Vultures in the Wind

by Peter Rimmer

  James Bell, known as Ding-dong to some of his friends, sat at the bar in the Captain’s Cabin, mentally scratching his head. He had tried farming three times, selling cars once, insurance for a week, and had gone out into the Urungwe prospecting for gold and anything else he could find to make him rich.

  He was twenty years old and been out from Scotland for two years and three months. It had taken him four months to realise that the last farmer was not going to pay him a bonus when the tobacco crop was in. He had been paid fifty dollars a month as a learner assistant, but the farmer charged him Salisbury prices for eggs, milk and vegetables that were produced on the farm. They had parted enemies in the middle of the reaping season, leaving James to walk halfway to Salisbury before he could cadge a lift. With men like that, he was not going to build up capital to buy his own farm in his lifetime, and James hated working for other people.

  When Jonathan walked into the Captain’s Cabin to have a beer and his first lunch in Rhodesia, James was fresh out of ideas. If he could not make a fortune in Rhodesia, there was nothing left but to jump into the Makabusi River, float into the Zambezi and end up drowned in Beira. But fortune and six hundred dollars sat beside him at the next bar stool, though he was too busy looking into the bottom of his beer glass to notice.

  Jonathan ate his lunch ravenously, large hunks of bread and cheese and pickled onions. Jonathan was particularly partial to pickled onions, something they had never heard of at Charterhouse. He was feeling on top of the world and wanted to share the joy and excitement. There was no one to his left and only a man of his own age next to him, the next two bar stools being empty. They were on a kind of an island of their own at the bar, and Jonathan felt a kinship with his neighbour in his new country. They were young men adrift in the heart of Africa, tough and resolute, and should be talking to each other.

  “You mind if I buy you a beer?” asked Jonathan, brightly.

  “You can drown me in the Makabusi for all I care.”

  “Oh dear. One of those days. Used to get them at school. Maybe a whisky?”

  He heard his companion’s Scottish accent, a well-educated accent but with a pleasant burr of the country to the north of England. James had not been able to afford a whisky for months, and came out of his depression to look at the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young man next to him. It almost made him sick. How could anyone be so cheerful on a Monday? He had his mouth half open to say no when a flood of words broke over him and he was forced to shut it again.

  “You must be Scottish. I’m Jonathan Holland. Mother says there’s Scots blood somewhere in the family. Just arrived. Found a room already. What’s the Makabusi? You been on a tobacco farm? You know an Italian called Aldo Calucci? What kind of whisky? Malt? Ice? Plain? Bet you drink it neat. Have a double. Never seen a sad Scotsman with a double Malt in his belly. What’s your name?”

  James began to laugh, a pleasant, warm laugh that made the men sitting at the table behind them look up from their drinks and smile. “Make it a double malt. No ice, no water. My name’s James Bell, Ding-dong Bell, but I usually hit the people who call me that when I’m drunk. And I’m broke.”

  “Then I’ll buy the drinks and you tell me all you know about Rhodesia, and when you’re drunk I promise not to call you Ding-dong Bell. Maybe your knowledge and my six hundred can get us both on the right track.”

  James looked at Jonathan, then at the whisky, and shook his head. It would be far too easy. Innocence of such quality was far too rare.

  An hour later, they were in Bretts, having left the stale atmosphere of the Captain’s Cabin. Two hours later, they walked to Le Coq D’or and, when Mrs Rankin opened the door after midnight, the key-fumbling having roused her, she found two young men as drunk as fiddlers. Her lodger was singing his school song. She put them both to bed without a word of reprimand. She missed her son more than she had realised.

  Jonathan woke on his first morning in Rhodesia with a little man in the front of his head who was wielding a hammer and cold chisel. At first he had no idea where he was, or who was snoring in the next bed. For a horrible moment he thought he was back at boarding school, but the little man in his head was telling him otherwise.

  “Morning, old boy.”

  “Where the hell was I last night?”

  “You’d better tell me!”

