Owen Sheers: The Dust Diaries

Owen Sheers

United Kingdom

The Dust Diaries

Seeking the African Legacy of Arthur Cripps

2004, EN, Zimbabwe

At a family reunion in Wales several years ago, the prize-winning poet Owen Sheers stumbled across the mesmerizing story of his great-great-uncle Arthur Cripps, a mysterious figure who turned from poetry to missionary work in Africa and ultimately became a shamanlike figure, ministering to the locals.

Arthur Cripps left his native England in a ship set for southern Rhodesia in 1900. During his time as a missionary in the British colony, Cripps became passionate about indigenous ways, leaving him ostracized from the largely racist, conservative European minority. Railing against colonial injustice, Cripps became a hero to the native population. He chose to exile himself from the Anglican church, factions of which branded him a heretic and burned down his churches. All the while he hid the soul-racking secret of what had driven him from England into the heart of Africa.

The Dust Diaries is the haunting record of Sheers’s all-consuming attempt to piece together the luminous fragments of Arthur Cripps’s remarkable life, and to understand the mystery of why he abandoned England for life in the African veldt — a journey that takes Sheers from the genteel reading rooms of Oxford University’s libraries to the parched landscape of contemporary Zimbabwe. Refracting Cripps’s life through the prism of his own vivid imagination, Sheers illuminates the devastating effects of power, the potent effects of grace, and the legacy of an extraordinary life.

Dust

a dead person’s remains ( honoureddust ).

confusion or turmoil ( raisedquite a dust ).

archaic or poet . The mortal human body ( we are all dust ).

the ground; the earth ( kissed the dust ).

— The Oxford English Dictionary

History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.

— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

This decaying sense , when wee would express the thing itself, (I mean fancy it selfe,) wee call Imagination , as I said before: But when we would express the decay , and signifie that Sense is fading, old, and past, it is called Memory. So that Imagination and Memory are but one thing…

— Hobbes, Leviathan

Mpandi was one of the Shona names given to my great, great uncle, Arthur Shearly Cripps, Independent Missionary to Southern Rhodesia. The name was translated for me in Mashonaland, where he lived, as ‘the man who walks like thunder’ or ‘the man who shakes the earth with his walking’. He was given many names during his life, but this is the one I have thought of most often as I followed in his footsteps, literal and metaphorical, over the past three years. Because for me he has always been walking, always on the move. Always a few steps ahead of me as I tried to track him down, as I tried to understand him. What follows is an account of this search: the story of my contact with him and of how the unfolding of one man’s life can resonate down the years in the lives of others. This account of my search is true. It happened, just as Arthur’s life happened, but the story of his life that I have written is not true in the same way. This story is written as a fiction, the fiction I formed in my mind so as to better understand Arthur’s life. It is, however, a fiction based on the facts, stories, myths and tales I gathered while looking for Arthur Cripps. Some of the people who feature in this story are imaginary, but most are not. Of those who really existed, some of their actions I have invented, many, again, I have not. It is the story of Arthur Cripps’ life reflected through my imagination. It may not always be true to historical fact, but I hope it is true to the essence of Arthur’s story and to the essence of the man I discovered buried in the nave of a ruined church far out in the Zimbabwean veld.

It is dawn in the African bush. Light is expanding from the horizon, growing over the veld of rock, grass and dust. The first birds are calling in the winter trees. Arthur Cripps, Independent Missionary to Mashonaland is lying awake in the rondavel he built next to the church he named Maronda Mashanu, the Saint of the Five Wounds. He is lying awake and he is dying. It is his last day on earth. He is eighty-three years old.

He listens to his breath and counts backwards.

Ten years since he lost his sight.

Thirty-seven years since he went to war.

Thirty-eight years since he built the church.

Fifty-one years since he came to Africa.

Fifty-five years since he fell in love.

The irregular coughs of the man sleeping in the bunk beneath him had been chiselling into his sleep all night, but it was the slap of the sea against the ship’s hull that finally woke Arthur. There was something different about it, a change in its register and rhythm. Keeping his eyes shut, he tried to work out what it was. And then he realised: they were still, the ship was no longer moving. They must have finally been allowed into harbour. They had arrived.

He felt a dip of excitement in his stomach at the thought of being on land again. The journey from England had been more laborious than he’d thought it would be; at least, the sea voyage had. He had enjoyed the earlier train trip through Europe. In Rome he’d even got a chance to visit the room where Keats died and the Protestant cemetery, where he’d seen the poet’s grave. Standing above the simple headstone near the grand Pyramid of Cestius he’d looked down at the engraving of a broken lyre and the strangely ambiguous epitaph: Here lies one whose name was writ in water . The poet’s friend Charles Brown had interpreted this as Keats’ abandonment of any hope of posthumous fame, but standing there looking at it with the perspective of eighty years’ hindsight Arthur liked to think it was not this simple. His name is writ in not on water. Part of nature, not fleeting but eternal, twisted into the currents of history. He had often talked about visiting the grave, but once there it had felt strangely unreal. But then maybe that was because he had never expected to be visiting it alone.

From Rome he had travelled to Naples, where he boarded the Hertzog , and that is when the harder part of the journey began: the unforgiving hours of boredom looking out at an indifferent sea, the forced formalities of the captain’s table and the joking sarcasm of some of the pioneer crowd. Most of his fellow travellers were tolerable, and there was a particular group with whom he had become good friends. He had a postcard in the pocket of his jacket hung at the end of his bed with these people’s signatures on it, a memento of their shared trip. But there was another group of men, ‘entrepreneurs’ they called themselves, who thought it fun to gently mock him and his vocation, often late at night, out on the deck when everyone was enjoying the cooler air. Their breaths heavy with port and cigar smoke, they would interrogate him about his work in Africa — was he ready to battle with witchcraft? Did he know they still ate missionaries in the Belgian Congo? How would he resist the charms of the native girls, out there alone in the bush? Inevitably the jokes would wane and they would soon be talking among themselves about their own schemes for fortune on the dark continent, but they had often irritated Arthur to such an extent that he longed to take one of them on in a boxing ring.