Family Get Together. Second Season in Zambia. Commences. Last Christmas on Cockington.
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Well, it is 4 pm on Monday afternoon, and I still have not decided on today's subject. This is due to three things. The first thing is, visitors arrive tomorrow. My daughter Janine and her husband Nathan arrive from America, and later in the week, the whole family and their partners/spouses arrive, so the whole family will be here together for the first time at our house in many years. All bedrooms and the garage will be full. Luckily, there are three toilets. So perhaps it is the anticipation of their arrival that has distracted me, but I must mention a further three.
“I never know if it is excitement or trepidation in anticipation of the whole family getting together. Like many families, while we are a family, we are a very diverse group.” - Peter McSporran
Probably the second biggest distraction is that I still have not had my echoendoscopy despite numerous dates and times set; they keep getting cancelled. There are a couple of flags in my blood test, but no indication that the cancer has reared its ugly head. I will get a better picture at my next consultation. Last week, my local GP cancelled my consultation, but I really need to see the specialist once I get my last scan done to hopefully fix my continued pain. I had two, yes, two days, with little pain, but that means nothing; it comes and goes normally on a daily basis, and every time it goes for two days, it normally comes back with a vengeance to destroy any optimistic hope I had that it is getting better with the latest medicinal regime. We will see. I will let you know later in the week. Talking of health, I was also in nearly daily contact with Keith Holland and on Monday he said he was wiped out, but he said his tumours were shrinking, always so positive despite everything. Then, today, Friday, I get a call that he has passed. I am shattered. He was back in South Africa fighting his personal battle with cancer at the time of his death. Keith and I have known each other for many years. I first met his dad, Binks, a legend in his own lifetime, during the war when I was sent with my ‘stick’ to guard a cattle sale at Hoyuyu, near Mtoko in 1974. Following the sale, we all retired to Hoyuyu Club, from which Binks set off without escort on the dirt road back to Mutare via Macheke. For us, it was a reasonably short trip back to base at Mrewa. By then, this was a really ‘hot’ area. Like his father, Keith was a cattle auctioneer and property agent well known in Manicaland. Keith and I also used to fish together annually on the Zambezi with a number of friends, including Gravy Scott and Neville Baker, both of whom were farmers in Manicaland. Those were the days. Keith has been valiantly fighting the big ‘C’ for some time now, and despite several setbacks, he had remained determined to beat it until the end. His resilience and determination are an inspiration to all of us who suffer from this disease. Sadly, also just this past month, my good old friend, Selby Chance’s son Richard, succumbed to it.
“Cancer is a horrible disease with no respect for age. Despite this, it is always so much sadder when someone from a younger generation than you is the sufferer, and even sadder when they pass.” - Peter McSporran
The final distraction: while I do not do much preparation before putting my finger to the keyboard in writing the blog, I sort of get the subject matter together in my head. I did this week after chatting to one of my old friends still in Zimbabwe. He has been challenged by one of Zambia’s better-known entrepreneurs, reputed to sail pretty close to the wind in some of his business dealings. So I thought I would write about my own experience in Zambia, which was very loosely connected to him. Fortunately, not directly. But before writing, I decided to check with my friend if it was OK. He asked me not to, as he feared some sort of retaliation, even perhaps legal. Of course, I only write about what I know, and if it is hearsay, then I say so. The other thing is, living in Portugal gives you both a geographical and a legal barrier to those who seem to operate with impunity in Africa, which, when deemed convenient, seems to ignore country sovereignty. However, their protectors' field of influence may not stretch this far, when I put that part of my story together. I will save that knowledge for a later blog. Surprisingly, much can be found in AI. I wonder what the legal position is if you quote AI as a source?
So there it is, all of the distractions and the need to do some work in the garden. That is a lie, I do not need to, but want to. After all, family can be critical of shoddy work and with them all here, no doubt they will make reference to the garden. So let's get back to closing off 2002, such a long year that seemed to go so quickly.
On the farm, Dave Craft, who was my manager on Diandra until we lost the farms, came up to join us in growing our first experimental five-hectare tobacco crop on the land we leased from ZRC in Chisamba, on the Mtendere Section. It had old barns but, funnily enough, no tiers. These had all been taken for fencing by the present owners, Karl Irwin and Francis Grogan, who had leased the property to us. There may have been other shareholders, but it was difficult for us to know; certainly, they were the voice and face of ZRC, and the ones we dealt with. They were also the founding owners of Zambeef, the largest beef finishers and retailers in Zambia. They had started selling beef out of a pick-up, and by the time we arrived in Zambia, there was not a town without at least one Zambeef outlet.
