Our travel plans would take us from Salisbury, southwest to Bulawayo and northwest to Victoria Falls. After visiting the Wankie game preserve and Vic Falls, we planned to head back east to Fort Victoria and the nearby Zimbabwe Ruins, then to the mountains of Umtali overlooking Mozambique.
We had some acquaintances in Gatooma, just a few hours by car from Salisbury. We had met Eugene and Thora Wiseman at The Jameson Hotel after phoning him our second day in Rhodesia. Eugene was a Thieme “taper” who pastored the Gatooma Baptist Church. Roy Hurst had given us his name as well as the name of several other “tapers” including some Salisbury residents and the Rhodesian Chaplain General. Of course, it had also been Roy who had put us in touch with RSM Harry Springer and Maj Nick Lamprecht.
We had also met a Rhodesian who was staying at the Jameson before starting his regular period of national service. All males served in the military from 18 to 55 whether it was the Army, Air Force or BSAP (British South African Police). If I remember correctly, this man was serving in the BSAP and would be patrolling the bush somewhere to the northeast near the Mozambique border. We were welcomed by Rhodesians such as this. We were Americans who were coming to help them in their struggle to maintain their freedom. He absolutely insisted that we stay with his father, a judge on the Rhodesian High Court, when we visited Bulawayo.
So, after stopping for tea in Gatooma with the Wisemans, we pushed on to Bulawayo for the night. Salisbury to Bulawayo was about a five-hour drive and there really wasn’t much to see from a tourist perspective in between. Of course, we were just fascinated to be “in” Africa and traveling safely down the main highway to the old capital of Rhodesia, Bulawayo. Of course, part of the excitement was that there was supposed to be a war going on! But, as long as we confined our travel to daylight hours, we were advised that we shouldn’t be concerned traveling to Bulawayo.
We saw quite a few more army vehicles than we had seen in Salisbury. Mostly, we saw Land Rovers and transport trucks—all painted in a camouflage pattern of green, brown and pale yellow. Occasionally, we would see a truck with 15-20 soldiers in the back, but it didn’t seem any different than what you would expect to see in the US when you were near a military base.
[We had seen some strange looking vehicles in Salisbury zipping around some of the downtown streets. These were armored vehicles, some with small guns poking through the armor plate. We had chased a couple of these vehicles in our rental car as we tried to get some snapshots, but were waved off by the soldiers. Some months later, I found out that these were vehicles from the Armor Corps out training drivers. I would be driving a camouflaged 2.5 ton Mercedes Unimog all over Salisbury as part of my combat-driver training.]
We arrived at the judge’s home just before sunset. Not surprisingly, he was a very formal gentleman. He seemed stiff and humorless, resembling the caricature that I imagined for someone from Britain.
He greeted us with hot tea as his house servant took our bags to our room. It was not my first experience with hot tea, but it was my first formal tea! Another servant, dressed in white with a pressed white cloth over his arm, served us tea in the “drawing room” where we were seated in stiff-backed chairs. The tea service was fine china and the tiny cups with their petite handles were hard for me to handle in my large American hands. As I struggled with my grip on the handle and balancing the saucer on my thigh, I found out just how hot the tea was! The handle twisted between my fingers and poured into my lap so as to ruin anyone’s honeymoon!
This was not the first time I had poured hot liquid in my own lap. I had done the same with very hot coffee a few years before at Steak and Eggs in Houston. That episode resulted in some blistering. This time, I knew what to do—I grabbed a pitcher of cold water and poured it in my lap. A change of clothes later I was none the worse except for the embarrassment.
Later that evening, we ate a moussaka casserole prepared by his cook from eggplant grown in his own garden. We had never had moussaka before, so thought of it as an African recipe for years until we were exposed to Greek cooking. After dinner, we retired for some sherry and conversation. Of course, we were full of questions about the war, politics, life under sanctions, and most of all, what it was like for him growing up as a white person in Africa.
He had grown up on a farm to the northeast near Melsetter. It was now a hotbed of terrorist insurgent activity. He learned the local African language from servants and his childhood playmates who were mostly the sons of the African workers employed on his father’s farm.
This is probably a good place to introduce you, the reader, to some terminology that will make telling the rest of this story a little easier:
When I write of the local black population, I will use the common term, “African.” Even though most Rhodesian whites were born and raised in Africa, they are commonly called “Europeans.” Even Americans are called “Europeans.” Those of mixed race, were called “Coloureds” and those from the Indian subcontinent are called “Asians.” This terminology continues to this day. Rhodesian Europeans had pejorative names for others as I am sure the Africans had for the Europeans, but there is no disrespect in the terms African, European or Asian.
The judge explained all of this to us and gave us our first good history lesson about Rhodesia and southern Africa. We retired to our room for the evening with plans to leave for Wankie the next morning.
Next: The Convoy.
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