‘Look Beyond the Wind’ (Timmins, 1955). As a youngster I often roamed around parts of his estate and the sawmill that was harvesting the timber he planted, though the doctor had finished his life’s work some years back. It was only many years later that I read his story and it was certainly one of the books that fuelled my desire to become a field geologist, and later possibly a farmer. The former was not to be, except perhaps as a hobby, but I was fortunate later in life, like Karen Blixen, to also be able to say: “ I had a farm in Africa…”
Scientific endeavour and discoveries are fascinating subjects, especially to the layman. While Africa has not produced, to my knowledge, any of the great physicists or chemists, we have our fair share of prominent geologists like Merensky above, and earlier Bain, Atherstone, Mauch, du Toit and Martin, to name but a few. Much of their pioneering work is ably described in Carl Anhaeusser’s book ‘A Century of Geological Endeavour in Southern Africa’ (Geol. Soc of SA, 1997) There were also numerous innovators in the development of the mining industry, an extremely technical field, which probably is not for the general reader. So far I have not come across a book to explain basic mining techniques and the development of some of the deepest mining capability on this planet, and what little I have learnt, has been from the odd older books like C B Jeppe’s ‘Gold Mining on the Witwatersrand’ (Tvl Chamber of Mines, 1946) through which I paged, scanning the numerous diagrams and so picking up a few grains of knowledge without being blasted by the hailstorm of technical terms that I didn’t understand. My days on the diamond drilling rigs of the sixties and seventies, and the long conversations with geologists and miners, have filled in a number of blanks spaces, but much remains a mystery.
The geologists and the mining engineers can be said to be the success stories of mineral riches – the prospectors were more often than not the losers in the game – but their quests are so much more romantic. The epitome of the glorious failure, to my thinking, must be Fred Cornell, whose evergreen work ‘The Glamour of Prospecting’ (T Fisher Unwin, 1920 plus many reprints) relates cheerfully all the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ that are slung at the diligent seeker of treasure. There is thirst, fatigue, heat, hunger, cold – and hope, in every chapter and it seems as if the hapless fellow was jinxed as he missed striking it rich at every turn, before being killed in a motor accident in London, when he seemed to have success in his pocket. One of those ‘must read’ books.
Jack Carstens was also dogged by ill fortune, but more cruelly so, since he actually found some of the first traces of the enormous wealth that was to be extracted from underneath Namaqualand – he just didn’t profit from it to any appreciable degree. Others employed him to do their rough work for him, as he ably describes in his book “Fortune Through My Fingers’ (Timmins, 1962), since he lacked the capital to develop his finds.
A totally different prospector was John Williamson. He was a brilliant Canadian geologist, who had a dream, as well as the faith, tenacity and capacity for hard labour under an equatorial sun, which kept him going for year after year, prospecting the incandescent Tanganyikan bush until he actually found his El Dorado. The Mwadui diamond mine was to make a major contribution to the impoverished African nation, and made its discoverer hugely wealthy. His story is told factually in H Heidgen’s book, ‘The Diamond Seeker’ (Blackie, 1959) – or if one prefers to have the story spiced up with a little fiction, one can read John Gawaine’s effort of the same (unimaginative) title, complete with femme fatale and imaginary dialogue (Macmillan, 1976).
The medical field too, holds much of interest. Whether it is a morbid curiosity in all that ails the human body; the freak accidents and disasters that can befall this frail construct, or the human face of distress and succour – there is a never-ending source of information and fascination. Even the relatively placid life of a country doctor, as described by Con Weinberg in his work ‘Fragments of a Desert Land’ (Timmins, 1975) during his stint between the World Wars in the Gibeon and Maltahöhe regions of Namibia, is much material of incident and drama. Another charming cameo work is the book ‘Salt River Doctor” by B A Mackenzie (Faircape, 1981) this time dealing with the afflicted of the Mother City.
The development of neurosurgery comes under the spotlight in David Gamsu’s book entitled ‘Adventures of a South African Brain Surgeon’(Hugh Keartland, 1967)– which seems a rather inept title for such a cerebral tome. However, that aside, the author does succeed in giving the layman a comprehensible insight into a profession, the description of which could be spiced up to be completely indigestible to the ordinary mortal. Much of the work described is forensic, and thus for the criminological fans even more interesting.
In a minor medical key, the calling of the nurse during the early days on the Diamond Fields is painted in the little book ‘The Lure of the Stone’ by W M & V Buss (Timmins, 1976).Sister Henrietta Stockdale had the fortitude to care for the ill and the injured on the dusty, dirt-ridden, overcrowded slum that was the Diamond Fields, where living conditions during the first few years must have been truly horrid. Similar experiences are to be found in Rose Blennerhassett and Lucy Sleeman’s ‘Adventures in Mashonaland’ (Macmillan & Co, 1893 or Books of Rhodesia, 1969). These two intrepid ladies pioneered the first bush hospital at Penhalonga and did valuable service in providing the first medical service of any kind in the territory.
The veterinary field, of course, spawned South Africa’s first Nobel laureate, Sir Arnold Theiler. From Thelma Gutsche’s work, ‘There Was a Man’ (Timmins 1979), I managed with great difficulty to extract a faint picture this extraordinarily gifted man’s vocation and the development of veterinary science in the subcontinent and further afield. Somehow the actual ‘beef and bones’ of the science never appeared out of the flood of soup, and after spooning laboriously through almost five hundred pages of the author’s offering, I was still left in want.
Possibly more in the James Herriot vein, but vastly more entertaining, was ‘From the Horse’s Mouth’ by W J van Rensburg (van Schaik, 1983) in which the author relates in lively and interesting prose, his country veterinarian experiences, as well as a stint at Onderstepoort, like Theiler. Needless to say he did not get the Nobel Prize – but then he managed to avoid Gutsche as well!
Obviously there are still a large number of glamorous occupations that should come under consideration. The transport-riders, as epitomised in Percy Fitzpatrick’s ‘Jock of the Bushveld’, have left a legacy redolent of camp fires and creaking oxwagons, perilous paths and the crack of whips and the shouts and whistles of the drovers. The heroes have their shoulders to the wheel, and the villains zoom through the leafy glades to inject the deadly trypanosome into the straining beasts, or assume the shadowy forms of the great cats lying in ambush along the rutted ways. Ah, what pictures one can see: from Poultney and Bee’s ‘Kalahari Campfires’ (Knox, 1941), to Stanley Portal Hyatt’s books ‘Biffel the Story of a Trek-Ox’, ‘Off the Main Track’ and ‘The Old Transport Road’ dealing with treks in Rhodesia, to works like Cecil Cowley’s ‘Schwikkard of Natal and the Old Transvaal’ (Struik, 1974) and C T Stoneham’s ‘Africa All Over’ describing his working life in post-WWI Tanganyika. There are a number of excellent books available in Afrikaans on the subject of transport-riding; C F Gronum’s work ‘Transportry, Runderpes en Poskoetse’ (Pro Rege, 1975) is a good example.
