On the south-east coast at the bottom end of Africa, inland from what is known as the Garden Route in the Republic of South Africa, is the rural village of Joubertina. It stands in a valley that runs for over a hundred kilometres between the mountains that rim the ocean to the south and the mountains that rise in serried ranks to the north. It is about 20 kilometres from the sea; very far south in Africa. I retired to this village by chance, but as the clock turns Africa back to medieval times I am glad to be so far from it all.
An extended family from the fruit lands of Germany travelled in a wagon train heading towards the Eastern Cape in the early 1800s. They were skilled in fruit growing, knew about peaches, plums, apples and pears; fruit that needs cold winters and water to irrigate the orchards. The Kritzinger families were on the way north on the old inland wagon trail that avoided the deep river gorges along the coast. They saw the valley, approved and stayed. The chosen place is semi-desert, where the endless mountain flanks are bare of trees. Black-stemmed aloes and shrubs grow on the stony hillsides with small tufts of tough grass. It is cold and rainy in winter so ideal for apples and other pomes fruit.
A prevailing east wind often blows off the sea and picks up moisture which drops as rain as it crosses the mountains to the south of the valley. From these southerly, seaboard mountains run streams of crystal clear water, and along which bracken and heather grow at higher altitude and then as they gurgle down the lower valley, lush reeds and grass line the rivulets. The German family knew the value of the desert land with available water and founded the village and planted orchards. Those orchards now spread through the long valley and in this 21st century those who live in the valley still depend on the fruit industry. The fruit farms and the pack stores give work to most residents. Some families have worked the fruit farms for generations and are of mixed race, with German and Bushman antecedents. Those two races were the only humans living in the semi-desert for many decades. The fruit industry supports only a sparse population and in the village of Joubertina a few merchants’ buildings are scattered along the one town road.
Traffic on the main highway that runs along the mountainside above the village is light. The sounds of cattle calling, tractors working, geese fighting in the sky and distant dogs barking substitute the roar of big city traffic. In the new century, the year 2000, I came to live here in rural quiet after the sprawl and smog of Cape Town and sixteen years with the security department at the University of Cape Town. The proceeds of selling my house in the pretty little west coast suburb of Flamingo Vlei bought a rambling, broken-down, thatched farmhouse with ramshackle outbuildings on a hectare of land in the southern slopes above the village, the slopes opposite to where the main road runs and outside the municipal boundary.
My early years were spent on my grandfather’s farm in the midlands of what was then Rhodesia. The family was poor and lived in hard circumstances and so I am comfortably at home here in the long fruit valley in an old farmhouse. Some of my family live nearby.
An old friend, Armand, lives in a mobile home and recently drove it from a wet summer in Scotland down to Derbyshire where it was warmer and drier. He does not like England’s weather. He is a man of Africa and once we were stationed together in the remote Zambezi Escarpment. We drank a lot and seduced a lot of women and sometimes attended to our police duties. He doesn’t like England either and roams the continent of Europe a lot. He tried Bermuda or one of those places, maybe Jamaica, once, but found a Caribbean paradise too close, in all respects, to black Africa. He sometimes phones me, and we talk of distant days in that Shangri-La that was the country of my birth, Rhodesia, and to where my soul yeans to return. The country Mugabe has ground down is one of the poorest, worst-run countries in the world, but still the African rulers give him standing ovations when he struts at their talk-shops and forums.
“I have just the thing for you,” Armand says, talking loudly on his cell phone while sitting in some English summer field. He is excited. He always is. “You should write a book about mercenaries.”
“How did you come to that conclusion?”
“You were a Congo mercenary.”
Funny how he always adds ‘Congo’ to ‘mercenary’ believing it gives an added touch of menace to the word. Funny that thing about mercenaries giving a tingle of dread, because mercenary is what most professional soldiers are. Many soldiers in peacetime are motivated by money, even those who say they are in it to serve the country. Very few western armies do not employ men from other lands. Surely if you are not a native of the land in whose army you serve you are a mercenary? The British army has many South Africans, Indians and others from ex-colonial lands in it. The Americans in Iraq have thousand of paid foreign staff. So the question is why does ‘Congo mercenary’ cause such interest in others? Maybe the media built a bogeyman; or maybe the Congo really is the heart of darkness. Those who have been there, even for a few days, will know if the description is valid. Certainly the hot fetid jungles of the Congo have refined the practice of man-on-man cruelty.
