Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

The church itself is a simple block building beside an ancient tree with a milk churn hanging from its lowest branch serving as a bell. Inside, Leonard changes into his preaching stole before carefully preparing the altar and supplicating himself in front of it, on his knees, his forehead resting on his hands and his hands resting in turn on the concrete of the altar step. A tail-less lizard runs a slalom between the silver paten, the candlesticks and the communion cup.

The church that morning is completely full. The women of the Mothers’ Union line the pews in their uniforms of bright blue head-scarves and aprons, and the old men in dark suits and deacons’ stoles play tall drums and shake maracas. Your name is mentioned again and again, in songs, in the sermon, in thanks and in prayers. The harmony singing is beautiful, weaving into itself and building to a crescendo until some of the women break from the pews and dance in front of the altar. I think of the reserved choir boys in Oxford. Leonard looks over it all, beaming and stamping his feet in time to the music.

After the service Leonard introduces me to some of the congregation, often in terms of their relationship to death rather than to other people. ‘This is Mary, her husband died two years ago, she had four children and lost three.’

Old edentate men and women introduce themselves to me according to whether you married them to their spouse, baptised them in the river, or did both. One woman’s back is bent with age and her face is obscured by a shawl over her head and a coloured cloth tied across her forehead. She grips my hand in both of hers and speaks to me in a hoarse whisper. Leonard bends to her mouth and then looks at me and says, ‘She says she loved Father Cripps like her own father.’ I ask him why her face is covered and he says simply, ‘Because leprosy took it away, yes.’

Flash bulbs of lightning at the open windows that line both walls of the church signal the coming of a storm, which is soon above us, the thunder cracking so hard that I feel it in my ribs. The downpour sheets the sky dark, filling in the windows with panes of rain. Those who were outside come running in, and are joined by groups of other people who had been driving on the road in open trucks, bundling in through the main door, their shoulders hunched and their clothes soaked tight to their skin. The church is packed, and the storm continues raging about us, flinging rain through the windows and exploding its thunder in the clouds. The noise of the water on the roof is so loud we have to shout to talk to each other, but then above it all I hear one woman’s voice start to sing. The shuffle of a maraca joins her and soon the congregation and the drenched refugees from the road are all singing, meeting the storm’s hymn with their own.

♦

Four days after walking your road to Leonard’s farm, I am walking it back again, although this time I am not alone. Sabethiel walks beside me, as Leonard insisted he should, to take me to the bus stop in town where I will catch a bus south to Masvingo. Sabethiel speaks no English, and I speak no Shona, so we walk together silently under the growing heat of a morning sun and a clear sky, your red road crunching under our feet.

In the space of these four days my idea of you has changed from an elusive ancestor I pieced together in photos, letters, poems, to a remembered man, fleshed out with the stories and memories of Leonard and the others in Maronda Mashanu. The manifestation of your life in these memories has made you clearer to me in many ways, but more of a mystery in others. My intuition that you lived partly as a pursued man in Mashonaland has deepened, I feel more strongly than ever that your life of sacrifice was also somehow a life of personal penance. I know from the histories and the accounts I have read that the men and women who came to Africa a hundred years ago all had their reasons to come here: riches, God, hope, health. But for most there was often a reason to leave their homelands too, and it is this other reason I am looking for in you. I know why you came here, but why did you leave? I can’t be sure, only knowing what I do, but I am increasingly certain that your shadow granddaughter, who even Leonard said he knew nothing about, is a residue, a living proof of that reason.

And there is a name too. A new name that has fed my curiosity, one I have not previously encountered in your story. Before I left for Maronda Mashanu I spent two days in the dark wood reading rooms of the Zimbabwe National Archives, all the time I was allowed without the necessary permit from the Ministry of Information. In the archives I found more of your history. More letters, more manuscripts, more photographs (even one of my father aged four sitting on the knee of your brother, William). In one folder, between a map of the Sabi Valley and a school exercise book with your poems written across its grid of blue squares, I found your Last Will and Testament. It was in this will I found the new name. The will is short, sparse and simple, and the name appears in a codicil, added at a later date. It is the only name on the paper other than yours.

It is this name and the will that contains it that occupies my mind that day as I take a rattling bus from Chivhu further south to Masvin-go, then a battered taxi from the bus station on to the medieval ruins of Great Zimbabwe, where I set up my tent inside the huge walls of the ancient stone complex. I am still thinking of the name and your will the next morning when I wake before sunrise and walk up to the imposing structure of the ruins’ Great Enclosure. Entering into its circle through the west entrance, I sit on a pile of blue-grey stone beneath the tall conical tower at the heart of the edifice. I am alone. It is early, quiet, and for once the air is cool, empty of the heat that fills the day. I wait for the sun, which comes, blood-orange red, rising from behind the outer wall, picking out in silhouette the thin shards of stone planted like battlements, and the tops of the trees that have found root inside the shelter of this African castle. The sun rises higher, clearing the walls altogether and lighting the ground inside the enclosure. With it comes birdsong, long, urgent calls and higher signature tunes, played again and again on the clear air, and heat, which finds itself on my skin until the flesh on my forearms warms and the first pinpricks of sweat tingle between the hairs.

I sit there, at the centre of the ruins, almost ninety years after you sat here taking in the quality of these circles, pillars and domes so you could echo them when you built your church in that clearing beneath the kopje in Maronda Mashanu. In travelling here I have made that link complete in my mind. The shape of these ruins, and the shape of your church, Great Zimbabwe passed on into Maronda Mashanu, and then replicated again and again in the mission stations you built across Mashonaland. The pieces of your life coming together, more fragments joining to make your history whole. But now there is another fragment: this name, printed clearly in your will. The only name other than yours. The woman it belongs to is another part of your story, but one which echoes nowhere else in your life as I know it. Unless, of course the name is already an echo, a resonance of your past, and it is the cause of its existence there, not any consequence that I should be looking for.

I leave the Great Enclosure and make my way back to my tent lower in the valley. Coming over the lip of a hillock I disturb a baboon eating in a tree. I stop and it hangs for a second like a dark question mark, one arm hooked around a branch, before dropping to the ground and hunch-running over the horizon, leaving me looking at nothing but the swaying leaves where it has been. And that is how it is here, following your story in Zimbabwe one hundred years too late, picking up the fragments, uncovering your tracks. Fact and fiction, myth and history. Glimpses of things, suggestions in the corner of the eye which disappear or dissolve when you try to look at them head on.