The Enigmatic Ornithologist

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

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

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

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.