A Single Swallow (6 page)

‘They're going, over there!' he exclaimed, and then mused, eyes stuck to his binoculars. ‘Perhaps because last time . . .'

The ringing again. But even so close to us, where the nets had been, the swallows returned. We saw it and felt it. The reeds must have been 3 metres high and they shook and rattled, amplifying the rustling of wings. At a guess – there is a birdwatcher's method of estimating dots (you close your eyes and see how many you can recall in a glimpsed area, then multiply the area until it covers the space you imagine the flock filled) – eight hundred or so came down just to our left.

The reeds snaked away, thick as shadow, into the gloom that surrounded the water. They chattered and swayed and gradually silenced. A little wind and some insects returned. I got a bite and stumblingly lit a fag. Rick smiled, blinking at me from behind his
glasses. He hauled out a cool-box and swept the tops off two beers. I toasted him in acknowledgement of this master-stroke. We had no fear any more.

Rick dropped me off at the Hobbit hole and we shook hands. I had no way of thanking him adequately but we had concocted a cunning plan to save face: roughly £70 pounds was worth 1,000 rand, which would buy a great many bird rings.

I had not dared mention, indeed I had forgotten, that while we were out England were playing Wales at Twickenham. I remembered now, and threw myself upstairs.

We had had a day, the swallows now had a night (and for some of them, the future possibility of that little manacle, human interest) and Wales, it turned out, had had England, superbly, freakishly, in the second half. The Supersports channels were so delighted with the defeat, rather than the victory, that they devoted a lot of the next twelve hours to it.

The timbre of their commentary was ‘How the heck did the English have the nerve to face us in the final of the World Cup three months ago when they can't even beat a bunch of whippersnappers like Wales? Disgusting!'

My phone chirruped and buzzed with the celebrations of family and various friends. One called me, knowing perfectly well I was in Africa, and conversed as if I too was in a London pub and had just seen the game.

‘Talk to you next weekend,' he said, happily, ringing off. We would be playing Scotland then.

 

THE COUCAL IS
a portly bird with a long tail, like a fat cuckoo, and in Namibia the song of the Coucal heralds rain, they say. Two months ago, writing a piece for a travel magazine, I had been in a small plane flying over Namibia when the November rains came. The swallows would have been arriving then. We heard the Coucal in the morning, its bubbling, burbling cry, and in the afternoon we flew towards the storm. In the distance they were white clouds, blackening as we droned nearer. The storm-scope on the instrument panel flashed orange, then red. We pulled our straps tight, and then we were in it. Rain, rain like an elephant's legs, with a rainbow for a trunk. The land flashed, misted and darkened where the huge feet fell. We threaded between columns of water and thunder; the squalls were headless silver giants, 11,000 feet tall, striding westwards with walking-sticks of lightning. We flew down a dark tunnel through an arch of lightning.

In Zulu myth the underworld, hidden in the ground beneath us, and in the mountains, is the realm of cannibals. One story has a swallow carrying a bolt of lightning which breaks open rocks and frees the cannibals' captives. When you have seen the southern rain, the apocalyptic, smoking towers of water and thunder, it makes perfect sense that swallows, arriving at the same time, would be heralded as lightning birds; breakers of rocks.

Now I drove back across the Free State, then across the northern Cape, singing, through furious rainstorms, towards Upington on the
Orange River. When it rains in Africa the sea seems to fall from the sky. Under the downpour at ground level you feel like a mosquito under a pressure hose. The water crashes down and bounces back off the ground in a kind of boiling mist. It seems impossible that anything as small and fragile as a swallow could survive it. They must either navigate around the storms, as we did in the small plane, or they must take shelter. When the rains pass the insects come out and the birds too, hunting and crying out, in a kind of survivors' banquet of celebration.

