White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Other Noah: The Man Who Saved 6,000 Wild Animals

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Rupert Fothergill and friend                                     Source: Internet

In the Bible, it was Noah who stuffed the animals into the ark, two by two. Now there is Russell Crowe, whose movie “Noah” went on general release this weekend, and whose animals are almost the backstory compared to Noah's family disputes.

But from 1958-64, on the Zambezi River and in the Zambezi valley between Zimbabwe and Zambia, there was another Noah: a game warden for the colonial government in Southern Rhodesia, who was the nearest thing to the biblical Noah. He led a small band of ingenious men, who between them saved about 6,000 creatures, great and small, from a watery grave.

The man who mounted probably the greatest animal rescue since the captain of the vessel in Genesis was Rupert Fothergill. This quiet “man of the bush” was in his forties when he undertook the rescue of every kind of living creature trapped by rising waters from the giant Kariba hydroelectric dam project, which flooded the Zambezi valley downstream from Victoria Falls.

At the time, the waters behind the dam created the largest man-made lake in the world. Because the governments of the British colony of Southern Rhodesia and and the British Protectorate of Northern Rhodesia were primarily concerned with relocating about 57,000 Tonga people from the flood plain, little attention was paid to the density of game that would be drowned.

Enter Fothergill, who orchestrated “Operation Noah.” With few resources, and often no idea how to do it, Fothergill and team went to work, learning as they went along.

As Tim Abbott, an American conservationist, told me, “How do you tranquilize a black rhino?” Well on YouTube, you can watch some amazing footage of the enormous, beautiful beast being secured, fighting back and finally being tied to a giant stretcher that was dragged onto a raft made of oil drums for the journey to her new life on high ground.

As the waters of Lake Kariba rose, islands formed in the flood plain, trapping everything. There is a searing image, recorded in a blog by Abbott, of a giant bull elephant, found by Fothergill's team when it was near death, having swum for five hours, its trunk changing color from the exertion.

Some big game was more or less ridden to safety through the rising water. Small creatures were carried in loving arms onto small boats and taken to safety. There are photographs and there is 16mm film of the rescues, even of Fothergill pampering an antelope calf.

Peter Jones, now 77 and living in Durban, South Africa, was on Fothergill's team. He told me by phone that gradually and with very few resources, they leaned how to save everything from poisonous snakes to the big game — buffaloes, elephants and rhinos; the big antelopes, eland, kudu, sable and wildebeest; cheetahs, leopards and lions; and hyenas.

Fothergill and his men (about seven white Rhodesians and 50 Africans, Jones recalls) had a small flotilla of dinghies with Evinrude outboard motors. There were six or seven of these, but later a larger boat (Jones thinks it was 30- or 35-feet-long and fitted with a diesel engine) was procured and used to tow the other boats with men sitting in them, holding animals in bags and nets and sometimes just in their hands. The boat's name was “The Tuna,” and it had come overland from South Africa — boats were in very short supply in that part of Southern Africa, a largely arid area.

I missed “Operation Noah” by a year. When I was a young reporter (17 years old), I was sent to the Kariba dam site to cover floods that threatened to wash the whole project away. It was just a year before the great animal rescue began but my boss, Eric Robins, a man from whom I learned my trade, was aware of the coming wildlife tragedy. Later, he wrote a book about it called “Animal Dunkirk: The story of Lake Kariba and 'Operation Noah,' greatest animal rescue since the Ark.” It was. It was.

Sadly, “Operation Noah” got lost in the turbulent history of Africa that was to follow and particularly the civil war in Rhodesia, which brought an end to the colonial era and tended to inter its good deeds with the race issues that dominated the politics.


Happily more and more images of “Operation Noah” are being digitized, largely by Fothergill's family, and are making their way onto the Internet. Watch Crowe, marvel at Fothergill.  —  For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate



A Cotton Wool Christmas

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It wasn’t the Grinch who stole Christmas; it was Northern Europe.

As a child born and raised in Central Africa, I was very aware of this confiscation. It outraged my mother, who was also born and raised in Africa.

