There is really only one way to see Victoria Falls: drenched and with droplets of water hanging from your eyebrows. So take a bathing suit. And wear it.

Forget the plastic raincoat. Leave the collapsible umbrella. Skip those mackintoshes on rent at your hotel. None of them will do you a bit of good. Leave the binoculars in their case. Keep the camera where it’s dry. Buy your slides at the curio kiosk. And if you must take your wallet and travelers checks, wrap them up in plastic. Take your bathing suit and wear it. You’re going to get wet.

Visitors to the falls walk along a cliff edge directly across from the cataracts. The view dazzles their eyes. The roar pounds their ears as the yellow Zambezi plunges into the narrow gorge. The gorge hurls back an upspray of mist, and it in turn falls back onto the cliff edge as rain. Heavy, tropical rain.

So wear your bathing suit.

Of course, you may feel conspicuous. You may wonder: “What will people think?” But I can answer that. They will think: “Now why didn’t I do that?”

At least that’s what my wife and I thought as four bathing suited hikers came our way. We envied them. We had eschewed the plastic raincoats, you see. We had left the umbrella behind. We had disdained to rent mackintoshes – and we were sopping.

The hikers drew near, stepping lightly in the rain. We ploshed through it – squush, squush, squush – our shoes overflowing at every step. They greeted us with grins. We smiled back, wet-puppedly, teeth-grittingly. They passed and went on down the trail. We watched the water splash off them while we continued to absorb it.

“Now why didn’t we think of that?” Donanne asked. She slapped at her ankles, imagining that she was Katharine Hepburn tugging leeches off her legs in “The African Queen.”

“Yes, why didn’t we?” I took off my polo shirt and wrung it out.

“Why are you doing that?” she asked through the rain.

“I don’t know,” I said. There was no logical explanation. When I put the shirt back on, it hung down to my knees.

“I’m not sure that was a good idea,” she said.

We squushed – plosh, plosh, plosh. “Do you think Dr. Livingstone got wet when he found the falls?” Donanne asked.

“I’m sure of it. He and his Scotch tweeds got drenched!”

“At least we have wash ‘n’ wear things.”

It was important to believe that the intervening years had wrought some progress. Still, we didn’t have wash ‘n’ wear travelers checks or wash ‘n’ wear shoes.

We walked out to an overlook, made what children might call “pretend binoculars” with our hands and peered into the mist. We heard and felt the falls. And now and then wind cleared the spray enough for us to see them.

As we stood there, another object joined us. It looked at first like a filled plastic laundry bag stumbling around on two thin legs. It turned out to be a lumpy little lady completely encased in plastic. She pulled open the hood of her raincoat, stared first at the mist and then at us as if we were apparitions.

“How sensible of you not to bother with rainwear,” she finally said. She joined us in scrutinizing the spray.

“Here I’ve come all this way,” she told us, “and you know how I feel? As if I’m slogging around my shower bath all caught up in the curtain.” She pulled back the hood, wiped rain from her face and made “pretend binoculars” just as we did.

“You know what I’m going to do next time?” she asked. “I’m going to bring a bathing costume. And I’m going to wear it!”

And next time so are we.

Photo: Atop Victoria Falls on the Zambian side of the Zambesi

Donanne and I returned to Victoria Falls in early January, 2002. It’s interesting to see the difference in water levels between early January and mid-March, the time of our 1970 visit, when Victoria Falls truly looks like “the smoke that thunders.”

The Zambian side of the Falls in January, 2002. Note the hikers.

Note difference in water flow between high and low water.

Next post: To Ghana for one of the last great tribal rites of the 20th century.

Walking through the Game Farm, we came upon a three-year-old just about my height. She was an elephant out for a stroll, accompanied – of course! – by a baby-sitter! She proved a friendly sort.

Seeing a new face she showed interest.

She even smelled with her trunk.

She reached out to me; I reached out to her. We made contact, almost but not quite shaking hands. She caressed me with her trunk – almost knocking me over.

Like other little girls she hoped for a treat. The keeper suggested I give her a sweet. I wondered: Not bad for her teeth? I offered her an airline candy. She took it delicately with her trunk and placed it in her mouth. She closed her long-lashed eyes. I could see her mouth muscles at work as she began to suck it. Slowly she swayed back and forth in what appeared to be utter enjoyment. A happy pachyderm.

Next post: Victoria Falls!

In a galaxy much like ours, but in a time far away, there was a country called Rhodesia, a place named by white buccaneer settlers for Cecil Rhodes, a man who stole the country from the Africans who lived there. He gave it to the settlers in perpetuity.

“Perpetuity” was running out when we first visited the place. The coffee plantation house Donanne and I had been living in outside Nairobi had been sold. I asked my editors to let us look over the territory I was to cover – all of sub-Saharan Africa – and they agreed. We roamed the continent for eight months.

When we arrived in Rhodesia, the settler struggle to lengthen “perpetuity” had a certain newsworthiness. After interviewing in Salisbury, as Harare was then called, I had stories to write. So Donanne and I flew to Fort Victoria (now Masvingo). There I would draft my dispatches and we would take a look at the Zimbabwe ruins.

My diary shows that we spent two nights there. I drafted stories. Donanne typed some of them for transmission; I typed others. We had tea and took naps and we paid visits on three different days to the ruins which now give the country its name.

These ruins were like no others we had ever seen. At these ruins no one was around. Nobody bothered to visit. No one! We had the place to ourselves.

On our first visit we walked over from the hotel in the heat and immense silence of the African afternoon. On our left a small granite hill rose steeply. We could see boulders and outcroppings crowning it. And– Was that a wall? A giant wall?

The closer we got to it the more certain we were that it was not just a wall, but a series of walls, some of them twenty feet tall and made who-knew-how-long-ago with amazing craftsmanship – and without mortar. We realized that the hill was not simply terrain but an acropolis. Atop it stood not only the ruins of an ancient fortress, but a kingdom’s capital, too, and what must have been the abode of ritual chiefs. Below it extended a maze of tumbled walls; they led to the Great Enclosure. In the valley stood a walled “temple” large enough to house a football field. A variety of ruins stretched in between.

