Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

Trying to keep as calm as I can I ask him if he has read your book An Africa for Africans , which inspired early African leaders like Charles Mzingeli and Chief Mangwende. I know I am opening myself up by asking him this. The conclusion you reach in the book, as a desperate measure, is a plea for segregation, separate areas of the country for black and white. You clearly say this would only work on a basis of absolute racial equality, but Hunzvi could still claim this an early model of apartheid. But he does not. He has not read the book and he even tells me that the book no longer exists, that there are no copies to be found in Zimbabwe. I tell him I read one in his own government’s National Archives.

He stares at me and I am continuing with my argument when I feel a squeeze on my thigh. Stopping mid-sentence, I notice the bar is very quiet. I think it must be Jodi, but turning around I see it is one of the men with Dr Hunzvi, a man who he introduced to me earlier as his ‘driver’. Like Hunzvi he wears a smart suit with a floral tie over a purple shirt. Keeping his hand on my leg he tells me to take it easy, and then, when Hunzvi has turned away to talk to a Zambian businesswoman on his other side, that it is best if I stop talking to Dr Hunzvi now. Looking down at me he makes it clear that if I do not, he may be asked to ‘make you quiet, my friend’.

I go back to my drink with Jodi and we watch Hunzvi flirt with the businesswoman. She is here to sell and buy handbags, she explains to him in a soft, patient voice. She is very beautiful, delicate, her long fingers covered in gold rings and her eyelids heavily painted with bright blue eye-shadow. She responds to Hunzvi’s jokes and touches, but she is obviously uncomfortable. Maybe Hunzvi senses this, or maybe he has somewhere else to go, but after ten minutes or so, he leaves, dropping the businesswoman his card and walking out of the bar followed by his entourage of silent men in suits. The air in the room loosens. The businesswoman turns to us and smiles, then orders another drink from the barman, who also looks more relaxed, leaning against the till as if he is exhausted.

But then, over Jodi’s shoulder I see Hunzvi’s driver re-enter the bar. He strides towards us and I feel the adrenalin run through my veins. Jodi sees him too and we exchange a glance, not sure if we should stay or get up and go. He comes up to me and holds out his hand for mine to shake. I am hesitant, but he is smiling, so I do.

‘I am from Chivhu,’ he says proudly as we shake hands, talking quietly and quickly as if he hasn’t much time, ‘and I know of your uncle. I know Father Cripps and I love what he has done. I am very pleased to meet you.’ Relieved, I say I am pleased to meet him too. Then I thank him for warning me earlier. He just says, still smiling, ‘It was best.’ And then he leaves, jogging back out the door to Hunzvi, who is waiting for him in the passenger seat of his black government car, its engine ticking over among the pick — ups and Mazdas in the back lot of the Cresta Oasis hotel, Harare.

So, I thought you would like to know this. That your name still carries a powerful charge in Zimbabwe, that it still disturbs the power people who want to keep things black and white, rich and poor. But more importantly, that it still resonates in the memory of the people. That farmers still thank you for leaving your land to the Africans, that your Children’s Home is still taking in orphans, that two of its pupils have become airline pilots. That your church is still there. That your daughter married a man who loved her, that he didn’t care about her past, and that together they played the piano you gave Ada. That the people of Maronda Mashanu still remember you as someone who tried to help. As someone who loved their parents and grandparents. As someone who ‘lived as an African’. That history can be closer than you think and that a life can carry on living after the person who lived it does not. I thought you’d like to know.

Dust in the air suspended

Marks the place where a story ended

— T. S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’

Except, of course, stories don’t always end; sometimes they are just brought to one. Behind the dropped curtain Hamlet’s Denmark continues. The bodies are cleared from the stage and Fortinbras takes his place at its centre. The List page of a novel is not where the characters dissolve into the white of the paper, just where the writer and the reader let go of them, where they part company. The storyteller concludes, but the story continues.

The stories of many of the people I have written about didn’t end where I left them: they continued, past the last date, the last page number, moving on under their own momentum, some of them to their own individual ends.

Cullen Gouldsbury did publish a novel in which the protagonist, Father John, was based upon Arthur. He called it God’s Outpost and I read it in the Rare Books reading room of the British Library, recognising Arthur in its pages. In the book Father John is a Catholic not Anglican priest, but Arthur is definitely there in his running and walking, in his physical appearance, in his Franciscan philanthropy. God’s Outpost was published in 1907. Nine years later Cullen was killed in the war and Arthur returned the literary favour, writing an elegy for his friend which he published in his book of war poems, Lake and War .

Cullen Gouldsbury

Poet of The Pace of the Ox,’ and ‘The Shadow-Girl ’

[Late of Lake Staff and 1 stKing’s African Rifles, died, at Tanga on August 27th, 1916]

So as a war’s forc’d loan we’ve lent thee now,

Our land finds few interpreters, and thou

Wast one. Methought not wisely but too well

Thou would’st chameleon parts aforetime play –

Wearing our hues alike of Heaven and Hell.

Yet who, that reads between thy lines, would say

Thy fellow-feeling for our petty views

(More narrow than our dorp’s gum-avenues,)

Was all benevolent complacency,

Ah! For those earthly beasts our land may know –

Our veld, its daylight calm, its twilight glow –

Bests money buys not, bests that priceless be –

How broad they love, how big thy reverence!

Much hast thou given us ere thy going hence,

Now take what we may give, and leave the rest, –

Take earth of ours thy world-wide Church hath blest,

Sleep, body, by our sea, beneath our stars!

Go, soul, to peace in honour from our wars,

Interpret there a land than ours more kind –

A land for all its colours — colour-blind!

Pastor Liebenberg, the Dutch Reformed minister in Enkeldoorn, also died before Arthur, on 6 October 1933. Considering himself unworthy to travel in the carriage behind his friend’s coffin Arthur ran ahead to the cemetery instead, and was waiting at the grave when the funeral cortege arrived. During the funeral he performed the graveside service, just as he had done twice before for two of Lieben-berg’s children.

Noel Brettell survived Arthur and went on to become a respected Rhodesian poet himself. He often wrote about the old man, in his prose memoirs and in his poetry. This is part of a poem he wrote called ‘Maronda Mashanu’, the first poem in his book Bronze Frieze: Poems mostly Rhodesian :

Maronda Mashanu

To Arthur Shearly Cripps, in hisblindness

It stood alone, that grim euphorbia:

Goat boy in dangling monkey skins,

Whistling his surly beasts after sparse nibbling,

Could scramble up through clefts where no path was,

And yodel a summer’s day under its shade –

But I could not.

…Alone, asleep, that strange sequestered church;