Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

by Alexandra Fuller

  So Muzorewa, who is (after all) a Christian man and a Methodist, does a most un-African thing. He gives up power after only six months. He hands Zimbabwe-Rhodesia and the whole damned mess back to the British. In London, December 1979, it is decided that once again we are a British colony except this time, the British mean to give us independence under majority rule. None of this mix-and-match, pick-your-own-muntu style of Rhodesian government.

  There is a cease-fire and we have to take Dad’s FN rifle and Mum’s Uzi and all Dad’s army-issue camouflage to the police station. We keep the rat packs and eat the last of the pink-coated peanuts and stale Cowboy bubble gum and we dissolve and drink the last of the gluey coffee paste. The policeman who collects the guns writes our name in a book and apologizes, “I’m sorry, hey.” He doesn’t say what he is sorry for.

  There are freeanfair elections in February 1980, just before my eleventh birthday, and we lose the elections. By which I mean our muntu, Bishop Muzorewa, is soundly defeated. He wins three paltry seats. One man, one vote. We’re out.

  On April 18, 1980, Robert Gabriel Mugabe takes power as Zimbabwe’s first prime minister. I have never even heard of him. The name “Rhodesia” is dropped from “Zimbabwe-Rhodesia.” Now our country is simply “Zimbabwe.”

  Zimba dza mabwe. Houses of stone.

  Those who live in stone houses shouldn’t throw stones for fear of ricochet.

  The first to go are the Afrikaans children.

  The day Robert Gabriel Mugabe wins the elections the Afrikaans parents drive up to the school, making a long snake of cars like a funeral procession, to collect their kids. The kids, fists held tightly by stern-bosomed mothers, are taken to their dormitories, where we are not ordinarily allowed until five o’clock bath time. The matrons have to get the maids to bring stacks of trunks down from the trunk room. The Afrikaans mothers pack. The Afrikaans fathers stay in the car park, leaning against their cars, smoking and talking quietly to each other in Afrikaans. There is a sense of history in their carriage; we’ve done this before and we’ll do it again.

  We have learned about the Great Trek in school.

  The “Groot Trek” of 1835, when more than ten thousand Boers, the Voortrekkers, left the Cape Colony and came north. They left the paradise of the Cape because they were fighting with their Xhosa neighbors and because they were dissatisfied with the English colonial authorities, who had forbidden the slave trade and who believed in equality between whites and nonwhites. So many men, women, and children died during the Great Trek, their bodies draped gorily over wagon wheels and under wagon wheels and next to horses in the illustrations in our history books. They died because they believed that the British policy of Emancipation destroyed their social order, which was based on separation of the races. They saw white predominance as God’s own will.

  So, now the Little Trek.

  But the next day some of the English Rhodesians are driven away too. There is only a handful of us left at supper that night; no more than twenty children in a dining room designed to hold ten times as many. My sister has already moved from Chancellor Junior School to the Umtali Girls’ High School. So she is not around for me to ask, “Where are Mum and Dad?”

  Tomorrow, the children who have gone to “B” schools, for coloureds and Indians, will be here. The children from “C” schools, for blacks, will be here too. Tomorrow, children who have never been to school, never used a flush toilet, never eaten with a knife and fork, will arrive. They will be smelling of wood smoke from their hut fires.

  Tomorrow child soldiers will arrive. They can track their way through the night-African bush by the light of the stars, these mujiba and chimwido. They are worldly and old and have fixed, long-distance stares.

  Eating with your mouth closed and using a knife and fork properly can’t save your life.

  It only takes a minute to learn how to flush a toilet.

  But still Mum and Dad don’t come and fetch me away.

  Instead, the first black child is brought to the school. We watch in amazement as he is helped out of a car—a proper car like Europeans drive—by his mother, who is more beautifully dressed than my mother ever is. She smiles as she leads her son, confidently, head held high, one high-heeled foot clacking smartly past the next high-heeled foot, through the tunnel that leads around the sandbags and into the boys’ dormitory.

  We won’t be needing those sandbags anymore.

