Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (15 page)

Mum on Caesar

LOSING ROBANDI

Rhodesia has more history stuffed into its make-believe, colonial-dream borders than one country the size of a very large teapot should be able to amass in less than a hundred years. Without cracking.

But all the history of this land returns to the ground on which we stand, because all of us (black, white, coloured, Indian, old-timers, newcomers) are fighting for the same thing: tillable, rain-turned-over-fresh, fertile, worm-smelling soil. Land on which to grow tobacco, cattle, cotton, soybeans, sheep, women, children.

In Rhodesia, we are born and then the umbilical cord of each child is sewn straight from the mother onto the ground, where it takes root and grows. Pulling away from the ground causes death by suffocation, starvation. That’s what the people of this land believe. Deprive us of the land and you are depriving us of air, water, food, and sex.

The Rudd Concession of 1888 tricked King Lobengula of the Matabeles into surrendering mineral rights to the British South African Company.

In 1889, the Lippert Concession allowed white settlers to appropriate land for farms and townships in Lobengula’s name—concessions that were
supposed
to be valid only in Lobengula’s lifetime.

In 1894 a British Land Commission declared itself unable to remove white settlers from native land.

In 1898 the British government set up “sufficient” areas for the exclusive occupation of the African people.

In 1915 the boundaries of the “Native Reserves” were set up.

In 1920 a Southern Rhodesia Order-in-Council assigned 21.5 million acres
(
out of a possible 96 million acres
)
for the sole use of Africans.

The 1925 Morris Carter Commission recommended division of land among the races.

The Land Apportionment Act of 1930 divided the country: 21.5 million acres for “Native Reserves”; 48 million acres for occupation and purchase only by Europeans; and 7.5 million acres for occupation and purchase only by Africans. Seventeen and a half million acres were unassigned.

The Land Apportionment Act was amended in 1941, 1946, and several times in the 1950s and 1960s, and the Native Reserves were renamed Tribal Trust Lands.

The Rhodesian government built its policy of racial segregation on the Land Tenure Act of 1969
(
repealed in 1979 under growing international and internal pressure
)
.

The Tribal Trust Lands Act is replaced by the Communal Land Act in 1982.

“To us the time has now come for those who have fought each other as enemies to accept the reality of a new situation by accepting each other as allies who, in spite of their ideological, racial, ethnic, or religious differences are now being called upon to express loyalty to Zimbabwe.” That’s what the new “ZANU (PF)” government announces at the end of the war.

“I’ll show them peace and re-bloody-conciliation,” says Mum.

Piss and reconciliation,
we call it.

Our farm is designated one of those that, under the new government, may be auctioned (but not to whites) by the government for the purpose of “land redistribution.”

This is how land redistribution goes.

First, the nice farms, near the city, are given to Prime Minister Robert Mugabe’s political allies.

Then, the nice farms far from the city are given to those politicians whom Mugabe must appease, but who are not best-beloved.

After that, the productive, tucked-away farms are given to worthy war veterans—to the men, and a few women, who showed themselves to be brave liberation strugglers.

Then farms like ours—dangerously close to existing minefields, without the hope of television reception and with sporadic rains, unreliable soil, a history of bad luck—are given to Mugabe’s enemies, whom he is pretending to appease.

Our farm is a gift of badlands, eel-worm-in-the-bananas, rats-in-the-ceiling.

Our farm is a gift of the Dead Mazungu Baby.

Our farm is gone, whether we like it or not.

Dad shrugs. He lights a cigarette. He says, “Well, we had a good run of it, hey?”

But already, landless squatters from Mozambique have set themselves up on our farm. Before our farm has been officially auctioned, and the old crop has been pulled in, before the new owners can set foot on the road that leads, ribby and washed away, up to the squat barracks house (which Mum painted peach, years ago, to try and cheer us up), before our footsteps are cold on the shiny cement floors of the veranda, the squatters come.

No one invited the squatters to come and take over the farm and other farms close to the border. The squatters are mostly illiterate, unlikely to have been war heroes, but hungry. They are belly-hungry, home-hungry, land-hungry.

They have made themselves a camp up in the hills above the house, they have chopped down virgin forest and planted maize. Their cattle drink straight from hillside springs, crushing creek banks into red erosion, which comes out, in the end, like blood in our tap water.

Mum says, “I’ll show them land re-bloody-distribution.”

Dad says, “Too late now.”

Mum grits her teeth and talks between them, so that the words are sharp and white-edged. She says, “It’s not theirs yet. It’s still our farm.” She pours brandy straight into a glass and drinks it without pretending to be doing anything else. Straight brandy without water, Coke, lemon. She says, pointing her finger at Dad, “We fought for this land, Tim! We fought for it,” and she makes her hand into a fist and shakes it. “And I’m not letting it go without a fight.”

Dad sighs and looks tired. He stomps out his cigarette and lights another.

“I’ll go and show those buggers,” says Mum.

“Take it easy, Tub.”

“Take it easy? Take it easy? Why should I take it easy?”

There is a baby, our fifth, swelling in her belly.

Mum started to throw up just after Christmas. She puked when she smelled soap, petrol, diesel fumes, perfume, cooking meat. Which is how we knew she was pregnant again.

I had prayed so hard for another baby, this one might have been conceived out of my sheer willpower.

Now Mum says, “These bloody
munts
make me feel sick.”

Which is not, apparently, anything to do with morning sickness and everything to do with losing the war.

She has closed down the little school which we used to run for the African children. “They can go to any school they like now.” But there is no transport for the children, so they hang around under the big sausage tree near the compound, where their mothers have told them not to play. Mum will no longer run a clinic from the back door for the laborers or anyone else who happens through our farm and is ill or malnutritioned.

