The Dust Diaries

by Owen Sheers

  When the sound of the rain on the roof begins to ease I ask one of the men if he knows the way to where Reverend Mamvura lives, Farm 16 in Maronda Mashanu. He raises his eyebrows, smiles and says in a deep voice, ‘Yes, I know where Reverend Mamvura lives,’ he indicates with a flat hand. ‘Up here, then left and then right.’ He pronounces his English carefully, each syllable given its due weight in the Zimbab-wean manner. ‘It is about nine or ten kilometres,’ he adds; then, tilting his head to one side, he asks, ‘But how will you get there?’

  ‘I’ll walk,’ I tell him. Because that is how you would have got there from this town, on your feet, and I don’t want to follow you any other way.

  The rain is light now, so I shoulder my rucksack, which feels too new in this town, and start to walk the way the man had described. I pass the post office on my left then continue up a long wide dirt street of shops, their entrances shaded by a wooden awning over an open walkway. The walkway and the shops’ faded, once colourful signs remind me of an American Western set, lending the street a pioneer feel beneath the African trappings of the town. Zvichanka Chete, Diki-ta Eating House, Fish and Chips, Chivhu Music Centre, Prop. D.J. Sit-hole, Zvoushe G. Dealer, Budget Boutique. A broken neon sign writes Enkeldoorn Garage in dull letters against the grey sky, reminding me of the town’s original name, and looking around now I find it hard to believe that it looks much different to when you were alive. Except, of course, today the people in the shops, walking on the walkway, driving in the beat-up trucks are all black and when you were here nearly everyone was white.

  I turn left up a smaller street. A series of corrugated lean-tos line the left side and a squat, hexagonal rusted corrugate church stands on the right. The sun has come out now and a barber is outside his lean-to, shaving a path through the thick black hair of a customer who sits on a couple of upturned Pepsi crates. The long flex of his clippers leads back into the dark of the shed, where a small boy stares at me, his stomach distended and one finger in the corner of his mouth. I wave and he ducks back, further into the dark. The barber laughs and waves instead.

  This street bears right, past the Chivhu hospital, a complex of low wooden buildings behind a wire-mesh fence with scrubland grass growing in between them. Some orderlies smoke under the shade of a large open thatched shelter that stands apart from the main buildings. At the corner of the hospital the road ahead of me peters out into veld grass, a narrow track and trees, so I turn left and start walking up the road I was told will lead me to Leonard’s farm at Maronda Mashanu. It stretches ahead of me, a long, straight, rust-red dirt road that narrows into the horizon like a textbook perspective diagram. Slightly cambered, its centre has been driven smooth by truck and bus tyres, scattering the larger pebbles into small banks and dips at it edges in which the rain water has collected in long thin puddles. A strip of grass flanking either side develops into thick bush away from the road: low green trees punctuated with rounded granite boulders. The wind has whittled some of these into standing stone sculptures, one stone on another, and many are rashed with orange lichen. Sometimes the words ‘Bus Stop’ are painted on them in black writing. A line of telegraph poles margin the road on the left, their single wire a dark pencil line against a sky that is still portentous with rain.

  I pass the hospital, where a man is sitting outside the entrance with his young daughter. The left side of her face is swollen, shutting one eye and blowing out her cheek. Her father wears an old suit jacket over a jumper, flannel trousers and battered slip-on shoes. He raises a hand and asks ‘How are you?’ in the Zimbabwean way, with the emphasis on the ‘you’. As he does so his daughter turns away from me and hides her face behind her father’s jacket. I tell him I am fine and walk on, my rucksack pulling at my shoulders and my water bottle swilling at my side. Occasionally the alarm of an insect trill laces the quiet, but otherwise the road is silent, just the sound of my own breath and my feet on the stones. Just once a man on a bicycle appears at the road’s sharpened point on the horizon and cycles towards me, rising and falling over the undulations like a boat on a gentle sea. He gets nearer, until I can hear the whirr of his wheels, passes me, then is gone.

