The Dust Diaries

by Owen Sheers

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧

  MAY 1921

  The Enkeldoorn to Umvuma road, Charter District, Southern Rhodesia

  The back wheel of the Royal Enfield Model C motorbike is still spinning, but slowing down, the silences between each swishing brush of its tyre against the buckled mudguard getting longer. Shuw…shuw…shuw…shuw. With each pass of the guard a little dust falls from the rubber tread to the road beneath. It lands in the dark pool of oil bleeding from the bike’s engine, the pipes and heavy carburettor hanging from its frame like the powerful chest of a cheetah. The pool of oil spreads, seeping into the dirt and moving over itself with slow, liquid determination. Eventually its dark edge touches and gathers around the tip of the metal hand-brake on the left handlebar, marooning its steel in a lake of oil. A file of ants crossing the road to the dust-grain volcano of their nest’s entrance are caught in its thick slide. One of them struggles in its darkness, another is already dead, carried along on its flow, slow-turning like a log on water, or a body, passed along the hands of mourners at a funeral.

  The oil continues to spread, beneath the bike and around the distorted front wheel, its spokes snapped and bent, until an arm of its flow touches the pale swirls of hair on the gazelle’s underside. The animal lies in front of the prone motorbike, its spine broken and its hind legs splayed awkwardly behind it. The onward flow of oil gathers at its body, then disperses to either side along the line of its belly. The gazelle’s shallow, rapid breathing is the only sound other than the turning rear wheel, and the rise and fall of its black-striped ribcage the only other movement. If you were close enough to its face you would be able to see a reflection of this scene in the convex surface of its open eye. The broken bike, the long, straight road narrowing into the distance and by the side of the road, an umbrella tree with a gathering of vultures waiting patiently in its branches, shitting their positions and stretching their wings as they watch the scene on the road like theatregoers watching the final act of a play.

  The man who is also lying in the road would not appear in this dark reflection, because he is behind the gazelle, ten or twelve feet closer to Enkeldoorn, which is where he was travelling to when the buck leapt out of the bush and into the path of his motorbike. He is lying face down in the red dust, his arms by his sides and his knees drawn up towards his stomach. Although he is too far away to be touched by the oil there is another dark pool spreading from under his head, matting in his greying hair and his ginger moustache. Unlike the gazelle he is not breathing, and over the next week many people, black and white, will hold Arthur Cripps responsible for his death.

  ♦

  The man is Jack Beardsley, one-time British East Africa merchant turned Southern Rhodesian farm manager. Jack came to Africa at the end of 1900 with his fiancée, Charlotte. He was thirty, she was nineteen. Charlotte’s father had forbidden their marriage on the grounds of Jack’s character, so Jack had taken the man’s daughter without his permission. They set up in Mombasa and Jack began his own import and export business. For a while their new life looked promising, although Charlotte missed England terribly and often woke Jack with her early-morning crying. Eventually, one morning three years after they had come to Africa, he woke not because of her crying, but because of her silence. He could not even hear his young wife breathing and when he turned on his side he found a note on the pillow where her head should have been. Her father had sent her money for passage back to England. She had left him.

  Charlotte’s departure left Jack bitter with the world, and his bitterness spread through him the way the oil is spreading now around the body of the gazelle, which is still breathing, fast and shallow, blinking the flies from its eyes. Like the spark that starts the fire, the bitterness spread to the rest of his life and especially into his luck. His business began to fail. He married again, the daughter of a colonial office clerk who died giving birth to their first child. The child, a son, was taken away by his parents-in-law, back to England, where Charlotte had gone too. Jack thought it was as if the country was taking back everything he valued, punishing him for taking Charlotte away all those years before. But then, not content with taking his life away, England came to him, bringing with her a war which brought the end of his business, and in 1918, when it was all over, he found himself old, bankrupt and with a set of rotting teeth that seemed the manifestation of the pain festering inside him. But he would not return to England. That, for Jack, would have been to admit his failure. So he moved further south instead, to the Charter District of Mashonaland, where he secured a position managing a large cattle and tobacco farm outside the dead-end town of Enkeldoorn. But the farm was not a good environment for him and he became sullen and even more lonely than he had been in the crowded streets of Mombasa, with too many hours to consider the mistakes and regrets of his life.

