The Dust Diaries

by Owen Sheers

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧

  23 NOVEMBER 1999

  Maronda Mashanu, Mashonaland, Zimbabwe

  The cock starts crowing early on Leonard’s farm, around five-thirty, but it isn’t this that wakes me the next morning but the tap, tap of Leonard working on his typewriter in his study next door. Sitting down to a breakfast of fried eggs and toast, Leonard hands me a slip of paper across the table that explains his early activity. It is the schedule for my stay with him, meticulously typed out and numbered, day by day:

  FARM;– 16⁄54; Maronda mashanu S.S.C. F:–

  Our Valuable Mr. Owen Sheers; Programme;–

  Tuesday: 23rd November, 1999:–

  Visit: Cripps’ Shrine: 9. A.M.—

  Wednesday: 24th November; 1999:–

  Mass at Maronda Mashanu Church near School, 9: 30 am –

  Visit All Saints Wreningham; Acompanied by Subdeacon M.M. Maranyika and Others.

  Thursday: 25th November, 1999:–

  Leave for: Masvingo

  Thank you:

  L.M.T. Mamvura.

  After breakfast five of us leave Leonard’s to walk to your grave at the old Maronda Mashanu church, taking the road I walked yesterday away from Chivhu. I walk with Leonard, who is wearing a pin-stripe suit jacket over his jumper and cardigan and a dark felt trilby-type hat. He walks with a stick, which he swings out in front of him at every step. On my other side is Horatio, wearing a woollen hat and a woollen jumper with a pattern of knickerbocker glories repeated over it. He walks with his hands behind his back, asking me about life in Britain. He wants to know what we ask for there: do we ask God for rain? No, I tell him, where I come from there is no need to ask, the rain just happens. Horatio’s wife, Faith, and Leonard’s cousin walk behind us, carrying a selection of waterproofs and bright umbrellas in case the rain happens again here. However much I try to slow down or wait for them the women always remain a few steps behind us. The morning is cool, but warming up quickly. A school bus passes us, and Leonard waves to the children packed in its open windows. Horatio kicks at some damba shells left on the road by baboons, who have cracked them open to scoop out their insides.

  Your church lies off the road, down a narrow track through bush trees and a cluster of euphorbia. As Leonard pushes through the branches with his stick I feel a mounting sense of anticipation. My relationship with you started a long way away, in books and libraries in Britain. Then you inhabited me, the idea of you, incongruous and foreign to my surroundings while I worked in London. Travelling on the underground, driving to work on a breakfast TV show at four in the morning through the city’s lamp-lit streets, you were always there somewhere. And now I have come to find you at last, in the patch of Africa you made your home for fifty years.

  The ruins of your church stand in the middle of a clearing at the base of a small tree-covered kopje. They have been halted mid-disintegration, their stone walls held together with new cement, so they stand at head height, one large rough stone circle leading into another, smaller circle. I recognise its shape from the photographs I saw in Oxford, even though the precariously sloping thatched roofs have long disappeared. I follow Leonard into the clearing, past a tiny ron-davel which must have been yours and into the church, through a gap in the larger stone circle. The remains of three rough pillars rise from the soil, like menhirs or standing stones, and then past these, there is you. A neat, smooth-bordered rectangle sculpted from the soil with a simple white cross at its head and bright blue plastic flowers in clay pots settled in its red earth. I stand above it and imagine you there, a long key in the lock of tin’s grave.

  Above the grave there is a concrete canopy, peeling a confetti of white paint. Horatio tells me this was built because the rain never fell on you, so when you were buried here, the rain stopped and the country suffered a drought. They built this canopy shelter so you would bring the rains. He swears that as the last pole supporting the canopy was made secure in the ground, the rain came and didn’t stop for three days until the ground had recovered from its thirst.

