The Dust Diaries (31 page)

The
ruga-ruga
were Masi warriors recruited as German irregulars. Tendai knew they could track and hunt any animal on the veld. He’d caught a glimpse of one of them the day before as he hid behind a rock by the river. A tall, lean man, about his own age. His hair was shaved into a tuft at the front of his head, a water gourd was slung across his chest and he wore a simple limbo cloth and a blanket, also tied across his chest. He carried an old German musket. As the man had stopped to drink from his gourd, Tendai saw that the stories were true: both his lower and upper teeth had been sharpened. Another porter at the lake once told him the Masi ate the flesh of their enemies. Tendai hadn’t believed him, but now, lying in the tall grass, listening to the
ruga-ruga
work their way nearer and nearer to his hiding place, he couldn’t help but remember both the porters tale and that flash of sharpened teeth.

More flies were gathering on his back, drawn to the unhealed scars that criss-crossed his spine; long wheals of thickened skin like stout white string. His shirt was thin and torn, and the blood seeped through the cotton in long, dark patches. Worried the flies would attract the attention of the
ruga-ruga
, he carefully rolled from his side onto his back. Every rustle of the grass against his skin seemed loud in his ears. His breath felt clumsy and his heartbeat so strong he was sure its echo through the ground would be enough for the Masi to find him.

The scars on his back were from a
niboko
, a hippo-hide whip. He had left the lake camp shortly after receiving them but his troubles had begun long before that whipping. Lying in the grass, his eyes tightly shut, his body aching and his throat dust-dry, he knew exactly the moment all his pain could be traced back to: one minute on a trek several months before. The minute when they killed the rhino.

They had been coming back from a patrol. Tendai was with a party of porters bearing for a company of the 3
rd
KAR. He was used to the assumed superiority of white men. He had grown up expecting the Europeans in and around Enkeldoorn to treat him and his mother as if they were hardly there. To shout orders at them, to hoot their cars to clear them off the road. It was the way of things. But bearing for askaris, other Africans, was something he had been finding hard to understand, to adjust to. They treated him like the white men did, as if their uniforms changed the colour of their skin.

He remembered that trek as one of the worst, not just because of the askaris, but also because several porters had died, leaving the remaining carriers loaded with more than their usual baggage. And of course because of what happened later. As they marched two abreast in a long line through the veld, his arms ached as if they would fall off his body, and his legs felt as if they were rooted in the earth. Every step was an effort, a tearing of these roots from the dry soil. But then perhaps that is why the rhino had come then. Because he was so unhappy, and the rhino knew he was, because the rhino was his animal.

When he was very young Tendai’s father told him the rhino was his totem. He had whispered it to him, very quietly, as if it were a great secret, an important message to be remembered. He even gave him a totem name,
Chipembere
. Rhino. Tendai listened carefully, wide-eyed, to his father as he told him he must never kill or eat his totem animal. If he did, it would bring very bad luck.

The next day Tendai proudly told his mother that his totem was the rhino: the strong, brave, rhino with a hide like iron. She had picked him up, laughed and said, ‘So, little man, is that your father talking again?’ The next week the white men came and killed his father. Tendai was sure the telling of his secret had brought bad luck. That it had brought the white men and his father’s death.

The rhino’s first charge smashed through the line ahead of him. No one had seen it behind the trees. The marching soldiers must have surprised it; perhaps it had been asleep. Tendai heard its pounding hooves, a scatter of screams from the askaris, and then it was through them, trampling the men like blades of grass. The line broke in every direction as the rhino slowed and heaved its body around to face the fleeing soldiers and carriers. Tendai stood, frozen. Perhaps he would have some power over the animal because it was his totem. He stared at it, watching its blinking short-sighted eyes, willing it to leave. But it lowered its head, pawed the ground and began a second charge, smashing through a Scotch cart, splintering the wood and throwing boxes and sacks of supplies into the air. Again it slowed in a cloud of dust on the other side of the line and turned. Gathering its shoulders underneath itself, it leant forward and began a third charge. But then the machine-gun fired. A cracking rattle of bullets from a juddering Vickers gun mounted on a rock. Tendai saw the shake and stutter of its ammunition belt, the vibrating arms of the askari firing it, the shouting face of the white officer behind him, screaming ‘Fire! Fire! Fire!’

