"Chirupula" Stephenson
was registered at birth as John Edward Stephenson. We have not managed to establish his place and date of birth, but we know it was in the 1870s, in the North East of England, so probably either in the last quarter of 1873, in Newcastle-on-Tyne, or in the third quarter of 1876, in Tynemouth.As a young man, he travelled to South Africa, and in 1896 he found employment in Kimberley. He then moved to Johannesburg, and by 1898 he had moved to Bulawayo in Southern Rhodesia, where he became a telegraph clerk. He was then recruited by Robert Codrington into what became the Northern Rhodesia Civil Service, and to take up his post he walked from Salisbury to Blantyre in Nyasaland, and from there he walked into th middle of Northern Rhodesia, where he "set up shop" as the first "Government Officer" for the area. On his journey to Blantyre he fell ill will malaria - a disease which at that time killed many intrepid explorers. He was taken in and nursed back to health by a young woman of the local tribe and he later married her, and she accompanied him thereafter. Later, he left his employment and built his own house and carved out an estate from the virgin uninhabited bush country. He was at one time married to three local women, by whom he had nine children.
He published his own auto-biography, "Chirupula's Tale" in 1937. and in 1948 and 1949 he published his own cyclostyled magazine called “Chiripula’s Gazette“. which ran for fifty-two numbers.
His life is described in the 1952 biography, "Jungle Pathfinder".
He died in 1957.
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