A FOREIGN COUNTRY: GROWING UP IN RHODESIA Nigel Suckling Draft: © January 2021 1 I – MUNALI – 5 II – LIVINGSTONE – 43 III – PARALLEL LIVES – 126 IV – LUSAKA – 212 V – GOING HOME – 244 APPENDIX – 268 2 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 3 for 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. 4 - I - MUNALI 1 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. 5 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 6 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 7 mischief 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.