The Last Resort

by Douglas Rogers

  The poachers, six young settlers with sticks and metal pangas, had chased the animal into the barbed-wire fence around Frank’s house. The dogs were snarling at it. Trapped against the fence, its corkscrew horns caught in the wire, it reared to try to defend itself. The poachers attacked it from behind with pangas, severing its hamstrings, until it fell to the ground. Blood was seeping from one flank. Its head twisted sideways, contorted in the trap of the fence. It had broken its neck.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Dad screamed, leaping out of the car and running over. ‘That is my animal!’

  The settlers skulked off, their blades dripping blood, their dogs cowering. He wished now he had brought his gun. He would have shot these people. But it was too late. The animal was dead.

  He looked at it lying there, mutilated. It had round, glassy eyes that stared mournfully up at him as he hovered over it. It was a magnificent bull eland.

  He wondered whether it was the offspring of one of the does that he and Mom had christened after my three sisters, back in 1991. He felt sick looking at it. But there was no way he was going to let the Commissar and his settlers – his poachers – eat the creature.

  ‘Okay, John, you and Muranda, you want this meat, you take it,’ he said, and he and Agoneka hauled the heavy, still-warm beast onto the back of his bakkie.

  That night the two Johns made a blazing fire and roasted the eland, sharing the meat with the staff of the cottage owners at the back. They had not eaten so well in a year. The animal was devoured in two nights. A few days later, however, Muranda arrived up at the house to speak to my father. He was agitated and angry. The Commissar had apparently turned up at the camp in a rage the night before, demanding the return of ‘his’ beast. ‘I am the headman for the valley,’ he had shouted at John. ‘I am entitled to the best meat from this animal.’

  But the staff had eaten it. All that remained were the hind legs. The Commissar was outraged. He physically threatened John and demanded his due: the best meat. Eventually he settled for what was left of it.

  Muranda’s initial enthusiasm toward the Commissar had already cooled before this point. When the Commissar first arrived in the area, John had been excited that he was going to get the settlers producing food again – food that he and Naomi could buy. That hadn’t happened. He had also since found out that he wasn’t a war veteran at all. He had been a collaborator, but he hadn’t fought in the war. He was connected, though. He was a committed member of the ruling party. He had seats on the boards of various government utilities, and a string of failed businesses behind him. It was his political connections that had gotten him here. His connections made him headman of the valley.

  My father knew of only one way to get back at the Commissar for the eland. All wildlife in Zimbabwe is owned by the state. It is illegal to hunt without a licence. The National Parks and Wildlife Department was one of the few organs of government that still functioned reasonably effectively. So he phoned the department, and an official drove out with three National Parks scouts armed with FN rifles. The official fined the Commissar for being found with ‘bush meat’. My father made sure they fined the two Johns, too; he later reimbursed them, but he didn’t want the Commissar to believe that he had been singled out.

  Which was, of course, when the Commissar paid him another visit. He confronted my father on the back patio one morning and spoke slowly, sombrely, in a low, menacing tone.

  ‘I expected you to be a good neighbour,’ he said. ‘But now you have reported me for this beast. In my culture the best meat is due to the chief. I do not expect to be fined for it. The meat of that beast was due to me.’ He kept going on about the best meat, how it was supposed to be his.

  Which was when my father’s effort at charm gave way to red mist.

  He thought of the eland bull twisted in the fence, those dead glassy eyes staring up at him. And he recalled how the animal’s eyes had looked at him that one night as it grazed. If only he had known, he would have shot the animal right then. One clean shot. An assisted suicide. Instead it had been hunted down by mongrel dogs and hacked to death with pangas.

  He started shaking. His face went purple and his fist slammed the refrigerator.

  ‘You expected me to be a good neighbour? I am a good neighbour! I give you donations for your party when you want them. I give you lifts into town, in my car, to your town house. Your people cut down my fence for traps and hunt my animals. You expect to get the meat from this buck they poached and what do I get in return? Their footprints lead straight to your door! And now you come tell me to be a good neighbour? It’s your turn to be a good neighbour!’

