The Dust Diaries

by Owen Sheers

  Note on Segregation by A.S. Cripps: When I wrote this book, which was published in 1927,1 was willing to approve of Segregation for Africans and Europeans—if Africans should be given a fair share of the land in the Colony. But afterwards I did not consider that Africans, in my opinion were given a fair share in the S. Rhodesian scheme of Land apportionment, and lost my faith in Segregation for S. Rhodesia.

  I am thankful for Segregation as planned by the Morris-Carter Commission for opening the way for Africans to purchase plots of land but I do not believe that Segregation is a righteous policy for a British Colony. Can it be a right policy for Christian people? Certainly not! A.S. Cripps.

  While in Harare I spend some time with white Zimbabweans, testing your name against their memories just as I had against the memories of black Zimbabweans in Chivhu and Maronda Mashanu. Jeremy left me a list of names and numbers in his house, of people I should contact if I wanted to go out, if I wanted company. I hire a mobile phone and call Stassi and Alice Callinicos. Stassi lectures in Classics at the University of Zimbabwe and Alice is a teacher who used to scout for film locations. They weren’t expecting my call, but in the laid-back Zimbabwean manner Alice tells me, ‘Sure, why don’t you come round? We’re going to a party tonight, come along.’

  The party is at a house on a hill, its lower fields ranked with parked cars, guided into place by a young black man in a waistcoat and a reflector belt. Flares line each side of the long drive up to the house, a flickering, primitive runway leading to the glow of a room filled with people, talking, drinking, smoking. There is an open veranda, and an undercurrent of music. Another black man in a waistcoat serves me from behind a bar. I don’t remember any black faces among the guests, but the people at the party are not the ‘Rhodies’ I have met elsewhere, the residue of Ian Smith’s regime, the white hardliners who have stayed in the country under majority rule, still holding their minority rule views close to their chests, like a deck of forbidden cards. These, at the party, are another breed of white Zimbabwean. They are the ones who stayed after the War of Independence and who welcomed Mugabe and his policy of reconciliation, his promise of a multi-racial success story. They are the liberal whites who still have black cooks, nannies, gardeners, not because they feel it is right, but just because that is the way of things. I meet teachers, university lecturers, documentary film makers, rose farmers. All have the easygoing nature that is naturally inherited in this country, the calm acquaintance with fate. They are people to whom history seems to have happened, not passed by. It is there in their talk of ‘before’, in their grandfathers who came here in ox-carts, and is palpable in the recent changes in their lives. The changes in the country have effected changes on them. History is alive and real in their memories in a way I have rarely encountered with their peers in Britain.

  John is like this. A carpenter in his late thirties, he still seems to be blinking into the light of his new country, a little unsure of how it all happened, but perfectly pleased to be here now that it has. I ask him if he has heard of you. He says he has one of the Shearly Cripps recipe diaries at home. Then he thinks for a moment, a smudged champagne glass in one hand, a smouldering cigarette in the other. He takes a draw, looks out above the flares into the dark night beyond.

  ‘There were a bunch of graves with the name Cripps near my school,’ he said. ‘In the highlands.’

  He looks back at me.

  ‘Ja, there was a funny story attached to them too. They were in the garden of a house abandoned early in the war. But you know what? The servants there cleaned it every day. Polished the silver and everything—and nothing was ever stolen, how is that? That fella’s name was Cripps—he your guy, is it?’

  No, I say, not him. Just the name game again.

  ♦

  Someone who does know you is Pelline, who I was introduced to by Alice and Stassi. Pelline lives on a tobacco farm near Mvuri, eighty miles north of Harare. I went to visit her because I wanted to see a white farm. And I wanted to get into the country again. Harare was already feeling too concrete, too tall.

  Pelline tells me what she knows about you as she sits knitting beneath the shade of a spathodia tree. It is the familiar story. Your love of the African, your belief in a black Christ. Your walking and your poetry. Your life fitting the narratives of a story moulded by its telling as a stream is shaped by its running. As a Catholic she particularly identifies with your witness to Francis of Assissi.

