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British Mensa Travel Special Interest Group |
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Miles
and miles... My brother Johnny is a doctor and, as a young man, he spent 5 years in Botswana. After a lifetime's work as a GP (and police surgeon) in Fife, he has retired and with his civil partner, Grant, he did 3 months last year in Zambia and is doing 6 months this time. The deal
is interesting simply as a deal. A dozen or so "safari lodges"
are clustered around the gates of the South Luangwa National park at a
place called Mfuwe. Some of them are very expensive. These lodges have
clubbed together to pay for a qualified doctor to look after their clients
- if something goes wrong qualified help really is a long way and a long
time away, but in 3 months last year he only saw dozen patients from the
safari lodges, none of them seriously ill. The Zambian government allows
this foreign doctor to work in their country on condition that he works
at Mfuwe clinic. That is 99% of his workload. This is the place where the cash economy happens. One kind of shop is the "knee-high boutique". Big western chains pack failed fashion lines and end-of lines into bales and sell them off cheap in Zambia. So you see Zambians walking around in the most bizarre variety of fashions. It has killed off the Zambian rag trade, except for the printed cotton wrap-round skirts which are such a feature of the Zambian scene. The road is a feature in a featureless landscape. The land seems to have no grain, no "lie"; it is a huge flat plain with rivers meandering through it. There is a random scattering of trees, bushes, grass and mud. This tree - is it the same one that I saw yesterday or earlier today? I really couldn't tell. I never quite got my eye in for that landscape. When I had travelled further I began to understand Ernest Hemingway's exclamation, "miles and miles of bloody Africa". I stayed in a hut at the safari camp where Johnny and Grant stayed. If there is no need to have walls to keep the cold out, space can be much more generous and architecture and building can be very different. Some of it was very interesting. But insects have to be kept out of houses and air let in, so instead of glass the windows had fine black wire mesh. It was very effective and you see straight through it. The huts were made to give an impression of "being in wild Africa", with curious and maybe not very good compromises between looking "authentic" and being good value for money. But it was OK, and at night when I heard heavy breathing and splashing in the mud outside I knew it was hippopotamuses and I wasn't at home! The experience which these "safari lodges" offer is to be taken round South Luangwa National park on a Landrover with the back seats built up like a '30s charabanc, so you get a good view. It goes slowly so that you don't frighten the animals. I went on some trips, some at night. There are no guarantees, you might or you might not see something interesting. But the guides know the habits of the animals and mostly you do see something interesting. By far the commonest are the impala - surely the model for Bambi. The cutest! Then there are the elephants: despite being so big, they can be in front of you and you don't see them. They walk past the vehicle in complete silence. There are giraffes, rhinos, warthogs, ostriches, so many others I can't list them all. Surely they have become used to the vehicles and become tame to some degree. A lion, not a very big animal, but very near. So long as you stay in the vehicle, you are safe. So they say! All of southern Africa has national parks. No fence surrounds them - they are simply continuations of the rest of the territory. but there is no permanent human settlement in them, the inhabitants were moved out years ago and the parks are seen as important national assets for the tourist trade. Over the whole country, it is against the law to kill any of the big game, but they can be killed if they are dangerous as lions can be, or destructive, as elephants can be. Obviously there is scope for conflict here, but it doesn't seem to be severe conflict. A "poor, third world country": we read about such countries in the newspapers, but seeing one is to realise that not all "third world countries" are the same. Thus, we are given the idea that population outrunning the capacity of the land to feed it is the cause of hunger, but whatever the situation might be in other parts of the world, it is not like that in this part of southern Africa. Nobody actually starves, there is plenty of spare land, as there is in North America and Europe. (It brings you up short to realise that in the Netherlands the project to drain the whole of the Zuiderzee and turn it into farmland has been abandoned, because there were not enough takers for the land that has been drained, and this in a country with one of the greatest farming traditions