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The Dust Diaries

Page 34

by Owen Sheers


  With a practised movement he catches the goat by its legs, one hand around the hindquarters, the other around the forelegs, and swings it onto its back. The animal lets out a short, shocked bleat, more of a sudden groan. One of the other boys crouches and quickly ties the animal’s legs with string while Sabethiel holds it still. The goat carries on bleating, faster, more urgent than before, its broken voice the only sound in the still evening above the constant static of the cicadas. Sabethiel puts his hand under its chin and presses, forcing its head back and exposing the taut white throat where its windpipe thrums beneath the skin. He shifts his hand up from its chin to around its mouth, trapping the tip of its tongue between its teeth, and its bleats become muffled, strangled, its nostrils flaring with the effort of its breathing. Then, with his other hand, Sabethiel brings the blade of the knife to its throat, and starts sawing with a rapid motion.

  For a second nothing happens and for some reason I think nothing will. It seems impossible that this animal, so vibrantly alive, will ever stop being so. But then its muffled bleats fill with liquid, turn to a gurgle, and the blood rises, shockingly red against its white hair, spilling onto the stone beneath. Goats, however, are stubborn and this one does not die easily, its tied legs jerking against the flow of blood from the vivid wound in its neck, and Sabethiel has to use the point of his knife, twisting it through the throat to find the spinal cord. Leaning on the handle with all his weight, he tries to snap the vertebrae, which eventually give, cracking with the sound of a branch breaking. And it is only then that the goat empties of life, the splash of its blood spreading from its neck like an extravagant bright red ruff.

  Leonard comes out of the house as the boys hoist the animal from the jacaranda tree by its tied hind legs. Some of the tree’s seed pods are shaken loose as it is jerked higher, falling around it like confetti. A few land on its rump, catch in its fine white hair. A dog slouches up behind me and nervously licks at the pool of blood on the stone, already congealing in the last light of the evening. I hear Leonard call out for me, ‘Owen, where are you?’ I walk down towards him; he is smiling one of his big smiles again.

  ‘Ah yes, the goat, you have seen the goat? Now we will have meat with the sadza for the festival, yes, yes.’ He puts an arm around me, pulling me close and I feel his strength again. He tells me to get my bags—‘Otherwise we will be late, Owen, yes, yes, and we mustn’t be late.’ Maybe it is the white of the goat still playing in my mind, but for a second, Leonard’s haste and concern makes me think of the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, hurrying, hurrying.

  We walk down towards the car, where Jodi is waiting, her cameras slung around her neck and her khaki photographer’s gilet bulging with film. I take a look back at the flat stone and see Sabethial cutting into the goat’s groin, sliding his knife down its belly and chest. The skin folds away, as if undone by a zip, opening to the red of the flesh beneath.

  ♦

  When I was last in Zimbabwe I noticed how the dark does not fall in Africa but grows, thick and black and quick, and this night seven months later is no exception. Within two hours of Leonard and me walking away from the goat strung up in the jacaranda tree, night has claimed the ground again and I cannot see my hand in front of my face without the aid of a match or a torch. In those two hours we have driven down to your church, unloaded our bags into your rondavel and walked throughout the site of the festival. On the way down we pass a boy by the side of the road, hammering a sign into the ground with a red arrow on it pointing down the track through the bush to your church. ‘Shearly Oripps Festival’ is written above the arrow, also in bright red paint. At the clearing the silence of your ruins has been overtaken by the activity and noise of preparation. A group of men are erecting a tall circular thatch wall on which another sign is nailed, ‘VIP Toilet’, and another group are building a temporary kitchen while women file up from the pump by the river, plastic containers filled with water on their heads. Leonard introduces me to old men who knew you, most of whom are wearing dark suits and old trilbies, the ribbon loose above the brim, and blue deacons’ sashes across their chests. I also meet Horatio again, wearing a thick woolly hat against the cold evening. He tells me he is the Festival Vice Chairman, and as we shake hands there is a friendly conspiratorial air about him, as if he, too, is remembering our walk to Wreningham and the stop at the beer hall. Moses Maranyika is also there, scanning the preparations with the eyes of a man who is in charge. I notice a pair of handcuffs glinting at his belt and he tells me that he is the Special Officer for the area, as well as being the headmaster and the Festival Secretary. ‘In case of trouble,’ he says, indicating the handcuffs and giving them a little rattle at his hip. I think of a Rixi taxi driver in Harare who warned me that the festival could become the target of Zanu PF intimidation. He said the Anglican Church was not popular with the government right now, and that one priest had even urged his congregation to pray for Mugabe’s death.