  Pelline is in her sixties. She speaks in a clear English accent. She lives on the farm with her husband Laci (pronounced Lot-see), who came to Zimbabwe as a Hungarian refugee after the war. Their house is cool inside, bare and simple. Walking its empty, whitewashed corridors to my room with its single bed, mosquito-mesh window and bedside table, I am made to think of a convent or an isolated boarding school.

  In the evening we eat crisp corn on the cob at the large wooden dining-room table. Then Laci settles down with the BBC World Service news, smoking his pipe and Pelline takes out her knitting. Outside the cicadas chirp and are answered by the intermittent crackle of the farm’s CB radio, the outside world breaking on us here as distant as waves falling on a faraway shore.

  ♦

  In the morning Laci gives me a tour of the farm. I sit on the back of his dusty red Honda scooter, my arms around his waist as we bounce along the pock-marked tracks and paths. He is older than Pelline, but lean and tanned. The skin on the back of his hands is loose, like the skin of a tree monitor, but the legs that echo mine on each side of the scooter are sinewy and strong.

  He takes me into the dark of a large corrugated warehouse and pulls out a rack of drying tobacco leaves, sliding it out like a file from a cabinet. They hang in tight rows like bats asleep, graduated in colour, fading along the line from green to yellow to brown. He tears off a corner of a leaf, rubs it between his finger and thumb and holding it out, tells me to smell, as proud as a chef asking a customer to taste. The scent is rich, edaphic, filled with the sun. It is dim in the warehouse but I can make out Laci’s white grin, appearing rare and bright in his tanned face.

  In the fields they are picking fresh tobacco beneath the huge steel sprinklers of the irrigation system. We bump and totter along the track through high-sided alleyways of deep green tobacco. I can feel Laci’s ribs under my arms. A lorry is parked at the end of the track, its open back piled high with picked leaves. Workers walk towards it from all directions, bundles of tobacco fanning over their heads like extravagant head-dresses. From Burnham wood to Dunsinane…

  Laci talks in Shona to the overseer, a middle-aged man in blue overalls and black Wellingtons, then we continue on the tour of the farm. He shows me the school he has built, and the medical centre and the village of workers’ rondavels. And I begin to see the problem. This is not just a farm. It is a community, an infrastructure. Take away the farm and you take away the medical centre, the school, the workers’ homes. It shouldn’t be like this, but it is, and I realise once again how tightly the land knot is tied, and how hard it will be to undo.

  Over the last few days Hunzvi’s War Veterans have been pressing further for forced occupation of white-owned land. Fuelled by political motives against the MDC, the only opposition party, Mugabe’s rhetoric seems to be moving their way, despite the possible consequences of economic ruin and, as I recognise touring the farm on the back of Laci’s scooter, the mass disruption to thousands of black Zim-babweans. But then Mugabe understands land in the same way you did. He understands its potential, how it can be used, to favour and punish. How it is easier to keep hold of power in a country of subsistence farmers than a country of economically independent people.

  The next day I visit Laci and Pelline’s son, Miki, on his own nearby farm. Like most men his age Miki was conscripted to fight in the War of Independence. There is a framed photo of him in his parents’ house, in uniform, his blond hair curling from under a beret, leaning against the armoured plate of a Humvi. Now though, he is a farmer like his father, and a keen po
lo player and race horse owner. He shows me a video of his winning mare, a 15.2 bay, galloping from the pack in the last furlong to cross the line, ridden by his favourite piccaninny jockey. Taking me outside into the garden he points out features of his house in relation to races won. The pool—the Gold Cup; the extension—the Jockey Club steeplechase; the new stables—the season’s opening meet at Borrodale. He is amiable, popular with his workers and possessed of the easy physical sturdiness of many white Zimbab-wean men. A sense of Africa in the blood, of an outdoor life. A heritage of being obeyed and making your own world from what you find in front of you. After a game of tennis (Miki wins, playing like a farmer, bare-chested, holding the racket like an axe and chopping at the ball) I ask him about the land disputes. He nods his head. He has already told me that in principle yes, some of the land should be redistributed, but it is a matter of how and to whom. He also points out that three quarters of the whites’ farms were bought after independence, and that no one complained then.

