Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

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The darkness is complete by the time I unpak my bag in your ron-davel and roll out my sleeping bag next to Leonard’s. For two years now I have been trying to inhabit your life, trying to get under your skin, and as I make a rough pillow out of m) rucksack, I wonder if this is as close as I will get: sleeping the night in your hut, listening to the song of the veld that you listened to outside its round stone walls. As I have moved through your life, from your letters, to Zimbabwe, to here, I have always encountered the problem of imagination, a struggle between what happened and what may have happened, a colonisation of fact by fiction. But this, the hard polished dung of your rondavel’s floor, the single slit window where you kept the portrait of your mother, the rustle of mice moving in the thatch, this, I feel, must be real. I lie down and I know I am lying in the shadow of you. I can sense the penumbra of your body on this floor, the touch of your skin on these walls. I think I understand, but I cannot be sure.

Leonard has taken the torch to go to the toilet and I can’t find my matches, so, deprived of my sight, I strain my ears to try and get a picture of what is happening outside. I can hear people, but it is hard to say how many. There is excited chatter, the rustle and thump of bags and packages being let to the ground, greetings and shouts. A drum has been beating a rhythm for the last ten minutes, and every now and then a man’s voice joins in, singing. The metal racket of one engine sputters into the clearing then stops with a sudden clank, leaving just voices in its wake, men and women’s, speaking quick Shona.

I have no idea how many people are coming to your festival. Leonard was hoping for around three hundred, but it has been a hard seven months — the petrol shortages, inflation, farm workers losing their homes in the land invasions — and I can’t help thinking that Leonard is being optimistic in his expectations. But then, through the open doorway of your rondavel I see the fires. Where the night air above the clearing had been filled with pitch black there are now constellations of pulsing orange spots. I watch as more come out over the kopje like stars emerging in the night, each one s little higher than the next. After half an hour there are so many that the shape of the hill is clearly marked out by the rough triangle of orange and yellow flickering lights.

I get up from the floor of the rondavel and walk out of the doorway towards the fires, and it is by their light that I that see the clearing and the trees at the base ol the kopje are teeming with people. Many are still arriving, baskets and bags carried on women’s heads, toddlers dozing in the arms of the men and babies tied to backs, their sleeping faces squashed against their mother’s spines. I walk on into the trees and into an ethereal atmosphere of firelight through wood smoke, the smell of roasting peanuts sweet and rich in the air. I see Jodi in there, darting between the fires, a big grin on her face, the small black camera always either at her eye or poised just below her chin. She sees me and shouts across, ‘ I’m trying to find the light. It’s tough, hey?’ Her South African English sounds surprising on my ear after the sea of Shona I have been walking through.

I walk on, and I am stared at. I am the only white man here, but I don’t want to miss a th ing. I am stunned by the volume of people, out here, in the veld, at night, all here for your festival. Most of them are surprised to see me, but after the surprise there is interest. The older people are interested in me because of you, the younger because of my watch, my shoes or for whether I know David Beckham. Everyone wants an address, a point of contact. Letters are still alive here, as a way of hope, just as they were for you. One boy in an Adidas tracksuit and a bobble hat pulled low over his eyes asks me quite simply why he can’t come back to Britain with me, ‘to help with your work, I can work with you’.

A woman surrounded by children asks me to sit by her fire. She introduces herself as Happiness and offers me some of the peanuts twitching on a flat pan above the flames. The children crowd at her shoulder, then, as she tries to teach me to count in Shona, at mine. Poshi , pin’, tatu, ina, shanu, tanhatu , the children chant along with me, screaming with laughter when I make a mistake. Happiness introduces me to her daughter Sandra, who is doing her O-levels this year and who wants to be a teacher. Her younger brother wants to be an airline pilot. In fact, all the boys want to be airline pilots. And then we talk about you. Because everyone knows your story here, which is told to me again and again, the same phrases reoccurring in different mouths, your life as a fable: ‘he loved the Africans’, ‘Arthur Shearly Cripp, he lived just as an African’, ‘Baba Cripps, he would walk one hundred miles into Salisbury.’

Two powerful beams of light sweep through the trees from behind me, passing across the dark tree trunks and the groups huddled around the fires like two searchlights. Walking out into the clearing with Happiness and Sandra I find that the lights belong to an open-backed truck which is pulling up beside your church carrying what looks like a load of blankets. The driver cuts the engine and it rattles out, sending a shiver down the truck’s chassis. Almost immediately the blankets begin to move, and as the driver gets out of his cabin to flip down the tail, children emerge from under them. They drop to the floor, young boys and girls rubbing sleep from their eyes, some of them carrying even younger children. They wear strange combinations of ill-fitting clothes and many are bare-footed. They stand around the back of the truck, disorientated by sleep, shivering and their teeth chattering audibly as a woman in a nun’s habit and large glasses ushers them into some kind of order. Watching them, I realise how cold it has become. There is no wind but the air now has a frozen edge to it, and the heat of the recent afternoon feels like a distant memory. I remember Leonard’s letter: ‘Our cou ntry is now very cold.’ Then, as if I had thought him there, Leonard’s hand is on my shoulder. He gestures towards the nun and the children, who are still slipping off the tail of the truck onto the ground. This is Sister Dorothy from the Shearly Cripps Children’s Home. They have come from Juru, that is five hours away,’ he adds, his voice rising to his now familiar pitch of astonishment. ‘I will go and help them, but you must talk to this man,’ he says, indicating a huge man at ids side. ‘His name is Patrick and he also knew Baba Cripps.’

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‘My name is Patrick Bwanya who comes from All Saints Wreningham in Manyeni Reserve, near Chivhu town where (‘ripps came in 1901 to work among the Vaheri people. He was welcomed by my three grandfathers, these being Wade sango (the one who losses the bush), Gava jena (white fox) and Mu pem hi (Beggar).’

Patrick and I are sitting inside the walls of your church, a few feet from your grave. We have come in here becauso Patrick wants to tell me all he knows about you, and the singing in the clearing has got so loud that it is hard to hear each other talk. I have brought a mini-disc with me this time and Patrick talks slowly in his deep growl of a voice in deference to the clumsy microphone I am holding out to him. As he tells me the story of your life again, I glance up at the sky above us. Your church is roofed with stars now, not grass, the constellations of Virgo and Hercules looking over you. Beyond the walls the singing lifts and falls above a steady rhythm of maracas and drums, the women’s voices flowing on like an endless stream, answered every now and then by the deeper voices of the men. Patrick tells me how he moved to Maronda Mashanu with his father, and a story about seeing bees stop a car. Then he describes your funeral, how the congregation of whites, blacks and coloureds was so big it did not fit inside the church, and how the people of Maronda Mashanu sang as they are singing now, songs only ever sung for the burial of a Mashona chief. He finishes with a big laugh and a nod towards you in your grave as he says what I have heard so many people say today, ‘Yes, because Baba Cripps, he was like an African.’