Johnny Cigarini (4 page)

President Kennedy based the Peace Corps on VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas). But the Peace Corps was for youngsters in large groups; VSO was mainly done alone, so it suited me just fine.

The youngsters selected to do the service had to attend an initiation course over Easter weekend at Tonbridge School. There, they were assessed and assigned postings. Ninety-five percent of the jobs were teaching posts, but there were a few plum locations, like the Solomon Islands, that everyone wanted. I must have made a good impression as I was sent to Africa and given a job to work for the Northern Rhodesian Community Development Department, and I took it with a handshake, which is how most things were still being done in those days.

1963 saw the rise of The Beatles, with their debut album
Please Please Me
. Harold Macmillan was our prime minister, but not for long. The Vietnam War was unabating, 70,000 marched in London against nuclear weapons testing,
Lawrence of Arabia
won best picture and the first Bond movie hit the US. In Saigon, a Buddhist monk committed self-immolation and back in London, Christine Keeler was arrested and sentenced for her part in the Profumo Affair. By November, JFK would be dead. It was August. The Beatles had just played their final Cavern Club show, John Surtees won the German Grand Prix, it was the month of the Great Train Robbery in Buckinghamshire,
Cleopatra
was on at the flicks
,
and
The Great Escape,
too. Martin Luther King had just delivered his ‘I Have a Dream' speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It was August 1963 and I got on a plane and I flew to Africa.

*

Lusaka is a city at 1300 metres, so it's a humid subtropical climate, or, specifically, a tropical savannah. Just the idea of stepping into the landlocked (then a protectorate) Northern Rhodesia was terrifying, but thrilling too. My arrival at Lusaka was ignominious. I was collected at the airport by the head of the Community Development Department and taken to stay overnight in his home. On the drive from the airport, we ran over a dog. It was the first time this had happened to me and I was surprised because it felt really hard, like we had hit a pile of bricks. When we arrived at his garage, he shouted, “There's a rat!” – and he gave me a broom handle to kill it as he flushed it out. The next thing I know, a rat the size of a cat runs out and sends me into the back wall. I was terrified and it escaped. Welcome to Africa! I don't think the boss was very impressed with his new recruit. I couldn't even kill a rat. How was I to survive wild Africa, home of the spotted hyena and the black mamba?

Northern Rhodesian territory was managed by the (British) South Africa Company from 1891, and while I was there, something great was to happen: independence.

I was sent to the North West Province – a large area, approximately five times the size of Wales. Northern Rhodesia was in the last throws of British colonial rule and was soon to become Zambia.

Pre-colonial, it was the African dream of Khoisan hunter-gatherers, migrating Bantu, Tonga people and the Nkoya. More came through the centuries until the nineteenth, when the Europeans eventually added to that influx with Francisco de Lacerda and, of course, David Livingstone, who would name Victoria Falls after his Queen and describe them famously as “scenes so lovely [they] must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight”.

Cecil Rhodes then led the British South Africa Company to scout for minerals, which they did find, along with copper metals. The British colony of Northern Rhodesia was established, but by the fifties, after more laws to alter and change the territories, opposition from the people grew and demonstrations rose against any further control by the British. Then the sixties came and Northern Rhodesia was the centre of turmoil, which would characterise the federation in its last years.

Northern Rhodesia became the Republic of Zambia in October 1964, but at independence, despite its mineral wealth, Zambia had problems. The main problem was the “few trained and educated Zambians” available to run the government and the economy was dependent on foreign expertise. Was I part of this foreign expertise invasion? Was I here to save Africa? On that note, the scariest thing you can say to an African is “Hi, I'm white, and I'm here to save you.”