  ♦

  The darkness is complete by the time I unpak my bag in your ron-davel and roll out my sleeping bag next to Leonard’s. For two years now I have been trying to inhabit your life, trying to get under your skin, and as I make a rough pillow out of m) rucksack, I wonder if this is as close as I will get: sleeping the night in your hut, listening to the song of the veld that you listened to outside its round stone walls. As I have moved through your life, from your letters, to Zimbabwe, to here, I have always encountered the problem of imagination, a struggle between what happened and what may have happened, a colonisation of fact by fiction. But this, the hard polished dung of your rondavel’s floor, the single slit window where you kept the portrait of your mother, the rustle of mice moving in the thatch, this, I feel, must be real. I lie down and I know I am lying in the shadow of you. I can sense the penumbra of your body on this floor, the touch of your skin on these walls. I think I understand, but I cannot be sure.

  Leonard has taken the torch to go to the toilet and I can’t find my matches, so, deprived of my sight, I strain my ears to try and get a picture of what is happening outside. I can hear people, but it is hard to say how many. There is excited chatter, the rustle and thump of bags and packages being let to the ground, greetings and shouts. A drum has been beating a rhythm for the last ten minutes, and every now and then a man’s voice joins in, singing. The metal racket of one engine sputters into the clearing then stops with a sudden clank, leaving just voices in its wake, men and women’s, speaking quick Shona.

  I have no idea how many people are coming to your festival. Leonard was hoping for around three hundred, but it has been a hard seven months—the petrol shortages, inflation, farm workers losing their homes in the land invasions—and I can’t help thinking that Leonard is being optimistic in his expectations. But then, through the open doorway of your rondavel I see the fires. Where the night air above the clearing had been filled with pitch black there are now constellations of pulsing orange spots. I watch as more come out over the kopje like stars emerging in the night, each one s little higher than the next. After half an hour there are so many that the shape of the hill is clearly marked out by the rough triangle of orange and yellow flickering lights.

  I get up from the floor of the rondavel and walk out of the doorway towards the fires, and it is by their light that I that see the clearing and the trees at the base ol the kopje are teeming with people. Many are still arriving, baskets and bags carried on women’s heads, toddlers dozing in the arms of the men and babies tied to backs, their sleeping faces squashed against their mother’s spines. I walk on into the trees and into an ethereal atmosphere of firelight through wood smoke, the smell of roasting peanuts sweet and rich in the air. I see Jodi in there, darting between the fires, a big grin on her face, the small black camera always either at her eye or poised just below her chin. She sees me and shouts across, ‘I’m trying to find the light. It’s tough, hey?’ Her South African English sounds surprising on my ear after the sea of Shona I have been walking through.

&n
bsp; I walk on, and I am stared at. I am the only white man here, but I don’t want to miss a th ing. I am stunned by the volume of people, out here, in the veld, at night, all here for your festival. Most of them are surprised to see me, but after the surprise there is interest. The older people are interested in me because of you, the younger because of my watch, my shoes or for whether I know David Beckham. Everyone wants an address, a point of contact. Letters are still alive here, as a way of hope, just as they were for you. One boy in an Adidas tracksuit and a bobble hat pulled low over his eyes asks me quite simply why he can’t come back to Britain with me, ‘to help with your work, I can work with you’.

