‘There’s not many of them,’ Roy said. ‘Probably about twenty or so. They’re not likely to do anything tonight,’ he said, coming back into the kitchen. He poured himself a glass of juice. ‘But we should certainly expect something tomorrow.’
‘Did you recognise any of them?’ Kristine asked.
Roy shook his head. ‘No, they didn’t look local.’ He glanced over at Natalie. ‘Often they’re not,’ he explained. ‘Somebody obviously has their eye on the farm and wants us off it. These guys outside will be their men, ZANU men. That’s the irony of it all. The locals have no interest in kicking us off the farm, why would they? We give them work, we feed them. When they kick the white farmers off, they give the land to a few of their buddies and they kick all the local labourers off. Often they beat them too.’
‘So what will happen to Bhekinkosi if they raid the farm?’
‘He’ll probably do a runner at the first sign of any trouble and you can’t blame him for that. Who wants to get a beating at their hands?’
Back in bed, Natalie lay looking at the light of the moon shining through the gap in the curtains and falling lightly on the bed sheet. She pictured the men gathering outside the fence. She recalled the man they had almost collided with at Boyle’s farm, bare-chested, machete dangling from his grip. Perhaps I made a mistake in staying, she thought. For some time, the worry kept her vigilant, her ears pricked for noises. Slowly, though, tiredness overcame her and she slept.
A sudden crash woke her. She sat up sharply. It was still dark and even the light of the moon seemed to have disappeared. The dog was barking loudly. The light on the landing flashed on and the sudden brightness falling through the open doorway hurt her eyes. Roy ran past down the stairs. Natalie sat up, her heart thudding.
25
He hung limply on the tree, his arms hanging loosely by his sides. His eyes stared off across the fields towards the kopje above Drew’s farm. I had never seen my father looking passive; it was that, perhaps, more than anything that struck me hardest. He had always been moving, always intense. Even when he bent down close to me, to put his arms around me, I had felt the crackle of his energy. To see him so inert, swinging softly in the early morning breeze, was the strangest thing of all.
His face was grey and his eyes, normally lit with life, were faded and bulging slightly. Open wounds marked his handsome torso. His shirt had been torn off. Flies buzzed around him, reminding me of the meat hung up in the market.
My mother’s hand was icy. She did not speak. Silently she gazed up at him. Around the tree women wept, ululated, cried out, but my mother did not utter a sound. When I looked up I saw that she was crying; the tears gathered in the folds of her lips. Even her weeping was silent.
‘Cut him down,’ she said, finally, softly. ‘Cut him down and bring him home.’
I do not remember him lying on the table in our one room hut, though I know from my mother that was where they laid him. I know, also, from my mother, that I sat beneath the table the whole day long and would have lain down to sleep there that night too if she had let me.
The house was busy with neighbours and friends and family. Legs. That is what I recall, now – all the legs that passed me that day. That and the sound of women grieving. Father O’Leary came in the afternoon. He was an old man by then. He took me and stood me between his legs as he sat on one of the few chairs in our house. I remember vividly the way he looked. If I close my eyes now, I could picture him vividly. And yet my father’s face is a blank. Why is that?
Father O’Leary conducted the funeral service and I stood and threw a handful of dust onto his coffin: but that was many years ago and I was a young boy and I remember nothing of it beyond that one image of him swinging from the tree.
I inherited my father’s looks, but, unfortunately, not his temperament. I was a lazy child, always dreaming and Father O’Leary, although he attempted to be patient with me, and to nurture me, would often grow frustrated and chide me with comparisons with my father. I was never resentful of these reprimands; my father was a god in my eyes, a gentle spirit that hovered over me and spoke to me with my mother’s voice.
Though I learned to read and write I showed no aptitude for study. I recall those days; playing football, fighting and smoking the stubs of cigarettes gathered in the streets. My mother had taken a job in the home of a white family in Bindura and I rarely saw her. Sometimes I would wake in the night to find her beside me, sitting on the edge of the bed, gazing down at me. Seeing me awake she would stroke my cheek, tears welling in her dark eyes, and though I longed for those moments with an unbearable aching of my heart, I would shrug her off and turn my back and pretend to sleep.
