Someone Wishes to Speak to You (17 page)

‘Sir Roger mentioned that your father was a flying instructor near Gwelo,’ said Mathew over dinner at his second meeting with Addie. ‘He must have met some interesting people.’

‘Oh, indeed he did. One story I always love to tell is that my father, being a senior RAF instructor at Guinea Fowl, had to train the young pilot officer recruit Ian Smith, who in those days always had to salute him! After the war, my father decided that he’d enjoyed his time here so much that he wanted to settle in Southern Rhodesia. He bought an apple orchard in Inyanga, in the south-east.’ Addie looked down at the table, suddenly a little unsure of herself. ‘As my father’s estate is within easy reach of the study site you’re establishing in the Vumba, my father has asked me to say that you would be always welcome to spend a weekend with us there. My
mother was killed in a road accident five years ago and as Daddy lives alone, he’s always pleased to meet new people, especially anyone recently out from England.’

Mathew and Addie enjoyed a very amicable evening, although Mathew was careful not to behave in any way that might imply he was looking for anything more than friendship. Addie was without doubt attractive and they had much in common, but the invitation to spend a weekend at her father’s estate has taken him a little by surprise and he knew he must tread carefully.

Rhodesia’s National Parks Department had informed the warden of their Vumba Botanical Park, David Montgomery, about Mathew’s forthcoming research activities and had requested him to cooperate fully. The chief CIO operative in Manicaland, and his counterpart in the Special Branch of Rhodesia’s British South Africa Police (BSAP) headquarters in Umtali, had been asked to keep an eye on him. There had been a degree of suspicion expressed by security officials in Salisbury about Mathew’s real objectives; they were apprehensive as to why he considered it to be so important to carry out his research activities so close to Rhodesia’s international border with PEA. The District Commissioner’s office had also been informed about Mathew’s presence in the area.

With a letter of introduction from Sir Roger to the resident director of the Leopard Rock Hotel, Charles Seymour-Smith, Mathew was given a fine room at a very good discount, which he decided to stay in until he found an appropriate place to establish his camp. The hotel had been built by Italian prisoners of war in the early 1940s, and was nestled under the base of a steep, mist-covered mountainside named Leopard’s Rock. Its turreted roof looked more like a French chateau within the woodlands of the Loire Valley than a hotel in southern-central Africa.

In preparation for his field work, Mathew had read as much as possible about the primate species that inhabited this region. Following Osman Hill’s primate taxonomy for the samango group of monkeys, sometimes referred to as white-throated guenons (
Cercopithecus albogularis
), the group had been divided into twelve sub-species of which the Stairs’ or Mozambique monkey,
C. a
. erythrarchus, had as a part of its distribution the mountainous eastern districts of Rhodesia, including the Vumba Mountains.

Mathew had read that samango monkeys were usually confined to quite densely forested areas with their distribution being fragmented, and as visual communication between troops in their forest habitat is always difficult, their vocal communication becomes more important. This added a new and potentially groundbreaking dimension to his research.

Soon after Mathew’s arrival, Seymour-Smith was most helpful by advising where he would be most likely to have the opportunity to see a troop of the Stairs’ – just to the rear of the hotel where the monkeys visited on an almost daily basis to scavenge.

Shortly after sunrise on Mathew’s second day at the hotel, when the sun had just begun to dilute the heavy mountain mist with the warmth of its rays and the animal kingdom had started to become active with the birds of the forest singing their early morning anthems, Mathew had his first encounter with two adult Stairs’ monkeys. At first he heard their abrupt, single coughs as they jumped and crashed down from the forest canopy: ‘jack’, ‘jack’. Then he caught glimpses of their long tails swinging to and fro like bell ropes, acting as important balancing agents.

As Mathew became familiar with the monkey’s vocalisations, it was evident that these low-pitched booming calls were used by adult males during inter-troop encounters and would often
be followed by loud ‘pant’ calls which appeared to be a response to potential dangers, such as Mathew’s sudden appearance in their midst. These would sometimes be followed by ‘chuckle’ noises and high-pitched bird-like calls as a reaction to a disturbance. When females and infants found themselves in trouble they would often squeal, chatter and scream. When Mathew first encountered a troop of some twenty Stairs’ as they foraged by the hotel and they were disturbed by his presence, the succession of their calls was to re-echo around the rocky outcrops behind them, sounding not dissimilar to a fusillade of rifle shots.

