Fireforce: One Man’s War in the Rhodesian Light Infantry. Written by Chris Cocks. Published by 30 Degrees South, Johannesburg South Africa. 2006

There is always a book somewhere out there that should have been read, but has not. As an author and writer on themes of African warfare and general history it is incumbent on me to read as much on the subject as is available, and there is a lot available. The Rhodesian War has generated an enormous amount of biographical material and general military analysis over the years, to the extent, I sometimes feel, that the whole episode has been mythologized far beyond the scope and significance of the war itself.

To put it in a brief historical context, the Rhodesian War was fought in real terms between 1965 and 1980 as the culminating chapter of an almost century long effort by the white settlers of Rhodesia and the British Government to find some sort of formula whereby a transplanted white minority could retain substantive power into perpetuity in an African territory. When this was ultimately proved impossible, and as African decolonization was accelerating throughout the 1960s, Rhodesia, under Prime Minister Ian Smith, took the provocative and highly suspect decision to declare independence from Britain unilaterally. By doing so Rhodesia effectively isolated itself from direct British moral or military support, facing the inevitability of civil war entirely alone.

The military history of Rhodesia at various phases has been well covered, and no doubt will continue to be examined in the future, and military biographies of the bush war abound. Having read quite a few of these, however, I was conscious of never having read Chris Cocks’ memoir Fireforce, which is not new to market, and which has over the period since its release been widely recognized as a landmark narrative. I recently mentioned this fact to Chris, who kindly sent me a copy, and feeling somewhat that I might be sitting down to read yet another iteration of an old and tired story, I settled down to read.

Within a few pages it had become clear that this is not so. This book is a vital and important chronicle, very different in style and context to most others, and certainly deserving of the accolades it has amassed.

Having said this, it is not easy to put my finger on why this is so. In this, Chris’ first book, the style of writing is neither as literary or as polished as his later work would be, and yet there are many more tutored writers out there who have covered the same subject with a great deal less of the visceral impact that oozes from the pages this book. There is a keenly observed human intensity in the narrative that is amplified and improved by loose grammar and the liberal use of slang and profanity. This immediately detaches the reader from the expectation that yet another ballad of the glory boys of the Rhodesian war is to be sung with all the crude, violent and nasty aspects of the experience bleached out. This is precisely not what Chris Cocks achieved in this book. Those who lived through the times will remember the Rhodesian Light Infantry for all the incredible work that the unit did during the hardest days of the war, but also, at times, reflective of all that was base and repugnant about white Rhodesia during the 1970s.

The men of the RLI, in a nutshell, were the doughboys of the Rhodesian army. They were regulars, informed by a highly militaristic society, itself informed by a laudable if somewhat anachronistic  determination to maintain the best attributes of the British Imperial period. The battalion did much of the hard fighting during the war, and in doing so carved a reputation in military circles that has endured ever since.

As Chris Cocks reveals, however, and as most white Rhodesians of the time were quite aware, the RLI was a rough and ready conglomeration of men, mostly young men, some hardly men at all, who knew how to fight, and fought hard and consistently. It is also a fact that they brawled, drank, stole, vandalized and philandered freely in a society that tolerated such misbehavior largely because The Saints suffered such hell on the front line, and could hardly be expected to maintain order when stood down – and also, perhaps, because, en-mass, the RLI could be extremely intimidating and difficult to handle, and anyone trying could run into a pack of teenage terriers ready and able to tear a person to ribbons.

There was also a culture of impunity surrounding much of the RLI misbehavior during this period, and although I do not wish to dwell on this aspect more than is merited, it is a fact that commanders were often indulgent because they had no choice. Chris Cocks makes the observation towards the end of the book that by 1979, 24 men on Fireforce duties at Grand Reef were covering the entire Operation Thrasher area, and call outs were a daily occurrence, sometimes twice daily. If a section of these men tore their way through bars and clubs in Umtali over any given weekend they could do so knowing that the army could hardly afford to reduce strength further by taking them off the line for any sort of disciplinary action. I quote a comment from an old RLI national service member, Jo’ van Tonder , who later served, and was seriously injured, as a territorial member of the Rhodesia Regiment.

‘Out of action,’ van Tonder remarked, ‘…the RLI were slapgat… but as soon as the bullets started flying the guys were quick into shape.’

And without a doubt this was true. The RLI were a light infantry commando battalion, often operating below strength, but highly trained, well led and extremely efficient at what they did. This is more than anything else the story that Chris Cocks tells, and the dichotomy that he perfectly illustrates. He does not waste a lot of time dwelling on the politics or the morality of white Rhodesia, but paints a picture of life in the rank and file of the RLI that is arguably the most authentic on the market. From arriving at the gates of Cranborne Barracks to his first active deployment, training is described in terms both accurate and colorful.

It used to be said of the regular Rhodesian Army that a career therein was a choice made by those who had no practical alternative, and so it was. The RLI tended to be populated , initially at least, by much human flotsam, which thereafter defined somewhat the nature and character of the battalion. This was the case even after the RLI ceased to be a last chance career choice and began to attract men of a much more intellectual cut, such as Chris Cocks himself, and others from many different social niches in Rhodesia, and indeed internationally, hoping for a slice of the action, or perhaps the glory, or even, as Chris himself observes, for the pure love of killing.

There is also a great deal of technical information for those with an interest  in terms of operational procedure, tactics, equipment and weaponry. However, it is the action sequences that deliver the most honest portrayals of the book. The grim reality of being under fire, the human responses in desensitizing circumstances and the gradual layering of stress and horror as ever greater emotional demands are made on an ever decreasing pool of men. Looting bodies for cash, drugs and souvenirs, grotesquely distorted casualty figures such as regularly characterized external raids, and the chipping away of the battalion itself as infrequent but consistent fatalities in action gnawed at the morale of a small and tight knit unit. Fatalities might have been infrequent, but they were coupled with a great many more emotional and physical injuries that tended to pitch broken men back into a society that was itself in a crisis of collapse, and had neither the wherewithal nor the expectation of any long term future under which to care for veterans.

There is great humor and pathos in this book, but more than anything an overarching sadness that will be felt most acutely by those whose lives at some point overlapped the period of white rule in Rhodesia. Within it there is a sense of loss and futility that seems to exceed that of any ‘normal’ war, for the soldiers in this army arguably lost no single battle, and moreover, in ultimately losing the war lost everything else besides. Although many do not necessarily grieve the fact, it remains true that there is almost no semblance  remaining in Zimbabwe of what once was, and what was once so bitterly fought over. There are no heroics or official recognition of achievement. There are no pensions, no after care, no counseling and no respect other than what is exchanged within the fraternity itself. The Rhodesian war is now a discredited period of history, and the Rhodesian Army a discredited institution. Whatever might have been the true facts of the situation, this is what we are all left with, and if writing this book was an act of catharsis for Chris Cocks, then congratulations to him. He speaks on behalf of a generation of men who simply did what soldiers do.

Separating the Fact from the Fiction

There has long been an aura of risk about climbing Kilimanjaro via the famed Western Breach. The matter came to a head in early 2005 with the death of three American climbers as a consequence of a rockfall. The route was briefly closed and assessed, perhaps more an act of protocol than safety, and opened again soon afterwards. It must be remembered throughout that these types of endeavors carry with them an inherent risk, and although every effort is made by climbing outfitters to both sanitize the risk and talk up the adventure, accidents happen, and the random nature of a tumbling scree of boulders hitting a tent, or knocking down a moving climber, is no more statistically likely than being knocked off a bike while riding on a busy highway: this bearing in mind the numbers of people that summit the mountain on an annual basis.

Having said that the percentage of climbers using the Western Breach is quite small comparatively, but only comparatively – check out the condition of Crater Camp as evidence of this – and the record of deaths is very limited. Bob and I climbed summited via the Western Breach in late 2009, and both of us by then being older climbers, we were each surprised to find the physical outlay and demands somewhat less than the awful midnight summit advocated on the Stella Point Route – awful because of the cold, the scree and the crowds. The night spent at Crater Camp was not uncomfortable, neither on this or other occasions I have found, while arriving at the summit in late afternoon was a more personal and certainly a more comfortable experience.