  A woman surrounded by children asks me to sit by her fire. She introduces herself as Happiness and offers me some of the peanuts twitching on a flat pan above the flames. The children crowd at her shoulder, then, as she tries to teach me to count in Shona, at mine. Poshi, pin’, tatu, ina, shanu, tanhatu, the children chant along with me, screaming with laughter when I make a mistake. Happiness introduces me to her daughter Sandra, who is doing her O-levels this year and who wants to be a teacher. Her younger brother wants to be an airline pilot. In fact, all the boys want to be airline pilots. And then we talk about you. Because everyone knows your story here, which is told to me again and again, the same phrases reoccurring in different mouths, your life as a fable: ‘he loved the Africans’, ‘Arthur Shearly Cripp, he lived just as an African’, ‘Baba Cripps, he would walk one hundred miles into Salisbury.’

  Two powerful beams of light sweep through the trees from behind me, passing across the dark tree trunks and the groups huddled around the fires like two searchlights. Walking out into the clearing with Happiness and Sandra I find that the lights belong to an open-backed truck which is pulling up beside your church carrying what looks like a load of blankets. The driver cuts the engine and it rattles out, sending a shiver down the truck’s chassis. Almost immediately the blankets begin to move, and as the driver gets out of his cabin to flip down the tail, children emerge from under them. They drop to the floor, young boys and girls rubbing sleep from their eyes, some of them carrying even younger children. They wear strange combinations of ill-fitting clothes and many are bare-footed. They stand around the back of the truck, disorientated by sleep, shivering and their teeth chattering audibly as a woman in a nun’s habit and large glasses ushers them into some kind of order. Watching them, I realise how cold it has become. There is no wind but the air now has a frozen edge to it, and the heat of the recent afternoon feels like a distant memory. I remember Leonard’s letter: ‘Our cou ntry is now very cold.’ Then, as if I had thought him there, Leonard’s hand is on my shoulder. He gestures towards the nun and the children, who are still slipping off the tail of the truck onto the ground. This is Sister Dorothy from the Shearly Cripps Children’s Home. They have come from Juru, that is five hours away,’ he adds, his voice rising to his now familiar pitch of astonishment. ‘I will go and help them, but you must talk to this man,’ he says, indicating a huge man at ids side. ‘His name is Patrick and he also knew Baba Cripps.’

  ♦

  ‘My name is Patrick Bwanya who comes from All Saints Wreningham in Manyeni Reserve, near Chivhu town where (‘ripps came in 1901 to work among the Vaheri people. He was welcomed by my three grandfathers, these being Wadesango (the one who losses the bush), Gavajena (white fox) and Mupem hi (Beggar).’

  Patrick and I are sitting inside the walls of your church, a few feet from your grave. We have come in here becauso Patrick wants to tell me all he knows about you, and the singing in the clearing has got so loud that it is hard to hear each other talk. I have brought a mini-disc with me this time and Patrick talks slowly in his deep growl of a voice in deference to the clumsy microphone I am holding out to him. As he tells me the story of your life again, I glance up at the sky above us. Your church is roofed with stars now, not grass, the constellations of Virgo and Hercules looking over you. Beyond the walls the singing lifts and falls above a steady rhythm of maracas and drums, the women’s voices flowing on like an endless stream, answered every now and then by the deeper voices of the men. Patrick tells me how he moved to Maronda Mashanu with his father, and a story about seeing bees stop a car. Then he describes your funeral, how the congregation of whites, blacks and coloureds was so big it did not fit inside the church, and how the people of Maronda Mashanu sang as they are singing now, songs only ever sung for the burial of a Mashona chief. He finishes with a big laugh and a nod towards you in your grave as he says what I have heard so many people say today, ‘Yes, because Baba Cripps, he was like an African.’

  ♦

  The singing and witnessing does not stop all night, drawing me up through layers of sleep again and again in time with the rising and falling of its cadences. Leonard is sleeping beside me, and when I wake I listen to his heavy breathing and to the lighter breaths of Jodi who sleeps beyond Leonard, her head on her camera bag. The music becomes part of my dreams, and I find it hard to tell when I am awake or asleep. For most of the night I think I am neither, but somewhere in between.

