by Peter Rimmer
Mike Barrow, fourth generation Rhodesian, was too scared to light the fire. After five minutes he wet his pants, the hot liquid spurting down inside his right trouser leg. He waited for two hours without sign or sound of Laurie Hall and then a sickle moon rose up from the bush and the new, small light showed him the shadows of the trees. Even the horses on a long rein had not moved in the night. An owl called from across the river and was answered from the top of the mopani tree to the right of Mike Barrow, raising prickles of primeval fear all over his body. Never before in his life had he felt so much an animal. Briefly, he wondered if the other animals could smell his fear. Mike Barrow waited… In the dark of the bush an animal crashed away in fear followed by the terrible sound of a caught bush pig about to die, rending the night with its agony of death. When he turned away from the snarling and thrashing, Laurie put a vice-grip on his shoulder.
“You don’t want to shoot me,” said Laurie, calmly. “That’s a leopard eating that pig two hundred metres away and you’re sitting in the dark, young Mike. Light the bloody fire, old boy, or we’ll go the way of that bloody pig.”
“Why were you so long?”
“You pissed in your pants?”
“Yes…a long time ago.”
“Waiting for the moon… You try and walk through those trees in the dark. Young impala ram. He’ll eat well.”
Laurie put a match to the dry leaves under the pile of wood and within seconds fire leapt out into the night, showing the trunks of the trees.
“Bring the horses closer, Mike. Closer to the fire. We lose those horses and we might as well be dead. My friend Will Langton tried walking it once… You would have liked to meet Hannes Potgieter.”
“Who’s he?”
“The fountain of all our knowledge, passed down by generations of Boers, Afrikaners… Haunch of venison cooked over hot coals and brushed by the smoke of the fire. Young Mike, go and rinse out your pants in the river. I do not like the smell of stale urine… And please mind the crocodiles, though luckily there are not as many as there used to be.”
Laurie Hall made a tripod from green wood he cut from the undergrowth. Searching, he found a straight sapling and cut the base with his hunting knife, the blade nine inches long and sharp as a razor, the product of his first pay from the army. While he whittled away the bark, he listened to the sounds of the bush, listening subconsciously for the sound of danger. For the moment he was happy. Mike Barrow had taken his rifle to the shallow pool and when he came back Laurie could no longer smell an unflushed public toilet.
With the tripod far enough away from the fire not to burn, Laurie stuck the haunch of venison with the bark-free sapling and propped the meat close enough to the heat of the fire to cook. The rest of the impala ram he began cutting into strips for biltong. Each long strip of bloody meat he hung over the bough of a tree next to the fire where the wood smoke would taint the dried strips of game.
When he had finished with the carcass, Laurie hung it in a tree three feet away from the fire and on the other side of their camp from the river. Mike Barrow sat on a fallen tree, one an elephant had pushed over during the previous year’s dry season, and his army pants began to dry out. Being cavalry, they were heavy trousers with leather patches to protect the inside of their legs from saddle sores. Mike had placed a small billycan for coffee next to the fire on a flat piece of ground, two coffee bags floating on top of the river water.
Laurie walked out of the light from the fire, down towards the river. When his eyes were ready, he looked up at the universe and wondered at the myriad of stars; the Milky Way, the second lacy layer of terrestrial light above the nearer stars. A yellow moon shone up the surface of the river, flat and oily black in the night. After ten minutes communing with the unknown universe, he walked back to the fire. Mike Barrow had turned the haunch of venison without being asked and steam was no longer rising from his trousers.
“Why did God make mosquitoes?” asked Mike Barrow.
“Why did he make man, if he did?”
“You don’t believe in God?”
