The Dust Diaries (43 page)

The darkness is complete by the time I unpak my bag in your ron-davel and roll out my sleeping bag next to Leonard’s. For two years now I have been trying to inhabit your life, trying to get under your skin, and as I make a rough pillow out of m) rucksack, I wonder if this is as close as I will get: sleeping the night in your hut, listening to the song of the veld that you listened to outside its round stone walls. As I have moved through your life, from your letters, to Zimbabwe, to here, I have always encountered the problem of imagination, a struggle between what happened and what may have happened, a colonisation of fact by fiction. But this, the hard polished dung of your rondavel’s floor, the single slit window where you kept the portrait of your mother, the rustle of mice moving in the thatch, this, I feel, must be real. I lie down and I know I am lying in the shadow of you. I can sense the penumbra of your body on this floor, the touch of your skin on these walls. I think I understand, but I cannot be sure.

Leonard has taken the torch to go to the toilet and I can’t find my matches, so, deprived of my sight, I strain my ears to try and get a picture of what is happening outside. I can hear people, but it is hard to say how many. There is excited chatter, the rustle and thump of bags and packages being let to the ground, greetings and shouts. A drum has been beating a rhythm for the last ten minutes, and every now and then a man’s voice joins in, singing. The metal racket of one engine sputters into the clearing then stops with a sudden clank, leaving just voices in its wake, men and women’s, speaking quick Shona.

I have no idea how many people are coming to your festival. Leonard was hoping for around three hundred, but it has been a hard seven months—the petrol shortages, inflation, farm workers losing their homes in the land invasions—and I can’t help thinking that Leonard is being optimistic in his expectations. But then, through the open doorway of your rondavel I see the fires. Where the night air above the clearing had been filled with pitch black there are now constellations of pulsing orange spots. I watch as more come out over the kopje like stars emerging in the night, each one
s
little higher than the next. After half an hour there are so many that the shape of the hill is clearly marked out by the rough triangle of orange and yellow flickering lights.

I get up from the floor of the rondavel and walk out of the doorway towards the fires, and it is by their light that I that see the clearing and the trees at the base ol the kopje are teeming with people. Many are still arriving, baskets and bags carried on women’s heads, toddlers dozing in the arms of the men and babies tied to backs, their sleeping faces squashed against their mother’s spines. I walk on into the trees and into an ethereal atmosphere of firelight through wood smoke, the smell of roasting peanuts sweet and rich in the air. I see Jodi in there, darting between the fires, a big grin on her face, the small black camera always either at her eye or poised just below her chin. She sees me and shouts across, ‘
I’m
trying to find the light. It’s tough, hey?’ Her South African English sounds surprising on my ear after the sea of Shona I have been walking through.

I walk on, and I am stared at. I am the only white man here, but I don’t want to miss a th ing. I am stunned by the volume of people, out here, in the veld, at night, all here for your festival. Most of them are surprised to see me, but after the surprise there is interest. The older people are interested in me because of you, the younger because of my watch, my shoes or for whether I know David Beckham. Everyone wants an address, a point of contact. Letters are still alive here, as a way of hope, just as they were for you. One boy in an Adidas tracksuit and a bobble hat pulled low over his eyes asks me quite simply why he can’t come back to Britain with me, ‘to help with your work, I can work with you’.

A woman surrounded by children asks me to sit by her fire. She introduces herself as Happiness and offers me some of the peanuts twitching on a flat pan above the flames. The children crowd at her shoulder, then, as she tries to teach me to count in Shona, at mine.
Poshi
, pin’,
tatu, ina, shanu, tanhatu
, the children chant along with me, screaming with laughter when I make a mistake. Happiness introduces me to her daughter Sandra, who is doing her O-levels this year and who wants to be a teacher. Her younger brother wants to be an airline pilot. In fact, all the boys want to be airline pilots. And then we talk about you. Because everyone knows your story here, which is told to me again and again, the same phrases reoccurring in different mouths, your life as a fable: ‘he loved the Africans’, ‘Arthur Shearly Cripp, he lived just as an African’, ‘Baba Cripps, he would walk
one hundred miles
into Salisbury.’

