IN THE HEART OF AFRICA

Ian Manning

We all preferred going to see the Doctor in the heart of Africa, which was the object in leaving India.
Carras Farrar
Bombay, 9th September 1874.


Preface

We have been away from the Bangweulu for some years now, but wherever I may be, whatever the month, whatever the day, even the hour, I think of those long lovely vistas of flood plain and of the river estuary where we truly lived; there I hope that orderly change holds sway, that the inexorable advance of the thunderheads and the flood and the lechwe and the slow retreat of the rains and the water and the animals - each day showing the measure of the great sweep of history before - still takes place, so that being far away – say on the 17 March, St Patrick’s Day, the day of Cathlin’s and my marriage, I will know that the last heavy rains – the Katumpu, have fallen, that the water is at least nine inches deep on the water meadows, and that the lechwe have taken up their temporary vigil in the termitaria woodland fringing the plains. It is a great comfort.


Kapundu Milimo (garden work - seed time): December

1

It was mid-morning when first we came to Chikuni; the sun bright, the grass short and emerald green, the occasional reedbuck and tssesebe hewn into the distance with flocks of glossy starlings flashing in the shrubbery of the termite mounds. As the track through the woodland turned gradually to the north, I became aware of a white shining house raised above a great plain advancing it seemed like some ghostly East-Indiaman in full sail the ocean of plain curving away behind it and into the reed beds of the Lukulu river. It was a dramatic entry into our new life.

Two recently erected houses - newly vacated by two biologists, stood on the eastern end of Chikuni Island, a slip of land only truly an island when the annual flood came in January, and behind those , on the far side of a narrow airstrip, stood three tin huts amidst a grove of paw paw and banana trees which housed a game guard, two workers and their families. The island was a 1000 yards long and some 60 yards wide, its shape that of a giant human spoor. And about us was Chimbwe plain, the plain of the hyena, a long tongue of it running off to the west and fringed a mile away to the south by the line of termitaria woodland known as Mandamata. A few hundred yards north of the island - a sign of more permanent water, lay beds of reeds of numerous species, patches of them interspersed with beds of hippo grass and clear pools dotted with lily pads and small islands once cultivated until one came to the Lukulu river itself, and then beyond that the Buteka plain, and beyond that still, on the horizon, the Lukanga woodland. And about all of this was the constantly changing colander of sky, for the land is so flat, the vistas so immense, that it is aptly named: Bangweuluwavikilwashimwangonwana, Where the Water
Meets the Sky, or as we now sensibly know it, Bangweulu.

Our house at Chikuni had been placed on top of a mound of earth leaving a hole beyond the Rauvolfia tree near our back door that filled with water in the flood. It was a small three-bed roomed, prefabricated house, its principal feature being its north-east facing lounge and the window that travelled clear across the side of the building. Even the bedrooms and my office were fitted with large windows so that when we were inside, the plain remained palpably with us.

In the rains came the flood when a thousand or more black lechwe antelope massed about the house, and in the dry season the plain dry, empty of all but a few tssesebe and perhaps an oribi on its way to water, shimmered and danced about us. In bed we had merely to lift our heads, and there it was; at breakfast one felt unerringly for a hot scone, eyes fixed on an elephant in the far distance as it trailed from N’go – haunt of the leopard, towards the cassava mounds of N’gungwa village some fifteen miles to the east. And there was always a breeze for although the reed beds of the Lukulu loomed close by never once did a mosquito venture near us, not even during the rains when Chikuni became truly an island.

This was our home, the place that confirmed for me, for all time, that working close to nature is the supreme joy, but also that paradise remains ephemeral, a state of mind and special circumstance, an epiphany, having – as Thoreau discovered at Walden pond, a beginning and an end.

Apart from our staff, our nearest neighbours were a community of fishermen and two game guards – junior officers of my employers, the Government Department of Wildlife and Fisheries - the Game Department as some of us still refer to it - at Kaleya, a fishing village on the Lukulu. Kaleya lay part of the way towards N’gungwa, a few mud huts placed on a shelf of high ground. In the rains, other fishermen would take up temporary residence here or on some of the raised levees lying to the west of Chikuni - usually near the deep pond of Kalubangkwale, and further to the west, beyond Mutoni, in the great sea sweep of swamp itself, on the small chulus - termite islands – evidence of drier times. We saw few people, fewer still of our own white tribe, but those we did were missionaries from Chilonga Mission - lying some hundred miles away as the crow flies on the Great North Road, near the Government boma of Mpika.


