Someone Wishes to Speak to You (26 page)

Ian Smith was later to record that only about 500 terrorists, and not over 1,000, had been eliminated. He also reported how the success of the Selous Scouts operation against insurgents had reverberated around the world, and how congratulatory messages had been received from far and wide.

Perhaps as a direct result of the Nyadzonya operation – it was certainly almost immediately after the raid – a new phase of terrorist activities by ZANLA and FRELIMO began. From the ridge of mountains that straddled Rhodesia’s border with Mozambique, a thirty-minute mortar attack was launched on the southern suburbs of Umtali. The attack concentrated mainly on the suburbs of Greenside, Palmerston and Darlington and, although there were no casualties, it showed that the citizens of Umtali were totally unprepared for this new development. An article in the
Umtali Post
subsequently highlighted accounts of how some residents had stood in their gardens watching what they thought to be a ‘display of fireworks’, prior to becoming panic-stricken when they realised they were under attack.

The residents of Umtali had to face a steep learning curve with regards to their personal safety and the security of their properties. Mathew attended a meeting organised by Umtali’s Civil Defence in order to raise levels of preparedness. Soon after a senior BSAP superintendent called for silence, Mathew experienced for the first time the depth of patriotism that existed among the European community, the ‘Spirit of Rhodesia’. The gathering had launched into a spontaneous rendering of ‘We Are All Rhodesian’, with its chorus:

Mathew was later to learn that man who wrote the song, Clem Tholet, was Ian Smith’s son-in-law and that his composition was being increasingly sung at such meetings. It was almost Rhodesia’s unofficial national anthem.

8

Change of Direction

During the latter part of 1976, Rhodesia became the target of Washington’s ‘shuttle diplomacy’, with President Gerald Ford considering that an American-driven solution in Rhodesia would aid his presidential re-election campaign by gaining him additional support from the ethnic minorities. It was his diplomatic troubleshooter, Henry Kissinger, who managed to persuade South Africa’s President, John Vorster, to cut supplies of fuel and munitions in the hope of bringing Ian Smith nearer to a negotiated settlement with his African opponents.

In order to encourage the insurgents to arrive at a peaceful solution, Kissinger visited Tanzania and Zambia to assure Julius Nyerere and Kenneth Kaunda that Ian Smith would concede his authority and power after a short but phased transfer period. After Nyerere and Kaunda had sanctioned the plan, Smith was summoned to Pretoria to discuss the agreement with Kissinger and John Vorster. Although Kissinger told Ian Smith that he fully recognised how desperately he wanted the best for his people, and understood why he was fearful of black majority rule, he was emphatic in his belief that the deal on the table would be the best he could expect to receive.

Soon after Ian Smith broadcast details of the Kissinger Agreement to the nation, any hopes that had been mustered from the deal were dashed. Some members of his RF party thought it represented the ‘death rites’ of the country. Such
future negotiations had to be abandoned, for five of the Frontline African leaders had rejected the proposals outright. Due to the collapse of the Kissinger Agreement, Vorster decided to continue with the deliveries of war materials from South Africa, as he was well aware that its failure had been no fault of Ian Smith’s government. It was also confirmed that the South African loan of $20 million to Rhodesia’s Ministry of Defence, which was previously held back, had now been made available.

Due to the ramifications of this international political debacle, Ian Smith came to recognise that whatever future internal agreements could be arrived at between his government and ZANU/PF and ZAPU, there could be no finality without the approval of the OAU. A final settlement might even have to be sanctioned by their communist supporters in China and Russia.

So, after Mathew had read as much as possible about the political stalemate which had resulted in the majority of Rhodesians, black and white, having to suffer its implications, he was thankful that he was at least able to redirect his mind from the political tragedies that surrounded him to the continuation of his observations on the complex social interactions of monkeys.

When Simon and Anna Vaughan-Jones arrived at the Leopard Rock Hotel with the equipment that Simon had arranged for the museum to supply, Mathew could see that the taxidermist had done an excellent job in making the caracal lynx as lifelike as possible. The lynx looked very much as if it was in the process of stalking its prey. It had been mounted and fixed onto a small trolley, so that it could be pulled out in front of the monkeys as they scampered through the long grass. The 2-metre African python was mounted and prepared in a similar lifelike fashion so that when it was put before
the monkeys, it would be sure to cause the maximum amount of alarm, the expression of which Anna had come to record.

During their five-day stay at the hotel, the Vaughan-Joneses visited Castle Beacon each day, arriving at the camp soon after the strong rays of the rising sun started to evaporate the early morning dampness of the foliage. After Simon had helped Anna to position the caracal and the python and set up her three high-frequency tape-recorders, they waited for the monkeys to descend from the trees before pulling one of the ‘predators’ into their midst. The caracal was the first to come out, which succeeded in creating instant pandemonium among the group. There was a crescendo of alarm calls, ideal for Anna’s recording. Similarly, when the python was introduced to a group of vervet monkeys, she managed to capture the sound as they screamed their specific alarm calls to warn the remainder of their troop of the presence of a predator.

