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The Rivers of Good Portent
The Rivers of Good Portent
The Rivers of Good Portent
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The Rivers of Good Portent

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The Rivers of Good Portent is a tale of Africa, based on a real event that occurred in 1608, when two sons of an Emperor were sent to the house of a Portuguese official to be brought up as Renaissance gentlemen. Their tale and that of the lost Mines of Chikova, one of Africa's abiding mysteries, is set in a time of civil wars and commercial rivalry against the backdrop, of ancient cities, imperial fortresses and the mighty Zambezi Valley.

In 1977 a British businessman is given some documents, which have been found in the mission at Baroma in Mozambique by an old friend. These tell in detail a story that is only partly known to history, a story of violence, politics, mysterious trade routes and lost mines, but at its centre is the struggle of these two boys to find their own identity. "...a delicious tale, deliciously told", Jayne Southern, Goodreads

LanguageEnglish
PublisherMark Igoe
Release dateJun 6, 2013
ISBN9781301448968
The Rivers of Good Portent
Author

Mark Igoe

Marco Books are written and published by Mark Igoe. Mark has written widely on travel, history and sport over thirty years in a half dozen different countries in Europe and Africa. He has published a dozen books, often co-authored by his wife Hazel, including a best selling guide to Zimbabwe and a popular guide to buying French property, published by Cadogan and branded by the Sunday Times. He has three grown up children and now lives in Norfolk, England with his wife and two bicycles, all better looking than he is.

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    The Rivers of Good Portent - Mark Igoe

    Before they opened the roof pool bar at Meikles Hotel the only place to sun yourself was on the balcony of your room, a balcony that wasn’t very large, even if you took a suite, as I used to do. The hotel faced a large square with a flagstaff, a fountain and paths flanked with jacaranda trees that in season turned it into a tumult of impressionist’s purple-blue and made my balcony idyllic. The hotel itself was excellent and once had a Manx headwaiter, a German manager and a restaurant that could hardly be bettered in Africa at the time. To stay there was a pleasure, especially when someone else was paying, and it was on such a visit that I first came across the Boroma Archive, an unwelcome distraction as I was enjoying an afternoon nap in the sun on that balcony.

    The phone rang and before the days of cell phones that meant getting up and padding back into the suite to lift the receiver. I hesitated for an instant wondering who it might be. I am not trained to be a secret agent and my presence in that city at that time, doing what I was doing, would perhaps not have met with approval at the U.N. I ordered my thoughts and lifted the handset. A voice said it was Paddy, that he was coming to see me, and I would be in for an hour, wouldn’t I? Trouble was, he said it in French. A lot of vocabulary, syntax and grammar competed for my brain with the question of why Paddy should be speaking French. I didn’t even know he could. So after a pause, I responded, quite fluently, yes.

    Paddy Delgado was the child of a relationship between a Portuguese official and the Irish wife of a British diplomat in Lorenço Marques. He’d been educated at Beaumont, a posh English school, and done his national service in the Royal Marines before studying tropical agriculture in, of all places, Edinburgh. I first came across him when he worked on a sugar estate on the Zambezi, and I for the World Bank. To say he was a tear-away would be a bit like saying that Casanova had an eye for the girls. Highly entertaining when sober, lethal the rest of the time, he was really not an easy person to forget. He now ran some citrus estate in the Mazowe valley near Salisbury, as Harare was called then. As I expected, it didn’t take long for him to be knocking on the door.

    He came in with the daintiness of an African buffalo on steroids: Hell, its good to see you my mate. You look good, like a lobster. Where is the mini-bar? He started rummaging in my fridge without any by-your-leave. Why are all these bottles so fucking small? Wait a bit; you have some Glenfiddich hidden behind the flowers! Who’s a clever boy then? Thanks I will, one for you? The whisky was a present for somebody else. There was a serious shortage of the real thing in the country…and it was only late afternoon. But I had already lost the initiative and with Paddy that was fatal.

    Why were you speaking French? I demanded. Because, he said, my phone was undoubtedly tapped and the plod on duty would have to get a translation by which time he would have come and gone. And why should my phone be tapped? I asked. Because of what I was doing here, he said. But you have no idea what I am doing here. Yes, he did, he said, I was arranging the export of half the country’s agricultural produce for the year. Do you know somebody in CIO? I asked. That was their security police. No he said. Well, how the hell do you know then? Because I had told him when partying with him the last time I was here. Talk about loosing the initiative.

