The Lost World of the Kalahari (12 page)

He used, in French, an opening phrase with which I was soon to become familiar: ‘You don't understand, Laurens. I don't want another cameraman. I need only someone who knows me and understands me, an intelligent friend who will do as I say, lift and carry for me and help me with all the complicated adjustments of focus, angles, and screens. Don't worry! He is just right for me.'

I protested no more. It was not what I had wished but there was no other reason to conclude that he could not do the job.

Spode then told me of his ideas for the film and the background filming he wanted to do around Bulawayo. I told him I had to go to Salisbury the following day and begged him not to begin work until I joined him, saying it was important that I, who was responsible for the story, and he for translating it into film, should work closely together from the start. I assured him that the moment I rejoined him I could give him whatever time he needed. We parted affably and I had no inkling whatsoever that in what I had said I had committed an offence for which I was never to be forgiven.

I left for Salisbury at dawn the next day, saw the head of the customs who, with the capacity of quick informal decision that is so refreshing in his country, picked up his telephone and instantly ordered his subordinates in Bulawayo to cancel the monstrous duty of £1,000. At noon the next day I was in Johannesburg. The Land-Rovers were still aboard a ship in Algoa Bay harbour, but Land-Rover agents and all my friends joined forces to speed their arrival. I do not think a goods-truck has ever travelled faster from the coast to the interior than the one containing my remaining three Land-Rovers. Four days later they were in Johannesburg and were at once unloaded and assembled. The two short-wheel-based Land-Rovers already had their extra fuel tanks and water containers built in, the third, a long-wheel-based vehicle like my own, still needed its extra tanks to be fitted locally because it had been ordered later. The Land-Rover mechanics turned to the task with such a will that two days later it was complete with four additional tanks, and emerged like its smaller companions with the Union Jack and South African flags and a neat label ‘Kalahari Expedition' painted, unbidden but bright, for luck on its flanks.

We loaded our supplies and spares that afternoon. All radio equipment I had had finally to reject in view of what I had seen of the bulk of the film equipment in Bulawayo. As always in Africa when there is the rumour of a journey a crowd of people quickly gathered, silent with inarticulate longing, to watch us tightly tying down the heavy loads, and tucking in the canvas covers round them. At last the Land-Rovers stood there ready, in the clear light of a late August afternoon on the high veld like three little ships battened down before a storm on a remote ocean. Now I had only to complete my promise to my wife and to collect a case for ‘the best gun in the world' which I had already bought in Rhodesia, my favourite all-round weapon for Africa, a .375 Magnum express. That done I went tired but content early to bed.

We left Johannesburg at sunrise with the smoke tumbling down purple among the tops of the giant skyscrapers, and the light of morning pink and gold on the battleship-grey dumps of the mines. At the head of the small convoy travelled Charles, our expert Land-Rover mechanic. He was tall, slender, dark with wide hurt brown eyes, sensitive, soft-spoken, and rather highly-strung. With his long hands he had gone at the task of assembling the Land-Rovers like a swimmer in a race diving into water. He had worked fast and accurately, with a mind for nothing else. I had, I must admit, hesitated for a moment before engaging him because I thought he might be too complex and sensitive a character for the occasion. But I have always had a predisposition for people of quickened spirit and this young man had plenty of it. Though too young he had volunteered for service in the war and disguised his age so effectively that he became the youngest soldier on active service with the South African Forces. He had fought in the Western Desert and Italy, and the moment he heard of my expedition implored his employers for leave of absence to accompany us. In neat, well-pressed khaki clothes, shining boots, and wearing his wartime South African desert bowler, he climbed into the first Land-Rover and deftly led the way out of the awakening city. I came last because I have learnt from experience that convoys are best led from behind where trouble, like the dust, invariably collects. We could not travel as fast as I would have liked for our Land-Rovers were new, so at the prescribed maximum of twenty-five miles an hour we drove the 300 miles west to Lobatsi where Ben Hatherall was already awaiting us.

