2004 - Mimi and Toutou Go Forth (21 page)

R
ain fell heavily on the camp at Albertville in the first weeks of January 1916, filling the gullies and forming open pools in the bush. Malaria and other diseases were a serious threat and several of the ratings came down with fever. Dr Hanschell asked Spicer to declare the Belgian camp and the native villages (to which there were many nocturnal visits) off limits. Spicer agreed. Only Magee, says Shankland, ‘who had no duties except as photographer, was allowed to come and go as he pleased, and he was the only one to acquire a working knowledge of the local native dialect—and dysentery’. The doctor also denounced the practice of pouring ketles of boiling water on the columns of black-and-white striped sarcophagid flies that marched in and out of the latrines, explaining that the peculiar diet of this army of myrmidons kept the toilets clean.

Snakes were also a threat in the wet, lying in the open ground of the camp and sunning themselves whenever the weather broke. Frightened off they would weave and push themselves away, only to return a few minutes later. The doctor took care to wear his long brown leather boots while walking about, and he began rewarding those Africans who brought him snake corpses. They brought him scorpions, too, and one evening he livened up dinner by removing a large live scorpion from his shirt pocket and placing it on a plate. It caused a great disturbance, until he allowed it to lash his hand with its tail, showing how he had rendered it harmless by amputating the sting and venom pouch.

It was the season of whirlwinds, of thunder and lightning, of storms that threw the lake into a fury. One day a series of sky-tall funnels were seen wheeling across the black surface of the water. They rose hundreds of feet high in crooked stems, then spread out at the top like mushrooms—where, mounting in eddies, they joined the thunderclouds in the sky.

Spicer announced that these dark vortices were waterspouts. ‘Very dangerous things! Only local atmospheric pressures prevent them from moving. At sea one learns to give them a wide berth. I’ve seen much bigger ones off the China coast…’

Dr Hanschell ventured to suggest that waterspouts occurred only in dry weather, but Spicer was warming to his theme. ‘I remember once, as captain of a gunboat on a passage from Hong Kong to the Yangste River—I’m expert, you know, at speaking Chinese—I warned a large junk to alter course to avoid one of these waterspouts…’

The officers didn’t pay much attention. They were too busy crowding the windows of the mess-hut to watch the whirling tapers as they swelled and spiralled in a jagged, thickening belt nearly 30 miles long. There was something theatrical about them; they looked like giant grey turnips or spinning tops moving across a painted backdrop.

‘The Chinese believe that the air is full of devils,’ continued Spicer, ‘and that particularly nasty ones run up and down the waterspouts; and so at the head of the mainmast they fix a long painted bamboo. If a devil sits on it, it breaks and he falls into the sea. Ingenious idea, but that junk would have done better to listen to my advice. The waterspout broke over it…’

As Spicer explained how the junk had been shattered—leaving nothing but ‘a little painted bamboo stick bobbing up and down in the sea’—he was utterly upstaged by the grey swirls smoking up out of the lake. It was the turn of the white men to stand spellbound, mouths agape, before such awesome elemental power. Caught up in thermals, the spouts continued to rise dramatically, one after another in a staggered line. They careered over the indigo water to where the cliffs round the lake met the weather clouds 800 feet higher. At the lip of the cliff they spilled over, before being caught up in another eddy and rising again, joining the sky-clouds as they marched over Africa’s vast swathes of savannah.

Not all the gyrating spouts made peace with the sky in this fashion. Others seemed determined to escape across the water, disturbing the local atmospherics and whipping up the weather. One swept towards a beach where wet-skinned fishermen were hauling in a net, keen to get it out of the storm. As the smoking eddy enveloped them, a sing-song humming noise could be heard up in the mess.

