The Dust Diaries

by Owen Sheers

  Frank was still explaining the history of the site when they entered the Cathedral’s nave through a heavy carved door, stepping into the relief of the building’s cool darkness from the rising heat of the day outside. Impatient to show him the peculiar features of the building, Frank didn’t wait for Arthur’s eyes to adjust to the dim light, and immediately began his well-rehearsed tour. In the nave, the huge font made from Italian marble shipped in from the Apuan Alps, and next to this, twelve pillars, all upside down, mistakenly erected that way by the local workmen while the Bishop was off on safari. In the body of the cathedral he drew Arthur’s attention to the elegant Moorish windows, and a dark crucifix made from the wood of the tree under which Livingstone’s servants had buried his heart. At the altar a single round piece of white marble was inlaid where the whipping post of the slave market had stood. Around this, to represent the blood that had fallen there, were slabs of grey marble veined with red as if that blood had just been shed and was still unfurling in the stone’s frozen water.

  Behind the altar itself was the grave of the Cathedral’s founder, Bishop Steere, buried there in 1882, two years after the building was completed. Behind this again was the entrance-way down into the old slave chambers, into which Frank crouched with a lit candle. Arthur followed, bending down low to avoid the stone of the door frame above him.

  The chambers were low-ceilinged dungeons of disturbingly small proportions. Frank continued his tour, his soft voice falling like ash in the bare rooms. This, he explained, was where fifty men or seventy-five women and children were chained and kept for three days. One deep channel for faeces and urine ran through the centre of each chamber, and one narrow slit at the level of the street outside provided a dusty ventilation. There was nothing else. It was a culling ground. The weak did not survive, and the strong emerged back into the light barely human.

  ♦

  After their visit to the Cathedral Frank had left Arthur to his own devices and he’d taken a walk through the town again. This time, walking through the streets alone, he found the strangeness of the place he’d felt that morning had begun to settle into a rhythm of its own. A rhythm he could identify and feel a part of. He talked to some of the traders in the tiny, cool shops that punctuated the narrow streets, and even bought himself a new khaki safari suit from one of them. It was a little short at the sleeves, but he was pleased with his rare purchase. Then he had lain down for a few hours in the cool of his lodgings, listening to the town outside, the distant roll of the port’s noise and the nearer quick talk of women and children, in both Arabic and Swahili. Eventually he slept, shedding his body of its sea weariness, until he was woken in the early evening by the muezzin’s call to prayer, skittering across the sky from one of the minarets that rose above the town’s bustle of people, plaster and dust.

  ♦

  That evening he and Frank took a pony and trap out to the British Governor’s house for dinner. His sleep, seeing Frank again, the impressive Cathedral, feeling the foreignness of the town ebb about him, all of these had left Arthur with a sense of contentment that he hadn’t felt for years, either in England or on his journey south. Lying with his eyes closed in his bed on the Hertzog outside Beira Bay, feeling the gentle rock and swell of the ship, he remembers now how that short trip out to the Governor’s house had seemed so perfect, as if just momentarily he and his surroundings were in harmony. The sun blinked, low and orange, between the coconut palms at the side of the road and dazzled in the sea beyond them. Through the trees he’d been able to make out the dhows coming home from the evening catch, each with its single sail, a white wing of wind. Beyond these the reef turned on itself like a seam in the sea, while on the beach he’d caught a glimpse of a boy and a girl playing under a stranded dhow’s dropped rigging. Even the swirls of dust thrown up by the pony’s hooves had appeared to turn and wheel as part of a greater synthesis with which he was in tune. For the first time since departing from England he had felt he was no longer leaving, but going somewhere instead.

  But that was before the dinner. The dinner which had, for some reason, so unsettled him, and sent him off kilter as easily as the pieces of driftwood he’d seen that afternoon caught up against the harbour wall, turned and swayed on the wilful motion of the waves.

  ♦

  The British Governor’s residence was a large coral limestone house on the coast a few miles north of Stonetown. Again, Frank fulfilled the role of guide as they rode out there, explaining that the building had once belonged to Princess Salome of the Omani.

