Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (5 page)

Bobo—Boarfold

COMING-BACK
BABIES

Some Africans believe that if your baby dies, you must bury it far away from your house, with proper magic and incantations and gifts for the gods, so that the baby does not come back, time after time, and plant itself inside your womb only to die a short time after birth.

This is a story for people who need to find an acceptable way to lose a multitude of babies. Like us. Five born, three dead.

I came after a dead brother, whose body had not been properly buried in the soul-trapping roots of a tree and for whose soul there had been no proper offerings to the gods.

But I am alive.

I was not the soul of my dead brother. He had a soft soul, I think. Like my sister, Vanessa, has. He was blond and blue-eyed and sweet like her, too. People wanted to pinch his cheeks.

But I plucked a new, different, worldly soul for myself—maybe a soul I found in the spray thrown up by the surge of that distant African river as it plummets onto black rocks and sends up into the sun a permanent arc of a rainbow. Maybe I found a soul hovering over the sea as my parents made the passage back to England from Africa. Or, it was a soul I found floating about in working-class, damp-to-the-bone Derbyshire.

I came to earth with a shock of black hair and dark green eyes. I had a look on my face as if somebody had
already
pinched my cheeks (so that they did not need repinching). I have a pair of the signature tackie lips. Fuller lips. On me, they look overlarge and sulky.

My soul has no home. I am neither African nor English nor am I of the sea. Meanwhile, Adrian’s restless African soul still roamed. Waiting. Waiting to come back and take another baby under the earth.

Adrian is a Coming-Back Baby, if you can believe what some Africans say.

I should have been a Coming-Back Baby, but I didn’t believe what some Africans say.

That Coming-Back soul searched for me. Undoubtedly, there was a struggle for my soul on the train coming up from Cape Town. That was the closest I came to being a Coming-Back Baby.

Boarfold

ENGLAND,
1969

To begin with they lived in a semidetached house in Stalybridge, Cheshire. But it was unthinkable to either of my parents to continue living in such ordinarily lower-middle-class circumstances. So, in spite of their lack of funds, but with their usual, brazen disregard for such details, they bought a farm in bordering Derbyshire with borrowed money. There was no house on the farm, just a barn, still rank with the smell of cow shit, ancient horse pee, old dusty chicken droppings. Dad was selling agricultural chemicals to suspicious, low-browed farmers, Mum was sleeves-rolled-up running after two small children, a goat, several chickens, and a hutch of rabbits whom she couldn’t bear to slaughter when the time came to turn them into rabbit pie, so she let them free where they overpopulated the Derbyshire countryside.

Girls at Boarfold

When the rain came in the winter and as far as the eye could see a gray shroud hung over the hills, the adventure of England wore off. My parents were more broke than ever, but they were not going to rot to death under a dripping English sky. Dad quit his job. They rolled up the entire farm and sold it as turf to a gardening company, which would unroll it as lawn in suburban Manchester. They rented out the barn (now equipped with flush loos and running water, and the cow shit scraped out to reveal scrubbed old stone floors) to gullible city folk as “rural cottages” and fled.

Dad went ahead to Rhodesia by airplane. Mum followed by ship with two dogs and two children.

The ship trundled steadily down the African coast with the slow, warm winds pushing her south, past the equator, where the air felt thicker and the sun burned brighter, all the way past the welcoming, waving beaches of the tropics and to the southern tip of the continent.

When the ship veered into the Cape of Good Hope, Mum caught the spicy, woody scent of Africa on the changing wind. She smelled the people: raw onions and salt, the smell of people who are not afraid to eat meat, and who smoke fish over open fires on the beach and who pound maize into meal and who work out-of-doors. She held me up to face the earthy air, so that the fingers of warmth pushed back my black curls of hair, and her pale green eyes went clear-glassy.

“Smell that,” she whispered. “That’s home.”

Vanessa was running up and down the deck, unaccountably wild for a child usually so placid. Intoxicated already.

I took in a faceful of African air and fell instantly into a fever.