We lived in British colony of Southern Rhodesia; and we were dominated by British immigrants who insisted on “dreaming of a white Christmas.” Well, tough luck.

As my mother liked to point out, not one more flake of snow fell in Central Africa than fell in the Holy Land, where Jesus Christ was born.

But we were — indigenous Africans and settlers alike — in the thrall of snow imperialism.

Being so close to the equator, snowfall was a meteorological impossibility. So those under the European cultural thumb decorated everything in sight with cotton wool. We could only dream of a cotton-wool Christmas.

Unlike my mother, my father felt no pressure from the European and North American inauthentic portrayal of Christmas as a white, cold affair. He didn't mind that the retailers edged their windows in cotton wool or that the Anglican Church went along with the Northern Hemisphere’s implication that Joseph and Mary struggled through the snow to get to the manger in Bethlehem.

The one thing my parents agreed upon was that Christmas began on December 24 and lasted for the traditional 12 days.

Not only was no snow substitute allowed in our house, but also no commercially produced ornaments; flowers and greenery were fine. As a result the whole family would go to a marshy area, known as a vlei, on Christmas Eve and cut great quantities of ferns which would be strung along the picture rails.

Decorations could be added to the green frieze, but only if we made them out of painted paper. Mostly, we stuck fresh flowers in it. It was a green Christmas.

When it came to food, my mother relented completely and we made English Christmas pudding (boiled for hours in muslin), fruit cake and pies made with mincemeat (an all-fruit mixture).

We weren't a drinking family, but a bottle of sweet sherry appeared at Christmas. My mother — who otherwise drank only tea and sometimes coffee (no water, milk, alcohol or sodas) — would take, ostentatiously, a very small glass of sherry. Having downed this half-ounce or so of fortified wine, she'd announce that she wasn't responsible for her actions, that she could feel her legs getting heavy and that she was drunk.

My brother and I watched Christmas after Christmas to see if there was any sign that there had been a physiological or psychological change in Mamma, but none was recorded.

We then ate a very English meal and listened to very English Christmas carols, like “The Holly and the Ivy” and “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” My mother, who hadn’t signed her separate peace treaty with Germany, wasn’t too keen on “Silent Night.”

It wasn't until I had turned 20 and was working in London at United Press International that I saw real snow. Sorry, Mamma, it beats cotton wool and it makes for a splendid Christmas, even if things were a bit different in Royal David’s City two millennia ago.

Now for some wassail. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

More White Mischief

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From the Romans on, wise men, including American humorist Mark Twain and French humanist Michel de Montaigne, have advised: Don't lie unless you have a good memory. This could be updated for conspiracy theorists this way: Don't spout theories of conspiracy unless you have the mind of an historian. Take note, Donald Trump.

Now back to Aug. 4, 1961 and the birth of Barack Hussein Obama in a faraway place, Kenya Colony in East Africa. It is a part of the British Empire that knows that its days as a playground for the English upper class — and often aristocratic playboys and playgirls – is limited. A year and a half earlier, their life in the sun was challenged and the future revealed when Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan told the South African parliament on Feb. 3 that “winds of change” were blowing through Africa.

The settlers on the famous “White Highlands” of Kenya Colony had survived the scandals of the 1930s and early 1940s, when the lover of a particularly beautiful woman, Lady Diana Broughton, was believed to have been murdered by her husband, Sir John Broughton, 30 years her senior. The murder of Josslyn Hay, the Earl of Erroll, took the cover off the aristocrats cavorting in Happy Valley and the famous Muthaiga Club in the capital, Nairobi.

Back in England, where the dark days of World War II were raging, the fun-in-the-sun frolickers were pilloried as a dissolute lot with servants, booze, drugs and a penchant for wife-swapping.

In the 1950s, the brutal Mau Mau uprising by Kenya's Kikuyu led to a loss of faith in the future in all of colonial Africa, including Southern Rhodesia, another British colony with a small white population. Unlike Kenya, which was governed from London, Southern Rhodesia had a greater degree of self- government and was less a playground for wild exiles.

The tone of life in Kenya was summed up by the title of a book about the colony's most famous murder, “White Mischief,” later a movie. Anyway by the time Obama was born, things in Kenya were getting tense.

