The Dust Diaries

by Owen Sheers

  Harare, Zimbabwe

  The Blue Arrow coach service leaves Harare for Bulawayo via Chivhu at seven-thirty every morning. Even at this time the heat in the city is oppressive, and handing my rucksack to the driver to store in the hold I feel rivulets of sweat run down my back. I reach around and pull the damp shirt away from my skin. Inside, the coach is air-conditioned cool, icy in the nostrils when I breathe in. There are not very many of us on the Bulawayo via Chivhu route today. Some women carrying bulging canvas chequered laundry bags, a younger girl with her head in a novel, some silent men, two of them in suits, shiny black leather folders on their laps, a young man in glasses who looks nervous. Another young man in a suit, wearing a brown trilby perched on the back of his head and with his foot in plaster is cracking kumquats between his teeth, one after the other, sucking out the flesh and spitting the rinds into the plastic bag on his lap.

  The coach judders to life and reverses out of the parking bay at the front of the Blue Arrow offices on Speke Avenue between Jason Moyo Avenue and Robert Mugabe Road. With a crunching of gears and a couple of revs of the engine it pulls out into the Monday morning traffic of downtown Harare, edging onto the main street between the private cars, the farmers’ trucks and the packed commuter taxis, minibuses so full they race through the town with arms hanging out their windows and the conductors hanging from the sliding doors, wads of greasy Zim dollars stuffed into pouches on their belts.

  We drive west out of the city on Samora Machel Avenue. Past the Zanu PF Headquarters which a few days earlier a Rixi taxi driver had told me people call the ‘shake-shake’ building because it resembles a carton of ‘shake-shake’ beer. Past the Zimbabwe Agricultural Society Showground and then out onto the road south which ribbons ahead of us across the veld, a single tarmac strip, straight but undulating like a ripple caught in time.

  ♦

  The Volvo coach picks up speed and soon we are doing seventy along the pock-marked road. Smaller vehicles get out of our way. I watch them through the back window as they tip and tilt back onto the tarmac behind us, as if they are riding the waves of our wake. The Blue Arrow hostess serves complimentary biscuits and tea and soft drinks. With one hand she carries the plastic cups shaking on a tray down the aisle, holding the seat heads with her other hand to keep her balance, walking the tightrope of the coach’s rocking and swaying. From Russia with Love plays on the TV screen bolted to the roof at the front of the bus and I watch Scan Connery despatch SPECTRE agents as the veld rushes by my window, expansive and monotonous, broken only by the odd gathering of rondavels off the road, lines of flapping bright washing strung in between them.

  I first saw this veld twelve days ago when the 747 that flew me here dipped its nose and banked, making the country rise in the window as if it had been poured into an oval glass, filling the Perspex with its yellow and red earth and a rash of green bush trees. Since then I have been staying in Harare, in the city, so it is only now, as the bus cruises south, that I get a chance to see the veld at first hand, to see the country you made your own, and which, in turn, made you hers.

  Harare has no trace of the veld. Its grid of wide concrete streets interlock at a centre of tall glass buildings, offices, banks, shopping arcades and hotels. Traffic lights hang on wires at the intersections like in an American city, and 4x45 and open-backed trucks wait beneath them, shaking on their exhausts. Newspaper boys weave between the stalled vehicles, hawking The Herald and the Daily News, and at the side of the road cobs of corn roast in their leaves over the smouldering coals of oil-drum barbecues. More oil drums mark the end of the street where President Mugabe lives, but these are painted red and stand upright, dented and patched with rust. Soldiers stand beside them, wooden-stocked AK47s at rest across their chests. Ever since a drive-by rocket attempt on Mugabe’s house this street is closed between six in the evening and six in the morning. The soldiers are ordered to shoot anyone seen on it during that time. They have already killed two people.

  Mugabe has governed Zimbabwe since the end of the War of Independence in 1980. As you suspected a hundred years ago, issues of land ownership lay at the root of this war, but its conclusion has not seen these issues rest. Land continues to be both the country’s fault-line and its foundation. When I arrive in Harare Mugabe is playing a dangerous balancing act between his promised redistribution of white-owned land and the consequences this would bring: disenfranchising the commercial farmers and thereby losing up to 42 per cent of the country’s annual national export income. What redistribution has already occurred has been marred by corruption, the giving and taking of land by Mugabe to favour his supporters or punish his opposition, black and white.

