Mrs. Pollifax on Safari by Dorothy Gilman Read Free Book Online Page A

attention had turned to the guard who walked toward them, looking very official with a rifle strapped across his back. He wore a felt cavalry hat, blue khaki shorts and tunic, and around his legs a wrapping of heavy cloth from ankle to knee that could only be puttees, decided Mrs. Pollifax, remembering Kipling. He peered into the car and then shook hands with Homer and began talking in an incomprehensible language that Homer seemed to understand. At last the guard saluted, the bus was put into gear and they moved across the modest bridge overthe river. “What language was it that you spoke back there?” asked Mrs. Pollifax.
    “Nyanga,” said Homer. “I speak Tonga, he speaks Luvale but we both know Nyanga. All the government people know Nyanga.”
    “Those spies you mentioned,” began Mrs. Pollifax, and then found it even more difficult to be heard as they turned off the paved highway onto a dirt road marked by a sign that read CHUNGA CAMP . “Those spies,” she shouted above the rattles and bumps, hanging onto her seat with both hands to keep from hitting the roof of the bus.
    “What?” shouted Homer.
    “Spies,” she shrieked. Just as she decided that the road had been cut out of a pitted lava bed it changed to brown dust beaten hard into corrugated stripes that placed her more firmly in her seat but vibrated her spine like a massage.
    Homer neatly steered the bus around a hole and shouted back, “They spy on freedom fighters. In the Southern Province they used to cross the border from Rhodesia and kidnap people, set land mines and kill. There is not so much there now, but still they sneak in. A month ago they set a bomb in Lusaka, at private home, and killed Mr. Chitepo, Rhodesian black nationalist in the African National Congress.”
    “Who did?” shouted Mrs. Polifax. “Who would do such a thing?”
    Homer shrugged. “Mercenaries. Rhodesian police agents. Spies.”
    Mrs. Pollifax rested her voice while she attached this diverting piece of news to certain facts casually mentionedin the pamphlets that Bishop had deposited with her last week. She remembered that until recently Zambia had been a lonely bastion of black independence in the center of Africa, bounded on the east by Portuguese-ruled Mozambique, on the west by Portuguese-ruled Angola, with Rhodesia flanking its southern border, backed up by South Africa below it. That had been Zambia’s situation when it finally threw off the last shackles of white rule in 1964.
    At the time of its independence, however, Zambia had found itself still bound to Rhodesia by roads, electric power, rail routes and economic ties. A man who loathed apartheid and who dedicated himself to working against it, President Kaunda had set out at once to loosen those ties, enlisting the help of the Chinese to build a railway to the north, and the Italians to build a new dam. The price of rejecting any dependence on Rhodesia had been severe: during one crisis the country had been forced to export its copper by trucks over a road that came to be called the “Hell Run.” Zambia had survived, however, and she supposed that it was proof of President Kaunda’s genius that it had not only survived economically but had remained involved in and supportive of the liberation movements in her neighboring countries. Those were the words the pamphlet had used:
involved
and
supportive. Embroiled
sounded more appropriate, she thought dryly; certainly nothing had been said about spies, land mines and kidnapings.
    Now of course, both Mozambique and Angola had won their independence after years of guerilla warfare and bloodshed, and Rhodesia and South Africa stood alone as rigid defenders of white supremacy. But she had forgotten—itcame back to her now—that sometime during the worst of the infighting Rhodesia had angrily closed her borders to Zambia, precipitating even more strains on the Zambian economy. A pity, she thought, that taking a stand on moral issues had to prove so lonely these