Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

As Leonard talks, he shakes his head slowly, like a father disappointed with a promisi ng child. I ask him why he has moved the cattle kraal nearer the house and he tells me. He had just two cattle left when one morning three months ago he found their heads and their skins lying in the mud of the kraal. They had been slaughtered and butchered while Leonard and his wife slept. ‘We are suspecting they came from Chivhu town with cars to carry the meat,’ he explains of the thieves. ‘There is no law here anymore.’ He shakes his head again, his eyes down, and he seems older than when I met him outside. Older and tired. For a moment he is quiet, and just the bleating of the goat fills the silence, but as I watch him I see a smile grow on his face, rising through his features to his bald forehead. Looking up, he begins to tell me about the preparations for your festival, and suddenly, he is no longer eighty years old but eighty years young, excited and energetic, his hands making the shapes of his words in the air.

♦

When I walk out of Leonard’s house onto the small porch the sun is already low in the sky and an African evening light has taken hold of the world, casting long shadows from everything it touches. A chicken struts past, pulling a grotesque jabberwocky shadow behind it. Patches of midges vibrate in the air and the cicadas and crickets trill and tune themselves in from the long grass around the homestead. Leonard is still inside the house, packing vestments and pewter candlesticks into a big canvas bag and preparing to leave for the festival site. I notice that the goat tethered outside which has been bleating has stopped. I turn around and it is no longer there. Then I hear its cracked, pathetic call again, further away, behind the house. I walk to the corner of the bungalow and see Sabethiel, who helps Leonard on the farm, and a couple of bare-footed young boys in torn shorts and T — shirts leading the goat away. The rope around its neck is taut as they pull it behind them up towards a large flat stone surrounded by thorn trees and one leaning jacaranda. Sabethiel sees me watching and waves, then beckons, so I follow them up towards the stone.

When I get there I find the seclusion of the place emphasises the peacefulness of the evening. The sun is now a bloated orange disc, setting the branches of the trees into razor sharp silhouettes. A swallow dips in the air above us and, higher, an eagle circles in the sky. I watch as Sabethiel leads the goat up onto the stone and the other boys follow. It is only then I see Sabethiel is holding a long-bladed knife, and I know what is about to happen.

With a practised movement he catches the goat by its legs, one hand around the hindquarters, the other around the forelegs, and swings it onto its back. The animal lets out a short, shocked bleat, more of a sudden groan. One of the other boys crouches and quickly ties the animal’s legs with string while Sabethiel holds it still. The goat carries on bleating, faster, more urgent than before, its broken voice the only sound in the still evening above the constant static of the cicadas. Sabethiel puts his hand under its chin and presses, forcing its head back and exposing the taut white throat where its windpipe thrums beneath the skin. He shifts his hand up from its chin to around its mouth, trapping the tip of its tongue between its teeth, and its bleats become muffled, strangled, its nostrils flaring with the effort of its breathing. Then, with his other hand, Sabethiel brings the blade of the knife to its throat, and starts sawing with a rapid motion.

For a second nothing happens and for some reason I think nothing will. It seems impossible that this animal, so vibrantly alive, will ever stop being so. But then its muffled bleats fill with liquid, turn to a gurgle, and the blood rises, shockingly red against its white hair, spilling onto the stone beneath. Goats, however, are stubborn and this one does not die easily, its tied legs jerking against the flow of blood from the vivid wound in its neck, and Sabethiel has to use the point of his knife, twisting it through the throat to find the spinal cord. Leaning on the handle with all his weight, he tries to snap the vertebrae, which eventually give, cracking with the sound of a branch breaking. And it is only then that the goat empties of life, the splash of its blood spreading from its neck like an extravagant bright red ruff.

Leonard comes out of the house as the boys hoist the animal from the jacaranda tree by its tied hind legs. Some of the tree’s seed pods are shaken loose as it is jerked higher, falling around it like confetti. A few land on its rump, catch in its fine white hair. A dog slouches up behind me and nervously licks at the pool of blood on the stone, already congealing in the last light of the evening. I hear Leonard call out for me, ‘Owen, where are you?’ I walk down towards him; he is smiling one of his big smiles again.

‘Ah yes, the goat, you have seen the goat? Now we will have meat with the sadza for the festival, yes, yes.’ He puts an arm around me, pulling me close and I feel his strength again. He tells me to get my bags—‘Otherwise we will be late, Owen, yes, yes, and we mustn’t be late.’ Maybe it is the white of the goat still playing in my mind, but for a second, Leonard’s haste and concern makes me think of the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland , hurrying, hurrying.

We walk down towards the car, where Jodi is waiting, her cameras slung around her neck and her khaki photographer’s gilet bulging with film. I take a look back at the flat stone and see Sabethial cutting into the goat’s groin, sliding his knife down its belly and chest. The skin folds away, as if undone by a zip, opening to the red of the flesh beneath.

♦

When I was last in Zimbabwe I noticed how the dark does not fall in Africa but grows, thick and black and quick, and this night seven months later is no exception. Within two hours of Leonard and me walking away from the goat strung up in the jacaranda tree, night has claimed the ground again and I cannot see my hand in front of my face without the aid of a match or a torch. In those two hours we have driven down to your church, unloaded our bags into your rondavel and walked throughout the site of the festival. On the way down we pass a boy by the side of the road, hammering a sign into the ground with a red arrow on it pointing down the track through the bush to your church. ‘Shearly Oripps Festival’ is written above the arrow, also in bright red paint. At the clearing the silence of your ruins has been overtaken by the activity and noise of preparation. A group of men are erecting a tall circular thatch wall on which another sign is nailed, ‘VIP Toilet’, and another group are building a temporary kitchen while women file up from the pump by the river, plastic containers filled with water on their heads. Leonard introduces me to old men who knew you, most of whom are wearing dark suits and old trilbies, the ribbon loose above the brim, and blue deacons’ sashes across their chests. I also meet Horatio again, wearing a thick woolly hat against the cold evening. He tells me he is the Festival Vice Chairman, and as we shake hands there is a friendly conspiratorial air about him, as if he, too, is remembering our walk to Wreningham and the stop at the beer hall. Moses Maranyika is also there, scanning the preparations with the eyes of a man who is in charge. I notice a pair of handcuffs glinting at his belt and he tells me that he is the Special Officer for the area, as well as being the headmaster and the Festival Secretary. ‘In case of trouble,’ he says, indicating the handcuffs and giving them a little rattle at his hip. I think of a Rixi taxi driver in Harare who warned me that the festival could become the target of Zanu PF intimidation. He said the Anglican Church was not popular with the government right now, and that one priest had even urged his congregation to pray for Mugabe’s death.