  A week later, when the capital was down to five hundred and sixty dollars and Jonathan had been finally dissuaded from going tobacco farming, having found out that none of the farmers had wide brimmed hats in their trucks, he thought the time had come to use his return ticket and that his life would be reduced to insurance and the 7.32 up to Waterloo.

  His new friend was still sharing his room and he was still paying for everything himself, though the genes of his long-dead reinsurance-broker father were telling him that what he had learnt in a week from James was cheap at the price and a lot cheaper than going down the same road to nowhere. He would have a long holiday, building up memories, and then go back and dig himself a rut for the rest of his life. The excitement of Matthew Gray and Aldo Calucci had vanished with the men, as the phone just rang at the game farm on the banks of the Zambezi and no one knew the whereabouts of the owner.

  “It’ll have to be joining the police or going back to England,” he told James the following Monday, a sober, more realistic Monday. “And going into the police would be like going back to school. All that discipline.”

  “I have one idea,” said James. “We can collect beer bottles and take them back to the breweries. They give two cents a bottle to whoever brings them back and most people just sling them in the dustbin. We need lots of blacks on bicycles going round the suburbs and bringing bottles back to us. We give them five cents a dozen, load up our truck and off to the breweries. How many bottles can we get on a truck?”

  “I have no idea, Ding-dong, but it’s probably the only chance I have of not ending up behind a desk.”

  “We’ll have to buy the bicycles and hope they don’t run off with them.”

  “That bit’s wrong. They must supply their own bikes. They’re in business for themselves like we are. Half for them, half for us. I buy the truck. They bring the bicycles. Cut out the chancers. I presume the breweries only take back bottles like that in truckloads.”

  “You sure you haven’t been in business?” asked James.

  “I used to sell stamps at school. During my first two years, mother was rather short of money. The roof leaked in the house. The death duties cleaned us out. If it hadn’t been for Matt, we’d still be broke. He just disappeared. No one’s heard a word from him in nine months. Just dumped his millions and vanished. I really worry about him. You’d like Matthew Gray. Nearly two metres tall and had made his millions on his own.”

  “What made him go all funny?”

  “I don’t think he went funny. Just had enough of them. Rather like me at Charterhouse. He wanted to get as far away from them as possible. Probably in Hong Kong or deep in the Burmese jungle. First we go and see the breweries and get it in writing they’ll buy back our bottles for ten cents a dozen. Then we look for a good truck. Just as well you can speak kitchen kaffir.”

  “Fanagalo sounds better. I like the blacks.” On the way out, Jonathan paid Mrs Rankin another week’s rent, adding fifty per cent extra for his friend.

  Five months later, in July, Madge Holland received a letter from her son, informing her that he was not returning to England. He was carting bottles back to the local breweries and had gone into scrap metal, sending the rusty iron down by railcar loads to the Rhodesian iron and steel company at Redcliff where it was needed for the smelting process. With sanctions biting the Rhodesian economy badly, no one could afford to throw away anything that could be used again. They were going to buy a three-tonne truck and had employed a driver; Ding-dong was the best friend he had ever had, and they were going to make a fortune.

  Madge smiled wryly, as she had not imagined the heir to the manor going into the scrap business. S
he cried a little and felt very sorry for herself. Then she looked at her options. She was forty-nine, had not even been out with a man since her husband had died, and the only thing left in her life was her son. The PS on the letter had been very simple: “Mum, why don’t you come out? There’s nothing left for you in England.”

  Even if he did not mean it, she would go and find out. She booked a flight on South African Airways, as British Airways were not allowed to fly to the rebel colony, and let the manor house on a year’s lease. Life had not begun for her at forty. Maybe it would begin at fifty. Terrified at what she was doing, she told herself all the way to the airport that she had nothing to lose. As the plane prepared to take off for Africa, she thought of the tall man who had walked into their lives and started this odyssey. She was sure he was dead, poor man. How could the newspapers be allowed to tell such lies? To Madge Holland, Matthew Gray was one of the few good men she had ever met. Even A C Entwistle would agree with that. How could the man have been stealing from them for all those years? Her husband had trusted him. If it were not for Matthew Gray, they would all be destitute. She did not even feel the plane lift off the soil of England.

