Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (6 page)

Bobo and Van

THE BURMA VALLEY

The central vein of Rhodesia rises up into a plateau called the Great Dyke. It is where most of the country’s population have chosen to stay. The edges of the country tend toward extreme heat, flat heartless scrub, droughts, malaria. The central vein is fertile. Rhododendrons will grow here. Horses will gleam with fat, shiny coats. Children look long-limbed, high-browed, intelligent. Vitamin sufficient.

And then, in the east, beyond Salisbury, there is a thin, strangled hump, a knotted fist of highlands. And there if you look carefully, nestled into the sweet purple-colored swellings, where it is almost always cool, and the air is sharp and wholesome with eucalyptus and pine, and where there are no mosquitoes, is a deep, sudden valley. (The map plunges from purple to pink then orange and yellow to indicate one’s descent into heat and flatness and malaria.) That valley, in the far east of the country, is the Burma Valley. Here, horses hang thin in the thick, wet heat, their skin stretched over hips like slings. Children are elbow-knee wormy and hollow-orange with too much heat, skin-pinching dehydration, and smoking-drinking parents. Dogs have scabs from putzi flies, which lay eggs on damp patches of earth or unironed clothes, burrow under the skin, the eggs becoming maggots, bursting into living, squirming boils, emerging as full-blown, winged flies.

“Don’t wear clothes that haven’t been ironed.”

“Why?”

“Or you’ll get putzis.” Which babies get on their bottoms from damp, cloth nappies.

Mum told us that Vanessa got them once from an unironed nappy.

“Vanessa had putzis on her bott-om. Vanessa had putzis on her bott-om.”

“
Ja?
Well at least I’ve never had a tick on my
downthere.
”

Mum and Dad left Karoi and bought the farm in the Burma Valley because they loved the view. When they had stood where the new veranda would one day be built on the front of the old farmhouse and when they had looked out at the view of the hills, stretching blue-green into a haze of distant forest fires, and when they had seen the innocent-looking hump of the farm stretched out at their feet toward Mozambique, it seemed to them like this farm could hold their dreams in its secret valleys and gushing rivers and rocky hills.

The plumbing was temperamental and obvious (a leach field bleeding green slime at the back of the house) and there was no electricity.

They said, “We’ll take it.”

Unsurprisingly, the valley had reminded one of its first European settlers of Burma. It was humid and thick with jungle and creepers, and cut through with rivers whose banks spilled prolific ferns and mossy rocks and lichen-dripping trees teetering on the edge of falling in, and it was fertile-foul smelling (as if on the verge of rotting) and held a green-leafy lie of prosperity in its jeweled fist.

The valley represented the insanity of the tropics so precarious for the fragile European psyche. The valley could send you into a spiral of madness overnight if you were white and highly strung. Which we were.

It was easy to leave Karoi. Karoi had always felt like a train station platform, a flat place from which we hoped to leave at any moment for somewhere more interesting and picturesque.

We loaded up two cats called Fred and Basil and three dogs called Tina, Shea, and Jacko, and we drove, our worldly possessions balanced perilously on the roof of our car, clear across Rhodesia from flat west to convoluted east. We stopped to fill up the petrol tank, drink Cokes, and buy bags of Willards chips (“Make music in your mouth”). Everyone, dogs included, was let out for a pee on the side of the road, behind the bougainvillea bushes.

“Go now or forever hold your pee.”

Dad doesn’t like to stop. Even if your legs are crossed and you can’t see straight you have to pee so much, he doesn’t like to stop. He says, “You should have gone back there when you had a chance.”

“
Ja,
but I didn’t need to go back there.”

Dad lights a cigarette and ignores us.

“
Agh,
please, Dad.”

“I have to pee, man.”

“She’s going to widdle in her knickers,” warns Vanessa.

“Oh
fergodsake.
Tim, pull over, won’t you?”

