Whatshot
Adventures with Kingsley Holgate - Afrika Outside Edge 16
Adventures with Kingsley Holgate - Afrika Outside Edge 16
Date: 2017-08-04
Ross and I wave from the boat, the crowd shouts with delight as I open up the throttle, the Landy party hoots and flashes their lights. "See you in Bagamoyo, over and out." The Land Rover party will have to backtrack, then take a massive detour inland. Bouncing into the wind, just on the plane, Ross and I hug the coast, thatched villages, tall palm trees and sandy beaches south down the outside edge of Africa. At last light we race the rubberduck up a deserted beach. We roll out our green khaki canvas bedrolls under the stars and the swaying palms up on a grassy bank, father and son lying on their backs chatting. Just the sound of the Kusi trade wind blowing through the palm fronds and the flop of the waves on the beach.
Next day still following the edge the Kusi picks up into an uncomfortable bone-jarring chop, hour after hour, big storm clouds over Pemba Island in the North of Zanzibar, the weather's turning ugly. The warm rain hits us in sheets, the sky goes dark, the visibility is poor but at least the wind drops and the sea smoothes out. We reach Bagamoyo at low tide in the rain and are forced to anchor about a kilometre from the shore. "You better wear strops - sea urchins," says Ross, "I'll stay with the boat." Dripping wet I walk into Helen and Frank's bar at the Traveller's Lodge.
The Land Rover party arrive covered in red mud. Frank gives us one of his Swahili crew to go and relieve Ross and pull in the boat on the high tide. That evening the District Commissioner tells us that the word Bagamoyo means "where you lay down the burden of your heart" which could be the phrase from a out of a slave lament, meaning that although they were to be shipped from the African mainland, their hearts would be left behind in Bagamoyo. Dr. David Livingstone called this trade in human flesh "the open sore of the world." Next day in a humanist turnabout we distribute life saving mosquito nets to mums and babies at the church where Livingstone's sun-dried corpse was carried to before being transported to Zanzibar and Westminster Abbey, where he is buried in the floor of the nave. Old professor Samahani, the local historian attached to the Catholic mission, looks us up and down through his thick spectacles. He's a delightful old man.
"Yes, many expeditions have come this way," he says nodding wisely. "Burton, Speke, Stanley and Livingstone - they all came here in dhows from Zanzibar and then their overland caravans left from here, but yours is the first one to come from around Africa. Karibuni, welcome to Bagamoyo."