Dark Continent my Black Arse Page 4

  Earlier that morning I had met a new guest who had installed himself in the dormitory. I could not miss him because he was so tall that his feet stuck out over the slats at the bottom of the bed. Peter, a 28-year-old from Ireland, had been travelling for 18 months and had been to 42 countries. His goal was to travel to 50 countries before turning 30. He was in Africa to do the Cape to Nairobi.

  One of the many pleasures of travelling is that you meet so many interesting people doing things they genuinely want to do. It was very inspiring to talk to Peter. When I expressed my amazement that he had travelled to so many countries at such a young age, he responded modestly, ‘There are more than 180 countries in the world. So I have done just more than a quarter.’ Although he was into information technology, he also worked as a barman in the different countries he visited in order to finance his trips.

  Peter and I had a long talk about the unending war in Northern Ireland. He explained to me, in detail, that the war had nothing to do with religion but was about the independence of Northern Ireland from Britain. ‘Just like the ANC ended up resorting to an armed struggle and using its armed wing Umkhonto weSizwe to further its objective of having a free South Africa, Sinn Fein could not achieve its goals just by talking to the guys in London. That is where the Irish Republican Army came in,’ my well-travelled companion explained.

  Peter had tried to convince me that we should go to Etosha National Park for a few days and then do the Nairobi trip together. Although he looked like a cool dude, I wanted to do this whole thing on my own so as to be as flexible as possible and not have to explain anything to anybody. That was why I was on a bus that was heading not for Etosha but for Livingstone, via Windhoek.

  When travelling in Namibia you are bound to go through Windhoek because, although Windhoek is in the middle of nowhere, it is right in the heart of Namibia. On the bus I sat next to a man who I was sure, judging by the size of his tummy, was a farmer. He was wearing a Springbok T-shirt. Just to break the ice, I said, ‘I see you are a great rugby supporter.’

  He did not respond and the way he looked at me made me wonder why I had asked him the question in the first place. That was a good reminder of how behind the times some people still are.

  I was obliged, thus, to spend most of the time looking through the window, trying to enjoy the scenery, which reminded me once again that Namibia is a really vast, dry, sparsely-vegetated and sparsely-populated country. The four-hour trip to Windhoek felt more like 14 hours. After all, I was sitting next to a heavy-breathing, Klipdrift-guzzling, white racist pig whose dress sense stretched to khaki shorts and a small black comb held in place by a long grey sock.

  At Windhoek bus station I noticed that the bus heading to Cape Town was carrying a number of beautiful young girls. I found myself re-thinking the question I thought I had answered long ago: was it better to do the Cape to Cairo or to start in Cairo and end in Cape Town? At that moment, looking at those fresh, sexy things, I thought maybe I should have started in Cairo and ended in Cape Town. That was such a stupid thought, though, because if I had started in Cairo I would still be in Egypt at that moment.

  Those are the kind of ideas men entertain when they start thinking with their second head, which was the case with me right then.

  The bus left Windhoek at sunset, heading up Sam Nujoma Drive in a northeasterly direction to Livingstone. I was now seated next to a man who was obsessed with eating peanuts and was using a matchstick as a toothpick. I spent most of the time looking out the window. I was really impressed, in transit, by the small and attractive towns of Otjiwarongo and Tsumeb, the capital city of the Otjikoto region in northern Namibia which is known as the ‘Gateway to the North’.

  Tsumeb is the town closest to the Etosha National Park, one of the greatest reserves for wildlife in all of Africa and a major tourist attraction. Although Tsumeb was once a thriving mining town, owing to a rich ore pipe that has produced large quantities of copper, zinc, lead, silver and unusual crystals, it is now mainly a transit point for tourists.

  When we stopped eventually in Grootfontein, named after its large hot spring, I had no sooner stretched my legs than a man came up to me and greeted me in Zulu, ‘Unjani mfowethu?’

  Before I could respond, he began to tell me his life story.