The dogs panted hotly down our necks and we itched with their irritably scratched-off hair, the cats cried angrily from their boxes, strong gusts of wind threatened to flip the mattresses off our roof. Dad smoked and we ducked his ash in the back seat. Mum read, occasionally nodding off into broken-chicken-neck sleep. Vanessa and I fought and whined and dodged the consequent flailing hands aimed toward our bottoms.

Rebel, the horse, was on a lorry with the sofa and the dining room table and Mum’s woodwork machines. He was padded by our sheets and towels and two suitcases in which Mum had packed all our clothes. Our whole lives, everything we were and everything we owned, were in a Peugeot station wagon and a lorry. If we had been vanished away, sucked up into the atmosphere, just as we were, there would have been no trace of our little family ever having been on the planet. Not even Adrian’s grave, which was never marked, would tell of our short, unimportant passage on this earth.

As we drove over Christmas Pass, through the Mutarandanda Hills, the small city of Umtali suddenly winked up at us in the bright eastern highland sun, which seemed more glittering and intense out here than it did in the dust-yellow western part of the country.

Umtali (corruption of the word
mutare,
meaning “piece of metal”) is the last city in Rhodesia before the somewhat mysterious, faintly exotic border of Portuguese-held Mozambique draws a red line across the map.

Against a cliff overlooking the road, a hedge had been planted to read welcome to umtali. During the war, the terrorists chopped out the “l” in welcome, so that the subsequent greeting read a chilling we come to umtali. As quickly as the women from the Umtali Gardening Club directed the “garden boys” to replant the all-important missing “l,” it was ripped out again, until the war was won (or lost, depending on whose side you were on) and the hedge was replanted to read welcome to mutare.

We stopped in Umtali, at the Cecil Hotel (renamed the Manica Hotel after the war). Vanessa and I were given a Coke, not out of the bottle and warm but in a glass, floating with little wondrous cubes of ice. A shiny African waiter with impeccable hands and careful, clean nails brought us little white plates of ham sandwiches with the crusts cut off and green shreds of lettuce and paper-thin tomatoes sprinkled all over them.

Mum and Dad were in the bar for a beer or two.

Vanessa and I picked the vegetables off the sandwiches and finished our meal quickly, eyeing each other competitively, mouths bulging. Then we ran around on the blue patterned carpet, dizzy with luxury and Coke (“Adds life”); wall-to-wall carpeting; the unfamiliar bitter-smelling chill of air-conditioning; hushed lights; vigorously flushing loos; soft-footed waiters whose gleaming uniforms were made of thick, shiny cream nylon, crisply piped in gold, sharp-shouldered with blue epaulets. The chairs were swallowingly soft, the colors were bubble-gold and shades of greeny-blue. A white lady with hair like a purple-rinsed haystack and long red nails frowned at us from behind the reception desk. I had never been anywhere so comfortable. I would have been happy to sleep on the floor, under one of the round, glass-topped coffee tables, for the rest of my life. I would never need to sting with sweat again, being forever nicely, lightly chilled. No ticks or flies or scorps or snakes on this prickling, clean carpet. Cold Coke and ham sandwiches for breakfast, lunch, and supper for ever and ever. Our-men.

On the way out of Umtali, heading always east, farther and farther toward Mozambique, we stopped at the little rural post office, Paulington, which serviced the Vumba highlands and the Burma Valley, to collect our new postbox key. And then we snaked across the rim of the mountains leading out of Umtali, barreled across the dusty Tribal Trust Lands, and dipped down off the mountains into the floor of the valley.

It was breathtaking, that first drive into the valley, dropping off the sandy plateau of the denuded Zamunya TTL, where African cattle swung heavy horns and collected in thorny corrals for the evening and where the land was ribbed with erosion, and then banking steeply into the valley, the road now shouldered by thick, old, vine-covered trees with a dense light-sucking canopy and impenetrable undergrowth. We had gone from desert to jungle in one steep turn in the road.

Then we drove almost as far across the valley as we could go in the direction of the Mozambican hills until we arrived, dusty and stinging with sweat, coated with dog hair, at the large, ugly squat house that was to be our home for the next six years. We were going to be here until the end of the thirteen-year-long civil war.

