by Peter Godwin
nine
Boys to Men
AFTER A FEW DAYS IN Chimanimani, we set off south to Silverstream, where Georgina and I both grew up. It is now three weeks since the election. We cross the Silverstream River just above the rapids which tumble into plunge pools where we used to swim as kids, and where Violet our nanny once nearly drowned and our elder sister, Jain, saved her. Silverstream feeds into the Crystal Creek and on into the Rusitu, where it flows through the valley below Lynam’s jambanja’d farm, and out onto the low, steamy Mozambique flood plain.
At the top of the village, above the factory, which processes wattle bark into tannin to cure leather, is our old house, a simple colonial bungalow, with a corrugated tin roof. Outside, I recognize the landscape of my memories, the rolling green lawns of Kikuyu grass, and the malachite kingfishers, which still patronize the pond. The cork oak, flame tree, Northumberland pine, silver oak, syringa tree, jacaranda, the belhambra with its long dangling bracts of white flowers at this time of year, and the coral tree, all sentinels of our childhood.
George and Tanya Webster now live here. Where my father used to have his old slip-covered armchair, next to the big brick fireplace, in the sitting room, where I used to fall asleep with the dogs, Tanya Webster, a large cheerful woman with curly black hair and glasses, now sits, knitting blankets, while kittens swat at her wool. A copy of The Purpose Driven Life sits on her side table. Her husband, George, heavyset, genial, with short, steel-gray hair and mustache, dressed in a black T-shirt and shorts, shows us around.
Our house is the same but different. Ancestral English bric-abrac has been replaced by African tchotchkes. A trio of plump wooden hippos, a copper wall clock in the shape of Africa, a standard lamp made from a varnished tree branch, a family of ceramic guinea fowl, black with white spots, arranged in descending size.
The old cast-iron wood stove has been replaced by an electric one; an en-suite bathroom has been added; the veranda, where I used to lie on the red-cement parapet in my flannel pajamas, watching the thunderstorms roll down from Spitzkop, is now enclosed.
George Webster’s great grandfather came up to Gazaland with the original pioneer column, in July 1893, from Haywards Heath in the UK, via Groot Marico in South Africa.
“My mum was from Bradford, she met my dad in World War II, in the RAF, and came out after the war,” he says. “My dad told her, ‘There are a hundred workers on this farm who speak only Shona, and you speak only English. Either we have to teach a hundred guys to speak English, or you must learn Shona.’ ” Soon she spoke it fluently, as does George, which is just as well as he’s the only white man left in Silverstream. He stays on, mostly so he can help his eighty-eight-year-old father, who is still clinging onto “the Meadows,” their family dairy farm down the Chipinge road.
Like his father before him, George Webster went into the air force. “In those days, during the Rhodesian war,” he recalls, “we used to fly a Canberra jet on a daily recon mission all the way up to the Kenya border, to take aerial photos. It used to fly so high—nearly seventy thousand feet—that from up there you could see both sides of Africa, and it was so cold you had to scrape ice off the cockpit instruments. One took a hit once, but it made it home.”
In late 1980, after independence, he resigned from the air force, along with seventy other technicians, after an ex-guerrilla who had invented his qualifications was brought in over them.
Webster has only been out of Africa once—for six weeks to visit his son Colin in London. He spent the time helping to set up a biltong drier, as his son had done a deal with Sainsbury’s in Wandsworth to take all their unsold fillet at half price, when it reached its sell-by date, and turn it into biltong.
The corridor down the middle of the house is lined with photos of fishing trips off the Mozambique coast, school rugby teams, British soldiers. All but one of the kids are gone: a daughter is in Calgary; a son is in the Royal Engineers, seeing service in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Northern Ireland; another lugs furniture in London, and makes biltong; and the last one, Liam, is about to join him. It seems there is no future for them here.
Webster tells me that five busloads of soldiers in civilian clothes have been deployed into nearby areas where Mugabe lost the vote. And an old Afrikaans farmer, Schalk du Plessis, was just wrenched from his truck by war vets who cuffed his hands behind his back and tied his neck to a tree with fence wire.
