Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier (5 page)

Dad woke up just before dawn and came down to the picnic table. He wore a length of bright chitenge cloth around his waist, above which his body gleamed white in the shape of his shirt, his arms and neck burned a ruddy brown. He said, “Sleep all right?”

“Fine.”

“Leave any for me?” he asked, shaking the box of cigarettes.

“One or two.”

Dad coughed and lit a cigarette. “How long have you been down here?”

“Hours,” I said.

“Then why didn’t you make the bloody tea yet?”

“I had a nightmare.”

Dad pinched the end of the match out between his thumb and forefinger. “Nightmare make you afraid of the kettle?”

“Nope.”

“Miss your electric stove in America?” asked Dad, breathing smoke at me.

“Maybe.”

Dad made a fire and boiled water, grunting in a soft, mildly complaining way as he laid a tray with cups, a jug of milk, sugar, the cigarette caught in the corner of his mouth. Then we moved up to the top of the camp, sat on the edge of Mum’s flower bed, and watched the graying dawn stroke mist through the rain-startled bush, and a snaky wisp of cloud rise off the Pepani River. We were quiet for a long time, drinking and smoking.

Then I asked, “Do you ever have nightmares about the war?”

“Nope.”

I lit the last cigarette. “Liar.”

Dad cleared his throat.

I said, “I hear you shouting in your sleep sometimes.”

“I’m not asleep. I’m shouting at the bloody dogs.”

“You’re shouting, ‘Heads down!’ and ‘Shit, we’re hit!’ ”

Dad poured himself more tea and shook the empty cigarette box. “It wasn’t much of a war,” he said at last.

“Were you ever scared?”

“Scared to death. Bored to death. Both.”

I had seen my father go off to fight in the war. He didn’t have to go very far from our farm near Umtali, on Rhodesia’s border with Mozambique. He walked to the end of the driveway, where he was picked up in a camouflage-painted Land Rover and taken off with five other farmers to the hills above our house, where they crept about for a couple of weeks hoping not to get noticed by the enemy. My father was called up into the Police Anti-Terrorist Unit (PATU), an outfit known colloquially as Dad’s Army.

“Cannon fodder was what we were,” Dad said. “We were just a bunch of bumbling farmers buggering around in the bush without much of a clue. We were lucky to get out of the war without shooting each other, let alone the bloody gooks.”

Dad gave up guns—even for hunting or crop protection—after the war. So now he and his men chase hippos and elephants off the bananas with gongs and branches of fire and Dad’s brave, thin shouts ragged in the thick, Pepani night, “Come on, you buggers! Off my bananas!”

I said, “K was in the RLI.”

“Really?”

“That’s what I thought at first too.” I took a sip of tea.

“Ha.” Dad shook his head. “In any case, those baskets were tough, I wouldn’t want to argue with one of those troopies.”

The soldiers in the RLI were called troopers (or, colloquially, troopies). The guerrillas nicknamed them MaBruka because the troopers wore very short shorts. Brookies, in Rhodesian slang, are little girls’ underwear.

“Did you believe in the war?”

“What?”

“Did you think it was right?”

Dad said, “Fergodsake, Bobo. The sun’s not even over the top of the bananas.”

“Well?”

“No.”

“Then why did you fight?”

“Call-up.”

“You could have been a conscientious objector.”

“A what?”

“A pacifist.”

“No, I couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“I was there and the war was there and that’s what I had to do. That’s what we all had to do—they didn’t give you a choice. It was stay and fight or get out. We would have lost the farm. We would have lost everything.”

“We lost the farm anyway,” I pointed out.

Dad grunted. “In any case, I wasn’t going to sit the war out and let some other poor bastard get snuffed on my account.”

“Do you regret it?”

Dad stood up and rubbed his belly. “I’m going to have a shower and then I am going to see my fish,” he said.

“Why won’t you talk about it?”

“Nothing to talk about.”