The rhino was charging straight at the gun. The bullets splintered and shattered its horn, sprayed its face, exploded an eye, raked across its body, breaking its hide. But still it charged, straight into the rain of lead, slowing against the bullets as a person might slow against an oncoming wind. Its gallop faltered to a trot, then to a stumbling walk, then, as the gun kept up its relentless firing, finally it collapsed. The gun stopped, its last report ringing out over the veld, the panicked rattle of its firing replaced by silence, then by squawks and screams of frightened birds. The rhino lay before it, shattered and broken, bleeding into the dusty ground. Its armoured body shook with a last grunting breath and then was still. Everyone stared at its broken bulk while the officer behind the machine-gun walked forward and nudged at its neck with his foot. Satisfied it was dead, he took off his helmet and wiped his pale face with the back of his sleeve.

Slowly, the line re-formed. Men emerged from behind rocks and bushes, gathered their rifles, their baggage and arranged themselves into marching order. The wounded askaris were placed on stretchers. An officer blew a whistle, and they trekked on, back towards the camp. As he walked behind the marching soldiers Tendai was certain that now he would have bad luck. His totem had been killed before his eyes. He had not tried to save it and now it would have its revenge.

So Tendai was not surprised when disease swept through the carriers’ camp, leaving hundreds of porters dead in a month. And he was not even surprised when he was arrested and wrongly accused by the pay master of stealing a tin of ghee from the supply store. He attributed everything to the death of his totem animal. But the punishment for the theft of the ghee had been too much for him, and it was after this that he decided to leave the camp and return to Maronda Mashanu. Four askaris had held him down, one at each limb, with a fifth sitting astride his shoulders. His shirt was pulled up to his neck, and his shorts down over his buttocks, exposing the skin between. A sixth askari stood over him and Tendai could smell the scent of the coconut oil rubbed in the
niboko
as he flexed the whip in his hands.

After the fifteenth lash Tendai managed to escape the grip of the askaris and begged the officer in charge to stop. But Captain Mein-ertzhagen had insisted the full punishment be carried out, and they had pinned him down once more for the remaining five lashes.

He was in the hospital tent for a week after that, but as soon as he could move his back again he left, slipping out of the camp in the middle of the night. He knew if he stayed there he would die, and he knew he could not die yet. He had no children to prepare his burial, to perform the necessary rituals. His spirit would be lost, left to wander for ever. So he left. To save himself and to save his spirit. He would, somehow, make his way back to Maronda Mashanu. There, he would care for his mother and farm the land. He would grow maize and pumpkins and sell enough of his crops to buy cattle. With cattle he would be able to marry and then, when he had a wife and a farm, if Baba Cripps taught him to, perhaps he would teach the children in the school. He would never leave Maronda Mashanu and he would never carry or work for another man again.

Tendai had his eyes shut, so he did not see the
ruga-ruga
part the long grass with the blade of his bayonet. He did not see the filed points of his sharpened teeth, the raising of his rifle, or the fine dark tattoos etched on the cheeks of his face. He just heard the grunt of effort as the man brought the bayonet down. Felt a sudden cold on the right side of his groin, a rasping scrape as the blade caught the edge of his pelvis, the tug on his body, as if he were a puppet, as it was pulled out again, the cold turn to heat, spreading up his stomach. Then the heat punctured with more cold, as the man stabbed and stabbed again. He did not see anything, but kept his eyes shut, and as the bayonet pierced his throat, he was already dreaming of rhinos charging through the veld, of his mother and his father, standing at the top of the kopje, welcoming him home.

Maronda Mashanu, Mashonaland, Southern Rhodesia

Fortune is kneeling at his side, holding a tin bowl in front of him and guiding his hand into its contents. He feels the soft, warm sadza there. Like mashed potato, but thicker in the grain. Pinching a little between his finger and thumb, as if he were testing cotton, he brings it to his mouth. Her hand is resting on his knee and his is on her shoulder. This is how he eats now. Holding on. Slowly, like a child.

