by Wilbur Smith
The driver parked where the track crossed a high earthen causeway and a timber bridge over a river-bed in which cool green waters swirled over the rippled sand-banks and tall reeds nodded their heads from either bank. The escort built a fire, roasted maize cobs over it and brewed Malawi tea, while Peter walked his guests in leisurely fashion along the causeway and went on with his lecture.
‘We Africans once had a tradition. If one of our young people became intractable and flouted the tribal laws, then he was sent into bush camp where the elders licked him back into shape. This rehabilitation centre is a modernized version of the traditional bush camp. I will not attempt to hide anything from you. It is no Club Med holiday home that we are going to visit. The men in it are tough, and only hard treatment will have any effect on them. On the other hand, they are not extermination camps – let us rather say that they are equivalent to the detention barracks of the British army—’ Craig could not help but be impressed by Peter Fungabera’s honesty‘– you are free to speak to any of the detainees, but I must ask you not to go wandering off into the bush on your own – that applies to you especially, Sally-Anne,’ Peter smiled at her. ‘This is a very isolated and wild spot. Animals like hyenas and leopards are attracted by offal and sewage, and become fearless and bold. Ask me if you want to leave the camp, and I will provide you with an escort.’
They ate the frugal lunch, husking the scorched maize with their fingers and washing it down with the strong, black, over-sweetened tea.
‘If you are ready, we will go on.’ Peter led them back to the Land-Rover, and an hour later they reached Tuti Rehabilitation Centre.
During the bush war it had been one of the ‘protected villages’ set up by the Smith government in an attempt to shield the black peasants from intimidation by the guerrillas. There was a central rocky kopje that had been cleared of all vegetation, a pile of large grey granite boulders on top of which had been built a small, sandbagged fort with machine-gun embrasures, firing platforms, communication trenches and dugouts. Below this was the encampment, orderly rows of mud-and-thatched huts, many with half walls to allow air circulation, built around a dusty open space which could have been parade ground or football field, for there were rudimentary goal posts set up at each end, and, incongruously, a sturdy whitewashed wall at the side nearest the fort.
A double fence of barbed-wire, sandwiching a deep ditch, surrounded the camp. The wire was ten-foot high and tightly woven. The floor of the ditch was armed with closely planted, sharpened wooden stakes, and there were high guard-towers on bush poles at each corner of the stockade. The guards at the only gate saluted the Land-Rover, and they drove slowly down the track that skirted the parade ground.
In the sun, two or three hundred young black men, dressed only in khaki shorts, were performing vigorous calisthenics to the shouts of uniformed black instructors. In the thatched open-walled huts hundreds more were sitting in orderly rows on the bare earth, reciting in chanted unison the lesson on the blackboard.
‘We’ll do a tour later,’ Peter told them. ‘First we will get you settled.’
Craig was allocated a dugout in the fort. The earthen floor had been freshly swept and sprinkled with water to cool it and lay the dust. The only furnishings were a plaited-reed sleeping-mat on the floor and a sacking screen covering the doorway. On the reed mat was a box of matches and a packet of candles. Craig guessed that these were a luxury reserved for important guests.
Sally-Anne was allocated the dugout across the trench from his. She showed no dismay at the primitive conditions, and when Craig glanced around the screen, he saw her sitting on her reed mat in the lotus position, cleaning the lens of her camera and reloading film.
Peter Fungabera excused himself and went up the trench to the command post at the hilltop. A few minutes later an electric generator started running and Craig could hear Peter on the radio talking in rapid Shona which he could not follow. He came down again half an-hour later.
‘It will be dark in an hour. We will go down and watch the detainees being given the evening meal.’
The detainees lined up in utter silence, shuffling forward to be fed. There were no smiles nor horseplay. They did not show even the slightest curiosity in the white visitors and the general.
‘Simple fare,’ Peter pointed out. ‘Maize-meal porridge and greens.’