    At this point I better explain what I was doing in Salisbury. First you must understand that in those days Zimbabwe was called Rhodesia and it was run, quite efficiently, I have to say, by the white settlers who had been arriving over the last century or so. However, in most of the rest of Africa the settlers, had there been any, had gone home and the reluctance of these ones to do so, and to hang on to control of the country, caused outrage in the Third World and embarrassment in the West. The Communist Block waged a war against them through the domestic nationalists, but for years there were not enough of these to make headway against their tough little army. The British, whose responsibility they were, could not intervene militarily because their own army was in sympathy with the Rhodesians. So, through the United Nations, they organised trade sanctions against the errant little state.

    Personally, as a British citizen and resident, none of this bothered me too much. It was no skin off my nose who ruled a small country six thousand miles away. But I now held a senior position in an international commodity trading company, one of the bigger ones, and was senior executive for Africa. Africa was one of our largest source areas, and Rhodesia was one of the most important. It now became illegal for us to trade in one of our most lucrative markets. Now, this presented me with a choice of two unattractive options. I could continue my job, break the law and perhaps end up in jail. Or I could let my board of directors find someone who would take the risk. This both scared and enraged me. My own government was asking me to do things their own army wouldn’t do. Or I could loose a lucrative post it had taken years to get and which financed expensive education for my children and fashionable golf clubs for my wife.

    But I was not going to let this beat me. I went to my board with a proposition. They should open an office in Monaco. Lots of companies did this as a tax-dodge so you could rent a convenience address quite easily. The point about Monaco for us though was it was not a member of the U.N. and not subject to Security Council Resolution number S/RES/216. Now, my wife was Italian with a family home in Lombardy. So we would live there – there were enough golf courses – and do whatever was necessary in Monaco about 90 minutes drive away. Also Nice airport was not far, and from there you could fly UTA to Johannesburg and most of francophone Africa, or hop on a Pan Am flight for Lisbon and from there reach Portuguese Africa. It was ideal! I could even take out Italian nationality. Operating out of Monaco with an Italian passport I was virtually immune.

    And so it was. While I still worked for them I based myself in Italy and had a great time. Working in Africa is stressful, but when you can break it with holidays in the Mediterranean it suddenly become more attractive. Years after the whole thing was over I found that the British did know about me, but I had made things just too inconvenient for them to pursue. The efficient Rhodesians, for instance, provided me with a letter which was stamped at their borders instead of my passport, so that it never showed I had visited the place. As to moral considerations, the sanctions were never going to work while South Africa didn’t enforce them, and sanctions always hurt the poorest anyway. I have told you all this, because it explains why Paddy had chosen me for the mission he had in mind.

    Having helped himself to my whisky, he lit a cigarette and asked after the family, in that order, then he said he wanted me to take something to London for him. I said I would if it were legal. He made a rude noise and said that it was because I was so legal here that the Rhodesians were not going to search by bags. I took his point, so I stipulated I would not carry drugs, precious stones, pornography, anything heavy, or bits of dead animals. He said they were just documents. I asked why he didn’t just post them? He said they were too important. I asked where he got them. He said Mozambique. I observed there was a war in Mozambique. He said he had noticed, he had been in it. Of course like every other white Rhodesian male, he was called up regularly, even at his age. I asked what he did there. He said, blow up things, shoot people, and generally have a good time. I began to weary of all this banter and asked for a full and truthful explanation.

    OK, he said. In Mozambique – I’ll tell you how and where one day – I came across a set of documents relating to Portuguese people living there in the 17th century. I think they are valuable, at least from an historical point of view. There is a guy who figures in it who is so much like me, I feel we must be related. Except I don’t think any of my ancestors went to Mozambique then. And he’s called Barbosa, not Delgado. They tell an amazing story. I have showed them to a Dr. Toner at the University here and he worries they may be forgeries. He has told me to send them to a pal of his at Cambridge. Anybody else but you might have them seized by Customs here as valuables leaving the country. But you are leaving with documents even more valuable to them. They are far too important to put in the post and I’m sure as hell not going to give them to the Frelimo government in L.M., I mean Maputo.

    So you want me to get them translated?

    Hell no. I am Portuguese, for God’s sake. The script is hard but the language is contemporary with Shakespeare. I have already translated them – even put them into a story. No, what I want you to do is get it confirmed that those folios are really from the 1600s. Also I want to know how many of the characters in it are known to history. I know Fernão de Albuquerque is, I know one of his descendants. But what about the rest?

    Paddy, what’s all this about? You are not in this for the money or are you?