“That was a hell of a long time ago, Armand. And I was there only for a short time.”
That conversation was forgotten until a visit to the bank which is across the road from the now disused railway station where a crumbling, vandalized steam engine stands next to the deserted station. Once again the septic tank was spilling sewerage down the main road, so my truck had to be parked on the uphill side of the bank. It was necessary to walk on the north side broken pavement so as not to soil my shoes. Crossing the road a thought came to me. Was the Congo of 1964 catching up with me again? That long-ago decaying chaos is mostly forgotten. Had it come down to the most southern tip of Africa? Maybe it was time to revisit a short spell of life that once had a major influence on me. Maybe putting it down on paper will allow me to see the situation here in a different light.
As the biblical age touted as the end of life is reached, all around are echoes from the Congo of 1964. Those in power display rampant greed and no day goes by without some corrupt official being exposed by the media. Looting, be it graft by the elected politicians, or by large gangs of heavily armed men rampaging through shopping malls, or battering cash-in-transit vans off the road, is rampant. Unlike in the Congo there is still some law and order. It seems to me looting is the trademark of Africa. Power and phone lines are stolen on a regular basis; even railway tracks are uprooted and sold. Here sometimes there are arrests, unlike the Congo, but for how much longer law and order will be enforced is uncertain, as time and again politicians breaking the laws are ignored by enforcers. In Africa the law does not apply to ruling politicians.
In the days of Shaka, and other African kings, anyone who had better crops or cattle than a neighbour was pointed out as a witch and impaled in the cattle kraal and his possessions were then shared between the ruler and his accusers. In modern Africa things have not changed much. In Africa people are still being identified as witches and killed and their possessions looted. Nearly every month the South African press reports such cases; normally well-off and elderly people in rural areas are pointed out and stoned. There are also regular ritual murders reported where body parts are harvested for black magic. Such conduct would make world headlines if it happened in the West. Witches? So what, it is only Africa! Of course, in South Africa the whites are all witches; in the rest of Africa anyone with assets is.
The decay in the village brings to me a feeling of inevitable, impending doom. Most of my life was spent fighting to keep my country, Rhodesia, out of black hands. Failure to do so destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives. While with the British South Africa Police my service included spells with the paramilitary Support Unit, and the Police Anti-Terrorist Unit, both dedicated to fighting terrorism. Rhodesia is no more. Zimbabwe is also no more, the mass murderer and master looter Mugabe has totally decimated it by his greed. Now South Africa, the country of my ancestors, is beginning to show all the symptoms of rule by black despots. I hope my dread is but prejudice.
These then are the paths that lead to the primordial forests of the Congo where butterflies do duty as vultures.
Violence came into my life at a very young age. At junior school one childish game was trying to recall earliest memory, trying to remember the earliest days. I regressed in my mind back as far as possible. There was a dew-wet fallow maize field filled with spear grass and the early morning sun made diamonds of the dewdrops stuck on the spiderwebs. It was cold and I was wearing a bib and a pair of dungarees. My brother, who is three years older than me, was aiming the .22 rifle at a dove cooing in a nearby tree. I must have been about four years old. Did we eat that dove? That early image stuck in my mind so today the details can still be recalled, but I fixed only the image of me in the dew-wet field. If the dove was shot it would have been eaten; using guns and killing began very, very early on.
My father’s family emigrated from England to South Africa in the 1820s and established a farm where they introduced chicory and grew rich in the little Eastern Cape village of Alexander. My paternal grandfather and his four sons moved to Rhodesia before the Second World War, and founded another farming dynasty there. My mother’s family were Afrikaans farmers who moved to Rhodesia in the early founding years of that country, in the late 1800s. As a child I spoke only Afrikaans and Shona, first learning English at school. The early days were spent on a farm in the midlands of Rhodesia, where the house was built of thatched poles and mud walls and there was no running water, telephone or electricity.
