Child of Africa

by T. M. Clark

  ‘Yes,’ Tsessebe said as he began talking to Rodger quietly in Ndebele.

  The old man launched into an animated conversation, hands waving in front of him, but Peta knew that, once again, Tsessebe would keep her father safe. Somehow Tsessebe had developed the ability to transform each time the old man’s mood changed. When she had moved Tsessebe into their house to look after Rodger, it had been one of the best decisions she’d ever made, as the two of them seemed to have a better relationship than many married couples did.

  The rhino backed out without incident, and the moment it was in the boma, it pooped, its tail swishing from side to side, then it spread the faeces around with its giant feet, marking its territory. ‘He’s going to settle right in,’ Peta said.

  Wayne nodded. ‘He’s lucky you bought him; I thought for sure that farmer from the Eastern Cape would bid more.’

  ‘I thought so too, but I think he was meant to be ours,’ she said as she watched the rhino explore around the boundary fence, all the time smelling the air, its lips curled up.

  ‘Right, just the horse left. Where do you want your stallion?’ Wayne asked.

  ‘I’ll take him out where that truck is parked.’

  ‘He’s a strange companion for the other two animals,’ Jamison said.

  ‘Zeus is for me. Dad and I started an anti-poaching unit on horseback. He’s from the Karoo, so I’m hoping he’ll be tough enough to cope with the tsetse flies. He was trained by an ex-Greys Scout, so he’s already battle ready, no bagging even, a match made in heaven.’

  Wayne asked, ‘Do they still tie them to a tree and throw a sack at them until they learn that the bag won’t hurt them?’

  Peta nodded but frowned. ‘Unfortunately, we need to here. I can’t have someone fall off and shoot themselves or their horse because a pheasant flew up next to them.’

  ‘Even with the new “whisper training” that’s all the rage now?’

  ‘Most of my guys are not good riders, so I need horses that don’t spook. I love the philosophy of building trust with a horse through spending time with it, but we often have different riders on different horses, and believe me, the guards are not generally horse lovers. Most are not naturally riders.’

  ‘You go out on patrol with your anti-poaching guards?’ Jamison asked.

  ‘Not as often as I’d like to.’

  They came to the smallest of the translocation trucks. When they opened the back, the horse whinnied. Peta walked up the ramp, all the time talking to Zeus as she put her hand on his rump, and then walked into the crate.

  ‘Come on, Zeus,’ she said. ‘You’re home.’

  CHAPTER

  5

  King Gogo wa de Patswa

  Tichawana Ndou stood outside the old school building; its whitewash was chipped and peeling, and there was no glass in most of the windows, but the bricks still stood strong. An institution worthy of remaining on Zimbabwe soil, despite its colonial start. He had taken the abandoned building and made it functional again, along with the boarding school next door, which now housed two hundred students.

  He stared at the new green and yellow sign on the wall. GWANDA TRAINING COLLEGE, FOR STUDENTS 12-25 YEARS OLD.

  When he had asked Hillary, the secretary of his construction business, to ensure that the college ran smoothly, she had been her efficient self and organised everything from the sign to the black uniforms every boy and girl wore. But she would never see inside the school. That part he had to keep her in the dark about. Already she knew too much of his business dealings, and he had nothing on her to keep her silent – she was as spotless as a dry-cleaned suit wrapped in plastic.

  He shook his head and walked proudly through the front door. He ran his finger along the old wall inside. It was recently repainted and the smell was strong. He continued through the entrance, then up some stairs, trailing his fingers on the wooden balustrade. Finally, he removed them and looked at the tips.

  Clean.

  He didn’t bother to show an emotion. This college was not built to make the people there happy.

  He walked into the first classroom. Once it had held desks and chairs, inkwells and snot-nosed white colonial brats who learnt to write cursive in the Queen’s English. It’d probably had coloured posters on the walls of the ABCs and, hanging from the ceiling, the planets revolving around a yellow sun. Now it had waist-high wooden benches arranged in rows. Functional, not fancy.

  He passed the lines of teenagers at the benches, all blindfolded. The instructor had waited for him. He nodded an acknowledgement.

  ‘Ready. Go,’ the instructor said.

  The teenagers each had an AK-47 in front of them, which they dismantled and reassembled, the noise of metal clicking into place familiar to his ears. It brought back fond memories of training in Zambia and in North Korea; of silky-haired girls who never complained but did what they could ‘for the good of the people’. If that meant serving some black boys from Africa, sucking them off, taking a beating, then they did that too, and like all good girls, they never complained.

  He felt himself stir. Later he would visit his club.

  He re-engaged with the group, his eyes flicking around, finding a boy who was slower than the rest. He walked to where the boy stood fumbling at the desk, his weapon still in pieces.

  ‘Time’s up,’ the instructor said, just as most of the trainees slammed down their reassembled weapons.

  The boy had not finished. Tichawana watched as a bead of sweat formed on his forehead and ran into the blindfold tightly bound around his eyes. The youth’s breathing was laboured, taking in too much oxygen in his fear. He had much to learn still.