  ♦

  Cyprian Tambo came to Enkeldoorn in the same month as Jack Beardsley, but they did not meet for another three years after their arrival and exactly one week before this morning with the vultures waiting in the tree and the flies gathering in a halo about Jack’s bleeding head. Like Jack, Cyprian also came looking for work, walking for three days from his home in Chipinga in the Eastern Highlands, staying with his brothers who worked in towns and villages along the way. He wore just his new khaki shorts and shirt with no shoes or a hat and carried his blanket and belongings in a bundle tied over his shoulder.

  Cyprian had first arrived in Umvuma, bearing his ‘book’ before him, a greasy notebook of character references and payment dates from his previous employers written in faint grey pencil over the rough pages. But however much he proffered his book to maids, wives and managers, there had been no work available. Most had simply shaken their heads and waved him away, but some people had taken the time to speak to him. They told him he should go and talk to ‘Baba Cripps’, a white priest who lived on the road over to Enkeldoorn.

  When Cyprian arrived in Maronda Mashanu the schoolmaster told him the priest was away, but he should wait for him to return. Cyprian waited for two days and eventually the priest arrived, completing a one-hundred-mile walk from Salisbury. He did not look as Cyprian had expected he would. He was tall and thin, a gaunt look about his face. His pale suit was dirtier than Cyprian’s own shorts and shirt, and his boots so cracked and broken that he may as well have been walking bare-footed as Cyprian had. He asked Cyprian to join him for a cup of tea and listened to his story. When he had finished Baba Cripps spoke to him in Shona, but he did not say the words Cyprian was hoping for. He said instead that he had no money to pay him, and although he could see he wanted to learn, there was no room for him in the mission school. He would have to leave and go back to his home in the Eastern Highlands. Cyprian said he understood and prepared to leave, but then the priest asked him to take a letter into Enkeldoorn for him, which Cyprian did, running as fast as he could. The letter was to a Reverend Liebenberg who wrote a quick reply and asked Cyprian to return with it to Baba Cripps. When he returned to Maronda Mashanu it was nearly dark again and Baba Cripps told him he should stay until the morning, when he could begin his journey home. But in the morning Baba Cripps had another letter for him to take over to Wreningham and a parcel to Altona. Cyprian stayed another night at Maronda Mashanu and in the morning Baba Cripps thanked him, ‘Ntatenda kwazwo mukuru wangu’, ‘Many thanks my brother.’ He made no mention of Cyprian starting his journey home.

  For the next three years Cyprian worked as Baba Cripps’ messenger and helper, accompanying the priest on his treks across the Charter country. At the end of the third year Cyprian said he wanted to train to be a priest like Baba Cripps and Cripps, satisfied that the boy was serious, arranged for him to go and study under his friend John White at Waddilove. Before he went he asked Cyprian to carry one last message for him, and it was then, one week ago, that Cyprian met Jack Beardsley, who had been waiting for him behind the trunk of an acacia tree long enough to scatter the ground at his feet with a confetti throw of cigarette butts
and ash.

  ♦

  Jack was waiting behind the acacia tree because however much he fenced this patch of land the piccaninnies and women from the missionary’s farms persisted in using a foot track that ran across it. Signs and wire were no use, so he had taken to waiting and catching the perpetrators in person. At first he merely gave the native a beating or chased them back down the track past the fence, but recently he had become more inventive with his punishments. Last month he made a boy climb the trunk of the acacia tree while he stood beneath prodding him on with the barrel of his shotgun, and the week before he’d made a girl knock down a hornets’ nest that hung in the same tree with her bare hands. He just wanted to make it clear this land was no longer theirs, that the path could no longer be used, and if it was, they would be punished for their trespassing.

