Our next stop was a place recommended on the backpacker’s grapevine: Jungle Junction. The hostel, situated on an island upstream on the Zambezi River from Livingstone, sent a guy called Fergus to pick us up in a beaten-up LandCruiser. It had a cracked windscreen, broken side mirrors and doorhandles, there were panels missing and the rear door latch was held together with a coat hanger. Oh, and there were 451,000 clicks on the odometer.
Manchester United and Futbol Club Barcelona stickers festooned the windscreen, reflecting the African obsession with European football and, in particular, the English Premier League. On the way out of town, Fergus picked up two female teachers from a college. The three Zambians in the front seat chatted, joked and laughed in their local language, Tonga, while modern African music played on one of the teacher’s mobile phones. It felt good to be moving again.
From the back seat, Sam pointed out a sixty-five kilometres per hour speed limit road sign, a new one to add to his mental collection. We left the bitumen after an hour or so and, with what remained of the side mirrors turned in, we bumped down a narrow bush track on non-existent suspension while the thorns of juvenile teak bushes and African balsawood trees scraped against the windows. The track led down to the Zambezi River valley. The teachers exited with their supplies at a small primary school in a village on the banks of the river. Apparently Sam and I were visiting the school the next day.
At the river’s edge, we piled into some balsa dugout canoes, operated by oarsmen who stood in the back with a single long oar, used for pushing or rowing. Sam was in one canoe, I was in the other. I tried to explain Sam’s challenges to Godfrey, the oarsman on Sam’s canoe. ‘He may not understand you completely,’ I said. ‘Sam is a bit different.’
Godfrey calmly nodded. ‘Okay, sure. Just stay still, Sam.’
‘Are there hippos?’ Sam asked.
Godfrey leant on his long oar and pushed off from the muddy bank. ‘Yes, but we’ll stay away from them.’
As we glided down the smooth waters, the honks of hippos echoed through the reeds. Elephants grazed on the bank. We reached Bovu Island where a white Zambian man, Brett, had set up the magnificently relaxed Jungle Junction. Sam and I were the only guests when we arrived, which was both good and bad: good that we had the facilities to ourselves, bad that it limited the chance for Sam to talk to strangers.
Bovu Island is also referred to as Simaleu Island after a Mr Simaleu. The story goes that many years ago he found a dead hippo on the island and tried to remove her uterus as material for some black magic. Unfortunately for Mr Simaleu, she was not in fact dead but asleep, and no doubt awoke in a surprised state. She contracted her private parts, trapping his arm inside her, and marched to the water, dragging Mr Simaleu behind her to his impending doom. With an axe in his free hand, and options running out fast, he did what he needed to do: he chopped off his trapped arm, and lived to tell the tale.
In the afternoon, Godfrey took Sam and me on a sunset canoe ride, a chance to have a fish from the canoe. Sam only reluctantly agreed. He doesn’t like fishing. The first time he caught a fish, from a boat when he was about ten, he was so frightened by the flapping white streak on the end of his line he promptly tried to jump out of the boat himself.
On the water, I lamely tried a few casts of the lure but I was really just going through the motions; I didn’t want to risk Sam jumping out of the canoe in these waters. The sunset over the Zambezi was heroic: we could glimpse the western orange sky here and there through the wild vine-filled jungle on the banks. A cacophony of insect noise and birdsong emanated across the swirls and eddies of the mighty river. Godfrey kept us clear of the rapids, where Muriel Spark’s ‘rocks that look like crocodiles and crocodiles that look like rocks’ ominously sat. He pushed hard on his pole as we inched upstream in the reeds and shallows, struggling against the incessant current.
As we turned and headed back for Jungle Junction, gliding easily now that the current was our friend, Godfrey mentioned to me that Brett had told him Sam was autistic. ‘My sister is autistic,’ he added, as he glided the canoe in the current.
‘Really, how old is she?’
‘Twenty-five.’ He paused. ‘So does Sam go to school?’
‘Yes, he’s in year eight.’
‘And does he shout at people?’
I wondered where this was going. ‘Not very often.’
‘My sister doesn’t want anyone near her. She lives by herself.’ Godfrey was clearly interested in Sam and the fact that he went to school, and could excel at maths and computer science. ‘People in the village think my sister has autism because she has been bewitched. Perhaps her father or someone else put a curse on her. She is actually my half-sister.’
I decided this wasn’t the time or place for a lecture on autism causality.
At dinner, we were joined by Brett in the dining hut: a thatched roof built around a giant African ebony tree. We chatted about autism, science and Harry Potter as I pushed Sam to eat a meal that was challenging for him: chicken cacciatore, rice and vegetables.
As we ate we were suddenly joined by a genet, perched on the railing beside me. Her body was the size of a small domestic cat but with her thin tail she was a metre long. Despite appearances genets are not cats, but are actually related to the civet. Her blonde coat was checked with dark brown markings, her tail striped. She eyed the three of us, and then the chicken. Before I knew it, a chicken bone on my plate was gone, and up with her in the tree. She was fast, very fast. Sam ate his chicken a tad quicker.
Our thatched hut was set away from the bar, restaurant and office. We had lighting in the room until the generator went off but no other power apart from at the office. The hut sat on stilts over the water. There were toilet facilities up a path but Brett suggested weeing off the verandah at night was probably safest. There was no Diesel here to protect us from hippos.
