The Dust Diaries

by Owen Sheers

  Saturday, October 18th (StLuke’s Day)

  I saw some more threatened land that can be ill-spared, but before many miles were travelled I was doubtless in the Wiltshire Estate. It is not of course proposed to ask from the European Co.’s Wiltshire Estate more than a fifty-yard strip to feed the promised railway.

  The Native African Sabi Reserve it is that stands to lose a twelve-mile belt to the railway, involving a loss of 291,800 acres, much of it good land surely, while large tracts in other parts of the Reserve are bad. God help us!!!

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧

  FEBRUARY 1920

  BSA Company’s Resident Administrator’s Office, Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia

  ‘Do you know what the local police call that place of his? Sherwood Forest. That’s what. There are that many thieving piccaninnies and shirkers hiding out down there.’

  Atherstone’s face was strained, taut across his temples, the veins in his neck standing proud above his collar. He turned on his heel and paced back to the far end of the Administrator’s office.

  ♦

  The Company’s Resident Administrator, Sir Donald Chaplain, did not want to be in his office. It was a fine evening and he would rather be in his garden. There were some petunias that needed tending. And a clematis to be tied back. But instead he was in his office at the end of a long day and although the window was open, the room was stifling. And now Atherstone had started shouting again.

  He gestured towards a wicker chair in the corner of the room, but Atherstone ignored his offer and kept pacing up and down. Sir Donald sighed and looked across at the Chief Native Commissioner, who sat in a reading chair staring at a point on the floor, Atherstone’s shadow flicking across his face with each pass of the open window.

  ‘How about you, Herbert? You’ve spent some time down there. Have you been to Cripps’ place?’

  The Chief Native Commissioner adjusted his position in the chair. He too would rather have been elsewhere. His wife was cooking a dinner party tonight and he wanted some peace at home before the guests started arriving.

  ‘Well, his running of things down there is somewhat unconventional. It certainly contributes to the difficulties faced by the Native Department, I mean in our efforts to maintain the prestige of the European community, not to mention discipline amongst the natives.’

  ‘And do you know why the veld fires never touch his farms?’ Atherstone was still caught up in his own round of rhetorical questions. ‘Not because he’s blessed, which is what the kaffirs think of course.

  No, the only reason those fires never touch his place is because there’s no bloody grass left there to burn. He’s got so many of them farming there that the ground is bare, dust!’

  ‘Yes, I know. You’ve told us already.’ Sir Donald turned back to the Native Commissioner. ‘Well that would seem to support what Had-field had to say about him.’ He reached forward from his chair and shuffled through some papers on his desk. ‘Yes, here it is. ‘…an absence of order and restraint which revealed an attitude of mind in that great and honourable man not in itself commendable when detached from his good qualities’.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what it’s like,’ Atherstone continued, finally pausing from his pacing at the far end of the room. ‘It’s like those weaver birds, the ones that build their nests by the hornet’s so when you try to shake the buggers down you get a face full of hornets instead. That’s what it’s like. The kaffirs are the bloody weaver birds and he’s the bloody hornet, buzzing his way up here to sting us.’

  ‘Oh, please sit down!’ Sir Donald raised his voice for the first time that afternoon. Atherstone took a seat in the wicker chair, sullen as a scolded schoolboy.

  ‘I don’t think it’s as bad as all that,’ Sir Donald continued more calmly. ‘He may be an irritation and I know from my own experience that the man’s certainly a very difficult person to deal with. But he’s harmless enough. Herbert?’

  The Native Commissioner shifted his position in the reading chair again. Nodding his head and frowning he opened his mouth to speak, but Atherstone interrupted before he could get any further.

  ‘Look, with respect, Your Honour, it’s all very well him tramping up here from the bush, ranting about injustice done to some piccaninny, but this is a different matter. I don’t think you realise. We need that railway, and we need that land for that railway. And he’s not just complaining to us, you know. Those pamphlets went all over the place. He’s had questions asked in the House, letters in The Times and the Manchester Guardian. And now the Archbishop of Canterbury wants to see him about the ‘Native Reserve Affair’.’

