Storms Over Africa

by Beverley Harper

  Richard treated him to a one-minute lecture in rapid Shona.

  The boy’s face fell but, a born salesman, he soon recovered. ‘Ah, but master, my mother she is very sick,’ he said in English for Steve’s benefit. He knew a soft touch when he saw one.

  ‘And is your sister pregnant, young one?’ Richard asked in Shona.

  ‘Yes, sir, and her husband beats her.’ The boy replied in the same language.

  ‘And is your father dead?’

  ‘Yes, sir, and my sick mother has many mouths to feed.’

  ‘And have your cattle run away, young one?’

  ‘Very bad, master. All gone, along with our goats and chickens. We have nothing to eat, sir.’

  Richard laughed at the enterprising young scoundrel. ‘Here is ten dollars,’ he said in English. ‘Go and buy your sick mother some muti to make her better.’

  ‘Thank you, baas,’ the boy handed Steve one of the carvings.

  Walking back to the car admiring the bird, Steve said, ‘The poor child, his mother is sick and he has to go out to work.’

  ‘That’s not all.’ Greg had followed the exchange in Shona. ‘His sister is pregnant, his sister’s husband beats her up, his father is dead, his family is starving, his cattle have run away and so have his goats and chickens.’

  Steve opened her mouth to express sympathy but she caught a look passing between the two of them and realised she had been expertly conned by the young boy. ‘The little devil,’ she laughed. ‘Do you suppose he spins that line to everyone?’

  ‘Not really,’ Richard replied. ‘He probably doesn’t have to. I imagine he does a roaring trade selling his carvings.’

  ‘Ten dollars seems so little.’ She held up the bird and turned it in her hand, admiring the craftsmanship.

  ‘Steve, the soapstone is lying all over the place here, it costs him nothing, he’s been carving and whittling since he was three, it’s not a very good carving and he’s delighted to get ten dollars. That young boy probably makes several hundred dollars a day.’

  She was tempted not to believe him, the child was grubby and dressed in rags, but she could see from his face, and Greg’s, that he was telling her the truth. ‘I guess I have a lot to learn about this country.’

  ‘Don’t be in too much of a hurry,’ Greg said kindly. ‘It’s a magic place. Spin out the learning process and enjoy it.’

  ‘What a lovely concept.’ She wished she could.

  In the car, the argument between Penny and Tshuma was raging. As they approached from behind Richard heard the black man say, furiously, ‘. . . Just don’t overdo it, that’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘You don’t own me,’ Penny said loudly.

  ‘I’m not trying to own you, you damned fool. Why do you always push things to the limit?’

  ‘What makes you such a bloody authority?’ Penny spat back. ‘Besides, I’ll do what I like.’

  ‘That’s my girl,’ Richard thought privately. The argument delighted him. Any dissension, any sign that all was not rosy between the two of them, was welcome.

  When they saw the others returning, the argument abruptly ceased and a frosty silence between the two of them followed. Tshuma sat to the far right of the seat, arms crossed, staring through the window. Penny scrunched herself into the left corner and did the same, breathing hard. Observing them in the rear-vision mirror, Richard grinned and found himself in excellent humour.

  Back on the main road, they overtook the lorry which had caught up with them while they were at the Monument. Richard blew his horn as he overtook and waved. Philamon waved back so vigorously he nearly ran off the road. ‘Bugger’s been drinking,’ he growled. ‘I’ll have his guts for garters.’

  He pulled up in front of the lorry and Philamon pulled up behind him. Richard strode up to the vehicle and had a spirited discussion with Philamon before returning to the Land Rover. ‘Do you mind driving the lorry,’ he asked Greg. ‘Philamon seems a little tired and emotional.’

  Greg took over the driving while the hapless Philamon perched on top of the camping equipment on the back. In this manner, and in convoy, they drove into Mwenezi. Steve asked when they were going to stop for the night. ‘My rear end has gone to sleep.’

  ‘Not far now,’ Richard told her. ‘I have friends on a farm a few miles south of here. We’re staying with them.’

  ‘They can’t possibly put us all up.’

  ‘This is Zimbabwe, my dear. People do this sort of thing all the time. It’s no big deal. Besides,’ he added, ‘they do it commercially. They’ve built cabins and a bush camp.’

  ‘Are we staying at a bush camp?’ She could not wait for the real experience of camping in Africa to begin.

