FLYING ACROSS AFRICA

Hokitika Guardian, 24 October 1928, Page 8

FLYING ACROSS AFRICA

(By Lady Heath in Stead’s Review)

I listened to< an account by Mr Gerald Bowyer of his adventures in travelling from Cape Town to London by motor ear—the first time a standard motor ear has made- this trip. Mr Bowyer refuse- to call Africa the Dark Continent; he calls it the Light Continent. He says that throughout his journey lie saw but one leopard, a few buck, a couple of hyena, and an odd jackal o-r two.. Roads, whether they are the better loads of Uganda, the narrower native tracks of Tanganyika, or the very occasional roads that thread the swamps in North Rhodesia, all bring to a certain amount of civilisation close to them, for civilsation follows the path of transport. But in flying over Africa one iis unable much as me -would like to, to stick to the safer linos of civilisation and roads, and is obliged to- get from landing place to landing place across anything that may lie between, whether it -lie swamp or forest, or craggy.mountain ranges with desolate valleys in bcrwv-eii. Looking hack on my flight, T am chiefly impressed by the minute scratches human effort has made on the surface or Africa. Over great areas there is a sign of living habitation. The fever and damps of the swamps make life impossible, and in other closely wooded areas there- ts depopulation owing to- the ravages or sleeping sickness. Even in the more highly civilised parts there are great areas of lonely country- mountainous stretches of veldt in South Africa, and •till more mountainous areas of desert to the north. But the centre of Africa cannot be called mountainous. From all its coasts Africa slopes upward to a great central p’nteau, on which are found, far away from the ravages of civilisation, the lowest forms of animal and vegetable life. Many pilots have flown this route, and I have heard cue of them say that on the whole trip he saw no game or anything alive. 1 can only surmise that this man did not know his Africa and did not koow what the living things looked like when he saw them. The natural instinct of game is to stand stock still when it hears a suspicious sound and to remain still until it discovers the cause and direction of that which startles it. It is therefore not to easy for one, who has not actually walked and shot over the country to distinguish wild life. For my part having lived in all three of the British East ) frican territories, and having travelled through all our other possessions ir that continent, often with a gun in search of game, my eyes were quick to see wild animals, and there was an abundance of them.

So. far south as Livingstone—twenty miles south of it, in fact—l sat rhinos in the hush, and flying lou over them was horrified to observe the devoted mother of a- baby rhinoceros run headlong from her charge when she heard the machine. Other game behaved quite differently. On the Sereugati plains in the west of Kenya the great herds of buck, numbering often many thousands, rati like a frightened herd of sheep from tlinoise of the engine. But two or three times on the edge of the plains when I passed over groups of lions, either sunning themselves in the morning heat or ranging from place to place. 1 was surprised to find that they took apparently no notice of my machine. They probably regarded me, as the natives did in various wild -places in which I landed, as an “act of God.” Tll the Southern Sudan I found th-' rhinos more quiescent, the white rhino, a creature peculiar to that region, ignoring my presence completely ; and the large herds of elephants took hut littF notice. Of the smaller game hidd-c among the undergrowth I can sahut little, the tiny buck, guinea fowl and snakes being altogether hidden from my view. Other birds than the guinea fowl, such as the great eagles which frequent the granite hills rising out of the forest plains, drifted by with complete contempt, sometimes only a few yards off.

1 retain wonderful memories of the beauties 'of Central Africa. On the equator itself there is no great heat, owing to the height of the central plateau, and where there is not forest or swamp there are vast rolling plains of agricultural land which the white settler is beginning to discover and to exploit. As soon as the powers that e help him by laying down transport and postal facilities—for those are the two tilings necessary to open up Central Africa—we shall have a great storehouse of mineral and agricultural wealth. A railway runs northward From the Cape for five days’ jo-urnev hofore it branches off towards the Pclg'an Congo. "Westward a line runs inland through Portugeuse East Afri"a from Beira and again another line runs from Dares-Salaam to Lake Tanganyika. Aimt-hor line b gradually creeping eastward from Lobito. but

the very centre, where there are gold ard diamonds, and that still more priceless possession, a rich virgin soil, th'-re is nothing except impossibly bad roads which cnoimt be used during the rainy season. fruit March to October, Never shall 1 forget the beauty of climbing at nine thousand feet over the ridc-e of the lfungwa Mountains on the southern side of Tanganyika. The driftiprr wh'te clouds that held the coniine of the rains were flecking the sky and gliding the crest of the next range. Fndertieafch them, interacting the mottled -grand of the valleys, were the silver riblvms of watercourses flowing to Lake Rukwa and the semi-dry swamp which lies to the north. In this valiev there are hundreds of white people finding a living by washing gold from the rivers. A little further

north a new diamond mine has recently been discovered. Two or three hundred miles still further north, on the shores of 'victoria Nyanza, there is a meat-canning.,industry starting. All these industries are begging for transport facilities to connect them with the mother country. Unless the Imperial Government can find means to provide the help that is required, these people will have to go elsewhere, and their industries will be lost to the Empire. From a navigational point of view flying over Central Africa is' child’s play. The visibility is wonderful. One can see fifty or seventy miles with the greatest ease, and in Africa things are built on a big scale. A single range as large us the Pennine?, a lake as large as Ireland, a solitary hill as big as Vesuvius, are common occurrences, so that one docs not have to concentrate on the details immediately beneath one, such as roads, crossroads, railways, and the twist of tiny rivers as one does in the small area and perpetually had visibility of the British Isles. All hour before reaching Lake Bangweota the shining stretches of its waters and the glittering silver of the bend of the Nile can be seen. The extreme beauty and bigness of things make one forget tin l possibility of a forced landing. The danger is really an ever-present one, and it is danger that could be greatly, lessoned or altogether removed if the Governments of Central Africa would combine to provide a chain ofwireless stations such as they have in the Sudan, and such as the Italian a.nd French colonies so proudly possess. To my mind Ahereorn is the centre of Africa, and for five hundred miles to the south there is a single telegraph line which lies on the. ground for nine months out of twelve owing to the thefts of wire-loving natives, or the pell-mell rush of careless giraffes or storms. To the north of A l: crcorn t-o Tabora there are four hundred miles of forest and swamp over which the trans-African aviator must fly, and through which the trans-African fraveller must go, and here th r, rc ;s no line for communication of any kind. To herald one’s advent or to warn the villages of on-e’s ‘coming means a ten day’s job by runner, one might be lost for weeks in the forests before the country people became aware that it was even necessary to send out a search party. These things must he remedied.