Rhodesia 1963 & 1967-70

MV Arbitrator

I first went to what is now Zimbabwe, then Southern Rhodesia, in 1963, to teach at an African boys' school called Bernard Mizeki College. I travelled out to Cape Town  on the Arbitrator, a motor vessel built in 1951 by William Doxford & Sons in Sunderland.

We left Tilbury in the first days of January during a bitterly cold winter. We made our way up the North Sea in thick fog, and needed an ice-breaker to cut our way up the Elbe to Hamburg. By the time we reached the English Channel a full gale was blowing, and the weather deteriorated further as we entered the Bay of Biscay.

The rest of the passage was slow because the Arbitrator kept breaking down. However, it was a pleasure to be back in the warm trade winds. I spent my mornings working with the two officer cadets, doing anything from refilling the lifeboats' water containers (in the Biscay storm - the first officer had a sense of humour) to painting the ship, from lubricating the propeller shaft where a bearing was running hot, a horrible job, to steering the ship, a job I loved.

I arrived in Cape Town on 2nd February and spent two nights in an hotel. On the evening of 4th February I climbed Table Mountain and sat at the top looking down on the harbour, where the Arbitrator was making a wide turn as she left port. I remember feeling both terribly alone and very excited.

I was in Southern Rhodesia by the 7th February, having travelled up on the sleeper train from Cape Town, a four day journey.

Bernard Mizeki College

Bernard Mizeki College, located to the northeast of Marandellas* in what was then Southern Rhodesia, was opened in 1961 as a private school to serve the growing middle classes of the Central African Federation - Southern & Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. It was intended to be a multiracial, elite boys' school, an 'African Eton', and was strongly supported by the Anglican Church and a number of Federation businesses.

When I first went there in 1963 it had two boarding houses and about 140 students working towards Cambridge Overseas 'O' Levels. I did some teaching, spent a great deal of very happy time, under the supervision of the estate manager, Basil Farrant, working on some 5,000 acres of beautiful musasa and munondo woodland, and....

....had the privilege of coaching the school's first and second eleven soccer teams. The first eleven, pictured, were hugely successful, beating every team except one, coming to be known as the White Wizards for their skills.

I only spent a few months at the school, working with two young VSOs and a dedicated staff - which included David Witt, Arthur Collishaw and Blair Murray - under the headmastership of an ex-Ghana civil servant, Peter Canham, and loved every moment.

* Now Marondera.                 Details of the school's history are here.

The Bernard Mizeki Staff

I have many memories of my first time at Bernard Mizeki College, where I worked as a volunteer teacher and odd-job-man from early February until August 1963, but I didn't have a camera with me and didn't, at the time, feel the need for one. Fortunately, the BMC Facebook page does have pictures of a few of the people with whom I worked.

It was the first headmaster, Peter Canham, right, who made Bernard Mizeki College such an exceptionally good school. As a private school, it was his task, along with the governors, to raise the money to build, staff and ensure the future of the school. An ex-colonial civil servant, he ran the place with superb efficiency, leaving the teachers free to get on with their jobs. He had strong views on what an 'education' was. In the days when 'blacks' (the other racial groups were 'whites' and 'coloureds') were only allowed into one of Salisbury, the capital's large hotels, he took the prefects to the Ambassador's and made them sit down to a full evening meal - so they could learn the etiquette of 'public' eating.

It was because of my experiences at the school that I later went in to teaching but I never again came across such an inspirational headteacher. Later, it was the lack of true leadership skills which made so many of the schools at which I taught for almost 30 years such disappointing places.

The teaching staff included Blair Murray, left, while at centre is Arthur Collishaw, also a teacher but one of the two priests at the school. At right is a man we simply knew as Dokwani, who worked with Basil Farrant, the estate manager.

Wilf Stringer, left, ran the primary school, where I did some teaching, but the VSOs and I found ourselves frequently at his house as it seemed to contain an inexhaustible supply of beer.

The school had lent us an ancient Lambretta as a means of getting around its extensive campus but it was extremely unstable on the dirt roads. Since all three of us, and sometimes more, piled on to it to drive the mile down to the primary school to visit Wilf of an evening and, more challengingly, ride back again, we became quite used to ending up in the dirt.