Climbing the ancient ascent and passing through the cool darkness of the Great Enclosure’s parallel passage filled us with amazement.

On subsequent visits we saw that the builders of Zimbabwe must have quarried the stone from peeling strips of weathered granite. These abound on the outcroppings which surround the ruins. Masons – working perhaps 700 years before, we had learned – must have heated the peeling stone, then abruptly cooled it with water, causing it to crack. Later they trimmed the stone and selected it for thickness. As a result, the layers of the walls were fashioned with a pleasing uniformity and stability.

In its heyday Zimbabwe must have been a splendid place, indeed. Its hilltop site was specially favored: protected from cold southeast winds in winter, but overlooking country that was nearly always green despite extreme dryness only a few miles away. Craftsmen had ornamented important enclosures with soapstone birds and other figures covered in gold leaf.

Gold work, bronze from the East, beads from India and Europe as well as Ming porcelain from China on display at the nearby museum showed that the community was a trade center as well as a chiefly capital. These trade goods tantalized our imaginations. What was Zimbabwe like in its heyday? How many people lived here?

What were their occupations? Some were traders obviously. Caravans must have arrived regularly, not only with foodstuffs to feed the population, but also with merchandise from across the Indian Ocean and the China Sea. Those caravans returned with gold. What else? We could not help wondering at the extent of trade links and entrepôts that must have existed in Africa’s prehistory.

The African prehistory. Was there such a thing? A decade previous to our visit when Americans were just awakening to the fact of Africa, most of them assumed Africa had no prehistory. If it did, they’d never heard of it. But here was evidence that it existed.

When the whites who so admired Rhodes first stumbled onto the ruins, they assumed that people they had so easily cheated could not have built monuments as marvelous as these. So they concocted fanciful explanations about who might have built them: Phoenicians, a lost tribe of Jews, or some other group of whites.

Nowadays the memories of the white Rhodesians are gradually passing. More people are visiting the ruins of Great Zimbabwe. Few of them doubt that they are a monument to the African past.

Next post: Donanne befriends a young four-legged critter carrying a trunk.

Donanne asked, “Do you live here?”

“Yes,” he replied, pushing the door open and stepping back from the threshold, obliging and respectful.

“Is it a good house?” I asked.

“It is a good house,” he answered, his face open and so honest that it told both all and nothing about him. “It is all right.”

The house stood on a five-acre plot of ground at the end of a lane of jacarandas in rolling country planted with coffee. An orange-brown anthill, maybe eight feet tall, stretched beside the front walk. There was room enough for us to live well and for me to have an office, and the rent was controlled.

While we toured the house, the young Kikuyu sat on the porch in the sun. I glanced at him through a window and wondered if his life would become involved with ours. We liked the house and eventually decided to take it.

Interviewing a prospective servant in Africa, I had heard, you looked him squarely in the face, trying to see what was there and not there. You took from him worn references withdrawn from a plastic bag or a wallet or a leather pouch, carefully unfolded them and read the statements of employers whose firms had transferred them elsewhere. You asked yourself questions: Is this man honest? Trustworthy? Of pleasant disposition? Will he steal sugar? Clothes? The checkbook? If I am fair to him, will he be fair to me?

Of course, we knew that the prospective servant was not someone we invite to dinner. Yet if we employed him, we were inviting him to share our lives. It would be at least a matter of weeks before we learned to know him as a servant. As a human being we might never know him at all.

When we took possession of the house on Rosslyn Lone Tree Estates, the young Kikuyu caretaker was still living on the place. We asked his name and heard him answer, “It is Robin.” When we inquired about his references and examined them, we discovered that the name, in fact, was Laban Waithaka Muturi. We looked carefully at him and he bore our scrutiny. We asked if he would like to work for us, mainly caring for the grounds as he had already been doing. He said, “It is all right,” which meant that he would. We decided to try the arrangement for a week to see how it went.

It went well. At the end of the week I typed out a letter of agreement between us. We would pay Laban twice a month at the same rate he was being paid by the absent owner. He would (1) care for the garden, (2) clean inside the house on request, (3) wash the car, (4) act as watchman when we were gone, (5) burn the garbage and (6) do other chores as requested. His hours of work would be 8:00 a.m. to noon, 2:00 p.m. to 4:30, Monday through Friday. He could remain in his quarters and friends could visit him, but “there will be no drinking of alcoholic beverages on the premises.” We agreed to pay for two shirts and one pair of trousers immediately and to finance two other garments when a probationary period was concluded at the end of the first month. They would also provide a bag of charcoal. Grounds for dismissal were enumerated: failure to perform duties, incompatibility, drunkenness, rowdiness.

I doubted that so specific a contract was necessary. But colleagues assured me it was a must. The worst possible nightmare that could befall an expatriate was to have a servant make an official charge that he had been cheated. Such charges were usually levelled just before the expat left on a transfer. Without a contract both parties had signed, the expat got caught in the con game. He paid exorbitantly just to get out of the country.

We did not really share our lives with Laban. He spent much of his time tending the long, broad lawn. There was no mower. Laban cut the grass with a long-bladed implement having a curved and sharpened end. He stood upright, swinging the implement back and forth, slowly cutting the grass.

Sometimes I watched him and wondered how I’d like that job. Laban had some education, at least enough to speak English. Didn’t this mowing crush him? Didn’t he find Lone Tree Estates rather isolated? What did he do for a social life? For friends? And yet, I would remind myself, Laban had a place to live and a job on the money economy. At least theoretically he was no longer tied to the land. Sometimes watching the man, I would wonder: Who is Laban anyway?

Donanne sitting amid the grounds Laban cared for

We really could not answer that question. That fact was borne out when we made our first trip. We went to Arusha where I would pick up stories about the East African Community and add to work I’d been doing about poaching problems in game parks. We would be away a week and would leave Laban in charge of the house and property.

