Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier (6 page)

It is a measure of how brainwashed white Rhodesians were that they were stunned to hear, on March 4, 1980, that Robert Mugabe, a leader of one of the guerrilla factions and a Marxist terrorist—a man whom many of them had never even heard of—had won an absolute majority in the parliamentary elections. As blacks celebrated in the streets of newly independent Zimbabwe, the white residents who had just fought, and lost, a long and bitter war stood by in appalled silence.

In their book,
Rhodesians Never Die,
Peter Godwin and Ian Hancock wrote that the Rhodesian authorities estimated that there were 20,350 war-related deaths in Rhodesia between December 1972 and December 1979. Fewer than 500 white civilians were killed while at least 7,000 black civilians and 10,000 guerrillas were killed. Over 1,000 members of the Security Forces were killed (under half of them white). Black civilian deaths were certainly underestimated and high casualties inflicted on black Rhodesian refugees in external raids (in Mozambique and Zambia) were ignored altogether. The African population bore the brunt of the war, but the European minority shed proportionately more blood. All came out of the war scathed in some way.

What is harder to document are the nonfatal casualties of the war. The victims of suicide (sewerage pipe, it was jokingly called), the alcoholics, the drug addicts, the homeless, the psychologically damaged, the people who (knowing nothing else
but
war) became mercenaries in other African wars (and ended their lives in South Africa, Mozambique, Angola, Somalia, or Namibia). The horror of the war remained largely unspoken and unacknowledged in the celebration of the freedom fighters’ victory. The whites either left the country, and sometimes the continent, or melted back into everyday life and tried to adjust to majority rule. The blacks found that independence had brought them little of the freedom and power they had been promised.

My family left Zimbabwe in 1982, when I was thirteen, a little over two years after the end of the war. We headed first for Malawi and then, when Dad’s contract on a tobacco plantation was up in that country, to Zambia. As part of the physical act of forgetting those years and the Rhodesian land for which my mother and father had fought so inadequately, and so pointlessly, we burned everything that might implicate us in that struggle.

A bonfire at the top of that farm near Umtali turned into ashes the T-shirts that declared “Rhodesia Is Super, Especially Umtali,” “Come to Umtali and Get Bombed,” and “Burma Valley Operation Thrasher.” We burned our Wrex Tarr
Zonke Chilapalapa
record (featuring “A Terrorist’s Lament” and “Picannini Red Riding Hood”) and our Clem Thollet “We Are All Rhodesians” tape, and we watched our propaganda magazines (distributed by the Rhodesian Ministry of Information) spiral into smoke. Then we packed up the dogs and cats and as many possessions as would fit in the back of a Land Rover and we headed north into African countries that had been independent for nearly twenty years.

WHEN DAD CAME OUT of the shower, he said, “Water’s nice and cold. Why don’t you hop in?”

“I’m thinking.”

“Do you want a piece of advice from your old father?”

“Not really.”

“Don’t look back so much or you’ll get wiped out on the tree in front of you.”

Curiosity and Cats

Dad

BY THAT AFTERNOON, the rain had returned. And by late evening, when we sloshed down to the end of the farm to see what remained of its west bank, the river had abandoned all pretense of making its way toward Mozambique in a stately manner and had gathered up its skirts and was racing with unseemly haste, tumbling great chunks of Fuller real estate with it in the process. The island in front of the watchman’s hut was washed away from its foundations and could be seen sailing hurriedly down the Pepani.

Two enterprising young crocodiles, flushed out of the roiling river, worked their way through the bananas to the breeding pond at the top of the farm and inhaled hundreds of fish before they were discovered by Mum.

“Now that,” she said as the pond was drained, “I really cannot allow.”

The crocodiles sank guiltily into the shrinking muddy puddle.

But Mum hardened her jaw. “Nope,” she said, “no clemency.”

Erasmus, the man whose job it was to take care of the breeders, and who had been a poacher before he found employment with Mum and Dad, told Mum, “I have a good trick for killing crocodiles. It is only that I need a torch and a gun.”

