KINGSLEY HOLGATE COLLECTION

Kingsley’s Legendary Bulawayo Bag In Kingsley’s words…

My old Melvill and Moon Bulawayo bag, handmade from 100% 510g heavy duty cotton canvas with leather handles, must surely be the most travelled Melvill and Moon bag in the world.

The design was taken from an old, character-filled bag belonging to a farmer from the Matopos region that Rob Melvill spotted at the entrance to the Bulawayo Club’s infamous watering hole many years ago. The bag had belonged to the farmer’s father and clearly had been used on countless adventures – the canvas faded from years under the African sun with many repair patches and well-worn leather handles. It became the inspiration for Melvill and Moon’s ‘Bulawayo bag’.

What a journey my bag has had over the past 20 years. Thrown up onto the tops of trucks, into boats, strapped to old bicycles, chucked into light aircraft or helicopters, shoved onto roof racks, carried on the backs of donkeys, camels, and squeezed between grub boxes and fuel jerry cans. Dug into by curious customs officials and belligerent soldiers with beery breath, often used as a seat or pillow and sometimes even for security – on a chair propped up against the door of a third-world hotel room that had no lock.

A bit frayed, tattered and stained, some of the corners now reinforced with leather, it has travelled to every country in Africa and evocatively named places like Casablanca, Timbuktu and Agadez in the Sahara and Ras Xaafun, the most easterly point of the continent in war-torn Somalia on the Horn of Africa. It’s also gone around the world following the Tropic of Capricorn; travelled from Cape Town to Kathmandu tracing ancient Silk Roads through the Caucuses, the vast Dasht-e Lut of Iran and the Karakoram Highway in Pakistan; and made it through 30 countries from the southern tip of Africa to Nordkapp in Norway’s Arctic circle on a 300-day journey called ‘Hot Cape – Cold Cape’.

Imagine the scene when more recently, there I was – the Greybeard owner – at the lost luggage counter of Istanbul’s shiny new Sabiha Gökçen International Airport, showing them a photo of my old bag and patiently explaining that apart from some dirty clobber, the contents included two well-worn size 14 veldskoene, the remnants of a bottle of rum, a dented enamel mug, an old Zulu talking stick, a ‘gris-gris’ necklace made from small leather pouches containing charms and verses from the Koran (to ward off evil) and two bags of raw frankincense, the beautiful smell from which far outweighed the odour of unwashed socks – and that whilst the bag had been checked in at Mohammad Haji Ibrahim Egal International Airport in Hargeisa, Somaliland for a flight to Addis Abba, then Cairo and onto Istanbul, it was nowhere to be seen.

I’m sure the Bulawayo bag is ‘blessed’ because two days later, there it was, safely delivered to our lodgings in the old city of Sultanahmet near the Hagai Sofia and the Blue Mosque – all the contents intact – and smelling sweetly of frankincense, my 10th anniversary gift to Sheelagh.

Back at Afrika House, my old Bulawayo bag, blessed by the Zen of Travel and now washed and dried in the tropical sun of KwaZulu-Natal’s north coast, awaits its next adventure, trip number 42, with many more to come.