by Tony Park
The wonders of modern communication, he mused. Next, he placed a call to his cousin, who had a farm south of Victoria Falls, on the edge of the Matetsi Safari Area, but lived in town. He hoped the man would answer his phone, as without him he would have to find the materials he needed from someone else. Not impossible, but he was working to a tight timeline.
‘Hello?’
‘Kanjane, cousin,’ Wellington said down the line.
‘Morrison, is that you?’ the voice said.
‘Please, no names, cousin. It’s not businesslike.’ Wellington didn’t like his real name, Morrison, and hated others using it.
His cousin, Albert, laughed and asked after his health. Wellington raced through the required formalities and asked what he needed to know. ‘Are you still fishing on that white settler’s farm the way you told me you were last year, when we last met?’
It took a couple of seconds for Albert, who, Wellington recalled, was not the brightest member of the family, to see through the veiled speech. ‘Ah, yes. I am, although the parks and wildlife dogs have tried to stop me, I move too fast for them, and I have a supply of fishing equipment from another friend who has been mining on his farm.’
Albert had, with the support of the local ZANU-PF chairman, occupied and subsequently been given a prospering cattle ranch during the farm invasions in 2002. The white farmer and his family had been hounded off by Albert and his mob of young supporters. Although they called themselves war veterans, not even Albert, the eldest of the occupiers, had been old enough to bear arms during the liberation struggle, which had ended with Robert Mugabe being elected to power in 1980.
Wellington was bitter about what had happened to his country. He felt no sympathy for the cattle rancher who had seen the family’s dogs and his prize bull slaughtered and his children’s lives threatened, but he resented the fact uneducated no-hopers like his cousin had become the beneficiaries of huge windfalls, while he had been forced across the border in search of work in the mining industry because of Zimbabwe’s economic collapse. Albert had taken over a working farm with a big house and a workforce of fifty men and their families, and now he resorted to feeding himself and his wife and four whelps by fishing illegally in the rivers of the nearby safari area and Hwange National Park. He had tried to bully the farm labour into working for him, but the herd boys had left when he’d failed to pay them; he had stripped the grand farmhouse of its contents, including the copper water pipes and electrical wiring from the walls, and sold it all. When the money he made had run out he had lived off the white man’s cattle until most of them perished in a foot-and-mouth outbreak. Those mangy beasts that had survived he had also sold. Albert was left with hundreds of acres of thorny bush and no means of income. So now he fished with dynamite.
‘Good, good,’ said Wellington to the dim-witted failure. ‘I will be in the Falls this evening. We must drink some beer together and you must sell me some of your bait.’
‘It will be a pleasure, cousin,’ Albert replied. ‘Times are very tough here in Zimbabwe and my family are hungry. It will be good to see you again, Morris – I mean, cousin.’
Wellington ended the call and rolled back onto his belly and picked up his small binoculars. There was movement at McMurtrie’s house. The door opened and the man’s thin white wife came out. She was wearing the dressing-gown she had been in when she had greeted McMurtrie earlier, but Wellington’s keen eyes noted she had shed the high heels and stockings that had poked from beneath the gown. Her hair, coiffed before, was now in disarray. The mascara at her eyes was smudged. She looked like the whore that mine gossip said she was.
McMurtrie was a weak man who had let a woman make a mockery of him. Such a thing would never happen in Wellington’s world. A wife who declared she wanted to leave for another man would not make it as far as the front door, let alone to another country, where this one had apparently gone, before slinking back with her tail between her soiled legs. Wellington was alternately repulsed and aroused by the thought of what McMurtrie’s wife had done. McMurtrie was Wellington’s enemy, yet he felt a strange kind of kinship with the man. Both he and his nemesis were warriors, now sworn to destroy each other. While Wellington would never have let a woman treat him the way McMurtrie’s wife had, Wellington pitied his foe. This woman was an unwanted distraction for the mine manager.
Wellington watched the woman feed the dogs. Her moves were jerky, resentful, as she dropped the bowls of food in front of the hounds. She raised the back of her hand to a smudged eye.
