Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

Note on Segregation by A.S. Cripps: When I wrote this book, which was published in 1927,1 was willing to approve of Segregation for Africans and Europeans — if Africans should be given a fair share of the land in the Colony. But afterwards I did not consider that Africans, in my opinion were given a fair share in the S. Rhodesian scheme of Land apportionment, and lost my faith in Segregation for S. Rhodesia.

I am thankful for Segregation as planned by the Morris-Carter Commission for opening the way for Africans to purchase plots of land but I do not believe that Segregation is a righteous policy for a British Colony. Can it be a right policy for Christian people? Certainly not! A.S. Cripps.

While in Harare I spend some time with white Zimbabweans, testing your name against their memories just as I had against the memories of black Zimbabweans in Chivhu and Maronda Mashanu. Jeremy left me a list of names and numbers in his house, of people I should contact if I wanted to go out, if I wanted company. I hire a mobile phone and call Stassi and Alice Callinicos. Stassi lectures in Classics at the University of Zimbabwe and Alice is a teacher who used to scout for film locations. They weren’t expecting my call, but in the laid-back Zimbabwean manner Alice tells me, ‘Sure, why don’t you come round? We’re going to a party tonight, come along.’

The party is at a house on a hill, its lower fields ranked with parked cars, guided into place by a young black man in a waistcoat and a reflector belt. Flares line each side of the long drive up to the house, a flickering, primitive runway leading to the glow of a room filled with people, talking, drinking, smoking. There is an open veranda, and an undercurrent of music. Another black man in a waistcoat serves me from behind a bar. I don’t remember any black faces among the guests, but the people at the party are not the ‘Rhodies’ I have met elsewhere, the residue of Ian Smith’s regime, the white hardliners who have stayed in the country under majority rule, still holding their minority rule views close to their chests, like a deck of forbidden cards. These, at the party, are another breed of white Zimbabwean. They are the ones who stayed after the War of Independence and who welcomed Mugabe and his policy of reconciliation, his promise of a multi-racial success story. They are the liberal whites who still have black cooks, nannies, gardeners, not because they feel it is right, but just because that is the way of things. I meet teachers, university lecturers, documentary film makers, rose farmers. All have the easygoing nature that is naturally inherited in this country, the calm acquaintance with fate. They are people to whom history seems to have happened, not passed by. It is there in their talk of ‘before’, in their grandfathers who came here in ox-carts, and is palpable in the recent changes in their lives. The changes in the country have effected changes on them. History is alive and real in their memories in a way I have rarely encountered with their peers in Britain.

John is like this. A carpenter in his late thirties, he still seems to be blinking into the light of his new country, a little unsure of how it all happened, but perfectly pleased to be here now that it has. I ask him if he has heard of you. He says he has one of the Shearly Cripps recipe diaries at home. Then he thinks for a moment, a smudged champagne glass in one hand, a smouldering cigarette in the other. He takes a draw, looks out above the flares into the dark night beyond.

‘There were a bunch of graves with the name Cripps near my school,’ he said. ‘In the highlands.’

He looks back at me.

‘Ja, there was a funny story attached to them too. They were in the garden of a house abandoned early in the war. But you know what? The servants there cleaned it every day. Polished the silver and everything — and nothing was ever stolen, how is that? That fella’s name was Cripps — he your guy, is it?’

No, I say, not him. Just the name game again.

♦

Someone who does know you is Pelline, who I was introduced to by Alice and Stassi. Pelline lives on a tobacco farm near Mvuri, eighty miles north of Harare. I went to visit her because I wanted to see a white farm. And I wanted to get into the country again. Harare was already feeling too concrete, too tall.

Pelline tells me what she knows about you as she sits knitting beneath the shade of a spathodia tree. It is the familiar story. Your love of the African, your belief in a black Christ. Your walking and your poetry. Your life fitting the narratives of a story moulded by its telling as a stream is shaped by its running. As a Catholic she particularly identifies with your witness to Francis of Assissi.

Pelline is in her sixties. She speaks in a clear English accent. She lives on the farm with her husband Laci (pronounced Lot-see), who came to Zimbabwe as a Hungarian refugee after the war. Their house is cool inside, bare and simple. Walking its empty, whitewashed corridors to my room with its single bed, mosquito-mesh window and bedside table, I am made to think of a convent or an isolated boarding school.

In the evening we eat crisp corn on the cob at the large wooden dining-room table. Then Laci settles down with the BBC World Service news, smoking his pipe and Pelline takes out her knitting. Outside the cicadas chirp and are answered by the intermittent crackle of the farm’s CB radio, the outside world breaking on us here as distant as waves falling on a faraway shore.

♦

In the morning Laci gives me a tour of the farm. I sit on the back of his dusty red Honda scooter, my arms around his waist as we bounce along the pock-marked tracks and paths. He is older than Pelline, but lean and tanned. The skin on the back of his hands is loose, like the skin of a tree monitor, but the legs that echo mine on each side of the scooter are sinewy and strong.

He takes me into the dark of a large corrugated warehouse and pulls out a rack of drying tobacco leaves, sliding it out like a file from a cabinet. They hang in tight rows like bats asleep, graduated in colour, fading along the line from green to yellow to brown. He tears off a corner of a leaf, rubs it between his finger and thumb and holding it out, tells me to smell, as proud as a chef asking a customer to taste. The scent is rich, edaphic, filled with the sun. It is dim in the warehouse but I can make out Laci’s white grin, appearing rare and bright in his tanned face.

In the fields they are picking fresh tobacco beneath the huge steel sprinklers of the irrigation system. We bump and totter along the track through high-sided alleyways of deep green tobacco. I can feel Laci’s ribs under my arms. A lorry is parked at the end of the track, its open back piled high with picked leaves. Workers walk towards it from all directions, bundles of tobacco fanning over their heads like extravagant head-dresses. From Burnham wood to Dunsinane …

Laci talks in Shona to the overseer, a middle-aged man in blue overalls and black Wellingtons, then we continue on the tour of the farm. He shows me the school he has built, and the medical centre and the village of workers’ rondavels. And I begin to see the problem. This is not just a farm. It is a community, an infrastructure. Take away the farm and you take away the medical centre, the school, the workers’ homes. It shouldn’t be like this, but it is, and I realise once again how tightly the land knot is tied, and how hard it will be to undo.

Over the last few days Hunzvi’s War Veterans have been pressing further for forced occupation of white-owned land. Fuelled by political motives against the MDC, the only opposition party, Mugabe’s rhetoric seems to be moving their way, despite the possible consequences of economic ruin and, as I recognise touring the farm on the back of Laci’s scooter, the mass disruption to thousands of black Zim-babweans. But then Mugabe understands land in the same way you did. He understands its potential, how it can be used, to favour and punish. How it is easier to keep hold of power in a country of subsistence farmers than a country of economically independent people.