But the day before the trip was to start – a Saturday – I was overcome by reservations. “Do you think this is really a good idea?” I asked Donanne. “Leaving the house this way. We really don’t know the guy.”

“I think he’s honest,” she said. “Anyway, what’s there to take?”

“Clothes. Furniture. What if we come back and the house is empty? We’d have no idea where to find him.”

So I spent Saturday afternoon lining up a guard from Securicor. I felt badly, distrusting Laban who seemed so honest, but I wanted to be sure.

The next morning when we were about to drive away, Laban waved and called: “Hoping to see you again.”

Then the house was sold. My editors generously agreed that I should spend the next six to eight months touring my sub-Saharan territory. Since there would be no housing allowance to pay, the paper agreed to finance Donanne’s travel. We put our household goods and belongings into storage and would live out of suitcases.

But what would happen to Laban? By then we felt affection for him. We knew now that he had a mother and a sister on a shamba near Limuru a bit north of Nairobi. Laban sometimes visited them on weekends and would bring greetings from his mother. Sometimes Donanne sent return greetings and even small presents.

We hoped our departure would not push Laban out of the money economy back into the subsistence one. But that seemed likely. I gave him a letter of recommendation and assured him that we would employ him again once we returned to Nairobi. We got his address – Kiroe Township – and said our goodbyes, feeling a little as if we were abandoning a friend.

We were not settled again into a house in Nairobi until 18 months later. I wrote Laban in Kiroe Township, saying, “If you do not have a job, would you like to come and work for us?” The letter sent our regards to Laban’s mother and sister and closed with words Donanne and I often repeated to one another, the words that Laban had used in sending us off on our first trip: “Hoping to see you again.”

I had doubts that the letter would ever reach its destination. But only a few evenings later who should come pedaling down Riverside Paddocks toward the small bungalow we had rented? Laban Waithaka Muturi. He had ridden in from Limuru, the bicycle his Pegasus, flying high in his triumphant return to the money economy. A grin spread the entire width of his face. “Hello!” he called.

“Habari!” I answered, ushering him into the drive. “Nice to see you again!”

“My mother sends her greetings,” Laban told Donanne when she came out of the house.

“Please give her our greetings,” she replied. “We have a good place for you.”

Laban grinned and exclaimed, “Nzuri sana!”

Laban rejoined the household. He occupied more spacious quarters than those at Rosslyn, received a fifteen percent raise and two new sets of work clothes and was living now in a neighborhood where he could strike up friendships with other workers. He worked for us until we left Nairobi. Alas! I cannot find a picture of him.

Next post: The Rosslyn house gets sold. Donanne and Fred leave Nairobi and hit the road for eight months of travel around his territory. First stop: the Zimbabwe ruins.

All photos here: Rosslyn Lone Tree house and/or yard

Hotel-living at first. We lodged at the Norfolk Hotel, famous for high-living British colonials riding horses through the dining room in long ago yesteryears. We had a small cottage at the back of the property out beyond the garden where superb starlings – my first acquaintance with them – jumped around inside an aviary. There was no heat in the cottage. This was East Africa, mere miles below the Equator and you weren’t supposed to need heat. There were even open vents at the ceiling for the circulation of air. But Nairobi lay in mile-high country and it was chilly. We bought East African Standards and Daily Nations so that I could keep abreast of the news. Once finished with the papers, we stuffed them into the air-vents to stay warm.

We had the devil of a time trying to find a place to live. We talked with estate agents. We rented a car from a place called Odd Jobs on Muindi Mbingu Street and went house- and apartment-hunting. Alas! without success. Finally we heard of a house, rent-controlled and empty, seven miles outside of Nairobi on Rosslyn Lone Tree Estate. A widow living in British Columbia owned the place and wanted desperately to sell it, but had been unable to do so for several years. We took a look. It was “old Nairobi.” Constructed of field stone, it offered an adequate living/dining room, a largish master bedroom, two smaller rooms (each room had its own wash basin) and a kitchen that defined the term “basic.” It was dark. The “cooker” was pre-World War II. The basin stood on two legs anchored to the wall, apparently on the verge of collapse. The young Kikuyu tending the place seemed awfully nice and probably could be hired as a servant. Hmm.

But no. Seven miles was too far out. Moreover, the place had its own well; the water was potable but bad for one’s teeth. Residents had to cart drinking water from Nairobi. But the deal-breaker was the kitchen. It was simply unbelievable..

I went off to Ghana to cover the elections and the restoration of civilian rule.

When I returned from Accra two weeks later, Donanne had not been able to find anything. By then we wanted very much to get out of hotels. We took another look at the house at Rosslyn Lone Tree Estate. On the minus side, the kitchen was not to be tolerated. On the plus side, the property was “real Africa;” at seven miles out it would offer a refuge from the bustle of Nairobi. Moreover, it was or had been a coffee plantation. Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) had lived on a coffee plantation, probably in a house made of field stone, maybe with a 12-foot-high anthill at the end of the drive just like the one this house featured. Who could forget the first line of Blixen’s masterpiece? “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot on the Ngong Hills.” We all pay homage to Karen Blixen in differing ways. We paid ours by taking the Rosslyn house.

Donanne peeking from entry porch

Even so, we continued to look for a more permanent place to live. After all, the Rosslyn house could be sold out from under us at almost any time. These efforts did not bear fruit. Finally we settled into the house, expecting to live there indefinitely.

Recollections of that house:

We were not its only occupants. There was a resident upstairs – whom we never saw – living above the ceilings. We could hear it at night. We would lie awake, staring at the ceiling, wondering if it would emerge, as this neighbor went sliding about its quarters. (It did not step; it slid.) Was it a giant slug? A sloth? A dragon? We never knew.