  ‘It’s a problem,’ he says. ‘The last lot went straight to Mugabe’s cronies, and then they did nothing with them. The farms are still there, just wasting, isn’t it? And those bloody war veterans. I’m telling you, most of them weren’t even born when that war happened. But there has been no serious trouble yet.’ He pauses, watching his kids splashing in the pool. ‘Some guy was badly beaten a few farms away, but I think he was British Intelligence. No one has tried anything here.’

  Like his father, who came to Zimbabwe with nothing, I feel Miki would not take kindly to anyone who did try something. Both, I sense, would defend their farms to the end, and if necessary, with their lives. As I drive Miki’s old pick–up back down the shaky road to his parents’ farm, it is this that worries me. This potential for violence, seeded under the soil, planted in the very land that gives this country both its strength and its identity.

  I drive through the farm’s boundary fence, its wire sitting neatly along a straight line; lush green lawn on this side, African dust veld on the other. As I do, I pass from Miki’s world of swimming pools, stables and sprinklers into the world of the workers’ rondavels: goats tethered to poles, chickens shaking themselves into the earth. Children wave from the side of the road, laughing at the strange white man driving their fathers’ boss’s car.

  The Marondera Hotel is waking to business: green-boiler-suited gardeners watering the pot plants, receptionists and waiters arriving in commuter taxis that unload their passengers, turn on full lock and sputter off back into town, trailing clouds of dust in their wake. Canon Holderness told me down the crackling line of my hired mobile that he would meet me here at 9.30 AM He arrives exactly on time, pulling up in front of the hotel in a long beige 19605 Chevrolet Coupe’ and looking small behind its large, thin steering wheel. I pick up my bag and walk towards the car as he opens the driver’s door to get out and greet me. He is old, but looks much younger than his ninety years. A half-crown of white hair about his bald, freckled head, a straight nose, full cheeks and lively eyes. He wears a pair of sky blue shorts and a matching safari shirt. The shorts fall to just above the knee but his legs are barely exposed. A pair of thick white woollen socks are pulled up his shins, folded neatly at the top, leaving just his knee caps on show, like the tops of two bald heads.

  He extends his hand, ‘Owen Sheers? Hello, Richard Holderness. Please, get in. We’ll go to my place. Do you like Coke?’

  ♦

  ‘Oh, he was too much for most of the white Rhodesians, for the average church-goer. They didn’t understand him. But I thought I must find out the secret of this chap, because the influence he had on the people on the mission was so profound. They were the best genuine Christians I had ever met. So I think I wrote to him and said may I come and visit you, and he said you’re very welcome. So, I went alone, I left my wife at the mission and drove across to Enkeldoorn. When I got there he was living in a hut, sleeping on a mattress on the floor. Well, when I arrived he pulled his mattress out and put it under a tree for me to sleep on and he slept on the floor. I stayed there several days and I like sleeping under a tree so we enjoyed that. He used to walk into Enkeldoorn to get his post, which was about an eight-mile walk, and I would walk with him. And blow me, trying to keep up with him walking was something!’

  I am sitting in Richard Holderness’s front room, drinking a glass of Coke while he talks about his memories of you. His voice is steady but high, cracked at the edges by age. The room is filled with books, boxes of papers and photographs of his family. There is one of his grandson, recently killed by a crocodile while on a canoeing trip.

  Like Betty Finn a few weeks before, Richard has also been telling me about his own life in the country. Also like Betty, he too fell in love with a poet, falling in love with her poem before he had even met her. It was published in the Rhodes University student magazine when she was twenty. Knowing it by heart, he recites it to me;

  How narrow is my faith if I should dream

  of easy virtue and the world’s esteem

  of flights of joy without the vales of sorrow

  thinking no trial will test my faith tomorrow.

  In such a soft, rewarded life as that

  where would we build the men we marvel at?

  Wherein would virtue lie? What be our goal?

  How would love prove itself or lift the soul?

  When he did met the poet who wrote the poem, a young girl called Lockie, he married her, his twenty-year-old college sweetheart, and they lived at missions together throughout the country ever since. From the day they were married they were hardly ever apart he tells me. When they retired they built a retreat in the mountains at Bonda and lived there together, in the clear air, among the mountain streams. And then, some years ago now, she died and Richard came here, to the Borrodale Trust: a community of bungalows, neat lawns, high walls and an automatic barrier at the exit and the entrance.

