by Wilbur Smith
‘And that is you – with the king.’ They had not been as impressed, even by the photograph of Tungata.
There was another cutting, a photo taken in Doubleday’s bookstore on Fifth Avenue, of Craig standing beside a huge pyramid of the book, with a blow-up of his portrait from the back cover riding atop the pyramid.
‘That is you!’ They were truly stunned now. ‘Did you write that book?’
‘Now do you believe?’ Craig demanded, but Lookout studied the evidence carefully before committing himself.
His lips moved as he read slowly through the text of the articles, and when he handed them back to Craig, he said, seriously, ‘Kuphela, despite your youth, you are indeed an important book-writer.’
Now they were almost pathetically eager to pour out their grievances to him, like petitioners at a tribal indaba where cases were heard and judgement handed down by the elders of the tribe. While they talked, the sun rose up across a sky as blue and unblemished as a heron’s egg, and reached its noon and started its stately descent towards its bloody death in the sunset.
What they related was the tragedy of Africa, the barriers that divided this mighty continent and which contained all the seeds of violence and disaster, the single incurable disease that infected them all – tribalism.
Here it was Matabele against Mashona.
‘The dirt-eaters,’ Lookout called them, ‘the lurkers in caves, the fugitives on the fortified hilltops, the jackals who will only bite when your back is turned to them.’
It was the scorn of the warrior for the merchant, of the man of direct action for the wily negotiator and politician.
‘Since great Mzilikazi first crossed the river Limpopo, the Mashona have been our dogs – amaholi, slaves and sons of slaves.’
This history of displacement and domination of one group by another was not confined to Zimbabwe, but over the centuries had taken place across the entire continent. Further north, the lordly Masai had raided and terrorized the Kikuyu who lacked their warlike culture; the giant Watutsi, who considered any man under six foot six to be a dwarf, had taken the gentle Hutu as slaves – and in every case, the slaves had made up for their lack of ferocity with political astuteness, and, as soon as the white colonialists’ protection was withdrawn, had either massacred their tormentors, as the Hutu had the Watutsi, or had bastardized the doctrine of Westminster government by discarding the checks and balances that make the system equitable, and had used their superior numbers to place their erstwhile masters into a position of political subjugation, as the Kikuyu had the Masai.
Exactly the same process was at work here in Zimbabwe. The white settlers had been rendered inconsequential by the bush war, and the concepts of fair play and integrity that the white administrators and civil servants had imposed upon all the tribes had been swept away with them.
‘There are five dirt-eating Mashona for every one Matabele indoda,’ Lookout told Craig bitterly, ‘but why should that give them any right to lord it over us? Should five slaves dictate to a king? If five baboons bark, must the black-maned lion tremble?’
‘That is the way it is done in England and America,’ Craig said mildly. ‘The will of the majority must prevail—’
‘I piss with great force on the will of the majority,’ Lookout dismissed the doctrine of democracy airily. ‘Such things might work in England and America – but this is Africa. They do not work here – I will not bow down to the will of five dirt-eaters. No, not to the will of a hundred, nor a thousand of them. I am Matabele, and only one man dictates to me – a Matabele king.’
Yes, Craig thought, this is Africa. The old Africa awakening from the trance induced in it by a hundred years of colonialism, and reverting immediately to the old ways.
He thought of the tens of thousands of fresh-faced young Englishmen who for very little financial reward had come out to spend their lives in the Colonial Service, labouring to instil into their reluctant charges their respect for the Protestant work-ethic, the ideals of fair play and Westminster government – young men who had returned to England prematurely aged and broken in health, to eke out their days on a pittance of a pension and the belief that they had given their lives to something that was valuable and lasting. Did they, Craig wondered, ever suspect that it might all have been in vain?
The borders that the colonial system had set up had been neat and orderly. They followed a river, or the shore of a lake, the spine of a mountain range, and where these did not exist, a white surveyor with a theodolite had shot a line across the wilderness. ‘This side is German East Africa, this side is British.’ But they took no cognizance of the tribes that they were splitting in half as they drove in their pegs.