By the time we were on the train from Cape Town to Rhodesia I was so racked with illness that I was almost unconscious: trembling and shaking and with a cold-burning sweat.

Some Africans would say, “The child is possessed, of course.” On account of the Coming-Back Baby. “And there are various magics you can perform with the help of a witch doctor if you wish to keep her.”

Some Africans would say, “What a load of rubbish. There’s no such thing as returning babies. Wrap the child in vinegar paper.”

Some Africans would say, “Good, let her die. Who needs another white baby, to grow into a bossy, hands-on-hips white madam?”

But I was made of my own soul already. I was here to stay.

Mum made them stop the train. I was raced to the nearest hospital. No one could say what was wrong with me. They took my temperature and fed me aspirin, which I puked up in bitter streams through my nose. They bathed my arms and legs with a damp washcloth until I sat up and demanded food.

“Say ‘Please,’ ” said Mum.

Although I had been conceived in Africa, I had been started in urban England (like a delicate vegetable started indoors, where it is safe—at a vulnerable age—from pests and too much sun). I had the constitution of a missionary.

Within a day I was well enough to continue the journey to Rhodesia.

Up through South Africa, the train labored in the heat, pulling herself up hills,
chaka-chaka
(an Ndebele war sound) through burning flat savannah that looked as though it might ignite at the sight of our metallic speed, slicing on hot wheels, ever north. This was where Cecil John Rhodes had intended for we British to go. From Cape to Cairo had been his dream. One long stain of British territory up the spine of Africa. He himself, the great white bald-headed one, made it only as far as Rhodesia.

Our train left South Africa, traveling up over the Great Grey-Green, Greasy Limpopo (all set about, said Rudyard Kipling, with fever-trees). Up to the long flat place where the dust blew all day and night and the air was raw with so much blowing. To Karoi, Rhodesia.

House at Karoi

KAROI

A colored topographical map of Rhodesia shows the west and the northwest of the country as pale yellow fading to green, which means that it is low and hot, barely undulating as it humps toward the Zambezi River valley. It means that when the wind blows it picks up fists of stinging sand and flings it against your skin.

Dete is there, in the flat part, in the west. “Dete” meaning “Narrow Passage.” Shithole.

When we first came back to Rhodesia, we lived in the northwest, in the flat, pale-yellow area, melted into orange in places, which meant that, unlike Dete, the land had some lift off the sunburnt lowveldt. But not enough so you’d notice the difference.

You could not look to the relief of mountains or banks of green trees on a day when the heat waves danced like spear-toting warriors off the grassland and when the long, wide airstrip above our house and the pale-yellow maize fields below it shimmered behind dry-season dust.

Grass, earth, air, buildings, skin, clothes, all took on the same dust-blown glare of too much heat trapped in too little air.

We lived on a farm near Karoi.

“Karoi” meaning Little Witch. In the olden days, which aren’t so olden as all that (within living memory), witches had been thrown into the nearby Angwa River (barely deep enough to drown a small goblin). Only black witches were drowned, of course. No one would have allowed a white woman, however witchly, to be sent plunging to her death in this way.

Vanessa went to the little, flat school in town every morning. Her school looked like a bomb bunker. The playground smelled like sweat on metal from the chipped-paint swings and slides. The playground’s grass was scrubbed down to bald, pale earth.

I had to stay at home with Violet, the nanny, and Snake, the cook.

Mum was don’t-interrupt-me-I’m-busy all day. She rode on the farm with the dogs in the morning and then went down to the workshop, where she made wooden bookshelves and spice racks and pepper pots for the fancy ladies’ shops in Salisbury.

Dad was gone at dawn, coming back when the light was dusky-gray and the night animals were starting to call, after Violet had given us our supper and bathed us. He was just in time to kiss us with tobacco-sour breath and tuck us in to bed.

In the morning, one of our horses would be brought down to the house and I was led around the garden until Mum came out to take the dogs for their morning ride. Then I was sent outside to play. “But not in the bamboo.”