TALK KILLS, the posters above bars from the Eastern Highlands to Wankie had declared during the war. LOOSE TONGUES COST LIVES. I can just about guarantee Dad never killed anyone with his tongue.

I said, “It might do you good to talk about it.”

Dad grunted. “I tell you what would do me good.”

“What?”

“If my daughter left her old man a few bloody cigarettes for his breakfast.” He tromped off to the shower—a loose grass enclosure at the top of the camp that was open to the sky and occasionally sagged open at the edges, revealing glimpses of the soapy, white body within. A silver bucket was suspended by a rope pulley over a circle of red gravel, a rickety bush-pole table held a candle (in a green wine bottle), a dish of soap, and a bottle of shampoo. Frogs and snakes nested in the grass fence and scorpions peered with glinting black eyes from the drain. The dogs trotted after Dad, looking forward to their morning encounter with the shower’s variety of wildlife. In a few moments I heard the squeak of the bucket as it was lowered over my father, then a gush and Dad muttering under his breath at the shock of cold water. One of the Jack Russells came trotting out with her tail raised in victory and a lizard clenched between her jaws.

BY THE MID - 1960S , all but a handful of African countries had gained independence from their European settlers. The Southern Rhodesian government, led by Ian Smith, in a panic lest the British prime minister turn their country over to the Africans too, made a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) on November 11, 1965. Under UDI whites retained power and black Rhodesians remained unable to vote. Wrex Tarr, Rhodesia’s resident wag, reflected the casualness with which whites regarded this momentous decision by tagging UDI a “Universal Declaration of Indifference.” A state of emergency was declared—but this was more a way to keep uppity blacks in line than to placate satiated whites.

Britain and the United Nations Security Council responded to Smith’s move by slamming economic sanctions on the rogue state, and black Rhodesian nationalists began preparing for war, training in countries that were sympathetic to their cause: Zambia, Ghana, Tanzania, China, North Korea, and the Soviet Union. For a time, the nationalist guerrillas dispatched into Rhodesia were quickly captured and killed by government forces; they were, as one white farmer put it, “only a pinprick in our sides” and “merely garden boys.” But, in 1972, the rebels intensified their war. No longer operating from beyond Rhodesia’s borders, they infiltrated the northeast of the country, caching arms near Centenary and Mount Darwin, and living in and off the local villages. From these bases, they attacked white farmers and intimidated their laborers; they laid mines and set ambushes. The “garden boys,” it turned out, weren’t nearly as inept or inefficient as the whites had painted them, and they were serious about gaining their independence.

What made the Rhodesian War almost unique among wars for independence in Africa was that both sides—white and black—considered themselves indigenous to the land. By the start of the war in the in the late sixties, the total population of the country hovered at around 5 million—of that, 230,000 people (at most) were white (or, in appearance, obviously “white”) and were considered by the government to be politically and socially more important than any other race in the country. There was also a small population of Indians and coloureds—coloureds were defined by Rhodesians as people with mixed blood—who ranked in the power base slightly above the blacks, but still far below the whites. By the end of the war, all able-bodied white and coloured men between the ages of seventeen and sixty were on permanent or semipermanent call-up “in defense of Rhodesia.”

The guerrillas belonged in one of two forces—ZANLA (Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army) or ZIPRA (Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army). The Mashona joined the ZANLA forces and made for Mozambique. The Matabele joined the ZIPRA forces and hid in Zambia. Whenever the two forces met, the rivalry that existed between the Matebele and the Mashona, and that preceded their common hatred of the whites, erupted in skirmishes.

The regular Rhodesian army had two battalions—the all-white RLI and the all-black (but white-officered) Rhodesian African Rifles (RAR). The Rhodesians took advantage of the existing enmity between the indigenous nations by dividing the RAR into Mashona and Matabele regiments. When there was trouble in the Matabele areas of Rhodesia, the Mashona troops were sent. When there was trouble in the Mashona area, the Matabele troops were sent.