“Darwin’s theory of evolution is pretty convincing. I don’t believe in the instant creation of Adam and Eve. Religion is a crazy way to keep man under control. Threaten him with eternal hellfire and he might behave himself without being watched. A thinking savage? That’s dangerous. The laws of nature appeal to me more than the laws of man or the laws of God as written by man. There are many stories in the Bible. The distillation of man’s philosophy ever since he could think and imagine himself important enough to merit a God. I’m an agnostic, young Mike. I don’t know and most men don’t know for certain any more than me. From my experience, too many of those who say they know for certain have an ulterior motive. Try the new liberation theology for a current example. Whenever politicians and priests start agreeing with each other, beware… You can turn the meat again. That’s the law of nature. This Rhodesia is overpopulated with man so now we fight each other. England was overcrowded when your great-grandfather came up with Johnson and Selous. Then there were open spaces, millions upon millions of game and less than half a million people. Now there are six or seven million people and it’s overcrowded. We English thought the open spaces of Africa would last forever. They didn’t. They thought the same in America. In America, they killed off the locals. We didn’t. There is something a little immoral when America tells us how badly we are behaving… That coffee ready?… We are all animals, young Mike, and anyone telling you different is a liar.”
“You think we will win this war?” asked Mike, passing Laurie a mug of black coffee.
“Of course not.”
“Then why are you fighting?”
“Same reason they are. Money… Then maybe I’m sick of this life and want a way out.”
“Do you think we should have colonised Africa in the first place?”
“At the time it was a great adventure,” said Laurie. “Most of it was empty land claimed by some chief as his hunting ground but never used, never occupied. Is the moral right of it all where you are coming from? Livingstone was bringing his God. So was Moffat. To save the savage from the pits of hell. The empire loved a religious crusade to make conquest right. Priests and politicians with a common goal. Dangerous. According to modern anthropology, backed by some very convincing skeletons, we, that is man, came out of Africa in the first place. With equal insanity you can say we were reclaiming our birthright… I could do with a drink. Man drinks or takes drugs to remove his mind from a world made mad by himself. We don’t like the world we created. Most probably we don’t even like ourselves. That’s why we like wars, Mike Barrow. So we can kill people. And we think by killing other people we will make ourselves feel better.”
Two hundred and ninety-three miles from the roasting venison, Heathcliff Mortimer was sitting in a hotel with no running water. Something had gone wrong with the municipal supply. It had gone off that morning, and it was now nine o’clock at night. With his body itching from mosquito bites with nothing to treat them with, Heath had gone down to the bar where he was drinking brandy made from cane spirit. There was no whisky and no soda water in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia.
Zambia, in full compliance with the United Nations resolution on Rhodesia, had closed its border with the rebel state to the south and largely cut off Zambia’s road and rail connection to the outside world. Erratic shipments of copper left the mines on the longer route to Lobito in Angola where the liberation armies of Angola regularly cut the Benguela railway line in their war with the colonial Portuguese. Very little was coming into Zambia and very little was going out.
The most visible source of income for the government was the prolific liberation movements in exile fighting the whites in Rhodesia, South Africa, Mozambique, Angola and South West Africa, all sponsored by the Russians and Chinese. The Zambian politicians in Lusaka spent their time flying round the world screaming at the West to reimburse them for their sacrifice in the fight against colonialism.
Hea
thcliff Mortimer had come to write up the moral indignation of a country raped by the colonial power who in the process had not had the forethought to leave behind an alternative rail and road route to the sea. Heath had shaken his head with wonder and admiration at the ability of the Zambians to keep the British, in particular, feeling guilty. As he was to say in the second volume of his book, before Cecil Rhodes there were no roads, railways and copper mines and no moral indignation for the lack of them. It was an extortionist’s dream come true and Heath had smiled at the air-conditioned Mercedes-Benz cars cruising the unswept streets of Lusaka above the broken water supply pipes. He did not have to ask who were the owners of the luxury cars paid for by the British taxpayer to assuage their colonial guilt. Wisely, with an eye to future exploitation, Heath pointed out, the Russians and Chinese gave guns and ammunition.
Down the end of the bar a voluble young black man was entertaining a senior member of the African National Congress of South Africa. They were both laughing and enjoying themselves. They were drinking Scotch whisky from a special bottle hidden by the barman under the counter and Heathcliff Mortimer smiled at the reality of Third World politics.