What would Africa be without its animals? Although the spread of man endangers all other living species on the planet, at least humankind seems to realize there is a problem, and attempts are being made to preserve remnants of former glories for future generations. Enter the conservationist, the game ranger, the anti-poaching patrol, and those kind and loving souls who succour orphaned rhinos, lions and other beleaguered beasties, raise them with the aid of large bottles of Klim plus supplements, and then find that they have to spend the rest of their days looking after them. Surely this heartbreaking work has more glamour and romance attached to it than any other career in the subcontinent; almost any little girl would want to be a veterinarian at some stage in their lives; most boys would want to be game rangers, but of the legion of books that have been written by people in this vocation, many testify to the hard life, dangers and disappointments that come with intensely exciting action, interesting challenges and occasionally a sense of a worthwhile job well done, and with visible, lasting results. A man of legendary status in South Africa is, of course, Harry Wolhuter, who wrote of his experiences as ranger in the early days of the Kruger Park, in ‘Memories of a Game Ranger’. His claim to fame lay not in conservation, but rather in killing the lion that attacked him, with his hunting knife – but he could claim extreme provocation as the said kitty was chewing his shoulder at the time.
A book that made a lasting impression on me just after we came to South Africa, was Mervyn Cowie’s ‘Fly Vulture’ (Harrap, 1961), which chronicled the fight to establish game reserves in Kenya. I must admit to being completely won over by the film version, in which the Hollywood Bunch had the baddie get his come-uppance at the horn of an angry rhino which consigned his truck into a donga. I seem to recall that I erupted into loud cheers and clapping at the sight. Since then I have read more sobering versions of the fight against poaching, which is often paid for by organized crime, such as Richard Leakey’s ‘Wildlife Wars’ (Macmillan, 2001), or D W Potgieter’s ‘Contraband’ (Quellerie, 1995).
There is a long list of authors and locations to choose from: like Nick Steele’s Natal books ‘Gameranger on Horseback’ and ‘Bushlife of a Game Warden’, to George Adamson’s ‘Bwana Game’ in Kenya, Cronje Wilmot’s ‘Okavango Adventure’, Daphne Sheldrick’s ‘Orphans of Tsavo’ and ‘The Tsavo Story’, Hannes Kloppers’ two volumes, ‘Veldwagter’ and ‘Gee My ‘n Man’, dealing with the Kruger and the Kalahari Parks respectively. I have read dozens of these offerings, and found something to keep me at it in each one. The writing may not be exceptional, the subject matter is rarely unique, but each account of the work done by these dedicated people involves the reader to a degree seldom felt with books dealing with other occupations – and so, read on.

AN AUTO-WHATSIS OF THE MAN ?

2009-06-08T11:15:00.000+02:00

AFRICANA VOTES & VIEWS VOL 1 # 4

The word autobiography is almost an oxymoron. I mean, how can a person trust anyone to tell his or her own life story as it really was. It's almost certain to be a bunch of gilded fabrications, self-laudatory rubbish, glamour spots in a dull life which was occasionally brightened by the odd ray of brilliance. Trust those vainglorious enough to write such a book only in that they will seek to portray themselves in a favourable light; that they will leave out all their failings except those they are proud of; that they will omit their mistakes, bury their blunders and conceal their crimes. Was it no' wee Robbie that said:

O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
And foolish notion.

So take heed biographer - auto- or not, for the road is strewn with thorns and rocks.
Let's take the swashbuckling hero, Sir Harry Smith, who had the temerity to write a fairly laudatory story of his own eventful life, which was published posthumously in 1901 ( with a little help from one G C Moore-Smith as editor, who might have been a descendant for all one knows). This book became an instant success as the public took to the man who epitomised all that was brave and British in the Victorian era, for the next decade, as reprint after reprint rolled off the presses. It is still accorded the accolade of being 'a classic of love and war', and I see that you can buy an expensive and nasty paperback edition, complete with all " occasional imperfections such as missing and blurred pages, missing text, poor pictures, markings, dark backgrounds and other reproduction issues " for a tad over $50 delivered in SA. In 1977 another book appeared, under the title " Remember you are an Englishman " by Joseph H Lehmann. This citizen of the good old US of A had a fair amount of admiration for the soldier/lover, as far as I can remember from cursorily reading a chapter or two, but the book seemed much of the same as the autoversion. Not so the volume by one A L Harrington, more aptly entitled "Sir Harry Smith, Bungling Hero" which appeared only a scant three years later. You'd swear it was an entirely different man the book was written about. Gone was the adulation for his reckless bravery, his leadership in suicidal charges where his men (and enemies ) fell in swathes around him; instead we have sharp criticism and insightful analysis of his rash political decisions, which caused his Whitehall masters no ends of headaches, and indeed resulted in his recall from the Cape at one stage. When in doubt - read about a man's life written by his enemy.
But not all is gloom on the autobiographical front. Every now and then a jewel emerges, which is taken to the bosom of the population at large - and it remains there. One such is the slim volume called simply "The Diary of Iris Vaughan" by herself. It takes a child to describe in uncritical, simple terms, the grown-ups around her, her interaction with them and her sibling, the realities of the country towns in which they lived and how the Boer War swept by in a tumultuous wave. Her stern, magisterial Pop, was apt to 'be savige', Mom stern and controlling, while her brother Charles aided and abetted her in all things naughty as children do. She decided early on that 'everyone should have a diery', because if you always told the truth, you were told you were rude and you get into trouble, or you could lie and that was wrong too - so you must either write whatever it was you couldn't say in the diary, or you had to keep quiet. She chose the former, and the result is a hilarious romp through Edwardian South Africa, complete with idiosyncratic spelling and frank pen-pictures of some of the staunch pillars of society. A must for biography addicts.
Humorous tales of this genre are often a fair bet as a good read. Somehow a person that doesn't take themselves too seriously is hardly likely to dwell on the high points and achievements of their own life in favour of the droll events that happened around them instead. So it is with Olga Levinson's "Call me Master", which purports to be full of fictitious characters in a mythical town called Windhoek - presumably in an erehwonian state of German South West. She describes herself as the last and non-rhyming sister in a slew of six girls, all -ita's. Within the first couple of pages she chronicles the arrival of a young man who announces to her parents that he has come to marry their daughter, whom he had met a week before - to whit Olga, and to whisk her off to South West Africa. Before long she entrains for the long and dusty ride to the capital, which does little to endear itself to the city girl, before she is once more relocated - to a farm in the wilds for good measure. Levinson writes mainly about other people, so the book can be likened to Betty Macdonald's famous "The Egg and I", in which the main character becomes a mirror from which to bounce all the other images. A cheerful and amusing book, which can be reread a few times.
Here's the third lady-writer in a row: Elspeth Huxley's twin volumes "The Flame Trees of Thika" and "The Mottled Lizard" are among my favourite personal memoirs of East Africa. Huxley's reminiscences of her early days on the trackless veld, where her family had been deposited in a manner very reminiscent of the unpreparedness of the 1820 Settlers further south. We are taken through the painful learning curves of the aspirant farmers, as they hack a clearing in the savannah, build some kind of shelter and decide on all the wrong choices before finding crops and methods that will work in the alien soil. Her writing is interesting, full of feeling for her adopted country, and her extensive use of dialogue to flesh out the characters and the interaction between them, though fictional, of necessity, never intrudes or gives an impression of a fictionalised account. I can smell her Africa, I hear its sounds and I see the colours shimmering in the equatorial sun. These two books have a virtuosity of their own, which her other non-fiction work never reaches, though a number of her travel and socio-political books are very readable, while I found her novels to be completely indigestible.