  After about two miles I pass a battered farm sign on a pole, white paint on black, ‘Farm N°4, Cripps Road’. This is your road, then, the one you walked for forty years, made with your own feet, from Maronda Mashanu to Enkeldoorn and back, carrying your letters, your manuscripts, your grievances, your hopes and your memories. Many roads and streets in this country have changed their names since independence. Windsor Way is now Makombe Way, Stanley Avenue is Jason Moyo Avenue, but this is still your road, Cripps Road. Long, straight, unforgiving, it seems suitably yours, and now I am walking up it to find you in your grave, carrying my questions about your life and why you lived it the way you did.

  ♦

  Ray Brown is another person who has asked these questions before me. An English professor at the university in Harare, he has studied your poems and your stories for traces of you and like Betty Finn he is long familiar with your life. I sat in front of Ray in his house on The Chase, a wide Harare street with rows of jacaranda and musasa trees obscuring the houses that line it on either side, and listened to him talk about you. He is a professor to the bone. Embraced by his huge armchair, he clenches his teeth on a pipe and thinks in silence for a long time before speaking. A wayward fringe of white hair falls across his forehead, beneath which a pair of large square glasses dominate his narrow face. He is a man of literature, and it is your writing that fascinates him: an English nineteenth-century poetic sensibility brought to bear on an African landscape at the dawn of the twentieth. A Keats scholar himself, it is maybe the mirror-man at work again, but he stresses the juxtaposition of your love of Keats, the physical sensualist, against your life of spiritual ideal and physical privation; the romantic nature of your writing against what he calls your ‘muscular Christianity’.

  When I ask him if he knows of a child, he is silent for longer than one of his usual pauses, then says, ‘No, I doubt it.’ He does tell me, however, of an occasion years ago when a girl stood up at a symposium held at the university and claimed to be your granddaughter, but he says that he and the other academics dismissed her as an impossibility. When I tell him that my great aunt also met a woman who said she was your granddaughter, and that I have an intuition that it was a specific event, something like a love affair that first sent you to Africa, he is quiet for a long time again. Eventually he stands, and goes to look for a book on his bookshelf. He brings back a selection of your poetry and prose, thumbs the pages, finds what he has been looking for, leans forward with his elbows on his knees and says, ‘See what you think of this, it’s from a poem called ‘To the Veld’.’ And then he reads:

  Take my love and praise…

  Most of all for thy weariness –

  The homeless void, the endless track,

  Noon thirst, and wintry night’s distress –

  For all tense stretchings on the rack –

  That gave me my lost manhood back.

  He looks at the page for a moment, then looks up at me again, peering over his glasses that have slipped down his nose, and says, ‘That last line has always troubled me, ‘my lost manhood’. Why lost, do you think?’

  ♦

  After two hours’ walking, my water bottle is empty and I can sympathise with your vision of the ‘endless track’. The clouds are bulking out above, darkening with rain and I’m worried that this is somehow not your road after all. I decide to carry on until the next farm at least, and walk on down a dip and over a little bridge. The land on the banks of the river that flows under it is covered in a lush grass that rises up into meadows on either side. A jacaranda tree hangs over the road, heavy with its lilac, bluebell flowers, and in the distance I can see a man carrying a spear and walking with two hunting dogs. I stop and rest, realising why you could have thought Mashonaland an Arcadia. Its country is unoriginal for miles, but then every now and then it offers up a pl
ace like this, where the simple beauty is all the more striking for rising out of the monotony of the veld.

  I am about to turn around and find some shelter before the rain, which I can see sweeping across the land over in the east, reaches me, when I see the sign for Leonard’s farm. It is a wide hoop of round metal painted white, with two dark-blue stripes like an old–fashioned life-guard ring. Leonard’s name, the farm number and the P.O. Box number are written on it, also in blue, the words invaded by patches of rust. It hangs on an old metal gate, which I push open and walk through, following a rough track that curves up to a homestead scattering of huts on slightly higher ground.