While Mathew was in the process of searching for a suitable location to establish his research camp, David Montgomery, the director of the Vumba Botanical Gardens and Reserve, took him up through the forest to Castle Beacon. There, a long track had been cleared for the erection of a series of telephone poles to connect the few residents of the Vumba with Umtali and the outside world. The forest clearing also acted as a fire-break, which meant that when a troop of monkeys descended the mountainside during their daily foraging, they had to come down from the safety of the trees and could be openly observed as they crossed the clearing.

Mathew had decided that this would be an ideal place to establish his camp. Thanks to the help of two of Montgomery’s botanical garden staff, it was not long before he was able to transport all of his equipment from the Leopard Rock Hotel and set up his tented camp under a stand of wild fig trees on the downhill side of the clearing. Here, Stairs’ and vervet monkeys had frequently been seen to forage.

Mathew was aware from his research that the samango group of monkeys were a diurnal (daytime) species and quite gregarious in comparison to some other primates. During the night they rested in trees, individually or in small groups, hiding themselves among the security of the deep foliage of their forest habitats. Their daily activity usually commenced just prior to sunrise
before they moved off for their early morning feed. The activity of the group Mathew was studying occurred in bouts and, after a period of resting high up in the forest canopy for between ten and forty minutes, one or two individuals would start to forage and the remainder of the troop would then follow their lead, these periods of foraging ending as quickly as they began. The Stairs’ seldom strayed from the security of their thickly forested habitat, except temporarily when coming down to the ground to transit the line of forest that had been cleared on either side of Castle Beacon.

As Mathew had done during his field studies of the eastern lowland gorilla, he collected faecal samples from both the Stairs’ and vervet monkeys whenever he was able to identify which of the species the samples were from. When Mathew had met with the Veterinary Department in Salisbury, they had agreed that the Public Health Pathology Laboratories used by their department’s veterinarian in Umtali would analyse the food items found in samples and provide both the museum and Mathew with their findings. The samples had to be taken down to the Umtali laboratory each Monday, but Montgomery and Seymour-Smith said that should he be unable to deliver them himself, they would be only too willing for one of their staff to do so on his behalf.

It took Mathew over three weeks before he managed to gain the confidence of this group of Stairs’ monkeys and to partly habituate them to his daily presence. His eventual success was mainly down to him placing bananas, nuts and seeds along the tracks that they regularly used through the grass of the forest clearing near to his camp. It was important for the troop of some eighteen to twenty individuals to become accustomed to seeing him at his base, while they foraged and feasted on the ripe figs in the trees above. He could see that as the monkeys spent the majority of their time foraging in the forest canopy, it would be extremely useful if he could observe them from the same level.

In order to achieve this, Mathew decided that he – with the help of Montgomery’s two assistants – would construct a wooden platform as high up in the forest canopy as possible. With Montgomery’s enthusiastic cooperation, and the willingness of his two assistant park rangers, Edgar Chidzikwee and Joshua Dombo, a wooden-planked platform measuring 2 × 1.5 metres was constructed and successfully hoisted up to almost 30 metres above ground level, safely secured to one of the sizeable upper branches of the largest of the fig trees above Mathew’s camp. To gain access, Chidzikwee and Dombo had managed to acquire some rope and wooden slats from the botanical garden stores to construct quite a practical rope ladder, which they insisted on testing prior to allowing either Mathew or their boss to try it out for themselves.

As had been the case with Mathew’s field studies with the eastern lowland gorillas, he soon settled down to a well-disciplined weekly routine, carrying out five continuous days of field observations from just before sunrise until dusk, spending the majority of the weekends, or two other days, sorting out and writing up his notes, supplementing his food supplies, organising paraffin for his hurricane lamps and any other stores or equipment that he was running short of. During this early period of Mathew’s time at Castle Beacon, he started to learn some of the basics of the local Manyika language from Chidzikwee and Dombo.

Charles Montgomery told Mathew that the Manyika tribe belonged to the Shona people and that the majority were indigenous to this eastern district of Rhodesia. The Manyika language, being a broad dialect of Shona, was widely spoken in Manicaland and in certain areas of the Manyica Province in PEA. This was because in the nineteenth century, it had been common practice for the European colonial powers to pay little attention to tribal homelands but rather to establish their political boundaries by topographical features such as rivers, lakes, valleys and mountain ranges.

