ON THE ROAD
The serialised version of Rob Burton's African Writings
PART SEVEN On The Road –Zambezi
(Tip - New readers should start from PART ONE at the bottom of the page)
We trudged back down the dirt road away from the Kazungula ferry. We, my wife and I, had been refused entry into Zambia. The immigration officials had made the decision that we were refugees from Rhodesia and we had to go back. I had told them that we had new passports issued in Gaborone because we were tourists and we had lost our original passports on the road. I did this because if they had seen our original passports they would have seen our South African visas and we would have been refused entry too. This cut no ice with them as they put the dreaded ‘refused’ stamp into our pristine passports. The only advice they gave us was to go back to Joburg and fly into Lusaka, the capital, where the immigration service could deal with us properly.
That was a dead end. We didn’t have the money to follow that advice. We barely had enough money to get us back home once we were in Nairobi, and then we would probably have to wing it a bit. I thought once in Kenya we could probably wangle something to get us home overland.
The immigration officials as we re entered Botswana told us to go and report to the police station because of the deportation stamp. Which we duly did. I was pretty nervous because the whole charade was a bunch of lies and if we were not careful it could come tumbling down around our ankles. Southern Africa in the late 1970s was embroiled in the political turmoil that would fester until Apartheid South Africa and what was then Rhodesia had tumbled and white rule demolished.
We entered an old colonial style building and in a room to our left sat a guy in a dusty uniform and beaten up peaked cap. He looked like he was in charge. We told him our story trying not to give too much away. Basically just as much as we had told the border guards. We were tourists, we’d lost our passports and got replacements at the embassy in Gaborone. He told us that he would contact Gaborone to check our story. I was sure this little police outpost didn’t have a direct line to the passport office of the British embassy so we thanked him and left. We didn’t go back to see if everything had checked out. We knew we were at the end of the road.
The guys who were running the trucks up North told us someone was coming South and we would be picked up and taken back to Joburg. In the meantime, we needed to get a room at the local hotel. There was only the one place to choose from, the name of which is lost in the mists of time, but on the upside, it was on the banks of the Zambezi river. After dumping our bags, we found a table on the veranda and ordered a cold beer and watched the water flow.
Soon we were joined by a bunch of guys, mainly South Africans but they also had in tow a young Australian bloke with a broken arm. They were truck drivers awaiting tankers coming south sanction breaking. Shell Company tankers full of fuel/oil were driven south by black drivers then handed over to the South Africans. [In breach of United Nations Security Council Resolution 134 according to Google]. The aussie had fallen off a motorbike as he tried to manoeuvre it through the rivers of dust and mud that passed for roads in these parts. He’d broken his arm which was patched up and plastered in Gaborone.
It soon became evident that these South African guys were a little bit more than just truck drivers. Over the beers they told us stories of their exploits as mercenaries in the explosion of wars on this continent. The older guys had fought in the Congo in the 60s while some of the younger ones claimed to have fought in the Angolan war a few years before. Some of the guys were carrying photographs which showed piles of dead African soldiers with white mercenaries posed beside them. They were clearly a tough bunch but good enough company on a hot evening with plenty of cold beer on tap. The aussie, on the other hand was turning out to be a bit of a dickhead.
The next day a couple of us wandered back up towards the ferry to see what was happening when we came across a confused and somewhat disoriented American. He span this yarn of travelling through Africa disclaiming Shakespeare on the side of the road to earn a few coins so he could eat. He was certainly ragged enough, dusty and longhaired and thin as a rake. He told us that he’d had a real problem at the border. The Botswanan's had tried to refuse him entry, using, he claimed, regulations that inhibited the import of animals to the country, and dogs in particular. He didn’t have a dog. He told us that he had had to argue his case long and hard and until finally he got through the immigration procedure.
The next time we saw him was later in the afternoon as we were wandering down the road more or less sightseeing, not that there was much to see. He had been arrested and was being held in a wire compound behind the police station. My wife and I went to to speak to him through the fence and he asked us to get him some cigarettes and to call the American embassy to tell them of his problems. Later that evening we both wandered back having called the US embassy and told them of their citizen’s distress. They told me that someone was already on their way to sort it out. This struck me as strange, because, I wondered, how did the embassy get to find out about their guy being in prison so quickly?
As we approached the compound we could see the guy was being beaten by two guards, so to our shame, I am afraid we walked on by, looking the other way. One has to look after oneself in these circumstances, maybe if we had a couple of the ex-mercenaries with us things would have been different, but it was just my wife and myself. The guy didn’t get his cigarettes and we never saw him again, I assume he was sprung by the embassy and even after all this time I still wonder who the hell he was? CIA? Who knows.
The next day other travellers turned up and one in particular gladdened our hearts. It was another British guy; I don’t know how he got there but he was toting a huge sea bag. Once he’d found his room and got settled over a beer he posed the question would we like to smoke some grass? Do bears shit in the woods was the obvious answer to that question. So we all trooped off to his room. Once there he emptied out some clothes and books from his off white sea bag and offered it up. Blow.Me.Down. The thing was about one quarter full of leaf. He had been picking it off the side of the road because it grows wild out in the bush. I knew this because I had traded work for matchbox’s full of the weed with the black guys in the steel mill I had so recently left. We filled our pockets and went off to get stoned.
That evening found a half a dozen of us sitting on the banks of the Zambezi watching the sunset, drinking beer and smoking huge spliffs. It was great, the air was cool and languid. We watched the patterns the current was making as the water drifted past. We pondered on just why this bit of the bank tapered nicely down to the rivers edge. Then we bloody realised we were sitting slap bang in the middle of a hippo run. The place where hippos left and returned to the water. Big hippos, the most dangerous animal in Africa (apart from mosquitos) who despite their size could hit around 20 mph. Cue the massive drug induced paranoia that we were all going to get chomped to bits or run over by this huge mammal as we scrambled away from the waters edge to the safety of the bar.
The next day, however, we were lucky enough to see hippos in their natural environment. A couple of the ex-mercenaries decided they wanted to go fishing on the river and we were invited too. The prey was going to be the fearsome, or so they told us, Tiger fish. What was even more worrying were the rules the hotel manager impressed upon us as we rented the boat and the equipment from him.
The place where we were staying was at the juncture of four countries. Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Zambia, Botswana and the Caprivi Strip, a salient of Namibia. This area was alive with insurgents attacking white rule in Rhodesia and further south in South Africa. While not quite a war zone the area was alive with military activity. We were told, in no uncertain terms, that the rule of the river was to stay on our own side. If we were to drift or veer over the centre line of the waterway we would be shot at. With that at the forefront of our minds we set off.
(Tip - New readers should start from PART ONE at the bottom of the page)
We trudged back down the dirt road away from the Kazungula ferry. We, my wife and I, had been refused entry into Zambia. The immigration officials had made the decision that we were refugees from Rhodesia and we had to go back. I had told them that we had new passports issued in Gaborone because we were tourists and we had lost our original passports on the road. I did this because if they had seen our original passports they would have seen our South African visas and we would have been refused entry too. This cut no ice with them as they put the dreaded ‘refused’ stamp into our pristine passports. The only advice they gave us was to go back to Joburg and fly into Lusaka, the capital, where the immigration service could deal with us properly.
That was a dead end. We didn’t have the money to follow that advice. We barely had enough money to get us back home once we were in Nairobi, and then we would probably have to wing it a bit. I thought once in Kenya we could probably wangle something to get us home overland.
The immigration officials as we re entered Botswana told us to go and report to the police station because of the deportation stamp. Which we duly did. I was pretty nervous because the whole charade was a bunch of lies and if we were not careful it could come tumbling down around our ankles. Southern Africa in the late 1970s was embroiled in the political turmoil that would fester until Apartheid South Africa and what was then Rhodesia had tumbled and white rule demolished.
We entered an old colonial style building and in a room to our left sat a guy in a dusty uniform and beaten up peaked cap. He looked like he was in charge. We told him our story trying not to give too much away. Basically just as much as we had told the border guards. We were tourists, we’d lost our passports and got replacements at the embassy in Gaborone. He told us that he would contact Gaborone to check our story. I was sure this little police outpost didn’t have a direct line to the passport office of the British embassy so we thanked him and left. We didn’t go back to see if everything had checked out. We knew we were at the end of the road.
The guys who were running the trucks up North told us someone was coming South and we would be picked up and taken back to Joburg. In the meantime, we needed to get a room at the local hotel. There was only the one place to choose from, the name of which is lost in the mists of time, but on the upside, it was on the banks of the Zambezi river. After dumping our bags, we found a table on the veranda and ordered a cold beer and watched the water flow.
Soon we were joined by a bunch of guys, mainly South Africans but they also had in tow a young Australian bloke with a broken arm. They were truck drivers awaiting tankers coming south sanction breaking. Shell Company tankers full of fuel/oil were driven south by black drivers then handed over to the South Africans. [In breach of United Nations Security Council Resolution 134 according to Google]. The aussie had fallen off a motorbike as he tried to manoeuvre it through the rivers of dust and mud that passed for roads in these parts. He’d broken his arm which was patched up and plastered in Gaborone.
It soon became evident that these South African guys were a little bit more than just truck drivers. Over the beers they told us stories of their exploits as mercenaries in the explosion of wars on this continent. The older guys had fought in the Congo in the 60s while some of the younger ones claimed to have fought in the Angolan war a few years before. Some of the guys were carrying photographs which showed piles of dead African soldiers with white mercenaries posed beside them. They were clearly a tough bunch but good enough company on a hot evening with plenty of cold beer on tap. The aussie, on the other hand was turning out to be a bit of a dickhead.
The next day a couple of us wandered back up towards the ferry to see what was happening when we came across a confused and somewhat disoriented American. He span this yarn of travelling through Africa disclaiming Shakespeare on the side of the road to earn a few coins so he could eat. He was certainly ragged enough, dusty and longhaired and thin as a rake. He told us that he’d had a real problem at the border. The Botswanan's had tried to refuse him entry, using, he claimed, regulations that inhibited the import of animals to the country, and dogs in particular. He didn’t have a dog. He told us that he had had to argue his case long and hard and until finally he got through the immigration procedure.
The next time we saw him was later in the afternoon as we were wandering down the road more or less sightseeing, not that there was much to see. He had been arrested and was being held in a wire compound behind the police station. My wife and I went to to speak to him through the fence and he asked us to get him some cigarettes and to call the American embassy to tell them of his problems. Later that evening we both wandered back having called the US embassy and told them of their citizen’s distress. They told me that someone was already on their way to sort it out. This struck me as strange, because, I wondered, how did the embassy get to find out about their guy being in prison so quickly?
As we approached the compound we could see the guy was being beaten by two guards, so to our shame, I am afraid we walked on by, looking the other way. One has to look after oneself in these circumstances, maybe if we had a couple of the ex-mercenaries with us things would have been different, but it was just my wife and myself. The guy didn’t get his cigarettes and we never saw him again, I assume he was sprung by the embassy and even after all this time I still wonder who the hell he was? CIA? Who knows.
The next day other travellers turned up and one in particular gladdened our hearts. It was another British guy; I don’t know how he got there but he was toting a huge sea bag. Once he’d found his room and got settled over a beer he posed the question would we like to smoke some grass? Do bears shit in the woods was the obvious answer to that question. So we all trooped off to his room. Once there he emptied out some clothes and books from his off white sea bag and offered it up. Blow.Me.Down. The thing was about one quarter full of leaf. He had been picking it off the side of the road because it grows wild out in the bush. I knew this because I had traded work for matchbox’s full of the weed with the black guys in the steel mill I had so recently left. We filled our pockets and went off to get stoned.
That evening found a half a dozen of us sitting on the banks of the Zambezi watching the sunset, drinking beer and smoking huge spliffs. It was great, the air was cool and languid. We watched the patterns the current was making as the water drifted past. We pondered on just why this bit of the bank tapered nicely down to the rivers edge. Then we bloody realised we were sitting slap bang in the middle of a hippo run. The place where hippos left and returned to the water. Big hippos, the most dangerous animal in Africa (apart from mosquitos) who despite their size could hit around 20 mph. Cue the massive drug induced paranoia that we were all going to get chomped to bits or run over by this huge mammal as we scrambled away from the waters edge to the safety of the bar.
The next day, however, we were lucky enough to see hippos in their natural environment. A couple of the ex-mercenaries decided they wanted to go fishing on the river and we were invited too. The prey was going to be the fearsome, or so they told us, Tiger fish. What was even more worrying were the rules the hotel manager impressed upon us as we rented the boat and the equipment from him.