There were spiders in the house. Not necessarily a bad thing because they keep down insects. But they seemed to be very pregnant spiders and they kept having babies. Sometimes, returning from dinner or a movie in Nairobi, we would find dozens of tiny baby spiders hanging from the hall ceiling. Donanne would get out the vacuum cleaner, suck the babies into its innards and then seal the machine so that none could escape.

The house had been built in the colonial days. Its water came from a well, not from a city waterworks. Without problems water flowed into basins and then emptied into– Well, we hadn’t inquired into what. One evening I was working on a dispatch in my office, the small bedroom overlooking the expansive yard outside. I heard a strange scratching. Stopped work. Looked about. Was it the sloth? The dragon? Nothing. Hmm. Went back to work. More scratching. More looking. Again returned to work. More scratching, a metallic sound. Then scratching of the sort that might be made on porcelain. I glanced at the basin behind the desk. Something was peddling furiously to escape the basin. A mouse. I nearly jumped out of my chair. I may have yelled with surprise. (Men do sometimes yell at the sight of a mouse.) Donanne came running.

We caught the critter and escorted it from the house. Then we carefully examined the basin. It did not empty into under-house plumbing, but simply into the garden outside. The scratchings I’d heard were those of the mouse making its way up the pipe. We put a stopper into the basin.

The neighbors along the estate road never paid any attention to us. (Because we’d like to have known our neighbors, Donanne once took a welcoming plate of cookies to a couple who had just moved in. Never heard further from them.) But Thomas, the neighbors’ cat, did wander over, picking its high-stepping way over the tall grass. We like cats, thought it would be fun to have a friend.

Over a period of days we worked at becoming acquainted. We even allowed Thomas inside the house. He so liked the house that he wanted to mark the territory as his own. We came upon him one day, tail held aloft, one masculine hind leg in the air, anointing our best chair. Wowee! If that was merely marking territory, it very much looked like something else. Yeegads! Was the chair ruined? Would the whole living room smell? Rather too excitedly I rushed at Thomas, shouting and clapping my hands. I chased the poor guy outside. We were too new in our acquisition of wildlife lore to realize an animal would mark its territory. Whatever. Thomas never came back.

Seven miles out was not all that convenient, more of a problem for Donanne (who was stuck at the house) than for me who used the car to chase stories. When we were in town at night, it seemed like a long drive home along a very dark road. One night driving home we had to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting an obstacle in the road. At first we were not sure what it was. Moving closer, we saw that it was a truck, parked smack in the middle of the two-lane road. As we moved closer, we saw that the hood was up. Still closer we made out the haunches of an African bent over, messing with the innards of the vehicle. We crept past and sent a good thought to him and all drivers on that road.

I will let Donanne describe that famous kitchen:

In retrospect it wasn’t that bad. It included the basics. A small fridge, a sink, a cooker, a few shelves, a light bulb – and a pothole in the middle of the cement floor. Filled with crumpled newspapers and covered with a woven mat from the bazaar the pothole in the floor mostly disappeared. The two-legged sink leaned against the wall under a window which opened onto the back of the property and through which a smiling Laban delivered tetra-pak milk cartons. The cooker was up a step in a shadowy alcove. From the heights of its hooded vent came strange sounds that made one wonder what might fall into the cooking pot. Stirring semolina was not without its drama. Something did fall once, black and wiggly, but I don’t know what it was. When it arrived, I left. Best of all, through the open windows of the kitchen and the rest of the house wafted the memorable fragrance of jasmine. We had no real grounds for complaint. After all, now we “had a [place] in Africa” if not “at the foot of the Ngong Hills,” at least on the road to Banana Hill.

After we’d been in the house about five months, we were notified that the widow in British Columbia had succeeded at last in selling the place. We would have to start house-hunting all over again. But wait! Sub-Saharan Africa was an enormous beat to cover. Maybe it made more sense for us to wander the territory for a time, visiting the countries I was supposed to cover and sending The Monitor reports about them. I proposed the idea to my editors. With extraordinary generosity they agreed. The housing allowance that I would no longer receive would help defray the costs of Donanne’s traveling with me. So we said goodbye to the house at Rosslyn Lone Tree Estate and set out on eight months of travel.

Next post: Meet Laban Waithaka Muturi.

Out over the Atlantic Ocean the plane moved through the night sky in the light of a brilliant moon, approaching the coast of Africa. Four years earlier I had flown out of Nairobi after two years in the Congo, unsure if I would ever return to the continent. Now, surprisingly, I was returning as a tyro foreign correspondent, emphasis on the tyro.

The pilot announced our descent into Dakar. Then he added: “We have great news! Americans have just landed on the moon!” Donanne and I joined the spontaneous applause. As Americans we could not help feeling proud.

As we crossed the tarmac, the moon shone above us, glowing white in the shape of a melon slice. What were the men up there doing? How did they feel?

“Ce soir,” I told the driver who taxied us to the airport hotel, “il y a des hommes sur la lune.” I pointed to the moon above us. “Vous en avez entendu?”

“Oui, m’sieur,” he answered, humoring me. “Vous voulez engager mon taxi pour demain? Je suis à votre disposition.” But we declined his offer to hire his taxi the next day.

From the balcony of our hotel room the next morning we watched sun-sparkled Atlantic rollers lapping at the shore of Africa. But even as they sent balmy air and salty pungency toward us, I was feeling frantic pangs of inadequacy. It was my first day as an Africa Correspondent in Africa. I had perhaps had ideas of becoming a latter day Ibn Batutta, that great Muslim traveler, a Maghreb Berber, who had traveled the Mediterranean world and even as far as China in the 14th century while Europe still lay in the long sleep of the Middle Ages. I had learned about him while taking a masters degree in African Studies at UCLA. Now, big foreign correspondent, I did not have the slightest idea of how to go about scratching up some copy.

Casamance Coast, Senegal (internet photo)

I felt trapped in the luxury beach hotel out by the airport. It seemed impossible to chase down any news there. The hotel news kiosk was inexplicably closed. The American Embassy had declared a holiday. The room clerk had not listened to his radio that morning and could tell me nothing. I craned my body far out over the balcony of our room, trying to catch breeze-blown bits of news in French from a radio playing somewhere below us.

