become a forwarding agent, then started a transport service across the Zambesi. He later went on to great fortune building hotels and selling them off. But when I met him, we were simply two men making the best of it. Mopane was amused that I had tossed a coin to choose my new vocation – photography was a relatively new field in those days. I didn’t bother to explain my ousting from the Trinity chemistry lab.
‘The bollocks on you!’ he said. ‘Did you journey to Rhodesia on such a whim, too?’
‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘Took up a post at a studio in Bulawayo. But toning and fixing is rather a chancy business in Africa, with the dust, not to mention the dust-devils. So I quit.’ Another lie.
‘But you’ve stayed on, it seems. Does life here in the bush suit you?’
‘The settlers are a good sort. Honest, spirited. Don’t turn their nose up at people. The Kaffirs are bewildering, of course, but seem pliable enough. The insects are rather an abomination.’
We exchanged bug stories. Tam-Pam beetles tugging at the hair, rhino beetles blundering into the knob, the putrid stink beetle and whistling Christmas bug. Scorpions, spiders, centipedes. Beasties all. I won the debate by telling him about the day I arrived in Bulawayo two years earlier. The sun vanished behind a black cloud: not a dust storm but a plague of biblical locusts! Then came the clamour: the frantic beating of pots and trays to scare them off. A hellish din, but effective.
‘You shall face far worse here,’ said Mopane cryptically. ‘Do you intend to pioneer?’
‘To wander. Pa always said, “My boy, never settle till you have to and never work for another man.” Time to play my own hand, do a touch of exploring. I believe I shall be the first to follow the Zambesi from the Falls all the way to the coast,’ I boasted.
‘Like the good Dr Livingstone.’
‘Oh. Yes, I suppose.’ I shook off my frown. ‘But without the religion.’
Mopane Clarke gripped my hand with a devilish grin.
* * *
I was ready for my escape into the wild. Leaving my camera equipment in Mopane’s care, I set off for Kasangula, a kraal two and a half days away. It was bossed by a chief Quinani, a quaint old bird who squatted in the sun all day, snuffing, dressed in a leopard skin and a Union Jack hat. I hired five dugouts and fifty bearers from him, then set off upriver, planning to eat by the hunt.
The shooting was very good and quite varied back then. Partridge, pheasant, geese, guinea fowl, even wild turkey. The land abounded in game, from the stately eland to the tiny oribi. The first buck I bagged was a big black lechwe: it stared right into the barrel of my heavy-bullet Martini rifle. Next was an indigenous species of antelope that Dr Livingstone had dubbed the ‘puku’: a shy, crepuscular creature, bigger than the impala, similarly golden but without the telltale toilet stripes, and with a frowsy look to its fur. A native told me the name came from a local word for ‘ghost’: Livingstone had sighted it in dry season, slipping in and out of the high yellow grass of the veldt. Makes for a good steak.
For a year, I journeyed in a go-as-you-please sort of style with my petty fleet of dugouts. There were several obstacles between me and the coast. For one, the tributaries of the Zambesi simply teemed with crocs and hippos. For another, it was a right task just getting my boys to do their job. They were superstitious of my whistling – which I did merely because I had nobody to talk to. And they wouldn’t pass certain spots without landing to make offerings to the dead and watch the witch doctor ‘do his stuff’, with animal tails and charms around his neck, bones and bangles around wrists and ankles. He was a fearsome sight – or thought he was. The Barotse were in fact a powerful nation, with many conquered tribes paying tribute. Penalties for missed payments were extracted in gruesome fashion: I saw natives with ears hanging by the cartilage, with noses slitted or removed entirely. This vengeful spirit erupted more and more among my bearers, too.
We had reached as far as Sesheke when a hippo upset a dugout and lost us some time. I suggested we get a move on to navigate the rapids before dark. ‘Nothing doing!’ the boys pretty much said. ‘We’ll see about