In an expedition dispatch sent through to us by Gary and Nicky Nightingale from Mafambisse on the Pungue River near Beira, we get the latest news in Kingsley’s words …

 

What a river! And the beauty of the Caborra Bassa Gorge that turned Dr. Livingstone back on his fateful Zambezi expedition! In 1977, we lost an outboard engine to the rapids here, so this time, joined by a willing group of Land Rover journalists and volunteers who are on the river for the week coinciding with Africa Malaria Day, we’re being more careful.

 

After 11 months we’re heading home. It’s a great feeling. On the Spirit of Adventure dhow, sailing back from the Somali border, we reach Ilha da Mozambique, the old southern gateway to the dhow trade. Now it’s by inflatable boats down the great Zambezi. We come across some huge crocs, and below the old slave-trading river port of Tete, we are entranced by the beauty of the Lupata Gorge and Little Mozambique Island rising like a plum pudding out of the centre of the Zambezi. The moon lights up the river; hippos are plentiful. Barefoot in the sand, we sit around the campfire. After nearly a year on expedition our objective still remains to improve lives — we’re continuing to distribute tens of thousands of mosquito nets to pregnant mums and mothers with babies in remote areas where there are no regular health services. The shocking statistic is that for every minute of every day and night a baby dies from the blood-sucking bite of the female Anopheles mosquito, and many of the villages we get to don’t have a single mosquito net.

 

Overloaded with nets, the One Net, One Life Land Rover support team follows us down the river delivering food, nets, fuel, and supplies to the river craft. On Africa Malaria Day, we do live radio crossings to SAfm, East Coast Radio, Cape Talk, and David O’Sullivan on 702. African skimmers swoop and glide in front of the boat, and we reach the grave of Mary Livingstone, wife of the famous Victorian missionary explorer. At Chupanga, on the south bank of the river where at age 41 this brave woman was killed by malaria and buried under a baobab tree in 1862, we pay our respects at the graveside by distributing nets to mums with babies. The administrator of Chupanga endorses the expedition’s scroll of peace and goodwill in support of malaria prevention and writes in it that nets we distributed here nearly a year ago are still being used and that amongst moms with babies there is a noticeable reduction of malaria in the area.

 

The mangrove swamps of the Zambezi Delta stretch for 8,000 square kilometers and malaria is rife. In a small thatched riverbank hut, a mum with a tiny baby sits in the smoke of a small cooking fire. Her husband is out fishing from a dugout canoe. She has no blanket, just a grass mat, a dented tin mug, a pot, a coconut grinder, a wooden grain stamper, and now a brand new mosquito net. The word soon spreads and mums shout and wave from the opposite bank. After a breakfast of mud crabs and prawns cooked on the coals we leave and from Chinde, at the mouth of the Zambezi, make our way back upstream to Marromeu. We huddle in the boats as the stinging rain pours down and the wind turns the wide river into a rough sea. Our Zambezi mission accomplished, tomorrow we’ll roll up the boats, tie them onto the Land Rover roof racks, and head south through the Gorongoza woodlands to the Pungue River for a riverboat journey down to Beira and the Indian Ocean, all part of our One Net, One Life odyssey. Then it’s south to ancient Sofala, the Rio Save, Maputo, and home.

 

We’ll keep in touch …