Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

A grave had beer, prepared in the chancel of the church of Maronda Mashanu — the church which had been largely built by Father Cripps himself after the style of Zimbabwe. It is now almost a ruin, but tlie people propose to build a new church round the grave. The service around the grave was conducted in Shona by the Rev. I angton Machiha, of Daramombe; the Lesson was read by the Rev. Edward Chipunza, who represented the Bishop, and Father Clark read the committal.

One other priest was present — the Rev. Cyprian Tambo, who as a young man worked for Father Cripps and was instructed and baptised by him.

All who loved Father Cripps will feel a deep gratitude to the Doctor and Staff of Enkeldoorn Hospital for their sympathy and care, and for their consideration for the many Africans who came to minister to him and to pay their respects. Foremost among these was Leonard Mamvura, Headmaster of Maronda Mashanu School and Secretary for Father Cripps, who cycled backwards and forwards each day after his work to spend as much time as possible with him, and Cecilia and Thomas, who attended him so faithfully.

Last night I danced on your grave. There must have been more than two hundred of us crammed into the ruins of your church: old men and women, children, mothers with babies swaddled on their backs, young men in Nike and Puma tracksuits, young women wearing coloured headscarves. And all of us dancing, our bodies made large with layers of jumpers, coats, scarves and hats worn against the freezing edge of the night. Our breath steamed like incense in the beams of a powerful halogen lamp mounted on a truck outside the walls, a generator shaking and chuntering on its open back. Everyone was singing. One man at the head of your grave blew long, low notes through an impala horn, another beat a tall mutandarikwa drum, his hands a blur above its tight skin. Above us the clear southern sky was full of stars, the Milky Way dusting a swathe across the blackness and the familiar constellations swung on their sides: Leo tipped, the Southern Cross between the legs of a rearing Centaur. And beyond the broken walls of the church the fires on the kopje were still burning in the deep black of the night, picking out the shape of the little hill in their pulsing spots of orange and yellow.

♦

It is seven months since I was last here looking for you. Seven months since I camped in the Eastern Highlands, thinking over the story about you and Ada and Theresa. I have come back to Maronda Mashanu to attend the annual festival held in your honour. Leonard has been writing excited letters to me in London, telling me about the preparations and what to expect. Three days of services, singing, plays, dancing and feasting. ‘Dear Owen,’ he tells me, ‘Our country is now very cold and please as you are coming for the Memorial Festival of Father Cripps, please try to wear some warm clothing. This is just to remind you.’

Although it has only been seven months, there are many changes since I was last in the country. There has been an election, marred by rigging, intimidation and ballot boxes found dumped in rivers as far away as Mozambique. The offices of the Daily News , the only voice of opposition in the press, were attacked with grenades. Journalists have been taken to detention centres and opposition leaders threatened. The land question that everyone was talking about when I was last here has become physical (‘I do hope,’ Leonard writes in one letter, ‘that the dust of the land situation in this country will settle down on land invasion soon after the election’). But the farm invasions have continued, some of them turning violent. As you suspected, land has once again been the touch paper for unrest, but this time it is a black government, not a white, that is doing the taking and the giving, despite the economic disaster it will bring. Already there is almost no foreign currency in the country and there are often severe petrol shortages. Driving out of Harare to Chivhu I pass a large group of War Veterans protesting outside the Zanu PF building. There are much fewer white faces on the streets and the air is somehow tauter than it was when I was last here. On the edge of the town a packed commuter minibus slows in front of me, stutters forward, then stops. It rolls to the side of the road and joins the other vehicles abandoned there which have also run out of fuel.

Seven months, and there are changes with me too. I am no longer getting on the Blue Arrow bus, and I am no longer alone. I am driving a bright green hire car, its metallic shine incongruous against the dusty colours of the veld, and Jodi Bieber, a South African photographer who has come to photograph the festival for the Saturday Times is sitting beside me. As we drive south we pass through a temporary camp of War Veterans, a tattered Zimbabwe flag flying from a crooked wooden pole, then past a deserted petrol station with one lonely pump and a stack of empty blue Pepsi crates stranded on the forecourt. Every now and then a scattering of rondavels appear at the side of the road, bright washing hung on a line, but mostly it is the veld, all around us. Flat, rashed with green over its brown-red dust and dotted with granite.

Chivhu arrives suddenly out of this landscape. Just a brief warning of some breeze-block’high density’ housing, much of it half-built, and then the town itself is there. We approach the central square, with the cream and green of Vic’s Tavern on one side, then turn left, past the post office, and up the main street of shops, before turning left again, past the old Dutch Reformed church, the hospital, then left again onto Cripps Road. Your road, long and yellow in the late afternoon sun.

I park the car outside the gate to Leonard’s farm. Somehow it would seem wrong to drive it up to his house; even coated in a film of dust from the journey, it still feels out of place here. So I walk, as I did seven months earlier, up the track to his homestead, where not much has changed. The rondavels are still there, arranged around the patch of beaten earth, the chickens are still pecking in the grass and the dogs are still slouching around, some with puppies in tow. I do notice one change though — the wooden cattle kraal has been moved closer to the house, leaving just a square of churned earth where it once stood. I also notice that the new kraal is empty, its irregular fencing holding nothing but air and another patch of ground, less churned than the old one.

And then there is Leonard, who has not changed, beaming a smile, walking towards me with the awkward gait of his one stiff hip, his arms outstretched, and saying my name over and over. His wife, Actor, walks behind him, wearing a bright red woollen hat and a blue-and-white spotted dress. She is smiling too, laughing and wringing her hands, and shaking her head at her husbands extravagant welcome. Leonard embraces me, squeezing out our seven months apart with the pressure of his strong arms. Then, taking me by the hand, he leads me into his house for tea. Jodi follows us, the shut ter of her camera clicking. As we enter the bungalow we pass a white goat tethered to a pole outside, bleating thinly, its narrow pink tongue vibrating in its mouth, shuffling its feet in the dust. Inside, its bleats are deadened by the walls, but the goat never stops calling, as if it knows something we don’t, as if it is trying to warn us.

Actor busies herself over the sideboard in the dark little room of Leonard’s bungalow, preparing some tea, then leaves to go and cook in the kitchen rondavel across the yard. Leonard and I sit at the shaky table in the middle of the room, just as we had done seven months before, and he brings me up to date as he pours out the tea and offers me sugar. He speaks about the election, the intimidation of the voters, the fuel shortages, the high price of Actor’s medical treatment and of the land invasions. I think of your book, An Africa for Africans and of how you saw this coming, this problem of land, the sowing of the dragon’s teeth: ‘This unawakened race does not perceive yet the injury that has been done it. But one day it will arouse itself, become articulate…and then…?’