  This woman is not a muntu nanny. This child is not a picanin. He is beautifully dressed in a brand-new uniform. The uniform is not a worn and stained hand-me-down like the one I wear.

  We wait until the mother and father of this little black child drive away, spinning up gravel from the back wheels of their white-people’s car as they leave. And then we make a circle around the little black boy. The boy tells us he is called Oliver Chiweshe.

  I have not known the full name of a single African until now. Oliver Chiweshe. Until now I only knew Africans by their Christian names: Cephas, Douglas, Loveness, Violet, Cloud, July, Flywell. I am learning that Africans, too, have full names. And not only do Africans have full names, but their names can be fuller than ours. I try and get my tongue around Joshua Mqabuko Nyongolo Nkomo; Robert Gabriel Mugabe; the Reverend Canaan Sodindo Banana; Bishop Abel Tendekayi Muzorewa: these are the names of our new leaders.

  I say, “That’s a nice name.”

  “Actually, my full name is Oliver Tendai Chiweshe,” says Oliver, emphasizing his middle name. He speaks beautifully accented, perfect English.

  We say, “Was that your father who dropped you off?”

  Oliver looks at us with pity. “That was my driver,” he tells us, “and my maid.” He pauses and says, “Daddy is in South Africa this week.”

  We are stunned by this news. “Why?”

  “Business,” says Oliver complacently.

  “And then he’ll come back?”

  “Ja,” says Oliver.

  That night at supper, Oliver sits alone. None of us will sit next to him. We wait to see if he eats like a muntu. We wait to see if he cement-mixes. But he has perfect European manners, which are quite different from perfect Mashona manners. He takes small, polite bites. He puts his knife and fork down on the edge of his plate between mouthfuls. He sips his water modestly. At the end of his meal, he pats the top of his lip with his napkin and puts his knife and fork together.

  I turn to my neighbor and hiss, “I hope I don’t get that napkin when it comes back from laundry.”

  “Ja, me too, hey.”

  Within one term, there are three white girls and two white boys left in the boardinghouse. We are among two hundred African children who speak to one another in Shona—a language we don’t understand—who play games that exclude us, who don’t have to listen to a word we say.

  Then our white matron leaves and a young black woman comes to take her place. She is pretty and firm and kind. She does not smoke cigarettes and drink cheap African sherry in her room after lights-out. She redecorates the matron’s sitting room with a white cloth over the back of the worn old sofa and fresh flowers on the coffee table, and she gets rid of all the ashtrays. A sign goes up on the door of her sitting room: no smoking please. young lungs growing.

  Some of the new children in the boardinghouse are much older than we, fourteen at least. They already have their periods, they have boyfriends. They laugh at my pigeon-flat chest.

  We sleep so close that, even with the lights out, I can make out the shape of my neighbor’s body under the thin government-issue blanket. I watch the way she sleeps, rolled onto her side, too womanly for the slender child’s bed. Her name is Helen. Her warm breath reaches my face.

  Helen, Katie, Do It, Fiona, Margaret, Mary, Kumberai.

  Some of the children at my school are the children of well-known guerrilla fighters. We have the Zvobgo twin sisters for instance, whose father, Eddison, spent seven years in jail during the War for “political activism.” He is a war hero now and very famous; he is in the new governme
nt.

  There are, it turns out, no white war heroes. None of the army guys for whom I cheered and prayed will be buried at Heroes Acre under the eternal flame. They will not have their bones dug up from faraway battlefields and driven in stately fashion all the way to Harare for reburial.

  We eat elbow to elbow. We brush our teeth next to each other, leaning over shared sinks, our spit mixing together in a toothpaste rainbow of blue and green and white. We shit next to each other in the small, thin-walled booths.

  That year, there is a water shortage and we have to conserve water.

  Now we must pee on top of each other’s pee. One cup of water each every day with which we must brush our teeth and wash our faces in the morning. We have to share bathwater. I am reluctant. Then the new, black matron says, “Come on, stop this silly nonsense. Skin is skin. In you get.”

