Zambia World Wide

Zambia was the place I first encountered disability, and the memory has been with me ever since. I had gone into a shopping area with my mother. I don't recall everything she needed to buy, but I know for a fact that one item she bought was the melody, on record, of the song "Charlene". As I entered one shop with her, I spotted a young boy with a begging bowl, and a little way behind him, an older man with no pupils in his eyes. Now many years later, with the benefit of hindsight and the cynicism that sadly develops with age and experience, I find myself wondering whether this older man were really blind, or whether he just had the knack of rolling his pupils completely up under his eyelids so that he just looked blind. But to a young impressionable child, it was a horrific sight, and, as children do, I suppose I just stared. I don't think I was familiar with the concept of begging, but once I realised what the bowl was for, I started pestering my mother for money to give him. She refused, I guess because she knew that if we gave to one beggar we would be besieged by many more, and she hurried me on my way. But the image continued to haunt me, and throughout the rest of the shopping expedition, I cried and nagged and protested. It could not have been a very large shopping area, because my memory tells me we kept seeing this pathetic twosome as we came in and out of the different shops. In the end, my mother relented, and I was given two pence which I was allowed to put in the bowl. Both Africans said thank you to me, and I was keen to get home afterwards and put them out of my mind. But from that day to this, I have never been able to put them out of my mind. Of course I told the rest of my family the sad tale when we got home, and my mother played her new record, and I cried and cried because I was realising for the first time that there was real human suffering in the world. Every time I have heard that tune since, "Charlene", I have felt that same sadness from all those years ago, and I know that in our family, for a long time I would react to it with tears, so that it became referred to by all of us as "The Blind Man's Song".

I suppose our departure from Africa would have stuck in my mind more vividly than other memories because it was the most recent, but also because I found it quite traumatic. I remember being given a tin of toffees as a going-away gift from someone (it was black with pictures of postage stamps all over it), and I remember fighting with my parents because I wanted to kiss Samson the houseboy good-bye and they didn't want me to - but I can't remember who won. I remember travelling overland by train from Zambia to Durban, the only time I actually remember seeing the Victoria Falls, as the train crossed them. We slept on the train, and every time it stopped, Africans flocked around the windows trying to sell us little wooden artifacts they had made. My parents bought me two little black wooden tortoises, which I'm sure I still have somewhere. There were hand signals (which I now understand were political) one could make to the Africans we passed working in the fields - either a "thumbs up" or a shaking, open hand. I had no idea at the time what they meant, but it was fun to make them and see what sign the Africans made back at us.