1961: By Ladybird round Africa

Next stop in the Ladybird book was Nairobi. In 1953 the British had formed an East African Federation of Uganda, Kenya and Tanganyika (today's Tanzania; you can see the Federation flag at their airports in these shots). This had its own airline, East African Airways which outlived those countries gaining their independence in the early '60s before they also formed independent airlines in the '70s. It seemed a good idea to link the three capitals Dar-Es-Salaam, Nairobi and Kampala/Entebbe with a flight that went on up to Khartoum and eventually Rome and London (sometimes via Benghazi, Libya when the British weren't so welcome in Cairo). I was thinking of catching the old EAA601 Britannia for this leg, but don't have a flyable version in East African livery, so we'll just have to slum it in the slightly later Comet 4, Flight EC715:



(There was also a C-47 which had two stops in between the capitals, but we'll get enough Dakotas as it is, and don't want to go to Jinja and Kisumu.) Going by Comet is lovely, but you have the same problem they had in reality: the cities are so close that it's hardly worth using an aircraft designed for much longer-haul flights. Nor did the Comet fly so beautifully at only 15000 feet!

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Noticed in the background, typical British freight/charter operators who dominated East Africa at this time - it'll be French and Belgians in the West:


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Here they are from the other side:



Well, our Slot was at 09.00, and it only takes about an hour in the jet. Just as we were starting to go, noticed this moving out in front of us:

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It's an AI Britannia of course, BOAC's Speedbird 161 - thanks, Tom!



Age before beauty and all that, so we have to let him go first. I went over to the far side of the runway, turned round and watched the Britannia take off.



Then it was my turn:

 
This is realistic because our Comet VP-KPJ was one of the first two (out of a total of 7) that EAA ordered in 1958 and took into service in 1960. It made sense, of course, to use the same aircraft type that BOAC had already established on their main routes.



You probably noticed that we left from RW30 where we landed in the BOAC Britannia, so were facing north. Though Comets can climb very quickly, we were sent a long way in the opposite direction, away from our destination, before being instructed to turn and head in the right direction!



That gave some fine views of the airport when we flew back over it:



Dank u Harry Biard! :salute:



Here's a shot of VP-KPJ flying along the north coast of Lake Victoria, close to the Uganda/Kenya border:



And some AI spotted with Traffic Tools Explorer:



Someone having fun with a little yellow Cub down there:



Crowded skies over Kenya!
 
Interesting to check the ICAO codes and see where those aircraft were going to. The 3 in the Cub picture came out of our target, HKJK: Jomo Kenyatta International. That main airport of Nairobi had only opened in 1958 and was originally called Embakasi (Kenyatta led the independence struggle against the British, so they had to leave before the airport was named after him). The British United Britannia had originally come from EGKK, London Gatwick. The Cub itself was going to FZRM, Kabalo in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo (the 'Z' dates back to when it had the snappier name Zaire). In 1961 that was just on the verge of ceasing to be the Belgian Congo (more about that later, the Ladybird party will eventually pass through). The other two in the Cub shot are both going to what is now Malawi: FWCL, Chileka International, and FWLI, Lilongwe, the capital. In 1961 Malawi was still Nyasaland, yet another British colony.

Big mountains way ahead:



I think that was Mount Kenya/Kirinyaga straight in front, north of Nairobi. It's about 5199 metres high according to my atlas. Off to starboard:



Kilimanjaro, the highest in Africa at 5892 metres and way to the south. Not long till the airport appeared ahead:

 
We go to the Gate:



This was quite a busy place around 10.00 in the morning.



A C-47 that landed just after us:



And some fine aircraft to be seen on the tarmac at Nairobi...



...and inside the hangar, where they're working hard on EAA's other Comet:



And look who arrived a short while later:



Speedbird 161! He comes down to park near us:



So despite the fact that he left Entebbe first, and we had to make that big detour west, our Comet still arrived a good 15 minutes before the old Britannia.