‘She is not good enough for you, Cameron, my friend,’ Wellington whispered as he watched her through the binoculars.
McMurtrie and the Hamilton woman were on their way to Livingstone, as per the original plan, and Wellington would follow them there, via the twin town of Victoria Falls, just across the cascading Zambezi, and launch the final battle of this war between the empire below and Global Resources above.
The woman bent over to shift a bowl of food so a small dog could get its share. The satin of the gown slid up, revealing a long thigh. Wellington felt himself swell against the damp grass and cool earth beneath his loins.
This unfaithful whore needed to be taught a lesson. He wanted to move down the hillside, darting from cover to cover with the practised ease he’d learnt during the bush war. He had served in the struggle and had become disenchanted by the government’s failure to deliver on the riches it had promised those who had sacrificed so much for Zimbabwe. He had been slaving in South Africa, for the whites, when the farms in Zimbabwe had been doled out to the well-connected and the party’s thugs, such as Albert. He had turned to crime, and had made himself more money than his cousin’s stupid ilk, but still he wanted more. It was not enough simply to win.
He rolled to one side and moved his hand to his belt. He wanted McMurtrie’s wife, as well as his scalp, but if he took her now, used her and killed her, then word might reach McMurtrie before he boarded his connecting flight for the wilds of Zambia. He needed McMurtrie to get on the flight to the copper belt for his plan to succeed.
He closed his eyes and imagined her, screaming, fighting, yielding. He let his imagination fulfil him as he bucked against the grass. The wife would die, soon enough, but it would appear an accident.
That would just leave McMurtrie’s daughter.
25
Despite the best efforts of Kylie’s personal assistant, Sandy, back in Australia, there was no way they could have connected to the charter flight in Livingstone in time to reach the remote Global Resources mine north of Kitwe in the copper belt on the same day they flew from Nelspruit.
Instead, they had to stay the night at Livingstone and Kylie had been happy to let their boss, Jan, recommend a hotel, which Sandy had booked. Kylie had not even bothered googling the hotel.
‘I’ve heard it’s a lekker place,’ Cameron said as they exited customs from the small terminal and walked past the touts to the driver who held a sign saying, Global Resource, Mr Cameron and Mrs Kylie. ‘That would be us.’
Kylie was glad they hadn’t been able to make the connection. She wasn’t here to sightsee, but after the horrendous few days they had endured she was looking forward to a quiet night.
The drive took them through the suburbs of Livingstone, mostly single-storey colonial-era houses with tin roofs, and then into the edge of the town, which seemed to be bustling with tourists and locals alike.
‘Have you been here before?’ she asked him. Cameron had slept through most of the flight.
‘We drove up here on a family holiday a few years ago. Jess loved it. Tania hated it.’
‘I didn’t ask when you boarded – is your daughter all right?’
He nodded. ‘She’s staying with friends. I saw my wife this morning again.’
Kylie raised her eyebrows, waiting for him to supply more details, but he clammed up.
‘I’ll sort it when we get back.’
They travelled in an awkward silence for a few minutes.
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p; ‘This place was a real dump when we were here last,’ Cameron said, pointing out the window of the van. ‘None of these shops were here. The place was rundown, businesses were closed and the roads were kak.’
‘It seems pretty prosperous now.’
‘Yes. But a lot of Zambia’s prosperity has come at Zimbabwe’s expense. A lot of tourist business from Zimbabwe, particularly the town of Victoria Falls just across the river, moved over to this side.’
‘Last night …’ Kylie began, changing the subject.
He held a hand up. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened. I didn’t mean anything, Kylie, and I apologise if I offended you.’
‘No, not at all. In fact, what I was going to say was that I apologise, for overreacting. I know you wouldn’t have tried anything. Besides, you were too drunk.’
