by T. M. Clark
If anyone saw her collection, they would assume it was just her work, brought home and arranged neatly. But in one hidden box was more damaging information. The box was where she put anything linked to the 5th Brigade and the mass graves, along with Tichawana’s other crimes, like the purchase deed of yet another Korean slave for his harem.
CHAPTER
6
The Heart Calls Home
The sun rose over the trees, its reflection pink on the surface of the water, enticing the elephant herd on. The young matriarch hesitated. She could hear the call of the guinea fowl as it re-pe-peed to the flock in a serenade of good cheer, and the doves cooing as they danced their mating rituals in the sand. She could see the tell-tale ripple of a turtle as it swam towards a submerged log to sun itself in the early morning warmth. She lifted her trunk and smelt the air, her ears flapping forward, the two notches in her ear distinguishing her from her herd, as well as the bump above her head where the radio collar, fitted years before, remained securely in place.
She turned her head, cautious of the human smell on the wind. After all these years it was a scent she knew well. Tainted with the faint smell of something sweet, as well as an oily odour that would never leave her memory. This scent could only mean one thing.
Danger.
Men with guns waited in ambush. They had killed her grandmother and her mother. They had slaughtered her aunt, and left the younger elephants to mourn their premature death. When they had died, she’d had to step up and take over as matriarch despite being a young adolescent. It was the way. It had always been the way.
Her mother’s mother was matriarch when she was born and had been separated from her herd. It had been her grandmother who hadn’t given up on her, and had come back through the poacher’s territory, through the charred huts and bushveld to find her. To track her to where she had been rescued by the humans. It had been her mother who had taken over for a few brief seasons when her grandmother fell to the poacher’s bullets, despite heading north for security. It had been her mother, with her one tusk, who had kept their herd together for a short time, until she too had been taken. Now the herd was her responsibility. Despite her lack of years, she followed the trails her matriarchs had shown her. She remembered them all. She’d been taught from an early age to remember. Imprinted the details on her memory.
She’d been born to lead one day, and although younger than many, she knew what she had to do now to keep her family alive.
But they were no longer alone. Youngsters whose grandmothers and mother had known each other had banded together as a larger clan. Sticking together, looking to her for leadership. Other herds whose matriarchs had been friends with her grandmother had been affected by the poachers. Their grand dames of the savannahs killed, their teeth chopped out of their heads, and their carcasses left to rot in the hot sun, vultures and hyenas feasting on their bodies.
At first she’d headed north, away from the gunfire and the slaughter. She’d avoided humans, with a new appreciation that not all were good, and she had followed the other herds across a mighty river and into a new land. There they had found peace for a while.
But that time was over.
Closing her mind to the memories, the smells and the hurt from years gone by, she forced herself to be calm. The whole herd relied on her. She flapped her ears, and backed up.
The baby elephant travelling next to her adjusted to his matriarch’s change in path and continued walking. Her younger sister, walking directly behind her baby, turned slightly, moving her bulk out of the way for the matriarch to pass back through the herd, followed by the baby. Slowly, and with purpose, the whole herd of elephants turned about fully and moved silently back into the dark shadow of the bush, plodding on through the veld.
They wouldn’t drink at this place today. This waterhole was not safe.
The matriarch placed her trunk over the baby who now walked next to her, and gave him a reassuring caress. Technically she was only a teenager herself, yet this little one’s mother had been one of the first to join their clan a few seasons before, and this was her second baby under her matronage. It was time to move to safer grounds again so that this baby would see adulthood.
It had been a long time since they visited the high rocky escarpment in the south, and beyond that, the miracle trees. She didn’t know if the grove would still be there, or if the humans who once saved her would be living there in their stone and thatch structures, but she knew that when that particular smell of humans and oil came about, it didn’t go away until every elephant was dead.
She’d felt the pull towards the south a few days ago, an invisible string, drawing her home, and had ignored it. Now, with the stress of moving her herd quickly and over a long distance, some of the mothers would need the help to feed their babies from the miracle trees she knew were in the south. She would be happier having her own baby near the trees too.
There was a chance that some of her herd might die on this journey across the great river and down into the lands of the southern rocks. She hoped not.
She pushed onwards.
She recalled the map of her life and where that journey had taken her, and adjusted her route to take the whole clan once again towards safety. Towards her birthplace in the steep hills of the big valley, where the eagles cried in the thermal winds, and the green grass grew next to the lakeside, sweet and juicy. Where a refreshing bath followed by a mud wallow on the shores of the vast water was a daily occurrence, and the hunters’ guns were silent.
CHAPTER
7
Yingwe River Lodge, Binga
Nothing could keep the smile off Joss’s face as he drove his bakkie into Yingwe River Lodge, his family home, ten days after his encounter with Peta. The big vehicle had eaten up the kilometres from Beit Bridge to the Binga district in the Zambezi Escarpment. The money he’d paid for the customisation had been worth every cent. Being able to drive only with his hands was the safer alternative and the Hilux didn’t seem to have suffered from the customisation. In fact, it purred over the tarred roads and through the road blocks and was now navigating the extremely corrugated and potholed gravel road as if it loved offroad as much as the tarmac.