Don’t be put off by the hype

So while I am not advocating the Western Breach route of Mount Kilimanjaro as a preferred option for older climbers, I am saying that one should take the hype with a pinch of salt, bearing in mind that a handful of companies that specialize in the Western Breach route have much to gain by over mythologizing it, and touting it as something out of the ordinary.It is true that rock falls do occur, but they are not inevitable, and probably no more likely than similar climbs in the Alps. The recent warming of the permafrost conditions have tended to loosen already loose rock formations, and it is true that the mid-morning thaw is probably the most risky period. But the risk is quantified, and acceptable by any climbing standards.

In fact climbing the Western Breach is a slow and steady trudge, made easier by the fact that the ground is relatively firm underfoot, with places where the terrain resembles a steep and rather length flight of steps. From Arrow Glacier Camp the climb up to Crater Camp occupies about five or six hours, more if you take your time, after which a very nasty but thankfully short summit push gets you to Uhuru Peak by mid-afternoon. The temperatures at that time are moderate, there is usually no-one around, after which the return to Crater Camp is dusty but not unpleasant. Sleeping at some 19000ft is uncomfortable, but not excessively so, since if you have made it that far the chances are you have adjusted well to altitude.

Get in touch with us today

My advice to anyone contemplating the Western Breach is to do it, making sure to use a reputable guiding company, pay what the trip is worth to avoid absolute novice guides, and attend to your own well being as you would on any mountain anywhere in the world. Get in touch with us at Eco Travel Africa if you would like to arrange an oldies climb of Kilimanjaro, in the company of either Bob or I, which will take a lot of the guesswork out of the trip. Or fill in the form below and we will bring you up top speed on what trips are being arranged.

Ceasefire and Elections

The closing chapter of Rhodesian history was decided in Lancaster House, London, between 10 September-15 December 1979. There, in what has been described by some as the Funeral Parlour of the British Empire, the principal protagonists in the unfolding drama of the Zimbabwe/Rhodesia Bush War brought the curtain down on this, the last substantive act in the drama of British imperial disengagement. It was a moment of profound delicacy. The Rhodesian conflict had been deliberately regionalised in an effort (a) to attack and destroy external guerrilla forces in their bases of operation in both Mozambique and Zambia (also in Angola during Operation Vanity in February 1979), and (b) to so reduce the national transport and communication infrastructure of both countries that ending the war would be a matter of urgency, not only for Rhodesia, but also for her two principal neighbours. The result of this was that the Patriotic Front, an unhappy alliance of Robert Mugabe’s ZANU (Zimbabwe African National Union) and Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU (Zimbabwe African People’s Union), and headed in practical terms by Mugabe, was forced to concede ground in key areas. This was particularly the case in the matter of land rights for a ten-year period after a political handover, and the holding of free and fair elections to determine the leadership of the new nation, irksome in the extreme for Mugabe who felt confident that a total military victory was tangibly close at hand.

A ceasefire was agreed upon and implemented at midnight on 28 December 1979, at which point the war effectively ended. A British Governor in the form of Lord Christopher Soames arrived in the country to complete the circle of British rule in the colony – restoring symbolic ‘legality’ to the rebel republic – and ostensibly to oversee elections, which, in practical terms, Soames enjoyed neither the physical power nor the political support to moderate or control.

It must be remembered that the Rhodesia issue had lingered as an open sore on the British post imperial agenda since the 1950s, and having achieved some sort of an honourable solution, the British, in this case the partnership of Margaret Thatcher and Lord Peter Carrington, had no interest in compromising a clean end to the matter by conceding to the concerns of a minority white population that by then numbered less than the population of a minor London borough. The Patriotic Front broke up prior to the election and Mugabe and Nkomo contested the ballot on individual terms. ZANU in particular flaunted the requirement that guerrilla forces be contained in pre-positioned Assembly Points, allowing, sometimes quite openly,  hard-core ZANLA fighting units to roam the countryside, reminding those who might have forgotten that the consequence of disloyalty to the party had not diminished in the slightest under the civilizing influence of a British Governor. (Ref: Soames’ memorable comment on the matter: They think nothing of sticking tent poles up each other’s whatnots and doing filthy, beastly things to each other. It does happen, I’m afraid. It’s a very wild thing, an African election.)

Local security concerns were articulated in two intelligence papers prepared by senior Security Force officers. The first listed a series of possible actions to oppose and prevent a ZANU or ZAPU  victory. It was understood, or perhaps more accurately, hoped, that the result of the election would be a narrow victory for Mugabe which could be countered by a coalition of Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU, Abel Muzorewa’s UANC (United African National Council) and Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front (Later renamed the Conservative Alliance of Zimbabwe). The second paper warned of a likely outright victory by Robert Mugabe in which case the potential for a euphoric rush to the capital by victorious guerrilla groups, supported by allied civilians, was very high. Various actions were suggested to prevent or protect against this.

Operation Quartz

These intelligence reports, along with a general sense of anxiety felt within the security circles and wider white society, were more than likely what lay behind the formulation of a military plan, Codenamed Operation Quartz, that would quickly move to neutralize ZANU’s main force concentrations conveniently contained, for the most part, in Assembly Points  located in various parts of the country. The understanding that underwrote the plan was in essence that Mugabe would react upon losing the election, or being outmaneuvered upon a narrow victory, by attempting some sort of armed takeover, or at the very least a quick return to war. ZANLA positions, including a temporary senior command HQ located in the grounds of the University of Rhodesia, would be attacked and wiped out by a combination of Rhodesian ground and air forces. South African assistance in the form of helicopters and a small detachment of the Reconnaissance Regiment would also be provided. South African troops were likewise deployed in the strategic area around Beit Bridge to protect the rear guard of a potential white exodus to South Africa should matters turn ugly in Rhodesia

Operation Hectic

Operation Hectic was an allied plan that involved the direct assassination of Mugabe and key aids, with Nkomo also targeted, but not quite so comprehensively. The operation was to be carried out by the elite troops of the Rhodesian C Squadron SAS. A series of attempts on Mugabe’s life were made during the tense weeks running up to the ballot, but each time he slipped through the net, either as a consequence of good luck or prior warning. The latter prompted renewed speculation regarding the existence of a mole at the highest security level in the country. A name quite often mentioned in this regard has been that of Ken Flower, local intelligence supremo and Director General of the powerful Central Intelligence Organization. Flower wrote a highly detailed account of his years at the helm of Rhodesian intelligence, Serving Secretly, but failed to mention Operation Quartz. Nothing has ever been proven against Flower, however, who died in 1987,  and who continues to enjoy the support of many ex-Rhodesian intelligence and security force members who do not accept that there is any truth in accusations against him. The fact remains, however, that a number of assassination attempts were made against both Mugabe and Nkomo by different units and agencies, each of which was frustrated, suggesting very strongly a very highly placed intelligence leak.

One of a number of highly unpalatable aspects of Operation Hectic involved a smear campaign against Mugabe and ZANU, with attempts to blow up churches in and around Salisbury for the purpose of blaming guerrilla elements and their atavistic, anti-Christian/Marxist ideological leanings. A wedding party of ostensibly UANC supporters traveling in a bus between Umtali and Salisbury was ambushed with many killed, the operation apparently undertaken by rogue elements of the Selous Scouts, but with no definitive proof of this ever being presented. The apparent objective was to suggest that the attack had been staged by vengeful ZANLA elements. A bomb attack was also staged against the printing facilities of MOTO Press, the publisher of a popular black readership magazine, after a spurious edition of the publication hit the streets of Salisbury painting a formidably distorted picture of Robert Mugabe. The bomb attack was intended to be interpreted as a ZANLA retaliation, which was confused somewhat by the discovery at the scene of a white male corpse  with South African money in his pocket.

The Order of Battle

The main attack force earmarked to assault the various ZANLA Assembly Points combined the RhAF, units of the Rhodesia Light Infantry, the SAS and Selous Scouts, supported by SA Special Forces and Paratroopers. Ten targets were identified. Assembly Points Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, Juliet and Kilo. ZIPRA was not specifically targeted – Nkomo was to be a pivotal alliance member in a new government – although Assembly Points Kilo and Juliet were shared by both. The urban assault on the ZANLA HQ would be carried out by units of the SAS supported by tanks and armoured cars of the Rhodesian Armoured Car Regiment with the addition of  106mm recoilless rifles.