David Witt taught maths. He was unusual in that most of the European teaching staff were single men while David had a wife, Bibi, and three children. The family were wonderfully kind to us young men. Their front door was always open and I fear we probably trespassed far too much on their warm hospitality. I recall David building a balsa wood model 'plane complete with spirit engine. Since I trained the school's cross-country team, and the school owned 5,000 acres, David used to launch his 'plane into the air and the team would set off, across the bush, to retrieve it.

All of these people, and others beside, were great fun to be with, warm-hearted, dedicated, understanding, and generous. We young men, who came for a short time and then went upon our several ways, benefitted hugely from the experience they gave us.

Many thanks to BMC Facebook members for the photos.

Southern Rhodesia to Mombasa

I bitterly regret not having a camera with me on my trip to Southern Rhodesia in 1963. This is the only picture I have of the young VSOs with whom I worked - Michael Atkinson at the back on the left and Malcolm Harrison at the front. Michael, an Etonian who was going up to Cambridge, had a full timetable while Malcolm worked on the estate. The three of us shared a bungalow, and the agreement with the school was that they provided all our food and soft drinks and a man to cook and clean, and enough pocket money to keep us in gin, beer and tobacco.

At right is Jonathan Farrant, son of....

....Jean and Basil Farrant (photo courtesy Bernard Mizeki College Facebook page here). Jean, who taught at the school, had written a biography of Bernard Mizeki, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe's first African martyr, after whom the school was named: his shrine was close by. Basil was the school's estate manager and kept a fatherly eye on the VSOs. It was Basil who, after I had worked at the school for some months, thought I deserved a holiday so took me for a tour of eastern Rhodesia.

When I left England in January I had no plans for what I would do after my months at Bernard Mizeki but while I was there my mother acted as my 'agent' in England to organise applications to several universities, and I finally obtained a place at the University of Keele in Staffordshire.

By the time the summer term ended, Michael Atkinson and I had decided to set off back to the UK by hitch-hiking north, through Zambia and Tanganyika to Kenya, a distance of some 1,700 miles. We slept by the side of the road - not without some qualms as much of the journey was through wilderness Africa - and began to learn the art of long-distance hitch-hiking. Michael ended up in Dar-es-Salaam, from where he flew home, while I continued my journey to Mombasa where I still had many friends.

1967: Decision

Sometimes one can picture the moment when a decision that affected the rest of your life was made, in this case on a rainy day while sitting at the kitchen table in a friend's flat into which we had moved from 14A Radford Street in Stone. As the end of my last year at Keele approached we had to decide what we were going to do next. I had been offered an MSc in the geology department at Keele; we had the opportunity of doing a teaching qualification and two years in schools in Zambia or Uganda; or I had the offer of a three year teaching contract at Bernard Mizeki College, where I had spent two terms in 1963.

We made the decision to go to Bernard Mizeki. I had such good memories of my time there, of the place and the people, that it was too much of a temptation; and Gill was keen to see Africa.

We left England with every intention of making a new life in what was then Rhodesia. Our heavier possessions, including all our books, went out by sea via Cape Town. We flew, and began to appreciate that the decision to go to Rhodesia had consequences, for the country had declared its independence under Ian Smith's white minority regime and was subject to UN sanctions, which meant that the only airline which flew direct was South African Airways. We flew from England to Salisbury Rhodesia via Las Palmas - picture - and Luanda in Portuguese Angola.

Return to Bernard Mizeki

When we arrived at the school, Bernard Mizeki College didn't seem to have changed much since I was last there four years previously. In this picture, the two main teaching blocks are at centre, with the dining hall behind them and the library to their immediate left. The buildings towards the far left are the two boarding houses, Kamungu and Molele. To the right are the staff houses.

We were assigned our own bungalow, though we did have to share it at times with, for example, a VSO. It had been Jean and Basil Farrant's house and they were keen gardeners, so we had some interesting plants and an excellent vegetable garden. The latter was cared for by....