I was happy alone now; I felt changed. I learned to count in hundreds of kilometres in place of hours; I nearly died when a sudden wind, a dipping corner and the speed of the car had combined for an instant to spin my life like a coin. In Upington I found heat, real heat, for the first time. I had shaved that morning; sweat and sun-cream acidly scoured my face and neck as I drove in dazed circles in the middle of town, road drunk and heat struck, cursing and unable to make a decision.

‘This is nothing,' said a local. ‘This is not hot!'

I watched thousands of swallows going down the orange-brown Orange River at dusk in a loose, vast stream. I tracked them as far as the binoculars could follow them. There were massive mid-river deltas of reeds down there; they could take their pick. I drove into the Kalahari as fast as possible with the windows down, just to see it and escape uncooked. Giving lifts to women and children I learned about seasonal farm work along the Orange: all was well now, harvest time, but in the winter their men just sat at home.

Going north from Upington, where I gave the hire car back, you take the trans-Kalahari highway, which leads across half of Namibia, to Windhoek. A long, long night on an Intercape bus began perfectly, cruising at swallow height over the desert, past Snake Eagles on posts, towards a sunset behind a thunderstorm. At the height swallows fly, the world is a very different series of propositions, distinct from the way we understand it, composed and threaded in ways invisible to man. Villages are complete entities, towns are collections of districts, of kinds of roofs, a graph in which few structures intrude into the
birds' realm. The way the world joins up, the way the land undulates through its features and under our impositions, are all legible to a swallow. Everything that is not of the air moves at a fraction of their speed, except vehicles, but even these are more limited and predicable than we conceive them, stuck to the roads. From the height of a three-storey building weather becomes much more visible and comprehensible than it is from the land. Every foot they gain in height will add miles to their horizon line, and therefore to the range of their forecast. They would have seen the thunderstorm we were now approaching long before I had.

It was a vision of coloured clouds, lightning and solar fire seen through smoking rain. Orange, pink and scarlet seemed to swirl behind the sweeping blue-black claws of falling water. The sky in some parts was a bare, stripped lemon colour, and pale blue. Lightning flashed and the lemon air seemed to turn green. We drove on towards it and everything darkened. The bus was going much too fast for its balding tyres, I had chosen the worst place, ‘the suicide seat' (front seat, top deck) and my nearest neighbour borrowed half my minimal water supply.

We stopped for half an hour at the South African border while a young Angolan talked himself through. Then we broke down for another hour, in no man's land before Namibia, and sat in darkness, the bus rocking in the wind, lit sometimes by lightning, sometimes by the headlights of huge trucks rushing at us. The passengers sat still and almost silent in the darkness and the wind made the soo-op-wa sighing that gives the south-westerlies their name in Namibia. In the brief, brilliant light of the lightning I could see my neighbour's face running with sweat, as was mine. The trucks would pick us up, glinting in their headlights, light us up with the full beam and charge towards us: when they passed it felt like they missed us by inches.

It took our poor Angolan even longer to get us into Namibia, where we broke down again. Two passengers fitted new fan belts. The relief driver pushed the bus even faster; he was young and trying to make up time. In the end, dazed and furious, I took him aside in the small hours, at a service station at Keetmanshoop and said, forcedly smiling,
that I would kill him if he did not slow down, and that if he killed me in a crash my brother would find him and kill him.

‘Better late than dead, right?'

He was sardonic about it, and I did not care if it was only in my imagination that we seemed to go fractionally slower after that.

The next morning a Norwegian called Dan and I drank whisky for breakfast to celebrate our arrival. He was in Africa to teach fencing. We passed the bottle and grinned tipsily at the Windhoek car park in which the bus had dropped us. Dan showed me fencing moves as I made calls on behalf of three puzzled young South African Catholics who had come to train for the priesthood and had hoped someone would meet them.

Lazing around in Windhoek, bemused by its heart (a German shopping mall thronged with Africans), forswearing further buses, organising a car, copying down official graffiti – One Nation! One People! One Namibia! – listening to the crackle of gunfire from an indoor shooting range, scribbling madly in my notebook and talking to everyone I met, I began to feel that if South Africa was desperate, Namibia was exultant.