  Leonard and Horatio leave me alone with you for a couple of minutes, but Leonard is soon back, anxious to show me the rest of the area. From the church we go into your rondavel, which has been preserved, complete with its conical thatched roof. Inside the floor is smooth, a mixture of polished mud and cow dung. I feel the walls and remember a line from one of your letters about helping the Matabele workers build the school at Wreningham: ‘Slapping sloppy masses of wet earth on a wall made of rough timber israther agreeable.’ Leonard stands against the wall opposite me and a dappling of sunlight falls across his face from the hole at the top of the roof. He points to it and explains that you always left a hole in the roofs of your buildings so the birds could fly in and out of your churches and your huts. He goes on to describe what was in this rondavel when you lived here. Your mattress, a large trunk stuffed with your letters and your books, a wooden cross and a picture of your mother propped in the one slit window. Nothing else. I look at the floor and try to imagine you here. The rondavel is tiny, and a tall man like you could probably touch both sides of it when lying down. I wonder how you coped in here after the openness and freedom of the veld.

  Leonard continues to guide me through the physical landscape of your life. He shows me the patch of ground where you grew your own pipe tobacco, the river in which you baptised him and hundreds of others, and the place on top of the kopje where you came to meditate. Then, looking very serious, he says we must have lunch, and we leave your church and your grave and walk back up the road to his farm. On the way back I am quiet, thinking about what happened when I was alone at your grave. While I was there I found myself speaking to you. I hadn’t expected to, and thinking about it now as we walk back to Leonard’s I realise that this speaking was perhaps a form of prayer. I can hardly remember the last time I prayed in earnest. I think probably when I was sixteen and my grandfather lay downstairs, dying. Since then the idea of it seemed redundant, a childish fancy, but now I had found myself praying again. It is what I did when faced with your grave, above anything else. Speak to you, ask you questions and listen to the silence of your reply.

  ♦

  Over the course of that afternoon and the following day Leonard guided me through what remained of you here in Mashonaland, the physical and the metaphysical. I visited your school in Maronda Mashanu where the children filed out into the central square to line up under a huge baobab tree, singing as they marched ‘We walk in the light of God’. Leonard was tired by now, so he left Moses and Horatio to accompany me to your other school beneath the two huge gum trees of Wreningham, waving us off from the gate of his homestead. As soon as we were out of sight a change came over the two men, like schoolboys away from the teacher. Moses asked me about women in Britain and Horatio about my job. After half an hour walking along the road we stopped at a beer hall, a bare concrete building with faded Coca Cola signs painted on it. Inside was a crude bar, stacks of Scud beers and crates of Castle Lager. Moses and Horatio bought a couple of bottles each, opening one with their teeth and stuffing the other one in their pockets, giving me a wink as they did. At the school hundreds of children stared at me cautiously before rushing up as one to shake my hand and ask ‘Makadini?

  On the Wednesday morning a mass was held at the new church in Maronda Mashanu. I walked there with Leonard while Sabethiel went on ahead of us with a canvas bag of altar objects clanking over his shoulder and his too-big Wellingtons slapping against his shins as he ran across the fields.

  The church itself is a simple block building beside an ancient tree with a milk churn hanging from its lowest branch serving as a bell. Inside, Leonard changes into his preaching stole before carefully preparing the altar and supplicating himself in front of it, on his knees, his forehead resting on his hands and his hands resting in turn on the concrete of the altar step. A tail-less lizard runs a slalom between the silver paten, the candlesticks and the communion cup.

  The church that morning
is completely full. The women of the Mothers’ Union line the pews in their uniforms of bright blue head-scarves and aprons, and the old men in dark suits and deacons’ stoles play tall drums and shake maracas. Your name is mentioned again and again, in songs, in the sermon, in thanks and in prayers. The harmony singing is beautiful, weaving into itself and building to a crescendo until some of the women break from the pews and dance in front of the altar. I think of the reserved choir boys in Oxford. Leonard looks over it all, beaming and stamping his feet in time to the music.

  After the service Leonard introduces me to some of the congregation, often in terms of their relationship to death rather than to other people. ‘This is Mary, her husband died two years ago, she had four children and lost three.’

