A FOREIGN COUNTRY:

GROWING UP IN RHODESIA
Nigel Suckling

Draft: © January 2021
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I – MUNALI – 5
II – LIVINGSTONE – 43
III – PARALLEL LIVES – 126
IV – LUSAKA – 212
V – GOING HOME – 244

APPENDIX – 268
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FOREWORD

As a child you have no measure of how fast the world around you is changing. Because you’re developing so quickly yourself, you assume your environment is static and will carry on pretty much the same as you grow into it. This is true for everyone everywhere, naturally. Most old people can, if suitably primed, talk indefinitely about the changes they’ve seen in their lifetimes, even if they’ve never moved from the place where they were born; but some environments change more drastically than others, even without a war to spur things along.
One such was Northern Rhodesia in southern Africa in the 1950s and 60s. As white kids growing up then we had no way of knowing, as our parents almost certainly did, just how fragile and transient our conditions were – how soon and how thoroughly the country would become Zambia, with a completely different social order and set of faces in command. The country of course is still there. In many ways its urban centres now look remarkably unchanged due to relative poverty. The houses we grew up in, many of the streets, landmark buildings and landscapes we were familiar with are still recognizably the same, much more so in fact than in many parts of Europe. What has vanished is the web of British colonial superstructure into which I and my siblings were born as privileged members, brief gentry on the cusp of a perfectly justified and largely peaceful revolution that was soon to brush us aside.
Then there was Southern Rhodesia, the tale of whose bloody transformation into Zimbabwe is much better known to the world, as is its following and equally bloody decline into chaos and then some semblance of stability under Robert Mugabe and beyond. It plays a supporting role in this account because although my sister, brother and I also lived there for several crucially formative years, we were insulated

3for much of that time by viewing it from behind the ramparts of boarding school. We caught glimpses and a taste of it which I’ll also describe, but the north was really our home. Also, from Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing onwards, life in Southern Rhodesia has been much better documented than the north and it seems to me that our way of life there in the closing days of Empire deserves more of a record. Northern Rhodesia was always a rather neglected backwater. Apart from the Victoria Falls, which it shared anyway with Southern Rhodesia, its copper mines were its main attraction to the wider world. Even then it did not get full credit for this bounty. During the Second World War it provided most of the copper needed by the Allies but it is unlikely many Americans in particular were aware of this. And the country was only once fleetingly visited by a reigning British monarch.
The approach I’ve adopted is much like that of a travel writer. Everyone’s childhood is equally intense and interesting to themselves and those around them. There’s no reason why mine should be especially worthy of attention except that it just happened to take place in unique and largely forgotten circumstances that have since dramatically changed. To the best of my ability this is what it felt like growing up in the British Central African Federation in the 1950s and 60s, with some background information thrown in to give perspectives that I was too young to appreciate or be aware of at the time.

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- I -

MUNALI

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My earliest memory is of lying in a baby cot looking up at my dad, who was leaning over, beaming and pulling funny faces. I thought he looked wonderful and wanted to be just like him when I grew up, and I can still picture him now as he appeared then.
You may think it unlikely not only to be able to remember such a moment a lifetime ago, but also for a baby to have such notions. Well, that’s true up to a point because of course how can a baby have any concept of growing up, let alone wanting to be like another human being? But that’s not to say they don’t have feelings, or instincts like those that prompt freshly hatched ducklings to latch onto the first large creature they see and assume it’s their mother. Babies just lack the words and context to express and understand the instincts that drive them.
Probably the reason I still have this memory is that a few years later my brother Chris, my sister Lesley and I were playing a game in which we were comparing our earliest memories. Being the youngest I had the advantage, being that much closer to my beginning; and this cot memory was the earliest I could dredge up – just a flash but it was as vivid as anything else in my memory then. The feeling of wanting to be like my dad was how I described and fixed the infantile moment in my later memory, the closest approximation I could reach to describe a feeling that at the time had been completely visual and instinctive. And the exercise worked because although not strictly accurate, it still conjures a true vision of the moment.

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To some extent all early memories must be like this – they are memories of memories of what originally happened, refreshed and reinterpreted along the way in the light of later experience, and remembered because in one way or another they were creative episodes in the story of our lives. Otherwise they would simply sink into the undifferentiated compost of experience, which is surely necessary if we are not to be swamped by the weight of the past.
So I’m not claiming any perfect objectivity here. What follows is just some of what I remember of growing up in another time and place with as little personal distortion as possible. Even so, much of it now seems like a dream. For both better and worse it is a lost world I will attempt to describe, with certainties and assumptions that often look as quaint now as those of the Victorians.

