The Dust Diaries

by Owen Sheers

  The war. That had not been an easy decision for him to make, philosophically or practically, and he remembers now how the question of what he should do wore away at him, night after night, when the mud walls of this rondavel were still barely dry. At first, like his friends and his family who wrote to him from England, he’d thought the war would be a military, not a civilian conflict. A breast-beating of the countries’ professional armies. But like most of Europe they’d underestimated the strength of its magnetism after so many years of peace. They had not foreseen the efficacy of modern warfare—but then how could they have? Kitchener and his finger, part accusatory, part elective; the million-man army drawn from sons, brothers and fathers. Mons, Ypres, the fingers of the war stretching as far as their homes, the tight black print of the casualty lists, the soft drop of the telegram, the silence in bedrooms in a million houses.

  But even then, when war was gathering Europe in its fist, he’d still been surprised when it drew the colonies in too; when the guns fired at the battle of Tanga, sounding the note that war had arrived in Africa despite both the British and German governors’ reluctance to enter the arguments of their parent nations. And that was when the recruiting began. The farmers and their sons went eagerly enough. The English and the Dutch around Enkeldoorn, whose countries had so recently been fighting each other, displayed a particularly natural talent for mobilisation, for the transition from civilian to soldier. Gradually, the area became emasculated. Parties of men set off for Nairobi to offer their services to the king. Cullen Gouldsbury, feeling the duty of his youth, had already joined the KAR, and after Tanga most of the other Enkeldoorn officials followed his example.

  Unlike so much else in the country, colour was no longer a barrier to entry. The Matabele who lived around some of Arthur’s outlying mission stations were soon taken into training, their warrior past qualifying them as a ‘martial race’ on the clipboard forms held under the arms of the upright recruiting officers. But the war needed men for more than just fighting, and soon the Shona men who Arthur lived and worked among began leaving their homes too, not for the regiments of the KAR but for the carrier corps. They often took their families with them and it was then, when so many Africans were leaving for war, that the decision about what he should do had risen to the forefront of his mind.

  Initially, the recruiting of Africans into both the KAR and the carrier corps had simply evoked his now familiar sense of moral exasperation with the colonial government. Since the first days of their presence they had treated the African as a child. A child they could put to work, but still an infant, intellectually and socially. And the analogy was not purely metaphorical; many settlers still accepted the ‘medical evidence’ that proved an African’s brain ceased to develop past the age of fourteen. It was an anthropological perspective he had struggled against throughout his tour in Mashonaland and now it was further distorted by the administration’s decision to recruit Africans. Though regarded as a child, the African was suddenly honoured with the responsibility of a man. The right to kill and be killed.

  However much this paradox outraged him the fact remained that the war was a reality and it would spill African as well as European blood. Black hands would fight, carry, cook, clean, wash, push and pull. War had spread its shadow across the races of the world as it had across its countries. Native Africans along with the other empire races were caught in its darkness and as long as they were he felt he should be too. He knew how the Africans would exist within the British Army. As they had done under all British administration, multitudinous in body and non-existent in voice. Someone had to speak for them. And so, despite his long-held pacifism, he eventually went to war, and for largely the same reasons he had first come to Africa. To lessen the impact of European affairs on the natives of the country. Another disease had been imported by the settlers and he hoped his presence might provide some protection against its symptoms of Honour, Might and Majesty and its lasting scar of loss.

  Fortune has left him, tutting and, he thinks, probably shaking her head because he did not drink as much as she wanted him to. He senses her body, momentarily covering the light of the door, of the day, then passing on through, opening a warm ray of sunlight again.

  He reaches his hand in front of his face and finds the beams, imagines the universes of dust orbiting in them. Cupping his hand slightly, he follows the light, as if it were a rail supporting him, until it comes to rest against the stone wall of his hut. Here, he flattens his hand against the surface; feels the pock-marked rock and the smooth, dry mud paste. The ridges and the valleys of the stone.