There is another early childhood memory of running down the steps of the old tin and thatch homestead, which was built under tall blue gums to look up at the sky at thunder passing overhead and the metallic grey shape of a massive four-engined bomber. There was shouting and excitement as the bomber roared overhead and then vanished behind the ridge where the neighbours lived, about five kilometres away. Soon there was the sound of metal tearing and then a rumbling, a booming earthshaking explosion and in the distance behind the far ridge a tall column of black smoke mushroomed skywards. That must have been at about the same time as my earlier memory. I was born in 1941 and that crashed airplane was on a practice flight from Gwelo airfield laden with training bombs. World War Two was still ongoing. How did I know it was an aircraft? It must have been the first one I ever saw, that big old war bird. Maybe someone told me what it was afterwards. A monument was built to the dead, a propeller from the bomber mounted on a plinth in the mealie field where it fell. We visited the crash site and the field smelt of blood and gunpowder; the smell of death. That familiar smell has been with me often over the years.
We grew up wild and untamed, barefoot and hunting the animals in the veldt with catapult, sling, bow and gun. When the school insisted shoes had to be worn it was with reluctance that I complied. The farmhome was left behind for boarding school at the age of ten. By that age guns and death were familiar and I could be trusted to shoot an ox and then skin, gut it and process the meat for the house. I knew very well what a gun was for. Death was familiar and death fed the family. Predators do not pity food. Much later I learnt of the other, very different death: that of man. Progress from hunter to trained man-killer was also at a young age.
Boarding school was Government subsidized and so children of the poor went to boarding school. We travelled by train from Salisbury to Que Que, a steam train which took all day to do the 150 kilometres, and we arrived smelling of coal. Once on the way to school my elder brother wanted the top bunk, but I beat him to it so he yanked me off by my leg. The steel ashtray that folded out from the cabin wall on a bottom swivel gouged my thigh as I fell and a chunk of meat ended up in the ashtray. When punched on the nose he did nothing because he was feeling guilty. That day I first felt the power and freedom of being strong and self-reliant. That scar on my thigh is still there sixty years on and always reminds me not to fear other men.
After final exams I never once returned to visit that high school where I learnt about girls and not much else. The strongest memory of high school is awakening sexual desire. Because of girls my shoes were regularly worn and my hair combed. The rules and regulations and studying and learning were hated intrusions. I was no good at any of it; it interfered with freedom and independence too much
There is part of me, a part that never leaves, that yearns for those youthful days and the freedom of the open veldt and the limitless horizon, the yellow moon rising over a stark baobab tree, a flooded river thundering rain-swollen between banks. No other man’s rules to tie me down. Jump into the flooded river and let the current go where it would and paddle only hard enough to keep the head above water. I wandered the vast, wild area of the family farm in school holidays, staying out for days, sleeping in caves and eating doves and wild fruit. At boarding school I wanted that back, and that is where my soul still lives. I am a child of the African veldt and would be as untamed as any bush animal if given the choice. But today the animals are gone from the forests of Africa, and the forests themselves are going to the charcoal ovens and I am caged by convention like most modern city-living men are.
Elvis Presley, rock and roll, stove-pipe jeans, leather jacket and hair slicked back with Brylcreem. Every night jiving and seeking the woman who might say yes, fighting and being cool. My mother was already in despair and worried about my future. I was staying at home and so had to take heed of her concerns. She booked me into the University of Cape Town on a bursary from the State Lottery as the son of a war veteran. My father had been with the Ghurkhas during the Second World War in Burma and India. That meant the British Government, who then ruled Rhodesia, would sponsor my education. Would my life have turned out differently with a university education or had Britain not thrown Rhodesia to the wolves? The future and past are not reachable.
The winds of change began blowing but were not heard because none of us colonialists were listening. While waiting to go to university, my mate Errol drove down the road in an Austin Healy 300/6. His hair was slicked back and he wore white-rimmed dark glasses. His big six cylinder, shark-bonneted, open sports car growled and burbled as he waved. Right then, more than anything, that big, long sports car and lots of money and all that went with it, became all that mattered. With only that, a man could pick and choose the girls; they would queue up. The Healy and money was the answer to the good life. An education was nothing, money was all. That same lust drove me for many years after leaving school.
At the time I was working as an assessor in the Tax Department. My need for a job, and a notice of vacancies on a pin-board in the post office, coincided. The job consisted of sitting in an office looking at forms all day. The Tax Department was in a big building and so there were lots of young woman to keep me interested and sane for a while. Life was then music, booze and girls. The salary was £360 a year, £30 a month. That bought a bicycle to get to work, back for lunch and then home again at 4.30pm. Affording a bicycle was considered lucky; many could only afford the bus. Those who have nothing are always satisfied with little.