The Rhodesian Army fielded primarily the Eland armoured cars, a close variant of the French Panhard AML that were produced in South Africa. This was a versatile weapon, armed either with a 90 mm quick-firing low pressure gun or a 60 mm breech-loading mortar, the former most commonly. These had superseded a fleet of British Ferret armoured cars that had never seen a great deal of active service and were largely obsolete. In addition the Rhodesians had acquired eight Russian T-55 tanks in October 1979, part of a consignment of weapons seized by the South Africans from a French cargo vessel believed to be transporting weapons to Angola, then more or less at war with South Africa.

Other military, police and auxiliary units, although not earmarked for use against the target Assembly Points, were nonetheless placed on standby for rapid deployment to areas of strategic importance, and for the general defense and protection of key sites and population centers. Various  signals were sent to local JOCs and sub-JOCs, briefing them on what roles they were to play in the upcoming Operation. Copies of these have been preserved, against orders, by some of the officers thus detailed, and a number of these are now in the possession of the Rhodesian Army Association. The following examples were provided by Captain Peter Bray of the RhACR, and are reproduced verbatim:

• Signal One – Op Thrasher Inyanga/Honde/Inyazura/Umtali
• Signal Two – Op Thrasher Melsetter/Chipinga/Mount Selinda/Cashel
• Signal Three – Vital Asset Ground

It can be seen from the above that the territorials and independent companies, alongside various Support Unit and SFA units, were to be concentrated in strategic and vulnerable areas throughout the Operation Thrasher area (primarily), which was the principal ZANLA theater and the area most likely to be affected by an emptying of the ZANLA Assembly points. An indication is given by this of the extent to which the matter was taken seriously by the military high command and the various JOCs (Joint Operational Centres).

The Operation That Never Was

The signal Quartz was never issued. Robert Mugabe and his ZANU won an unexpected, but in retrospect inevitable, majority at the polls. The Rhodesian military machine, primed and waiting for the signal, waited in breathless anticipation. Three hours before the anticipated launch of the operation, however, it was cancelled. Many reasons have been cited for this:

The first was the belief of the Commanding Officer of the SAS, Lt.Col. Garth Barrett, commanding the pivotal unit in the entire plan, that the operation had been compromised at the highest planning level. This again implies a sense of unease about the existence of a well placed mole in the system. The SAS had been thwarted several times in efforts to kill Mugabe so there was certainly some basis for this fear.

Another theory put forward was that the close proximity of some ZIPRA and ZANLA elements had precipitated an inevitable leak of information.

A third and more plausible explanation was that General Walls himself, head of ComOps (Combined Operations) and the last substantive Rhodesian white man on the inside of the ceasefire negotiation process, recognized that the extent of Robert Mugabe’s win nullified any real chance of any kind of coup succeeding. Quartz had been formulated on the understanding that Mugabe would not win, or at least would not win resoundingly, and when he did it seemed that an inevitable course of action had begun that could not now reasonably be halted. It has also been suggested that Walls never intended there to be any kind of violent Rhodesian effort to reclaim power. The planning and dissemination of the details of the plan were simply to forestall any maverick individual action on the part of units or commanders acting in the belief that victory was being handed to the enemy. If it was generally believed in the armed forces that a centralized scheme was in place then individual units and battalions would be likely to remain under orders.

Even after the Mugabe victory had been announced some expectation lingered that a coup of some sort would be ordered. This did not entirely evaporate until Walls appeared on national television and addressed the nation with the stern warning that ‘…anybody who gets out of line or for whatever reason starts disobeying the law will be dealt with effectively and swiftly...’

Walls’ Denial

Interestingly Lt. Gen. Peter Walls was careful to distance himself from the planning of Operation Quartz, and moreover denied any knowledge of its existence. This is quite understandable bearing in mind that Walls was walking a tightrope between ushering in majority rule and ushering out a highly motivated, aggressive and effective military machine that certainly did not deserve defeat in terms of its battlefield performance. It might be remembered that Rhodesian ex-Prime Minister Ian Smith had not represented the Zimbabwe/Rhodesia Government during the Lancaster House negotiations, Bishop Abel Muzorewa by then being Prime Minister. It had been Walls who had appeared at the Conference as the white man in Rhodesia to deal with, notwithstanding the fact that a number of white members of government served on the Zimbabwe/Rhodesian negotiating team.

Walls could hardly then openly acknowledge Operation Quartz, bearing in mind that he was actively trying to win the trust of the incoming government, being, at the very least, the titular head of the armed forces integration. This did not last very long, and Walls quickly fell from grace, as did Ian Smith, and the process of sweeping white influence out of government and the armed forces soon claimed both.

Walls was in fact accused of treason in parliament by the then Minister of Information Nathan Shamuyarira, claiming that:

• Operation Quartz involved a military takeover of the country scheduled for 4 March, the day of Mugabe’s electionvictory.
• ZANLA troops had been purposely massed in assembly points in order that the Rhodesian Air Force coulddeal with them in concentration.
• ZIPRA was not to be attacked in the hope of promoting an alliance between Nkomo and Muzorewa onceZANLA had been neutralised.
• Operation Quartz was cancelled a bare 3 hours before it was due to be launched, because Walls felt that it could not succeed in view of Mugabe’s overwhelming victory at the polls.

All of this Walls denied, but was not believed, and was advised soon afterward by members of the government to leave the country without delay. In conclusion it can hardly be credible that the commander of the armed forces of Rhodesia could have been unaware of an operation that required such a widespread mobilization of the armed forces, and action likely to generate tremendous hostility overseas and an enormous political embarrassment to the government of the United Kingdom. This in particular bearing in mind that the government then lay under the ostensible control of a British Governor, meaning that war thereafter would not be with white Rhodesia but with Britain. However it has been stated by a Brigade Major of 3 Brigade based in Umtali that Walls might not have been aware of the precise codeword Quartz because this was a codeword specific to the mobilization of 3 Brigade in terms of the actions planned for the operation (1 Brigade Bulawayo being supplied with the codeword Melrose). This is not to imply that Wall’s was unaware of the operation as such.

This is an excerpt from Rhodesia: Last Outpost of the British Empire. Article by Jeremy Brickhill highlighting the matter in more detail.

On the battlefield, meanwhile, the intensity of reprisal and counter-reprisal grew, and as manpower shortages in the armed services became critical, any and every type of force multiplier was considered. The Selous Scouts and Special Branch were behind most of these ideas and were highly creative and successful in employing them. One such scheme turned the tables on the terrorist‟s tendency to rob rural stores. Operatives fitted transistor radios, much coveted by guerrillas in the field, with secret homing transmitters effective within a radius of 50 kilometres. The transmitters were usually only active when the radios were turned off which meant that any follow up by Fireforce could be conducted in the fairly certain knowledge that the guerrillas were asleep. This theme was developed a little further, when a charge of plastic explosive was fitted into each radio so that when the on/off switch was activated a prescribed number of times, the charge would detonate. These were called „road runners‟ after the propensity of Wily Coyote to explode several times during the course of a cartoon episode.

Exploding bicycles was a tactic the Selous Scout used during a number of cross-border raids. Bicycles packed with explosives were left lying around in Gaza to be picked up by FRELIMO patrols. Usually the devices were detonated by weight on the saddle or ringing the bell, and before FRELIMO and ZANLA fighters got wise to it, a good number were despatched. The fact that quite a number of civilians fell victim to these ruses spoiled only slightly the pleasure of hearing that many important guerrillas had been killed. As a first entry into chemical warfare, the Rhodesians poisoned natural waterholes in the dry southeast of the country. The hope was that more than the handful of terrorists who had so far died of thirst on the long, dry march in from Gaza would succumb to poison. The rains broke not long afterwards, however, and the scheme was abandoned.