It is tempting—because it is less complicated—to think of the Rhodesian War as being about right and wrong, black and white. The truth is, of course, blurrier than that. On the whole, it was a war of race, but it was also a war of clashing nations and conflicting ideals. The whites claimed they were defending a way of life, that they were defending the country against communism, that they were protecting “our munts from themselves.” In the late seventies, when the Rhodesian War was at its most desperate and brutal, some of the rest of Africa was in the throes of a postcolonial massacre. The liberators of many African states had learned too well the vile lessons of their erstwhile oppressors and had turned their jaws—sometimes literally—onto their own people.

Blaine Harden, the
Washington Post
bureau chief in sub-Saharan Africa from 1985 to 1989, offers up a smattering of examples of the bizarre behavior of some of Africa’s leaders in the late seventies in his
Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent:

Uganda’s Amin declared himself King of Scotland, sent a cable to Richard Nixon wishing him a “speedy recovery from Water-gate,” and ordered white Britishers to carry him on a throne-like chair into a reception for African diplomats. Before he was toppled in 1979, his troops killed an estimated quarter-million people and ripped Uganda, once the most prosperous country in East Africa, to pieces. Bokassa installed himself in 1977 as “emperor” of the Central African Republic in a diamond-studded, Napoleonic-style ceremony that cost $22 million, one quarter of his country’s national revenue. After his overthrow two years later, he was convicted, among other things, of murdering members of his army, poisoning his grandchild, and taking part in the killing of at least fifty children who had refused to wear school uniforms to school. At Bokassa’s trial in 1987, the prosecutor said there was not enough evidence to convict the former emperor of cannibalism. One of Bokassa’s former cooks, however, testified that his boss kept corpses in a walk-in refrigerator and that Bokassa had once asked him to serve one for supper.

Rumors of cannibalism and chaos in independent Africa were, of course, rich fodder for Rhodesia’s propaganda machine. White Rhodesians, the government argued, had only to look north to see what was in store for them if they allowed the blacks to run the country. Pointing to examples of brutal and inept dictators north of the Zambezi, Ian Smith felt justified in calling black Rhodesians the “happiest blacks in Africa.”

The black guerrillas were fighting for their freedom—the freedom to vote, to own land, to receive a good and equitable education, and to walk the streets of their own country without fear. The liberation forces were regaled by their leaders with a picture of Rhodesia as it had been in precolonial times: an era of prosperity and pride, of great architecture and stunning art. It had been a time of self-sufficiency, freedom, and fairness. It had been, above all, a time when the great Mashona farmers had been allowed to cultivate their own land and when the brave Matabele warriors and cattlemen had been allowed to defend their own livestock against lions and theft.

Both sides claimed to be morally right.

Acts of stunning bravery and of spectacular cowardice were committed on both sides. Neither side was exempt from atrocities. Both sides were brutalized by the experience. The guerrillas terrorized villagers, raped civilian women, killed alleged “sellouts,” murdered innocent families, and desecrated churches; the Rhodesian Security Forces tortured and murdered their prisoners, burned villages, raped civilian women “sympathizers.” And at the end of it all, soldiers of all colors and political persuasions were left washed up and anchorless in some profound way—like the guilty survivors of a natural disaster. War is not the fault of soldiers, but it becomes their life’s burden.

Anyone who has existed on the soil on which a war is fought knows the look of the returned soldier—the haunted look of someone who has seen more than his fair share of horror. People who have inflicted pain, who have destroyed, who have been in pain and been destroyed. People whose words for killing reflect the casualness with which they have learned to view the act: “scribbled,” “culled,” “plugged,” “slotted,” “taken out,” “drilled,” “wasted,” “stonked,” “hammered,” “wiped out,” “snuffed.”

By the late seventies, the Rhodesian government was finding it more and more difficult to finance its efforts and to persuade the increasingly weary population that this gruesome war was a viable alternative to black majority rule. In December 1979, the United States and Britain brokered a cease-fire, which led to all-party elections in 1980.