  ‘Believe me, Atherstone, I’ve made it perfectly clear to him that I don’t like what he’s doing. Inexcusable, really.’

  ‘Bloody treasonable,’ Atherstone agreed.

  ‘Well, yes…’ Sir Donald didn’t like the way this was going, but the Surveyor did have a point. The missionary was certainly causing a stir in Britain, and as the British government still had an Imperial veto on all native affairs, he had good reason for concern.

  He turned to the Native Commissioner again. ‘What do you think of this?’

  This time the Native Commissioner spoke quickly, pre-empting any attempt at interruption from the Surveyor. ‘Well, I don’t think he’ll stop until he’s got his way. He’s more native than European, you see, defends them like his own because he thinks he is one of them. And they love him for it.’ He cast a glance at the Chief Surveyor, ‘Try to budge him and you might find it’s him who’s the weaver bird and they who are the hornets.’

  The sun had edged a little further into the window, dipping under the frame on its descent towards the horizon. Its rays shone into Sir Donald’s face, igniting orange stars in his eyes and playing across his desk, sparking to light the nib of a pen, a silver letter knife, a marble paperweight. He wanted to be in his garden while the sun was still up, to watch its deepening glow across the petals of his flowers and the leaves of his plants.

  ‘Yes, well, leave this with me, Atherstone. I’ll have a word with the Bishop, see what he has to say. He sails for London soon, maybe he can put things right there.’

  Atherstone rose from his wicker chair and crossed to the open window. He stood with his back to the room, his arms on the frame, blocking out the sun from Sir Donald’s face.

  ‘The Company needs that land, it’s as simple as that. I mean, who came here and found it in the first place?’ He turned back into the room. ‘Some bloody sky-pilot can’t stop us getting it.’

  Sir Donald leant forward, put his elbows on the desk and pulled his hand down his face, feeling the heavy cool of his wedding ring pass over his skin. As his fingers passed his eyes, he exchanged a glance with the Chief Native Commissioner, who was still sitting in the reading chair, nodding towards the Surveyor’s back, his eyebrows raised and tapping the face of his watch with his forefinger. Sir Donald knew what he meant. Time was getting on. It was time to go.

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧

  The Times, 11 June 1920

  SOUTHERN RHODESIA

  to the Editor of The Times

  Sir—During the past four months, while in England on furlough, I have noticed with surprise and great regret the attempts recently made in the Press and on public platforms to create a feeling that grave abuses exist in the administration of the natives in my diocese of Southern Rhodesia, and that they are subjected to oppression at the hands of the British South Africa Company, or the European settlers, or both. From my intimate knowledge of that territory, and considerable experience for 17 years of the manner in which the native problems have been dealt with, I can unhesitatingly endorse the recent high tribute of our High Commissioner (Lord Buxlon) to the sympathetic treatment which our natives receive at the hands of the administrative officials and of the white population. The remarkable progress which they have made in numbers, wealth and education during the last 20 years is in itself a sufficient testimony to the prudent, just, and benevolent methods ad
opted by the Company, with the whole-hearted support of the white community, in handling this, one of the most difficult branches of Colonial administration. It is not my intention to enter into any controversy on this subject, but I feel it my duty to say what I know and believe to be true.

  Fredric Southern Rhodesia

  12, St John’s Street, Chichester

  §

  14 July 1920

  Maronda Mashanu,

  Mashonaland,

  Southern Rhodesia

  To John Harris,

  Anti-slavery and Aboriginal Protection Society,

  London

  Dear John Harris,

  Many thanks for sending me the Bishop’s Jetter. I suppose he means well and is in his own way conscientious. Personally, I quite sympathise as to the picture your vivid words conjure up of the disciples of the Black Christ forsaking him and fleeing. There is some stern work ahead of us (D. V.) assuredly. Well God bless your society!!!