As du Plessis sat there against the tree, with the wire around his neck, he saw that his guard was wearing a baseball cap bearing the slogan Jesus Loves You. “So,” says Webster, a committed Christian himself, who distributes Gideon Bibles in the tribal areas, “old Schalk challenged him. ‘How can you do this to me and yet you profess to be Christian?’ he asked.” And the war vet got embarrassed and untied him.
We pause to watch the satellite news on Sky TV—Tendai Biti, one of the MDC’s leaders, is saying that ten of their supporters have now been killed, five hundred injured and four hundred arrested or abducted by Mugabe loyalists in post-election violence. A Chinese freighter packed with weapons for Mugabe—AK rifles with three million bullets, mortars and rocket launchers—has sailed away from Durban, after the South African trade unions there refused to unload it. The Websters cheer.
That night I walk down the wide planked corridor to my old corner bedroom, to sleep there again for the first time in thirty years. The windows still have the same grenade screens that were welded onto them after our neighbor Piet Oberholzer was murdered, and the branches still scratch against them, like they did all those years ago, scaring the boy that I used to be.
I sleep profoundly, dreaming of my childhood. Of m’Apostolic trance dances, and leopard hunts, cattle herding on horseback, and shy pangolins in forest clearings, nibbling food from my palm, ngangas, whom we still called witch doctors then, rocking on the mud floors as they chanted, traditional beer brewing. And deep into the night, on wind-borne surges from the compound, I hear the throb of drums, just like I always used to hear.
IN THE MORNING I am awoken by the mournful train whistle announcing the shift change at the factory. And the cockerel crows serve as a snooze alarm. Over tea, Tanya wonders where the staff are. “They haven’t turned up this morning,” she says, an undercurrent of fear evident in her voice. “I hope nothing terrible’s happened to them…” She tries the phone but it is dead.
George takes us down to the factory, where he does my father’s old job. “Your father was like a god to us when we were growing up,” he says. “I never thought I’d end up running this place.”
The Wattle Company, as the plaque on the office wall recalls, was established as Forrestal Land, Timber and Railways Co., in 1945, by Baron Emile Beaumont d’Erlanger, who, as the head of the Channel Tunnel Company, dreamed of tunneling between England and France in the early twentieth century. Now owned by black Zimbabweans, this Silverstream factory is a working monument to radical improvisation—most of the machinery here is more than fifty years old.
An old Mercedes five-tonner I can still remember remains in service. It was a real beast to handle, called—they all have names hand-painted on their snouts—Boys to Men, because if you learned to drive it, you had made that leap. Behind it is Big Brother, a tractor.
The four huge roaring Hadean boilers are still fed constantly, red flames making short work of the logs being tossed into their gaping black cast-iron maws by rows of sweating, shirtless men. “We used to have one stoker to each boiler, now we need two on each,” says Webster. “The average man is smaller and weaker than his father, due to malnutrition, AIDS, malaria. Silverstream is now one of the worst areas for malaria in the whole country—there’s this mutant strain coming up from Mozambique.”
In my youth, Silverstream was blessedly malaria-free. Areas like this, and most of the colonial capitals, were built above the malaria line, but climate change has nudged up average temperatures, to put them into the mosquito zone.
The factory is running out of bark to process into tann
in. Since late January, Webster says, their foreign currency earnings have been withheld by the Reserve Bank head, Gideon Gono, to fund Mugabe’s election campaign. Now the factory is short of spares, diesel. The whole fleet of trucks is grounded.
The Wattle Company should have a complement of twenty-two hundred workers to keep the plantations and the factory going. But, in a country with 94 percent unemployment, it can only raise eighteen hundred. “We have gold on one side and diamonds on the other, so our guys don’t want to work,” complains Webster. “They can earn more in a day there than they can here in a week.
“At one point there were nearly a million people digging for diamonds. We had workers who would go there to dig for the weekend—the police were charging Z$10m to dig for twenty minutes. Some got great finds—I had one guy come up to me at Chiadzwa with a cake tin full of diamonds!”