  ♦

  Having made his decision, he’d found the practical implications of leaving these stones, his mission work in Mashonaland, an equally hard dilemma to bear. Just a year earlier he had established his own mission station here, ten miles north of Enkeldoorn. It stood on one of four farms he’d bought with the aid of a government grant, the royalties from his books and a trust fund his brother William had tried his best to keep him away from.

  The mission took its name from that he had given the whole area: Maronda Mashanu, the Saint of the Five Wounds. Although it was eleven years since his arrival in Africa, the purchase of the farms and the establishment of this station felt like a true beginning for him, as if the previous time in the country had been a false start. In moving to his own mission station, on his own land, he felt the potential of his work, the purpose of his living in Africa might finally be reached. Free of Charter government native land law and the restrictions of the Anglican Church, an era of self-sufficiency, both spiritually and materially, was close at hand.

  Many families who had lived with him at Wreningham followed him to Maronda Mashanu. Two local headmen, Mashonganyika and Pfumojeni, chose to move their kraals from the Manyeni reserve to his farms and more families came in their wake, persuaded by their headmen’s choice and attracted by his vision of free land for Africans. Because there would be no hut tax on his land, no government inspectors, no controls and no rents. Each man would farm and live on his own portion of land as freely as the white farmers tilled theirs.

  At night he lay in his hut re-reading his battered copy of Theocritus’ Idylls by the light of a stuttering candle, and by day he saw the poet’s vision reflected in his four African mission farms. He felt his idea of an Africa independent from European influence begin to take shape. Simple, pastoral, prelapsarian. An edaphic, unhindered existence.

  The four farms covered a sweep of veld that lay across the path he had walked so often between Wreningham and Enkeldoorn. The land was good, requisitioned by the government for white purchase only and covered a total of 7,800 acres. It was the type of land that he had at first found so monotonous, but which he had, in time, come to love. Expansive, scattered with low contorted bush trees, ancient baobabs with their obese, knotted trunks and the crimson fire blossom of the fever, acacia musasa and mopane trees. Sculptures of granite outcrops gave way to huge, bare-sided inselbergs, motte and bailey kopjes, swathes of blond grass—a land criss-crossed with dusty paths and vibrant with cicadas. A land capable of awesome stillness or, under the rain, the wind, momentous movement. It was raw and basic and yet for him imbued with a sacrosanct quality he valued as much as any cathedral.

  A few weeks after he’d purchased the land he trekked alone across the whole area, looking for a place to establish a church. Late on the second day of his trek he followed a branch of the main river that ebbed and rushed through all four of the farms, a slither in the dry season, a torrent in the wet. The branch stream ran down through a shallow dip in the land, through a band of thorn and bush trees, into a cluster of euphorbia and out into a clearing below a small kopje. Pushing his way through the low branches he walked out and stood at the centre of the clearing. His cotton shirt was heavy with his own sweat and a pair of flies circled him, buzzing at his ear, lighting on his skin and buzzing away again. Tipping his hat back on his head he’d looked up above the ring of green treetops. A single eagle cir
cled in the bare sky above him, its wings and tail forming a dark crucifix against the evening sunlight. He knew he had found the place where he would build his church.

  A month later he’d returned to the clearing again and began work with the same Matabele workmen with whom he had built the school at Wreningham. Since his last visit to the clearing he had already built the church many times in his mind, and even as the men first swung their mattocks to break the red topsoil he could already see the finished building in the clearing, its high thatched roof encircled by the trees and the shadow of the kopje falling across its bleached stone walls.

  He knew the church before it was built because he had already seen the building he wanted it to look like. Earlier that year he’d trekked down as far as Fort Victoria and camped out in the Zimbabwe ruins. Sitting with his back against the trunk of a mopani tree he had smoked his pipe and watched the setting sun transform the conical tower, the high walls, the crumbled pillars, into a shadow show of silent grandeur. He did not know the history of the place—whether it had been a gold mine, a fortress, a city, a temple—but he knew it was in some way sacred, and made all the more so by its current supplication to nature. Lizards stop-started across the tall tower, slipping between its flat stones; cranes, hornbills, weaver and secretary birds nested in the trees that grew in the shelter of its walls and baboons sat back on their haunches, solemnly chewing on damba fruit at the bases of its fallen pillars.

