Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (4 page)

Village

CHIMURENGA:
THE BEGINNING

In April 1966, the year my parents moved to Rhodesia with their baby daughter, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) launched an attack against government forces in Sinoia to protest Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain and to fight for majority rule.

Sinoia, corruption of “Chinhoyi,” was the name of the local chief in 1902.

The Second Chimurenga, it was called by the black Africans in Rhodesia, this war of which the 1966 skirmish in Sinoia was just the start.

Chimurenga.
A poetic Shona way of saying “war of liberation.”

Zimbabwe, they called the country. From
dzimba dza mabwe,
“houses of stone.”

The whites didn’t call it Chimurenga. They called it the Troubles, This Bloody Nonsense. And sometimes “the war.” A war instigated by “uppity blacks,” “cheeky kaffirs,” “bolshy muntus,” “restless natives,” “the houts.”

Black Rhodesians are also known by white Rhodesians as “gondies,” “boogs,” “toeys,” “zots,” “nig-nogs,” “wogs,” “affies.”

We call the black women “nannies” and the black men “boys.”

The First Chimurenga was a long time ago, a few years after the settlers got here. The welcome mat had only been out for a relative moment or two when the Africans realized a welcome mat was not what they needed for their European guests. When they saw that the Europeans were the kind of guests who slept with your wife, enslaved your children, and stole your cattle, they saw that they needed sharp spears and young men who knew how to use them. The war drums were brought out from dark corners and dusted off and the old men who knew how to beat the war drums, who knew which rhythms would pump the fighting blood of the young men, were told to start beating the drums.

Between 1889 and 1893, British settlers moving up from South Africa, under the steely, acquiring eye of Cecil John Rhodes, had been . . . What word can I use? I suppose it depends on who you are. I could say: Taking? Stealing? Settling? Homesteading? Appropriating? Whatever the word is, they had been doing it to a swath of country they now called Rhodesia. Before that, the land had been movable, shifting under the feet of whatever victorious tribe now danced on its soil, taking on new names and freshly stolen cattle, absorbing the blood and bodies of whoever was living, breathing, birthing, dying upon it. The land itself, of course, was careless of its name. It still is. You can call it what you like, fight all the wars you want in its name. Change its name altogether if you like. The land is still unblinking under the African sky. It will absorb white man’s blood and the blood of African men, it will absorb blood from slaughtered cattle and the blood from a woman’s birthing with equal thirst. It doesn’t care.

Here were the African names within that piece of land for which we would all fight: Bulawayo: the Place of Killing. Inyati: the Place of the Buffaloes. Nyabira: the Place Where There Is a Fjord.

The white men came. They said, “What name do you give this place?”

“Kadoma,”
they said. Which in Ndebele means, “Does Not Thunder or Make Noise.”

The white men call that place Gatooma.

“And what name do you give this place?”

“Ikwelo,”
they said. Which in Ndebele means, “Steep Sides of the Riverbank.”

The white men called the place Gwelo.

“What is this place?”

“Kwe Kwe,”
said the Africans, which is the sound the frogs make in the nearby river.

The white men called the place Que Que.

“We will live in this place.”

“But this is the chiefdom of Neharawa,” said the Africans.

“And we will call it Salisbury.”

The white men named places after themselves, and after the women they were with or the women whom they had left behind, after the men they wanted to placate or impress: Salisbury, Muriel, Beatrice, Alice Mine, Juliasdale, West Nicholson.

And they gave some places hopeful names: Copper Queen, Eldorado, Golden Valley.

And obvious names: Figtree, Guinea Fowl, Lion’s Den, Redcliff, Hippo Valley.

And unlikely, stolen names: Alaska, Venice, Bannockburn, Turk Mine.

In 1896 the Ndebele people had rebelled against this European-ness. They killed about one hundred and fifty European men, women, and children in a matter of a few weeks. But within three months the settlers, with the help of military reinforcements from South Africa, had defeated the Ndebeles, and Cecil John Rhodes had negotiated a cease-fire with the Ndebele leaders at Matopo Hills.

In camp

Matopo Hills, where Cecil John Rhodes is buried, staring out over Ndebeleland in perpetuity. Matopo Hills, a corruption of “Amatobos,” meaning “the Bald-Headed Ones.”

In the same month, June 1896, that Rhodes was settling with the Ndebeles in the south of the country, the Mashona in the central and east of the country rose up in a separate and more serious rebellion against the whites. When farmers, such as the Mashona, go to war, they are not like the Ndebele warriors, who come into the open savannah flashing their bare chests under the clear sky and waving their plumed headdresses and flaunting the skins of slaughtered lions and hunted leopards on their thighs and brows. Farmers fight a more deadly, secret kind of war. They are fighting for land in which they have put their seed, their sweat, their hopes. They are secretive, sly, desperate. They do not come with loud war drums and bones of powerful animals around their neck. They come with one intent, sliding on their bellies, secret in the night. They don’t come to be victorious in battle. They come to reclaim their land.

The Mashona killed four hundred and fifty settlers.

Reinforcements to help the settlers arrived from South Africa and England. The Africans developed a system of hiding in caves to escape from the white man’s army. The settlers used dynamite to force the Africans out of the caves, killing whole villages at a time when the caves collapsed—Mashona men, women, and children died by the hundreds, buried together. Survivors of the collapsed caves were executed as soon as they crawled out of the ready-made tombs. It took almost two years for the first Chimurenga to be quelled.

The Africans did not forget their heroes from this first struggle for independence.

Kaguvi, Mkwati, and Nehanda.