Physical fitness is something that is essential for a long, enjoyable life. Fitness was part of my life and has always been so; ten miles each way, 40 miles a day on the bicycle. The previous year I had been captain of the rugby, water polo and gymnastics teams at school and also cricket and boxing. Forty miles a day on a bicycle was nothing. By the age of twelve my body was already fully grown to six foot two and 200lbs; working as hard as a grown man on the farm made sure of that. Club rugby and swimming remained a passion after school. Playing sport to stay fit gave way to other things, but a morning run was a lifetime habit. At a rock and roll session we talked, Errol and me, and he told me how to get that Healy Six. A job on the Copper Belt on the Northern Rhodesian mines was the answer to the Holy Grail.
The year 1959 found me as an eighteen-year old signing on as a miner at the lowest legal age. Lonrho mining company signed me up at the fancy multi-storied building in Salisbury with waterfalls in the foyer. Starting wages as a learner official would be £150 a month, plus a hundred underground danger pay and a monthly copper bonus then running at 75 per cent of salary, £430 a month; that was more than a year’s pay at the tax department. That money broke my mother’s heart. Money blinds the poor very easily. The Healy came out of the first month’s salary with change to spare. What else does a randy, strong eighteen-year-old youth need out of life but money and a fancy sports car? Mining underground? Dangerous work? When you are young and strong and quick and alive, danger is only an added excitement and enjoyment.
The copper mine was in the village of Mufulira. It is near the Congo border, near the Katanga Province and city of Elizabethville where there were diamond mines and other rich minerals. That city was a small Paris in those days of Belgian rule. Diamond smugglers came across the border and often at night in the mine single-quarters a black man would knock on the door and offer a stone. There was extreme danger of arrest in this, as one never knew if the man was a police informer and the detectives were hiding round the corner waiting for the buy to be made. It was a time to make a quick and right decision, or spend years behind bars. I bought a couple of times taking the risk, but the next step was selling and the only buyer was the Greek who owned the general dealer’s shop in the main street of the small town and the price was set so low it was not worth it.
It was those diamonds in Katanga and the other mineral wealth including copper that fixed in mind a picture of a country with endless wealth, of gold and diamonds that could be picked up off the ground, wealth there for the taking. The truth is Katanga is nearly like that nirvana of imagination and the mines have been, and still are, looted by a variety of despots. Various armies and warlords have been running the Katanga mines for many decades now. Mugabe sent in his army with his handpicked generals to support the elder Kabila and for many years those generals looted and shared the riches with Mugabe. The Congo President, the younger Kabila, is today still too weak to do anything about the exploitation of the Katanga wealth.
On Copper Belt mines, as in all mines, danger is part of the deal. It is not possible for a man to extract wealth from deep in the earth without being in extreme danger. When there are millions of tons of rock above the crawl hole, and there is no way of stopping that rock collapsing, only delaying it long enough to get the ore out, then life is at risk. On the Copper Belt the weight of the overhang was not the only danger. There was also plenty of underground water. The area is sub-tropical with heavy annual rain and that rain does not all run off in rivers; a great deal of it is stored in aquifers underground. On the copper mines teams go in to drain the underground lakes ahead of development. The drainage teams go down the drive to the face and a steel door with pipes and air valves is closed behind the team. They blast and smash rock until the drive is five metres from the lake. They then put in more charges and come out and shut the door. If all is well the charge breaks the rock bulkhead and releases the lake and the water floods to the steel door from where it is piped to surface. Most of the Northern Rhodesian mining towns’ water supply came from those underground lakes.
Sometimes the underground water goes undetected and a development driveway hits an area where the rock is so waterlogged it has turned to mud. As the drill crews hammer the bulkhead, drilling holes to put charges in, the rock face suddenly melts and millions of tons of sodden rock and a wall of mud rushes down the drive. A mudslide avalanche sweeps the underground railways away and minces the puny bodies of miners. But danger brings with it very high rewards and those who survive live very well, well enough to lure recruits to fill the shoes of the dead. That mining environment was also one that shaped me, an environment where danger and fear, in myself, and in my fellow man, was always present and familiar. Man learns from all the passing show of life, the good and the bad.