Each man had a dollop of the fluffy stiff cake spooned into his bowl, and topped by another of stewed vegetable.
‘Meat once a week. Tobacco once a week – both can be withheld for bad behaviour.’ Peter was telling it exactly as it was. The men were lean, ribs racked out from under hard-worked muscle, no trace of fat on any of them. They wolfed the food immediately, still standing, using their fingers to wipe the bowl clean. Lean, but not emaciated, finely drawn but not starved, Craig judged, and then his eyes narrowed.
‘That man is injured.’ The purple bruising showed even over his sun-darkened skin.
‘You may speak to him,’ Peter invited, and when Craig questioned him in Sindebele, the man responded immediately.
‘Your back – what happened?’
‘I was beaten.’
‘Why?’
‘Fighting with another man.’
Peter called over one of the guards and spoke quietly to him in Shona, then explained. ‘He stabbed another prisoner with a weapon made of sharpened fencing wire. Deprived of meat and tobacco for two months and fifteen strokes with a heavy cane. This is precisely the type of anti-social behaviour we are trying to prevent.’
As they walked back across the parade ground past the whitewashed wall, Peter went on, ‘Tomorrow you have the run of the camp. We will leave the following morning early.’
They ate with the Shona officers in the mess, and the fare was the same as that served to the detainees with the addition of a stew of stringy meat of indeterminate origin and dubious freshness. Immediately they finished eating, Peter Fungabera excused himself and led his officers out of the dugout leaving Craig and Sally-Anne alone together.
Before Craig could think of anything to say, Sally-Anne stood without a word and left the dugout. Craig had reached the limit of his forbearance and was suddenly angry with her. He jumped up and followed her out. He found her on the firing platform of the main trench, perched up on the sandbag parapet, hugging her knees and staring down on the encampment. The moon was just past full and already well clear of the hills on the horizon. She did not look round as Craig stepped up beside her, and Craig’s anger evaporated as suddenly as it had arisen.
‘I acted like a pig,’ he said.
She hugged her knees a little tighter and said nothing.
‘When we first met I was going through a bad time,’ he went on doggedly. ‘I won’t bore you with the details, but the book I was trying to write was blocked and I had lost my way. I took it out on you.’
Still she showed no sign of having heard him. Down in the forest beyond the double fence there was a sudden hideous outcry, shrieks of mirthless laughter rising and falling, sobbing and wailing, taken up and repeated at a dozen points around the camp perimeter, dying away at last in a descending series of chuckles and grunts and agonized moans.
‘Hyena,’ said Craig, and Sally-Anne shivered slightly and straightened up as if to rise.
‘Please.’ Craig heard the desperate note in his own voice. ‘Just a minute more. I have been searching for a chance to apologize.’
‘That isn’t necessary,’ she said. ‘It was presumptuous of me to expect you to like my work.’ Her tone was not in the least conciliatory. ‘I guess I asked for it – and did you ever let me have it!’
‘Your work – your photographs—’ his voice dropped ‘– they frightened me. That was why my reaction was so spiteful, so childish.’
Now she turned to look at him for the first time and the moon silvered the planes of her face. ‘Frightened you?’ she asked.
‘Terrified me. You see, I wasn’t able to work. I was beginning to believe that it had be
en only a one-off thing, that the book was a fluke, and there was no real talent left in me. I kept going back to the cupboard and each time it was bare—’ she was staring at him now, her lips slightly parted and her eyes mysterious cups of darkness ‘– and then you hit me with those damned photographs, and dared me to match them.’
She shook her head slowly.
‘You might not have meant that, but that’s what it was – a challenge. A challenge I didn’t have the courage to accept. I was afraid, I lashed out at you, and I have been regretting it ever since.’
‘You liked them?’ she asked.
‘They shook my little world. They showed me Africa again, and filled me with longing. When I saw them, I knew what was missing in me. I was struck with homesickness like a little boy on his first lonely night at boarding-school.’ He felt a choking in his throat, and was unashamed of it. ‘It was those photographs of yours that made me come back here.’