The place where we were staying was at the juncture of four countries. Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Zambia, Botswana and the Caprivi Strip, a salient of Namibia. This area was alive with insurgents attacking white rule in Rhodesia and further south in South Africa. While not quite a war zone the area was alive with military activity. We were told, in no uncertain terms, that the rule of the river was to stay on our own side. If we were to drift or veer over the centre line of the waterway we would be shot at. With that at the forefront of our minds we set off.
As with most fishing expeditions I’ve been on we didn’t even get so much as a bite. What we did get to see was a herd or a pod of hippos languishing in the water. For such large animals it is easy to come upon them unawares. The first indication is just the little grey lumps of their ears sticking out of the water and as one gets closer it is then they rear out of the water exposing their large grey shiny bodies and large ivory teeth as they get spooked. We didn’t get too close. If one of the females had a calf she would want to protect it. As previously mentioned hippos kill more humans than one would expect of a country populated with lions, cheetahs, crocodiles and other dangerous animals and reptiles. A swift about turn was in order and we made it safely back to the hotel.
Back at the hotel, it turned out that the aussie had been a bit of a prick. When some of the drivers went to their truck for food supplies to cook something up for themselves. They found the cupboard was bare. Despite having a broken arm he had become popular with the local ladies. It wasn’t just his good looks they were after it was the tinned goods and food that he was paying them for their services. He was lucky he didn’t add a broken nose to his list of misadventures. Fortunately, as the crime was seen as a sexual misdemeanour by the group of toughs we were hanging out with, he got away with it.
Later, he was still around bragging about this and that, when he started pooh poohing the grass we were smoking as not being ’hard’ enough. I told him we had something much ‘harder’ in my room––smoking heroin. And if he wanted some I’d go and get it. He was game. What I did have in my room was a dried out teabag. We mixed the tea leaves with more grass and rolled a nice looking joint for him. He took it way and sat and smoked the whole lot – he really did bogart that joint maaan. And he got really stoned. I don’t know if it was mind over matter and just the suggestion there was heroin in the joint that did for him, or smoking the whole joint was more than enough. But he was stoned maaan.
The following day a few of us went out for a walk, back up towards the ferry. The South Africans wanting to see if their lorries were waiting to come across. As we wandered up the dust road we came across a Botswanan Army patrol. There was about six of them in their distinctive camouflage uniforms all carrying AK47s. They made us stop and requested our papers. As I reached for my passport one of the soldiers stepped forward and stuck the muzzle of his AK into my belly.
I stopped moving. “Papers.” The officer was calling. The soldier with the gun nodded and I reached into my pocket and withdrew both our passports. “British,” I said as I handed it over. That seemed to be good enough as the weapon was removed from my bellybutton and our passports, once quickly checked, was returned to me. I silently thanked whoever for the power that lay within those blue cardboard covers that got me though most borders and military checks with no problems. The South Africans were not so lucky they were lined up against a wall and roughly searched, no love lost between the black soldiers and the white South Africans.
Later that evening we had a more visual and exciting reminder of the tensions underlying the military presence we had experienced just that morning. As we were sat out on the balcony overlooking the river a firefight broke out about half a mile down the river. The were booms and bangs and the rattle of heavy machine guns and small arms. We could see tracer flashing both ways across the river. It didn’t last for long, probably another flash in the pan or bored soldiers taking pot shots at each other, we carried on drinking long after silence had fallen back over the dark waters.
The next morning the owner of the hotel filled us in with the news. It turned out that some insurgents in Zambia had fired a mortar at Rhodesia, but such was the nature of the countryside, where these four countries joined together, they had missed and had hit Botswana, who, as a Sovereign State, were duty bound to fire back to regain their honour. So yes, just a flash in the African pan.
The next day news came that the Shell tankers were coming across the river and our new found friends would soon by on their way. One of them, and I’m ashamed to say I’ve forgotten his name, although it might be on the back of photos I have back in England, let’s call him Dave. He very kindly invited my wife and myself to stay with them in his apartment in the Hillbrow area of Johannesburg when we got there. He knew we had no money and our plans were to leave South Africa as soon as possible once back in the city.
Our lift turned up the day after the trucks had left. It was a dusty white Toyota land cruiser driven by two guys. We piled our stuff in and said goodbye to the hotel staff and a few other people who were hanging around. As we drove they told us they had been up north ‘doing business’. Fortunately, they didn’t tell us about the cargo of illicit tourist souvenirs and other contraband they had stashed all over and under the vehicle. They owned a very profitable African Arts shop in the city and this is how they kept it stocked up by smuggling prohibited goods across the border.
We got through the border with no problem and soon we were back in Johannesburg and being welcomed into Dave’s flat in Hillbrow, the designated White area of the city. Somehow Christmas had come and gone during our trip through Botswana and now New Years Eve was on the horizon. There were plans afoot for a big night out. I can’t remember much of it. What I can remember is being down in some dark club where I Feel Love by Donna Summer was being blasted out. I remember we had a fantastic time and ended up in a take away shop around midnight where I had the pleasure of talking to a very drunken Scottish woman who was spitting deep-fried haggis in my face. Happy New Year.
Back at the hotel, it turned out that the aussie had been a bit of a prick. When some of the drivers went to their truck for food supplies to cook something up for themselves. They found the cupboard was bare. Despite having a broken arm he had become popular with the local ladies. It wasn’t just his good looks they were after it was the tinned goods and food that he was paying them for their services. He was lucky he didn’t add a broken nose to his list of misadventures. Fortunately, as the crime was seen as a sexual misdemeanour by the group of toughs we were hanging out with, he got away with it.
Later, he was still around bragging about this and that, when he started pooh poohing the grass we were smoking as not being ’hard’ enough. I told him we had something much ‘harder’ in my room––smoking heroin. And if he wanted some I’d go and get it. He was game. What I did have in my room was a dried out teabag. We mixed the tea leaves with more grass and rolled a nice looking joint for him. He took it way and sat and smoked the whole lot – he really did bogart that joint maaan. And he got really stoned. I don’t know if it was mind over matter and just the suggestion there was heroin in the joint that did for him, or smoking the whole joint was more than enough. But he was stoned maaan.
The following day a few of us went out for a walk, back up towards the ferry. The South Africans wanting to see if their lorries were waiting to come across. As we wandered up the dust road we came across a Botswanan Army patrol. There was about six of them in their distinctive camouflage uniforms all carrying AK47s. They made us stop and requested our papers. As I reached for my passport one of the soldiers stepped forward and stuck the muzzle of his AK into my belly.
I stopped moving. “Papers.” The officer was calling. The soldier with the gun nodded and I reached into my pocket and withdrew both our passports. “British,” I said as I handed it over. That seemed to be good enough as the weapon was removed from my bellybutton and our passports, once quickly checked, was returned to me. I silently thanked whoever for the power that lay within those blue cardboard covers that got me though most borders and military checks with no problems. The South Africans were not so lucky they were lined up against a wall and roughly searched, no love lost between the black soldiers and the white South Africans.
Later that evening we had a more visual and exciting reminder of the tensions underlying the military presence we had experienced just that morning. As we were sat out on the balcony overlooking the river a firefight broke out about half a mile down the river. The were booms and bangs and the rattle of heavy machine guns and small arms. We could see tracer flashing both ways across the river. It didn’t last for long, probably another flash in the pan or bored soldiers taking pot shots at each other, we carried on drinking long after silence had fallen back over the dark waters.
The next morning the owner of the hotel filled us in with the news. It turned out that some insurgents in Zambia had fired a mortar at Rhodesia, but such was the nature of the countryside, where these four countries joined together, they had missed and had hit Botswana, who, as a Sovereign State, were duty bound to fire back to regain their honour. So yes, just a flash in the African pan.
The next day news came that the Shell tankers were coming across the river and our new found friends would soon by on their way. One of them, and I’m ashamed to say I’ve forgotten his name, although it might be on the back of photos I have back in England, let’s call him Dave. He very kindly invited my wife and myself to stay with them in his apartment in the Hillbrow area of Johannesburg when we got there. He knew we had no money and our plans were to leave South Africa as soon as possible once back in the city.
Our lift turned up the day after the trucks had left. It was a dusty white Toyota land cruiser driven by two guys. We piled our stuff in and said goodbye to the hotel staff and a few other people who were hanging around. As we drove they told us they had been up north ‘doing business’. Fortunately, they didn’t tell us about the cargo of illicit tourist souvenirs and other contraband they had stashed all over and under the vehicle. They owned a very profitable African Arts shop in the city and this is how they kept it stocked up by smuggling prohibited goods across the border.
We got through the border with no problem and soon we were back in Johannesburg and being welcomed into Dave’s flat in Hillbrow, the designated White area of the city. Somehow Christmas had come and gone during our trip through Botswana and now New Years Eve was on the horizon. There were plans afoot for a big night out. I can’t remember much of it. What I can remember is being down in some dark club where I Feel Love by Donna Summer was being blasted out. I remember we had a fantastic time and ended up in a take away shop around midnight where I had the pleasure of talking to a very drunken Scottish woman who was spitting deep-fried haggis in my face. Happy New Year.
My wallet now only contained enough money to get my wife home. And even then the cheapest route was via Frankfurt Germany and then into Heathrow. I had the indignity of begging off my parents asking them to book a return ticket. This was duly done and although I left a day later than my wife we turned up at Heathrow the same day as I had a direct flight from Joburg to London. My parents were there to meet us to drive us home. Our African adventure was over.
PART SIX On The Road – Soweto - Nairobi - 1977 - Part 2 Botswana
Hanging out in Gaborone for a few days while our new passports were processed was no biggie. It bought with it all the excitement of being on the road with new friends, meeting new people and having an adventure but mostly we hung around the trucks because we didn’t want all our stuff stolen. The backs were canvas and we could only rope the doors shut. There were also chores to be done around the trucks to make sure they were working and everything was shipshape.
One day Janet and I were wandering around the local shops when I stopped to admire a beautiful soapstone chess set being offered for sale by a street seller. I was no means a chess player but the work that had gone into the making of the board and the pieces was remarkable. The chap in question perking up at a possibility of a paying customer told me about where the stone came from and as he was the artist telling me about carving the set, I was admiring.
I was afraid I would disappoint him because there was no way I was going to tote the heavy chess set across Africa and then by air back to the UK. He didn’t give up that easily, though, and negotiations went downhill from his point of view by my constant refrain of ‘No, No, No, Sorry.’ He pointed to my Levi denim jacket. We could do a swop he suggested. Again I had to refuse. I loved my Levi jacket. It had reached just the right level of ‘distress’ and ‘tattiness,’ the denim was soft and it was as comfortable as a baby’s blanket. So I walked away. It was one of those moments I came to regret and I have few regrets about my life. The chess set was a thing of real beauty made by a craftsman who only wanted my tatty jacket. What a young fool I was.
Soon enough we were back on the road. They call them roads but it was just a way through the dirt and it was often deep dirt. Our first destination was Francistown about halfway between Gaborone and the Kazungula Ferry which would take us across the Zambezi River into Zambia. We would have to drive about one thousand kilometres along dirt roads of rough driving to get to the ferry.
In all of my journeys in Africa one thing that had been absent was sightings of animals. Apart from seeing a sign saying Beware of the Lions while in a Lion Park in Salisbury Rhodesia we had not seen hide nor hair of the legendary creatures of the Dark Continent. So it was with some excitement when we saw tribes of monkeys at the side of the road.
Then to add to the excitement we saw a sign saying ‘Beware of the Elephant.’ By the time we had passed a couple of these signs we got to wondering if there really was only one elephant and it would be a surprise elephant lurking behind a tree ready to leap out to shock the unwary traveller. Remember this was 1977, there wasn’t a radio in the cab and it was a long, boring, dirt road––we had to make our own fun.
What we had for musical entertainment was a cassette player. This was one of those mono cassette players, the sort which would also become useful for uploading code into home computers when they were invented. It was basically a speaker encased in a plastic box with the slot for the cassette covered by a plastic flippy lid. I had a few choice cassettes with me some David Bowie, Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff they kept the boredom at bay when we were not spotting monkeys or watching out for leaping elephants.
One of the main irritations apart from constantly eating the dust from the truck in front was the military checkpoints. There were many of them because Botswana had become a training ground for many of the terrorist organisations active in Southern Africa. At the check points we would have to stop the trucks and have our papers investigated by surly looking, ragtag, young soldiers, who flicked suspiciously through our passports looking for who knows what? Probably a crisp, high denomination note.
They also wanted to search the back of the trucks. It was during one of these searches that one soldier, toting an old Lee Enfield 303 rifle, stumbled across my trusty cassette player. He held it up.
‘What is this?’ He asked.
‘It’s my cassette player,’ I answered.
‘Oh, a cassette player,’ he looked at it with new eyes. ‘I have always wanted a cassette player,’ he said looking at me hopefully.
