The Lost World of the Kalahari (11 page)

I had already thought a great deal about a film unit and had two major possibilities in mind. Friends of mine had for long been urging me to take on one of my expeditions a young Scandinavian film producer, of whom they expected great things. Then there was another, a continental freelance film producer called Eugene Spode. I knew him personally because a South African friend of mine had introduced us some five years before, asking me to write some lines for a short and impressive war film he had made. Since then I had met Spode quite often in London. He seemed to be an unusual and gifted person: not only painter, musician, and scenario writer but also composer, producer, and camera-man. He hardly spoke a word of English and conversation with him was either in French, of which he had some knowledge, or through my friend as interpreter. My friend, who knew him extremely well, was certain he needed only a fair chance to prove himself a film maker of note. But, more important to me, I liked Spode and my imagination was touched by all I was told of him. It is true that he struck me as a profoundly unhappy person and perhaps I should have been warned by that. I don't believe that a truly creative person can be permanently as unhappy as Spode appeared to be. But my friend had told me of his suffering under Nazis, Communists, Fascists, and other lesser tyrannies of the modern world and society which adequately explained this. I was told also of the intensely heroic role he had played in the resistance movement of his country. More, I was told he loved Africa, had been there several times, and had even made a documentary film of it. His record in the war and his reputed knowledge of Africa decided me. I chose Eugene Spode. I wrote to my friend in Africa for his address and again got an immediate response, ending with the sentence: ‘I have always known you and Eugene would do great things together in Africa.'

My sense of the ‘togetherness of things', already flattered, now became proud of yet another positive response to my planning. I sent Spode a telegram and he came at once to meet me in London. I had never seen him so charming, happy, and confident. He was like a person renewed. I told him all I could about the conditions under which I expected he would have to work. I told him also about Vyan and Hatherall and the qualities that made them so important to me and the expedition, and about the black people I hoped to take with us. I stressed how decisive personal relationships would be on the journey. I told him, with irony deferred, of the lesson commended to me when I was very young by a great hunter and gentleman: ‘Little old cousin, if you want to go into the blue in Africa, always pick your companions only from among men you have known for at least five years. And the chances are, even then, that you will pick the wrong one.' I found myself talking to him as I do to all people who are drawn to my native land. I described Africa as a great, exacting, and often shattering personality. I told him of the extremes of heat, the glare and the glitter that attacked one's senses, the parasites, spiders, ants, snakes, and scorpions, and the incessant sapping of one's physical endurance and drag on one's watchfulness. Later, I remember becoming lyrical and saying something to the effect that Africa was a great and unfulfilled barbaric woman still seeking a worthy lover and testing all newcomers by every caprice, extreme, and stratagem of her unfathomable nature; but that those who were not discouraged from loving her would in the stillness of an unbelievable night find themselves suddenly rewarded with a tenderness, delicacy, and absence of reserve that passed European comprehensions.

Spode smiled sweetly at this and reminded me gently that, after all, he had been to Africa and knew all this. He was certain that, as always, he would love Africa, and was prepared to take over from me the entire responsibility of organizing the film side of the expedition. At this I said I would have to insist on only one thing: I must be responsible for the story and the words of the film, though how it was translated into its film idiom, of course, would be his entire concern.

For some days we talked over all this until we both felt we had nothing more to say. Our agreement was complete. Even questions of money had been clearly and simply decided. I would finance the expedition. If there was a profit we would share it equally. If there was a loss I would bear it alone. More, I hoped to get contracts to write for newspapers all over the world, and I said I would get them to agree to buy his photographs to illustrate my reports. The income from the photographs, I insisted, would be entirely his.

That settled, we went together to the B.B.C. and came to a final agreement. They arranged for Spode to study their own film methods in their studios and consult their most experienced film people. Meanwhile I had to leave for Africa almost at once. I warned him that for three months or more I would be unable to have any but brief, businesslike exchanges with him. Was he able to arrange for the film and the technical requirements? He said he was not only able but moved by ‘the generous opportunity' put in his way. I arranged for him and his cameras and film material to be flown out to Africa. We confidently fixed a place for our next meeting in a hotel in Bulawayo in Southern Rhodesia on 21 August. One of the last things I said to him was: ‘Please bring your violin with you. It's a wonderful thing to have music round the fire in camp, and you'll help us more than I can say if you'll play for the lions at night!'

I
LEFT
for Africa with my wife and my personal Land-Rover in May, which gave me three months to prepare for the expedition. Even that was barely enough. I had a great deal of Bushman research to do in libraries and museums. I had thousands of miles to travel from the Cape to the Zambezi, looking at old Bushman caves, sites, and paintings and refreshing my memory of the heart of the immense country of the vanished little men. Happily unaware of the fate awaiting them I made plans and selected locations to re-enact certain key scenes from the Bushman's story for background material for the film. I saw scores of officials to get the many permits, introductions, and vouchers necessary if the journey were to succeed. I organized supply and refuelling points in and around the vast Kalahari knowing that in order to get fuel to some of the more remote points in time I would have to see it on its way by sea, rail, truck, at least three months before I needed it. I engaged the rest of our personnel. I ordered all the complicated supplies from mosquito nets, snake-bite serum, dehydrated foods, camp beds, field chairs, and work tables to the latest drugs for malaria and dysentery as well as aureo-mycin and morphia in case of serious accident. I had hoped to see something of my own family but I found the time for such contacts rapidly devoured by increasingly urgent demands. On top of all this, there was always the inevitable intrusion of the ‘unpredictable' in Africa to take greedy bites out of such time as was left. Then a shipping strike in England delayed the despatch of the Land-Rovers and cut down the leisurely six weeks we had planned for their assembly.

