Gert’s brother, Danie, worked as a diamond driller, the elite corps among the Copperbelt miners. Most of the diamond drillers were Afrikaners from Johannesburg attracted by the huge copper bonus white mine workers were being paid. They were so named because the cutting edge of the drill bits were studded with industrial quality diamonds to make them hard enough to cut through the rock. Danie worked in a mine near Ndda, in the centre of the Copperbelt. He said he could get me a job as a grizzly man at the Rhoan Antelope Mine owned by Anglo American in the small mining town of Luanshya. A grizzly man worked with high explosives and was the next highest paid job on the mine.
The four-day trip by train left South Africa at Beitbridge and travelled across Southern Rhodesia to Victoria Falls where I crossed the Zambesi into Northern Rhodesia. Southern Rhodesia is not unlike the Eastern and Northern Transvaal but across the great Zambesi the country changes to flat grassland and equatorial forest. The trees which covered vast areas of the country were unlike any I had seen before, for they carried their autumnal colouring all through summer. Leaves of brilliant reds and yellows and even mauves and purple, all the colours expected of a northern hemisphere autumn. A passenger who sat beside me told me of giant edible mushrooms that appear in the forest overnight and grow two feet tall with a canopy three feet across. A mushroom weighing thirty pounds. I’d been around long enough not to take everything I heard as gospel, but in the months to come I would see Africans selling these huge mushrooms at the side of the road, simply cutting off the amount the purchaser required. Giant, brilliantly coloured moths with a wingspan ten inches across also bred on the wet, leafy floor of the forest.
Northern Rhodesia felt different and the Africans, like most from central Africa, were truly black, their faces seemingly flatter and their build smaller than the lighter milk chocolate brown of the Zulu or the Shangaan. They spoke Swahili, and it was with some consternation that I realised it was a language I did not speak and that I was cut off from the African people for the first time in my life. In the mines they talked a language known as Ki-swahili which was not unlike Fanagalo, but like all languages designed for a working purpose, it was limited and stunted. Africans raw from their villages in the bush were recruited to the mines where they were taught this mine language so that they could take instructions from their white bosses and, in many cases, talk to each other. A work gang often contained black miners from half a dozen different tribes, each with a different language.
At four o’clock in the afternoon on the fourth day we finally pulled into the sleepy town of Ndola. Ndola was really only a small community made up of miners’ families and tradespeople who lived off the giant copper mines. The remainder of the town’s people were British colonial service administration officers and their families. It made for an uneasy white dichotomy. The mining families seldom mixed socially with the civil service families established at a separate end of the town. Ndola was thirty miles or so from Luanshya but the end of the railroad as far as passenger trains were concerned.
Gert’s brother met me at the station where the air was filled with the babble of confused and frightened blacks. White mine officers feigned indifference while blue uniformed black mine policeman filled with self-importance and professional impatience herded and pushed hundreds of Africans from the train. Too late now to turn back, they had been harvested from the bush like wild tsamma melons.
For the past two days and nights the train had stopped at small sidings with no more than a tin shed and a small clearing to separate them from the rest of the bush. Here small groups of perhaps a dozen Africans wrapped in blankets would be herded onto the train by a black recruiting officer. The whites of their eyes showed their fear and confusion as they were bundled aboard the hissing, steam-belching monster, jeered at by those who had earlier been gathered up and who were by now, with arms resting casually on the sills of carriage windows, accustomed to the clickity-clack of momentum and the wonderment of the snake which runs on an iron road.
Now they were almost at the end of their journey. I watched as the black mine police tried to get them roughly into line. They came only because drought and a great locust plague had destroyed their crops and the grazing for their cattle. Driven from their villages as indentured labour for the mines, they would work for a year so they could send money to keep their starving women and children alive. The fear these poor creatures felt the first time they were plummeted into the bowels of the earth was a source of great mirth to the initiated black miners as well as to many of the whites.
Gert’s brother noticed me looking at the poor buggers. ‘Ag man, they like a monkey when they first come. They can’t even climb a ladder and when you show them a mirror they go almost white when they see the big ape looking back at them. It’s very funny man, I’m telling you.’ He picked up my suitcase and I followed him over to a green Bedford utility. ‘I just come off shift so I’ll drive you to Luanshya, I telephoned the mess there yesterday and they know you coming. Tomorrow you got to report to the mine recruiting office for a medical and then you go sign on for the school of mines for three months. I got to warn you, man, they got a Welsh bastard there called Thomas, watch out for him. If you get out of the school of mines and get your blasting licence you go onto grizzlies for six months, three if you lucky. But the money is good.’
‘Why only six months or even three?’ I asked as we pulled out of the station.
‘I didn’t want to tell you before, but if you on grizzlies much longer the odds is cut down.’
‘The odds?’
‘Ja man, the odds of getting badly injured or killed.’ Gert laughed. ‘They don’t pay you that kind of money for nothing, you know.’
‘Does everyone go onto grizzlies?’
‘Ja, all the young guys, if you over twenty-two your reactions not fast enough. Only young guys are fast enough or,’ he grinned, ‘mad enough to do it!’
‘Christ, it doesn’t look as though I’ve got a lot of choice!’
Gert’s brother laughed again. ‘None. All young guys got to be grizzly men, nobody else will do it. On the Rand it’s not even allowed. Moving ore through a grizzly is the best way, but it’s also the most dangerous. The miner’s union on the Rand won’t have a bar of it and grizzlies are banned anywhere in South Africa, but here in Northern Rhodesia they don’t care, man. As long as they get the muck out they happy.’ He paused as he made a turn, heading the ute onto a corrugated dirt road leading out of town. ‘But you make blêrrie good money and if you careful you’ll be orright.’
I laughed. ‘Don’t worry, Danie, I’ll be bloody careful!’
He looked at me, his hands vibrating on the steering wheel as we hit a particularly badly rutted strip. ‘That’s the blêrrie trouble, a grizzly man comes on night shift, eleven to seven, he got the job to pull all the ore out of a stope. That’s my job as a diamond driller, I drill the stope all day and you got to pull the muck out through the grizzly at night. If you too careful and you don’t get enough muck through the grizzly so I got an empty stope to work with, you in a lot of trouble man!’ He gave me a knowing grin. ‘You do that a few times and you can collect your ticket. The diamond driller is king and you fuck up his stope you don’t work in the mines no more, man.’
I remained silent. I hadn’t any idea what he was talking about, but I gathered that whatever a grizzly man did he was under all sorts of pressure. And pressure creates accidents.
‘That’s one good thing about Thomas in the school of mines, he makes things so blêrrie bad in your training that if you make it and get your blasting licence you got a good chance of staying alive on a grizzly.’