The Dust Diaries

by Owen Sheers

  These then, were the punctuation points of Arthur’s life in Mashona-land. Enkeldoorn and Wreningham, white and black, commerce and church, lost and found. It was in these two locations that his contrasting parishes lay, and this is why he spent so much of his time on this track, passing between the settlements twice a week on his solitary treks, etching his mark on the country with his feet.

  On the veld, alone, however, was where he felt he most belonged. After three years in Africa it was here he felt closest to the essence of the country, and to his God. Sometimes, on the longer treks to other towns and villages further away, he would sleep out in the open, lying beside his camp fire, tracing the myths and stories of the constellations, familiar and yet different in the southern sky above him. Waking in the morning, his red blanket covered with dew, he would perform a private Eucharist on a nearby rock, or on the bank of a stream, before packing up and carrying on again. It felt completely natural for him to do this, and it was during these solitary celebrations that he was at his most content. And in many ways he thought this was suitable: that he felt most complete neither in Enkeldoorn nor in Wreningham, but in between them. He was, after all, the in-between man, in every sense of the word. Between sky and earth, God and man, European and African. For although by skin colour and country he belonged to the whites in Enkeldoorn, he knew he could never feel himself a pan of their pioneer lifestyle, and in return he knew that many of them were suspicious of him. His closeness to the natives and his attempts to live with and like them unnerved the Dutch farmers and the British administrators alike.

  In the first few years he’d found it no easier with the Africans, many of whom also regarded him with suspicion. The people who lived on and around the mission recognised his good intentions but however hard he tried to serve them he was, for many outside the mission, just another European mufundisi bringing talk of a God and rituals that disturbed the stability of their own beliefs. Some of the Mashona elders in the surrounding villages feared he would upset the delicate balance of their ancestors’ spirits while the n’angas, the local shamans, saw him as a professional threat and did what they could to fan this fear. Arthur had heard some had even warned the people that allegiance to the white man’s God would anger the Mhondoro, the tribal spirit, and bring tragedy upon their families.

  In those early years Arthur’s lack of Shona was a further frustration. The young missionary girl who had been his tutor in Umtali, having been told so often that the white men were right, had been too timid to ever correct his mistakes, so he arrived in Wreningham with a more imperfect grasp of the tongue than he had hoped. For the first year at the mission he spent hours in his hut each night, bent over a Shona grammar and dictionary, painfully composing his sermons word by word and learni ng them by heart by the light of a candle. But his efforts at fluency on paper were all too often dismantled on his tongue as he stumbled through the subtle nuances of the language’s tonal pronunciation. It was only when the young mission boys began running around the church hut with their knuckles on the ground in the manner of chimpanzees every time he spoke of Shoko Kristu, that he learnt he had been preaching for months not as he had thought on Christ’s message, but Christ’s monkey. There was only a breath and an upward inflexion between the two words, but it was enough.

  The language, however, could be mastered, and in the meantime he had continued to try and serve the Mashona by doctoring, representing them in the colonial courts, assisting with their farming and helping in family disputes where he could. But there were other elements of his presence among them that were harder to overcome. Above all, there was the fact that he was white. The 1896 chimurenga had happened only eight years ago; the European settlers had killed over four thousand natives in revenge. The Mashona had not forgotten, and could not forget, these men, or the things they had done. Stories were still told in kraals and around fires of how the suspected rebels were hunted down and hung from trees and of how caves into which whole families had fled were dynamited by their pursuers.

  When Arthur arrived in 1901, the relationship between the white settlers and the native Mashona in the wake of the uprising was uneasy and awkward, but he was still surprised at the extent of the settlers’ ignorance and disinterest in the Africans around them. Interaction was minimal, restricted to the boys and women who worked for them as carriers, cooks or maids, and even in these situations the meeting of the two cultures was rarely successful. Either the Africans were mistreated or they stole from their employers, or, most commonly, they simply left and went back to their kraals. Because before the settlers came the Mashona had no need to work for money, and for most this was still the case. The settlers, however, needed labour to build their new world, and they were frustrated by the thousands of natives who refused to supply it. The Africans’ apparent absence of wants stood in exact opposition to their own lives. They were here for gold, farming, trade. The Mashona were simply here.