“For heaven’s sake,” said Mum, sniffing. “Just bonk the little blighters on the head and bring me their hides.”

Then we hurried back through the rain to the camp, sat huddled under the shelter of the tamarind tree, and tried to ignore the yelps and shouts that wafted down through the persistent rain from the top of the farm.

Eventually Erasmus, looking like the sole survivor of a catastrophic mud slide, appeared with two crocodile skins and laid them on the veranda wall for Mum’s approval. Mum inspected them and said, “Pity about all the holes. They might have made quite a sweet pair of shoes.”

Dad lit his pipe and said, “Still got all your fingers, Erasmus?”

“Bwana?”

Lightning blanketed the sky and turned everything an eerie shade of pale blue for a moment. Thunder swelled around us, as if the belly of the earth were growling.

Mum said, “Thank you, Erasmus. You’d better knock off now.”

Dad said, “You’d better salt those skins like mad, or they’ll start stinking the place up.”

Mum said, “I might pin them up around the ponds as a warning to other crocodiles.”

Dad said, “I’m going to Lusaka tomorrow. Anyone need anything?”

“Should we treat ourselves to a nice fat turkey for Christmas this year?”

“What’s wrong with those things that keep crashing around the garden? Why don’t we eat one of them?”

“Those are Atatürk and Isabelle, and they’re not for eating,” said Mum. “Too tough by now anyway.”

It was quite true that Mum’s pet turkeys had been more than usually exercised by the frequent appearance of snakes and monitor lizards and by the constant unwanted attention of the dogs.

“Crocodile tail?” Dad tried.

“Not very Christmassy,” said Mum. “Go and see the Greek fellow at Cairo Butchery. You might be able to swap some fish for a bird.”

Dad sighed. “All right. What about you, Bobo?”

“I don’t think I can stomach Lusaka,” I said, thinking of the crush of traffic and the blistering Christmas decorations flapping from the shop windows, everything turgid and overblown. I find the forced cheer of the holiday season depressing in northern climes, but the tropical equivalent is almost unbearable. And I thought of myself half suffocated and sweating, permanently assigned to guard the car while Dad negotiated with the Greek butcher. “I’ll stay in the valley,” I said.

Mum said, “You could always help me sex the fish.”

I flinched, “No thanks, Mum,” and said to Dad, “Maybe you could drop me off at K’s farm. I’ll go and look at his bananas.”

Dad threw me a sharp look from above his pipe.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing.”

“I’m curious,” I said.

“You know what they say?”

“What?”

Dad tapped his pipe and cleared his throat. “Curiosity scribbled the cat.”

“Well,” I said, “aren’t you curious?”

“Nope.”

THE NEXT MORNING , shortly after six, Dad stopped the pickup at a signpost advertising a school, a church, and K’s farm. “This is it,” he said. “Just follow the signs.”

“How far?”

Dad shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never been there.” He handed me a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches. “Here.”

“Thanks.”

“It’s on the Chabija River somewhere. Ten or fifteen kilometers, I think.”

“Okay.” I looked out into the vast stretch of Africa that swept in front of me, a rolling belly of land as far as I could see, interrupted by the odd stark hill and bands of dense trees. The occasional throb of smoke chugged up out of the expanse, indicating the presence of a lonely village. There was no sign of a commercial farm, usually distinguishable by a better-than-usual road, tobacco barns, rows of gum trees (grown to fuel flue-cured Virginia tobacco or for fence posts).

“Everyone here knows him. Just ask for Mr. Banana.”

“All right.”

Dad eased the pickup back onto the tarmac. His brown arm wedged out of the window of the cab as he spun away into the distance. The car looked too small and feeble against the space that billowed above it and the great expanse of mopane forest that spread out on either side of it. Very quickly, the pickup became a shimmying white dot against the black road, and then it was gone. I started to walk.