2

During the first three weeks of our time at Chikuni, Chimbwe plain was miraculously transformed from a brown desiccated expanse of short grass shimmering in the heat, silent but for the occasional melancholy cry of a bird far off, into an emerald green meadow dotted with pink flowers. Long lines of lechwe issued forth from the reed beds and levees lining the Lukulu and walked slowly towards Chikuni, their heads held low, horns thrust forward; a purposive advance on their lekking grounds surrounding our house. It was the end of yet another migration. How many times had that happened before; the herds trekking endlessly twice a year between the line of the Chambeshi that cleaves the swamp from the north-east, and the alluvial water meadows. But there they were, slightly in advance of the annual flood, strolling along like contented cattle, yet soon, like the plain about them, about to spring once more into life.

I learnt later, when a year had gone by, that the male's coat was already darker now about the neck, would grow darker still - especially the alpha males some of whom would have coal black sides, by the time the first leks are established in the first flood. The lechwe had been doing this through the millennia: before the death of Livingstone, before the arab slavers and the Portuguese traders came, before the bushmen and the pygmy long before, who knows how far back, for the Bangweulu basin is truly ancient representing many years of geological quiescence in the turbulence and change of the rift valleys about her.

In the morning we sometimes sat on the steps and felt the wind spring up from the east and blow red dust along the top of the Mandamata, hiding for an instant, a small herd of tssesebe and a few diminutive oribi on their way to the Lukulu to drink or perhaps a skein of knob-nose duck making low across the plain. Or sometimes at dusk, in the dry season, I would walk towards the reedbeds across the short grassed plain as herons and Denham’s bustards made singly towards the safety afforded by the reeds, the sky glowing in the setting sun, the tips of the phragmites reeds afire and the coucal's throbbing call bringing down the night. And standing on the edge of the mud flats with marsh sandpipers calling plaintively .”.tu..tu..tu…tu” and occasionally, painted snipe bursting forth from beneath my feet and crackling away towards the river which now lay hidden in the gloom. As the days passed the grass grew rapidly. We could see it happening. Later, in the afternoon, we might walk the few hundred yards separating us from one of the flooded capillaries’ of the Lukulu to inspect the water level. It was, as Hobito informed us, at its lowest level, even though it had started raining.

It would take much time to fill the sponge of swamp, until finally, the water would begin to rise the 17 or so inches to its peak, for the Bangweulu is flat country, the vast plains and endless vistas of swamp, with only one exit point – the Luapula - at war with evapo-transpiration and the insatiable sponge effect itself. But rise it would. The lechwe knew that. And so they prepared themselves.

The land and swamp in Bangweulu is so inseparately annealed with the sky that I became acutely aware of the shape and play of the clouds, especially when moisture poured off the land and was sucked inexorably upwards forming dense anvils of cumulo-nimbus that rolled threateningly down upon us or merely floated closer like friendly whales. Walking back to the house I would be overcome by an all pervading sense of peace and contentment, and a realization that truth lay embodied in what surrounded us - the eternal unchanging truth, underlined by yet another skein of knob-nose duck that drew low across the tops of the reeds. In the morning, my staff mustered outside the house , an event that was to be the early morning ritual: Cotton Mateyo for a time, but always Kasongo and Hobito.




3


Hobito hailed from N’gungwa, a small muscular man with a Hitler moustache and toes that ended all in a line as though evolution had restructured his feet according to Lamarckian principles. I would often remind him of the common belief of mainland people that the people of the swamps had webbed feet. Although he spoke little English, his reaction was always to raise his hand to his mouth, cover his teeth, and giggle while trying to hide one foot behind the other. Although he now lived in N’gungwa, in Bisa country (Chief Chiundaponde under Paramount Chief Kopa), his people are the original inhabitants of Bangweulu, people long settled there prior to the arrival of the main wave of Bantu in the late 17th Century from the Congo Basin; yet forced by them to take up a secretive life in the swamps where they lived like sitatunga on beds of floating reeds or on small termite islands like Mbo Yalubambe where the purest strain of baTwa (wild men) live, a people of pygmy origin. On the other hand, Kasongo was a much larger man, an Unga from the large sand island of Ncheta on the Chambeshi where it cleaves the swamp before becoming the Luapula. Both of them were consumate canoemen with deep chests and firmly held suspicions of the main land with its canopied forest and strange survival patterns. They were hunters and fishermen, and not slash and burn agriculturists, with a fierce pride and a well-earned mistrust of those who placed themselves in authority over them. For awhile they were joined by the game guard, Cotton Mateyo, the heir to the Chieftaineship of Bwalya Mponda with his seat, his masumba, lying at Ncheta. Other men came too, but for a brief time. And then there was Kapinga, the gentle fishermen, who caught fish for our table and for Fred the pelican.

