A Single Swallow (11 page)

Zambia did not look so different from Caprivi, except that there were more undulations in the road, and everything was broken, except the airport. We went there first, to drop off the mother and child. In Livingstone signs, buildings, roads, kerbs and pavements were all broken. There was a tatty, ragged, transitory air to the place, as if people were here despite themselves: the tourists for the Falls, and the migrants for refuge from Robert Mugabe. Half the town's prostitutes, according to BBC news, were Zimbabwean. There were stories of trucks backed up for miles on the other side of the border, with nothing moving between them but girls.

The pool at the Jolly Boys backpackers' hostel was surrounded by miserable-looking girls; young Scandinavian teachers. Jollity was in short supply, thanks perhaps to an absence of boys, and also to the vast amount of kwacha required to buy a drink. There are no coins in Zambia. This means that everyone always owes someone change, and the smaller notes in unrippable and often soiled plastic are gold dust. Because computers had not yet taken over, barmen spent their shifts with furrowed brows making pencil entries in ledgers and juggling debts, loans, orders and 1,000 kwacha notes.

The Scandinavians wafted in and out of their dormitories, clutching passports and cash like virginities. They were stalked, hopelessly, by older and drunken Brits, South Africans and one or two white Zambians, who held and held forth views on racial and gender politics and the state of Africa, particularly Zambia, which no self-respecting liberal could tolerate for a second. I nodded, smiled, said please and thank you and wondered where the swallows were.

‘We've got fuckin' hundreds of them. There's been a German couple staying with my mate who are doing research on them. I'll call him, he's got a microlight. I'll call him. Hey, Steve, there's a guy here who's into swallows. Yeah, swallows. Hey, can I give him your number . . . ?'

‘Where does your friend live?'

‘You can't miss it. North of Lusaka, first left.'

His name was Peter. We straggled out into the darkness to look for food. Pot-holes lurked like crocodiles in broad reaches of darkness. Peter soon decided that the bars were too empty, the women too proper, and he was not hungry. Like everyone else, he was counting his kwacha.

‘I run a trucking firm. I've got one truck here, stuck in the mud, and I've got another the driver is saying is broken down. They're probably trying to sell the load right now. I tell you, this place, it's fucked.'

I decided to leave Peter's friends and their swallows to their own devices.

To see the wonder of the world that is Victoria Falls you sign in, hand over dollars and pass an ugly statue of Dr Livingstone apparently hewn from solid copper. You decide whether or not you need a raincoat and boots, and then follow one of the little paths towards the noise.

Perhaps Victoria Falls is the ultimate triumph of the British Empire in Africa; you are told its other names and they are all older, truer, sound more beautiful, say more and show more, but Victoria Falls is as mighty as English itself and as surreal as the great White Empress hurling herself off the greatest cliff on the continent and plunging to her death with all her petticoats billowing. The locals call it Mosi-Oa-Tunya: the smoke that thunders.

A man sold me a statue. She was beautiful: the first Queen of Victoria Falls, he said. I asked her name. Mukuni, he said, named after her people.

‘So they should be called the Mukuni Falls!' I cried.

‘Yes!'

In fact he named her after the first Chief Mukuni who came down from Congo in the eighteenth century, conquered the Baleya people (who were originally of the Rozwi culture in what is now Zimbabwe) and founded Mukuni village, which is to this day presumed to have been the largest village in the area when Dr Livingstone arrived. The rest is history, or rather politics, as there is still a Chief Mukuni of
Mukuni and you may visit him there and mix with his people, the Toka-Leya, many of whom are artists.

She was a tall, slender woman, and weighed less than 100 grammes. Her people call the falls Shungu Mtitima and perhaps her name was actually Bedyango, the high priestess of Mukuni, who has final say on who will be the next chief. But this was a wise man, so he gave her to me in return for a little understanding, not too much, and I carried her from then on, neatly swaddled in the middle of my emergency toilet roll, believing her to be the true queen.

