The Clarence Valley Independent presents a new column written by Oscar Tamsen, a Yamba resident and former foreign correspondent whose work around the world from the early 1950s saw him in Colonial Africa for nearly two decades as a working journalist. Oscar’s years in the ‘Dark Continent,’ as it was then known, had him travelling from Cairo to Cape Town, meeting some of the world’s top newsmakers of the time as well as participating in a number of wars and rebellions. His first column deals with his search for a man considered as our planet’s most isolated person in what was then the old British Empire.
One of the most varied and rugged of my journeys throughout Africa was a trip I made to find Andrew McInnes, the lonely district officer of a remote area in Tanganyika, larger than the whole of New South Wales.
His official duties as the only White man in the area were to dispense, on behalf of the Tanganyika Government, all forms of justice, medicine, security and social welfare among an African population totalling well over a million people. As one of the real pioneers of Africa, he had to endure the incredible hardship and deprivation of only seeing other White people every 18 months when he emerged from the African bush for an extended holiday at the coast.
It took me five long days of safari travel by vehicle, donkey, dug-out canoe and foot to find the lonely Andrew at his small outpost, much the same as I had journeyed with Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway and Tarzan’s Jane during their wild game viewing and filming trips to Africa.
On this occasion, I had to shoo two prides of lions lying on the warm and very rock strewn and muddy track I was following for more than 600 kilometres; fighting off a python that invaded my temporary camp one night and later had to chase a baboon which had helped himself to my all- essential hessian water bag.
Finally, after a journey of a lifetime, I eventually arrived at my remote destination near the Congo border. When I met Andrew, I felt like the journalist Stanley, who met up with the ‘lost’ and courageous Scottish missionary, David Livingstone, the first White man to traverse Central Africa.
Andrew was emotionally overjoyed to see me — his unexpected visitor — as there were no mobile phones, iPads or even easy personal radio communications in those days of yore. I was immediately implored to stay in his outpost house for a couple of days and, that evening, was astonished when he appeared for dinner in an immaculate dinner suit complete with bow tie and white starched shirt front.
“My dear chap,” this university educated North Irishman explained, “living here on my with no one to talk to for such a long period of time, I would simply go bonkers without keeping up standards.”
This somewhat eccentric and likeable but lonely district officer even went so far as to keep a two- or three-monthly bulk delivery of newspapers unopened on arrival just so he could pick one up in chronological order each night — just as he might have done had he been living in a cosy suburban house in far-off coastal Dar es Salaam or London. His rationale was that he could pretend he was reading the previous day’s news when, in fact, it was often weeks or months old.