For the past 50 years, former tea planter Geoff Fox has forged a remarkable relationship with the Hehe people of southern Tanzania. Angus Begg reports
Later, I come across a copy of the Book of Kings written by another Persian poet, the 10th-century Ferdowsi, while searching for souvenirs in a city market. It is more portable than some of the other gift options that are presented to me – including carpets bearing the likenesses of Vladimir Putin, the Aga Khan and Ahmed Shah Masood, the ethnic Tajik leader of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance murdered in 2001 by al-Qaeda suicide bombers.
Nearby, pensioners and dependents queue at a money-wiring office to collect funds sent by family members working in Russia, Dubai and elsewhere. The Tajik economy has yet to find a replacement for the subsidies of Soviet times and wages have remained largely stagnant.
I get chatting with Aslibegim, a 36-year-old lecturer in English at the Tajik State University, who supplements a $50-a-month salary with translation work for UN aid agencies. He is another one who looks back to the old days with affection.
‘Things were better then,’ he says. ‘Everything was cheaper, now we are always worrying about money.’
Pervasive corruption also keeps Tajikistan poor. Zamon, a young businessmen selling Russian DVDs and Chinese stationery in the market, defends his prices by saying he needs to pay a krisha, slang for a government official who will organise the paperwork in return for a bribe.
Long-term prosperity, however, may lie at the end of the Pamir Highway in the shape of Tajikistan’s massive and booming neighbour, China. On the whitewashed wall of a restaurant two hours’ drive out of Murghab on the way to Khorog we had spotted the Chinese characters for ‘food here’ painted in red. The sign was the idea of restaurant owner Salimjon Surbanov, who was targeting a hungry influx of Chinese merchants following the reopening of borders at the end of the Tajik civil war.
The Pamir Highway may wear thinner before Tajikistan can hitch itself to China’s growing economic power. But what the country lacks in asphalt and motels it makes up for with the kind of hospitality that is almost unheard of in other parts of the world. The highway may not always have brought benefit to this region in the past, but it could yet provide a lifeline to a better future.
It is 9:30am, and we are sitting in a 4×4 on the large piece of uneven sand and gravel that is the car park of the Mafinga bus-station. Me, 70-something Geoff Fox and Emmanuel Mdemu of the thick glasses and encyclopaedic knowledge of everything that has ever happened in Mafinga and quite some way beyond. Mdemu is slightly younger than Fox.
A dusty crossroads in Tanzania’s Southern Highlands, Mafinga is where the bus heading for the capital, Dar Es Salaam, will hopefully stop and pick me up. It is a grey and overcast day, a stiff wind is wrapping itself around what appears to be the terminus shelter – and the bus is two hours late.
To kill time, we drive around the town, Fox and Mdemu reminiscing about occupants, past and present, of the houses we pass. ‘This is where Tom, a Belgian woodworker, lives… and there’s Swedish engineer Kjell Svensson’s place.’ Apparently, Kjell’s wife tried to return after leaving him, but he would not have her. The tales sound like extracts from my book, The Expat Diaries.
Fox arrived in Tanzania in 1959 with the idea of becoming a tea planter for Brooke Bond, the British tea producer. He found a lot bit more than tea. What he discovered was to change his life and keep him rooted to a country that would replace Devon, the English county that he had until then called home.
Based in the Southern Highlands, working on tea plantations created by German settlers some half a century earlier, Fox soon found himself living the type of settler existence not far removed from that described in books about 1960s colonial Kenya. Perhaps most importantly, given the direction his
For the past 50 years, former tea planter Geoff Fox has forged a remarkable relationship with the Hehe people of southern Tanzania. Angus Begg reportslife would take, he learnt about the true meaning of safari, Swahili for ‘to travel’ or ‘make a journey’.
In Fox’s case, such journeys were far from his previous existence in genteel, rural England. He and his wife, Vicky, would safari from the cool, forested hills of the highlands, down into the low country and towards the Ruaha river. It was an untamed landscape home to elephants, lions and the type of African wildlife made popular with a global audience through Born Free, the 1966 film of George and Joy Adamson’s adventures with ‘their’ lions.
Over the years the Foxes would make the journey repeatedly. Later they would drive, taking their children and camping along the river – never far from the wildlife. They were not alone in their earliest adventures. Carrying their tents, clothing, food and cooking-gear were what Fox refers to as ‘the head porters’, helpers sourced from the local Hehe tribe.
These adventures were the Fox family’s first encounters with Wahehe – the Hehe refers to a rumbling chant made by the warriors when preparing for battle, wa meaning ‘the’ – who are an amalgamation of various tribes that achieved local fame in 1891 when their chief, Mkwawa, led them to take on the might of Imperial Germany – putting at least one force of colonial troops to flight.
Fox feels the need to repay Wahehe for their generosity of spirit, and much of his focus today is on creating social projects in Mafinga.
Emmanuel Mdemu, a former forester with Brooke Bond, the same tea company for which Fox worked, has researched the history of Wahehe. ‘After that ambush, which was regarded as a military defeat, the Germans regarded Wahehe as the herrenvolk [master race] of East Africa.’ And, among the tribes in the region, Chief Mkwawa gained a reputation for having supernatural powers.’