I asked myself: What am I doing in this job?

Nothing seemed to work in Africa. That, of course, was its charm! And Donanne, daughter of Foreign Service people, loved that aspect of it. But it was hardly something an Africa Correspondent could report.

We took an ancient bus into Dakar. It stopped often. Out at the airport there had been plenty of seats, but soon it grew crowded. The passengers laughed and yakked; babies cried. Passengers pressed against one another. No one seemed to respect that which Americans hold so dear: private space. Packing the aisle, passengers began to block the flow of air from the windows. The temperature rose in the bus; the heat released the odors of humanity.

The bus took us through Ouakam, a shantytown of wood and metal scrap, a home to peasants seeking urban survival and a better life, people who had fled servitude to a drought-plagued land. It was a place of the odors of decaying garbage, of cook fires and sweating bodies. Ouakam overwhelmed me: with its laughter, its color, with its communality, its vitality, its open-air sociability – and with its crowding, poverty and dirtiness. The smells, the heat, the closeness in the bus: all these afflicted me. Overload shut down my senses. My head swam. What, I wondered, was wrong with me? I had come to report on Africa and I was woozy with culture shock. Meanwhile, more like Ibn Batutta than I was Donanne grinned, drinking in the sensations, loving them.

Leaving the bus at last, we walked around the center of Dakar, a city of tall buildings and noisy hubbub. Despite the veneer of French culture from its colonial past, it pulsated with Africanness. I was glad to witness that again. My head stopped swirling. I did some man-in-the-street interviews, got people’s reactions to a man being on the moon. We made arrangements to move the next day to a hotel in the center of town.

Later, standing again on the balcony of our room, I felt better about Africa, better about me. Below me I watched a woman walking in the hotel garden. She moved in clouds of cloth, within a yellow-patterned fabric wrapped about her waist. Above that a pink bodice floated. And above that a blue bandanna of satiny sheen, elaborately tied, ensconced her head. Slowly, sinuously, the woman drifted along, moving with that matter-of-fact African grace.

Observing her, I realized that she was walking into the copy of the first Africa-datelined story I would write. She would lead my American readers across the long bridge they would have to cross to understand who she was. It was that long span from America’s ready acceptance of modern technology and astronauts on the moon into traditional Africa where the skills set involved living in a city on nothing a day and finding joy in it, where news of the moon landing was being met with skepticism.

“Allah will not allow men to walk on the moon,” people had told me in Dakar. “The moon is sacred. Allah will place in the sky a facsimile of the moon. It will deceive the Americans.”

They were saying: “The moon is hot. It will burn up any men who try to land on it.”

They were saying, “These American astronauts are demons! They deny the existence of God!” They were saying, “Men on the moon? It is a white man’s lie. Haven’t they always lied to us?”

I wrote the piece and filed it. That made me a working correspondent.

And looking at the moon, I couldn’t help thinking: Wouldn’t Ibn Batutta have loved to take that trip!

Next post: Our first house in Kenya. Donanne describes a colonial kitchen.

When I returned from Africa at the end of my two-year tour in the Congo, I felt torn about a future in USIS. By and large the work was satisfying – at least for a young man of 31. I found Foreign Service people vital and interesting – if perhaps unduly focused on personal status and attaining rank. I enjoyed living overseas, immersing myself in other cultures.

But Foreign Service life was obviously much more satisfying when shared with someone you loved. The single officer had to deal with loneliness, no one to talk to and have dinner with, no one to take along to – and seek refuge with – at the interminable cocktail parties. Some officers made do with casual relationships. That was not my style. I needed someone to whom I could commit myself.

The agency assigned me to Karachi, Pakistan. I was to report there at the end of home leave. Tour #1: Belgium. Tour #2: Congo. Tour #3: Pakistan. There seemed no unity of focus in that trio.

Moreover, I felt unready for a new continent. I wanted to understand more of what I had witnessed in Africa. “I felt no racial prejudice before I came to the Congo,” claimed an American Army officer I met in Léopoldville. “But I sure feel it now.” That struck me as stupid thinking. But many people felt that way. It might make sense to do graduate work in African Studies. Maybe I just needed some time to figure out what my next steps should be.

I resigned from USIS, returned to Los Angeles, drifted a bit and then opted to do a masters degree in African Studies at UCLA. I moved into an apartment in Brentwood. I began dating. Two of the girls were daughters of retired Foreign Service officers. I was not consciously looking for a wife. But I suppose I was ready to fall in love.

Carol Waymire, a young woman at the Christian Science church in Westwood, had been in the first Peace Corps class, serving in Ghana. We hit it off, for very few people had had any experience of Africa in those days. As we crossed the street from the church one Sunday morning, Carol introduced me to a girl who was doing a degree in Library Science at UCLA. She happened to be, as I was, a graduate of Principia College and had lived for two years in South Africa. Newly resigned from USIS, I tried to convince her that the agency was full of great opportunities for librarians. So Carol’s stint in Ghana was the African linkage that got me introduced to Donanne.

Donanne finished her degree and got a job as a reference librarian at the new library in Santa Monica. I would drive down there evenings to hang around and see her home; she was living with her parents then. She kept telling me she didn’t want to see me so frequently. Whenever she said that we began to see each other more often. When she worked nights at the library, I sometimes brought her a picnic dinner.

Then I took a trip east (my twin brother was having a play done in Tennessee and I had to see it). I had been pressing Donanne so hard that she expected to get letters from me every day. But I was too busy to write. That omission got her attention. Maybe she should not take me for granted, after all. Hmm. Donanne left her parents’ apartment to room with Carol and another friend. She left the library and began working in the Research Department of Universal Studios.