  With Cyprian Jack was in playful mood, the morning’s whisky having not yet sunk so far as to drag him down with its cooling plumb-line weight, and so he made the boy dance. Leaning against the tree with a handful of pebbles and his stick under his arm, he threw the stones at the boy’s feet, and shouted at him: ‘Dance, kaffir! Maybe we’ll have a little rain if you do, hey? Dance for more rain!’ He even clapped out a rhythm, clapping faster and faster and never stopping until Cyprian’s eyes began to roll from exhaustion and his whole body was shining with sweat.

  ♦

  Cyprian told Baba Cripps what had happened, and the next day Cripps walked out on the track himself. He told Cyprian not to follow him, but he did, keeping at a distance and crouching behind a bush when Baba Cripps confronted the farm manager. He could not hear what they said to each other but he could tell the two men were arguing. The manager was waving his arms around and at one point he picked up his gun, and Cyprian wondered whether he should run out and knock the man down. When Baba Cripps finally walked back down the track Cyprian saw the priest’s face was flushed and that one vein was standing proud, running across his forehead and scalp into the greying hair above his ear, like the snakes Cyprian had seen, disappearing into the grass when disturbed.

  Cyprian told his friends about Baba Cripps and the farm manager and when Jack went into Enkeldoorn that night he complained loudly in the bar of Vic’s Tavern about ‘that bloody priest sticking his nose in’. The other drinkers who had lived in Enkeldoorn for longer than Jack were familiar with Cripps’ behaviour and though they nodded sagely in agreement, they couldn’t help smiling to each other at his outbursts. Still, they told him, slapping his shoulder, it was nothing to worry about, leave the mad old priest to his ways. They bought him drinks to ease his temper and before too long both Jack and the others had forgotten about the troublesome Baba Cripps.

  But when Jack is found this morning lying dead in the middle of the Enkeldoorn to Umvuma road, it will not take long for those same men to remember his confrontation with Cripps, and as his body is lifted into the back of William Tully’s new Ford truck they will already be whispering about the priest’s involvement in the accident:

  ‘Bucks don’t just jump out like that, they just don’t, not when there’s a bike on the road.’

  ‘I’m telling you, that priest, man, he’s dealing with more than just our God now. He’s been learning that black magic shit from the kaf-firs, I tell you.’ And in Maronda Mashanu too, people will speak in hushed tones about the miracle of the gazelle buck and the farm manager. Old men sitting at the dare of their homesteads will nod their heads slowly when they are told, as if the story of the gazelle buck merely confirmed what they could have told the teller many months before. Small boys will begin trying to command the birds that hop between their parents’ huts and as they fry a pan of peanuts over the fire, mothers will tell stories to their children about Baba Cripps and his power over the animal spirits of the veld.

  ♦

  The rear wheel of the bike stops spinning. The oil has stopped flowing and the gazelle’s breathing has slowed to nothing, like water settling to stillness after a pebble has broken its calm. A couple of the vultures flap down to the road from the umbrella tree. They are joined by a stork and a pair of crows, strutting in the dust. The crows are the first to the body of the gazelle. Hopping onto its muzzle with quizzical heads, they begin pecki ng at the dark reflection of the broken bike, the flat canopy of the umbrella tree and the road, disappearing into the centre of the animal’s eye.

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧

  MAY 1933

  Maronda Mashanu, Mashonaland, Southern Rhodesia

  When the Society of the Divine Compassion withdrew from Wren-ingham at the beginning of 1933 the newly appointed Bishop Paget was forced to find a suitable substitute to run both the church and the mission school. Although Wreningham was close to Maronda Mashanu and Cripps had started his career in Southern Rhodesia at the mission, approaching Father Cripps was out of the question. Paget didn’t doubt that even at the age of sixty-three the old priest had the energy for such a task, but over the years he had applied that energy in such a way as to rule himself out of any candidature. A refusal to accept government subsidies for his schools had led to a split between Cripps and the Anglican Church and it was a fissure that Bishop Paget feared too deep to breach. Cripps had even gone so far as to leave Southern Rhodesia, although in the end he came back, four years later, as the Bishop had suspected he would. The old man was more African than European now and Paget couldn’t imagine him settling into an English country parish with anything other than difficulty.

