One Heck Of A Ride

79 Chapter 8 My first African safari was a boyhood dream come true, and one of my most memorable adventures, but it came at a time when the Dark Continent was undergoing yet another of its periods of strife and change. To protect their clandestine ivory trade, Kenya’s leaders had closed its hunting four years earlier and its professional hunters were changing their professions or moving their operations to Tanzania, Botswana and South Africa. A civil war that had begun in 1977 still raged in Mozambique, while politicians in South Africa and the United Nations were debating how to hand South West Africa/ Namibia over to SWAPO (the South West Africa People’s Organization). Zimbabwe had gained its independence but, as you’ll read in Chapter Eight, its civil war was not yet settled. Part 2: Africa Zimbabwe 1981 Three of the Big Five H istory will say Rhodesia’s bloody fifteen-year Bush War ended when the United Kingdom granted the country its independence in a formal ceremony in the capital city of Salisbury on 18 April 1980. Charles, the Prince of Wales, as well as prime ministers, presidents, governors and dignitaries from across Africa and the Commonwealth were there to see Lord Christopher Soames, Rhodesia’s governor, step down. From that day on, the country would be known as Zimbabwe, colonialism would be an ugly part of the past, majority rule would prevail, and all would be well again in the southernAfrican country that Cecil John Rhodes created more than a century earlier. Or so the rest of the world believed. Speeches and a band playing “God Save The Queen” did not end the bloodshed. Violent tribal clashes continued between ZIPRA (the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army, whose Mashona leaders were allied with the Zimbabwe African People’s Union, a Marxist-Leninist political party) and ZANLA (the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, the Maoist military wing of the Zimbabwe African National Union allied with Matabele leaders). Groups of partisan rebels refused to put down their Chinese and Soviet military weapons and were roaming the country, attacking vehicles, raiding farms, and killing anyone who resisted and more than a few who didn’t. The U.S. State Department was warning Americans to avoid Zimbabwe, and to travel only during daylight on major roads if they had to drive. The main road from Victoria Falls to Bulawayo was especially dangerous, the agency said. Things came to a head with the Battle of Bulawayo in February 1981, when ZIPRA guerillas rebelled in a suburb of that city and ZANLA forces attacked both the guerillas and the Zimbabwe National Army sent to squash the uprising. The official death toll was 280, but other reports claimed as many as 400 troops and citizens were killed before the revolt ended two days later. It was into this corner of Africa I landed in August 1981, just six months after the rioting in Bulawayo. America’s news media had given minimum coverage to the politics and strife in the emerging country, and the hunters I spoke with after I bought a twenty-one-day Zimbabwe safari in an auction at SCI’s 1980 convention said the