in the world.) Rather, the chiefs allocate tribal land (only a very small amount of land is held under "title" and that for only 99 years) and even land allocated by the chief may be well beyond the needs, so that you may see a large stretch with only particularly favoured plots cultivated; such as under a tree or in a hollow. The rest is left wild. In some ways then, this seems the "tropical island" of our day-dreams. You can grow as much food as you need, what more do you want? But you do want more. Clothes, a radio, a book, a tool. You may have all the food you want, but other things are out of reach if you haven't money. The shortage of cash has odd consequences. Mobile phones (here called "cell phones") have just come into use and beer sales dropped by 60%. The money has gone on the cell phones. They probably drink just as much beer, only they've gone back to home-brewed beer. It's not my taste in beer! Most arrangements are made by word of mouth, which depends on messages being passed on accurately, and I am sure that vast amounts of time are wasted by misunderstandings and failures to get through. It would grate very badly on me. Some of Johnny's work is to treat conditions which you would see anywhere, like the man who fell off a ladder and broke his wrist. Others are situations you would only get in Africa: a child nearly dead with malaria, 1 in 3 of pregnant women are HIV-positive. Actual AIDS is defined by the appearance of infections, including fungal infections, and rare types of cancer, but the infection may have been picked some time before it becomes AIDS. AIDS is no longer an immediate sentence of death. People can be kept alive for 10 years after symptoms of AIDS appear, and to have a parent alive for a further 10 years makes a huge difference to a child. So Johnny offers an HIV test to all pregnant women and, if they have the virus, he does all he can to prevent the child from getting it; this is fairly often successful. Still, the death rate is terrible, leaving a lot of orphans. Grant has
taken it upon himself to rebuild and improve the clinic and sponsor children,
not always AIDS orphans, to go to school. Grant and Johnny gave me a list
of things to bring. A woodworking plane, school calculators, electric
light bulbs and fluorescent tube starters, scissors, etc, etc. I thought
airport baggage inspection would go wild when they saw it, but they let
it pass without comment. I dare say stranger things go to into Africa
and come out of it. This man
is looking after 18 children, mostly not his own; they get fed too. How
are these children going to grow up? Are they going to feel very insecure,
because anybody might die at any time, or are they going to feel very
secure, because there will always be somebody to look after them? Who
knows? But either way it's a huge burden in a poor country. But people
are very kind and in a non-money economy in some ways people have more
to spare. Of course Johnny and Grant are local heroes and get invited to peoples' homes in the surrounding villages. Just getting there is an adventure. The villages are well off the main road, and we went in their 4WD vehicle. In theory the paths leading off the road to the villages are unpaved roads, and passable by vehicles, but really they are what they look like; paths. They are not simply courses across open land as a ship may have a course across the ocean; they are fixed routes. For some complicated reason, I had to do some of the driving, although I have no Zambian driving licence or insurance, but "a white man can do anything". It was quite an experience to drive at 10 mph (but it seems much faster when your forwards view is so short), along tracks which bend sharply left and right and, when I reached a fork, trying respond to calls of "right" or, confusingly, "reft" - like the Japanese, these people cannot tell the difference between "l" and "r" . And along the too-few "straights" I had to judge which side to tend to, or I would hear the shouts of anger behind me as the vehicle knocked down maize. I saw that the villages were different. In one, the houses were simply but pleasingly painted, set around a village "square" of sand which has been swept in overlapping patterns. How different to Mfuwe with its inches-deep mud. To go inside these houses is to realise how desperately poor the people are. Nevertheless, the men and especially the women come out in the morning immaculate in perfectly clean clothes. I don't know how they do it. We were the guests of honour. We sat on special chairs, and it was interesting to see how primitive methods could produce quite comfortable chairs. A fuss was made of us. The word for "white man" is muzungu (plural mazungu, literally "a wanderer, a person who does not live in a fixed place") and I soon learned to pick that word out and know that they were talking about me. We were introduced to the village chief and the Ndune, the regional chief's representative, who