The Dust Diaries (13 page)

The station itself occupies a low kopje that overlooks an expanse of tall yellow grass through which the wind, when it comes, blows shifting waves of shadow and light. Outcrops of granite and the odd thorn tree are the only features to break the immediate view on all sides, although just over the horizon there are scatterings of Mashona kraals, their conical rondavels dotting the ground down towards a dip in the land where a sluggish river ebbs and flows with the seasons. At the top of the kopje two huge gum trees stand on either side of a small compound. In front of these is the square thatched hut that serves as both church and schoolroom, and behind this another hut of a similar shape, but smaller, which is the priest’s quarters. The store room and kitchen stand a few yards further off again. Across from the church a ragged line of rondavels back onto a patch of scrubland vegetation that falls away down the east flank of the kopje. Their walls are made of a crude wattle and daub and their mud-clotted thatches reach almost as far as the floor. Goats, dogs and chickens wander freely about the area between these huts and the church, and the air is often languid with the heavy smoke of open or smouldering fires, lingering like incense.

Arthur stops again, this time by an acacia tree that he knows marks the half-way point on the track. Digging in his satchel between the books and the letters, his fingers find the cold steel of his water bottle. Pulling it free with a metallic swill of the water inside, he untwists the cap, and brings the bottle to his lips and drinks. The water is still cool despite the growing heat of the day and he feels it run down his throat into his stomach, tracing the route of his gullet with a chill sensation, coming to rest in a dark cold patch in the pit of his belly. He resists the temptation to drain the bottle, although he knows he needs the water. He has not long recovered from a bout of malarial fever, and he still carries the residue of that sickness in the shape of a vicious thirst. But he is only half-way, so he places the bottle back in his satchel, buckles its one strap and carries on again.

Ahead of him is Enkeldoorn, the only other significant destination on this path apart from Wreningham. It is a small place, no more than fifty or sixty people making it their permanent home, and its history is one of chance and accident rather than design. Arthur is not alone in considering it something of a lost town.

Enkeldoorn was established hurriedly in 1896 when news of the attacks by the Matabele impis in the south of the country reached the area of low veld and vlei country in which the town now lies. The stories of butchery and burning were enough to rush a scattered collection of pioneers together to form a laager around the one existing farm. When the rebellion receded these pioneers remained, naming their new home after a prominent Kamuldoorn tree that stood sentinel over the settlement: Enkeldoorn, the Dutch for ‘single thorn’. For a while they were the only white men and women to live under the tree’s long evening shadow, but gradually more came to join them, lured south by stories of gold reefs, rich for the picking, that were spreading through the country and through Europe like a virus. One reef was said to pass right through the hills outside Enkeldoorn, a glittering band of wealth embedded in the rock, just below the surface of the thin soil. And so they came, with their dynamite and their dreams, and Enkeldoorn was born again as a prospecting town. Bank clerks and shopkeepers became miners overnight, setting out in ones and twos on wagons loaded up with explosives, mining tools and a couple of native boys riding on the back, their legs dangling into the dust clouds stirred up by the wheels.

After weeks in the bush these men would return, pale with rock dust, smelling of dynamite and the earth. They went to drink in Vic’s Tavern, the only bar in town, but they weren’t there just looking for drink, or even for an hour with one of the handful of whores who had come down from Salisbury. They were also looking for other men and, more particularly, for other men’s dreams: for someone they could take aside into a corner after a few whiskies, and on whose shoulder they could lay their hand as they pulled out a lump of quartz from their pocket, which they’d spit on to reveal the specks and strands of gold hidden inside. With these waistcoat tempters many an administrator or traveller was persuaded to put up a share of capital in a mining enterprise. But all too often the prospector would then disappear, leaving them with their anticipation of riches dwindling by the day. Because the gold in the hills did not exist after all. But now Enkeldoorn did, and so it remained, washed up on its imaginary reef out in the veld, four days’ wagon drive from Fort Salisbury and a week’s at least from any other town of consequence.