  The acacia and jacaranda trees that line the residential streets of Harare are one reminder of the veld that still exists in the city. Each year they blossom into bright reds and purples, but here their roots split pavements, not earth. In the centre of town crowds of people, black and white, stream through the arcades, drinking in cafes, talking on mobiles. On the corners craftsmen hawk their wire trinkets: birds, motorcycles, planes, all bent from the steel with a pair of pliers. Booksellers line the pavement with their second-hand paperbacks and months-old magazines, and every street has its army of Shona sculptures standing on parade for sale: green, white and grey fluid forms, reminiscent of Henry Moores, but African through and through.

  On First Street department-store dummies look out onto the lunchtime workers sitting in the sun. White dummies, looking onto black people. Some of the blacks, though, are white or the whites black, depending on how you look at it. Albinos, walking down the street in wide-brimmed hats to protect their sensitive skin, blinking the fair lashes of their pink-rimmed eyes. ‘Unlucky,’ a Rixi taxi driver tells me. ‘I would not like to be one.’ He laughs, ‘You are black, but you are white, so you belong nowhere. Nobody likes you.’

  Further out of town shopping centres punctuate the long, straight streets and rows of flats and houses. Out at the Avondale Centre middle–class whites and blacks meet in the Italian Cafe for espressos, croissants and the latest news of strikes, farmers’ disputes and stoppages up at the university. In the Fife Avenue shopping mall the same crowd meet again later, on the open terrace of the Book Caf6, where saxophonists play into the warm night and small-press poets read their work. In the suburbs large low houses nestle on well-kept lawns behind tall wire fences. Signs tell passers-by the speed with which the armed response unit will come to the house if the alarm is triggered. Further out again, after the suburbs, it is still city, but new city. Sprawling estates of high-density housing, rows and rows of unpainted breeze-block bungalows, some with aerials and satellite dishes on their roofs and cars parked in their driveways. But here the city’s domination of the veld is not so complete. The streets are covered with a dusty earth that shifts across them in the wind, and tall grasses grow between cracks in the concrete, prising through like an old habit that will not die. Here, families all sleep in the same bed, the parents partitioned by a hung sheet from the children. It is the city, but the ways of the village have not been forgotten. There are chickens in back yards. Nervous, sullen dogs, and if you need him, a n’an-ga nearby who will tell you if the snake at your door was sent as a blessing or a curse.

  The house I have been staying in is in Rowland Square, north-west of the city centre on Prince Edward Street. It belongs to a white Zim-babwean called Jeremy Brickhill. At seventeen Jeremy deserted the Rhodesian Army while lighting in the War of Independence and went to join the ZIPRA guerrillas in the Zambian bush. The war ended and he returned to Harare, as did his wife, who had been exiled from the country for protesting against Ian Smith’s regime. Zimbabwe was now an independent state led by Robert Mugabe, who on coming to power had announced a policy of reconciliation. ‘If yesterday I fought you as an enemy, today you have become a friend,’ he told Zimbabwe’s whites, ‘and if yesterday you hated me, today you cannot avoid the love that binds you to me and me to you.’ Encouraged, many whites did not ‘take t
he gap’ and stayed; but for some people the war was not over and they could not forget. One day as Jeremy turned the key in his car door he unlocked an explosion that blew him apart, embedding parts of his car into his body. The bomb may have been intended for him or his wife, he doesn’t know, but as he walks around the hot house in just a sarong he still displays its mark, a cross-stitch of scar tissue, running the length of his torso. It reminds me, together with the photos he keeps on his wall of the decommissioning of weapons at the end of the war (rows and rows of missiles, machine-guns and armoured cars lined up in the bush), of how recent the conflict is here, lying shallow in the memory of this young and old country.

  Jeremy is often away, so most of the time I share the house with his housekeeper, Richard. Richard is twenty-four, black, quiet, softly spoken and gentle-mannered. He lives in a one-roomed building behind Jeremy’s house, with a single bed, a radio that is nearly always on and posters of Manchester United on his walls. He will be getting married next summer. On Sundays his cousin comes and calls for him after church. Wearing a long white deacon’s stole and holding a Bible under his arm, he gently rattles the chain on the gate at the bottom of Jere-my’s drive to call Richard out from his room. Richard appears in long trousers and his Sunday shirt and together they walk off through the square towards town.

