NF (1957) Going Home (22 page)

The supper of maize porridge was cooking on the fire outside—a handful of sticks in the dust, small flames, pale in the last sunshine around the big iron cooking pot.

The official said: ‘These conditions are as bad as anything in Britain during the industrial revolution. But thank God we’ve got the sun; we’ve got this magnificent climate. Imagine this squalor under an English sky.’

And, from another official, who asked me to make a point of writing about tuberculosis—how it is on the rampage, a particularly virulent form of it; and how one of the reasons why it is spreading fast from the crammed cities to the Reserves is because there aren’t enough hospital beds, so that the Africans when they are too ill to work are sent back to the villages: ‘Do you know what’s the mainstay of white supremacy? No, not the police. The sun. The only reason they get away with these dreadful conditions they make the natives live in is that the sunlight makes life tolerable.’

After I had left Bulawayo, I got a message telling me that the CID had been around interviewing the people I had seen, telling them I was a wicked and unscrupulous person, and they would get themselves into trouble if they consorted with such as me.

I know how these matters are conducted, because an African once described to me how, after he had been talking to a certain progressive churchman, the CID came around to his house.

‘So you’ve been complaining to Father X?’

‘Not complaining, no.’

‘You’ve been telling a pack of lies about your conditions?’

‘No, I would not say I have been telling lies.’

‘But you’ve been talking to Father X?’

‘There is no law against it, so far as I know.’

‘You’d better watch out. We’ve got our eyes on you. You needn’t think we don’t know what’s going on.’

Everybody talks about Kariba, with an odd mixture of resentment and pride: too big a project, they say, for two hundred thousand people—yes, of course it is an imaginative and bold step; but how can a handful of white people find £113,000,000?

This is the first big Federal project, a symbol of the success of Federation, a big dam on the Zambezi, 200 miles below the Victoria Falls. Before leaving Britain I had promised to find out as much as I could about the Africans who are working on it, and those who are being moved from the flood areas.

The Federal Hydro-Electric Board very kindly gave me permission to go up and see what was going on; and therefore, in our borrowed car, Mr Paul Hogarth and I set off one afternoon; for he wanted to make drawings on the dam site.

The road up north is the one I had driven over a thousand times as a child; it was the road into the city, and I was afraid it might be changed. For the first 20 miles out of Salisbury it has become a fine, wide highway; but after that there are strips
and corrugations and dust-drifts; and I was able to think myself back into those interminable journeys in and out of town; for my father hated driving fast, and in any case our cars were always very old and could not do more than about thirty miles an hour.

Strips are a Southern Rhodesian invention; instead of surfacing a whole road, a double line of strips of tarmac are laid, just wide enough for the wheels. They are efficient if kept in order; if not they become sharply-edged pitted ledges swirling with sand. It was pleasant to drive over the familiar route, watching the stations go by—Mount Hampden; Darwendale, with its chrome mountain—the one over which the sun rose through my window at home—and its soil glittering with fallen chrome fragments; and then on to Maryland and Trelawney, which are sandveld, the earth of a beautiful pale, crusty gold. And next there was Banket, which was the station we used. Impossible to give any idea how much the station meant to us farmers who lived so far from town. The little clutch of corrugated iron-roofed buildings, a couple of stores, the garage, the post office, the station-master’s house—this was our town, and going to the station was always an event.

All the way from Salisbury I was telling myself that now I would be firm, and turn off from Banket up past the police station, and along that red-dust road between the trees that once was a railway track leading to a big gold-mine that has long since fallen into the status of a small-working operation. ‘Yes,’ I said, turning the car sharply over the glittering hot railway lines, ‘now I must certainly go and see how the hill where the house used to be rises empty and bush-covered from the mealie-fields.’ But I did not go.

We drove through Banket fast. There is a new hotel there, built just where at one time the mealie sacks used to be laid out waiting for the train to take them to Salisbury and the markets. The sacks were of a new, strong, golden-brown stuff, with a double line of bright blue down them, smelling strongly of ink from the farmers’ brand-marks. They were stacked up on each other 10 feet high, with dirt lanes between; so the children in for the afternoon from the farms used to play on them, jumping perilously from one barricade to another. The sacks were hot
and smooth; and sitting on them the hard, small grains inside gave to one’s weight like shifting sand. The smell was of sun-heated red dust, and ink, and jute and fresh, sweet mealies. The sacks were laid at either end of the rows in such a way that they made a bulging staircase; and if one sat on the top and let oneself go, one slid very fast and, bumping over the sacks, landed with a thud in the soft, warm dust.

