However, if no one will pen down these stories, no one will ever come to know them, and no one will ever learn from them! … I can do this, I can pen them down — word for word — I brought this know-how to Africa ...
Until then, everything what was told could only be narrated, in countless variations, at first by those who were present, afterwards by hearsay only — continuously embellished, shortened, extended, distorted — depending on the state of interest or the state of mind …

When I left Europe — in 1882 — the method to document the spoken word unmistakeably for all times was working without electricity and without machines!
I took this method to Africa within my sixteen years old brain, first across the sea with the „Drummond Castle“ from England, then across land by train to Natal.
The railway line between the port of Durban and Natal’s capital Pietermaritzburg was in those times the longest on the continent — four hundred and fifty miles!

¹ My parents died when I was about eight years old. My father had been connected with the printing of early newspapers in Fleet Street, London. The Typographical Guild came to my rescue and sent me over to a convent in Bruges, Belgium. There, my mind flourished under the care of the good sisters. I learnt Flemish and French, and I was rather good in composition and copper-plate handwriting — not as an artist but as a reporter!

After four years at the convent I was sent back to London, and entered one of Pitman’s earliest classes to learn shorthand. That ingenious jumble of symbols was fast becoming the wonder of the business world. Typewriters and Lynotype-setting machines had not yet been invented. But shorthand was making it possible to report speeches verbatim and then transcribe them into longhand for printing by the old hand-setting method.

Shorthand fascinated me. I was determined to master the strange hieroglyphics as quickly as possible so as to be able to report speeches by public men word for word for publication. Eagerness was a spur to my brain and soon I was a qualified shorthand writer employed as a reporter on the Catholic weekly THE TABLET — an interesting achievement for a young Protestant!
But a weekly could not satisfy my thirst for reporting. When I had finished my work for THE TABLET I did freelancing for other papers, and like many another cub reporter would race gleefully after a fire-engine in pusuit of a story. A satisfactory enough life for any lad.

But fate had something better up her sleeves. Although I was only sixteen, I was entrusted with one of the most responsible and arduous tasks assigned to pressmen — Parliamentary reporting.
One afternoon while I was busy transcribing my notes I became aware that a party of interested visitors had gathered round me. One of them in particular was staring at my shorthand symbols with the greatest interest.
„What on earth are those squiggels, boy?“ the stranger demanded.
„Pitman‘s shorthand symbols, sir,“ I replied. „I‘m transcribing a speech made in the House this afternoon.“
„You must be quick in summarising!“
„Oh no, sir. I don‘t summarise. That‘s for the editor. I just take down what the speaker says and write it out in longhand afterwards.“
„Not word for word, surely?“
“Yes, word for word, sir.”
„Remarkable!“ exclaimed the visitor. „Most remarkable!“
He stared again at the neat symbols and walked away, still muttering his surprise.
I looked after him with amusement, then caught the eye of a passing friend.
„Who was that?“
„Mr. Harry Escombe — a very important gentleman from Natal.”
The name meant nothing to me, and I had almost forgotten the incident when the summon came.
„Hey, Filmer! Mr. Escombe wants to see you. That Natal bloke, you know.“
It was all so sudden there was no time to wonder. The Natal bloke was kindly but keen. He asked a few friendly questions, and then —
„How would you like to work for us in Natal, my boy?”
I gulped. „I’d — like very much, sir.”
„Good! It’s a great country for lads like you. I’m very impressed with this shorthand of yours. It’s most important to have a verbatim record of Government speeches. I want you to come out to South Africa and be verbatim reporter to the Natal Legislative Council, of which I am a member. Don’t decide now. It’s a big step to take. Go home and think it over, and let me know your final answer later.”

Durban in 1882 was a gangling, adoloscent town sprawling from green hills to the wide sandy shore. The harbour was only then being built, and the „Drummond Castle“ anchored out in the bay. There she slung her passengers overside in a huge laundry-type basket to be dumped with a bump on the heaving deck of the tug „Melrose”, which puffed its way to the Point wharves.

My funds were running low so an hotel was out of question. I decided to go to the railway station as quickly as possible and buy my ticket to Pietermaritzburg … and, then, the train would bring me to the end of the world as I knew it then.