It was interesting to see the old colonial ways. I was sent to Kobompo, a small town on the Kobompo River, and it was full of hippos. You could see them clearly and it was all rather scary, as the hippos had a reputation for being quite aggressive, territorial and ill tempered, especially the females, who were protective over their young. The crocs were frequent victims of hippo attacks, but I wondered about humans, as we mainly travelled around in canoes made from dugout trees. I was later to find out that the hippo is considered the most dangerous apex mammal of all Africa. Sometimes, I guess it's not good to read the guidebooks. I was in the boat with my pink skin and straw hat, quite blatantly a guest to them, so perhaps I was just lucky… again. One night I went on a crocodile hunt. A large male croc had been terrorising the villagers and they decided to try to kill it, and invited me along. We went out on the river in a dugout canoe to try to find the croc. The idea was that we would see the reflection of the croc's eyes with a torch, and quietly drift up to it and shoot it from close up through one eye. Any shot from further away would probably have bounced off the croc's skull and not penetrated the brain. I was also told that after shooting it we'd have to quickly haul the beast into the canoe and tie it down before its nerves kicked back in. I was pleased we didn't find it, as I didn't much fancy being in a dugout canoe with no stabilisers along with a thrashing crocodile.

In fact, there were only five white people in Kobompo: the district commissioner and his wife, a single young district officer – who was partial to the local African girls, the community development officer with whom I was housed, and myself. I really believed the homosexual thing was following me around… D'Arcy Hayne, the community development officer, had a young African boy he used to take to his room to ‘teach English'. However, he never bothered me. Despite the fact that we were now living and working in a soon-to-be independent Zambia, the district commissioner and the district officer still wore their white uniforms with white-feathered helmets, likely a British pride they cared not to shake off too soon; very colonial rule in image, very proud – and very sick, looking back. We shouldn't, I suppose, have been like that.

I stayed in the North West Province for seven months. D'Arcy had an old 1950s Vauxhall Victor car and we had to push it each morning to get it started. We used to get up at 5am each day to get to the Community Development Hall. It was where all the young African girls were doing their domestic science courses – the ones that I found out, too late, were all being shagged by the district officer. D'Arcy told me one morning when we were pushing his car.

I remember the sunrises; they were just wonderful. I had not been in the tropics before and I had never seen such a huge sun. It was everything I had dreamed of Africa: a giant globe in the landscape that would plunge into the deep each and every nighttime, then return again each day with colours that would dazzle me, delight me, make me want to write home about. But I didn't, because there was no one to tell. Instead, I lived in the now; it was hard not to in Africa.

I did a survey of why the local youths were leaving the villages to go to the Copperbelt towns. This required me to mainly cycle, which I was used to from my time on the bicycle in Gloucestershire, or occasionally drive a jeep into the bush with an interpreter to speak with the villagers. I recall one interesting incident.

My interpreter and I were cycling along a sandy track when we heard the drums a long way from the next village, even from where we were on the track. The drumbeats were so loud it was as if the track itself was shaking, and we could feel the vibrations travel through the bicycle wheels and into our legs. We followed the noise. When we got there, we found a woman on all fours. She was barking like a dog and all of the villagers were sitting in a circle around her, with the men beating their drums as she crawled and barked. She had a spell placed on her by the witchdoctor, a man covered in face paint and the feathers of sky birds. Her crime had been to publicly ask, after a baby had been born, who would want to be born into this world. Because the baby had died, she was blamed. Naturally, the villagers thought the baby had heard the woman, with its baby ears, and had chosen not to live because of her and what she had said. The woman was forced to drink the local honey beer. After barking and hopping around like an animal, in an attempt to exorcise the evil spirit, she would be cast out into the bush where she would not survive. It was an amazing and terrifying scene, but there was nothing I could do to prevent it happening. Nothing at all. I recently watched the magnificent film
Blood Diamond
where the character of Danny Archer manages to summarise the continent with nothing but an acronym. It manages to work, somehow; it was how I felt at the exorcism. T.I.A. was the acronym he used: This. Is. Africa. There is nothing you can do but accept it for what it is. Africa.

All the time I did this survey I was staying in the African villages, sleeping in straw huts and eating the local food. This was mainly cassava, made from a root, which needed to be soaked for days to eliminate the impurities in it and then pounded. Africa was proving to be a magical place for me, and each day would bring with it the suspense and surprise of new adventures, ones I had read about in the big boys' adventure novels. I was living in villages with locals and helping them, if only in a small way. It was ironic that I had Ken Senior to thank for all of this, the man who had molested me. I recall another incident in one village, where all the youths had been locked away to perform their coming-of-age rituals, during which they would be circumcised, likely without anaesthetic, possibly with blades not too sharp, or not too clean. T.I.A.