  Six months after Madge Holland arrived in Rhodesia, Caetano of Portugal was overthrown and the Portuguese, no longer backed by the home government, were forced to run out of Mozambique and Angola, leaving behind Marxist states. The communists had reached the north eastern border of Rhodesia and, apart from the small border with South Africa, they had the country surrounded. Then the Americans were kicked out of Vietnam by the communists, and a flood of second-hand weaponry flooded into Africa from communist China, along with battle trained instructors.

  South Africa, seeing the total onslaught reaching their borders, sent paramilitary police to Rhodesia to fight the communists. The bush war intensified, and at last the Smith government admitted that it was a war and not merely a series of sabotage attacks. The Rhodesians, drawing on their knowledge from the war in Malaya, the only war in which the communists were defeated by counter-insurgency forces, fought in the bush, hunting the terrorists like deadly game, fighting man against man. The kill rate rose to thirty to one, and the average life span of a guerrilla fighter, once inside Rhodesia, was ten days. Luke Mbeki wept for his men, and the Chinese and Russian instructors called for more recruits.

  Promised the white man’s farms, the white man’s cars and the white man’s jobs, a large number of the black youth of Southern Africa responded to the drums of war. In Mozambique the great victory turned to civil war as Frelimo, the newly appointed government, took on Renamo, another political faction, who were backed by the Rhodesian government. In Angola, the civil war flared on three fronts after the MPLA, backed by Russia and their surrogate army of Cubans, seized power before there could be any such foolishness as a free and fair election by the people.

  The war against the Portuguese had been about power, not about people. And the losing guerrilla movements of the FNLA and Unita, who had also fought the Portuguese, wanted their share of the spoils and appealed to South Africa for help. Within days, when the South African invasion reached the outskirts of Luanda, the Angola capital, the Americans realised that it was madness to continue backing apartheid South Africa, even against their mortal enemy. The civil rights movement and the United Nations would have hounded them to hell.

  South Africa withdrew under American pressure, and the vultures came lower. The whole of Africa, with all its strategic minerals and gold, was within the grasp of the Russians. In a frenzy of activity, they flooded arms into Ethiopia, Cuban troops into Angola, gave arms to Swapo in South African-controlled South West Africa, and forced Luke and the ZIPRA-ZANIA high command to commit thousands of young, inadequately trained troops to the Rhodesian slaughter, using the United Nations to howl in disgust when the Rhodesian army crossed international borders in hot pursuit.

  Politically, the Russians stood very much higher than the Americans on the moral mountain of anti-colonialism and anti-white. While Teddie Botha was fighting his way back to South Africa in command of his tank, the Russian empire reached the zenith of its power, with its resources stretched to breaking point. The problem for the Russians with Africa and Far East Asia was that nothing came back in return. There was no financial reward, only political. The new nations of Africa and Asia, the new Marxist states, were run, by and large, by megalomaniacs disguised as statesmen, terrorists who would kill their mothers for power, disguised as presidents.

  The peoples of Africa began to starve, and the vultures flew lower. The Western world said not a word, saving their rhetoric for the white pigs in Rhodesia and the neo-Nazis in South Africa. The white countries of Southern Africa became ruled by the police and the army. Laws were passed, giving them dictatorial powers. Southern Africa was in a state of military and economic war.

  The only thing that had not turned against them was the weather. The rains were good. The crops grew. The people, buffeted on both sides, were able to feed themselves. It was said in Africa that you follow or lead, or get the hell out of the way. Most people chose to get out of the way.

  Book Three

  1

  At the artists’ colony in Port St Johns, no one owned a television set or bought a newspaper. They were seven kilometres down the Wild Coast from the village of Port St Johns and they were generally self-sufficient in food and stimulants. Vegetables were grown, pigs ran in the limited coastal forest, and fish were taken from the sea.