“Home,” Mum announced cheerfully.

We scrambled out of the car, seasick after the choppy passage across the unfolding hills (Coke and ham sandwiches churning uncomfortably). We stared suspiciously, unimpressed at the house. It looked like an army barracks, low to the ground and solid with closed-in windows and a blank stare. The yard, littered with flamboyant pods, was big and bald and red.

Dad

CHIMURENGA,
1974

That was 1974, the year I turned five.

That year, in neighboring Mozambique, a ten-year civil war between Frelimo rebels and colonial Portugal was just drawing to a close and a new civil war between Renamo rebel forces and the new Frelimo government was just beginning.

We could see the Mozambican hills from our house. Our farm ended where the Mozambican hills started.

In 1974, the civil war in Rhodesia was eight years old. In a matter of months, terrorist forces based in Mozambique under the new and guerrilla-friendly Frelimo government would be flooding over the border to Rhodesia to conduct nightly raids, plant land mines, and,
they said,
chop off the ears and lips and eyelids of little white children.

“Do you think it hurts?”

“What?”

“To get your lips chopped off.”

“Why would you get your lips chopped off?”

I shrug.

“By whom? Who told you that?”

“Everyone knows terrs chop off your lips if they catch you.”

My sister and I both have big lips. Tackie lips is what the other children call them. Africans have tackie lips, too. I try and remember to suck in my lips, especially for photographs in case anyone thinks I’m part
muntu.
I wouldn’t mind getting my lips chopped off, or at least pared down a size or two, and then I wouldn’t be teased by the other children.

“You’ve got tackie lips. Like a
muntu.
”

“I do not.” I suck them in.

“You’re sucking in your lips.”

“Am not!”

Mum says, “They’re not tackie lips, they’re full lips.” She says, “Brigitte Bardot has full lips.”

“Is she a
muntu
?”

“No, she most certainly is not. She’s very glamorous. She’s French.”

But I don’t care how French or glamorous Brigitte Bardot is; she is not the one getting teased about my lips.

Vanessa says, “Getting your lips chopped off would hurt like
sterik.
Of course it hurts, man.”

Of course. It hurts.

“I wouldn’t cry.”

“Yes you would.”

“Would not.”

Vanessa takes my wrist in both her hands and gently twists the skin in opposite directions, a Chinese bangle. I have long hairs on my arms, pulled back with smears of snot from where I’ve wiped my nose. The snot makes a green, long pattern through the blond, sunburnt hair.

“
Yurrah
man!”

“Does that hurt?”

“
Ja, ja!
Oh it hurts!” I start to cry.

“See?”

“Ja.”

“Now, don’t cry.”

“Okay.” I wipe my nose on my arm.

“Don’t wipe your nose on your arm, man, yuck.”

I cry harder.

“It hurts worser than that to get your lips cut off.”

“Okay.”

“So would you cry?”

“
Ja, ja.
I’d cry, hey.”

Robandi, the farm, had been named by the original owner’s two sons, Rob and Andy. Robandi. Almost an African word. Like the Lozi word
banani,
they have. Or the Tonga word
ndili,
I am. Or Nyanja
pitani,
to the . . .

We have moved, mother and father with two children, a couple of cats, three dogs, and one horse, right into the middle, the very birthplace and epicenter, of the civil war in Rhodesia and a freshly stoked civil war in Mozambique. There is no way out of the valley for us now. We have borrowed money to buy the farm. Money we might never be able to repay. And who is going to buy the farm off us now? Who is going to buy our farm and take our place in the middle of a civil war? We are stuck.

We erect a massive fence with slanting-backward barbed wire at the top around the house. Mum plants Mauritius thorn around the inside of the fence for good measure; it bushes out with its forward-backward hooking thorns. We stop at the SPCA in Umtali and collect a host of huge dogs, and then we collect dogs abandoned by civil-war-fleeing farmers. These dogs are found tied up to trees or staring hopefully down flat driveways, waiting for their nonreturning owners. Their owners have gone in the middle of the night to South Africa, Australia, Canada, England. We call it the chicken run. Or we say they gapped it. But they gapped it without their pets.