To spread the use of chemical warfare into the wider conflict, the security services had their own homegrown Doctor Death to call on. Bob Symington, professor of surgery at the University of Rhodesia, was an amateur toxicologist with a small but well-appointed laboratory in his Borrowdale home. He was also a high-ranking territorial officer and as such had a direct connection to the Ministry of Defence. As early as the last quarter of 1974, Symington was working with the Ministry to devise a system of exterminating guerrillas, using various poisons. At the same time authorisation was handed down to the CIO, to commence a top-secret programme to deploy chemical weapons. Ken Flower was Director General of the CIO and answerable only to the Prime Minister, so if Flower was au fait with the operation, so must Smith have been. The chemical warfare programme was placed under the aegis of the Selous Scouts and was installed at the Bindura Fort to keep it from prying eyes.

The first major application was to impregnate clothing with parathion, an organophosphate absorbed into the bloodstream through hair follicles. A person wearing a treated article of clothing such as jeans, a t-shirt or underpants could be expected to die within four or five days.2 Poisoned clothing, tinned meats and soft drinks were supplied to ZANLA contact men via pseudo groups. Consumables were laced with the thallium, a poison that attacks the peripheral nervous system. Thallium was also a favourite of chemist-turned-crime-writer Agatha Christie. Cigarettes were poisoned by treating the filters with anthrax spores.

By the middle of 1977, it had become apparent that Rhodesia was losing the war, and as a consequence the chemical programme was expanded. Special Branch distributed poisoned food and clothing in a highly secret programme that utilised rural stores that were commonly raided by insurgents. Storekeepers were usually ignorant of the deployment and as a consequence quite a few accidental deaths were recorded in the general population. In June 1977, The Operations Coordinating Committee requested the officer commanding Special Branch to provide detailed figures for deaths of guerrillas that could be attributed to poisoning. The figures supplied indicated that 809 individuals had succumbed to this method in a period of six months.3 Many members of Special Branch believed that more terrorists were being accounted for by chemical means than by conventional fireforce attacks.

Biological attacks were also part of the strategy, and claimed an unknown but significant number of lives. The Selous Scouts introduced cholera bacteria into the water supply for the FRELIMO and ZANLA camps at Madulo Pan not far from Malvernia. By sabotaging pumps and pipelines, the Scouts forced the guerrillas to use tainted ground water. Unaccountable cholera outbreaks were reported in various parts of Rhodesia as a consequence of ongoing deployments of spore and the natural spread of the disease.

Anthrax was also used by the Selous Scouts to infect cattle in the Malvernia area. The spore would then be passed on to humans consuming the meat. The distribution of anthrax was carefully controlled in Gaza lest infections move to the Kruger National Park to the detriment of wildlife and South African goodwill. Selous Scouts intelligence officer Jim Parker, in his book Assignment Selous Scouts, confirms that anthrax was deployed in Matabeleland north to infect or kill cattle, in order to deprive infiltrating ZIPRA forces of food. Veterinary Department personnel, unaware that the Scouts were responsible, had a very difficult time containing outbreaks in the Tribal Trust Lands. The disease was more easily controlled on white ranches where there was better access and security.

By October 1979 the isolation unit at Gwelo Hospital was overflowing with cases of anthrax poisoning. Patients from Lower Gwelo, Que Que, Zhombe, Gokwe, Selukwe, Shangani – even some from as far away as Fort Victoria – were treated. There were 10, 753 recorded cases of anthrax poisoning in 1979 and 1980, and 182 confirmed deaths. These figures were compiled from treated cases and in reality must have been much higher.5 Whichever way, they far exceeded cases recorded in the rest of the world combined.

This is an embedded article published in Covert Action Quarterly dealing with the use of biological agents during the Zimbabwe Rhodesia War of 1965-1980. A brief summary of the Rhodesian biological war program can be found here
CAQ Magazine Zimbabwe,Rhodesia,Anthrax

(…yes I know that is Hattie McDaniel & Vivien Leigh  in Gone With The Wind on the left)

One of the things that I miss most and least about living in Africa is servants. I certainly miss being liberated from the daily grind, but at the same time I have learned to love the lack of a stranger in the home.I say stranger with caution, because, of course, domestic servants in the African context, and probably in any context, have never been strangers.

I say stranger with caution, because, of course, domestic servants in the African context, and probably in any context, are hardly strangers. They occupy an important part of our lives, and vice versa. What is more I think this was particularly so in an earlier generation of colonial life when employing domestic service was an almost Victorian institution. Although they were separated by both class and race – in southern Africa these have tended in the past to be the same – servants would naturally become so intimate with the family that they became almost family themselves. One of the passages that I found most interesting to write in my recent history of Rhodesia was in the chapter that dealt with race in general, and race relationships in particular. It was about service and labour, and you can link to it here.

We all had ‘em

Like everybody else who grew up in any one of the British African colonies – either of the two Rhodesias, Malawi and Kenya spring to mind, but in the age of the age of FaceBook I cross paths with other empire brats from all over Africa – we all took for granted a black soul living among us…often more than one, but very seldom none at all. In fact, during the 1950s/60s/70s in Rhodesia it was regarded as  an admission of the most dire economic circumstances for a white family to have no servants at all, and there were very few that I remember that did not.

By the time I left Zimbabwe briefly during the 1980s it had already begun to seem to me that domestic service was a dying institution, but ten years later, when I returned, I was quite amazed to discover that the opposite was true. In the decade or so that I had been away a black middle class had emerged for whom domestic service had become no less a key pillar of the local (we used to say Rhodesian) way of life. I personally determined to resist it, and resolutely declared myself perfectly capable of looking after myself, but in due course I capitulated, mainly because every domestic servant in the locality, noticing a vacancy in my household, sent a brother, sister or cousin along to apply for the position.

In fact it began to dawn on me, as it had not in the past, that domestic service was regarded as a rather plumb job. Recently, watching the British TV series Downton Abbey, it occurred to me that in Africa, like anywhere else, a domestic servant expects and enjoys a level of respect that reflects the quality of the home he/she is employed within. A domestic servant is higher up the pecking order than a gardener for example. The job also comes with certain perks – better housing and regulated working conditions are the obvious examples, but decent accommodation and regular food must count for a lot too. There is another key benefit too, one that is incalculable and difficult to define, which is the benefit that accrues from that peculiarly paternal relationship that African whites in particular have tended since the dawn of the institution to adopt towards their black servants. It is a wholly reciprocating relationship, what is more, and  precisely where the servant/master lines get confusingly smudged.

I use the term ‘white’ in this regard with some caution. I do not have enough experience of black middle class life in Zimbabwe to really comment with much authority on that strata, but I can, with some authority, comment on how the institution evolved in my own socioeconomic quarter.

Early Assimilation

The servant/master relationship in the Rhodesias was really savaged by Doris Lessing in her book The Grass is Singing. The idea that the institution was riven with Jim Crow type institutionalized brutality has never been supported by any real evidence. While researching my book Rhodesia, Last Outpost of the British Empire I read an enormous amount of historic material offering anecdotal background to the domestic relationship between black and white, and although class driven, as every aspect of life was in the early 20th century was, it emerged in my view as a mutually supportive and quite passive relationship. I do think it is fair to say that amongst the lower and working class whites who flooded into the country between the wars, and immediately after WWI, there might have been evidence in their treatment of blacks of that exaggerated class consciousness that Britain is so famous for, particularly among the lower and artisan classes. It was these mainly who might have found some satisfaction in for the first time in their collective history having someone lower down the ladder than they to look down upon. For the most part, however, a sense of familial paternalism tended to be the overriding characteristic of the domestic relationship, and in many ways it still is.

The roots of that paternalism are both rational and understandable. In the aftermath of the Mashona and Matabele Rebellions of 1896 life in Rhodesia quickly began to develop the characteristics of any other British orientated society in the late Victorian period. Towns and settlements began to grow alongside a coordinated system of administration that included government, a judiciary and law enforcement. In amongst all this black society had to cope with both the rapid evolution of a western type society into which it was assimilated while at the same time trying to pick up the pieces of the more familiar system that had been manifestly crushed by the unstoppable march forward of global progress. Education for blacks was only just becoming available under the aegis of many missionary organizations entering the country, but it would be twenty years or more before the first generation of literate and educated blacks would emerge with anything like the kinds of tools necessary to embrace and understand modern life.