I was not the kind of guy to ask a girl to marry him more than once. If I would allow myself to ask only once, I had better be like a competent attorney: he knows the answer before he asks the question. I asked the question shortly before Christmas, 1966. The answer was the one I wanted. Donanne soon quit her job. Why work? She was getting married! No long engagements, thanks. We were married in March, 1967.

Donanne and Fred, First Christmas card, December 1967

That spring I finished my degree in African Studies. I’d been writing a novel about Coquilhatville that was less a novel than a means of thinking through that experience. We had money that I’d saved from the hardship pay I’d amassed in the Congo and my brother and I began to do some menial television writing: concocting voiceover narration for Cesar Romero to record for a show called Cesar’s World, produced by Mustapha Akkad.

About this time I sent an essay to The Home Forum page of The Christian Science Monitor, then an international daily newspaper, now a weekly magazine. Called “The Terrace,” it was a young husband’s view of his first year of marriage. The bonding that occurred showed him he’d hardly known his wife when he married her. Silence Buck Bellows – there’s a New England name for you! – accepted this piece from a writer unknown to her. Curious about me, she asked for background information. I replied that I’d been in the Congo and had just finished a degree in African Studies.

Silence wrote back, wondering if I’d be interested in putting my knowledge and experience of Africa at the service of the paper. A second African linkage! I thought: Why not? I can write book reviews. Then DeWitt John, The Monitor’s editor, wrote, asking much the same thing. I replied positively, still doubtful that the paper wanted more than book reviews. I may have noticed, however, that the byline of Jack Shideler, the Africa man, had disappeared from The Monitor’s pages. I hoped I would hear from John before Donanne and I were to go on a super-cheap Hawaiian vacation, occupying an Oahu apartment for $5 a day. But we heard nothing.

Then in the fall I went back to Boston to interview with DeWitt John, Courtney Sheldon, the managing editor, and Hank Hayward, the foreign editor. The Monitor was looking for a new Africa correspondent. Both Jack Shideler and Bob Hallett had died in the field. No staffer on the paper would take the assignment. It was daunting to think that correspondents were dropping as quickly as the first Europeans sent to the Ivory and Gold Coasts. But I had survived the Congo. Donanne was more than willing to return to Africa; she had said to me shortly after we were married, “We aren’t going to live in Los Angeles all our lives, are we?” I was unemployed. Fall into a foreign correspondent’s job on the basis of an uxorious essay? Thank you very much! I’ll take it!

Next post: Donanne and Fred arrive in Senegal where he will write his first dispatch as The Christian Science Monitor’s on-the-ground Africa correspondent.

Wildebeest in the Serengeti migration (initernet photo)

I drove south out of Nairobi in a rented VW bug. I had seen the flamingoes at Lake Nakuru and was determined to visit other parks I’d read about in Dr. Bernhard Grzimek’s The Serengeti Shall Not Die. I crossed the border from Kenya into Tanzania. I drove through Arusha and beside Lake Manyara where lions lay in the trees, their legs straddling branches as they looked down at me and yawned.

I had no trouble getting lodging at the edge of Ngorongoro Crater. There were only a couple of hotels then and very few visitors. To drive into the crater, however, required hiring a Land Rover and a guide. That cost $30, more than I could afford. But it was clearly folly to stand at the edge of the Crater, yet not go into it. I screwed up my courage and began asking strangers if I could hitch a ride with them into the crater. A couple from Florida were kind enough to take me along.

The immense crater was a perfect zoo. The animals were free in their natural habitat while zoo visitors were caged inside movable viewing stands, the Land Rovers. Thanks to the Hollingsworths’ generosity, I had a splendid day. Moreover, I learned from them that the migration had just begun in the Serengeti. I was uncertain what this meant. But clearly it was important. When the Hollingworths had heard the news – the Serengeti’s chief warden had telephoned it to them in Florida – they had dropped everything and flown immediately to see it. What an extravagant journey in May, 1965!

Coming down off the Ngorongoro Highlands about noon the next day, I drove across the flat, rain-greened plain. Gazelles and ostriches and hidden lions watched me pass. Time after time herds of zebra blocked the dusty track. I had to stop for them.

Off across the plain I watched thousands of animals on the move. Zebras shambled along in striped glory. Wildebeests marched with bobbing heads. They moved in hundreds of single-file lines, the calves trotting that gawky, humorous wildebeest trot to keep up with their mothers.

Later, when the African sky had filled with sunset-reddened clouds, I had to stop again. The animals were paralleling a watercourse and the road crossed their track. They surged over the road in a lowing, ever-onwardly-flowing swarm.

They moved before and behind the car, close enough for me to tug their stringy manes or swat their striped haunches, to smell their wildness and feel the cool currents of air set up by their movement. I tasted their dust and sensed myself adrift on the flood of their sound: the grunting, the swishing, the roar of thousands of hooves crossing a piece of ground.

Inching forward, I got the car through the moving animals. I drove to nearby Seronera Camp at the heart of the Serengeti. I got lodging in a rondavel with earthen walls and a thatched roof, picked up a guide and drove out. The plains were alive with animals, hundreds of thousands of them, all moving northward toward the fresh grass in what is now known as the Mara. I parked the car and sat on top of it, binoculars to my eyes, the waning sun hot on my skin, dust in my nostrils, watching the endless parade.

The animals passed close to Seronera Camp all that night. I watched them the next morning and the next afternoon and heard them again all the following night. They were still passing when I left the next morning to drive back to Ngorongoro. This was the end of my Congo tour for USIS. I went from there to Cannes, France, via Nairobi and took an ocean liner back to the United States.

What was Donanne doing in the late spring of 1965? She was living in a dorm at UCLA, finishing her year-long graduate degree in Library Science. Her father Don Ralston was about to retire from the Foreign Service and follow his daughter’s lead by becoming a librarian (he worked for many years as the deputy senior librarian at UCSB). The Ralstons would shortly join Donanne in West Los Angeles and they would all live together for about a year during which Donanne began working at the Santa Monica public library.

Next post: Fred has returned from Africa. Donanne has finished her library degree at UCLA. Finally… They meet.

