The Dust Diaries (14 page)

The hut tax angered Arthur and he had tried his best to undermine it at the Anglican Synod in Salisbury in the April of 1903. As usual he chose to walk the hundred miles to the capital, and he arrived with just minutes to prepare before presenting his case. He stood in front of the assembled clergy, his already threadbare khaki suit caked in the fine red dust of the veld and the sweat still fresh on his face. Clearing his throat, he proposed:

In view of the agricultural and pastoral character of the Mashona people, and of the fact that they have been only twelve or thirteen years in contact with civilisation, we consider that the most desirable form of taxation to stimulate their industry is taxation in kind.

He had worded his proposal carefully. He knew it would be seen as a stab at the British South Africa Company, but he also felt sure that in the eyes of the church his argument was strong. A tax in kind, he went on to explain, would diminish the disruption to the Africans’ way of life in their kraals and villages. A tax in cash required the men to leave their homes in search of work. A tax in kind would at least let them stay. Surely it was in the interest of the Anglican Church to promote the idea of a stable family home among the native people? He sat down, aware of the murmurings of disapproval both his speech and his outfit had provoked among the clean pressed suits and vestments around him. The proposal was refused. As was his second request that the Synod delete a section of their ‘Resolutions on the Native Question’ which read: ‘Neither individuals nor races are born with equal facilities or opportunities.’

The day after the Synod Arthur began his long walk back to Enkel-doorn, taking with him a dramatically altered view of his position in Africa. Although in theory the entire Anglican Church in Southern Rhodesia was missionary in nature, few of the other clergy were leaving for native postings that morning. Few of them even spoke the native language of the country or had tried to learn it, and he realised what he had already begun to suspect—that his view of the Mashona people and of the place of the missionary in Africa was not just at odds with many of the whites he met in Enkeldoorn and Salisbury, but it was also very different to that of the Church in whose name he was serving.

Bishop Gaul had seen him off that morning. Over the last two years the two men had grown closer. Arthur had often accompanied the Bishop on his treks, the Bishop riding a donkey and Arthur trotting alongside, sometimes even reading to him from his book of poems. He had got to know him well, as a man as well as a priest, so he knew that morning that the Bishop recognised his dissatisfaction, his dawning realisation of the divide between his own ideology and that of the Synod. When Arthur had taken him up again on his failed proposals the Bishop had been uncharacteristically apologetic.

‘You must understand,’ he’d said, stretching up to lay his hand on Arthur’s shoulder, ‘that many of the Synod don’t share your intimate experience with the Africans. Their parishes are European—farmers, businessmen—and in their own way they carry the interests of those people as close to their hearts as you do the interests of your Africans.’

Arthur shook his head in reply, speaking softly, but still unable to disguise the tautness in his voice. ‘But I still don’t see how the Synod can stand up behind the Company and say that, that all races aren’t born equal in God’s eyes. That’s a mistake, a terrible mistake.’

As he listened to the young missionary, the Bishop remembered something another priest had said about Cripps the previous evening, at the close of the Synod. ‘When I hear Father Cripps speak,’ he had said, ‘I know in my heart he is right, but I still can’t agree with any of his conclusions.’ As Bishop Gaul looked up at Arthur now, he knew what that priest meant. His intentions were sound but Cripps was too fiery, too quick to condemn. He smiled, and patted Arthur’s shoulder;

‘The best thing you can do now is carry on your good work in Wreningham.’

Arthur looked down at the Bishop. He looked thinner than when he had last seen him. His skin sagged from his cheekbones and there were crescents of shadow under his eyes. He looked tired, and somewhat distressed. He thought he shouldn’t press his case any further.

He took a deep breath and exhaled through a smile, ‘Good work? I don’t know about that. I suppose I manage to get around a bit but there’s still so much I don’t get done. And I’m sure most of Enkel-doorn think me quite mad, they certainly look at me as if they do.’