  The instructor began walking along the benches, checking the results. ‘This one is always slow with his weapon,’ he said when he reached Tichawana and the boy, ‘but he is good with a knife. Better than most of the other students.’

  Tichawana continued to look at the boy. He didn’t show any outward signs of being different from the other kids. A regular youngster, the perfect recruit.

  ‘He can also speak fluent Chinese, French and German as well as English and Ndebele, and he is good at teaching the other students languages. He is getting faster with his weapons training. He will be a good asset to have, this one, as he is able to use a computer. Very quick with a computer.’

  Tichawana nodded. ‘A genius is only an asset if he does not get shot, or cause his comrades to get shot because of his incompetence in the field. Give him extra training, make him prove he is the best with his weapon. If he does not learn before my visit next month, we can let his comrades have him for torture practice. We cannot afford to keep dead weights in training.’

  The instructor nodded, then moved down the bench.

  Tichawana saw the boy shudder and knew that he wasn’t quite immune to his surroundings yet; he still had to be broken further so that he could be built up. Moulded into what was needed for the cause.

  The time was almost ripe to strike at Bongani. Their father was seventy-seven and a sick old man. From what his spies said, he now had pneumonia. He would soon become one with the earth, and Bongani would inherit his kingdom.

  And it would be ripe for the taking.

  Once the chief died, all the N’Goma magic in the world would not protect Bongani and his people. His brother would learn the hard way what it was like to lose everything. To have it taken away.

  All these years, Tichawana had circled his father’s territory, ensuring that when the day came, he could take what belonged to him: the inheritance that should have been his.

  If only his mother had been the first wife, and not the second. If only he had been born before his half-brother.

  His father was the last obstacle. There would be no one to stop him now.

  ‘I will see you at the same time in a month.’ Tichawana walked out of the room and down the stairs of the old school building.

  The driver opened the door of his Mercedes-Benz and he climbed in. ‘To the office,’ he said, t
hen he put his head back on the plush white leather upholstery and closed his eyes, the air-conditioning washing over him. He could almost see his brother’s face.

  He wouldn’t see the takeover happening.

  Soon Bongani would be dead, and Tichawana would inherit everything.

  * * *

  ‘I need you to take a letter for me,’ Tichawana instructed.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Hillary said.

  He looked at his secretary sitting in the visitor’s chair in front of him and wondered how someone like her was still unmarried and in the workforce. Not that he was complaining – he couldn’t function without her.

  ‘Start the letter with “Dear Mr Kamupambe”.’ He watched her as her pen flew across her page. ‘“If you believe that the elephant capture is significant,”’ he said. Once again, he was instructing the ZimParks board to move a hunting concession to an area that already had a full quota, just below the Mana Pools area, because of the lack of big tuskers in the first area where the original concession was. If they didn’t, he would remove the financial support that Crew-Build, his construction company, gave as conservation donations to their organisation.

  This was power.

  Not that every professional hunter he employed actually closed out every concession on those elephants, but he needed elephants of the right size to match some of the ivory shipments coming in from Zambia and Northern Africa, in order to bring those shipments into the legal market. The authorities, like the police, customs and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, did not tend to look too closely when a hunter said that he had ‘moved’ the concessions for the animals, and then had the tusks as a by-product of the legal hunt to prove it.

  ‘Make sure that you use strong language, so that they know it is not a request,’ he instructed her.

  Hillary nodded.

  He smirked. She often reworded his letters into a more Professional manner. That’s what secretaries and subordinates were for, to correct his small imperfections and allow the world to only see him as a Professional businessman. Nevertheless, a thick, gold-framed certificate hung on his wall, stating that he had obtained a Bachelor of Commerce at the University of Zimbabwe. No one paid attention to the date on the bottom, which read 1975, when the university was still called the University of Rhodesia.

  ‘Anything else, sir?’

  ‘No, I’m going to the club now. Tell my driver to bring the Mercedes around from the garage.’

  She walked to the door.

  ‘Hillary, did you forget something?’ he asked.

  She turned and curtseyed to him before exiting.

  He stood up and walked to his coat rack for his jacket. He looked in the mirror. He did not recognise the man in the suit and tie that stared back at him. Once he’d had an athletic build, but these days he was more fat than well built. He turned sideways. His stomach was widening; he needed to stop his frequent beers at the club. The once strong body of a fighter was now flabby with lack of physical use.

  He made a note to begin getting back into shape, and what better way than to spend a few days with his youth army? Take a week or two and retrain himself. He smiled. The government called the camps ‘educational facilities where the young would learn “life skills”’. He owned seven. The system worked in his favour. His training camps were slowly amassing him a youth army to rival the president’s. To serve him. To fight and die for him.

  One day soon, he would call on all the youths he trained in his educational camps and they would rise up, take up arms for him against his brother. Soon there would be bloodshed unlike anything that had been seen in their country for almost two hundred years, since the days of King Mzilikazi and his son, Lobengula, when they killed millions of Shona people, before the white people settled there. There would be a massacre in Northern Matabeleland to rival his days in the 5th Brigade and the slaughter in the name of the Gukurahundi. The Shona had such a lovely way of putting things into poetry: ‘The early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains’ instead of an attempted genocidal decimation of a tribe.