For the most part Europeans were not immune to this fact. It may surprise many to know that the race dynamic in Rhodesia prior to UDI was not in any way as difficult and hostile as it would be in the late 1960s and 1970s. During the period between the wars a lot of effort was expended to promote assimilation, and a somewhat utopian ideal existed for the development of black society under the Pax Britannica. However, the fact remained that blacks at that time were bewildered by the modern world, highly vulnerable to it and certainly incapable within it of any kind of unassisted development.

The first settler generation – the majority of them anyway -  who began to employ blacks in various capacities, saw them as being very much in the kindergarten of life, and came to believe that it was their moral duty as the ‘civilizing race’ to uplift them with both a firm and fair hand. As blacks began to discover education, however, and began to grow more at ease with modernity, they ceased to be quite so helpless. Slowly whites began less to see the necessity of paternalism towards blacks than the desirability of it. This was because the first generation of African blacks to achieve full education in British Africa began immediately to agitate for wider political freedoms, which took a great many whites by surprise, and began to introduce a little of the hostility into the relationship that would grow so rampant later. Colonial authorities and settler communities across the board in British Africa had absolutely no plans for encouraging black political parity, and moreover could starkly envision the end of British rule in Africa if they ever did. Paternalism in general then began to subtly evolve from the earlier texture of helping a child to emerge into maturity to the much rougher approach of constantly reminding that child that his/her immaturity was manifest and likely to be permanent.

This, however, tended to be a more general, social/political phenomenon affecting society as a whole. On a more personal level it was still in the home where the only real point of contact between the races took place. At the time there were very few, and there continues to be very few, whites who can speak any indigenous languages, and certainly the locally adapted pidgin called Chilapalapa, or Kitchen Kaffir, offered very little opportunity for either party to bridge the gap. Blacks, on the other hand, tended almost universally to be conversant in English. They were required to do so, and were taught English at school, which consequently gave them a great deal more opportunity to observe, assess and form opinions than we did. It was only very late in the life of Rhodesia that I remember any serious discussion being given to teaching native languages to white kids as part of their formal curriculum, and yet this would have made so much sense. It would at the very least have diminished the overarching us-and-them aspect of life in the country during the critical pre-UDI period, to the extent that even if we could never have realistically hoped to hold onto power, we would at least have had a more authentic understanding of the people who were about to govern us.

But I digress. That deeply embedded paternalism in the domestic relationship carried over after independence with the result that the characteristics of the black/white relationship in the home did not much change. There might possibly have been a little bit caution on the part of the employers, and a certain amplified confidence on the part of the employee, but on the whole matters did not alter appreciably. It remained a basic prerequisite of expatriate life in Zimbabwe to have at least one servant while working in a suburban household in middle class Zimbabwe remained a desirable job to have. And, moreover, the implied responsibility of paternalism continued, as it still does, to be very much part of that relationship, a responsibility that always has extended far beyond the individual in employment to include as many of the extended family as could be squeezed into the equation.

Rachel, my wife, who is from the United States and was not born into the institution, adapted to it well on a purely practical level, not very difficult admittedly, but on a more analytical level she was never wholly reconciled to it. Initially she was preyed upon, and stumbled once or twice, when she was met by her first domestic employee with the sense of expectation, and some entitlement that might have been better managed by someone with more experience.  In particulate when AIDs deaths began to really impact daily life in Zimbabwe, and almost on a weekly basis there were deaths within the immediate or extended family, the financial weight of funerals and allied expenses meant in many ways, in particular with a large staff, that one found oneself acting less as an employer than as a social elder and bank or credit union.

One thing that Rachel did identify that I as a lifelong African white did not was how that paternalism fed so easily into pre-existing fabric of black social organization, in particular when one views oneself as a patriarch – male or female – at the head of a large extended family. Without access to consumer credit it stands to reason that inter-family loaning and owing would be common, and looking to one’s employer for quite a lot of the day to day support necessary to survive would seem to be natural and need not have about it the exploitative and demanding character that it might otherwise seem to have.

That is not to say that there are not, and have not been, plenty of shenanigans in exploiting the bleeding hearts. Newcomers to Africa, be they diplomatic or commercial expats, are almost always taken to the cleaners in the early stages of their adjustment. The younger the candidate the steeper the learning curve. This is indeed so much a fact of life that the Peace Corps and other volunteer agencies warn young volunteers to not fall in love with serial philanthropic abusers and to be extremely judicious in adopting responsibility for local problems. This is a cultural clash, of course, based on two key misconceptions. The first is that all Africans are dirt poor and the second that all westerners are fabulously rich. Neither is universally true, but much profit is made from generations of newcomers to Africa as they find this fact out for themselves.

So really the best and most mutually satisfying relationships in the home tend to be amongst the old-timers: those that are not engaged in a social experiment and for whom the relationship is structured upon no less solid foundations than an average mother-in-law or first cousin relationship in the white, European system of familial organization.

Let me quote my own family as an example of this. I cannot remember precisely when Tobias came into our lives. It was after I have left home, so his relationship was really less with the family than with my mother and father. There were problems of course, ruptures that were extremely personal in nature, but none of these noticeably undermined what over the course of more than twenty years became a very deeply interdependent relationship that only solidified further as each party grew older. Tobias aged, and aged in tandem with Dad, and the two aged together. Their relationship was based on banter, humor, empathy and support. And yet it was also fundamentally separate in a way that was clearly understood, and for which neither man was responsible, but to which each owed fealty and obeyed.

With Mum it was different. I cannot say for sure, but I think it had to do with gender and a patriarchal aversion to domination by a woman that can never be entirely massaged out of any culture. Who knows? It was no less of a good working relationship despite this fact. Tobias witnessed every phase of their lives, and vice versa, and was privy by association to every problem and crisis that punctuated the passage of two very complimentary lives in their lives. It need only be said that in the dead of night when Dad died and Mum was alone it was Tobias who was first on the scene. What the event meant to him personally I have never inquired, but I cannot doubt that it meant a lot. Throughout the necessary upheaval and family grief he remained steadfast, and was washed up later on the shores of my sisters ample home. Belinda still lives in Harare at the date of writing, and Tobias lives out his twilight years as the Major Domo of her small but respectable and highly efficient staff. How many years of association is this? A great many indeed.

Tobias will die thus, and with him will pass probably a more potent symbol of what really went on in the bad old days than any history book you can ever read will tell you. Under an umbrella of a very strange race dynamic, three people lived out their middle and late years very much part of one another lives. I don’t care if I never have another servant, but I am glad to have overlapped on that particular colonial institution, because, in the final analysis, it was one of the few that was good for all.

]]> http://peterbaxterafrica.com/index.php/2012/04/06/downton-abbey-africa-style/feed/ 1 http://peterbaxterafrica.com/index.php/2012/04/04/the-white-mans-burden/ http://peterbaxterafrica.com/index.php/2012/04/04/the-white-mans-burden/#comments Thu, 05 Apr 2012 00:41:05 +0000 Peter Baxter http://peterbaxterafrica.com/?p=3784

Your new-caught sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child – Rudyard Kipling

(…yes I know that is Hattie McDaniel & Vivien Leigh  in Gone With The Wind on the left)

This is an excerpt of Rhodesia: last Outpost of the British Empire by Peter Baxter. The article it relates to is here

Much closer to home was the complex relationship that whites had with their domestic servants. An almost obsessive determination on the part of white immigrants to make use of this most colonial of facilities, was born out of two factors.

The first was that in the Victorian and post–Victorian period the goal of reaching the upper middle classes was best defined by the maintenance of domestic service. This ideal was imported to the colonies, where the facility became available to just about anyone with a white skin. In Rhodesia, this was profoundly felt due to the large number of British working class folk who brought with them their particularly well-developed class-consciousness. All of them were able on some level to look down on another social group, most for the first time in their lives. By 1904 the trend had taken such firm root that each European household employed on average more than two domestic servants. Some families would have more than this but there were very few that had none.

