Chirundu Tales - Part 8

CHIRUNDU TALES   (Part 8)

Rhodesia’s declaration of independence in 1965 triggered the end of our project.  All our funding came from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) in Florida but this funding was withdrawn as part of the United States participation in the international sanctions that were imposed on Rhodesia.  Of course it was accepted that this spelt the end of our project but it was over a year before this actually materialised.

Thinking back over the three years the project lasted, one could not but reflect on the good and amusing things that had transpired and the part played by our staff as well as the Sugar Estate staff at Chirundu in making it the memorable period it was

As already reported, there was a close bond between ourselves and the many characters who lived and worked on the estate. Our location was a frequent choice for visits by them so what follows are a few of the many events that I feel are worthy of mention.

On one of the early occasions, a couple, Ollie Meyer and his wife, from the Triangle estate in the lowveld arrived on the station having been directed there by friends at Chirundu.  They had a rather dilapidated old Land Rover that was fitted with a roof made from sugar cane tops and a somewhat scruffy little boat in tow!  They introduced themselves and asked if they could park their vehicle with us whilst they spent a few days camping on the river.  This was no problem to me so I left them to get on with their plans.  They launched the boat, loaded it ready for their safari and set off with a big wave. I went about my work but about an hour later when I got home, I found them back on shore.  Apparently shortly after they set off they hit a hidden stump which punched a hole, about 4 inches in diameter, in the hull and they only just made it back to the station before they sank.

They had a fibre glass boat and it was obvious that the damage was serious. From my point of view there was little I could do to help as I didn’t have any fibre glass in my store but we kicked a few ideas around and tried to do a repair that would at least make the boat good enough for fishing nearby.  We used a lot of hessian on our cages and I happened to have a good stock of contact adhesive (Plio-Bond) so we applied several layers of impregnated hessian over the hole, both inside and out,  allowing each layer to dry before applying the next one.  The following morning they tried out the boat and it seemed that the repairs had worked and before I knew it they had loaded up again and set off as they had originally planned.  Several days later they returned from what they described as a super trip.  It was hard to decide if they were very brave or extremely crazy because downstream from us, the only other habitants on our side of the river were the game rangers at Mana who would have had no, or at most, limited resources with which to carry out any repairs.   Whichever it was, they got away with it!

As the sugar plantation neared its final closure, several estate employees combined to make a last weekend river trip to Mana Pools which involved about 10 boats.  Their return on Sunday afternoon coincided with me taking some visiting friends to Chirundu where they had left their vehicle.  Having done that I decided to stay on at the Estate club to have a swim and watch the evening movie.

Just before sunset, the river trippers arrived, all suitably “well oiled”.  The daughter of one of the party took me to one side and told me they had stopped at the station and having run out of beer, invaded my larder and cranked up my stereo for an impromptu dance.  By the time they left, there was only one beer in my fridge!  Having been alerted, I asked the club barman to put a case of beer in my truck but did not let on to any of the revellers that I was aware of what had happened.

On Monday morning I received a radio message that some parcels would be arriving on the RMS truck so I was obliged to go into Chirundu to collect them.  On my trip I bumped into one of my “guests” and pretended that I was extremely angry about going home to find a lone beer in my fridge.  I further told him that I had visitors from our Salisbury office arriving that afternoon and that I was forced to go to Chirundu to re-supply my beer stock to entertain them.

That evening a friend of mine, Graham Lester, arrived at the camp with two and a half cases of beer, a peace offering from some of the guilty parties. My pretence about being very angry must have really been taken to heart because over the next few weeks, every time I went to the club, more beer was quietly slipped into my Land Rover.  By the time I finally put a stop to it, I had received a total of seven and a half cases, a lot of which, I might add, was eventually consumed by the donors!

Within our boundaries were several small river front leases called “Fishing Camps” that were very popular in the dry season but less so during the rains. In the dry months there was a steady stream of visitors to these camps and we became friendly with some of them, particularly those who spent longer periods there.   At the same time others of them were less than welcome.  I recall one family who arrived in the area at night, at the height of the rains, in a Zephyr Zodiac!  Not surprisingly they did not make it all the way but were badly stuck just inside our boundary so I sent our tractor to pull them through.

They were really worn out and their children badly needed a  meal  and a good nights’ sleep so I bent our rules and allowed them to use our guest house. I told them that there was no chance of them reaching their destination which was about two miles downstream from our HQ and that the best I could do for them would be to give them a tow the back to the main road with our tractor the next morning. 

When I went to the guest house next morning they were in the middle of breakfast. I told them that the tractor would be available around lunch time so they should be ready to move.  Astonishingly the husband said that they were very comfortable where they were and to save me the trouble of towing them back to Chirundu they would spend their holiday there.  Politely, I told him that this was not an option and that they must evacuate the facility that day.  This provoked a very unpleasant outburst from the ‘gentleman’ and he used some rather choice adjectives about my parentage and my total lack of sympathy for a family in distress.  He also threatened physical violence.  I ended up telling him that the tractor would be with them at midday and if he chose not to use it, his next visitor would be a man in a BSAP uniform!  The threat worked and I was very pleased that the episode was over without any further unpleasantness.  Needless to say, I was not sympathetic when my tractor driver reported that the exhaust system from the car had been left behind somewhere along the muddy road. 

