Darkest England (35 page)

I wrote several times. No reply. I had more or less given up when I got this parcel from England. A plain brown, padded envelope into which had been stuffed, none too carefully, a big brown hat. I knew it at once, of course. A broad crown and three internal pockets, sewn with twine. I noticed a whitish ring around the crown, a kind of tidemark, as if it had spent some time immersed in water.

In one of the secret pockets I found a note.

As far as she could ‘ascertain', Beth Farebrother wrote (strange, that word, ‘ascertain' – so apparently scientific, suggesting diligent research, but allowing enough leeway to
cover a helpless, stumbling search in the dark), Booi had set off along the Thames. He had not got very far.

She'd seen a television report about an abandoned cart, no driver, found beside the river, near Richmond. Most alarming were the two donkeys, still in harness. The donkeys had not been fed or watered for some days. Several dozen people had offered to adopt them, children had collected money to buy these abandoned beasts an honourable retirement in some donkey refuge. Various animal welfare groups had demanded that the owner of the donkeys be found and prosecuted, not only for deserting the animals: a whip had been found in the cart.

Beth immediately went south and spent some days searching the towns and villages beside the Thames. She got nowhere. The donkeys had been saved, the story was forgotten. She was about to leave when she came across a group of children playing near the river. A small boy was wearing a tawny hat, far too large for him. The children told her they'd had the hat ‘from another boy'. They had played a game for it – the game appeared to involve jumping in the water. The ‘other boy' had been bad at it, and he had lost his hat. They were vague about what happened next and said the other boy had ‘gone away'.

But they had given her the hat. Indeed, they had seemed quite relieved to be rid of it.

One might speculate about his fate, Beth Farebrother wrote, but what good would it do?

But I would like to speculate. What would have happened had things been other? For if you compare the lives of the great explorers, David Mungo Booi does pretty well. He moves through England with just the right amount of ignorance, essential if you are to make headway, and he is relatively kindly and enlightened in his views of the natives.
But compare the deaths of the great explorers, and a crucial difference is revealed. When Booi's namesake, Mungo Park, perished in West Africa nearly two centuries before, his country mounted an expedition to find out what happened to him and to repatriate any relics which might have remained when their man drowned in a river while being attacked by natives. The expedition found his hat, which floated, and his journal which they published.

However, when David Mungo Booi perished at the hands of little savages in England, it was noted only by a woman who had once taken part in the Eland Dance with him; when she returned his notebooks, they were used to make cigarettes, and now she posted back his hat, which, if also returned to his own people, would most likely be used to make a fire.

When his other great namesake, David Livingstone, died in Africa, his heart was buried in the savannah and his body in Westminster Abbey. From what Beth had written, one could speculate that David Mungo Booi had drowned in the Thames. Or, perhaps more accurately, in his own misconceptions of England. His inability to comprehend the true nature of the country through which he passed was no greater than that of his brother explorers in Africa; he shows scant sign of recognizing how bitterly divided it was, given to increasingly irrational and violent hatred, and he seems at the end to have parted company from reality (how else could you explain why a man who knew the tale of Dicky the Donkey harnessed his expedition to a donkey cart!).

There was going to be no great ceremonial laying to rest of his body or his heart. But I did bury his hat. On the road to Zwingli, under an open sky. And I raised a cairn of stones beside it and left this monument with an
inscription borrowed from Livingstone's monument in Westminster Abbey, to which holy harbour he was returned by his faithful African servants who pickled his body and sailed home with it.

Above the buried hat I set the inscription:

B
ROUGHT BY
F
RIENDLY
H
ANDS
O
VER
L
AND AND
S
EA
H
ERE
L
IES
D
AVID
M
UNGO
B
OOI
E
XPLORER
M
ISSIONARY
W
ARRIOR

Khoisan click sounds

The five basic clicks in this (Standard Khoisan) system are given below, together with their traditional labels and descriptions of their method of articulation and their sound.

From:
Hunters and Herders of Southern Africa
Alan Barnard
(C.U.P. 1992)