  As I walk up the track I take stock of the place. On my right is a single brick rondavel with a neat thatched roof and a line of washing hanging quietly in the still air outside it. Past this, there is a cattle kraal, not made from regular planks or fencing wood but from whole branches planted in the ground with other branches woven in between them to form the horizontal rungs. It gives the impression of intricate planned disorder, part natural, part artificial. Inside, a couple of short-horned cows shift from foot to foot in the mud. Past this, still on my right, there is a squat concrete well with its metal bucket pulled up short to the winding axle and a thin short-haired dog lying at its base, pole-axed by the humid heat. Ahead of me is the homestead proper, a rough square of dusty ground flanked by a whitewashed iron-roofed bungalow on the right, and a couple of thatched rondav-els, raised on bricks, to its north and its south. Inside the centre square there is a wooden maize holder, constructed like the cattle kraal from undeveloped wood, an ancient green plough being reclaimed by the earth it once disturbed and a corrugated-iron drying stand on which a pile of red, green, blue and white pots and pans show up brightly against the background of yellow veld grass. A scattering of thin chickens, their red wattles trembling as they walk, strut the dusty ground, pecking for food. Just outside the square is a plain concrete block, its corrugated roof pinned down by stones, with an entrance at each end. White arrows painted on its walls point to each of them, and written above them in English and Shona are the words VARUME

  GENTS and VAKADZI LADIES.

  I am just past the well when a young boy appears from behind one of the raised rondavels. He stops, stares and runs into the hut, calling to someone inside. I stop too, worried that I have intruded. I am suddenly aware that if this is Leonard’s farm, then it is the first time I will meet someone who actually met you, who lived with you and knew you as a person, not as a subject written on a page. I wait, feeling the first heavy drops of rain land on my rucksack and my arms, and the sweat cooling on my skin. A woman wearing a brightly patterned skirt, a dark cardigan and a scarf wrapped around her head, and an older boy wearing a white shirt and black trousers, appear from the rondavel. I walk nearer to them, explaining I am here to see Reverend Mamvura. She smiles, says ‘Aya!, bringing her hand down in a gesture I don’t quite understand, while the boy walks towards me, smiling, and shakes my hand. He leads me towards the bungalow and goes inside its darkness, calling softly ‘Baba, baba!’ He says a few more words in quick, quiet Shona and from inside I hear a man’s voice, older, deeper. ‘Come in, come in, yes, yes.’ I step inside and hear the sky open up behind me as, like the drawing down of a blind, the sweep of rain reaches Leonard’s farm, crashing onto the iron roof of his bungalow and splashing in the dusty square outside.

  Inside there is an older man sitting in an armchair, wearing a dark-green short-sleeved shirt and a grey tank top. On seeing me he raises his eyebrows, lets out an ‘Ahhhh!’ and, pushing himself out of the chair embraces me and my rucksack in one. He smells of sadza, earth and mothballs. When we pull apart he keeps his arms around me, saying ‘Welcome, welcome, Owen’, smiling and shaking his head. This is Leonard Mamvura, lively, passionate, eighty years old but looking only fifty. I realise he is crying, and then that I am too.

  The boy who met me, who Leonard introduces as Sabethiel, takes my rucksack while Leonard takes my hand and leads me to a small table in the centre of the room, at which we both sit down. As with the others I met in Harare, any distance is broken by our shared knowledge of you. Leonard introduces me to his cousin, the woman I saw earlier, who now brings me a white enamel bowl with blue trim, some soap and a towel to wash my hands, while Leonard makes a pot of tea before sitting down with me to talk about you.

  The room is small and dark and simple. The shaky table we sit at stands at its centre with a sofa and an armchair against two of the walls on which free advertisement calendars and printed quotations from the Bible vie for space, along with photographs of Leonard’s family and one portrait of Robert Mugabe.

