Christopher Hope - Jimfish

The scene of suffering was too much for Jimfish (there is only so much you can mask with a red beret) and when the Division broke into a triumphal chorus of the national hymn — as the last huts and those trapped inside them burnt to ashes — Jimfish took the opportunity to slip away. Having walked for several hours through the bush he came to a village, which, from the tattered flag raised above the compound, he knew to be a loyalist community, linked by tribe and tradition to the faraway regime in the capital, Harare. Here was no smoke and no fire, but a deep and terrible silence. Arms, legs and heads lay scattered like broken dolls. In this village it had been the Matabele dissidents themselves who had fallen on the loyalists and hacked them to pieces, and the destruction was no less terrible than the one he had just fled.

As Jimfish lingered beside this field of carnage, debating in his heart whether any of these pitiful victims were on the right side of history, he was again taken prisoner by the Red Division, which had pursued him relentlessly since his escape. This time General Jesus was determined to show him no mercy.

Jimfish was imprisoned, along with dozens of Matabele prisoners whom the Brigade had rounded up — a crowd as thick as chaff on a threshing floor. They were made to stand on the banks of the nearby Cwele river and were summarily mown down with bursts of automatic fire. But so close was the press of bodies that, by a miracle, Jimfish was not touched, although he was buried under the weight of other victims and almost suffocated. He lay hidden until nightfall, when General Jesus ordered his troops to begin dumping the bodies down a nearby mineshaft. This was hard labour and the troops worked slowly; they complained about the weight of dead bodies, took frequent rest breaks and did not concentrate on their grisly work.

It was now that Jimfish again took the chance to escape. He walked through the night and the following day, thirsty, hungry and downhearted, knowing that the more distance he put between himself and his pursuers, the better was his chance of saving his life. He begged lifts from passing cars, and he was lucky to be picked up by a truck driver from Uganda, ferrying goods to the capital of Kampala, where, the driver told Jimfish, people were suffering terribly from army brutality and political stupidity.

‘Our ex-President, Milton Obote, was an intellectual tyrant. He was chased away to make room for President Idi Amin. He was the boxer tyrant who enjoyed public executions. But he was chased away, too, and now we have Milton Obote all over again. He has an Academy where he gives people an education they never recover from — they graduate to the grave.’

The driver left him on a street corner in Kampala, where crowds were milling about. Some people were wildly happy; many were terrified and everyone was thin. When Jimfish asked what was going on, they told him there had been another coup and President Milton Obote had fled for a second time, taking with him all the money in the national bank.

‘We have seen Idi Amin flee, only to be replaced by the dictator who came before him, Milton Obote. Now he has gone once again. Who is next? Is history a revolving door? Do despots always win? And, by the way, what tribe or species of creature are you? How is it that you are not white or black, neither man nor boy, fish nor fowl? Are you with us or against us?’

Jimfish had no answers to these question and he said simply: ‘My name is Jimfish. I believe there is a right side of history and I hope one day to arrive there.’

This infuriated the crowd and they set the dogs on him for being neither for nor against them, neither completely black nor sufficiently white but all the shades in-between, and Jimfish ran for his life. Sore and starving, he arrived on the edge of town and sat in the gutter beside a rubbish dump. An Asian gentleman named Jagdish saw his distress and took him home, gave him the run of his house, ran a bath for him, fitted him out with fresh clothes and set on the table a simple supper. When Jimfish thanked Jagdish for his kindness, the good man said he was sorry he could not do more. He had once been very rich, but the dictator before the dictator who had just fled had expelled all the Asians from Uganda. Most of his family had gone to England, but he had stayed and now he gave away what money he still had to those who had none.

‘I am an African,’ he said. ‘I’m at home here in Uganda, and so I stay.’

Jimfish was very taken with this Asian who seemed not to care if he was on the wrong or right side of history, lacking the spark of anger that kindles the rage that is the rocket fuel of the lumpenproletariat. He stayed some days with the good Jagdish and when he had recovered with clean clothes on his back and some cash given him by his rescuer, he went to explore the town.

Beside the very rubbish dump where, not long before, he had sat down to beg, he saw another poor wretch, as thin as a flagpole and lying in the gutter, so deathly still that he might already have passed away. And in one hand he held what looked to Jimfish like a dried-out beetroot.

Uganda, 1986

Remembering that he might have died in the selfsame gutter had the good Jagdish not rescued him, Jimfish gave this beggar all the coins in his pocket. But when the poor man roused himself, seized his hand and tried to kiss it, Jimfish shook himself free, terrified of contagion.

‘For heaven’s sake!’ said the beggar. ‘Don’t you recognize your friend and teacher Soviet Malala?’

Jimfish was amazed. His old mentor was so changed, even his Lenin cap had gone.

‘What on earth has happened to you?’ Jimfish said. ‘The last time I saw you, in the garden of Sergeant Arlow, you were feisty and fit, ready to drive the settler entity into the sea. But here you are, a shivering wreck.’

‘I think I’m about to faint,’ said his teacher.

Gently Jimfish lifted him — he weighed no more than a bundle of firewood — and carried him back to the house of Jagdish, and there they fed and washed him and put him to bed. When Soviet Malala awoke, Jimfish was at his bedside.

‘And now tell me,’ he said, ‘first of all, what has happened to the lovely Lunamiel?’

‘Dead,’ said the philosopher.

‘Lunamiel dead?’ Jimfish was devastated. ‘Was it grief? Did she die heartbroken when I made my escape and left her?’

‘Not at all,’ Soviet Malala said. ‘She was blown to bits in church one Sunday morning by a large bomb, timed to explode during the Communion. Many others in the congregation that day also died. Soon after you left Port Pallid the country descended into a low-grade civil war, with death squads of the white oppressor hunting down and killing black people, who resisted their tormentors and fought back with bombs and ambushes and riots. Which in turn led to further shootings by the reactionary settler entity of our revolutionary structures, cadres and formations. It was a time of frequent funerals and whoever caused the other side to bury more of their own, felt themselves to be winning the war. So as to be ready for freedom and the rise of the lumpenproletariat, I set off on a pilgrimage to the land that gave me my name, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, where everyone is equal, free, fed and fortunate. I followed your route and headed north.’

Jimfish felt he would be the next to faint, but managed a question: ‘What has made you so thin and so ill? You who always swore that revolutionary anger was the antidote to sickness, cynicism and doubt, and that struggle forged sinews of steel?’

Now Soviet Malala looked desperately sad and Jimfish had to bend closer to hear his whisper. ‘Love. This is what love did to me.’