  ‘You see, my broer, I was born in Kenya, grew up in Namibia and studied electrical engineering in Cape Town. I am now back and working for the Namibian Electricity Corporation.’ As to be expected of a coloured man who had lived in Cape Town, he had no front teeth and smelled of alcohol.

  Why can’t you coloured guys leave the snoek fish and Black Label alone? I was about to ask, but he did not give me a chance.

  ‘You see, my broer, I can see the difference between Xhosas and Zulus by looking at their eyes. All Zulus have squint eyes. So that is how I knew that you are a Zulu,’ he continued, confidently.

  That was a first for me. Nobody had ever told me that I have squint eyes. What is a well-known difference between Xhosas and Zulus, acknowledged especially among black South Africans, is that Xhosas are very manipulative, power-hungry people whereas Zulus are stupid, taxi-driving war-mongers who are capable of insulting you until you develop concussion.

  After a half-hour break at Grootfontein, which also used to be a thriving mining town, we headed north again. My ‘broer’ had in the meantime wandered off in search of new companionship.

  It was not such a comfortable night because, instead of cuddling with Laura the man-eater as on the Cape Town to Windhoek leg of the journey, this time I was stuck next to a peanut-eating black man who could speak only Afrikaans, his home language. How weird. He clearly did not know of June 16, 1976, when more than 15 000 unarmed school kids in Soweto, on a march to protest against the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction, clashed with police and about 700 people were killed in the violence that followed. Because of the peanut eater’s monolingualism we could not communicate and there was nothing to do but put my head back and close my eyes. Even while dozing off, I was surprised by how wide and straight the tarred road through Ovamboland was – until I registered this was territory occupied until 1990 by the South African Defence Force.

  We got to the rural border town of Kasane at sunrise. The majority of passengers, including the peanut guzzler, disembarked. The rest of us were stamped out of Namibia in a modern immigration office without any problems whatsoever.

  To the woman I met on Swakopmund’s beachfront: For just one day, I regretted having thrown away your phone number.

  Kaunda’s Zambia

  Father of the Nation

  Zambia, formerly Northern Rhodesia, became an independent country under Kenneth Kaunda after the United National Independence Party, which he had led since his release from jail four years earlier, won the general election held in 1964. Born at Lubwa Mission in Northern Rhodesia in 1924, KK, as he is affectionately known, started off as a teacher. He left his teaching career at the age of 27 to work full time for the political liberation of this country.

  The ‘Rhodesia’ part of ‘Northern Rhodesia’ obviously came from Cecil John Rhodes, whose British South Africa Company (BSAC) pushed the railway line further north of Bulawayo (in what was then Southern Rhodesia), via the town of Livingstone, between 1904 and 1909. In 1911, the BSAC amalgamated North-Western Rhodesia and North-Eastern Rhodesia into Northern Rhodesia and received a charter to administrate it. In 1924 the British government took over the administration of the territory until it achieved independence on 24 October 1964.

  KK was president for 27 years. After seven years as head of state, he turned Zambia into a one-party state and declared himself president for life. Frederick Chiluba, leader of the Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD), spearheaded the reintroduction of multiparty democracy in Zambia and succeeded KK in 1991. When things got so bad under Chiluba’s lead-ership that some Zambians wanted KK to stand for re-election, Chiluba amended the constitution to make only Zambian-born Zambians eligible for election as presid
ent. The fact that KK’s father was born in Malawi was enough to put him out of the running. In 2001 Zambia elected its third president – Levy Mwanawasa, the new MMD leader.

  Kenneth Kaunda played an important role in the liberation of South Africa by allowing anti-apartheid freedom fighters who had gone into exile to stay in Zambia, and by permitting South Africa’s then banned ANC to locate its head office in Lusaka. For that I am grateful to KK.

  The wheels of bureaucracy ground more slowly on the Zambian side of the border. In a corrugated-iron shack masquerading as an immigration office, the queues were longer and more questions were asked, and our bus was inspected in a leisurely fashion by one of the immigration officials. Some passengers, I am not sure why, were taken into a back office. As a result, it took more than an hour to process the 25 passengers on the bus.

