Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (25 page)

Mum with horses

MKUSHI

Depending on the state of the roads, our farm is three to six hours from Lusaka and two to four hours from the Copperbelt.

Either way you arrive at it, the farm does not come as a surprise.

Drive out of Lusaka, its shantytowns spreading like a tea stain away from the city center and its hum of commerce. Drive away from the clamor of market women in their shack-shanty stalls where they trade vegetables, oil, cloth, clothes. Drive past the Planned Parenthood building and under the great, stark, concrete archway proclaiming Zambia’s freedom, one zambia, one nation. Leave the city concentration of poverty behind—leave behind its stench and the place where social diseases come together to shout the misery of the truly almost-dead-from-it poor. And the one-in-three with AIDS and the one-in-six with TB. Leave behind the Gymkhana Club, where red-faced expats-like-us drink and shout their repeated stories to one another, cigarettes waving. Leave behind the expat, extramarital, almost-incestuous affairs bred from heat and boredom and drink. Leave behind the once-grand, guard-dogged, watchman-paced, glass-top-walled compounds of the rich and nervous.

Msasa forests are thicker here.

And the trees are swollen against one another, giving the impression that they can outlast the humanity which presses up against them. Charcoal burners trudge toward the gray haze of the big city, pushing piles of charcoal in burlap bags strapped high onto bicycles, but their axes don’t seem to have dented the forest yet. The road is a narrow strip of potholed black on which few vehicles swing and rock, avoiding the deeper holes and slamming into some of the shallow, surprising dents.

We hurry through the rotten-egg stench of Kabwe, which belches smoke from copper and cobalt mines. There are, here, some reminders of our European predecessors, who long ago returned to the ordinariness of England where they now remember (with a fondness born of distance and the tangy reminder of a gin-and-tonic evening) the imagined glory of sunburnt gymkhanas and white-clothed servants. These long-gone Europeans had tried to turn Kabwe into something more powerful than its smell (which is strong enough to taste; bitter, burning, back-throat-coating, like the reminder of vomit). There are some surviving trees from the dream of the Kabwe Gardening Club—dusty, droughted, diseased, root-worn. These expat trees (brittle frangipani, purple-flowered jacaranda, and pod-exploding flamboyant) line the streets like soldiers who continue to stand, even as their comrades fall.

The mine houses, which are now sand-covered and chicken-littered, contain some reminders of the
mazungu
madams who once designed water-sucking lawn and rose gardens around a gauzed veranda. There is the Elephant Head Hotel (peeling paint, stained green plaster, urine-smelling), a Church of England, and a hospital (where lines of fevered patients curl out of the door). A magnificent green and white onion-domed mosque rises out of the center of Kabwe; neither colonial decomposing, nor yet postcolonial socialist (which is to say gray cement-block), but of some other resilient culture, defying time and place.

At Kapiri Mposhi (comprising a railway stop, whore-riddled bars, and an Indian store where everything from bicycles, to nylon scarves, to made-in-China sunglasses, pencils, and alarm clocks is sold) we will turn right. But first there is the third of the four roadblocks we must negotiate from the city to our farm. Back-to-front spikes tooth the road, sandbags burst heavily and spill white onto the tarmac, and the military lounge on their rifles. We must produce passports, reflective triangles, the car’s registration; but all this can be avoided if we would only produce a fistful of notes and some cigarettes, soap, oil.

Dad loses his temper. It’s hot and we have been up since long before dawn in order to make it to and from town before dark, when bandits, the poor roads, and unlit, sometimes drunkenly driven vehicles make travel hazardous. Dad lights a cigarette and stares out of the windscreen; he is seething, very quiet, but he seems to be in his own thought world, completely ignoring the antagonism of the militia man. Finally Dad turns to the man with the gun and says, “
Fergodsake,
either let us go, or shoot us.” The man with the gun is clearly drunk, but he is startled into a brief state of alertness.