I looked at his weapon. ‘Ah yes, but that’s my cassette player,’ I explained bravely.
‘Oh,’ he flipped open the lid and looked inside. ‘What is this?’
‘It’s a cassette,’ I explained. I glanced at it. ‘Jimmy Cliff, you like Jimmy Cliff?’
The soldier nodded. ‘Jimmy Cliff, yah, I like Jimmy Cliff.’
I took the cassette out of the machine and put it in the box and gave it to the soldier who looked at it, not really sure what to do with it. I kept the player in my hand and offered him a couple of packs of Marlboro cigarettes we kept for emergencies such as this which he accepted gladly. We departed as friends as I left Jimmy Cliff – Wonderful World Beautiful People, with him.
Hanging out in Gaborone for a few days while our new passports were processed was no biggie. It bought with it all the excitement of being on the road with new friends, meeting new people and having an adventure but mostly we hung around the trucks because we didn’t want all our stuff stolen. The backs were canvas and we could only rope the doors shut. There were also chores to be done around the trucks to make sure they were working and everything was shipshape.
One day Janet and I were wandering around the local shops when I stopped to admire a beautiful soapstone chess set being offered for sale by a street seller. I was no means a chess player but the work that had gone into the making of the board and the pieces was remarkable. The chap in question perking up at a possibility of a paying customer told me about where the stone came from and as he was the artist telling me about carving the set, I was admiring.
I was afraid I would disappoint him because there was no way I was going to tote the heavy chess set across Africa and then by air back to the UK. He didn’t give up that easily, though, and negotiations went downhill from his point of view by my constant refrain of ‘No, No, No, Sorry.’ He pointed to my Levi denim jacket. We could do a swop he suggested. Again I had to refuse. I loved my Levi jacket. It had reached just the right level of ‘distress’ and ‘tattiness,’ the denim was soft and it was as comfortable as a baby’s blanket. So I walked away. It was one of those moments I came to regret and I have few regrets about my life. The chess set was a thing of real beauty made by a craftsman who only wanted my tatty jacket. What a young fool I was.
Soon enough we were back on the road. They call them roads but it was just a way through the dirt and it was often deep dirt. Our first destination was Francistown about halfway between Gaborone and the Kazungula Ferry which would take us across the Zambezi River into Zambia. We would have to drive about one thousand kilometres along dirt roads of rough driving to get to the ferry.
In all of my journeys in Africa one thing that had been absent was sightings of animals. Apart from seeing a sign saying Beware of the Lions while in a Lion Park in Salisbury Rhodesia we had not seen hide nor hair of the legendary creatures of the Dark Continent. So it was with some excitement when we saw tribes of monkeys at the side of the road.
Then to add to the excitement we saw a sign saying ‘Beware of the Elephant.’ By the time we had passed a couple of these signs we got to wondering if there really was only one elephant and it would be a surprise elephant lurking behind a tree ready to leap out to shock the unwary traveller. Remember this was 1977, there wasn’t a radio in the cab and it was a long, boring, dirt road––we had to make our own fun.
What we had for musical entertainment was a cassette player. This was one of those mono cassette players, the sort which would also become useful for uploading code into home computers when they were invented. It was basically a speaker encased in a plastic box with the slot for the cassette covered by a plastic flippy lid. I had a few choice cassettes with me some David Bowie, Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff they kept the boredom at bay when we were not spotting monkeys or watching out for leaping elephants.
One of the main irritations apart from constantly eating the dust from the truck in front was the military checkpoints. There were many of them because Botswana had become a training ground for many of the terrorist organisations active in Southern Africa. At the check points we would have to stop the trucks and have our papers investigated by surly looking, ragtag, young soldiers, who flicked suspiciously through our passports looking for who knows what? Probably a crisp, high denomination note.
They also wanted to search the back of the trucks. It was during one of these searches that one soldier, toting an old Lee Enfield 303 rifle, stumbled across my trusty cassette player. He held it up.
‘What is this?’ He asked.
‘It’s my cassette player,’ I answered.
‘Oh, a cassette player,’ he looked at it with new eyes. ‘I have always wanted a cassette player,’ he said looking at me hopefully.
I looked at his weapon. ‘Ah yes, but that’s my cassette player,’ I explained bravely.
‘Oh,’ he flipped open the lid and looked inside. ‘What is this?’
‘It’s a cassette,’ I explained. I glanced at it. ‘Jimmy Cliff, you like Jimmy Cliff?’
The soldier nodded. ‘Jimmy Cliff, yah, I like Jimmy Cliff.’
I took the cassette out of the machine and put it in the box and gave it to the soldier who looked at it, not really sure what to do with it. I kept the player in my hand and offered him a couple of packs of Marlboro cigarettes we kept for emergencies such as this which he accepted gladly. We departed as friends as I left Jimmy Cliff – Wonderful World Beautiful People, with him.
We continued to eat dust for many miles and coped with the occasional military checkpoint with the packs of cigarettes we had stashed in the cab. If you want my advice and someone is waving an AK 47 at you Marlboro works wonders. Another wonder in dusty conditions is tea made with evaporated milk. This was a staple of the British Desert Rats in the 2WW and sitting by the side of a dirt road in Africa with a white enamel tin cup of hot brewed tea, greasy with evaporated milk and powdered with the red dust off the road it is nothing more than an elixir.
The water for the tea was boiled over an open fire made from deadwood scavenged from the side of the road. We were instructed by our Encounter Overland buddies to make a lot of noise to scare away the snakes. We also watched out for the dreaded Tsetse Fly, it's a big bugger with a nasty bite, and as a bonus it passes on the disease known as sleeping sickness. At night we bedded down in the back of the trucks, it was uncomfortable but safer than risking it in a tent, what with the flies, snakes, baboons and surprise elephant.
In places the road was a river of deep sand ploughed into deep runnels by the other vehicles using the road. In other places it turned into a hard washboard that rattled every bone in one’s body and unscrewed the bolts holding things down and the Bedford truck together. It was hard work driving fighting with the steering wheel, there was no power steering in these trucks. We ate dust mile after mile as we journeyed through the Botswanan bush but loving every minute.
Although the trucks were resilient, we suffered a few breakdowns. The main problems were the diesel injectors which meant changing various bits of pipework on the side of the road. This usually drew a crowd, even if we seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, invariably within minutes an audience would congregate silently watching us work. They never asked for anything, just watched. And when we left, they would smile and wave as if we were their best friends embarking on our honeymoon, before, I suppose, disappearing back into their lives.
The routine stops at the military check points were monotonous, but we soon got used to the routine. By dipping into our tobacco stash the guards would wave us through with a smile. It wasn’t long before the signs pointing us to the Botswanan Zambian Border at the Kazungula Ferry appeared. Once in Zambia we could start the second leg of our journey aiming to reach the famous game reserves of Tanzania which we were looking forward to.
That was until my wife Janet and myself were deported from the Zambian Border. The customs officials refused us entry into the country. They suspected the new passports we had got in Gaborone. They told us they thought we were Rhodesian refugees escaping the country. We told them we were not, but didn’t want to admit to having lived and worked in South Africa either. We told them we we just just tourists and we had lost our passports hence the new ones. It didn’t wash. They told us we could fly into Lusaka the capital and gain entry there, but that would mean returning to Joburg and we didn’t have the means to do that nor the finances to purchase air tickets.
Have you ever tried to bribe a customs guard armed with an AK47? I have, it didn’t go well.
Me: ‘Is there anything I can do that will get me through the gate?’
Guard: ‘What you mean?’
Me: Is there anything I can doooo, for yoooouuu that will help?
Guard looking suspicious: ‘What’s that? What you mean?
Me: ‘Is there anything at all I can do… okay forget it. Bye.’
Me – Leaves border area swiftly.
Maybe I should have been more blatant and waved some of the American dollars we were carrying but he had a machine gun and I wasn’t brave enough.
The trucks left us behind, there was nothing they could do. They told us someone was coming south and we would be picked up in a few days. We found a room in a hotel on the banks of the Zambezi and wondered what would happen next––Africa still held surprises for us.
The water for the tea was boiled over an open fire made from deadwood scavenged from the side of the road. We were instructed by our Encounter Overland buddies to make a lot of noise to scare away the snakes. We also watched out for the dreaded Tsetse Fly, it's a big bugger with a nasty bite, and as a bonus it passes on the disease known as sleeping sickness. At night we bedded down in the back of the trucks, it was uncomfortable but safer than risking it in a tent, what with the flies, snakes, baboons and surprise elephant.
In places the road was a river of deep sand ploughed into deep runnels by the other vehicles using the road. In other places it turned into a hard washboard that rattled every bone in one’s body and unscrewed the bolts holding things down and the Bedford truck together. It was hard work driving fighting with the steering wheel, there was no power steering in these trucks. We ate dust mile after mile as we journeyed through the Botswanan bush but loving every minute.
Although the trucks were resilient, we suffered a few breakdowns. The main problems were the diesel injectors which meant changing various bits of pipework on the side of the road. This usually drew a crowd, even if we seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, invariably within minutes an audience would congregate silently watching us work. They never asked for anything, just watched. And when we left, they would smile and wave as if we were their best friends embarking on our honeymoon, before, I suppose, disappearing back into their lives.
The routine stops at the military check points were monotonous, but we soon got used to the routine. By dipping into our tobacco stash the guards would wave us through with a smile. It wasn’t long before the signs pointing us to the Botswanan Zambian Border at the Kazungula Ferry appeared. Once in Zambia we could start the second leg of our journey aiming to reach the famous game reserves of Tanzania which we were looking forward to.
That was until my wife Janet and myself were deported from the Zambian Border. The customs officials refused us entry into the country. They suspected the new passports we had got in Gaborone. They told us they thought we were Rhodesian refugees escaping the country. We told them we were not, but didn’t want to admit to having lived and worked in South Africa either. We told them we we just just tourists and we had lost our passports hence the new ones. It didn’t wash. They told us we could fly into Lusaka the capital and gain entry there, but that would mean returning to Joburg and we didn’t have the means to do that nor the finances to purchase air tickets.
Have you ever tried to bribe a customs guard armed with an AK47? I have, it didn’t go well.
Me: ‘Is there anything I can do that will get me through the gate?’
Guard: ‘What you mean?’
Me: Is there anything I can doooo, for yoooouuu that will help?
Guard looking suspicious: ‘What’s that? What you mean?
Me: ‘Is there anything at all I can do… okay forget it. Bye.’
Me – Leaves border area swiftly.
Maybe I should have been more blatant and waved some of the American dollars we were carrying but he had a machine gun and I wasn’t brave enough.
The trucks left us behind, there was nothing they could do. They told us someone was coming south and we would be picked up in a few days. We found a room in a hotel on the banks of the Zambezi and wondered what would happen next––Africa still held surprises for us.
PART FIVE On the road Soweto to Nairobi – 1977 – Part 1
Driving into Soweto in the middle of the night in 1977 was not without its risks. Just a year earlier in the students uprising hundreds of young people were killed or wounded by South African police carrying automatic weapons.
But here I was driving a bright blue Bedford 4-ton ex-army truck down the dirt roads into the heart of the township––a place where white people were banned from entering. The other fly in the ointment was, we where there to buy red diesel for the trucks which was also highly illegal. We needed the cheap fuel because I would be driving this son of a bitch to Nairobi in Kenya.
I had finally decided to bail out of the dark satanic steel mill I had been working at in Vanderbijlpark. It was no fun for me, neither was it fun for my young wife of just over one year. We had to get out. But not for us the dash to the airport to disappear over the horizon, no, Africa still beckoned, we wanted to check the beat of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
This took a modicum of planning, of course. First was finding the escape route. Before the other Rob left we looked at some options––going to work for the railways in Rhodesia was the first one we considered, that didn’t work out so we looked into working on the fishing fleets down in the Cape. But it seemed like hard and dangerous work so that was shelved. One day, after Rob and his wife, Heather left, I was scanning the newspapers and saw an ad that caught my attention.
A company called Encounter Overland was looking for drivers to return empty safari trucks from Johannesburg to Nairobi. I immediately called them and met them in Joburg a few days later. I got the job, there was no pay, just the adventure, plus board and lodgings. That was good enough for us. Nairobi was half way home anyway and who knew what opportunities would come our way en route? Now all I had to do was entangle myself from the day job.
The plan was to wait until I had accrued holiday and then leave. The company, in fact, was shooting themselves in the foot because when they paid us holiday pay we were paid up to date including the holiday wages. So we could get away, paid up, and scot free. The small matter of all the furniture and so on in the apartment that the company stood guarantor for at the local shops was simple to solve. The stuff we wanted to keep was boxed and shipped home. [One thing shipped home was a very nice stereo system I had purchased on the drip via the company system – for months after returning to the UK I was terrified that BOSS (SA Secret Service) would come knocking at my door – and there was the small matter of the 3 year contract I had broken) Then we put a quiet word around all the maids in the apartment block we were leaving and for tiny sums they could come and purchase the lot. Everything went and so did we.
