Zambia World Wide

Weasel-features sprang into life on my return. 'Dedrekeffirsfidyerokay?' he enquired. Again, I answered in a fashion designed to cut short any chance of further conversation, delving deeply into the volume about Zambia, with which I had been issued, part of which featured an item on a local loony called Edward Makuka Nkoloso, who was heading up Zambia's effort to beat the Yanks to colonising the moon, by despatching a chubby young girl and her cat into space in an aluminium dustbin. If she had to live on boerewors on the journey, she'd never make it past the first cloud (& she didn't!).

And so we settled down, my unintelligible companion and I, to a slow and sultry journey through the bush. It was slightly disappointing not to see herds of bobbing giraffe sweeping through the hinterland, nor observe large feline carnivores despatching their hapless victims before our transported eyes, but it was all new to a Lanarkshire lad and, by that virtue alone, exciting. I even began to understand the strangulated English of my Afrikaaner carriage-mate, although I had to put on my best Terry-Thomas impersonation, to be able to respond to him. He was callow, but impossibly warped in his view of emerging political trends. I had come to Zambia for adventure, maturing experiences and the chance, perhaps, to offer a helping hand: he was fleeing Zambia because the 'blerry Keffirs' were going to destroy everything that was good about life in Africa (for the white minority) in short order. He could not tell me, however, why that was inevitable or how destabilising the painfully-established colonial infrastructure by decamping southwards represented any sort of personal or political progress. Mainly, though, he didn't understand the question, because he was a thick git and filled with a gut hatred of change. If he has survived military service in the Rhodesia to which he then was gratefully inbound or travelled on later to white supremacist South Africa, once Mugabe had wreaked his poisonous, destructive policies on Zimbabwe, he's no doubt sitting in a Pretoria bar, nursing a Castle lager and talking the same racist bollocks, his whole life ruined by having to fairly share a country with the people from whom we took it in the first place. I met lots of unhappy people like him, in the three years to come, but also many pragmatists, in Zambian industry, commerce and politics, who managed to re-shape their attitudes and ended up benefiting from so doing, albeit not for a lifetime.

We mutually decided that we preferred silence to discourse and settled down to staring out of the dusty window or reading. Eventually sleep overcame my weary mind and I dozed. Whilst I did so, he nicked the remaining ten pounds from my wallet, although I didn't discover this until I detrained at Livingstone. So much for escaping from the abhorrent thieving 'keffirs' of independent Zambia. Southern, temporarily minority ruled, Africa was welcome to him, the light-fingered Jaapie tea leaf.

Re-reading my memories of the journey, two things struck me: how high-minded I sound and my failure to register much of the actual scenery en route. I can only comment that I've never been accused of the former, then or since. I guess that I must have been fortunate never to have mixed with peers who harboured such bitterness towards anything, as much as did that escapee on the train from independent Africa. The 60's were a blessed time of discovery for me and my mates, even if heavily leavened with poverty and much sexual frustration, and we thoroughly anticipated a bountiful future that would massively exceed, in joy, reward and colour, the sepia lives our parents had been forced to endure. In my case and most important of all, I had the added thrill of abandoning my (s)mother. Admittedly, my hatred of Finlay remained white hot, but, in my defence, so would have Mother Theresa's. As for omitting the no doubt scintillating detail of the laborious route we must have followed through the bush, the Zambezi escarpment and numerous trackside villages, I can only plead fatigue and a fragile imagination crushed by early schooldays spent with you-know-who.

But now we were drawing into Livingstone, to a setting that made Lusaka look like Manhattan. Roll on the REAL start of the adventure. The Scots Lad was more than ready for it, but blerry skint.

COPYRIGHT:GERRY HODES 2011

Episode #5: The Scots Lad, North of the South Border