 
The last picture we saw from the Ladybird book was of those jolly Lake Victoria boatmen, but we're getting a bit ahead of it having already reached Kenya. Still in Uganda, this was the third page of text:



You'd want to strangle John with his notebook full of 'facts', wouldn't you? Anyway, we all learn a few selected ones there. Daddy's remark that the natural world is 'like a zoological gardens turned loose' is breathtakingly arrogant if you think about it. But there is some progress: before WW2 Daddy would certainly have had to shoot a few wild animals for trophies to prove to Mummy that they'd been there, and he would probably have let John bag a couple of impala too.

The illustration confirms that the book has a big emphasis on education:



John observed that 'It's just the same as a school at home,' and this remains true of much of the educational system in 21st Century Africa. Not only do the pupils often look very like retro British schoolchildren in their smart uniforms, but African schools usually retain the discipline, respect for teachers and old-fashioned values that we think have been lost in the West! (Whether or not it's a good thing to grow up in the 1950s is a debatable point.)

Time for our first of these:



East African Airways did accurately refer to them as C-47s, though they appear as D.C.3 in contemporary timetables. The one above is VP-KJU the MAAM Sim cargo version (a free texture for the superb payware aircraft), but it's more realistic to go in the passenger VP-KJR, a texture you can get for Manfred Jahn's C-47.

And we're flying to Mombasa on the Kenyan coast of the Indian Ocean:



This is Flight EAA 001 which left at 8.00 in the morning.



We're just behind an Aden Airways DC-4 going to Mogadishu in Somalia. 'The Mog' may be familiar from Black Hawk Down, and Somalia is very near the top of those Failed Nation lists that sometimes appear. In the 1950s the north was still a separate 'Somaliland', some of which had been taken over from the Italians after Mussolini's defeat. Last I read of Somalia, it is improving slightly, with a relatively stable government beginning to regain control from bandits and pirates. Good luck to them.

 
Tell me about it, Chief!



Soon we are on our way, heading from Kenya's capital on that Central African Plateau towards its main port on the east coast.



That will be Kilimanjaro. Safe enough from here, but aircraft have crashed into these mountains as it can be extremely foggy around them.



Looking out for the Indian Ocean...



...before beginning our descent.



The main trade along this coast in the first half of the 19th Century was slavery, the biggest slave market being Zanzibar, an island we will visit later. The Sultan of Zanzibar had two other islands (Pemba to the north and Mafia* to the south), but also controlled a little of the continental coast, including the three main ports Mombasa, Tanga and Dar-es-Salaam. The slaves were captured in Central Africa by Arab slave-traders who sold them to the folks back home in the Middle East and got extremely rich in the process.



The British, who had already given up their own slavery and were busy supressing the trade on the West Coast of Africa, put pressure on the Sultan to close the Zanzibar slave market. Eventually he did, but the trade just went on from the mainland ports.

*Not to be confused with the Italians of the same name who come from Sicily (another island we flew over!).
 
This is a fairly quiet corner of the Cal Classic world, not expecting much at HKMO, now called Mombasa Moi International.



It is named after President Daniel Arap Moi who succeeded Jomo Kenyatta as Head of State in 1978. In the 1950s the Kikuyu people of Kenya, many of whom were well-educated and aware of the shortcomings of colonialism, began the so-called Mau Mau Uprising against the British. This was supposed to involve pagan witchcraft and sinister blood oaths which frightened the rest of the black population. Some white farmers, including women and children, were killed. The British reacted with extreme savagery, interring and torturing thousands of young Kikuyu men and flooding the country with 20,000 troops. Postwar Britain could not afford such a policy, either in monetary or moral terms, so they sensibly released the Kikuyu leader Kenyatta from jail and allowed him to lead Kenya to independence in 1963. Both sides eventually behaved with wise tolerance and understanding, but the brutality of the British reaction to Mau Mau is only just beginning to be revealed and right now, 60 years later, there is a court case in London where some very old Kenyans are seeking compensation - and an apology - for the terrible way they were treated.



For some reason the Ladybird book doesn't mention any of that...

Not much going on here around 9.00 in the morning.



Deserted except for a very swish-looking private business plane (not slave-traders, one hopes).




So we get to park right in front of the terminal building at Gate 1.



Maybe that plane belongs to the mysterious girl in the orange trouser suit who appears ahead of us at so many of these African airports?
 
