Head of African Travel (Literally) Follows in Grandfather's Footsteps

PHOTO: Jim Holden, president of African Travel, is a native of Zambia, where his grandfather was one of the first British people to settle. (Courtesy of African Travel)

Jim Holden, a native of Zambia who has been regional managing director of Abercrombie & Kent’s Nairobi Office and president of Travcoa and is now president of African Travel, will lead a group on a tour in May that follows in his grandfather’s footsteps. Holden’s grandfather, Edward Arden Copeman, was an administrator for Cecil Rhodes, the man for whom the country of Rhodesia was named. Holden has Copeman’s memoirs and used them to create a tour that would retrace a 300-mile trek that led to a battle to end slavery in the area and to the re-drawing of the border between what is now Angola and Zambia.

In the interview below Holden explained to TravelPulse the details of his grandfather’s history and why he is leading a trip to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps.

TravelPulse: So you are leading a trip that follows the footsteps of your grandfather. Who was he, why was his trip important, and where are you going?

Jim Holden: My grandfather was brought into darkest Africa; it was just called darkest Africa then. The only administrative center they had was in what is called eastern Zambia today, which was then Northern Rhodesia.

People talk about corporations outsourcing today, but I love to point out that this is not a new invention. In fact, the British invented it as a cheap and quick way of colonizing parts of the world they wanted to colonize.

In Africa they turned to a very wealthy gentleman, Cecil Rhodes, who really made his fortune at the young age of 30 in diamonds and gold in South Africa, and they said, “We’ll give you the concession for parts of Africa north of the Limpopo,” into what is today now Zimbabwe and Zambia.

What Rhodes would do, he would send these emissaries, he would find intrepid explorer-type personalities, and he would send them north to negotiate with the African chiefs. The negotiations at the initial stages were for access to minerals. It was mineral rights and protection of the British government in terms of security.

To do that he had to find people to carry out those negotiations and to then be the administrators once he had negotiated his treaty. And that’s how my grandfather got there. My grandfather met a bloke who was called Codrington, who was one of the first governors, in England. He told my grandfather that the BSA, the British South Africa Company is looking for individuals to go and do Rhodes’ bidding in these unexplored areas of Africa.

This was 1900 and it was very soon after David Livingstone, who was tramping around there until about 1850. They were following in his footsteps and my grandfather signed up. In order to get there you had to go by ship and it dropped at the mouth of the Zambezi River in what is today Mozambique and then you took to your feet, because there were no trains and no planes; so you walked. And if you look at a map it’s about a 300-mile hike from the mouth of the Zambezi to what is today the eastern part of Zambia.

It would take you a couple of weeks to do it.

TP: If you were healthy.

JH: You had to remain healthy, and malaria was rampant as were all sorts of other unknown diseases at that time. Disease was one of the main killers.

Rhodes had established an administrative station on the eastern part of what is today Zambia. That’s where my grandfather headed. They said, "We’ll outfit you and you can set up a station in the western part of Zambia." To do that he rounded up 500 head of cattle. They would be the source of food and larder for when they got to western Zambia. And he then had to walk from Luangwa Valley down to Zambezi, then along the Zambezi through what is now one of Africa’s national parks. It’s called the Lower Zambezi.

There were lions and elephants and he had to drive these cattle through that area in order to reach the western part of Zambia. There were two issues he had to deal with. One was the tsetse fly, which was rampant in those days and it gives cattle sleeping sickness and kills them.

But tse tse is only active in daylight, so he thought he could travel at night. But if he did that he had to encounter lions, who hunt at night. So of the two unattractive choices he chose the latter. He divided his 500 head of cattle into small groups of 20 or 25, allocated to each a herder, and they would wind their cattle through the night. His memoirs were full of stories of the cattle being stampeded in the dead of night by lions.

But much to his credit they didn’t lose a single cow. And they managed to come out at the other end. They crossed several rivers that flow into the Zambezi during the course of their journey and eventually arrived at Kasama, which is not far from Livingston along the Zambezi River.

No sooner had he got there when they said, “We want you to go to northwest corner of Zambia,” almost at the source of the Zambezi River. They wanted him to establish what was in those days called a boma. It was an administrative center. So he trekked up there north and established the administrative center, but when got there he found that the slave trade was alive and well.

The Portuguese who claimed the western part of Africa, which is today Angola, were in cahoots with the Arab slavers. What they used to do was cross the border, the Zambezi River into Zambia, raid the villages, and if you’ve seen those awful pictures of how they marched the slaves to the coast. They yolked them up, basically. They were tied together with a tree, basically, with a fork either end. And the fork went around the poor hapless fellow’s neck with a chain on the other side.

The hands and feet were shackled as well and they were marched two by two all the way across the Zambezi to Angola. There they would be put on ships and taken to two little islands called Principe and Sao Tomé. And there they would be grouped with other slaves coming from other parts of Africa’s west coast, they’d come from Benin, Nigeria and Ghana and they were brought here to Principe and Sao Tomé and put on larger vessels and headed off to the new world.

When this happened in Zambia my grandfather would get word that the slavers had raided the villages and would he chase after them and release the slaves. But what he found, with the border being the Zambezi River, by the time he got there, it was too late. The Arabs and Portuguese had crossed the river and they could thumb their noses at him.

So he went to Rhodes, who in turn went to the British government, who in turn went to the king of Italy and asked for a realignment of the border. So with Italy acting as the moderator, they renegotiated the borders with the Portuguese and if you look at a map today you’ll see that while most borders follow the river, in that case the border goes about 100 miles west into Portuguese territory, Angola, then goes in a straight line almost to Victoria Falls, then zigzags back to follow the course of the river, which then defines the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe.

TP: So it’s because of your grandfather putting in this request that the border is what it is today?

JH: Exactly. In the correspondence back and forth it shows that they realized if they established an administrative center in that part of Africa, they would have to get rid of slavery because that was causing a lot of unsettlement in the area. So before they could get on with anything else they had to stamp that out.

The only way to do it was to give the staff and the soldiers sufficient time to catch up with the slavers and to prevent them raiding the villages.

TP: In what way was the slave trade causing problems for the British?

JH: It ties in with poaching today. When a poacher takes an elephant, he takes the big ones with the biggest tusks. [But those elephants] are also the ones with the institutional knowledge, who know, in times of drought, for example, where to find water.

The damage done by poaching is much more than the obvious, which is the death of an elephant. It also consigns the rest of the herd to death, because there is no one in the herd with the knowledge to get water in droughts, etc. Plus elephants are organized much along the same lines as us humans, in families and groups, and when you take the elephants with the big tusks, the whole structure falls apart.

It was exactly the same with slavery. The Arabs would come in and round up all the healthy looking men, put them all together and march them off to the coast, decimating the village in the process. Not only were the individuals taken off into slavery, but it consigned the village to collapse because there were no menfolk left. The whole infrastructure would collapse.

So when the new administration came into these areas, what they brought was law and order, a formal structure of organization of society and so forth, but before they could do that, they couldn’t have slavery continuing under their eye, pretending it was part of day-to-day life. It was not.

TP: Where will your trip go?

JH: My trip retracing my grandfather’s footsteps will travel through the Luangwa Game Reserve, down to the lower Zambezi, which is now a national park on the Zambezi River and end up at Victoria Falls, a long way from the slave trade.