CHAPTER ONE

FORMATIVE DAYS IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

Neall Ellis’s determination to hew his own path in life can be traced back to his youth and, more precisely, to his experiences as a schoolboy in Bulawayo and, later, in Plumtree, both in the south-west of what is now Zimbabwe. In colonial times it was known as Southern Rhodesia, or simply Rhodesia.

Born of good British stock in South Africa’s great mining and financial centre of Johannesburg on 24 November 1949, he didn’t live there long. Six weeks later his father moved the whole family to Rhodesia. At the time, Ellis Senior was general manager of Gallo Africa, a major music production and sales company, probably the biggest of its kind in Africa. Originally from Woolwich, near London, he had come out to South Africa with the Royal Navy during World War II. He had served on board the battleship HMS Royal Sovereign on Arctic convoy runs, shipping vital supplies to the Soviet port of Murmansk in Russia. His service with the RN also took him to South Africa where, in Simonstown—then a British naval base—Leslie Thomas Ellis met and married Ruby Sophia Hyams. ‘My mother’s side was very Afrikaans—they were Vissers—while my grandfather’s name was Hyams’, recalls Neall.

The move to Bulawayo brought many changes, including a number of different homes in the city. As Neall recalls: ‘My parents encouraged us to be pretty independent … we were strictly disciplined and my mother used to thrash us with a wooden coat hanger, but it would always break, so it wasn’t too bad!’

There were two large dams, not far from home, where the kids would fish: ‘Mom was petrified whenever we went near either of them, having already lost one son to drowning. However, we were taught to swim at a very young age—something like three or four.’

In one of the family homes, at Hillside, on the side of a kopje at the back of the house, the youngsters played their games in the nooks and crannies of the rocks and they would sometimes encounter cobras or other bush creatures that had ventured in from the wild.

We never thought too much about it—the snakes would give us a wide berth if they sensed our approach and we would duck away if we saw them—got spat at by a Cape cobra a few times, though.

At the time, Dad was very friendly with a man named Alan Boyle, an Australian, and both men were what you’d call ‘party animals’. They would go up north into Africa, driving or chartering a light aircraft, the idea being to make recordings of traditional African music which Dad loved. It was all the kind of antiquated reel-to-reel stuff that you never see today, bulky, testy old machines.

Neall believes that his father’s interest in this aspect of ‘Black Culture’ was the start of old man’s Eric Gallo’s specialisation in traditional African music, for which the company later became known. More important to the Ellis children at the time, their father would return from his trips with lovely ebony masks and other African carvings, curios and a huge variety of native trivia on which tourists today spend good money. Neall recalls: ‘One morning I went into the kitchen and opened the fridge. There was a candy box and inside, one great big lump of elephant shit!’

Growing up, young Neall remembers lots of weekends when the family and their friends went up into the Matopos Hills on picnics. Rhodes lies there, watching over the country once named for him, under a brass plate set into granite over his grave on the summit of one of the gomos.¹

Meanwhile, the kids would play games, such as kennietjie. This game would start with a groove being dug in the ground. Then one of the youngsters would take a twig and lay it across the groove, before flicking it with a stick and someone else had to catch it. These were the kind of pastimes that children of the original Pioneer Column must have played of an evening after they had unhaltered—or as we liked to say, outspanned— their oxen following a long day’s trek. Neall recounts:

I was fascinated by the historical impact of the area, especially what that tiny band of settlers who had followed in the wake of Cecil John Rhodes’ dream had achieved. There were lots of stories of these rugged, tough pioneers, almost all of them frontiersman like Alan Wilson and his Shangani Patrol … and their bloody and terrible end under the spears of Lobengula’s Ndebele warriors. There was a great lore, a fine historical tradition in all those tales that were recounted around the fire in the evenings, and I was fascinated. It was the same when my grandmother introduced me to the history of the Zulu people and their tribal cousins, the Ndebele, who moved northwards into Rhodesia long before the white man got there.