Fearing swift and punishing retribution from the Germans, Mkwawa fortified his kraal, a traditional village, arranged in circular formation. The German-led forces attacked and Mkwawa escaped. For many years the deposed chief evaded arrest, effectively living as a fugitive. ventually, of course, the Germans caught up with him. A vague blend of fact and legend has him holed up in a cave, where he shot his two bodyguards before turning the gun on himself, rather than suffer the indignity of capture. The Germans supposedly beheaded him on finding his body, and sent the head to Berlin. It remained in Germany until 1954, when the British recovered it, allowing the last governor of Tanganyika, Sir Edward Twining, to return it to its homeland.
Hardened by more than half a lifetime in East Africa and a stint as a youngster in the Royal Marines, Fox nevertheless speaks of Tanzania and Wahehe with a fondness that comes from years of intimacy; it was a Hehe, Nallos Kihega, who taught him how to pluck and plant tea. And Mdemu himself, another Hehe, instructed Geoff in the art of bee-keeping and, as they grew older together, explained to him about the trees and plants of Mafinga.
With such a background it was perhaps to be expected that the very notion of safari would become a business for the family – and it was in the early 1980s, long before Tanzania became established on the tourist map, that the Foxes started their company. This was roughly the same time that Tanzania’s economy, under Julius Nyerere – described by Fox as ‘a good man’ – was brought to its economic knees by an unworkable form of socialism.
Clockwise from top left: lioness and cub at the Ruaha National Park; the family’s tennis court; the Foxes have invested in two Cessna Caravans; a fugitive Chief Mkwawa rested beneath this tree
‘One day we found some chaps at our favourite spot on the Ruaha river. And they had a fridge.’
Clockwise from top left: lioness and cub at the Ruaha National Park; the family’s tennis court; the Foxes have invested in two Cessna Caravans; a fugitive Chief Mkwawa rested beneath this tree
But the seed of the idea had been planted much earlier, on a safari in 1972. ‘We found some chaps at our favourite spot on the Ruaha river… what made it worse was that they had a fridge. This meant cold beers, and we’d always had to make do with warm ones.’ It was this discovery that led to the family establishing the first of their safari lodges.
Up at Mafinga, Fox explains that much of the land he now owns there was given to him by the local community; the only condition was that he must create jobs for locals, which he has done. ‘If Chief Adam Sopi was still alive today,’ says Mdemu, referring to the previous head of Wahehe, ‘he would make Geoff an honorary Hehe.
‘He has done a lot for development – built infrastructure and always employs Hehe, even in Ruaha and Katavi [national parks where the family has safari lodges].’ t the Foxes’ wilderness camp in Katavi National Park, perhaps Africa’s most remote wildlife mecca, four hours’ flight in a six-seater Cessna from Dar Es Salaam, I come across more Hehe, all immensely proud of their tribe’s fame and tradition, of the name Mkwawa. At the lodge in Ruaha, the staff nod and smile enthusiastically when I ask if they are Wahehe.
Fox is so taken with the history of Wahehe that he is encouraging Mdemu to write a book on his and their history. But his friend’s spectacles are broken, and today he cannot read a page without holding it up to his nose, let alone write one. Mafinga is short on shops of any kind, so Fox is making it his mission to find his old friend suitable reading glasses.
Tales of his life in Mafinga are peppered with references to other old friends, white people who have now moved away or back home. Only two other Europeans from the old colonial days remain.
When I ask Fox if Tanzania is where he would like to end his days, despite the departure of many of his friends, his answer is instant. ‘Oh yes,’ he says. He then takes me to what he calls ‘the old folks’ home’. Fox has always liked building things – ‘Did you know I built five dams?’ – and some way past the tennis court, the bowling green and a secret fairy garden created by one of the female Hehe employees, a house is being built for their retirement. It has been dug out of the earth, built by the villagers using little more than the most basic of tools.
Yet, seemingly, the elder Fox cannot find enough to do. Chatting in the car, he expresses the need to repay Wahehe for their generosity of spirit, and much of his focus today is on creating social projects in the Mafinga area – an Aids orphanage, an outreach programme for mothers with HIV-positive children, classrooms for the local primary school, and a clinic and dispensary.
This remarkably fit, often bossy, 70-year-old says he far prefers his adopted country to England. It appears to have much to do with mentality.
‘I’ve always maintained that the [European] colonies were created by remittance men and misfits,’ says Fox, referring in no vague way to what he regards as the general mismanagement and ‘lack of understanding’ of the various multinationals that arrived in the country in more recent times.
Back in Mafinga, the bus still has not turned up. Over the two hours we spend waiting, Fox is warmly greeted by men there to catch buses that will take them to different parts of the country. I get the impression he feels he has lived a privileged life here in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania, and that he truly values his friendship with Wahehe, who have made his experiences richer.
‘It is unusual for white men to respect illiterate black tea farmers, but Geoff showed respect,’ says Mdemu. ‘That may be a small thing, but Wahehe remember.’