  He’d stayed there, against the mopani tree, until it was pitch dark. And even then he hadn’t moved, but stayed sitting there, among the ruins, trying to imagine what they had looked like when they were freshly built, roofed with thatch domes and alive with people.

  The next morning, as he prepared his breakfast of chapatti and peanut butter, he’d been joined at the ruins by a carload of tourists. They were led by a businessman from Johannesburg. He’d listened as the businessman explained away the history of the place to his colleagues, attributing the skilled building work to Semite or Phoenician traders. Of course, he could not be sure of their exact origins, but at least he was sure about one thing, that the ruins were certainly not the work of native Africans.

  ‘Ja, believe me,’ he’d said as the group strolled between the fallen gateways and through the passage between the tower and the outer wall. ‘I know natives, and I know the natives never built these walls. They’re always in want of bossing up, isn’t it? But as for this display of art—the kaffirs haven’t it in them, and never had.’

  He hadn’t been surprised. The businessman’s view was a respected one among many of the country’s scholars and historians. And he even understood why it might make sense to them. A denial of the ruins was a denial of African history, and it is easier to yoke a man who has no history than a man whose ancestors built great cities of blue-grey stone.

  As he’d worked with the Matabele tribesmen in the clearing at Maronda Mashanu he’d kept the businessman’s words in mind and built against them, towards an alternative idea of the Zimbabwe ruins. An African idea. But it was not an easy idea to follow. The local stone did not break as easily as the neat granite flakes of the ruins, and whatever skill lay in the blood of their ancestors had been diluted by time in the veins of the Matabele. The curved walls often fell under their own weight and the red mud plastered between the stones was twice washed away by the rain. But eventually, one bare hot afternoon, as they tied the last bundle of veld grass to the tall thatch roof, they finished. Standing back at the edge of the clearing he’d looked up at his new church. It did not resemble the church he had built in his mind. It was a little crooked, and not as tall as he had hoped it would be, but its ancestry was still unmistakable. Formed in a rough crucifix, its rounded stone and dagga walls were repeated inside by parallel walls and chambers and its five domed, thatched roofs were supported by five tall round stone pillars. It was Zimbabwe, breathing through Mashonaland stone and a Christian church. It was the church he had wanted since he came to Africa, a church for the Black Christ.

  On the day they finished work Reverend Liebenberg came out from Enkeldoorn to admire the building and to photograph him in front of his new parish church. Standing him by its open doorway, Liebenberg set up his tripod, told his friend to remain as still as he could, and, shielding his eyes from the glare of the sun, released the shutter.

  Like a key turning in the lock of the land the completion of the church opened the borders of his farms, and over the ensuing months a steady stream of African families moved their homes and their stock to Maronda Mashanu. He watched the geometry of their settlement imprint itself on the veld: neat squares of ploughed earth worked over by heavy-shouldered oxen; rows of maize, mealie corn and pumpkin plants; the pattern of the kraals punctuating the plain, each echoing the other with a circle of rondavels around a beaten patch of earth and a dare of stones where the men sat and talked. Away from the kraals shifting herds of cattle and goats melted over the banks of the river, shepherded by small boys who carried spears taller than themselves. The fly-flinching heads of the cows set off the bells at their necks, and the peal of these bells became a regular percussion to the ongoing music of the veld—of wind, grass, birdsong and insect call.