In those days every aspect of life was segregated. There were buses for the whites, smart affairs with seats that looked as though they must have come from some of those white people’s houses. The buses for the blacks were decrepit, often without windows, billowing acrid fumes and often running out of petrol.
I recall the resentment welling on those occasional mornings when I would walk with my mother to the bus station and we would sit for some moments in the black’s waiting room and watch the smart white folk, with their neat children going about their business.
‘Study hard and you can change things,’ my mother would tell me, when I spoke about such things, but I did not see how reading novels and Shakespeare and doing algebra would change the situation. The faces in all the books I saw were white and so were the writers and the teachers. I had no interest in it all. I finished school just as soon as I could and found work running errands for a black shopkeeper.
I was fourteen when things changed.
Working at the shop was an older youth, Joseph Charamba. Joseph was thin and lanky. He wore wire framed glasses and dressed as smartly as his poverty would allow. He was quiet and had a studious appearance and always had a book stuffed into the pocket of his jacket. For many months I ignored him, preferring the boys from my street who played football and smoked and sat at the side of the road watching girls.
When he did not arrive for work one evening, the shopkeeper cursed Joseph and told me to serve behind the counter, a long board of wood supported by sacks of rice. I was happy to take up the position, numbers were no problem for me and I could handle the change with ease. I had just got into my stride, offering an enthusiastic sales pitch to each customer that entered the dark, concrete room that served as the shop when two men struggled in carrying Joseph between them.
They laid him down on the wooden counter. His face was bloodied and his shirt ripped and covered in dirt.
‘The police beat him,’ one of the men panted. He gesticulated over his shoulder, out into the bright sunlight. ‘We were out in the streets… protesting… the bus strikes.’ He could hardly get his words out, whether from exhaustion or fear I couldn’t tell. Joseph was moaning.
‘Did they hurt him bad?’ the shopkeeper asked, eyeing his body nervously.
‘They smacked him good with their batons.’
When the two men had gone, I helped the shopkeeper fetch a bucket of water and washed his face and checked the bruising to his sides. Joseph winced when I cleaned the blood and dirt from his skin.
‘What you go doing that for, man?’ I asked.
‘It’s important,’ he said, through his teeth. ‘We got to stand up to them.’
He gave me a book. New but dog-eared already, its cover almost falling from it, the spine broken from having been folded back. On the front cover it read Kwame Nkrumah in blue letters.
‘Read this, kid,’ he said, ‘it’s time you started learning about the world.’
I looked at it suspiciously. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m not so keen on books.’
‘You can’t read?’
‘Yes, I can read,’ I shot back. ‘I just don’t see much point in it.’
He stopped in the doorway. He had been on his way out, leaving me brushing the dust from the floor. Stepping back into the dimness of the shop,
he lowered his voice.
‘Listen, kid,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing so important as books. That why they end up getting banned or burnt. Books are dangerous. You know why they’re so dangerous?’
He had poked his face up close to mine. His glasses had been broken in the police charge that had knocked him senseless and he had used string to fix them back together. The glass in one of the lenses was cracked so that when you looked at his left eye it was distorted. I thought about the books I had read at the mission school and could not imagine why they would be dangerous.
‘They’re dangerous,’ he said, prodding my chest, ‘because they’re full of ideas. And you know what? There’s nothing more frightening for the white man than us filling our head with ideas.’
I read it that evening in the light of a small kerosene lamp, at the table in our hut, waiting for my mother to return. Freedom is not something that one people can bestow on another as a gift, Nkrumah wrote. They claim it as their own and none can keep it from them.