When the tempest had abated, an exploration of the beach showed that the clouds were not waterspouts at all, but a seething mass of tiny flies, known throughout Central Africa as
kungu
. Livingstone made the same mistake, as recorded in his Zambezi journal:

Clouds, as of smoke rising from miles of burning grass, were observed bending in a southeasterly direction, and we thought that the unseen land on the opposite side was closing in, and that we were near the end of the lake. But next morning we sailed through one of the clouds on our own side, and discovered that it was neither smoke nor haze, but countless millions of minute midges called ‘kungo’ (a cloud or fog). They filled the air to an immense height, and swarmed upon the water, too light to sink in it. Eyes and mouth had to be kept closed while passing through this living cloud: they struck upon the face like fine drifting snow. Thousands lay in the boat when she emerged…

‘I know of nothing in Africa that more wholly astounds the mind than the
kungu
clouds of the Great Lakes,’ writes Archie Carr in his wise and engaging
Ulendo: Travels of a Naturalist In and Out of Africa
(first published in 1964). They don’t bite, but
kungu
come from the same family as mosquitoes and midges and, like them, spend their larval stage in water. On lakes like Tanganyika, the total mass of
kungu
larvae can outweigh all the lake’s other inhabitants. Carr thought they could become an important food source, calculating that each square yard of lake bottom would produce around a quarter of a pound of larvae: ‘an imposing yield of meat’. He adds that it is ‘more than you can expect for beef from an acre of cultivated pasture’.

Dropped from the cloud of the previous hatching,
kungu
eggs lurk in the suffocating mud at the bottom of the lake—nearly a mile deep—then start to rise at an average speed of 75 feet an hour, timing their various larval stages on the way by the amount of light that comes down on them. But nobody knows why, once they have released their eggs, these vast swarms head off over the baked veld. ‘You look at the mass of those billions of flies up there cavorting about in the sky,’ writes Carr, ‘and the thought wells up that fun or not, such a prodigious pageant has got to have a bearing on evolution, on the final survival, extinction, or remodelling of the race. But just you try to tell what the bearing is.’

The
kungu
cloud settles on ships like mist. Sailors get lost in it. There are stories of people choking to death in it. But what is its purpose once the eggs have been laid? Why do the flies keep swirling across the savannah for miles and miles? ‘It both looks like cloud and merges with cloud till the cloud is midges as well as moisture. It can take the form of the tornado in the slow vortex of an ordinary thermal, or it can mix in with real tornadoes.’

Perhaps the answer lies in the weather itself. The mad dance of the
kungu
creates turbulence and is therefore of great practical importance in mixing the air. Without turbulence there would be no distribution of the sun’s heat, no rain clouds, no weather in fact (weather being simply the transformation of the sun’s energy into the energy of wind and storms). Far from being a pointless digression, the
kungu
are a vital element in the region’s delicate ecosystem.

The great cloud having passed, billions of the tiny flies (each no bigger than a pinhead) were found lying on the water and shore. The wet linemen who had hauled in the catch were plastered with them, but they didn’t mind. They simply scraped them off their skin and squeezed them into balls. Others ran down to the beach with baskets into which they scooped the insects.

The fishing was sometimes hard on Liemba (as the Africans called Lake Tanganyika) and they believed the
kungu
were sent by a higher power for their benefit. Whereas a waterspout↓ was very bad news for fishermen, thrashing their boats to pieces, a visitation of
kungu
was very good news indeed.

≡ Waterspouts are known locally by the same word for ‘snake’,
nyoka
. In the myths of the Great Lakes, they are connected to a raft of legends about monsters that emerge from the abyss.

It was a benison from the gods, the leeshore tribes’ version of manna from heaven. They liked to add this high-powered protein supplement to their plates of
ufa
(maize meal) or
posho
(cassava).

Dr Hanschell watched them prepare it. The squashed insects were wrapped in banana leaves and dried in the sun, then smoked over a fire for several days. Baked into a cake, they tasted like stale chocolate mixed with old fish. Sometimes
kungu
is still served to tourists as part of an omelette or scrambled eggs (a bit like grated truffle), but the Naval Africa Expedition were offered only a plain black mass. In the words of Archie Carr, trying it in the 1950
s
, it looked ‘like a burnt loaf of bread’.

None of them would eat it, not even Tait or Mollison. The doctor, however, tried some white-ant biscuits that Rupia made for him. These ants—they are termites, really—often swarm around the same time as the
kungu
. This is another memorable sight, and it must have reminded ‘Tubby’ Eastwood of his pillars of fire and smoke, if Shankland’s description is anything to goby:

They rose in thin smoky columns from the anthills all around the camp as if the earth were on fire deep down. Soon their wings fell off, and as they crawled about to start new anthills, noisy fluttering birds devoured them, and baboons and pariah dogs came out of the woods to eat them. Rupia grilled some of them on a hot stone and brought them to the Doctor as a delicacy—they really looked very tempting. Thinking philosophically that an African visiting England might think twice about eating shrimps and other insects of the sea, he tackled them boldly and found them quite good eating. They reminded him of marrow on toast.

