The Leopard Hunts in Darkness (9 page)

‘So what makes you come here, Kuphela? A sensible man like you, walking without even a stick into the leopard’s cave? You must have heard about us – and yet you came
here?’

‘Yes, I have heard about you. I heard that you were hard men, like old Mzilikazi’s warriors.’

They preened a little at the compliment.

‘But I came here to meet you and talk with you,’ Craig went on.

‘Why?’ demanded Lookout.

‘I will write a book, and in the book I will write truly the way you are and the things for which you are still fighting.’

‘A book?’ Peking was suspicious immediately.

‘What kind of book?’ Dollar backed him.

‘Who are you to write a book?’ Lookout’s voice was openly scornful. ‘You are too young. Book-writers are great and learned people.’ Like all barely literate
Africans, he had an almost superstitious awe of the printed word, and reverence for the grey hairs of age.

‘A one-legged book-writer,’ Dollar scoffed, and Peking giggled and picked up his rifle. He placed it across his lap and giggled again. The mood had changed once more. ‘If he
lies about this book, then perhaps he lies about his friendship with Comrade Tungata,’ Dollar suggested with relish.

Craig had prepared for this also. He took a large manila envelope from the flap of his pack and shook from it a thick sheaf of newspaper cuttings. He shuffled through them slowly, letting their
disbelieving mockery change to interest, then he selected one and handed it to Lookout. The serial of the book had been shown on Zimbabwe television two years previously, before these guerrillas
had returned to the bush, and it had enjoyed an avid following throughout its run.

‘Hau!’ Lookout exclaimed. ‘It is the old king, Mzilikazi!’

The photograph at the head of the article showed Craig on the set with members of the cast of the production. The guerrillas immediately recognized the black American actor who had taken the
part of the old Matabele king. He was in a costume of leopard-skin and heron-feathers.

‘And that is you – with the king.’ They had not been as impressed, even by the photograph of Tungata.

There was another cutting, a photo taken in Double-day’s bookstore on Fifth Avenue, of Craig standing beside a huge pyramid of the book, with a blow-up of his portrait from the back cover
riding atop the pyramid.

‘That is you!’ They were truly stunned now. ‘Did you write that book?’

‘Now do you believe?’ Craig demanded, but Lookout studied the evidence carefully before committing himself.

His lips moved as he read slowly through the text of the articles, and when he handed them back to Craig, he said, seriously, ‘Kuphela, despite your youth, you are indeed an important
book-writer.’

Now they were almost pathetically eager to pour out their grievances to him, like petitioners at a tribal
indaba
where cases were heard and judgement handed down by the elders of the
tribe. While they talked, the sun rose up across a sky as blue and unblemished as a heron’s egg, and reached its noon and started its stately descent towards its bloody death in the
sunset.

What they related was the tragedy of Africa, the barriers that divided this mighty continent and which contained all the seeds of violence and disaster, the single incurable disease that
infected them all – tribalism.

Here it was Matabele against Mashona.

‘The dirt-eaters,’ Lookout called them, ‘the lurkers in caves, the fugitives on the fortified hilltops, the jackals who will only bite when your back is turned to
them.’

It was the scorn of the warrior for the merchant, of the man of direct action for the wily negotiator and politician.

‘Since great Mzilikazi first crossed the river Limpopo, the Mashona have been our dogs –
amaholi
, slaves and sons of slaves.’

This history of displacement and domination of one group by another was not confined to Zimbabwe, but over the centuries had taken place across the entire continent. Further north, the lordly
Masai had raided and terrorized the Kikuyu who lacked their warlike culture; the giant Watutsi, who considered any man under six foot six to be a dwarf, had taken the gentle Hutu as slaves –
and in every case, the slaves had made up for their lack of ferocity with political astuteness, and, as soon as the white colonialists’ protection was withdrawn, had either massacred their
tormentors, as the Hutu had the Watutsi, or had bastardized the doctrine of Westminster government by discarding the checks and balances that make the system equitable, and had used their superior
numbers to place their erstwhile masters into a position of political subjugation, as the Kikuyu had the Masai.