  The time of the man the business world called Tichawana Ndou, but who the criminals of the country called King Gogo wa de Patswa, the King of Thieves, was near.

  * * *

  Hillary sat in her small room in Makokoba. She sub-rented her space in the house along with six other people, who had use of a single room each. They were lucky, they had two bathrooms to share; many of the others who crammed into the houses like this one had to make do with one. The housing crisis just never seemed to ease. But it was better than being in a shanty town where the government could come at any moment and bulldoze your home and your belongings. Besides, she needed to be near the city; it was where her job was. But one day, she dreamt of returning to her parents’ land, where her father’s kraal once stood. To build a proper house there, where she could tend to their grave, and acknowledge where they lay in the dark earth, their lost spirits waiting for a proper burial, trapped between the worlds. She longed to enable them to pass over, to journey to the other side and join their ancestors.

  Shaking her head, she opened the A4 file she kept hidden in the big pot in her small corner kitchen. Everything she knew about her boss, Tichawana Ndou, was recorded in it. She still had the first book she had been given when she was handed over to the orphanage after the police had found her. She had only drawn pictures then. Sketching his face again and again, so she would never forget. She remembered each face as if she saw them in photographs. They never faded from her memory. When she had learnt to read and write, she began to record details too.

  When the men first came into the kraal, Hillary and her mother had been crushing maize into mielie-meal. When her mother heard the soldiers, she had run with Hillary to the toilet to hide. Through the crack in the door, they had watched the men being made to dig their own shallow graves. Her mother had covered Hillary’s mouth so that she could not make a sound. Her brother was shot when he tried to run away, and then her father was killed. They were the last of the men to die.

  She did not make a sound, but one of the men came to check in the outhouse. Her mother had lowered her into the long-drop toilet, into the maggot-filled cesspit below. Then the man had opened the door and dragged her mother out.

  Hillary had listened to the screaming outside, and to more shots. She had tried to jump up and to get out, but she had been too small. She’d needed something solid to stand on. But when she had felt the shack burning above her, she had been grateful that she was in the pit. When a piece of still burning wood fell into the drop area, she had been able to smother the flame with the poo, the maggots and the moisture. Once the fire had gone out, she leant the plank carefully against the side like a ramp and had only needed a little step to reach up and drag herself out of the hole.

  Hillary remembered walking around the burnt-out structures that were once her home, smelling the stench of burnt flesh. The hyenas and the vultures had got there before she had been brave enough to climb out of her hiding place, and she had to chase them away from the corpses that remained in the ikhayas.

  She found her mother there. She always wore a gold cross around her neck; it was from the days when she had been a nurse at the hospital in Bulawayo. It was blackened, so Hillary took it and shone it on her dress, then put it around her own neck. Finally she had pulled away all the bushes that had been piled onto the mass grave, and reopened it. She buried what was left of her mother, her neighbours and the women in her small village, never understanding why the attackers had buried most of the women with the men, but left some in the ashes.

  Knowing that there was nothing for her at her kraal, Hillary had carefully washed in the river, taking time to make sure that her dress was dry before she began the long walk to the city to try to find her mother’s sister. She knew the road; it was long and many cars and buses would pass her once she was on the main part of her journey. But eventually she had succumbed to the heat and exhaustion and someon
e had picked her up from where she had fallen on the side of the road and taken her to a hospital. The police had taken her to the orphanage when they couldn’t find her aunty.

  She had been too scared to tell anyone what had happened, terrified that the men in the red hats would find her and kill her too.

  When she was sixteen, Hillary began working as a secretary in the office of the orphanage, where she learnt to type and file paperwork. With her first pay cheque she bought an A4 file and paper to write on. She’d begun recording everything she could remember about that night.

  Later she got a job as a checkout girl in the local Spar. She progressed up the ladder slowly, and was a secretary in the office the week before she turned twenty. She worked hard, and in her spare time, she looked for her family’s killers. Searching in the streets and the papers and on the TV when she got a chance to watch.

  Her diligence paid off when she saw one of the men in the newspaper, standing next to the president, smiling at a birthday celebration. He was older, but she could never have forgotten his face. Once she had his name, she could find out more about him, and in 2007, when Crew-Build, his construction company, advertised for a receptionist, she had applied.

  Now, three years later, she had the name of the other man responsible too. He used to be called the Black Mamba. His real name was Philip Samkanga, and he was one of the generals in the Zimbabwe Army. She had amassed not one but eight files on her family’s killers. Each man had his own collection of notes, but she had concentrated her energy on the one closest to her – Tichawana Ndou. In her documents were copies of his accounts, and copies of those he showed the world. She had the names of his spies, and the people who were his muscle within the communities of Zimbabwe. She knew who he had meetings with and when, and what they discussed. She added the letter she had written today.