In the backseat Vanessa and I sink into ourselves. I want to say, “He was just kidding. Only a joke. Don’t shoot, really.”

But the soldier starts laughing. “Ah, Fuller,” he says, “you are too clever. Too clever.”

Dad doesn’t wait for him to wave us through, but drives ahead; the wheels of the car spit gravel up against the drums that guide us away from the spike-toothed barrier.

People have died like this. They have driven through roadblocks when it has not been clear that they have been waved through and a drunken sergeant has pumped several rounds of ammunition into the backs of their heads. Cause of death: Accident.

We say, “Acci-didn’t. Acci–didn’t stop. Ha ha.”

There is a madman who lives on the road to Mkushi. Every full moon he comes out onto the tarmac and digs a deep trench across the road. Dad would like to find the madman and bring him back to the farm. “Think what a strong bugger he is, eh?”

“Yes, but you could only get him to work when there was a full moon.”

“Which is twice as hard as any other Zambian.”

We cross the second bridge (one more roadblock) and reach the gum trees, their ghostly white limbs stretching into the sky, and now we are almost home. The road is dirt, washed, potholed and ribbed from here, spitting up a fine, red, throat-coating dust, but the peace of the farm is already spreading her fingers toward us.

The farm does not come as a surprise, because it’s where I would put a farm. It’s where any sensible person would put a farm. We have driven hundreds of kilometers and each kilometer brings land more beautiful and fertile and comforting and with each passing kilometer the air clears and the sky appears wider and deeper. And then, when it feels as if the land could not have settled itself more comfortably for human habitation, there it is—Serioes Farm—lying open like a sandy-covered, tree-dotted blanket. Softly, voluptuously fertile and sweet-smelling of khaki weed, and old cow manure and thin dust and msasa leaves. It seems the logical place for this family to stop. And mend.

Zambia has been independent since October 1964.

The president, Kenneth Kaunda—affectionately known as KK—is a deeply religious teetotaler, the son of a missionary. He is prone to tears and long speeches and calls himself a Social Humanist. He speaks of love and tolerance and reconciliation.

“One Zambia, one nation.”

“UNIP is the people’s party.”

UNIP stands for United National Independence Party. It is the sole legal party in Zambia.

KK orders his critics and those who oppose his government to be tortured, killed, imprisoned. He is the only presidential candidate at election time, winning a landslide victory against no one year after year.

Election times come and go and nothing changes; the pointless elections are not memorable.

The occasional, quickly squashed coup attempts are what I remember.

Anyone can stage a coup. I have the impression that even I could arm myself with enough gin and anger to walk into the radio station in Lusaka and break off the nightly broadcast of African rumba to declare myself the new leader of the country.

“Stay calm,” I would say into the microphone, “it is me, Bobo Fuller, in charge. I hereby declare the third Republic of Zambia.” And by the time my words reach the rural areas (days, maybe weeks later) I will have been locked up and will be on my way to death.

The leaders of the coups, the political detainees, the student rioters are quickly forgotten in jail. Their heroic dissent melts in the tropical heat and washes away with the next rainy season.

Vanessa is away at secretarial college in Zimbabwe when we arrive on the farm, that first night. The workshop manager—a rough-looking ex-Rhodesian named Gordon (“Call me Gordy”)—has been instructed to stock the kitchen with enough food to get us started. Accordingly, there are half a dozen beers and a few slabs of meat in the leaky gas fridge, a loaf of stale crumbling bread, an old jam jar containing oil, and a small bowl of salt. Gordy says, “We haven’t had electricity for six weeks. These bloody guys, hey? The first rains and all the lines go down and then you’re fucked-excuse-my-French.” We smile politely, excusing his French. “So you’ll have to build a fire for your supper, hey?”

“That’s okay,” says Mum.

“I brought a
muntu
for you. He used to be the cook here.” An African in a grubby khaki uniform grins broadly behind Gordon’s shoulder.

“Hello,” Mum says to the African.

I say, “How are you?”

“Bwino, bwino, bwino.”