The second factor was that – in time – the prestige of keeping domestic servants became inverted to imply that, if a white family did not have servants, then they were living in a state of poverty. Therefore, even when the direst economic circumstances prevailed, at least one servant would be retained in a white household for no better reason than to keep up appearances.

By the 1930s, domestic service had come to define a large part of the celebrated Rhodesian way of life. White women were liberated from basic housework which made the isolation of their frontier lives a great deal more bearable. The colonial lifestyle also meant suburban living on a grand scale, characterised by large houses and extensive holdings. In time Rhodesian flower gardens came to be celebrated throughout the Empire. Expansive properties, spacious homes and extensive sporting facilities – these were but a few of the many luxuries that could never have been possible without cheap and willing domestic labour.

However, domestic service was governed by the strictest rules of propriety. In the 1950s a set of Federal guidelines for new immigrants was careful to include instructions to housewives without experience of employing male servants. They were cautioned never to allow their female children to exhibit any degree of nakedness, and for themselves to make their own beds, wash their own underwear and avoid appearing in a state of casual undress. This implied that women and female children were at some sort of risk at the hands of male servants. In theory this should have been so, for according to the census of 1911 there were over 6000 African men living in Salisbury, but only 300 women. It was not inconceivable, then, that a lonely black man far from his home might be tempted by this most forbidden fruit. However statistics do not bear this out, and incidents of rape or indecent conduct, although they occurred, were very rare.

Nonetheless, under the Immorality Suppression Ordinance Acts of 1903 and 1916, an act of indecency – as applied to a black man –  included raising or opening any window, blind, screen or the fly of a privy in order to observe any woman nude or semi-nude. This was later expanded to include voyeurism, flirtation and even friendships.

Whatever the mutual complicity, suspicion or risks that might have characterised the relationships between master and servant, it was in this quarter that the only real contact between the races took place. Social convention forbade any shared interaction and, even those men who married or cohabitated with black women, tended to do so with overtones of concubinage and chattel rather than in monogamy. The general view that each race held of the other was formed primarily at this point of contact.

Gertrude Page, who authored such Rhodesian classics as The Rhodesian and Winding Paths, wrote of a black house servant being beaten for wiping his nose on a tea towel. It is probable that incidents like this did occur, but they were certainly rare and never institutionalised. Doris Lessing in her novel The Grass is Singing went to some length to portray the unlikely tyranny of an unschooled white mistresses against her black servant. Hylda Richards in her portrayal of early farm life in Rhodesia draws more on the humour of mutual misunderstanding, than the usual attempts to depict the blacks as nose picking, belly rubbing incompetents, or the white housewife as a monster.

‘In this way I came upon darkest Africa,’ Hylda Richards writes, (which was characterised by)  ‘the ignorance, natural and acquired, of the African native.’¹ Richards admits that she did not like blacks at all, but having emigrated from lower middle class England, she apparently never contemplated living without them.

My hope of being the beloved mistress of devoted slaves received a nasty shock. Like all newcomers I tried to spoil them so they would love me, but they just took advantage of my kindness and made incredible demands …

Far from ruling with an iron fist, Richards found it impossible to make any impact on her servants at all. A black male’s disinclination to be bossed around by a woman of any colour found expression in many ways. Theft, indifference, lies, evasions and dumb insolence, were all weapons in a domestic servant’s arsenal. To deliberately lay sauce and pickles for breakfast and marmalade for dinner, to sweep around things and spot no cobwebs, to give notice the moment he realises he cannot adequately train his mistress – all these drove the inexperienced Richards to distraction.

Only the years show one how to cope with a native servant, so that during the first day of office one knows which brand they are; the intelligent quick boy who will later on use that intelligence for evading work, or the apparent idiot who may, with patience, become a strict routiner.

Most labour – be it domestic, industrial or agricultural – was migrant. A kaleidoscope of different languages and cultures merged in the workplace. Sir Granville Orde-Brown, who was at the turn of the century the undisputed Empire expert on race and race relations, remarked on the subject:

 … it is easy to hear a camp-fire conversation in the Congo during which conditions in the Union, Rhodesia, Tanganyika and Angola are all discussed and commented upon; brothers from Nyasaland may go one to the north and the other to the south, and may be trusted to compare their experiences on their return home.

A language unique to migrant labour evolved which came to be known as eChilapalapa, or more commonly ‘kitchen kaffir’. Chilapalapa was a pidgin language combining the common elements of a number of native dialects with occasional flourishes of English and Afrikaans. It developed initially on the Witwatersrand mines under the name Fanagalo, and it gave whites the sense that they could speak a native language and blacks the sense that they could speak English. In time it became the lingua franca of the workplace and was widely spoken throughout the Rhodesias and beyond.

Hylda Richards recorded an amusing conversation in eChilapalapa as she tried to explain to her boss boy the causes of World War II:

‘Manjie’ (now) lo Germeni tells lo Austria, Mina bamba wena! (I catch you) and lo Austria say, Aikona! (No you won’t) And lo English tells lo Germeni aikona enza so! (Don’t do that!) Manjie lo Germeni bambele (Beat up) lo Austria.’ …and so the conversation continued until it ended with the boss boy gaining the gist of the story and concluding. ‘Uh, uh! Lo Germeni meninge (very) cheeky!’

Migrant labour was yet another of the strange anomalies of Southern Rhodesian race relations. While the Carter Commission and the subsequent Land Apportionment Act institutionalised a strictly separate system of development, all kinds of efforts were made to improve conditions in the reserves, to make it less attractive for young males to leave in search of work. However the counteractive imposition of hut taxes and the increasing demands for labour conspired to ensure that they did just that. Migrant labour had many different levels depending on its source, but since cities and towns were to remain white areas, all labour to some degree could be considered migratory.

There was internal labour migration from the reserves to the cities and a more regional movement that often saw labour originating in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. These workers flooded into the Copperbelt, into Southern Rhodesia and in vast numbers further south to the mining areas of the Witwatersrand. The 1930s brought large-scale industrial development not only in Southern Rhodesia but in the north as well, creating a huge demand for labour. An entire industry developed around the movement of labour, involving private recruiting agents and modern transport networks, as well as comfortable rest stations along the most travelled routes.

The social cost to men and their families of long-distance migration was immense. In the early days tribesmen were torn away from their traditional life to work for enough money to pay their hut taxes, after which they would return to their lands and their families. By the 1930s, however, such attitudes had changed. The miniature industrial revolution, that was underway in both Rhodesias, rapidly undermined traditional structures of life by depopulating tribal areas of young and productive males. The wearisome journeys home and the material demands of kinfolk when they arrived, caused many to abandon their home areas for more modern lives in labour compounds and other fringe urban settlements. Many took wives or concubines from tribes different from their own and in due course discarded old tribal attachments for the new, integrated industrial generation of working blacks.

Rates of pay in Southern Rhodesia were higher than those in the north, and then, with a great deal more freedom of movement than now, many would travel huge distances to find suitable work. Large numbers of Nyasas moved south from the Shire Highlands and the ‘dead north’ of Nyasaland to find work in the cities and settlements of Southern Rhodesia. A labour caste system evolved with certain groups preferring – or being preferred for – certain types of work.

The removal of night soil from privies throughout Salisbury was the preserve of Tongas from the Zambezi Valley. Lawyer Hardwicke Holderness relates in his memoirs a story of an amateur Shakespearean practising her lines in the privy that backed up against a sanitary lane in Salisbury. ‘Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?’ she keened, whereupon a crisp reply emerged from behind her. ‘Mina aikona Romeo, Madam, mina Zambezi boy!’⁶

Kingsley Fairbridge recorded the sight of gangs of Mozambican migrant workers slaving on the preparatory work for the new township of Umtali.

Great gangs of boys from Nyungwe (Tete) and Senna were working on the streets that were to be. Mabandawi and Magorongoza dug side by side, trenching the two streams that flanked the township; the deadly mud, packed with germs of malaria, was cast up beside the trenches.

Before World War I, Mozambican and Nyasa farm workers often followed white farmers down from Nyasaland to settle in Southern Rhodesia. This practice served to introduce local white farmers to the superior work ethic of the Nyasa, after which they tended to select Nyasas and northern Mozambicans for farm work in preference to whatever local labour was available.

