My mouth is slightly dry and I find myself shifting in my seat. I’m nervous. I’d be insane not to be. Nervousness is just a heightened sense of awareness. That man in the battered green Toyota, for instance: is he really staring at us from behind his newspaper? Then I see which newspaper it is and feel better. No intelligence agent in Zimbabwe is likely to read an opposition paper.
‘I’ll stop here so you can just shoot out quickly,’ says the driver, a local man who’s volunteered to drive us round. It’s only ten yards of pavement, but I know it’ll feel like walking half a mile. The others seem much more composed: Oggy, the producer I now work with permanently, and Nigel, the South African cameraman I first teamed up with during the siege of Sarajevo in 1992. We’re not supposed to be here. The BBC is banned by the Zimbabwean government, and so am I, individually. We work on the principle that they don’t really care about us, but things can change.
When we’re in the shop I feel safe. It’s stupid, of course, since the security police have no less power inside the shop than they do outside. I suppose it’s because it feels so normal and pleasant and familiar in here. There are a lot of shops around the world which I like, but Fereday’s, the best camping and trekking shop in Africa, is one of my favourites. It was founded a century ago in the centre of Harare, in the days when you needed to hire a brace of ox wagons and the same number of rifles to get around the country. But a few years ago it migrated to the smart suburb of Borrowdale – not as glamorous, but easier to get to.
Over the years I have bought wallets, tote bags and hats here, and one of the two small grips I carry with me on my travels is always from Fereday’s. I feel better equipped as a result. An ethnologist might call it a totem, but anyone else would be right to call it a superstition. This time I found a folding stool here for my three-year-old, who will adore it. But I was mostly looking for something else: boots.
In the city of Bulawayo, a little decayed now but still stately, with wide avenues and grand buildings, is the workshop of that greatest of Zimbabwean institutions, the Courteney boot. Handmade from game leathers and welded tyre-like treads, indestructibly tough, each pair stamped with a number, Courteney boots are designed by a third-generation shoemaker called John Rice. They get their name from the magnificent late Victorian hunter and naturalist, Frederick Courteney Selous.
Selous was an attractive character, a hunter and one of Africa’s earliest conservationists. He was born in 1851, the unlikely product of a marriage between a chairman of the London Stock Exchange and a poetess, and headed off aged 19 to make his life in Africa. Henry Rider Haggard based his character Allan Quartermain, of King Solomon’s Mines fame, on him. Selous had children by at least three African women, as well as by his wife, who lived in outer-suburban Worplesdon in Surrey. He joined the British Army in WWI, and was killed by a sniper in 1917 in what is now Tanzania, aged 66. The German general in command on the other side sent a note of apology across to the British for his death.
A local friend who helped me on my first illicit trip to Zimbabwe at the start of 2008 gave me an excellent pair of Courteneys, but they look a touch out of place on the King’s Road in London. And I spend rather more time in London, alas, than in the African bush. So I wanted something slightly more urban. Fereday’s sold Courteneys – might they have a pair of my size, in a style I liked? In Zimbabwe, with all its shortages, that was not at all certain. So while Oggy busied himself with bush shirts, and Nigel looked at the fishing gear, I headed for the boot section and there, on display, was a pair of Courteney’s Vellies in my size.
Vellies have a long history in southern Africa. The word is short for velskoene, Afrikaans for ‘bush shoes’ and (as used by generations of brown-kneed characters) it sounds like ‘fellies’. The British heard about them from South African and Rhodesian soldiers in the North African desert during WWII and called them ‘desert boots’. I went through plenty of pairs of desert boots in the 60s, when they were fashionable, but they rarely lasted long. Courteney’s Vellies, by contrast, are made of kudu or some other game-skin, legally culled in the Zimbabwean bush, and they last forever.
I walked out of Fereday’s wearing my new Courteney Vellies, and dived into our waiting car to avoid being spotted. They were comfortable from the first moment, though a purist might have felt that the colours of the left and right were mildly different. I suppose kudus aren’t always identical. But after a week or so in the dust and sun of the bush they would match perfectly well.
And so I added another element of totemism to my travel gear. It’s not that I’m superstitious, I tell myself – it’s simply that I always seem to work better when I’m wearing my Courteneys and travelling with my Fereday’s grip. Perfectly rational, you understand. I suppose it makes me feel mildly Frederick Courteney Selous-ish, as though I could handle just about everything that comes charging towards me.
Armed with all this totemism, I got through the trip successfully. I even suggested, as we drove through Bulawayo, that we should visit the Courteney Boot factory. But Oggy felt enough was enough and his word goes.
John Simpson is the BBC’s world affairs editor and can be seen around the globe on BBC World News, which is available in 200 countries and territories worldwide, and on selected British Airways flights.