  ‘Quite a woman apparently, marvellous gardener. You’ll see when we arrive, extraordinarily beautiful,’ he said, shaking his head in admiration as he spoke.

  Walking through the Princess’s gardens, with the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle in the air and the evening light of a sinking sun, Arthur saw what Frank meant. The house and the grounds were both of a remarkable, exotic beauty. A long, open veranda ran the length of the ground floor, with only a few potted plants and one large round table occupying its generous space. At the centre of the back wall a pair of dark wooden carved doors stood open, giving a view into a large room with a window open onto the sea. White drapes beat over the window, blown pregnant by the wind off the water. The first floor was also open on the front of the house: a long covered balcony on which Arthur could make out an African in a white robe walking the length of it, lighting the candles that stood in tall holders around its edge. He could also see that a wooden table occupied the centre of this balcony and that a group of Europeans stood at its furthest end, holding drinks and talking. One of them, wearing the white uniform of the Colonial Service, saw them approaching and came to the balcony railings. ‘Father Weston! Good evening! Do come up and join us. If you hurry, you’ll catch the sun!’

  The company at that dinner comprised Arthur, Frank, the British Governor, his almost silent wife, Mr Beardsley, a merchant from Essex, Charlotte, his timid and much younger female companion, and a man who introduced himself to Arthur as’S. Tristam Pruen, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society’. As they watched the sun sink into the sea a servant brought a tray of pink gins and a bottle of quinine. Arthur declined the gin, but still took his five grains of quinine. The medicine was bitter on his tongue and he wondered briefly if he wouldn’t rather suffer malaria than this taste lingering in his mouth every evening.

  They ate at the large dark wood table, its surface softened by the touch of hands over time, and were served crab, red snapper and rice by wordless, effortless Africans dressed in the same simple white robes as the candle-lighter. Ol the guests, Mr Beardsley, the merchant, was by far the loudest. When he laughed Arthur watched the tips of his ginger moustache tremble and he thought he saw the girl by his side visibly wince at his volume. She looked worried, her strained smiles failing to convince Arthur of anything other than her anxiety. The merchant, however, seemed oblivious and was having far too interesting a time quizzing S. Tristam Pruen to notice his companion’s apparent distress.

  S. Tristam Pruen (he never said what the S. stood for) was a writer of some repute among the European community in Africa, though the party only had his word to go on for this. A few years earlier he had published The Arab and the African, which he described to the assembled company as ‘a handbook of my own experience written down to help and introduce others to the dangers and excitements of this dark continent’.

  On hearing this Mr Beardsley, who had arrived only a few weeks before, began to ask Pruen for his advice on various matters concerning adjustment to tropical life. Which did he consider the best cash crops to grow on the mainland of British East Africa? What was the most effective method of sisal production? How to prevent white ants getting in his food cupboard? The best way to approach a native village? Arthur watched him as he stabbed at a forkful of crabmeat while asking ‘And what about the rats, eh? Bloody things, oh, sorry fathers, yes, the things keep getting at my meat wherever I seem to hang it. Size of dogs they are!’

  ‘Yes, t
hat took me a while to work out myself,’ Mr Pruen replied, ‘and in the end it was my cook who solved the problem. We simply hung the meat in the centre of the pantry from a rope with a knot in it, and a square sheet of tin skewered through resting on this knot. The rat will climb down the rope as far as this tin, but then find its desires frustrated, slipping off the sheet clear of the meat.’

  ‘Damned clever, very clever, sir. Why didn’t we think of that, eh, Charlotte?’ Mr Beardsley turned to the girl at his side who forced out a weak smile. Arthur thought she was going to cry. The Governor, recognising that Mr Beardsley was in danger of monopolising the conversation, interjected before he could ask another question.

  ‘I understand you’re quite a hunter too, Mr Pruen, is that right?’

  Mr Pruen looked up at the Governor over his food, smiled, and sat back, placing his cutlery on his plate.