Before we leave, Tanya takes us on a farewell tour of the garden. Across from the old Northumberland pine an imposing palm tree now rustles, new since our time. In this little corner of the country, at least, the Websters, as Kipling once put it, in his poem to British imperialism, still hold “dominion over palm and pine.” Then Tanya explains that they dug up the palm from outside a farm homestead in Lemon Kop that was being jambanja’d by war vets.
Georgina and I get down on our knees on the lawn, beneath the coral tree. It is considered a magical tree. Zulu people plant a coral tree on the grave of a chief. The bark is used to make a poultice to heal wounds. We are collecting the small, shiny scarlet seeds that the coral tree has shed. We call them “lucky beans.” As kids, we used to push a needle through their black eyes and thread them on a string to make bracelets. Tanya brings out an old jam jar and we fill it with lucky beans.
BACK ON THE ROAD the next day, we descend into the Savé Valley. The first big baobab, which has prominent veins like those on well-muscled forearms, also has a message whitewashed on its gray bark: Vote MDC 2002. That was the last time power eluded the opposition, and its legal challenges from then are still snarled up in Zimbabwe’s craven courts. At the side of the road, women sell maize meal decanted into tiny bags, and cream-of-tartar fruits, in their furry green maraca husks. Small boys hold up roasted mice, kebab’d on sharp sticks. Years ago, we thought it amusing to send out photos of this as a holiday greeting card, with the caption Happy Crisp Mouse.
A vast python, thigh-thick at its mid-section, stretches gorily dead across the entire width of the road, ludicrously unlucky, as there is almost no traffic. Public transportation is paralyzed by high fuel prices, and lack of spares.
We pass through the shimmering silver arch of Birchenough Bridge, and on into Bikita. On several occasions, Georgina notices people being pushed in wheelbarrows, off to the side, along footpaths, away from the road, and we comment on the transport shortage.
It’s only later, to our shame, that we realize that these are the first of the torture victims of Mugabe’s interrogation bases, too badly hurt to walk, being pushed home in wheelbarrows by their desperate family members.
Georgina’s friend Rita Harvey has asked us to look in on her elderly mother, Jeanette, who lives in the Pioneer Cottages, sheltered accommodation for the elderly in Masvingo town, after being thrown off their farm.
“Go past the burnt-down OK Bazaars, and right at the robots,” says Jeanette on the phone. She is sparrow spry, bright eyed, alert, notwithstanding her hearing aid. Her forty-year-old special-needs son, Forbes, sleeps on the enclosed porch of their tiny cottage, surrounded by his collection of miniature liquor bottles.
“We spent fifty years building that farm up and they took it from us just like that. They’ve destroyed the windmills. I don’t understand, if they want to farm, why destroy the windmills? Now there’s no water.
“For his last four years, my husband, Keith, was bed-ridden and not completely lucid. He kept saying, ‘I want to go home.’ And in the end, he did. He’s buried under a flat-topped acacia tree on the farm. He picked the gravesite himself.”
She shows us photos of her family. “Of my eight grandkids, not a single one is still in this country.” For a moment I think she might cry, but she quickly composes herself.
“I find it difficult to drive now. Mostly we walk, there’s nothing much to carry back from the shops now—the shops are empty. I don’t know what’s going to happen.
“The Zimbabwe Pensioners Support Network people come three or four times a year with a seven-ton lorry. They bring us sugar, cooking oil, jam, rice, and flour. Mrs. Odendaal says she’d starve without it. Someone came and knocked at my door the other day with two loaves of bread, and said, ‘This is from a church in Pretoria.’ Another brought soap and toothpaste wrapped in a towel, with a few sweeties thrown in. And at Christmastime, we each got a little box—a small bottle of whiskey and one of wine and some razors. We don’t know how to say thank you—the trouble they go to—spending their own money, finding out what we need. Forbes likes the biscuits.”
“Yes.” Forbes nods, grinning.
“We are very fortunate, I understand that. It’s so hard for Forbes, though. On the farm, he had a role, he could help with the cattle. He can’t read, and I can’t hear. So, when we watch TV we have to help each other!”
