2004 - Mimi and Toutou Go Forth (24 page)

Spicer-Simson, standing on his verandah, watched it intently through his glasses, while Dudley, beside him, pleaded with him to order an attack. In the harbour,
Fifi
was getting up steam and
Mimi
was preparing for battle, but Spicer let the moment pass. The
Graf von Götzen
looked formidable; he had already earned his place in history. While Dudley argued, the
Graf von Götzen
altered course and disappeared.

In the middle of the argument Spicer simply turned abruptly on his heel and went back into his hut. Cursing him, Dudley strode past Odebrecht and the doctor—and without looking at them, says Shankland, ‘went to the edge of the bluff and put his hands to his mouth to form a trumpet and shouted, ‘As you were! As you were!’ He waved to the crews to come up, and went off down the path to meet Wainwright.’

Odebrecht watched the whole scene from the cliff’s edge, but remained silent. Then comes the most dramatic moment in Shankland’s marvellous book: ‘[As] at last he turned and gazed straight at the Doctor, not a muscle of his face moved. Then he walked quickly away and entered the hut where he was billeted.’ Three days later, Odebrecht was marched to a prisoner-of-war camp, still wearing the doctor’s mosquito boots.

In the interim, Fundi had turned up at the hospital tent with terrible burns on his hands and shins from stoking
Fifi
’s furnace during the attack on the
Hedwig
. Lament had only noticed these injuries as they were preparing for the aborted attack on the
Götzen
. Fundi’s body was a suppurating mass of blisters, especially the tops of his feet. In the service of his new colonial masters, he had raked out the hot ash directly onto them. The romantic adventure of
Mimi
and
Toutou
was well and truly over.

M
orale plummeted over the next few days. The men wanted to go out and fight; an instinct that the reappearance of the
Götzen
rubbed raw and angry. Twice again she had been spotted on the horizon, the temptress, casually riding the swell. Still Spicer refused. He gave no reason, but perhaps he believed he had fulfilled his orders by sinking the
Hedwig
and it was foolish to pitch
Mimi
and
Toutou
(now repaired) against such odds.

It was a time of signs and wonders. Walking through the bush, Dr Hanschell had been delighted to come across a carpet of golden butterflies that stretched for yards around. A few days later he was less pleased when he awoke to find a brown-and-pink, diamond-patterned snake near the wall of his hut. He stamped his foot and it fled outside. Curious, the doctor followed. The snake had gone. On the lakeside opposite, the sun was rising behind Mount Kungwe at exactly the point where it reached its full height of 8,620 feet; its notched, double-topped head embodying the greatest demon of the land. A few days later news came through on the radio that Spicer (with whom the Admiralty was generally well pleased), Wainwright (for carrying out Spicer’s orders to the letter) and Lamont (for running
Fifi
’s engines without a stoker) had all been awarded medals. On hearing of his award Lamont disappeared to his workshop. He emerged at nightfall, clutching a brass medal on one side of which he had engraved the words FUNDI RN (Royal Navy) and on the other HMS FIFI, 9 FEBRUARY 1916. But who would present it? As Shankland tells us:

The Black Squad↓ went in a body to Spicer and asked him to present it at a ceremonial parade. Spicer gave permission for the parade, but thought it wouldn’t be tactful for him to take part in it personally. Marapandi produced a broad ribbon of red, white and blue from which he suspended the medal.

≡ The African connections of the expedition.

In the end, Lamont presented the award himself. After it had been hung round his neck, a beaming Fundi acknowledged the cheering, clapping crowd and went round shaking everyone’s hand, Spicer’s included.

Not long after this spontaneous display of gratitude, Spicer abruptly left Albertville. He said he was going down to Stanleyville and left Wainwright in charge, adding that he was not under any circumstances to attack the
Götzen
unless the German ship began shelling the camp.

Spicer was away for months. The expedition heard that he had gone down to Leopoldville (Kinshasa), the Belgian capital on the western Congo, more than 1,500 miles away. Nobody knew quite what he was up to,↓ but on his travels Spicer received a telegram from General Northey, who commanded British troops in the region, asking him to attack the
Götzen
.

