Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

A month later he’d returned to the clearing again and began work with the same Matabele workmen with whom he had built the school at Wreningham. Since his last visit to the clearing he had already built the church many times in his mind, and even as the men first swung their mattocks to break the red topsoil he could already see the finished building in the clearing, its high thatched roof encircled by the trees and the shadow of the kopje falling across its bleached stone walls.

He knew the church before it was built because he had already seen the building he wanted it to look like. Earlier that year he’d trekked down as far as Fort Victoria and camped out in the Zimbabwe ruins. Sitting with his back against the trunk of a mopani tree he had smoked his pipe and watched the setting sun transform the conical tower, the high walls, the crumbled pillars, into a shadow show of silent grandeur. He did not know the history of the place — whether it had been a gold mine, a fortress, a city, a temple — but he knew it was in some way sacred, and made all the more so by its current supplication to nature. Lizards stop-started across the tall tower, slipping between its flat stones; cranes, hornbills, weaver and secretary birds nested in the trees that grew in the shelter of its walls and baboons sat back on their haunches, solemnly chewing on damba fruit at the bases of its fallen pillars.

He’d stayed there, against the mopani tree, until it was pitch dark. And even then he hadn’t moved, but stayed sitting there, among the ruins, trying to imagine what they had looked like when they were freshly built, roofed with thatch domes and alive with people.

The next morning, as he prepared his breakfast of chapatti and peanut butter, he’d been joined at the ruins by a carload of tourists. They were led by a businessman from Johannesburg. He’d listened as the businessman explained away the history of the place to his colleagues, attributing the skilled building work to Semite or Phoenician traders. Of course, he could not be sure of their exact origins, but at least he was sure about one thing, that the ruins were certainly not the work of native Africans.

‘Ja, believe me,’ he’d said as the group strolled between the fallen gateways and through the passage between the tower and the outer wall. ‘I know natives, and I know the natives never built these walls. They’re always in want of bossing up, isn’t it? But as for this display of art — the kaffirs haven’t it in them, and never had.’

He hadn’t been surprised. The businessman’s view was a respected one among many of the country’s scholars and historians. And he even understood why it might make sense to them. A denial of the ruins was a denial of African history, and it is easier to yoke a man who has no history than a man whose ancestors built great cities of blue-grey stone.

As he’d worked with the Matabele tribesmen in the clearing at Maronda Mashanu he’d kept the businessman’s words in mind and built against them, towards an alternative idea of the Zimbabwe ruins. An African idea. But it was not an easy idea to follow. The local stone did not break as easily as the neat granite flakes of the ruins, and whatever skill lay in the blood of their ancestors had been diluted by time in the veins of the Matabele. The curved walls often fell under their own weight and the red mud plastered between the stones was twice washed away by the rain. But eventually, one bare hot afternoon, as they tied the last bundle of veld grass to the tall thatch roof, they finished. Standing back at the edge of the clearing he’d looked up at his new church. It did not resemble the church he had built in his mind. It was a little crooked, and not as tall as he had hoped it would be, but its ancestry was still unmistakable. Formed in a rough crucifix, its rounded stone and dagga walls were repeated inside by parallel walls and chambers and its five domed, thatched roofs were supported by five tall round stone pillars. It was Zimbabwe, breathing through Mashonaland stone and a Christian church. It was the church he had wanted since he came to Africa, a church for the Black Christ.

On the day they finished work Reverend Liebenberg came out from Enkeldoorn to admire the building and to photograph him in front of his new parish church. Standing him by its open doorway, Liebenberg set up his tripod, told his friend to remain as still as he could, and, shielding his eyes from the glare of the sun, released the shutter.

Like a key turning in the lock of the land the completion of the church opened the borders of his farms, and over the ensuing months a steady stream of African families moved their homes and their stock to Maronda Mashanu. He watched the geometry of their settlement imprint itself on the veld: neat squares of ploughed earth worked over by heavy-shouldered oxen; rows of maize, mealie corn and pumpkin plants; the pattern of the kraals punctuating the plain, each echoing the other with a circle of rondavels around a beaten patch of earth and a dare of stones where the men sat and talked. Away from the kraals shifting herds of cattle and goats melted over the banks of the river, shepherded by small boys who carried spears taller than themselves. The fly-flinching heads of the cows set off the bells at their necks, and the peal of these bells became a regular percussion to the ongoing music of the veld — of wind, grass, birdsong and insect call.

Routine entered the land too. Each morning he would see the women slow-striding through the mist with bundles of wood or clay pots of river water carried on their heads. Those not yet baptised were naked but for scraps of limbo around their waists and bead necklaces falling across their long, flat breasts. A child was nearly always swaddled to their backs, asleep, its face massaged against its mother’s shoulder blades. With an easy raised hand they would call to him as they passed, ‘ Magwanani Babal and he would call back, ‘ Magwanani , ’

He developed his own routine too. Doctoring, preparing sermons, writing, corresponding, trekking, baptisms, births, marriages, deaths. Increasingly his time was taken up as a mediator between husbands and wives, working energetically to overcome their differences and keep marriages together. And he was still something of the in-between man in Enkeldoorn too. He knew he would never master the small talk that seemed so essential to communicate in the town. He had always been awkward in speech, the spoken word coming to him harder than the written. And yet, at the same lime, most of the farmers found him too rarefied, too intellectual to welcome him completely into their circle. He had, though, over the years come to some sort of an unspoken accommodation with the Europeans in the area. They respected his physical endurance, feared his fierce defence of the natives and accepted his eccentricities. He had been living in the area for long enough now for only new in-comers to find anything strange in the sight of his tall, rangy figure striding across the veld, shabbily dressed in an old golf jacket, his pockets stuffed with ink pots and pens and a battered satchel over his shoulder overflowing with letters, books, tobacco and tinned food. He was, though, still most content when removed from European society. Leading the singing under the open-topped thatch of his church, the starlings darting in and out of its poles. Or alone on the veld, settling down under his red blanket by a camp fire after a long day’s trekking, the four bright points of the Southern Cross developing in the dark blue sky above him.

His wider society of friends had suffered the usual expansions and contractions of time. Through his work with the Aboriginal Protection Society he had made close ties with the Methodist John White and the Anglican Edgar Lloyd, with whom he maintained a regular correspondence. He also wrote to friends in England: Maynard Smith, James Adderly, Laurence Binyon, and weekly to his sister Edith, who kept him supplied with literary journals and books of poetry.