The Encounter Overland guys put us up in an apartment in Joburg until we were ready to leave. We spent time getting used to driving the Bedford truck and sorting out the mechanics. I had to learn some of the ins and outs of the diesel engine so I could field strip it if something went horribly wrong. There were three trucks. Another driver, had been recruited, a British guy, single and like us looking forward to doing the trip. The two Encounter overland guys would crew the third truck, one acting as a driver and the other as the convoy mechanic.
The night before we left we entered Soweto for our illegal fuel top up. The township was dark, but even at midnight the place was busy. It was a regular trip we’d been told so nothing too much to worry about but I remember feeling nervous as we drove down the bustling streets.
Also the Bedford truck, although bright blue was obviously military looking, with a khaki canvas cover on the back –the large hole in the roof where a machine gun could be mounted was pretty obvious. I was keenly aware of the history of Soweto and took it on trust the guys we were with knew what they were doing. The transaction complete we left as quietly as we had arrived.
The first leg of the journey was to take us to Gaborone the capital of Botswana. This was an important stop because my wife and I had South African immigration stamps in our passports and this would stop us travelling through ‘Black’ Africa. We were aiming for the British High Commission and embassy where we could change passports enabling us to continue up through Botswana, into Zambia, through Tanzania and into Kenya.
When we got to the border between South Africa and Botswana, there was delay as the trucks papers were checked and the vehicles searched. As we waited, we befriended a South African policeman who turned out to be a border guard. As we expected to be some time we jumped at the chance to go on patrol with him in his Land Rover.
His job he told us was to patrol the border fence a couple of times a day to watch out for signs of infiltration from a range of guerrillas using Botswana as their base to attack Rhodesia (ZAPU/ZANU) and South Africa (ANC). Fortunately for us, no attempts at infiltration were made that day, and we enjoyed the scenic if bumpy ride along the dirt track. He stopped occasionally to scan the horizon through binoculars allowing us to do the same.
Eventually, we were through the borders and into Botswana proper. The three blue trucks rumbled on towards Gaborone. I had been told driving the Bedford was no more difficult than driving a mini and on the smooth tarmac of the main roads it was easy. The overland guys had warned us that beyond Gaborone the dirt roads started and things would get much tougher.
It wasn’t long before we were turning into the car park of the British High Commission. As we did a motorcycle cop roared up on his bike and frantically waved me down. I ground through the gears and pulled up. As I jumped out of the cab the policeman was looking suspiciously at the bright blue military looking vehicle in front of him.
‘You have soldiers in the back?’ he asked.
‘What? No.’ I answered. ‘No soldiers.’
‘You have soldiers.’ He said more confidently, going towards the back of the truck.
‘No, it’s a safari truck, no soldiers.’ I said.
Maybe he had second thoughts about opening the back of a truck that might harbour half a dozen big burly British mercenaries. We will never know.
He said, ‘okay, no soldiers.’ Then he got back on his bike and left leaving us slightly bewildered but ready to get on with the important job of getting new passports.
Driving into Soweto in the middle of the night in 1977 was not without its risks. Just a year earlier in the students uprising hundreds of young people were killed or wounded by South African police carrying automatic weapons.
But here I was driving a bright blue Bedford 4-ton ex-army truck down the dirt roads into the heart of the township––a place where white people were banned from entering. The other fly in the ointment was, we where there to buy red diesel for the trucks which was also highly illegal. We needed the cheap fuel because I would be driving this son of a bitch to Nairobi in Kenya.
I had finally decided to bail out of the dark satanic steel mill I had been working at in Vanderbijlpark. It was no fun for me, neither was it fun for my young wife of just over one year. We had to get out. But not for us the dash to the airport to disappear over the horizon, no, Africa still beckoned, we wanted to check the beat of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
This took a modicum of planning, of course. First was finding the escape route. Before the other Rob left we looked at some options––going to work for the railways in Rhodesia was the first one we considered, that didn’t work out so we looked into working on the fishing fleets down in the Cape. But it seemed like hard and dangerous work so that was shelved. One day, after Rob and his wife, Heather left, I was scanning the newspapers and saw an ad that caught my attention.
A company called Encounter Overland was looking for drivers to return empty safari trucks from Johannesburg to Nairobi. I immediately called them and met them in Joburg a few days later. I got the job, there was no pay, just the adventure, plus board and lodgings. That was good enough for us. Nairobi was half way home anyway and who knew what opportunities would come our way en route? Now all I had to do was entangle myself from the day job.
The plan was to wait until I had accrued holiday and then leave. The company, in fact, was shooting themselves in the foot because when they paid us holiday pay we were paid up to date including the holiday wages. So we could get away, paid up, and scot free. The small matter of all the furniture and so on in the apartment that the company stood guarantor for at the local shops was simple to solve. The stuff we wanted to keep was boxed and shipped home. [One thing shipped home was a very nice stereo system I had purchased on the drip via the company system – for months after returning to the UK I was terrified that BOSS (SA Secret Service) would come knocking at my door – and there was the small matter of the 3 year contract I had broken) Then we put a quiet word around all the maids in the apartment block we were leaving and for tiny sums they could come and purchase the lot. Everything went and so did we.
The Encounter Overland guys put us up in an apartment in Joburg until we were ready to leave. We spent time getting used to driving the Bedford truck and sorting out the mechanics. I had to learn some of the ins and outs of the diesel engine so I could field strip it if something went horribly wrong. There were three trucks. Another driver, had been recruited, a British guy, single and like us looking forward to doing the trip. The two Encounter overland guys would crew the third truck, one acting as a driver and the other as the convoy mechanic.
The night before we left we entered Soweto for our illegal fuel top up. The township was dark, but even at midnight the place was busy. It was a regular trip we’d been told so nothing too much to worry about but I remember feeling nervous as we drove down the bustling streets.
Also the Bedford truck, although bright blue was obviously military looking, with a khaki canvas cover on the back –the large hole in the roof where a machine gun could be mounted was pretty obvious. I was keenly aware of the history of Soweto and took it on trust the guys we were with knew what they were doing. The transaction complete we left as quietly as we had arrived.
The first leg of the journey was to take us to Gaborone the capital of Botswana. This was an important stop because my wife and I had South African immigration stamps in our passports and this would stop us travelling through ‘Black’ Africa. We were aiming for the British High Commission and embassy where we could change passports enabling us to continue up through Botswana, into Zambia, through Tanzania and into Kenya.
When we got to the border between South Africa and Botswana, there was delay as the trucks papers were checked and the vehicles searched. As we waited, we befriended a South African policeman who turned out to be a border guard. As we expected to be some time we jumped at the chance to go on patrol with him in his Land Rover.
His job he told us was to patrol the border fence a couple of times a day to watch out for signs of infiltration from a range of guerrillas using Botswana as their base to attack Rhodesia (ZAPU/ZANU) and South Africa (ANC). Fortunately for us, no attempts at infiltration were made that day, and we enjoyed the scenic if bumpy ride along the dirt track. He stopped occasionally to scan the horizon through binoculars allowing us to do the same.
Eventually, we were through the borders and into Botswana proper. The three blue trucks rumbled on towards Gaborone. I had been told driving the Bedford was no more difficult than driving a mini and on the smooth tarmac of the main roads it was easy. The overland guys had warned us that beyond Gaborone the dirt roads started and things would get much tougher.
It wasn’t long before we were turning into the car park of the British High Commission. As we did a motorcycle cop roared up on his bike and frantically waved me down. I ground through the gears and pulled up. As I jumped out of the cab the policeman was looking suspiciously at the bright blue military looking vehicle in front of him.
‘You have soldiers in the back?’ he asked.
‘What? No.’ I answered. ‘No soldiers.’
‘You have soldiers.’ He said more confidently, going towards the back of the truck.
‘No, it’s a safari truck, no soldiers.’ I said.
Maybe he had second thoughts about opening the back of a truck that might harbour half a dozen big burly British mercenaries. We will never know.
He said, ‘okay, no soldiers.’ Then he got back on his bike and left leaving us slightly bewildered but ready to get on with the important job of getting new passports.
PART FOUR On the road - Rhodesia - 1976
This particular article is available as a podcast, you can listen to it here
Twelve months of working continental shifts in a massive South African steel works was taking its toll. Young marriages were feeling the strain because the men were continually at work or asleep. There was a lot of work and not much play. Some of the families just bailed, disappearing overnight, never to be seen again. I needed a Plan B to get out too.
The company, ISCOR, stood HP guarantor for everything we wanted to buy for our new lives in Vanderbijlpark a steel town in what was known the Transvaal in 1976 – this area of the country was mainly populated by the Afrikaans, the white South Africans of Dutch decent. It was an open secret that many of the would be ex-pat deserters would go around town and purchase high value but portable items such as jewellery, watches and so on to take home with them. Those who had them drove their cars to Jan Smuts airport and left them in the car park with the keys still in the ignition.
But I was looking for another way out. After all Africa was a big country and I was a highly skilled British engineer. I can’t remember how we actually found out the Rhodesian (Now Zimbabwe) Railway Company was looking for maintenance engineers. I had been an apprentice at a company in Somerset called Bristol Aerojets making bits of rockets and missiles and for one year of my training I had attended the Rolls Royce Technical College in Filton, Bristol. My mate, the other Rob, had been apprenticed at Westland Helicopters in Yeovil, Somerset, so we were pretty hot property.
The railway company was keen to interview us so a road trip was planned to Salisbury, (now Harare) the capital of Rhodesia. Pouring over the map and asking friends and colleagues it seemed that the drive from Johannesburg to Salisbury would be about fifteen hours, non-stop. We couldn’t rent a car locally so first we had to get to Johannesburg to pick up the Toyota Corolla we had chosen for the trip.
Our first destination was a place called Beitbridge because this was the border between South Africa and Rhodesia. We also had to get there because it was the place we had to pickup the armed convoy to get to Salisbury safely. We had to do this because black nationalist guerrillas were attacking travellers and killing them. So it was imperative that we drove hard and crossed the border in time to join the convoy.
Of course, we were late, and we missed the convoy. A soldier on duty told us it had only just gone and if we hurried we would surely catch up with it. We couldn’t miss it because it was a line of vehicles protected by British South African Police (BSAP) driving pickups (bakkies) with Browning heavy machine guns mounted in the rear. ‘Was it dangerous?’ We asked. ‘Not if we caught up to it quickly’, he answered. So we set off at a pace to catch it up.
We never saw the convoy. We didn’t overtake it and I had booted the car to try and catch up. I have no idea how we missed it. I have a vague recollection of seeing some vehicles in a café car park, but it was only a fleeting glance as we were going so quickly, maybe that was it? There was only one road to Bulawayo and we were on it. So with the naivety of youth and no questions about our own mortality we forgot about the convoy and drove on through the beautiful Rhodesian countryside.
And have no doubt Rhodesia/Zimbabwe is a beautiful country even when viewed through a dusty windscreen at speed. We flew through areas of bush dotted with rounded humps and with koppies in the distance. The red soils baked hard by the sun and mile after mile of hard driving which blurs the memory.
I have no recollection of staying anywhere for the night so we must have shared the driving to get to Salisbury. Rob and I, with our two wives Janet and Heather on the back seats piloted the vehicle along the long, straight and empty roads. We even stopped to stretch our legs and take photos at some of the obvious viewpoints. It was late in the evening when we eventually arrived in Salisbury (Harare).
On first impression Salisbury left a favourable impression. It was very ‘British.’ Plus, I remember the kindness of the locals summed up when a complete stranger gave us coin to use in the parking meters because we hadn’t any local currency.
The next day we went to see the representative of the railway company. When we recounted our journey he was gobsmacked. He couldn’t believe we’d made the whole journey and not been in the convoy. He was even more amazed that we’d stopped to take photos. He went on to tell us how lucky we’d been not to have been targeted by the guerrillas and have an RPG fired through our radiator––which was the standard operating practice of the guerrillas. It was only later when we were driving around Salisbury that we noticed how the locals would have their weapons stuck out through the open windows of their vehicles as a sign that they were armed and ready.
The crux of the interview for the railway job was that they needed engineers such as ourselves and if we were willing to take the positions they offered us we would be working and living in Umtali (now Mutare). We asked where Umtali was. Over by the Mozambique border in the East of the country we were told. ‘Isn’t that dangerous?’ We asked. We might have been naïve but we did know there was a war going on over there and the warning about the folly of our drive had hit home. No, we were told it’s not dangerous any longer––Umtali only got mortared about twice a week now.