One day Dad says to Mum, “Either I go, or some of these bloody dogs have to go.”

“But they don’t have anywhere
to
go.”

Dad is in a rage. He aims a kick at a cluster of dogs, who cheerfully return his gesture with jump-up licking let’s-playfulness.

Mum says, “See? How sweet.”

“I mean it, Nicola.”

So the dogs stay with us until untimely death does them part.

The life expectancy of a dog on our farm is not great. The dogs are killed by baboons, wild pigs, snakes, wire snares, and each other. A few eat the poison blocks left out in the barns for rats. Or they eat cow shit on which dip for killing ticks has splattered and they dissolve in frothy-mouthed fits. They get tick fever and their hearts fail from the heat. More dogs come to take the place of those whose graves are wept-upon humps in the field below the house.

We buy a 1967 mineproofed Land Rover, complete with siren, and call her Lucy. Lucy, for Luck.

“Why do we have the bee-ba?”

“To scare terrorists.”

But Mum and Dad don’t use the siren except to announce their arrival at parties.

There are two roads out of the valley. We can drive up to the Vumba highlands to the north or through Zamunya Tribal Trust Land to the east. Neither road is paved, and therefore both are easily planted with land mines. We are supposed to travel in convoy when we go to town.

A convoy is: a Pookie, the mine-detecting vehicle that can drive over a matchbox without squishing it. There is something in the Pookie that beeps if it detects metal. And land mines are cased in metal. Then two or three long crocodile-looking lorries, which are spiky with Rhodesian soldiers, their FN rifles poking out of the sides of the vehicle like so many bristles, ready to retaliate if we are ambushed. And finally, us. Farmers and their kids in ordinary vehicles, or mineproofed Land Rovers, our own guns poking from windows, on the way to town in our best clothes. If we are killed in an ambush or blown up on a mine, we will be wearing clean brookies, our best dresses, red and black necklaces made out of the very poisonous seeds from lucky-bean trees. We’ll be presentable to go and sit on the left hand of
Godthefather.

The third way out of the valley is too dangerous for casual travel now. It was possible, before the war, to climb up over the mountains, on footpaths unguarded by customs officials, to Mozambique. But these secret paths have been blocked by the minefield that has been laid along the border. Almost daily, and often at night, a mine erupts underneath the unsuspecting legs of a baboon, or a person—a fisherman coming back from the fish-rich dams in Mozambique, or a soldier in a troop of terrorists. We cheer when we hear the faint, stomach-echoing thump of a mine detonating. Either an African or a baboon has been wounded or killed.

“One hundred little baboons playing on the minefield. One hundred little baboons playing on the minefield. And if one little baboon should accidentally explode, there’ll be ninety-nine little baboons playing on the minefield.”

We had a policeman come to our school to talk to us about mines. Vanessa said he had come because I sucked my thumbs and the policeman was here to chop off my thumbs. I tucked my thumbs into my fists, but the policeman stood on the stage in the Assembly Hall and rocked back and forth in tight-squeaky shoes and stared over the top of our heads and didn’t look toward my thumbs once.

“Mines are hidden in cake tins and biscuit tins.” He showed us. The tins were bright and promising, with pictures of roses painted on their sides, or small children with rosy cheeks in old-fashioned winter clothes running behind snow-covered trees, or butter-soft shortbread with cherry-heart centers. “Would any of you open this tin?”

A few of us raised our hands eagerly.

“Children like you open the tins and get blown to pieces.”

We greedy, stupid few quickly sat on our hands again.

The policeman showed us pictures of holes in the ground where a mine had been.

A kid asked, pointing to the picture, “Was a kid blown up by that mine?”

