Captain Nelson's Freedom Ferry

A hot, leonine wind prowled through the saw grass, rattling the few gaunt thornbushes that dot the banks of the Zambezi River near Kasane. Potbellied kids squatted in the shade of round, white-walled mud huts while their mothers hacked with mattocks in the maize patches. Down at the riverbank, "Captain" Nelson Maibolwa puttered with twin 18-h.p. outboard motors slung on a ramshackle wood-and-iron pontoon. Behind him flowed the sun-dappled, grey-green Zambezi, where crocodiles, hippos and shoals of saber-toothed tiger-fish eternally wait their prey. There came the sound of a laboring truck engine, and brawny, coal-black Captain Nelson peered down the rutted dirt track from the south as proudly as if Emma, Lady Hamilton were being piped aboard the poop deck. It was another load of passengers for his Freedom Ferry.

Chink in the Curtain. Most maps do not even show Kasane, in the British Protectorate of Bechuanaland. But to hundreds of thousands of blacks suffering under the indignities of South African apartheid, the scruffy riverside village is the gateway to Elysium. For Kasane leads to Freedom Alley, a tiny, 50-yd. stretch of border between friendly Bechuanaland and Northern Rhodesia that refugees from South and South West Africa may cross in safety. Even so, only a rifle shot west of this chink in the apartheid curtain, menacing reed banks mask the end of the Caprivi Strip, a narrow arm of South West Africa that is heavily patrolled by armed South African cops. To the east, a wire game-fence marks the border of white-supremacist Southern Rhodesia, which also views with suspicion this traffic in escaping Africans.

Indeed, it was only with the collapse of the Central African Federation last January that Kenneth Kaunda's Northern Rhodesian government was free to permit refugees safe passage on their way north. Scores have already made the trip through Freedom Alley. Thousands more will follow as South Africa's black and colored people grow ever more restive under Hendrik Verwoerd's oppressive regime. Most of the refugees are young men (usually in their 20s or 30s) headed for freedom-fighter training camps, either around Tanganyika's capital of Dar es Salaam or else in the Leopoldville Congo, where promising recruits are picked for intensive guerrilla and sabotage courses in Ethiopia, Egypt and Algeria.

The Journey North. Traveling furtively by foot, truck or freight car, would-be freedom fighters must first make it on their own to Francistown, a rallying point north of Bechuanaland's bleak Kalahari Desert. The toughest uhuru (freedom) trail winds more than 500 miles up from South West Africa, along a miraged, meandering heavy-vehicle track that cuts through the desert, then swings east just below the trackless Okavango Swamp. Once in Francistown--two hotels, a handful of stores and gas stations strung along a tarred main street--the fugitives are taken in hand by one or another of the insurgent political parties banned in South Africa. They rest briefly at a rambling old hostel known as the "White House," where last week 30 young men were waiting impatiently for the next leg of their trek. The black-hating Afrikaners who dominate Francistown's white population would gladly break a few African skulls, so the refugees stay to themselves, keeping their knobkerries close at hand until they can board a truck (at $9 a head) for the grueling 200-mile haul to Kasane.

The five-ton trucks are piloted by Africans, who prefer to drive by night to prevent their radiators from overheating. Steering by the stars and the seats of their pants, they skirt the Great Makarikari Salt Pan, bounce through mopani forests, across sand dunes and dry lakebeds. Last month one truckload of refugees had to follow an elephant herd for miles to find a waterhole.

On to Uhuru. In the truck that rumbled up to Captain Nelson's Freedom Ferry one recent afternoon, 28 weary, unkempt passengers sprawled on dirty blankets. All but two were members of banned African nationalist groups, headed for Dar es Salaam. Since Bechuana land cannot afford politically to let would-be terrorists out of the country, the group had to be interrogated by a border constable. One illiterate young tribesman claimed he was off to Dar to become an airline pilot; another said slyly that he aimed to be a bank manager. With a flashing grin, a third traveler answered: "I wish to pursue a higher education." Though well aware of the kind of schooling they were headed for, the African constable waved them through.

The women looked up from their maize patches as Captain Nelson yanked his outboard motors into sputtering life. The truck groaned aboard, the ramp came up, and the Freedom Ferry spun out into the stream, heading straight for the dreaded Caprivi Strip. Four minutes later, Nelson swung his craft expertly to shore on the Northern Rhodesian side. Only a herd of piebald cows was on hand to greet the newcomers. Ahead of them lay the wearisome 1,500-mile road to Dar, but the perilous part of their odyssey was over. As they disappeared down the boggy track to uhuru, Captain Nelson wiped his hands on an open-necked blue shirt. Inevitably, armed with higher education, they would be back. "Good, good," muttered the skipper. "One day something--wham! bang! --must happen."

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