When a man goes underground in a deep mine he must control fear. To work in a mine a man must steel his heart and body to fear. When there is no light but the lamp on the helmet, where if the artificial light goes out a hand touching your face cannot be seen, then you block out fear of the dark. When you stand at the top of a black hole going down solid jagged rock hundreds of feet and you climb down that black hole on a vertical steel ladder whose steel rail steps are backed by wooden boards so gumboots do not slip through the rungs, and the hand rails are wet with condensation, then you put your fear of heights away. When you get into the man cage that takes you into the black from the surface, a cage the size of a railway carriage standing on its head, and there are two hundred other men in the cage, so the cable stretches a metre, and the winding engine driver thinks it is a joke to let the cage drop in freefall so your feet come off the ground and you float, then you put aside vertigo.
Thursday evenings were the worst time to ride the man hoist. Thursday was the evening when visitors were allowed to ride the man cage and visit the better, safer parts of the mine, safer being relative. That was the night the visitors, men and women dressed in clean blue overalls and wearing white helmets like shift bosses, and clean gum boots, gathered nervously at the man hoist cage. If you were going on shift then you braced yourself for the worst as the cage man closed the doors and rang his signal to the winding engine driver. As the cage carried only a dozen or so people, and not the hundreds it carried at a shift change, the hoist driver had lots of scope to play and he used it to the full, throwing the big drums into free spool and keeping it that way until a few metres from the level where you got out. Then he would gently apply brakes to stop the freefall, and follow with a hard stop so the cage bounced on the cable, the sill rising and falling in the doorway. The stifled screams of the visitors amused the cage man. The fear of others is funny.
The danger on the Copper Belt did not only come from the bowels of the earth. The men who mined were as hard as the rock they fought underground. Climbing hundreds of metres up and down each shift made men hard, lifting rock made them hard, pushing explosive charges into holes with wooden stakes, so as not to ignite the charge early, made them hard. Working with pneumatic rock drills that created a sound so loud it could not be heard but only felt in the air as a vibration, made them deaf and deaf men are loud and rambunctious. There was danger in all the social events of the mining town, danger from hard, loud and strong men, addicted to the feel of danger, who sought the danger as a drug. That too was the environment that shaped me.
A fresh eighteen-and-a-bit-year old lad was bait to the older miners, a chicken to pluck. It did not matter that I was large and very fit and had done a lot of boxing; it was better not go to the Mufulira Hotel bar on a Friday or Saturday night. Once on my own had been enough; the lesson had been learnt and the mine recreation club was my choice. Then Ron came into my life. He was a large, raw-boned Afrikaner who shared the single-quarter with me. The accommodation was a four-roomed house, two rooms each side with a gauzed-in veranda each and a shared bathroom and toilet at the back. The rooms were not inter-leading so one could ignore the housemate if you chose to. Ron was not someone easily ignored. He had a bad stutter and a wart on his penis. His face was covered in scars, his eyebrows white welts, and part of an ear was missing; the other one showed tooth marks. Ron wanted me to go with him when he picked his regular fight on Friday and Saturday night. Fighting was his favourite entertainment, and he needed me to go with him because the brawlers in the bar had learnt not to pick on him. Ron could pick his fight when the rock-breakers baited me, his friend.
Every weekend at closing time the rock-breakers milled around loudly abusing each other, trying to provoke a fight and inevitably a tough miner would grab my shirt front and stick his face against mine and enquire if I wanted to make something of it. Ron would push the man back and say he would make something of it, and took the other by the throat with his left hand. Punches would rain on Ron’s head and face. Ron’s right hand would clench and cock back behind his shoulder, the whole time his left throttling the punching man, and then the right would thunder against the man’s face and Ron opened his left hand and the miner fell unconscious on the floor. This was repeated many times over the months.
How times have changed. There was never any police involvement in those days when fighting was regarded as a legitimate sport. There was no animosity afterwards, no civil suits or charges of assault laid. Maybe there would be less violent crime today if men were still allowed to indulge in physical fighting. How did it come about that all such pursuits are so stigmatized in most of the world today? Has society become too ruled by its feminine side? A certain yearning to return to those wild, manly days comes back when dreaming in the sun.