The Bishop began to laugh, but the breath cracked in his throat and rattled into a cough which bent him double, one hand over his mouth the other smacking his solar helmet against his thigh. Arthur went to him, putting his hand on his back. He could feel the ribs there, and the muscles around them contracting with each hacking breath. He made Arthur think of his old cat back home in Kent, its bones tangible under the skin.

The Bishop spat a thick gob of mucus into the dust at his feet and eventually took a deep clean breath. He stood up straight again, his cheeks red with burst capillaries and the veins in his neck standing proud above his dog collar.

‘Malaria,’ he said, breathing heavily. ‘I’m taking enough quinine to poison myself ten times over, but I still can’t shake the thing.’

Arthur nodded, although he recognised that cough and he knew it wasn’t malarial. He’d seen both natives and whites coughing like that in Enkeldoorn, and it had always meant one thing: TB. He thought of his visit to Keats’ room in Rome. How the poet’s friend, Severn, had described the sound of Keats’ consumptive breath ‘boiling’ in his lungs.

‘Anyway Cripps, that was your fault,’ the Bishop continued. ‘Making me laugh like that. ‘Get around a bit’ did you say? Never heard anything so ridiculous, man. Last I heard you were covering a hundred miles a week down there.’

‘Well, yes, but it’s good for me, clears the head, and,’ he added, ‘it’s nothing to what an African might do, you know that, don’t you?’ He swung the strap of his satchel over his shoulder. ‘But it suits me well, suits me very well indeed.’

When they had made their farewells and Arthur had left, Bishop Gaul did not turn and make his way back to the town but stayed where he was and watched the young missionary walk off towards Enkeldoorn, his characteristic long, rangy stride and his satchel bouncing on his back. He followed him until he could no longer make out the shape of his body, until he was just a dark speck on the dust road, and as he watched him he listened to his own thin breath, wheezing and falling in time with the younger man’s steps. Only when Arthur had gone, dissolved into the heat haze above the road, did the Bishop turn and walk back into town, wondering as he went whether he would ever see Cripps again.

That walk back to Enkeldoorn was one of Arthur’s hardest since his arrival in Southern Rhodesia. But it was not just the Bishop’s health and the Synod’s short-sightedness that concerned him. The ground he walked over was dry and cracked; a couple of years of late rains had made this a lean year, and he knew it was going to get worse. The spectre of famine was more than a possibility. Already the ground broke like dry plaster about the plough blades, and the early crops had failed. He knew that for many of the natives in his district starvation was a real threat, and he was aware that the mothers worried for their newborns with an anxiety beyond their usual instinctive fear.

Three days later he was sitting on the veranda of Vic’s Tavern, sipping a mug of tea in the shade of a wisteria. He had his eyes closed and was enjoying the coolness the plant cast over him after his hot morning walking when a passing Afrikaans farmer told him the news that had come in to town just hours before him. The British South Africa Company had announced its decision to increase the hut tax on native men by fourfold, from ten shillings to two pounds. The farmer passed on, throwing a last remark over his shoulder, ‘At least we might get some of those kaffirs working now, isn’t it, eh, padre?’

Arthur didn’t answer him. He had hoped the Church would provide a stumbling block for the Company on this issue. He couldn’t see how it wouldn’t. It was its duty to. But it had not, he had been wrong, and he saw that now. Wrong not to press his case with the Bishop harder and wrong to place his trust and the welfare of his African parishioners in the hands of an Anglican Synod, most of whom had never witnessed African living, let alone experienced it.

He responded in the only way he knew how: in writing. He had always written, since he was a schoolboy, and his coming to Africa had not stopped him. As he walked across the veld he composed poetry in his head. At night, he penned novels and short stories in battered school books and worked on his sermons. His only contact with home, with his brother, sisters and mother, was through writing letters. In this way he had lived by the pen for the last three years, always writing, setting down an epistolary and literary version of his life that shadowed his day to day living in Africa. But now he wrote with a different purpose and for the same reason he used to run. He wrote to release the energy inside him, as if his pen was a lance, and with it he would drain his anger and frustration. He wrote to the Chief Native Commissioner, the acting District Commissioner, to the papers in Salisbury and even the papers in England. He had no idea if it would be in the slightest way ef fective, but he felt he had to do something. He had already failed once, so further failure seemed nothing to worry about.

