Tag Archives: Africa

Uncategorized

AFRICA DAYS 10: Rainy Season, Bush Travel and Prep for the Drive Out

Leave a comment

GENEVA OVERHOLSER

MAR 19, 2025

Note: Africa Days is a series of posts based on journals and letters from my years living in Kinshasa and traveling across Africa, beginning in 1974. You can read previous and following posts on Substack and below.

As the rainy season approached once again, I thought back to The Fight the previous year, and how astonishing it was that the torrent had held off until moments after Ali’s victory. Had it started before the fight (as feared) it would have been disastrous, for a rainstorm in Zaire is like nothing you’ve ever seen. In a letter home, I seem bent on rhapsodizing about it:

“In Zaire, everything loves a rainstorm. Things that elsewhere would go under cover, here come out. Color, for example. Rainstorms are usually gray. Not in Zaire. Just before they come, in late afternoon toward evening, the sky turns a vivid yellow, so that everything is shot through with it. The usual lush green is charged with yellow. As soon as the rain comes, the yellow clears. The sun sets pink in one part of the city, a pink that spreads wider than any dry sunset. And then the sky turns silver. A luminous silver behind shining dark-wet green trees.

“The lightning, too, is brighter than any I’ve seen — even against the silver sky — and it flashes a blinding white. The white flashes in complete silence, broken eight or 10 seconds later by awesome gurgles and groans, turning into jagged boulders of sound, rolling from one horizon to another, reverberating like a base speaker that can’t handle the volume.

“Everything moves and sways. The trees — so heavy and hot in the blanketing heat — are released into movement. For the big old mango trees, this means slow swaying of heavy limbs, each branch softly muting the next on its swing back and forth. For the bamboo, which grows so high that its normal position is diagonal, the winds bring low balletic dips and slow, smooth lifting, then a low dip to the other side. Their papery leaves — in tiny millions — seem to stretch and stroke the breeze.

“It’s the palms, though, that seem made for these storms. Each frond meets the wind and rides it in its own way — ostrich plumes blown by invisible fans, lifting and curling, dropping and flinging straight — until the wind is finished playing and comes on powerfully strong. Then the palm is like a little girl whose long hair is blown straight sideways, baring her tiny head. The birds, too, love the rain in Zaire. They sing loudly in their trees as it begins. They’re followed by bats, who swoop dark, high and low against the silver sky.

“As the storm exhausts itself, the sky turns a bruised lavender gray like an old film. The lightning now looks gold against the darkening sky, and it’s hard to tell bats from the wind-borne bamboo leaves.”

That Thanksgiving of 1975, we took a wonderful multi-day trip into “the bush” to the east of Kinshasa with friends with Land Rovers. We drove through stately forests wreathed in vines and lush with butterflies. We crossed rivers and streams on rusty old ferries and makeshift bridges, and plowed through mud and waterholes on the roads in between.

We stayed in Catholic missions and with Peace Corps volunteers. We saw arts and crafts being made throughout the region — masks, tapis, dolls representing Pende dancers. And we saw a beautiful waterfall that, were it in the United States, would have been a major attraction. Here, it seemed to go utterly unnoticed.

What consumed most of our free time during this second school was planning for the big trip we intended to take once the term ended. As I wrote in a letter to friends:

“We had intended (and still hope) to buy some kind of van (such as a VW combi) and outfit it here with the help of school carpenters and friends. Then we would head north to the Central African Republic (we would probably have to put our vehicle on a riverboat to get out of Zaire, given road conditions), then throughout West Africa and (if possible) across the Sahara. Then we’d travel throughout North Africa and continue on to Europe, where we’d spend several more months traveling and living out of our van. We‘d’ then return to the States in late spring of 1977. (As it turned out, we moved to Paris for a couple of years instead. But that’s another story).

“We began attempting to implement this plan in early September upon our return from our summer adventures and found — to our great dismay — that no new vehicles are coming into the country. Zaire is in the midst of an economic crisis. It has little or no foreign reserves and, consequently, is defaulting on its loans and not paying its bills. In an attempt to straighten out this mess, the government is not permitting the importation of any vehicles. The used-car market is almost non-existent, and the few who are selling are getting astronomical prices for their cars.