Exactly the same process was at work here in Zimbabwe. The white settlers had been rendered inconsequential by the bush war, and the concepts of fair play and integrity that the white
administrators and civil servants had imposed upon all the tribes had been swept away with them.

‘There are five dirt-eating Mashona for every one Matabele
indoda
,’ Lookout told Craig bitterly, ‘but why should that give them any right to lord it over us? Should five
slaves dictate to a king? If five baboons bark, must the black-maned lion tremble?’

‘That is the way it is done in England and America,’ Craig said mildly. ‘The will of the majority must prevail—’

‘I piss with great force on the will of the majority,’ Lookout dismissed the doctrine of democracy airily. ‘Such things might work in England and America – but this is
Africa. They do not work here – I will not bow down to the will of five dirt-eaters. No, not to the will of a hundred, nor a thousand of them. I am Matabele, and only one man dictates to me
– a Matabele king.’

Yes, Craig thought, this
is
Africa. The old Africa awakening from the trance induced in it by a hundred years of colonialism, and reverting immediately to the old ways.

He thought of the tens of thousands of fresh-faced young Englishmen who for very little financial reward had come out to spend their lives in the Colonial Service, labouring to instil into their
reluctant charges their respect for the Protestant work-ethic, the ideals of fair play and Westminster government – young men who had returned to England prematurely aged and broken in
health, to eke out their days on a pittance of a pension and the belief that they had given their lives to something that was valuable and lasting. Did they, Craig wondered, ever suspect that it
might all have been in vain?

The borders that the colonial system had set up had been neat and orderly. They followed a river, or the shore of a lake, the spine of a mountain range, and where these did not exist, a white
surveyor with a theodolite had shot a line across the wilderness. ‘This side is German East Africa, this side is British.’ But they took no cognizance of the tribes that they were
splitting in half as they drove in their pegs.

‘Many of our people live across the river in South Africa,’ Peking complained. ‘If they were with us, then things would be different. There would be more of us, but now we are
divided.’

‘And the Shona is cunning, as cunning as the baboons that come down to raid the maize fields in the night. He knows that one Matabele warrior would eat a hundred of his, so when first we
rose against them, he used the white soldiers of Smith’s government who had stayed on—’

Craig remembered the delight of the embittered white soldiers who considered they had not been defeated but had been betrayed, when the Mugabe government had turned them loose on the dissenting
Matabele faction.

‘The white pilots came in their aeroplanes, and the white troops of the Rhodesian Regiment—’

After the fighting the shunting-yards at Bulawayo station had been crowded with refrigerated trucks each packed from floor to roof with the bodies of the Matabele dead.

‘The white soldiers did their work for them, while Mugabe and his boys ran back to Harare and climbed shaking and snivelling under their women’s skirts. Then, after the white
soldiers had taken our weapons, they crawled out again, shook off the dust of their retreat, and came strutting back like conquerors.’

‘They have dishonoured our leaders—’

Nkomo, the Matabele leader, had been accused of harbouring rebels and accumulating caches of weapons, and driven in disgrace by Mashona-dominated government into enforced retirement.

‘They have secret prisons in the bush where they take our leaders,’ Peking went on. ‘There they do things to our men that do not bear talking of.’

‘Now that we are deprived of weapons, their special units move through the villages. They beat our old men and women, they rape our young women, they take our young men away, never to be
seen or heard of again.’

Craig had seen a photograph of men in the blue and khaki of the former British South Africa police, so long the uniform of honour and fair play, carrying out interrogations in the villages. In
the photograph they had a naked Matabele spread-eagled on the earth, an armed and uniformed constable standing with both booted feet and his full weight on each ankle and wrist to pin him, while
two other constables wielded clubs as heavy as baseball bats. They were using full strokes from high above the head, and raining blows on the man’s back and shoulders and buttocks. The
photograph had been captioned ‘Zimbabwe Police interrogate suspect in attempt to learn whereabouts of American and British tourists abducted as hostages by Matabele dissidents’. There
had been no photographs of what they did to the Matabele girls.