seemed a much more powerful man, though that may just have been the way it was here. Some of these men had been away and worked for money, for example as mechanics in Lusaka, and then come back to live as subsistence farmers. Then the women were sent away, maybe not wholly wrongly; we were a threesome of senior white men, and the host entertained his guests to a meal. Once again, that showed how poor they were, it was just one chicken between us, and I'm not sure all of one. Because of the tsetse fly there are no horses, donkeys, cows or sheep and even goats are rare. So it's chicken, chicken, chicken, and eggs are widely on sale at the roadside. Not only does this part of Zambia lack these animals’ meat, it also lacks their use as haulage animals. But the vegetable side was something else! Cassava looked and tasted rather like parsnip and there was a dish called nsima which I just couldn't get along with, but Grant discovered new depths of taste in it. It is a very stiff porridge of maize flour not dissimilar to polenta but cooked for a short time. This is eaten by hand along with a small serving of relish made of leaves, ground nuts and beans depending on availability. We were being feted - we had meat! It took a few days to realise a strange feature of the Africans. They have no face and eye language that I could see. Maybe it is the Geordie in me that makes me miss the nod of recognition when I meet somebody I have seen before, the nod and wink to somebody I know well. After a while I began to really miss that. And babies just won't play peek-a-boo, they just stare back with their big, unblinking, brown eyes. But people who have more contact with the white man seem to reply in kind, though I don't know whether they have taken up the habit among themselves. A busy week with my brother! And then to Lusaka in a much more appropriate Beech 18 seat twin turboprop (full load) and on to Livingstone (only two passengers) It is easy to see why the white man wanted to settle in and around Livingstone! No jungle, just rolling grasslands and flowering trees. I went to Victoria Falls, a spectacular sight, I walked along the bridge and the bungee jumping operators said "You look like a jumper!" Not me! Not on your Nellie! I was supposed to meet the tour operator for the next leg of my trip, but it was oddly difficult to track him down. When I did track him down, he said I wasn't on his list to go. What a heart-stopper! But after phoning his head office he agreed to take me - I had already paid. There was the leader himself, a man of about 40, a recent female graduate in tourism studies who was learning to take the trip next time and two New Zealand women teachers. We did a huge mileage together in a minivan. So, into Botswana. We crossed wide rivers by ferry. I went a on a boat trip in the Chobe reserve, but the main experience of this part of the trip was to spend two nights in the Okovango delta. We got into a dug-out canoe at a muddy ditch-side and the poler drove the canoe along the channels between the reeds out into the delta. Very authentic, but actually the dug-out was worryingly tippy, and the GRP canoes are much steadier. The channels seem like roads, with known layout and junctions, but I found out later that a canoe can cut any path through the reeds. We went out to an island and made camp for two nights. A guide took us out walking to look for animals to see, and only now, writing this up, do I realise that this was the only time I had walked out rather than going in a vehicle. Are there no lions in the Okovango, is that why I was everywhere else restrained from walking out? But elephants and hippos are also dangerous. Even in Mfuwe the locals were wary of elephants and such like. That really is a restriction. In Britain we are free of such fears. The tourist trade talks about "the big five", lion, leopard, elephant, kudu but the smaller animals and birds (some of them European summer visitors) and the plants are just as interesting. The guide was very knowledgeable, there are courses and qualifications for guides, Southern Africa is serious about its tourism industry. Here I saw ostriches, somehow I had forgotten that they live in Southern Africa, and once again too many other things to list. But these were land experiences, the only special water thing I saw was hippos "fighting" (if it is fighting) with their jaws wide open in a "lake" where the water was too deep for the reeds to grow. The Okovango is a unique place, but I thought that as an experience it had been oversold. Botswana looked little different from Zambia. The landscape looked rather drier, but it had that same never-ending quality. I was told that "there are no trees here because the water-table is too high and trees cannot live if their roots are in water-logged ground" and "there are no trees there because there is no water" and I believed it, but I never got the eye to see it for myself. After hours of