He was almost home.
When his parents had been killed in 2003, he didn’t think he would ever see his home again. But Bongani had been his lifeline. He’d become manager of the lodge, and taken responsibility for it when Joss couldn’t. Getting out of the marines at that stage hadn’t been on the cards, and then time passed and his accident happened.
Now, his time to return had come. To heal. Maybe to stay, because his friend Bongani needed him now, and he had a debt to repay.
The cows that walked on the road ahead were thin, and behind them ran a young child with a long whip, his shorts tattered and torn, his T-shirt ripped and dirty. On his feet he wore traditional tyre shoes. Someone old school was obviously still living in the village that lay on the outskirts of the lodge. Joss wondered who. He noted that the cattle were unbranded and he was certain that they were a good Brahman lineage.
He wound down the window and whistled to move the cows along. Slowly he edged through the mass, and at last was out the other side. When he rounded the final corner to his family safari lodge driveway, he found his heart was beating wildly. There used to be dense bush on both sides of a graded road, but now the bush was totally cleared and huge potholes had to be navigated. Barren ground baked in the sun where bush shrub used to be. The villages once contained within the old Tribal Trust Lands were spread all the way up to the five-kilometre buffer zone that surrounded Kariba Lake, the only barrier saving the lake on the Zimbabwe side from encroachment by local settlers. Small hedges of aloes separated one family from another, keeping goats and chicken from straying to the next person’s home, which were neat mud ikhayas decorated with brown and black geometric images and thatched roofs that puffed smoke from cooking fires.
A few black children ran in the road with wire cars, their
wheels made from tin cans, and old people sat under those trees that had not been cleared. No birds flew past. No wild game dared show its face here for fear of being captured in a snare or shot by the settlers in the expanded village.
His heart sank. He knew that his Zimbabwe had changed. Bongani had warned him about the influx of new settlers into the Binga area, Ndebele and Shona people too; people frightened to stay near the cities where the government’s dictatorship was being felt daily. He had been the one to organise the settlers, and collected a small monthly levy from them for staying on his land, using the money to keep the communal lands ploughed for the maize, sorghum and vegetables that helped to support them. As chief-in-waiting, Bongani was doing a damn fine job of managing the lodge and the responsibilities of the people, but with his father on his deathbed, that was all about to change. When Bongani became chief, he’d need a break from being the manager of the lodge for a while, until he was sure that everything under his chieftainship was secured. They both knew that he was in for the fight of his life to keep his position: his half-brother, Tichawana, circled in the shadows like a hyena.
A smiling Bongani stood at the back entrance to the safari lodge.
‘Bongani!’ Joss said as he opened his door. He got out of his bakkie, ensuring both feet were on the ground before pushing away from the seat.
Bongani reached out his hand in friendship, but Joss surprised him by pulling him forward and giving him a hug.
‘It is good to see you again, my old friend.’ Bongani stepped back and held him by the shoulders. He looked him up and down, and tears ran freely down his dark face. ‘So much has changed; the boy has come back to Zimbabwe as a man. This is where you belong even if you lost parts of you in the faraway war. This is your place.’
Joss smiled. ‘It’s good to be home.’
Bongani dusted his feet off at the door to the kitchen. ‘I will introduce you to your houseboy, Lwazi, and his grandfather, Madala White. They are giving you a little time to settle in before coming back. They have already moved into the spare rooms as we discussed so that Lwazi is here to help you.’
‘Thanks, Bongani, I appreciate it.’
‘It benefits them too. Believe me, if I could have moved in here with you, I would have, but my father is too ill; I cannot move out of my home and leave him.’
‘You have enough on your plate without adding me to it. I’m just happy to be home. Besides, I need help modifying this place so that I can be independent, and someone to wake me up when the nightmares happen, which will be for a good while yet. I couldn’t get you up at night and still expect you to continue your chief duties in the day without falling asleep.’
Bongani chuckled. ‘You always were better with words than I was, Joss. Lwazi will be fine. He already looks after his grandfather, and does it with kindness.’
‘How’s your father?’
‘He is fading fast. I never thought I would see the day he was bedridden, but I do not believe he will be getting up again. I think you have arrived in time to say goodbye.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. I’ll visit him first thing in the morning.’
‘He would like that; he is looking forward to seeing you again. He liked your father a lot and he was very unhappy when he died, so I think seeing you are now home will comfort him.’
Joss nodded. ‘I guess, for me, having my folks taken suddenly was hard, but easier too. You have had to watch your father deteriorate and become a shadow of himself.’
‘This is true. If I get to choose, I want to die quickly. Have a heart attack out in the fields, or get taken by a lion. Do not let me suffer as a broken-down old man.’
‘I couldn’t agree more,’ Joss said, looking around. ‘So, we have a working fridge and a gas stove?’
Bongani nodded. ‘The fridge is an old paraffin one. I bought it because the electricity to the house is not so good any more. We have lots of power failures. The small house generator was stolen long ago. You must not stock the fridge with lots of food; it is not as cold as an electric fridge and the food will go off. I eat mostly in the lodge kitchen, where the generators were bolted down to a concrete slab very well by your father, making them too hard for the skabengas to steal.’