  Once everyone was back on board and we were on the road to Livingstone, I observed that the landscape was no longer the same. On the Zambian side there was more undergrowth and shrubs and trees, as well as huts and houses, not to mention cattle strolling across the road. The roads, compared with those in Namibia, had deteriorated.

  Not long after leaving the border, we hit a roadblock. A police officer climbed into the bus and walked halfway up the aisle, turned and got off, without saying a word to anyone, including the driver. Almost the same thing happened at the second roadblock a while later, except that the officer walked all the way to the back of the bus before turning and leaving without breathing a word to either us or the driver.

  About 20 kilometres from Livingstone we came across a local bus that was stuck in a ditch. The passengers, mostly women it seemed, were trying to push it out, but to no avail. Our driver stopped to investigate and, in consultation with the hostess on our bus, decided that we must try to help.

  The hostess announced to us passengers, ‘This is Africa; we have to help them, because tomorrow we might get stuck and then we will expect them to help us.’ After those few words everyone was ordered off the bus. Nobody seemed put out and we all obeyed quietly.

  The ditch in which the local bus was stuck was much deeper than anticipated and our bus struggled in vain to pull the other bus out with the help of a thick rope. A few minutes later a truck arrived and, naturally, the truck (driver, that is) volunteered to help. In no time the bus was out of the ditch and everyone clapped while some women ululated. We got back on our east-bound bus and the other passengers got into their bus, which headed in the opposite direction.

  After about 15 minutes, we found ourselves on the outskirts of Livingstone, where our driver had to fork out 100 000 Zambian kwachas at a dilapidated tollgate plaza. It was the first of a number of currency transactions in Zambia and neighbouring Zimbabwe that involved many thousands of kwachas and Zim dollars. (At the time the exchange rate was 770 kwachas to a rand, so the tollgate fee amounted to about R130.)

  Twenty-five hours after leaving Swakopmund, I was in Livingstone.

  The man after whom Livingstone is named, the missionary and explorer Dr David Livingstone, was the first European to see (on 16 November 1855) the breathtaking falls on the Zambezi River that he named Victoria Falls. At present, the Zambezi River forms the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe. It is strange that the name Victoria Falls remains, considering how much Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe hates Britain. The original name was Mosi-oa-Tunya, which means ‘smoke that thunders’.

  The British explorers, including John Hanning Speke, must have esteemed their queen, Victoria, very highly. While looking for the source of the Nile, Speke stumbled onto the largest lake in Africa and promptly named it after her as well. Again, after all these years of Africa’s ‘indep endence’, that vast body of water, which is of great natural importance to the continent, is still named after Her Royal Highness, Her Majesty Queen Victoria, who died more than a hundred years ago.

  Thank goodness, neither Livingstone nor Speke, as far as I know, saw the Sahara. Had they done so, the world’s largest desert would no doubt be known today as Victoria Desert. Nobody can blame the explorers, I suppose, because they were mostly sponsored, after all, by the Royal Geographical Society. They had to show their gratitude and appreciation in some way, and naming their ‘discoveries’ after their Queen was an easy way out.

  Unlike the early British explorers, who were looking for fame and fortune and, especially in Livingstone’s case, to spread Christianity, I had reasons of a more personal nature for undertaking my journey. Given all the negative things I had read about the African continent, I wanted to experience for myself – by myself – Africa’s culture and languages, cuisine, architecture and whatever else she had to offer, and to see the effect outsiders had had on her.

  Livingstone, which the locals also refer to as Maramba, is very small for a town that for 24 years was the capital of Northern Rhodesia. What’s more, despite its old and run-down buildings, dusty and potholed roads and very relaxed atmosphere, thousands of travellers regard it as the African adrenalin capital, with bungee jumping, white-river rafting, canoeing, elephant riding and viewing of wildlife and of the falls all at your doorstep, so to speak. It is little wonder that within an hour of arriving in Livingstone I had booked myself on a Zambezi sunset cruise for later the same day and for a microlight flight over the Victoria Falls the following day.