Now she says, “Don’t you have your
comrades
at the hospital? We’re all lovely socialists together now, didn’t you know? If you go to the hospital, your
comrades
will treat you there.”

“But, madam . . .”

“Don’t ‘But, madam’ me. I’m not ‘madam’ anymore. I’m ‘comrade.’ ”

“You are my mother. . . .”

“I am not your bloody mother.”

“We are seeking health.”

“You should have thought of that in the first place.”

The sick, the swollen-bellied, the bleeding, the malarial all sit at the end of the road, past the Pa Mazonwe store, and wait for a lift into town, where they will wait hours, maybe days, for the suddenly flooded, socialized health care system to take care of them.

Mum’s belly makes it hard for her to get on her horse. She makes Flywell hold Caesar next to a big rock and she hops from the rock into her stirrup and eases herself up. Then she arranges her stomach over the pommel and kicks Caesar on.

“Wait for me!” I yank at Burma Boy’s head. He is ear-deep in some yellow-flowered black-jacks. Mum doesn’t even turn around. She whistles to the dogs, one short, sharp note. She is in a dangerous, quiet rage this morning.

We ride up, past the barns and past the turnoff to the cattle dip and past the compound where our laborers live in low-roofed redbrick houses or elaborately patterned huts. We ride up past the small plots where the laborers are allowed to grow their crops of cabbage, rape, beans, and tomatoes and up the newly blazed trails that lead to the new village erected by the squatters.

There is the acid-sweet smell of burning wood on damp air as we follow the patted-down red earth into the squatter village. We can hear the high, persistent wail of a small child and, as we get closer, the frantic yapping of dogs. The squatters built three mud huts in a circle around a wood fire over which a pot of
sadza
is bubbling. The curly-tailed African dogs run out at our pack and start to growl, their hackles raised high on bony backs.

“Call your dogs!” Mum shouts into the raw new village (the bush poles that have been cut to make the huts are still bleeding and wet; the thatched roofs smell green—they will not stop water from leaking into the huts when it rains).

The squatters are standing in a row in front of their huts. The baby that has been crying stops now and looks at us in silent astonishment. He is hanging from his mother’s back. The other women have slung their small children onto soft, ready hips. The men stand in a row, chins high, mouths soft and sullen. One of the children is coughing, eyes bulging, hair fuzzed a telltale protein-deficient red: kwashiorkor hair. He is naked except for a pair of threadbare shorts through which I can see his shriveled penis and the tops of his stick-thin legs.

Mum circles around the huts; Caesar spins up the newly stripped earth as he paces. I pull Burma Boy up under one of the huts and sit, crouched into my saddle, watching.

“This is our land!”

The squatters stare back, their expressions not changing.

Mum spurs Caesar on, charging into the impassive group of men, women, and children. The African dogs yelp and flee, cowering, into the dark mouths of the huts. One of the young children, too big to be on a hip but too small to be far from his mother, screams and follows the dogs. The mother with the baby on her back is holding a gourd, used for carrying water or beer. She suddenly, in a rage of bravado, runs at Mum, shouting in a high, tremulous, singing voice, and strikes Caesar on the nose with the container. Caesar backs up, but Mum spins him around again, digs down into her saddle, legs tight. “Come on,” she growls, and then as Caesar surges forward, his nostrils wide and red-rimmed with surprise, Mum screams at the woman, “Don’t you hit my horse! You hear me? Don’t you hit my bloody horse. . . .”

Mum charges at the squatters repeatedly, kicking Caesar fiercely and running indiscriminately at the women, the children, the men. And then she turns her horse onto the freshly planted maize field and begins tearing through it, between the still-bleeding stumps of the newly cut msasa trees. “You fucking kaffirs!” she screams. “Fucking, fucking kaffirs.”

Some of the men break from the huddle around the huts and start to run after Caesar, shouting and waving their badzas and machetes. The children are all crying now. The women wrap the children in their arms and skirts and shield their faces.

“You bastards!” screams Mum. “You bloody, bloody bastards. This is our farm!”

One of the men starts to hurl clumps of earth at Mum. They fall damply against Caesar’s flank. He shies away, but Mum hunches down and clamps her legs onto him so that his breath comes out—
umph
—and she charges again and again at the squatters. The women scream and run into the huts with the children, shutting the flimsy bush-pole doors behind them. The men stand their ground, heaving whatever comes to hand at Mum and her horse. They are shouting at us in Shona.

I shout, “Come on, Mum!” Scared. “Mu-uuum.”

Still she wheels Caesar around again and again; the white froths of sweat gathering in balls on his neck and flecking out from between his hind legs.

I stand up in my stirrups and scream as loudly as I can, “Mum! Let’s go.”

I start to cry, pleading, “Mum-umm, please.”

Finally the fight seems to bleed out of her. She turns to the men one last time and shakes her riding crop at them. “You get off my farm,” she says in a beaten, broken voice, “you hear? You get the hell off my farm.”

Mum has come back from the ride pale and with a light film of sweat on her top lip. She doesn’t talk. When we get back to the yard, she slips off the horse, sliding down the saddle on her back, and then grimaces, holding her belly. She lets Caesar wander off, still saddled, reins looped and dragging on the ground, to graze in the garden. I shout for Flywell, frightened by the look of Mum.

Mum pours herself a glass of water and goes into her room. When I go in there, the curtains are drawn and it sounds as if Mum is breathing through her voice.

“Are you all right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Can I get you some tea?”

“That would be nice.”

So I order the cook to make tea and I bring Mum a cup but she does not drink it.