  ‘Well,’ he started with a heavy sigh, ‘during my time in equatorial East Africa I have come to know the ways of the bush, and so yes, I have had my fair number of run-ins and tangles with the wildlife which lives there. I do therefore also have some knowledge on how best to bag them. Or escape them, depending on the appropriate action at the time,’ he added with a snort.

  The writer continued, his gift for verbosity leading him into a series of anecdotes about his African hunting experience. Arthur noticed how these stories all followed a similar pattern. Mr Pruen would amaze the table with the plumage of the sun-birds or plantain-eaters or the peculiar habits of the gazelle, leopard or crocodile, speaking with the authority (and, Arthur admitted, often the love) of the naturalist. Then he would explain in exacting detail the best method to capture, shoot, trap or skin the creature in question. It was a surprisingly candid display, he thought, of man’s ability to worship and destroy. To love and to kill.

  He looked around the table. Mr Beardsley was enraptured by the hunting stories, while the Governor nodded politely, obviously having heard such facts and myths before. His wife, in contrast, a stout woman in her forties, ate throughout Mr Pruen’s speeches, silent as she had been the whole evening, her eyes downcast at her plate, while the young Charlotte looked straight ahead of her into the garden, where the midges hovered around the candle flames and the fireflies ignited themselves in sh ort bursts of electric green. Frank, meanwhile, sat quiet and small at his side, the way he used to sit at college when in the presence of authority, real or imagined, as if he could by will alone remain unnoticed. It was getting late, but the heat had still not drained from the day, and as he drifted towards his own thoughts against the distant stream of Pruen’s stories Arthur felt a long tear of sweat gather behind his knee and run the length of his calf into the heel of his boot.

  ‘But I mustn’t talk about this kind of thing all night. Not when we have new blood at the table…How about you, Father Cripps? I’d be interested to hear what brought you to Africa.’

  Arthur was only aware he had been addressed when the faces of the others at the table followed Pruen’s gaze. He felt himself redden at being caught out not listening, but the Governor, who was experienced in this kind of social situation, stepped in to help.

  ‘Yes, Father, I’d be interested to hear what brought you here as well, if you don’t mind. From what Father Weston has told me you had quite a literary career in the offing back home, and a Trinity living too, I believe?’

  Arthur turned to the Governor, at once grateful for his help, but also reluctant to be drawn on his motivations for missionary work, especially in the company of people he had only just met.

  ‘Well, there were many reasons really,’ he replied, ‘and actually Frank was one of them. I mean, Father Weston and I are old college friends, and he used to write to me about what he was up to here…’ He talked on, sketching out his education under Bishop Gore at Oxford, how he had met James Adderley, a travelling preacher he’d accompanied on treks through the Essex countryside, how he hoped, in coming to Africa, to lessen the blow of two cultures meeting. He said nothing, though, about why he had chosen Southern Rhodesia. Nothing about the book he had read a couple of years before, sitting in his armchair under a veil of light from his standard lamp, the winds of an Essex night beating in waves at his window. The book was Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, written by Olive Schreiner in a white heat of anger after the ‘96 Mashona uprising. It told the story of trooper Peter Halket, who is ordered to shoot an African prisoner, but who helps the prisoner escape instead, and so is executed himself. But he said nothing about this book or how its story lit his imagination. And he said nothing about the book’s frontispiece either, a photograph that had burnt its image onto his mind. A tree, a mimosa tree as he would come to learn, around which a group of white Rhodesian pioneers rested, all men, lying on the grass propped up on their elbows, leaning on their long rifles, smiling into the camera. And hanging from the tree three more men, all black. Three Africans on long ropes, naked, slow-turning, hanging from the branches of that mimosa tree, their heads dropped, chins to their chests, the bad fruit of a day’s work. He said nothing about any of this; somehow he knew it would not have been welcome information at the table. And he said nothing about Ada either.