Must be my day for the ladies. A few paragraphs back I mentioned one Karen Blixen as another failed coffee planter. She is of course, the renowned author of "Out of Africa" and coined the immortal phrase "Once I had a farm in Africa…" for both which efforts she has been enshrined among the American pantheon of literary deities on African matters, along with Stanley and Hemingway. In the matter of her book, I would hesitate to call it an autobiography - it is too ethereal, too much like a saga, with shifting scenes and actors walking on and off. They make stilted speeches, of deep matters and thoughts, and their sculpted faces are cunningly lit by hidden lights in the wings. That there is some great writing, one cannot dispute; that it be accepted as 'the truth and nothing but,' would be unrealistic. The view presented is from one side of the auditorium only. None of the nasty unpleasantness of reality seems to intrude, least of all the personality of the author, who comes across as a manipulative harridan from hell in the documentary film I have seen on the subject of the last few years of her life.
From iconic books, to an icon: George Adamson, Bwana Game, the lion man. He was born in India and his parents passed Kenya on their way down south, got hooked and bought a farm, a la Huxley's parents. Coffee farming was an ill-researched pastime in those days, and neither Adamson senior nor the Huxleys (nor Karen Blixen, for that matter) got it right. George had an interesting time of it, trying out all manner of agricultural pursuits as he gravitated to his promised land - the Northern Frontier District, NFD for short. In no time he had added the trades of goat-herding, gold prospecting, hunting, and a slew of other exotic occupations to his CV, before finding his vocation as a game warden at the tender age of 32. Disaster was to strike some six years later, when he was confronted by his nemesis, Joy, the Austrian lady of "Elsa - the Lioness" fame, who decided that he was husband material, and who subsequently ditched her then husband to hang George's scalp on her belt - figuratively speaking.
From certain accounts I've read, it was a marriage made in hell - for George, and certainly what I saw of the lady during a documentary film which interviewed both, separately, she was the sort of person I could really take an un-shine to, while the old boy warmed the cockles of my heart in a taciturn, sincere, nature-boy sort of way. Reassuringly enough, other writers on matters Kenyan also tended to take extreme views on this relationship. Elspeth Huxley was very much in the lady's camp, while another author ( whose name was Ricciardi, I seem to recall ) in turn gave me all the dirt on Joy's tricks and made George out to be the good 'un. No doubt the truth is somewhere in between, as it usually is. His book is a thoroughly interesting read; though there is little literary merit, just a life full of incidents, cobbled together into a more or less contiguous narrative. Throughout the work his love of nature and animals are the predominant themes, while his efforts frequently place him as arbiter in the struggle between the tribesmen and the game he protects.
Great events have often triggered worthy books by some of their participants. Wars must rank highly among favoured subject matter, and while not my personal choice, I do occasionally read books of the genre that have caught my attention. Not for me the undoubted military skill displayed by von Lettow Vorbeck and related in his immensely popular book "My Reminiscences of East Africa" - that's more for students of tactics and military science, or serious historians. No, I would prefer a slim volume of personal reminiscences of the same campaign by a South African gunner, ineptly entitled "On Safari" by F. C. if I wanted to get a feel of warfare during WWI in East Africa; the bouts of malaria and dysentery, the poor food, if any, the murderous heat and inimical landscape - added to which was the spice of dodging sniper fire or a full attack.
One of the great autobiographical works on the Boer War must be Deneys Reitz's "On Commando". How well he describes the gung-ho approach to war by a callow youth, which is so quickly bled dry by the heat of the first battle; by the stench of corpses and the howling of Howitzer shells overhead. One can share in his despair of the lost battle, the exhilaration of a charge and the sorrow felt at the death of a comrade. The book exposes the human side of the dogged struggle as experienced by one participant, not an analysis of military tactics, not individual or collective bravery - not right or wrong. Reitz went into exile after the war, refusing to swear allegiance to the British Crown. He, together with his brothers and a few likeminded companions fled to Madagascar, where they eked out a living of sorts on the edge of starvation, before they were persuaded to return by Isie Smuts' letter, which implored them to rather work for the unification of the country. Reitz's two subsequent books, "Trekking On" and "No Outspan" make equally good reading in a lesser vein, as Reitz becomes a fully fledged military man, an MP and minister of state.
As a complete opposite to the above works, my choice would fall on General Manie Maritz's "My Lewe en Strewe". I know I take my life in my hands to criticise this Afrikaner folk hero, as there are still people in Namaqualand and elsewhere, who frankly worship his memory (just as they would take a Lee Metford to Jannie Smuts if he came riding down those dusty track today), but I read his book not once, but twice in the course of trying to get a picture of the war on the region which has become my main interest. The first reading aroused a deep antipathy in me; Maritz's bombast, braggadocio, self-importance, and not to put too fine a point on it - bunch of lies about his personal exploits and their effect on the course of the war - all these put my teeth on edge. Where this ex ZARP policeman got his rabid anti-Semitism from was a mystery to me until I read Lennox van Onselen's book referred to in V & V # 2, which records at length Maritz's interaction and eventual defeat at the hands of the low-life that ruled the Reef underworld before the war. Still, the man must have had something - even the famous prospector Fred Cornell was impressed most favourably when he met the Rebel general at Prieska in 1914, describing him as an " alert, bluff, soldierly man " with "the manner of an educated man". He also refers to his astonishing feats of strength, courage and leadership during the Boer War, as well as during his service with the Germans in SWA during their two colonial wars. Maritz had a solid reputation, so much so that he managed to quell the simmering rebellion that the government faced when they effectively gave the treasure trove of Namaqualand's diamonds to 'foreigners' so beggaring the locals in the 1920's. So then why did he have to exaggerate his undoubted courage (or it could be called lack of imagination) in hand-to-hand fighting, during which he was often wounded grievously, why were there always many more dead enemies after battle, and why was every skirmish a victory ? My second reading was accompanied by all the books of his companions: Reitz, Bouwer, de Kersauson, Meyer and Smith, as well as works by historians from the British side - and the most charitable conclusion I could come to was that Maritz was suffering from some seriously senior moments by 1938, when he was about 62 years old, at which time the book was published shortly before he died in a motor accident.
Enough of all these dogs of war, let's see how the men of science and letters fare. Certainly one of my early favourites was Dr Robert Broom, who dashed off a small volume entitled "Finding the Missing Link" in 1950. A somewhat presumptuous title, as well as erroneous, as was proven later, but in the heat of battle in those pioneering days of palaeoanthropology - it was quite excusable. In this case again, the event overshadowed the person to some degree, and Broom's cantankerous, headstrong nature, his inattention to his personal finances and his eccentricity don't really emerge from the book. Broom, one reads elsewhere, would do his dustiest fossil-hunting wearing a dark suit - but would strip buck-naked when it got too hot. The indefatigable Scot promised that he would "wear out, not rust out", and kept his word. At the age of 85 he had just completed his monograph on the ape-men, when he is reported to have whispered "Now that's finished ... and so am I". He died moments later. Perfect ending.