Another family of visitors arrived towing a rather rickety wooden boat.  Sensibly they had two outboard motors , a small West Bend  and a 2 hp. Seagull as a standby in case the bigger one failed.  They set up camp in one of the leases and were all set for some exciting fishing but their first trip on the river turned out to be a bit of a disaster.  The transom on the boat must have been rotten because before they had gone very far from the river bank, the wood split and the West Bend ended up in the water.

They dropped the anchor as soon as they could and decided to dive to try and recover the engine.  They tried for a few hours but did not find it and gave up for the day. In the meantime I got my carpenter to put together a timber frame with which to repair the broken transom.  This seemed to brighten their spirits and they decided to try again the next day.   Where they had first anchored was at a fairly wide and comparatively shallow part of the river so at their second attempt they dropped the anchor a little distance upstream from where they estimated the engine had fallen off.

They spent the best part of a couple of hours diving but were out of luck.  As a last resort one of them followed the anchor rope down to see what it had hooked on.  It was the West Bend!  With my  assistance, they  managed to recover it and in a few hours in my workshop it was stripped down and re-assembled so their trip was back on track and not the disaster it might have been.

Two friends from my school days, “Snowy” DuToit  and Mike Berridge came for a visit and I took them by river to Mana Pools where we spent a couple of nights in camp with Ranger “Scratch” Tebbitt.  Mike had been the first Head Boy at Jameson High School some years previously and had graduated with a B.Sc in Salisbury followed by a Ph.D at Cambridge in the U.K.  He was very keen on wildlife conservation and, as a graduate in entomology got along famously with our American entomologists whom he met whilst he was there.  Actually their conversations about insects were way above my head, in fact it seemed to me like they were conversing in a foreign language.  A short while after the first visit Snowy returned accompanied by Mike and his fiancé Sue whom he later married.  I remember this visit very well because due to our limited accommodation, we were forced to set them up in our cattle feed store.  Sue, who was fresh out from UK, never batted an eyelid.

I lost contact with Mike but Snowy has kept me updated on his movements.  He went on to become Sir Michael Berridge for his work on many aspects of scientific research and became a Fellow of the Royal Society. Mike also had a big mention in the 2006 edition of WHO’s WHO.

Without a doubt, the most welcome visitor we had was my father Norman, better known to his friends as “Dusty”.   He was a machinist by trade and a workaholic by choice.  He would go for months on end without a day off at the textile factory where he worked in fact the company bought him and my mother  complimentary return tickets to the UK after he had worked eighteen months without a single day off!

His devotion to his work meant that he had no hobbies or sporting interests and was certainly not in the least bit interested in my favourites, fishing and hunting.  When he arrived at Chirundu he was a totally different person.  All we had to do was give him a comfortable chair on our veranda, a pair of binoculars and the occasional bottle of Castle lager and he was as “Happy as Larry” as the saying goes. He would sit for hours observing everything that went on on the river and each breakfast time, lunchtime and evening we would be treated to a very detailed report on what had happened. Nothing was missed out.  We heard about hippo movements, motor boats, dugout canoes and the activities of birds he was unable to identify.

Actually his engineering skills came to the fore when he identified a solution to a starter motor problem I had with the International Scout  4wd that was issued to me.  Dad stripped the starter and thanks to the Workshop Manager on the sugar estate was allowed to use one of their lathes for a few hours. He bored out the shaft apertures and manufactured two bronze bushes to overcome the wear problem on the manufacturers  units.  We had three starter failures prior to his intervention but none afterwards.  Needless to say our original  issue vehicles which came from the US were replaced by Land Rovers in the second year of operations. As popular as they may have been in the USA, they were not at all suited to our conditions.

Once during the rains, the RLI mortar troop were in the area and I met up with them at the petrol station at the border.  I told the officer in charge, Lt. Pullen, that I did not think that their Ford F250 high clearance pickups would make it to our station and beyond as they were , in my opinion, top heavy and would not be able to negotiate the existing road profile.  He laughed at me and scorned my little 1957 Land Rover.  We parted company and the next time I saw the troop, they were well and truly stuck (all four of them) in the ditch along the road in the Mwangu Extension.  I managed to ease my way past them and proceeded home, much to their surprise, without stopping.  Once back on the station I sent our tractor, with a long chain to pull them through. When they reached the station the officer came to thank me and to say the least, he was somewhat subdued.

As previously reported, relations between ourselves and the military were extremely good but we did have the odd hiccup. On one occasion an RLI Land Rover came through our headquarters and the occupants decided to improve their diet by shooting chickens that belonged to our African staff. To say I was angry was an understatement so I immediately wrote to Peter Walls complaining about the incident, emphasising the PR aspect as well as the danger of discharging weapons in a residential area.  The reaction was surprisingly rapid.   Within a couple of days, Captain Peter Rich arrived with a pocket full of money.  The workers, whose chickens had been killed, were assembled and after a very impressive apology from Peter, were generously compensated for their losses.  They were also given several boxes of tinned army rations as an additional bonus.  I received a letter of apology from Peter Walls in which he assured me that the perpetrators would be severely dealt with.

Our constant dealings with the Game Department produced some rather amusing tales as well as some unusual social events.  These will be dealt with in Part 9 of this seies.