Next stopover for the Ladybird family (minus Mummy) was going to be the island of Zanzibar. There were flights there every day in the late '50s, mostly by C-47 stopping at Tanga and that other island, Pemba, on the way. EC001, which we took from Nairobi, was one of them, departing at 10.05 most days. The DH89a that we saw seems to have covered Pemba - Zanzibar - Dar-Es-Salaam, but didn't usually come as far north as Mombasa. Since I couldn't wait to fly it, let's pretend the Dakota broke down and they've sent the Dragon up as a replacement service:



'Look, Daddy! We're going in a biplane,' said John excitedly, 'Is it from the Great War?'
'Not quite that ancient, O foolish child,' Daddy explained, 'The De Havilland 89a Dragon Rapide is a 1937 development of the 1934 DH89. The military version, the DH89b, is known as the Dominie.'
John carefully wrote all these useful facts down in his notebook.
'Isn't it thrilling that we've been in a great jet and now we're to fly in a dear little biplane,' said Alison.
'One of the advantages of being fictional characters in an unlikely story set in the early '60s,' explained Daddy.
'Gosh,' said both children almost in chorus.



'Is it named after Olivia de Havilland?' asked Alison, 'She was awfully good in Gone with the Wind.'
'No, you silly female thing,' said Daddy, beginning to lose it now, 'It was designed by her father, Sir Geoffrey.'
'Gosh, women are air-heads, aren't they Daddy?' added John. 'Anyway, I preferred her in They Died With Their Boots On.'



So we are going just down the coast to Tanga which is opposite Pemba Island.



Probably one of the best passenger aircraft ever for having a near all-round view.



And here's a shot of it pootling down that east coast of Africa:



Tanga airport (HTTG) ahead:

 
Approach and descent:



One reason the Ladybird book doesn't ever mention Tanga may be that it was the scene of a humiliating British defeat. Tanganyika had been a German colony since the 1880s, and with the outbreak of war in 1914 the British decided to grab it quickly using 8,000 troops sent over from India commanded by a Major-General Aitken. They made a very badly-organised landing here, opposed by just a few hundred German colonial troops under the brilliant Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. one famous feature of the battle (described quite accurately in William Boyd's novel An Ice-Cream War) was the Indian soldiers disturbing a hive of killer bees who joined in and helped the German Askaris drive them, panic-stricken, back to the beach! Although the British did eventually gain a foothold, it wasn't until the Germans had inflicted massive casualties, captured a lot of useful supplies and generally taught a nasty lesson. Aitken was sacked, and Lettow-Vorbeck went on to lead enormously-superior British armies a merry dance all over East Africa for the rest of the First World War. He, by now promoted Major-General, was quite rightly granted a Victory parade when he got back to Berlin!



Looks like another deserted airport.



No problems parking here, though you have to be careful with the DH89 which is quite difficult to control on the ground.



You can see the red giraffe flag which the British gave Tanganyika Colony from 1919 to independence in 1961:



There's that girl again! How did she manage to get here so quickly? Concorde?



DEJA-VU, or what?!?

Daddy, John and Alison may have been among the last visitors to colonial Tanganyika which was amalgamated with Zanzibar at independence to form modern Tanzania :tanzania:
 
Nah, that outfit was just popular at the African (British) clothing stores of the era. Every girl *had* to have one... :)
 
I'm pretty sure it's the same girl. I suspect that she may have chosen (Dutch) Orange deliberately... She seems to be waiting for someone at every airport - and the weird thing is, it's every airport we take Daddy, Alison and John to! Is she waiting for them? Or is she waiting for me? Or am I being paranoid?!?

Dismissing all worries about the South African secret agent, it's time to fly on to Zanzibar.



We'll stick with the de Havilland, C-47s are grounded for the time being.



Someone on a quiz show on TV recently had to name an African country and said 'Zanzibar', which was wrong as it's been part of Tanzania since 1964. 'Zanzibar' is actually Persian (or Farsi) for 'Coast of the Blacks', and Persian, followed by Arab, traders were the first foreigners to arrive as long ago as the 11th Century A.D. (Freddie Mercury was a Parsee/Persian whose ancestors came from India, but he was born in Zanzibar).



