Ardtaraig

Cairo to the Cape by Imperial Air
Nowhere was the romance of commercial flying more compounded with the perceived conditions of the exotic than on the Imperial Airways route between Cairo and the Cape. A belated and sky-high realization of Cecil Rhodes’ famous imperial dream of a Cape-to-Cairo railroad vertically binding together British African possessions, the air route across eastern Africa (and hence always over British colonial territory) was initiated in 1932 with a voyage that eventually covered the 8,000 miles in 11 days with 31 stops and changes of at least five different kinds of airplanes. At that time, fights were generally 200 to 250 miles in length and all done during the day as nighttime flying was not yet possible in the region.

Therefore Imperial Airways had constructed some 57 landing fields, 30 of which were little more than 4clearings that occasionally required the builders to act as big game hunters who had “…to drive away the lions and elephants that fought to preserve the sanctity of the bush,” according to an early air enthusiast, Sir Harry Brittain. In his book “By Air” (1933), Brittain also provided a photograph of the landing strip at Dodoma in Tanzania, where a chained baboon and monkey served as an improvised alert system if lions or leopards appeared.

Described as “the world’s most adventurous sky journey,” the African route had been many years in planning and execution, first charted in 1919 and then flown, with varying degrees of luck, by an intrepid handful of RAF and South African pilots. The first two adventurers to make it in 1920 endured two accidents and thus required three airplanes to achieve the result in 46 days.

Such interrupted and precarious travel evoked in the minds of many who made it something of the romance that attended the earlier earthbound endeavors of the 19th century explorers of the so-called Dark Continent. Seen from above, as seen from below, the African landscape was forbidding to the Westerner, even overwhelming. Joseph Conrad’s hero, Marlowe, in Heart of Darkness describes the scene as “a silent wilderness… something great and invincible….” The first air traveler on the Cape to Cairo air route, opened up by Imperial Airways in 1932, was Ewart Scott Grogan who wrote of his experience of seeing the continent from above that “[i]t is one of the most terrifying things in the world–this immensity, this spaciousness, this seeming infinity….” And yet he added in relief: “[W]hile it terrifies, it inspires….” Grogan personally knew both dimensions, height and width, because he had earlier walked from the Cape to Cairo in a three-year trek (1897-1900).