The Dust Diaries (26 page)

‘Have you now?’ Pruen asked, like a father showing admiration for some feat performed by his son. ‘Well done, well done.’

Out of the corner of his eye Arthur became aware of another figure approaching them from the direction of the khaki tents of the Fusiliers’ camp. Pruen sensed the figure too and turned to see who was joining them. The man was approaching with a quick, confident stride that belied the age written across his face. He was taller than Pruen, but shared the characteristic bearing of a body that had once been heavier, the same loose skin about his neck and chin. He also, like Pruen, wore the uniform of a Fusiliers officer, but had adapted it to the style of a bush ranger, his sleeves rolled to above the elbow and a beaten soft leather hat instead of the regulation solar helmet. The hat’s wide brim was pinned up on one side like a hunter’s, beneath which a pair of bushy white eyebrows and a white goatee sat in shocking contrast to the tanned skin of his face. As he got closer Arthur noticed that whatever emaciation had thinned his face and waist had somehow left his arms and chest intact. They were solid and broad, like those of a labouring man.

Pruen greeted the new arrival with the eagerness of a dog meeting his master. ‘Ah! Lieutenant Selous! Come here, come here, I want you to meet an old friend of mine.’

Arthur couldn’t help smiling at the sudden promotion in intimacy despite the fifteen years since their last meeting.

‘Lieutenant Frederick Selous,’ he continued, gesturing on either side to the two of them. ‘The Reverend Father Cripps. Father Cripps, Lieutenant Selous—although I suspect the lieutenant needs no introduction?’

Pruen raised the inflexion at the end of the sentence, turning it into a question. And he was right. The Lieutenant did not need any introduction, Arthur had indeed heard of Selous before. It was almost impossible to live in Charter country and not hear of him. His name was something of a legend in Southern Rhodesia. Second only to that of Rhodes himself, his was the most often mentioned in settler circles when the nostalgic fires of frontier memories were being stoked. For the last fifty years he had been the country’s foremost big-game hunter and naturalist, famously guiding President Roosevelt on his African safari. He had a reputation as a prolific writer, was a gifted musician and at the age of sixty-four was already a veteran of the Matabele wars of the 18905. Arthur had, however, first paid attention to his name not because of his talent for action, but rather his fierce opposition to it. He remembered reading some letters Selous had written to the
Salisbury Herald
objecting to the Boer campaign and the treatment of Boer prisoners and their families. The letters made a deep impression on Arthur at the time. He had once overheard a friend of Selous’ describe the hunter as ‘a moral antiseptic in a country where men are not saints’. It was a welcome surprise to find the same man standing before him now.

The dull clatter of the loading process continued on the lake shore behind them and the flies kept up a dog-fighting buzz around their heads as the two men shook hands.

‘Yes, your name goes before you, Lieutenant,’ Arthur said. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you in person.’

‘And if you’re the Cripps I think you are, then it’s an even greater pleasure to meet you. I’ve read your work—I admire it.
Bay Tree Country
especially.’

Pruen looked on, beaming, like a chemist who had elicited a satisfying reaction from the introduction of two unknown substances.

‘And I’d like to talk further,’ Selous continued, ‘but I’m afraid I’ve come to break up your reunion.’ He turned to Pruen. ‘The men are almost ready, Pruen. Driscoll’s getting jumpy. We should have them fall in.’

A seriousness fell like a veil across Pruen’s face and Arthur suddenly thought how old he looked. How old ihey both looked. Too old. Too full of examined life to go and risk it all before the German guns. In Flanders they were sacrificing boys. Here, it was grandfathers.

Selous turned back to Arthur. ‘Will you be blessing us on our way, Father? ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ and all that?’

‘Well, yes, I will, but it needn’t end there. I’m coming along as well.’

‘You’re coming with us? To Bukoba?’

‘Yes.’

The two older men raised their eyebrows in unison. Selous nodded slowly and looked at Arthur from under the brim of his hat. ‘Are you now? Well, there’s a thing. A parson coming along for the ride. Good for you, Father, good for you.’

Maronda Mashanu, Mashonaland, Southern Rhodesia

‘Good for you, Baba, good for you.’