....Titus, who also looked after the rest of the garden and helped around the house. The vegetable garden produced....

....a wealth of vegetables but, with the Marandellas area above 5,000ft, we could also grow things like strawberries, though I had to borrow test tubes off the science department to prevent the birds eating them.

With Gill also teaching in the school on a local contract we should have settled quickly - but we didn't. The danger of returning to a place one remembers so happily is that it will have changed, and the college had. Almost all the teaching staff who had worked there in 1963 had left and, although we made very good friends with many of the new staff, the school had lost its direction. The reason was simple: the inspirational head I had known, Peter Canham, had been sacked and replaced by a man who was not up to the job.

We quickly made contact with many of the teachers I remembered, and were soon offered a job at another school, St Faith's, near Rusape. We went across to look at the school which, although a very small, rural secondary, buzzed with energy, and were shown the house which we would have. We were sorely tempted - but we had signed a contract which, as a matter of principle, we were loath to break. So, with great sadness, we turned down the offer.

However, we didn't leave St Faith's empty-handed. We took two kittens home with us, Nangatanga, which means pumpkin, because of his stripes, and Nhata, which means flea, so-called because she brought them with her.

Settled at Bernard Mizeki

After a bumpy start we settled to life at the school. Gill taught French and English and I taught a range of subjects, including Maths and English. In the latter I had no qualification beyond 'O' level but loved teaching it, and put on two plays in the school's open-air theatre, 'Androcles and the Lion' and 'Julius Caesar': to my surprise the boys seemed to have an innate appreciation of Shakespeare. I went back to coaching the cross-country and football teams. The footballers were never the stars of 1963 but the cross-country team always did well.

I ran a farm club. One of our biggest successes was onions. Because water came from a borehole and was precious, we irrigated our garden with water from the boys' showers. As we were harvesting the crop, the local health authority decided that this wasn't a good idea and condemned the whole crop - which didn't prevent the school staff from benefitting from our efforts.

The school had a hefty meat bill so, to alleviate this and to provide a change of diet, the farm club began....

....breeding rabbits. They were fed, in part, off maize stalks from the school fields. However, we had not done the most basic research: when it came to it, most of the boys refused to eat rabbit. Rabbit, we discovered, was a tribal totem of the WaShona. So, instead, we sold the dressed carcasses to a local butcher, who exported them, despite UN sanctions, to China. At the project's height, we were killing fifty rabbits every Wednesday.

The college was named after the country's first Christian martyr, Bernard Mizeki, who had been killed in a village a few miles from the school. During the Matabele Rebellion of 1896, Mizeki was stabbed. His wife found him still alive but while seeking help she and others reported seeing a great white light and heard a loud noise “like many wings of great birds”. On their return, Bernard's body had disappeared.

Each year, on the anniversary of his death, hundreds of pilgrims converged on Bernard Mizeki's shrine. Many came for two or three days and camped on the site, gathering round their fires to sing late into the evening. It was the task of the school to help organise the event.

The school was surrounded by some 4,000 acres of 'bush', mostly miombo woodland where the main tree species were musasa and munondo. The landscape was dominated by the kopjes, outcrops of granite which stood above the surrounding countryside. We spent hours walking along the tracks and firebreaks that had been cut through the woodland, seeing many species of birds, animals like rock hyraxes, and snakes - boomslang and cobra were the most common.

Marx & the Cats

Marx needed huge amounts of exercise so he very much appreciated the school's 4,000 acres of bush. We both walked with him, but Gill took him many more miles. One of the fruits of a local tree was called a kaffir orange, and we threw these for him to chase, so for every mile we walked Marx ran five.

Marx did have his less endearing side. He would disappear from the house and return later having eaten something disgusting which he had found in the bush. He also rolled in filth, after which he was bathed, which he hated.

The cats were not amused by his arrival, and took to navigating the rooms via the tables, chairs and the tops of the room partitions. Later the three made friends, and when Nhata (above) had her kittens, which she produced one morning on our bed, her family shared Marx's basket.

