Soon after I arrived in Cape Town, my mother announced that she had been remiss. I’d arrived on a short visit home, before the extended travels that will take me to Shanghai, and she had never taken me to Victoria Falls. She grew up in Zimbabwe, then called Rhodesia. Her brother, my Uncle, fought and died in the country’s Bush War. His widow is still there. He was named Iain. I was named Iain in his memory.

So I found myself gazing out of an aeroplane window, overlooking the African bush, smoke rising off stunted trees in the distance. The Victoria Falls is called Mosi oa Tunya by locals, meaning “the smoke that thunders”. The crash of Zambezi water dropping from a wide meander, sprawled across the landscape, into a narrow gorge, bubbling and frantic, can be heard on the far side of town, a few kilometres away. The spray, shot up off basalt more than 30 stories below, appears on the horizon, like pale, portentous smoke. (Read on …)