But now there is a large, modern hotel. Because this is the main road north, along which cars come up all the way from the Cape, through to Northern Rhodesia, and so to Kenya, and ultimately, if they wish, to Egypt, there are hotels building all along it. This is the road from Cape to Cairo: but it is still a rough and primitive road; and thus, for me at least, enjoyable to drive over. Sinoia is twenty miles up the railway line from Banket; and that is no longer a station merely, but a small town. I remember sitting in the car waiting for my father when he had to drive there to get a spare part for the car, or for the farm machinery, or to take a labourer into the Native Hospital. It used to be just a station, a few buildings, the iron roofs glittering with heat, the earth rocking with heat-waves. Sinoia is extremely hot; all my memories of it are of that truly withering heat. But on this evening we drove through it fast, past another fine new hotel, and along to Karoi. I had not before driven farther than Sinoia, for me it was the end of the stations; and beyond that there was the Zambezi escarpment.

The road became sharply worse, badly potholed and swirling with dust. The plan was to drive until the turn-off to the Kariba Gorge, and then find some hotel to stay the night. I was imagining the little hotels, lines of rooms built side by side under a low roof off a verandah, whose existence depended on the bar, which was what Banket hotel used to be like. The children of the district would stand on the verandah and watch the Government officials and the commercial travellers and the insurance men, in their correct town clothes, standing at the bar drinking with the farmers in their khaki and their bush-shirts.

The road was twisting, swerving up and down; the air was full of reddish dust as the sun went down, so that as the car turned at a bend a blaze of red, glinting with particles of light,
blinded us and made the car rock. That grass known as redtop, a soft, feathery, reddish-pink grass, was growing everywhere; and the sun swung over it, so that it was like soft flames springing up, or the sweep of a veld-fire with the wind behind it, when sun-thinned flames lap forward over unconsumed stems. The autumn green of the trees was gilded and burnished with the low sunlight. Once a small buck sprang across the road, and its coat was heated to a warm, reddish-brown. The tree-trunks flashed up dark, showing red wakes of the rose-red grass behind; and the sun-heat slid fast up their solid heaviness, roughening the bark so that it held pockets of red glow.

Just before the sun sank, and a red blaze shot up the clear blue of the sky, the light was coming flickering through the tree-trunks and laying black bars over coloured dust; and, turning a corner, the glow was so intense it burned out the softness of small foliage up tall grass stems. The grass on a turn of the road was ten feet high, still stiff with sap; and each stem glittered a pale, clear red, like a forest of fine tinted wires; and the tree-trunks behind showed black and still against the flare of red, the roughness of bark swallowed in substance of shadow. Fine perpendicular grass stems; straight rising trunks, and, above, the flat-layered branches of the bushveld, black with glowing edges—a springing upwards of a myriad sharp lines, backed with soaring trunks; and, above, the blocking horizontal masses of the branches.

And then the big red sun dipped under, and there was an exquisite afterglow, warm and nostalgic and clear; and the air was sweet with hot dust and hot leaves and warm grasses.

Soon it was dark; the lights of cars showed miles away, dipping through the bush, or shining up in a wide, white dazzle over the farther side of ridges. And the road was very bad; and we hoped that soon an ugly little roadside bar-hotel would show itself; or at least, I did; for I wanted to sleep again beneath a corrugated-iron roof, and hear it sing and crackle as the night-chills fought in the metal with the day heat.

Then, where the map said we could expect Karoi, a big white hotel rose three-cornered on the road, shining with car lights and strung with little coloured bulbs.

So the car was left in a rank parked solid with cars and we
went into a fine modern hotel, full of farmers in for an evening’s relaxation, and travellers going north and south. The verandah was pleasant to sit and drink on, looking as it does on to a little court edged with flowers and decked with more coloured lights strung over white walls, reminding me of a hotel I once stayed in in Spain, which had exactly this air of warm moon-lit laziness, and even more because of the women wearing bare-armed linen and cotton dresses, and moving with the indolence of hot weather.

The dinner was disagreeable because there was a middle-aged lady at the table from Kenya. She said she was leaving Kenya, where she had lived most of her life, because things were so bad there. Mau Mau? But no; the natives were under control again; it was the Indians, she said; the Indians all over the place; and Indians and natives coming into the bars now, and even to eat in some of the hotels. They had a bad type of Indian, she said, they were traders, and always speaking up for themselves. And now they were even asking for land; they were getting uppity. Who ever heard of Indians being farmers?

