LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter Three

      FOR THOSE who care to look, Africa is all over Oxford. It’s in the glass boxes at the Pitt-Rivers Museum, the iron-ribbed museum of a museum that the Victorians built to display the shrunken heads and feathered curiosities of the peoples they were about to introduce to Progress. It’s in the odour of borax at Queen Elizabeth House, an institution where some of Britain’s last colonial training courses were held before it was reinvented as a centre for development studies. It’s in the quiet stucco Quaker meeting-house in St Giles where some of the earliest anti-slavery meetings were held. It’s at the ugly cinder-block headquarters of Oxfam, the anti-famine group founded by Oxford pacifists during the Allied blockade of occupied Greece that has become Britain’s wealthiest international charity. Oxford has updated the ethic of service to the colonies that it preached a century ago when Rudyard Kipling wrote of ‘the white man’s burden’. Nonetheless, dozens of its university graduates still set off for Africa each year with what might be described as a modern version of that urge, an ambition to ‘develop’ Africa that arouses much the same pleasurable hopes and feelings as did earlier pledges to serve Kipling’s ‘lesser breeds without the law’.

      Emma first found Africa at Oxford among her fellow students at the polytechnic. A red-brick institution in the suburb of Headington, Oxford Polytechnic then had a reputation as a haven for well-bred students who couldn’t get into more prestigious universities, let alone Oxford University itself. She was seventeen and in her first year when she met Sally Dudmesh, a sweet-faced blonde anthropology student standing beside a university notice board. Sally holds a British passport, but she was raised in Africa and considers herself a white African. She now designs jewellery in Kenya, though when I first spoke to her in 1997 she was spending the summer in England, as she does every year. She said she and Emma felt an instant attraction, particularly when Emma learned of Sally’s connection to Africa. ‘I felt like I was meeting my own sister,’ Sally remembered. ‘At that time she was very arty. She always dressed exotically. She had this sort of very wonderful calmness. She just glided into a room.’ Emma wore a long purple velvet coat. She was pale, with a husky whisper of a voice and a smile full of sparkle and mischief. ‘She made fun of disasters with people. She had a wicked sense of humour, a really fun, bad-girl side.’ The two girls struck up a fast friendship.

      Sally lived with Willy Knocker, a white Kenyan from a well-known colonial family who was studying at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Through Sally and Willy, Emma was drawn into a circle of friends who shared a fascination with Africa. They liked to dress in African clothes and talk about African politics while smoking pot and listening to African music. They wanted lives with an edge. Although many of them came from colonial or diplomatic backgrounds, they all abhorred the British Empire and blamed colonialism for most of Africa’s problems. They felt their romance with Africa somehow set them apart from the restraint and tedium of middle-class English life. ‘It was just sort of a wildness - a spirit of adventure,’ said Sally, trying to explain the allure Africa had for her and Emma. ‘There’s an incredible freedom and scope to Africa that you don’t find in England. In England everything is so controlled. In Africa there’s an intrigue and a fascination and a sense that you can really expand. In England you have the feeling that you’re always having to play a certain role. You could always see that we would not end up living in England. We were not ordinary English girls.’

      Sally and Willy’s house was a meeting point for other young people on their way to Africa. Emma met Alastair and Patta Scott-Villiers at a party there in the early 1980s. Patta - her given name was Henrietta, but she’d been called Patta since childhood - was studying international development with Willy in London. She and Alastair planned to move to Sudan as soon as she finished her master’s degree. Alastair and Patta were a couple of years older than Sally and Emma. Alastair was compact, sandy-haired and snub-nosed. His father had been with the Foreign Office, and he had spent part of his youth in Canada. Alastair seemed to have picked up some freewheeling North America ways in Canada. He was brash and friendly, an endlessly inquisitive chain-smoker. Patta was more reserved and watchful. She came from an aristocratic family but never mentioned her connections. She had soft brown hair and a magnolia complexion. She seldom wore make-up and liked to dress in blue jeans and T-shirts. Like many of Emma’s friends, she seemed to feel more relaxed outside England. In 1983 she and Alastair moved to Sudan. Patta went to work for the international charity CARE. Alastair, who had been dealing antiques in London, went along hoping to find some kind of work once they got there.

      It was exactly the sort of adventure that appealed to Emma and Sally. Already Emma was restless living in Britain. She had visited Europe several times on holiday. In 1985 she took off the better part of a year to fly in a Robin Aiglon single-engine plane to Australia with a young man named Bill Hall. Hall was the son of a distinguished Oxford professor. He had already finished university and gone to work for his family’s engineering business when Emma and a friend rented a house from his parents in the nearby village of Littlemore. A solidly built, meticulously careful man in his twenties, he was an accomplished pilot. He had always wanted to fly his single-engine plane to Australia, where he had family. He invited Emma to come along with him. In those days without satellite navigation, it was much more risky than it is now to fly all the way across Europe, Asia and the South Pacific in such a small plane. Emma knew nothing about flying, but she threw herself into the organizational details of the trip. She made the arrangements for their stops along the way, travelling to London to apply for visas at the embassies of half a dozen countries. For instance, Emma convinced the Saudi embassy to grant them a visa, even though as an unrelated, unmarried couple she and Hall should not have been allowed to enter Saudi Arabia.

      Emma talked her lecturers into letting her use the aerial photographs she planned to take as coursework for her art degree. The Oxford Times covered the pair’s departure. ‘We will fly through extremely varied landscape, including jungle, desert and ocean,’ Emma proudly told the reporter from the paper. She persuaded newspapers in Australia and India to write articles about their 30,000-mile flight. One of them took a marvellous picture of her and Hall in the cockpit. Hall is looking up from a map, while Emma simply looks ravishing in pearls and a colourful print dress.

      The

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