‘Many of our people live across the river in South Africa,’ Peking complained. ‘If they were with us, then things would be different. There would be more of us, but now we are divided.’
‘And the Shona is cunning, as cunning as the baboons that come down to raid the maize fields in the night. He knows that one Matabele warrior would eat a hundred of his, so when first we rose against them, he used the white soldiers of Smith’s government who had stayed on—’
Craig remembered the delight of the embittered white soldiers who considered they had not been defeated but had been betrayed, when the Mugabe government had turned them loose on the dissenting Matabele faction.
‘The white pilots came in their aeroplanes, and the white troops of the Rhodesian Regiment—’
After the fighting the shunting-yards at Bulawayo station had been crowded with refrigerated trucks each packed from floor to roof with the bodies of the Matabele dead.
‘The white soldiers did their work for them, while Mugabe and his boys ran back to Harare and climbed shaking and snivelling under their women’s skirts. Then, after the white soldiers had taken our weapons, they crawled out again, shook off the dust of their retreat, and came strutting back like conquerors.’
‘They have dishonoured our leaders—’
Nkomo, the Matabele leader, had been accused of harbouring rebels and accumulating caches of weapons, and driven in disgrace by Mashona-dominated government into enforced retirement.
‘They have secret prisons in the bush where they take our leaders,’ Peking went on. ‘There they do things to our men that do not bear talking of.’
‘Now that we are deprived of weapons, their special units move through the villages. They beat our old men and women, they rape our young women, they take our young men away, never to be seen or heard of again.’
Craig had seen a photograph of men in the blue and khaki of the former British South Africa police, so long the uniform of honour and fair play, carrying out interrogations in the villages. In the photograph they had a naked Matabele spread-eagled on the earth, an armed and uniformed constable standing with both booted feet and his full weight on each ankle and wrist to pin him, while two other constables wielded clubs as heavy as baseball bats. They were using full strokes from high above the head, and raining blows on the man’s back and shoulders and buttocks. The photograph had been captioned ‘Zimbabwe Police interrogate suspect in attempt to learn whereabouts of American and British tourists abducted as hostages by Matabele dissidents’. There had been no photographs of what they did to the Matabele girls.
‘Perhaps the government troops were looking for the hostages which you admit you seized,’ Craig pointed out tartly. ‘A little while ago you would have been quite happy to kill me or take me hostage as well.’
‘The Shona began this business long before we took our first hostage,’ Lookout shot back at him.
‘But you are taking innocent hostages,’ Craig insisted. ‘Shooting white farmers—’
‘What else can we do to make people understand what is happening to our people? We have very few leaders who have not been imprisoned or silenced, and even they are powerless. We have no weapons except these few we have managed to hide, we have no powerful friends, while the Shona have Chinese and British and American allies.
We have no money to continue the struggle – and they have all the wealth of the land and millions of dollars of aid from these powerful friends. What else can we do to make the world understand what is happening to us?’
Craig decided prudently that this was neither the time nor the place to offer a lecture on political morality – and then he thought wryly, ‘Perhaps my morality is oldfashioned, anyway.’ There was a new political expediency in international affairs that had become acceptable: the right of impotent and voiceless minorities to draw violent attention to their own plight. From the Palestinians and the Basque separatists to the bombers from Northern Ireland blowing young British guardsmen and horses to bloody tatters in a London street, there was a new morality abroad. With these examples before them, and from their own experience of successfully bringing about political change by violence, these young men were children of the new morality.
Though Craig could never bring himself to condone these methods, not if he lived a hundred years, yet he found himself in grudging sympathy with their plight and their aspirations. There had always been a strange and sometimes bloody bond between Craig’s family and the Matabele. A tradition of respect and understanding for a people who were fine friends and enemies to be wary of, an aristocratic, proud and warlike race that deserved better than they were now receiving.
