In December 1964 we drove to Zomba, in our trusty Peugeot 404 station wagon. My father had managed to find a job with UNDP as Deputy Resident Representative in Malawi.
This is my first letter written from Zomba. We had an excellent trip lasting five days, the last two in Malawi where we found the roads and resthouses excellent and everything extremely well-run, tidy and orderly. Scenery is particularly beautiful and we’ve been through the country almost from top to tail. Zomba itself is by far the most attractive place we’ve ever lived in. It is set on the side of a plateau in masses of trees with views over sloping land to the far distant mountains on the horizon on all sides. We face the well-known Mlanje Mountain which is more or less on the Portuguese border to the Southeast and which we hope to climb in due course.
At the moment we’re living in the government hostel which is more like a hotel and better than most Tanganyikan ones up country, and we have two rooms and service, which is all very comfortable. The house we were originally allocated I turned down as being too small. It is only two bedrooms and was in all extremely tiny and box-like… we have been given a larger three-bedroom one which is unfortunately not yet ready as it is still occupied and also has to be done up. Also our boxes have not yet arrived from Dar.
Zomba is so unlike Dar es Salaam and it’s hard to think of it as an independent country, self-governing, as there are masses of British civil servants still and Dr B is very pro-British. He’s a bachelor recluse, teetotaller as you probably know and does not even speak the local language very well, as he had been out of the country for about 40 years when he came back to be prime minister. Despite the unrest among his ministers and his full firm hand, it seems that the people in the country are behind him.
She never really took to Zomba, mainly because she was so unhappy there, and kept on flitting off to Dar, Nairobi to see her other old friends, and Zanzibar, ostensibly on chest and carpet buying trips, but more to be with Neville. It’s fair to say she was very home-sick for Tanzania. ‘Despite its view, it’s a one eyed place full of dull people with commonplace minds and views and I’m fed up with it.’
Expeditions
Their first Christmas was a bit of a disappointment – they drove to Lake Malawi and stayed in a ‘rather ‘mediocre hotel, the food not up too much but the lake very pretty.’ On the way down they suffered a broken windscreen which made the journey rather windy, wet and cold (it rained on and off!). One of their passengers was a Nigerian ‘crown counsel’ who sang ‘stirring songs to cheer us up, starting with Rule Britannia with all the words! Which if you live in modern Africa is a most amusing choice!’ I remember this trip vividly with the broken windscreen!
Despite the ‘rather boring life here’ they made the best of it and went on various expeditions. I remember this one: ‘We drove to the famous Mlanje Mountain of Laurence Van der Post fame, a really beautiful place. We crossed the border with great difficulty into Mozambique for lunch, Tom and Hubert Renson a Belgian FAO expert had their wrong national passports [Dad’s Czech birthplace and Tanganyika stamps causing much consternation in case he was a communist spy]…and we had a pleasant lunch in a friendly Portuguese restaurant with nice cold wine and a bunch of very plain Portuguese as companions.’
Zomba Plateau
On New Year’s Day the three of us climbed a local peak and I sat on a rock on the summit while the other two went along the ridge. It then rained and we all got soaked. The road up to the plateau is so narrow and tricky that you go up on the hour and down on the half hour with a £50 fine if you transgress though I don’t know who’s supposed to take it off you.
Lake Chilwa photo trip
In March 1975 when Dad was on Safari, she ‘went down to a nearby lake with one of our fish experts to take photographs. It is very shallow and there were large dug-out canoes being pulled in with their catches which were piled up on the shore and sold to waiting merchants, who bore them off on lorries and bicycles to nearby markets. It was a lively scene and people didn’t mind being photographed at all.’
Rock art/painting
If I stay here, I’m going to cultivate an interest in rock paintings and prehistoric sites, of which there are many discovered and undiscovered around and about. Today I’m going down to the archives to look at books and maps.
In May 1965 there was a surprise visit from Neville who came down for a long weekend. They made several expeditions looking for rock paintings and did a bit of work together on book reviews.
I have been leading expeditions to look for rock paintings, first to an island on a nearby lake. We went over in a motorboat and then walked and climbed for about a couple of hours. It nearly killed me and at one stage only the sight of her little bottom way above me and her shout of ‘Come on mummy if I can do it you can’ spurred me on.
We reached the cave and then had to have a way cut through the horrible thorns to enter only to find it full of guano, no paintings, but there was a splendid view and I felt very proud of having achieved my goal. Three of the party cried off almost at the foot of the hill.
Last Sunday some of us drove down to Mlanje and went to visit the chief of a village who was said to know about the Batwa – these are pygmy-type people who are said to have lived in central Africa before being pushed out by other tribes. We have seen them in the Congo and Ruanda Urundi and they are supposed to live in the mountains around here.
They did not see them, despite meeting the local sorcerer who was ‘unkeen’ – because the Batwa were believed to be invisible unless you took special medicine, which they were refused. Undeterred, they returned to Mlanje a few weeks later.
Climbing Mt Mlanje
On Saturday a party of eight of us climbed part of Mlanje Mountain. If you have a map you can see that we went up through the Fort Lister gap and up a path on the south east side of the mountain. It was so steep in parts that the forestry department had laid huge stones as steps, some of them a foot high which made the going easier, but it was terribly arduous and at times I felt I should never be able to get up. My back ached so, and I was so out of breath that I had to take a veganin, but we managed to get to the edge of the plateau in about 2 1/2 hours and then onto the hut in about another hour or so.
Our party consisted of we three, two young geologists, bachelors, one fish expert {Renson] and a married couple from the geological survey. As we had no cook we had to do it ourselves but everything was very well catered for by one of the young men and it wasn’t very hard work. Luckily managed to persuade one of the porters to stay to do the washing up and other chores for the men didn’t help much.
Vicky was very good though she didn’t like the ascent very much but made it. We had a tremendous sing-song while we cooked and ate and managed to knock back a bottle each of whisky and brandy between six of us in 2 or 3 hours – not bad going and no one had any effects.
In September when my mother was in Kilwa and Dar trying (unsuccessfully) to get to Zanzibar, they heard they were moving to Ankara, Turkey. They had been in Malawi barely a year. She had two weeks to pack up. They decided they would drive from Zomba to Ankara, taking a boat from Dar to Port Said, another boat to Beirut, before setting off again in the car to their new home.
Travels with my mother 