Outside he can hear children. The delicate peal of a goat’s bell. The rising of life in the veld. After he has eaten he will sit outside and wait for Noel Brettell to come and read to him. And as he waits, he will smoke his pipe. The doctor who visits him says he should not smoke his pipe. Fortune says he should not smoke his pipe. But he will still smoke his pipe. He will feel the heat of it linger in his mouth, the smoke work its way over his palate and smell its thick scent in his nostrils. He will live in sensation, in now and not in the past, where the memories crowd at the edge of his mind. The tobacco will help him forget, and it will help him remember; reminding him, in his dark, half-deaf, rise-and-fall world, that he is alive.

Alive. He did not expect to return from the war alive. He preached a Christianity of witness and the war had been no exception. He went out on every patrol, on every attack, on every slow gunboat across the sheet-metal water. And every time he expected to die. He was not afraid, but he expected to die, the way he had seen so many others die. But he did not. St Michael kept the bullets flying past him, gave him shelter when the shells fell and jammed the rifles aimed at him. When he returned he built another mission church to celebrate his survival. It was another echo of Zimbabwe and he called it Zuwa Rabuda: Rising Sun.

He remembers his return from the war clearly. But not for the relief it brought. And not even for the unsettling sensation of being back in Maronda Mashanu where so little had changed. Where, despite all that had happened, the goats still
grazed and
the women still walked from the river with firewood and water on their heads, making it seem impossible they had lived through the same period of time. That the same dates had passed over them. That is not why he remembers his return. He remembers it because for eighteen months at the lake he witnessed the insult of war. The injury of it, man to man, black and white, and he thought his return would mean an end to such witness. But he was wrong. On his arrival back in Mashonaland he found the insult continued. Not in the way of the war: carriers withering under neglect, askaris cut down under machine-gun fire, men dying in a war that was not theirs to fight. But in a quieter fashion. Delivered in the language of the law. Devised by ministers and commissioners not generals and captains. Slower, less immediate in nature, but still fuelled by the same idea. But then, as he came to realise, in Southern Rhodesia it was always the same idea. There had only ever been one idea in the country, one idea that dominated all others. The idea that shaped the country and fuelled its forming. The idea of Land. It was the only idea that mattered. Land had brought the settlers, the missionaries, the war. Land held the stones, the iron, the gold. Land held the Africans’ ancestors, their spirits and their myths. Land held the past of the country, locked in its earth, and, as he realised on his return from the war, its future too.

The insult came in the form of an Imperial Commission report on the native reserves. The author, Government Surveyor Atherstone, recommended a reduction of one million acres in this land set aside for native use. In the Sabi Reserve, in Arthur’s own district, the land taken by the government would be used to build a railway. The reserve would be cleared of native villages for six miles on each side of the line, and the land there assigned for white settlement only.

Arthur knew the reserves were already too small for the growing population that lived there. That water supplies were short, and much of the earth infertile. And he also knew the BSA Company didn’t want the Africans to be able to farm their own land, so they would take the best land from the reserves. They wanted workers, not farmers. He also knew the Company had millions of acres of unassigned land it could draw upon elsewhere. But that unassigned land would be left and kept for when more white settlements would be built, and now, after a war where thousands of Africans had died, land would be taken from the reserves instead.

He was exhausted by his experience of war. His soul felt shredded.

But he recognised that without land the natives would become strangers in their own country. The reserves were not the answer, but as he wrote to his friend John White at the Aboriginal Protection Society, they were the ‘best makeshift harbour of refuge’. So he chose to fight again and began writing a pamphlet,
A Million Acres
, in protest. Looking back it seemed inevitable, but there must have been a choice. He could have allowed the report to go unchallenged. Returned to just his local mission work. Perhaps even returned to England. But really, there had been no choice. He had to fight the Commission’s report. He had always fought. He had only ever chosen not to fight once in his life and he’d never stopped regretting that choice. Even now, years later, pinching sadza to his slow mouth, holding Fortune’s soft shoulder, her hand on his knee, the thought of that choice, that walking away, still haunted him. Like a recurring dream that he will never wake up from, that he will only forget when he never wakes up again.