The humid coastal strip was narrow, and the railway soon rose and wound into the hills. Up and up it went, till the wind blew free and chill; and round the curving shoulders of the heights blue vistas unrolled of hills, hills and more hills; and here and there where the ground levelled off clusters of strange, hive-shaped grass dwellings hung. These were the beehive huts of the Zulus, the proudest warrior race in Southern Africa. They fought other native tribes, they fought each other and — most bitterly of all — they fought the white men, both Boer and Briton.
Over the Drakensberg to Natal in 1837 streamed a band of Voortrekkers, and, after having been involved in so many clashes, on the historic date 16th December, 1838, the Zulus were decisively if temporarily defeated. The Trekkers founded their settlement on a long, low ridge beneath a great escarpment. Beside it wound the river Umsindusi, where reeds grew taller than a mounted man. Here at last was a haven, known in the Zulu tongue as „Umgungundhlovu“ — the Conqueror of the Elephant — but called by the Trekkers Pietermaritzburg, after their two leaders.
The town was fourty-five years old when I arrived invited to note down, word for word, the speeches of members of the Natal Legislative Council.

At that time, the train went no further. With it, the achievements of modern civilisation ended here. Travellers who wanted to pursue further to the North, could do this only by horse-driven coach, by oxen-driven wagon, mounted on a horse or on foot.
This journey by rail from Durban to that place of my future life close to the edge of Africa’s wilderness made me aware that limits are to be overcome only if ambition is combined with inventiveness.
When it was too late, I became aware that inventiveness which knows no limits may create limitless ambition for development — and that, at the end, development will have to accept its limits.

I look around in this hall full of dust and rust, and I consider: railways and shorthand — both were keys for my personal development and for all development which I helped to take into the wilderness. The results of thinking and acting were determined by abilities of brain and hand, in other words by the ability of human beings to understand and — with a bit of training — to emulate.
Who wanted it, could become knowledgable from reliable documentation of the spoken word — and was empowered to track down the shortness of liars.
Or he could understand the working of steam in a locomotive and he could make use of that principle to make his own wheels turn — in a tractor for work in a sugarcane-field, in a pump to clear waste-water from the mines, for a mill or for a forge. All of these were machines whose functions did remain comprehensible; they could be maintained by hand, may be by using a suitable hand-tool. Each part could be replaced by hand or could be improved by brain and by hand.

Less and less people are quite at home with the matrix of electric-powered machines.
More and more people feel compelled to use them without comprehending how they work. Electricity did not only snatch the power from the wheel but, at the same time, took away the personal freedom to copy and to pursue with own means.
Tracks of digital ciphers on flickering monitors do lead into a fictitious world manipulated by specialised handymen of ageless profiteers of conflicts in the real world.

Now that electricity has degraded the wheel to a pathetic cargo-robot, railways will not anymore be symbols of imperial pursuit; business tycoons and money-traders are taking possession of those digital cyphers which, appearing in the form of the Internet, create only the illusion they would serve the freedom of individual communication.

Oh, I do follow their tracks, they will come close as my nightly guests on this rolling stage. I shall listen to them; and I am going to dot down everything with this pencil here, while my specialised handymen will search in the global archive of this electric-driven net, with some astonishable success, for quotes from their own documented history.
But, I do not trust these purchasable surfers. I do not trust their discoveries, which may want to play an „X“ for an „U“.
Once I switch off this computer, its dark monitor will mirror my own features, ageless … then I am going to bend over my notebook and dot down …

„Oh no, sir. I don‘t summarise. That‘s for the editor. I just take down what the speaker says and write it out in longhand afterwards.“

Twelve years before me, in September 1870, another boy had arrived by train from Durban in Pietermaritzburg, the son of a clergyman in England’s Bishop’s Stortford. At that time he was seventeen, only one year older than I was at my arrival. He was sent to his brother in South Africa for health reasons, tuberculosis had bothered him already during childhood. But South Africa didn’t seem to help him healthwise; two years after arrival he suffered from a mild heart-attack.

Imagine, that boy would have fallen victim to his weak heart then, in 1872, Africa’s history would have taken another course; and the great imperial dream of a railway crossing the continent from Cape to Cairo would not have been dreamt at all.




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