She stands in her tiny garden, next to her carefully tended guava tree and bauhinia, to see us off. But as we leave, she turns fearful again. “We’ve been warned that they’re going to start invading houses next,” she says, “to get ‘hoarders.’ ”
WE DRIVE ON to Harare in silence. Georgina sucks on a silver NicoPipe. At the side of the road youths wave long sticks with plastic bottles on the ends. These are black-market fuel-dealers; the dealers in gold, diamonds, foreign currency, phone cards, all have their own particular choreography. We pass a car transporter heading north to the capital, packed with high-end Mercedes—luxury rides for the fat cats, while most are ragged and desperate. We encounter four roadblocks in quick succession, but the policemen’s hard brown eyes sweep over us and find nothing of interest; they’re looking for baksheesh from those who’ve been shopping in South Africa.
As we drive through Chivhu, which Jeanette had still called Enkeldoorn, “Lone Thorn”—its old Afrikaans name—Georgina starts to recite one of the series of silly limericks I’d composed when the state place-name-change commission had been expunging colonial vestiges:
“A farmer from Enkeldoorn said,
“ ‘Rather than change, I’d be dead.’
“When told it’s now Chivhu
“Said, ‘I don’t believe you.’
“And then put a gun to his head.”
Then she turns the music back up and goes to sleep.
WE HAVE BEEN driving fast because it is the anniversary of the death of our sister, Jain—killed in the Rhodesian bush war twenty-eight years ago today, weeks before her wedding. As soon as we reach Harare, we head straight through the city to the northern suburb of Borrowdale, to Christchurch, where Jain’s ashes are entombed next to Dad’s.
Together we sweep the grass tailings off the two gravestones on the crematorium lawn. As we do so, a marmalade cat strolls over and nudges our legs to be petted, and then curls up, purring, on Dad’s gravestone as it observes us through lazy green eyes.
“It belongs to the old pastor, Father Bertram,” says Rodgers Sokiri, the church gardener. “The one who buried your father. He left to live in South Africa.”
We phone my mother from the graveside and tell her what we’re doing.
“What’s it like there?” she asks. “Describe it for me, Peter.”
So I tell her that there is a marmalade cat purring on Dad’s gravestone, and cockerels are crowing and black-eyed bulbuls are chirping and hopping from branch to branch of the jacaranda trees. That the flamboyant trees are in flower over a bank bursting with white roses. And that amidst them there is a single, startling crimson one, beneath which the cat now settles and begins to wash itself assiduously. That lush banana fronds sway over the boundary wall in the late-afte
rnoon breeze. I tell her that rather than flowers, we have brought lucky beans from the coral tree in our old garden in Silverstream, and that we are pouring them into the runnels of the letters carved into Jain’s gravestone, so that they are now picked out in lines of scarlet.
“How is it in London?” I ask.
“Raining,” she says, and I can hear her quietly weeping on the end of the phone, all those miles away.
ten
My Blood Is Too Heavy
IN OUR WEEK-LONG ABSENCE, Harare’s private hospitals have started to fill with victims of Mugabe’s crackdown against the opposition, which his generals are calling Operation Mavhoterapapi?—“Who Did You Vote For?”
Denias Dombo lies broken on a bed in Dandaro clinic, his dark head propped up against the bright white pillows, trying to eat a slice of bread. His left leg is in plaster from hip to heel, just the calloused khaki sole peeping out the end of the sheet. Both arms are in plaster casts too, right up to the veined ridges of his farmer’s biceps.
He winces as he turns to pick up his teacup because several of his ribs are broken. “Can you lift my leg back up,” he asks. “My blood is too heavy.” On his bedside table is a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped.
“I’m halfway through it,” he says, following my gaze. “I passed tenth grade, you know.”
Dombo trained and worked as a mechanic, until one day nearly twenty years ago when a colleague accidentally switched on the engine he was adjusting, and the spinning fan blades severed two of his fingers—he holds up his plastered left arm to show the digits ending at gnarled nubs just up from the knuckle. After that, he returned to his ancestral home at Mudzi, on the lip of the Zambezi valley, where until last week he farmed groundnuts and maize, and lived in a tidy brushed-earth kraal with three thatched houses and a granary up on wooden stilts, and his seven cattle which slept in a thorn-tree-enclosed pen each night. Around now he should be harvesting his groundnuts, instead of lying shattered in a Harare hospital.