When Nangatanga damaged his right front leg I had broken the scaphoid bone in my right wrist, so both of us were in plaster. My damage occurred while playing for the school's staff team. We travelled all over the place, playing teams such as the local Public Works Department and the police. All the other players were black, and some, particularly the police side, took some pleasure in being particularly rough with me. The wrist damage occurred when I was tackled by a very large police sergeant.

Visits & Visitors

An early visit was to the Markwe caves with the Ferrars - he was was the school's bursar. The caves were high on one of the distinctive granite outcrops, called kopjes, near Marandellas, which featured....

....a mass of beautiful drawings dating back to the age of the Bushman, before they were displaced by the coming of the Bantu.

We made several visits to my cousin Charlotte and her husband Keith and their three children at Donnington Farm, near Norton. Keith ran a terrific operation there, specialising in....

.... maize and beef cattle - Aberdeen Angus crossed with local Afrikanders. He was the third generation to farm Donnington Farm, which Keith 'shared' with game animals such as kudu. Picture shows me with my cousin Charlotte.

Charlotte's mother Christian, my mother's older sister, who, after the death of her first husband had run a small bookshop, had remarried and lived on a large ranch near Bulawayo. Her husband, Basil Frost, had made his money from running small shops in the African 'reserves'. They were very good to us on our one visit but they strongly disapproved of our educating 'the blacks'.

In late 1969 my mother and father arrived out from England to visit us. They sailed from Southampton on Union Castle's Vaal, arriving in Cape Town and then travelling up by train to Bulawayo and on to Salisbury. They spent Christmas with us, after which we....

....went to the Victoria Falls, flying from Salisbury airport on a day trip. The falls themselves were in full spate and we were suitably soaked.

Having inspected the falls we took a river boat upstream, stopping at an island where my mother managed to disappear: we feared she had met a hippo but I think she went for a wander and didn't notice the time. The flight back was unpleasant as we passed through a series of intense thunderstorms.

The Soapstone Carvings

On the visit with my parents to Victoria Falls we stopped to buy soapstone carvings from some men in a small open-air market. Soapstone is an unusually soft metamorphic rock, a schist formed largely of the mineral talc. It's easy to carve and as easy to scratch, so it's a great material for carving but not so good for keeping.

Having always had a soft spot for chameleons I couldn't resist this one. He's less than 5cm high and is out-of-proportion and crudely carved, though he does show a chameleon's main features, like his two-toed feet.

The other carving is of a man's head. It's a little larger and we bought him because, although he's poorly finished, whoever carved him has captured a man deep in thought, perhaps a wise man and, perhaps, quite old.

Like all our mementos, they've bumped their way around the world with us and survived various purges when we've moved house and felt we had to get rid of at least some of our clutter. We don't have much else still with us from our three happy years in Rhodesia, so the man and the chameleon are rather treasured.

Inyanga Holidays

As so often happens, we have little photographic record of the good people with whom we worked on a day-by-day basis, the Armstrongs, Katedzas, Davises, Chapandamas, Mutambanengwe, Garnets, Coutts, Ferrars, and Hunts. Instead, the photographic record is mainly of those we saw on holiday. The Witts, David with his wife Bibi and their three children (above), had left Bernard Mizeki and moved to a school miles out in the bush, St Mary's at Wedza. We visited them often, and they came in to see us. Conditions at Wedza were a little primitive. The only power came from a generator which David ran, and which switched itself off at ten each evening. So we would be plunged into darkness and 'Sergeant Pepper' would as suddenly die.

David introduced me to fly fishing. Cecil Rhodes had stocked his country estate at Inyanga, in the eastern highlands, with American rainbow trout, and they had thrived in the fast-flowing rivers, so we would drive up to what was now a National Park for a week or so, either camping or renting....

....one of the Park's cottages by the ford over the Pungwe river.

The countryside was like highland Scotland, open hills with rushing burns, and empty of people. As well as the Pungwe, we....

....fished one of its tributaries, the remote and beautiful Matenderere, and because the rivers were grossly overstocked the Park required that we keep all the trout we caught. Eating small trout lightly fried in butter is no hardship.