  While our new matron watches, I climb into the bathwater, lukewarm with the floating skin cells of Margaret and Mary Zvogbo. Nothing happens. I bathe, I dry myself. I do not break out in spots or a rash. I do not turn black.

  The year I turn twelve, Mum and Dad drive me to Harare, where I write an entrance examination to get into a prestigious, girls-only private high school, and much to everyone’s surprise I pass the examination and am accepted into Arundel High School, known by its past and current inmates as the Pink Prison.

  Mum on Caesar

  LOSING ROBANDI

  Rhodesia has more history stuffed into its make-believe, colonial-dream borders than one country the size of a very large teapot should be able to amass in less than a hundred years. Without cracking.

  But all the history of this land returns to the ground on which we stand, because all of us (black, white, coloured, Indian, old-timers, newcomers) are fighting for the same thing: tillable, rain-turned-over-fresh, fertile, worm-smelling soil. Land on which to grow tobacco, cattle, cotton, soybeans, sheep, women, children.

  In Rhodesia, we are born and then the umbilical cord of each child is sewn straight from the mother onto the ground, where it takes root and grows. Pulling away from the ground causes death by suffocation, starvation. That’s what the people of this land believe. Deprive us of the land and you are depriving us of air, water, food, and sex.

  The Rudd Concession of 1888 tricked King Lobengula of the Matabeles into surrendering mineral rights to the British South African Company.

  In 1889, the Lippert Concession allowed white settlers to appropriate land for farms and townships in Lobengula’s name—concessions that were supposed to be valid only in Lobengula’s lifetime.

  In 1894 a British Land Commission declared itself unable to remove white settlers from native land.

  In 1898 the British government set up “sufficient” areas for the exclusive occupation of the African people.

  In 1915 the boundaries of the “Native Reserves” were set up.

  In 1920 a Southern Rhodesia Order-in-Council assigned 21.5 million acres (out of a possible 96 million acres) for the sole use of Africans.

  The 1925 Morris Carter Commission recommended division of land among the races.

  The Land Apportionment Act of 1930 divided the country: 21.5 million acres for “Native Reserves”; 48 million acres for occupation and purchase only by Europeans; and 7.5 million acres for occupation and purchase only by Africans. Seventeen and a half million acres were unassigned.

  The Land Apportionment Act was amended in 1941, 1946, and several times in the 1950s and 1960s, and the Native Reserves were renamed Tribal Trust Lands.

  The Rhodesian government built its policy of racial segregation on the Land Tenure Act of 1969 (repealed in 1979 under growing international and internal pressure).

  The Tribal Trust Lands Act is replaced by the Communal Land Act in 1982.

  “To us the time has now come for those who have fought each other as enemies to accept the reality of a new situation by accepting each other as allies who, in spite of their ideological, racial, ethnic, or religious differences are now being called upon to express loyalty to Zimbabwe.” That’s what the new “ZANU (PF)” government announces at the end of the war.

  “I’ll show them peace and re-bloody-conciliation,” says Mum.

  Piss and reconciliation, we call it.

  Our farm is designated one of those that, under the new government, may be auctioned (but not to whites) by the government for the purpose of “land redistribution.”

  This is how land redistribution goes.

  First, the nice farms, near the city, are given to Prime Minister Robert Mugabe’s political allies.

  Then, the nice farms far from the city are given to those politicians whom Mugabe must appease, but who are not best-beloved.

  After that, the productive, tucked-away farms are given to worthy war veterans—to the men, and a few women, who showed themselves to be brave liberation strugglers.

  Then farms like ours—dangerously close to existing minefields, without the hope of television reception and with sporadic rains, unreliable soil, a history of bad luck—are given to Mugabe’s enemies, whom he is pretending to appease.

  Our farm is a gift of badlands, eel-worm-in-the-bananas, rats-in-the-ceiling.

  Our farm is a gift of the Dead Mazungu Baby.

  Our farm is gone, whether we like it or not.

  Dad shrugs. He lights a cigarette. He says, “Well, we had a good run of it, hey?”