Also I began to be vaguely troubled about Eugene Spode. I met many people who had known him in Africa and though everybody acknowledged his gifts yet there was an odd reservation in their manner, a suggestion that he might not be tough enough for the journey. Also I found myself in dispute with authorities in territories where he had worked because they seemed reluctant, since he was not British, to grant him a working permit on the same terms as the rest of the company. It all ended in making me apprehensive for a time. But more than anything else I worried increasingly over the mechanics of making the film.

I had been aware from the start that in undertaking the making of a film I was stepping outside my own experience. I had learnt by bitter precept how gravely one can expose oneself to accident and disaster in this process, and especially in Africa. The original idea had been that Spode as well as being photographer to the expedition in his minor capacity, would make a separate documentary film of his own. The more I thought of this the madder it seemed to me. We had taken on too much. I wrote to Spode suggesting that we should make only the television film using it as a pilot scheme for a greater documentary in colour later. I added that even so I considered the work would be too much for one person and begged him to engage a first-class technical assistant. I left the choice of individual to him insisting only that the person should be British as I wanted no more trouble with the authorities. If he failed, I offered to engage an assistant for him in South Africa.

Spode wrote back saying he had already come to the same conclusion and was prepared to bring an assistant at his own expense if necessary, only he would prefer to engage one himself in Britain. The practical good sense and generosity of his response was a complete antidote to any misgiving I had picked up on arrival in Africa. I left it all gratefully behind me and hastened on for I had a growing mass of intractable detail to deal with. Fortunately I have many friends in Africa and there is a strong instinct in all pioneering countries to come to the help of a pioneer. I was helped everywhere generously and the idea which ultimately rescued the expedition from near-disaster came not from me, but from friends. The mines in South Africa, in order to get the labour they need, have built up a vast recruiting organization all over the country. It maintains its own roads and refuelling stations deep in the remotest bush and in the most primitive parts of Africa. A friend in the Chamber of Mines said to me one day: ‘You ought to have letters from us to our people in the blue just in case of need. One never knows . . .' So a letter was written commending me and my needs to the care of their recruiting officers, directors of air services, and pilots. Without it my expedition would almost certainly have failed.

In early August, hard-pressed, but still within our prescribed schedule, my wife and I came to the Victoria Falls on the Zambezi to complete the last link in the chain of ground organization. From there my wife was to return to England because I had no intention of exposing to the hazards of the journey anyone who had not been conditioned to Africa nor born with the immunities of Africa within her. The wisdom of this decision was demonstrated almost as soon as we arrived at the Falls. My wife quickly developed a mysterious and dangerously high fever. The doctor, summoned from fifteen miles away, declared himself unable to diagnose it, so for a fortnight the fever swayed violently up and down. It has sometimes appeared to me that fever is designed, in part, to magnify reality so that the imponderable contribution of the spirit to the
malaise
which produces it, can become visible. There seems to be deep within it a rounding-up process of time, which brings past, present, and future all lucidly together in the focus of a single symbol. As I sat, frightened, by my wife's bed day after day listening to her quick breathing, with the shock of the great Zambezi waters abysmally falling a mile away shaking the windows and rattling the doors without cease, I saw how deeply anxious she was, not about herself, but the journey. Her anxiety expressed itself in the single entreaty, constantly reiterated, ‘Buy your own gun, the best there is, and take it on the expedition with you.'

Since the war I had lost all taste for shooting and on previous expeditions had left it to those of my companions who enjoyed it. Vyan and Ben I knew were counting on shooting the game that would be our main diet, and it would deprive them of one of their great joys if someone else took a hand. My wife knew this. But still now she kept on imploring me to buy a gun of my own – ‘the best in the world'. And when she came out of her fever she held me to my promise.

As far as the expedition was concerned, she came out of it just in time. We were already well in the third week of August when I saw my wife into a plane on her journey back to England, and I left the same day by road for Bulawayo. I drove my Land-Rover through the hundreds of miles of shimmering and singing bush as fast as I could and did so because Spode had arrived in Bulawayo earlier than at first planned in order to study and adapt his arrangements.

Too late for effective advice, I had received two letters about his assistant saying that because of the expense he had decided not to engage a professional assistant but to bring out a South African studying at a university in Britain, ‘a friend of his' with a ‘useful knowledge' of filming, and prepared to pay his own way. Both my wife and I had been alarmed by this because it was not what we had agreed to do at all. Still, filming was Spode's department and I could hardly protest, except to write back saying I hoped he had chosen the right man, begging him not to let expense stand in his way, and repeating my offer to find a local professional.

Now, on my way to my first meeting with Spode in Africa, I called in at the garage which was our agent in Bulawayo. I found Spode's equipment and films neatly stored in the cool of the office. I was somewhat taken aback by the space they occupied because I had no idea of what 80,000 feet of film, night flares, cameras, stands, and screens in bulk would look like. But I was completely staggered by a bill from the Rhodesian customs for close on £1,000 duty! The agent told me he had pleaded in vain that the material was ‘in transit' but the customs had been unyielding. He said, and I agreed, that the matter could only be settled with the Ministry in Salisbury. I had hoped for at least a day with Spode in Bulawayo before returning to Johannesburg to receive the Land-Rovers still plodding their way out from England. Instead, now, I would have to use that day for a journey to Salisbury. I went straight to book a seat in the morning plane to Salisbury, put my own Land-Rover into the garage for a thorough overhaul, and went to meet Spode.

By this time it was evening and dark. I found Spode waiting for me in the hotel. My friend, who had first introduced us, was with him, having decided with characteristic generosity to launch him safely on his way. I was delighted to see them, they both appeared glad to see me, and we talked well into the night. I told Spode frankly about my misgivings regarding his choice of an assistant, who, incidentally, had not yet left England.