A secret from my African childhood has become a deeper mystery

About 55 years ago, when I was about ten, my younger brother Roger and I discovered a slave pit in Africa.

Actually it probably wasn’t a slave pit and we probably didn’t discover it, but ‘Arab’ ‘slave pits’ were what Southern Rhodesian schools offered as an explanation for the circular, room-sized, stone-lined pits sunk about five feet below ground but open to the sky. And if Roger’s and mine were not the first modern eyes to behold this antiquity, then we were able at least to persuade ourselves of the claim, as there was no path trodden into the small patch of dark, dense primary forest in whose midst we found the pit; and nobody else seemed to know about it. This felt like a discovery.

We never persuaded Dad to climb with us the open, grassy hill on the other side of the cool Pungwe river by whose banks sat the ‘government rest house’ where our family often holidayed; so Roger and I remained sole guardians of the experience.