  At first, when he talks about his wife, he is excited, often saying ‘we’ when he means T, as if with her he, alone, no longer existed. But then, as he talks of the later years his voice slows and he grows thoughtful. Like Betty Finn he assures me that love, a true love, does not fade, but grows. He stands up from his armchair and leads me into his bedroom where he takes down a book from the bookshelf. It is a copy of C.S. Lewis’s poetry. Without saying anything he opens the book, which falls apart at an often-opened page. He reads the poem there, aloud:

  Joys that Sting

  Oh doe not die, says Donne, for I shall hate

  All women so. How false the sentence rings.

  Women? But in a life made desolate

  It is the joys once shared that have the stings.

  To take the old walks alone, or not at all,

  To order one pint where I ordered two,

  To think of, and then not to make, the small

  Time-honoured joke (senseless to all but you);

  To laugh (oh, one’ll laugh), to talk upon

  Themes that we talked upon when you were there,

  To make some poor pretence of going on,

  Be kind to one’s old friends, and seem to care,

  While no one (O God) through the years will say

  The simplest, common word in just your way.

  When he has finished reading Richard remains standing by the bookshelf looking at the poem, as if expecting another line to emerge from the blank page under the text. An alternative thought to turn the poem around, another last line to answer that which closes it now. He holds the book before him, open across his joined hands like a prayer book. I look at his face and I see his lively eyes have dimmed, rimmed with red and filmed with tears.

  ♦

  After lunch in his little dining room we go back into the front room. Richard sits in his armchair. The day is at full heat outside, the window a white square of pure light behind a thin curtain. I want to know what else Richard knows about you, what he knows about your life before Africa.

  ‘Well,’ he says, his English acce
nt laced with traces of South African flat vowels, ‘I’ve always been interested in people and when I was with him I thought, well, did I dare ask him about, you know, how he became a Christian and all that? And no trouble at all, he told me his kind of spiritual story.’ Richard leans forward, his elbows on his bare, bald knees. ‘Well, he said, it goes back to one moonlight evening. He was reading Keats’ poetry—he was living in someone’s house, his uncle’s house I think he said, but I don’t know now—and he said, ‘I was overwhelmed with beauty and I walked out into the moonlight garden and all the cadences of Keats’ poetry were surging through my mind and I fell in love with beauty. But I didn’t know that was God at the time.’

  ’

  Richard sits back in his chair, a playful smile on his face and his eyes sparking up again. Resting his hands on his stomach, he continues with the story, speaking Cripps’ words as if from a well-rehearsed script;

  ‘Then he came across a book called Trooper Peter Halket by Olive Schreiner. In this book Trooper Halket is horrified when he kills an African, and as he looks at the body lying there he sees the figure of Christ, a black Christ, hanging on a cross. A black Christ. This impressed Cripps very much and he wanted to learn more about the cross and Christ, so the next thing he came across was the Life of Francis of Assisi. Now, he put all those things together you see: beauty, Keats’ poetry and God, Christ in people, black or white, and the life of poverty and simplicity of Francis of Assisi.’

  Richard begins to cough and takes a drink of water from a glass on the table. So far this is all a story I know. Your story again, in yet another person’s words. The same story, different words.

  ‘Well, he decided he wanted to become a priest. He did his training and as a young priest or a deacon he was sent to a church, now I’ve forgotten the name of it, but there, well, something happened, so that although…’ He trails off, suddenly less sure of the well-trodden path of this tale. His manner changes and his voice falters, gets quieter. ‘You see, I only learnt what happened much later…Now this is the strangest thing—I don’t know whether to jump the gun and tell you. I only learnt this years, years later you see. It was when I took early retirement, when I was about sixty-two or sixty-five, and my wife and I moved to the retreat, back in Bonda. While we were there we got a letter from a girl called Mazzy, Mazzy Shine, saying could she come and visit us because, like you, she wanted to find out about Arthur Shearly Cripps.’