Makorongo had an unusual friend in the form a young policeman of Scottish decent called Tony Maxtone-Mailer. Tony's parents married in Malaya in 1911. His grandfather John Gibson, famous for building the Kandy Railway, had become a rubber planter owning plantations in Keang. Tony's father, Maxtone Lockhart Mailer, arrived from Dumfries in Scotland to manage the rubber plantation and soon married Nellie, one of John Gibson's five daughters. After WWI ended, Maxtone Mailer took the opportunity to move to East Africa to run coffee and timber plantations that had been acquired by the British Government after the German surrender. The youngest of four children, Tony was born in Kenya in 1991 and instantly went down with blackwater fever. While his elder brother and sisters were sent back to Dumfries to be brought up by their grandparents, Tony was the little one who stayed with his mother and grew up in northern Tanzania. Since he had survived blackwater