The vervets appeared to be far more vociferous with their alarm calls than the more reserved and sedate Stairs’ monkeys. As soon as one of them spotted either the caracal or the python, it would stand up on its hind legs, bob to and fro and screech its alarm calls, which would be immediately taken up by the rest of the group as they made a rapid escape from the long grass of the clearing and returned to the security of the trees. However, by the final day of Anna and Mathew’s observations, although the monkeys still showed various degrees of suspicion at the mounted specimens they continued to run through the tall grass of the clearing to the forest below instead of returning to the safety of the trees. They just hoped that should a live predator put in an appearance, the monkeys would stop this complacency and head for the forest.

(The experiment was a success. Listening to the tapes in her office in Salisbury, Anna could detect the difference between the vervet’s alarm calls when confronted by the caracal and the python. At this time, very little observational material on the reaction of primates to predators had been recorded or published.)

Simon and Anna invited Mathew to have a farewell dinner at the Leopard Rock Hotel, to thank him for all the help he had given them during their time at his Castle Beacon camp. As he usually led a relatively solitary life, Mathew was thoroughly enjoying the company of friends who shared the same interests as him.

‘I remember a paper that was presented at a symposium called “Captive Propagation and Conservation of Primates”,’ said Mathew. ‘Quite fascinating. A Dutch field worker studying chimpanzees in West Africa had filmed a scene in which he pulled a mounted stuffed leopard into their midst. While they all jumped up and down and screamed hysterically at their number one enemy, an alpha male broke off a sturdy branch from a nearby tree, then appeared to use it as a weapon, beating it repeatedly on the ground in front of the predator. As far as I know, chimpanzees have been recorded using tools, such as twigs to poke into the holes of trees to extract termites, but they’ve never been seen selecting something to protect themselves with. I think that’s the first time an anthropoid ape has been seen using an implement for either defence or attack.’

‘I’ve heard about that piece of footage . . . Oh, Mathew – I’ve just remembered something. I’m so sorry not to have given it to you before,’ Anna said rather sheepishly. ‘It sounds awful but to tell you the truth, I’d quite forgotten about it. I just came across it while repacking my equipment! Here, Jan asked me to pass this on.’ Anna handed him an envelope.

Mathew was relieved that he was in a dimly lit environment as he felt himself blushing slightly. He just hoped that neither Simon nor Anna noticed his reaction as he tucked the letter into his pocket to read when he was back at his camp.

After the friends had said their farewells and Mathew was driving the short distance back to Castle Beacon, he reflected that in all probability Simon had reminded Anna about the note and insisted that Anna should pass it on to him. On
one occasion, while Simon and he had been walking by themselves on one of the mountain paths above the hotel, he had said, ‘To tell you the truth Mathew, I can’t stand the way Paddy Bushney treats Jan much of the time. It’s almost as if he merely regards her as some type of trophy, the consequence of a successful military campaign; one which provided him with the possession of such an obedient, faithful and beautiful young wife. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but on one of Jan’s visits to the museum she told me how very much she hopes that when you next visit Salisbury, she will have the opportunity to meet you again. She told me that she not only very much enjoys your company but would love to have you as a close friend, a confidante. In fact, she almost made me promise to arrange a reunion with you.’

When Mathew opened the envelope, under the light of his hissing paraffin lamp, he found attached to the two-page neatly written letter a colour photograph of Jan with her arms around the neck of a sub-adult cheetah. She was wearing a powder-blue cotton dress that hung loosely over her shapely body and, impulsively, Mathew could not prevent himself from kissing the photograph. The beaming smile on her face seemed to mirror her very happiness in being in the company of such an endearing creature, and she had written on the back of the photograph that while she had her arms around the cheetah and gently stroked and caressed him, he had maintained a continuous purr as if in appreciation of her attention.

Mathew found that the photograph of such a happy-looking Jan, and the sentiments expressed in her letter, had an unsettling
effect on him rather than a feeling of contentment that she should be so concerned about his welfare. At the same time, he realised from what Anna and Simon had told him about the unhappiness of Jan’s marriage, how potentially emotionally explosive it would be if he were to become intimately involved with her in the future. However, in spite of such forebodings, there was no denying that he had experienced ‘love at first sight’ when he met her. To get to know her was one of his main ambitions; to see if the feelings were mutual and to what degree she would respond to his courtship. In the isolation of the hut that Edgar and Joshua had recently constructed for him, looking once more at Jan’s photograph, he could not imagine anything more desirable in the world than to gain her lifetime love and affection.

Less than two weeks after Simon and Anna returned to Salisbury, there was a spate of insurgency attacks on rural communities. Jim Prior told Mathew that the BSAP had found an increased incidence of young collaborators (known locally as
mujibas
) passing information on to ZANLA about troop movements – in some cases also conveying weapons for the insurgents or carrying out small instances of sabotage. Jim had added that at the beginning of the Bush War, local people were only too willing to report insurgents coming across the border. But now these reports had stopped altogether. This could either be down to ZANU/PF’s ‘reign of terror’ on the local tribal communities, or the increased numbers of their fellow Africans being killed by Rhodesia’s security forces during their counter-insurgency raids into Mozambique.