Kaguvi. Also called Murenga, or Resister. From which the word Chimurenga comes.

Mkwati, famous for his use of locust medicine.

Nehanda, the woman, supra-clan mhondoro spirits. She went to her execution (with Kaguvi) on April 27, 1897, singing and dancing. “We shall overcome. My blood is not shed in vain.”

Now, how can we, who shed our ancestry the way a snake sheds skin in winter, hope to win against this history? We
wazungus.
We white Africans of shrugged-off English, Scottish, Dutch origin.

Seven ZANLA troops died on April 28, 1966, the first battle of the Second Chimurenga. A memorial stands in their name in the modern city of Chinhoyi, “The Gallant Chinhoyi Seven.”

Mum, Adrian, and Van

ADRIAN,
RHODESIA, 1968

Mum says, “The happiest day of my life was the day I held that little baby in my arms.” She means Rhodesia, 1968. She means the day her son, Adrian, was born.

Mum is on Chapter Two, weeping into her beer. It’s a sad story. It’s especially sad if you haven’t heard it a hundred times. I’ve heard one version or another of the story more than a hundred times. It’s a Family Theme, and it always ends badly. To begin with Mum is happy. She is freshly married, they are white (a ruling color in Rhodesia), and she has two babies, a girl and a boy. Her children are the picture-perfect match of each other: beautiful, blond, and blue-eyed.

Mum

Vanessa, signature tackie lips
(
lips that are rosebud full
)
, a mass of fairy-white hair, toddling cheerfully, with that overbalancing, tripping step of the small child. And tottering after her, the little boy who could be her twin. In the background, a black nanny called Tabatha, in white apron and white cap, strong, shining arms outstretched laughing, waiting to scoop them up; she is half-shyly looking into thecamera. Mum is looking on from the veranda. Dad is taking the photograph.

Then Adrian dies before he is old enough to talk. Mum is not yet twenty-four and her picture-perfect life is shattered.

She says, “The nurse at the hospital in Salisbury told us we could either go and get something to eat or watch our baby die.”

Mum and Dad take Vanessa to get some lunch and when they come back to the hospital their baby son, who was very sick with meningitis an hour earlier, is now dead. Cold, blond ash.

Adrian

The story changes depending on what Mum is drinking. If she is very drunk on wine, then the story is a bit different than if she is very drunk on gin. The worst is if she is very drunk on everything she can find in the house. But the end is always the same. Adrian is dead. That’s an awful ending no matter what she’s been drinking.

I am eight, maybe younger, the first time Mum sits down in front of me, squiffy in her chair, leaning and keening and needing to talk. The Leaning Tower of Pissed, I say to Vanessa when I am older and Mum is drunk again.
Ha ha.

Mum tells me about Adrian. I understand, through the power of her emotion, her tears, the way she is dissolving like soap left too long in the bath, that this has been the greatest tragedy of our lives. It is my tragedy, too, even though I was not born when it happened.

Usually, on nights when Mum is sober, and we are kissing her good night, she turns her face away from us and puckers her lips sideways, offering us a cheek stretched like dead-chicken skin. Now that she is drunk and telling me about Adrian she is wet all over me. Arms clasped over my shoulders, she is hanging around my neck, and I can feel her face crying into the damp patch on my shoulder. She says, “You were the baby we made when Adrian died.”

I know all about making babies, being the daughter of a farmer. I have already put my hand up a cow’s bum, scraped out the sloppy, warm, green-grass pile of shit and felt beyond that, for the thick lining of her womb. If the womb is swollen with a fetus I can touch the shape of it, pressing against the womb wall. A curved back, usually, or the hump of a rear, the bony fineness of a tiny head. I know about conception. Cows that don’t conceive have their tails cut to differentiate them from the fertile cows, whose tails are left long. The short-tailed cows are pulled from the herd and put on a lorry and sent into Umtali, where they become ground meat, sausages, glue. They become Colcom’s Steak Pie.

The next morning, Mum, who usually eats nothing for breakfast, has two fried eggs, fried bananas, tomatoes. A slice of toast with marmalade and butter. She swallows a pot of tea and then has a cup of coffee. She usually does not drink coffee. The coffee tastes bad because there are
sanctionson,
which means no one will sell Rhodesia anything and Rhodesia can’t sell anything to anyone else, so our coffee is made from chicory and burnt maize and tastes like charcoal.

All morning, Mum is more bad-tempered than usual, in spite of her enormous breakfast. She yells at the cook and the maid and the dogs. She tells me to “stop twittering on.” I shut up. That afternoon, she sleeps for three hours while I sit quietly at the end of her bed with the dogs. We’re afraid to wake her, although the dogs are ready for their walk and I am ready for a cup of tea. I am watching her sleep. Her face has fallen away into peace. The dogs sit prick-eared and watchful for a long time and then they lie with their heads in their paws and worried eyes. They are depressed.

Adrian is buried in the cemetery in Salisbury.

Mum and Dad leave Rhodesia. They leave the small anonymous hump of their son-child in the huge cemetery opposite the tobacco auction floors in town. They go to England, via Victoria Falls, conceiving me in the sixties hotel next to the grand, historic, turn-of-the-century Victoria Falls Hotel.

I am conceived in the hotel (with the casino in it) next to the thundering roar of the place where the Zambezi River plunges a hundred meters into a black-sided gorge. The following March, I am born into the tame, drizzling English town of Glossop, Derbyshire.

The plunging roar of the Zambezi in my ears at conception. Incongruous, contradictory in Derbyshire at birth.