2004 - Mimi and Toutou Go Forth (20 page)

On the other side of the graves stood Dr Hanschell and the British officers. The doctor did his best to listen to Spicer as he read the burial service, but his mind wandered back to the moment when he had been sitting on the quay with Flynn. Spicer had arrived to inspect the
Kingani
, stepping over the corpses of Junge and the others to count the marks where shells had struck.

‘Twelve hits out of thirteen shells,’ he announced. ‘That’s a pretty good show.’ He went on to attribute much of this success to his own range-finding, despite the fact that Waterhouse could not understand his instructions. And then, quite casually, Spicer bent over Junge’s twisted body and calmly removed the dead man’s signet ring.

It was on Spicer’s finger now as he read the burial service psalm: ‘I said I will take heed unto my ways: that I will offend not in my tongue. I will keep my mouth as it were with a bridle: while the ungodly is in my sight. I held my tongue, and spake nothing. I kept silence, yes, even from good words…’

The bugles sounded the last post as the sun flooded in low from the western side of the lake, turning the waves scarlet where the light touched the water. Dr Hanschell watched the deep-red orb dip below the surface. His eye was drawn to a group of Holo-holo behind Spicer. They now knelt down whenever he passed.

Spicer’s words echoed under the bluff, his skirt flapping in a light breeze, the red sun glinting on his new ring. ‘Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay…’

A rifle salute, fired by 50 Belgian
askaris
, concluded the ceremony. Specially chosen guards were posted over the graves during the night. According to Magee: ‘The significance of this lies in the fact that a large majority of the Belgian native troops are recruited from tribes addicted to cannibalism and some of them might have felt tempted to take the opportunity of indulging in their horrible custom if precautions had not been taken to prevent it.’↓

≡ In his lecture, Spicer used this event to display some fancy vocabulary: ‘A guard had to be placed over the graves to prevent the
askari
, who still retain their anthropophagous habits, from digging them up.’

Spicer wasn’t alone in wanting a trophy. Soon after he had returned to his hut, Dr Hanschell was visited by the red-haired Irishman. He had a little bottle of Junge’s blood and wanted to preserve it as a souvenir. A petty officer accompanying the Irishman also had a bottle filled with blood. Holding it up to the light, the doctor saw to his horror that the second bottle contained half a finger that had been severed from one of the dead. He obliged them all the same, pouring antiseptic into the bottles to stop their contents putrefying.

Recounting all this to Shankland in the 1960
s
, the doctor could not remember the name of this petty officer, but the event clearly affected him deeply. It made him wonder in what, exactly, Western civilisation consisted: ‘When they had gone, he sat for a time deep in thought. Spicer had the Captain’s ring as a trophy, the
askaris
wanted to eat the bodies, and now these two men had bottles of blood.
Requiescat in Pace
. ’

A few days later, a tall, half-naked African teenager with long soft curls was brought to ‘Tubby’ Eastwood by his Nyasa servant. Marapandi explained that his name was Fundi and he was the stoker off the
Kingani
. The boys had been hiding him in their camp since he had swum ashore during the fight. Eastwood suggested he join Cross and Lamont in the engineering workshop. Spicer agreed: he had no intention of following procedure and handing Fundi over to the Belgians after they had kept him in the dark about Rosenthal.

This decision increased Spicer’s standing with his men, which had in any case risen considerably since the engagement. They liked the sweet-natured Fundi and he transferred his loyalties from the Germans to the British with remarkable ease. As Shankland reports:

Fundi soon became popular with everyone: he had something of the quiet dignity of a pastoral tribesman. The other boys and the ratings supplied him with clothes, and he was put on the ration strength. The Doctor’s contribution was a used razor blade with which Rupia cut a path through Fundi’s curls, giving him a nice central parting: the boys parted their hair ‘all the same masters’, using razor blades on each other to achieve the proper effect.

It was agreed that Fundi would remain the
Kingani
’s stoker once it had been refitted. The eleven surviving members of the
Kingani
’s crew—three German engineers and eight African deckhands—were marched away by Stinghlamber’s men. The goat that had been on board was adopted by Tait, who tried to dress her up in naval uniform and take her on parade. But the goat was not as tractable as Josephine, although she let the chimp ride on her back.