Due to the significant benefit that the wooden platform gave to his behavioural observations, Mathew commissioned Chidzikwee and Dombo to construct a second platform, which he was only too happy to pay them a reasonable sum to accomplish. He decided that this platform should be located in the forest canopy further down the mountain from Castle Beacon, where the road from a substantial abandoned house to the Leopard Rock Hotel interrupted the forest. Here, the Stairs’ monkeys would frequently descend to the ground, cross the road and raid the property’s overgrown kitchen garden and orchard of fruits, which included such delicacies as guanos, mangoes, bananas, mulberries, granadillas and apples.

During Mathew’s many hours of observations, he noted for the first time the many social interactions that occurred between troops of the Stairs’ monkeys, and the more active and smaller vervet monkeys, as well as being able to observe the way both species foraged for and selected their favourite foods. Whereas ripe wild fruits were the commonest and the most popular foods, these would be frequently followed by eating flowers together with a handful of leaves. Apart from the fruits, dry and green leaves, flowers, pods, shoots, seeds and strips of bark, he had been able to observe both species eating insects and caterpillars, and on one occasion he saw an adult male Stairs’ monkey extracting the gum of an acacia tree by tearing off small strips of bark with its canine teeth. Although at times he experienced a great deal of loneliness, this was soon compensated for when in writing up his notes he recognised how so many of his observations had never previously been recorded, and were therefore completely new to science.

It was a few days after Mathew’s fourth week at his Castle Beacon camp that he received a message via the Leopard Rock Hotel that Group Captain Miles Kinloch and his daughter had made a booking for the coming weekend and had invited
him to join them for dinner on the Saturday. Mathew was at first hesitant to accept the invitation; he didn’t trust himself not to become involved with Addie.

However, after two days of heavy rainfall when he was unable to carry out any worthwhile observations and was confined to his camp, he decided that a brief change of venue would do him good and accepted the Kinloch’s invitation. He also arranged with Charles Seymour-Smith to take a room at the hotel for three or four days in order to carry out some comparative studies between the monkeys at Castle Beacon and those that came down through the thickly vegetated slopes of Leopard’s Rock itself.

The decision to meet the Kinlochs at this early stage of his time in Rhodesia had not been made easy for him; since his arrival, he had already received letters from both Lucienne and Antonia which had done little to help him resolve his mixed feelings for them. Lucienne’s letter touched on how her literary research work for Osman Hill was progressing and how she was getting on with her degree course, but the greater part of it highlighted how much she enjoyed being with Daniel Olingo. Lucienne had written that after Mathew had left, Daniel, who was currently working in the African Section of the US State Department in Washington, had visited her in Atlanta on several occasions.

Mathew had to reproach himself for the absurdity of still harbouring such strong emotions, but he couldn’t help feeling a degree of selfish possessiveness, even jealousy, in the knowledge that another man was having the benefit of her company. Antonia had expressed her fond sentiments in her letter and he was very aware of how susceptible he was to the attractions of female company, especially to women who had taken a particular interest in him. He knew how careful he would have to be in the future if he was to avoid any further social and emotional complications for the time being.

When Mathew met the Group Captain and Addie, they
were sitting at a table by the window in the bar of the hotel, overlooking the small lake and the valley below with the distant dramatic backdrop of the Chimanimani Mountains. When Mathew approached their table, Addie leapt up and much to his surprise, greeted him like a long-lost friend by planting a kiss on both of his cheeks. ‘Mathew!’ she exclaimed. ‘How lovely to see you again! Meet my father, Miles Kinloch.’ Addie’s father took Mathew’s hand in a warm, firm handshake. He almost personified the image of an aging RAF wartime pilot officer: he had a thick-set stature; a handsome physique; a generous crop of snow white hair, which was neatly parted down the middle; a bushy, well-manicured white moustache, curled upwards at either end and a rather flushed complexion that hinted at his many years of good living and exposure to the elements. His
bonhomie
was emphasised by the enthusiastic interest he showed in Mathew’s field work. ‘Addie’s told me a little of what you’re doing out here, I’m certainly looking forward to hearing all about it, sounds fascinating.’