I managed to buy three leopard skins from the villagers. This wasn't easy because the local people, with their ancestors' history of colonial rule, were all quite suspicious of me with my blonde hair and straw hat, and were reluctant to sell the skins. Mostly, they thought of all white men, even a youngster like me, as figures of authority and didn't want to get into trouble. When I got back to the UK, I sold the skins to a furrier on Regent Street for £150. It was a small fortune for someone on a student grant of £4 a week and I remember how I bought myself a nice blazer with that money. I felt proud to have journeyed to the far corner, to Africa, to sleep in huts and return with those animal skins, to sell them and dress myself in a fine jacket. I remember that night standing in front of my long mirror. I felt like a genuine adventurer and entrepreneur, like a character in a Wilbur Smith book. Perhaps my enterprising father was looking down on me. Perhaps he was watching me. Perhaps.

My next job was to organise a famine relief scheme on the border with the Congo. After the establishment of the First Republic of the Congo, there was a civil war for independence in Katanga, which bordered the North West Province of Northern Rhodesia. The agriculture had collapsed and people were starving. My job was to distribute grain.

While on the border with Katanga, I went hunting with the local Irish missionary where I shot at a herd of gazelles. One of them fell; it fell so hard I could hear its bones rattle and break like dry twigs. The herd cleared and the one lay alone on the hot African earth. I didn't feel sad, but felt connected to it somehow, as if what was happening had pulled me into the hunting world that I was surely part of. It had pulled me into Africa and the pulse of Africa was beating and I could feel it now, in my hand – the one that gripped the trigger I was still squeezing. On closer approach, the animal was twitching, and the closer we got to it, the more it seemed capable of twisting its neck, perhaps managing a ferocious bark. However, the Africans, with the Irishman and I, took no risk. They loved the gazelle and wished it no pain. They pounced on it and clubbed it until it died. Later, when they were skinning it, it emerged that the animal was pregnant and its clinging onto life now became so clear: there was a perfectly formed foetus inside it. All was now obvious to us and it made for an interesting story – even for the hunters. It made me sad but the Africans needed the meat, so I forgave myself again.

On another occasion, I raised my rifle to a magnificent roan antelope – one of the largest species of the savannah. It stood there proud with huge horns, staring me down as if trying to tell me something. I thought of the gazelle and I wondered if there was an unborn inside this great antelope. I was also intimidated by its thousand-yard stare. My rifle dropped and the power I was feeling in my hands quickly vanished, burying itself in my stomach, and the electricity in my face was gone too. I couldn't shoot and I lowered my gun. I would never hunt again, I told myself. But Africa is a different world, and in different worlds there are different rules.

The Gaboon viper is one of the most beautiful snakes in the world, but also one of the deadliest and people die within minutes of being bitten by one. It is not a very long snake, but wide. We came across one while driving on a remote track. It was sunning itself on the road and was probably asleep. We stopped the jeep and jumped out to look at it. I put my gun above its head and shot it, and I didn't even hesitate. It seemed to represent something very different to the greater mammals of the plains: the gazelle and the Grant's zebra, the elephant or even the spiny mouse. This cunning reptile was sly, knowing and wicked. It was reptilian in all its character. I wanted it dead. I wanted its skin.

Driving around, we would often see snakes on the road. The local technique was always to brake hard and slide over them on the dirt road, so as to kill them, otherwise the tyres could make them flip up into the underside of the car and possibly enter your vehicle. Once I was driving along and a black mamba stretched right across the road. It was so long I couldn't see either end of it. A couple of times I had snakes in my house, usually green mambas, and ants – a big problem too. You could be found standing on an ants' nest and wouldn't feel them until they were all over your legs and body. You would have to take all your clothes off to get rid of them. In Africa, ants can kill a man, and even a horse. They climb all over it, and at a signal that is released throughout the group, probably via the queen, all bite the horse in unison and it dies of a great shock. These ants were fascinating to watch performing their tasks, carrying items ten times their own size. Sometimes there would be an army ant trail a foot wide stretching across the road or in the bush, led by two or three scout ants. The anthills could be as tall as trees, and were quite a different ant breed to the simple ant of the English wood.