He laughed, though it was short-lived. He went back to gazing out the window, where the scenery changed from chaotic African cityscape to the dusty coloured bush. Through breaks in the vegetation, though, she started to catch glimpses of the river, its surface dark and rippled as it raced towards the sheer drop-off downstream. On its verges was a belt of thicker, greener trees and reeds.
‘The Zambezi.’
Cameron had said it matter-of-factly, but the word was nonetheless laden with exoticism. She felt a frisson of excitement at the prospect of seeing the Victoria Falls. A one-line addendum in Sandy’s itinerary had mentioned that the hotel they were staying at was inside the Mosi oi Tunya National Park – the name meant ‘smoke that thunders’ – and that it would be possible to walk to the edge of the falls. She wasn’t in Zambia for a holiday, but she couldn’t come all this way, stay in Livingstone, and not see its famous natural wonder.
They passed a roadside picnic spot where people were drinking beers from cooler boxes and taking in the increasingly breathtaking view of the river.
‘What are we going to do about Wellington?’ Cameron asked.
‘I called our government relations people in Johannesburg this morning and they put me in touch with the National Prosecuting Authority. They’re sending someone to Barberton the day after we get back, so we can brief them on Wellington’s crimes. I asked that the local police be left out and the agent I spoke to said that wouldn’t be a problem.’
Cameron nodded in agreement. ‘Our Colonel Sindisiwe Radebe is rotten to the core. We need to bring her down or, at worst, get her replaced.’
‘I want him, Cameron.’
‘You’re talking like an African now,’ he said.
*
Luis sat with his mother, on the sandy bluff overlooking the Indian Ocean. Behind them was the Ponta da Barra Lighthouse, which only worked for a couple of hours a night because its solar panel was faulty.
Lights were beginning to twinkle out on the greying waters, as the squid fishermen set out for their night’s work. A young man in mismatching wetsuit top and pants carried his spear gun and flippers down to the water’s edge. He would be hunting crayfish, bound for the braais of the South African tourists camped with their off-road trailers in the nearby campground.
‘How is my son?’
‘He is asleep,’ his mother said. ‘He will cry more tomorrow.’
‘Jose is lucky to have you, Mother.’
‘He would be luckier to have a father. He is growing up too fast. He keeps company with bad boys.’
Luis ploughed the sand with his toes. It was dirty beneath the fine, pale surface layer. The tourists thought of this place as paradise, but it had also seen sorrow and death during the bad years. He had fought and he had studied in order to escape the inevitability that he might end up out at sea rowing a flimsy lula boat made of driftwood and polystyrene foam, or diving for crayfish. His mother cleaned holiday lodges owned by foreigners. She barely earned enough to survive, yet she sent his son to school each morning in a freshly cleaned and pressed uniform.
‘I only ever wanted the best for you, Luis.’ She gestured out to the twinkling lights. ‘You do not belong out there. You are an engineer, a geologist, a metallurgist.’
He nodded, but sighed. The letters after his name would not feed his son, or save his mother from the backbreaking work she would do until she could crawl on her knees no longer in a tourist’s bathroom. A man with woolly, unkempt dreadlocks and dressed in layer upon layer of tattered rags walked along the beach waving his arms in the air. Snippets of his incoherent shouts reached Luis on the wind and spoiled the travel-brochure illusion of paradise spread out below him. He was envious, in a way, of the madman. He wanted to rant and shout and curse heaven and earth and cry out for the wife he’d lost, but he was tied to the real world by his memories, his dreams and his ambitions. Perhaps God had cursed him for being vain, for wanting more than he had a right to dream of. Luis had lusted for prestige and wealth and the trappings of a modern, peaceful society. It had almost been in his reach, in the early days in South Africa, but he had been dragged down into the hell of the country’s deadly criminal underworld. He had been punished for his greed.
‘You cannot go back to South Africa, can you?’
He looked at his mother. How could she know?