  Routine entered the land too. Each morning he would see the women slow-striding through the mist with bundles of wood or clay pots of river water carried on their heads. Those not yet baptised were naked but for scraps of limbo around their waists and bead necklaces falling across their long, flat breasts. A child was nearly always swaddled to their backs, asleep, its face massaged against its mother’s shoulder blades. With an easy raised hand they would call to him as they passed, ‘Magwanani Babal and he would call back, ‘Magwanani, ’

  He developed his own routine too. Doctoring, preparing sermons, writing, corresponding, trekking, baptisms, births, marriages, deaths. Increasingly his time was taken up as a mediator between husbands and wives, working energetically to overcome their differences and keep marriages together. And he was still something of the in-between man in Enkeldoorn too. He knew he would never master the small talk that seemed so essential to communicate in the town. He had always been awkward in speech, the spoken word coming to him harder than the written. And yet, at the same lime, most of the farmers found him too rarefied, too intellectual to welcome him completely into their circle. He had, though, over the years come to some sort of an unspoken accommodation with the Europeans in the area. They respected his physical endurance, feared his fierce defence of the natives and accepted his eccentricities. He had been living in the area for long enough now for only new in-comers to find anything strange in the sight of his tall, rangy figure striding across the veld, shabbily dressed in an old golf jacket, his pockets stuffed with ink pots and pens and a battered satchel over his shoulder overflowing with letters, books, tobacco and tinned food. He was, though, still most content when removed from European society. Leading the singing under the open-topped thatch of his church, the starlings darting in and out of its poles. Or alone on the veld, settling down under his red blanket by a camp fire after a long day’s trekking, the four bright points of the Southern Cross developing in the dark blue sky above him.

  His wider society of friends had suffered the usual expansions and contractions of time. Through his work with the Aboriginal Protection Society he had made close ties with the Methodist John White and the Anglican Edgar Lloyd, with whom he maintained a regular correspondence. He also wrote to friends in England: Maynard Smith, James Adderly, Laurence Binyon, and weekly to his sister Edith, who kept him supplied with literary journals and books of poetry.

  Closer to home there were a few families and individuals with whom he had reached a deeper understanding. The Nashes often fed him and provided him with a bed when he trekked over to Umvuma, and the Tullys, farmers outside Enkeldoorn, had even asked him to be godfather to their son, William. When he had been at Wreningham he had campaigned for women missionaries to join the station, and eventually his requests had been granted in the shape of
Mary Prior and Agnes Saunders. The women were fiercely independent and he and Agnes in particular did not always agree on methods of pastoral care. He knew she found him awkward to deal with, stubborn, but a shared bias towards the African provided the foundation for a mutual respect. He’d frequently found Agnes asleep in a rondavel, the brown legs and arms of several sleeping children wrapped around her neck and her body.

  But he had also lost friends. The drain of recurring malaria and the TB he had recognised finally defeated Bishop Gaul. He stood down from his position and sailed from Beira Bay for England in 1907, embarking at the same dock where he had stood waiting for Arthur seven years earlier. Then in 1913 his mother died. He received the news from his brother William, reading the letter in his rondavel at Maron-da Mashanu, sitting on his bed beneath the only picture in the bare hut: a portrait of his mother, Charlotte Cripps. Early in 1914 he returned to England on furlough to conduct a memorial service for her and to settle his affairs in the wake of her going. He’d stayed with his brother at The Lawn in Tunbridge Wells, but England and her countryside which he had missed so much when in Africa now felt alien to him, as did his brother’s way of life. William went shooting in Chase Woods, clouds of pheasants beaten into his line of sight, made regular trips up to the Spread Eagle pub and worked long hours in his study that looked out over a manicured lawn to the town below. Like the country itself, his life seemed crowded, rich, its destiny long settled, so unlike the sense of new beginning he felt with each morning he woke in Mashonaland.

  He did not visit Ada. He dreamed about her, as if just being nearer her unlocked his memories, and he often woke early in the morning, listening to the racket of the rooks outside his window, imagining how seeing her again might be. But he did not see her. He could not bear to make the journey, take the risk. And it was not just for him. Theresa would be seventeen now. No longer a child. The same age Ada was when he’d met her. So he did not see either of them, and it was on that voyage back to Africa that he’d recognised how his mother’s death had cut his last tie with England. Standing on the deck of the ship, listening to the sea part and gather behind it, he’d watched the lights of Southampton slip beneath the water, and known he was not leaving, but returning to his home.