Jean Rusenyagugu spoke to me in smiles, in chuckles and laughter. That was because French was our common language, and neither of us spoke it well.

Jean was janitor-factotum at the USIS Cultural Center in Bukavu in the eastern Congo when I was the inexperienced, twentysomething bossman there. Soon after I arrived, he studied me with his broom. “Vous etes marié, Monsieur?” he asked at last.

No, I said, I was not married.

Jean scrutinized me, stunned. How could I not be married? Was I not an adult? Was not marriage a symbol of adulthood? How could foreigners be so strange?

Many months later, about to leave Bukavu, I bought a souvenir: a large cowhide drum, three feet tall and almost as wide. When I lugged it into the office, Jean smiled with delight. “A wedding drum!” he exulted. “You are going home to get married!” I’m sure he thought that my parents had finally found me a bride.

When I asked to take a photo of Jean, he cast his dustcloth aside and ran off, reappearing with a book in his hand. He posed for me in the sunny parking lot: stiff of stance, but grinning, nonetheless. He held the book before him, tenderly and proudly, and I photographed Jean Rusenyagugu, Bukavu janitor, fluent communicator with smiles, proud holder of a book he could not read.

Lake Kivu

Déogratias Mpunyu, librarian-driver, was a long sliver of a man, easily 6′ 8″. He was a Tutsi, a refugee from Rwanda, the neighboring country just across Lake Kivu where Tutsi rule, stretching back into unremembered time, had recently been overthrown.

Literate, educated, adept in French and even attempting English, “Déo” seemed an ideal librarian. But the passion of his life was to drive. He longed to fold his long frame behind the steering wheel of the Center’s truck and drive it around town, honking and waving and shouting at friends. Young ladies with bundles on their heads would stop and turn their bodies to watch him pass.

Reports came that Déo brought little more than jubilation to his driving. He had no license – not too surprising in the strife-torn, newly independent Congo – and he was vague about how he had learned to drive. I grew concerned that claims of damages might be brought against the Center – for why were Americans in the Congo if they were not rich enough to pay damages? It became clear that I myself must be the licensing authority.

I proposed a test drive. Déo seemed delighted, laughing gaily. Anything to get behind the wheel! But I detected some uncertainty, too. I remember, as we started out, hoping very much that Déo really knew how to drive.

Perhaps his legs and arms were too long. Perhaps his head sat so high on his long Tutsi neck that his eyes had no proper field of vision. Perhaps I unnerved him. Whatever the cause, at the end of the first block, Déo drove into a traffic sign. It was wood; it splintered in half. Déo graciously accepted the consequences of his mishap and contented himself in the library.

The film truck Déo could not drive outside US Consulate, Bukavu

Paul Wemboyendja, projectionist, film truck operater, was tallish, stocky, charming. A suave wheeler-dealer, a great contact man. He knew everyone in town.

My first morning in Bukavu Paul entered my office with distressing news. His wife’s mother had just passed on. Could he have time off to attend her funeral in Usumbura, the nearby capital of Burundi?

Of course I was being tested. But I did not even know yet what I was supposed to accomplish as Center director. So why play martinet? I let Paul go. If he liked to travel, that was fine with me. If I had any goal in Bukavu, it was to see some country.

I never figured out exactly how many wives Paul had – serially or simultaneously – or how many mothers-in-law he could claim. But Paul and I did see country.

We traveled into northern Kivu Province, quickly on a weekend. I went to see wildlife. Paul managed to find a very comely companion at a local bar. When I had to disturb him for the key to the truck, he walked through the lobby of the Hotel des Grands Lacs in pink silk pajamas to demonstrate for all to see how I was disturbing his amours.

On another trip, this one to show USIS films, we returned to Bukavu via Kagera National Park in Rwanda. I waxed poetic about the sleekness and grace of gazelles. He said: “Beaucoup steaks, Monsieur.”

I thought: “How esthetically deprived this African.” He probably thought: “How foolish this American.”

Kivu farmstead

Paul Wemboyendja. Jean Rusenyagugu. Déogratias Mpunyu. I think of them now and then. Sometimes I smile wondering what they thought of me. Did “Frederic Hunter” seem a strange music in their ears? (How can it be otherwise?) Did I seem over-diligent, time-worshipping, gauche and a fool? (What white bossman in black Africa does not seem so?)

Perhaps there are nights when talk turns to the strangeness of white people: how ill-odored they are, how vulnerable to the sun. And perhaps one of these men – Paul or Jean or Déo – will say: “I knew an American once, worked for him.” And he will laugh. “Too much book!” he will say, thinking of the library at USIS Bukavu. “Hundreds of books and no woman!”

A confession: I vividly remember the photo I took of Jean Rusenyagugu, proudly holding the book outside the Bukavu cultural center. In my mind’s eye right now I can see the image of Paul Wemboyendja, with his pillbox haircut, sitting atop the film truck in Parc Albert. I have looked high and low for the pictures. Alas! There have been many moves in the intervening years. The photos seem to have disappeared.

Paul Polakoff

If I think occasionally of Paul, Jean and Déo, I actually see Paul Polakoff now and then. Paul was the American officer at USIS Bukavu who made truly important contributions to the work there. He had excellent French and good contacts with local Europeans through the Table Ronde, a men’s lunch group of which he was a member. Paul contributed continuity, both preceding me in my second tour in Bukavu and outlasting me. Paul also helped me get set up in an apartment overlooking Lake Kivu once it became clear that my stay would last until my Congo tour ended.

While it’s often difficult to judge if information work is having any positive effect, Paul took items from the nightly Voice of America broadcasts and used them to produce a daily news bulletin for the elite of the town, a real contribution.

After I left, Paul pulled off one of the great Congo coups! He enticed his college sweetheart to come out to the Kivu with her two children and marry him. Paul and Claire, whom I knew in Los Angeles, made a great foreign service couple. Paul had a terrific career for the agency, most of it involving Africa.

