No Stopping for Lions Read Free

older. Whole trains, sometimes co-ed and sometimes segregated, passing through four countries and picking up unsupervised students who were oblivious to border crossings or authority as they concentrated on one thing: the opposite sex. The kids lurched from boredom to hormone-driven mania, and the days were filled with attempts to satisfy both. Neil tells great stories of hot tubs in the public baths of the Bulawayo station, saving his meal money by eating only watermelon for the whole journey, jumping train at one station to lie in wait for the girls’ train to pass through, and developing a skill for hypnotism which made him a hero even after one episode went terribly wrong when his subject, as the race driver Sterling Moss, crashed and ‘burned alive’. This particular time Sterling Moss, who had driven the racetrack of his imagination with great skill many times before to the amusement of his schoolmates, took the scenario into his own hands. Unprompted and out of Neil’s control, his car first spun off the track, then crashed and burst into flames. Sterling writhed and screamed that he was burning, and Neil found himself powerless to snap him out of it until the very last minute, when Sterling stiffened then went still. For a second the others feared that he’d ‘died’, but to Neil’s relief he had fallen asleep and woke up shortly afterwards, apparently none the worse for his near-death experience.
    Neil’s first real job was back in Northern Rhodesia with the Standard Bank and he was sent to their branch in Kasama, the main town of the country’s north. He’d think nothing of hitchhiking 500 miles (800 kilometres) to work, taking a shortcut through the Congo and waiting days for a lift. Sounds heroic now, and today it would be foolhardy bordering on impossible, but those were more halcyon times. Once, having been dropped off near a village, Neil had to shake the hand of every inhabitant after the headman had gathered them in a deferential line. Another time, in the middle of the bush and miles from any white settlement, any other white person in fact, he sat down to an extraordinary three-course meal with the visiting district commissioner, attended by white-gloved servants.
    He moved on to work for BP Southern Rhodesia in the country’s capital, Salisbury, and while there he was called up to do National Service, a common requirement of many countries at the time. This was followed up by fortnightly territorials, and photos taken on one such training exercise show an almost unrecognisable Neil, as fit as Phar Lap and as pumped up as Rambo. He was transferred to Shell BP in Northern Rhodesia, now independent and called Zambia, but the grass of the outside world was too green to be ignored and the next year he resigned and headed for Europe. After twelve months of backpacking around there, living life to the full, finding new friends and working just long enough to finance the next leg, he thought he should knuckle down. So it was back to Africa and the University of Cape Town to study economics. More fun and games and new friends, and lectures in subjects that turned out to be pertinent and dynamic. Although the regulated life of a student was not for Neil and he threw it in after the first year, his study of African history and African government and law turned an interest into a passion and he left with a life-long interest in Africa’s failings and fortunes.
    Then it was back to Europe and work in a factory in Münster, ostensibly to learn German — but something odd was happening. Neil was feeling the opposite of restless for the first time. The notion that this life couldn’t go on forever was lapping at his feet and he sensed that it was time for commitment, to put a stake in the ground. He had learnt enough to know that newly independent African countries such as Zambia would go through long and hard periods of adjustment in which the quality of life