  But already, landless squatters from Mozambique have set themselves up on our farm. Before our farm has been officially auctioned, and the old crop has been pulled in, before the new owners can set foot on the road that leads, ribby and washed away, up to the squat barracks house (which Mum painted peach, years ago, to try and cheer us up), before our footsteps are cold on the shiny cement floors of the veranda, the squatters come.

  No one invited the squatters to come and take over the farm and other farms close to the border. The squatters are mostly illiterate, unlikely to have been war heroes, but hungry. They are belly-hungry, home-hungry, land-hungry.

  They have made themselves a camp up in the hills above the house, they have chopped down virgin forest and planted maize. Their cattle drink straight from hillside springs, crushing creek banks into red erosion, which comes out, in the end, like blood in our tap water.

  Mum says, “I’ll show them land re-bloody-distribution.”

  Dad says, “Too late now.”

  Mum grits her teeth and talks between them, so that the words are sharp and white-edged. She says, “It’s not theirs yet. It’s still our farm.” She pours brandy straight into a glass and drinks it without pretending to be doing anything else. Straight brandy without water, Coke, lemon. She says, pointing her finger at Dad, “We fought for this land, Tim! We fought for it,” and she makes her hand into a fist and shakes it. “And I’m not letting it go without a fight.”

  Dad sighs and looks tired. He stomps out his cigarette and lights another.

  “I’ll go and show those buggers,” says Mum.

  “Take it easy, Tub.”

  “Take it easy? Take it easy? Why should I take it easy?”

  There is a baby, our fifth, swelling in her belly.

  Mum started to throw up just after Christmas. She puked when she smelled soap, petrol, diesel fumes, perfume, cooking meat. Which is how we knew she was pregnant again.

  I had prayed so hard for another baby, this one might have been conceived out of my sheer willpower.

  Now Mum says, “These bloody munts make me feel sick.”

  Which is not, apparently, anything to do with morning sickness and everything to do with losing the war.

  She has closed down the little school which we used to run for the African children. “They can go to any school they like now.” But there is no transport for the children, so they hang around under the big sausage tree near the compound, where their mothers have told them not to play. Mum will no longer run a clinic from the back door for the laborers or anyone else who happens through our farm and is ill or malnutritione
d.

  Now she says, “Don’t you have your comrades at the hospital? We’re all lovely socialists together now, didn’t you know? If you go to the hospital, your comrades will treat you there.”

  “But, madam . . .”

  “Don’t ‘But, madam’ me. I’m not ‘madam’ anymore. I’m ‘comrade.’ ”

  “You are my mother. . . .”

  “I am not your bloody mother.”

  “We are seeking health.”

  “You should have thought of that in the first place.”

  The sick, the swollen-bellied, the bleeding, the malarial all sit at the end of the road, past the Pa Mazonwe store, and wait for a lift into town, where they will wait hours, maybe days, for the suddenly flooded, socialized health care system to take care of them.

  Mum’s belly makes it hard for her to get on her horse. She makes Flywell hold Caesar next to a big rock and she hops from the rock into her stirrup and eases herself up. Then she arranges her stomach over the pommel and kicks Caesar on.

  “Wait for me!” I yank at Burma Boy’s head. He is ear-deep in some yellow-flowered black-jacks. Mum doesn’t even turn around. She whistles to the dogs, one short, sharp note. She is in a dangerous, quiet rage this morning.

  We ride up, past the barns and past the turnoff to the cattle dip and past the compound where our laborers live in low-roofed redbrick houses or elaborately patterned huts. We ride up past the small plots where the laborers are allowed to grow their crops of cabbage, rape, beans, and tomatoes and up the newly blazed trails that lead to the new village erected by the squatters.

  There is the acid-sweet smell of burning wood on damp air as we follow the patted-down red earth into the squatter village. We can hear the high, persistent wail of a small child and, as we get closer, the frantic yapping of dogs. The squatters built three mud huts in a circle around a wood fire over which a pot of sadza is bubbling. The curly-tailed African dogs run out at our pack and start to growl, their hackles raised high on bony backs.