Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

The sun rises higher and its heat falls over Arthur with the words; words written thousands of miles away and sounding on his ear from different countries, different lives. The words of the world, resting in their envelopes, flown and shipped to Africa, carried by rail, donkey and finally a barefoot boy down the dust road from Enkeldoorn to Maronda Mashanu, where Leonard sits beside Arthur reading, bringing them to life on his careful, considerate tongue.

And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another.

Revelation , 6:4

Rev. L.M. T. Mamvura,

Maronda Mashanu

P.O. Box 62

Chivhu

Zimbabwe

5th October, 1999

Dear Mr. Owen,

I hasten in replying your kind letter received today with open arms dated 28th September, 1999. Thank you very much for writing.

I will be only too pleased to be meeting you and if I could be helpful to you for your Research work about your uncle, our ‘Hero’ the late Beloved Father and Noble Friend, the simple Missionary Poet, Father Arthur Shearly Cripps.

We will only be too pleased to be with us at our Shelter if you approve of it for any time you wish to be with us and stay with us at our Shelter. We are KM. 9, from local town Chivhu. It will be cheaper for you to be with us than to stay in our Town Hotels for they are very expensive.

You can come with and friend or friends and stay with us for any time you so wish to stay. Life is very expensive in with the prizes of things rising every day. The cost of living is indeed very high here.

Please do write and phone me when you arrive in Harare and tell us when you are coming to us after your arrival on the 10th of November, 1999.

Yours very thankfully for writing and expecting you your arrival with red eyes!!

Leonard Mamvura

The Blue Arrow coach service leaves Harare for Bulawayo via Chivhu at seven-thirty every morning. Even at this time the heat in the city is oppressive, and handing my rucksack to the driver to store in the hold I feel rivulets of sweat run down my back. I reach around and pull the damp shirt away from my skin. Inside, the coach is air-conditioned cool, icy in the nostrils when I breathe in. There are not very many of us on the Bulawayo via Chivhu route today. Some women carrying bulging canvas chequered laundry bags, a younger girl with her head in a novel, some silent men, two of them in suits, shiny black leather folders on their laps, a young man in glasses who looks nervous. Another young man in a suit, wearing a brown trilby perched on the back of his head and with his foot in plaster is cracking kumquats between his teeth, one after the other, sucking out the flesh and spitting the rinds into the plastic bag on his lap.

The coach judders to life and reverses out of the parking bay at the front of the Blue Arrow offices on Speke Avenue between Jason Moyo Avenue and Robert Mugabe Road. With a crunching of gears and a couple of revs of the engine it pulls out into the Monday morning traffic of downtown Harare, edging onto the main street between the private cars, the farmers’ trucks and the packed commuter taxis, minibuses so full they race through the town with arms hanging out their windows and the conductors hanging from the sliding doors, wads of greasy Zim dollars stuffed into pouches on their belts.

We drive west out of the city on Samora Machel Avenue. Past the Zanu PF Headquarters which a few days earlier a Rixi taxi driver had told me people call the ‘shake-shake’ building because it resembles a carton of ‘shake-shake’ beer. Past the Zimbabwe Agricultural Society Showground and then out onto the road south which ribbons ahead of us across the veld, a single tarmac strip, straight but undulating like a ripple caught in time.

♦

The Volvo coach picks up speed and soon we are doing seventy along the pock-marked road. Smaller vehicles get out of our way. I watch them through the back window as they tip and tilt back onto the tarmac behind us, as if they are riding the waves of our wake. The Blue Arrow hostess serves complimentary biscuits and tea and soft drinks. With one hand she carries the plastic cups shaking on a tray down the aisle, holding the seat heads with her other hand to keep her balance, walking the tightrope of the coach’s rocking and swaying. From Russia with Love plays on the TV screen bolted to the roof at the front of the bus and I watch Scan Connery despatch SPECTRE agents as the veld rushes by my window, expansive and monotonous, broken only by the odd gathering of rondavels off the road, lines of flapping bright washing strung in between them.

I first saw this veld twelve days ago when the 747 that flew me here dipped its nose and banked, making the country rise in the window as if it had been poured into an oval glass, filling the Perspex with its yellow and red earth and a rash of green bush trees. Since then I have been staying in Harare, in the city, so it is only now, as the bus cruises south, that I get a chance to see the veld at first hand, to see the country you made your own, and which, in turn, made you hers.

Harare has no trace of the veld. Its grid of wide concrete streets interlock at a centre of tall glass buildings, offices, banks, shopping arcades and hotels. Traffic lights hang on wires at the intersections like in an American city, and 4x45 and open-backed trucks wait beneath them, shaking on their exhausts. Newspaper boys weave between the stalled vehicles, hawking The Herald and the Daily News , and at the side of the road cobs of corn roast in their leaves over the smouldering coals of oil-drum barbecues. More oil drums mark the end of the street where President Mugabe lives, but these are painted red and stand upright, dented and patched with rust. Soldiers stand beside them, wooden-stocked AK47 sat rest across their chests. Ever since a drive-by rocket attempt on Mugabe’s house this street is closed between six in the evening and six in the morning. The soldiers are ordered to shoot anyone seen on it during that time. They have already killed two people.

Mugabe has governed Zimbabwe since the end of the War of Independence in 1980. As you suspected a hundred years ago, issues of land ownership lay at the root of this war, but its conclusion has not seen these issues rest. Land continues to be both the country’s fault-line and its foundation. When I arrive in Harare Mugabe is playing a dangerous balancing act between his promised redistribution of white-owned land and the consequences this would bring: disenfranchising the commercial farmers and thereby losing up to 42 per cent of the country’s annual national export income. What redistribution has already occurred has been marred by corruption, the giving and taking of land by Mugabe to favour his supporters or punish his opposition, black and white.

The acacia and jacaranda trees that line the residential streets of Harare are one reminder of the veld that still exists in the city. Each year they blossom into bright reds and purples, but here their roots split pavements, not earth. In the centre of town crowds of people, black and white, stream through the arcades, drinking in cafes, talking on mobiles. On the corners craftsmen hawk their wire trinkets: birds, motorcycles, planes, all bent from the steel with a pair of pliers. Booksellers line the pavement with their second-hand paperbacks and months-old magazines, and every street has its army of Shona sculptures standing on parade for sale: green, white and grey fluid forms, reminiscent of Henry Moores, but African through and through.