driving along that empty road, with its very light traffic, its wide border and very gentle curves, the eye became weary. But the guides were always seeing things of interest. My brother Johnny remembered his 5 years in Botswana with fondness and he asked me to tell him how it was getting on. In that respect Botswana was different. There were none of the west's cast-off clothing and the shops had real state of the art check-out equipment. The fruit in the shops was wrapped in cellophane - is that progress? Children don't need to pay to go to school. The roads are good, a complete network, and the newer ones don't run through the centre of the towns, they by-pass them. That shows awareness! I saw a new shopping centre, designed for a hot country, but laid out and built to standards no lower than Scandinavia. Botswana is the richest country in Africa, not too difficult with a population of only 1.8 million and diamond mines, and the timber and tourist trades. The standard of discussion in the newspapers is high and the CIA website rates Botswana as the least corrupt country in Africa. So I am pleased to report to my brother that Botswana is doing very well. But its AIDS problem is the worst in the world; 1 in 3 of the population has HIV. That is 1 in 3 of the people you meet on the street. That is hard to take in. Over the Limpopo (just a trickle at this point) and into South Africa. Into a region of rolling hills, lived in largely by Afrikaaners. This is another kind of farming. The farms are fenced-in areas where the usual wild animals live and breed. When the farmer wants some money, he shoots some of them and cuts and dries the flesh and sells it as "biltong" - I saw large amounts of it on sale in South Africa and in Botswana. Some of these farms have quite a European look and feel to them, except for their rough build and untidiness. You hardly see the blacks, but they are there. Johannesburg began as a gold and diamond mining rush-town and it became an industrial town. It shows - there are mining waste heaps and abandoned machinery all around it. The centre is a New-York style grid layout. It is one of the major cities of Africa and the world. The tour company dropped me at the "Backpacker's Ritz", a large house in an up-market suburb and very much like a British youth hostel. Some of the tour guides and staff at the "Ritz" could fairly be described as "dropouts". They have left skilled or educated jobs with career progression to live for the moment for a few years at least, or maybe for the rest of their lives. They are interesting eccentrics. The "Backpacker's Ritz" organised tours to local things of interest. In any country, such tours, guided by people who know their way around, often get you to see the things of interest which you would struggle to find in twice the time by yourself and they are very good value for money. One was to Soweto, simply a taxi with the driver acting as guide. The driver knew his city and he had an intelligent understanding of what we would find interesting. Soweto (simply SOuth WEst TOwn), may have started out as a dump, a labour-housing settlement under Apartheid, but it isn't that now. Money has been spent on it and it shows. The driver-guide showed us round with pride. All the roads are now paved, some of the original houses are still there unchanged, but most have been added to and many have been completely rebuilt. All now have piped water, sewerage and electricity. Its looks a nice place. The driver pointed out the only street in the world which has 2 Nobel Prize winners living on it. Then there is huge central market, the only part of the town which has a real third-world look to it. You might not like to eat some of the food on sale here! But it is being rebuilt. Over the road is the huge Baragwaneth hospital (note the Cornish name), with 10 000 beds, surely one of the biggest in the world, though maybe that's not out of proportion for a city of 5 million. Our guide proudly told us they can do even very difficult operations like the separation of Siamese twins there. And a unique thing is being built beside the new central market, the biggest mini-bus station in the world. Mini-buses are a feature of Johannesburg, and the only cause of conflict I saw in my time. They are 12-seater vans, they carry no route identification, would-be passengers at the roadside show where they want to go to using a code of hands and fingers, almost like sign language, and the driver stops if he is going that way and has space. They are used almost entirely by the blacks. They are a large part of some traffic streams. Otherwise, it's taxis. The 2010 World Football Cup is being held in Johannesburg - everybody was talking about it, more than I should think Londoners talk about the Olympics - and as preparation the city authorities want to replace the mini-buses by "proper" buses, like in other cities. The mini-bus drivers were going to go on strike the next