  At midday I checked in at the Jolly Boys backpackers in town. My dorm mates were Dave from London, who was in Zambia for four days, and Lizzy, also from London, who was going to spend a week in Zambia before heading for Botswana and on to Namibia. Jollies, as Jolly Boys is called, had a swimming pool, a bar and no garden but a wonderful view over the treetops of the spray rising above the falls.

  Soon after checking in, I decided to have a shower. After all, I had not washed for more than a day. I had rubbed a good lather of soap all over my body when the water from the showerhead suddenly diminished to a trickle, and before I knew it there was no water at all. I was, in a matter of seconds, left with soap all over my body but no water with which to rinse it off. So I had to rub the stinging lather off with my face cloth. As much as I agree that half a loaf of bread is better than nothing, half a shower is definitely worse than nothing. But, as they say, if you pay peanuts, expect monkey service.

  With an itchy and sticky body, I headed for the bar, by then the only place that could make me feel better. I spent an hour sippping beer before the transport arrived to take me, along with some other tourists, to the river.

  Although it was winter, the volume of water in the river was impressive, the white mist churned up by the cascading water thundering softly. Our double-decker boat had a motor, but only minimum power was used and, as a result, we just glided gently over the mighty Zambezi. The price of the cruise included food and drinks, so I continued from where I had left off at the bar. I was spoilt for choice as far as alcohol was concerned: there were several brands of local beer, whisky and brandy. I opted to continue drinking Zambia’s finest beer – Mosi.

  The two-hour cruise was very relaxing, especially after spending more than 24 hours in a bus, and almost everyone was on the upper deck to enjoy the view of the small overgrown islands dotted all over the river and of the banks covered in tall trees in which you could glimpse monkeys swinging from branch to branch. Meanwhile, something was bugging me. After a couple of drinks, I had enough courage to approach the captain. I was convinced that we were drifting downstream and I wanted to know when we were going to turn around to keep us from plummeting down the Victoria Falls.

  ‘No, my friend, we are going upstream. The falls are actually behind us,’ he said in a calm and soft voice. Although I was tipsy, I felt very embarrassed. The comforting thing was that nobody had heard our conversation because almost everyone on board was too busy boozing.

  Later, I chatted to two young girls whom I had seen at reception at Jollies. They were African-Americans who had just finished a three-week exchange programme in Durban at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Small world, hey, I thought to myself. Sin
ce we were the only black people on board, besides the crew, we talked about a variety of issues of common interest, ranging from why black people don’t travel to why some African-Americans look down on Africa when their forefathers come from here. For their age, the girls seemed to be very clued up on world affairs.

  Sunset on the Zambezi was surreal, magical, the red sun reflecting off the water as the river continued on its more than 2 500-kilometre journey from its source in the northwestern part of Zambia to where it flows into the ocean, more or less midway up the Mozambican coast. It was one of those moments when I felt like making time stand still so that the moment could linger forever. The tall grass and trees overhanging the banks of the river made me love the place and feel even more peaceful.

  I stood on the upper deck of the boat enjoying the fresh breeze and looking at the sun as it disappeared quietly behind the horizon. While most of my fellow tourists were busy taking photographs of hippos, I took time to think about the journey on which I had embarked. I came to the conclusion that for my trip to be successful I would just have to take it a day at a time and not worry about what might be in store for me tomorrow.

  Back at Jollies it seemed like a good idea to return to the bar for some more of Zambia’s finest before going to bed. At the counter the two African-American students joined me for more chatting. I wasn’t really interested in them, though – I may look and act like a young man on the loose, but I do have principles. One is that I don’t take advantage of young girls and/or students. I made that decision during my student days when I saw older, working brothers having relationships with young students. It just did not seem right. In fact, I came to the conclusion that older guys who go out with students suffer from low self-esteem. After all, why, if you are working, don’t you date people in the same boat as yourself?