Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

Enkeldoorn was established hurriedly in 1896 when news of the attacks by the Matabele impis in the south of the country reached the area of low veld and vlei country in which the town now lies. The stories of butchery and burning were enough to rush a scattered collection of pioneers together to form a laager around the one existing farm. When the rebellion receded these pioneers remained, naming their new home after a prominent Kamuldoorn tree that stood sentinel over the settlement: Enkeldoorn, the Dutch for ‘single thorn’. For a while they were the only white men and women to live under the tree’s long evening shadow, but gradually more came to join them, lured south by stories of gold reefs, rich for the picking, that were spreading through the country and through Europe like a virus. One reef was said to pass right through the hills outside Enkeldoorn, a glittering band of wealth embedded in the rock, just below the surface of the thin soil. And so they came, with their dynamite and their dreams, and Enkeldoorn was born again as a prospecting town. Bank clerks and shopkeepers became miners overnight, setting out in ones and twos on wagons loaded up with explosives, mining tools and a couple of native boys riding on the back, their legs dangling into the dust clouds stirred up by the wheels.

After weeks in the bush these men would return, pale with rock dust, smelling of dynamite and the earth. They went to drink in Vic’s Tavern, the only bar in town, but they weren’t there just looking for drink, or even for an hour with one of the handful of whores who had come down from Salisbury. They were also looking for other men and, more particularly, for other men’s dreams: for someone they could take aside into a corner after a few whiskies, and on whose shoulder they could lay their hand as they pulled out a lump of quartz from their pocket, which they’d spit on to reveal the specks and strands of gold hidden inside. With these waistcoat tempters many an administrator or traveller was persuaded to put up a share of capital in a mining enterprise. But all too often the prospector would then disappear, leaving them with their anticipation of riches dwindling by the day. Because the gold in the hills did not exist after all. But now Enkeldoorn did, and so it remained, washed up on its imaginary reef out in the veld, four days’ wagon drive from Fort Salisbury and a week’s at least from any other town of consequence.

In the years since Enkddoorn’s brief gold rush a spur of the railway had been promised to the town by Rhodes himself, but when Arthur arrived in 1901 Enkeldoorn was still waiting for it to be built, to come and lend a meaning to its lonely existence. At least with a railway the town could claim to be the end of the line. As it was it was not even that. It was simply a full stop in itself, a stubborn outcrop of European life set adrift in the heartland of Africa.

The railway spur never came, but in its absence Enkeldoorn made the best of its lonely position. Destined never to be a destination in itself, the town became a trading post, a supply town, a stopping and going place, supplying the farmers that surrounded it and the travellers that passed through it.

The geography of the town, like its character, was uncomplicated. Widely dispersed dwellings, lean-tos and huts spread out from a tighter concentration of buildings that lined the one main street. This street was a wide streak of dust flanked by wooden and brick buildings with clumps of veld grass growing in between them. On it stood the post office, Vic’s Tavern, the administration offices, the police station and a collection of shops selling pioneer equipment: tools, tents and general supplies. At the end of the high street was the town jail, a long squat iron-roofed block in which a dozen or so natives served sentences for offences that many of them never knew were offences, breaking, as they did, no code of their own. Early each morning a couple of native policemen overseen by a white officer escorted these prisoners out of town, chained neck and foot, to work on the Salisbury road. Apparently, somewhere to the south of Salisbury there was another group of chained men, also working on the same road, the idea being that one day they would meet, and Enkeldoorn would finally have a clean link to the capital. No one Arthur had spoken to seemed particularly convinced of this.

The only other building of any stature was the Dutch Reformed church, set back from the high street on the left as you approached from Salisbury. This is where Reverend Liebenberg preaches to the town’s Dutch and Afrikaans population, and where he also lets Arthur preach to the much smaller Anglican congregation. It was an arrangement the two men came to not long after Arthur’s arrival in the area, it being obvious to both of them that the question of denomination was a diminished one in comparison to the scale of the task they both faced. Liebenberg and his wife had since become good friends of Arthur’s, and recently Liebenberg had even been kind enough to play the church’s old piano in Arthur’s services, banging out the hymns on the yellowing keys with such enthusiasm that he often drowned out the singing of the small congregation altogether.

These then, were the punctuation points of Arthur’s life in Mashona-land. Enkeldoorn and Wreningham, white and black, commerce and church, lost and found. It was in these two locations that his contrasting parishes lay, and this is why he spent so much of his time on this track, passing between the settlements twice a week on his solitary treks, etching his mark on the country with his feet.

On the veld, alone, however, was where he felt he most belonged. After three years in Africa it was here he felt closest to the essence of the country, and to his God. Sometimes, on the longer treks to other towns and villages further away, he would sleep out in the open, lying beside his camp fire, tracing the myths and stories of the constellations, familiar and yet different in the southern sky above him. Waking in the morning, his red blanket covered with dew, he would perform a private Eucharist on a nearby rock, or on the bank of a stream, before packing up and carrying on again. It felt completely natural for him to do this, and it was during these solitary celebrations that he was at his most content. And in many ways he thought this was suitable: that he felt most complete neither in Enkeldoorn nor in Wreningham, but in between them. He was, after all, the in-between man, in every sense of the word. Between sky and earth, God and man, European and African. For although by skin colour and country he belonged to the whites in Enkeldoorn, he knew he could never feel himself a pan of their pioneer lifestyle, and in return he knew that many of them were suspicious of him. His closeness to the natives and his attempts to live with and like them unnerved the Dutch farmers and the British administrators alike.

In the first few years he’d found it no easier with the Africans, many of whom also regarded him with suspicion. The people who lived on and around the mission recognised his good intentions but however hard he tried to serve them he was, for many outside the mission, just another European mufundisi bringing talk of a God and rituals that disturbed the stability of their own beliefs. Some of the Mashona elders in the surrounding villages feared he would upset the delicate balance of their ancestors’ spirits while the n’angas , the local shamans, saw him as a professional threat and did what they could to fan this fear. Arthur had heard some had even warned the people that allegiance to the white man’s God would anger the Mhondoro , the tribal spirit, and bring tragedy upon their families.

In those early years Arthur’s lack of Shona was a further frustration. The young missionary girl who had been his tutor in Umtali, having been told so often that the white men were right, had been too timid to ever correct his mistakes, so he arrived in Wreningham with a more imperfect grasp of the tongue than he had hoped. For the first year at the mission he spent hours in his hut each night, bent over a Shona grammar and dictionary, painfully composing his sermons word by word and learni ng them by heart by the light of a candle. But his efforts at fluency on paper were all too often dismantled on his tongue as he stumbled through the subtle nuances of the language’s tonal pronunciation. It was only when the young mission boys began running around the church hut with their knuckles on the ground in the manner of chimpanzees every time he spoke of Shoko Kristu , that he learnt he had been preaching for months not as he had thought on Christ’s message , but Christ’s monkey . There was only a breath and an upward inflexion between the two words, but it was enough.