During my years as a foreign correspondent and journalist in what was a violent Africa over six decades ago, I had the good fortune to become involved in many heart-warming – and sometimes tearful events highlighting genuine inter-racial respect.

One such story of sheer decency between people of different colour concerned Gerald Johnson, a British First World War Royal Flying Corps fighter pilot who had taken part in a bloody aerial combat against German enemy aircraft in the skies above what was known, until the German defeat there in 1917, as German East Africa.

I first met Flying Officer Johnson in the 1950s after he had eventually retired in Britain and had discovered he had sufficient funds to take him back to the former East African war front. He told me that the reason for his return to the tropics some 33 years after the end of the war was that he wished to personally thank a group of African tribespeople who had saved his life after his Tiger Moth aircraft had been shot down by German enemy fire “somewhere in the jungles” of what later became British-governed Tanganyika.

My newly retired pilot acquaintance related how he had been forced to leave his aircraft by parachute after the crippled craft had caught fire from a hail of German bullets. This had caused him to land in the midst of a giant rainforest without the first clue of knowing where he really was.

After disentangling himself from overhanging branches and patching up a few wounds, he had found a watercourse which he had followed in the hopes of finding some evidence of human habitation. I was told how he had run out of his emergency rations and, after several days of walking through leach and wild animal infested valleys in the forest, had collapsed from exhaustion, disease and a general fear of the unknown.

During our initial conversation, this First World War veteran told me he had no idea of how long he had lain unconscious in the heart of what in those days was, to a lost European, an uncharted no-man’s land.

When he had eventually regained consciousness and had opened his eyes to survey his surroundings, he had sensed that he was on an old blanket on the dirt floor of an African mud hut surrounded by a group of gaping Black faces.

It appeared that he had been discovered on the forest floor by a passing tribesman and had been carried back to a small and remote African village. On arrival there, the headman had pronounced him as being a god who had dropped out of the sky from one of the giant birds his people occasionally saw flying overhead with the noise of a swarm of mosquitoes.

The lost and befuzzled pilot was immediately dubbed “The Bwana Ndege” which, in Swahili,” means the “master of the birds.”

With heartfelt compassion, the tribespeople had nursed their unusual find back to health – to a point where he believed he had to dutifully attempt to return to his squadron.

Realising that Gerald was still a very sick man, his African rescuers insisted on carrying him on a home-made stretcher to a distant mission station many long and footsore miles away. From there, he was smuggled back to British-held territory in neighbouring Kenya for a reunion with his comrades at arms.

This now joyful pilot was later repatriated back to Britain to recuperate but, from the first day of his arrival there, he resolved to return to East Africa one day when he could recompense the people who had snatched him from death’s door. As soon as he had retired, he made his return journey back to Africa to try and ferret out those who had saved him and to say a heartfelt “thank you.”

On being told this unusual story of sheer human gratitude, I felt encumbered to help this, by-now, ageing man settle the biggest debt of his life. Armed with a simple map of Tanganyika, we managed to more or less sketch the direction of his last flight before he was forced to bail out over enemy territory.

With the added assistance of some historic Royal Flying Corp flight records, we finally came to the conclusion by deduction that his wartime misadventure had occurred somewhere within an area of over 500 massive square miles. Armed with this knowledge, we set out on safari with an African interpreter in the vain hope of locating at least one of his surviving former African friends.

We travelled by Land Rover to innumerable villages throughout our hand-picked region and had become despondent about ever finding the village where Gerald had been so meticulously nursed back to health. On the fourth day of what was starting to look like a real misadventure, we were having an impromptu lunch outside a small settlement when our interpreter decided to take yet another stroll among the people to enquire whether anyone had heard tales of a “Bwana Ndege” from the days of the First World War.

Our interpreter was normally a somewhat quiet and shy person who would only talk in whispers when he was repeating, in a local dialect, our innumerable questions going back in history. We therefore dismissed his mission as futile and were astounded when he came running back an hour or so later, loudly claiming he had found someone who knew about the great “Bwana Ndege.”

Hot on his heels was an African teenager. Slowly but surely, we managed to prise from the youngster the information that his grandfather often told a story of a White man who had been looked after in his village when British forces had clashed with Tanganyika’s German rulers.

Overjoyed at hearing this news, we followed our teenage informant on a long day’s march through very dense jungle. Finally, we were taken to an extremely old man in a hamlet resembling the end of the world. At first, little did he realise that the white-haired person standing next to me was the village’s god incarnate.

When I explained through our interpreter that my companion was indeed the “Bwana Ndege,” both men hugged each other with considerable emotion and incredulity at the prospect of our having literally found an important needle in a vast African haystack.

In the company of all the village elders and residents, Gerald handed out a substantial amount of money in great bundles of shillings and cents to each of his old wartime friends and paid for two bullocks to be bought and slaughtered for a giant bush village banquet and barbecue to celebrate the unexpected happy reunion.

When I later advised Britain’s ‘Encounter’ magazine of Gerald’s successful return to Africa as a potential story for publication, my idea was rejected on the grounds that it was all too improbable to find a single unnamed person in the wilds of Africa. I then realised the meaning of the old saying that truth is sadly all too often construed as being fiction.