Another random early memory which I cannot date is of the first time I connected

‘chicken’ on the plate with the birds that clucked around farms and African

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compounds and whose sole purpose I’d previously been aware of had been to produce eggs. ‘Is this the same chicken as the cluck-clucks?’ I asked. There was a sudden hush

at the dinner table and nothing was actually said, but the realization dawned on me

that the answer was ‘yes’. I stared at my plate comparing the remembered

deliciousness of chicken meat with my new sudden scruples. Then the moment for vegetarian conversion passed and I tucked in hungrily.
Then (and more relevant perhaps to the point of describing another time and place) there was the party held for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 when I was three years old. All the children in the neighbourhood came, and more besides

who were presumably children of our parents’ friends. Our bikes and trikes were

decorated with patriotic red, white and blue crepe paper ribbons and the treats were served up on the red-painted concrete veranda of our white bungalow. On the trestle table were some large china commemorative beakers with an ornamental portrait of the young and beautiful Elizabeth II surrounded by patriotic flags. Holding two of the

mugs to my chest I strutted around saying ‘Hey look at me, I’m the Queen of

England’. There’s a little grey cloud attached to the end of that memory so I suspect it ended in disgrace and possibly even a slippering.

Corporal punishment was a standard part of our parents’ repertoire in those

early years, at least for my brother Chris and me. For us boys the warning ‘Just wait

till Daddy gets home’ was followed by a standard ritual. When he did arrive back

from work, teaching just up the hill at Munali School, we were sent off to wait in the bedroom while the crime was explained. In due course our dad joined us we had to tell our side of the story, make our excuses and then bend over the bed to receive his prescribed number of whacks with the slipper. Chris tended to suffer more of this than I did; partly I think because, as older brother, he was held more responsible for any

7mischief we got into, which certainly wasn’t always the case and I often took advantage of the prejudice to drop him in it while I got off scot free; but also because

he and our father naturally fought a lot anyway. ‘The trouble is they’re too much

alike,’ our mother would often sigh as they fell into yet another battle of wills.

‘I’m nothing like him!’ Chris would mutter fiercely if he heard this, but Caryl

would just smile knowingly.

I can’t remember what disciplines were applied to Lesley. At one of her

birthday parties a couple of years later she went round surreptitiously polishing off the

dregs of the adults’ drinks and was rushed off to hospital by car in a drunken stupor.

When she returned a few hours later, pale and contrite and mortified at having missed

the end of her own party, I don’t remember any sanctions at all being applied to her.

Nor at any other time really. Perhaps it was a private matter between her and Caryl.
Another memory from around the same time is of the cry ‘Bafwa!’ ringing out in the distance. This was our African cook Dixon rounding us up at bath time in the evening. Sometimes Chris and I hid and pretended not to hear, just to see how long he would keep it up; which must have been very annoying for Dixon but perhaps our pretence was believed because I don’t recall ever getting into trouble over it and Dixon was enough a part of the family not to hide his feelings much when he was cross with us children.

‘Bafwa! Bafwa!’

I don’t remember ever hearing anger or impatience in our cook’s call. This could just be the convenient gloss of nostalgia but it’s also quite possible he enjoyed the chance for a stroll outside with us to blame for any domestic delays. As I say, he never seemed shy of telling us off when we were naughty at other times, trying to steal snacks from the kitchen and suchlike.

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On the topic of servants, here’s an extract from the Northern Rhodesia Handbook dated 1953, a government advice manual issued to new European arrivals to the colony:

AFRICAN SERVANTS
The average household employs a cook, who also does the washing, a house-boy and a garden-boy. The ability, willingness and the general demeanour of African servants vary considerably, but most of them need constant supervision. The average wage for house-boys is between £2 and £2 10s. a month, for garden-boys slightly less and for cook-boys between £4 and £6 a month. Employers, besides paying wages, are expected to provide their servants with uniforms (khaki and white drill), housing and food. Wages and rations for the three servants mentioned above would therefore amount to about £10 a month.
African girls are often employed as nurse-girls for young children. It is advisable to send them to be medically examined before engaging them. This service is performed free at Government hospitals or clinics.
The majority of African servants speak at least a little English, but it is in the employer's own interest to learn something of the native tongue. When speaking in English, the householder should remember to talk slowly, simply and distinctly.
The African servant is normally good-natured and well-mannered. He appreciates good manners in Europeans and should be treated with tolerance and understanding, but not with familiarity. Discipline should be firm but fair.