On 14 January, perhaps as a result of the
kungu
’s movements, there was a violent storm.
Fifi
(formerly
Kingani
) fouled
Vengeur
(formerly
Del Commune
), dragging her anchor and nearly foundering on rocks. Eventually the storm clouds subsided and the expedition weighed up their situation.
Mimi
’s bows had still to be repaired after colliding with
Kingani;Toutou
had sustained some damage while firing her gun;
Fifi
was not quite ready to sail, despite Cross’s patch; and
Vengeur
had lost two propellers in the storm. The Belgian speedboat
Netta
had also been damaged in the bad weather, twisting two propeller shafts. With the exception of the unwieldy
Dix-Tonne
(the ‘Fishcake’) and the other Belgian speedboat, which was useless as a fighting vessel, the whole flotilla was now out of action. Things could not have been worse. The sky had just cleared when a second German gunboat appeared on the horizon. It was the
Hedwig von Wissmann
—the ship they had come all this way to attack. Now it looked as if it was going to attack them instead.

A
s it turned out, there was no immediate cause for alarm. Leutnant Job Odebrecht, commander of the
Hedwig
, had no intention of attacking the Albertville flotilla that day—mainly because he didn’t know about it. He dared not come in too close for fear of bombardment by the Belgian shore batteries. That was how the
Kingani
had been lost, according to the Holo-holo spies. They had told the Germans that the sunken steamer’s funnel could be seen far out at sea from the shore. Odebrecht’s orders from Zimmer were to find a wreck, but he saw nothing and returned to Kigoma with no news. Except to say there did seem to be considerable activity at Albertville.

Zimmer was still uncertain as to the exact situation on the lake. Had the British somehow suborned his intelligence sources? The only thing for it, he decided, was to send out the whole fleet on reconnaissance, then regroup and start a combined operation against any naval threat they found. On 8 February he sent the
Hedwig
down to the settlement of Kungwestock, opposite Albertville, with orders to scout the opposite shore, then rendezvous at noon on 9 February with the
Götzen
, which Zimmer would command personally.

After a night moored under the mountain at Kungwestock, Odebrecht set off in the
Hedwig
across the lake towards the Belgian camp. The sky was overcast and hazy, but he felt confident. He had two six-pounder guns forward and a revolving Hotchkiss aft (like the
Kingani
’s gun, it had been captured from the British on the coast). So when, around 7.45
AM
, he spotted through his binoculars a steamer and a small motor boat coming towards him from the Belgian shore, he was not unduly worried. It had happened before: the Belgians always scattered at the last minute. But as they came closer, he saw that the vessels were flying the white ensign of the Royal Navy and that they carried proper artillery, not light machine-guns like the Belgian boats.

So the British were here after all! The steamer looked familiar…rather like the
Kingani
, in fact, except that it had no gunshield and different guns.

Odebrecht spotted the laughable Belgian barge the
Dix-Tonne
lumbering along behind the British launch; behind the barge was one of the Belgian whalers. It was obvious they meant to attack, but Odebrecht remained confident. Only the size of the gun on board the steamer, which was leading the attack, gave him pause. It was very big—twice the size of his own guns, even though the
Hedwig
was larger than the approaching steamer.

There were still several miles between the vessels. Odebrecht kept going towards the Belgian shore for almost an hour, until he was about six miles from the leading vessel coming towards him. Then, at 9.30, he turned sharply to port. There are conflicting reports as to why. In ‘Tanganyikasee: A Gunboat War in Deutsch-Ostafrika 1914–1916’, Holger Dobold and Dennis Bishop maintain that the German captain hoped to outrun the attacking flotilla and trap them. ‘It may have been Odebrecht’s intention to ambush the Allied fleet in reverse by drawing the Allied steamers to the meeting-place with the
Götzen
…’