It was the smell that I noticed first, a dry, dusty, smoky smell overlaid with a tang of burnt jet fuel, that had a hint of something indefinable in it, was it a slight animal sweaty background? I couldn’t decide, but the air was cooler and much fresher than the stale canned air of the South African Airways Boeing 707 I had just emerged from.
So this is Africa, the mysterious Dark Continent that I had read so much about in my boyhood, home of Tarzan, where the Mau Mau had just been beaten, where the Congo had just erupted into civil war and chaos, where I was going to spend the next three years as a colonial policeman in Northern Rhodesia, this was December 1960.
As I walked down the steps, I looked around at Nairobi Airport, noticing the clear blue sky, not a cloud in sight, such a contrast to the cold, grey, grimy, wet skies of my home in South Wales. The soil, very red and dusty between the sparse grass at the edge of the runway. Outside of the door to the whitewashed transit lounge, where I and my fellow passengers were headed while the plane refuelled, stood a tall African policeman, made taller by the dark red fez with the glinting badge of the Kenya police at the front. He was smart, polished boots, ironed khaki shorts down to his knees. Dark blue crew necked pullover, with a polished black leather belt around his waist. As I neared him I noticed the tribal marks scarring his cheeks, hard, dark, rather bloodshot eyes as he looked us over in passing. "I bet he’s seen some things in the last few years" said Hugh, one of my new colleagues I had met the previous day in the departure lounge at Cromwell Road in London...
Colonial Policemen - read on here