Take Dr Sidney Harold Skaife; the extremely popular natural history boffin, who lived on the slopes of the mountain above Hout Bay in a house he built himself. I was forced to reacquaint myself with the book yesterday, as I had read it just too many decades previously to remember much of it. While no one can deny that Skaife led an interesting and varied life, full of incident, worthwhile pursuits and groundbreaking discoveries in the entomological field, very little emerges of the man, except that he was certainly gifted, able to communicate his wide knowledge by means of the then 'new' media of radio and film, as well as writing natural history books on a wide variety of subjects. My respect for him increased when I was reminded that he, an Englishman born and bred, also achieved a measure of literary fame with a series of Afrikaans thrillers of the "Skiet, skop en donder" variety. I have a sneaking suspicion I actually read "Adriaan Hugo - baasspeurder" at some stage of my youthful indiscriminate appetites. His autobiography shows none of those skills - instead it consists of short passages of (to me) intensely interesting biological anecdotes and facts, a litany of where he went from where to where and what he did in each place, and a whole autograph album full of names of prominent people even I have mostly never heard of - and I've been around some time. What does that prove? Merely that he should have stuck to his favourite subject - biology. It was the thing he was really good at, and he knows this, as he writes "it has been said that the writing of autobiographies is as common as adultery, and just as reprehensible" at later he confesses that his only excuse was that "it was a pleasant form of self-expression, of recalling happy memories of the past, and perhaps boasting a little - to show off a special talent that we may have". Bravo, Dr Skaife. I find your autobiography eminently credible - even if only because of these expressed sentiments.
The legal fraternity, too, is not shy of recording their illustrious careers. A number of semi-biographical books by magistrates, lawyers and judges grace my shelves. Some are ponderous tomes such as J G Kotze's "Memoirs and Reminiscences" in two volumes, as he obviously acquired a taste for the game and had to bring his audience up to date some five years after the publication of the first volume. Others like Herman's "The Law my Master", Juta's "Reminiscences of the Western Circuit", and Corder's "Judges at Work" and "The Truth and Nothing But", focus mainly on the frailties of others instead of the careers of the arbiters of their fates, and it is that which makes them entertaining. One or two of these 'Frontier Lawmen' stand out in my memory as having written books filled with both dramatic and humorous content, well worth a revisitation now and then. They are F H Guthrie's "Frontier Magistrate' dealing with his experiences in the Eastern Cape and Walvis Bay; and lastly, my personal favourite legal man, William Charles Scully. He went in for ponderous titles: 'Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer' as well as 'Further Reminiscences…', but the contents are generally written in a light, modest vein, with a ribald sense for the ridiculous in the behaviour of the people around him - not excluding himself. Scully led an adventurous early life as a gold and diamond prospector, and missed becoming a rich man by a combination of ill-health and circumstances, as he relates his misfortunes at Du Toit's Pan and Barberton - where he lay within inches of untold wealth. Only after these escapades did he settle down to the humdrum existence of a government clerk, and later magistrate, but one always gets the sense that here was a romantic, waiting to burst out into the world. A number of his novels and stories are also good reads - but once does have to forgive the odd passage of Victorian Purple Prose.
Although it was intended to include an offering in this genre by a poet, writer and/or artist, when it came to making the choice, my eye fell on Guy Butler's trilogy " Karoo Morning", "Bursting World" and "A Local Habitation". As I had previously read no more than an odd chapter here and there, I sat down to them with a will, fully intending to give a blow by blow account of the engagement. Then reality struck, and I must confess that I have chickened out. After reading a hundred or so pages, I was suddenly struck by my presumption and crass stupidity. Who the heck did I think I was anyway ? To take on a long-deceased general with an army at his beck and call, to roast a little old lady in print, or to deflate a pompous politician, all these seem like fair game. To even consider writing a 'literary criticism', however humble, on the work of an esteemed professor of the English language, a noted poet, playwright and writer, smacked not only of foolhardiness but looked like literary suicide. So let me say only that Butler's work deals largely with his experiences in academia and with his work in literary circles, some religion and a liberal dusting of politics with a smidgeon of family life - and with the exception of the latter, I have no knowledge on these matters. Nuff said.

HUNTER BY NATURE

2009-04-05T15:10:00.000+02:00

AFRICANA VOTES & VIEWS VOL 1 # 3

Hunting has become unfashionable; abhorred in many circles; part of the instant gratification market - but that bloodthirsty urge that impels little boys to terrorise the neighbourhood's birdlife, and later, possibly the world's dwindling game, just won't go away. Just so we understand each other, 'hunting' does not figure in my vocabulary as equating to a bunch or braying jackasses in red coats, mounted on half a ton of horseflesh apiece and accompanied by a pack of yowling curs, who chase a small carnivore hardly larger than the pet cat, across field and hedgerow with bloodthirsty intent. No, hunting involves a man, a noble beast and a gun. Call it 'bringing home the bacon' or something a little more high-brow, like 'satisfying the primeval instincts', the fact remains that no hunter can explain his addiction to a non-hunter satisfactorily.
Let me give it a go anyway! It goes something like this, according to that great writer/hunter Robert Ruark: one of life's wonders is the potential for a puny man to slay a great beast, like a lion or an elephant - not by means of his muscles, but using his brains. So, instead of using his mental muscle in a nice peaceful game of chess, or for solving a crossword puzzle, man goes out, fashions himself a spear, or digs a game pit - or buys an impressively noisy gun. He then converts some few hundred kilos of more or less aggressive beast into a series of lunches for his tribe, and he can hang some of the inedible bits on a tree outside his hut (or a wall inside if he is so minded) while he brags to all and sundry about his prowess. Better than saying checkmate; or putting down the completed Sunday Telegraph Crossword? I'd think so.
Many of the modern hunters are passionate about the great outdoors, the wild beasts that roam the veld; they want to preserve them for their children and grandchildren to enjoy in the future. Yet when the spoor has been followed, when the quarry is within range, that finely crafted weapon will be aimed, and as the cross-hairs zero in on the lethal spot, the hunter holds his breath and the force that squeezes a trigger comes into effect. In the moment that the bullet strikes and the buck crumples, it is consigned into immortality in the mind of its killer. He owns that glorious particle of the wilds of Africa - even if humanity builds a smoke-spewing power station on the very same spot in the next year. If fate would have it that the beastie took exception to a few ill-placed grams of lead, and a charge resulted, necessitating the expenditure of more ammunition or a bit of frantic exercise, so much the better for that mental photo album in full magnificent technicolour with action-replays galore. The regret at having extinguished a life comes later. Sometimes decades later, or never, for some.