Over the next few days the
Kingani
was raised and mended. The shell-hole in her hull was repaired by Lieutenant Cross. After sending out for wood from the forest, he made an iron patch over a charcoal fire with bellows. He then applied the red-hot slice of metal to the tear in the hull.

Until then the former racing driver had shown litle aptitude for engineering, so everyone was fairly astonished when the patch worked. Lament, the Glaswegian engineer with whom Cross had a difficult relationship, was full of praise and even Spicer was gracious for once. He promptly renamed the ship HMS
Fifi
, which he thought went rather well with
Mimi
and
Toutou
. It meant ‘Tweet-tweet’ in French and was suggested by the wife of a Belgian officer (she had a little cage bird of the same name). Shankland reminds us that ‘HMS
Fifi
was the first German warship to be captured and transferred to the Royal Navy.’

With Fundi’s help, Lament fixed
Fifi
’s engines and the Belgians handed over a large gun with which to rearm her: it was one of the twelve-pounders that had formed part of their defences on the cliff. They were happy to do this because some new guns had been brought up from Kinshasa. Also their own steamer the
Alexandre del Commune
had at last been repaired and brought out from its muddy resting place on the banks of the Lukuga. There were similar plans afoot to finally assemble the
Baron Dhanis
, which still lay in pieces at Kabalo. A boiler had been found for her at last.

The
Del Commune
now came under Spicer’s command. The Belgians had optimistically renamed her the
Vengeur
. The six-pounder that had been on the
Kingani
when she was captured was mounted on the
Vengeur
. There was a delicious double irony in this, since that gun, like those of the
Götzen
, had once been on the
Königsberg
, Rosenthal’s old ship. Prior to that it had been on the
City of Winchester
, a British merchantman that the
Kbnigsberg
had captured at the start of the War. (The Germans could have celebrated with a nice cuppa afterwards, as the
Winchester
was filled with crates of the best Ceylon tea.)

Why Spicer took command of a Belgian vessel needs some explaining. Though they were hardly on friendly terms, the capture of the
Kingani
had brought about something of a rapprochement between the Allied forces on Lake Tanganyika. The Belgian and British governments had come to an understanding whereby Spicer would be in charge afloat and Stinghlamber in command ashore. The Admiralty was exceedingly pleased with Spicer’s performance. His promotion to full (rather than acting) commander was relayed by Morse code through a pair of Marconi field radios that had been recendy installed at Albertville. At about the same time, another message came through. Spicer read it out at a special parade: ‘His Majesty the King desires to express his appreciation of the wonderful work carried out by his most remote expedition.’

The Holo-holo offered more than mere ‘appreciation’. The sinking of the
Kingani
and the sending away of the German captives did not simply make him a man of power in their eyes, it elevated him to the category of divine being. Everything he did seemed to increase their reverence. ‘The tattooed snakes curling up his arms added to his lustre,’ explains Byron Farwell, ‘particularly when he took to semaphoring to or from the launches, even though no one, not even the signalman, could read his messages. The Ba-Holo-holo believed he was calling to his ju-ju to deliver another German ship into his hands. Perhaps he was doing something like that.’

Acutely aware of his image, Spicer was not averse to a little stage management.

‘You’ve got the devil’s own luck,’ Dr Hanschell told Spicer shortly after Cross had patched up the
Kingani
. ‘All along you’ve been wanting to capture one of the enemy’s vessels—and now you’ve done it!’

‘Only ignorant people talk about luck,’ replied Spicer. ‘This was a case of successful mystique.’

Successful mystique. It was a strange thing to say, because the capture of the
Kingani
and Cross’s repair-work were far from mystifying. Perhaps Spicer meant that he had inculcated a spirit of resourcefulness in his men by cultivating an air of mystery. This may have impressed some of them, but the majority regarded him as a figure of fun. Cross, in particular, went to great efforts not to burst out laughing whenever Spicer spoke.

But among the Holo-holo Spicer was a god. His deification had been well prepared for as news of his journey and the wondrous machines that accompanied him had spread throughout the bush. After the capture of the
Kingani
, his stock needed to be maintained: one of the ways he did this was through a ritual that became known as ‘the twice-weekly bath’.