“What’s your name?” Gordy asks him.

“Adamson,” says the African.

Gordy shrugs. “I can’t keep track,” he says. “They like to change their names like it’s going out of style, hey.” He waves in the direction of Adamson, as at a mosquito or a fly.

Gordy has preceded us on the farm by a couple of months. He is supposed to be fixing the stable of tractors, combine harvesters, motorbikes, generators, water pumps, and trailers with which Dad will rework—regenerate—this exhausted, lovely farm. Gordy lights a cigarette and tells us, “Aside from your truck, there’s only one working vehicle on the whole bloody farm.” He takes a drag off his cigarette and adds, “Which is my motorbike.”

The kitchen sighs and creaks to itself, settling around us.

Gordy kicks himself into action. “So you have everything you need?”

We nod.

“I’ll see you tomorrow then, hey?”

We troop back out of the kitchen, into the long concrete drain that lines the front of the house, and watch Gordy spin up the driveway on the only working piece of machinery, aside from our truck, on the farm.

Dad lights a cigarette.

Mum says, “His wife’s quite pretty. Pregnant, too.”

I wrinkle my nose. “She must have got that way through wind pollination, then.”

“Bobo!”

For supper, we eat fried meat on top of fried bread, with boiled black-jack greens on the side. Mum found the black-jacks growing in what had once been the vegetable garden and is now overgrown with weeds and encroaching bush.

“You eat?” Adamson points incredulously at the weeds.

“Black-jacks are jolly good for you,” Mum tells him. “Taste like spinach.”

“For African, yes, madam. But for
wazungu
?”

“Beggars can’t be choosers.”

We drink the barely cool locally brewed Mosi from the leaky mildew-smelling fridge, keeping an eye out for UFOs, unidentified floating objects, in the bottles. We had been warned by Gordy, “I know a bloke who found a
muntu
’s finger in his beer, hey.
Struze
fact.” The beer is yeasty and mild and flat, but it tastes better than the red-brown water that splutters out of the faucets.

I take a few swallows of the meat and bread and then push my plate away. There is a taste in African meat sometimes that is strong, like the smell of a sun-blown carcass. It is a taste of fright-and-flight and then of the sweat that has come off the hands and brows of the butchers who have cut the beast into pieces. It makes the meat tough and chewy and it jags in my throat when I swallow.

“Not hungry, Chooks?”

“I’m okay.” I sip my beer and stare up at the ceiling, which is flecked with thick crusts of fly shit, most concentrated directly above the dining room table.

Adamson appears to clear the dishes (the kitchen door is coming apart; it is two pieces of plywood held together by a handle and it chatters to itself whenever it is opened and closed). Adamson says, “I can cook Yorkshire pudding.”

“You can?” says Dad.

“I work for Englishman, many years.”

“I see,” says Dad.

“I work for the last
mazungu
bwana here.”

“Ah.”

“And now I am to cook for you.”

“Good.” Dad puts both hands down on the table in front of him, looks up at the cook, and says, “Then no silly buggers with Mr. Fuller, eh?”

“No, Bwana. No.”

Adamson has a large, sorrowful head, so heavy and bone-dense it looks as if it is straining to stay upright on his neck. His lips are massive and sagging, very red, revealing a few stumps of teeth. He nods sadly and says, almost to himself, “Buggers can’t be choosers.”

The farm has been without proper management for years. Even before the Germans acquired it, a series of alcoholic, occasionally insane
mazungus
(mostly burnt-out Rhodesians, fleeing the war) have run the place into the ground. The house and garden have been allowed to fall into tropical collapse. The carpet tiles in the hall are floating up, peeling and green-gray, from where they have been soaked during the rainy season. There are pots and pans all over the house, set out to catch rainwater from the leaking roof. Mosquitoes breed happily in the stagnation.

That night, the first night on our new farm, while I am sitting on the edge of my bed contemplating my new bedroom, a rat the size of a small cat runs over my foot.