‘I didn’t understand,’ she said, and they were both silent. Craig knew that if he spoke again, it might come out as a sob, for the tears of self-pity were prickling the rims of his eyelids.
Down in the encampment below them someone began to sing. It was a fine African tenor voice that carried faint but clear to the hilltop, so that Craig could recognize the words. It was an ancient Matabele regimental fighting chant, but now it was sung as a lament, seeming to capture all the suffering and tragedy of a continent; and not even the hyena cried while the voice sang:
‘The Moles are beneath the earth,
“Are they dead?” asked the daughters of
Mashobane.
Listen, pretty maids, do you not hear
Something stirring, in the darkness?’
The singer’s voice died away at last, and Craig imagined all the hundreds of other young men lying in wakeful silence on their sleeping-mats, haunted and saddened by the song as he was.
Then Sally-Anne spoke again. ‘Thank you for telling me,’ she said. ‘I know what it must have cost you.’ She touched his bare upper arm, a light brush of her fingertips which thrilled along his nerve ends and made his heart trip.
Then she uncurled her legs and dropped lightly off the parapet and slipped away down the communication trench. He heard the sacking flap fall over the entrance to her dugout and the flare of a match as she lit a candle.
He knew he would be unable to sleep, so he stayed on alone listening to the African night and watching the moon. Slowly he felt the words rising up in him, like water in a well that has been pumped down to the mud. His sadness fell away, and was replaced by excitement.
He went down to his own dugout and lit one of the candles, stuck it in a niche of the wall and from his hold-all took his notebook and ballpoint pen. The words were bubbling and frothing in his brain, like boiling milk. He put the point of the pen to the lined white paper – and it sped away across the page like a living thing. Words came spurting out of him in a joyous, long-pent-up orgasm and spilled untidily over the paper. He stopped only to relight fresh candles from the guttering stump.
In the morning his eyes were red and burning from the strain. He felt weak and shaky as though he had run too far and too fast, but the notebook was three-quarters filled and he was strangely elated.
His elation lasted him well into the hot brilliant morning, enhanced by Sally-Anne’s change of attitude towards him. She was still reserved and quiet, but at least she listened when he spoke and replied seriously and thoughtfully. Once or twice she even smiled, and then her too-large mouth and nose were at last in harmony with the rest of her face. Craig found it difficult to concentrate on the plight of the men that they had come to study, until he realized Sally-Anne’s compassion and listened to her speaking freely for the first time.
‘It would be so easy to dismiss them as brutish criminals,’ she murmured, watching their expressionless faces and guarded eyes, ‘until you realize how they have been deprived of all humanizing influences. Most of them were abducted from their schoolrooms in their early teens and taken into the guerrilla training-camps. They have nothing, have never had any possession of their own except an AK 47 rifle. How can we expect them to respect the persons and properties of others? Craig, please ask that one how old he is.’
‘He does not know,’ Craig translated for her. ‘He does not know when he was born, nor where his parents are.’
‘He does not even have a simple birthright,’ Sally-Anne pointed out, and suddenly Craig remembered how churlishly he could reject a wine that was not exactly to his taste, or how thoughtlessly he could order a new suit of clothing, or enter the first-class cabin of an airliner – while these men wore only a ragged pair of shorts, without even a pair of shoes or a blanket to protect them.
‘The abyss between the haves and the have-nots of this world will suck us all into destruction,’ Sally-Anne said as she recorded through her Nikon lens that dumb-animal resignation that lies beyond despair. ‘Ask that one how he is treated here,’ she insisted, and when Craig spoke to him the man stared at him without comprehension, as though the question was meaningless, and slowly Craig’s sense of well-being burned off like mist in the morning.
