In particular he recalled how over port they had talked about an incident which the air passengers had been told of during their stop in Chinsali, involving Gore-Browne’s friend John Peacock, the local District Commissioner. Apparently Peacock had entered the sacred burial grove in Shi Mwalule’s village, where all the Bemba senior chiefs were buried. A kind of Westminster Cathedral for Wemba [Bemba] kings, Gore-Browne described it to Ethel [his aunt], a rather remarkable place actually, surrounded by thick foliage and wonderful great palm trees about 60 feet high.
Inside was a sacred hut containing relics of past chiefs, forbidden to all except senior chiefs and certainly to white men. No one was sure why Peacock had entered – whether it was for a dare or that he had got lost shooting snakes and entered accidentally, realizing too late. Anyway the locals were saying he would be cursed and some terrible fate befall him, and the keeper of the grove had supposedly told him he wouldn’t live another year.
Gore-Browne was worried by the news. The last white man to enter the grove had been a man called Ford, DC [District Commissioner] for Kasama, in his first year in Africa. The incident had lost him the trust of the local people and he had had to be transferred to another district 600 miles away. The first day he went to his new boma, the flagstaff fell on his head and killed him.
[Later] …came the shock news of the death of his friend John Peacock, the former District Commissioner who had moved to Broken Hill. Poor old Peacock’s car spun out of control after the brakes failed, and turned over and pinned him down in a ditch, and he was found drowned in 31 inches of water, he wrote to Ethel. At least he was later shown to have died instantaneously – the doctor certified his neck had been broken.
Everyone was talking about the Bemba curse claiming another victim, and Gore-Browne couldn’t help remembering how Peacock had used to toast surviving another year on the anniversary of entering the sacred burial grove, and had almost died a couple of years earlier canoeing on the river when a sudden rain started, capsizing him and his wife.
Source:
Lamb, Christina. “Part Two: 1927-1967, Chapters 14 & 15.” The Africa House: The True Story of An English Gentleman and His African Dream. Harper Collins Publishers, 2004. 179-80, 211. Print.
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