  He wanted to say more. He wanted to say: That is not even your house. You stole that house. You did not build it. My friend built that house; now you live in it. But my mother had heard him from the living room and came rushing out. She grabbed his arm and ushered him into the house. She remembers all too clearly the face of the Commissar as she led Dad away.

  ‘He just stood there. Inscrutable, staring, not blinking. He looked neither angry nor shocked. He just had a dull, blank look. You couldn’t tell what he was thinking.’

  There was a theory among some farmers that it was best to be confrontational with the regime, that they would leave you alone if you stood up to them. Unita Herrer was convinced she had been violently kicked off her farm only because she’d made concessions to the ruling party in her area, offered to give up her land, and they saw this as weakness: even the weakness of a sixty-four-year-old woman would be exploited. Oom Piet reckoned he had been allowed to keep his home and land because he had sent a message to the minister: ‘If you want my place, you must come and shoot me and bury me there.’

  My father had been in the habit these past few years of asking the few white farmers he knew who were still on their land how they did it.

  ‘What’s your method?’ he would say.

  I was with him one morning in Mutare when we bumped into Chris de Lange, a reedy maize farmer from the far western part of the valley. With his veld hat, khaki shorts, bush shoes and squeaky, high-pitched voice, Chris was straight out of a Herman Charles Bosman story.

  ‘So, Chris,’ said Dad, ‘you’re still on your place. What’s your method?’

  ‘My method?’ he shrieked. ‘Ag, man, they’ve come for my place a few times. When I see them come up my drive I just stand at my front gate and I start screaming. I jump up and down, wave my hands in the air like crazy, and just keep shouting at the top of my lungs: ‘Fok off! Fok off! Fok off!’ Eventually they think I’m mad and drive away.’

  Chris indeed sounded mad to me. I couldn’t see my father using this method.

  Of course, resistance hadn’t worked for many others. My father now worried what effect his outburst would have on his future.

  TEN

  The Political Commissar

  I THINK I should go and speak to him,’ I told my parents.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I think I should go speak to the Commissar.’

  My mother was incredulous. ‘Why would you want to speak to that crook?’

  ‘Well, you said there are lots of stories out here. He’s bound to have one, too.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but he’s a bloody crook!’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  Dad remained silent in his leather recliner.

  It was late one night in June 2006, and I had just flown in, the beginning of a month-long visit. This trip would be different: Grace was coming out in ten days’ time, her first visit to Zimbabwe. We would spend four days with Piet and Mienkie de Klerk on their houseboat on Kariba, the giant man-made lake in the Zambezi Valley in the west of the country, then come back out here for two weeks. I was excited for Grace to see my parents’ strange world and where I grew up.

  But it was a different trip for another reason: I knew now that I wanted to write a book about the farm. On my past visits I’d always been thinking in terms of writing articles, but now I felt more co
mfortable out here, at home, and I wanted to write about the farm as a metaphor for the condition of the country. To do so I needed to speak to the other side: to the Commissar. I even thought I could help my parents by doing so.

  What had I ever contributed to their struggle? I always just flew in, took notes, then flew back home to regale Grace and my friends with stories of my crazy parents over bottles of wine in Bar Tabac and Raoul’s. Now, though, it occurred to me that if I got to know the Commissar, I might be able to persuade him to leave my parents alone.

  Dad broke his silence.

  ‘Your mother’s right. The man is a charlatan. I used to come across people like him all the time in court. I defended some of them. He’s come out here with his spiritual mumbo jumbo to con these rural people, to build a power base for himself. He says he’s going to help them, but I guarantee you he won’t. Still, that’s no reason not to talk to him. Tell you what – when we drive in tomorrow, I’ll introduce you.’

  ‘How will you manage that?’ I said.

  Mom shrieked from her chair, ‘Because after all that’s happened your bloody father still insists on giving him lifts to town! I mean, it’s outrageous!’

  They had very different views on tactics.

  ‘Look who,’ said Dad.