  ♦

  This problem of the labour situation dominated discussion across the settler community. It had been a thorn in the side of the administration since the establishment of the British South Africa Company; in principle they were opposed to slavery but they were also desperate to engage the massive potential labour force they saw before them. The Company found an answer to the problem with the introduction of a ‘hut tax’ to be paid by every male native for himself and for each of his wives. The tax was required in cash, and cash could only be earned by working in the settlers’ mines, houses or farms. It seemed simple. The Africans had an absence of wants, so in its place the Company had created a need. The need for money.

  The hut tax further exasperated the already fragile settler-native relationship and its initial establishment had been at the root of the native uprising in 1896. For the Mashona in Mashonaland and the Matabele in Matabeleland the twenty years of rule by the white population had brought nothing but disruption to their way of life. Whole tribes had been moved from their ancestral land where their forefathers were buried, and foreign diseases were brought into the country killing both the people and their livestock. Herdsmen were forced to dip their cattle in the local streams to protect them against rinderpest and foot and mouth, only to find that the dipping chemicals polluted their drinking water. And now the hut tax was to be levied in every district to pay for the price of this disruption. It was a move too far for many, and encouraged by their spirit mediums they rose against the white men. Eight years later that uprising had been reduced to fireside myth, the rebel leaders were long dead, the Mashona’s self-belief was crushed and the hut tax still remained. The men around Wren-ingham wore its brass payment tokens on pieces of cord around their necks. Arthur had noticed these necklaces were something of a status symbol for the younger men; the more tokens, the more wives, and the more huts. But for the older men he knew the necklaces were worn in another symbolic gesture. For them, who could remember life here before the settlers, the brass tokens threaded on a string of hide were a reminder, worn against their skin, of their new position in a land they had once called their own.

  The hut tax angered Arthur and he had tried his best to undermine it at the Anglican Synod in Salisbury in the April of 1903. As usual he chose to walk the hundred miles to the capital, and he arrived with just minutes to prepare before presenting his case. He stood in front of the assembled clergy, his already threadbare khaki suit caked in the fine red dust of the veld and the sweat still fresh on his face. Clearing his throat, he proposed:

  In view of the agricultural and pastoral character of the Mashona people, and of the fact that they have been only twelve or thirteen years in contact with civilisation, we consider that the most desirable form of taxation to stimulate their industry is taxation in kind.

  He had worded his proposal carefully. He knew it would be seen as a stab at the British South Africa Company, but he also felt sure that in the eyes of the church his argument was strong. A tax in kind, he went on to explain, would diminish the disruption to the Africans�
� way of life in their kraals and villages. A tax in cash required the men to leave their homes in search of work. A tax in kind would at least let them stay. Surely it was in the interest of the Anglican Church to promote the idea of a stable family home among the native people? He sat down, aware of the murmurings of disapproval both his speech and his outfit had provoked among the clean pressed suits and vestments around him. The proposal was refused. As was his second request that the Synod delete a section of their ‘Resolutions on the Native Question’ which read: ‘Neither individuals nor races are born with equal facilities or opportunities.’

  The day after the Synod Arthur began his long walk back to Enkel-doorn, taking with him a dramatically altered view of his position in Africa. Although in theory the entire Anglican Church in Southern Rhodesia was missionary in nature, few of the other clergy were leaving for native postings that morning. Few of them even spoke the native language of the country or had tried to learn it, and he realised what he had already begun to suspect—that his view of the Mashona people and of the place of the missionary in Africa was not just at odds with many of the whites he met in Enkeldoorn and Salisbury, but it was also very different to that of the Church in whose name he was serving.

  Bishop Gaul had seen him off that morning. Over the last two years the two men had grown closer. Arthur had often accompanied the Bishop on his treks, the Bishop riding a donkey and Arthur trotting alongside, sometimes even reading to him from his book of poems. He had got to know him well, as a man as well as a priest, so he knew that morning that the Bishop recognised his dissatisfaction, his dawning realisation of the divide between his own ideology and that of the Synod. When Arthur had taken him up again on his failed proposals the Bishop had been uncharacteristically apologetic.