  It is the singing that finally draws me to full wakefulness in the morning, a small group of men around a fire near the rondavel, passing a song between the in like a round. I get out of my sleeping bag, step over Leonard and walk through the open doorway to go and wash in the river. Outside, the sun has not yet taken the edge off the night and the air is still cold. Those sleeping in the open are stirring from where they lay under blankets beside the embers, children stumbling around, sleep still heavy in their eyes and their breath steaming in the cold as if they are exhaling the smoke of last night’s fires. There are now around 700 people here, all going about the morning chores of washing and eating and passing on the singing from group to group.

  After a breakfast of boiled eggs and toast the festival proper begins. The festival committee all carry schedules that Leonard has typed out on his old typewriter and the day proceeds with a strange mix of strict efficiency on the part of the committee and casual nonchalance on the part of the crowds. By mid-morning the Bishop of Harare has arrived in his wine-red cassock and an altar is prepared outside the walls of the church. The priests and the deacons gather for the memorial service, all wearing their white vestments as they proceed towards the altar, the choirs accompanying them, and a tall wooden cross held before them. I can’t help thinking of the photo of you I found in Rhodes House Library, that odd juxtaposition of the veld and your ecclesiastical dress. The scent of incense mixes with the smell of fires.

  The congregation sit on the ground around the altar, the women of the Mothers’ Union in their bright blue headscarves and shawls and the choirs from other churches each in their own bright uniforms of yellows, reds and purples. I join a group of boys from the Children’s Home, crouching at the back. The service is long and the sun is hot and after a while they start to yawn and play, shooting pieces of straw from the clam-like dried seed pods of the jacai anda tree and drawing biro tattoos on each other’s arms: a Nike swoosh, an Adidas logo, ‘Power Rangers’ written below.

  After the service I chat with Sister Dorothy about your Children’s Home. She tells me the children help in all areas of the home, in the garden, the kitchen and even with teaching the younger children. She asks me if I can send the boys football magazines and then tells me very proudly that many of their pupils go on 1o university. Two boys have even become airline pilots with Air Zimbabwe.

  Over a lunch of sadza and beef after the memorial service the talk turns to politics. Some of the men admit that Zanu PF only won this area in the recent election because of their intimidation tactics. Chivhu is a long way from Harare, and it is easier for things to go unseen here. All the men I speak to are worried about the situation, and more than once I am told by someone shaking his head that Zimbabwe is at the lowest point of its twenty-year life. They know the land situation must be reformed, that some of the land should be redistributed, but none of them support the violent farm invasions. They are al
so all too aware of Mugabe’s political shorthand of black and white, and they know it isn’t as simple as that. That the ‘race card’ is a smoke screen for inter-African political struggles, between Zanu PF and the MDC. As one man says, for himself, he is more concerned about their boys coming back in body bags from the war in the Congo than the land problem. You are mentioned again by a local farmer, who gives thanks that you left your land to the Africans. ‘Otherwise,’ he says, a serious frown on his face, ‘I would not have my farm now, and my children would not be in school. That is why I am here.’

  ♦

  That evening I help Leonard up to the evensong which is being held on the summit of the kopje and the irony does not escape him. As he leans on my arm he tells me how you used to lean on him on the road into Chivhu, your fingers digging into his shoulder when you were in pain. He says he hopes his grandchildren are there to help me walk when I am old.

  On the kopje I meet more people who knew you including an old woman with pencilled eyebrows like sweeps of italic ink. As we sit on a flat stone, still warm from the touch of the sun, she tells me she always called you her father. The congregation gather around us, the choirs fanning out in their bright vestments like the wings of different species of butterfly. The old woman tells me her christened name is Cecilia, but that everyone calls her Fortune.

  A younger woman approaches with a tiny old man on her arm. She says she wants to introduce me to her grandfather, Thomas, who was with you when you died. I shake hands with the old man, who is wearing a brown suit and a shirt and a tie. His lower lip hangs loose from his mouth and he has soulful, sad eyes. His voice is very weak as he asks for my address so he can write to me. All he says about your death is that you died quietly.

 

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