In the years since Enkddoorn’s brief gold rush a spur of the railway had been promised to the town by Rhodes himself, but when Arthur arrived in 1901 Enkeldoorn was still waiting for it to be built, to come and lend a meaning to its lonely existence. At least with a railway the town could claim to be the end of the line. As it was it was not even that. It was simply a full stop in itself, a stubborn outcrop of European life set adrift in the heartland of Africa.

The railway spur never came, but in its absence Enkeldoorn made the best of its lonely position. Destined never to be a destination in itself, the town became a trading post, a supply town, a stopping and going place, supplying the farmers that surrounded it and the travellers that passed through it.

The geography of the town, like its character, was uncomplicated. Widely dispersed dwellings, lean-tos and huts spread out from a tighter concentration of buildings that lined the one main street. This street was a wide streak of dust flanked by wooden and brick buildings with clumps of veld grass growing in between them. On it stood the post office, Vic’s Tavern, the administration offices, the police station and a collection of shops selling pioneer equipment: tools, tents and general supplies. At the end of the high street was the town jail, a long squat iron-roofed block in which a dozen or so natives served sentences for offences that many of them never knew were offences, breaking, as they did, no code of their own. Early each morning a couple of native policemen overseen by a white officer escorted these prisoners out of town, chained neck and foot, to work on the Salisbury road. Apparently, somewhere to the south of Salisbury there was another group of chained men, also working on the same road, the idea being that one day they would meet, and Enkeldoorn would finally have a clean link to the capital. No one Arthur had spoken to seemed particularly convinced of this.

The only other building of any stature was the Dutch Reformed church, set back from the high street on the left as you approached from Salisbury. This is where Reverend Liebenberg preaches to the town’s Dutch and Afrikaans population, and where he also lets Arthur preach to the much smaller Anglican congregation. It was an arrangement the two men came to not long after Arthur’s arrival in the area, it being obvious to both of them that the question of denomination was a diminished one in comparison to the scale of the task they both faced. Liebenberg and his wife had since become good friends of Arthur’s, and recently Liebenberg had even been kind enough to play the church’s old piano in Arthur’s services, banging out the hymns on the yellowing keys with such enthusiasm that he often drowned out the singing of the small congregation altogether.

These then, were the punctuation points of Arthur’s life in Mashona-land. Enkeldoorn and Wreningham, white and black, commerce and church, lost and found. It was in these two locations that his contrasting parishes lay, and this is why he spent so much of his time on this track, passing between the settlements twice a week on his solitary treks, etching his mark on the country with his feet.

On the veld, alone, however, was where he felt he most belonged. After three years in Africa it was here he felt closest to the essence of the country, and to his God. Sometimes, on the longer treks to other towns and villages further away, he would sleep out in the open, lying beside his camp fire, tracing the myths and stories of the constellations, familiar and yet different in the southern sky above him. Waking in the morning, his red blanket covered with dew, he would perform a private Eucharist on a nearby rock, or on the bank of a stream, before packing up and carrying on again. It felt completely natural for him to do this, and it was during these solitary celebrations that he was at his most content. And in many ways he thought this was suitable: that he felt most complete neither in Enkeldoorn nor in Wreningham, but in between them. He was, after all, the in-between man, in every sense of the word. Between sky and earth, God and man, European and African. For although by skin colour and country he belonged to the whites in Enkeldoorn, he knew he could never feel himself a pan of their pioneer lifestyle, and in return he knew that many of them were suspicious of him. His closeness to the natives and his attempts to live with and like them unnerved the Dutch farmers and the British administrators alike.

In the first few years he’d found it no easier with the Africans, many of whom also regarded him with suspicion. The people who lived on and around the mission recognised his good intentions but however hard he tried to serve them he was, for many outside the mission, just another European
mufundisi
bringing talk of a God and rituals that disturbed the stability of their own beliefs. Some of the Mashona elders in the surrounding villages feared he would upset the delicate balance of their ancestors’ spirits while the
n’angas
, the local shamans, saw him as a professional threat and did what they could to fan this fear. Arthur had heard some had even warned the people that allegiance to the white man’s God would anger the
Mhondoro
, the tribal spirit, and bring tragedy upon their families.