  Old edentate men and women introduce themselves to me according to whether you married them to their spouse, baptised them in the river, or did both. One woman’s back is bent with age and her face is obscured by a shawl over her head and a coloured cloth tied across her forehead. She grips my hand in both of hers and speaks to me in a hoarse whisper. Leonard bends to her mouth and then looks at me and says, ‘She says she loved Father Cripps like her own father.’ I ask him why her face is covered and he says simply, ‘Because leprosy took it away, yes.’

  Flash bulbs of lightning at the open windows that line both walls of the church signal the coming of a storm, which is soon above us, the thunder cracking so hard that I feel it in my ribs. The downpour sheets the sky dark, filling in the windows with panes of rain. Those who were outside come running in, and are joined by groups of other people who had been driving on the road in open trucks, bundling in through the main door, their shoulders hunched and their clothes soaked tight to their skin. The church is packed, and the storm continues raging about us, flinging rain through the windows and exploding its thunder in the clouds. The noise of the water on the roof is so loud we have to shout to talk to each other, but then above it all I hear one woman’s voice start to sing. The shuffle of a maraca joins her and soon the congregation and the drenched refugees from the road are all singing, meeting the storm’s hymn with their own.

  ♦

  Four days after walking your road to Leonard’s farm, I am walking it back again, although this time I am not alone. Sabethiel walks beside me, as Leonard insisted he should, to take me to the bus stop in town where I will catch a bus south to Masvingo. Sabethiel speaks no English, and I speak no Shona, so we walk together silently under the growing heat of a morning sun and a clear sky, your red road crunching under our feet.

  In the space of these four days my idea of you has changed from an elusive ancestor I pieced together in photos, letters, poems, to a remembered man, fleshed out with the stories and memories of Leonard and the others in Maronda Mashanu. The manifestation of your life in these memories has made you clearer to me in many ways, but more of a mystery in others. My intuition that you lived partly as a pursued man in Mashonaland has deepened, I feel more strongly than ever that your life of sacrifice was also somehow a life of personal penance. I know from the histories and the accounts I have read that the men and women who came to Africa a hundred years ago all had their reasons to come here: riches, God, hope, health. But for most there was often a reason to leave their homelands too, and it is this other reason I am looking for in you. I know why you came here, but why did you leave? I can’t be sure, only knowing what I do, but I am increasingly certain that your shadow granddaughter, who even Leonard said he knew nothing about, is a residue, a living proof of that reason.

  And there is a name too. A new name that has fed my curiosity, one I have not previously encountered in your story. Before I left for Maronda Mashanu I spent two days in the dark wood reading rooms of the Zimbabwe National Archives, all the time I was allowed without the necessary permit from the Ministry of Information. In the archives I found more of your history. More letters, more manuscripts, more photographs (even one of my father aged four sitting on the knee of your brother, William). In one folder, between a map of the Sabi Valley and a school exercise book with your poems written across its grid of blue squares, I found your Last Will and Testament. It was in this will I found the new name. The will is short, sparse and simple, and the name appears in a codicil, added at a later date. It is the only name on the paper other than yours.

  It is this name and the will that contains it that occupies my mind that day as I take a rattling bus from Chivhu further south to Masvin-go, then a battered taxi from the bus station on to the medieval ruins of Great Zimbabwe, where I set up my tent inside the huge walls of the ancient stone complex. I am still thinking of the name and your will the next morning when I wake before sunrise and walk up to the imposing structure of the ruins’ Great Enclosure. Entering into its circle through the west entrance, I sit on a pile of blue-grey stone beneath the tall conical tower at the heart of the edifice. I am alone. It is early, quiet, and for once the air is cool, empty of the heat that fills the day. I wait for the sun, which comes, blood-orange red, rising from behind the outer wall, picking out in silhouette the thin shards of stone planted like battlements, and the tops of the trees that have found root inside the shelter of this African castle. The sun rises higher, clearing the walls altogether and lighting the ground inside the enclosure. With it comes birdsong, long, urgent calls and higher signature tunes, played again and again on the clear air, and heat, which finds itself on my skin until the flesh on my forearms warms and the first pinpricks of sweat tingle between the hairs.