The sun was beginning to decline when we crossed the Transvaal Border into Bechuanaland. I noticed that since last I had crossed the frontier the fences had been repaired, gates mended and painted, the stones at the side whitewashed, and a new flag hoisted, bright in the blue, to the head of a shining pole. The post, too, was manned again and a policeman in smart uniform and polished boots raised his hand in a precise salute as we went by. Then in the distance a cloud of red dust rose like an explosion over the pass and a roar of urgent traffic rolled towards us. Charles drew on one side, wisely stopped the engine, and we all parked behind him.

Charles got out and came back to me saying: ‘Looks as if we are being met! A reception committee?'

I shook my head. ‘No! I suspect an old Lobatsi custom: a wedding with an escort of every car in the village to speed the bridal couple safely over the frontier for a honeymoon in Johannesburg!'

I had hardly finished speaking when the dust and a long line of cars swept past us. The first had a score or more of old boots and shoes tied to the boot. In the last car, despite the red stinging sand, a pair of broad shoulders and a fine massive head with iron-grey hair, a deeply tanned and lined face, and shrewd grey eyes glowing with recognition, suddenly were pushed far out of the window and a surprisingly young voice called: ‘Colonel! Colonel! I'll be with you in a second.' Still shouting, man and car vanished in a dark stain of dust.

‘Who on earth is that?' Charles asked.

‘Ben Hatherall,' I answered laughing. ‘You'll be seeing a lot of him from now on. I'm glad to see he's lost none of his zest for life! Like him not to miss a wedding!'

Lobatsi, little more than an administrative and shopping hamlet among the last of the Waterberg foothills on the brink of the desert, was almost empty as a result of the wedding. I went first to the Government Offices to call on a friend and was talking to another old friend, the head of the police, when a distressing little incident occurred. As it reveals the exposed state of mind I was in at the time, and something of the oppressive and electric atmosphere everywhere in Africa, I tell it briefly here.

I was laughing with the police lieutenant over some reminiscence when suddenly for no obvious reason at all desire to laugh went from me. More, I felt all confidence and zest drain swiftly out of me. I had no idea what caused it. Alarmed I turned round. Immediately behind me shackled between two policemen on his way to judgement went a young man of Bushman blood. Our eyes met briefly and I knew then that the black invasion of my being came from him. I looked in those eyes filled with neither hope nor despair, and recognized the black hand that puts out that candle in the heart when it knows its gods have failed it.

‘What's happened to him! What's he done?' I asked the lieutenant in distress.

‘Ritual murder,' he answered grimly. ‘Murdered his own little sister to make medicine for the clan. His people, too, were suspected of the murder of some airmen who crashed in the bush up north some years ago.'

The coincidence was almost too much for me. I remembered that, some years before, I had spent a night at the scene of that murder. I had met his people and used a kinsman of this very man as a tracker.

‘Poor devil!' I said. And immediately felt sad that here, at the physical beginning of the journey, I was confronted with the overwhelming question that assails one at every step of the way these days in Africa. ‘What am I to him, and he to me? And what am I to do about it?' For this question has haunted me ever since I was a child in Africa.

I have never seen justice in treating ‘ritual murder' as murder. We have a share in it too, for the increasing revival of ritual murder is an expression, in part, of the sense of insecurity that we have inflicted on the indigenous spirit of my native land and a desperate attempt, by natural children, to appease an insupportable fear. It is also a product of our denial of what is naturally creative in Africa, and we too who arrest and judge the murderer are accessories before and after the fact. After the trial the law-officers, judges and accusers, and I talked the matter over. I thought I had rarely seen nicer faces or met fairer minds. I think they would have liked to agree that life and the situation in Africa needs more than justice to carry it out of certain disaster. But law and order came first and had to be maintained with mercy if possible, without it if not.