  Yours ever,

  A.S. Cripps

  P.S. I have just read a report from the West Sussex Gazette of another of Bishop Beaven’s speeches. The Bishop emphatically denies that there was oppression of the native races, who, he declared, ‘were dealt with in the spirit of even-handed justice for which the flag of Britain stands’. God forgive him if he really said that. Would it possibly help the Native Cause if I challenged him to disown or withdraw this statement, or if he would do neither, to take three months’ notice from me?

  §

  1 January 1921

  Maronda Mashanu,

  Mashonaland

  To John Harris,

  Aboriginal Protection Society,

  London

  Dear John,

  …This unawakened race does not perceive yet the injury that has been done it. But one day it will arouse itself, become articulate…and then…? But this is for the next act in this sombre drama.

  Yours

  A.S.C.

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧

  PART FOUR

  Our souls are love and a continual farewell.

  —W. B. Yeats, Ephemera

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧

  6 DECEMBER 1999

  Marondera, Zimbabwe

  Another Blue Arrow morning. The touch of the bus’s air conditioning, its taste of dry ice after the heat outside. The shake of its awakening and the stop-start weave and roll, out of the thinning town and into the scrubland of the veld.

  This time I am on the Harare-Mutare service. On the road that winds south-east out of the capital, rising towards the highlands and the scent of pine amid the eucalyptus. But I am not going all the way today. Seventy-two kilometres and an hour after we left Harare I step down from the coach into a sun-blast of heat and go to wait outside the pink plasterwork of the Marondera Hotel.

  I have come to Marondera to meet another person who knew you. Canon Richard Holderness is ninety years old; sixty years ago he drove 100 miles from his own mission station to visit you at Maronda Mashanu, because, as he told me later that day, he ‘wanted to find out what made you tick’. Well, I am still trying to find out myself, so I’ve come to Marondera to ask Canon Holderness what answer you gave him. I have read your letters, seen your photographs, heard your stories, read your poems and knelt at your grave, but the elemental nature of you still eludes me. And there are unresolved questions: the shadow granddaughter, the name in your will, and why you left Britain in the first place.

  ♦

  After camping at Great Zimbabwe I returned to Harare. There was a book in the National Archives I wanted to read there. One of your books that Leonard had mentioned, called An Africa for Africans. Leonard described it as your statement on land in Africa, your thesis on why the Africans should be allowed to buy and own their own land. He told me a story about a visit from Paramount Chief Mut-shutshu. One night, in the middle of a great storm, the chief’s house was struck by lightning. It was burnt to the ground, a sparking, fizzing bonfire lighting up the rain-filled night. He lost everything, including his copy of An Africa for Africans. Leonard remembers the chief walking to Maronda Mashanu to request another copy from you. That was all he wanted. Not shelter or help or blessing. Just your book and the possibility of a different future.

  At the archives I have to talk my way in. I am told I have already had all the time I’m allowed in there without a permit from the Ministry of Information. But the porter at the front desk is sympathetic when I tell him why I am here. He nods his head earnestly, as if he understands the importance of what I am doing.

  ‘It is good that you have come here to learn about your uncle,’ he says. ‘He is your Vadzimu, your ancestral spirit.’

  Then his serious face breaks into a smile and he laughs, hits his desk and wags his finger at me. ‘So you had better go in and read his book, otherwise he will be angry, and then you will be very, very sick.’

  So I am allowed an extra day in the archives, and as instructed by the porter I spend it with you and your book.

