All about cars

Imagine, if you will, you are a person living in a remote central African village in 1923. You spend your time hunting, fishing, picking berries and fruit to feed your family. You are completely unaware of anything beyond a 20-mile radius of your village. One day you are busy skinning a wild boar you speared in the jungle. (Well, you would hardly spear a pet boar as your kids would get mad.) There you are bragging to your buddies about the fight the wild boar put up when a strange and unfamiliar noise is heard in the jungle.

It is a staccatto, popping, roaring sort of sound. You think of wild animals but this is like no animal you have ever heard. The women folk drop what they are doing and retreat into their huts. The children  and elderly men hold their ground curiosity overcoming their sense of fear. (The pet boar scampers off into the undergrowth never to be seen again.)

The strange noise gets louder and louder indicating whatever is out there is getting closer.

The men grab their spears.

Suddenly, out of the forest appears the strangest sight the people have ever seen. What must they have thought of two white men riding a pair of Triumph motorcycle/sidecar rigs? Some ran away being totally unable to deal with such an unfamiliar phenomenon. (That was what my father and his siblings did in the West of Ireland when they saw their first car in the premier decade of the twentieth century.)

The two men were Nebraska natives, James Wilson and Francis Flood, and were the first people to ride motorcycles across Africa. Their 3,800 mile journey started in Lagos, Nigeria and finished at the Red Sea.

Though their appearance in remote villages did cause some initial surprise they were made welcome and treated well by the local people. It did not take the indigenous people long to realize two guys on motorbikes were not a threat. At that time African villager's first encounter with white-skinned people was when British, Dutch or French soldiers arrived to set up mines and have the people work for them. Or when missionaries arrived and went about went about convincing the people they were adoring the wrong supreme leader.

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