I was also taught in Zambia that, when it comes to business, never believe what is there at face value. You have to delve deep, but back then, coming from a rather sheltered, and should I say, fairly honourable business regime, we were naive in dealing with businesses that had survived thirty-five years of independence against our twenty in Zimbabwe at that stage. In calling them street-wise would be an understatement. Not unlike how business is now done in Zimbabwe some forty six years after independence, with the Universal Leaf Africa (ULA) loan in the pipeline, we had ordered the heat sources for our three tobacco sections through Johnathan Johnson-Butcher, which were similar to, and probably copies of, the Zimbabwe hot air and hot water heat exchange systems designed by John Wightman and Modrho. We also ordered some bulk curers, as did many of our scheme members, batch curers and also heat systems for chongololos. We were going to convert any existing conventional barns into chongolos, having done the same in Zimbabwe. Funnily enough, there were only two member companies of our scheme who went for tunnels; they were Vixers, a company owned by Hylton and Rob Grifford and Anthony Struik and Shanatsi, a partnership that included Campbell Dunlop, Bruce Chapman and Colin Huddy, who decided to go with very large tobacco tunnels sourced from Brown’s Engineering in Zimbabwe. These were brave men, as building these curing monoliths with untrained builders was no small feat. Vixers was to become the most successful scheme member, now owning a number of properties from Chisamba to Kabwe and also diversified into agricultural contracting. They were extremely hard working, and Hylton, the leader, chosen or self-declared, I am not sure, was a hard taskmaster while Anthony controlled the purse strings. Unfortunately, Shanatsi did not fare so well; the only tobacco grower in their partnership, Bruce, remained in Zimbabwe, and while they employed a proficient red-soil farmer, Ian Gillwald, whom I had been in the army with, they did not fare well. The last I heard, Ian is still on the property but has worked for the original landowner successfully growing potatoes for the past twenty-odd years. The tunnel made an excellent potato storage shed. Land clearing, manager recruitment and dam building were in full swing, in preparation for the 2003/04 tobacco season.
For myself, in December 2002, I went back to Harare to attend my last Tanganda Tea Company board meeting, to collect my daughter Janine, who arrived from Cape Town where she was finishing her tertiary education, to spend our last Christmas on the Cary’s farm, Cockington Estate. Oh, I should have mentioned that by this time Rozanne and Selby had joined me in Zambia, so once again we were husband and wife. For the first two months, we continued to live in the ‘Big Brother’ house with Chris and Ro Thorne. By December, however, Rozanne and I had moved into what was more of a garden flat than a townhouse, and it was adequate for the three of us. Selby and Duncan, Thorne’s younger son, attended Boabab College. Both these boys, being about seven at the time, were exceedingly traumatised by events in Zimbabwe and their compulsory move to Zambia. The Thornes had a particularly rough time having been locked into their house for extended periods while being ‘jambanjied'. The boys were very unsettled in school and took quite a long time to get over it. I say this cautiously as I think you can never fully recover from the events that occurred there.
As it happened, the day Janine arrived in Harare coincided with my board meeting at Tanganda, and as I have mentioned before, these meetings were always followed by lunch. As it was nearing Christmas and my last one, it became extended and unbeknownst to me, Rozanne had picked up Janine from the airport and thereafter waited patiently for what they thought would be until the board meeting ended. I do remember that Senator Sam Whaley was one of our esteemed guests, an uncle of the late, great Joe Whaley, along with some other dignitaries who enjoyed red wine. Why be rude and leave our guests early? I was not the flavour of the month when the ladies were finally called to retrieve me. Thereafter, we spent time with my in-laws Bob and Shirley Cary at Cockington Estate. Strangely enough, while most of their farms had been designated for confiscation, the home property, a small section, was not, and Bob and Shirley thought maybe they would be able to continue to live there. The following year, Bob was arrested for residing on his own property; that story is for a later blog. After Christmas and before the New Year, we headed back to our new, humble dwelling in Lusaka.
Disclaimer: Copyright Peter McSporran. The content in this blog represents my personal views and does not reflect corporate entities.
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