Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

The language, however, could be mastered, and in the meantime he had continued to try and serve the Mashona by doctoring, representing them in the colonial courts, assisting with their farming and helping in family disputes where he could. But there were other elements of his presence among them that were harder to overcome. Above all, there was the fact that he was white. The 1896 chimurenga had happened only eight years ago; the European settlers had killed over four thousand natives in revenge. The Mashona had not forgotten, and could not forget, these men, or the things they had done. Stories were still told in kraals and around fires of how the suspected rebels were hunted down and hung from trees and of how caves into which whole families had fled were dynamited by their pursuers.

When Arthur arrived in 1901, the relationship between the white settlers and the native Mashona in the wake of the uprising was uneasy and awkward, but he was still surprised at the extent of the settlers’ ignorance and disinterest in the Africans around them. Interaction was minimal, restricted to the boys and women who worked for them as carriers, cooks or maids, and even in these situations the meeting of the two cultures was rarely successful. Either the Africans were mistreated or they stole from their employers, or, most commonly, they simply left and went back to their kraals. Because before the settlers came the Mashona had no need to work for money, and for most this was still the case. The settlers, however, needed labour to build their new world, and they were frustrated by the thousands of natives who refused to supply it. The Africans’ apparent absence of wants stood in exact opposition to their own lives. They were here for gold, farming, trade. The Mashona were simply here.

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This problem of the labour situation dominated discussion across the settler community. It had been a thorn in the side of the administration since the establishment of the British South Africa Company; in principle they were opposed to slavery but they were also desperate to engage the massive potential labour force they saw before them. The Company found an answer to the problem with the introduction of a ‘hut tax’ to be paid by every male native for himself and for each of his wives. The tax was required in cash, and cash could only be earned by working in the settlers’ mines, houses or farms. It seemed simple. The Africans had an absence of wants, so in its place the Company had created a need. The need for money.

The hut tax further exasperated the already fragile settler-native relationship and its initial establishment had been at the root of the native uprising in 1896. For the Mashona in Mashonaland and the Matabele in Matabeleland the twenty years of rule by the white population had brought nothing but disruption to their way of life. Whole tribes had been moved from their ancestral land where their forefathers were buried, and foreign diseases were brought into the country killing both the people and their livestock. Herdsmen were forced to dip their cattle in the local streams to protect them against rinderpest and foot and mouth, only to find that the dipping chemicals polluted their drinking water. And now the hut tax was to be levied in every district to pay for the price of this disruption. It was a move too far for many, and encouraged by their spirit mediums they rose against the white men. Eight years later that uprising had been reduced to fireside myth, the rebel leaders were long dead, the Mashona’s self-belief was crushed and the hut tax still remained. The men around Wren-ingham wore its brass payment tokens on pieces of cord around their necks. Arthur had noticed these necklaces were something of a status symbol for the younger men; the more tokens, the more wives, and the more huts. But for the older men he knew the necklaces were worn in another symbolic gesture. For them, who could remember life here before the settlers, the brass tokens threaded on a string of hide were a reminder, worn against their skin, of their new position in a land they had once called their own.

The hut tax angered Arthur and he had tried his best to undermine it at the Anglican Synod in Salisbury in the April of 1903. As usual he chose to walk the hundred miles to the capital, and he arrived with just minutes to prepare before presenting his case. He stood in front of the assembled clergy, his already threadbare khaki suit caked in the fine red dust of the veld and the sweat still fresh on his face. Clearing his throat, he proposed:

In view of the agricultural and pastoral character of the Mashona people, and of the fact that they have been only twelve or thirteen years in contact with civilisation, we consider that the most desirable form of taxation to stimulate their industry is taxation in kind.

He had worded his proposal carefully. He knew it would be seen as a stab at the British South Africa Company, but he also felt sure that in the eyes of the church his argument was strong. A tax in kind, he went on to explain, would diminish the disruption to the Africans’ way of life in their kraals and villages. A tax in cash required the men to leave their homes in search of work. A tax in kind would at least let them stay. Surely it was in the interest of the Anglican Church to promote the idea of a stable family home among the native people? He sat down, aware of the murmurings of disapproval both his speech and his outfit had provoked among the clean pressed suits and vestments around him. The proposal was refused. As was his second request that the Synod delete a section of their ‘Resolutions on the Native Question’ which read: ‘Neither individuals nor races are born with equal facilities or opportunities.’

The day after the Synod Arthur began his long walk back to Enkel-doorn, taking with him a dramatically altered view of his position in Africa. Although in theory the entire Anglican Church in Southern Rhodesia was missionary in nature, few of the other clergy were leaving for native postings that morning. Few of them even spoke the native language of the country or had tried to learn it, and he realised what he had already begun to suspect — that his view of the Mashona people and of the place of the missionary in Africa was not just at odds with many of the whites he met in Enkeldoorn and Salisbury, but it was also very different to that of the Church in whose name he was serving.

Bishop Gaul had seen him off that morning. Over the last two years the two men had grown closer. Arthur had often accompanied the Bishop on his treks, the Bishop riding a donkey and Arthur trotting alongside, sometimes even reading to him from his book of poems. He had got to know him well, as a man as well as a priest, so he knew that morning that the Bishop recognised his dissatisfaction, his dawning realisation of the divide between his own ideology and that of the Synod. When Arthur had taken him up again on his failed proposals the Bishop had been uncharacteristically apologetic.

‘You must understand,’ he’d said, stretching up to lay his hand on Arthur’s shoulder, ‘that many of the Synod don’t share your intimate experience with the Africans. Their parishes are European — farmers, businessmen — and in their own way they carry the interests of those people as close to their hearts as you do the interests of your Africans.’

Arthur shook his head in reply, speaking softly, but still unable to disguise the tautness in his voice. ‘But I still don’t see how the Synod can stand up behind the Company and say that, that all races aren’t born equal in God’s eyes. That’s a mistake, a terrible mistake.’

As he listened to the young missionary, the Bishop remembered something another priest had said about Cripps the previous evening, at the close of the Synod. ‘When I hear Father Cripps speak,’ he had said, ‘I know in my heart he is right, but I still can’t agree with any of his conclusions.’ As Bishop Gaul looked up at Arthur now, he knew what that priest meant. His intentions were sound but Cripps was too fiery, too quick to condemn. He smiled, and patted Arthur’s shoulder;