Free A Single Swallow by Horatio Clare Page A

said, suddenly, ‘you’re such a bright boy. Please – you must try to go to school . . .’
    He looked at me with such a strange look, something like pity. We shook hands and smiled. I drove away.
    I came to Rundu in the late afternoon, apprehensive about it and excited. It was the gateway to the Caprivi Strip, a region about whichthe guidebooks had been tentative and gnomic. It was closed off by the Border War (when South Africa fought the Marxist liberation movement in Angola), then opened to convoys, then shunned again when four French tourists were killed in 1999 (supposedly by UNITA, Jonas Savimbi’s Western-backed, mercenary-rich, anti-Marxist, above all pro-Savimbi militia, long after UNITA had lost their fight for Angola.) The strip itself is one of the most wonderful colonial perversions.
    Even by the insane, bandit laws of imperial cartography, Namibia ought to be a rectangle. The South Atlantic and the magical, diabolical Skeleton Coast to the west; then the Orange River, more or less, to the south; then a straight line up through the Kalahari – jutting slightly to account for the Okavango swamp and Botswana – takes you to the horizontal northern frontier with Angola, formed by the Kunene River, home to the most ferocious crocodiles in all Africa, and the Kovango River. But in 1890 Queen Victoria’s men gave a long flat pencil of land running between the Kovango and the swamp to Bismarck, allowing him to link his vast, boiling wastes (the Kaokoveld desert is a truly extraordinary and still near-impenetrable world) to the Zambezi, which runs eventually to the sea on the other side of the continent. It was not a gift but a swap: Victoria’s subjects got undisputed claim to Zanzibar, prince of spice islands, a prize so rich her ministers also threw in Heligoland – some North Sea rocks – as a sweetener. And Heligoland surely swung it: on paper it is otherwise hard to see how it was a good deal for Germany, partly because of the small matter of Victoria Falls, at the end of the strip, where the Zambezi commits suicide in a giant inverted volcano of sparkling tortured water and roaring rock, which effectively stymies navigation.
    The upshot is that Namibia looks like a child’s attempt to make a paper rectangle, a distracted child, which did not bother to tear off a last strip jutting off the top right corner: Caprivi.
    Rundu is a left turn off the main road, low buildings, lots of people and heavy heat. The guidebook says something about a place to stay by the river. The main street has a curl, a division, and then you hit the river road. There are various signs promising lodges. The roaddown to the one I chose was rough: the Mousebird coped easily with its gradients, broken surfaces, floodwashed gravel and holes, but though we did it several times there was always something interesting between the top and the bottom – a half-nasty spin, a scrape. I missed the turn and ended up at the beach. There were two or three cars and one or two people, listless in the heavy, yellow, riverine peace. I asked someone, who pointed just uphill. We spun around, scuttered back up and turned hard right through an open gate onto a sand track. There were bushes, little lodge huts, a shuttered bar/breakfast room almost overlooking the river and no sign of anyone at all.
    There was a choice between full sunlight or slightly too cool, too deep sand, so we stopped where we were. The owners’ house (‘
owner-occupied, delightful German couple
’ or something,’ etc.) was set back in bushes a little way above the gate. I walked slowly. The front door was shut but everything else was open; a radio played along with the breeze. At just this height above the water in just this much shade it was halfway between very hot and perfect. This is exactly where the colonisers always seemed to live – in the speck of space which nature has made most appealing to people.
    A girl came