24. Plantations

Although it was impossible to be certain, I was also convinced that Iliva was not living among the plantation workers. As a Reader, I received the task of understanding what the Americans had left us regarding the cultivation of coconut and oil palms. Even though I used every opportunity to make my own enquiries, I never heard anything of her when I visited the plantations to supervise the germination process and train the workers on how to transplant, tend and feed the young palms.

The people recruited to create the plantation were certainly a mixed bunch. In the earliest days, a good deal of the work was done by the Guardians themselves as they felled trees to put up the first forts. Cultivation was almost an afterthought until the completion of the stadium when it became necessary to find work for the builders released as construction ended. Later, the pattern of creating a plantation became established, especially as the focus shifted from coconuts to oil palms, with the necessary adaptation of cultivation techniques.

The new system was just becoming established about the time of Iliva’s disappearance. The first task was the heavy work of clearing the jungle and cutting down the trees and of building the fort and the stockade to protect the nursery beds. In this phase, the trees provided building materials and it was important to clear the stumps and burn the undergrowth, providing ash that could be ploughed back into the ground and to get rid of unwanted plant diseases that might have remained from the jungle.

One of the problems we had to deal with, as we shifted our focus to oil palms was that we had relatively little information on their needs and how to grow them. What the Americans had left was not in their language so we had to work from some pages of notes, written by hand by an American, and attached to the other document. From this we understood that the seeds of the oil palm were dormant for many years and that we needed to warm them for three or four months before they would sprout.

This was very difficult to control as we needed to estimate the correct temperature, and it needed to be maintained day and night. In the end, the problem was resolved by Langanipa and Bahla. A room was constructed with a thick floor made from slabs from the airfield, which would retain the heat of the sun through the night. Langanipa measured the temperature using a long metal bar that rested on and turned a roller as it heated or cooled. By looking at the position of a disk on the end of the roller we could tell when the room was too cool and, if necessary, build a fire beneath the floor to raise the temperature.

Once the seeds had sprouted, we planted them in bamboo tubes for transport to the nursery beds near the fort. The young plants remained in the nursery beds for more than a year while the new plantation was cleared. After the fort and stockade had been completed, disposing of the felled trees was a problem and in the early times they were simply burned. Later, however, as we discovered how to heat certain rocks and extract pig iron, a requirement for fuel was created and ultimately, separate teams of charcoal burners were established to dig pits under the ground. The logs were buried there and huge fires were built over them to dry the wood and turn it into charcoal for the iron smelter.

Part of the problem of being sure that Iliva was not living in the plantations was that the workers’ camps, inside the stockade, were intended only for the official employees of the plantation. These were mainly men from the village and the forest who were brought up on six month contracts. Perhaps understandably, therefore, shanty towns outside the stockade were tolerated and the men could go there for recreation in their spare time.

These were unauthorised and, because the Guardians generally turned a blind eye to them, they were somewhat lawless places, rather like their counterparts in the Village. It was difficult to imagine that Iliva would have wanted to live in an environment of that type but a lone woman would not have been at all conspicuous there. Some men had wives and lovers living there and there were also shebeens selling illicit liquor and other entertainment, much of it provided by women.

My work meant that I had a good opportunity to talk to the workmen. Every day we would set out from the Guardian quarters in the fort and make our way into the plantation to set out and organise the day’s tasks. We would assign work parties to clearing the forest, uprooting stumps, burning undergrowth, weeding and so on, as appropriate. If the Tractor was in the plantation on that day, we would ride out on the trailer to arrive at sunrise.

The workers would already be there, with a fire built and we would share a drink with them. Having walked out from the camp, they would generally have set out much earlier than we had and be eating their breakfast. I was lucky enough to be on Guardian terms, under which tasty meals were provided for us but they generally ate much more simply, with perhaps a chunk of corn bread and some sugar water to sustain them for the whole day.

Guardians were more likely to have meat, fruit, coconut milk and hot tea so those of us prepared to share with the workmen were usually warmly welcomed. We would find them nursing hangovers from the night before and teasing each other about their adventures with the shanty women. They saw us as being rich and privileged with access to any woman we wanted and they would offer to introduce us to gorgeous girls that they knew in the camps. They said there were beautiful women there, positively fighting to make our acquaintance.

This wasn’t a serious conversation – the real difference between our situations would have made that uncomfortable I suppose. It did, however, provide every opportunity for me to explain how none of the women they offered would meet my standards which, perhaps surprisingly, exactly corresponded to a description of Iliva. All done jokingly, of course, but being on the right side of a Guardian (which is how they saw me) was no small achievement for a worker, so I have no doubt at all that they tried quite hard to fill my specification, but without success.

I sometimes wonder what I would have done if I had managed to locate her. It would not have been a good thing because, if I had found her, then I think that the news would inevitably have got back to Manla Kulu who was relentlessly pursuing his own search. I did not think about that then and, fortunately, the issue did not arise at the time.

As the work progressed, different skills were necessary, first to clear the land, then to help me to lay out and position the palms and to plant out the seedlings and ground cover; later, on a continuing basis, different teams were brought in to weed and fertilise the young trees and erect cages to protect them from rats and other pests.

As the plantations matured, the trip out to the work area in the morning changed. In a new plantation, we would see the jungle being cleared as the untended forest made way for orderly fields. At this stage, one had ample opportunity to see the Tractor at work.

It was then nearly forty years old. Through the efforts of the Technical Guardians, it was still functional but the paintwork had been almost worn away by careful cleaning and polishing each week. The metal showed the marks of welding and reinforcement where cracks had been mended. A track had been carved out of the side of the hill into the jungle and a large shed constructed in each stockade area, where the Tractor could be serviced and repaired. Whenever it came up to the plantations, a trunk of spare parts and the tools for servicing and emergency repairs were brought with it from the store left in the Hanger by the Americans.

The drivers of the Tractor were an elite Guardian squad, led by a Lieutenant and with half a dozen Sergeants qualified to do the actual driving. They were minor celebrities in their own right down in the village, and everyone knew them by sight. Each morning the two Sergeants on duty for the day would check the condition of the Tractor and supervise start-up before taking it out of the shed inside the stockade and into the plantation.

Depending on the task for the day, the appropriate implements would be loaded with the cans of fuel onto the trailer and they would set out for the fields. Generally, the Tractor was extremely reliable. Any part of it that was fragile or might break had long since been discarded or replaced and it worked from morning to night on ploughing and tilling.

When the Tractor occasionally failed to start, or broke down during the day, repairing it was the highest priority for everyone. The maintenance team that travelled with it would be galvanised into action and the driver of the moment would not rest easy until it was going again and clearly established that the breakdown was not due to his negligence.

The responsibility for looking after the Tractor was a heavy one and, no matter how much they pretended not to worry, the drivers themselves were a nervous and irascible group, much subject to digestive ailments and bad temper. The result was that, once the plantation had been prepared and these prima donnas went on to their next task, the rest of the team breathed a collective sigh of relief. No matter that hoeing weeds by hand was hard work, they were happier when the mechanised part of the operation was over.

As the plantation developed round the fort, the area nearby would start to contain recognisable palm trees and ground cover crops. The American notes suggested crops that would serve as feedstuff for grazing animals but, since they had not left any animals of this type with us, we adapted the recommendation and planted ground nuts and beans that we could use directly.

Because it took a number of years to establish a new plantation, I was able to work with the Guardians to supervise several sites at different stages of development. As I made my way from one to another of them, I made contact with many different teams of workers. After a while, they gave me a nickname which translates as ‘Only Perfection’. None of them found any trace of a woman like Iliva among the people that they knew in the camps.