30 -- Avocado on a Hot Tin Roof (Salisbury: Jan 1977)

Aside from the discomfort I was feeling over our financial condition, it was rainy season and we were advised that many of the bridges and roadways in the Midlands could be washed out.  There was also increased terrorist activity in the area we were planning to visit.  All the more reason to head back to Salisbury and get ourselves organized before I started my training.

Once back to our new home in Alexandra Park, we began to take stock of our finances.   It was time to begin living within our means from my salary of about Rh$300/month that I would start receiving in a few weeks.  We returned the rental car and began to rely on our neighbors for transportation for shopping. The Petherams, our next door neighbors, took us under their wings.  He was a retired civil servant and she spent her days caring for her garden and making pottery in a kiln he had built for her in a building off the garage. 

We had tea with them at least once a day and often shared a meal at their table.  Their houseboy was also a cook. [Please remember that I am reflecting the local customs and language.  Household help were called “boys” or “girls” although they were adults.  This was not meant in a derogatory sense.  Rhodesian culture was not worried about American political correctness.  Of course, there were many derogatory nicknames for Africans, Asians, Europeans and even us “Yanks”.  “Yank” sounds cute to the American ear, but it wasn’t a compliment.]  Their houseboy/cook would prepare full meals with roasted beef or chicken, roasted potatoes, and vegetables from her garden.  A typical Rhodesian meal always ended with some sort of sweet truffle smothered in cream.  Hey, we didn’t know anything about cholesterol in those days!

He spent hours filling me in on the history of Rhodesia.  Now that he was retired, he no longer had commitments to a territorial unit for call-ups, but did serve one or two days a month with the BSAP as part of a neighborhood watch.  They would patrol the streets of Alex Park at night.  There really wasn’t a real threat of terrorist activity in Salisbury, but the patrols kept the petty theft that was common, down to a minimum.

All Rhodesian homes had iron grates on windows and doors called “burglar bars.”  Since windows and doors were often left open day and night to allow for the cool breezes to circulate, the burglar bars prevented entrance to the petty thief.  However, we were advised that we should not leave watches, billfolds or jewelry out on dressers close to the windows as thieves would reach between the bars and grab anything within reach.

Since most homes had servants who lived within the fenced/hedged yards and those servants would have family visitors, there was always the chance of things “going missing.”  Whites distrusted Africans, believing that they would “steal you blind” if you gave them the opportunity.  Some of this was engendered by a sense of guilt from the disparity in the standards of living between white and black.  My neighbor helped me see a different side: 

Africans have a different understanding of ownership.  In the bush, they are accustomed to taking whatever nature provides for them.  If there is a tree with fruit, then they feel free to take the fruit for food.  A dead tree is a source of firewood.  If maize (corn) is growing in a field that they are passing through, they will take what they need for their daily provisions.  This is not stealing to them.  Whatever is there is there for their need.  Ownership is different for them than for those of us who have grown up in a European society. 

So what many of us Rhodesians consider theft is not theft for an African.  If they see a watch sitting out and they need a watch, they may not feel any sense of guilt in taking it. “I need a watch . . . Here is a watch . . . My need has been met.”

There was a lot of petty theft and the burglar bars and household lockboxes were there to protect property and protect Africans from their own natural tendencies.

Another neighbor was an Inspector with the BSAP (British South African Police).  However, his job as a policeman was in an anti-terrorist role. One night at dinner, he invited me to join him “the field” later that week. He said I would get to see the war from a policeman’s perspective before I went into the army.

A couple of mornings later, he picked me up in his camouflaged Land Rover and we first stopped at his office.  He showed me a large room filled with captured weaponry.  There were dozens of Soviet made AK-47 automatic rifles, SKS carbines, RPG rocket launchers, grenades, crates of ammunition and land mines that had been taken off of dead terrorists or left behind when they fled into the bush.

Then, we jumped into the back of a large truck with a dozen police reservists, mostly in their forties.   After about an hour’s drive, we disembarked in a large open field.  I was handed an WWI vintage Enfield 303 rifle with a clip of ammo and we “marched” down a trail to a firing range.  We spent most of the day at that firing range. 

Now, I had no idea that I was going to be doing in the countryside during this “refresher training” with these BSAP reservists.  I wasn’t dressed for it.  I had on street shoes, a pair of long dark blue khaki slacks, a short-sleeved oxford cloth shirt—no hat and no sun lotion to protect my arms, neck and head.  By midday, I was burned to a crisp, my feet were blistered and since I didn’t have any “kit,” I didn’t have a canteen with water or anything to eat for lunch. 

I was miserable!  In that condition, with my glasses slipping off my nose as I dripped with sweat, most of my rounds were going in the dirt and not into the target.  At the end of the day I was well-toasted and concerned that my glorious army career was not going to be so glorious.  

I had sold my Colt 45 automatic to my Inspector friend that morning for Rh$500.  We needed the money and I would not need a personal firearm once I was in the army.  Rhodesian soldiers brought their weapons home with them at night.  The only personal weapon I had left was a hunting knife that had been given to me as a gift by my friends, Ken and Jill Duckman, just before I boarded the plane in Houston.

However, when I got home, nicely toasted and in desperate need of a bath, Pegi told me that she had been hearing automatic weapons fire all day long.  My civil servant neighbor and his wife had already retired for the evening, so I couldn’t discuss my worries with them.  We would just have to be alert—after all, my police friend hadn’t mentioned anything about current threats in Salisbury.

After a long soak in the tub, we turned out the lights and I quickly fell asleep.  Since I had sold my 45, I put the hunting knife on the table next to the bed.  About 2:00 am, we were suddenly awakened by a loud noise.  It sounded like something had hit the tin roof of our cottage. [Tin roofs are incredibly noisy.  Thunderstorms really “thunder” as the rain pounds down on the tin.]

I crawled out of bed in my underwear, grabbed the hunting knife and a torch (flashlight) and crept out into the hallway.  Seeing no intruder, I heard another loud noise on the roof.  It sounded like it was coming from the kitchen.  I decided that I would take the intruder by surprise by exiting the front door and crawling around to the kitchen on the other side of the house.

I turned off the flashlight so as not to give myself away.   Barefoot and in my aforementioned underwear, I stole around the bushes in front of the kitchen and crouched, knife in hand to meet the intruder.   My toes felt something mushy underfoot.  I switched on the torch to discover several avocados split open on the ground where they had fallen from a large avocado-pear tree onto the tin kitchen roof.  I guess a knife was the right implement to deal with attacking avocados!

Next:  31 — The Rhodesian Light Infantry (Salisbury: Jan 1977)

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27 -- Tea with the Judge (Rhodesia: Dec 1976)

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.  In a few months I myself 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:  28 — The Convoy (Rhodesia: Dec 1976)

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