≡ He tried to commandeer a boat belonging to the British consul at Banana on the mouth of the Congo, but was overruled in a stern missive from Bonar Law at the Colonial Office.

Spicer replied that he would not, because he thought the chances of success too slim.

It was during Spicer’s absence that the statues started to appear. The Holo-holo had been so impressed by the sinking of the
Hedwig
, writes Magee, ‘that they moulded images of the commander in clay (and good likenesses, too) which they worshipped in their villages as their new ju-ju’. Dr Hanschell first heard about them when Rupia had burst into his hut as he was writing some letters home.

‘Navyman God!’ said his servant with a mysterious smile. When the doctor asked him what on earth he was on about, Rupia merely repeated, ‘Navyman God!—You come see!’

He followed Rupia out to a small clearing in the bush, where they found a clay statue about two feet high with short legs and arms but a well-modelled face and torso. The doctor told Shankland how he ‘went up close to it and found that the face was a recognisable caricature of Spicer with a pointed beard and wearing a sun-helmet. It was grasping with both tiny hands an object representing a pair of binoculars. Tiny incisions marked the tattooed snakes and butterflies on the chest and forearms, and between the squat little thighs there was a bit of native loin-cloth.’

Later, the Catholic missionary from the Order of the White Fathers came to Dr Hanschell for quinine as he prepared to return to his church at Karema (established in 1885, the mission station was formerly a vast transit camp for slaves en route to Zanzibar). The White Father confided to the doctor that these statues had been appearing all along the lakeshore and inland as well. He accused Spicer of undoing all his good work as the tribe reverted to its old ways: there had been some cockerel feathers and snakeskin on a platform before the statue and some stones smeared with blood. The elderly White Father had spent many years trying to persuade the Holo-holo to give up cruel practices and idolatry and embrace Jesus Christ—and now a fetish of a European had been set up within a few miles of his mission!

‘I suppose they think of me as some kind of great chief witch doctor?’ Dr Hanschell asked the despondent missionary.

‘No—that’s not their name for you,’ replied the White Father, at last breaking into a smile. ‘What they call you, as nearly as I translate it, is something like ‘Harmless Village Idiot’. Poor doctor! No statues for you!’

Why had Spicer, in particular, inspired such worship? The snakeskin by the statue is of relevance here, and it relates to the spirit of Mount Kungwe. Mkungwe had two troublesome sons, Katavi and Lubadyu. According to Dr Egon Kirschstein in a 1937 edition of
Tanganyika Notes and Records
:

The tale tells of a quarrel between Katavi and his father Kungwe long long ago, whereby Katavi split the father’s head. That notch is visible today. Kungwe did not pardon the insult, but ordered Katavi to leave the country. In his anger Katavi threatened to create another Tanganyika somewhere else. Old Kungwe smiled contemptuously when he heard of such a boast by the outcast. Katavi, however, fulfilled his threat and made a new Tanganyika further inland, in that part of the country which is now called the Katavi plain.

Katavi’s brother Lubadyu was similarly outlawed, so enraging Kungwe that he picked him up and threw him over to the other (Congolese) side of Lake Tanganyika. ‘The effort was so great,’ according to C. C. O’Hagan,↓ ‘that Mkungwe lay down and in the early morning he can be clearly made out from the north lying on his back, his head towards the water, his knees raised with his hands clasped over his stomach.’

≡ A British colonial official who climbed Mount Kungwe in May 1939.

Mkungwe has never risen again. Over on the Albertville side, Lubadyu made mountainous country, too, when he fell; but the shock of the fall was so great that he disintegrated—‘so that only his bulk, but not his form can now be made out’. This myth of the division of a single land mass into two parts, each with a divine authority subordinate to a greater power, may be related to a theory advanced by the explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley—namely that early humanoids were witness to the tectonics of the Rift Valley (which produced Lake Tanganyika) and retained that distant memory in their myths and legends.

Holo-holo mythology has a strict hierarchy. Just as the spirit Mkungwe reported to the cosmogonic god Kabedya Mpungu (who does not concern himself with merely human affairs), so the errant sons reported to Mkungwe. Doubles play an important part in these legends. For instance, on appeal, the ancestral spirits of human twins (known as Migabo) would act as intercessors to Katavi and Lubadyu, who would pass this appeal to Mkungwe and so on up the chain to Kabedya Mpungu. The Migabo were usually approached and called upon after a vision or dream of snakes. Seeing snakes meant that the spirits had been neglected.

