The Dust Diaries

Owen Sheers

The Dust Diaries

Seeking the African Legacy of Arthur Cripps

2004

At a family reunion in Wales several years ago, the prize-winning poet Owen Sheers stumbled across the mesmerizing story of his great-great-uncle Arthur Cripps, a mysterious figure who turned from poetry to missionary work in Africa and ultimately became a shamanlike figure, ministering to the locals.

Arthur Cripps left his native England in a ship set for southern Rhodesia in 1900. During his time as a missionary in the British colony, Cripps became passionate about indigenous ways, leaving him ostracized from the largely racist, conservative European minority. Railing against colonial injustice, Cripps became a hero to the native population. He chose to exile himself from the Anglican church, factions of which branded him a heretic and burned down his churches. All the while he hid the soul-racking secret of what had driven him from England into the heart of Africa.

The Dust Diaries is the haunting record of Sheers’s all-consuming attempt to piece together the luminous fragments of Arthur Cripps’s remarkable life, and to understand the mystery of why he abandoned England for life in the African veldt—a journey that takes Sheers from the genteel reading rooms of Oxford University’s libraries to the parched landscape of contemporary Zimbabwe. Refracting Cripps’s life through the prism of his own vivid imagination, Sheers illuminates the devastating effects of power, the potent effects of grace, and the legacy of an extraordinary life.

Dust

1. a dead person’s remains (
   honoureddust
   ).
   
2. confusion or turmoil (
   raisedquite a dust
   ).
   
3. archaic
   or
   poet
   . The mortal human body (
   we are all dust
   ).
   
4. the ground; the earth (
   kissed the dust
   ).
   

—
The Oxford English Dictionary

§

History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.

—Milan Kundera,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being

§

This
decaying sense
, when wee would express the thing itself, (I mean
fancy
it selfe,) wee call
Imagination
, as I said before: But when we would express the
decay
, and signifie that Sense is fading, old, and past, it is called Memory. So that
Imagination
and
Memory
are but one thing…

—Hobbes,
Leviathan

DECEMBER 2000

Mpandi
was one of the Shona names given to my great, great uncle, Arthur Shearly Cripps, Independent Missionary to Southern Rhodesia. The name was translated for me in Mashonaland, where he lived, as ‘the man who walks like thunder’ or ‘the man who shakes the earth with his walking’. He was given many names during his life, but this is the one I have thought of most often as I followed in his footsteps, literal and metaphorical, over the past three years. Because for me he has always been walking, always on the move. Always a few steps ahead of me as I tried to track him down, as I tried to understand him. What follows is an account of this search: the story of my contact with him and of how the unfolding of one man’s life can resonate down the years in the lives of others. This account of my search is true. It happened, just as Arthur’s life happened, but the story of his life that I have written is not true in the same way. This story is written as a fiction, the fiction I formed in my mind so as to better understand Arthur’s life. It is, however, a fiction based on the facts, stories, myths and tales I gathered while looking for Arthur Cripps. Some of the people who feature in this story are imaginary, but most are not. Of those who really existed, some of their actions I have invented, many, again, I have not. It is the story of Arthur Cripps’ life reflected through my imagination. It may not always be true to historical fact, but I hope it is true to the essence of Arthur’s story and to the essence of the man I discovered buried in the nave of a ruined church far out in the Zimbabwean veld.

Maronda Mashanu, Mashonaland, Southern Rhodesia

It is dawn in the African bush. Light is expanding from the horizon, growing over the veld of rock, grass and dust. The first birds are calling in the winter trees. Arthur Cripps, Independent Missionary to Mashonaland is lying awake in the rondavel he built next to the church he named Maronda Mashanu, the Saint of the Five Wounds. He is lying awake and he is dying. It is his last day on earth. He is eighty-three years old.

He listens to his breath and counts backwards.

Ten years since he lost his sight.

Thirty-seven years since he went to war.

Thirty-eight years since he built the church.

Fifty-one years since he came to Africa.

Fifty-five years since he fell in love.

Beira Bay, Portuguese Mozambique

The irregular coughs of the man sleeping in the bunk beneath him had been chiselling into his sleep all night, but it was the slap of the sea against the ship’s hull that finally woke Arthur. There was something different about it, a change in its register and rhythm. Keeping his eyes shut, he tried to work out what it was. And then he realised: they were still, the ship was no longer moving. They must have finally been allowed into harbour. They had arrived.

He felt a dip of excitement in his stomach at the thought of being on land again. The journey from England had been more laborious than he’d thought it would be; at least, the sea voyage had. He had enjoyed the earlier train trip through Europe. In Rome he’d even got a chance to visit the room where Keats died and the Protestant cemetery, where he’d seen the poet’s grave. Standing above the simple headstone near the grand Pyramid of Cestius he’d looked down at the engraving of a broken lyre and the strangely ambiguous epitaph:
Here lies one whose name was writ in water
. The poet’s friend Charles Brown had interpreted this as Keats’ abandonment of any hope of posthumous fame, but standing there looking at it with the perspective of eighty years’ hindsight Arthur liked to think it was not this simple. His name is writ
in
not
on
water. Part of nature, not fleeting but eternal, twisted into the currents of history. He had often talked about visiting the grave, but once there it had felt strangely unreal. But then maybe that was because he had never expected to be visiting it alone.

