KINGSLEY HOLGATE

Ever wondered how an adventurer is ‘created’? Here, in the first chapter from KINGSLEY HOLGATE’s new book, he tells his origin story

His early years in Zululand that sparked a lifetime of adventure

As a small boy, my dad – the tall and rather serious Reverend Arthur – would hold me on his lap and enthral me with stories of the great Victorian explorers. My mom

– Ivy May – loved adventure and as kids we’d regularly be piled into the old brown 1946 Chevy sedan and head for the bush. She would give me large red suckers if I promised not to be car sick and puke over my brothers, Donald and Mervyn. We would camp and eat stew off battered enamel plates as we made our way on long missionary journeys into the interior, which took us as far north as the old Belgian Congo.

Those wonderful years instilled in me a deep love of travel. After leaving school, I took off to explore the world, supporting myself with oddball jobs that ranged from selling hotdogs outside pubs, washing dishes, and a short-lived stint as a photographer on Paignton Pier in Devon with a flea-infested, giant teddy bear as a prop to make kids smile. I worked on building sites with Irish paddies who shared their sandwiches, as a crewman on a boat to China (got kicked off in Scandinavia), taught English in Persia and built machine-gun bunkers in Israel.

But Africa called me home. Whilst backpacking around the world I’d met Gillian, a Yorkshire lass. She came out to Africa and we were married at Mandawe Cross, a little stone-built mission church situated close to the site of KwaBulawayo (King Shaka Zulu’s great military kraal), on the ridge overlooking the Nkwaleni Valley and close to the town of Eshowe.

Gill fell in love with Africa, and in no time at all she was speaking Zulu. The Zulus called her ‘Mashozi’ (she who wears the shorts) – in those days her little English ‘leggy peggies’ stuck out from old, colonial khaki shorts. We owned and ran a trading post called Phobane, named after Francis Fynn’s early ivory-hunting camp. Here we traded with the Zulus in everything from beads to blankets, maize meal, sugar, rice, three-legged iron pots, enamel plates, tin buckets, colourful cloth, padlocks, giant navy-blue bloomers, huge ama-bodise (large brassieres), guitar strings, babies’ bottles and plastic shoes.

We thoroughly enjoyed our trading store days. Mashozi would help deliver babies in the middle of the night, and our old Series 3 Landy was the local ambulance, hearse, wedding car and delivery van. We were the bank, the post office and the party-line public phone. We didn’t lock our doors at night, and at Christmas Zulu mamas would bring us live fowls as presents.

We milled maize from a tractor beltdriven hammer mill, traded in cattle hides, goat skins and bones, generated power from an old crank-start single-cylinder Lister, pumped our water from the uMhlatuze River and had to keep an eye open for a black mamba that lived down at the pump house. At night we listened to radio serials, read by candlelight and had wonderful parties where people slept over wherever they could find space. We were the only mlungus (white people) that far up the valley and we’d always be invited to the colourful traditional Zulu wedding parties, coming-of-age ceremonies and beer drinks.

Our son Ross was born in the rainy season. It was tough getting in and out in the wet, sliding around the 65 hairpin bends to our remote trading store. I remember Mashozi and I leaving the little fellow with his Zulu nanny to go off to a ‘bash’ in Eshowe one evening, expecting to be back by midnight. But there was a fierce storm and the Mcibilindi River came down in flood. Sunrise found us throwing bottles of milk across to Ma Buthelezi and little Ross on the other side of the raging torrent!

Excerpt from Africa: A Love Affair with a Continent, self-published (order it via anna@kingsleyholgatefoundation.org). R650

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