‘I brought another smaller generator in my trailer, so that I can use my gym equipment. Sounds like I’ll need to lock it up each day when I’m finished with it. Maybe we should be investing in some solar panels.’
‘No improvements. You need to understand how this area has changed, and you need to look through your financials for this lodge properly with me. Those settlers will see you improving the house only and say you are rich and should be sharing it with the villagers.’
‘Perhaps a solar farm for the village closest us then – that way we all benefit.’
‘Maybe.’ Bongani nodded slowly. ‘But do not start putting money into anything until we are sure they are not going to kick you off and blame the government. The people are still volatile. There are always outside influences that corrupt them. I feel that as chief, I am losing control of the area because my BaTonga people are no longer the majority – too many settlers. I thought that they would be thankful that I had created a safe place for them, but this is not so.’
‘That serious?’
‘You will see how they look to one in particular, Mary, even though I am not married to her. She is just a worry-monger and she spreads it to everyone daily. She forgets that soon I will be her chief and the government will give the power of the final word to me. It will be me who decides who can live here and who cannot.’
‘I take it you have reminded her of this?’
‘It falls on deaf ears. But that is my problem, and we can sort that out another day. Right now, we must get you settled into your home again, and make you comfortable so you can finish healing.’
‘We both have our work cut out. I’ll need to make sure they see me as part of the community, not a baas.’
‘Good luck with that one,’ said Bongani. ‘As long as your skin is white and ours is black, it will always be expected that you want to be the baas.’
Joss just shook his head as he walked through the passage that led to the lounge and dining area and the bedrooms. ‘Wow, look at that, even the family pictures are still on the walls.’
Bongani smiled. ‘This is your home. Why would it have changed?’
‘I can’t thank you enough for watching over the house; it means so much to me.’
‘Inkosi Joss, lots has changed here, but the bond that your family and mine share, that will never change,’ Bongani said. ‘No amount of pressure from our president to kick out the white man will ever truly sever the friendship of the Zimbabwe people towards each other. There are those who would go blindly and follow heretics, but there are also those who wait for a strong man to come into power, to heal the land and bring all people of Zimbabwe together again.’
They walked through to the lounge area. It was as if Joss was in a time warp; nothing much had changed – his grandfather’s huge kudu bull head still hanging above the mantelpiece of the fireplace. The crimson couch his mother had bought, a lot more faded and used than when last he saw it, but it was still there. The kudu skin that used to cover the floor was gone, but the floorboards gleamed with a recent polish. The house had been well cared for. He found the heavy silver cutlery still in the drawers of the dining-room sideboard, and the cut-crystal glasses sat with their decanter on the silver tray, polished as if he hadn’t spent years away. The huge twelve-place dining table had remained in place, the polished surface still a deep burgundy. He had so many happy memories of dinners spent at that table.
‘Thanks, Bongani,’ Joss said, tears glistening in his eyes.
They walked into the main bedroom. His folks’ bed was where it had always been, a huge four-poster in the middle of the room, its netting grey with age.
‘Some of the ladies from the lodge came and helped spring clean with Charmaine, one of our best housekeeping staff, whe
n they heard that you were coming home. I bought this mattress new in Victoria Falls last week so that you would have a good sleep at least,’ Bongani said.
‘Thanks. I’ll sort the money out for you. I’ll have to replace this bath, put in some rails so that I can be independent.’
‘Do not get too fancy,’ Bongani warned.
Joss’s stomach made a twanging noise. ‘Excuse me. It can do with some lunch. I’m starved.’
‘We can eat at the lodge,’ Bongani said.
They walked back into the kitchen as the back door opened. A teenage boy jumped up the top step into the kitchen then turned and held the door open for the old man behind him, who walked with a stick.
‘Good timing. Lwazi, Madala White, meet Joss,’ Bongani said.
Joss stuck his hand out. ‘Good to meet you.’ He looked at the young man. Tall and thin, the boy was obviously still growing. Joss remembered that awkward stage well.
‘Lwazi,’ the youth said as he put his hand out, but instead of a conventional handshake, he did a sort of slide shake, and Joss smiled as he quickly did the handshake that as kids they had thought was the best brotherhood shake ever.
‘You know that Zimbabwe shake?’ Lwazi said.
‘I’m Zimbabwean,’ Joss said. ‘Good to meet you. Bongani has told me a lot about you.’
Lwazi just nodded.
Joss shook hands with the old man. ‘Madala. Bongani mentioned that you are one of the tutors in the village school.’
‘He teaches us to read and write, and to add, to do maths,’ Lwazi answered before his grandad could.
‘Sounds like your grandson is very proud of you,’ Joss said.
‘He does me proud too,’ Madala White said, smiling.
Lwazi looked at Joss. ‘Bongani told me that you grew up here. Did you go to the village school too?’
Joss shook his head. ‘I was at boarding school in Kariba until I went to senior school at Peter House, in Marondera, but I would come home to our lodge for holidays.’