Enough. Those who have done this, will know what I'm talking about, others will shake their heads. Let me just say that some of the earliest books I read on Africa, were hunting books. I hungered for a taste of the wilds, the wide savannah, the cool forests and the lush swamps of Africa; I wanted to feel the heft of an elephant gun, the brute force of the kick, the slap of the bullet as it reached its target, and the sweet triumph of holding the heavy head of my prize - the essence of the romance of the Dark Continent. It didn't always quite work out like that, but hey, it's OK to aim high. One of the highlights of hunting in Africa with said elephant gun, was sitting in the middle of a herd of buffalo on a breathless hot day in the Okavango swamps with my tracker. In front of me was a scrawny bush, and on the other side of it about a thousand pounds of buffalo cow was peering suspiciously at me while her calf grazed a few metres behind me. High drama potential indeed, but when a whiff of us finally reached the herd around us, they just thundered off in a cloud of dust, while we resumed breathing. I hesitate to confess this, but my most life-threatening experience came when a duiker gored me. In defence, I must hasten to say that I had only just arrived in Africa from grey, gritty Germany; I was ten years old and I was trying to feed the supposedly almost tame beastie a handful of grass, when it charged, put two holes in my knee and shoved me arse over tip into a goldfish pond. S'truth - you can ask my sister - she was watching.
Back to hunters. John Hunter was one of my early favourites; a man of action this Scot, a large man in the mould of the legendary hunters like Cummins, Cornwallis-Harris, Baker and Selous. He ran away from home, did all manner of exciting things and then drifted into ivory hunting, rhino and lion control as well as becoming a Bwana Mkubwa in the safari trade. His first book is now a highly prized collectors' item; "White Hunter", (Seely Service & Co 1938) but it lacks any pretension of writing skill; I really enjoyed his second effort, baldly entitled "Hunter" ( Hamish Hamilton, 1952). It may have been that the style really appeals to the young and young at heart, but there must be some merit in the book, since it was translated into several languages - French, German, even Afrikaans. His publishers were obviously emboldened by the success and they managed to convince him to take on a co-author from their stable for his third effort, which was probably a fairly daunting project.
They picked on one of my favourite authors of my youth - Dan Mannix. This was a man who could make any young lad's heart beat faster. He ran away from home and joined a travelling circus. He made it his business to learn a bundle of tricks, including magic, sword-swallowing, fire-eating and light-bulb chewing among others.
(Memoirs of a Sword-Swallower) I suffered from burnt gums and lips and an overactive gag-reflex for some months after the first reading of that volume. Anyway, Mannix did an admirable job with John Hunter, and "African Bush Adventures " was published in 1954. Again they drew on Hunter's experiences of the bush, animals, game control, and even conservation. Mannix later collaborated with a Swiss animal collector and hunter Peter Ryhiner, and the book " The Wildest Game " was the result.
The fourth Hunter book appeared in 1957 with the help of Alan Wykes, who was a recognised author, with a number of titles to his credit; "Hunter's Tracks" is essentially more of the same as dished up in his previous three books. Lots of safari hunting adventures, pulling wounded dangerous game out of thickets for his clients, and fending off dangerous clients' wives while the inept hunters were drowning their sorrows in camp. A lengthy manhunt adds some variety to this volume. Another enjoyable read, probably made more so by Wykes' collaboration.
The latter also wrote two other good hunting biographies: "Snake-Man" (1960), which is the story of C J P Ionides, who was a conservator, a hunter/collector of a number of rare animals in addition to becoming Bwana Nyoka, an eccentric snake catcher in his latter years. Ionides also wrote two books himself, "A Hunter's Story" (W H Allen, 1965) and "Mamba's and Maneaters" a year later - both eminently readable works. Wykes then wrote "Nimrod Smith" which appeared in the next year, and which features the exploits of another Great White Hunter of the early 20th century.
Another early hero of mine was W D M Bell - Karamojo Bell, as he was known from the region, which contained his favourite haunts. His books are mainly on elephant hunting; to him an elephant was 'X' number of pounds of ivory, which could be traded or sold to equip another shooting expedition during the next hunting season, which enabled him to lead the footloose roaming life that he preferred. Bell knew the structure of an elephant's skull better than most other hunters. He hunted with a ridiculously small-bore rifle - 7mm, but his accuracy and skill in getting up close to his quarry ensured his success with a minimum of woundings and dangerous charges. This was a far cry from some of the great nimrods of the previous century, who would at times have to fire several dozen shots to fell one animal, riding hell for leather to get out of the way of the enraged beast between shots, to enable them to reload their ponderous ordnance. Bell chalked up round about a thousand elephants during his career, but his hunting lacks romance, though he is an able raconteur and a master at bushcraft.
Most of the hunting books I read in the fifties and sixties had to have one premier quality - affordability. I would walk past the CNA and look longingly at the Africana Collectanea series displayed there at astronomical prices like 8s.6d. for Baines and Lord's " Shifts and Expedients of Camp Life, Travel and Exploration ", and I would sigh and move on. Those hunting titles that appeared in softcover, priced at a modest 1s. 2d. or thereabouts, were more in line with the depth of my pockets. Still, one could pick up reasonable secondhand bargains if one knew ones way around the city and the antiquarian shops. So it was that over the years I picked up a treasure trove of hunting books, 'Poor Man's Africana' but nowadays quite sought-after titles.
There was "Crocodile Fever' by L Earl (Collins, 1954), featuring hide-hunting of the scaly saurians in Zimbabwe and Mozambique, while Cronje Wilmot's book "Always Lightly Tread" (Timmins, 1956) carried on in the same vein in the Okavango, with game control, meat hunting and a bout of bubonic plague thrown in for good measure. One of the famous books to come from the Transvaal Lowveld of that genre, were A C White's "Call of the Bushveld" , an evocative hunting book by the owner of 'White's Avoca', a game farm near present-day Hoedspruit. The latter two volumes are beautifully illustrated by my old friend Charles Astley-Maberly's drawings. I got to know the old man and his wife on their Duiwelskloof farm when I was a youngster. I often stayed with a neighbour during holidays, and used to visit the old couple for tea and scones, when we would sit outside on the verandah, and as dusk fell, the bushpigs would ghost out of the surrounding forest onto the lawns.
Those times produced a number of interesting titles; T V Bulpin wrote the classic "The Ivory Trail" - the story of S C Barnard, also known as Bvekenya - who played about evading the police round about Crook's Corner in the far north-east of the Kruger Park. Bulpin followed this up with "The Hunter is Death", which was the story of George Rushby, another one of the great elephant hunters of the lion-infested Njombe district in Tanzania. South Africans had a few greats among the 20th century Nimrods as well; J F Burger won renown with his tales of hunting angry beasts - " African Jungle Memories", "My Forty Years in Africa", "Horned Death" and "African Buffalo Trails" - were some of his most successful books. One of the evergreens is, of course, P J Pretorius' "Jungle Man" which not only recounts his hunting exploits, but for good measure, devotes a few chapters to hunting down the German cruiser, the Königsberg, which had holed up in the almost impenetrable Rufiji Delta in southern Tanganyika during WWI. Although one must deplore the slaughter of most of the Addo herd of elephants that he writes about, one can but rejoice about the change of attitudes which has led to their preservation under present-day human pressures.
The East African safari trade was the subject of many books by game conservators, hunters and outfitters. A number of well-known authors come to mind; Donald Ker wrote "Through Forest and Veldt", W D Holmes' "Safari RSVP" was another such, as was Dennis Holman's "Inside Safari Hunting", while the firm of Cullen & Downey wrote a book about the other side of the coin, entitled " Saving the Game". The spice in many of these tales is the human-animal interaction, when city-slicker meets beast. Most of the pro's are not too economical with their past clients' dignity, but to my taste, one Osborne stood out as a hunter who despised most of his clients to such a degree that it spoilt his book "A Guiding Son", which I recently read. One of my favourite tongue-in-cheek writers is Alexander Lake, who penned the tame-sounding title "African Adventures" and the more perilous "African Killers", which I seem to recall had the subtitle "All about killers lying in wait and hunters lying in print" - that had a ring of truth about it.