  I am in Zimbabwe looking for you again. In libraries, in archives and in the memories of people. I thought I had stopped following you, but you didn’t go away, so I have come to the country you lived and died in, following in your footsteps, hoping that somehow I will find more of you here. Because I still think I don’t know your whole story, and I feel instinctively that what is missing is the keystone I need to understand you. Before I left for Zimbabwe I visited my great aunt Elizabeth, your niece, who knew you and who wrote to you through those last quiet, isolated years in the veld. She told me that when she had come here for a memorial service years ago, she had been introduced to a woman who said she was your granddaughter. It had been quick, cursory, but she was sure she had said she was your granddaughter. If you have a granddaughter, you must have had a child, and a child must have had a mother, but in your letters, in the books written about you, there is always just you. So I have come to Zimbabwe, nearly fifty years after you died, to look for you again, and to look for your story, your real story that has been covered by the dust of time and history.

  But ‘real’ is not such an exact word here as it was in Britain. Harare is all city – cinemas, Rixi taxis, cricket grounds—but like the grass that grows between the cracks in the concrete, the older Shona histories of myth, magic and superstition are always showing through the city’s surface. Reality and myth and fact are not so definite here, but feed off each other to create a culture in which myth is no less ‘real’ than fact, just another way of telling the same story. There was a report in the paper yesterday about a prostitute who is being charged for cursing a client who refused to pay. The man woke the next morning to find that his genitals had disappeared. A doctor has given evidence to support the man’s case, swearing it is true that the prostitute’s curse has deprived him of his manhood, leaving a space between his legs, a blank page of skin. And there are other stories in the paper, about tolo-gashes, spirits of the veld playing havoc with people’s lives, about witchdoctors, about black magic and politics. Myth, reality and fact, in black and white, hand in hand in hand.

  With you too, it has been hard to extract the real from the myth, but you are still here, in the city you first stood up to then stayed away from. I have been following your name around the city. There is an orphanage outside town named after you, and your books and letters are in the university library and in the National Archives. I thought I found a street named after you but found out later that it was not you, but another Cripps, a pioneer called Leonard Cripps. Most people I meet know your name because of a diary, the Shearly Cripps Recipe Diary, which is sold as an annual fund-raiser for the orphanage. I find a copy in a bookshop in town. It has a lurid rainbow cover with your name across it, and inside there are quick recipes, adverts for Dazzle Hair Design and Enbee Schoolwear, dates, school calendars, weights and measures. There is a section called ‘Time and Trouble Savers’: ‘Emergency funnel—Use corner of brown envelope. Dropped egg—sprinkle heavily with salt to absorb the moisture.’ When I meet people here many are surprised you are a man and a missionary. They thought you were a woman and a cook, a pioneer’s Mrs Beeton. Fact and fiction, hand in hand.

  Others, though, know you intimately, and these are the people I have come to talk to in Harare. They are the people who like me have traced you in history and tried to understand you, who have already tried to tell your story. After the time I have spent with your letters, with your life on my mind, meeting them is like meeting the ex-partners of a lover. What we have in common is you. They know and retell the same stories I have uncovered, they have touched your writing, had their minds enquiring in yours. At first there is instant contact, the shared interest recognised, then a period of mild competition, scoring off each other’s knowledge of you. But then we settle into an exchange of ideas and theories, before the examination of you widens to take in their lives and mine, but always through the prism of yours.

  Betty Finn’s house is on Bradfield Road in the north-east of the city, number 33, a modest bungalow with an open garage on the side with wisteria trailing over its roof. The bartered blue Rixi taxi drops me in front of a large black iron gate. I buzz the intercom and speak into it and soon there is the dog, as there is in every house in Harare, barking and baring its teeth at me through the bars beneath the armed response sign tied to them. The dog is joined and subdued by an older African man called Gregory who opens the gate with one hand while bending down and holding the dog by its collar with the other. The front door of the bungalow opens and Betty Finn welcomes me, apologising for the dog, the gate, the buzzer—‘But,’ she explains, ‘crime has got so bad now I have to be careful.’

