At midnight, on my flight to Johannesburg, an alarming commotion woke us all. A black stowaway had been discovered, a sad mad young man whose history is anybody’s guess. At dawn I saw him lying in a narrow space behind the last row of seats, his hands and feet heavily manacled, his expression terrified. When I glanced down at him he began to cry. He had wet himself: they wouldn’t, he sobbed, let him go to the toilet. One could scarcely blame them for that; he looked seriously deranged and the midnight struggle had sounded strenuous. Nearby, an Afrikaner steward sat on guard, a tall hulky fellow, his thick sleek hair like a shiny brass helmet, his pale blue eyes close-set, his lips thin in a plump face that was easily rearranged. For me it wore a professional, steward’s smile. When I emerged from the loo it wore a snarl of contempt as he addressed some remark, in Afrikaans, to his captive. I asked, ‘What’s the story?’ Discomfited, the steward looked away – this stowaway might, after all, have been a hijacker … Then he muttered, ‘Even in the air they make trouble!’
At Jan Smuts airport I changed planes for Lusaka. From there, on the morrow, a bus would take me to Karoi in northern Zimbabwe, where Lear (my dearly beloved bicycle) had been left with friends at the end of last year’s ride from Nairobi.
As we took off the extrovert Afrikaner beside me introduced himself as Mr Du Plessis, sales director of a pharmaceutical company. He thoroughly approved of the recent political changes. ‘Sure we dodged most sanctions easy enough – Malawi helped a lot. Only our expansion northwards was blocked. The Chinese, Japs, Taiwanese, Koreans – all those yella fellas, they had Africa all sewn up. But since ’91 we’re right in there, fighting hard.’ Mr Du Plessis had no hang-ups about being governed by blacks in the nearish future. ‘The ANC know which way to jump, they can smell where money comes from. And their Commie friends don’t count any more.’
Gazing wistfully down at Mashonaland, Mr Du Plessis lamented having been born too late to kill an elephant. Hunting was his ‘hobby’, but now only Arabs and Americans can afford to shoot big game. He didn’t seem to notice my failure to make sympathetic noises.
In June 1992 I had left a drought-stricken region, Lusaka’s air harsh with dust and despair, starving villagers flocking to the city from hundreds of miles away, the vestigial grass like brown wire, brittle leaves rattling on the trees. Now, eight months later, I stepped out of the airport into warm light rain and a riot of fecundity – all around the brightness of new growth, a gleaming tender green. My impulse was to sing and dance in celebration but that might have alarmed Mr Du Plessis.
Walking to the main road, a pannier-bag in each hand, I passed herds of cattle still bony but now content, grazing avidly. When an archetypal African bus, palsied and hoarse, picked me up at the junction a youth made four inches available at the edge of his seat and asked where my vehicle had broken down. I don’t think he believed my story. South Africa beckoned – ‘Here are no good jobs’ – but he feared capture on the border. ‘Down there the police put you working on farms for no wages and the farmers whip you.’
Lusaka is a ramshackle mini-capital, swarming with small highly skilled pickpockets and large daring muggers. I felt a glow of affection as its few obligatory flourishes of high-risery appeared on the horizon. At a residential centre for AIDS patients, where I stayed on previous visits, ten black South African public-health workers had arrived the day before ‘to learn from the Zambian experience’. They were USAID-sponsored and led by a paunchy information co-ordinator from Colombus, Ohio. African countries, he asserted, need teams of Western psychotherapists to enable people to get a handle on all this AIDS trauma. He sounded like a skit on ‘the Western helper in Africa’; his protégés made no comment but their body language was eloquent.
In Lusaka’s bus terminus – sprawling, thronged at sunrise, the atmosphere cheerful – nothing indicated from where which bus left and the legends over the cabs were best ignored; a bus marked ‘Blantyre’ might be going to Mbeya. Most of the drivers sitting in empty buses didn’t yet know their destinations but hoped soon to find out. Two kind youths noticed mama’s problem. When the unmarked Harare bus at last appeared they promptly identified it and trustingly I climbed aboard.
The fare for the 180 miles to Karoi was £3, a the rate commensurate with the vehicle’s condition. Only faint traces of cream paint remained on the grey metal of the interior. The red leatherette seats were in shreds. One door handle had long since been replaced by a rusty nail-and-chain contrivance. The other door had been welded to the body after the last crash – so explained our corpulent driver as he heaved himself across the engine to get to his seat. There was no roof-rack, though most passengers were setting off on trading expeditions to Karoi or Harare. They embarked in high spirits, exchanging long complicated greetings and cryptic jokes. Two baby-laden young women had a struggle to enter: their head-loads were a colossal round basket of tomatoes and a bulging sack of maize-cobs. They laughed uproariously at their own predicament, then at last were in, depositing their loads on the floor where other passengers had to surmount them, which they did uncomplainingly.
A green-and-white bus parked nearby looked much smarter than ours but when required to start its engine made resolutely uncooperative noises. At once a dozen men volunteered to push it, resembling a rugby scrum as they bent and shoved, and shoved, and shoved. They were still shoving when we rumbled away, no more than an hour late.