The omnipresent District Officer in the African colonies, or 'DO' as he was generally known, was another class of hunter that wrote some thumping good yarns. For a part of each year they would be tasked with patrolling their remote region, accompanied by sufficient bearers to sustain life in the wilds, but which also meant shooting a considerable number of heads of game for the pot, as well as despatching any problem animals that plagued the populace. One of my favourites is G Muldoon, who wrote about his game control adventures in Central Africa in his two well-written books "Leopards in the Night" and "The Trumpeting Herd" (both published by Rupert Hart-Davis in 1955 & 1957 respectively). This brings me out of Africa, to one of the most respected hunter/naturalists who had to be judge and executioner in the conflict between man and beast on many occasions. Jim Corbett the slayer of the maneaters of Kumaon, the Temple Tiger and the man-eating leopard of Rudraprayag, among a host of problem cats, was no ordinary hunter, who killed for trophies or glory. His role was as the last resort between a defenceless cowering population of rural Indians, and the few rogue cats that caused panic and disrupted all life in the hill villages. His unrivalled knowledge of bushcraft, tracking and the habits of his quarry are used in describing the hunts in painstakingly beautiful detail - as one puny man pits his wits and quick reactions against a huge predator who sees him as his prey. I am the proud owner of all the books Corbett has written, and I reread them often - sharing in his fears as he stalks, and is in turn stalked by the maneating leopard in the stygian darkness; I marvel at his skill in following the progress of his quarry through the jungle, by track and by the sounds of the other beasts and I delight in his sharing his thoughts and deductions about the behaviour of the animal he is following. I have not read another writer of such talent in that genre, though another comes close - one Hugh Allen, an invalided soldier, who emigrates to India after WWII with his sister, buys a farm in the jungle and attempts to do battle with the deer, wild pigs, monkeys, as well as big cats. His book, "The Lonely Tiger" (Faber & Faber 1960) is a tour de force of one man's struggle against the forces of nature that surround him, which he does not want to destroy, but which he cannot ignore.
While I am on hunters in other parts of the world - let me not forget my hunting hero Bob Ruark. I was introduced to "The Old Man and the Boy" when I was barely in my teens. Strangely enough I didn't like it - then. A year or two later I read the story of his first hunting safari to Africa, "Horn of the Hunter" and I became an instant 'Ruarkophile' to coin a phrase. His zesty language, robust sense of the ridiculous - even when he was the subject of the ridicule, his descriptive passages of the hunts and the philosophical musings in camp after the first couple of Martinis - were all to my taste. I acquired his other hunting books, like "Use Enough Gun" and "I Didn't Know it Was Loaded", as quickly as I could, and the duo of the "Old Man and the Boy" and its sequel "The Old Man's Boy grows Older" last of all. As my son grew up, I gave him copies of both the latter, as well as "Horn of the Hunter". There is much home-spun philosophy, wisdom, humour, etiquette and just plain horse-sense in these books; I felt anybody who reads them can't help but get a little improved by doing so. Well - my boy hasn't robbed a bank yet, he's not an alcoholic or a drug addict ( Bob Ruark fancied his tipple, but not in the hunting field) and last year he shot an elephant cow at a range of about two metres after she had flipped a Yankee student out of the tracker seat on an open vehicle full of kids. I reckon reading Ruark didn't do him any harm.
Back to some of our local talent. One George Michael, a Joburg lad, I seem to remember, became a 'noted' Big Game Hunter in the fifties, and he wrote "African Fury" which did not impress me. Possibly to make up for his defects, his wife wrote " I Married a Hunter" two years later - which did nothing to charm me either. The books were full of cutesy snapshots of Ma, Pa and the babies with some deader on the ground in front of them. At least, that is how I remember the books. One of the few books by a lady author, which charmed, was a cheerful tale by one Sally Macdonald, who joined her husband on a home-crafted safari in pre-war Tanganyika. "Tanganyika Safari" (Angus & Robertson 1948) is an entertaining read, as is her other book, which has nothing to do with hunting - "Sally in Rhodesia".
Then there is the gifted writer, and I believe, talented concert violinist of his day, Victor Pohl. He wrote a number of books of short stories about the Basuto people around his family farm in the Eastern Free State, as well as his family's lot during the Boer War in "Adventures of a Boer Family". However, his real talent came to the fore in the book "Bushveld Adventures" (Faber & Faber 1940) in which he describes his youthful hunts with his black companion and a dog trotting at his heels. Very reminiscent of 'Jock', and a charming read for young and old, hunter or not.
I have read a goodly number of Afrikaans hunting books, many of which are of interest, but I must confess to finding a fundamental difference between this genre in English and the same in Afrikaans. Possibly it has to do with the attitude to the hunt and the animal. For the Brits it's a noble animal they're pitting their wits against, and a sport (of kings, mind you, not so long ago) which carries a certain aura of romance. For the Afrikaner, the animal is historically so much biltong, and the hunt is a way of bringing home the biltong. Possibly I should not decry the delicious snack (of which I caused quite a few hundredweight to be made in my time), nor should I slander a good roast, but their literary efforts don't make romantic reading matter.
To name but a few, J Bruwer's " Noord van die Zambesi", Lucas Potgieter's two books "Staanplekkies langs my geweerpad" and "Fonteintjies langs my geweerpad", P Duplessis' "Duinestories", S le Roux's " Baanbrekers en Jagters van Suid Afrika", Sangiro's couple of books, J von Moltke's interesting three works on the early Southwest Boer hunters, and P J Schoeman's hunting reminiscences, are all good workmanlike examples. One J Sproul excelled with the title "My Vier-en-tagtigste Leeu en ander Jagverhale" but I could not wax lyrical about it - in fact I have forgotten everything about the other 83 cats, it was that unmemorable. For my money, I still prefer Pieter Pieterse's humorous anecdotes as on offer in his book " Boude en Blaaie - en nog 'n Paar Bosveldstories" (Uniboek 1991) - though it's still biltong that's being "platgetrek", but at least there's some pepper on it!
I fully expect a howl of protest from my audience, that's you, firstly because of the subject matter of this contribution, secondly because I've left out all the "Big Guns". Not to fear, at some future date I shall have the temerity to review the great, the brave, the accurate and the merciless killers.
Yours, from the hunting trail,
Arne

TWO TALENTS IN ONE FAMILY

2009-04-05T15:05:00.000+02:00

AFRICANA VOTES & VIEWS VOL 1 # 2

The name van Onselen is probably familiar to a number of South Africans, as two of them, Lennox and Charles are well-known writers. Their beginnings could not have been more different. Lennox was a policeman, but his first book dealt with the relatively little known subject of antique furniture. As he says himself in the foreword of “Cape Antique Furniture” ( Timmins 1959) when he tried to obtain information during his Cape Town days, from bookdealers – possibly along Long Street – there were none to be found, so the enterprising man decided to write a modest introduction himself.
