Vaughan Preece

The Kiwi lad was Vaughan Preece. He had just graduated from the University of Canterbury with a Master’s Degree in History and a two-year scholarship to the University of Cambridge. The lecturer with the questionable ticker was supposed to supervise young Preece’s thesis research at the vaunted English institution.

So, instead, Cambridge extended his tenure and offered him a three-year scholarship to read law. A bonus of such unexpected proportion that the mainlander had hardly to think twice.

This munificent twist of fate would ultimately propel young Vaughan down yet another entirely unexpected avenue – one which saw him nearly lose his life while performing his duty to Queen and Country as a colonial administrator in a dusty village in a far-away part of central Africa during an obscure revolution.

After leaving Cambridge with his entirely unplanned and fortuitous law degree firmly in his still-disbelieving grasp, Vaughan presented himself at various London law firms in expectation of instantaneous fame and fortune.

“When I learned that they were only prepared to offer me the princely salary of £800 a year I baulked,” he said. “That was about how much I would need to pay for a room in a grubby flat-share in Earl’s Court.

“So I was considering my rather limited options when I saw an advertisement for a colonial administrator position in Uganda. I knew a bit about that part of Africa from my history lectures so the Colonial Office duly sent me to a place called Northern Rhodesia. That was the way the British did things!”

In those days the trip from London to Northern Rhodesia, a remote swathe of wild territory between the Belgian Congo and the Zambezi River now known as Zambia, took more than a month. It involved a train trip to Southampton, a Union Castle steamship to Cape Town, and then many days of rail travel from Cape Town up the sub-continent through the storied British colonial outposts of Mafeking, Bechuanaland, Plumtree, Bulawayo, Victoria Falls, Livingstone and, eventually, the Northern Rhodesian capital of Lusaka.

“God, I was knackered when I got there,” Vaughan says, drily. One suspects from the twinkle in his eyes that this exhaustion was occasioned not by the lengthy journey but by the non-stop socialising among the contingent of fresh-faced colonial ‘administrators’ being sent in a steady stream to impose His Majesty’s will on his distant, and largely bemused and uncomprehending, African subjects.

Soon after arrival the young Kiwi was posted to Mwinilunga, one of 46 administrative districts created by the colonial government of Northern Rhodesia.

“My job as a District Commissioner was to be the local government. Essentially an entire District Council all rolled up into one rather pink and sweaty blob,” he said. “I was responsible for the security of the local people and their wellbeing, and supervision of all the other departments of government such as law and order, education, health, wildlife management and that sort of thing.”  

After learning the local language, Lunda, Vaughan was able to establish a rapport with the Africans of ‘his’ region by socialising with them on the verandah of his home – much to the chagrin of the other Europeans in the district.

“I didn’t care – this was very much my Kiwi way and helped me to do my job and maintain control of the district. My technique for problem-solving was to put a lot of beer in the fridge, then invite all involved to put their feet up at my house and get sozzled while they talked through the issues at hand. Invariably they’d all leave nursing horrible hangovers but vowing enduring friendship and cooperation. Until the next time they fell out over something.

“It was a highly effective way of doing things!”

Vaughan discovered quite by accident another very effective strategy of enhancing his personal mana among the natives. Witchcraft! Through an entirely coincidental process which involved him setting out to debunk the power of a local wizard (known in those less enlightened times as a witchdoctor), Vaughan himself became known as a thrower of bones. Much to his satisfaction he discovered that this new-found status enhanced his authority and effectiveness as a local administrator – he had proved the truth of the old adage, as valid in central Africa as anywhere else in the world, ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!’.

Over time the boy from Te Wai Pounamu developed quite a name for himself in the wilds of central Africa, where the smoke from village fires turned the setting sun blood red and the throb of myriad drums carried news between settlements faster than a carrier pigeon could fly. His distinctive ‘handlebar’ moustache, which he sports to this day, earned him the local name of ‘the creature with the hair on its face’. His other-worldliness and suspected connection with the spirits was enhanced by the fact that he managed to tame, and keep as a pet, one of the most fierce and feared members of the African animal kingdom – a sharp-toothed, razor-clawed honey badger.    

Africans share the bush with many wild animals which sometimes intrude on daily life. Elephants can be a particular problem. On one occasion Vaughan was bashing his way through the bush, with his statutory party of 26 porters, tracking a rogue jumbo that had been terrorising villagers. As he watched his tracker taste elephant dung to determine how far away its depositor was, the answer to the question came charging out of the bush at him. His porters scrambled out of its path and the beast altered course towards them, thundering past Vaughan who took a pot-shot with his rifle and managed to hit its lungs. It collapsed immediately in a great cloud of long brown grass and dust – much to the amazement of the now-disassembled throng of excited porters.

“That was my first elephant,” he said. “Over time I became a bit more accomplished at dealing with them!”

Perhaps Vaughan’s most nerve-wracking moment over his 12-year colonial career was as he felt an African spear penetrate his abdomen. Insurgents fighting for control of the country had attacked a mission station near a place called Kasama. He had travelled there with a riot police patrol to apprehend the attackers but was ambushed and set upon. As spears and rocks rained down on him he thought he would end his days in that dirty, dusty corner of Africa, far from the tranquil beauty of the Hunter’s Hills. Thankfully reinforcements arrived in the nick of time and, with the aid of their automatic rifles, forced the spear and machete-wielding terrorists to retreat.

Vaughan recovered and, to this day, uses the spear-head which so nearly brought his time in Africa to a premature close as a gardening tool.

As he says, “a classic case of turning swords to ploughshares!”

Vaughan eventually left Northern Rhodesia in a great hurry. After Zambia’s independence he was appointed local court officer in Barotseland, home of the Lozi people – a proud, warrior race who are an offshoot of the great Zulu nation in South Africa. The Lozi, governed by a paramount chief and with their own, established system of government, had no taste for being governed by the ‘inferior’ Bemba tribesmen from the north of the newly-independent country. Vaughan found himself equally dis-inclined to impose the new dispensation’s wishes on the Lozi, so the arrangement was a marriage made in heaven.

After several years of contriving somehow to have Lusaka ignore the daily goings-on of Barotseland, and vice versa, Vaughan received the inevitable phone call.

“Pack your bags and get the heck out of there and onto the first flight leaving Lusaka tomorrow morning,” the disembodied voice of a friend warned him. “There’s a ticket waiting for you at the airport. The government heavies are coming to get you and will throw you in jail for dereliction of duty!”

It’s fair to say that Vaughan wasted no time complying with the instruction. And that life for both Vaughan and the Lozi was never again quite so free-wheeling