  The Commissar was standing at the bottom of the road, as my father had said he would be.

  He was exactly as he had been described: heavy, thickset, slow-moving, with that dull, blank, expressionless face. It was a face of either authority or incompetence.

  The car gently rocked as he clambered into the back seat.

  ‘So, Commissar, how are your new farmers?’ Dad asked.

  My father was using his sarcasm plan again, probing, teasing, his rage at the Commissar since the confrontation on the back patio a month ago shelved for the moment.

  I expected the Commissar to tell him how well things were going, as the government still claimed the land reform programme was a great success.

  ‘These people,’ he said instead, waving his hand in the air, talking about his settlers. ‘They think they can get a piece of ground for nothing and it will just grow food. They don’t realise farming takes hard work.’

  Dad gulped in surprise. It wasn’t the answer he was expecting.

  We were soon driving past Margaret Matongo’s place.

  There were three productive farms left in the immediate area, and they were all owned by black farmers. The Muzorewas, who had now left Cottage 4, were to the west of Drifters; Dr John Pfumojena, a physician who’d once treated my father for malaria, was next to them; and their neighbour to the east, Margaret, was the dynamic wife of a bus company tycoon named Didymus Matongo. The Matongos were erstwhile ZANU-PF stalwarts, but my father had always liked them and really admired Margaret. If Unita Herrer used to be the greatest woman farmer in the valley, Margaret now held the title, and her immaculate fields of winter wheat stretched a kilometre and a half to the river bank to our left, in stark contrast to the dishevelled ground under the Commissar’s control next to it. My father told me once he could only laugh when, in 2003, after it was clear that the government had utterly destroyed agriculture in the country, reporters from the state-run ZTV came to film Margaret Matongo in her fields as a shining example of the great success of the land reform programme. They didn’t tell viewers that the Matongos had bought their farm in the 1980s and that Margaret, like any other farmer, had become successful only after years of trial, error and hard work. Dr Pfumojena and the Muzorewas had bought their farms, too.

  Dad tried a new angle with the Commissar.

  ‘You know why this is a good farm?’ he said, ready to give him a subtle lesson on the basic laws of commerce, drive and hard work.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ the Commissar replied with a tired sigh. ‘Matongo bought this land. She learned to farm it herself. You can’t get something for nothing in this world.’

  Dad gulped again.

  ‘You can’t get something for nothing,’ the Commissar kept muttering.

  It occurred to me that either he was playing his own games with my dad or he actually genuinely agreed with him. Either way, he was no fool.

  Dad finally introduced me.

  ‘So this is my son. He is a writer. He wants to find out about the history of this area and the story of your people.’

  I felt a flush of annoyance. I didn’t want my father to introduce me as a writer, certainly not to a ruling party official. But my father had judged the Commissar well.

  His face lit up.

  ‘A writer? This is good! I know all this history. I can tell him many stories.’

  The Commissar did know a lot of history. He told it as we drove.

  ‘My great-great-grandfather was a famous chief in this area,’ he began. ‘He was the spiritual adviser to Chief Mutasa when Rhodes first came to this valley in 1891.’

  I had no idea the Commissar had royal lineage. Coupled with his political connections, it helped account for his power base here.

  ‘Your great-great-grandfather met with Rhodes?’ I asked.

  ‘When the whites came, they asked Chief Mutasa for land to do mining. Mutasa sent one of his men to my ancestor for spiritual advice. My ancestor was informed by his spirit medium, ‘People will come without knees. Do not fight them now, you will not win. They are too well equipped.’ So in this way my ancestor advised Mutasa to agree to Rhodes’s request, and Rhodes was allowed to settle in the valley and start mining here.’ I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  ‘What do you mean, “people without knees”?’

  ‘People without knees were the whites,’ said the Commissar.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they wore shorts. Their trousers had no knees. This is what was interpreted by my ancestor.’

  ‘What about “well equipped”?’ asked Dad.