He attempts to give a brief outline of the origin of individual items, the timbers used and illustrates their development with some black and white photos. Interestingly he already acknowledges the early Eastern influences of the Malay craftsmen on the early Dutch efforts; they probably brought designs such as the ball and claw, and the cabriolet leg, as well as marquetry, rattan and laquer work to the Cape. The second wave of influence came through the Huguenots, who were to have a profound effect on local designs. Then came the English occupation and further continental ideas were brought into the mix.
The author wrote chapters on furniture development in the city and country districts, and features items which would grace reception rooms, bedrooms, dining rooms and he concludes with a chapter on long case clocks and some tips for the aspirant collector.
This little book was published in a limited edition of a thousand copies, so copies are reasonably hard to find, especially in good condition. Still, a worthwhile addition to your library, if antiques are in your field of interest.
Not surprisingly, his second book entitled “A Rhapsody in Blue” (Timmins 1960) deals with the development of the police, starting with the office of Fiscal in the late 17th century, later ably assisted by men of the Watch. A further body of men, the Dienaars, followed, and the office of Fiscal was made purely administrative. By the mid-19th century the Cape Constabulary was organized according to London principles, while in the country districts the Landdrosts were assisted by their veldcornets in keeping the peace..
The same period saw a proliferation of various armed, semi-military bodies, such as the Cape Regiment, Cape Mounted Riflemen, Imperial Cape Mounted Riflemen Corps, Cape Police, Frontier Armed and Mounted Police etc. Many of these were deployed in the Frontier Wars that were being waged on the Eastern Cape and on the Orange River. In the Boer Republics too, there were the notorious ZARP’s and the OFS Republican Police, while Natal had its Natal Mounted Police. After the cessation of hostilities the Transvaal Town Police and the S A Constabulary paved the way to the formation of the SAP. The author’s narrative is full of anecdote, as well as solid historical fact, but occasionally the book is a little ‘bare-bones’ for the serious scholar, as all this information is crammed into the first thirty pages of the book. The remainder is an ode to the life of a policeman, mostly tough, sometimes rewarding, often heroic, with dashes of humour – an eminently readable work.
He concludes with some of his own experiences, including his time as a personal bodyguard to General Smuts. He also saw service in the Sixth Infantry (Police) Brigade during WWII in North Africa, where he was captured by the Italians at Tobruk. With a few friends he escaped in 1943 and made it to Switzerland, where he had to remain due to that country’s neutral status, until the end of the war. A short concluding chapter sketches an ideal police force in an ideal state – a far cry from what happened in the thirty years after the book’s publication.
His third book is probably the most sought-after. “Trekboer” was published by Timmins in 1961, and once more the author draws on his own meetings and interviews with these nomadic stockmen of the arid interior and in the Northwest. By the time the book was written, they were already an almost extinct breed. The advent of the water-drilling machine, and then the ubiquitous windmill, made it possible for stock farmers to lead a more settled life with their flocks on the plains of Bushmanland, and the government promoted land-ownership as well as fencing of properties. All was well during the years when the Twa grass stood knee-high after good rains, but drought inevitably followed and the farmers had once again to muster their starving flocks, pack their wagons and trek along the dusty roads in search of better pasture.
Both van Onselen in “Trekboer” and F A Venter in his book “Kambro-kind” sketch the heartache and privation of the desperate farmer and his dwindling capital on the seemingly endless plains, shimmering in the white-heat, hoping to find a flush of green from a fleeting shower of rain. Many of them ended up eking out an existence on the banks of the Gariep, often dependant on the goodwill and charity of their more fortunate kinfolk, while others trekked into the Kalahari, which though a desert, still could support livestock in years when Bushmanland lay bare under successive droughts.
The author also had his brush with the glittering wealth of Namaqualand and he relates some of the history of the discovery of diamonds, their effect on the Namaqualanders, who saw so much wealth coming from their lands, without any benefits coming their way. One senses a certain amount of sympathy in this policeman’s stories of IDB’s, police-traps and men who became inexplicably well-off almost overnight.
Lastly, as a dessert, he dishes up an account of the searches of a Pretoria chiropractor for the Lost City of the Kalahari. This struck a real chord in my memory, as I shared a schoolbench with the good doctor’s two children. After each vacation, which they had spent flying up and down the desert and camping within earshot of the lions’ roars, Lynn and Scott Haldeman would give their classmates another thrilling episode of their adventures – enough to make me green with envy. On the other hand, they never did find anything, nor were they likely to do so. It is now generally accepted that the much-vaunted Lost City described by the American traveler G A Farini ( actually his real name was William Hunt) was a geological phenomenon amplified by a fertile imagination and some good old-fashioned showmanship.
His fourth, and presumably last book, “Head of Steel” was published in 1962. This time he traces the development of the rail network from the Cape into the Transvaal. While quite an interesting read for the layman, I would suspect it is a little superficial for the railway enthusiast. Generally all of Lennox van Onselen’s books are worth reading and they are good, unpretentious ‘poor man’s Africana’.
Charles van Onselen, on the other hand, is an academic, a sociologist and historian, who has written a number of books on the economic development of the Southern African region, labour exploitation and crime. His first book, “Chibaro” (Pluto Press, 1976) is certainly an eye-opener. Most people know about the Belgian king, Leopold having the chutzpah to not only assume ‘ownership’ of a huge chunk of Africa, but then he set his minions to enslaving the population, and strip-mining everything in sight, from ivory to rainforest timbers and minerals, while committing some of the ghastliest atrocities you can imagine. His descendants still own a few dozen palaces spread around Europe – makes you think, doesn’t it?
The Rhodesian populace underwent similar exploitation; van Onselen examines the labour practices of the mining companies in Rhodesia, after the BSA Co had successfully quashed the last remnants of rebellion. Taxes were imposed, to pay which meant that men had perforce to work in the mines. When mining proved to be unprofitable due to the patchy presence of pay-dirt, the first to suffer were the African mineworkers, who laboured under horrendous conditions, ill-fed, and ill-housed, for progressively lower pay, powerless to alter their working conditions. Life in closed compounds became the standard option imposed by the capitalists of the whole subcontinent, and vice, alcohol, drugs, and credit were all used to keep workers in lengthy labour contracts which resulted in increasing social upheaval, poverty, disease and often death.
Lastly, the author considers the response of the black worker to this labour coercive economy: drunkenness, theft, desertion, property destruction, forgery and absenteeism – the only responses that the workers, brutalized and cowed by the system, could use against their masters. Not a pretty picture, and a far cry from the benevolent face which mining companies would like to portray to the world. In short, an uncomfortable read; typically a reworked doctoral thesis, which requires some specialized interest to persevere with.
The author then wrote a duo of books on the social and economic history of the Witwatersrand up to WWI. Entitled “New Babylon” and “New Niniveh”, van Onselen approaches the phenomenon of unlimited wealth generation, not from the perspective of the beneficiaries, the Randlords, but from the points of view of the underclasses. In the former book, he examines the role alcohol played in ridding the ZAR of agricultural surplus, while providing an anodyne to the masses as well as an incentive for labour recruitment. Sex was the other attraction, and prostitutes streamed to the Rand, first from the Cape, then in increasing numbers from the slums of America, Britain and Europe, closely followed by their symbiotic pimps and gangster elements.