So in this environment of racial sensitivity, imagine a white American giving birth to a child fathered by an African. The local newspaper, The East African Standard, would have been aghast. Blimpy club men would have sputtered over their Scotch and sodas and their wives would have spilled their tea and moved forward the hour for their evening cocktails, known as sundowners.

The settlers in Kenya may have lived fast but, as in Southern Rhodesia, no issue was more sensitive than white women and black men. In 1957 there was a celebrated case in Southern Rhodesia of a black man, Patrick Matimba, who, while studying in England, had married a white woman from the Netherlands and took her to live in his homeland. The white Southern Rhodesians were enraged. While there might have been many white men who were coupling with black women, the reverse was not tolerated. It terrified the settlers.

Uncomfortably the Matimbas set up house in the only place that they were allowed to, church property in the farming hamlet of Rusape. When Mrs. Matimba suffered a miscarriage, her husband could not visit her in the local white hospital. Around this time a white widow, Mrs. Fletcher Lowe, who had an affair with her African servant, was imprisoned. I covered both stories and knew the players well.

So to those of us who grew up in colonial Africa, it is inconceivable that Obama's mother gave birth to him in Nairobi and that his step-grandmother watched the birth.

More intriguing is how birthers believe that not one but two birth notices were placed in Honolulu newspapers within nine days of Obama's birth. How could that be done without credit cards; the Internet; or in the probability that outside of the American Embassy, not too many people in Kenya knew anything about Hawaii? After all, Hawaii had only been a state for two years and the people of Kenya had other things on their minds, let alone how to post birth notices across two oceans.

No, Donald Trump. The kind of disinformation pedaled by the birthers had a name in Kenya: white mischief.  – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

 

 

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Voting

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I shall be voting today. I shall toddle down to the Episcopal church hall in my town, once described by Washington Post writer Hank Burchard as “a hotbed of social rest.”

Polling place volunteers will check my ID, and apologize for so doing. All very civilized, like a Norman Rockwell painting. None of the ugliness of the campaign will penetrate the faux England of the Virginia Hunt Country.

A wretch like myself, though, will wonder which of our billionaires, so decorously standing in line with farmhands and exurbanites, gave big money for attack ads or whether one of the nice lawyers, with his multimillion-dollar, class-action practice, has paid to have a politician’s private life made public.

Yet, when it comes to voting, my cynicism is contained. I carry the scars of failed democracy, but my passion for voting is undimmed.

It all goes back to the late 1950s, when I was a wild-eyed teenaged reformer—is there another kind? The place was Southern Rhodesia and the issue was white minority rule.

We, the wild-eyed, had an almost messianic faith in the curative powers of voting. We even believed that democracy in Africa would be more gentlemanly and idealistic than it was in Europe or America. Oddly, this belief later affected liberal American newspaper columnists like Meg Greenfield of The Washington Post and Anthony Lewis of The New York Times.

Our belief, naive and well-meaning, was that without the old colonial restrictions, stronger, better societies would rise in Africa than had existed in the rest of the world. Our belief was akin to that of Jews who had high hopes that the State of Israel, informed by the suffering of European Jews, culminating in the Holocaust, would produce a kinder, gentler nation than the world had yet seen.

In looking back the odd thing is how kind and gentle, though skewed to the whites, Southern Rhodesia was. There was little crime, no measurable social unrest, but a profound sense that things would change for the better when one man, one vote was the law of the land.

Democracy was the balm and elixir that would move Africa to Winston Churchill’s “sunlit uplands.”

In 1980, after a brutal civil war, Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, got its vote. It was rigged from the beginning, and Robert Mugabe began to lay waste what had been literally and figuratively a sunlit upland.

His first action was one of genocide in the southern part of the country, called Matabeleland. Mugabe’s troops killed an estimated 25,000 people who, being of a different tribal grouping, had had the temerity to vote against him in the first free election.

The new reality of African democracy was “one man, one vote, once.”
Even so, the idealists clung to their hopes. As late as 1996, the dwindling white minority was still hopeful. At that point in time, they had not suffered direct reprisals; Mugabe’s evolving hatred of the white minority had not been seen. It soon would, with seizure of the farms and later businesses.