‘Perhaps the government troops were looking for the hostages which you admit you seized,’ Craig pointed out tartly. ‘A little while ago you would have been quite happy to kill
me or take me hostage as well.’

‘The Shona began this business long before we took our first hostage,’ Lookout shot back at him.

‘But you
are
taking innocent hostages,’ Craig insisted. ‘Shooting white farmers—’

‘What else can we do to make people understand what is happening to our people? We have very few leaders who have not been imprisoned or silenced, and even they are powerless. We have no
weapons except these few we have managed to hide, we have no powerful friends, while the Shona have Chinese and British and American allies. We have no money to continue the struggle – and
they have all the wealth of the land and millions of dollars of aid from these powerful friends. What else can we do to make the world understand what is happening to us?’

Craig decided prudently that this was neither the time nor the place to offer a lecture on political morality – and then he thought wryly, ‘Perhaps my morality is old-fashioned,
anyway.’ There was a new political expediency in international affairs that had become acceptable: the right of impotent and voiceless minorities to draw violent attention to their own
plight. From the Palestinians and the Basque separatists to the bombers from Northern Ireland blowing young British guardsmen and horses to bloody tatters in a London street, there was a new
morality abroad. With these examples before them, and from their own experience of successfully bringing about political change by violence, these young men were children of the new morality.

Though Craig could never bring himself to condone these methods, not if he lived a hundred years, yet he found himself in grudging sympathy with their plight and their aspirations. There had
always been a strange and sometimes bloody bond between Craig’s family and the Matabele. A tradition of respect and understanding for a people who were fine friends and enemies to be wary of,
an aristocratic, proud and warlike race that deserved better than they were now receiving.

There was an elitist streak in Craig’s make-up that hated to see a Gulliver rendered impotent by Lilliputians. He loathed the politics of envy and the viciousness of socialism which, he
felt, sought to strike down the heroes and reduce every exceptional man to the common greyness of the pack, to replace true leadership with the oafish mumblings of trade-union louts, to emasculate
all initiative by punitive tax schemes and then gradually to shepherd a numbed and compliant populace into the barbed-wire enclosure of Marxist totalitarianism.

These men were terrorists – certainly. Craig grinned. Robin Hood was also a terrorist – but at least he had some style and a little class.

‘Will you see Comrade Tungata?’ they demanded with almost pitiful eagerness.

‘Yes. I will see him soon.’

‘Tell him we are here. Tell him we are ready and waiting.’

Craig nodded. ‘I will tell him.’

They walked back with him to where he had left the Volkswagen, and Comrade Dollar insisted on carrying Craig’s pack. When they reached the dusty and slightly battered VW, they piled into
it with AK 47 barrels protruding from three windows.

‘We will go with you,’ Lookout explained, ‘as far as the main Victoria Falls Road, for if you should meet another of our patrols when you are alone, it might go hard for
you.’

They reached the macadamized Great North Road well after darkness had fallen. Craig stripped his pack and gave them what remained of his rations and the dregs of the whisky. He had two hundred
dollars in his wallet and he added that to the booty. Then they shook hands.

‘Tell Comrade Tungata we need weapons,’ said Dollar.

‘Tell him that, more than weapons, we need a leader.’ Comrade Lookout gave Craig the special grip of thumb and palm reserved for trusted friends. ‘Go in peace, Kuphela,’
he said. ‘May the leg that walks alone carry you far and swiftly.’

‘Stay in peace, my friend,’ Craig told him.

‘No, Kuphela, rather wish me bloody war!’ Lookout’s scarred visage twisted into a dreadful grin in the reflected headlights.

When Craig looked back, they had disappeared into the darkness as silently as hunting leopards.

‘I
wouldn’t have taken any bets about seeing you again,’ Jock Daniels greeted Craig when he walked into the auctioneer’s
office the next morning. ‘Did you make it up to the Chizarira – or did good sense get the better of you?’

‘I’m still alive, aren’t I?’ Craig evaded the direct question.