President Kruger, the arch-reactionary statesman, actually connived in the launching of Republican rotgut, and condoned prostitution as a necessary evil, only to be forced into passing the ‘Ontugt Wet’, in effect the first legislation which prohibited relations between black miners and European women – when the ‘swart gevaar’ raised its ugly head in the minds of the local gentry. The Boer War altered all that, but only briefly, and soon Milner was forced into putting the first Immorality Act into force.
Lastly, transport, and in particular the cabbies, come under the magnifying glass. As the New Babylon grew from a scant few square miles some forty-fold in size within a few years, the transport needs of the masses had to be addressed. Once again President Kruger proved to be the reactionary influence, as he wanted his constituency, the agriculturalists, to have an outlet for their products, ie forage. He steadfastly refused to grant concessions for anything but horse-drawn vehicles and trams, when electricity was already a viable alternative. The author follows the power struggle between cabbies from different racial groups, their organizations, changes from the basic Cape cart, to the modish Victorias and Landaus, and on to the motorised taxi. He describes the stratification of cabbies by laws and regulations into classes, which in turn determine the fares and race of the passengers. Lastly, in 1906, the electrified tram, or trolley, made its appearance – and to my wonder, I actually still made use of those historic conveyances in the late fifties and early sixties!
The second book in this series “New Niniveh”, concerns itself, among others, with the role and composition of the servant-class. Firstly sturdy Irish and Scottish lasses were the preferred imports (after all in a society of 88% unmarried men, they could prove to be useful as breeding stock) but these inevitably succumbed to the white colonialist class-consciousness, which decreed that manual labour was unfitted for those of paler hue. Enter the Zulu ‘houseboy’ who would handle the menial work under supervision of the cook-general. Inevitably the economic fluctuations in the fortunes of the mining industry, made this structure too expensive, and black women joined the rank of servants, and then ‘picaninnies’ became the logical lowest rung of this labouring class.
Another interesting sub-class was that of the dhobi’s, or amawasha – who laundered the dirty apparel of Rand society. These consisted again mainly of Zulus, who formed a guild of micro-entrepreneurs wielding no little power and influence in the burgeoning city. The author sketches their rise and inevitable decline as mechanized steam laundries, shortage of water and capitalist intrusion crept into their kingdom.
A section of the book deals with the role of the Afrikaner poor, especially after the Boer War. From the ruins of their agricultural origins they streamed into the city and competed for work with foreign workers and the black labour force. The author traces the proletarianisation of this group, unemployment and the rise of a class-consciousness which was to play a growing political role as the century progressed.
Lastly the book deals with the shadowy criminal army that inhabited the caves, derelict mines and prisons on the Reef – the Umkosi Wezintaba – a Mafiosi-type brotherhood, rooted in social injustice, but which changed to robbery, extortion, burglary and murder. The mine compound system, the prisons as well as the free-roaming members of this army, were well-organised and informed and became a serious threat to law and order for several decades. Both of the above books are recommended reading for serious historians and students of the South African industrial revolution, but for a casual reader they may be too academic in flavour.
Another tour de force by this author was “The Seed is Mine” (Hill & Wang 1996); an award-winning biography of a black share-cropper, Kas Maine, whose life spanned most of the 20th century. From the edge of the Kalahari, where he spent the first half century of his life, he was a subject of the forced removals that became such a feature of the apartheid regime. As farming became increasingly mechanized, his services became less and less valuable to the white farmers on whose land he lived. Finally he ended up in the puppet state of Bophutatswana, with a plot of land which was too small to be farmed economically, and from where he had to send his children off to the cities to make a living.
Politics hardly entered into this man’s life, rather it was the economic and social changes that affected him most, leaving him powerless to alter the environment in which he lived. His working relationships with the white landowners and the representatives of the white government, both only concerned with their own interests, were surprisingly good, though he was never their equal socially. He is often portrayed as being critical of individual whites, but never rails against them as a group. The book is a real tribute to a hard-working black farmer, who showed remarkable forbearance and patience with his lot.
The latest book written by this author, “The Fox and the Flies” is visibly the result of his previous researches into the underbelly of the Witwatersrand demi monde. It chronicles the life and times of Joseph Liis, aka Joe Silver, thief, burglar, racketeer, gangster, whoremaster and psychopath. His nefarious career started in southern Poland, from where he emigrated to London with one of the early waves of migrants in the 1880’s. He wasted no time in establishing himself as a petty criminal and pimp on the streets of the East End at the time of the horrendous Whitechapel murders – of which more later. At the ripe old age of 21, already syphilitic, he decided to bless New York with his presence.
His American chapter saw him continuing in a similar vein, but even though he made full use of the corrupt lawmen of his adopted country, he spent his first two spells in Sing Sing and Riverside prisons in Pittsburgh, after which he left the States as a naturalized US citizen and returned to London, where he was soon incarcerated in Pentonville for a stretch. His next target was Johannesburg, and here van Onselen gives a fascinating insight into the low-life of this city in the making, where almost ninety percent of men were single, perpetually thirsty and looking for diversions. He describes Silver’s racketeering, his interaction with South African notables, such as Smuts, Manie Maritz and Mostyn Cleaver, which was to result in lengthy court cases as well as the first stirrings of an immorality act being passed by the old president, Kruger. The beginning of the Boer War found Silver in jail once more. First the Fort in Johannesburg, then the Potchefstroom prison. When the Brits threatened the town, Silver was shown the open gate and he departed thankfully to Kimberley, which was celebrating the lifting of the siege. Here again he did not last long doing what he did best, and once more he landed briefly in jail before being deported to Cape Town.
The Mother City, and particularly District Six, proved to be congenial surroundings until the war ended, when our man departed to – wait for it – Bloemfontein, of all places. Yes, even that placid Boer capital was to feel the impact of the brothelkeeper and white slaver from hell. But once again his intrigues resulted in imprisonment and finally he was deported back to the Cape. He managed to spend a year there more or less out of trouble – except for leaving a ‘wife’ maddened with syphilis in Valkenberg, for whom he had to pay maintenance, so when the Germans were forced to ship out large numbers of troops to quell the Hereros in South West Africa in 1904, he judged that he might as well make the sleepy little town of Swakopmund, and later Windhoek, his new business locale. Finally, in 1906, his luck ran out and several of his prostitutes ganged up on him and the German authorities incarcerated him once more before deporting him again. In vain he tried to leave ship at Cape Town, as well as at Durban, but the subcontinent had become too well informed about his activities, so he had to return to Europe.
His further adventures include Germany, France, Belgium, Argentina, Chile, New York and London again, before he finally departs almost inexplicably towards Poland, where he belatedly meets his just deserts – apparently for a completely different reason. I’m not going to spoil that one for you though.
The book is a tour de force of meticulous research and dogged pursuit of information. The subject is not a pleasant one; in fact, the author makes a case for Silver to have been ‘Jack the Ripper’, but to all devotees of things criminal, this book is a must. For those with an interest in the social history of the late 19th and early 20th century, it is also a valuable work and a thumping good read. Happy reading!