Africa: 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.