‘Well, carry on, then,’ he said. ‘Carry on.’
When he had gone the students giggled nervously.
Natalie finished the lessons early that day. After the students had left, Memories helped her to tidy the classroom. A cupboard had been salvaged from one of the rooms and Natalie had fixed a lock to it. They kept the books and resources locked safely away. Memories swept the floor with a twig brush and then wiped down the board with a damp cloth.
‘I think I should go to the police station,’ Natalie said to her.
She perched on a table and Memories came and sat in one of the chairs looking up at her.
‘Why?’
‘I think I should explain what I have been doing; let them know that I’m not getting paid for it. They may think I’m doing some business here, and I shouldn’t be doing that without the correct visas.’
Memories shrugged.
‘You think they will close the school down again?’ she asked.
Natalie got up and walked across to the window. She gazed out across the parched grass and the stunted trees. A rough gravel parade ground stood off to the left side of the school and on the opposite side of that there were other dilapidated classrooms, their windows empty, vegetation poking through them, like eye-sockets in old skulls.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
They walked back up to the village in silence, each preoccupied by their thoughts. It was not until they were close to the huts that Natalie noticed Memories had been unusually quiet. Though she was serious, Memories liked to talk and to ask questions; she was endlessly interested in what life was like in England and often quizzed her relentlessly about what her home had been like, what kind of things she owned, how people behaved and especially about school in England.
At first she had answered her flippantly and with irony, but this annoyed Memories and after a while Natalie noted that it was her intense curiosity that drove the questions. She could see the young girl trying to picture the outside world in her head, as though by doing so – by building up that image – she could begin to make a movement out of the limiting restrictions of the village.
‘What do you want to do when you are older?’ she had asked her once.
Memories pursed her lips and closed her eyes, thinking before she answered.
‘I would like to be a teacher,’ she said finally. ‘I would like to go to college to study and then become a teacher.’
‘That’s great,’ Natalie said. ‘You’re bright, you could do that.’
She opened her eyes and looked at Natalie. For some moments she said nothing. When she spoke her voice was flat and so mature Natalie felt herself blush.
‘I am from a village without a proper school. We have no money. I won’t be going to college – that is for white people, and for some people in the city.’
The village was quiet. Moses was seated beneath the Msasa tree gazing out across the fields. The children were nowhere to be seen and the women were in the huts. A couple of emaciated chickens pecked in the dust. At the edge of the village, Natalie took the path up to where she had left the Kawasaki. Memories stood still on the edge of the village and watched her go.
‘Natalie,’ she called.
Natalie turned. Memories’ face was dark and sad. She raised her eyebrows questioningly and then forced a smile.
‘It’s not so bad,’ Natalie said. ‘It’ll be okay.’
‘The baby is sick.’ Memories said. She looked down at the floor, her toe scuffing the dust.
‘Happiness is sick.’
14
Kare, kare. Long, long ago… We are drawing to the close of my grandfather’s story, though he is still so young. He was sixteen that year of the uprising, the first Chimurenga. The people had risen all across Mashonaland, following the example of the Ndebeles. Across the country settlements went up in flames. The white settlers fled back to the forts, the strongholds and the voice of Nehanda was heard across all the land.
Tafara had arrived back at his village late in the day. The light was almost gone and the air heavy with the scent of burnt thatch. There was little left of the buildings: charred pots, broken and scattered across the earth, crumpled walls. On the branch of a tree the remnants of some clothing hung limp and damp, fragile reminders of the family that had lived there. No smoke rose from the remains of the thatch of the huts; the fires had gone out long before. There was no sign of the inhabitants. A lone cockerel sat forlornly on the granite rock behind the village, silent, its head moving jerkily from side to side.
Tafara squatted down in the middle of his home, the scent of the smouldering ruins filling his nostrils. Taking the ashes from the ground, he held them above his head and let them drop down upon him like snow, settling in his hair, on the bridge of his nose, on his shoulders. Handful after handful, until the air was full of powdery dust and he was choking from it and tears ran from his eyes. As his vision blurred he saw again the bodies contorted in the burning kraal, and the blood on his hands, and then the policeman as he collapsed to the floor. And in his mind’s eye he saw Ngunzi, Mbudzi, Kamba, his aunts and sisters forced from their homes, from the huts that they had been born in, from the village their family had lived in for generations, and forced to watch as the white men lit the fires.
His mind lingered on Ngunzi, almost blind now, bent double as he walked, his hair as grey as the ash that caked Tafara’s body; Ngunzi forced to march at the point of the white man’s gun, to leave behind his beloved village, the rocks, the fields, the places where the ancestral spirits dwelled.
In the treetops the birds called their familiar songs, but nothing was familiar anymore. The world had changed. He saw that now. Nehanda’s words had meant nothing. The white man’s bullets had not turned to water, nor would they. The white man had come and he had changed everything. The white man had no desire to live side-by-side with the Shona, he suddenly realised. It was not a case of sharing the land, they had come to take the land and they would.
