As a young man in 1956 I had an older friend in the figure of Colonel Ewart Grogan, a tough African explorer, politician and businessman who one day accosted me in Nairobi, Kenya, with the ear-stinging words of “all you young fellows today are soft!”
I took this criticism somewhat grudgingly to heart and silently decided I would one day show him that he was possibly utterly wrong. As it so happened, the occasion to do so actually arrived quicker than I expected….
As a long-time working journalist and foreign correspondent covering Africa, I was about to take six months leave as stipulated by Kenya government regulation after a certain period of service in East Africa. I was planning what I would do while on leave when I unexpectedly received word from my editors to take my holiday and then move to South Africa to work out of Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban with the expectations of future serious anti-Apartheid Indigenous African, Cape Malay, Indian and African unrest there.
This meant that, instead of continuing to live and work out of my Nairobi home headquarters, from where I had previously covered the Mau Mau and Congo rebellions, I would now have to be based for a time in the more southern reaches of the African continent but was assured I could still fly from there to all points of newsworthiness throughout Africa.
“Ah yes,” I immediately thought with a gleam of hopeful satisfaction in my mind, now is the time to show the barrel-chested Colonel just what the young men of the day are capable of doing.”
I knew at that moment that I simply had to prove my weight to a highly accomplished man who, in the late 1800s, had personally walked from Cape Town, at Africa’s southernmost point, to Cairo, in the extreme north of the great sprawling and then largely unmapped continent.
I also had the satisfaction of knowing that I had already on a previous occasion ridden a bicycle with a photographer friend from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, situated to the north of Kenya, to write a series of articles on the land where the mysterious Blue Nile River originates in the Land of King Solomon. So, I said to myself, why not ride my bicycle to South Africa, well over 3,000 rough road kilometres from Kenya?
It all sounded initially good to me as I had also just suffered a big disappointment over a matter of the heart and the lady concerned had departed to visit her tobacco farming family at Fort Jameson in Northern Rhodesia.
So started what was possibly the greatest of my African adventures during two decades of living and working throughout what was then unfortunately already a highly troubled Africa with clashes over colonisation and inter-tribal
My route was the so-called ‘Great North Road’ which generally consisted of either a dusty deserted track through arid regions or water-logged muddy stretches of sticky black cotton soil in some of Africa’s higher rainfall areas.
My first stop was at Namanga River, at the intriguing Amboseli National Park, a Kenya home to giraffes, rhinos, elephants, lion and so many other captivating animals in spite of it being the remnants of a giant historic dry soda lake.
From there it was into Tanganyika to the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro at Arusha and Moshi where I met up with an old acquaintance, Greg Hemingway, a son to the noted author, Earnest, with whom I had journalistic dealings over his two Uganda air crashes within a matter of hours of each other.
After this, I rode through the vast expanse of the Serengeti plains — but that was where my luck sadly started running out.
After I had reached this stage of my great adventure, no doubt powered by too much youthful over-confidence, I unexpectedly found I sometimes had to ride through parched moonscapes, laden with old-style refillable hessian bags of lifesaving water with no natural water sources in sight for a hundred kilometres or so. My supplies of nuts, biscuits, dried fruit and dehydrated meat also started running out.
In those days, there was hardly any traffic on the Great North Road as it threaded and bumped its way south with very few roadside stopping places. I could only replenish my provisions in bigger settlements which were few and far between, often too widely interspersed to enable me to buy one, let alone, two good meals a day.
The African sun also started to take its toll, and I kept on being fooled by wonderful watery heat mirages on the horizon, but they would never allow me to reach them.
While in the region of Tabora in Central Tanganyika, I decided to make camp one evening some distance from the road which, at this point, was more of a track.
I had not seen a single human face for the past couple of days as usual and, to cheer myself up, decided to sit under a spreading Mopani tree and do a spot of diary writing in the failing dusk light.
After I had selected this camping place for the night, I made my makeshift safari bed so that my head would be against the base of the tree. This was my normal insurance just in case I might find myself lying in the path of night wandering hippos or rhinos which were apt to trample the unwary sleeper to death.
After scribbling a page or two in my diary about the events of the day, I neatly put it away for safekeeping in the breast pocket of an old WWll army jacket I carried with me as protection against inclement weather. I hung the jacket on a broken branch of the Mopani tree above my spur-of-the-moment bed. I also placed my wide-brimmed bush hat next to it before falling into a deep sleep, tired from the day’s pedalling exertions.
I heard no unusual sound that night other than the distant barking of wild hyaenas and the steady African drumbeat of nocturnal insects in the air.
On waking in the morning, I stumbled to my feet to have a quick breakfast before the soaring African sun had climbed too high in the heavens. It was then that my heart missed a number of gigantic beats, and I froze for a minute or two as I realised that my jacket and precious hat were missing.
Had a passing baboon grabbed my things and run off, I mused to myself as I frantically searched the area around my camp site? I looked carefully for any signs of baboon tracks or for any other evidence of what had possibly transpired.
There were also no human footprints left in the sand around my tree. Of only one thing I was certain — and that was that two of my most important pieces of essential equipment had mysteriously disappeared that night without a sound or even a squeak. Quite frankly, this unexpected set of circumstances in the lonely wilds of a dangerous continent were far worse than previously being attacked in the Congo by Cuban Communist troops sent to Africa by the Russian Soviet Union of the day.
What exactly was the story behind the disappearance of Oscar’s vital equipment in an inhospitable corner of sunbaked Africa? To find the answer, Part 2 next week (22/1/2025) will tell the tale.