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Category: Northern Tales

Camping in Northern Rhodesia

From Great North Road

Camping in Northern Rhodesia by Bob Eglinton

My Dad once a year would take his students into the Northern Rhodesian country side for six weeks to carry out hands on survey work in the field. Sometimes a Farmer would pay a small fee to have his farm surveyed, where each field was laid out including gates and corner posts. Fields were all shapes and sizes to take in account the terrain and dry water beds and other potential hazards. This would all be incorporated into lessons as a challenge for the budding students to resolve. The Field trips were during the winter months so it must be February/March for I recall steaming breaths some mornings when we got up. Before starting schooling we would as a family spend the whole time at camp and once I started my school days it was only during the school holiday period that we would join Dad in the field for a two to three week period.

The camps were always very comfortable where there was no electricity. The only concession being a blue 'saucepan radio' hooked up to a largish battery for news broadcasts and evening background. I recall listening to Superman, up, up and away also Dick Tracey. Cooking was fuelled on a log fire or primus stove with lights being a 'Tilley Lamp' and hurricane lamps all fuelled with paraffin.

I am told when I was two that one morning Mom pulled back the blanket to get me up and curled up under the blanket with me was a snake. With the nights being chilly the snake must have thought it had discovered a lovely warm spot!

At a different camp, my sister and I were woken up in the middle of the night by the folks where we and our beds were covered in red ants. I recall standing to one side whilst our pyjamas were quickly removed and ants being brushed off with bare hands. The ants did not bite us for some reason but it put paid to the rest of the night. There were thousand upon thousands, a dark river meandering from out of the darkness, through the tent and on to the darkness on the other side. Sunrise next morning there was no sign of a red ant, only the ones stepped upon during the night.

The black and white picture is of me, up a tree, wearing my Broken Hill School uniform. The other picture is of an oil painting that my mother did and I imagine that the black and white picture gave her part of the camp scene. When my parents immigrated to England Mum as a hobby took up oil painting and went to night school for a year or so. Sadly Mum developed breast cancer and she undertook to create a Rhodesian painting, one for each of here six children before succumbing 1985. This is my painting of the bush camps that I loved as a youngster. Mum loved her country, Southern Rhodesia, with so much passion and was very taken with trees and flowers.

For me it captures the Northern Rhodesia as I grew up in and the full wild beauty of it all. I attach and if you feel the picture suitable then would share this with the Northerners.

Contributed by Bob Eglinton.

April 20, 2003

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