Fortune’s voice reaches him as if down a long corridor filled with cotton wool. Faint, blurred at the edges. Then he feels the cup again, its tin lip at his own, the taste of the wild apple juice spilling over them, running down his chin.

The war. That had not been an easy decision for him to make, philosophically or practically, and he remembers now how the question of what he should do wore away at him, night after night, when the mud walls of this rondavel were still barely dry. At first, like his friends and his family who wrote to him from England, he’d thought the war would be a military, not a civilian conflict. A breast-beating of the countries’ professional armies. But like most of Europe they’d underestimated the strength of its magnetism after so many years of peace. They had not foreseen the efficacy of modern warfare—but then how could they have? Kitchener and his finger, part accusatory, part elective; the million-man army drawn from sons, brothers and fathers. Mons, Ypres, the fingers of the war stretching as far as their homes, the tight black print of the casualty lists, the soft drop of the telegram, the silence in bedrooms in a million houses.

But even then, when war was gathering Europe in its fist, he’d still been surprised when it drew the colonies in too; when the guns fired at the battle of Tanga, sounding the note that war had arrived in Africa despite both the British and German governors’ reluctance to enter the arguments of their parent nations. And that was when the recruiting began. The farmers and their sons went eagerly enough. The English and the Dutch around Enkeldoorn, whose countries had so recently been fighting each other, displayed a particularly natural talent for mobilisation, for the transition from civilian to soldier. Gradually, the area became emasculated. Parties of men set off for Nairobi to offer their services to the king. Cullen Gouldsbury, feeling the duty of his youth, had already joined the KAR, and after Tanga most of the other Enkeldoorn officials followed his example.

Unlike so much else in the country, colour was no longer a barrier to entry. The Matabele who lived around some of Arthur’s outlying mission stations were soon taken into training, their warrior past qualifying them as a ‘martial race’ on the clipboard forms held under the arms of the upright recruiting officers. But the war needed men for more than just fighting, and soon the Shona men who Arthur lived and worked among began leaving their homes too, not for the regiments of the KAR but for the carrier corps. They often took their families with them and it was then, when so many Africans were leaving for war, that the decision about what he should do had risen to the forefront of his mind.

Initially, the recruiting of Africans into both the KAR and the carrier corps had simply evoked his now familiar sense of moral exasperation with the colonial government. Since the first days of their presence they had treated the African as a child. A child they could put to work, but still an infant, intellectually and socially. And the analogy was not purely metaphorical; many settlers still accepted the ‘medical evidence’ that proved an African’s brain ceased to develop past the age of fourteen. It was an anthropological perspective he had struggled against throughout his tour in Mashonaland and now it was further distorted by the administration’s decision to recruit Africans. Though regarded as a child, the African was suddenly honoured with the responsibility of a man. The right to kill and be killed.

However much this paradox outraged him the fact remained that the war was a reality and it would spill African as well as European blood. Black hands would fight, carry, cook, clean, wash, push and pull. War had spread its shadow across the races of the world as it had across its countries. Native Africans along with the other empire races were caught in its darkness and as long as they were he felt he should be too. He knew how the Africans would exist within the British Army. As they had done under all British administration, multitudinous in body and non-existent in voice. Someone had to speak for them. And so, despite his long-held pacifism, he eventually went to war, and for largely the same reasons he had first come to Africa. To lessen the impact of European affairs on the natives of the country. Another disease had been imported by the settlers and he hoped his presence might provide some protection against its symptoms of Honour, Might and Majesty and its lasting scar of loss.

Fortune has left him, tutting and, he thinks, probably shaking her head because he did not drink as much as she wanted him to. He senses her body, momentarily covering the light of the door, of the day, then passing on through, opening a warm ray of sunlight again.

He reaches his hand in front of his face and finds the beams, imagines the universes of dust orbiting in them. Cupping his hand slightly, he follows the light, as if it were a rail supporting him, until it comes to rest against the stone wall of his hut. Here, he flattens his hand against the surface; feels the pock-marked rock and the smooth, dry mud paste. The ridges and the valleys of the stone.