That put the mockers on Plan B so we went to the Lion Park to be tourists instead. This was a local game park just outside of the city, where you could drive around to see the animals. Unfortunately, it only had dirt and sand roads and our little Toyota got stuck in a hole. We got out and tried to push it but it was stuck fast. We hadn’t seen any game and the place seemed empty, not that we could see much as we were surrounded by bush. Rummaging about for twigs and branches to put under the wheels I came across a large sheet of plywood. It was exactly what we needed to get us out of our predicament––until I turned it over. Stencilled on the other side were the heart stopping words BEWARE OF THE LIONS.
Janet was swiftly put on the roof of the vehicle as look out, as she was the lightest, while we quickly and efficiently got the car out of the pit. I know we didn’t see any lions nor any other wildlife come to that. We returned back to the city centre for a quiet walk and a look around the botanical gardens. It was nice but as we wandered back towards the car I realised I had lost the car keys. Panic. We retraced our steps and sure enough there they were sat in the middle of the path. But believe me my heart was racing. I’m not even sure that we were allowed to drive the car outside of South Africa–– we might have glossed over those details, as you do.
The next day we were faced with the fifteen-hour drive home. We had a deadline. The vehicle had to be back with the renters in Johannesburg so we would not be liable for another day and we also had to be able to catch the bus back to Vanderbijlpark where we lived.
This time on the return journey we would be sensible and use the convoy to get us back to the safety of South Africa. But the convoy was just too slow. We had that deadline and they kept stopping, eventually with a reluctant, ‘be careful’ they thought we were enough out of danger to let us go. I’d worked out we needed to average about seventy mph to get us to downtown Jo’burg to dump the car before the rental company closed. We made it with about thirty minutes to spare––that was some hard driving ––all I remember is the three of them sleeping and letting me get on with it.
Back home, in the flat at Vanderbijlpark, it was time to think about the future because I knew I wasn’t going to spend another eighteen months of my life in the maintenance department of the steel mill. In fact, this was the beginning of the end of me wanting to be a skilled machinist. But it would take at least another ten years for that to happen, in the meantime there was a whole continent to explore.
This particular article is available as a podcast, you can listen to it here
Twelve months of working continental shifts in a massive South African steel works was taking its toll. Young marriages were feeling the strain because the men were continually at work or asleep. There was a lot of work and not much play. Some of the families just bailed, disappearing overnight, never to be seen again. I needed a Plan B to get out too.
The company, ISCOR, stood HP guarantor for everything we wanted to buy for our new lives in Vanderbijlpark a steel town in what was known the Transvaal in 1976 – this area of the country was mainly populated by the Afrikaans, the white South Africans of Dutch decent. It was an open secret that many of the would be ex-pat deserters would go around town and purchase high value but portable items such as jewellery, watches and so on to take home with them. Those who had them drove their cars to Jan Smuts airport and left them in the car park with the keys still in the ignition.
But I was looking for another way out. After all Africa was a big country and I was a highly skilled British engineer. I can’t remember how we actually found out the Rhodesian (Now Zimbabwe) Railway Company was looking for maintenance engineers. I had been an apprentice at a company in Somerset called Bristol Aerojets making bits of rockets and missiles and for one year of my training I had attended the Rolls Royce Technical College in Filton, Bristol. My mate, the other Rob, had been apprenticed at Westland Helicopters in Yeovil, Somerset, so we were pretty hot property.
The railway company was keen to interview us so a road trip was planned to Salisbury, (now Harare) the capital of Rhodesia. Pouring over the map and asking friends and colleagues it seemed that the drive from Johannesburg to Salisbury would be about fifteen hours, non-stop. We couldn’t rent a car locally so first we had to get to Johannesburg to pick up the Toyota Corolla we had chosen for the trip.
Our first destination was a place called Beitbridge because this was the border between South Africa and Rhodesia. We also had to get there because it was the place we had to pickup the armed convoy to get to Salisbury safely. We had to do this because black nationalist guerrillas were attacking travellers and killing them. So it was imperative that we drove hard and crossed the border in time to join the convoy.
Of course, we were late, and we missed the convoy. A soldier on duty told us it had only just gone and if we hurried we would surely catch up with it. We couldn’t miss it because it was a line of vehicles protected by British South African Police (BSAP) driving pickups (bakkies) with Browning heavy machine guns mounted in the rear. ‘Was it dangerous?’ We asked. ‘Not if we caught up to it quickly’, he answered. So we set off at a pace to catch it up.
We never saw the convoy. We didn’t overtake it and I had booted the car to try and catch up. I have no idea how we missed it. I have a vague recollection of seeing some vehicles in a café car park, but it was only a fleeting glance as we were going so quickly, maybe that was it? There was only one road to Bulawayo and we were on it. So with the naivety of youth and no questions about our own mortality we forgot about the convoy and drove on through the beautiful Rhodesian countryside.
And have no doubt Rhodesia/Zimbabwe is a beautiful country even when viewed through a dusty windscreen at speed. We flew through areas of bush dotted with rounded humps and with koppies in the distance. The red soils baked hard by the sun and mile after mile of hard driving which blurs the memory.
I have no recollection of staying anywhere for the night so we must have shared the driving to get to Salisbury. Rob and I, with our two wives Janet and Heather on the back seats piloted the vehicle along the long, straight and empty roads. We even stopped to stretch our legs and take photos at some of the obvious viewpoints. It was late in the evening when we eventually arrived in Salisbury (Harare).
On first impression Salisbury left a favourable impression. It was very ‘British.’ Plus, I remember the kindness of the locals summed up when a complete stranger gave us coin to use in the parking meters because we hadn’t any local currency.
The next day we went to see the representative of the railway company. When we recounted our journey he was gobsmacked. He couldn’t believe we’d made the whole journey and not been in the convoy. He was even more amazed that we’d stopped to take photos. He went on to tell us how lucky we’d been not to have been targeted by the guerrillas and have an RPG fired through our radiator––which was the standard operating practice of the guerrillas. It was only later when we were driving around Salisbury that we noticed how the locals would have their weapons stuck out through the open windows of their vehicles as a sign that they were armed and ready.
The crux of the interview for the railway job was that they needed engineers such as ourselves and if we were willing to take the positions they offered us we would be working and living in Umtali (now Mutare). We asked where Umtali was. Over by the Mozambique border in the East of the country we were told. ‘Isn’t that dangerous?’ We asked. We might have been naïve but we did know there was a war going on over there and the warning about the folly of our drive had hit home. No, we were told it’s not dangerous any longer––Umtali only got mortared about twice a week now.
That put the mockers on Plan B so we went to the Lion Park to be tourists instead. This was a local game park just outside of the city, where you could drive around to see the animals. Unfortunately, it only had dirt and sand roads and our little Toyota got stuck in a hole. We got out and tried to push it but it was stuck fast. We hadn’t seen any game and the place seemed empty, not that we could see much as we were surrounded by bush. Rummaging about for twigs and branches to put under the wheels I came across a large sheet of plywood. It was exactly what we needed to get us out of our predicament––until I turned it over. Stencilled on the other side were the heart stopping words BEWARE OF THE LIONS.
Janet was swiftly put on the roof of the vehicle as look out, as she was the lightest, while we quickly and efficiently got the car out of the pit. I know we didn’t see any lions nor any other wildlife come to that. We returned back to the city centre for a quiet walk and a look around the botanical gardens. It was nice but as we wandered back towards the car I realised I had lost the car keys. Panic. We retraced our steps and sure enough there they were sat in the middle of the path. But believe me my heart was racing. I’m not even sure that we were allowed to drive the car outside of South Africa–– we might have glossed over those details, as you do.
The next day we were faced with the fifteen-hour drive home. We had a deadline. The vehicle had to be back with the renters in Johannesburg so we would not be liable for another day and we also had to be able to catch the bus back to Vanderbijlpark where we lived.
This time on the return journey we would be sensible and use the convoy to get us back to the safety of South Africa. But the convoy was just too slow. We had that deadline and they kept stopping, eventually with a reluctant, ‘be careful’ they thought we were enough out of danger to let us go. I’d worked out we needed to average about seventy mph to get us to downtown Jo’burg to dump the car before the rental company closed. We made it with about thirty minutes to spare––that was some hard driving ––all I remember is the three of them sleeping and letting me get on with it.
Back home, in the flat at Vanderbijlpark, it was time to think about the future because I knew I wasn’t going to spend another eighteen months of my life in the maintenance department of the steel mill. In fact, this was the beginning of the end of me wanting to be a skilled machinist. But it would take at least another ten years for that to happen, in the meantime there was a whole continent to explore.
PART THREE On the road - Land Rover to Lesotho
Taking the caffeine tablets to help me drive was a mistake. I realised that as the Land Rover drifted sideways, on two wheels, down the dusty bank and into the storm drain at the side of the road. In my hyper state I had missed the turning but decided to try and make it anyway. The have big storms in South Africa so the storm drain was big and wide and not too deep and the vehicle came to a halt crashing back onto all four wheels. Fortunately, we lived, but my passengers, my friends Rob and his wife Heather, were none to happy about it as the yells, screams and curses from the back indicated. It was the culmination of a disastrous trip into Lesotho, the landlocked kingdom surrounded by South Africa.
The other Rob, my buddy, and I decided that we needed to buy a car and what we really needed was a Land Rover so we could go ‘on safari.’ We managed to find a beat up Land Rover Series 2 long wheelbase pickup advertised for sale locally so we went to have a look. It seemed to work fine as we drove it up and down some steep banks near to where the seller lived. An added bonus was that it had the aluminium back that we could bolt on to make it a ‘Safari.’ We handed over the cash.
We were both skilled engineers working for ISCOR the South African Iron and Steel Corporation in Vanderbijlpark, a steel town just south of Johannesburg, in what was then the Transvaal, so we were pretty confident that we could iron out any problems that popped up when we got it home. We checked it over, changed the oil and filters, put new brakes on it and learnt how to bleed them so they worked when we needed them to. We bolted on the rear cab and bought second-hand seats that we riveted to the floor inside.
After a couple of weeks’ work, we were set for a new adventure and our sights turned to Lesotho. Our plan was open ended as we had packed camping equipment so that we could stop where we wanted to. We had a vague commitment to travelling to Maseru the capital, but our first stop was going to be Butha-Buthe––about a four-hour drive away. The reasoning for this was there was a mountain there called Butha-Buthe Mountain and on the map it looked like there was a track we could drive up.
We were young and looking for adventure and what better way than driving up a mountain to see what was there? The drive from Vanderbijlpark was uneventful, Rob and I sat in the front while the two wives, Janet and Heather were relegated to the aluminium box on the back. It wasn’t great but it was the best we could do. The Land Rover performed well as we drove down the main roads through the spectacular South African countryside. I cannot remember the border crossing but as always it was probably just a formality as we had British passports – the blue ones – that allowed us to go everywhere in those far off days.
Taking the caffeine tablets to help me drive was a mistake. I realised that as the Land Rover drifted sideways, on two wheels, down the dusty bank and into the storm drain at the side of the road. In my hyper state I had missed the turning but decided to try and make it anyway. The have big storms in South Africa so the storm drain was big and wide and not too deep and the vehicle came to a halt crashing back onto all four wheels. Fortunately, we lived, but my passengers, my friends Rob and his wife Heather, were none to happy about it as the yells, screams and curses from the back indicated. It was the culmination of a disastrous trip into Lesotho, the landlocked kingdom surrounded by South Africa.
The other Rob, my buddy, and I decided that we needed to buy a car and what we really needed was a Land Rover so we could go ‘on safari.’ We managed to find a beat up Land Rover Series 2 long wheelbase pickup advertised for sale locally so we went to have a look. It seemed to work fine as we drove it up and down some steep banks near to where the seller lived. An added bonus was that it had the aluminium back that we could bolt on to make it a ‘Safari.’ We handed over the cash.
We were both skilled engineers working for ISCOR the South African Iron and Steel Corporation in Vanderbijlpark, a steel town just south of Johannesburg, in what was then the Transvaal, so we were pretty confident that we could iron out any problems that popped up when we got it home. We checked it over, changed the oil and filters, put new brakes on it and learnt how to bleed them so they worked when we needed them to. We bolted on the rear cab and bought second-hand seats that we riveted to the floor inside.
After a couple of weeks’ work, we were set for a new adventure and our sights turned to Lesotho. Our plan was open ended as we had packed camping equipment so that we could stop where we wanted to. We had a vague commitment to travelling to Maseru the capital, but our first stop was going to be Butha-Buthe––about a four-hour drive away. The reasoning for this was there was a mountain there called Butha-Buthe Mountain and on the map it looked like there was a track we could drive up.