Add to this a related story about a monster in the lake (which was thought of as a giant snake) and we come closer to understanding why the tattooed Spicer was so revered. The snake designs on his arms and thighs plugged him directly into the mythic consciousness of Holo-holo society.

His main claim to holiness, however, was his victory over the Germans, who were disliked by some Holo-holo for violating a sacred site. In 1925 G. W. Hatchell wrote about visiting Kafishya, near Karema on the former German side of Lake Tanganyika. Here the Holo-holo had once stored wooden images of the old kings of the people, which they brought over when they crossed from the Congolese side:

It was said that a German, Lieutenant Bishoff, having reason to suspect that Kafishya was the scene of human sacrifice and believing that he had found human blood on the images took them away and destroyed them. Certain of the older people at Karema however believe that many of the images had been sent to Berlin.

According to Hatchell, a sect of Holo-holo women keep the skulls of the dead kings safe from any further interference at another site on the lakeshore. I heard the same story during an expedition to the lake in 2003 and it cast some light on Spicer’s deification.

When their kings became infirm, the Holo-holo would kill them. This was done with full ceremony, but in secret by a witch doctor. As part of the ritual, the new king would emerge from the same hut in which the old king had been murdered and thereby take his place (the dead king’s skull would then be kept as a sacred object). This symbolism may well have played its part in the deification of Spicer. Having killed the ‘old king’ (the Germans), he took on their power. It is a variant of the Fisher King myth made famous by Sir James Frazer’s
The Golden Bough
(1890–1915).

Modulations of this ritual can be found in various parts of the Rift Valley and Nile basin. While it seems to be geographically focused on the nexus of the Great Lakes, it is the wellspring of many myths of renewal that travelled far and wide. During their explorations of Lake Tanganyika in November and December 1871, Stanley and Livingstone were told a fable by their boatman Ruango which reiterated many of the cultic motifs, including fish and secret enclosures, that Jesse Weston believed underpinned medieval romances such as
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
and were furthermore the bedrock of the Holy Grail story. Weston’s
From Ritual to Romance
(1918) is said to have exerted a profound influence on T. S. Eliot.

The fish myth may have some connection to giant Nile perch (
Lates angustifrons
). Found in Lakes Tanganyika and Victoria and throughout the Nile system, they can grow as large as seven feet long and weigh up to 400 pounds (for comparison, the largest salmon ever caught was probably around 71 pounds and most salmon are 10–16 pounds). As Christopher Ondaatje writes in his
Journey to the Source of the Nile
(1998): ‘They were known to the ancient Egyptians, and mummified remains of the fish have been found. There is some evidence that Nile perch may have once been the object of cult worship.’

Sadly the men of the Naval Africa Expedition were prevented from fishing for Nile perch by the power of another king. In colonial times, Lake Tanganyika was regarded as the private fishery of the Belgian King Albert I, so Stinghlamber forbade them from using the fishing rods they had brought all that way.

§

By the time Spicer returned to the lake on 12 May 1916, plans were afoot for the Belgians to take Kigoma, the German provincial capital, and the British to take Bismarckburg, their redoubt at the foot of the lake. A British column under one Lieutenant-Colonel Murray was advancing on Bismarckburg through Northern Rhodesia (Zambia). The idea was that Spicer’s flotilla would support them from Lake Tanganyika and prevent the Germans from escaping by water.

Mimi, Toutou, Fifi
and
Vengeur
were loaded up and prepared for the long journey. The men wanted to take the goat from the
Kingani
, but Spicer wouldn’t let them. With tears in his eyes, Tait led the animal behind a hut and shot it. The goat was burnt and its ashes cast upon the waters of the lake. Eastwood’s chimpanzee Josephine, however, was allowed to join Dr Hanschell on
Fifi
.

They arrived at Bismarckburg on 5 June to find a white fort armed with cannon and a harbour in which floated a fleet of dhows in the German service.↓

≡ The ruins of the fort can still be seen at Kasanga in present-day Zambia.