The bewildering crosscurrents of labour movement and the rapid merging of communities were a feature of the postwar period. These activities, however, tended to diminish as the global depression of the 1930s made itself felt. The labour recruitment industry and its infrastructure fell away and was never quite revived. Migrant labour, of course, continued to flow, but it became victim to tighter political controls and covetous practices of governments jealous of their labour reserves.

Migrant labour also formed the bedrock of much black political opinion in the period between the wars. The main detractors of political amalgamation (Northern and Southern Rhodesia) tended to be black, with many of their concerns bound up in the fear of competition with labour from distant areas. As Nyasaland pioneered the migrant labour movement, so Nyasas brought back and disseminated the early breezes of revolution. Political consciousness travelled along a system of verbal arteries that ran from the Witwatersrand to Katanga and beyond.

Howard Moffat was the uncomfortable heir to a government charged with the task of regulating this disordered race-landscape. While this was not all that contributed to the aura of failure that tends to hang over his term, it represents much of what ultimately overwhelmed him. He was of missionary heritage and in his blood was the titanic social conscience of his forbears. It must then have been particularly difficult to be the hand that consigned the black man to a social and political wasteland. In many ways it was Godfrey Huggins who seemed born to the tasks of this time. From the backbenches, he contributed much of the weight that was used to push the country along the road that it must ultimately follow. Moffat went through the motions and completed his term, but was not dismayed when the day came for him to hand over power to Huggins.

Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro is one of those bucket list achievements that anyone with an outdoor bent should consider. Kili is a great mountain for older climbers because, taken slowly, there are no significantly difficult features to overcome and no technical climbing required. The topography of Mount Kilimanjaro is relatively simple. It is a volcanic cone the rises out of the surrounding Masai Steppe at an extremely modest elevation. The first phase is forested, which makes for a very pleasant introduction, followed by the heather belt, which is a little more uniform, but with the advantage of more generous views. As the climb continues the landscape becomes more barren, but no less interesting, and of course the higher the mountain you climb the more impressive the views.

Route Options for Kilimanjaro

There are several route options – Lemosho Route, Marangu Route, Rongai Route and Machame Route, each with its own characteristics. Our recommended route for older climbers of Mount Kilimanjaro is Lemosho Route, it is the longest and most scenically diverse which suits older climber for two reasons – there is more of ecological interest to see, and the the period allowed for acclimatisation is greater. The last point, of course, is the most important. For us of the baby boomer generation, the key to a successful summit is to allow as much time as possible for adaption to high altitude.

Altitude Consideration on Kili

At 19300ft Kilimanjaro is a high mountain by any standards, and no matter how experienced a climber you are, you will feel it. Drugs like diamox help a lot, and are essential unless you have a point to prove, but nothing beats a slow, measured pace. The key to a slow measured pace, of course, is to not be hurried, and this is why we are aiming our trips at older climbers. There will be no young adventurers in the group to unreasonably drive the pace, and no younger guides to do the same. We offer an eight-day minimum which means six days on the ascent and two – three if necessary, on the decent.

Kilimanjaro Summit Approaches

The summit of Mount Kilimanjaro can be approached in two ways. Via the Western Breach, which, despite what many say, and the mythology of climbing Kilimanjaro, is not the most difficult climb. There are one or two inherent dangers, falling rocks principal among these, but the risk is slight. It is a daytime climb, temperatures are higher, and the strp structure of the rock makes the one foot in front of the other principal easier. The downside is that a night needs to be spent at high altitude which is never easy.

The more orthodox route is via Barafu Camp and a midnight ascent. This is usually undertaken over a soft scree at freezing temperatures with a view to reaching the summit at dawn. Thereafter it is a fast decent to lower altitude which is always a relief.

Which is easier is always a matter of opinion, but either way the last push is the hardest, and it is as much as anything the mental conditioning that you have generate din the days and hours prior to this that will get you over the hump.

Once again the key to a successful summit of Mount Kilimanjaro for older climbers is pace. A slow pace among like minded climbers is the optimum way to both enjoy and succeed. If you would like to know more about Eco-Travel Africa Over Fifty Kilimanjaro Climbs, contact us today or fill in the contact form below and we will be in touch immediately with more details.

Tanzania is at the vortex of the African tourist industry, positioned equidistant from everywhere, and packed with just about everything that anyone needs to see of Africa in a compact fortnight’s worth of travel.

The integrity and standards of preservation of Tanzania’s national parks are almost unique in Africa, and with iconic names like Serengeti and Ngorongoro to pull in the crowds, the crowds come. The petit Kilimanjaro International Airport daily disgorges hundreds of visitors, each processed and divided up among the dozens of tour busses and safari Landcruisers lining up in the parking lot under the spreading red flamboyant trees. It is an industry that handles nearly 400 000 visitors a year, a major contributor to the Tanzania economy, and a significant employer in a conspicuously challenged corner of the world.

Ebony And Ivory

The Tanzania tourist industry however has a soft underbelly. Visitors may take heart from the high standards of resource management in all the national parks, but still, at such places as Oldonyo Orok Curio Market situated just outside Arusha, scores of otherwise wise and salient folk from the liberated west linger among row upon row of carved artifacts made from the iconic local ebony wood. Colossal quantities of this precious resource are purchased and shipped abroad daily, with apparently not the slightest inkling of how this impacts the environment that each person has paid so much to visit.

The fate of African Blackwood (Dalbergia melanoxylon), known locally as Mpingo, is just a tiny symptom of a vast global disease of resource abuse, but it is bitterly ironic that it is from the heartland of enviro-consciousness that the main culprits in this crime are drawn. With powerful education applied in all aspects of the rational west towards the conservation of the environment, it is astonishing how easily these lessons are forgotten when they come to be applied. Oldonyo Orok sells a wide selection of items of cultural and curio interest, and yet two thirds of the shop floor is dominated by blackwood, with prominent signs offering worldwide shipping, suggesting that this is fate of most of it.

Speak to any shop assistant or a curio seller on the side of the road and all will either claim to have ‘license’ to harvest Blackwood, or that what is harvested is ‘replanted’. Rarely are these claims true, but they are nonetheless all it usually takes to make those few tourists who care hand over their money. In fact very few licenses are issued to harvest and utilize African Blackwood (Dalbergia melanoxylon), known locally as Mpingo, and certainly no program motivated by the artists themselves exists to institute the replanting of a tree that can take more than a generation to reach a stage of any sort of commercial viability.

African Blackwood

Mpingo is one of the most recognizable of all wood species to the layman, categorized usually under the name ebony, an umbrella term it shares with other woods of a similarly dense, black and highly ornamental form. It appears most commonly on the flutes of bagpipes, and other woodwind instruments, as well as on the black keys of some pianos, and in many other decorative and functional applications. Its value lies mainly in its qualities of dense composition and beautiful black patina, both of which allow it to be easily carved or turned, and then polished to an immaculate finish.

The tradition of carving Mpingo for implements, fetish and decoration dates back to antiquity, and traditionally was the preserve of the Makonde people of the border region between Tanzania and Mozambique. With the concentration of tourist markets in northern and coastal Tanzania, many Makonde woodcarvers have migrated north with the result that their sculptural style has tended to become more closely associated with Tanzania than Mozambique, and with their main subject matter evolving into popular themes of wildlife and Masai cultural iconography.

The Future of Mpingo

While obviously if each tourist that visits Tanzania removes an average of a kilo of this wood each year, then it will not be long before it disappears altogether; but it is also true that each kilo that is sold adds about US$20 of tax fee revenue into the informal economy. Take this away and large number of people in and around the northern circuit will be without an income. Creative conservation measures are required here, but creativity in this regard is not a common feature in Africa.

Surprising therefore it is that in a quiet house along the congested road to Machame lives an unassuming man who stands at the forefront of the hardwoods conservation movement in this vulnerable region, and although modestly supported by a few outside organizations, he has almost single handedly taken on the responsibility of ensuring the viability of the beautiful African Blackwood reserves into the future.