In those early years Arthur’s lack of Shona was a further frustration. The young missionary girl who had been his tutor in Umtali, having been told so often that the white men were right, had been too timid to ever correct his mistakes, so he arrived in Wreningham with a more imperfect grasp of the tongue than he had hoped. For the first year at the mission he spent hours in his hut each night, bent over a Shona grammar and dictionary, painfully composing his sermons word by word and learni ng them by heart by the light of a candle. But his efforts at fluency on paper were all too often dismantled on his tongue as he stumbled through the subtle nuances of the language’s tonal pronunciation. It was only when the young mission boys began running around the church hut with their knuckles on the ground in the manner of chimpanzees every time he spoke of
Shoko Kristu
, that he learnt he had been preaching for months not as he had thought on Christ’s
message
, but Christ’s
monkey
. There was only a breath and an upward inflexion between the two words, but it was enough.

The language, however, could be mastered, and in the meantime he had continued to try and serve the Mashona by doctoring, representing them in the colonial courts, assisting with their farming and helping in family disputes where he could. But there were other elements of his presence among them that were harder to overcome. Above all, there was the fact that he was white. The 1896
chimurenga
had happened only eight years ago; the European settlers had killed over four thousand natives in revenge. The Mashona had not forgotten, and could not forget, these men, or the things they had done. Stories were still told in kraals and around fires of how the suspected rebels were hunted down and hung from trees and of how caves into which whole families had fled were dynamited by their pursuers.

When Arthur arrived in 1901, the relationship between the white settlers and the native Mashona in the wake of the uprising was uneasy and awkward, but he was still surprised at the extent of the settlers’ ignorance and disinterest in the Africans around them. Interaction was minimal, restricted to the boys and women who worked for them as carriers, cooks or maids, and even in these situations the meeting of the two cultures was rarely successful. Either the Africans were mistreated or they stole from their employers, or, most commonly, they simply left and went back to their kraals. Because before the settlers came the Mashona had no need to work for money, and for most this was still the case. The settlers, however, needed labour to build their new world, and they were frustrated by the thousands of natives who refused to supply it. The Africans’ apparent absence of wants stood in exact opposition to their own lives. They were here for gold, farming, trade. The Mashona were simply here.

This problem of the labour situation dominated discussion across the settler community. It had been a thorn in the side of the administration since the establishment of the British South Africa Company; in principle they were opposed to slavery but they were also desperate to engage the massive potential labour force they saw before them. The Company found an answer to the problem with the introduction of a ‘hut tax’ to be paid by every male native for himself and for each of his wives. The tax was required in cash, and cash could only be earned by working in the settlers’ mines, houses or farms. It seemed simple. The Africans had an absence of wants, so in its place the Company had created a need. The need for money.

The hut tax further exasperated the already fragile settler-native relationship and its initial establishment had been at the root of the native uprising in 1896. For the Mashona in Mashonaland and the Matabele in Matabeleland the twenty years of rule by the white population had brought nothing but disruption to their way of life. Whole tribes had been moved from their ancestral land where their forefathers were buried, and foreign diseases were brought into the country killing both the people and their livestock. Herdsmen were forced to dip their cattle in the local streams to protect them against rinderpest and foot and mouth, only to find that the dipping chemicals polluted their drinking water. And now the hut tax was to be levied in every district to pay for the price of this disruption. It was a move too far for many, and encouraged by their spirit mediums they rose against the white men. Eight years later that uprising had been reduced to fireside myth, the rebel leaders were long dead, the Mashona’s self-belief was crushed and the hut tax still remained. The men around Wren-ingham wore its brass payment tokens on pieces of cord around their necks. Arthur had noticed these necklaces were something of a status symbol for the younger men; the more tokens, the more wives, and the more huts. But for the older men he knew the necklaces were worn in another symbolic gesture. For them, who could remember life here before the settlers, the brass tokens threaded on a string of hide were a reminder, worn against their skin, of their new position in a land they had once called their own.