Two powerful beams of light sweep through the trees from behind me, passing across the dark tree trunks and the groups huddled around the fires like two searchlights. Walking out into the clearing with Happiness and Sandra I find that the lights belong to an open-backed truck which is pulling up beside your church carrying what looks like a load of blankets. The driver cuts the engine and it rattles out, sending a shiver down the truck’s chassis. Almost immediately the blankets begin to move, and as the driver gets out of his cabin to flip down the tail, children emerge from under them. They drop to the floor, young boys and girls rubbing sleep from their eyes, some of them carrying even younger children. They wear strange combinations of ill-fitting clothes and many are bare-footed. They stand around the back of the truck, disorientated by sleep, shivering and their teeth chattering audibly as a woman in a nun’s habit and large glasses ushers them into some kind of order. Watching them, I realise how cold it has become. There is no wind but the air now has a frozen edge to it, and the heat of the recent afternoon feels like a distant memory. I remember Leonard’s letter: ‘Our cou ntry is now very cold.’ Then, as if I had thought him there, Leonard’s hand is on my shoulder. He gestures towards the nun and the children, who are still slipping off the tail of the truck onto the ground. This is Sister Dorothy from the Shearly Cripps Children’s Home. They have come from Juru, that
is five hours
away,’ he adds, his voice rising to his now familiar pitch of astonishment. ‘I will go and help them, but you must talk to this man,’ he says, indicating a huge man at ids side. ‘His name is Patrick and he also knew Baba Cripps.’

‘My name is Patrick Bwanya who comes from All Saints Wreningham in Manyeni Reserve, near Chivhu town where (‘ripps came in 1901 to work among the Vaheri people. He was welcomed by my three grandfathers, these being Wade
sango
(the one who losses the bush), Gava
jena
(white fox) and Mu
pem
hi (Beggar).’

Patrick and I are sitting inside the walls of your church, a few feet from your grave. We have come in here becauso Patrick wants to tell me all he knows about you, and the singing in the clearing has got so loud that it is hard to hear each other talk. I have brought a mini-disc with me this time and Patrick talks slowly in his deep growl of a voice in deference to the clumsy microphone I am holding out to him. As he tells me the story of your life again, I glance up at the sky above us. Your church is roofed with stars now, not grass, the constellations of Virgo and Hercules looking over you. Beyond the walls the singing lifts and falls above a steady rhythm of maracas and drums, the women’s voices flowing on like an endless stream, answered every now and then by the deeper voices of the men. Patrick tells me how he moved to Maronda Mashanu with his father, and a story about seeing bees stop a car. Then he describes your funeral, how the congregation of whites, blacks and coloureds was so big it did not fit inside the church, and how the people of Maronda Mashanu sang as they are singing now, songs only ever sung for the burial of a Mashona chief. He finishes with a big laugh and a nod towards you in your grave as he says what I have heard so many people say today, ‘Yes, because Baba Cripps, he was like an African.’

The singing and witnessing does not stop all night, drawing me up through layers of sleep again and again in time with the rising and falling of its cadences. Leonard is sleeping beside me, and when I wake I listen to his heavy breathing and to the lighter breaths of Jodi who sleeps beyond Leonard, her head on her camera bag. The music becomes part of my dreams, and I find it hard to tell when I am awake or asleep. For most of the night I think I am neither, but somewhere in between.

It is the singing that finally draws me to full wakefulness in the morning, a small group of men around a fire near the rondavel, passing a song between the in like a round. I get out of my sleeping bag, step over Leonard and walk through the open doorway to go and wash in the river. Outside, the sun has not yet taken the edge off the night and the air is still cold. Those sleeping in the open are stirring from where they lay under blankets beside the embers, children stumbling around, sleep still heavy in their eyes and their breath steaming in the cold as if they are exhaling the smoke of last night’s fires. There are now around 700 people here, all going about the morning chores of washing and eating and passing on the singing from group to group.

After a breakfast of boiled eggs and toast the festival proper begins. The festival committee all carry schedules that Leonard has typed out on his old typewriter and the day proceeds with a strange mix of strict efficiency on the part of the committee and casual nonchalance on the part of the crowds. By mid-morning the Bishop of Harare has arrived in his wine-red cassock and an altar is prepared outside the walls of the church. The priests and the deacons gather for the memorial service, all wearing their white vestments as they proceed towards the altar, the choirs accompanying them, and a tall wooden cross held before them. I can’t help thinking of the photo of you I found in Rhodes House Library, that odd juxtaposition of the veld and your ecclesiastical dress. The scent of incense mixes with the smell of fires.

