BOB BROWN WAS TWO HOURS into his flight back to New York from Southern Africa in the summer of 1985 when he was given a message from the cockpit by one of the flight attendants. I’d persuaded an official at South African Airways to pass on by radio the news that Arthur Cumming, a Rhodesian with whom we’d been hunting a few days before, had been murdered.
Dapper, brave and a veteran of this bush war, Arthur had been dubbed ‘Gentleman Jim’ by some of the members of his unit, the Rhodesian Light Infantry or, as we knew it, the RLI. Whether in civvies or in the distinctive mottled green cammo gear worn by Prime Minister Ian Smith’s ‘rebel’ army, he was always impeccably turned out.
First details of his murder, which took place at the Cumming hunting concession not far from Wankie in Rhodesia’s north-west region, were sketchy. However, since we’d got to know the Cumming family quite well – we’d been hosted by Arthur and his wife, Sandy, in their home in a region that had had its share of hostilities in the ongoing guerrilla struggle – we were able to relate to what little we’d been told. With another American adventurer of repute, Big John Donovan, as part of our group, Bob had even managed to bag a decent sized kudu bull and, to the chagrin of us all, a sable antelope.
The routine at the old Cumming ranch – it had been in the family for a couple of generations – was the same for each of the five or six mornings that we had hunted. We’d go out in Arthur’s Land Rover before dawn each day. While we’d have to travel across dirt roads to get to our destination, which was troubling, we weren’t deterred: Arthur had been using those roads just about forever and he was fine, so far anyway.
It was worrying that there had been landmines laid in many of the surrounding hunting areas during the previous couple of years, but so far none on the Cumming’s concession. In several cases nearby, insurgent mines had been triggered by vehicles and some of the occupants, children included, had been killed. We were also aware that a few weeks before we’d arrived, insurgents active in the region had used a couple of TM-46s to boost an explosive charge that they’d use to drop a bridge across the nearby Matetsi River.
Our tracker on this leg of our Rhodesian adventure was Tickey, a senior member of the Matabele tribe who’d been with the Cumming family for more than 30 years. Small and wiry, with a pinched face, Tickey could read the bush like you or I might scan a newspaper. He’d follow a trail through thorn and scrub brush and tell you how many animals had used it, exactly what they were, how they were moving, in haste or passively, and when last they’d passed that way.
Tickey could spot a lioness in the long grass even before she knew he was there. As Arthur said, he was the best in his league and the man was justifiably proud of his ability. He was very much ‘part of the family’ he told us.
When asked about his loyalties, considering that so many of the other African folk in that area had been subverted by insurgents, Arthur was unequivocal: ‘I’ve grown up among his people. So did my dad and his dad. I speak his language like his own children. Consequently his people are my people.’
He went on to say something about a bond of understanding between the folk on his ranch that he’d seen demonstrated over and over again. In fact, the family was on such good terms with its ‘native’ staff that Arthur actually declined a government offer to erect a security fence around the homestead.
So who were we to argue when Tickey rode shotgun on board the four-by-four while we hunted the big stuff?
What we didn’t know – and which was only to emerge afterwards – was that Tickey was already a fully paid-up member of the guerrilla force active in the region. Had he been a bit smarter, he could probably have led us into an ambush. That would have been a jackpot all-round: a handful of Americans and a journalist to boot.
He could certainly have done so had he wished: subsequent reports spoke of a squad of ZIPRA guerrillas some 30 or 40 strong that had entered the region from Zambia a short while before we’d arrived. Furthermore, they were armed with some of the best squad weapons in the Soviet armoury, including RPG-7s.
In the end, Tickey waited until we’d left the farm to head home before he led his group of terrorists into the Cumming home. That happened shortly after Arthur’s brother Lawrence had gone off to Bulawayo earlier in the day.
At about nine that evening, according to Sandra Cumming, Arthur got up to lock the outside doors, much as he always did about that time of night. Moments later, she recalled, three black men wearing the uniforms of the Rhodesian Army – complete with camouflage cloth caps – entered the room. They’d come in from the kitchen, which meant that somebody had opened the outside door for them.
Sandy’s first words to her husband were ‘Arthur, what’s the army doing in the house?’ All that Arthur could do was shout: ‘Run Sandy! Run for your life!’ Then all three intruders opened up on him with their AKs and this Rhodesian farmer crumpled in a heap on the cement floor.
Sandy, almost nine months pregnant, had meanwhile slipped out of the house through one of the side doors. Roughly 30 seconds later she heard more shots, some of them ricocheting off the concrete. The terrorists had delivered the coup de grace and she knew that her Arthur was dead.
By slipping into a low clump of foliage at the bottom of her garden, Sandy Cumming managed to survive the onslaught, even though her husband’s killers spent a good while searching for her. Finally, even though the insurgents were still in the house, all of them gathered together in the sitting room and plundering the booze cabinet, she was able to sneak back into the house and activate the recently installed Agriculture-Alert system – we used the term Agric-Alert.
While Sandra Cumming played hide-and-seek with her husband’s murderers, a nearby army patrol rushed to her rescue. But even that took time.
The favourite insurgent ploy in that war, immediately prior to an attack on a farmhouse – as with Malaya while its guerrilla emergency lasted – was to lay a pattern of mines, usually an anti-tank mine surrounded by a cluster of anti-personnel mines (APs) in the approach road to the farm. If nobody had been able to check beforehand, one or more of these bombs might be detonated by the vehicles heading in.
Arthur Cumming, though critically wounded, didn’t die immediately. And because the entire farming community of the north-west – for a radius of more than 100 miles – was connected to the same radio-based security system, they could follow the drama in real time. They’d all heard Sandy’s first call for help once she’d emerged from hiding, the killers having returned to the house after their fruitless search outside. Finally, after the attackers left, she came onto the link again: ‘Arthur’s dead’ were her words.
Bob Brown was to learn all of this after he returned to the United States. He communicated with both Lawrence as well as Sandy Cumming. Not long afterwards, he was to get news about her newborn.
Reports that subsequently filtered through from Rhodesia indicated that Tickey, who had often hauled young Arthur about on his back while still a child, had been arrested. He was tried in court and executed by the authorities a short while later.
I covered the Rhodesian war almost from the start of hostilities. I was to go north of the border from South Africa – based as I was in Johannesburg at the time – scores of times in a dozen years. Sometimes I’d fly or sometimes I’d go by road, which I did often enough, occasionally with my wife. We’d travel the lonely road between Bulawayo and Beit Bridge, just praying that we didn’t run into the guerrillas.