Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

GENTS and VAKADZI LADIES.

I am just past the well when a young boy appears from behind one of the raised rondavels. He stops, stares and runs into the hut, calling to someone inside. I stop too, worried that I have intruded. I am suddenly aware that if this is Leonard’s farm, then it is the first time I will meet someone who actually met you, who lived with you and knew you as a person, not as a subject written on a page. I wait, feeling the first heavy drops of rain land on my rucksack and my arms, and the sweat cooling on my skin. A woman wearing a brightly patterned skirt, a dark cardigan and a scarf wrapped around her head, and an older boy wearing a white shirt and black trousers, appear from the rondavel. I walk nearer to them, explaining I am here to see Reverend Mamvura. She smiles, says ‘ Aya! , bringing her hand down in a gesture I don’t quite understand, while the boy walks towards me, smiling, and shakes my hand. He leads me towards the bungalow and goes inside its darkness, calling softly ‘Baba, baba!’ He says a few more words in quick, quiet Shona and from inside I hear a man’s voice, older, deeper. ‘Come in, come in, yes, yes.’ I step inside and hear the sky open up behind me as, like the drawing down of a blind, the sweep of rain reaches Leonard’s farm, crashing onto the iron roof of his bungalow and splashing in the dusty square outside.

Inside there is an older man sitting in an armchair, wearing a dark-green short-sleeved shirt and a grey tank top. On seeing me he raises his eyebrows, lets out an ‘Ahhhh!’ and, pushing himself out of the chair embraces me and my rucksack in one. He smells of sadza, earth and mothballs. When we pull apart he keeps his arms around me, saying ‘Welcome, welcome, Owen’, smiling and shaking his head. This is Leonard Mamvura, lively, passionate, eighty years old but looking only fifty. I realise he is crying, and then that I am too.

The boy who met me, who Leonard introduces as Sabethiel, takes my rucksack while Leonard takes my hand and leads me to a small table in the centre of the room, at which we both sit down. As with the others I met in Harare, any distance is broken by our shared knowledge of you. Leonard introduces me to his cousin, the woman I saw earlier, who now brings me a white enamel bowl with blue trim, some soap and a towel to wash my hands, while Leonard makes a pot of tea before sitting down with me to talk about you.

The room is small and dark and simple. The shaky table we sit at stands at its centre with a sofa and an armchair against two of the walls on which free advertisement calendars and printed quotations from the Bible vie for space, along with photographs of Leonard’s family and one portrait of Robert Mugabe.

Leonard himself fascinates me. Enthusiasm runs through him like an infection. He is almost completely bald, just a dusting of white hair circling the back of his head. His eyes are heavy-lidded and his face is lined, particularly in two diagonal grooves that run from the side of his nose to above the corners of his mouth. This gives his passive face a solemn look when he is not smiling. But that is rare, because he is often smiling, and laughing a characteristic laugh that peels off into a squeal. When he speaks to me his head nods and waves, as if it is this motion that powers the words which he marshals in the air in front of him as he talks. His language is clear, a careful, formal English, peppered with repeated yeses and uh-ohs when he is listening or responding to a question.

Leonard removes the white mesh fly-cover from a plate of biscuits and we talk. He tells me that your church, the original Maronda Mashanu, is not far from here, and that you are buried in its nave. Then he talks about when you were alive, referring to you in turns as ‘Our hero, Father Shearlycripp’, ‘the most beloved Father Shearlycripp’ or ‘our noble friend, Father Shearlycripp’. Many times he says with a shaking head and in a high yet serious voice, ‘He was a very good friend of the Africans, yes, yes.’

It is clear that Leonard has taken it upon himself to be the guardian of your legacy and your memory out here in the veld. He goes into his study, a tiny room with sagging shelves piled high with papers and folders, and brings out several books and articles that have been published about you. The words of more people who have come here to question Leonard about the old missionary poet he read and wrote for. Soon, however, it seems that my welfare overtakes the welfare of your memory, and Leonard sets about arranging my welcome, shouting orders at the silent Sabethiel, talking quickly to his niece. He shows me my room at the back of the bungalow, a mattress laid across two huge sacks of mealie meal, a wooden side table and one small window looking out over the track and the road I walked this morning. Then he tells me I must wash, and leads me down to the concrete toilet block where his cousin has already prepared a small blue plastic tub of warm water. The toilet itself is a simple construction of a raised hole set in concrete with a wooden board lain across it. A metal hook hammered into the wall skewers a sheaf of neatly torn squares of newspaper. Leonard leaves me with a bar of soap and I strip off beside the toilet, step into the tub and give myself a body wash, listening to the flies humming and tapping under the wooden board over the toilet hole and looking out of the one small window at the sky, already clear of the morning’s rain clouds.

That afternoon Leonard shows me around his homestead, the neat ploughed areas of mealie corn, the kitchen hut with its open fire in the centre and highly polished black shelves moulded out of the earth walls, and the cows, still shifting about their wooden pen. He introduces me to his son, Horatio, who lives with his wife and children in the rondavel I passed on my way up the track. Horatio is fifty and speaks excellent English. He must have been born about the time that you died.

The headmaster of the local school joins us for more tea in the late afternoon. His name is Moses Maranyika, and where Leonard has told me stories about your missionary work here, Moses is keen to tell me about your supernatural powers: your ability to control the bees and, above all, your prowess as a rain spirit. He says that wherever you walked there might have been a band of rain either in front of you or behind you, but never over you. You always walked dry. Leonard laughs and says that Father Cripps must have been with me because it only started raining today when I came inside the house. Moses plays along, nodding, wide-eyed, and says, ‘Yes, he is your ancestor, so his spirit will be with you here.’ Moses is also a sub-deacon at the church, and he and Leonard segue seamlessly from this supernatural conversation into organising a church service for tomorrow to let everyone meet Father Cripps’ great, great nephew.

That night, after a supper of chicken legs and sadza, I write notes from the books Leonard has about you by the light of a single candle while he snoozes in his chair, piping up to conversation every now and then. His talk drifts from you to the land situation to AIDS, which he worries about a lot. He calls the virus ‘Slim’ and tells me that in the last month he has buried twenty young men, all hollowed out by the disease. He shakes his head, looking sad, and says, ‘They go to work in the towns, but then they come back here and they die.’ Outside the cicadas are at full drill, and the night is a deep black. Later, I fall asleep on the mealie sacks, my legs aching from my long walk. As I drift towards sleep I think about tomorrow, when I will visit your grave, and about how to ask Leonard about your granddaughter, who seems to have already been everywhere before me but whose name and existence no one can tell me about.