Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

The back wheel of the Royal Enfield Model C motorbike is still spinning, but slowing down, the silences between each swishing brush of its tyre against the buckled mudguard getting longer. Shuw…shuw…shuw…shuw. With each pass of the guard a little dust falls from the rubber tread to the road beneath. It lands in the dark pool of oil bleeding from the bike’s engine, the pipes and heavy carburettor hanging from its frame like the powerful chest of a cheetah. The pool of oil spreads, seeping into the dirt and moving over itself with slow, liquid determination. Eventually its dark edge touches and gathers around the tip of the metal hand-brake on the left handlebar, marooning its steel in a lake of oil. A file of ants crossing the road to the dust-grain volcano of their nest’s entrance are caught in its thick slide. One of them struggles in its darkness, another is already dead, carried along on its flow, slow-turning like a log on water, or a body, passed along the hands of mourners at a funeral.

The oil continues to spread, beneath the bike and around the distorted front wheel, its spokes snapped and bent, until an arm of its flow touches the pale swirls of hair on the gazelle’s underside. The animal lies in front of the prone motorbike, its spine broken and its hind legs splayed awkwardly behind it. The onward flow of oil gathers at its body, then disperses to either side along the line of its belly. The gazelle’s shallow, rapid breathing is the only sound other than the turning rear wheel, and the rise and fall of its black-striped ribcage the only other movement. If you were close enough to its face you would be able to see a reflection of this scene in the convex surface of its open eye. The broken bike, the long, straight road narrowing into the distance and by the side of the road, an umbrella tree with a gathering of vultures waiting patiently in its branches, shitting their positions and stretching their wings as they watch the scene on the road like theatregoers watching the final act of a play.

The man who is also lying in the road would not appear in this dark reflection, because he is behind the gazelle, ten or twelve feet closer to Enkeldoorn, which is where he was travelling to when the buck leapt out of the bush and into the path of his motorbike. He is lying face down in the red dust, his arms by his sides and his knees drawn up towards his stomach. Although he is too far away to be touched by the oil there is another dark pool spreading from under his head, matting in his greying hair and his ginger moustache. Unlike the gazelle he is not breathing, and over the next week many people, black and white, will hold Arthur Cripps responsible for his death.

♦

The man is Jack Beardsley, one-time British East Africa merchant turned Southern Rhodesian farm manager. Jack came to Africa at the end of 1900 with his fiancée, Charlotte. He was thirty, she was nineteen. Charlotte’s father had forbidden their marriage on the grounds of Jack’s character, so Jack had taken the man’s daughter without his permission. They set up in Mombasa and Jack began his own import and export business. For a while their new life looked promising, although Charlotte missed England terribly and often woke Jack with her early-morning crying. Eventually, one morning three years after they had come to Africa, he woke not because of her crying, but because of her silence. He could not even hear his young wife breathing and when he turned on his side he found a note on the pillow where her head should have been. Her father had sent her money for passage back to England. She had left him.

Charlotte’s departure left Jack bitter with the world, and his bitterness spread through him the way the oil is spreading now around the body of the gazelle, which is still breathing, fast and shallow, blinking the flies from its eyes. Like the spark that starts the fire, the bitterness spread to the rest of his life and especially into his luck. His business began to fail. He married again, the daughter of a colonial office clerk who died giving birth to their first child. The child, a son, was taken away by his parents-in-law, back to England, where Charlotte had gone too. Jack thought it was as if the country was taking back everything he valued, punishing him for taking Charlotte away all those years before. But then, not content with taking his life away, England came to him, bringing with her a war which brought the end of his business, and in 1918, when it was all over, he found himself old, bankrupt and with a set of rotting teeth that seemed the manifestation of the pain festering inside him. But he would not return to England. That, for Jack, would have been to admit his failure. So he moved further south instead, to the Charter District of Mashonaland, where he secured a position managing a large cattle and tobacco farm outside the dead-end town of Enkeldoorn. But the farm was not a good environment for him and he became sullen and even more lonely than he had been in the crowded streets of Mombasa, with too many hours to consider the mistakes and regrets of his life.

♦

Cyprian Tambo came to Enkeldoorn in the same month as Jack Beardsley, but they did not meet for another three years after their arrival and exactly one week before this morning with the vultures waiting in the tree and the flies gathering in a halo about Jack’s bleeding head. Like Jack, Cyprian also came looking for work, walking for three days from his home in Chipinga in the Eastern Highlands, staying with his brothers who worked in towns and villages along the way. He wore just his new khaki shorts and shirt with no shoes or a hat and carried his blanket and belongings in a bundle tied over his shoulder.

Cyprian had first arrived in Umvuma, bearing his ‘book’ before him, a greasy notebook of character references and payment dates from his previous employers written in faint grey pencil over the rough pages. But however much he proffered his book to maids, wives and managers, there had been no work available. Most had simply shaken their heads and waved him away, but some people had taken the time to speak to him. They told him he should go and talk to ‘Baba Cripps’, a white priest who lived on the road over to Enkeldoorn.

When Cyprian arrived in Maronda Mashanu the schoolmaster told him the priest was away, but he should wait for him to return. Cyprian waited for two days and eventually the priest arrived, completing a one-hundred-mile walk from Salisbury. He did not look as Cyprian had expected he would. He was tall and thin, a gaunt look about his face. His pale suit was dirtier than Cyprian’s own shorts and shirt, and his boots so cracked and broken that he may as well have been walking bare-footed as Cyprian had. He asked Cyprian to join him for a cup of tea and listened to his story. When he had finished Baba Cripps spoke to him in Shona, but he did not say the words Cyprian was hoping for. He said instead that he had no money to pay him, and although he could see he wanted to learn, there was no room for him in the mission school. He would have to leave and go back to his home in the Eastern Highlands. Cyprian said he understood and prepared to leave, but then the priest asked him to take a letter into Enkeldoorn for him, which Cyprian did, running as fast as he could. The letter was to a Reverend Liebenberg who wrote a quick reply and asked Cyprian to return with it to Baba Cripps. When he returned to Maronda Mashanu it was nearly dark again and Baba Cripps told him he should stay until the morning, when he could begin his journey home. But in the morning Baba Cripps had another letter for him to take over to Wreningham and a parcel to Altona. Cyprian stayed another night at Maronda Mashanu and in the morning Baba Cripps thanked him, ‘ Ntatenda kwazwo mukuru wangu ’, ‘Many thanks my brother.’ He made no mention of Cyprian starting his journey home.