There was an elitist streak in Craig’s make-up that hated to see a Gulliver rendered impotent by Lilliputians. He loathed the politics of envy and the viciousness of socialism which, he felt, sought to strike down the heroes and reduce every exceptional man to the common greyness of the pack, to replace true leadership with the oafish mumblings of trade-union louts, to emasculate all initiative by punitive tax schemes and then gradually to shepherd a numbed and compliant populace into the barbed-wire enclosure of Marxist totalitarianism.
These men were terrorists – certainly. Craig grinned. Robin Hood was also a terrorist – but at least he had some style and a little class.
‘Will you see Comrade Tungata?’ they demanded with almost pitiful eagerness.
‘Yes. I will see him soon.’
‘Tell him we are here. Tell him we are ready and waiting.’
Craig nodded. ‘I will tell him.’
They walked back with him to where he had left the Volkswagen, and Comrade Dollar insisted on carrying Craig’s pack. When they reached the dusty and slightly battered VW, they piled into it with AK 47 barrels protruding from three windows.
‘We will go with you,’ Lookout explained, ‘as far as the main Victoria Falls Road, for if you should meet another of our patrols when you are alone, it might go hard for you.’
They reached the macadamized Great North Road well after darkness had fallen. Craig stripped his pack and gave them what remained of his rations and the dregs of the whisky. He had two hundred dollars in his wallet and he added that to the booty. Then they shook hands.
‘Tell Comrade Tungata we need weapons,’ said Dollar.
‘Tell him that, more than weapons, we need a leader.’ Comrade Lookout gave Craig the special grip of thumb and palm reserved for trusted friends. ‘Go in peace, Kuphela,’ he said. ‘May the leg that walks alone carry you far and swiftly.’
‘Stay in peace, my friend,’ Craig told him.
‘No, Kuphela, rather wish me bloody war!’ Lookout’s scarred visage twisted into a dreadful grin in the reflected headlights.
When Craig looked back, they had disappeared into the darkness as silently as hunting leopards.
I wouldn’t have taken any bets about seeing you again,’ Jock Daniels greeted Craig when he walked into the auctioneer’s office the next morning. ‘Did you make it up to the Chizarira – or did good sense get the better of you?’
‘I’m still alive, aren’t I?’ Craig evaded the direct question.
‘Good boy,’ Jock nodded. ‘No sense messing with those Matabele shufta – bandits the lot of them.’
‘Did you hear from Zurich?’
Jock shook his head. ‘Only sent the telex at nine o’clock local time. They are an hour behind us.’
‘Can I use your telephone? A few private calls?’
‘Local? I don’t want you chatting up your birds in New York at my expense.’
‘Of course.’
‘Right – as long as you mind the shop for me, while I’m out.’
Craig installed himself at Jock’s desk, and consulted the cryptic notes that he had made from Henry Pickering’s file.
His first call was to the American Embassy in Harare, the capital three hundred miles north-east of Bulawayo.
‘Mr Morgan Oxford, your cultural attaché, please,’ he asked the operator.
‘Oxford.’ The accent was crisp Boston and Ivy League.
‘Craig Mellow. A mutual friend asked me to call you and give you his regards.’
‘Yes, I was expecting you. Won’t you come in here any time and say hello?’
‘I’d enjoy that,’ Craig told him, and hung up.
Henry Pickering was as good as his word. Any message handed to Oxford would go out in the diplomatic bag, and be on Pickering’s desk within twelve hours.
His next call was to the office of the minister of tourism and information, and he finally got through to the minister’s secretary. Her attitude changed to warm co-operation when he spoke to her in Sindebele.
‘The comrade minister is in Harare for the sitting of Parliament,’ she told him, and gave Craig his private number at the House.
Craig got through to a parliamentary secretary on his fourth attempt. The telephone system had slowly begun deteriorating, he noticed. The blight of all developing countries was lack of skilled artisans; prior to independence all linesmen had been white, and since then most of them had taken the gap.
This secretary was Mashona and insisted on speaking English as proof of her sophistication.