  In Harare the papers, the coffee shops and the taxi drivers are all busy with the same conversation. The talk is of the land situation, the redistribution of the white farmlands to the rural blacks. A group calling themselves the War Veterans, led by a Zanu PF MP, Dr Hunzvi, are threatening land invasions and forced occupancy. Sitting at the dark wood desks of the National Archives, the librarians and archivists moving silently about me, this contemporary conversation gives your eighty-year-old words an added weight. I realise you saw this coming. This cycle of taking. The land question. The idea of land, tied like a Gordian knot at the centre of the country, tightening over the years until now, when it seems that nothing will undo it; nothing but the fall of the sword.

  From An Africa for Africans (1927)

  Self-determination and self-development are surely required by our Natives, and how are they to attain to a proper measure of either—conditions and feeling in South Africa being what one has found them to be by long experience? Self-development and self-determination need to be stressed in my opinion if we are to seek any really hopeful settlement of the Native question in our Colony…

  ‘But to hold all natives down in a position of permanent inferiority will ultimately beget a deep and bitter race hatred which will aim, not at the autonomy of the black but at the extermination of the white. If once such a huge war of extermination between white and black broke out in South Africa, it is idle to argue that the white would win. He would, of course, with his machine-guns and aeroplanes and other ‘civilised’ devices, but it would be a Pyrrhic victory.’ (Professor Brooks)

  ‘Survivors,’ as Tacitus puts it, ‘not only of the others but of themselves.’

  Let us remember that in considering the interests of Southern Rhodesia’s Natives we are considering the interests of eight hundred and thirteen thousands of our fellow British subjects. Let us remember, in reckoning out the due proportion of the land proposed to be devoted to them and their children, the proportion of their numbers to the number of the settlers, also what a mighty proportion of the whole Southern Rhodesian revenue they pay.

  The position of our Natives encouraged to plunge into the new go-ahead life of the Southern Rhodesia Colony, but denied a place in the sun as regards that self-development on the soil which really appeals to them, while the arts of cajolery are used to induce more and more Europeans to acquire vested rights on easy terms in that soil appeals to me as pathetic and ominous of tragedy. Oh the pity of it!…

  Before I make an end here I want to avow my hopefulness as to a Territorial Segregation Policy proving a welcome remedy for our sick sub-continent’s racial bitterness, but I am hopeful as to such a Policy, only if it be coupled with a REALLY liberal settlement of our Native Land Question. In a report to the Government of the South African Union (Blue Book U.G. 41-1918) the late M. Evans, CMC, summarised the condition on which a Territorial Separation must depend, if it were to have any real hope of working prosperity. He wrote to this effect:

  ‘The native pop
ulation is rapidly increasing. By contact and example we are altering their outlook on life. The present generation is not like their fathers, and the next will differ more widely. For a better adjustment in the interests of both races we propose to take away the present right of the native to acquire land where he will, and to strictly limit his opportunities within certain recommended areas. If the scope within such areas is not such as to enable him to reasonably develop with the general progress of the country, then I fear that our attempt will not result in that racial peace and satisfaction which we are attempting to secure.’

  Granted that saving clause—I avow myself a fervent segregationist at this present critical time in Southern Rhodesia’s history. I see the splendid hope of Freedom for the Self-Development of Native Africa, which a Segregation Policy provides at this present juncture when indigenous Native Life is being so hard pressed in our Mixed Areas.

  This last passage is something of a shock to me: to see you declare yourself a ‘fervent segregationist’. I understand your motives, and that you were writing in a climate that nurtured serious arguments of opposition on the grounds that European diseases in the Mixed Areas effectively ‘culled’ the natives living there. But still, with my knowledge of the history of apartheid I find yours a hard conclusion to follow. Reading it again, however, I realise that you were already aware of the weakness in the theory, those capital letters seeming to spell out your desperation for a solution against another instinct: that given the opportunity humanity would choose advantage over equality—‘a REALLY liberal settlement…’

  Turning the page I find a loose piece of paper, and I remember something else Leonard told me. Before you died you instructed him to insert a typewritten statement into each of the last six copies of the book. I pick out the paper now and read the date: 11 July 1950.