We were young and looking for adventure and what better way than driving up a mountain to see what was there? The drive from Vanderbijlpark was uneventful, Rob and I sat in the front while the two wives, Janet and Heather were relegated to the aluminium box on the back. It wasn’t great but it was the best we could do. The Land Rover performed well as we drove down the main roads through the spectacular South African countryside. I cannot remember the border crossing but as always it was probably just a formality as we had British passports – the blue ones – that allowed us to go everywhere in those far off days.
We arrived at the mountain in the early afternoon and set off up the dirt track towards the summit. I had been taking advice on how to tackle the baked washboard dirt roads. The hard ridges were created by vehicle suspensions pounding up and down compacting the dirt into bone shaking bumps and ripples. The key, I was told, was to drive at around 70mph and then the vehicle would ‘float’ over the washboard surface. And it does work. The problem was, halfway up the mountain, the clutch gave up the ghost.
When the clutch goes the first indication is a horrendous burning smell and then you start to lose forward momentum as the engine starts to race. Although Rob and I were top class engineers we were not motor mechanics, we had no spares and we were in the middle of the bush in Africa. There is no AA rescue service. We managed to turn the vehicle around and coast down the hill. Fortunately, we had enough clutch left to get us to the Crocodile Inn.
I have no idea why it was called the Crocodile Inn because we were nowhere near a river and there were no crocodiles – but hey, that is Africa for you. We parked the truck in the car park and hunted out the owners. We told them of our situation and got permission to put our tent up next to our stricken vehicle. We also asked if there was a local mechanic that could give us a hand.
Of course, we were big news locally and as we started to set up the tent a crowd of people came to watch us. A few guys came over to chat and ask us what’s what. Everybody was very friendly but we were sure we were being scoped out so we tried to keep everything shipshape and under control. Our audience was still there after night had fallen and having cooked ourselves a meal on the camping stoves, we shared some of the food with our guests.
We also met a guy who claimed to be a Land Rover mechanic in Johannesburg and that tomorrow he would come and help us out. After he disappeared into the night we guessed that far from being a Land Rover mechanic he was probably the actual Land Rover mechanics ‘boy’. This was a derogatory term used by white South Africans to label the grown black men who did the basic, hard, and dirty labour for them. We had also fallen into that racist linguistic trap.
Later that night we were tucked up in our sleeping bags. All four of us were sharing one big tent. The ground was hard so we tried to drink enough beer to numb the pain. Nevertheless, we were sleeping fitfully so the noise of someone or something moving around outside our tent alerted us to a prowler of some sort. There was a clinking of metal on metal which had the other Rob and I out of our sleeping bags and grabbing handy weapons to protect ourselves and our wives. By the time we were out of the tent having made enough noise about it the intruders had gone, taking with them some of the tools we had stupidly left out––another hard lesson learnt. Fortunately, most of the tools had been stolen in the first place from the various workshops we worked in, so no great loss.
The next day, good to his word, the mechanic turned up with his own tools and we set to stripping the Land Rover down to get at the clutch. To do this in the middle of a field in Africa with no jacks or ramps meant getting at the bell housing from the top. This involved taking the seats out and then removing the floor of the cab. As we were all dab hands at wielding spanners for a living it was a job soon done.
While we were working another bunch of people turned up. We were a bit worried as some of them were in police uniform. It turned out that it was the local mayor and his retinue who had come to visit us and check out what was happening. We had a friendly chat the outcome of which was an invite by the police officer to have a ride that afternoon on the police horses. Meanwhile, the mechanic had, with some help from us, removed the drive shafts, got the bell housing off, and stripped the clutch plate out. Now all we needed was a replacement. The mechanic jumped in his car to go and find one.
In the meantime, we decided to have a walk around the locality. We also needed to find some food to cook. As we wandered around we came upon a butchers. It was a rondavel hut, the building was circular made of the local red mud and topped off with a grass roof. This one had the carcass of a sheep hanging outside. The bloodied fleece was neatly put to one side while the guts and entrails of the unfortunate creature lay on the ground under it’s nose. Actually, it didn’t have a nose as the head had been placed on the blood stained tree trunk that served as a chopping block.
We decided on a barbecue that evening so all we had to do was choose what cuts we wanted. This left our wives dumbstruck. The meat they usually bought was nicely wrapped in cellophane on a nice polystyrene plate, from the supermarket. They had never been faced with a whole animal to choose from. After some discussion we decided to go for ribs. People put ribs on barbeque––didn’t they? We also thought that by barbequing the meat the heat would probably kill anything the multitude of flies buzzing around the corpse had left behind.
The deal done the butcher set to hacking up Larry the lamb and producing for us a bloody newspaper wrapped parcel to carry home. When we returned to the Crocodile Inn the mechanic had returned and it was not good news. He couldn’t find a replacement part locally, but there was one a couple of hours drive away and if we could pay for his petrol and give him the price of the part he would go and fetch it for us. The deal was done and we watched him drive off down the dusty track with our money, wondering if we would see him again.
The police horses were bony old nags but they were sure footed across the dusty veld. We turned up, as arranged at the police station and hauled ourselves into the saddle. None of us were horsemen but it was a chance not to be missed. As we rode away from the building there were shouts and whistles which attracted our attention. Hands were waving at us out of the barred windows of the prison cells, the inmates were wishing us well.
We rode around for about an hour through the spectacular countryside which was more than long enough for my sore backside and aching legs. These horses had plodded along but for inexperienced riders like ourselves we needed to get off and down a few beers to ease the pain away. Back at our camp we started to organise our barbeque, under the ever watchful gaze of people who would wander up and stand about three or four yards away and just watch. It is unnerving at first because one is never quite sure what they want. And after having some of our belongings stolen and people creeping around out tent the night before we were extra suspicious.
A couple of the guys we met on the first day came up and sat down with us. We gave them a beer and chatted away. They told us, quite openly, they were diamond smugglers. And they regularly smuggled diamonds out of the kingdom. This was not beyond the realms of possibility because the Letseng diamond mine was only about two hours south of Butha Buthe. Notwithstanding their claims, the way they were dressed seemed to suggest they were not doing so well in the diamond smuggling trade. But we all have a story to tell over a few beers don’t we?
The following day the mechanic turned up with the replacement clutch plate. It was the work of a couple of hours to replace it and then bolt the floor and seats back in. We paid the mechanic the money he asked for as it was a fair price for what he had done for us and was probably a nice windfall for him, it certainly didn’t break our bank. As we had to get back to work we set to breaking our camp and getting ready to leave. We had to turn our backs on the mountain adventure and the capital of Lesotho.
Back on the road to Vanderbijlpark we stopped at a truck stop for coffee and as we were paying I noticed some caffeine tablets for sale at the till, they were the drug of choice for the long distance truck drivers, so they were good enough for me.. As I was tired from sleeping on the hard ground for two nights this seemed like a good idea to perk me up. That is, of course, until I missed the junction and put the Land Rover up on two wheels trying to make it. My mate, the other Rob, took over the driving and I was relegated to the back seats with my wife.
The was the first and last adventure we took in the Land Rover, today over forty years later, I have no recollection of what happened to the vehicle––I assume we sold it on. And for both Rob and myself our days in South Africa were numbered. We would soon go our separate ways back to the U.K. to new lives. But for myself and my wife Janet the next few months would see us traveling through the deserts of Botswana in a five ton, bright blue, ex-army truck.
When the clutch goes the first indication is a horrendous burning smell and then you start to lose forward momentum as the engine starts to race. Although Rob and I were top class engineers we were not motor mechanics, we had no spares and we were in the middle of the bush in Africa. There is no AA rescue service. We managed to turn the vehicle around and coast down the hill. Fortunately, we had enough clutch left to get us to the Crocodile Inn.
I have no idea why it was called the Crocodile Inn because we were nowhere near a river and there were no crocodiles – but hey, that is Africa for you. We parked the truck in the car park and hunted out the owners. We told them of our situation and got permission to put our tent up next to our stricken vehicle. We also asked if there was a local mechanic that could give us a hand.
Of course, we were big news locally and as we started to set up the tent a crowd of people came to watch us. A few guys came over to chat and ask us what’s what. Everybody was very friendly but we were sure we were being scoped out so we tried to keep everything shipshape and under control. Our audience was still there after night had fallen and having cooked ourselves a meal on the camping stoves, we shared some of the food with our guests.
We also met a guy who claimed to be a Land Rover mechanic in Johannesburg and that tomorrow he would come and help us out. After he disappeared into the night we guessed that far from being a Land Rover mechanic he was probably the actual Land Rover mechanics ‘boy’. This was a derogatory term used by white South Africans to label the grown black men who did the basic, hard, and dirty labour for them. We had also fallen into that racist linguistic trap.
Later that night we were tucked up in our sleeping bags. All four of us were sharing one big tent. The ground was hard so we tried to drink enough beer to numb the pain. Nevertheless, we were sleeping fitfully so the noise of someone or something moving around outside our tent alerted us to a prowler of some sort. There was a clinking of metal on metal which had the other Rob and I out of our sleeping bags and grabbing handy weapons to protect ourselves and our wives. By the time we were out of the tent having made enough noise about it the intruders had gone, taking with them some of the tools we had stupidly left out––another hard lesson learnt. Fortunately, most of the tools had been stolen in the first place from the various workshops we worked in, so no great loss.
The next day, good to his word, the mechanic turned up with his own tools and we set to stripping the Land Rover down to get at the clutch. To do this in the middle of a field in Africa with no jacks or ramps meant getting at the bell housing from the top. This involved taking the seats out and then removing the floor of the cab. As we were all dab hands at wielding spanners for a living it was a job soon done.
While we were working another bunch of people turned up. We were a bit worried as some of them were in police uniform. It turned out that it was the local mayor and his retinue who had come to visit us and check out what was happening. We had a friendly chat the outcome of which was an invite by the police officer to have a ride that afternoon on the police horses. Meanwhile, the mechanic had, with some help from us, removed the drive shafts, got the bell housing off, and stripped the clutch plate out. Now all we needed was a replacement. The mechanic jumped in his car to go and find one.
In the meantime, we decided to have a walk around the locality. We also needed to find some food to cook. As we wandered around we came upon a butchers. It was a rondavel hut, the building was circular made of the local red mud and topped off with a grass roof. This one had the carcass of a sheep hanging outside. The bloodied fleece was neatly put to one side while the guts and entrails of the unfortunate creature lay on the ground under it’s nose. Actually, it didn’t have a nose as the head had been placed on the blood stained tree trunk that served as a chopping block.
We decided on a barbecue that evening so all we had to do was choose what cuts we wanted. This left our wives dumbstruck. The meat they usually bought was nicely wrapped in cellophane on a nice polystyrene plate, from the supermarket. They had never been faced with a whole animal to choose from. After some discussion we decided to go for ribs. People put ribs on barbeque––didn’t they? We also thought that by barbequing the meat the heat would probably kill anything the multitude of flies buzzing around the corpse had left behind.
The deal done the butcher set to hacking up Larry the lamb and producing for us a bloody newspaper wrapped parcel to carry home. When we returned to the Crocodile Inn the mechanic had returned and it was not good news. He couldn’t find a replacement part locally, but there was one a couple of hours drive away and if we could pay for his petrol and give him the price of the part he would go and fetch it for us. The deal was done and we watched him drive off down the dusty track with our money, wondering if we would see him again.
The police horses were bony old nags but they were sure footed across the dusty veld. We turned up, as arranged at the police station and hauled ourselves into the saddle. None of us were horsemen but it was a chance not to be missed. As we rode away from the building there were shouts and whistles which attracted our attention. Hands were waving at us out of the barred windows of the prison cells, the inmates were wishing us well.
We rode around for about an hour through the spectacular countryside which was more than long enough for my sore backside and aching legs. These horses had plodded along but for inexperienced riders like ourselves we needed to get off and down a few beers to ease the pain away. Back at our camp we started to organise our barbeque, under the ever watchful gaze of people who would wander up and stand about three or four yards away and just watch. It is unnerving at first because one is never quite sure what they want. And after having some of our belongings stolen and people creeping around out tent the night before we were extra suspicious.
A couple of the guys we met on the first day came up and sat down with us. We gave them a beer and chatted away. They told us, quite openly, they were diamond smugglers. And they regularly smuggled diamonds out of the kingdom. This was not beyond the realms of possibility because the Letseng diamond mine was only about two hours south of Butha Buthe. Notwithstanding their claims, the way they were dressed seemed to suggest they were not doing so well in the diamond smuggling trade. But we all have a story to tell over a few beers don’t we?