Elephants trumpeted. Hippos honked, stomped and splashed. Cattle mooed off in the village. A small something landed on the roof. A large something trampled in the reeds near the verandah. All that separated us from the river was a mosquito net and five wooden stairs.
Before dawn the hippos started up a ruckus. I crept out onto the verandah. In the dim moonlight I could see their hulking silhouettes a stone’s throw away, but I sure didn’t throw any. I reminded myself again that they can’t climb stairs and retreated inside.
Dawn lifted the mist from the Zambezi, the vapour rising off the fast current looking like a pot about to boil. Squadrons of reed cormorants glided by in tight formation, a large hadeda ibis, resplendent with his emerald-green sheen and ruby beak, hark-harked for a mate as he lazed on a hanging branch, a pied kingfisher shot from the reeds. The northern waters tumbled east to the rising sun in their relentless journey to the falls.
After breakfast we headed over to the village, a short canoe ride across the channel on the northern side of the island. Godfrey showed us through the village, a scattering of huts over a dozen or so acres, housing one hundred and thirty-six people at last count.
The village, with no electricity and water carted by bucket from the river, was authentically traditional. I had promised Brett and Godfrey that Sam and I would take my laptop over with us and give a lesson on the basics of word processing to the teachers in the primary school.
At the school, the kids were being taught outside in the sun, under a Zambian flag on a pole. The lessons were in Tonga and they spoke little English; that skill only became possible if their families could afford to send them to high school in Livingstone.
What the children lacked in English they made up for in enthusiasm. Fascinated by seeing themselves on the monitor of the movie camera I was carrying, they tumbled over each other and Sam and me to get into frame, yelling, screaming and laughing as they did so.
As the children broke for lunch the three teachers—Maureen, Marita and Alice—sat in a classroom with Sam and me. I showed them the basics of using a keyboard and a mouse, and cutting and pasting. Sam gave them a display of what could be done with word processing when you’re fast. They very much appreciated the lesson, but I wondered how many years it might be before a school like this would get a computer.
After the lesson we waved goodbye to the throng of jumping children and made our way back to the village. Cruising up the track behind us was Godfrey’s sister, Manga, the one with autism, and her friend. This was going to be interesting.
Manga was certainly wary of us and aloof, but shook Sam’s hand and said hello before walking on ahead of us to her hut, next to Godfrey’s.
‘So what does she do?’ I asked Godfrey, as we strolled along the dusty track.
‘She fishes and sells oil. She is very good at fishing.’ Manga, just ahead of us, heard him and half-smiled. As she moved further away, Godfrey explained that she was very skilled at catching fish using a simple wooden pole, a piece of string and a worm on the end. She would sell the fish to people in the village, but only particular people on particular days. No one knew why, but she never relaxed her self-imposed rules.
She would also buy a large quantity of oil from a wholesaler before dividing it up and selling it to the villagers in small bottles. Once again, only to certain people on certain days. And she never made a mistake with the money. She lived alone, with only minor support from her family, and spoke well, although only when she felt like it.
‘Do you think she’s content with her life?’ I asked.
Godfrey stopped walking and turned to me. ‘Yes. I do.’
It was fascinating to see how an autistic woman, probably one who would be classed as high-functioning in a developed world environment, coped in a village in Zambia, and also how the village coped with and reacted to her. After a while Godfrey started talking again. ‘You know, every now and then—say, every few months—she just takes off. Just walks. She can walk all the way to Livingstone. Sometimes she turns up at the police station there, asking for a lift back.’
I thought to myself that it was a bloody long way to walk. ‘Why do you think she does it?’
‘It tends to happen when she’s stressed. Maybe it’s a release.’
Sam, Godfrey and I reached the community centre, a small open-walled hut where a village woman cooked over a makeshift fire. A friend held the woman’s one-year-old baby, and the two women chatted while she cooked. Skinny dogs slept on the dusty roads, chickens followed by their chicks scratched under the thickets and thorn bushes nearby. Rectangular mud huts, some with doors and windows, some not, but all with thatched roofs, stood here and there. African music floated over the village from speakers somewhere distant.
Sam was wary of the food. Our cook prepared okra, eggplant and tomato, and ground peanut with rape, all to go with the cornmeal pup. It looked and smelt good to me, but even though Sam might have managed some of this in a more familiar environment I knew it wasn’t going to happen today so I didn’t push.
Godfrey chatted to the women in Tonga. I heard Sam’s name mentioned and computers and teachers. He explained he’d been telling the ladies how Sam, even though he was like Manga, had still taught the teachers some computer skills. There was an unmistakable note of defiance and pride in his voice.
As we headed back to the canoes after lunch one of the men in the village shouted across a cow field to Godfrey, pointing at the river. On the far bank was a hippo with a gaping wound in its leg, likely from a croc or another hippo. Our canoe was about fifty metres from the wounded beast. Godfrey manoeuvred carefully, keeping a close eye on the animal, but we were safe.
The next day—after the hippos fortunately had a quieter night—we headed back to Livingstone and Jollyboys. Our last day in the city was spent trying to catch up with schoolwork and neuroplasticity exercises. Sam’s table tennis had improved markedly throughout the week and he was chuffed with himself. He had stopped seeing it as a chore and actually asked to extend our game a little at the end, which in turn made me feel chuffed.