Tom Cain: Dictator

Frustrated by her daughter’s sudden departure, Jacqui turned her attention to her husband. ‘That girl will be the death of me. And you could have done something to help, my darling, instead of sitting there stuffing your face while your daughter was being so rude.’

Dick Stratten didn’t respond. He had long since learned that there were times when nothing a husband said could possibly be right. It was best just to let his wife have her say and get things out of her system.

Out on the lawn, Zalika stopped in mid-stride and spun to face her parents, still sitting at their lunch. ‘Look!’ she cried, flinging one hand back up at the sky. ‘Can’t you see? It’s Andy! He’s back from Buweku! He’s brought Moses home!’

Stratten frowned as he peered out towards the horizon, following the line of his daughter’s arm.

‘My God, the girl’s right,’ he said. ‘I must be going blind in my old age.’

Now he rose too, stepping up to the wooden rail that ran round the edge of the veranda, the evident strength and fitness of his body giving the lie to his claims of decrepitude.

‘Oh, you’re not so bad… not for such a very old man,’ said Jacqui, teasingly.

They’d met when Dick was thirty and she a girl of eighteen, just a year older than Zalika. His family and friends, all stalwarts of white Malemban society, had been appalled: she was too young and, even more importantly, too common for the heir to the Stratten estates. Dick didn’t care what anyone else thought. His view of the world was shaped far more by the law of the jungle than the niceties of social convention. As far as he was concerned, Jacqui Klerk was the most desirable female he had ever clapped eyes on and he was damn well going to have her as his mate. Twenty-six years later, they were still together and that youthful animal passion had deepened into a lifelong partnership.

‘Don’t be too hard on the girl,’ Stratten said.

‘Oh I know,’ his wife sighed. ‘It’s just, well, I worry that she’s going to turn into a wallflower if she doesn’t make a bit more of an effort. All one can see now, looking at her, is a mass of drab mousey hair and that great big Stratten nose.’

‘It’s a very splendid nose,’ said Stratten with exaggerated pride.

‘On a man like you, darling, yes it is. But not on a young girl. I know Zalika means “wondrously beautiful” in Arabic, but we have to accept our daughter will never be that. She could be a great deal less plain, though, if only she accepted even one of my suggestions.’

‘I don’t think she’s plain at all.’

‘Of course not, you’re her father.’

‘Anyway, I’m sure it’s just a phase. She’s trying to work out who she really is. It’s natural for her to rebel a little bit, all children do it.’

‘Andrew didn’t.’

Stratten gave her a quizzical, not to say sceptical look. ‘Maybe you just didn’t see it. In any case, you are famously the most beautiful and best-dressed woman in the whole of southern Africa’ – Jacqui Stratten glowed in the warm light of her husband’s compliment – ‘so she’s rebelling against you by pretending to take no interest at all in how she looks. The second she finds a boy she really likes that will all change, just you wait.’

Jacqui mused on the problem as she watched Zalika take a few more paces across the grass. As the plane drew closer she started waving her arms above her head. The girl’s frantic gestures were answered by a waggle of the plane’s wings. She squealed with delight then ran away again across the grass, calling out as she went, ‘I’ll go and meet them at the strip!’

Zalika disappeared out of sight of the veranda. Not long afterwards came the sound of an engine starting up and the arid scrunch of tyres on dusty gravel.

Jacqui’s thoughts turned to the boys her daughter was rushing to meet. Her son Andy – how handsome he was becoming, she mused proudly – and his lifelong friend Moses Mabeki, the son of the family’s estate manager. Moses was Andy’s equal in looks, with a finely sculpted bone structure made all the more apparent by a shaven head, and full lips framed by a close-cropped beard. But as the horn-rimmed spectacles round his liquid brown eyes suggested, he took a much more earnest approach to his studies. Moses had attended the University of Malemba before being offered a graduate place at the London School of Economics’ Department of Government. As the first member of his family ever to receive a college education, he had no intention whatever of wasting it on girls and parties.

Dick Stratten had insisted on paying the young man’s tuition fees and living expenses. ‘Moses is like a son to me too,’ Stratten had told the boy’s father, Isaac Mabeki, as they shared one of the bottles of thirty-year-old Glenfiddich they polished off from time to time, talking not as master and loyal servant but as one man to another. ‘I know he will do great things for this country one day. With your permission, it would be my pleasure and an honour to help him on his way.’

Moses had spent the past three years in London, returning to Malemba only for occasional visits. Now, with his masters degree completed, he was coming home for good.

The roar of the Cessna’s engines as it passed low over the house and made its final approach to the landing strip roused Jacqui Stratten from her reverie. She blinked, gave a little shake of the head and thought for a second. Yes, there would be time. Then she smiled at a servant who was hovering a few feet from the table. ‘Coffee, please, Mary,’ she said. ‘Mr Stratten and I will have a cup while we wait for the boys to arrive.’

The seventy-four-year-old man sitting behind his mahogany desk in a lavishly appointed office in Sindele had begun his career as a village schoolteacher, working in the same modest school where he had been given his own early education by Anglican missionaries. Had his life followed its expected course, Henderson Gushungo would now be retired, a respected member of his little community, spending his days sitting under a shade-tree, talking to the other old men, grousing about the way the world had changed and indulging his grandchildren.

Gushungo, however, had had other, more radical ideas. He’d joined the resistance movement against the white minority who ruled his country as though it were still a colony of the British Empire. Like Nelson Mandela in South Africa, he’d burnished his reputation among his people and radicals around the world by going to prison for his beliefs. Unlike Mandela, he’d emerged from jail filled with a lust for revenge, not reconciliation. For years he had fought a war on two fronts: publicly against the whites, and privately against his competitors within the liberation movement. Now he held the entire country’s destiny in his hands. Having been Prime Minister, he had promoted himself to President, never submitting himself to any election whose result was not certain before a single vote had been cast.

Gushungo liked to call himself the Father of the Nation. But he was a very stern and cruel parent.

His soldiers were fighting in the jungles of the Congo. His henchmen were forcing white farmers off their properties and forcibly cleansing hundreds of thousands of black Malembans from areas where, in his increasingly paranoid imagination, they might constitute a serious opposition to his continued rule. His demoralized opponents, unable to remove him themselves, prayed that God would do the job for them. But the old man had no intention of meeting his maker any time soon. His hair was still thick and black, his face remarkably unlined, his posture erect. His mother had lived past one hundred. He still had a long way to go.

One of the phones arranged to the right of his desk trilled.