Cornishman in Africa: Friendly Fire?

The 21st of December is our longest day out here, whilst the lengths of the days do vary it is nothing like the variation you see in Cornwall. Where for you it can be dark in the evening at 16:30 in the winter and yet in the summer it will stay light till nearly 22:00 and a similar variation at the other end of the day. Here the variation in hours of daylight is only about one hour, half an hour at each end of the day, so without fear of contradiction you can say it is going to get dark around 18:00.

It gets dark quickly here too, you don’t get the lingering hours of dusk and half light. All of this shattered the illusions that I had before I moved out here of sitting on the veranda drinking a gin and tonic and watching the sun go down at about 21:00. In reality by the time you have left work, fought your way through the traffic, down the tracks to home it is just about dark before you get there. So we have fire. Which we cook on warm our water with and sit around in the evenings to either keep warm or just gaze into.

We have fire, then we have fire. I don’t know if you have ever flown over Africa, but if you have and you have gazed down at the beauty of this fantastic continent, you may have noticed that there is always a part of it burning. This has its upside and down sides, the upside being that, as a broad sweeping generalisation the Africans are not up there with the Japanese when it comes to litter consciousness and as such. Africa is a bit covered in litter, but once a year this gets cleared up by the big hot Hoover that comes along clearing all in its way. When this happens every year it is not too bad as the grasses and the bushes take a bit of a kicking but in general the bigger trees tend not to be too put out by this.
It’s when there has been no fire for years and the bush has grown up tall and dense, there is leaf litter and Human litter piled up deep and dry. Then life gets interesting.

Last Sunday I was on my own at the cottages, apart from Mutonga who’s turn it was to work that day. He was out and about watering the plants and grass, using up the water we have to use so we don’t blow the pipes up. I was leisurely going about my work and cooking the meat for my lunches for the week which I do outside on my braai along with all my cooking.

All of a sudden the sun went out, it was uncanny, I know in Cornwall it sometimes happens that the sun may go behind a cloud for a while, (like three months) but over here it is very rare, and add to this that it cast a brown eerie hew over everything, it was very odd. Anyway I looked up and saw the sky was obscured by smoke. Seeing the direction it was coming from I grabbed my phone, (Unfortunately it’s the only camera I have currently.) and ran to the best vantage point, that happened to be the bar.

It was not more than a couple of minutes before Mutonga had joined me. It was quite impressive a huge plume of smoke and at its base a wall of fire about 75m wide and rising into the air a good twenty metres as it engulfed trees in its path.

The wind direction was taking the fire towards the dam and away from the cottages which was a blessing so we stood and watched it in awe. It swept through the trees and bush at the edge of the dam and onto the grass then crept right up to the water’s edge engulfing the reeds along the shore as if it was coming down for a drink. When the fire reached the end of the dam the wind changed, first dropping so the flames died a little, we thought that it might peter out.

Then to our horror and amazement the wind turned around fanned the flames back into life and propelled them down the next bank towards us and the bar. Mutonga went immediately to get help from as many people as he could muster in the immediate vicinity. I got hacking the grass and reeds down that were nearest to the bar, then went and got the hosepipe from behind. It took about 5 minutes to roar up that side of the dam and reach me, the heat hits you like a sledgehammer. Luckily the fire was now in the shorter grass and had lost a lot of its ferocity. Mutonga was back with his friends and we set to work beating and dousing the flames. That limb of the fire was brought under control fairly quickly, but we had noticed that with the change of wind, the fire was going back towards the cottages, and all around were huge trees and very thick bush.

With the fire by the bar now out, we left one person there to keep an eye on that and the rest of us now numbering four, went to tackle the bigger blaze.
Where the fire had come out of the bush and into the long grass it was not too difficult to gain control, just choking and burning hot, our biggest worry was that there was no break in the trees between the fire and the houses. We set about cutting a fire break, we just had to get about 30m through thick bush, trees up to 5 inches thick and a bamboo forest. Unfortunately the only tools we had were 2 shovels a slasher and my bush knife. The next four hours I probably lost more weight that I would have done if both my legs had fallen off. This constant hacking and dragging was interspersed with having to run back and beat the fire out where it was trying to get across the vlei again into the trees on the other side.

My head and face was burning my throat was dry, hands were bleeding so I could hardly keep hold of the knife, the blisters on them had gone through both layers of skin and were settling into the muscle. Where you cut through the bamboo it is so dense you are forever slicing your hands on the bough you have just cut as you go to cut the next.

At 18:00 we had cut a 5m swathe through the bush, it was not really enough but the fire was within 20m of us, the wind had dropped a bit and had enabled us to back burn to give us a little more breathing space.

At 19:00 we had won, and what a battle it had been. I went to shower looked at myself in the mirror, it was not a pretty sight. My hands were a mass of blood, the hair on my arms was gone the hair on my head was all singed and my clothes had more burn holes than I could count. On retrospect I wish I had taken a picture. It was not the relaxing Sunday afternoon that I had envisaged. But my God it was fun.

We all met at the bar and replaced a lot of those lost fluids with Castle.
We did not light the fire that night.

Denzil Bark.