    I’m not going to all this trouble for nothing. If I can’t make few bucks out of it I shall be surprised and disappointed. But no, you are right. It’s not all about money. One day perhaps, if I ever get it all together you can read the stuff yourself. Somehow I feel a connection to those people and those times. Here they think that Portugal just grabbed bits of Africa and sat on its arse for five hundred years. It wasn’t like that. It’s hard to explain what the connection is. It’s not just a nationality thing. It’s not even a race thing. It may be spatial to a certain extent. I have worked in some of the places in the documents. I have fought in them. Am I difficult to understand?

    Yes

    Anyway, I took the documents to Europe, phoned the guy in Cambridge and organized for them to be delivered. He also attached his translation, which was much longer and read like a novel; there seemed no point in forwarding them as well. He sent the results back to Toner but copied them to me. Yes they were dated to the mid-to-late 1600s. Some names were recoded in other documents, Albuquerque, Madeira, Diogo, Felipe, Avellar, Baptista, others were not. There was no reference to Maria, which I wondered about because I had a list of all the documents’ authors and if Madeira was recorded elsewhere, why not his daughter? I sent the learned observations back to Paddy in the post, and I know it got there because it was to come into my possession again. But I am getting ahead of myself. Having introduced you to Paddy, who was to frighten the life out of me later in this memorial to him, I first have to introduce you to the Boroma Archive. So here goes.

    II The Sertanejo - Pungwe Valley 1608

    To choose a point at which these affairs began? Who cares? I am not a scrivener, a reciter of romances, or some fat monk, saving Your Reverence’s presence. But let us take a day in spring, in the year 1608. We were by the banks of a river in the eastern mountains, I think called the Nyamingura . We had camped in a clearing nearby. I remember Mbiru squatting and cleaning a musket. I told him not to forget the dragon, and wandered down to the river. The path was covered with thick undergrowth, so you couldn’t see your feet, which I don’t like, for it is the snake you don’t see that bites you. I reached the river and sat on a stone, my eyes screwed up against the sunlight, and waited until they became accustomed to the brightness. The path hit the river at a point where a rapid cut the quiet surface, from bank to bank, causing a murmur to become a subdued roar, loud enough to require a raised voice. The rocks of the rapids functioned as stepping-stones - leaping stones in some places - and below them the river dropped in a little step, the height of a man’s knee. Here the panners stood or knelt among the rocks and little islands of sand, dipping their clay pots into the clear cold waters.

    When I could see well, I noticed a figure on the far side of the river, and I recognised him as the thin youth in the jackal skin who squatted outside the local king’s hut. Now he leaned against a tree, watching the panners, then watching me. He carried a club and a spear. I looked at the panners. They were young women, sinewy, black as jet and wore loincloths. I looked down river to where it disappeared into a shallow gorge – green hills against a cobalt sky. I remember this instant because I remember it being the moment of believing that this journey had been in vain.

    The trouble was since Homem’s time people had spoken of Manica and the eastern mountains with awe, as though they were some mysterious treasure house, yet they had been searched these last forty years, their rivers panned, the shafts scoured. Like the famous silver mines of Chikova that existed, I though, only in men’s imaginations, the mountains of Manica never lost their magic. I, of all people should have known better. But when, at Dambarare, a month ago, I heard the rumours, off I had trotted. Have I as many brains, you may ask, as the back end of a mule?

    A woman lifted her head and stared at me. It was not an offensive stare, simply one of fascination. I am, after all, a rare sight. I am hairy, and my large grey beard, my gold earrings and my considerable girth make me somewhat of a spectacle for folk in out of the way places. She was no great beauty either with pointed teeth to go with pointed breasts. I waded over to her. Now, beautiful, what have you got there – show me. I took the pot and examined its shadowy interior, swirling the water around the bottom, to let the light seek out the little telltale grains. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the skinny warrior leave his tree and start to jump from stone to stone towards me.

    There was nothing in the pot but sand and water. I sighed and held it carelessly in the fingers of my right hand as I looked across towards the next panner. The pot slipped and fell on a rock, smashing. The woman gave a little cry. I looked sadly at the potsherds fluttering away in the clear water. The youth with the spear and club was nearly across the river. It doesn’t matter, I thought, there is nothing in this river but fish.

    He of the jackal skin arrived on the rock beside me screaming like a short changed whore. I shrugged and slowly walked back to the western bank, but the youngster was in the water beside me. "You broke the pot – you stole the gold – the king will be angry – all Wazungu are robbers – pay!" I turned and pushed him into the water. The great warrior disappeared, emerging later in a frenzy of rage, splashing and spluttering. The women laughed. I climbed onto the bank, retraced my steps along the overgrown path, and returned into the cool of the forest.

