Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

♦

The singing and witnessing does not stop all night, drawing me up through layers of sleep again and again in time with the rising and falling of its cadences. Leonard is sleeping beside me, and when I wake I listen to his heavy breathing and to the lighter breaths of Jodi who sleeps beyond Leonard, her head on her camera bag. The music becomes part of my dreams, and I find it hard to tell when I am awake or asleep. For most of the night I think I am neither, but somewhere in between.

It is the singing that finally draws me to full wakefulness in the morning, a small group of men around a fire near the rondavel, passing a song between the in like a round. I get out of my sleeping bag, step over Leonard and walk through the open doorway to go and wash in the river. Outside, the sun has not yet taken the edge off the night and the air is still cold. Those sleeping in the open are stirring from where they lay under blankets beside the embers, children stumbling around, sleep still heavy in their eyes and their breath steaming in the cold as if they are exhaling the smoke of last night’s fires. There are now around 700 people here, all going about the morning chores of washing and eating and passing on the singing from group to group.

After a breakfast of boiled eggs and toast the festival proper begins. The festival committee all carry schedules that Leonard has typed out on his old typewriter and the day proceeds with a strange mix of strict efficiency on the part of the committee and casual nonchalance on the part of the crowds. By mid-morning the Bishop of Harare has arrived in his wine-red cassock and an altar is prepared outside the walls of the church. The priests and the deacons gather for the memorial service, all wearing their white vestments as they proceed towards the altar, the choirs accompanying them, and a tall wooden cross held before them. I can’t help thinking of the photo of you I found in Rhodes House Library, that odd juxtaposition of the veld and your ecclesiastical dress. The scent of incense mixes with the smell of fires.

The congregation sit on the ground around the altar, the women of the Mothers’ Union in their bright blue headscarves and shawls and the choirs from other churches each in their own bright uniforms of yellows, reds and purples. I join a group of boys from the Children’s Home, crouching at the back. The service is long and the sun is hot and after a while they start to yawn and play, shooting pieces of straw from the clam-like dried seed pods of the jacai anda tree and drawing biro tattoos on each other’s arms: a Nike swoosh, an Adidas logo, ‘Power Rangers’ written below.

After the service I chat with Sister Dorothy about your Children’s Home. She tells me the children help in all areas of the home, in the garden, the kitchen and even with teaching the younger children. She asks me if I can send the boys football magazines and then tells me very proudly that many of their pupils go on 1o university. Two boys have even become airline pilots with Air Zimbabwe.

Over a lunch of sadza and beef after the memorial service the talk turns to politics. Some of the men admit that Zanu PF only won this area in the recent election because of their intimidation tactics. Chivhu is a long way from Harare, and it is easier for things to go unseen here. All the men I speak to are worried about the situation, and more than once I am told by someone shaking his head that Zimbabwe is at the lowest point of its twenty-year life. They know the land situation must be reformed, that some of the land should be redistributed, but none of them support the violent farm invasions. They are also all too aware of Mugabe’s political shorthand of black and white, and they know it isn’t as simple as that. That the ‘race card’ is a smoke screen for inter-African political struggles, between Zanu PF and the MDC. As one man says, for himself, he is more concerned about their boys coming back in body bags from the war in the Congo than the land problem. You are mentioned again by a local farmer, who gives thanks that you left your land to the Africans. ‘Otherwise,’ he says, a serious frown on his face, ‘I would not have my farm now, and my children would not be in school. That is why I am here.’

♦

That evening I help Leonard up to the evensong which is being held on the summit of the kopje and the irony does not escape him. As he leans on my arm he tells me how you used to lean on him on the road into Chivhu, your fingers digging into his shoulder when you were in pain. He says he hopes his grandchildren are there to help me walk when I am old.

On the kopje I meet more people who knew you including an old woman with pencilled eyebrows like sweeps of italic ink. As we sit on a flat stone, still warm from the touch of the sun, she tells me she always called you her father. The congregation gather around us, the choirs fanning out in their bright vestments like the wings of different species of butterfly. The old woman tells me her christened name is Cecilia, but that everyone calls her Fortune.

A younger woman approaches with a tiny old man on her arm. She says she wants to introduce me to her grandfather, Thomas, who was with you when you died. I shake hands with the old man, who is wearing a brown suit and a shirt and a tie. His lower lip hangs loose from his mouth and he has soulful, sad eyes. His voice is very weak as he asks for my address so he can write to me. All he says about your death is that you died quietly.

♦

I watch the evensong from a rock behind the priest’s head. The congregation fans out beneath, a mix of the choirs, Mothers’ Union, suited older men and children in shorts and T — shirts. Once again I listen to the singing, rich, full and flowing, Christian hymns tinged with veld life, the sound of a single impala horn running beneath. Throughout the service Tendai, a ten-year-old boy from the Children’s Home, translates for me, solemnly whispering into my ear, his soft, serious voice a second delayed after the preacher’s. The evensong ends with two women and one of the priests dancing in the dust, kicking up the dry earth with their bare feet.

A few hours later and everyone is kicking up the dust with their feet, dancing in the clearing around your church. Night has taken hold again, with its deep, absolute blackness and its shocking stars that send a plumb line to the centre of the soul. The clearing is packed with people and the drummers have whipped the crowd into a frenzy, women, men and children dancing in the African way: leant over at the waist, elbows out, knees bent, shaking their pushed-out bottoms in time to the drums, like bees performing a directional dance. The smaller kids are on older children’s shoulders, one woman yells out a line of song, and everyone answers: a lowing, liturgical swell of voices. The drums get faster, and the dancing more frantic. The lightning flash of Jodi’s camera illuminates everything for a second, then passes, plunging us back into night and torches and sound and feet, shuffling and kicking up dust.

I think of the goat, its slaughter like a sacrifice, then the High Church vestments, candlesticks and incense, the services, the heavy black Bibles, then this singing and this dancing, the canopy over your grave, an appeasement to you as a rain spirit, the Christian memorial service and what the porter at the archives told me about Shona ancestor worship. And I realise I was wrong. Lying in your hut, listening to the sounds of the people arriving was not the closest I would get to you. Nor was it reading your letters, or tracing the work of age on your face in the photographs I found. Nor was it even in the memories of the people who knew you, who told me your stories. It is here, now, as I am carried along by the push and tide: of the crowd, as we move as one towards your grave, as the singing swells and falls like waves, like a voltage passed through the hundreds of bodies. This is when I am closest to you.