‘Your wife, God rest her soul, believed you, Luis, because she wanted to. I know you. You would have come home to your family if you still had a proper job. You would have been like the others who come streaming home across the border at Christmas time if you had a job that paid for an annual vacation. Even when your father worked for the Boers, in the bad days, he was still allowed home for Christmas. If it was just that your papers were not legal you would have still come, like the mahambane, walking through the bush. Yet you stayed. Was the criminals’ money worth it, Luis? Was it worth your son drifting into a life of crime, too, because he lacks a father’s discipline?’
He looked at her and blinked. He felt the tears sting his eyes and turned away from his mother’s gaze.
‘Look at me, my son.’
He kept his gaze fixed on the lights on the water. Maybe he should use his money to buy a boat, and accept his fate. He could learn again the lessons of childhood. At least he could feed his son and his mother with honest work.
She grabbed his chin between her thumb and forefinger and turned his face to her. ‘I have kept your school work, your papers from university, your thesis. I know you like no one else, my son. You are like your father. He went down into their mines and he came back and he fought for his country’s freedom. He would not have been happy as a fisherman, Luis. He longed for more, but not for himself, for his children. For you. I want you to stay here and be a father to your boy.’
He looked into his mother’s eyes and saw the strength of a woman who had endured so much loss – far more than he had. She did not question her fate. She cared only for her remaining son and her only grandchild.
Something she had said, just then, came back to him.
‘You kept everything? My thesis?’
She nodded. As the realisation began to show on his own face she allowed herself a small smile of satisfaction.
*
Wellington Shumba smoked a cigar as he reclined on a sun lounge, in the dark, near the pool bar in the grounds of the Kingdom Hotel in the Zimbabwean holiday town of Victoria Falls.
His cousin wore his best clothes – a nylon shirt decorated with little balls of worn fibres, shiny grey slacks and scuffed vinyl shoes. Wellington’s clothes all carried brand-name labels, none of them knock-offs. Wellington exhaled and regarded Albert through the fug of smoke and the perspective of success.
This man, and the other lazy, greedy idiots above him, had ruined Zimbabwe for all of them, but in a funny way they had spurred others on to greatness. Without the inmates who’d been given the key to the asylum, Wellington might still have been drilling holes in the ore seam beneath Bindura, earning his pay and blowing it on chibuku beer and whores. He would never have lost his job and he would have died without achieving very much.
But no, Albert, and his fearless leader, the comra
de president, and every ZANU-PF fat cat and lackey in between had screwed his beautiful country and forced the hard workers to leave and set up somewhere else. The xenophobic resentment, official and unofficial, that Wellington had encountered in South Africa had pushed him into a life of crime and, eventually, the netherworld of the zama zamas. It was fate. It was a life he was destined for. There, he was able to combine the mining knowledge he had learned in Zimbabwe and the criminal skills he had developed on the streets of Alexandra and Soweto to deadly, lucrative effect.
‘The fishing gear is in the bag,’ Albert whispered conspiratorially.
Wellington looked down at the striped bag and nodded. He inhaled again, savouring the aromatic flavour, adding to it with the expensive cognac. He felt the warm, giddy head spin of victory, which danced enticingly in front of him through the smoke, personified in the ample bottom of the waitress who sashayed past them, caught his eye and smiled. ‘Thank you, Albert.’
Albert raised his eyebrows. ‘What are you going to do with it?’
Wellington raised his guard, as he would if he was anticipating the first blow in a shebeen fight. ‘Why do you ask?’
Albert spread his hands wide and smiled. ‘Just curious, cousin. Perhaps it is a task that you might need some assistance with. Things have been tough on the farm, and I am always looking to diversify.’
Wellington held back the laugh that rose in his throat. He didn’t want to draw unnecessary attention to himself. ‘Things have been tough on the farm.’ If Wellington had been given a mine he, even as a lowly miner, would have known how to run it and make a billion US dollars. Albert had been given a profitable cattle ranch and turned it into a useless sprawling patch of thorn trees.
Albert ran a finger around the collar of his shirt. ‘The offices of our party were bombed in Gweru last month. It was said to be the work of reactionaries from the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. These lapdogs of the British will do anything to undermine the revolution.’