Zimbabwe elections lost all validity with intimidation, violence and phony prosecutions. Yet the people voted even if they risked brutality for doing so. They had signed on to the hope implicit in voting.

Sadly, democracy elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, excluding Botswana and South Africa, also failed awfully in Uganda under Idi Amin and foolishly in Zambia under Kenneth Kaunda. Democracy had become a contrivance to set up a dictatorship.

We, the boy soldiers of democracy marching around Salisbury, the Southern Rhodesian capital, with placards, did not understand that democracy is learned and it thrives only where it is husbanded by the voters and protected by a phalanx of independent institutions.

We were not alone in not seeing this. Neither, by the way, did the British, French and Portuguese governments. Neither, one fears, did the advocates for the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.

So, get out there and vote. Cherish the moment. You will not get a gun butt against your head outside the polling place.

Zimbabwe’s Days of Yore and Plenty

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The pictures are harder to take than the words. The words you can skip over; the pictures take you by the throat. All of my boyhood in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, came surging back to me with choking sorrow when I saw press pictures of Zimbabwean children digging through the roadside gravel, in the hopes of finding kernels of maize–corn in American English–that may have blown off passing trucks.

 

When hunger stalks Africa, maize is more important than gold–the difference between living and dying. It is eaten in several ways; even the stalks are chewed in the way Latin Americans chew sugar cane. Mostly, it is made into a stiff porridge called sadza.

 

Some of my earliest memories of the vital importance attached to maize go back to when I was nine years old and was awarded the job in our household of measuring the weekly maize ration to each employee. By law, every man–and domestic helpers were mostly men–received 15 pounds of maize each week.

 

My job was to watch the precious ground maize—grits to Americans–weighed out of 100 lb. sacks into smaller sacks. The weekly weighing was a jolly time, with much joking and laughing (and you have not laughed, until you have laughed in Africa) while the meal was dispensed, weighed with a scale hung on a tree limb.

 

This weekly ceremony, together with the distribution of stewing beef, was symptomatic of everything that was right and wrong with life in colonial Africa. It was humanitarian; it was generous; and it was patronizing. The amount of meal far exceeded the daily consumption of one person and was designed, although this was not mentioned, to feed more than one hungry mouth. It was a government-abetted welfare; paternalism in action.

 

I have often thought about this conscious food distribution from the better-off whites to the poor blacks as less an act of racism than of British class snobbery: noblesse oblige in the colonial context. It was the same instinct that caused the viceroy of India to pretend to find work for 5,000 people at his palace in New Delhi.

 

Much of the meal ration found its way to extended families in the townships or to peddlers who came around on bicycles. None of it went to waste. The classic meal, eaten with little variation, was sadza, which is a dumpling that diners shape with their hands and dip into a stew made ideally with meat, but sometimes with other protein-rich ingredients like beans, or termites and caterpillars, which were harvested as delicacies. I ate a lot sadza with various stews, but the caterpillars were beyond me.

 

The question I have most often been asked is, “What was it like in Rhodesia?” I have never had a good answer except to say that it was like living in a good London suburb, but with a back story of indigenous people who came and went in our lives without really registering. British author Evelyn Waugh described this phenomenon as far back as 1937, when he wondered at the “morbid lack of curiosity” of the settlers for the indigenous people. He might have been told that it was the selfsame lack of curiosity that his characters in “Brideshead Revisited” had about the workers in the rest of England.

 

At this passage of time, it is almost possible to defend the British in Rhodesia. Their greatest gift, I sometimes think, was not democracy, law, literacy or religion, but the golden maize they brought with them in l890, which replaced rapoco, a low-yield grain grown in the region. Maize was produced in such abundance in Zimbabwe, before President Robert Mugabe destroyed the commercial farms, that it was exported throughout southern Africa.

 

Now the breadbasket is empty; and children sift through roadside gravel for corn kernels blown from trucks. Would I could fix my scale to a tree and weigh out a plentiful measure for those children, who are no older than I was, when I was the quartermaster in another time.