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By way of comparing lifestyle, from a list in the same handbook of prices Europeans might expect to pay for everyday items, flour was 2s 9d per 5lb bag; beef and pork were about 2s per lb; beer about 1s per pint; imported whisky and gin about £1 per bottle; local brandy and gin about 13s per bottle; a dining room suite from £40 and a medium-sized car about £600-700. Income for a Government employed teacher would have been something like £12-1500 a year, so employing three servants would have cost less than a tenth of our dad’s salary.
However, I’m jumping ahead and out of the context available to me at the time of my earliest recollections, when Dixon was just a large figure of some authority within the family circle. He was a lovely, cheerful man, short and stocky, plump even, and he was to work for us throughout our time in Rhodesia. I say he was part of the family but of course this was only as true as it was of, say, servants and the British gentry in the nineteenth century. He was not completely of the family because he left after our supper to go home to the servants’ village nearby and his wife, who we rarely met. Even when he was with us he largely remained in his own realm, the kitchen. To a child’s eyes this was an awe-inspiring place because mostly we were not

10 allowed in and then at the back of it stood the big cast-iron wood-burning stove that was the living heart of most operations. High drama occasionally erupted when the beast just would not burn, or die for no reason in the middle of some crucially important operation. There were also the irons used for pressing our clothes. These were also solid cast iron devices filled with live charcoal from the stove. We were impressed by a sense of primal forces at work in the kitchen.
Its mystique was only enhanced when, coming home one night we were attacked by a snake lurking by the kitchen doorstep. Why we were going in through the kitchen rather than the front door, God only knows now. Perhaps our parents had lost a key or perhaps it was just the most direct way into the house from the detached garage beside it but whatever, there was great excitement and a bloody hunt for the snake later. We were very careful about steps and snakes after that, which was a common experience in Rhodesia; it was one of their favourite haunts.
Chris remembers of this incident our Granny standing well back fiercely clutching her daschund Trippin to keep it from entering the fray and getting fatally bitten. He also remembers another famous snake incident from Munali when a mamba

was spotted in the big lantana hedge dividing our garden from the Martins’ next door.

All the African servants turned out to hunt the beast with rakes and brooms and any other weapon they could find. As they were all terrified of snakes there was a terrific din worthy of the Matabele wars till the wretched (though probably also deadly poisonous) creature was dragged limply from the foliage amid great celebration.
I’m sure the house and its kitchen appeared much less dramatic to our parents.
To them it would just have seemed a modern white bungalow with a corrugated iron roof and a cantankerous wood stove, the house being built to a standard though flexible pattern that was repeated in government houses right across Northern

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Rhodesia, usually with red or green painted concrete floors to defend against white ants. It was the second last in a hockey-stick shaped, unpaved lane of about a dozen identical houses running downhill from Munali School, homes for the teachers at the only African secondary school in the country that took some 250 students to complete sixth form standard. From there a lucky few went on to university in South Africa or Britain. When independence came in 1964, most if not all of the ruling Cabinet had been educated there and President Kenneth Kaunda was proud to call himself a Munalian after having taught there for a while. Our dad was on friendly terms with him before and after independence.
Another early memory from Munali is of rushing indoors with news of some terribly exciting discovery outside. Caryl was in the living room having tea with some other mothers.

‘Calm down, Nigel,’ she said. ‘Now say hello nicely to Mrs …’ and so on till
I’d properly and politely greeted each of our guests. ‘Now what was it you wanted to tell us?’

But by then the excitement had been ruined. I burst into tears and ran from the room. For years I harboured a lingering grudge about this incident which seemed to typify the stuffiness and formality of much of our colonial 1950s upbringing. Later however I came to suspect that while to some extent that may have been true, it equally illustrates a persisting tendency of my own to get terribly excited by new discoveries and assume that the rest of the world will automatically share my enthusiasm . . .

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So how did we come to find ourselves in Munali in the early 1950s? Well, our father hailed from Ilford in Essex, on the north-eastern edge of London. Beyond that, he was

always rather vague about his family’s origins except to say that he believed they

came from Norfolk. If true it means we might well be related to Lord Nelson of

Trafalgar fame because that’s where he grew up. His mother’s maiden name was

Suckling and her brother Maurice was an Admiral who gave young Horatio a leg-up into the Navy; and later as Chairman of the Navy Board sponsored him all the way to glory.
The other famous person to whom we might possibly be related on our dad’s side is the Cavalier poet Sir John Suckling, probably best remembered now for his

poem ‘Why so pale and wan fond lover? Prithee why so pale?’ His more famous

invention is the card game Cribbage which he developed from an earlier traditional game called Noddy. Sir John seems to have been a charming wastrel, champion bowler and card player (though some said he cheated) and occasional soldier. He died in exile in Paris at the age of 33, either from suicide by poison or drunkenness, after choosing the wrong side in a political dispute at home.
We’ve never really investigated either of these possible connections though.
Our father Norman was an only child, a lower middle class boy made good. His dad had worked for British Rail in administration, played classical cello and even composed a few Bach-like tunes. He had aspirations and Norman had fulfilled them, graduating from Queens College, London, as a geographer and mathematician. He also played the violin but only ever got it out occasionally for Christmas carol singing, any spontaneous joy in the instrument having been burned out by relentless