In the open huts the lessons were political orientation, and the role of the responsible citizen in the socialist state. On the blackboards, diagrams showed the relationship of parliament to the judiciary and the executive branches of the state. They had been copied onto the boards in a laboured, semi-literate hand by bored instructors and were recited parrot-fashion by the rows of squatting detainees. Their obvious lack of comprehension depressed Craig even more.
As they trudged back up the hill to their quarters, a thought struck Craig and he turned to Peter Fungabera.
‘All the men here are Matabele, aren’t they?’
‘That is true,’ Peter nodded. ‘We keep the tribes segregated – it reduces friction.’
‘Are there any Shona detainees?’ Craig insisted.
‘Oh, yes,’ Peter assured him. ‘The camps for them are up in the eastern highlands – exactly the same conditions—’
At sunset the generator powering the radio was started and twenty minutes later Peter Fungabera came down to the dugout where Craig was re-reading and correcting his writing of the previous night.
‘There is a message for you, Craig, relayed by Morgan Oxford at the American Embassy.’
Craig jumped to his feet eagerly. He had arranged for Henry Pickering’s reply to be passed on to him as soon as it was received. He took the sheet of notepaper on which Peter had jotted the radio transmission, and read; ‘For Mellow. Stop. My personal enthusiasm for your project not shared by others. Stop. Ashe Levy unwilling to advance or guarantee. Stop. Loans Committee here requires substantial additional collateral before funding. Stop. Regrets and best wishes. Henry.’
Craig read the message once fast and then again very slowly.
‘None of my business,’ Peter Fungabera murmured, ‘but I presume this concerns your plans for the place you call Zambezi Waters?’
‘That’s right – and it puts the kibosh on those, I’m afraid,’ Craig told him bitterly.
‘Henry?’
‘A friend, a banker – perhaps I relied on him too much.’
‘Yes,’ Peter Fungabera said thoughtfully, ‘it looks that way, doesn’t it?’
Even though he had missed the previous night, Craig had difficulty sleeping. His mat was iron-hard and the hellish chorus of the hyena pack in the forest echoed his sombre mood.
On the long drive back to the airstrip at Tuti Mission, he sat beside the driver and took no part in the conversation of Peter and Sally-Anne in the seat behind him. Only now did he realize how much store he had set on buying Rholands, and he was bitterly angry with Ashe Levy who had refused his support and with Henry Pickering who had not tried hard enough, and his damned Loans Committee who could not see the ends of their own noses.
Sally-Anne insisted on stopping once again at the mission schoolhouse to renew her acquaintance with Sarah, the Ma
tabele teacher. This time Sarah was prepared and offered her visitors tea. In no mood for pleasantries, Craig found a seat on the low veranda wall well separated from the others, and began scheming without real optimism how he might circumvent Henry Pickering’s refusal.
Sarah came to him demurely with an enamel mug of tea on a carved wooden tray. As she offered it, her back was turned to Peter Fungabera.
‘When the man-eating crocodile knows the hunter is searching for him, he buries himself in the mud at the bottom of the deepest pool,’ she spoke softly in Sindebele, ‘and when the leopard hunts, he hunts in darkness.’
Startled, Craig looked into her face. Her eyes were no longer downcast, and there was a fierce and angry glow in their dark depths.
‘Fungabera’s puppies must have been noisy,’ she went on just as softly, ‘they could not feed while you were here. They would have been hungry. Did you hear them, Kuphela?’ she asked, and this time Craig started with surprise. Sarah had used the name that Comrade Lookout had given him. How had she known that? What did she mean by Fungabera’s puppies?
Before Craig could reply, Peter Fungabera looked up and saw Craig’s face. He rose to his feet easily but swiftly, and crossed the veranda to Sarah’s side. Immediately the black girl dropped her gaze from Craig’s face, bobbed a little curtsey and retired with the empty tray.
‘Do not let your disappointment depress you too much, Craig. Do come and join us.’ Peter placed a friendly hand on Craig’s shoulder.
On the short drive from the mission station to the airstrip Sally-Anne suddenly leaned forward and touched Craig’s shoulder.