In Part 1 of this particular story published in last week’s Clarence Valley Independent, Oscar was cycling on holiday down the African continent from Nairobi, in Kenya, to South Africa in an over-confident attempt to prove to an older mentor and friend, Colonel Ewart Grogan, that the young men of the day were equal to Grogan’s big adventure in the late 1800s when he walked alone from Cape Town in Africa’s most southerly point to Cairo, literally on Africa’s most northern coastline. Oscar was asleep one night in the wilds of Tanganyika when his valuable all-weather coat and broad brimmed bush hat mysteriously disappeared without a sound or sign of an intruder, man or animal. Had a passing baboon been responsible for this drastic loss of essential weatherproofing against Africa’s burning sun and tropical rains, Oscar wondered in sheer dismay and fear……..? Or had a human leaned maliciously over his sleeping body to steal what was his most important apparel against the rigours of the African weather? Oscar’s story based on events in 1956 is continued below….
After nervously pondering my sheer bad luck for a while, I made a turban of a small towel as protection against the eternal African threat of sunstroke and nervously continued on my way, not knowing what or who may be lurking in the vicinity. To say I was in fear at the time would be a serious understatement! I felt myself to be the most lonely man alive and started to think that my initial bravado to cycle down ‘Darkest Africa’ was a gigantic personal mistake and an act of unnecessary bravado.
After a couple more hours of travelling along the Great North Road and still not seeing any sign of habitation, I finally reached with relief a small African village where I related my story to the tribal headman with the aid of my basic ‘Kitchen Swahili’.
Imagine my reaction when this first person I had spoken to for days warned me about Tanganyika’s “lion men” who were active in the district and were generally up to no good.
I was told that these people lived by their wits and would roam around at night to steal whatever they could find. The suggestion made to me was that I had become a victim of their thieving ways after having been discovered asleep in my temporary roadside haunt.
Just as an aside, the headman casually added that the ‘lion men’ wore animal fur cloaks, carried wooden clubs embedded with lions’ claws and were known to be dangerous. This further information instantly chilled my entire being at the thought that one or more lion men — the apparent self-acclaimed kings of the jungle –had actually stood over me to reach my coat and hat.
Once again, I debated with myself the possibility that the very martial Colonel Grogan may have been right after all by claiming that the young men of my age were wilting without “guts” and fortitude.
Ever since this particular incident on my way to South Africa, I have spent many hours trying to find an answer for the disappearance of my hat and jacket. My experience that night under the Mopani tree has stayed with me for over 65 years; as vividly as if it had only happened yesterday.
After eventually crossing the Tanganyika border into Northern Rhodesia, or what is now known as Zambia, I managed to make camp on a small hillock and went to bed in my sleeping bag, leaving my boots alongside me. In the morning, while putting one of the boots on my right foot, I experienced the worst pain of all-time — a poisonous scorpion had made his bed in my footwear and gave me a very nasty bite that caused my foot to swell up and for me having to immediately apply a hasty tourniquet with straps from one of my cycle’s two saddlebags.
I quickly learned the lesson that morning that, when in the African bush, one can never leave one’s boots or shoes on the ground without first stuffing them with socks to prevent any creepy crawlies from making their home inside and potentially giving you a very dangerous nip, particularly as most of them in Africa are poisonous by nature.
As my bitten foot had become very swollen and painful, I had to continue my journey with only one boot and a tear or two of agony in my eyes. I also now realised that Africa in the raw was slowly denuding me of my essential kit and good health, still wondering whether my mentor and friend’s original assertions about my youthful generation were after all correct.
With Northern Rhodesia being a fairly well-developed copper-producing colony in those days, I was soon able to buy a new bush hat and jacket and to have my swollen foot and leg attended to.
After spending a few days resting in an hotel on what was Northern Rhodesia’s ‘Copperbelt’, I felt I needed some personal consoling so I decided to do a side trip and, instead of continuing to head south for the time being, to go east to Fort Jameson to lick my wounds with the possible help of she who had left me in Nairobi to visit her parents on their tobacco farm near the Nyasaland border.
The route I took was locally named ‘The Great Eastern Highway’ but it, too, was nothing more than another slightly improved donkey track with only one heavy commercial vehicle passing me every one or two days.
My journey was not very onerous until I arrived at the top of a magnificent mountain range overlooking the mighty Luangwa River and the new and very long concrete bridge I had to cross.
After flying at great hair-spinning speed down what was an almost sheer gorge, I arrived at the bottom just as the sun was setting. Here, I met the only soul I had seen for quite some time in the form of an African man whose job it was to look after the road leading to the bridge, later made famous when it was bombed by terrorists during the Zambian war.
When he saw me on my bicycle, his immediate advice was not to try to attempt to ride or walk up the opposite side of the gorge as the road up and over the mountain range road was too steep for 20 or 30 kilometres at least. It was suggested that I should attempt to instead get a lift with my bicycle by one of the rare commercial Smith and Youngsen delivery vehicles which occasionally passed along the way.
This resulted in me spending the night near the bridge. Shortly after rising in the morning, I heard the low grinding gears of a vehicle travelling down the steep mountain pass I had already negotiated. As soon as I saw it approaching me, I started hailing it down. To my amazement, it was a Landrover with two people inside.
Imagine my great surprise to find that the driver was a former medical student acquaintance who I knew some years before at university. I soon learned that this man had obtained a posting to a Copperbelt Hospital, had just got married to the lady nurse beside him and they were undertaking a safari for their honeymoon.
I was accordingly offered a lift with my cycle to Fort Jameson with an air of total disbelief that I could so miraculously join up with someone I knew in one of the most desolate places on earth.
Almost six months to the day that I had left Nairobi I finally arrived in Cape Town with saddle sores and innumerable adventures on the way.
When mention of my travels was published in some leading African newspapers, my old mentor, Colonel Ewart Grogan, sent me congratulations with the words: “These days, some boys do grow up.”