What was Donanne doing in the late spring of 1965? She was living in a dorm at UCLA, finishing her year-long graduate degree in Library Science. Her father Don Ralston was about to retire from the Foreign Service and follow his daughter’s lead by becoming a librarian (he worked for many years as the deputy senior librarian at UCSB). The Ralstons would shortly join Donanne in West Los Angeles and they would all live together for about a year during which Donanne began working at the Santa Monica public library. She reappears in these posts in two more weeks!

Next post: As he finishes his Congo tour, Fred lucks into supreme animal viewing during the annual migration on the Serengeti plains.

Shortly after my second evacuation from Coquilhatville, I flew to Europe for some long-planned vacation: Oktoberfest in Munich with American friends, a reunion with my parents in Greece. (As a parent now, I can imagine how relieved they must have been to see me.)

I returned to Léopoldville in late October, expecting that I might return to Coquilhatville. Mercenaries had prevented rebels from entering the town. They had occupied Ingende at the ferry crossing of the Ruki and had pushed far enough along the road to Boende to prevent further rebel advances. But the rebels were entrenched in Boende. The State Department could not be convinced that sending an officer back to Coq made sense.

I made a trip of several days to Coq. During it I arranged for Jules André to manage the Center, paying employees and keeping an eye on the place. Jules was surviving partly on these kinds of odd jobs and this one was welcome in that it paid in hard currency. He also agreed to sell my car.

I tried to rekindle staff morale and re-establish a regular schedule of film showings in the Coq cités. I also fired N’Djoku Pierre. A USIS projector turned up missing after the evacuation. Eventually the Catholic priest who bought it returned it to the Center; we reimbursed him. N’Djoku had stolen before. I “let him go” on the basis that we were reducing staff.

A letter about the trip reports: “Stayed at the house in Coq, but took my meals with Thérèse and Jules. How incredibly generous and hospitable they are! I’ve never seen them happier together. I think the marriage may have found a new sense of direction in their having decided at last to leave Coq, in their having at last again something to aim at together after these hard times of drifting along wondering if they could take it. They laugh together a great deal. Jules seemed relaxed, even touched her affectionately now and then. They called each other ‘chou’ a great deal; I’d never heard that before. Nice to be in this atmosphere.”

Other Belgians were also leaving Coq. Delinte and Boudart were pulling out. Maitre Herman had already begun looking for legal opportunities in Léo.

In late November I was reassigned as the temporary Branch Public Affairs Officer in Bukavu, where I had first served in the Congo. The Center there was running well. Another USIS officer Paul Polakoff was publishing a daily bulletin, taken from Voice of America newscasts, a real service to the community. Bukavu had seen its ups and downs during the rebellion, but was now safe. The American officers in the town – State, USIS, CIA and military – took their meals at the home of Dick Matheron, the consul, and lived nearby. The house became a club of sorts with a convivial cocktail hour before dinner, quite a lovely BOQ, in fact.

American Consulate, Bukavu, Congo, 1964

US government regarded the town as a war zone; American women could not be sent there. The house stood on a bluff overlooking Lake Kivu and off to the left, across the blue water, lay the peninsula on which the town itself stood. Across the driveway stood the CIA house where lived whatever men, moving in and out, worked for The Agency.

Outside of town some weeks earlier, trying to get info about rebel movements, vice-consul Lew MacFarlane had gone missing. Everyone assumed he had fallen into rebel hands and might be suffering unspeakable atrocities. Then one happy day he reappeared, hungry but unharmed. Roscoe, a young CIA operative, was certain that The Agency could do a better job of running the Congo than could the Congolese. He and I used to argue the point, I contending that, in fact, even The Agency hardly understood the tribal interweavings at play and could not possibly run the place.

The occupants of both houses used to gather for cocktails and dinner. The meal, prepared by Matheron’s cook, was often served around 8:30. A very cushy deal. Italian love songs would waft from the phonograph, exciting yearnings in men missing women. Occasionally guests of the consul would join us for dinner. Often with us was Père Angelo, a young Italian priest of amazing courage and of such virility that one could not help suspecting that the Italian adherence to priestly celibacy was of a different nature than most American adherence. A most unpriestly fellow, Angelo went up in American T-28 fighter planes, piloted by anti-Castro Cubans, and helped shoot up rebel strongholds to the south. He also waterskied.

If American women were not allowed in Bukavu, Belgian women were available to take up the slack. But even these were in short supply. Bukavu was a place where husbands seemed inured to their wives’ dallyings. Cuckolds and cuckolders socialized together. The Belgian woman, probably 35, who acted as the USIS secretary, was married to and living with one countryman, blind and disabled, and also the lover of another; he lived in their apartment.

One afternoon the US Army colonel and I paid a call on Mme Gaillard. She obligingly offered the colonel her opinions as to which women had adventures and which would satisfy the purposes he had in mind. (In fact, he did find une amie.) Mme Gaillard came to dinner at the consul’s house a few nights later, accompanied by her husband. As often happened in BOQs of that era Playboy magazines were strewn about the living room. Madame gave us a European woman’s opinions of American nudes. Of the Playboy offerings she opined, “Elles n’ont pas de belles poitrines” (“They do not have lovely breasts”).

A bushbaby (internet photo)

The favorite at the consul’s house during the casual times before and after dinners was The Bush Baby. As I recall, it had no other name. A bush baby is a small, nocturnal primate with extraordinary jumping abilities. While this guy was small enough to hold in your palm, he was too jumpy to be petted. While you were sipping your drink, he could easily land on your shoulder, arriving from who knew where. Of course, he was an object of delight. Not only for his jumping and flying abilities, but also for his love of the bottle. He would hop to the drink cart and lick the top of any whiskey bottle inadvisably left open. Once this inclination was detected, bottles were often left open to entice him. When the night wore on, he would stumble over to the bottom of the floor-length curtains and fall asleep.

Next post: The crew at USIS Bukavu.