John Berry's

The windows of the house falling out, and Artie Nel.

On arrival in Kitwe in July 1966, Arlene and I spent the first 10 days in the brand-new Edinburgh Hotel, while the company made a house ready for us. What luxury – Crayfish Meuniere at 15/- (about $US$2.00), and a good Tournedo for even less! Never had either of us had it so good.

But all good things must come to an end, and after 10 days we moved into a house in “The Gulch” – a crescent of semi-detached bungalows near the Convent in which Anglo American Corp put all of its new employees. The evening that we moved in, we realized that the place was literally seething with cockroaches, and so, after killing as many as we could and unpacking our suitcases (it would be a couple of months before any trunks arrived: they had been shipped to “Chartered Exploration – Lusaka. In bond via Beira”) we fell into an exhausted sleep.

The next morning I went to see Mr. Nel, over in the AAC offices opposite Coronation Square - the rumor was that the bigwigs over there refused to have the exploration offices in their building, because we geologists left big muddy bootprints all over their nice clean carpets. Mr. Nel obviously DID NOT like it that I was complaining, and immediately launched into an emphatic speech: “Look, Mr. Berry, we are not in London and we are not in New York, we are in the middle of Effrika, and there is nothing I can dew about a few cockroaches. You will just have to learn to live with them!” So I went over to Diamond’s Supermarket and bought a Communist Chinese stirrup pump and some really nasty bilious yellow poison to go in it.

That evening we sprayed in all the nooks and crannies in the kitchen, and at everything that moved. I was really angry at Artie Nel, so I gathered a couple of hundred dead or dying cockroaches into the pages of the day’s “Times of Zambia”, and went to bed.

The next morning I went over to his office again, newspaper in hand, to be greeted by the same tirade: “Look Mr. Berry, I have told you once and I will tell you again, you are not in London and you are not in New York….” I interrupted his speech by dumping the dead and sticky cockroaches all over his desk, and walked out. The next day the exterminators came around to the house.

About a week later, as I shut the door of the living room on the way to bed, the entire outside wall of the room fell out, with a mighty crash of breaking glass. The wall consisted of a wooden frame holding a row of louvered windows which ran the length of the room: the frame had been completely consumed by termites. Again, I went over to Artie Nel’s office, to be greeted by, “Gott, Mr. Berry, I hev told you before and I’ll tell you again, we are not in New …” This time, however, he was obviously fed up with my complaints and was not going to do anything about it, even if the sky had fallen in. I had no evidence to dump on him, so I had to get my boss, Pete Freeman, involved, and we got the maintenance crew out within a couple of days.

The fire at the petrol depot

One Sunday soon after we arrived we were awoken from a mid-afternoon nap by the shouts of children outside, and immediately realized from the low rumble, almost pressure waves rather than audible sound, that permeated the air, that something was badly wrong. Leaping up, we could see from the window a huge column of black smoke rising from the Light Industrial Area. We jumped into the car and drove out to the Chingola Road, from where we could soon see that one of the large tanks at the Petrol Depot, the only one in town, was ablaze. We drove down the London Road and joined a small knot of spectators watching workmen rolling 44-gallon drums of petrol away from the blazing tank, through thick smoke and enormous heat. The men were showing incredible courage, and managed to get most of the 44-gallon drums away from the fire.

However, we heard later and read in the morning papers that, on the other side of the fire, the side that adjoined an African township, UNIP Youth agitators had incited a small riot against whites. This had spilled over onto the main road, where rocks were thrown at the cars coming into town from Chingola. A lady was killed by a rock that came through her windscreen.

This incident caused a drop in the petrol ration from 10 imperial gallons per month to 8 gallons, which was a real hardship for anybody who did not live close to work.

Our arrival in Zampia

Arlene and I flew from London to Lusaka on Aug. 7th, 1966 on a Vickers VC10 jet. I was the first geologist to be flown out: Dr. Curt Niggli, the previous arrival, had come with his wife the traditional way by ocean liner to Capetown and then by rail via Kimberly and Mafeking, Bulawayo and Victoria Falls to Zambia. This enabled new employees to arrive at the same time as their personal effects, and the 5-day rail journey gave them time to begin to acclimatize to Africa. Curt and Rosemarie actually had twice that long to adjust to Africa: their train hit an elephant near Victoria Falls and was derailed, and they had to be taken to Salisbury (now Harare) and accomodated in a hotel for four days while the track was repaired.

The switch to a direct jet flight from Europe took place soon after Zambia's independence, giving rise to the old-timer's scornful term for post-independence arrivals: VC-tenners.

Our flight landed in Entebbe, Uganda, close to midnight, and there the plane was sprayed against insects with everybody still aboard. This triggered a lot of Arlene's allergies.

We landed at Lusaka in the crisp bright sunlight of Zambian winter mornings, and were met by a man not much older than I and taken to headquarters. There we were sat down and given coffee, and Mr.____ started by saying "You will be posted to Zambian Anglo Mine Services in Kitwe: the flight leaves at 7 pm, and we have arranged a day-room for you at the Ridgeway Hotel." Arlene, by this time dog-tired from the all-night flight and bothered by allergies, immediately blurted out in some indignation: "I was told we would be living in Lusaka, not some horrible little place out in the bush. Where is this place Kitwe, anyway?" At which point I nearly died, not knowing whether this person was a superior or perhaps even my boss. Mr. _____ gently explained that Kitwe was a large town, the major center of the mining industry, and that it was a bout 200 miles away.

Arlene and I had read a couple of books about Zambia before leaving, and had thus heard of Lusaka's Ridgeway Hotel. It turned out to be quite idyllic, except for one thing: there was no running water that day, owing to a break in the main. In order to have baths, we had to ask the very young African boy who stationed himself at the top of the staircase a few feet from our room to bring water for us. He was only about 13 and unnaturally eager to please. It took many trips with buckets of hot and cold water before we could bathe, and we felt very guilty to put such a small person to such hard work.

At 6.00 pm we were collected and driven to the airport, and after an uneventful flight on a Zambian Airways DC3 arrived in Kitwe, where we were met by my actual new boss, Pete Freeman, and taken to the Hotel Edinburgh, a striking modern 10-story building in the heart of town.