We first discovered the airboat parked two hundred yards away in a clear pool of water into which the galvanized pipe, running from the water tower, fed. It was a 10,000 gallon tank, and every few days, Hobito or Kasongo would start up the little two-stroke engine and pump water from the pond into the tank which watered us all, standing twenty feet up on its stand. It was pure clear water of course, water sifted and clarified by the papyrus.
Our drinking water pond was connected by a shallow canoe path to the Lukulu, the same path used by the men when travelling up to Kaleya – or even on occasion N’gungwa, to visit their friends or to buy fish. The airboat had difficulty traversing the dry patch for it was broad of beam and was hindered by the dry grass and reeds on the paths edge. With the 180 h.p engine at full revs, the wash of the propeller blasting back into the reeds, I would push the rudder too and fro, forcing the nose of the boat from port to starboard and back to port again, the men knee deep in the ooze pushing and pulling until we shot off once more beating across the clear ponds bordering the Lukulu.

That first time, in December, I went over to inspect the inlet: a mere trickle of water flowed down the path; the flood had begun. At the same time, a pair of house sparrows, who had long kept us company, left. Their departure came as a shock, as though a valued guest had left without saying goodbye. But it was a general time of leave-taking and bird life soon became scarce in the estuary, the shoebill storks gone, a few solitary spurwing sulking in the sward, a pair or two of pygmy geese in the deep pools, a flight perhaps of fulvous tree duck and sulking on the edge of the reed beds, the occasional rufous-bellied heron.

With the trickle, increasing daily, the fibingu nsobe – translated from chiBemba as the reed of the sitatunga – a cyperus sedge, turned noticeably green and shiny, forming waist high thickets in two feet of water, its hard triangular shaped stems waving halos of leaves and seed in the air. And all around in the afternoon, large mounds of dark cloud shed their water, looking like schools of hydra floating in clear water their tentacles of rain trailing over the earth, turning it green, yet still drumming up the dust. And rainbows crisscrossed the sky and turned to lightning at night.

At sunset a small heard of adult female lechwe, accompanied by their newly born lambs, stood on Chonamangkoswe island and looked towards the east, their heads held at half mast, unafraid and resting. Fireflies sparkled about beyond our windows, and later it began to rain, a heavy crackling roar against the side of the house, rattling the corrugated iron sheets.

One night I heard the excited hooting note of a hyena signalling its return to its wet season home. It had obviously accompanied the first wave of lechwe males back from the Chambeshi and now would hunt them from the comfort of its warren dug into a large termitarium in the Mandamata. Its call seemed defiant, a loud whistling and moaning of : “Here I am. I’m back again.!”. In the morning, my search of the plain with binoculars revealed some scattered herds of lechwe. But of the hyena there was no sign, nor later when it was hot enough for vultures to be born aloft on thermals of hot air, did the swamp folk announce a death.

After breakfast I strolled down the airstrip with the men and looked towards the fibingu and at a lone tssesebe bull standing on the short grassed meadow. He would soon be moving off to his regular haunts on the large plain called Nyamushitu lying to the south of the Mandamata and close to the Lulimala river, for he is a dry land species reliant on hard ground where he is able to use his great speed to escape predators. But for the moment he was content to stand there, standing high and giraffe-like at the withers. But he snorts and runs off in a springing four legged pogo stick motion known as stotting, then stops again, snorts and stares at us.

Chikuni is separated on its heel from a much smaller island by a narrow depression that in the rains feeds water from the Lukulu swamp onto the plain. This depression marks the end of the airstrip. Immediately to the north of the airstrip and embracing the series of islands running west of Chikuni’s heel is a mini depression of some twenty acres. It is the first place to be flooded and the most sought after lek in the vicinity of Chikuni. Here already, with the tssesebe looking out of place, were two adult male lechwe. As we approached one of them chased the other for about 30 yards and then stopped. This clearly signalled the start of the rut, the agonistic behaviour would become more marked, more aggressive as the dominant males demarcated and defended their territories on the most productive water meadows. From a wall of fibingu immediately to the north of the water meadow came the plaintive bleat of lechwe calves. My world was agog with change.