The policeman hesitated, caught between wanting to scare the hell out of us and wanting to preserve our childish innocence. He said, “Not this particular mine. But you can never be too careful, hey?”

We shook our heads solemnly.

“Mines can also be buried, and you will never know where they are.”

A little voice from the assembly hall asked, “In your driveway even?”

“Oh,
ja
. Oh,
ja
.”

There was a rustle of titillated fear among the audience. The teachers looked bored, cross-armed, cross-legged, watchful. Waiting for one of us to misbehave so that they could send us to detention.

I only know a few people who have gone over mines.

A girl who attended the high school in Umtali went over a mine and had her legs blown off but she lived. She was brave and beautiful and when she got married in South Africa a few years after the accident,
Fair Lady
magazine wrote a big article about her and showed photographs of her walking down the aisle of a church all frothy in a white dress and a long white veil and with the help of bridesmaids and crutches.

Fanie Vorster, who is a farmer in the Burma Valley, went over a mine, too, but he did not get his legs blown off. If he had, it might have given children a chance to run away from him when he tried to trap them in his spare bedroom and pin them to the single bed with his fat gray-hair-sprouting belly while mums and dads drank coffee in the kitchen with his stick-insect purple-mottled bruised-and-battered wife. Fanie Vorster didn’t even get a headache when he went over the mine because he was in a mineproofed Land Rover, so the back end of it blew off and left the cab intact with Fanie inside, not at all hurt. He sat on the side of the road and smoked a cigarette until help came along.

Which just goes to show, all prayers aren’t answered.

Once Vanessa and I were driving back from a Christmas party with Mum and we were behind an African bus that had gone over a mine. It left a hole the size of the bus in the middle of the road and the bus lay blindly on its side like an eyeless, legs-in-the-air dead insect. Mum said, “Put your heads down!” Mum said, “Don’t look.” So I put my head down and squeezed my eyes shut and Vanessa looked out the window as we drove past the bus. She said bits and pieces of Africans were hanging from the trees and bushes like black and red Christmas decorations. Some of the passengers weren’t dead, Vanessa told me, but sitting on the side of the road with blood on them and their legs straight out in front of them, like people who have just had a big surprise.

She said, “Did you look?”

I said, “No ways, hey.”

Once at the police station I saw the army guys unload bodies in black plastic body bags from the back of a pickup and I heard the damp-dead sound of the heavy flesh hitting the ground.

I told Mum I had seen dead terrorists.

She said, “Don’t exaggerate.”

“I did. They were in bags.”

“Then you saw
body bags,
” she told me, “not bodies.”

That’s how I think of dead bodies, as things in long black bags, the ends neatly tied off. And I think of dead bodies as strips of meat hanging land-mine-blown from trees like strips of drying, salted biltong, even though I have only Vanessa’s word for it.

We drive through the Tribal Trust Lands to get to town, past Africans whose hatred reflects like sun in a mirror into our faces, impossible to ignore. Young African men slouch aggressively against the walls of the taverns. Their eyes follow us as we hurry past, and we stare at them until they are swallowed in the cloud of dust kicked up behind the armed convoy and the mine-detecting Pookie and the snake of farmers coming into town to sell green peppers and mealies, tobacco and milk. Outside one of the African stores (which advertise Cafenol for headaches and Enos Liver Salts for indigestion and Coke for added life on bullet-pocked billboards), there is a gong hanging from a tree. When our convoy thunders through, an old woman squatting under the shade of the tree gets painfully to her feet and beats the gong with surprising vigor.

The sound of that gong echoes through the flat, dry TTL and bounces against the hills that border them. Anyone camped in those hiding, thick hills or crouched behind boulders by the side of the road can hear the warning. We know now that we are being watched. A blink of binocular glass against the rocks up in the hills. An unnatural sway of thigh-deep grass on a still day. The shaking foliage of a tree as branches are parted, then allowed to spring back.

Mum sits back in her seat and slides the Uzi forward out the window.

She says, “Be ready to put your heads down, girls.”