The congregation sit on the ground around the altar, the women of the Mothers’ Union in their bright blue headscarves and shawls and the choirs from other churches each in their own bright uniforms of yellows, reds and purples. I join a group of boys from the Children’s Home, crouching at the back. The service is long and the sun is hot and after a while they start to yawn and play, shooting pieces of straw from the clam-like dried seed pods of the jacai anda tree and drawing biro tattoos on each other’s arms: a Nike swoosh, an Adidas logo, ‘Power Rangers’ written below.

After the service I chat with Sister Dorothy about your Children’s Home. She tells me the children help in all areas of the home, in the garden, the kitchen and even with teaching the younger children. She asks me if I can send the boys football magazines and then tells me very proudly that many of their pupils go on 1o university. Two boys have even become airline pilots with Air Zimbabwe.

Over a lunch of sadza and beef after the memorial service the talk turns to politics. Some of the men admit that Zanu PF only won this area in the recent election because of their intimidation tactics. Chivhu is a long way from Harare, and it is easier for things to go unseen here. All the men I speak to are worried about the situation, and more than once I am told by someone shaking his head that Zimbabwe is at the lowest point of its twenty-year life. They know the land situation must be reformed, that some of the land should be redistributed, but none of them support the violent farm invasions. They are also all too aware of Mugabe’s political shorthand of black and white, and they know it isn’t as simple as that. That the ‘race card’ is a smoke screen for inter-African political struggles, between Zanu PF and the MDC. As one man says, for himself, he is more concerned about their boys coming back in body bags from the war in the Congo than the land problem. You are mentioned again by a local farmer, who gives thanks that you left your land to the Africans. ‘Otherwise,’ he says, a serious frown on his face, ‘I would not have my farm now, and my children would not be in school. That is why I am here.’

That evening I help Leonard up to the evensong which is being held on the summit of the kopje and the irony does not escape him. As he leans on my arm he tells me how you used to lean on him on the road into Chivhu, your fingers digging into his shoulder when you were in pain. He says he hopes his grandchildren are there to help me walk when I am old.

On the kopje I meet more people who knew you including an old woman with pencilled eyebrows like sweeps of italic ink. As we sit on a flat stone, still warm from the touch of the sun, she tells me she always called you her father. The congregation gather around us, the choirs fanning out in their bright vestments like the wings of different species of butterfly. The old woman tells me her christened name is Cecilia, but that everyone calls her Fortune.

A younger woman approaches with a tiny old man on her arm. She says she wants to introduce me to her grandfather, Thomas, who was with you when you died. I shake hands with the old man, who is wearing a brown suit and a shirt and a tie. His lower lip hangs loose from his mouth and he has soulful, sad eyes. His voice is very weak as he asks for my address so he can write to me. All he says about your death is that you died quietly.

I watch the evensong from a rock behind the priest’s head. The congregation fans out beneath, a mix of the choirs, Mothers’ Union, suited older men and children in shorts and T–shirts. Once again I listen to the singing, rich, full and flowing, Christian hymns tinged with veld life, the sound of a single impala horn running beneath. Throughout the service Tendai, a ten-year-old boy from the Children’s Home, translates for me, solemnly whispering into my ear, his soft, serious voice a second delayed after the preacher’s. The evensong ends with two women and one of the priests dancing in the dust, kicking up the dry earth with their bare feet.

A few hours later and everyone is kicking up the dust with their feet, dancing in the clearing around your church. Night has taken hold again, with its deep, absolute blackness and its shocking stars that send a plumb line to the centre of the soul. The clearing is packed with people and the drummers have whipped the crowd into a frenzy, women, men and children dancing in the African way: leant over at the waist, elbows out, knees bent, shaking their pushed-out bottoms in time to the drums, like bees performing a directional dance. The smaller kids are on older children’s shoulders, one woman yells out a line of song, and everyone answers: a lowing, liturgical swell of voices. The drums get faster, and the dancing more frantic. The lightning flash of Jodi’s camera illuminates everything for a second, then passes, plunging us back into night and torches and sound and feet, shuffling and kicking up dust.