I began the business of organising my next transport. Hiring a car took a day and a half, a small fortune and multiple trips to the airport, half of them through magnificent downpours. The rain was always preceded by a thick green-red smell, which seemed to steam as if from cracks in the earth; then the sky turned grey-black, sometimes shot through with silver-white sun lances, and it would seem even hotter, under the cloud, and then the rain would come.

I was not much enamoured of the car. White with a fake velour-like interior, it was made God Knows Where, but was unmistakeably Japanese. It was all electric. A boot lid that would cut your fingers off if you were careless, automatic transmission, quite a lot of oomph and no doubt thirsty, it had Grande or Classic or something in curly-wurly writing near the bank of its red and gold tail-lights. Power steering, with a ride like a feather mattress sliding down a spiral staircase, sod-all clearance and, it felt, twice as wide as the Mousebird (God help us if Livingstone's pot-holes were anything to go by) there could be only one name for it: the Pimp.

The traveller showed up at the hostel around supper time. He was so wiry and quiet he was almost difficult to see; he achieved a beer in seconds and eased himself onto the list for the cook's supper, though in theory it had closed a while before. Roan is a chef, a snowboarder, a Kiwi, about twenty-four, and he was coming to the end of three months on the road: Tanzania, Kenya (‘It's a great time to go to Kenya,' he said, phlegmatically: the country was in flames and the
whole world was wondering if either Kibaki or Odinga could see a way out), Malawi, Zambia, and, next, Caprivi. He was on his way to Canada, via South Africa.

‘Man, I'd love to see you in three months' time!' he laughed. ‘You'll be thin, covered in shit, you won't care what you eat, you'll be obsessed with your ass – it gets really out of hand, like someone says woah! I just did a beauty – like – you can go and see it if you want, it's still there! And you're like no, really . . . And you'll be so at ease with your body. I am. I'd tell anyone anything now.'

We played pool and drank. Roan showed me how you find south using the Southern Cross.

‘You take the long axis of the cross, there, and carry it on: that's one line. And see below it, those two bright stars? They're the pointers. So you draw a line bisecting a line between them, and carry it on until you meet the line from the cross. Below that is south.'

In the end we did an exchange. Roan got my still almost pristine little guide to Namibia and South Africa, and he was pleased to unload a battered
Africa
on to me, which I eviscerated with a steak knife. The whole of East Africa from Egypt to South Africa went, except for Ethiopia, and I also saved the first or last pages of countries like Zimbabwe and Mozambique which have borders with countries through which these north-west-bound swallows approximately pass.

The plan was to drive north-east to Lusaka, Zambia's capital, break, drive north through the Copper Belt, get as close as possible to the Democratic Republic of Congo, peer at it over the border and attempt to answer the following questions.

Could one obtain a visa for the country at the border? If not, was it possible to fly direct from Zambia to Kinshasa in the DRC without a visa for the DRC (starting in London, you have to begin looking for DRC visas in Brussels, and I had not) on the basis that one was really going to Brazzaville in the Republic of Congo, just a short boat ride from Kinshasa across the mightiest river in Africa?

Should any of these be possible, I would still be sticking to the supposed flight plan of
Hirundo rustica
. However, it seemed unlikely. Tim Butcher, author of
Blood River,
a recent book about the DRC,
had set his heart and years of preparation on coming through Congo in one piece. The writer of an article for the
New York Times
took a train which sounded fantastic, but she was there for a month while I had a week at most. One blogger wrote an hilarious piece about obtaining a DRC visa from Zambia's northern border, which involved days and days and days of the dullest work there is: sitting still in great heat, waiting.

Which would leave, I feared, one option: Brazzaville via Addis Ababa, courtesy of Ethiopian Airlines, but I did not have to face it yet. All around, thousands of swallows were either preparing for it or beginning to migrate, or were already far over the northern horizon, on their way.

It was eight-thirty in the morning and I was going too. The hitcher wore a pale grey suit and smart shoes.

‘Where are you going?'

‘Hello.'

‘Sorry – hello! Would you like a lift?'

He climbed in.

‘I am going just into town.'

‘Right!'

We set off. Automatic transmission and assisted steering do have points in their favour; the acceleration was good and unlike the Mousebird, the Pimp did not make any audible objections.

