Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

On First Street department-store dummies look out onto the lunchtime workers sitting in the sun. White dummies, looking onto black people. Some of the blacks, though, are white or the whites black, depending on how you look at it. Albinos, walking down the street in wide-brimmed hats to protect their sensitive skin, blinking the fair lashes of their pink-rimmed eyes. ‘Unlucky,’ a Rixi taxi driver tells me. ‘I would not like to be one.’ He laughs, ‘You are black, but you are white, so you belong nowhere. Nobody likes you.’

Further out of town shopping centres punctuate the long, straight streets and rows of flats and houses. Out at the Avondale Centre middle — class whites and blacks meet in the Italian Cafe for espressos, croissants and the latest news of strikes, farmers’ disputes and stoppages up at the university. In the Fife Avenue shopping mall the same crowd meet again later, on the open terrace of the Book Caf6, where saxophonists play into the warm night and small-press poets read their work. In the suburbs large low houses nestle on well-kept lawns behind tall wire fences. Signs tell passers-by the speed with which the armed response unit will come to the house if the alarm is triggered. Further out again, after the suburbs, it is still city, but new city. Sprawling estates of high-density housing, rows and rows of unpainted breeze-block bungalows, some with aerials and satellite dishes on their roofs and cars parked in their driveways. But here the city’s domination of the veld is not so complete. The streets are covered with a dusty earth that shifts across them in the wind, and tall grasses grow between cracks in the concrete, prising through like an old habit that will not die. Here, families all sleep in the same bed, the parents partitioned by a hung sheet from the children. It is the city, but the ways of the village have not been forgotten. There are chickens in back yards. Nervous, sullen dogs, and if you need him, a n’an-ga nearby who will tell you if the snake at your door was sent as a blessing or a curse.

The house I have been staying in is in Rowland Square, north-west of the city centre on Prince Edward Street. It belongs to a white Zim-babwean called Jeremy Brickhill. At seventeen Jeremy deserted the Rhodesian Army while lighting in the War of Independence and went to join the ZIPRA guerrillas in the Zambian bush. The war ended and he returned to Harare, as did his wife, who had been exiled from the country for protesting against Ian Smith’s regime. Zimbabwe was now an independent state led by Robert Mugabe, who on coming to power had announced a policy of reconciliation. ‘If yesterday I fought you as an enemy, today you have become a friend,’ he told Zimbabwe’s whites, ‘and if yesterday you hated me, today you cannot avoid the love that binds you to me and me to you.’ Encouraged, many whites did not ‘take the gap’ and stayed; but for some people the war was not over and they could not forget. One day as Jeremy turned the key in his car door he unlocked an explosion that blew him apart, embedding parts of his car into his body. The bomb may have been intended for him or his wife, he doesn’t know, but as he walks around the hot house in just a sarong he still displays its mark, a cross-stitch of scar tissue, running the length of his torso. It reminds me, together with the photos he keeps on his wall of the decommissioning of weapons at the end of the war (rows and rows of missiles, machine-guns and armoured cars lined up in the bush), of how recent the conflict is here, lying shallow in the memory of this young and old country.

Jeremy is often away, so most of the time I share the house with his housekeeper, Richard. Richard is twenty-four, black, quiet, softly spoken and gentle-mannered. He lives in a one-roomed building behind Jeremy’s house, with a single bed, a radio that is nearly always on and posters of Manchester United on his walls. He will be getting married next summer. On Sundays his cousin comes and calls for him after church. Wearing a long white deacon’s stole and holding a Bible under his arm, he gently rattles the chain on the gate at the bottom of Jere-my’s drive to call Richard out from his room. Richard appears in long trousers and his Sunday shirt and together they walk off through the square towards town.

I am in Zimbabwe looking for you again. In libraries, in archives and in the memories of people. I thought I had stopped following you, but you didn’t go away, so I have come to the country you lived and died in, following in your footsteps, hoping that somehow I will find more of you here. Because I still think I don’t know your whole story, and I feel instinctively that what is missing is the keystone I need to understand you. Before I left for Zimbabwe I visited my great aunt Elizabeth, your niece, who knew you and who wrote to you through those last quiet, isolated years in the veld. She told me that when she had come here for a memorial service years ago, she had been introduced to a woman who said she was your granddaughter. It had been quick, cursory, but she was sure she had said she was your granddaughter. If you have a granddaughter, you must have had a child, and a child must have had a mother, but in your letters, in the books written about you, there is always just you. So I have come to Zimbabwe, nearly fifty years after you died, to look for you again, and to look for your story, your real story that has been covered by the dust of time and history.

But ‘real’ is not such an exact word here as it was in Britain. Harare is all city — cinemas, Rixi taxis, cricket grounds — but like the grass that grows between the cracks in the concrete, the older Shona histories of myth, magic and superstition are always showing through the city’s surface. Reality and myth and fact are not so definite here, but feed off each other to create a culture in which myth is no less ‘real’ than fact, just another way of telling the same story. There was a report in the paper yesterday about a prostitute who is being charged for cursing a client who refused to pay. The man woke the next morning to find that his genitals had disappeared. A doctor has given evidence to support the man’s case, swearing it is true that the prostitute’s curse has deprived him of his manhood, leaving a space between his legs, a blank page of skin. And there are other stories in the paper, about tolo-gashes , spirits of the veld playing havoc with people’s lives, about witchdoctors, about black magic and politics. Myth, reality and fact, in black and white, hand in hand in hand.

With you too, it has been hard to extract the real from the myth, but you are still here, in the city you first stood up to then stayed away from. I have been following your name around the city. There is an orphanage outside town named after you, and your books and letters are in the university library and in the National Archives. I thought I found a street named after you but found out later that it was not you, but another Cripps, a pioneer called Leonard Cripps. Most people I meet know your name because of a diary, the Shearly Cripps Recipe Diary , which is sold as an annual fund-raiser for the orphanage. I find a copy in a bookshop in town. It has a lurid rainbow cover with your name across it, and inside there are quick recipes, adverts for Dazzle Hair Design and Enbee Schoolwear, dates, school calendars, weights and measures. There is a section called ‘Time and Trouble Savers’: ‘Emergency funnel — Use corner of brown envelope. Dropped egg — sprinkle heavily with salt to absorb the moisture.’ When I meet people here many are surprised you are a man and a missionary. They thought you were a woman and a cook, a pioneer’s Mrs Beeton. Fact and fiction, hand in hand.

Others, though, know you intimately, and these are the people I have come to talk to in Harare. They are the people who like me have traced you in history and tried to understand you, who have already tried to tell your story. After the time I have spent with your letters, with your life on my mind, meeting them is like meeting the ex-partners of a lover. What we have in common is you. They know and retell the same stories I have uncovered, they have touched your writing, had their minds enquiring in yours. At first there is instant contact, the shared interest recognised, then a period of mild competition, scoring off each other’s knowledge of you. But then we settle into an exchange of ideas and theories, before the examination of you widens to take in their lives and mine, but always through the prism of yours.