Of course the Persians and Arabs brought Islam and civilization to the east coast of Africa; but although they also traded in spices, their main interest in Africa was slaves. Enterprising traders could get an expedition together (i.e. a bunch of armed men) on the coast, go inland, attack a village or two, grab as many prisoners as possible and bring them back to Zanzibar to sell at a vast profit. Both the Bible and the Koran accept slavery as a perfectly normal thing, apparently part of God's great plan.



Keeping the mainland coast on our starboard side, you can see the big flat island ahead.



A view of the great mountains that we've now bypassed and left behind us.



In the 15th Century, due to improved ship technology, the Portuguese managed to sail around the Cape of Good Hope and up the African east coast. They attacked and took over many of the coastal settlements, including Zanzibar and Pemba islands. They wanted spices, and to trade with India, but were happy to let the Arabs go on with the lucrative slave trade too. Portuguese power declined and by the 18th Century the Islamic sultanate mentioned before was established on the three big islands and a little way into the hinterland...



Zanzibar ATC are going to have us fly past the airport, turn around and come in from the south to RW36.
 
Before we land on Zanzibar there is some catching up to do with the Ladybird book. As well as the boat race on Lake Victoria and the school in Uganda, there were at least two more pages, + their illustrations, for Kenya.



Here you have the classic vague justification for colonialism: the original inhabitants weren't exploiting their land properly, so they deserved to lose it to people who knew how to make money from it! This is illustrated by perhaps the most remarkable picture in the whole little book:



The artist has essentially painted typical English countryside, familiar to the early '60s British children for whom the book was produced. This has led to the imported sheep having to be unrealistically squeezed into a cornfield. It is pretty obvious who's Lord of All he Surveys. But, as the text most patronisingly mentioned, 'the farm workers were Africans, who were very clever with the machinery.' (OK as long as it's a Massey Fergusson tractor rather than a Kalashnikov rifle).

Of course the whites acquired all that rich, fertile land through the simple expedient of superior weapons technology. Before anyone could ask any awkward questions about the political and military history of East Africa you turn the page and writer and artist quickly turn to animals - which can be exploited by man without rationalising the destruction of their way of life!



As mentioned before, there is some progress with 'Reserves' where 'animals are protected and live their lives safe from the guns and traps of man.' There's also another picture where he's crammed everything in:



Someone cared about the animals before it was too late. Unfortunately, of course, colonialists had a similar attitude towards 'native' humans, putting the most dangerous of them into reserves too. This had already happened to 'Indians' on the American continent, both north and south. Soon the Ladybird folk will get to South Africa where a rearguard action of the denial of civil rights and basic liberties to the majority population was still in full swing half a century ago...

But for the time being, there's Zanzibar airport (now greatly expanded into HTZA Zanzibar International) ahead:



And it's another perfect landing in the DH89...

 
Not long till we reach the big one, South Africa...

Let's go and park in Zanzibar:



There's an Air Safaris Hermes freighter in one corner.



It's a bit busier than Tanga was, but not much.



He must've been sitting there a long time, as it seems to have sunk into the melted apron! That can be quite easily cured by just going into the right file and raising the aircraft a few feet.



Looking round with Traffic Explorer we spot a Hunting Clan DC-6 going up to Mombasa. I also took a sneak preview of Dar es Salaam (HTDA), our next stop, a big, exciting airport:



We will be arriving the dark, so it's good to grab a daylight view.

By the mid-19th Century Britain was the world's maritime superpower with control over India. British explorers like Burton and Speke came to Zanzibar to use it as a base for penetrating the interior of Africa and finding the source of the Nile. At first they weren't that bothered about slavery. Even the great missionary-explorer Livingstone was helped by the Arab slave traders, though he did not like what they were doing and genuinely cared for the African people. Places that he put onto western maps, like Lake Kivu, got the local language name, not named after some faraway foreign Royal! As the British public learnt more and more about what was going on in East Africa - including from Journalist-Explorers like Henry M. Stanley - the Foreign Office intervened more to put pressure on the Sultan to stop slavery. Gordon was trying to do the same thing in the Sudan. In the late 1880s, when the European powers divided Africa into 'spheres of influence' (i.e. areas which it was OK to colonise), Britain took Zanzibar and Germany got Tanganyika.