Every Wednesday and Saturday, just before 4
PM
, Tom emerged from his master’s hut with a grass mat, which he then proceeded to unroll on the ‘quarterdeck’. Without fail, a throng of Holo-holo gathered to watch. Many were dressed in ceremonial costumes with horn and feather adornments; some perhaps wore the slit-eyed wooden masks of the Holo-holo that are collector’s items today, now that the tribe is on the brink of extinction.

Tom would return to the hut and come out carrying a green canvas bathtub on his back, which he then filled with cans of steaming water. As the Holo-holo jostled for the best view, he would place a stool by the tub on which he would set a bottle of vermouth and a tooth-glass. Tom would then test the water in the tub with a forefinger before going to fetch his master.

Farwell takes up the story as Spicer appears—rather like Mr Kurtz in Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
:

The god himself emerged from his hut wearing only slippers and a towel draped round his waist, every inch of his torso covered with tattooed beasts, birds, reptiles, flowers, and insects. He stood for a moment smoking a cigarette in a long holder while his audience clapped. When silence fell, he raised his arms and, flexing his muscles, set the tattooed snakes writhing. Then, handing his cigarette holder to his servant, he stepped into the bath. He scrubbed vigorously, using a heavily scented soap that perfumed the air. When completely lathered, he stood up while his servant rinsed him with buckets of cold water. He then dried himself, wrapped the towel around his waist, and lit another cigarette while his servant poured him a glass of vermouth, which he drank appreciatively.

Sometimes the bath rite was preceded by a series of physical jerks. Farwell doesn’t mention these in detail (and Magee doesn’t mention the bath business at all), but they get the full Shankland treatment: ‘The natives, with eyes open wide, began to sigh—‘Aaaaih…!’ and click their tongues in time with the exercise—‘Click—Aaaaih! Click—Aaaih!’ and kept it up all through the whole performance.’

Shankland’s 1968 account of the expedition is happily free from imperialist prejudice. The same cannot be said, alas, of Magee writing in 1922. His description of the test flight of two seaplanes (which arrived immediately after the capture of the
Kingani
)↓ perfectly illustrates the rhetorical devices used to emphasise the ‘otherness’ of Africans.

≡ Manufactured and supplied by Britain, the planes had Belgian pilots. Armed with 65-pound and 16-pound bombs and four machine-guns apiece, they were assembled at a Belgian post 25 miles south of Albertville.

It so happened that at about the time the Marconi operators made a test of their apparatus the Belgian airmen down the coast, having fixed up one of their seaplanes, decided to make a trial flight. Picture, therefore, the amazement of the superstitious negroes when, shortly after the wireless had begun sending test messages, with the rasping, crackling of electric sparks, lo and behold came the answer to their prayers to Heaven, as the natives thought, in the form of a low droning, gradually getting louder!

Suddenly the seaplane shot into view out of the clouds, describing circles and going through sundry evolutions over the camp. The natives stood spell-bound, gazing upward with arms extended, eyes bulging, and mouths agape.

The airman then made a sudden dive downward and that broke the spell. The savages bounded off into the bush, terror lending wings to their progress. Mothers snatched up their pickaninnies and dived for the shelter of their kraals, shrieking at the top of their voices. It was real pandemonium…

The Holo-holo should not have been underestimated. They understood very well that the balance of power on the lake had shifted. As a result, German intelligence on Belgian activities withered, according to Byron Farwell: ‘The Ba-Holo-holo switched their allegiance from the Germans to the skirted British god, the new master of the lake. The Belgians obtained an extra bonus from the expedition: they no longer had to fear an uprising. The Germans, kept in the dark, still did not know about
Mimi
and
Toutou
, nor did they know what had happened to the
Kingani
.’

Nevertheless, Bwana Chifunga-Tumbo—or Lord Bellycloth as the tribespeople now dubbed Spicer, in honour of his skirt—still had a lot of work ahead of him. He had yet to fulfil his orders and sink the
Hedwig von Wissmann
, which had been sighted scouting the coast after the
Kingani
’s disappearance. And then there was also the matter of the Germans’ largest vessel on Lake Tanganyika: the
Graf von Götzen
was clearly a formidable prospect.