Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

It was not just the message but also the medium that struck a chord with the Mashona. Poetry was part of their lives: there was a poem for grinding the maize, a poem to speak to your ancestors and praise poems for great chiefs. It had been particularly painful that after the failed 1896 uprising the whites had celebrated the fall of their spirit mediums in song. The settler paper, The Nugget , had printed it in triumph, a long piece of doggerel ending on a threatening note of intention:

As others have learned long ago,

So the young generation must learn to know

That the White Queen means to reign.

But now Arthur had spoken out against the White Queen and although his voice may have been silenced in Salisbury, it continued to resonate in the kraals of the Mashona, who in turn resonated their new-found respect for Arthur in the names chosen for him in the months following his protest. Father Cripps became Baba Cripps, Baba Cripps became Chapea , He-Who-Cares-for-People, and then Chapea became Kambandakoto : He-Who-Goes-About-as-a-Poor-Man.

♦

Arthur was nearing the end of his morning’s journey. As he came over a lip in the track the buildings of Enkeldoorn appeared before him, a mile or so off and about a hundred feet lower than where he stood. He rested against a young tree, shifting his satchel strap away from a raw patch of skin on his shoulder, and looked down on the town. Its scattering of tin roofs reflected the sun in a white glare so the settlement shone in the shallow valley like a trace of diamond in base rock. On the near side of the town he could see people scattered out across a flat area of land cleared of the tall veld grass. They were making the final preparations for the annual New Year games. Ladies’ white parasols and wide-brimmed hats stood out against the dun red of the earth, clustered together like the petals of oversized flowers where they stood in groups, chatting. In contrast to the stillness of these white islands their husbands and sons ran between them, pulling lengths of rope, guiding ox wagons into position and testing the ground with the heels of their boots. A temporary flag pole had been erected and the Charter flag, a Union Jack with a lion proud at its centre, beat and fluttered over the scene.

Adjusting his satchel again, Arthur set off towards the cleared field. He didn’t want to be late, he had a service to conduct later that day and he wanted time to prepare after he’d competed in the games. He knew, though, that in Enkeldoorn he may as well concentrate on the sports, as it was there on the games field he was most likely to win the respect of his white parishioners, rather than later from the pulpit.

♦

Charlie Anderson shielded his eyes with his hand and squinted at the figure making its way down the kopje path towards the field.

‘Looks like the Devil Dodger’s decided to join us,’ he said, partly to himself but loud enough for the man crouching beside him tying a rag to the tug-of-war rope to hear.

‘What’s that?’

‘The Devil Dodger, the peripatetic parson, that’s him, isn’t it?’

The other man stood up and looked where Charlie Anderson pointed. He was taller than Charlie and wore the bush uniform of a District Commissioner, khaki short-sleeved bush shirt, long shorts to above the knee, white woollen socks pulled up to just below, and for the occasion of the games, an Oxford Blues tie and a khaki Wolseley helmet.

‘Mmm, yes, that’s him. Good, I was hoping he’d come. He’s pretty fit, you know.’

‘So he bloody should be,’ Charlie said, turning away from the sun towards the taller man. ‘All that rucking walking. I don’t know why he doesn’t get a bloody horse.’

‘He did.’ The taller man’s voice was softer than Charlie’s, less of Africa in his throat. ‘But he never rode it. I saw him outside town once, leading the thing like a pet. It died. Tsetse fly I think.’

A couple of native boys carrying a trestle table caught Charlie’s eye over the taller man’s shoulder. ‘Self-righteous bastard,’ he mumbled, before yelling at the two boys, waving his arms in front of him. ‘Ho! Daniel, not there you bloody fool! Over there, behind the tent, right back!’ He paused, then said, ‘Sorry Cul, better go and do it myself.’ He walked off towards the two boys, shouting at them again, this time in stilted kitchen kaffir. ‘ Tsaukakuruboshwe! Shurc! Shure the bloody tent!’

The tall man watched Charlie’s stocky, bow-legged frame stride off towards the tents at the side of the games field, then turned back to follow Arthur’s progress down the kopje. A fly buzzed his ear. He made a half-hearted swipe at it and was surprised when he felt the tick of its body against his fingers. Looking down he saw where it had fallen: a dark currant, vibrating in the dust, one wing useless, the other flicking madly at its side. He lifted his right foot and brought the heel of his boot down on the fly’s panicked dance, twisting it into the ground like the stub of a cigarette.

The tall man’s name was Cullen Gouldsbury, and he was Assistant District Commissioner for the Enkeldoorn Charter area. Cullen had been serving in Southern Rhodesia for all of his first three-year tour and although still officially an assistant he’d taken on the duties of a full blown DC. Despite his age (he was only twenty-two) it was a promotion he had taken in his stride. He had an affable, easy manner, with enough of a public school education to get on with the officials and enough of a country childhood to get on with the farmers. His habit of flicking his blond fringe away from his eyes by blowing up into his hair made the kaffir children laugh, and he was popular with their parents too.

Cullen enjoyed his work. One day he might be overseeing native court cases and handing out licenses to farmers, another collecting taxes and holding an open surgery for the problems of the natives. Those surgery days could be some of the hardest, when fifty or sixty African men appeared out of the bush before dawn. A crowd of young and old, some in torn European clothes, most in the traditional scraps of limbo or skins, crouching silently on the ground before his veranda waiting for him to arrive. When he did, accepting them into this cramped office one at a time, their petitions often seemed endless. And sometimes seeing them there in the town was not enough. During his time in Enkeldoorn he had often been called out to preside over disputes in the local Mashona villages too, sitting as judge on cases as diverse as arguments over land and chieftainship to accusations of adultery or abuse. The extent of his influence often bewildered him, and it sometimes made him feel uneasy when the headmen called him Shumba , the Shona for ‘Lion’, or when he looked at the simple figures of his situation. Just him, aged twenty-two, a police chief and half a dozen native policemen governing over more than a hundred thousand natives and several hundred whites.

But Cullen had aspirations beyond his Colonial Office work. Since arriving in Africa he had written about his experiences on the continent in novels, short stories and poems, and his tales of pioneer characters and settler adventures had been as well received in London as they had in Fort Salisbury. He was hoping to build upon this fledgling reputation, and that is why he was watching Father Cripps today. That is why he observed the priest’s every movement as he approached the games field, as he paused by the stone boundary and fanned himself with his old panama. Because the priest, he was sure now, would be the subject of his next book.

Cullen had recently finished his latest novel and had been looking for a subject for his next. It had struck him, as he sifted through the people he knew and his three years of memories in Rhodesia, that the missionary might well provide him with one. There was something about the man that fascinated him: the excessive nature of his pastoral care, his outspokenness, his empathy with the natives and his strange mix of contradictions. And there was something else too: a fissure in him, a fracture that worked upon itself, creating a friction that only ever reached his surface as an intonation, a tremor. Cullen could only surmise what this disturbance in the missionary may be, but he hoped that today he might get closer to finding out, that he might be able to talk with Cripps and get nearer to what lay beyond the priesthood that he wore so faithfully, like a blessing and a curse.