That book got me started. I returned it to Joseph the next day and asked him if he had anything else. He gave me Marcus Garvey. Karl Marx. In the early evenings I devoured these books as I had never any text I had read at school. I began to join Joseph and some of his friends who would meet and discuss politics, communism, revolution, black rule in Africa and for the first time in my life I drank in ideas that made sense to me, that seemed relevant to my life.
Darkness had fallen. I was sitting at the rickety table, a single candle burning, its light fluttering in the slight breeze that came from the open door. My eyes watered as I tried to read the text. I held the pages so close to the flame they almost singed. My mother had not yet returned and I was alone, restless, not tired from the day’s work in the shop.
I heard their voices before the rap against the door. Closing the book, I laid it on the table and called out to them softly. Joseph’s face appeared in the doorway, barely visible in the shadow cast by the curtain strung up across the room to give my mother some privacy.
‘Comrade,’ he said, his voice serious as it always was. ‘Come with us.’
‘Where are you going?’
Coming further into the room he patted the pockets of his worn trousers. The pockets bulged, and he pulled a stone from one of them, holding it out, almost as if it was a jewel. He grinned.
‘Enough of the books,’ Joseph said. ‘It’s time for action.’
It was a dry night. The air was cool and sharp with the scent of wood smoke. The roads were quiet and we kept to the backstreets. The police station was on the edge of the town and we approached it from the back. There were six of us, young men I recognised from Joseph’s meetings. Closer to the police station I noticed movements in the shadows. Warily I stepped back, but Joseph whistled short and low and a group of men paced out into the road. By the time we had skirted the low building another group had joined us and we were about twenty strong.
The police station was quiet. Electric lights glimmered dully behind the glass in the windows and, above the doorway, a bulb illuminated the dark street. A car was pulled up against the pavement. There was a sharp crack and the side window of the car shattered. For a moment I was perplexed, I had not seen the stone fly. It had come from behind me and there was a grunt of satisfaction that the first missile had hit home.
Almost immediately shadows flittered against the light inside the station. A second stone pinged off the wall, but another hit the window and that shattered too. And then we all threw our stones, fanning out across the street in a rough semi-circle and I felt a wonderful joy, a lightening of my soul, as though something heavy that had been weighing down inside me had shifted and begun to rise to the surface. I scrambled in the dust seeking more ammunition but could find only a bottle. As I threw it a head poked out from the doorway and the bottle shattered beside it so that it ducked back in again immediately.
For five minutes we pelted the police station; the men inside were trapped and had little chance to respond. Soon, though, our stones began to run out. Pockets light and empty, the young men began to scuttle around in the street for extra ammunition. The momentary lull was all the police needed. There was a sharp crack and I felt a whistle of air past my ear. For a moment I did not understand what it had been, but shortly after a second bullet ricocheted off a concrete wall, pulling away the plaster facing.
‘They’re firing!’
‘Move it!’
A hand pushed me forward and I stumbled and fell to my knees. Around me the crowd was dispersing, feet kicking up the dirt, bodies ducking and weaving. Another shot bit into the wall behind me. I scrambled forward on all fours heading for the darkness of an alley twenty feet away. The road was suddenly, brightly illuminated so that the bricks and the broken bottles stood out in sharp relief. A car had swerved into the street and its engine gunned as it sped towards us. I felt my heart constrict with panic. Felt the adrenalin pump into my veins. I jumped up and ran. I ran faster than I had ever run, down through the alleys and the darkened back streets, tripping and falling and picking myself up and, ignorant of the cuts and the bruises. I hurdled fences, stumbled through vegetable plots until, panting, I stopped and listened to the distant sound of the sirens, the occasional crack of rifle fire and the echo of shouts in narrow streets.
It was a few nights later that I heard Mugabe. Joseph had invited me to a church where an activist was due to speak.
‘It didn’t put you off?’ he laughed when I went to work the next day.
‘Man, it was the best thing!’ I whispered, so the shopkeeper would not hear. ‘They were stuck, man, they couldn’t move!’
‘Tomorrow, come to church, there is somebody I want to hear.’