That night he slept up on the top of the rocks. He lay out one last time on the granite and gazed up at the heavens, at the vast array of the stars that his father had first shown him; he felt the dense darkness, the warmth of the rock gradually seeping away into the night. He listened to the sounds of the land, the forest, the wind in the rocks, the voices of the spirits, of his ancestors. The voices of the rocks, the trees and the grass, of the bushes and brook, the spirit of the antelope, the hare, the cow, the birds. He listened to a world that he felt in his bones was dying, trying not to fall asleep, trying not to allow himself to miss one moment of it, trying, if he could, to capture it in his soul, that until he died he may retain the memory of it.
When, finally, he did fall asleep he dreamed that he was a baby left out upon the rock. Birds circled in the dark sky, their eyes glittering like the stars. And slowly he realised it was not him at all, but his child, Anokosha’s child left out as an offering upon the rock. In his sleep he gazed down at his child, soaring above it with the harrier hawk and the jackal buzzard. Breaking from the thicket he stood above the child, a duiker, a leopard, heart thumping, accepting the offering.
The next day, he set out west following the road they had taken Mhuru and Anokosha on.
On a gentle rise, on the southern bank of the Mazowe River, a new settlement was being erected. The uprising did not seem to have affected the work, and as Tafara drew close he saw that a large number of men were working on the buildings. The work was directed by a large Shona, with broad shoulders, dressed in white man’s clothes. A number of buildings were being constructed, most on traditional lines, round, with conical thatched roofs, but behind these a larger house was rising, square in shape, built with brick, and a large chimney at its rear. The bricks were being made at the back of the camp, down close to the river. On either side of the Mazowe, figures moved across the fields gathering grass for thatch.
Tafara squatted by the banks of the river and gazed for some time at the work. He noted a single white
man, dressed not in khaki, nor like the settlers he had seen on the kraals, but rather in black from head to toe, though there seemed to be a strip of white cloth around his throat. The white man paced the settlement energetically, sometimes speaking to the Shona foreman, sometimes directing the work of the men on the large, brick-built house. Occasionally he himself would pick up some of the materials and show the labourer how he wanted it. The settlement buzzed with energy and the work was coordinated and disciplined in a way Tafara had not witnessed before.
‘Brother,’ he called out when some of the men walked by, carrying the grass up to the settlement site. ‘Who is the white man you are working for?’
‘He is a spirit man,’ the worker said, using the common Shona term, N’anga, for a spirit medium.
‘Brother,’ Tafara said, as the man turned, the grass piled thick across his shoulder to move up the slope towards the buildings. ‘Maybe the N’anga will give me work?’
Work for the white spirit-medium was not hard. Not being skilled in any particular craft, Tafara was set to work in the fields cutting the long grass that would be used as thatch for the cottage. They rose early, before the sun had risen and worked through the day, stopping for a brief period during the full heat of the afternoon.
Any complaints the men might have had about the work were mitigated by the example of the white man himself, who never seemed to flag. He rose earlier than the men and was still awake, sat on a rough wooden stool by a crudely fashioned table writing by the light of a lamp that burned, giving off an acrid foul-smelling smoke. More than once the men speculated around the fire that the white man was inhuman, that he himself was a spirit, a ghost, who had no need of sleep.
If that was the case, then he was a benign one. He showed great concern for the welfare of the men, and even nursed one young boy who suffered from fever. Each day he would wander around the settlement inspecting the work, smiling, a small, worried smile, friendly but seeming as though he bore some invisible weight upon his shoulders.
Each Sunday the men were given the day off, and the white man led prayers in the large building that had almost been completed. Tafara listened to the sound of his sonorous voice, its strange intonation, and the sound of the singing, a curious mixture of Shona song and something different, exotic, full of love for Mwari who had died and come back to life again. Sometimes he longed to go up there and join the men, but he didn’t. He lay on his bed of straw and gazed up into the dark shadows and thought of his village, and his mother and sisters, and of old Ngunzi and whether he was still alive. He thought of Anokosha, the bride he had lost and of the child of his dreams. And in his heart he nursed his anger. An impotent, cancerous hatred.
It was about this time that they killed Nehanda. The uprising had been faltering for months as more and more white soldiers marched up from the South where they had already crushed the Ndebele. Word that Nehanda had been taken captive spread quickly across the country and the last hopes of taking back the hills and valleys from the white men faded.
Nehanda was held in the main white settlement of Salisbury. She was charged with having been complicit in the murder of a white Commissioner, named Pollard. The white spirit-medium, Father Bruce, told them of the arrests the following Sunday morning.
All the workers had been summoned to the main building that morning, and the service was held outside under a lowering sky. A blustery wind shook the leaves on the baobab trees and lifted the newly laid thatch on the roofs of the houses.
‘Many of those who led the rebellion, have bowed in repentance,’ Father Bruce told them, speaking mainly through his interpreter, a thin, intelligent young Shona who had taken on the white name Bernard. ‘They have accepted Mwari who the white man calls Jehovah Jesus and the power of his grace.’ And then the white man called upon Mwari, raising his hands up towards the dark clouds and declaiming in accented Shona, thanking Him for His grace.
Later that night, as they sat around the fire, a different story was told. ‘Mbuya Nehanda, they could not kill her,’ an elderly worker, with grizzled grey hair whispered. ‘I know. I have heard it.’