“So we have been having a helluva time finding anything. We have recently come upon a used Peugeot van for sale. It is quite roomy and so would surpass the VW in livability. But it is lower to the ground, and whether or not it can be sufficiently raised by new wheels, larger tires, spring adjustment or whatever, we are now in the process of determining. If it cannot, we may consider going by boat to Bangui, driving to Dakar and then shipping it to Casablanca, as crossing the desert would not be feasible.”

Then, in a February letter, this development: “We’ve decided on a used ’72 VW bus, which we found for sale for $2,500. We’ll have to pay duty, as well, and buy new tires and all the spare parts. The way things go around here, who knows what we’ll really end up having to pay?

One of the many to-do lists we made in preparation for our drive out

“We’ve also decided to collaborate with a couple of fellow teachers to run a month-long summer school, which should net us at least $1,000 per person. Since the VW won’t be available to us until 1 July anyway, the timing will be perfect.”

On our spring break we flew to Johannesburg to buy backup car parts and tools, material to build sand ladders, English-language books and other necessities unavailable in Kinshasa.

But there would be one last grand adventure in Zaire before that. Over Christmas break, we hiked up to the snowy 10-mile massif of the Ruwenzori Mountains and hitched rides through the Ituri Rainforest, home to the nomadic hunter-gatherers called Pygmies and to the rare and lovely okapi, the only living relative of the giraffe.

Uncategorized

AFRICA DAYS 9: Poling in the Okavango Swamp, Whiplash in South Africa

Leave a comment

The view while gliding through the swamp — and our guide, Kitsola. (Happily, he never used the rifle.)

Note: Africa Days is a series of posts based on journals and letters from my years living in Kinshasa and traveling across Africa, beginning in 1974. You can read previous and following posts (for free) on this site or at https://genevaoverholser.com/

“We had read in our ‘Traveler’s Africa’ guide that, deep in the Okavango swamp of Botswana, it was possible to hire canoes for a sort of water safari during which you would encounter hippos and crocodiles. This expedition turned out to be completely different from what we had anticipated — and absolutely magical. With little information (as usual) we made our way by train from Bulawayo, Rhodesia, to Francistown, Botswana, then found a ride (with great difficulty) in a mail truck making the 310-mile trip from Francistown to Maun, over a desolate stretch of the Kalahari Desert.

Kalahari Desert

“In Maun, with information still at a premium, we finally determined that it would be necessary to pay a private pilot to fly us deep into the swamp. (This remarkable place is formed mysteriously by the Okavango River, Africa’s seventh largest, which pours into a desert rather than into a body of water, thus forming a swamp in its last gasp.) There we would find the Txatxaba camp, run by a man whose father trapped crocodiles in the area decades ago. This cost us a pretty penny, but we weren’t about to turn back now. We took the flight, swooped low over the tiny island airstrip to clear away the grazing impala, landed, emerged to the tune of buzzing tsetse flies, and were picked up by men in makoras, or dugouts.

View as we flew into the swamp, and the men with makoras meeting us

“They poled us through the tall grasses of the swamp to the camp. We had a good lunch with the manager and his wife, who outfitted us with our own makora and our guide Kitsola, told us to keep our eyes open all the time and said they’d see us in a week or so.

“What a week it was. Mike and I rode along in the canoe as Kit poled us through a wonderland of wildlife. We camped on islands with many different kinds of antelope in sight. Kit would play his thumb piano by firelight. By the third day, we were in deep enough to encounter the predators, so we camped on the tiniest islands in order to hear any creature who might approach us through the water.

Abundant (and often very close by) wildlife

“And hear the creatures we did, the mysterious whoop of the hyena starting low and ending high, which made me question the term ‘laughing hyena’ until the second night when it added a weird cackling of 5 to 8 notes starting high, jumping around the scale. And then we heard the most chilling sound: the throaty groan of lions. Kit kept the fire going and his rifle by his side.

“During the day we would take walking safaris on the islands. In this manner, we saw many interesting signs of animals, in addition to the animals themselves: trees stripped by elephants to incredible heights, their footprints left in the mud forming pools you could have sat in. We noticed that there was one pile of dung in particular that Kit would always give wide berth to, rather than step over, as he usually did. It turned out to be hyena scat. A hyena had come to his village and attacked his daughter, he told us, and it would repeat the act unless he respected its leavings.