The following day the mechanic turned up with the replacement clutch plate. It was the work of a couple of hours to replace it and then bolt the floor and seats back in. We paid the mechanic the money he asked for as it was a fair price for what he had done for us and was probably a nice windfall for him, it certainly didn’t break our bank. As we had to get back to work we set to breaking our camp and getting ready to leave. We had to turn our backs on the mountain adventure and the capital of Lesotho.
Back on the road to Vanderbijlpark we stopped at a truck stop for coffee and as we were paying I noticed some caffeine tablets for sale at the till, they were the drug of choice for the long distance truck drivers, so they were good enough for me.. As I was tired from sleeping on the hard ground for two nights this seemed like a good idea to perk me up. That is, of course, until I missed the junction and put the Land Rover up on two wheels trying to make it. My mate, the other Rob, took over the driving and I was relegated to the back seats with my wife.
The was the first and last adventure we took in the Land Rover, today over forty years later, I have no recollection of what happened to the vehicle––I assume we sold it on. And for both Rob and myself our days in South Africa were numbered. We would soon go our separate ways back to the U.K. to new lives. But for myself and my wife Janet the next few months would see us traveling through the deserts of Botswana in a five ton, bright blue, ex-army truck.
PART TWO On the Road - Swaziland 1976
Wow, Bob Marley was coming to South Africa - and Jimmy Cliff. This was getting better and better. Reggae music was the sound track to my life and in the mid 1970’s Bob Marley and Cliff were big stars. It couldn’t be true. Surely these major stars would be boycotting the apartheid state where I had, in my naivety, emigrated. I was working in a large steel mill in Vanderbijlpark located in what was then known as the Transvaal.
But no, there was a poster listing other reggae musicians and they were not coming to South Africa after all, the music festival was going to be located in Mbabane the capital of Swaziland. Swaziland is the independent state surrounded, like an island, by South Africa on three sides and Mozambique to the east.
The festival was going to be held on Boxing Day, which was a stroke of luck because we had the Christmas holidays off. Very quickly seven of us organised the trip. The other Rob, my buddy, and I had befriended two British engineers who worked at the plant and as they both had cars and we didn’t it was a perfect match, despite one of them being a bit of an arsehole.
One of the downsides of being an expat is that one really doesn’t get to choose one’s friends. Just by being there you become de-facto mates with everyone and unless you are happy being Johnny No Mates then you have to put up with people you probably would not give the time of day to back at home.
One of the guys was called Rory and he was friendly, red-haired with a ruddy face, always grinning and interesting to talk to. The other guy, let’s call him Dick, was a long steak of cats piss, opinionated and a braggart. I didn’t like him much, but he had a car, and needs must.
Our wives, Janet and Heather were coming with us plus a guy I knew from back in Weston-Super-Mare called Pete. Coincidentally, when we first met him, before we left the UK, he told us he had a girlfriend in Vanderbijlpark and would be visiting her after we had arrived. It turned out that her father didn’t like him that much and had thrown him out and we had offered him a room for the rest of his stay. It also turned out that I didn’t like him much either, but that’s another story.
Mbabane was not too far away, about a five or six hour drive, some of which would be on dirt roads. We left early on Christmas day. We had packed cool boxes with Christmas dinner and beer, planning to stop somewhere en-route for our festive picnic.
I was in the lead car driven by Rory. My wife and I sat in the back seat and Pete was up front. It was a hot and dusty drive once we were off the hard top but the scenery made up for that. The ground and grass was scorched brown by the southern summer. We drove past many small compounds made up of rondavels, the traditional circular huts made from mud, dung and other local materials and topped with a thatch. A thorn bush hedge surrounded each little settlement we passed.
By lunchtime we were following a river and the bank seemed as good a place as any to enjoy our turkey and salad. We were out in the countryside and there were no signs of local habitation, but within minutes, we had a bunch of children watching us. This seems to be the norm in Africa. Stop in some out of the way place that looks uninhabited and pretty soon you will have an audience.
We let them share our food and we even risked swimming in the river. Bilharzia, a water-borne parasite, is found in the rivers and lakes of Southern Africa, but the water in the river was free flowing and we had been told that this was safe. The kids were swimming in it anyway so we did too. It was nice to cool off and have some fun.
It was during lunch that Dick’s obnoxious personality came to the fore, he started to get insufferable and loud. He was particularly rude to my wife and we had a stand up argument that almost came to blows. Our friends calmed us down and we got back on the road to the music festival.
The border crossing was uneventful as we all had British passports and we made our way into Mbabane where we found rooms in a local motel. Later that evening we went out to find food and a drink. We seemed to be the only foreigners (White) around but we ensconced ourselves in a bar that was playing good music and settled down with some cold beer.
Dick has cosied up to the bar and was chatting up a local girl and it was clear that it wasn’t going too well. He was drunk by this time and we could hear he was being his loathsome racist self. People had started to pay attention and as we were the only white faces in the place the situation could very quickly spiral out of control. We had to get him away.
As we were trying to get him out, into the street, he loudly announced that if he had a shotgun he could clear the bar of all the fucking kaffirs in it. This was incendiary language given where we were. We needed to do something so Rob and I jumped him and starting punching his lights out before the locals decided it was us that needed punching or worse. Some security turned up and they were toting shotguns. We dragged the idiot out into the street and told him to fuck off, as we didn’t want to be associated with him. I went back in an apologised to the woman as Dick disappeared into the night with Rory, and we finally retired to the safety of our motel beds.
The next morning we were faced with the astounding news the music festival was off. The festival tents were up, the site was ready, but no one, it seems, had informed the musicians that they were meant to be there. It all seemed to be some sort of major cock up or scam. We were not sure – but what now?
We sat down to have a council of war to tell Dick that his behaviour the night before was outrageous and that if it happened again we would beat the shit out of him and leave him to his fate. We also needed to decide what we were going to do with the rest of our holiday now that the music festival was a bust.
Somehow, we found out about a place called Paradise Falls that was up the river. We were told it was a popular spot for the locals to hang out to swim. So now we had a plan and it didn’t take long for us to get on the right road to the falls. Once there some local guys who were very friendly wanted to chat with us. They also wanted to share some ‘beer’ telling us it was ‘mealie beer’. [Probably umqombothi – I Googled it for this article] They were insistent that we had a drink because it was Christmas and we needed to drink.
Wow, Bob Marley was coming to South Africa - and Jimmy Cliff. This was getting better and better. Reggae music was the sound track to my life and in the mid 1970’s Bob Marley and Cliff were big stars. It couldn’t be true. Surely these major stars would be boycotting the apartheid state where I had, in my naivety, emigrated. I was working in a large steel mill in Vanderbijlpark located in what was then known as the Transvaal.
But no, there was a poster listing other reggae musicians and they were not coming to South Africa after all, the music festival was going to be located in Mbabane the capital of Swaziland. Swaziland is the independent state surrounded, like an island, by South Africa on three sides and Mozambique to the east.
The festival was going to be held on Boxing Day, which was a stroke of luck because we had the Christmas holidays off. Very quickly seven of us organised the trip. The other Rob, my buddy, and I had befriended two British engineers who worked at the plant and as they both had cars and we didn’t it was a perfect match, despite one of them being a bit of an arsehole.
One of the downsides of being an expat is that one really doesn’t get to choose one’s friends. Just by being there you become de-facto mates with everyone and unless you are happy being Johnny No Mates then you have to put up with people you probably would not give the time of day to back at home.
One of the guys was called Rory and he was friendly, red-haired with a ruddy face, always grinning and interesting to talk to. The other guy, let’s call him Dick, was a long steak of cats piss, opinionated and a braggart. I didn’t like him much, but he had a car, and needs must.
Our wives, Janet and Heather were coming with us plus a guy I knew from back in Weston-Super-Mare called Pete. Coincidentally, when we first met him, before we left the UK, he told us he had a girlfriend in Vanderbijlpark and would be visiting her after we had arrived. It turned out that her father didn’t like him that much and had thrown him out and we had offered him a room for the rest of his stay. It also turned out that I didn’t like him much either, but that’s another story.
Mbabane was not too far away, about a five or six hour drive, some of which would be on dirt roads. We left early on Christmas day. We had packed cool boxes with Christmas dinner and beer, planning to stop somewhere en-route for our festive picnic.
I was in the lead car driven by Rory. My wife and I sat in the back seat and Pete was up front. It was a hot and dusty drive once we were off the hard top but the scenery made up for that. The ground and grass was scorched brown by the southern summer. We drove past many small compounds made up of rondavels, the traditional circular huts made from mud, dung and other local materials and topped with a thatch. A thorn bush hedge surrounded each little settlement we passed.
By lunchtime we were following a river and the bank seemed as good a place as any to enjoy our turkey and salad. We were out in the countryside and there were no signs of local habitation, but within minutes, we had a bunch of children watching us. This seems to be the norm in Africa. Stop in some out of the way place that looks uninhabited and pretty soon you will have an audience.
We let them share our food and we even risked swimming in the river. Bilharzia, a water-borne parasite, is found in the rivers and lakes of Southern Africa, but the water in the river was free flowing and we had been told that this was safe. The kids were swimming in it anyway so we did too. It was nice to cool off and have some fun.
It was during lunch that Dick’s obnoxious personality came to the fore, he started to get insufferable and loud. He was particularly rude to my wife and we had a stand up argument that almost came to blows. Our friends calmed us down and we got back on the road to the music festival.
The border crossing was uneventful as we all had British passports and we made our way into Mbabane where we found rooms in a local motel. Later that evening we went out to find food and a drink. We seemed to be the only foreigners (White) around but we ensconced ourselves in a bar that was playing good music and settled down with some cold beer.
Dick has cosied up to the bar and was chatting up a local girl and it was clear that it wasn’t going too well. He was drunk by this time and we could hear he was being his loathsome racist self. People had started to pay attention and as we were the only white faces in the place the situation could very quickly spiral out of control. We had to get him away.
As we were trying to get him out, into the street, he loudly announced that if he had a shotgun he could clear the bar of all the fucking kaffirs in it. This was incendiary language given where we were. We needed to do something so Rob and I jumped him and starting punching his lights out before the locals decided it was us that needed punching or worse. Some security turned up and they were toting shotguns. We dragged the idiot out into the street and told him to fuck off, as we didn’t want to be associated with him. I went back in an apologised to the woman as Dick disappeared into the night with Rory, and we finally retired to the safety of our motel beds.
The next morning we were faced with the astounding news the music festival was off. The festival tents were up, the site was ready, but no one, it seems, had informed the musicians that they were meant to be there. It all seemed to be some sort of major cock up or scam. We were not sure – but what now?
We sat down to have a council of war to tell Dick that his behaviour the night before was outrageous and that if it happened again we would beat the shit out of him and leave him to his fate. We also needed to decide what we were going to do with the rest of our holiday now that the music festival was a bust.
Somehow, we found out about a place called Paradise Falls that was up the river. We were told it was a popular spot for the locals to hang out to swim. So now we had a plan and it didn’t take long for us to get on the right road to the falls. Once there some local guys who were very friendly wanted to chat with us. They also wanted to share some ‘beer’ telling us it was ‘mealie beer’. [Probably umqombothi – I Googled it for this article] They were insistent that we had a drink because it was Christmas and we needed to drink.
Rob took a swig and then he offered me what looked like a cardboard litre milk carton. I toasted my new grinning friends and took a swallow. At the moment my friend, Rob, shouted out, ‘Ah, they’re taking the piss, it’s just vomit mate.’ And right at that moment that’s just what it tasted like. It had a lumpy, sour, soft porridge like consistency in my mouth. The vinegar notes on my tongue almost convinced my brain that it was vomit I was drinking. But by then it was just too late. I swallowed the mess and wished my friends a Happy Christmas whilst cursing Rob who was pissing himself laughing. No one else wanted a taste after that.
Then our new friends offered us a boat ride, which we accepted. Out on the river all was cool and calm and we enjoyed cruising up and down the river watching the scenery pass. It was then another bottle was produced. This time it was ‘berry beer’. It had a distinctly home-brew look about it with debris and other sediments floating around in it. But hey, it was Christmas, what else could we do? It was slightly better than the mealie beer, but not by much. Sour, with no hint of berries, but clearly alcoholic, I guessed we would be blind by midnight.
We eventually reached Paradise Falls. It was well named for at that moment it was truly paradise. The fast moving clear water meant that it was free of any nasty bugs and it was popular with the locals. The water ran swiftly over undulating rocks worn smooth by the rushing water. One could start at the top and slide down, dropping into cool pools before the next switch back ride to the bottom. It was one of those times when it was fun to be alive and adventuring in a foreign country.
Then our new friends offered us a boat ride, which we accepted. Out on the river all was cool and calm and we enjoyed cruising up and down the river watching the scenery pass. It was then another bottle was produced. This time it was ‘berry beer’. It had a distinctly home-brew look about it with debris and other sediments floating around in it. But hey, it was Christmas, what else could we do? It was slightly better than the mealie beer, but not by much. Sour, with no hint of berries, but clearly alcoholic, I guessed we would be blind by midnight.
