'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]