The Tragic Romance of Africa by Dennis Hubbard

Author:Dennis Hubbard [HUBBARD, DENNIS and NICHOLAS, JONATHAN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd

THE CONGO

Football and cricket were popular pastimes and I played in the Broken Hill Railway team for both. The nearby mine also had their own teams, and we frequently played some quite serious but friendly games, which usually finished quite evenly matched. In my first year I was lucky enough to be part of the football team tour when we were sent 200 miles north to Elizabethville just over the border in the Congo. Elizabethville was quite a large town at the time, probably bigger than Broken Hill, and was the capital of the southern Congo province of Katanga. This region was a pivotal area of the Copper Belt and so mining was a huge part of the local economy.

The train north was a huge old steam train: black, filthy, and extremely smelly inside, even more so than the one we’d travelled in from the Cape. The soot fell like rain as it heaved its way out of Broken Hill station with a cacophony of clunking, grinding and hissing like the formidable grand old lady she was. Luckily we only had to sit in the carriage for a single day’s journey, and though it was still officially winter it was in the low seventies Fahrenheit and pretty airless inside. We chugged past Chibwe and Kapiri Moshi, small towns whose names had become familiar to me in the office, before we stopped at Ndola near the border for a crew change. I saw some black men in smart Congo Railway uniforms walking past towards the engine but I didn’t appreciate the significance of this until later when we reached Elizabethville. Over the border into the Congo we passed through Sakania and then Tshinsenda, two more vaguely familiar names, until we reached our destination in mid-afternoon. It may have been my imagination, and even though we were only 200 miles closer to the equator, it seemed distinctly hotter and more humid than Broken Hill. But this was not the most important and notable difference from life in Northern Rhodesia.

After almost a year in Rhodesia and South Africa, where the indigenous black Africans clearly played a secondary role in everything and were not permitted to mix with the white population or hold positions of any status, we’d arrived in a country where the black people seemed to be far more noticeable. This discovery came as a complete revelation to me, as the segregated society was up until then all I’d known in Africa. Clearly this was not the case everywhere. The train driver had indeed been black, as were most of the staff at Elizabethville station. After we’d boarded a bus to take us to our hotel I saw the streets of the town populated by smartly dressed and confident-looking black people, and saw they were working in the shops and even driving cars around. This was something I had not seen before. Yet again I began to ponder some serious questions about the paradise I was living in over the border.

We were

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