Later we introduced my cousin Charlotte's husband Keith to the sport. David and Keith had been at opposite ends of the political spectrum while at university together in South Africa but they forgot their past differences in their enjoyment of the sport. In this picture, Keith is cooking fresh trout and washing them down with a dumpy of beer.

Departure

As the time for our departure approached, David and Bibi moved to Umtali, in the east of the country, so we visited them there, on one occasion staying at Brown's Hotel in the town. On our last visit we drove north, back to Inyanga National Park, stopping at the Pungwe Falls. The view may have been spectacular but Gill felt terrible, so we hurried back to Marandellas and took her to the doctor, who announced that she was pregnant. For the next few weeks she was almost incapacitated by morning sickness, to the extent that I had to administer a daily injection. In tutoring me in how to do this, our lovely doctor said, "Imagine her bottom's a dart board...."

Finding a job back in the UK from Rhodesia might have been difficult so, since I was determined to continue teaching, we decided that I should apply for a teaching qualification, accepting a place at the Bristol School of Education, part of Bristol University, to do a Postgraduate Certificate in Education.

We began the miserable process of getting rid of the things which couldn't travel back with us. The two cats went to Bibi and David while we found Marx a home with a neighbouring farmer, who renamed him Mark. Sadly, Marx died of canine distemper soon after moving to the farm. The picture shows us with Marx very shortly before he left us.

We had gone to Rhodesia with all our possessions with the intention of settling permanently in this beautiful country amongst the warm, generous people we had come to love. When we decided to leave it was like a defeat. I remember weeping bitterly as we drove away from the college.

That we left was, in retrospect, a wise decision. After years of agony as the civil war drew out, Rhodesia became Zimbabwe with the prospect of developing into one of the richest and most advanced countries in Africa, a hope which was ruined under Robert Mugabe.

We flew back to England via Malawi, picking up our BOAC VC-10 flight at Blantyre - pictured. Steadily, sadly, we lost touch with all the friends we had made, and the memories of our attempt to settle in Africa faded.

Flame Agate

I bought this flame agate from one of Salisbury, Rhodesia's top jewellers who had an office and workshop upstairs in a very ordinary office building. We came to know him through my aunt Christian who, being comfortably off, was one one of his regular customers. We used to drop in on him and, although he knew he would only sell us a small piece, he was always welcoming.

Agate - this picture is of another agate of little value - is a cryptocrystalline form of silica, silicon dioxide, with the same chemical formula as quartz, opal, chalcedony and jasper, but distinguished by being banded. Agate is relatively common but the Rhodesian 'flame' variety is much sought-after.

The flame agate I bought was large, 120mm long, but cheap because the tip of the flame had broken off while it was being cut. Agate like this forms in a hole in, usually, a lava such as basalt, the layers of silica depositing from the outside inwards, the colour varying on what trace minerals the depositing hot water was carrying. I later dropped and broke it again but you can see where I stuck it back together.

In the early days we bought pieces like this malachite pendant. As time went on we found ourselves with more money and began to appreciate the wealth of gemstones produced in Rhodesia, so we were able to buy more expensive pieces, including a beautiful gold pendant set with garnets which we called 'Cleopatra'.

When we came to leave Rhodesia and were worrying about how we would get our money back to the UK, the jeweller suggested we bought a very valuable stone from him which he would disguise by setting it in a relatively cheap ring. In the event we didn't need to use this form of smuggling but I have often wondered if, had we bought the gem, whether we would ever have parted with it. The stone he showed us was a perfect Sandawana emerald from a mine near Bulawayo.

I'm so sorry I can't remember the jeweller's name.

Mementos of Bernard Mizeki

This tie and blazer badge, and a precious few photographs, are all I have to remember my first time at Bernard Mizeki College in Southern Rhodesia in 1963. The College was named for a local martyr and the downturned spears symbolise the manner in which he met his death.

I always thought it was a very smart logo, one that we could all be proud of, but the colours didn't translate well into a football strip so, as soon as I was given some money, I dressed the highly successful 1st XI, which I had the privilege of coaching, in a white strip, with the result that they became known as the 'white wizards'.