 
The DH89 did fly between Pemba, Zanzibar and Dar-es-Salaam on Sunday evenings as Flight EC207.



This must have been a magical experience for anyone lucky enough to have made the trip, though many of them probably took it for granted and were worrying more about the price of tungsten, how England were doing in the Test Match, or whether little Nigel would pass his Common Entrance, rather than noticing the ethereal, eternal African sunset...



You're travelling more or less due south:



A good view of the Microsoft mosque which Mr Gates has provided for the spiritual needs of any imaginary Muslims who inhabit the FS world:



They seem to be well provided for with their own water towers. Nice shot of the whole island by night, stretching away into the distance as we leave Zanzibar behind us:



Zanzibar town and the airport:



Took a look at some of the AI plying its trade up and down the east coast:



A C-47, and this DC-6 going from Dar up to Mombasa:



The patch of light up ahead will be Dar-es-Salaam:



It's only a half an hour flight.
 
Very interesting thread to follow, Ralf.

It's all there isn't it, the social history of the Empire, in those simplistic illustrations of a perfect World. Everyone knows their place and the sun is always shining:sheep:


Looking forward to the next chapter.

Andy.
 
Hi Tom, I put lots of *purpose mistakes* in to keep everyone on their toes, but you're the only one who ever notices! :salute:

Landing at Dar-es-Salaam:



One of the most surreal geographical deals in History came in 1890 when the British swapped Heligoland, a huge lump of rock in the North Sea, for Zanzibar. Germany kept mainland Tanganyika, but gave the British the islands off the African coast. Kaiser Wilhelm II later fortified Heligoland at great expense.



Zanzibar stayed independent till 1964, though of course the British took over the whole of Tanganyika in 1919 when Germany had been defeated in the First World War. in '64 the black Africans of Zanzibar (perhaps remembering how their ancestors had been treated?) rose up against the Arabs (most of them harmless shopkeepers) and massacred several hundred people. It looked like a Communist takeover and the ex-colonial power, Britain, initiated a major mobilisation including Royal Marine Commandos and an Aircraft Carrier. Unlike the Suez Crisis eight years earlier, this was given the green light by the USA which said Zanzibar was Britain's 'sphere of influence'. Luckily diplomacy was able to prevail and the islands were soon incorporated into Tanzania peacefully.



Cal Classics have retro-ed more than 20 airports in Tanzania - I mean Zanzibar and Tanganyika - and the capital HTDA is one of Harry's finest.



A little look at some of the AI parked here this evening:



It is a bit dark, glad I showed that daylight preview earlier; but we'll take another look round here before flying on the next leg back into the interior.

 
'fraid there's still some catching up to do with the Ladybird book as they're still back in Mombasa:



So they do acknowledge that the Arabs had some technological expertise a couple of millenia ago. The artist, Jack Matthew, has provided a beautiful picture of a dhow:



(Nice how he's included the modern yacht to illustrate that lanteen sails are still pretty useful.) They do then have to bring up the vexed issue of the slave trade:



Obviously nobody mentions that the British Empire was itself established through two centuries of trade in and use of slaves, especially in the Americas and West Indies. '...eventually we took over East Africa.' is a nice way of putting things too! However, it was true that 'the Africans' were getting higher education, sharing in Government and 'being prepared to govern their countries themselves' at this time, and the British were, for the most part, quite reasonable about knowing that the days of colonialism were over. This was not the case with the Portuguese who were the first in, last out Europeans in Africa, trying to hold onto colonies like Mozambique and Angola right up into the 1970s. The worst problems British governments had were with white settlers who didn't want to give up their power and privileges to black majorities, especially in Rhodesia. The Ladybird solution to 'Man's inhumanity to Man' is to quickly insert another picture of safe, reliable, innocent animals:



This was in the days when David Attenborough was just starting out, but of course now we see superb film of all these creatures in the comfort of our plasma screens. It occurs to me that for every 10 hours of wildlife documentary from places like Africa we probably only get a few minutes a year on TV of the human history and politics of the continent.



I'm afraid that you CANNOT see the map in John's notebook yet, as it would spoil the surprises of this trip! You can, however, see a nice picture of exciting, mysterious Zanzibar (even Daddy wasn't to know the bad things that kicked off there four years later):

 
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