Those sessions taught the value of having a strong man on your side. Physical fighting and learning to control other men is a very valuable thing to any would-be soldier. It came to me gradually in my life as part of the environment into which I was born. That life is passed. The warriors of old, who fought with sword and club, were the last men to earn the right to be called warriors. Those who were the most fearless were the most highly regarded. Is being fearless no longer needed in today’s soft world? Possibly not, as today cowards can kill just as effectively as a fearless man. Today’s weapons allow a man to kill from afar and stay remote from the act of killing. Maybe if wars were still fought hand to hand, and those who declared war were required to lead from the front, there would be a lot less war.
Those Copper Belt days were lived out near the border of the Katanga Province of the Congo. There was no way of seeing the future that would take me to that country. Politics was very far from my interests; I knew nothing of what was happening in my own land, knew even less about what went on in other parts of the world. The newspapers and media played a very small role in my life and in society in general then. News media had not penetrated all aspects of living as it has done today. Television was introduced to the country while I was mining; what concerned politicians seemed comical posturing at the time. The hand of government was still very light in those days; the free-spirited citizens of the Federation made sure the politicians did not interfere too much. The all-powerful centralized state did not exist in The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.
A constant in all British territories was once the need for a standing army. The belief throughout the Commonwealth was that one day there would be another major war and British subjects would be called to the defence of Britain. The use of young men as cannon fodder is an old and widespread practice. At the age of twelve I had been drafted into the school cadets and we wore the badges of Britain. The headmaster, who was also the hostel housemaster, ordered me to report to the parade square next to the armoury. A .303 Lee Enfield Mk 1V was put in my hands. I was ordered to march and fix bayonet and squeeze off aimed shots on the range at Bisley targets out to 500 yards. After range work boiling water was poured down the barrels of the old rifles to clean them, a practice which dated from black-powder days. Rhodesia was a British colony and a Rhodesian saluted the Union Jack. No-one asked my thoughts on that, only “fall in, and quick march”. So from an early age I was a soldier under command of those who were British through and through. Discipline instilled by British army training is hard to shake off.
Within months of leaving school the call-up to Territorial training arrived. For six months my body and soul belonged to the staff at the Heany Barracks outside Bulawayo. Each day was long and extremely physically testing. Hours of marching and running and nights spent digging trenches. Every waking second under the command of vicious corporals and sergeants with loud voices, who delighted in pushing men to exhaustion and beyond as any dissent meant weeks in detention barracks. My added burden was being made a Bren gunner; the machine gun was twice as heavy as a rifle and a lot more difficult to carry comfortably. On ‘battle practice’ riflemen were issued with blanks to fire, the Bren number two, who carried twenty empty spare magazines, had a wooden football rattle with which to simulate machine gun fire. The culmination of all the marching was the pass-out parade. The company, like robots polished and shiny, cleated boots like a cannon shots on the tar, one loud sound in unison. For many weeks after leaving the barracks my body would jerk to attention at any loud voice.
Our training was that laid down by the British Army over the centuries. The orders given while marching and doing arms drill were those from hundreds of years ago. The arms and equipment all dated from the Second World War or before. The webbing was that of a British soldier from the First World War, the ammunition pouches each side of the chest on web straps that ran over the shoulders, linked to the belt front and back. Canvas small and big packs clipped onto the same straps at the back, and a greatcoat of felt made up full battle order. The black leather boots were iron-studded. Puttees wrapped the ankles. It was all outdated, uncomfortable and impractical. The strict discipline was hammered into all recruits. Recruits were allowed to saying only one thing; “Yes. SIR.”
As a Territorial, one had to serve the army for many years and give a weekend per month to training. The assumption was always that you were a willing participant in the military. When the state needed to activate an army in any emergency, a Territorial had to heed the call. It is said that army service teaches a boy discipline. Maybe it does, but it also makes a boy yearn to put all military matters behind him and get on with living. That it did to me.
In the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland the early 1960s was when the Black Nationalist movement began to agitate for black rule and the murders which plagued the region for twenty years began. The Territorials of the Northern Rhodesia Regiment were called up and spent endless days in the Kitwe mine sports club hall waiting for the police to call them to assist in quelling the riots. That call never came. While lolling around in the sports hall, where blanket rolls were spread on the hard, wooden floor, radios provided some distraction. It was radio news that informed us the Belgian Government had suddenly caved in and had handed the Congo, whose border was nearby, over to the blacks. That news was incredible and almost unbelievable. Some men believed the news media had it wrong. No white man would just hand over a country to black rule. It was something far beyond any imagining. It was impossible to understand for those who had grown up in Africa.