He ordered another local brandy. It was alcohol, and he had needed to get drunk. Fourteen months from his seventieth birthday was no age to be staying in hot climates without running water. He had tried talking to the barman without success and he was now trying to listen to the conversation of the two black men at the other end of the bar. They were talking in English which he knew they would not do if alone in the bar. It was the prize snobbery of the Third World, showing off the residue of their education. Heath smiled to himself. The two men were making heavy weather out of keeping up their conversation in English. He was bored and a little drunk and picked up his glass and walked down the bar. The worst they could do was tell him to go to hell and the best they could do was allow him to buy a round of Scotch whisky. The greeting when it came was a total surprise.
“Hello, Mr Mortimer. I wondered when you would recognise me, Paul Mwansa. I met you in London through Josephine Langton. Jo and I were going out together. Don’t you work for her brother?”
“Yes I do,” said Heath thinking on his feet, having not recognised him in the dull light of the bar.
“This is a friend of mine from the ANC. We are helping him fight apartheid.”
“That’s very good. Can I buy you gentlemen a drink? What are you having?”
“I only drink Scotch,” said Paul Mwansa. “So does my friend.”
“Mr Barman,” called Heath, allowing himself a small smile. “Three Scotch whiskies please. Doubles.”
When the new drinks were poured, Heath raised his glass. “To the liberation of Africa,” he said.
“That’s a very good toast,” said the man from the ANC without a name.
“I know it is. Everybody in the whole wide world would like to be liberated. Very few are.”
“How is Josephine?” said Paul with the air of old proprietorship.
“Not very well, as a matter of fact.”
“Why is that?”
“The Labour Party is out of power in England and Josephine is out of a job and out of a salary and money. She was a junior minister in the Labour government.”
“She’s still a Member of Parliament?”
“Not anymore. She lost her seat.”
“But she must have made some money,” said Paul Mwansa.
“Not in England. We take a rather poor view of corruption in our governments. Maybe in the future we will catch up with the rest of the world. I rather hope not. Now, can my paper buy you another drink?”
“Why ever not?” said Paul Mwansa.
‘Indeed, why ever not?’ said Heath to himself. There was just enough in the bottle for three more drinks.
Three hundred and fifty-four miles from Lusaka towards the West, Hilary Bains was fighting another bout of his recurrent malaria. He was so thin that his wife Mary was not sure whether he would live. They had been married almost fourteen years and none of the family were strong. Mary knew it was the river. They were too close to the river, the mosquitoes and the malaria. Malcolm, the boy, was also sick and Penny, the girl, had never been strong growing up in the bush. Hilary thought it was God’s way of allowing the family to serve Him through serving the poor and sick, lost in the wilderness of Barotseland, a Barotseland that now only existed as part of Zambia, the old British Protectorate lost in the liberation. None of the Bains’s children had ever been outside the mission station, their only education coming from their parents and the books sent to the mission school by the London Missionary Society. They could speak Lozi as well as English and they had never worn shoes. Hilary and Mary believed in leading by example.
Limited medicine had reached the mission from the outside which kept them alive and strong enough to preach the word of God. The new government, mostly, just ignored them. Most of the whites in Zambia had left the country after their farms and businesses were confiscated and handed over to loyal members of UNIP, the ruling party that had won the ‘one man one vote’ election. The small farm at the mission outside Mongu was so poor that it was left alone, coveted by no one as it scratched at the soil to give the children in the school and the patients in the makeshift hospital one meal a day. The mission was in permanent crisis. For Mary and Hilary, there was work and six hours’ sleep and nothing in between, not even recognition by the local authority or the far distant mission in London.
A week after Laurie Hall and Mike Barrow had eaten the haunch of venison, the boy, Malcolm, died of malaria. Mary said it was the will of God but Hilary was not so sure. Recovering enough to bury his only son, the Reverend Hilary Bains, for the first time, realised he had lost his faith. For fear of hurting his wife he kept the revelation to himself. At the age of thirty-eight he had lost his God and with it the meaning to his life. Being the man he was, he blamed no one but himself.