We eventually reached Paradise Falls. It was well named for at that moment it was truly paradise. The fast moving clear water meant that it was free of any nasty bugs and it was popular with the locals. The water ran swiftly over undulating rocks worn smooth by the rushing water. One could start at the top and slide down, dropping into cool pools before the next switch back ride to the bottom. It was one of those times when it was fun to be alive and adventuring in a foreign country.
The drive back was uneventful, as are all return journeys. Time loses the elasticity of the outward journey and solidifies into something much shorter and direct. Conversation is stilted as people drift in and out of sleep. The driver is focused on the road and trying to keep his eyelids open as night falls. Rory and I shared the driving and all too soon the smoking inferno of the steel mills hove into sight and we were home.
PART ONE On the Road – South Africa 1976
My first experience of South Africa was stepping into Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg and wondering why all the policemen had machine guns. This was around 1976 and I had gone through the process of being accepted for emigration and no one thought to tell me, a politically naïve twenty-two-year-old, about apartheid.
I travelled with my wife of a few months to our new life in Vanderbijlpark in the Transvaal. I had found work in the steel mills of ISCOR the states massive Iron and Steel Corporation. This was to be my first experience of living abroad.
Everything was arranged by the recruiting department of ISCOR. Our first night in South Africa was in a hotel with other recruits who had been on the same flight. A new challenge was the meal. It was a steak in a monkey gland sauce. Monkey Gland Sauce? What? Real Monkey? It was Africa after all and I’d never seen this on the menu at my local Berni Inn. The waitress explained that no monkeys were harmed in the making of the sauce and to celebrate we all got slightly drunk on the over large bottles of Castle beer. At five thousand feet above sea level alcohol works very efficiently on the brain.
We moved in to our new flat furnished with brand new furniture we were encouraged to buy at the local shops on HP. The company stood as guarantor. Vanderbijlpark was a company town through and through––the person with us who took us around the shops provided each of the vendors with our work number and department. We also had a generous ‘settling in’ allowance burning a hole in our pockets. We’d all signed three-year contracts, which underlined the penalties of breaking said contracts. Mainly, it was to do with paying back all the monies the company had shelled out to get us there including our allowances. I never once, during my time in S.A., questioned why the company was being so generous. Similar enquiries to move to Australia uncovered the fact that once moving there one was pretty much left to one's own devices to find work and housing. So S.A. was an easy decision for me––a man of very little brain I am sure you are thinking.
The steel plant was straight out of Blake’s vision of Dark Satanic Mills. I was lucky, as a highly skilled centre lathe turner I worked in the maintenance department. Hard-bitten expat engineers and steelworkers from all around the world kept the mills running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, no time off for good behaviour. Apart from fulfilling the regular maintenance work––making new bits for the plant to keep it running––there was also the drama of some frantic guy turning up at 2 in the morning with a mangled piece of steel in his hand demanding a ‘new’ one asap so production wouldn’t be held up.
They ran continental shifts, which was new to me. This meant I worked six in the morning until two in the afternoon. The other shifts were two until ten pm., and ten until six am. Weekends were twelve-hour shifts while one shift had a day off. Tuesday was the other day off. But that meant the ten till six crew had to be back at work at two until ten. They had glossed over this back in the U.K. so it came as a bit of a shock.
Long hours of hard, dirty work meant I crewed up with two characters I will call Jock and Paddy. One was from Glasgow and the other from Northern Ireland. Both older and grizzled, both had impenetrable accents. They would speak and I wouldn’t know what they were saying–– good job they were not my bosses.
Most of the shift foremen were local South Africans––Afrikaners. There was no love lost between the Afrikaners and the Brits for historical reasons. We soon learnt the bad things to say to the hulking brutes, swear words such as voetsec and son of a bitch, which seemed to rile them but to the normal Brit factory worker were quite mild. This antagonism came about during the shift switch. We would come in ready to work on machines that the outgoing guy should have cleaned down and made ready for the new guy. This rarely happened even though the white worker would have a ‘boy’ to do his work, hence the ill feeling.
I was an ill feeling that had far reaching consequences. One guy, a Boer, but friendlier than the rest as he was on my shift, apologised to me telling me he could not invite me to his house because his grandmother wouldn’t tolerate it and would not speak to me. Such is the power of cultural memory I was to learn later.
By ‘boy’ I mean black workers who did the menial tasks around the factory. Helping with the heavy lifting and the cleaning. The ‘machine boys’ were mainly Xhosa. This is because even in the factory there was a tribal hierarchical system going on. The Zulu’s had the best work because they were top of the heap. Then it was the Tswana people, the Swazi’s and at the bottom the Xhosa. The Zulu guys job was to sweep the factory floor. He did this with an air of authority and quiet majesty. He would stop and chat telling us of his three wives back at his homestead.
I'd come to understand what was happening politically in South Africa through the simple expedience of experiences such as getting on a local bus and being told I wasn’t allowed to ride on it because I was white, living in white only areas and becoming aware of the situation very quickly.
The black guys in the factory liked us Brits because most of us were used to doing the heavy work and cleaning ourselves and during the night shift (and the day time) we would let them get their heads down in some quiet corner. We were also useful in making knobkerries or fighting sticks on the lathe, which were very much in demand. We took payment in the form of matchboxes full of grass so everyone was happy.
Social life in Vanderbijlpark revolved around the club. The bar was a rough and ready place, a bit Wild West if you will. It was the preserve of MEN––rough, tough men––steelworkers. Women had to sit in the lounge and to go in there the male partner had to wear a shirt and a jacket. It was in the men’s bar that my friend and I had to crawl out on our hands and knees, like in a movie, because there was a full-blown punch up going on––just like in the Western movies on TV.
Other social events included braai (BBQ) on the Vaal River and hanging out at other peoples homes, especially if they had a pool. But this didn’t happen too often because of the shift systems we worked. For the young stay at home wives this was not much of a life as they barely saw their new husbands, as we were always at work or in bed asleep. Most of them strayed and marriages split up with the female partner often fleeing back to Britain. Mine lasted until we both arrived back in the U.K, but that’s another story.
At home I’d travelled abroad on holidays, France, Spain, Majorca, but now I was on another exciting continent. A continent, the best man at my wedding had piqued my interest about having been bought up in Zambia. I wanted to see more. So with my pal, another Rob, we purchased a Landrover and went exploring.
*****
How does this relate to writing you might ask? I believe in the adage write what you know. Since my adventures in Africa I have travelled to many countries and lived in a few––I am currently living and working in China. These experiences influence in some way or other what I write. I use my experiences and the people I have met along the way to give my writing depth and colour. So if a young writer were to ask my advice I would tell them to take Jack Kerouac’s advice and get On The Road.
My first experience of South Africa was stepping into Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg and wondering why all the policemen had machine guns. This was around 1976 and I had gone through the process of being accepted for emigration and no one thought to tell me, a politically naïve twenty-two-year-old, about apartheid.
I travelled with my wife of a few months to our new life in Vanderbijlpark in the Transvaal. I had found work in the steel mills of ISCOR the states massive Iron and Steel Corporation. This was to be my first experience of living abroad.
Everything was arranged by the recruiting department of ISCOR. Our first night in South Africa was in a hotel with other recruits who had been on the same flight. A new challenge was the meal. It was a steak in a monkey gland sauce. Monkey Gland Sauce? What? Real Monkey? It was Africa after all and I’d never seen this on the menu at my local Berni Inn. The waitress explained that no monkeys were harmed in the making of the sauce and to celebrate we all got slightly drunk on the over large bottles of Castle beer. At five thousand feet above sea level alcohol works very efficiently on the brain.
We moved in to our new flat furnished with brand new furniture we were encouraged to buy at the local shops on HP. The company stood as guarantor. Vanderbijlpark was a company town through and through––the person with us who took us around the shops provided each of the vendors with our work number and department. We also had a generous ‘settling in’ allowance burning a hole in our pockets. We’d all signed three-year contracts, which underlined the penalties of breaking said contracts. Mainly, it was to do with paying back all the monies the company had shelled out to get us there including our allowances. I never once, during my time in S.A., questioned why the company was being so generous. Similar enquiries to move to Australia uncovered the fact that once moving there one was pretty much left to one's own devices to find work and housing. So S.A. was an easy decision for me––a man of very little brain I am sure you are thinking.
The steel plant was straight out of Blake’s vision of Dark Satanic Mills. I was lucky, as a highly skilled centre lathe turner I worked in the maintenance department. Hard-bitten expat engineers and steelworkers from all around the world kept the mills running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, no time off for good behaviour. Apart from fulfilling the regular maintenance work––making new bits for the plant to keep it running––there was also the drama of some frantic guy turning up at 2 in the morning with a mangled piece of steel in his hand demanding a ‘new’ one asap so production wouldn’t be held up.
They ran continental shifts, which was new to me. This meant I worked six in the morning until two in the afternoon. The other shifts were two until ten pm., and ten until six am. Weekends were twelve-hour shifts while one shift had a day off. Tuesday was the other day off. But that meant the ten till six crew had to be back at work at two until ten. They had glossed over this back in the U.K. so it came as a bit of a shock.
Long hours of hard, dirty work meant I crewed up with two characters I will call Jock and Paddy. One was from Glasgow and the other from Northern Ireland. Both older and grizzled, both had impenetrable accents. They would speak and I wouldn’t know what they were saying–– good job they were not my bosses.
Most of the shift foremen were local South Africans––Afrikaners. There was no love lost between the Afrikaners and the Brits for historical reasons. We soon learnt the bad things to say to the hulking brutes, swear words such as voetsec and son of a bitch, which seemed to rile them but to the normal Brit factory worker were quite mild. This antagonism came about during the shift switch. We would come in ready to work on machines that the outgoing guy should have cleaned down and made ready for the new guy. This rarely happened even though the white worker would have a ‘boy’ to do his work, hence the ill feeling.
I was an ill feeling that had far reaching consequences. One guy, a Boer, but friendlier than the rest as he was on my shift, apologised to me telling me he could not invite me to his house because his grandmother wouldn’t tolerate it and would not speak to me. Such is the power of cultural memory I was to learn later.
By ‘boy’ I mean black workers who did the menial tasks around the factory. Helping with the heavy lifting and the cleaning. The ‘machine boys’ were mainly Xhosa. This is because even in the factory there was a tribal hierarchical system going on. The Zulu’s had the best work because they were top of the heap. Then it was the Tswana people, the Swazi’s and at the bottom the Xhosa. The Zulu guys job was to sweep the factory floor. He did this with an air of authority and quiet majesty. He would stop and chat telling us of his three wives back at his homestead.
I'd come to understand what was happening politically in South Africa through the simple expedience of experiences such as getting on a local bus and being told I wasn’t allowed to ride on it because I was white, living in white only areas and becoming aware of the situation very quickly.
The black guys in the factory liked us Brits because most of us were used to doing the heavy work and cleaning ourselves and during the night shift (and the day time) we would let them get their heads down in some quiet corner. We were also useful in making knobkerries or fighting sticks on the lathe, which were very much in demand. We took payment in the form of matchboxes full of grass so everyone was happy.
Social life in Vanderbijlpark revolved around the club. The bar was a rough and ready place, a bit Wild West if you will. It was the preserve of MEN––rough, tough men––steelworkers. Women had to sit in the lounge and to go in there the male partner had to wear a shirt and a jacket. It was in the men’s bar that my friend and I had to crawl out on our hands and knees, like in a movie, because there was a full-blown punch up going on––just like in the Western movies on TV.
Other social events included braai (BBQ) on the Vaal River and hanging out at other peoples homes, especially if they had a pool. But this didn’t happen too often because of the shift systems we worked. For the young stay at home wives this was not much of a life as they barely saw their new husbands, as we were always at work or in bed asleep. Most of them strayed and marriages split up with the female partner often fleeing back to Britain. Mine lasted until we both arrived back in the U.K, but that’s another story.
At home I’d travelled abroad on holidays, France, Spain, Majorca, but now I was on another exciting continent. A continent, the best man at my wedding had piqued my interest about having been bought up in Zambia. I wanted to see more. So with my pal, another Rob, we purchased a Landrover and went exploring.
*****
How does this relate to writing you might ask? I believe in the adage write what you know. Since my adventures in Africa I have travelled to many countries and lived in a few––I am currently living and working in China. These experiences influence in some way or other what I write. I use my experiences and the people I have met along the way to give my writing depth and colour. So if a young writer were to ask my advice I would tell them to take Jack Kerouac’s advice and get On The Road.
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