‘Kindly state the nature of the business to be discussed.’ She was obviously reading from a printed form.
‘Personal. I am acquainted with the comrade minister.’
‘Ah yes. P-e-r-s-o-n-n-e-l.’ The secretary spelled it out laboriously as she wrote it.
‘No – that’s p-e-r-s-o-n-a-l,’ Craig corrected her patiently. He was beginning to adjust to the pace of Africa again.
‘I will consult the comrade minister’s schedule. You will be obliged to telephone again.’
Craig consulted his list. Next was the government registrar of companies, and this time he was lucky. He was put through to an efficient and helpful clerk who made a note of his requirements.
‘The Share Register, Articles and Memorandum of Association of the company trading as Rholands Ltd, formerly known as Rhodesian Lands and Mining Ltd.’ He heard the disapproval in the clerk’s tone of voice. ‘Rhodesian’ was a dirty word nowadays, and Craig made a mental resolution to change the company’s name, if ever he had the power to do so. ‘Zimlands’ would sound a lot better to an African ear.
‘I will have Roneoed copies ready for you to collect by four o‘clock,’ the clerk assured him. ‘The search fee will be fifteen dollars.’
Craig’s next call was to the surveyor general’s office, and again he arranged for copies of documents – this time the titles to the company properties – the ranches King’s Lynn, Queen’s Lynn and the Chizarira estates.
Then there were fourteen other names on his list, all of whom had been ranching in Matabeleland when he left, close neighbours and friends of his family, those that grandpa Bawu had trusted and liked.
Of the fourteen he could contact only four, the others had all sold up and taken the long road southwards. The remaining families sounded genuinely pleased to hear from him. ‘Welcome back, Craig. We have all read the book and watched it on TV.’ But they clammed up immediately he started asking questions. ‘Damned telephone leaks like a sieve,’ said one of them. ‘Come out to the ranch for dinner. Stay the night. Always a bed for you, Craig. Lord knows, there aren’t so many of the old faces around any more.’
> Jock Daniels returned in the middle of the afternoon, red-faced and sweating. ‘Still burning up my telephone?’ he growled. ‘Wonder if the bottle store has another bottle of that Dimple Haig.’
Craig responded to this subtlety by crossing the road and bringing back the pinch bottle in a brown paperbag.
‘I forgot that you have to have a cast-iron liver to live in this country.’ He unscrewed the cap and dropped it into the waste-paper basket.
At ten minutes to five o’clock he telephoned the minister’s parliamentary office again.
‘The Comrade Minister Tungata Zebiwe has graciously consented to meet you at ten o’clock on Friday morning. He can allow you twenty minutes.’
‘Please convey my sincere thanks to the minister.’
That gave Craig three days to kill and meant he would have to drive the three hundred miles to Harare.
‘No reply from Zurich?’ He sweetened Jock’s glass.
‘If you made me an offer like that, I wouldn’t bother to answer either,’ Jock grumped, as he took the bottle from Craig’s hand and added a little more to the glass.
Over the next few days Craig availed himself of the invitations to visit Bawu’s old friends, and was smothered with traditional old Rhodesian hospitality.
‘Of course, you can’t get all the luxuries – Crosse and Blackwell jams, or Bronnley soap – any more,’ one of his hostesses explained as she piled his plate with rich fare, ‘but somehow it’s fun making do.’ And she signalled the white-robed table servant to refill the silver dish with baked sweet potatoes.
He spent the days with darkly tanned, slow-speaking men in wide-brimmed felt hats and short khaki trousers, examining their sleek fat cattle from the passenger seat of an open Land-Rover.
‘You still can’t beat Matabeleland beef,’ they told him proudly. ‘Sweetest grass in the whole world. Of course, we have to send it all out through South Africa, but the prices are damned good. Glad I didn’t run for it. Heard from old Derek Sanders in New Zealand, working as a hired hand on a sheep station now – and a bloody tough life too. No Matabele to do the dirty work over there.’