  The other essentials were paid for by selling their art, mostly rather bad art – it was the way of life that was more important – to the summer tourists who thought the long-haired, head-banded, kaftan-clad artists a real attraction. They bought the carved objects, the hand-beaten jewellery, hand-tooled leather and the canvases without frames for a small sum and either treasured them as holiday souvenirs or threw them in the trash can when they reached home. What they paid for was the atmosphere of peace and tranquillity in one of the last hippie colonies on earth.

  The girls were mostly young, deeply tanned and without make-up, their bodies as they swam in the big, rolling breakers a picture of health. The home-made bikinis of soft leather added to the sensual attraction. The men were bearded, long-haired and well-muscled from manual labour. All had the look of serenity that had long since vanished from the civilised world. They were freaks who did not wish to hear of war. They smoked dagga which they grew themselves, freaking out in the warm sun and treading the soft white sand while listening to the waves. They were happy.

  Among them was a tall man who looked to be in his early thirties. He was their leader, and it was said by some that he had found the colony by walking up the coast from Cape Town, the journey taking him nearly a year. His voice was soft, and the sun and sea had bleached the few traces of grey in his brown hair. His beard was long and wispy, and wound up under his chin. His eyes were a soft blue, and he was the only one in the colony who did not smoke dope.

  If the tourists bought him a beer at the Vuya restaurant, the one commercial establishment with its store near the colony, he drank it with pleasure. If they bought him wine, he drank it with greater pleasure, and he always smiled with the crow’s-feet of sun and pleasure etched into the deeply tanned part of his face, framed by the centrally parted hair and the full growth of beard. He wore colourful, home-made clothes and never wore shoes. The soles of his feet were rock hard, insulated alike against the hot sand of the day and the cold nights of winter. The only thing no one uncovered was his past. In the colony, no one cared.

  Mark, as he called himself, built his own shack and introduced a water system for the colony, using the force of gravity to conduct water from the river higher up in the forest. He built a small distillery and made a white liquid that danced them high among the stars. He listened to their pains, if they had any, and encouraged their art. He was the father of the colony.

  The Transkei was a product of apartheid, a self-governing homeland ruled by the Xhosa blacks. Mark had been with them for alm
ost two years when he gave the artists’ colony its first surprise. “I’m going to build a house,” he said.

  He had gone to the local chief and exercised his right to a hut site, choosing a place tucked into the cliff overlooking a beach of his own, where the tumbled oysters collected after a storm.

  “You have to be born in the Transkei to be given a site,” said one of them.

  “I told the chief I was born in the Transkei.”

  “And he believed you?” Mark smiled, and the colony watched as the man cut into the cliff with pick and shovel to clear a level site for his permanent home. He had looked for a long time on his way up the coast for a place to live, and here he was going to stay.

  It took him six months to cut into the earth and rock, making shelves of the rock formations and digging a reservoir for the rainwater he would collect from his roof. Then be built his one-roomed home from driftwood he had collected over the years. The house was in the shape of a rondavel, thatched with reeds, and had a view forever overlooking the oceans.

  Nine metres below, the sea lapped or pounded depending on its mood. Some days the sea was smooth and the sun sparkled on a million ripples. Some days it was rough, and rolled in thunderously to below his house in white-topped waves from a kilometre or more off-shore. Some days the gannets and skuas dived on the sardine shoals and the colony launched their boats and rowed out to the fish, Mark taking the big oars at the front of his boat. Some days it rained and squalled, and the Wild Coast earned its name. Apart from the tourists who bought him drinks no one came to Mark and whatever was in his mind he kept to himself. Away from the eyes of his friends he wrote, but the pages were never seen. He wrote carefully in a good, educated hand and locked the papers in a chest which was wedged between his shelves. The chest was his only secret and no one ever saw what was stored inside.