I spent the evening and night with the Resident and his wife who were old friends of mine, in the ample Residency, comfortable and serene behind a tight green hedge and surrounded by an impeccable lawn and budding trees. I went over every detail of my plans with the Resident and made many an adjustment on his experienced advice. Between tea and dinner he took me to call on my old safari cook Simon, who was now totally blind as a result of an accident on my previous expedition. But he was well cared for and I thought I had never seen so fulfilled an expression on Simon's wrinkled old face as he sat in the setting sun outside his neat hut with his children around him and a wife beside him.

‘May you go slowly, master,' he entreated me in farewell, for in my part of Africa to go slowly is to go wisely and peacefully.

‘Indeed, I will go slowly, Simon,' I said. ‘And I'll come back to see you on my return and bring you and your children your Christmas presents.'

From there my friend took me to meet Simon's successors, a cook and a camp assistant he had engaged for me. The cook, like Simon, was a Northern Rhodesian from Barotseland. His European name was Jeremiah, his surname Muwenda. He was a tall, straight man who held himself with obvious self-respect and a certain reserve in his manner. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and when he talked he sounded, perhaps, just a trifle pedantic. I asked him only three questions.

‘Can you bake bread in antheaps?'

‘Yes,
Moren
,' he answered and smiled. ‘Yes, master. But I prefer baking it in pots.'

‘Can you cook in thunderstorms?'

‘Yes! I can cook in thunderstorms.' At that he laughed and his whole face and eyes joined in the laughter.

‘Would you like to come on this journey? I'll look after you well but it will be long and not easy.'

‘I am here to come,' he answered simply.

His companion was taller, broader, looser limbed, and a different type. He was a man of the Bamangkwetsi, John Raouthagall, of few homely words, great inner composure, and a pair of large black eyes that looked steadily into mine without concealment or evasion. He was a close friend of Jeremiah's and when I asked him if he was certain he wanted to come said gravely he was there precisely in order to come.

I slept badly that night. I kept on waking up and seeing again the face of the condemned Bushman. As a result I got up when it was still dark on that Sunday morning and climbed the hill at the back of the Residency. I got to the top as the dawn broke and to the west the Kalahari showed up like a coil of a winedark sea. Barely fifty feet from me five rhee-buck got up from their warm beds behind a ledge of rock and shook the dew from their slender yellow flanks. Some bush pigeons came streaking by on whistling wings like messengers of fate, provoking the feeling of great urgency which had been with me so much ever since I decided on the journey. I went fast down the hill jumping from stone to stone and feeling all the better for it.

Charles, Ben, Jeremiah, and John were already packing the last of their new gear into the Land-Rovers as I arrived. With his gun beside him, Ben drove off first; Charles and John followed; Jeremiah and I came last. We passed the ‘cliffs where the elephants once fell over' and travelled all day on the red road of history that runs north from Mafeking in a straight line right into the interior with the foothills of the Transvaal on one side and the wide-open threshold of the Kalahari on the other. Towards noon we achieved the first five hundred miles on our speedometers and were able to travel a little faster. At noon the next day we were in Francistown, the little village on the railway where a rough road cuts into the Kalahari. I stopped there to call on ‘Masai' Murrell, the chief representative in the area of the recruiting organization for the mines. I discussed fully my plans and possible emergencies with him and was greatly heartened by the ready promise of help he and his staff gave me. We lunched with two of my oldest friends, Molly and Cyril Challis, and drove into Bulawayo after dark on the Monday evening. Neither Spode nor my friend was in the hotel. I left a note for them to say I had arrived very late and gone to bed. Before sleeping I was given a local newspaper by the receptionist who ‘thought I would be interested to see' an account of the expedition ‘Eugene Spode, the distinguished continental film producer' had outlined in interviews with local journalists.

At breakfast I saw no sign of Spode and my friend, but after a while I was handed a curt note saying they were both waiting for me in the lounge. I finished my breakfast and went up the stairs to meet them. They were both sitting side by side on a couch at the far end of the vast room. I waved to them but they hardly acknowledged the greeting and remained seated. For the first time I began to feel something must be very wrong.

As I came up to them I was handed a typed document.