The road to K’s farm was really more of a fitful dirt track than a road in the conventional sense of the word, an irregular cut into the bush, soupy with the recent rain. Within minutes, gluey clay stuck on the soles of my shoes, until I was teetering on a platform of the stuff. I took my shoes off and walked barefoot, letting sausages of mud ease between my toes. As soon as the sun tipped the edge of the horizon and fingered through the mopane trees, the air grew languid with the kind of clammy heat that promises worse to come. On either side of me, there were wallowing settlements—clusters of huts and thorn-branch kraals—exhaling in the post-rain morning sun. There was a salty, sinewy smell of smoked goat meat on the air, mixed with the scent of damp thatch and the raw, churning smell of sun on wet manure. Small, nose-and-eye-seeking mopane flies clustered on my face and congregated in the sweat-cut creases in my neck and behind my knees. Children, desperately malnourished and filthy, made a wake of shouting chorus behind me, practicing their English with triumphant insistence: “How are you? What is your name? Where are you going? Give me your shoes!”

I passed the church—a stern white building set apart from the sporadic jumble of fields and the disarray of huts that made up the villages along here. Its blue wooden doors were locked and its windows, bare narrow slots, were too high for me to see into. The school, a ramshackle affair, was set back from the church on an eroding hill. Next to it, a muddy soccer field lay waterlogged and churned. Two goats and a donkey were nibbling grass near one of the goalposts.

I kept walking and eventually crossed a wide, sandy river and then a reed-spiked wetland, and now the track narrowed to a threaded ribbon through the trees, barely wide enough to allow the passage of a lorry. The villages had thinned to small settlements hacked out of the bush surrounded by balding patches of flooded millet and maize. Chicken coops, suspended from stilts, tilted in the clay, threatening to topple over altogether. At one of these outposts, an old man shuffled out of the bush, tightening a string around the top of ragged trousers. We greeted each other. The old man rubbed rheumy eyes and spat prolifically—he looked and sounded as if he had been smoked over a wood fire for a long, long time.

“Mr. Banana?” I asked, pointing into the ever thickening country ahead of me.

The old man adjusted his trousers and cleared his throat.
“Ee,”
he agreed, and then indicated that he’d like a cigarette. We stood together in the morning sun for the space of one smoke; then he turned and scuffed off into his hut and I returned to the track.

I walked for another kilometer or two and then the feeble track that I had been following abruptly forked, the broader part of it peeling off to the left and the right petering out to an almost indiscernible footpath. The trees were varied and enormous here, great black-barked msasas and wide-bellied winter thorns. I took the left fork and kept walking.

It was late morning by the time my ear caught the sound of men shouting in unison. It was the sound that I associate, in Zambia at least, with men doing work that in much of the rest of the world is done by machines. I hurried toward the noise and there, a few kilometers before the boundary to his farm, were K and a span of laborers. The men were stripped to the waist and were trying to shore up the greasy banks of a steep gorge with the great arms of a mopane tree. K was shouting orders in Shona and the men were scrambling and slithering in response, crying words of exertion and exhortation to one another: “Pamsoro, pamsoro, pamsoro! Sumudza!”

The gorge was the kind of deep-throated slit into the earth that hosts seasonal, lorry-swallowing flash floods. K informed me in a series of breathless shouts that it had spilled its banks in the night and had torn loose the bridge that once spanned it. Now, just twelve hours after the end of the rainstorm, the water had subsided to a series of sedate pools—even though whole limbs of trees hung where they shouldn’t, debris had been thrown high up onto land, and what was left of the bridge was being worn, as a necklace, by a fever tree.

I scrambled down the bank and waded through a coffee-colored pool. K came to the bank and gave me a hand up the other side. I was aware that I was disheveled to the point of dissolving: sweaty, mud-spattered, and flustered. K did not seem at all affected by the heat. Indeed, with his great expanse of hairless skin, he seemed especially modified to suit the climate. He helped the men press three more branches of a tree into the bank and then he stood back. One man came up to K and they spoke together in Shona, their voices low and urgent. Then the man nodded and slid into the water below the level of the bridge.