Along with the letters, which were mostly ignored, he wrote a poem, which was not. Over the weeks following the Synod he worked each night in his hut at Wreningham on a satirical piece which he titled
Ode Celebrating the Proposed Quadrupling of the Hut-Tax
. When he had finished he posted it for publication at his own expense in Salisbury, sending with it a letter informing the publisher to place it on sale as widely as possible, and to make sure it got into the hands of the administration. It was too unsubtle to be a true satire, but he hadn’t written it for literary merit. He had written it to be noticed, to make an impact. The closing stanza made his point clear:

Go glean in the fields of the harvest bare,

From famine meat a four-fold share!

Apply a text as best you may –

From him that hath not, take away!

Arthur knew the poem struck a nerve in the capital a few weeks later when he called in at the post office in Enkeldoorn to receive a wire from Bishop Gaul in Salisbury. It was the stern message of a father to a son who had gone too far, and in deference to the Bishop Arthur withdrew the pamphlet from circulation. He was disappointed that Gaul had not let it live, but he was also satisfied that the poem had served its purpose, however briefly, as a voice of opposition on behalf of the Mashona, who as he now realised, were denied any public voice of their own.

Arthur had anticipated the reaction to his poem in Salisbury. He knew there was no way that such open criticism of the hut tax would be allowed. What he did not anticipate was the reaction from the other side of his life in Mashonaland, from the Mashona themselves. Unknown to him, news of his protest spread quickly through the ‘bush telegraph’, a network of African messengers passing on important news between the kraals and villages from the vantage points of kopjes and hills. It was the bush telegraph that told African workers in Salisbury about the massacre of British troops at Shangasi in 1893 hours before any official news got through, and after Arthur’s protest against the hut tax its effectiveness was proved once more. In the months following the publication of his poem, Arthur’s congregations swelled and he was visited by a number of headmen who either wanted to question him on the tax and other aspects of the administration, or who just wanted to see in the flesh the white
mufundsi
who had defied Salisbury.

It was not just the message but also the medium that struck a chord with the Mashona. Poetry was part of their lives: there was a poem for grinding the maize, a poem to speak to your ancestors and praise poems for great chiefs. It had been particularly painful that after the failed 1896 uprising the whites had celebrated the fall of their spirit mediums in song. The settler paper,
The Nugget
, had printed it in triumph, a long piece of doggerel ending on a threatening note of intention:

As others have learned long ago,

So the young generation must learn to know

That the White Queen means to reign.

But now Arthur had spoken out against the White Queen and although his voice may have been silenced in Salisbury, it continued to resonate in the kraals of the Mashona, who in turn resonated their new-found respect for Arthur in the names chosen for him in the months following his protest. Father Cripps became
Baba Cripps, Baba Cripps
became
Chapea
, He-Who-Cares-for-People, and then
Chapea
became
Kambandakoto
: He-Who-Goes-About-as-a-Poor-Man.

Arthur was nearing the end of his morning’s journey. As he came over a lip in the track the buildings of Enkeldoorn appeared before him, a mile or so off and about a hundred feet lower than where he stood. He rested against a young tree, shifting his satchel strap away from a raw patch of skin on his shoulder, and looked down on the town. Its scattering of tin roofs reflected the sun in a white glare so the settlement shone in the shallow valley like a trace of diamond in base rock. On the near side of the town he could see people scattered out across a flat area of land cleared of the tall veld grass. They were making the final preparations for the annual New Year games. Ladies’ white parasols and wide-brimmed hats stood out against the dun red of the earth, clustered together like the petals of oversized flowers where they stood in groups, chatting. In contrast to the stillness of these white islands their husbands and sons ran between them, pulling lengths of rope, guiding ox wagons into position and testing the ground with the heels of their boots. A temporary flag pole had been erected and the Charter flag, a Union Jack with a lion proud at its centre, beat and fluttered over the scene.