VERY EARLY ON IN MY career, Nigeria became something of a turning point. I’d worked and studied in London, got myself professionally qualified and after a year or two in the big city, I started hankering after what the media disparagingly referred to as the ‘Dark Continent’.
London was fine, for a while at least, but after all that crush and bother, unabated noise and unwashed masses, this wild soul hankered after places that might offer some kind of challenge. I actually started to miss Africa and the quietude of the bush. Also, I needed action, lots of it. More importantly, I knew exactly where to find it: back in Africa, of course.
‘Untamed’ is how the travel magazines of the day would refer to the vast landmass to the south of Europe and in a sense they were right. In their own manner – clichéd and often repetitive – Hollywood and Hemingway had entrenched a bit of that mystique as well as some of the more glamorous aspects of a continent that was as uncertain of its future as mysterious. With books such as The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Robert Ruark’s Uhuru as well as films like King Solomon’s Mines and Where No Vultures Fly, they did a good job of creating the kind of mystique, particularly about East Africa, that appealed to the younger generation. Elspeth Huxley and Karen Blixen had originally set the scene: those who came later followed a well-travelled road.
Almost overnight, there was a casual Western drift towards Africa involving young people intent on uncovering some of these ‘New Frontiers’ for themselves. They would hang about The Thorn Tree in the forecourt of Nairobi’s New Stanley Hotel, or drink endless Tuskers on the verandah of the old Norfolk Hotel, all the while talking about their experiences, which they would embellish once they returned home. President Kennedy’s newly created Peace Corps was an integral part of it.
Meanwhile, the euphoria of new-found independence and charismatic and well-educated black leaders all had a hand in igniting some of the emerging torches of egalitarianism, almost like the Free Slavers of previous centuries. Sadly, it wasn’t long before some of this enthusiasm was tempered by a series of military mutinies and violence, much it coupled to corruption on an almost biblical scale. We were to learn soon enough that on the African continent, all these upheavals were extensions of the same equation: power and money in the hands of the few. It is also fair to say that black people had no monopoly in this truck: they’d already been well-tutored in the wiles of making a fast buck by their friends in Europe and America. For all this, I was still keen to go back. In fact, the more I heard the more eager was I to have a look for myself.
That was about the time that I returned to Britain from South Africa. In theory, I could have flown directly to London again, but instead, I decided to hitchhike. In practice, a white man in undeveloped countries doesn’t cadge lifts from poor people. Instead, he pays.
Though it took me four hard months, the trip was remarkable, if only because I survived an escalating guerrilla war in Portuguese Angola. That liberation struggle was my first real taste of things military and I found it both unusual and exciting. I was also to take one of the last flights out of Luanda to Pointe Noire in Congo Brazzaville, at that stage in a de facto state of war with Lisbon.
I even managed to cadge a lift on a ship from Pointe Noire to Port Gentil in Gabon, from where I travelled two days upriver on an open boat to Lambarene in a quest to meet the great Dr Albert Schweitzer.
Prior to that escapade, these were only places on the map in my mind, but they had always caught my interest. While at boarding school, I’d spent many hours pouring over maps – Papua New Guinea, the Okavango Swamps, Niger’s Delta, the Mississippi and the rest. One day, I swore, I’d visit them all. To some extent, I eventually did.
In the course of that trans-Africa expedition, for that was what it was, I went down with malaria several times, travelled overland and totally alone for lengthy stretches through the wilds of Liberia and spent a while in Dakar in Senegal, which was idyllic because it was almost like being on the Mediterranean coast in France, except that almost all the faces were black and this was the Atlantic. From Dakar I got a lift on an old oil-service tug to the Canary Islands.
Of all the countries along the way, I found Nigeria the most intriguing. It had become independent just five years before and it was possible to go anywhere you liked in complete safety. Equally, you didn’t have the level of criminality for which the country has since become notorious nor anything like the number of murders that now take place. Though some of this mayhem may since have been limited by the combined efforts of both the army and the police, it is only recently that people were still being murdered for the Nikes on their feet, sometimes on the way into town from the airport.
During that first 1960s visit I managed to explore almost the full extent of Africa’s most populous state and I loved it. I adored the people and their disjointed, garish, cacophonic cities. Even the food appealed: plantain, gari and fu fu, which was sometimes so hot it could sear leather.
Moving overland in Peugeot taxis (or the more cumbersome, cutprice mammy wagons – trucks with seats on the back and with something of a roof for cover), it took me about a month to cross from the Cameroon Republic to what was then known as Dahomey (Benin today). Along the way, I found a Nigeria that was a very different kind of country before a series of army mutinies and civil wars ripped it apart and moulded it into the crooked, inefficient and brutal catastrophe it has since become.
I would have liked to make even better acquaintance with the place, but I had to get back to Britain, if only to put bread on the table. If I was ever to come back, I told myself, I would need the cash to do so.
I spent five or six months establishing a daily shipping service between Tilbury and Calais. The ship was called The Londoner and we offered return fares to Paris for less than six pounds. It was owned by that imperturbable Swede Sten Olsson who established Stena Line – now run by his son – that still plies many British ferry routes.
Having accomplished that much, I hung around the Moorgate offices of one of the subsidiaries of the shipbrokers Clarksons while waiting for the next project, but it never arrived. There were lots of promises: a Chinese trade show when Beijing was still Peking (getting a visa was almost like winning the lottery), Angola’s Cassinga iron ore project and others. Angola offered promise, but then the project was stymied by a guerrilla insurrection. Though I was given a couple of raises while I waited, nothing caught my fancy and frankly, I was bored.