Unexpected pleasures

Living in unexpected places (I wouldn’t like to say quite how little I knew of Zambia before turning up here eight months ago) can have its unexpected pleasures.

Yesterday, someone at school happened to mention in passing that David Shepherd would be giving a talk at one of the other international schools in Lusaka the following evening. Zambia’s capital, I think I might have mentioned before, is somewhat culturally deprived, so to have an event that I would happily pay to attend in the UK was, as I said, an unexpected pleasure.

With the end of April supposedly comes the end of the rains. We could now expect temperatures to fall steadily until July, a winter of sorts (the African sort, with temperatures perhaps even dropping below twenty degrees), before rising until the rains begin again in late October. Except things are not going quite as expected; it has rained twice in the last week. And then, shortly after five this afternoon, our house was battered with hailstones the size of golf balls and the pools that surround our house whenever it rains rose to heights we have never previously seen. Into this we ventured out, determined not to miss such a rare opportunity to spend Friday night doing something other than playing cards. We waded to the car (literally - I had to take my shoes off) and forded the roads that had become silt-laden rivers.

David Shepherd was welcoming people at the door when we arrived. I remarked that he was somewhat responsible for my living in Africa, to which he replied: ‘I’m very pleased to hear it. How’s that?’ I explained that I had grown up in house with pictures of his of African wildlife on the walls and that these had rooted in me a desire to see such things for myself. He took it is a great compliment, which I suppose it was, though I had not realised that when I said it, and we talked briefly about what I was doing in Zambia and how he had first arrived in such an unexpected place. It seems that forty years ago, shortly after Zambia had gained independence from Britain, he was commissioned by the Zambian government to paint a dozen pictures that would be the founding pieces in a national art collection. These paintings are now on display in the National Museum in Lusaka, which we have thus far avoided visiting but will now make an effort to explore.

His talk was a mix of dark, unhappy truths - poisoned waterholes killing over 250 zebra - and humorous anecdotes - cheetah’s tails being used to clean Land Rover windscreens while they use the bonnet as a look-out. His stories revealed that fearlessness that seems to be possessed by many born between the wars, and generally lacking in those born since. It is not reckless valour but that courage that comes from strength of conviction and commonsense, neither of which are quite as abundant as it seems they once were.

All in all it was a thoroughly agreeable way to pass an evening, wherever in the world one might be.