3a: Butiaba

I left Lindi as you heard on the last tape and went up to Nairobi.  I spent only a short time there because I was doing an anti-malarial course, which was a new thing that the medicos had found out and it meant taking, what was it, atapen [?] for several days and quinine for several days and you had to go on continuously and if one of them turned your eyeballs yellow you had to stop; if the other one turned your eyeballs purple you had to stop, et cetera.  Fortunately I went through the whole course and funnily enough I never had malaria afterwards, despite the fact that I lived for another three years in malarial areas!  So that experiment and that stay in Nairobi did me a lot of good!

Quite apart from the malarial cure it meant that I came back to being an ordinary human being as opposed to being somebody stuck out in the [Pirini?].

My next posting from Nairobi was over to Butiaba.  I undertook that posting on the basis that Butiaba was going to be closed and the facilities moved to somewhere else.  At that stage I wasn’t given any indication of where it was likely to be.  It was just that as Butiaba was just an emergency landing stage between Malakal in the Sudan and Port Bell in Uganda on the north coast of Lake Victoria, it was felt that it was not a good halfway type of point, as an emergency bolthole it was fine, but it really meant that it was only in emergency on this rather long, I think it was a limiting sector, of the route down to South Africa all the way down from Cairo.  It made Malakal to Kampala one of the longest hops and therefore could take the least load.

I knew nothing about Butiaba, but then I knew nothing about Lindi before I got there.  I went up to Port Bell (I flew up to Port Bell) and from there I was driven by, I think it was the Station Superintendent there, he drove me from Kampala over to Butiaba, he left me there and he came back and that was me!

There was no station superintendent at Butiaba that I took over from, it was really as I say just an emergency landing point that was kept alive all the time.  The facilities were just limited to a mooring, a motor boat, a radio station, and that was it!  There was me in charge and we had a coxswain and a radio operator.  We all lived up at the Government rest-house which was there as Bukumi camp.  I remember it as it was right on the main, well, the only road, but I remember it was on the top of the escarpment, and you had a very windy [winding] road going down the escarpment to the plains beneath, which of course were the plains in which lay Lake Alberta and Lake Tanganyika and Lake Edward and those lakes that lay in part of the Rift Valley.

It was fortunate that the radio operator there was South African and he had with him as usual not only his complete kit but also his cook and personal boy. That meant that at least we had someone who could cook for us because neither the coxswain nor I had any permanent servants and there were none available round that camp.  In fact there was, what, four or five miles away from the port of Butiaba and the only thing between us and Butiaba apart from one small kraal, was, well, whatever animals you could think of.  All sorts of antelopes of course, but also buffaloes, elephants, lions, usual sort of complete range of East African animals, plus an awful lot of baboons!  We had a little office in the actual port of Butiaba; when I say ‘port’ it was an official port, because it was the base for the SS Corridan and the MS, well the river steamer Lughard.  There was a superintendent there, of course he was a Scotsman, but he also had his wife and his daughter with him which was very unusual indeed.  She was a nice girl and his wife was a very nice woman indeed, in fact they were very nice people.  Quite honestly I cant remember any other people being there, other than one or two Sikh engineers and they were engineers servicing the boats.  The boats operated around Lake Albert, across to the Congo and back and up and down, and they were essentially a part of the Kenya-Uganda Railways and Harbours Ltd.  I don’t suppose they were Ltd anyway as it was a Government organisation.

I remember now yes there were a couple of people there because there was an oil rig there.  They were doing exploratory drilling about a mile inland from the harbour.  I don’t remember which company it was now, but two or three of the drillers were quite friendly and we used to frequently entertain them up at the Bukumi camp. There was one of them, a Pole, I should remember his name but I cant now, he was very keen on fishing, and because we’d got our motor launch he was delighted, because we were quite happy to take him out fishing, provided we could wangle the petrol, not only in the evening time but also on his days off.  It was while I was there that I personally got quite keen on fishing, particularly because we had in that area the Nile perch, this was a reasonable size fish in fact any fish under 5 lbs we threw back in the water because they were real good fish, and quite big fish, so that I enjoyed my fishing as a result of meeting these blokes from the oil exploration place but I can’t remember now how many there were or what company it was.

