Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

This time I am on the Harare-Mutare service. On the road that winds south-east out of the capital, rising towards the highlands and the scent of pine amid the eucalyptus. But I am not going all the way today. Seventy-two kilometres and an hour after we left Harare I step down from the coach into a sun-blast of heat and go to wait outside the pink plasterwork of the Marondera Hotel.

I have come to Marondera to meet another person who knew you. Canon Richard Holderness is ninety years old; sixty years ago he drove 100 miles from his own mission station to visit you at Maronda Mashanu, because, as he told me later that day, he ‘wanted to find out what made you tick’. Well, I am still trying to find out myself, so I’ve come to Marondera to ask Canon Holderness what answer you gave him. I have read your letters, seen your photographs, heard your stories, read your poems and knelt at your grave, but the elemental nature of you still eludes me. And there are unresolved questions: the shadow granddaughter, the name in your will, and why you left Britain in the first place.

♦

After camping at Great Zimbabwe I returned to Harare. There was a book in the National Archives I wanted to read there. One of your books that Leonard had mentioned, called An Africa for Africans . Leonard described it as your statement on land in Africa, your thesis on why the Africans should be allowed to buy and own their own land. He told me a story about a visit from Paramount Chief Mut-shutshu. One night, in the middle of a great storm, the chief’s house was struck by lightning. It was burnt to the ground, a sparking, fizzing bonfire lighting up the rain-filled night. He lost everything, including his copy of An Africa for Africans . Leonard remembers the chief walking to Maronda Mashanu to request another copy from you. That was all he wanted. Not shelter or help or blessing. Just your book and the possibility of a different future.

At the archives I have to talk my way in. I am told I have already had all the time I’m allowed in there without a permit from the Ministry of Information. But the porter at the front desk is sympathetic when I tell him why I am here. He nods his head earnestly, as if he understands the importance of what I am doing.

‘It is good that you have come here to learn about your uncle,’ he says. ‘He is your Vadzimu , your ancestral spirit.’

Then his serious face breaks into a smile and he laughs, hits his desk and wags his finger at me. ‘So you had better go in and read his book, otherwise he will be angry, and then you will be very, very sick.’

So I am allowed an extra day in the archives, and as instructed by the porter I spend it with you and your book.

In Harare the papers, the coffee shops and the taxi drivers are all busy with the same conversation. The talk is of the land situation, the redistribution of the white farmlands to the rural blacks. A group calling themselves the War Veterans, led by a Zanu PF MP, Dr Hunzvi, are threatening land invasions and forced occupancy. Sitting at the dark wood desks of the National Archives, the librarians and archivists moving silently about me, this contemporary conversation gives your eighty-year-old words an added weight. I realise you saw this coming. This cycle of taking. The land question. The idea of land, tied like a Gordian knot at the centre of the country, tightening over the years until now, when it seems that nothing will undo it; nothing but the fall of the sword.

From An Africa for Africans (1927)

Self-determination and self-development are surely required by our Natives, and how are they to attain to a proper measure of either — conditions and feeling in South Africa being what one has found them to be by long experience? Self-development and self-determination need to be stressed in my opinion if we are to seek any really hopeful settlement of the Native question in our Colony…

‘But to hold all natives down in a position of permanent inferiority will ultimately beget a deep and bitter race hatred which will aim, not at the autonomy of the black but at the extermination of the white. If once such a huge war of extermination between white and black broke out in South Africa, it is idle to argue that the white would win. He would, of course, with his machine-guns and aeroplanes and other ‘civilised’ devices, but it would be a Pyrrhic victory.’ (Professor Brooks)

‘Survivors,’ as Tacitus puts it, ‘not only of the others but of themselves.’

Let us remember that in considering the interests of Southern Rhodesia’s Natives we are considering the interests of eight hundred and thirteen thousands of our fellow British subjects. Let us remember, in reckoning out the due proportion of the land proposed to be devoted to them and their children, the proportion of their numbers to the number of the settlers, also what a mighty proportion of the whole Southern Rhodesian revenue they pay.

The position of our Natives encouraged to plunge into the new go-ahead life of the Southern Rhodesia Colony, but denied a place in the sun as regards that self-development on the soil which really appeals to them, while the arts of cajolery are used to induce more and more Europeans to acquire vested rights on easy terms in that soil appeals to me as pathetic and ominous of tragedy. Oh the pity of it!..

Before I make an end here I want to avow my hopefulness as to a Territorial Segregation Policy proving a welcome remedy for our sick sub-continent’s racial bitterness, but I am hopeful as to such a Policy, only if it be coupled with a REALLY liberal settlement of our Native Land Question. In a report to the Government of the South African Union (Blue Book U.G. 41-1918) the late M. Evans, CMC, summarised the condition on which a Territorial Separation must depend, if it were to have any real hope of working prosperity. He wrote to this effect:

‘The native population is rapidly increasing. By contact and example we are altering their outlook on life. The present generation is not like their fathers, and the next will differ more widely. For a better adjustment in the interests of both races we propose to take away the present right of the native to acquire land where he will, and to strictly limit his opportunities within certain recommended areas. If the scope within such areas is not such as to enable him to reasonably develop with the general progress of the country, then I fear that our attempt will not result in that racial peace and satisfaction which we are attempting to secure.’

Granted that saving clause — I avow myself a fervent segregationist at this present critical time in Southern Rhodesia’s history. I see the splendid hope of Freedom for the Self-Development of Native Africa, which a Segregation Policy provides at this present juncture when indigenous Native Life is being so hard pressed in our Mixed Areas.

This last passage is something of a shock to me: to see you declare yourself a ‘fervent segregationist’. I understand your motives, and that you were writing in a climate that nurtured serious arguments of opposition on the grounds that European diseases in the Mixed Areas effectively ‘culled’ the natives living there. But still, with my knowledge of the history of apartheid I find yours a hard conclusion to follow. Reading it again, however, I realise that you were already aware of the weakness in the theory, those capital letters seeming to spell out your desperation for a solution against another instinct: that given the opportunity humanity would choose advantage over equality—‘a REALLY liberal settlement…’

Turning the page I find a loose piece of paper, and I remember something else Leonard told me. Before you died you instructed him to insert a typewritten statement into each of the last six copies of the book. I pick out the paper now and read the date: 11 July 1950.