    I approached the clearing carefully to see if I could surprise Mbiru; it was a game we played. I failed. Without looking up he told me the dragon was still in its bed. I sat down on a log and poked about in a skillet to see what I could find to eat. I was rewarded with a little stew. I took some mutsoro porridge from a pot and dipped it in the stew, and was just about to drop it into my mouth when the skinny youth broke out of the undergrowth, still carrying his club, which had perhaps floated better than the spear. He stood over me continuing his tirade about the pot, the king and the character of the Portuguese in general. On this last subject he must have been ill informed because he then had the temerity to put his left hand into the stew and fling it at me. Mbiru looked up in amused anticipation. I stood, grabbed the youth’s club and smashed his skull. Then I sat down and continued my meal. Mbiru went back to cleaning his musket.

    Do you know who that was? he asked.

    An ill mannered fellow said I.

    Certainly; also the son of the local king. For death no mat is spread. Mbiru’s proverbs were wearying but I always had to ask what they meant.

    No mat is spread?

    It means that death makes no allowances for kings.

    Neither do I, said I, where are the men?

    Up river. Down river. Panning. Hunting. They will return before dark.

    So I told him to hide the corpse. We would have to leave that place. If it were King Chisuko’s son there would be trouble, although I thought I had done the father a favour. I did not really regret loosing my temper. There was no gold in the river anyway. And actions like that are inclined to increase one’s reputation; to gain you masimba, a reputation for power and strength.

    When they returned in the cool dusk the men peered at my handiwork where it was hidden under newly cut branches. They packed up their belongings and sharpened spears or loaded muskets, saying to each other that Barbosa was so clever with club; he was fast as a snake, no wonder he was called the Snake-with-Earrings! Then we fed the fire, ate mutsoro porridge, and waited till the moon rose.

    But, I go to fast. If you haven’t been to Manica you will not know what I am describing. If you go west from the port of Sofala you travel through the kingdom of Teve. Then a plateau appears and here begins the kingdom of the Manica. Running from north to south is a range of mountains, which are the beginning of an even higher plateau. Beyond lie many lands most of which pay homage to the Emperor of the Karanga. My fellows and I had gone to Manica from the west and then travelled north, now we had to cross that damned escarpment again, and a fair old climb it was.

    Mbiru had become my closest companion over the last year. He was quiet, although much given to proverbs, good with his hands, fast in a fight, fit for his years and I suspected was a warrior of some defunct war band or a reformed bandit. Now he pushed ahead when we began to climb. He tilted his head back to see the top of the great, dark curtain of black, like a rampart. Under his breath, and to nobody in particular, he commented that these were strange mountains, the trees were strange and not like those around the Mtericue, the people who lived in pits in the mountains were strange, Barbosa was strange. I paid him no attention.

    Is it true Unyama’s people live in holes? This you have told me but I have no way of knowing the truth since we came here from the south. I have seen many curious things in your company, so I can believe anything now, Barbosa

    I heard the question but I did not answer. I glared at him as I tramped past, silently cursing him for expecting a reply. He was not stupid. Did he not know that climbing mountains at my age was no small affair? And here he was pestering me with questions. Could he not see my labour and sweat? Could he not hear my panting and farting? Did he think that two leagues of nearly vertical mountain were conducive to a discourse on the husbandry of the mountain men? He did, of course and was merely tormenting me, reminding me that he was young and I was old, that he was thin and I was stout, that he was a black man and therefore more accomplished at walking. Perhaps all those things are true, but I have other skills, friend Mbiru, I thought. I would box your ears if I had the strength.

    Nevertheless, to live in a hole is a strange thing, especially with goats! But if he is a friend of yours and an enemy of Chisuko, that is a good thing. And they say his people are great magicians and diviners, and live among the clouds. So perhaps holes with goats are not so bad after all.

    But I was not to be drawn by this nonsense. I would make an answer before the moonset and before then we should be in the high forest. The path, of course, was not vertical; not even a scramble, just and uphill walk but a very tiring one. I selected a tree about half a league away on the mountain and decided to rest there. From there we should be able to see if there was any pursuit. If there was there should be time to reach the high forest where they would not dare to follow. We could give Chisuko a run for his money should there be a fight and the high forest was ideal ambush country. When we reached the Unyama lands beyond it we would be safe. The wiry little mountain men were famous for defending their little stone forts and I didn’t think the indolent Chisuko would dare follow.