From Rome he had travelled to Naples, where he boarded the
Hertzog
, and that is when the harder part of the journey began: the unforgiving hours of boredom looking out at an indifferent sea, the forced formalities of the captain’s table and the joking sarcasm of some of the pioneer crowd. Most of his fellow travellers were tolerable, and there was a particular group with whom he had become good friends. He had a postcard in the pocket of his jacket hung at the end of his bed with these people’s signatures on it, a memento of their shared trip. But there was another group of men, ‘entrepreneurs’ they called themselves, who thought it fun to gently mock him and his vocation, often late at night, out on the deck when everyone was enjoying the cooler air. Their breaths heavy with port and cigar smoke, they would interrogate him about his work in Africa—was he ready to battle with witchcraft? Did he know they still ate missionaries in the Belgian Congo? How would he resist the charms of the native girls, out there alone in the bush? Inevitably the jokes would wane and they would soon be talking among themselves about their own schemes for fortune on the dark continent, but they had often irritated Arthur to such an extent that he longed to take one of them on in a boxing ring.

Zanzibar had come as a welcome break from life on board ship. They had made a double stop there and Arthur had taken the opportunity to catch up with his college friend Frank Weston, who was a missionary on the island. The voyage down from Aden had not been easy. Just two days after leaving port the
Hertzog
ran into the south-west monsoon, a curtain of storms and high winds that lasted for three days. They were so fierce that when they finally abated and he emerged from his cabin he saw that the two black funnels rising above the centre of the deck had been turned a dull grey⁄white, coated with a layer of brine from the waves that had broken into and over the ship. The hull bore marks of the storm too. Immediately below the railings of the lower decks he could see it was streaked with long pale splashes of dried vomit, fanning out down to the waterline. Like the other passengers he had not had a good time of it, feeling the sea beat itself against the outer wall of his small cabin through long, sleepless nights, so it was a relief when the clustered white buildings of Zanzibar’s capital, Stonetown, came into view.

The strong smell of cloves and spices carried on a warm trade wind had heralded the presence of the island hours before anyone on board could see her shores. The captain told them this would be so. But there had been another smell too, equally strong, coming in gusts, that puzzled Arthur. He enquired of it to a passing crew member. The boy (he looked no older than sixteen) told him simply, ‘Oh, that’s shark, sir. They salt ‘em in vats on the shore before selling them to the niggers on the mainland.’ Shark and spices. Not for the first time on that voyage, Arthur felt he was inhabiting someone else’s life, a Rider Haggard-type fiction, and not his own at all.

As the
Hertzog
steamed nearer through a flat, hot morning with heatwaves tricking the eye, the buildings of Stonetown became clearer. A broad white palace with pillars and grand steps dominated the immediate ground behind the port and its frilling of palm trees. Part of its facade was covered in a crude scaffolding and half-naked workmen clambered over its stone like animated hieroglyphs. Arthur realised it must be Beit el Ajaib, the House of Wonders that Frank had written to him about, and on closer inspection he saw he was right. There, behind the scaffolding, the white walls gave to a shattered dark hole, the last remaining damage of the British shells that had thudded into the palace back in 1896 in what turned out to be the world’s shortest war. Just forty minutes long, Frank had said. To the south of the House of Wonders the massive bastioned walls of the old fort rose from a packed confusion of smaller, square coral-rag buildings, their wooden carved doors of red, green and blue the only colours in the white and dull fawn of the new and old stucco plasterwork. Behind these, the towers of minarets and the domes of mosques were the only buildings tall enough to be seen. Arthur had expected to be able to see the spire of the Anglican Cathedral that Frank had also written to him about, but however much he scanned the on dine of the town, he couldn’t find it. There were just the delicate minarets, wavering in the haze against an African sky so blue he felt the colour as a sensation in his chest.

As the
Hertzog
came into port both the town’s buildings and the noise of the place came into focus. A crowd of hundreds of people were shouting from the quayside, woven baskets offish and fruit carried on their heads. After the flat emptiness of the sea and then the cramped conditions of his cabin Arthur had been disorientated by the crush of them about him as he disembarked from a launch onto the harbourside. The dull familiarity of the ship fell away and suddenly everything was strange again: men with bloodshot eyes appearing close to his face asking questions in broken English that sounded more like demands; the musty stench of goats wandering among the crowd; children tugging at his jacket, softly chanting ‘Meester, meester’; the smells and colours of the fish, nuts and fruit they carried in their baskets.

Frank was there waiting for him. Arthur spotted him through the crowd, jogging towards him, his arms outstretched as far as the crush of people would allow and his voice a welcome foothold of familiarity, ‘Arthur! Who’d have thought it? God bless YOU for coming, God bless you!’ Arthur held out his own hand but his friend dodged it and embraced him instead.

Frank was soon guiding him out of the port area and into the narrow alleys and passageways behind the main coastal road. It had been three years since they had seen each other, and he saw Frank had changed. His pale complexion was now tanned a dark brown, and the broad face of his youth was leaner, narrower in appearance. He were a light safari suit with a clerical shirt and collar and the same wire-rimmed spectacles he had worn in England. He looked older. There were flecks of grey in his neatly-parted dark hair and Arthur thought again of the white brine on the black funnels, the signature of the storm. But he was still the Frank he had known at college: energetic, nervy, excited, with hands that explored the air around him as he talked, and a face that managed to express both a frown and a smile as he listened to you.

This morning he was as excitable as ever, anxious to show Arthur his world on the island and what he had done there. He walked ahead, one arm out in front finding a way through the flow of people pressing against them, talking to Arthur over his shoulder, asking questions about home, their old tutors, their mutual friends.