Perhaps in India, it was suggested, it could be said they were farmers. ‘Then why don’t they go back there? We don’t want them.’ But the Government was soft. It was soft with the Kaffirs and it was soft with the Indians. Look what it did with Mau Mau. Giving in to Britain as usual—our men knew how to deal with the natives, but the British troops had different ideas, and look at the fuss in Britain over nothing, the Kaffir never did understand anything but a good hiding. And she was going to live in Southern Rhodesia, which was the only civilized country left. South Africa was no good because of the Nationalists, and Northern Rhodesia was a Kaffir country, but Southern Rhodesia was still a British country, thank heavens for that at least.

After this, we followed the advice of the management, and decided to spend the evening in the drive-in cinema at the back of the hotel. Drive-in cinemas are now rapidly becoming a major feature of life in the southern half of the continent-naturally, since it saves one from being parted from one’s car too early in the evening.

But I admit it seemed odd to find one in Karoi, which must
be (if I remember it right) about 170 miles from Salisbury, and another 150 from the Zambezi; it is a little station stuck in the bush.

We took the car round to the back of the hotel, and there drove it up the ramp, anchoring the front wheels in a groove for the purpose, had the loudspeaker fixed on to the window, and looked at the big, white screen that glimmered soft in the moonlight against a blaze of enormous African stars. Then there was a newsreel, and then a British film whose name I forget, but the script was by Mr Priestley, and the main part was played by Alec Guinness. The story was about a young clerk told he was soon to die; so he drew out all his savings and set himself to have a good time in a luxury hotel. I think I might have considered this a good film had I seen it in Leicester Square, but nothing could have seemed more incongruous and pitiful than this cosy little drama of provincial snobberies and homespun moralities played out in front of ranks of tobacco farmers in their big cars, with the African waiters hanging about in the shadows, watching the screen with one ear open for a summons from the verandah whence came the chink of ice in glasses; while behind the screen the Southern Cross moved sideways to make room for Orion, and the crickets chirped incessantly just off in the bush.

We were off along the road next morning while the moon still whitened it. The light changed fast and warmed; and the bush darkened and sprang up on either side of the road as the sun burst over the hills.

The turn-off to Kariba has a big notice that there is no accommodation for sightseers. After the pitted, rutted main road, the new dirt-surfaced road to Kariba was restful to drive on. It winds along through increasingly wild country down towards the Zambezi, for 60 miles or so; and the kloofs and hills and turning points along it have names like Puff-Adder Rise and Buffalo Nek.

From time to time the car was stopped by a tsetse fly post, and the wheels and body of the car were sprayed. When the car stopped for a couple of minutes, it was at once invaded by half a dozen innocent-looking flies, which we swatted at once,
reminding ourselves that very few people die of sleeping sickness.

We reached the site at about nine in the morning, a turn off the road into a flat place between hills, which were covered all over with camps, tents and breeze-block huts shining white through thick trees, while land-rovers and bulldozers manoeuvred everywhere, over sun-dried mud-ruts. White men supervised groups of Africans doing this or that sort of work.

It all looked like a gold-rush film; another world from the comfortable conformities of little Salisbury; and I liked it very much. This was the atmosphere of the old days, the good old days that people remember so sentimentally; and I cannot help remembering them sentimentally too.

It took some time to track down the official who would be responsible for us—a young Frenchman from Mauritius who, after a few years here, was already completely Rhodesian and who went out of his way all day to be as helpful and as hospitable as he could be, in the Rhodesian tradition of fine hospitality.

First, he explained that all this scene of chaotic activity was temporary; for affairs were still in the stage of building access roads and permanent housing; and groups of people were being flown in daily from Greece and Italy; and the African labourers were being garnered in from wherever they could be found.

He took us in his land-rover over roads such as I have never even imagined; but they were not roads, merely those parts of a rough terrain that offered the least resistance to locomotion. I was filled with respect for land-rovers; this one climbed up tracks as steep as house-sides without any effort, and finally up a high mountain, so that Paul Hogarth could make drawings of the landscape.

On the top of this mountain we sat, therefore, for an hour or so, while baboons and monkeys swung through the trees and gibbered at us from the bushes; and we threw pebbles down a steep, narrow gully full of boulders, watching them bound off at angles or up into the trees, and we looked at a great expanse of landscape. It was an aeroplane view of the systems of the Zambezi and the Sanyati rivers, winding flat and brown through thick, green forest—a landscape that stretched off and away
and around for nearly 100 miles, mountain and hill and plain, river and marsh and forest, with cloud-shadows moving over it like the stains on the bed of an ocean. At the side of the mountain we sat on was the Kariba Gorge, where the wide Zambezi narrows and runs fast and deep and browny-green, edged with white sandbanks.