  ♦

  He stopped talking. A change had come over the company when he said ‘Christianity’, the word travelling down the table like a cold wind. He smiled briefly at the Governor, then looked down at the scratched and dented surface of the table. Clearing his throat in preparation, it was Pruen who first spoke again.

  ‘Yes, well, at least Mohammedanism will not be a stumbling block for you, Father,’ he said. ‘Not that I consider it to be a really serious one anywhere on mainland Africa. Apart from here and maybe in Dar I’ve never seen a native perform any Mohammedanistic religious duty beyond turning a sheep or a goat towards Mecca before cutting its throat.’

  He laughed, and Beardsley and the Governor joined him. Arthur thought of the elegant minarets and the women in purdah.

  Pruen carried on. ‘And I know what you mean about the meeting of two cultures. I’ve spent much of my own time in Africa trying to right the wrongs of such a meeting. Just last month I was at a freed slave station, arranging apprenticeships for the boys there. But you’ll not have that problem in Rhodesia either; the natives there have, I understand, managed to escape the plague of slavery.’

  Arthur looked up at him. ‘I was thinking more of the meeting between our own society and the African,’ he said, ‘rather than the Arab and the African.’

  ‘Oh, come now, Father, I think you have nothing to worry about on that count,’ Pruen said, looking a little surprised. ‘The natives of Mashonaland have not suffered from their meeting with the white man, I assure you. No, your concerns in a place like that should not be with worries of native suffering, but with the natural obstacles you will come across in bringing the gospel to the heathen. Indifference, slow minds and witchcraft, that’s what you should prepare yourself for, Father. But the Mashona are a humble people too, full of humility, and once converted can be quite perfect Christians, I believe. Good material to work with, I’d have thought.’

  Before Arthur could reply the Governor addressed Pruen himself, taking in the attention of the whole table at the same time, speaking as he did, a little too loudly. Arthur suspected a case of tropical deafness.

  ‘I don’t believe I’ve told you the history of this house, have I, Mr Pruen? Or indeed any of you. Except Father Weston’—he smiled at Frank—‘and of course my dear wife, who has heard it all before.’ The Governor turned to his wife. She did not look up from her plate on which she was pressing her fork onto the last grains of rice that had, until now, eluded her. He turned back to the assembled company and as the servants cleared the plates and served coffee, he began his story of the house and its previous owner, Princess Salome.

  Settling back into his chair, the Governor told them how the Princess had been betrayed by her brother, the Sultan Mahjid, when in 1870 he gave the house they were now sitting in to the British to use
as their consulate. The Princess, an emotional and passionate woman, was distraught. She had put the energy of a mother into the gardens that surrounded them, and she wept bitterly when she had been guided out of the house with her servants under the watchful guard of her brother’s men. She was moved to a third-storey apartment in town, where she pined for her house with its spacious rooms and balconies through which the coastal wind wandered freely. Her apartment was cramped in comparison, and without character. From its high window she watched her island change at the hands of commerce: the influx of Europeans, the bustle and activity of slave market days, the tall ships that sailed into harbour to take their spices across the oceans to the tables of Russia, Europe, the Americas. It was not, however, the view of her pulsing capital that came to fascinate her, but the view of another window, opposite her own. This window looked into the rooms of a young German merchant from Hamburg and, lit at night by oil lamps, it provided an insight into another life too tempting for the Princess to resist.

  She had watched the young man move in and unpack his belongings: a few books, his new solar sun hat, a sepia photograph of his mother placed on his desk. Then over the following months she had watched him grow into the island, and it into him. She traced the sun’s effect on his pale skin, from the red blushes on the back of his freckled neck to a darker brown that showed in contrast to the milky whiteness of his torso when he took off his shirt. She watched him acquire friends and observed their Western din tier parties, bright with laughter and the sound of glasses in the nighi. He bought a gramophone and she listened with him when he played his scratched records of Bach and Wagner. She watched him when he was alone and despondent, dreaming of home, and she watched him when he was cheerful and excited, dressing for a party. Anc! in this way she fell in love with him.