  I sit there, at the centre of the ruins, almost ninety years after you sat here taking in the quality of these circles, pillars and domes so you could echo them when you built your church in that clearing beneath the kopje in Maronda Mashanu. In travelling here I have made that link complete in my mind. The shape of these ruins, and the shape of your church, Great Zimbabwe passed on into Maronda Mashanu, and then replicated again and again in the mission stations you built across Mashonaland. The pieces of your life coming together, more fragments joining to make your history whole. But now there is another fragment: this name, printed clearly in your will. The only name other than yours. The woman it belongs to is another part of your story, but one which echoes nowhere else in your life as I know it. Unless, of course the name is already an echo, a resonance of your past, and it is the cause of its existence there, not any consequence that I should be looking for.

  I leave the Great Enclosure and make my way back to my tent lower in the valley. Coming over the lip of a hillock I disturb a baboon eating in a tree. I stop and it hangs for a second like a dark question mark, one arm hooked around a branch, before dropping to the ground and hunch-running over the horizon, leaving me looking at nothing but the swaying leaves where it has been. And that is how it is here, following your story in Zimbabwe one hundred years too late, picking up the fragments, uncovering your tracks. Fact and fiction, myth and history. Glimpses of things, suggestions in the corner of the eye which disappear or dissolve when you try to look at them head on.

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧

  1915

  The Last Will and Testament of Arthur Shearly Cripps

  I desire to be buried without a coffin or monument on the hill Makirri Maure on the farm Muckle Neuk. The farms of Money Putt and Maronda Mashanu shall be preserved as mission locations, free of any rent or labour tax to native tenants residing thereon.

  CODICIL

  I the Reverend Arthur Shearly Cripps, do hereby give and bequeath to Mrs Ada Neeves of Icklesham. Rye. Sussex. England free and unencumbered by any death duties, or should the said Ada Neeves predecease me, then to her husband, or in the event of his death, to her children in equal shares the sum of £25 Sterling.

  Signed with his own initials when he was blind.

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧

  1 AUGUST 1952

  Maronda Mashanu, Mashonaland, Southern Rhodesia

  In the church at Icklesham. At her organ practice. Was that the first time he had seen her? Was that the first
time they met? No, he doubts it. They must have met before. At services, in the village, when Reverend Churton took him on a round of the farms to introduce him.

  ‘May I introduce Mr Cripps, our new deacon?’ Then aside, usually to the man of the house, ‘A graduate of Oxford, and a blue to boot, you know?’

  So no, not the first time they had met. But now, remembering, more than fifty years later, he thinks of it as the first. He remembers the light through the five frames of the chancel window. The way it fell over her where she played at the organ. And her singing…No, he doesn’t. He remembers she was singing, but he does not remember her singing. That has gone now. Now, in this rondavel, blind, he lives in a world of sound but he is deaf to the sounds of the past. Words, songs, they all pass so briefly. So few burn or brand on memory. But she was singing, he knows that. At the top of her voice, thinking she was alone. But she wasn’t alone. He was watching her, one hand still on the iron handle of the porch door.

  Ada Sargent. But of course he didn’t know her name then. Just that he had disturbed her at her practice, and that he was as shocked as she was by their sudden meeting. By the silence in the church after the organ’s last note and by the other’s face, surprised, wide-eyed, staring at him through the frame of the chancel archway, the two stone tablets of the Ten Commandments laid in the wall above them.

  Then they had spoken, introduced themselves. He probably made apologies for disturbing her, he can’t remember. He knows she called him ‘sir’ and the sound of that word on her lips made a hollow in his chest. He didn’t want her to call him sir, he wanted to be close to her, even then, and that word sir did nothing but set them apart. But that is all. He can remember little else of what they said.