‘She is dead,’ another said across the flames. ‘I have heard it too.’
The elderly man shook his head vehemently. ‘No, no,’ he muttered, ‘you have not heard the story in its full. Yes, they took Mbuya Nehanda and others too. And the others, yes, it is true, so they say, that they repented of their deeds and turned to the white man’s God, this Jesus Mwari. But Nehanda would not. She stood firm to the end.
‘They took them and hung them. Even those that had repented and converted to the white man’s religion. They hung them all. But when they tried to hang Mbuya Nehanda, they could not. They hung her once, but she did not die. They tried a second time, and still she did not die, because the spirit was in her.
‘Before she died, she said to the Catholic priest, ‘My bones will rise again.’ I heard that he was so incensed that he struck her in the face. The third time they hung her and she died.’
A heavy silence fell upon the men. Above the sound of their breathing came the sound of the crackling of the fire and the wind fluttering the leaves and thrashing the dry grass. Beyond that was the sound of frogs, full throated in the brook at the bottom of the slope and beyond that, faintly, the sound of the white man, Father Bruce, singing.
‘My bones will rise again,’ the grizzled old man repeated. ‘That is what she said.’
Tafara hoarded those words. Nursed them in his bosom. Recited them to himself at night, like a prayer, like the prayer of the white man that he forced them to repeat. ‘My bones will rise again.’
Some days after these events a message arrived for Tafara. The messenger was a tall, thin man with a long scar down the left side of his face. When he arrived on the fields of Mazowe he was hungry and tired.
‘For many months I have been searching,’ he said, pushing the bread that Tafara had given him into his mouth. ‘I did not think that I would find you.’
Tafara nodded slowly. His heart had missed a beat when the man asked for him and was now pounding so heavily that he felt light-headed and as though he would vomit.
‘I was with your wife.’
Tafara’s eyes darted up and fixed upon the man’s face. His eyes could not leave the jagged scar. His breathing came quick and hard.
‘At the white man’s fort?’
‘No.’ The messenger shook his head. ‘This was on a farm down, far south.’ He waved his hand vaguely. ‘She had been there some time. When she came they did not know that she was carrying a child. They were angry when they found out.’
Tafara gazed at the man wordless.
‘She bore the child,’ he continued. ‘When I left the farm she made me swear to find you and tell you.’
He had finished the food and looked around as though for more but Tafara had nothing left to give.
‘She called him after you,’ the messenger said. ‘Tafara. Happiness.’ He stood up as though a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. ‘She wanted you to know this.’
‘Where are they?’ Tafara said, his hand leaping out and taking the messenger’s. ‘Where is this farm?’
He looked down at Tafara and his face was suddenly full of sorrow. He shook his head, an action that seemed more like he was trying to free himself from some thought, to shake something out.
‘It is no use,’ he said.
‘Tell me,’ Tafara said.
The messenger paused and then ducked his head, his eyes glancing away from Tafara’s seeking out the dark corner of the hut.
‘They are no longer.’
Tafara stood up. The man held up his hand. ‘The baby was weak. They developed a fever.’ He shook his head again. ‘That was just before I left.’
For many hours after the man left Tafara sat in the darkness of the hut listening to the sounds of work, the wind in the trees and the cry of the birds. In his mind he pictured the baby on the granite rock. Pictured his bride as she had been in his dreams.
And in his heart the bitterness grew.
15
When the work on the white man’s settlement was finished, Tafara made his way once more back towards his village. It had been two years since he had killed the soldier. As he approached the village from the north, from above the precipice of granite, rose a thin pillar of smoke, a dark oily column against the clear blue of the sky, and a feeling of joy lifted from deep within his soul. He felt it rise, painfully, within him. A strange feeling of lightness and suffering. As he hurried forwards, the strength dissolved from his legs, and it was as it sometimes is in a dream when you move with all your might but make no progress.
Though he dared not hope, yet, as he ran, he imagined greeting them. Pictured the family back around the fire: the children, the old women, his friends. He scrambled up the side of the hill, loose shale breaking under his feet, his hands cutting against the sharp grass. At the top of the granite mound, the view stretched out across the shimmering valley, and as he leapt up upon the rock, the cry already forming on his lips and looked down into the folds of the hill from where rose the smoke from the fires, he saw the camp.
The tents were spread at the foot of the hill, on the level ground as it sloped away to the grassland where the cattle had once roamed. Up in the crevices of the slopes were a considerable number of white men. Hard at work were almost naked black labourers. The sound of hammering, of shouts, of metal upon rock, the soft, rhythmic noise of earth being dug, rose up with the dust and the smoke from the fire. Tafara sank to his knees as the bubble burst and his heart deadened.
He found work at the mine and a part of his soul found solace in waking each morning in the familiar setting. The white man had come to extract gold, and had found evidence of a thin seam in the rock. Tafara worked as a general labourer, carrying out from the deepening hole the earth and rock to deposit further down the slope, the work was tedious and back-breaking and the rations poor so that most of the time he felt half starved.
A Child Called Happiness Page 9