week to protest. I don't know the outcome. Another tour was to the city centre. The city-centre is like any other big city, very expensive shops, smart people with mobile phones, and not all of them white. We saw the city's mining past, right under the modern city centre. We saw huge shopping malls, not too different from what you could seen in many British cities and we went up the highest building, really a very good view. Unfortunately the city centre is described as "not safe for white persons after dark" - and certainly not for a foreigner without local knowledge. Wherever I went there was this care for the visitor, often genuine care for a fellow-creature, but sometimes also safeguarding the tourist trade against the bad publicity arising from a death. Sometimes it was like friends advising against risks which you really ought to take if you want to live life to the full. So, no meander around the old city centre. There is a "new centre" at Sandton, maybe equivalent to Canary Wharf, which is said to have the most stunning architecture, but I didn't get to see it. Sandton is in competition with the old city centre, and maybe as in London, the competition has done both good. I went by myself to the Museum of Apartheid. Others had been moved by it, but I had lived through those times and read the newspaper reports, so none it was "news" to me. The mementos and the reconstructions just didn't move me, and some of them were a bit amateurish. They just didn't grab me. Why not? Something I had had for lunch? Or maybe any reconstruction of past evil will seem small after the horror of the Auschwitz museum. To a large extent, Soweto is the black suburb but, even so, a large number of blacks live in Johannesburg itself, but I didn't go to those parts. Instead I went to Melville, Johannesburg's bohemian district and savoured the cafes and bookshops. I felt totally relaxed. Bookshops should give an insight into a country's mental life, but most of the books were British or American, very little about Africa, a disappointment. I tried to walk to the railway station, another of my interests, but I got lost in the vast white suburbs. The high walls around each house are very striking, they are topped by barbed wire and electric fences with signs announcing "XXX Security; Armed Response". I walked between these fortifications. As I meandered along, among the very few people I met were a mixed-race couple who asked if I was lost. Well, yes, I was. They took me in and gave me something to drink and gave me a lift back to the Backpackers Ritz. The glimpse they gave me of what it is like to live behind those walls was revealing. Their children played in a large garden with a swimming pool and other nice features, but they can't go out and meet other children unless their parents take them. Crime, particularly violent crime, is a problem, and maybe people are more afraid of it than they ought to be, maybe it is a kind of respectability to say how worried you are. But they all talk about crime, and the fear of it is a real factor holding the country back. However, they all say that crime is a problem that is being reduced. They blame immigrants from other African countries for their crime rate, and just like here, there is an argument as to whether that blame is unjust. At least they haven't got Rupert Murdoch to rock the boat. I am sure I am not alone in feeling deeply grateful that Apartheid in South Africa did not end in a blood-bath, and maybe South Africans feel the same too; it would have been their blood! Even so I had expected there to some lingering resentments against "those others", but I didn't hear of any, in fact people went out of their way to stress their cooperation. Thus, one man told me that in Apartheid times, if a robber robbed a black man (and the terms "black", "coloured", "white" etc were used without embarrassment), only black men would help in catching him, but now all will cooperate in catching him. I was pleased to see a larger-scale example of cooperation. There was a failure at one of the country's bigger power stations, which would take some time to repair. There would have to be power-cuts, unless people cut their power consumption. And they did and power-cuts were avoided. Even South Africans seemed impressed. The names and memory of white men who did good things has not been wiped away. I got a good feeling about the country. It is strange that the most interesting and productive meeting between Europe and Africa has not happened on the Mediterranean, but at the very far end of Africa. It's an 11-hour flight back to Britain, and every morning and every evening, 4 jumbos make the journey. It shows the depth of our connection with South Africa.
Reading this
through, I ask myself "What right have I to say all this?" Am
I better than a journalist, who judges a whole city on the basis of one
evening in a pub? Trying to be honest, I think I have bettered that standard.¦ |