Then the same news kept repeating the information and we had to believe it. The blacks attacked the scattered whites in the vast land of rainforest and big rivers. Where the hell was their army? When would the blacks be driven off? Each day the news reports came in of whites being killed and women raped. Convoys of fleeing whites stopped by rag-tailed Congolese Army patrols and mass murder and rape committed at the roadside. Those reports came to us in that echoing sports hall, while from nearby outside came the sound of rioting and shots of the police firing over the heads of the screaming black mob. Above all was the utter disbelief that anything like that could happen. This side of the border the agitating blacks were well under control; that would always be the case. The few police out there did not even need the might of the army to deal with the unrest.
They came through Kitwe, those sorry refugees, passing by in overloaded cars, many wearing bloody bandages and with grotesquely swollen faces all black and blue, all of them heading south away from the killing grounds. We stood and watched and wondered. The white men of the Northern Rhodesia Regiment had their suspicion of black rule firmly endorsed by the early Congo massacres of the white Belgians. Outside the sports club grounds smoke from burning barricades rose and teargas wafted on the wind. But no one had been hurt or killed. The strangeness of it all was hard to grasp. Yet to a man the Territorials were sure that nothing like that could ever happen in Northern Rhodesia. Then a family in a Kombi was stopped murdered by what became known as the Crocodile Gang. The winds of change blew dark clouds over the sun.
It was not only the irritating call-ups that got to me. It was also the obsolete orders that had to be obeyed. Trained as a Bren gunner it was my lot to carry the machine gun on riot duty. The rules during civil rioting were very strict and British. We were permitted to shoot only when individually ordered by name to do so by the senior officer in charge. Before any force was used at all, the riot act had to be read three times over a loudspeaker and a large banner telling all to disperse unfolded. If ordered to fire then all expended cartridges were to be collected as evidence for the courts. We soldiers laughed, but it was rueful laughter as we knew we would be compelled to comply. The officers were bloody mad. How the hell do you collect cartridges from machine-gun fire? How do you identify spent brass as your own? The call to help the police never came so the order to fire was not given. So our discipline was not put to the test. The police made do with teargas launchers and long batons. My own discipline would have been sorely tested by any such orders.
It was the persistent call-ups, combined with the stupidity of some of the orders and the strangeness of the new politics which was the deciding factor. The very high pay and bonuses on the copper mines meant there was plenty of money to spare. Many young miners of that wild time went off to Europe for a few years, travelled around, and had an extended holiday on the deep well of money. With two others from the mine as companions I booked on the Windsor Castle one way to England and left Africa to see some of the world. There were no plans other than to get away from the army. My experience of life was limited to how to hunt and fish and shoot guns. Maybe the best way for a young man to learn at the fleshpots of life is to begin with a clean slate. Begin with an open mind and with un-jaded taste. Excess quickly sates even the most robust appetite and enjoyment of excess lasts longer in the innocent.
The bitter resentment of military service was maybe misplaced. Throughout recorded history young men have been the mainstay of armies. There are valid reasons for this. Young men are physically capable of sustained labour. Young men do not understand death. Young men like playacting at being mature, grown men. In human males there is an instinctive hunting imperative that runs deep in the genetic makeup. Men all feel the innate urge to hunt and kill, and older men, the politicians, turn that urge to their advantage when they go to war with rivals. Everywhere the young are used when there is killing to be done. Young men are grateful for any small reward the elders deign to bestow on them; that reward is usually only false praise for being patriotic or real praise for false patriotism. When it is more than mere praise by the elders, when the reward is more material, young men line up in droves and offer to serve.
So it was that my twentieth year found me sitting on a deckchair aboard a liner heading for Europe. Big cities, wanton women, heavy traffic, nightclubs, and drugs were beyond my known, narrow horizon. Sitting on that deckchair was a big and strong farmboy, so inexperienced in life he thought nothing could scare him. The ignorant do not know what many things there are in life there are to fear. Work would surely not be a problem, as a learner official on the mine I knew all about ventilation, stope control and underground survey. What more could a man need to find work in England and Europe? The unknown has no terrors to those with no imagination. Life was good and sweet and the salty wind blew scent and suntan lotion across the rocking deck.
The anvil of life had so far only roughly shaped me and a final shape would take some time yet to emerge from the forge.