  ‘You must understand,’ he’d said, stretching up to lay his hand on Arthur’s shoulder, ‘that many of the Synod don’t share your intimate experience with the Africans. Their parishes are European—farmers, businessmen—and in their own way they carry the interests of those people as close to their hearts as you do the interests of your Africans.’

  Arthur shook his head in reply, speaking softly, but still unable to disguise the tautness in his voice. ‘But I still don’t see how the Synod can stand up behind the Company and say that, that all races aren’t born equal in God’s eyes. That’s a mistake, a terrible mistake.’

  As he listened to the young missionary, the Bishop remembered something another priest had said about Cripps the previous evening, at the close of the Synod. ‘When I hear Father Cripps speak,’ he had said, ‘I know in my heart he is right, but I still can’t agree with any of his conclusions.’ As Bishop Gaul looked up at Arthur now, he knew what that priest meant. His intentions were sound but Cripps was too fiery, too quick to condemn. He smiled, and patted Arthur’s shoulder;

  ‘The best thing you can do now is carry on your good work in Wreningham.’

  Arthur looked down at the Bishop. He looked thinner than when he had last seen him. His skin sagged from his cheekbones and there were crescents of shadow under his eyes. He looked tired, and somewhat distressed. He thought he shouldn’t press his case any further.

  He took a deep breath and exhaled through a smile, ‘Good work? I don’t know about that. I suppose I manage to get around a bit but there’s still so much I don’t get done. And I’m sure most of Enkel-doorn think me quite mad, they certainly look at me as if they do.’

  The Bishop began to laugh, but the breath cracked in his throat and rattled into a cough which bent him double, one hand over his mouth the other smacking his solar helmet against his thigh. Arthur went to him, putting his hand on his back. He could feel the ribs there, and the muscles around them contracting with each hacking breath. He made Arthur think of his old cat back home in Kent, its bones tangible under the skin.

  The Bishop spat a thick gob of mucus into the dust at his feet and eventually took a deep clean breath. He stood up straight again, his cheeks red with burst capillaries and the veins in his neck standing proud above his dog collar.

  ‘Malaria,’ he said, breathing heavily. ‘I’m taking enough quinine to poison myself ten times over, but I still can’t shake the thing.’

  Arthur nodded, although he recognised that cough and he knew it wasn’t malarial. He’d seen both natives and whites coughing like that in Enkeldoorn, and it had always meant one thing: TB. He thought of his visit to Keats’ room in Rome. How the poet’s friend, Severn, had described the sound of Keats’ consumptive breath ‘boiling’ in his lungs.

  ‘Anyway Cripps, that was your fault,’ the Bishop continued. ‘Making me laugh like that. ‘Get around a bit’ did you say? Never heard anything so ridiculous, man. Last I heard you were covering a hundred miles a week down there.’

  ‘Well, yes, but it’s good for me, clears the head, and,’ he added, ‘it’s nothing to what an African might do, you know that, don’t you?’ He swung the strap of his satchel over his shoulder. ‘But it suits me well, suits me very well indeed.’

  ♦

  When they had made their farewells and Arthur had left, Bishop Gaul did not turn and make his way back to the town but stayed where he was and watched the young missionary walk off towards Enkeldoorn, his characteristic long, rangy stride and his satchel bouncing on his back. He followed him until he could no longer make out the shape of his body, until he was just a dark speck on the dust road, and as he watched him he listened to his own thin breath, wheezing and falling in time with the younger man’s steps. Only when Arthur had gone, dissolved into the heat haze above the road, did the Bishop turn and walk back into town, wondering as he went whether he would ever see Cripps again.

