West with the Night

Two years since my last visit to West Caprivi, and my skin has grown unaccustomed to the bites and itches of the field. The names of places and people are rusty on my tongue. It is good to hear Khwedam again. There are more village settlements now, a little disorienting.

The 'creole' camp at Buffalo, my label for the mix of cultures and languages of its residents, is as it ever was. All sorts of familiar objects of curiosity - markers of Friedrich and his determinedly outdoor and individualistic life. No one was there on arrival, so I made myself at home in the open-air clay kitchen, with its view over the Kavango river and its high clouds. I made cucumber soup and coconut dahl whilst an old buffalo, a hippo, two bushbuck and a family of warthog took turns to feed within a hundred metres.

The next day I went into Mutc'iku with a German student researcher for her interview with a local Khwe leader who appears to have made a remarkable recovery from alcoholism. We found the men playing wera (mancala) at Dikwe's Place, the local watering hole, with a spat between two old ladies going on in the background. Business as usual. We made our way to a quieter setting. It was a bit surreal, sitting there in a wretched Khwe courtyard, with the litter, death's-door dogs and chickens scurrying around, the family piecing together a meagre meal, witnessing this researcher, as if watching someone else live my former life. Yet she is more relaxed in her manner, less concerned with 'doing it right' and pleasing everyone, like I was. She will do better.

The grass is high after the long rains; I was unsure of the turning to /'Ui-Sha's house, but I got it right. She was just heading out with the goats and I received a warm welcome. Her beautiful, smart, breadwinner daughter (and my fieldwork friend), whom I saw a week before her death in 2010, is gone, lost to the scourge of AIDS and witchcraft, but /'Ui-Sha looks strong in body and spirit, as she always did. She has planted an even bigger field of maize this season. Her friendly but deranged grandson was there. He's never been the same since the armed rebel attack on Bushbaby shebeen in 1999, still scrawling the name of that fateful place on the outside walls of her two-room government-issue house.

Carol came to pick me up from Buffalo, and we ate solar-cooked Persian biryani by the fire under a magnificent tapestry of stars. On the way back to Katima, we stop at an NGO base in East Caprivi on the Kwando river delta, where one Nadia has recently saved a third pet cat from being eaten by a kingsize python. She eventually wrestled the python into a cooler box. (Rule number two: every white southern African must have a cooler box, primarily for alcohol and red meat, and then also just because you never know when it might come in handy). Meanwhile her hyena-specialist colleague attended to the barely-conscious cat.

From the funny to the sad, it's life and death all the time in this place.

The next morning Carol loaded me into her 30-year old Toyota which gets us curious looks of admiration at the border post, and off I went to Livingstone once again, dodging the potholes with the Rhodesian-Zambians. A Zambian taxi driver crossed the bridge with me on foot, and hooked me up with a Zim taxi driver on the other side. The latter was a Tonga-speaker from Binga, with possibly the cleanest smartest taxi I've ever been in. He has a 4-year accounting degree from a university in Gweru. There weren't any jobs for him afterwards, of course, so he drove second-hand BMWs and Mercedes from Walvis Bay to Zimbabwe through Kazungula (vehicle import loophole, for those in the know, like the Rhodesian-Zambians).

Before heading to the airport and disturbing the immigrations officer from his lunchtime nap, I buy divination sticks at the craft market. They are laid out on the floor across a piece of old newspaper, directly on top of a photograph of Mugabe's face. The seller tells me they mean good luck: it's going to be seriously needed if the rumours about the president's poor health come to bear.

'Like Bread from the Congo': Katima Revisited

The smoke coming out of the earth catches at the heart: that first sight of the distant Victoria Falls from the air. I'm still surprised at these unexpected moments of patriotism, having left nearly half my lifetime ago. After landing, I crossed the Zimbabwe-Zambia border by foot, breathing in the dramatic whirlpools and rainbows far below the railway bridge. Well-known views, lesser-known emotions. At immigrations, a black Zimbabwean man was taking his two granddaughters to see the Falls for the first time. The official passed a wry comment about his ID card which still said Rhodesia. I came across the bridge last in mid-2008. It was a horrible time in Zimbabwe's demise, the air thick with desperation and despondency. This time, thankfully, it felt more positive.

Transport to Caprivi has a way of just falling into place. Usually I take the Mazhandu Family Bus but this time Carol arranged a lift from Livingstone with some friends of hers. They are white Rhodesian-Zambians with a fighting spirit who have moved from place to place, mine to mine, much of their lives. Now retired, they had lengthy negotiations with the local induna for 7 acres of land down a bush track in western Zambia, on the edge of the Zambezi. Their business card simply gives a latitude and longitude, and 'Upper Zambezi River, Western Zambia'.

We negotiated the potholes of the Livingstone-Sesheke road at some speed, and arrived in the dark. The journey included the only conversation I've ever had where someone has offhandedly referred to the characteristics of bread from the Congo, as if eating bread baked in the DRC was the most normal of things. At bedtime I moved my campbed onto the veranda to enjoy the night air, its moonlight, and its many sounds. The Zambezi river is fast-moving at this time of year, bulging from its northern post-rain tributaries. Rule number one: always travel with your own mozzie net -- you never know when you might need it.

The Sesheke market (also the main photo on this blog) was the first stop of the next morning. It's been some years since my last visit, but I took the transition back to smallest-town Africa like a fish to water. We indulged in chitenge fabrics, dry beans, boiled nyimu beans and eggs, before being dropped at the Namibian border and hitching a lift into Katima Mulilo with the only gay in the village. Katima has grown. Less dust, new shops, more cars on the road. People didn't take much notice of me when I walked into town the next day, crossing paths with a boomslang on the way. (As a child I recall how its very name was as ominous to the English ear as the snake.) I went to the market and unsurprisingly maxed out on more of my favourite goods: chitenges and beans.

Katima reigns in unusual characters with interesting stories, as ever. The local masseuse (yes, imagine), for example, is no less than a natural-medicine-toting missionary en route to Tanzania, on horseback, nogal. They were stopping over in Katima when her missionary father hit two drunk pedestrians at night on the main road. They await his court case. My old trailer home now houses a Scottish fish biologist who has spent the last 30 years in Africa and was just back from a consultancy in Liberia.

The Fish Farm is past its heyday and rather dilapidated, overgrown, unkempt. But it was good to be back in Carol's corner cottage, the birdsong in the early morning is overwhelming (they're certainly not complaining)  and I still feel fond of what was my fieldwork base in 2003-2006. Tatenda has returned from death's door and looks well and healthy on his anti-retrovirals. We dropped off medicine and foodstuffs for Bill, diagnosed recently with advanced cancer. His wife, the ever-resilient Lydia, gifted me with a bottle of her signature homemade lemonade in a Smirnoff Vodka bottle. Change is always in the air, but the Fish Farm friendships live on.

[ *names have been changed]