‘At church?’ I mocked.
‘He’s the leader of ZANU. He’s local, a Shona, educated. A teacher.’
Mugabe was not a large man. He was quiet and reserved, standing, before the meeting started, alone at the front of the church. He was neatly dressed, very smart and there was something refined about him, something almost delicate. When he spoke his voice was considered and educated; his words, though, were coruscating, peeling away the skin of white rule. He may have looked cool and educated, but beneath he was steel.
‘The whites will never accept what you are speaking of,’ an elderly man objected, after he had finished speaking. ‘You go too far.’
‘Whether the whites accept or not is immaterial,’ Mugabe responded icily. ‘They will have to capitulate whether they like it or not. They will have to accept domination.’
His words thrilled me. When I listened to him I felt the anger that was squeezed deep inside me had found a voice. As I sat listening to him, I thought of my mother, of how she had whispered to me late in the night when she returned from work, stroking me gently as I pretended to sleep.
‘Your father would say,’ she would begin. ‘Your father would say… ’
Through her, then, I had learned of Nehanda. Through her I heard of Tafara and Zindonga. Of the farm that was ours before the whites came, of the herds that grazed this land, of the burial site of our elders, of the hills where the spirits of our ancestors lingered, waiting for the white man to be gone, waiting to reclaim their land. ‘One day my bones will rise,’ my mother cooed in the darkness. ‘One day my bones will rise, and in that day the white man’s bullets will turn to water and we will drive him from his land.’
Mugabe’s quiet insistent voice wound itself around me. It was like flint against my soul, striking a spark. Gently he blew upon the kindling, feeding the little flame burning inside.
Later, I stood in the darkness and waited for him. He left the church alone, a book tucked beneath his arm, his head down. He stepped carefully along the path, as though attempting to keep his polished, leather shoes clean.
‘Mr Mugabe, sir,’ I said.
He turned sharply, and stopped.
‘Yes?’ he said.
I felt his eyes boring into me from behind the thick lenses of his gl
asses. I shifted my feet nervously, glanced down at my shoes, old, plastic sandals that slopped as I walked.
‘What can I do, sir?’ I whispered. ‘I want to do something to help.’
He stepped closer. Examined me. I could smell his clothes, fresh, a hint of cologne. I could hear his breathing; short, shallow breaths. He raised his hand and I flinched. He hesitated a moment. I noticed a tremor run through him, like a breeze passing across the surface of water. He went to lay his hand upon my shoulder, but then seemed to change his mind and withdrew it and tapped the side of his nose thoughtfully.
‘Are you afraid?’ he asked.
I shook my head.
‘The other night we pelted a police station,’ I volunteered, glancing up at his face.
He nodded. ‘You want to fight?’
‘Fight?’ I said.
I pictured my father swinging from the outstretched limb of the tree. Pictured the way that his eyes had stared emptily across the fields, across Drew’s farm, that land that had been ours.
‘Yes, sir,’ I said. ‘Yes, I want to fight.’
He nodded again and a faint smile flickered across his face.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Come and see me.’
He folded back the cover of the book and took out a small piece of paper, which he passed to me.
‘You can read?’
‘Yes, sir.’
He nodded again, at this, and turned and carried on walking down the path towards the main road, stepping gingerly as he went, keeping his shoes clean.
26
Roy yelled in anger. The light flashed on in the kitchen and Natalie heard him cursing. When she got there Roy was sitting on one of the stools, and blood seeped onto the floor tiles.
‘Don’t move!’
Natalie stopped in the doorway. The floor was covered in broken glass and on the kitchen table lay a half brick. Skirting around the table, Natalie went to the cupboard and pulled out a brush and swept up the shards and the glittering grit of glass that had scattered across the room from the broken window. A breeze blew in. Outside was the sound of movement, low mutterings, the crackle of a fire in the distance. Roy rinsed his cut heel quickly and applied some hasty bandaging.
A Child Called Happiness Page 15