  ♦

  That walk back to Enkeldoorn was one of Arthur’s hardest since his arrival in Southern Rhodesia. But it was not just the Bishop’s health and the Synod’s short-sightedness that concerned him. The ground he walked over was dry and cracked; a couple of years of late rains had made this a lean year, and he knew it was going to get worse. The spectre of famine was more than a possibility. Already the ground broke like dry plaster about the plough blades, and the early crops had failed. He knew that for many of the natives in his district starvation was a real threat, and he was aware that the mothers worried for their newborns with an anxiety beyond their usual instinctive fear.

  Three days later he was sitting on the veranda of Vic’s Tavern, sipping a mug of tea in the shade of a wisteria. He had his eyes closed and was enjoying the coolness the plant cast over him after his hot morning walking when a passing Afrikaans farmer told him the news that had come in to town just hours before him. The British South Africa Company had announced its decision to increase the hut tax on native men by fourfold, from ten shillings to two pounds. The farmer passed on, throwing a last remark over his shoulder, ‘At least we might get some of those kaffirs working now, isn’t it, eh, padre?’

  Arthur didn’t answer him. He had hoped the Church would provide a stumbling block for the Company on this issue. He couldn’t see how it wouldn’t. It was its duty to. But it had not, he had been wrong, and he saw that now. Wrong not to press his case with the Bishop harder and wrong to place his trust and the welfare of his African parishioners in the hands of an Anglican Synod, most of whom had never witnessed African living, let alone experienced it.

  He responded in the only way he knew how: in writing. He had always written, since he was a schoolboy, and his coming to Africa had not stopped him. As he walked across the veld he composed poetry in his head. At night, he penned novels and short stories in battered school books and worked on his sermons. His only contact with home, with his brother, sisters and mother, was through writing letters. In this way he had lived by the pen for the last three years, always writing, setting down an epistolary and literary version of his life that shadowed his day to day living in Africa. But now he wrote with a different purpose and for the same reason he used to run. He wrote to release the energy inside him, as if his pen was a lance, and with it he w
ould drain his anger and frustration. He wrote to the Chief Native Commissioner, the acting District Commissioner, to the papers in Salisbury and even the papers in England. He had no idea if it would be in the slightest way ef fective, but he felt he had to do something. He had already failed once, so further failure seemed nothing to worry about.

  Along with the letters, which were mostly ignored, he wrote a poem, which was not. Over the weeks following the Synod he worked each night in his hut at Wreningham on a satirical piece which he titled Ode Celebrating the Proposed Quadrupling of the Hut-Tax. When he had finished he posted it for publication at his own expense in Salisbury, sending with it a letter informing the publisher to place it on sale as widely as possible, and to make sure it got into the hands of the administration. It was too unsubtle to be a true satire, but he hadn’t written it for literary merit. He had written it to be noticed, to make an impact. The closing stanza made his point clear:

  Go glean in the fields of the harvest bare,

  From famine meat a four-fold share!

  Apply a text as best you may –

  From him that hath not, take away!

  Arthur knew the poem struck a nerve in the capital a few weeks later when he called in at the post office in Enkeldoorn to receive a wire from Bishop Gaul in Salisbury. It was the stern message of a father to a son who had gone too far, and in deference to the Bishop Arthur withdrew the pamphlet from circulation. He was disappointed that Gaul had not let it live, but he was also satisfied that the poem had served its purpose, however briefly, as a voice of opposition on behalf of the Mashona, who as he now realised, were denied any public voice of their own.

  Arthur had anticipated the reaction to his poem in Salisbury. He knew there was no way that such open criticism of the hut tax would be allowed. What he did not anticipate was the reaction from the other side of his life in Mashonaland, from the Mashona themselves. Unknown to him, news of his protest spread quickly through the ‘bush telegraph’, a network of African messengers passing on important news between the kraals and villages from the vantage points of kopjes and hills. It was the bush telegraph that told African workers in Salisbury about the massacre of British troops at Shangasi in 1893 hours before any official news got through, and after Arthur’s protest against the hut tax its effectiveness was proved once more. In the months following the publication of his poem, Arthur’s congregations swelled and he was visited by a number of headmen who either wanted to question him on the tax and other aspects of the administration, or who just wanted to see in the flesh the white mufundsi who had defied Salisbury.