  ‘The whites had guns, of course. They were equipped. It would have been a mistake to fight. We would fight them later when we were more prepared.’ Then he added wryly: ‘Which we did. As you have seen.’

  The Commissar had a sense of understatement.

  We were nearing the top of Christmas Pass now. A familiar domed granite hill appeared to our right, beyond the edge of the road. The Commissar pointed at it. ‘You see that mountain? That is my ancestral burial ground. A sacred place. That is where my ancestor lived, in the caves on top of the hill. Before the whites came, the Matabele were coming. They used to raid us and take our belongings, including our beautiful wives and daughters. My ancestor lived in a cave up the hill for security from war. Our people lived in the Mutare Valley we now see below.’

  The town had come into view.

  ‘My clan had all the land from the border of Mozambique to Dangamvura to the Mutare River. It was all ours. But then in 1897, as you know, after the railway line was built by the whites between Mutare and Beira, the site of Mutare was moved to here and my forefathers had to leave. That was how some of them came to settle in the valley we are now in by the river.’

  The Commissar had a deadpan, baritone delivery that matched his blank, expressionless face, but he knew his history. Even my father couldn’t argue with what he was saying.

  ‘All was smooth here until the Second World War. After that war, those British who fought in Europe were allocated land here for commercial farming as a reward for their success in that battle. Many of them settled in the valley my forefathers had been moved to. But our people were now educated. We were educated by British missionaries. We did not want to work on white farms, so the native commissioner, Cripps, moved us again, this time to Zimunya.’

  Zimunya is on the other side of Mutare. There were many forced removals of blacks in Rhodesia, moved to what are now known as communal lands but then as tribal trust lands.

  My father listened intently. He had a few quibbles, but not many. The Commissar was certainly right about the Second World War. I recalled the story John Muranda had told me down at the camp about how his father was repaid wit
h a medal after the war, while white veterans were allocated land. I had always been under the impression that it was the original white settlement in the 1890s that caused the rupture over land in our area. But, according to the Commissar, the real problem had come much later, after the Second World War.

  But then, just as I was beginning to think my father had completely misread the Commissar, the man drifted off into the old tribal world, a realm of visions, dreams and spirits. It was as if he couldn’t resist it.

  ‘But let me put it clear,’ he suddenly boomed. ‘When I was two years old in Zimunya and just beginning to talk, I told my father my name: “The Big One. Mukuru.” He was shocked. That was the name of his father. So he knew then that I was a leader. When I grew up I said to my father, “I belong to where your forefathers lived.” It took me a long time, but only now, after this land reform, did I finally get it. My wife received a call from the district administrator’s office in 2004 that I had been allocated land, and that was when I moved to where I am now.’

  My father couldn’t help laughing. ‘Two years old? The Big One? What?’

  ‘Yes, Mukuru, the Big One,’ he said seriously.

  But he wasn’t finished.

  ‘But also I had a conviction that we came from that place. In 1980 I had a dream. I was driving through that area and I saw a beautiful house just by these hills and a white man handing me over the keys and saying, “This is the house that we are giving you.” There was a beautiful lawn around it.’

  He was flitting between his two worlds: the ancient and the modern.

  ‘Interesting,’ said my father. ‘A dream, hey?’

  I suddenly worried that the Commissar really did have designs on my parents’ home. Frank’s place didn’t have a lawn, but theirs did. A beautiful one. I decided to change the subject.

  We were cruising down the pass now, the green ribbon of Mutare revealed in its dappled valley. The Commissar’s ancestral hill towered above us. I knew the hill well. As a boy I used to climb it with a friend, David, whose father managed the Wise Owl Motel just below. It gave me the creeps. Once David and I thought we would camp on it for a night, but when dusk came, the air suddenly turned cold, the monkeys started screeching and we thought we heard a leopard growl. We scampered home, terrified. Later, in my early teens, my dad, to get me fit for cross-country running season, would make me run up the old pioneer road that wound around its foothills. The hill still gave me the creeps, but I knew that a good way to get to know the Commissar’s intentions would be to ask to see his burial ground with him.