I felt content that morning – and curiously liberated. Without evading the grimness of life in much of modern Africa, one can recognize that this continent is not yet sick as our continent is sick. Most Africans remain plugged into reality. In contrast we have become disconnected from it, reduced to compulsively consuming units, taught to worship ‘economic growth’ – the ultimate unreality in a finite world.
By noon I was happily reunited with Lear, who had been polished, oiled and pumped in anticipation of my arrival.
It took me eighteen days to cover the 1,270 miles from Karoi to Beitbridge, via Raffingora, Mutorashanga, Mazowe, Harare, Chivhu, Gweru, Zvishavane and a few Communal Areas (ex-Reserves) deep in the bush. Because Zimbabwe’s main-road traffic is quite heavy, by African standards, I chose dirt tracks – usually well maintained – wherever possible.
Towards the end of The Ukimwi Road I wrote: ‘Having sniffed the air south of the Zambezi, I felt Zimbabwe to be not a continuation of Black Africa but – both historically and emotionally – the beginning of South Africa.’ This is hardly surprising. Most of the original white settlers, the Rhodes-funded Pioneers, came from South Africa in 1890 and soon apartheid (known as ‘parallel development’) was flourishing in Southern Rhodesia. The Reserves were the equivalent of South Africa’s ‘homelands’, infertile places of banishment for ‘surplus people’. Southern Rhodesia was established not as a new colony ruled from London but as a commercial enterprise run by the British South Africa Company. When the Pioneers failed to find another gold-bearing Rand they turned to farming, with small-scale mining as a secondary interest. In 1897 an official British government report noted that slavery – delicately described as ‘compulsory labour’ – was widespread, as was the use of the sjambok to make that labour more productive. However, Rhodes’ diamond-and-gold-based omnipotence tempted London to ignore his company’s ill-treatment of the ‘natives’. A century later the residue of that brutal tradition remains obvious enough to shock newcomers.
Most commercial farms are still white-owned though some blacks – whose sources of wealth do not bear scrutiny – have joined the ranks of the landed. A lucky minority of rural blacks own subsistence farms, the soil pale and poor, or have a share in a new and usually inefficiently run co-operative. Many of the landless are seasonal workers who reap tobacco for Z$175 a month, the minimum legal wage, equivalent to £16 at the 1993 rate of exchange. As in South Africa, those workers are allowed to cultivate small plots of their employer’s land. In 1948 the Danziger Commission decided that 10 acres (not hectares) was enough for both the cultivating and grazing needs of a black family in Southern Rhodesia. Forty-five years later a tobacco farmer told me that 40 hectares (100 acres) of tobacco could keep a white family in modest comfort – yet farms of up to 80,000 hectares are common. Moreover, in addition to their spacious homes many whites have a holiday bungalow on the Kariba dam, complete with speedboat. All this under a black government … Peering apprehensively into South Africa’s future I wonder if, more than a decade after ‘liberation’, the needs of the majority will be similarly disregarded.
Zimbabwe, too, had been transformed by the ending of the drought. Everything was thriving: tobacco, maize, sorghum, cotton, sunflowers, pastureland. The clarity of the light, especially after a rain shower, exaggerated each colour: the redness of the soil, the greenness of the forests, the silveriness of the cliffs, the whiteness of high, complicated cloudscapes. Sometimes surreal granite-rock formations towered over the road where erosion had gone mad, creating gravity-defying constructions: piles of house-sized boulders on cliff-edges, looking as though a finger could topple them. Other crazily marvellous geological aberrations were visible in mountain form, thrusting up along distant horizons in a wild disarray of angularity.
Having ascended to Karoi by bus, I had forgotten Mashonaland’s altitude: about 5,000 feet. From Zvishavane a spectacular descent, around and around and around precipitous forested mountains, took me into enervating heat. Here stretch many miles of unpeopled rough bush, unused though capable of sustaining cattle. This whole area is extra-securely fenced as the property of Union Carbide – an ominous name, posted on gateways under ‘KEEP OUT!’ warnings. Throughout Zimbabwe, I found cycling past so much fenced farmland disquieting. Those fences, essential on commercial farms, are profoundly – philosophically – unAfrican.
Next day I was down to the punishing lowveld, sweating towards the Limpopo on a road hideously yellow-carpeted with squashed locusts. The unsquashed compounded the repulsiveness of the scene by eating their dead comrades. All around loomed baobabs, those most improbable of trees, seeming sculptures rather than growths. By sharing their vitality with humans and animals, baobabs – immensely complex organisms – have saved countless lives. In regions otherwise waterless the fibrous wood secretes water, some fruit trees storing up to 5,000 litres. Wherever it grows the baobab’s fruit is the locals’ main source of vitamin C and women believe it increases their fertility, which may well be true. I rested under one awesome giant, leaning reverently against a trunk perhaps three or four thousand years old.
My last evening in Zimbabwe was spent in Peter’s Motel on the border, beer-drinking with truckers from Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Lesotho, Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland. No one was even remotely interested in the politics of the new South Africa; they had other things on their mind, like feeding their wives and families by fair means or foul. Helpful hints were exchanged about which sort of bribe was most acceptable to which customs officer; everyone seemed to be smuggling something to or from somewhere. An alarming number did not retire alone. One can only hope they used the free condoms found on their bedside tables.