The Dark Continent!

... For me this is home ground. Born in England and proud of the label, but Africa without a doubt is still the dominant woman; salacious, always watching from the shadows – how much I miss her. So much joy, so much excitement, and yet amongst all of this there is always so much sorrow – a continent of vast extremes. England, in comparison, I see as a gentle leafy stroll, beautifully sedate and often I am grateful for this. For the quiet of her countryside, the solidarity of her infrastructure, for the nights when I sleep without the need for a gun at my bedside...

Africa was different then.  I know – I was there.

... Like marauding ants they swept through the ship’s innards; overzealous baggage handlers touting for business.  Two appeared at our cabin door; mother screamed and almost fainted. Borrowed from the ship’s library she had recently finished, Sir Reginald Coupland’s recount of the slaughter of British soldiers at Isandhlwana, a battleground she knew to be somewhere north of where the captain of the RMS Carnarvon Castle was abandoning us to the wilderness. However, in the face of Cetshwayo’s imaginary impis, my father merely laughed. Shirt stained with English blood and torn open to his britches’ belt he shrugged off help from the army surgeon, left his short chamber, Boxer-Henry .45 calibre rifle against the wardrobe door and, oblivious to a thousand fluting spears stepped with drawn sabre from behind a redoubt of upturned suitcases and wire coat hangers; every inch the protagonist of mother’s Zulu fantasy.

‘We take your bags to railway station?’ Both men were six feet plus, bared to the waist and black as, dare I say it; ‘polished anthracite’ (love that description) and would in Haggard’s day been described as ‘fine specimens of ethnic masculinity’. Naivety and political incorrectness always paint a colourful picture. Mother had never seen black guys before. Not real ones – only at the pictures. To her, all were ‘Zooloos’ and people to be wary of.

Between the boat and the railway station I struck up my first African friendship. The baggage handlers were really cool guys. They taught me new words; Zulu swearwords befitting the interest of their ‘new chum’ fresh out from Blighty; both men shrieked with laughter at my pronunciations. Mother looked on, though somewhat disapprovingly, as was expected of a white woman newly arrived in the colonies. They hid their spears really well and could have, as she told me later, ‘skewered us all on the station steps for the vultures to pick at’. God – it was going to be tough in Africa.

Somewhere inside the station, my father was shouting obscenities at half a dozen uniformed officials for ripping him off... I refuse to repeat the actual words for fear of censorship. However, the day progressed; our baggage was duly loaded aboard the Cape to Bulawayo mail train and we clambered aboard.

People were crying, some laughed, all gesticulated wildly and most, struck with the angst of parting, mouthed final words of endearment to those of us leaning out from opened windows. Smoke and steam belched from the engine; the guard blew his whistle, the carriages clanked in their couplings and as some eager giant our 19D class locomotive flexed its iron muscle and ground away from the southernmost station platform in Africa...