This involved hitchhiking to the Western edge of Zambia, about half a dozen steps in Angola and then into Caprivi – which I think is now known as "the Zambezi region" and then into Botswana and to the Rhodesian border. Of course Rhodesia is now Zimbabwe.
By that time I then picked up a ride and with some young people in a Land Rover. We got to the border – and they all got in except the immigration official came to me and without any explanation said I wasn't welcome and stamped "PI" - Prohibited Immigrant - in my passport and that was that.
I turned around and hits like the way I had come back to Lusaka. I decided to travel to South Africa – then still under the apartheid system – through Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland – now Eswatini – and then into South Africa.
In Lusaka I teamed up with an American that I had bumped into – Lorin Stack.
We set off. Got lots of rides along the mostly bumpy dirt roads and eventually arrived at the Malawi border.
My hair at the time was pretty short – just over my collar, having two or three months earlier been cut by a Ugandan army barber when I had been an unwilling guest of the Ugandan army at various establishments around the country (The Last King of Scotland – another story).
But obviously it wasn't short enough. Also I was still wearing South Sea Bubble Loons – one of the few bits of clothing that remained with me since I had left London all those months ago.
I suppose Malawi was a pretty conservative country. Lorin was a pretty short back and sides sort of guy and so he didn't have any problem but the Malawi police on the border decided that I was a hippie and that I was a subversive danger to all of Malawi society.
Result: I was arrested – and both Lorin and I were put in the cells. The police were pretty decent actually. The cell wasn't too bad – probably the best I had been in and out of the nearly half-dozen or so which I had spent time in in Africa – and the police themselves were friendly and the food was okay.
The next morning they gave us a pair of scissors and Lorin cut my hair back above my collar. The police also gave me a needle and thread and I was told to sew my very wide bell bottom trousers so that they were pleated inside.
And so with short hair – and and trousers with newly narrow legs, the police decided I wasn't a hippie any more and that there was no danger to the state of Malawi – and they let us go.
We hitchhiked to Blantyre which was the then capital of Malawi (I think now it's Lilongwe) and there it was a far more cosmopolitan attitude and I cut the stitches of my trouser legs and shook them open to their full 16"(or whatever it was) glory.
Free at last!
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