  Although Cripps returned to the country, he did not return to the Church. Refusing a licence from the Bishop he gave himself the title ‘Independent Missionary to Mashonaland’ and when necessary followed his name simply with ‘Clerk of Holy Orders’. Again Paget could not pretend to be surprised. At the last Synod before he left for England Cripps had sat, eaten and slept with the African clergy rather than the European. Even his presence was dependent on there being some pressing case in defence of the native and he would rarely attend for any other matter. His world had become black and white and his vision, just black. A black Christ in a black country, in which they, the white settlers, were merely tenants, obstacles to harmony and a presence to be endured.

  Many in Salisbury were surprised the Bishop let Cripps carry on his work in his diocese—a rogue missionary operating without official licence.

  ‘Isn’t he more trouble than he’s worth?’ the Company’s Administrator had asked him at the Governor’s lawn party, hoping, Paget suspected, that he might rid himself of Cripps’ endless petitions via the authority of the Church. The Bishop pointed out, as he did to all such enquires, that Cripps’ land was his own and that he still accepted Cripps’ candidates for ordination, and yes, he would continue to do so until given good reason not to. ‘And besides,’ he had added, wanting to leave no doubt in the Administrator’s mind of where he stood on the matter, ‘I think I know a saint when I see one. I just let him well alone.’

  The Reverend Smith of Nyasaland, arriving as an interim appointment at Wreningham in early 1933, did not share the Bishop’s liberal views. He had been forewarned about the presence of Cripps in his parish and he established himself in his new post with a series of announcements designed to bring some order to the chaos that he found around him. Within his first week Smith insisted that individual church payments for each African mission station be paid in full. Those behind in their dues, he refused Communion, and those stations which remained delinquent in their payments would be disestablished as places of worship altogether. Which is why, on this May morning at the end of the rainy season the Reverend is travelling across the rough dirt roads of the district, a match box rattling in the glove compartment of his car and a steel can of petrol swilling and sloshing in its boot.

  Since his arrival in Mashonaland Cripps had built over thirty native mission stations. They were primitive structures, no more than pole and dagga shepherd shelters, built in the style of his church, with crude wooden crosses and altars of piled stones. Cripps stayed in them himself on his long
treks through the area, and performed marriages, christenings and funerals in them for the Africans who lived too far from the mission centres of the district. Reverend Smith had counted thirty-seven such stations on his books when he arrived at Wreningham. This morning though, as he drives on through the veld sitting beside Peter, his African driver, peering through the wiper arc in the dust on the windscreen, there are just thirty-three. The remaining four no longer exist other than as patches of darkened earth and blackened stone, carpeted with a soft floor of ash blown in the morning breeze.

  Although failure of church dues was his public reason for the burning of these shelters, the Reverend Smith also had personal motives founded more on ideas of aesthetics and theology than administration. The buildings were clearly unsafe, and they were dirty and untidy and their architecture, though no doubt authentically African, was in no way a suitable reflection of the glory of God. There was, he felt, a purifying quality in the flames that gathered at the fringes of the thatch before rushing hungrily up to the apex of the stations’ roofs. A holy judgement and an eradication of chaos where he would build order.

  Encouraged by his morning’s efforts Reverend Smith was now making his way over to Cripps’ own church. The man had no licence from the Anglican Church, refused to pay his dues and taught his African parishioners an obstinacy and wilfulness that could only encourage instability. He had clearly lost his way and the local clergy, cowed by long acquaintance with his bullying tactics, had lost their nerve. He, however, had not, and he drove towards Maronda Mash-anu filled with the satisfying inner warmth known only to those of holy righteousness and decisive intent.