Sebastian Chuwa

Sebastian Chuwa began the serious advocacy of woodland and forest conservation in the district of Kilimanjaro in 1991, after his return form study abroad, during which time he worked, taught and studied at the Kew Botanical Gardens in London, and prior to that he worked for many years in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in the field of conservation. Sebastian still lives in the house built by his father, a prominent local herbalist who inspired his son with a basic sense of how the forest lives and functions, and how its integrity impacts the lives and livelihoods of many who exploit it directly, and many, many more who live downstream.

Sebastian is the driving force behind two local projects, the first is perhaps the flagship outreach, the African Blackwood Conservation Project, and the second a more personal crusade to halt the decline of the Kilimanjaro Forest itself.

The African Blackwood Conservation Project

The two project are linked broadly under the umbrella of forest conservation, but the Blackwoods Conservation Project has a more international flavor, being partly the brainchild of Texan decorative wood turner James Harris, who in partnership with Sebastian started the project in 1996. The technical know-how and local energy, however, is wholly local, and is not focused on the good work of Sebastian Chuwa alone.

Sebastian began his work in the protection of Mpingo during a period of work in Tanga, a coastal region of Tanzania close to the border with Kenya, but on his return to Moshi in 1997 he was welcomed by local community leaders who gave him a plot of land in exchange for the promise of Mpingo saplings to replant in the neighborhood. Now, less than a decade later, the Blackwood Conservation Project nursery, situated about 7km south of Moshi, at the end of a rough bush track in a zone of irrigated market gardening, is a thriving tree nursery. Here rows of the inconspicuous but iconic trees are planted out under shade where they wait for a patch of African soil somewhere in the lowland bush to contribute to the regeneration.

The Kilimanjaro Forest

This is the public work that Sebastian does. Somewhat more behind the scenes is his community work on behalf of the Kilimanjaro forest, that green cloak of verdant cover that gives the great mountain so much of its mystique. The forests of Kilimanjaro have been under threat for a long time. Early travelers through the region wrote of the difficulties and irritation of moving through a blanket of canopied forest stretching mile upon mile in every direction. Pockets of community life existed here and there, pockets that were expanded with the development of a colonial economy, and the introduction of cash crops like coffee and bananas. Nowadays all the usual maladies of over-exploitation affect the Kilimanjaro forest, which has now diminished to an almost remnant fringe of old growth pressed upwards by the crush of humanity, and downwards by the drying of the environment and the spread of the high desert.

It might be the preservation of the Mpingo that gets the funding, but it is easy to get the sense in conversation with Sebastian that it is the preservation of the forest that is the work of his passion. The ghost of his father, a man of spiritual substance for whom the diversity of this living, forming structure was both his livelihood and his art form, is fundamental to the journey that Sebastian takes today. The highland forests of Africa are places of contest and emotion, and of differing and at times contradictory objectives. Sebastian’s acts a bridge in this regard, speaking on behalf of the community to conservation agencies that would like to limit non-fee paying human access into the forest altogether, and behalf of conservation agencies to the communities for whom the forest has been a resource and source of spiritual and temporal support for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.

The threat to the forest was recently deemed sufficiently serious for the boundaries of the National Park to be extended over all of what had previously been under local government management. This, as Sebastian observes, does not stop people using the resources of the forest, it simply means that now they do it illegally. It has also driven a wedge between the interests of one group and the interests of another.

Sebastian is the first to recognize the right of the community to utilize its environment. His answer to the prevailing conundrum of community verses ecology is education. Such innocently misnamed initiatives as the Mile High Club, a government sponsored outreach designed to advocate responsibility towards nature has been a vehicle that Sebastian has used to preach his message of sustainability. It is too much to expect that the community can be barred entirely from the use of the forest, but if they are to be allowed access to the resources of this vital natural zone, then equally it is incumbent on them to exercise responsibility.

The Disease And The Cure

And this certainly seems to be happening. Near his home in the lush back country of the Kilimanjaro small holdings Sebastian has a nursery developing a stock of local hardwood seedlings that has resulted in the 2004 celebration of 1 million trees replanted. These have mainly found their way along the stream banks and water catchments of the upper forest, and indeed sometimes as deep into privately owned land as 15km from the forest edge. The people who work and sustain this effort do so voluntarily, and unlike the Blackwood Project, which is support by agencies as divers as the Cottonwood Foundation, the Lindberg Foundation and British Petroleum Tanzania, the work in Kilimanjaro enjoys very limited financial support from the United Nations through its COMPACT program, and massive moral but almost no financial support from the Tanzanian Government.

And yet still the challenges are enormous. Sebastian revealed a touch of the humorous African fatalism that is the only way to survive the moral ambiguity of the tropics. A drive through any one of the towns and villages in the district, and particular conurbations like Moshi and Arusha, will reveal not only mountains of charcoal manufactured illegally, and timber yards stocked to the rafters with illegally harvested camphor wood. This, when one considers that the national parks administration only confiscates timer and fines offenders with a view to individual profit within the department, has an unstoppable momentum.

But Sebastian maintains that the his efforts are making a difference. It is in education that the future lies. When children are nudged towards a more sympathetic understanding of conservation, coupled with the potential for a life liberated from poverty and the primary exploitation of the environment, there is a chance that what remain will be protected, and perhaps, with aggressive reclamation of the forest, the river backs and gullies, that it might even be expanded.

Most of all though it is necessary for us, the tourists who bring our dollars into the community, to make sure that we do does not further the destruction of what we come so far to see and enjoy. Responsible tourism cannot just be the preserve of the operators, it is our responsibility too.

The current buzz in Kilimanjaro is the imminent closure of Crater Camp. I discovered this on my most recent trip when a few mates and I summited via the Western Breach and spent a long and ugly night at Crater Camp.

Crater Camp is touted as the last word in isolation on the slightly over-trammeled Kilimanjaro circuit. There is no doubt that getting up there, particularly via the famous Western Breach, is a large undertaking, and spending the night at over 5500m is not for lightweights, but isolated Crater Camp is not!

We made the trip up from Arrow Glacier Camp in about 7-hours of fairly solid slogging up the middle of the Western Breach. Scrambling over the edge of the crater the first sight that greets one is the rather diminutive – not much more than a huge ice-cube – Furtwangler Glacier. After the obligatory photograph against the ice mass – ‘say Fartwanker!’ – we trudged over the ash colored sand that lines the crater floor towards camp situated about 500 meters distant. As usual the porters had arrived before us and were setting up camp, and besides them we were alone on this beautiful and desolate spot.

Litter and worse…

However it was difficult to ignore a carpet of detritus littering the extremities of the camp, a collection of oddments including discarded tampons, teabags, hand-warmers and the usual debris associated with the human condition. I took my camera and set off to photograph the hidden piles of kitchen waste and portable toilet dumps that were the most obvious signs, but pretty soon I was reeling at the sheer volume of crap – literally – that littered the camp surrounds.

Behind every rock, and even some way up the trail towards the summit, hundred and hundreds of human turds lay un-decomposed as might be expected under these conditions of temperature and altitude. It was the most revolting sight imaginable in an otherwise pristinely beautiful natural space.

High altitude lethargy…

Basically the problem is this: It is ecologically unsound to dig pit latrines at this altitude thanks to the fact that no degeneration will take place and what is deposited will remain effectively forever. The use of portable toilets is the alternative, but few porters care to portage filled units down so they simply dump the contents onto the sand. Moreover the porters themselves have no facilities so have no choice but to defecate out in the open and it is this that accounts for the colossal amount of human waste in evidence everywhere.

The end of Crater Camp

As soon as I was back in Moshi I was on the phone to the local head of KINAPA who told me that the situation at Crater Camp had been of concern to the parks authority for some time, and that in fact the decision had recently been taken to shut the facility down altogether. This effectively means that any Western Breach Summit will end at Barafu Camp and that only by special license can anyone in future make use of the crater floor.

As far as current obligations are concerned, pre-existing bookings will be honored, but within a year the facility will be cleaned up and left to nature. It is a very sad fact that the state of human commerce on the mountain is so reckless and indifferent, but the fact remains. Although very sad it is probably for the best. So for those of you booked to climb via Crater Camp, hold your nose, watch your step and make the most of being the last of any of us to make the journey.