by Alan Cowell at the Air Mail: Watching the nano-second messaging of modern electioneering from Washington to Paris to London, I couldn’t help but think of pigeons.
Carrier pigeons, to be precise. I was thinking of an earlier era, in an African setting, when I worked for Reuters before embarking on a career as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. In the run-up to the election in 1980 that brought Robert Mugabe to power, I was part of the coverage of the ceasefire in Zimbabwe’s seven-year bush war that preceded the vote.
In the process, I became the last Reuters correspondent known to have sent dispatches by carrier pigeon.
In late 1979, two colleagues and I deployed in an armor-plated Land Rover to accompany New Zealand special forces who, under the terms of the ceasefire preceding Zimbabwe’s elections and independence, set up an assembly point at which hundreds of Soviet-armed guerrilla fighters who had fought the white-minority Rhodesian regime of Ian D. Smith were supposed to congregate.
It was in the remote savannah and scrub, and this was an era long before satellite phones, cell phones, smartphones, or, indeed, any phones. In this far-flung spot, there were no communications available to the outside world.
But we had a lucky break. A friendly editor at The Bulawayo Chronicle secured for us a wicker crate of 10 carrier pigeons trained to fly back to their home loft in the city of Bulawayo. From there, our messages would be sent by runner to the Chronicle’s newsroom and transmitted to the Reuters bureau in the capital, Salisbury (later renamed Harare), for onward telexing to Johannesburg and, finally, the Reuters headquarters in London.
There was a particular piquancy to this arrangement since Baron Julius Reuter, the eponymous founder of the wire service, had in 1850 used squadrons of trained homing pigeons to bridge a 76-mile gap in the burgeoning telegraph networks spanning Europe to fly market-moving financial news from Brussels to the German city of Aachen. Pigeons, in other words, were the Internet of their time.
A pigeon fancier in Bulawayo trained us in the arcane ways of handling the birds’ onboard G.P.S. First you wrote your story, then with spidery script you could squeeze 400 words onto tissue paper contained inside a 30-pack of local Madison cigarettes, and you folded this masterpiece of precision into a tiny container taped to the bird’s leg.
Then, deftly restraining the pigeon’s legs between index and middle fingers, with a thumb over those straining wings, you planted a tender peck on the bird’s head and, with two hands, tossed it aloft.
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