Getting used to life on board;
On board the people were getting to know each other, and life was easy and pleasant.
The weather was mostly fine and there was a real holiday mood like in a big hotel in a resort. In those lazy weeks short friendships and clandestine love affairs bloomed. Little tiffs surfaced and were soon forgotten afterwards. In the morning the early raisers went for jogs along the decks. People were sunbathing on the decks, swam in the pool that was open for the time being. When the sea was rough the pool was closed and covered up with a tarpaulin to the chagrin of the children.
The girls made friendship with other children also they could not speak each other’s language. Not before long they used the lifts from top to bottom, were chased by the sailors from the first class swimming pool as they had soon found out that it was not crowded. They found their way to the kitchen to get apples from the cooks. They went to the movies, and blocked the lifts much to the annoyance of elderly lift users. They were full of mischief and had a lot of fun. They were bursting with energy; they had not had any school for more than three month. I decided, enough was enough and every morning they had to attend English lessons for children. Peter and I attended English lessons as well.
The teacher was a young lady and she did her best to cram a little of English grammar into the recruited heads. She taught us intriguing words like “thingamajig” and “full as a goog”! I found it fascinating to watch the “students.” One woman was very competitive; she tried very hard to catch the eye of the teacher to answer the questions. When she got all her answers right, she boasted how easy this was. I think she got pretty much on the nerves of the poor students who could barley assemble an English sentence. Sometimes a heated exchange of words in different languages took place as pencils and pens scratched over rumpled foolscap, trying to make sense of a new language. One young lady was never finished with her grooming, combing her long, blond hair or trying to stick on an inch more to her blood red fingernails that took all her attention. She didn’t even look up when she was called to answer a question; she was so absorbed into her beautification.
Finally we got used to our cabin. For Peter was a bed provided in the next-door cabin. He didn’t want to sleep in a cabin with strange people. The girls drew straws to decide who slept with whom. Marie-Louise and Jacky slept together head to foot, but the bickering between the two didn’t stop so we decided that Lilli and Marie-Louise should sleep together for the time being. It worked as we were ignoring their complaints.
Our Cabin Steward looked well after us. Every morning he cleaned our cabin and made our beds. He was always sitting in the corner near our cabin and in the coming weeks I sometimes had a chat with him half in Italian and half in English. His home was in Genoa and he had a little daughter, his wife was dead. He had always been a ships steward and had travelled the world.
As a goodbye present from friends in Switzerland, all three girls had received a red T-shirt with their name in bold letters printed at the front. They loved their T-shirts and wore them often the sailors got to know their names and always called out, hi Lilli, hi Jacky, hi Marie-Louise.
We also experienced very rough seas, howling gales and cold weather. People fell sea sick and the dining room was visited only by a few. The girls were fine and didn’t feel
seasick at all. I was in my top berth lulled by the up and down motion that took place in my brain. I was slowly fed dry, small bread rolls and after a day and night cooped up in our tiny cabin, I had to get up. I felt weak, like emerging from a long and serious illness. I bundled up in my coat and a headscarf and went up and outside. The wind was fierce; I could barley open the door to the deck.
I nestled into a deckchair that stood against the wall. I felt much better breathing the salty, fresh sea air. Nobody else was around. It was bliss to have the stormy sea all to myself. I was fairly sheltered under the canopy of an upper deck. There were no sea birds, no flying fish today. The sea was hissing and broiling, changing her colour with the shifting clouds showing her fickle temperament. Peter so far didn’t show any sickness until he went up for lunch and a fellow passenger told him to drink a fair amount of whisky to bolster his immunity against seasickness. I was half asleep when he white as a sheet, nearly fell with the door into the cabin and quickly crouched over the washbasin to get rid of the whisky and also the fish he had for lunch. After that he felt better and went back on deck, but not before he made the suggestion to me that I try the trick with the whisky as well.
We never knew who our cabin neighbours were, but we knew there was a French couple with two teenage children that occupied the next-door cabin. They were a very
vocal and demonstrative family. Long and very heated arguments were fought with the odd missile hitting the connecting wall to our cabin. When this first started I ventured out carefully to see our steward and asked him if he heard that racket and if it wouldn’t be good of him to go in there and tell them to be more civilised. He threw up his hands in horror and said no…no…no… He didn’t want to go in their and risk to be hit as well. Anyhow somebody took action, as they tried to keep their arguments to themselves. They also seemed to have run out of missiles. Sometimes somebody ran out of the cabin huffing and puffing and tried to slam the cabin door, which didn’t work. When I saw the steward he pointed to their door, lifted his shoulders slightly and we smiled.
Pleasant days followed each other as our voyage took us further along the African coast, past Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Dahomey, Nigeria, Cameroon so all this exotic places just remained places on the map in the lobby. We travelled now in the Gulf of Guinea and the days were warm and pleasant like summer days. We were not far from the Equator, which is an imaginary circle on the surface of the earth, dividing it into the northern and the southern hemisphere, between Cameron and Gabon.
Ptolemy the Alexandrian Astronomer during AD 100 divided the equatorial circle into 360 degrees and created an imaginary North-South and East-West Network over the surface of the earth as a reference grid to find positions of known Islands and Continents.
In roman mythology Pluto was the god of the dead, the husband of Proserpine. Pluto assisted his two brothers Jupiter and Neptune to remove their father Saturn from power. They divided the world between them, Jupiter chose the earth and heavens, Neptune ruled the sea and Pluto received the lower world where he ruled over the shadows of the dead.
It was the day we crossed the equator.