    At last the moonlit valley appeared before us as the low forest fell away, and it spread out in a patchwork of meadows and woods, pasture and tiny fields, ornamented with tiny pinhead lights of fires. I told Mbiru I would answer his questions when we reached a certain tree on the skyline, about halfway up, and handed him the dragon to carry. We reached the tree, a young broadleaved beech wood, about an hour later. He gave me a handful of mujanje fruit, which I swallowed, gratefully but in silence and we all sat or squatted down in the long grass. We could see we were safe. I ran an eye over my little party. They knew they were safe for now, these men I had endangered with my flash of temper. Not that they minded. Life was cheap in those days.

    It was not as though they were old friends, these dozen or so men who talked quietly, alert as leopards, weapons to hand, staring casually over the darkened plain. Some I had known for a few months, some for a year or two, some only for weeks. They were nearly all Karanga, although two were Sena speakers from the valley and one was a little Tonga with poisoned arrows. They were in my service by consent, they were neither slaves nor servants, but followed me for pickings. Like a lion, I had the reputation of making fat kills, and there was an unspoken contract of meat share in exchange for protection. Except the meat was gold. Like me they were master-less men, owing no allegiance to king or emperor and most could not remember the names of the headmen in whose villages they had been born. Most of their clans no longer existed, having been wiped out in the wars that had accompanied the contraction of the empire. So they lived as they could, part mercenary, part bandit, part miner, part trader, following men like me to the hunting grounds and the goldfields. On this trip I had disappointed them.

    I had learned a lot since I had first climbed this escarpment, as a beardless boy, eighteen years before. I seldom made mistakes like this. But this journey to Manica had been a mistake and now we were empty handed and hungry. Yet I knew Mbiru would anticipate any trouble from the men, and anyway the hospitality I expected at Saunyama’s should shore up any flagging loyalty.

    And so I felt safe too. Mbiru at my back, my old friend, Saunyama, among his strange farms and people up ahead, and soon the dark high forest, where no enemy would follow. Safe but exhausted. For the path wound league after league from grassland into trees, up and up, through the dripping, frightening dark of the ancient hardwoods, until we emerged in the cold, damp mists of the mountaintop.

    With what little breath I had left, I warned the men of the stone forts of the mountain men, which guard the paths. If you have only seen stonewalls in towns or castles, to find one looming out of the dark in the middle of nowhere can be an unsettling experience. Then we set off, the chilly mist about our shoulder like an old blanket. I don’t know when we were first seen; nobody had listened to my talk of the highland forts. But I saw the familiar low stone hat on the skyline of one of them.

    Even in times of peace one family lived there to tend the walls and keep watch for strangers. And few escaped the sharp eyes of children playing atop the ramparts. And as I saw the walls, I heard the voice of a child calling to her grandmother. Soon the news of our presence would be flying along the valley from village to village until it reached the homestead of Saunyama. Twelve they would say, twelve people are coming from Sachisuko, twelve people with four muskets among them; twelve people and one Muzungu, and the Muzungu looked like the Snake-with-Earrings.

    The mist began to lift and I looked down the shallow valley in the welcome lemon light of morning with relief. The deep green forest, from which we had just come, clung to its side like water lapping a shore; a shore made of rolling grassy downs and stone-walled villages, their field tumbling down stone terraces. Already the women were walking to the fields and the smoke from a dozen cooking fires rose straight up into the still air. I could hear the calls along the valley, the tongue nearer to that of Barwe than to Karanga. We marched on along well-beaten paths, which ran among the terraced gardens and over chattering brooks that were hid deep in sunken watercourse in the long grass. It was what the Karanga call the Month of the Goat.

    Presently we arrived at the homestead of the king, a dozen huts surrounded by a wall with a livestock pit in the centre. The gate was open. We waited to be invited in and Mbiru occupied himself examining the stone work, but before he could tell us how crude it was compared with that of his country, Saunyama himself appeared, rheumy eyed and bent, and bid us follow him.

    I have to tell you, King, said I, when we finally collapsed by his hut, exhausted and bathed in sweat, that we may be followed. A little misunderstanding caused me to kill one of Chisuko’s sons. Some snuff?

    "Chisuko, he will not come up here. So long as you have caused no problem with the Manica. Chikanga has been after our land for an age. Chikanga is king of the Manica, you know, Barbosa." As we talked the men of the village gathered and men from other villages too. No, I told him, I had caused no harm in Manica, I had paid my respects to the Chikanga, crawling through the dung and dust before him, and bringing him presents, and this word made the old man’s eyes light up and the question as to what I had brought him hung in the air. I had bought him a bag of good beads, as it happened. This was not as fine a present as I usually brought, but it didn’t matter. He had done very well out of me in the past. When I discovered using the mountains as way to Tete avoided having to pay the Emperor’s tolls or those of the rapacious king of Manica, I had come often, and showered the little tyrant with Cambay cloth

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