Comrade Jack had been the garden boy of a very nice English family who lived in Bulawayo. For the first fifteen years of his life he had lived in a township outside the city, the place of the killings, the old capital of Lobengula, King of the Matabele, who had been chased out of his royal kraal at Gu-Bulawayo by Cecil John Rhodes before the turn of the twentieth century. Jack had become Jack when he joined the very nice English family who gave him a room at the back of the house, ‘boy’s’ rations of meat, mealie meal, salt, beans and soap plus three pounds a month. There was an outside shower next to the room and a flush toilet, neither of which Jack had seen before. In the old township he had used a ‘long drop’ for a toilet which constituted a deep hole in the ground, and the communal tap with which to wash himself. Inside the room was a bed with springs and a mattress.
Jack’s job was to keep the leaves out of the swimming pool, the weeds out of the flowerbeds, and keep the grass cut to perfection. In the dry season he watered the lawn and the flowers with a long hosepipe.
By the time he was eighteen the young maid from the house next door spent most of her nights on the mattress in Jack’s room and the nice English family never seemed to notice. Once a week there was a beer drink in one of the servant’s rooms, chosen for when the owner of the house was away. There were ten years of Jack’s life spent pleasantly watering the flowers but when UDI came along, Smith’s declaration of independence from the British, followed by what Jack heard to be sanctions which meant absolutely nothing to him whatsoever, the nice English family decided to go and live in Australia where, even if they had wished, Jack would not have followed. Because of similar laws of immigration it would have made no difference if the nice English family had decided to go back and live in England. None of this Jack understood but he did understand that no one wanted to buy the house, and though he was told he could stay in the room until the house was sold when the new people would give him a job, there were no ‘boy’s’ rations every week and no three pounds at the end of the month. After three months of being left on his own, Jack was not sure whether the dep
arted nice English family were nice after all. For ten years he had seen them for every day of his life and they were gone, never to be seen again. Unbeknown to Jack, the same thing had happened or was happening all over colonial Africa. The white man was moving out, and fast.
The pretty young maid who had been replaced four times was not so sure of Jack without any food and money and his friends no longer invited him to the beer drink. Sadly, he walked back to the old township where he was recruited to fight to throw out the rest of the whites that had stolen his country.
They had offered him a job, so he went with them to a military training camp in Zambia where he had become Comrade Jack instead of the garden boy. The Russian instructor could not understand or pronounce the Matabele name he had lost at the age of fifteen. Jack had been easier so Jack it was.
In the training camp he was taught the great ideology of communism where everyone was equally rich, and how to use an AK-47 assault rifle, RPG rockets, and how to lay mines under roads. The Russian instructor thought all Africans knew how to live off the bush and survive in the wild so fieldcraft was left off the syllabus.
By the time Sixpence, Fourpence and Onepenny had paddled the freedom fighters across the great width of the Zambezi River, pointing out the crocodiles in the dusk on the sandbanks and the noses and eyes of the submerged hippopotami, Comrade Jack was terrified and refused to let the trackers leave them behind in the bush. At one point Comrade Jack had to point his gun at Onepenny. Comrade Jack was desperate.
In a quick conversation between themselves in Lozi – which by then they knew was understood by nobody else in the raiding party, conversation between Comrade Jack and the trackers being conducted in English – they agreed to stay with the freedom fighters until the time was right to melt away into the bush. Their job had been to deliver the freedom fighters onto enemy soil and not fight the war. The worry was Comrade Jack reporting them when he returned from his raid into the white-owned ranching district three hundred miles southeast from the Victoria Falls. By this time, having seen that Comrade Jack had no bushcraft whatsoever, the trackers thought the chances of the ill-trained soldiers coming back alive were very small. They had vivid memories of Hannes Potgieter, the Boer, in their minds. And Hannes Potgieter had told them there were many Boers in Rhodesia.