Early in the morning when I stepped out on deck I was embraced by moist, warm air; it was a very agreeable sensation I had never experienced. In a sauna, the hot, moisture is harsh and leaves one exhausted. This was, like being gently swaddled in a moist, warm baby blanket, it was wonderful.
Big preparations were made for a celebration and the baptism for the ones who traversed the first time the equator. Everybody was on the main deck when sailors performed a sort of macabre play with the birth of Neptune and then chased the people for their baptism. When they were caught, they were thrown without much ceremony into the pool. The sailors had also positioned a tall pole with a trophy on top of it. They asked anybody who would be game to climb first. Nobody did, as it would be pretty hard for the first person to reach the top, as the pole was completely smeared with liquid soap. Peter, always a good sport, didn’t want to spoil their fun and made the beginning, it was very hard because of the slippery soap. He didn’t make it to the trophy but he got a lot of applause because he was the first to try. The ones that tried later had it easier and with time most of the soap was rubbed off and some young guys reached the top.
We were together with some of our new acquaintances and talked what sort of revenge we could take and Peter had the idea of hiding the white shoes of one of the entertainer, a rather small man with a tiny moustache and always in a white suite, who had taken them off for whatever reason. It turned out not to be as humorous as we thought it would be. The poor guy was frantic when he didn’t find his shoes. He was rather comical and at first we thought he just played along but it turned out that he was really despaired, when he didn’t find them it was just like he had only one pair of shoes. We couldn’t watch him longer and showed him where they were. He didn’t laugh; he was not amused.
We passed by the African countries of Gabon, Kongo and Angola.
Of Gabon I remembered the humanist Doctor Albert Schweitzer who arrived in Lambarene in 1913 and build his hospital and helped and treated thousands of people.
As a German national he was interned in France from 1917-1918. In this period he wrote two important philosophical works, The Decay and restoration of Civilization and Civilization and Ethics. In 1924 he returned to Lambarene and rebuild his hospital. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952 and died in 1965, a truly great man.
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During 350 years, from 1470, the Portuguese, the French, Dutch and English carried on a very lucrative slave trade from this area.
Freed slaves founded Libreville in 1849, the capital of Gabon that became independent in 1960.
With the name Kongo the famous explorer Henry Morton Stanley and his famous remark “Dr. Livingstone I presume?” came to my mind. He founded Kinshasa that he named Leopoldville in 1881 as a trading depot on the Congo River.
He was ruthless and nasty towards the African native people whose country he explored for the sake of European Nations. He received a knighthood for his service and he died in 1904 when more or less all of Africa was in European hands.
In 1974 Angola, a country rich in mineral resources was still under colonial rule from the Portuguese. The Portuguese were not fair and kind and didn’t apply a policy of equality. Their only interest was to exploit the riches of the country to the benefit of Portugal. It was calculated and cruel. In 1974 the adult literary rate was still only 15 %. Angola was governed by a system called “do indignato”, a rule of economic exploitation, educational neglect and political repression.
In the 1950s a nationalist movement grew and in 1961 a guerrilla war against the Portuguese and their exploitation of Angola was initiated. Angola reached independence from Portugal in 1975.
Forced labour
The Portuguese Empire first established a de jure system of forced labour throughout its colonies in 1899. The Portuguese government did not implement the system in Angola until 1911. It was abolished it in 1913
In 1926, later that year, Salazar reestablished forced labour, ordering colonial authorities to force nearly all adult, male, ethnic minorities in Portugal's African colonies to work.
The government told workers that they would only have to work for six months of every year. In practice, this obligation was a life sentence of forced labor. Civil rights for natives, no longer treated as natural law, had to be "earned" on a case by case basis under the designation of assimilade. Less than 1% of the native population ever achieved this designation. By 1947, 40% of workers died each year with a 60% infant mortality rate
By 1940 the white population in Angola had risen to forty thousand, 2% of the population. Most of these émigrés, illiterate and landless, took the best farming land, regardless of availability, without compensating existing landowners.
The authorities expelled natives, forcing them to harvest maize, coffee, and beans. Natives could "volunteer" to work on the plantations, voluntários, or face conscription, working for $1.50 per month as contratados. This system of forced labour prompted 500,000 Angolans to flee, creating a labor shortage, which in turn created the need for more workers for the colonial economy.
By 1947, 40% of the forced labourers died each year with a 60% infant mortality rate in the territory (according to The World Factbook's 2007 estimates, infant mortality rate (deaths/1,000 live births) in modern-day Angola was 184.44 - the worst result among all countries in the world).
Historian Basil Davidson visited Angola in 1954 and found 30% of all adult males working in these conditions; "there was probably more coercion than ever before." Marcelo Caetano, Portugal's Minister of the Colonies, recognized the inherent flaws in
the system, which he described as using natives "like pieces of equipment without any concern for their yearning, interests, or desires". Parliament held a closed session in 1947 to discuss the deteriorating situation. Henrique Galvão, Angolan deputy to the Portuguese National Assembly, read his "Report on Native Problems in the Portuguese Colonies". Galvão condemned the "shameful outrages" he had uncovered, the forced labour of "women, of children, of the sick, [and] of decrepit old men." He concluded that in Angola, "only the dead are really exempt from forced labor."
The government's control over the natives eliminated the worker-employer's incentive to keep his employees alive because, unlike in other colonial societies, the state replaced deceased workers without directly charging the employer. The Portuguese Government refuted the report and arrested Galvão in 1952[3] In 1961, Galvão would be involved in the hijacking of a Portuguese luxury cruise liner.
Somewhere along the borders of Angola and Southwest Africa we passed the remote Island Saint Helena, made famous by Napoleon.
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