The little office that we had was quite small, it just had the absolute necessaries, a little store of engineering spares and of course it housed the radio station for the radio operator.  I particularly remember that station because the first thing that happened when we went down to the office was to get the bush boys to bring up a bucket of water.  This water was straight out of the lake, which meant that first you strained it through wire mesh, then you strained it through linen, and then you put it into a pot and boiled it, and after you’d boiled it you strained it through again, some very fine cotton mesh; then you put it into a great big filter, which looked like it had chalk candles in it. What was it called, a Higginson or Hutchinson candles or filters or something?  It was only after then the water dripped through these filter candles, and got caught and when you’d got enough you were able boil it again and have a cup of tea! [ceramic candle filters are still widely used, I’ve used them in Scotland! http://www.faireyceramics.com/%5D

The journey from Bukumi camp down the escarpment then across the plain to Butiaba harbour could be quite exciting.  On one occasion we were going down and suddenly found there was a whole mob of baboons in the way.  Well, you can ease down into a mob of baboons, but they wouldn’t take much notice of you, and I mistakenly, or I learnt, I got out of the car and picked up a rock and threw it at them to get them out of the road.  One didn’t do any good, so I picked up another stone and threw that one, and a little while later I found that they were picking up stones and throwing them at us! So, when we got through we were very happy to have made it but I learnt my lesson there: with a baboon you never throw stones at it or anything like that because they copy you, and they become quite reasonably accurate!

The other thing was the transport.  We had there the Ford V8 station wagon, this really was then was the established vehicle for Imperial Airways in outstations.  I’d never met it before because we didn’t have one down in Lindi, and the ones in Nairobi were more sophisticated because you had more of a town there where you had built-up roads, well more built-up roads, whereas out in Butiaba it was just a gravel track which trucks only had made and kept them rolled down.  They were really very very wearing on tyres and very very uneven surfaces, but there was one stretch which was a nice and straight stretch.  Just for devilment we one time tried to see what speed we could get up on this and it was the first time I had driven a motorcar at just over 60 mph and boy!, was that a rough journey!

I’ve an old memory there, which was having got these fish which were reasonably easy to catch, although you had to be careful because you might pick up some other sort of fish; there was the ngege and the ngasa as well as the mbuta. It was the mbuta that was useful for eating, the others were a bit bony, a bit rough.  But a reasonable size Nile perch or the mbuta which we caught, not less than 5 lbs weight, we used to take back up to the camp, because the radio operator’s cook was very good with them.  I always remember that he gutted the fish and rubbed salt into it both front and back, and then put it up onto a sort of staging up in the air about three feet off the ground, which was made by sticks lashed together; underneath he made a fire, which was smoky from the wood he always used to use, so that we got our fish which was not only dried and salted but also smoked, and though it might sound pretty horrible, when it was cooked subsequently it really was the most tasty fish.  And having not had anything like that for, oh, many years, I really thoroughly enjoyed it.  So apart from the inevitable meat which we shot, we didn’t have any chicken, it was always shoot your own meat, the fish came in as a really delightful change.

But we quickly learned that the plan was not to go up to Laropi, which is what I thought it might be, but that I was to move the place up to Juba, which was way up in the Sudan.  This was, oh, three times as far as it would have been from Butiaba to Laropi, but I certainly felt it was going to be a better move from my point of view, than going up and being stationed in Laropi.  I had some idea of Laropi because Bill Linstead, earlier on when we were planning the stations for the primary route, Bill Linstead had been up to Laropi and done a survey there, and I had seen his plans and read his notes and there was just nothing.  You’d have to take everything up there; there was not a thing.  So we would really not have been able to exist under those conditions with what we had for ourselves at Butiaba.  We would have had to import the rudiments of living.

Tape 3 side 1 continues