Having made his decision, he’d found the practical implications of leaving these stones, his mission work in Mashonaland, an equally hard dilemma to bear. Just a year earlier he had established his own mission station here, ten miles north of Enkeldoorn. It stood on one of four farms he’d bought with the aid of a government grant, the royalties from his books and a trust fund his brother William had tried his best to keep him away from.

The mission took its name from that he had given the whole area: Maronda Mashanu, the Saint of the Five Wounds. Although it was eleven years since his arrival in Africa, the purchase of the farms and the establishment of this station felt like a true beginning for him, as if the previous time in the country had been a false start. In moving to his own mission station, on his own land, he felt the potential of his work, the purpose of his living in Africa might finally be reached. Free of Charter government native land law and the restrictions of the Anglican Church, an era of self-sufficiency, both spiritually and materially, was close at hand.

Many families who had lived with him at Wreningham followed him to Maronda Mashanu. Two local headmen, Mashonganyika and Pfumojeni, chose to move their kraals from the Manyeni reserve to his farms and more families came in their wake, persuaded by their headmen’s choice and attracted by his vision of free land for Africans. Because there would be no hut tax on his land, no government inspectors, no controls and no rents. Each man would farm and live on his own portion of land as freely as the white farmers tilled theirs.

At night he lay in his hut re-reading his battered copy of Theocritus’
Idylls
by the light of a stuttering candle, and by day he saw the poet’s vision reflected in his four African mission farms. He felt his idea of an Africa independent from European influence begin to take shape. Simple, pastoral, prelapsarian. An edaphic, unhindered existence.

The four farms covered a sweep of veld that lay across the path he had walked so often between Wreningham and Enkeldoorn. The land was good, requisitioned by the government for white purchase only and covered a total of 7,800 acres. It was the type of land that he had at first found so monotonous, but which he had, in time, come to love. Expansive, scattered with low contorted bush trees, ancient baobabs with their obese, knotted trunks and the crimson fire blossom of the fever, acacia musasa and mopane trees. Sculptures of granite outcrops gave way to huge, bare-sided inselbergs, motte and bailey kopjes, swathes of blond grass—a land criss-crossed with dusty paths and vibrant with cicadas. A land capable of awesome stillness or, under the rain, the wind, momentous movement. It was raw and basic and yet for him imbued with a sacrosanct quality he valued as much as any cathedral.

A few weeks after he’d purchased the land he trekked alone across the whole area, looking for a place to establish a church. Late on the second day of his trek he followed a branch of the main river that ebbed and rushed through all four of the farms, a slither in the dry season, a torrent in the wet. The branch stream ran down through a shallow dip in the land, through a band of thorn and bush trees, into a cluster of euphorbia and out into a clearing below a small kopje. Pushing his way through the low branches he walked out and stood at the centre of the clearing. His cotton shirt was heavy with his own sweat and a pair of flies circled him, buzzing at his ear, lighting on his skin and buzzing away again. Tipping his hat back on his head he’d looked up above the ring of green treetops. A single eagle circled in the bare sky above him, its wings and tail forming a dark crucifix against the evening sunlight. He knew he had found the place where he would build his church.

A month later he’d returned to the clearing again and began work with the same Matabele workmen with whom he had built the school at Wreningham. Since his last visit to the clearing he had already built the church many times in his mind, and even as the men first swung their mattocks to break the red topsoil he could already see the finished building in the clearing, its high thatched roof encircled by the trees and the shadow of the kopje falling across its bleached stone walls.

He knew the church before it was built because he had already seen the building he wanted it to look like. Earlier that year he’d trekked down as far as Fort Victoria and camped out in the Zimbabwe ruins. Sitting with his back against the trunk of a mopani tree he had smoked his pipe and watched the setting sun transform the conical tower, the high walls, the crumbled pillars, into a shadow show of silent grandeur. He did not know the history of the place—whether it had been a gold mine, a fortress, a city, a temple—but he knew it was in some way sacred, and made all the more so by its current supplication to nature. Lizards stop-started across the tall tower, slipping between its flat stones; cranes, hornbills, weaver and secretary birds nested in the trees that grew in the shelter of its walls and baboons sat back on their haunches, solemnly chewing on damba fruit at the bases of its fallen pillars.