  Leonard himself fascinates me. Enthusiasm runs through him like an infection. He is almost completely bald, just a dusting of white hair circling the back of his head. His eyes are heavy-lidded and his face is lined, particularly in two diagonal grooves that run from the side of his nose to above the corners of his mouth. This gives his passive face a solemn look when he is not smiling. But that is rare, because he is often smiling, and laughing a characteristic laugh that peels off into a squeal. When he speaks to me his head nods and waves, as if it is this motion that powers the words which he marshals in the air in front of him as he talks. His language is clear, a careful, formal English, peppered with repeated yeses and uh-ohs when he is listening or responding to a question.

  Leonard removes the white mesh fly-cover from a plate of biscuits and we talk. He tells me that your church, the original Maronda Mashanu, is not far from here, and that you are buried in its nave. Then he talks about when you were alive, referring to you in turns as ‘Our hero, Father Shearlycripp’, ‘the most beloved Father Shearlycripp’ or ‘our noble friend, Father Shearlycripp’. Many times he says with a shaking head and in a high yet serious voice, ‘He was a very good friend of the Africans, yes, yes.’

  It is clear that Leonard has taken it upon himself to be the guardian of your legacy and your memory out here in the veld. He goes into his study, a tiny room with sagging shelves piled high with papers and folders, and brings out several books and articles that have been published about you. The words of more people who have come here to question Leonard about the old missionary poet he read and wrote for. Soon, however, it seems that my welfare overtakes the welfare of your memory, and Leonard sets about arranging my welcome, shouting orders at the silent Sabethiel, talking quickly to his niece. He shows me my room at the back of the bungalow, a mattress laid across two huge sacks of mealie meal, a wooden side table and one small window looking out over the track and the road I walked this morning. Then he tells me I must wash, and leads me down to the concrete toilet block where his cousin has already prepared a small blue plastic tub of warm water. The toilet itself is a simple construction of a raised hole set in concrete with a wooden board lain across it. A metal hook hammered into the wall skewers a sheaf of neatly torn squares of newspaper. Leonard leaves me with a bar of soap and I strip off beside the toilet, step into the tub and give myself a body wash, listening to the flies humming and tapping under the wooden board over the toilet hole and looking out of the one small window at the sky, already clear of the morning’s rain clouds.

  That afternoon Leonard shows me around his homestead, the neat ploughed areas of mealie corn, the kitchen hut with its open fire in the centre and highly polished black shelves moulded out of the earth walls, and the cows, still shifting about their wooden pen. He introduces me to his son, Horatio, who lives with his wife and children in the rondavel I passed on my way up the track. Horatio is fifty and speaks excellent English. He must have been born about the time that you died.

  The headmaster of the local school joins us for more tea in the late afternoon. His name is Moses Maranyika, and where Leonard has told me stories about your missionary work here, Moses is keen to tell me about your supernatural powers: your ability to control the bees and, above all, your prowess as a rain spirit. He says that wherever you walked there might have been a band of rain e
ither in front of you or behind you, but never over you. You always walked dry. Leonard laughs and says that Father Cripps must have been with me because it only started raining today when I came inside the house. Moses plays along, nodding, wide-eyed, and says, ‘Yes, he is your ancestor, so his spirit will be with you here.’ Moses is also a sub-deacon at the church, and he and Leonard segue seamlessly from this supernatural conversation into organising a church service for tomorrow to let everyone meet Father Cripps’ great, great nephew.

  That night, after a supper of chicken legs and sadza, I write notes from the books Leonard has about you by the light of a single candle while he snoozes in his chair, piping up to conversation every now and then. His talk drifts from you to the land situation to AIDS, which he worries about a lot. He calls the virus ‘Slim’ and tells me that in the last month he has buried twenty young men, all hollowed out by the disease. He shakes his head, looking sad, and says, ‘They go to work in the towns, but then they come back here and they die.’ Outside the cicadas are at full drill, and the night is a deep black. Later, I fall asleep on the mealie sacks, my legs aching from my long walk. As I drift towards sleep I think about tomorrow, when I will visit your grave, and about how to ask Leonard about your granddaughter, who seems to have already been everywhere before me but whose name and existence no one can tell me about.