‘So what do you do?'

‘I am a person seeking employment.'

Fingers dive hopefully into a sheaf of papers in a folder. A CV tries to emerge, but I prevent it.

When I dropped him off the person seeking employment gave me a wave and a brave attempt at a smile. Zambia's unemployment rate is estimated at 50 per cent by the UN; life expectancy is less than forty. I was an old man, suddenly, in Zambia. The person seeking employment was not much younger than I, and I did not hold out much hope for him in Livingstone. Tourism has declined in recent years and the
most recent employers to open offices in town were western NGOs and charities. I saw hundreds of people dressed for work on Africa's roads, but from then on I wondered how many were seeking employment.

I fell in love with Zambia just north of Livingstone. It was going to be an 800-kilometre day, the sun was shining, the tarmac patchy and popular with trucks, and there was a roadblock. The policewoman wore a smart pale brown uniform with a large peaked cap which made her look to me like a smiling summer version of an officer in the Coldstream Guards.

‘May I see your passport please,' she said. ‘Where are you from?'

‘Britain!' I said. Her smile was infectious.

‘This is your car?'

‘No, I hired it.'

‘Well. We are very pleased to see you!'

‘Thank you, madam! I am very pleased to see you too!'

Wow, I thought. What a day.

A hundred kilometres later I had almost had it with Zambia. The road was dreadful. Only the locals, the daily locals, one suspects, could travel it at anything like speed. I tried hitching along behind one, a white bakkie with two grinning and carelessly chatting occupants. Although I could catch them on the rare good bits they vanished every time we hit the rough. I cannot have kept up with them for more than 10 kilometres. Doubly frustrating was the rolling green beauty of the country; you wanted to keep stopping but you could not: it would only confuse the slaloming trucks, snake-dancing ahead, headlights winking through the dust.

Then it changed: the miracle of a good road! I hardly dared celebrate for a while, but the way to Lusaka was clear. There was a rhythm in the land. It rose and fell in undulations, sometimes gentle, sometimes steep. The villages and towns generally sat on the north or east side of the streams and rivers, so you would ride a crest which dipped down to a bridge, then the road would rise again,
through the conurbation. And there were swallows. I pulled the Pimp over and climbed out to say hello to a group of about a dozen. They were sitting on a telephone wire, it now being mid-morning. Either they had spent the night there, and were having a lie-in, diving off now and then to snack, or they were pausing, having been travelling since first light. Behind me there was a straggle of wire and a patch of marsh, picked over by egrets: a good place to hunt flies.

A man on a bicycle, coming up out of the next town, bobbed his head at me.

‘What do you call those birds?' I asked him.

‘Those?'

‘Yes!'

‘Ah, I am not sure . . .'

‘Swallows?'

‘Yes!'

‘And they come through here?'

‘Yes! With the rain. I don't really know their names.'

‘OK, no – Thank you!'

‘You are very welcome.'

‘Thank you!'

So many conversations went like this. It was rare to find ordinary people who paid much attention to the birds – to any birds. Perhaps out in the country, away from the roads and towns, there were older people who noticed their comings and goings, but in Zambia there were few older people. Perhaps amateur naturalism, in the way it is practised in Europe, is a luxury afforded by security, wealth and leisure.

The swallows were a mixed crew; half moulted, half not: their tail streamers, the mark of a fully mature, fully moulted bird, were still very short. They are known to travel in loose groups but it is not certain if they journey with their mates, children or neighbours, or whether they simply join travellers they meet along the way. It is thought they set out from the north with family and associates, as long as the children are ready to go when the adults are. But in the case of
late broods the parents will go first, the young following as best they can.

Long before we reached Lusaka, having been run off the road by a bus which chose to overtake on a blind bend, where it narrowly missed a vehicle coming the other way, I concluded that Zambian drivers are optimists. I lost count of the number of times some optimist, having just not quite killed either of us, sailed by with a blinding grin which seemed to affirm that God does indeed walk the earth and devotes His time to protecting all who love a summer day and can think of no better way of spending it than tootling through Zambia rejoicing in the thrills of the road.