‘I love it here,' said a pilot, ‘I'm staying.'

‘Yes, it's good here. Safe,' said a taxi driver.

‘My family have been here for generations,' said a hotelier. ‘We love it.'

‘Oh, Namibia is wonderful!' enthused two overlanders. ‘So easy!' A doctor and an engineer, they had sold their house in London seven months before and were on their way to Asia in an old Camel Trophy Land Rover.

These were the voices of black and white, neither rich nor poor, of German, South African, British, Namibian and New Zealand descent. Any one of them, reading a cross-section of Windhoek newspapers, would conclude that this was a country with as many doubts, problems, potential and actual shortages, as many troubles and menaces to its future as any country anywhere. Even the most cursory survey of its history – tribal archipelago, German South West Africa, League of Nations mandate ‘protected' by South Africa, revolution, war,
independence – tells a story as sickening and vicious as any on the great continent. The Herero and Nama peoples revolted against their German colonisers in 1904. Forty thousand had been slaughtered by 1906; an entire nation reduced to 20,000 refugees. And yet the contrast with South Africa was extraordinary. As though here, in spite or because of a gory twenty-three-year mêlée involving America, Russia, Cuba, Portugal, China, Britain, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa and Angola, the southern hemisphere had eventually seen off the northern, and black liberation beaten white spheres of interest, and anti-imperialism not merely survived but apparently overtaken imperialism, and something like harmony reigned.

SOMETHING LKE HARMONY: A PORTRAIT IN OUTDATED STATISTICS
¹

Life expectancy: 52 years

HIV prevalence rate: 19.6%

Adult literacy rate: 85%

Estimated number of orphans: 67,000
²

 

The size and emptiness of Namibia seem to question the very notion of what a country is. Namibia contains some of the oldest rocks on the planet; on my last visit I had climbed an upthrust of metamorphic gneiss over a billion years old. Its brown skin cracked and tinkled like glass. Elsewhere in the Kaokoveld wilderness, the guide said, there were rocks that had weathered eight billion summers. Yet the country, the entity ‘Namibia', has only existed since 1990. It is one of the least densely populated countries on earth, second only to Mongolia, with fewer than three inhabitants per square kilometre. On the Skeleton Coast I saw the bones of whales which had been killed by the whaling ships of the nineteenth century, scattered around the wrecks of ships and aircraft from the Second World War. It was as though the strip of sand between the murderous green surf and the bare desert was a graveyard of time. Our Land Rovers seemed as anachronistic as spacecraft, the span of our lives as brief and fragile as
the mayfly's. Countries are political concoctions, and in political terms Namibia exists most clearly in opposition: it is what it is not. It is not South Africa. It is not a compilation of unrealised dreams and unfulfilled destinies, as South Africa is. Namibia is a
tabula rasa
. It is a vast ancient wilderness, in which people live, the descendants of a constellation of tribes: the San bushmen, hunter-gatherers, were the region's earliest inhabitants, followed by the Ovambo and Kavango, originally from the north; the Nama and the Damara in the south, and the Herero, who arrived from the north-west in the seventeenth century. In the nineteenth century Afrikaner farmers came up from the south, and from the 1880s Germans and other Europeans arrived, their descendants now forming, with the Afrikaners, a white strand in the Namibian nation. I met one of Namibia's older inhabitants, on my last trip. Her name was Kozombango, meaning ‘of the caves', and she was a Himba, a nomadic race who came to northern Namibia three hundred years ago, fleeing tribal wars. She lived as the Himba have always lived, in a hut in the desert like an upturned beehive, kept company by a dog and a few chickens, her skin coated in a mixture of ochre and cow fat to fend off the sun. Outside her hut was an arrangement of stones which marked the site of the Holy Fire through which Kozombango kept in touch with her ancestors. The notion of Namibia, to this most Namibian of ladies, would be a laughable irrelevance.