Our campsite one morning, and Kit’s thumb piano

“Two particularly striking things deserve mention. On one of our walks, we noticed Kit paying special attention to a tiny bird, who would hop from tree to tree until finally, following it, Kit located a bees’ nest. He smoked out the bees and axed out the comb, and we ate the most delicious honey I’ve ever had, taking the rest of it with us for our oatmeal the next morning. We had been led to the hive by the honey guide, a bird which has developed this relationship with men and other animals. The Bushmen say that if the honey isn’t shared with the guide, he’ll lead you next time into a lion’s den or the pit of the deadly black mamba.

All praise to the honey guide!

(The next encounter was gruesome to witness and is even more horrifying now to recall. Poaching of elephants has fallen in recent years, but rhinoceros have been killed in fast-growing numbers of late.) 

“The second striking occurrence was an encounter with poachers. We came upon their camp midway through the trip. The tusks of elephants were soaking in the water, and meat and skins were drying everywhere: hyenas with their large ears turned inside out; impalas and elephants pieced on the ground like a pattern. The elephant ears alone were taller than I am. The feet and lower legs sat on the ground like high boots whose tops had fallen over. Some of the inner organs, blown full of air while soft, were hanging in translucent balls to dry, to serve as containers for the fats. One man was working on shaving some of the extra wood off his makora. The hunt had been so successful, the prizes so weighty, that the men needed more space.

“Our final destination was South Africa, where we embarked on a three-week whiplash of experiences, some sublime, many disturbing. We landed in Johannesburg, a mini-New York that felt astonishing to find on this continent. We visited Soweto — the part tourists are allowed into.

“We hitchhiked to Durban, then down the coast (with a jaunt north to Oudtshoorn for an ostrich ride) to Cape Town, surely one of the world’s loveliest cities. There, we consumed much good wine, cheese, fresh fruits, and seafood. Finally, we took the famed blue train back to Johannesburg, the finest train I’ve yet to ride. Luxury on wheels.

“I find it hard to put on paper the many conflicting feelings about our time in this lovely, complex, deeply troubling country — a topic we want to discuss with you all on our return. I want to share here a tiny instance of how South Africa’s mores affected us personally. One hot evening we happened to be dropped off, after a day of hitchhiking, next to an appealing-looking bar a ways out of the town where we’d be spending the night. A beer sounded like just the thing to refresh us for the final leg. We walked eagerly into the cool, welcoming dark. The response was lightning-quick: The bartender looked at Mike (he never looked at me) and said, ‘She is not allowed here. There’s a ladies’ bar in town.’ Obviously, this was but a grain of salt before the vast and deadly mountain of apartheid, which affects every moment and shapes the lives of every South African. But I won’t forget that slap of exclusion; that presumption that I deserved neither to be looked upon nor spoken to directly.

Sunset in the Okavango 

“With our 77-day vacation over, we boarded a jet in Johannesburg bound for Kinshasa. The airline agent asked why we were going to Zaire. ‘We live there,’ we said. ‘Ah, I’m sorry to hear it,’ she replied. ‘I used to live there myself.’”

Going back to work did come hard after this idyll. But we had much to look forward to. During Christmas break, we hoped to hike the Ruwenzori Mountains — the most beautiful trek of them all, as it turned out. And throughout the school year, we’d be laying plans to realize the big dream that had lured us here: to drive all the way up out of Africa to Europe, when our teaching stint in Kinshasa ended.

Uncategorized

AFRICA DAYS: The Beginning

In the summer of 1974, three years into my newspaper career, I got married. Mike had just landed a job he’d been longing for — in Africa. He would be teaching for two years at The American School of Kinshasa (TASOK), in what was then called Zaire (later to return to its previous name, Democratic Republic of the Congo). I’d leave my work covering Colorado’s state legislature. I hoped to do some freelancing (communication challenges would render that virtually impossible), but my job would be to run the school library. Behind this radical change was a dream we shared: During all our school breaks, and for several months afterward, we hoped to explore this vast and wondrous continent, so little-known to so many.

