ABSTRACT

On the second day of 1950 we set out on a formidable twenty-five-hundred-mile journey of rather more than two months that was to take us as far from our base as the southern tip of Lake Tanganyika, to the frontier of what was then Northern Rhodesia, the modern Zambia. Our first stopping point was at Mbarara, the capital of the Ankole kingdom in the grasslands of southern Uganda, midway between Lake Victoria and Lake Edward. As far as Masaka the scenery was that of Buganda with its typical alternation of flat-topped hills and papyrus-filled swamps, the foreground much obscured by elephant grass growing six to eight feet high; as we turned west, the countryside began to open out, with long views across gently rolling downlands. The rectangular houses set in their surrounding banana groves disappeared in favour of the round beehive shelters of the pastoralists. Soon we began to encounter dense herds of cattle moving from one grazing place to another, their massive lyre-shaped horns knocking against each other as the beasts swayed from side to side. The herders were slim sharp-featured men and boys, dressed in bright red-and-gold waist-cloths with a short upper cloth knotted over one shoulder, striding along holding their sticks behind their necks, both arms raised.