  I spend that afternoon with Betty, who has written academic articles about you, your poetry and your legacy. She is old now, in her seventies, but her interest in you has been a long-standing one. She shows me the unpublished manuscript of a book she wrote about your life; another person trying to pin you down with words. She says it doesn’t work, though, that you slip from under them, reclusive, ungiving, unwordable. We have tea and she tells me what she knows and thinks about you. How she thinks you were an impractical man who couldn’t even ride a bike, forced to live a practical life, your buildings and your body collapsing around the iron foundation of your faith. She says that in the last years people in Enkeldoorn said you were dirty, that you smelt, but that you always wore a clean white cravat. Above all else, she says she thinks you were lonely, unbearably lonely, despite your African friends and followers. The way she talks about your life in the bush, she makes it sound like a voluntary exile, rather than the finding of a home. I ask her about your child, if she knows the child’s name or where they lived, but she dismisses the idea, convinced that there can be no child. There was no wife, not even an African one, which, she says, was common among missionaries out in the bush. No, there was no love affair, and no daughter.

  As the afternoon fades Betty’s subject of your loneliness spins on its axis until Betty is talking about her own isolation, and I wonder if there isn’t something of the mirror-man in you. That people can’t help seeing the ruling qualities of their life reflected in you. But then perhaps this is not a quality of yours exclusively, just the nature of relationships across history, between the writer and the written. The pursuer looking for something in their subject that they recognise in themselves. For Betty this seems to be loneliness, abandonment. She came to Rhodesia to be with the man she loved, Hugh Finn, a scientist and a poet, and married him here. She had always wanted to marry a poet ever since her childhood friend had announced dramatically while they were picking strawberries that she had discovered a great poet and that she would marry him. The friend was only
twelve years old then, but years later she did marry the poet. His name was Tom Eliot, and hers was Valeric.

  Hugh has been dead for some years now, and Betty is marooned in Zimbabwe, the country to which her love brought her and in which it has now left her, washed up on her own grief, which is deep and solid, echoing as it does the dimensions of her love. She explains to me, simply and determinedly as if explaining a complicated equation to a child, that love does not go away with death, does not diminish, and anyone who says it does has not been in love. Instead, she says, it grows daily, fed by memory and its own nourishment, increasing in depth and volume and casting an equal shadow of grief as it does so. Gregory serves us an English Sunday roast. The sun is hot through the barred window behind the table, a bird caws extravagantly from a tree in the garden and Betty cries for a while, holding her fork in one hand and her head in the other.

  ♦

  The Blue Arrow coach is still reeling in the long road across the bush. Out of the side window I follow the fluid dip and rise of the slack telephone wires hung between their wooden poles, a long black rhythmical wave against the dull grey sky. I have been in Zimbabwe for twelve days, and I have tried to call Leonard every day, to tell him I am coming, but I have never got through. Looking at these wires now I understand why. Many of them have been brought down, cut open and stripped of their valuable copper, and this is probably why my voice never reached this far out of the city, and this is why I am having to come unannounced. In my shirt pocket I have the last letter from Leonard, dated over a month ago, and I only hope the words of welcome written there are still valid.

  A rash of half-built breeze-block bungalows signifies the edge of a town. It has started raining, hard, soaking rain. I look out the front window of the coach to see Chivhu appear in its frame through the clear arc of the one long wiper sweeping waves of water off the windscreen with each swing of its arm. The coach slows, crunches down a couple of gears and pulls into a small square with buildings on three sides. The driver calls ‘Chivhu’. I am the only person to leave the coach. Outside, the rain is cutting up the dusty ground, unlocking the smell of the earth. I collect my rucksack from the hold then run to the shelter of the nearest building, a cream wooden hotel with green window frames and guttering and a swinging sign that says ‘Vic’s Tavern’. Along with a couple of men standing on the covered veranda I watch the Blue Arrow coach leave, then take my bag to a table, sit down, and order a toasted egg sandwich and a cup of tea. A waistcoated waiter brings my order out from the empty hotel and I watch the rain sheet off the sloping roof, spilling from the guttering, waterfalling to the ground, distorting the world beyond.