Two-and-a-half years and 25 countries later, Mike and I boarded an overnight ferry in Tunis bound for Sicily, leaving Africa for the first time since we’d touched down. We had indeed fulfilled our dream. We had hiked to the snowy top of Kilimanjaro, the fiery lip of the Nyiragongo volcano and the glacial massif of the Ruwenzori Mountains. We’d trekked into the rain forest to find mountain gorillas and paddled through the Okavango swamp, camping on tiny islands so our guide might hear the sound of any lion who might decide to join us. We hitchhiked through South Africa, rode riverboats up the Congo, and sat on top of a beer truck to view the elusive Okapi in the Ituri forest. We walked the 10-mile white-sand beach of Lamu, seeing not a single soul. These experiences and many more were breathtaking, but our Africa days affected us more deeply, too, enriching our understanding of art and culture and history, geography and natural beauty, economic and political systems — of the human experience, our variety and our commonalities.

I wrote about this remarkable period in our lives while we were living it, in journals and letters home. From D.C. to Des Moines to Cambridge to L.A. to New York, these papers were carted — ignored and largely forgotten. Then, last year, my husband David and I traveled in Morocco. Our travels stirred memories. Back home, I sought out the journal entries from the days Mike and I spent in Morocco on our drive up out of Africa. My curiosity was piqued. At the beginning of 2025, I dug around in several collapsing memorabilia boxes, assembled the various Africa writings and, for the first time in half a century, began to read them.

What follows are excerpts, along with some of the photos we took.

Lying on the equator in the heart of Africa, Zaire (now DRC) is about the size of the U.S. east of the Mississippi

Chapter 1: Arrival

September 1974. “In Amsterdam’s gorgeous Schiphol Airport, we boarded a mammoth jet that insulted our sense of geography by showing us the Alps as we skirted Paris, serving us lunch over the Mediterranean and tea over the southern Sahara, and depositing us before nightfall in Lagos, Nigeria.”

A couple of days and a short flight later, we arrived in Kinshasa.

A brochure and photos from The American School of Kinshasa (TASOK)

“We are on a lovely palm-thick campus, in a comfortable two-bedroom duplex, separated from the classroom buildings by an honest-to-goodness jungle, though a jungle devoid of monkeys. We have a toad living in a planter in front of our house and a wonderfully multi-colored lizard living in the vicinity of a certain corner. At times, I feel distressed to be penned in to A Compound. But we are beginning to make our way out into this huge, bustling, funny, beautiful/ugly city in this fascinating land, and this whets our appetites for adventure and travel greatly.

“Yet where we can go and when — these are the unknowns. Much of how you determine how to live here depends on what the people you first meet tell you can be done. And we’ve begun to realize that THAT, in turn, depends entirely on what THEIR predecessor-informants said. It’s just received wisdom that you can’t hop on one of those ferries crossing the huge river to Brazzaville, whose city lights so beckon. No one says exactly why. Normal standards of accountability, dependable procedures — these simply don’t apply, making life here feel sometimes frightening, sometimes amusing, always mysterious and apparently predictable only in its unpredictability.

“What is available here, in terms of necessities, is a point of interest. The things that are not local are likely to be in great supply at SOME store in this vast city, though no one can tell you where. Or, again, they may be completely out of stock everywhere, until, literally, the boat comes in. There are huge stores scattered about the city, but aisle after aisle may be filled with bar soap, while nary a bottle of shampoo can be found. Next week, aisles of shampoo, no soap.

“Things are VERY segregated here, only not (any longer) according to color as much as according to wealth. There are some VERY wealthy people, white and black, and masses of very, very poor. And their lives are poles apart. There is no one in the middle. At one end of the spectrum are the people with multiple huge Mercedes (more than I’ve ever seen) and at the other those who must crowd like cattle into dilapidated buses, barely able to breathe.”

It turned out that the lizard in the corner was a gecko, one of many with whom we lived. I wrote a poem about them:

“I like Africa because

Of the lizards

Who run high up on

Their toes

Pulling their tails

Behind them

Carefully

Like long skirts.”

We were settling in okay, but we were a bit disappointed by the challenges of traveling, and we began to plan ways to overcome them. But first, something would come to town that would enthrall the world, and it would surely enthrall us. The Rumble in the Jungle was about to happen in Kinshasa.