6. Scenery, or Lack Thereof, As Our Train Crossed South Africa and Botswana, Heading Toward Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia

We were simply amazed at the size of this cavernous hole at Kimberley. We soon learned that this was the world’s largest diamond mine, where thousands of mainly African people worked, in the late 1800s and beyond, manually digging for diamonds, the profits of which went to their big bosses, the Whites in charge. We had never heard of the man called Cecil Rhodes, either. He was a young British businessman, an imperialist, and a politician, too. We learned much later that he had gained the monopoly of the De Beers Diamond Company, making enough money to become very rich, indeed, though nowadays people will point out that this was at the expense of those whom he exploited. Not only could he afford to leave a legacy, the Rhodes Scholarship, to Oxford University in England, but he also set out to find even more wealth for himself, exploring uncharted territory further north. Although he didn’t find diamonds there, he liked what he saw, naming the new land which he had “discovered”, Rhodesia, after himself. He is buried in a special grave site in the Matopo Hills, not far from the town of Bulawayo, Rhodesia.

For us, on board the train, we knew nothing then of the history of South Africa, nor of Rhodesia, nothing of the battles that had taken place, between the Blacks and the Whites, between the Dutch and the British, between warring African tribes, even. We were simply interested in what we could see from the train windows, and even that was difficult to come to terms with, because of the drastic changes as the miles sped by. Cape Town and surrounds, at sea level, had been luscious and vibrant, but as we headed north, with the land gently rising before us, we could see more dessert-like, arid conditions all around us. We travelled towards the border, to Mafeking and the Limpopo River, between South Africa and Bechuanaland, which latter is now called Botswana. This country looked desolate to us, with its rugged landscape consisting of dry soil, and short scrubby bushes here and there, and nothing else. No-one seemed to be living there, either, as far as we could discern, until we arrived in the capital of Gabarone. My brother, John, even remarked, one morning, that just before going to sleep the previous night, he had looked out of the train window, and seen a desert with one bush, and that he had woken up today, to see the same desert and still just one bush! We laughed at this comment. The monotony of the landscape and the distances involved in crossing this country, made it hard to believe that the train had continued to chug its way forward throughout the night.