“Why not?”

Snake and Violet settled down for plastic mugs of sweet milky tea and thick slabs of buttery bread as soon as Mum was out of sight. “There are things in there that might bite you.”

“Like snakes?”

“Yes, like snakes.” Violet took a bite of bread and a mouthful of tea and mixed the two together in her mouth. We called this cement mixing, and we were not allowed to do it.

“Why?”

“Because it’s something only
muntus
do. Like picking your nose.”

“But I’ve seen
Euros
picking their noses.”

“Rubbish.”

“I have.”

“Don’t exaggerate.”

So I went into the bamboo behind the kitchen and played in the crisp fallen leaves and lay on my back and looked up at the tall, strong, grass-colored stems, so shiny it looked as if they had been painted with thin green and thick golden stripes and then varnished. And nothing happened to me, even though Violet shook her head at me and said, “I should beat you.”

“Then I’ll fire you, hey.”

“Tch, tch.”

Then one morning, as I was playing as usual in the bamboo, I felt an intense burning bite on what my mother called
downthere.
Screaming in pain, I ran into the house and yelled for Violet or Snake to help me.

They put down their tea and put their bread over the top of the cup so that flies would not drown in their tea and they frowned at me. But they would not look
downthere.

“Owie, owie.”

But “Not there,” said Snake, “I can’t look there.” He picked up his bread, wafted the flies off his peels of butter, and began to drink his tea again. But the spell had been broken for him. The moment of peace in the morning was ruined by me and my bitten, burning
downthere.

Violet hid her mouth behind her hand and giggled.

Bobo and Van

I would have to wait for my mother to get home from her ride.

“It was a spider,” said Snake.

“Or a scorpion,” said Violet, taking a bite of bread and a mouthful of tea.

“A scorpion?” I screamed louder.

“Maybe a little snake.” The cook shut his eyes.

I tugged at Violet. “A snake? A snake!”

Violet shook me off and quickly swallowed her tea and bread without enjoyment. Glaring at me angrily as if I were giving her a stomachache.

“Help me!
Owie,
man!” I wondered if I was going to die.

I said, “Look in my brookies! Please help me!” But Violet looked disgusted and Snake looked away.

I lay on the floor in the kitchen and screamed, holding my shorts, writhing and waiting to die from the poison of whatever had bitten me.

When Mum came back from her ride I ran to her before she could even slip off the horse, stripping down my shorts and crying, “I’ve been bitten! I’m going to die!”

“What nonsense,” said Mum. She dismounted and handed the reins to the groom.

“On my
downthere.
”

“Bobo!”

“A scorp or a snake, I swear, I swear.”

Mum pressed her lips together. “Oh,
fergodsake.
” She pulled at my wrist. “Pull up your shorts,” she hissed.

“But it’s owie, man.”

“Not in front of the servants,” she said. She dragged me into the sitting room and shut the door. “Never, ever pull down your shorts in front of an African again.”

“Owie!”

“Do you hear me?”

“
Ja, ja!
Oh it hurts!”

She bent down and tugged at the soft, bitten skin.

“There,” she said, presenting me with a tiny tick pressed between her forefingers, “all that fuss for a little tick.”

“What?”

“See?” The tick waved its legs at me in salute. It still had a mouthful of pink skin,
my
pink skin, in its jaws. “Nothing to get your knickers in a twist about.”

I shook my head and wiped my nose on my arm.

“Now go and find Violet and tell her to wash your face,” said Mum. She pressed the tick between her nails until it popped, my blood bursting out of the tick and staining the tips of Mum’s fingers.

That’s how I remember Karoi. And the dust-stinging wind blowing through the mealies on a hot, dry September night. And a fold-up and rip-away lawn prickled with paper thorns. And the beginning of the army guys: men in camouflage, breaking like a ribbon out of the back of an army lorry and uncurling onto the road, heads shaved, faces fresh and blank. Men cradling guns. And the beginning of men not in camouflage anymore, looking blank-faced, limbs lost.