13 childhood training. Much the same happened with my sister Lesley and piano lessons later. She passed all her exams and often talked of getting a piano later in life but never really found a way of using her skills for simple enjoyment.
Then after Norman graduated the Second World War broke out and, as luck would have it, he was sent to India as a Captain in the army to map out the dangers of a Japanese invasion with the No7 Indian Air Service Company. In the event the invasion never happened so he had a very lucky war. The Japanese got bogged down in Burma next door, to which Norman could easily have been sent and then it might have been a whole different story in which we were never born; but that didn’t happen. Instead he got to visit the Taj Mahal by moonlight (though with only his sergeant for company, as he was fond of joking) and met our mother Caryl Theodora Littlewood.
She had a much more colourful background, being second generation British
Raj, although her family in fact mostly originated in Ireland. In the nineteenth century when most Irish headed for North America or Australia, her family from around Cork had for some reason decamped en masse for India. Caryl’s mother Muriel (our Granny) was born there and remembered travelling around India in an ox-cart as a child. By the time she died in England in the 1970s at the age of 93 she had witnessed within her lifespan the arrival in the world of the first cars, planes, radio, television

and computers; plus two World Wars and Britain’s transformation from ruling the

largest empire the world had ever seen to joining the European Common Market as just another member among equals. Mostly Granny seemed quite phlegmatic about these changes though and was an enthusiastic follower of the TV soap opera Crossroads which ruled the British airwaves at the time.

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Granny married a half English cousin named Littlewood and had three children – Charles, Joan and Caryl – who were born in Allahabad, the capital of Uttar Pradesh state in northern India, bordering Nepal. Our grandfather was in government service (something to do with telegraphs I believe) and the family moved around the state, to Meerut near Delhi and Lucknow, the state capital. Then as he had an elderly grandmother in southern India, our grandfather had himself transferred there, to Bangalore and finally Madras where he retired. He died and was buried in Bangalore in 1941, aged only 58. Along the way the family lived a couple of years in the hill station of Ootacamund (Ooty) in the Nilgiri Hills, the Governor’s summer retreat from the heat of Madras.
Caryl and Norman married in 1945 and my sister Lesley was born the following year, making her the third generation to be born in India. On independence in 1947 our parents moved to England briefly before Norman, having had his appetite for colonial life whetted (not least by the weather) applied to the Colonial Office as a teacher and was sent to Northern Rhodesia. Where he really wanted to go apparently was China, but there were no British postings there so he had to settle for the Empire and Africa. Norman’s first posting was to Mongu where Chris was born. Mongu was the capital of Barotseland, the large western province of Northern Rhodesia, about which more will be said later. Then some time in the next couple of years he took the job at Munali, just outside the capital Lusaka in the centre of the butterfly shaped country.
Caryl’s sister Joan was already in Northern Rhodesia after having had a brief stint as a teacher in Haywards Heath in England. Her first posting was to Mufilira on the Copperbelt in the north, then she became headmistress of the Infants’ School in Broken Hill (now Kabwe), about 90 miles north of Lusaka along the Great North

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Road. Kabwe is the home of the famous Broken Hill Man discovered in the course of zinc and lead mining in 1921 and long hailed as a missing link in human evolution between humans and Neanderthals, though its importance has since been questioned. In Broken Hill (named after the Australian mining town) Auntie Joan lived with her mother, our Granny, in a wonderful thatched and rounded house or rondavel that looked rather like a traditional African house. Granny had apparently had auburn hair in her youth but she was already grey by this time and the only remaining trace of it was a touch of red in Caryl’s hair when the light caught it just right, a trait that has emerged in some of her grandchildren.
Chris remembers these trips to Broken Hill as major excursions, not surprisingly perhaps given the poor reliability of cars back then, the state of the roads

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and lack of telephones if you broke down. We’d set off for Broken Hill as if going on

safari, with a porous hessian water bag strapped to the front of the car to provide cool water for us (or the car) should we break down along the way. On the other hand, if you did break down someone would be sure to stop and help because that was something we did for others on occasion. Africans too would materialize out of the bush to lend an enthusiastic hand if you got stuck in a ditch or drift of sand.
The Great North Road lived up to its name to the extent that it was indeed a road that was distinctly more drivable than the dry, thinly forested savannah on either side; it also did head in a northerly direction, but much of the time it was little more than a patchily tarmacked dirt road. Still, that only added to the sense of adventure. On one of our first visits to Broken Hill we kids were delighted to be handed piles of comics to read while the adults chatted – only to discover they were Christian comics designed to look like normal American ones but with preaching intent. We weren’t long fooled.