  ‘You’ll get plenty of bush camp. We’re staying at the house.’

  ‘But there are eight of us.’

  ‘Tony and his wife live alone. Their children have grown up and moved away. The house is enormous. They have servants coming out of their ears. Samson and Philamon will be looked after by the farm boys.’

  ‘How about me, Mr Dunn?’ Joseph Tshuma looked defiantly at Richard.

  ‘I’ve explained that you are black,’ he said bluntly. ‘You will sleep in one of the cabins.’

  ‘I see,’ Tshuma said slowly, anger in his eyes.

  ‘That’s not fair, Daddy.’ Penny’s anger with Joseph was still obvious but she was not about to let her father get away with this rudeness.

  Richard was so pleased to hear her disagree with him he was not annoyed by it as he might have been. ‘It’s the only way they’re prepared to accommodate you,’ he told Tshuma.

  ‘But, Daddy . . .’

  Richard cut in. ‘Tony and Elaine lost a son during the war, Penny, or have you forgotten.’

  ‘But that was over ten . . .’

  ‘He was still their son, ten years or fifty years ago. It’s the best I can do.’ He clenched his jaw, ready for a battle.

  ‘Forget it, darling,’ he heard Tshuma say to Penny. ‘It’s only one night. We have plenty of other nights.’

  That’s right, you bastard, rub my nose in it.

  Looking in the rear-view mirror he was disappointed to see a reconciliation of sorts taking place. Tshuma had moved out of his corner and was holding Penny’s hand, smiling at her. As he watched, he saw Penny mouth the word ‘sorry’ and Tshuma nod that it was all right.

  He shot Steve a look to see how she was taking what, to her, must have appeared like rabid racism. She was biting her lip and saying nothing. He wondered if she would ever see his point of view. The sudden appearance of a solitary nyala bull enabled him to divert her attention. The animal was in fairly dense bush about twenty metres from the side of the road, an unusual sight for this secretive and shy large antelope. He slowed the vehicle. ‘Nyala,’ he said, pointing.

  ‘Where?’ She reached for her camera.

  ‘Forget the pictures,’ he advised, ‘you’ll see quite a few at the Saunders’s. This fellow won’t come out of the bush.’

  Steve caught sight of him. ‘He’s beautiful.’

  The animal was browsing on the lower branches around him. His ears flicked constantly and he started often, as though poised for flight.

  ‘That’s a nice bull,’ Richard said.

  ‘How do you know it’s a bull?’

  Richard grinned. ‘Aside from the obvious?’

  She grinned back and nodded.

  ‘He has horns,’ he told her. ‘The females have none. And see that shaggy hair under his neck and belly? Only the males have that. He also has long, white-tipped hairs along his back.’

  ‘What are the females like?’ Steve whispered, afraid to raise her voice in case she startled the animal.

  ‘More of an orange or chestnut colour. And they don’t have that white marking between the eyes either. They’re also smaller than the male.’

  The nyala suddenly disappeared into thicker bush and Richard pulled back onto the road. ‘Are you sure I’ll see more at the Saunders’s?’
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br />   ‘Nyala aren’t found many places. Zululand, Swaziland, southern Mozambique, southern Malawi and this part of Zimbabwe are about the only places you’ll see them in any numbers. The Saunderses have quite a large herd on their place. Because they’re not hunted there, they move about quite freely.’ He smiled at her. ‘You’ll get your pictures, I promise.’

  A short while later he turned off the A4 and into an impressive entrance marked ‘Nyanetsi River Estate’. The road wound through a man-made forest of oak, beech, elm and ash trees, so huge they cut the sunlight from reaching the mossy grass on the ground. ‘It looks like England,’ Steve said.

  ‘Tony’s grandfather planted them.’

  Some of the leaves were just starting to turn from dark green to shades of red, orange, brown and yellow. A few had fallen but autumn was slow to come to this part of Zimbabwe and the trees remained bare for only two months before getting dressed for spring.

  ‘Can’t have been easy establishing these trees in the lowveld,’ Penny commented, impressed, despite being angry with her father. European trees did not much like the extreme heat and long dry periods of this part of the country.

  ‘The old man wouldn’t give in. When one of them died he’d replant it. Eventually each of the trees protected the others around it. Tony says the temperature in the middle of the forest is a good fifteen degrees cooler than outside it.’

  ‘What was wrong with planting African trees?’ Joseph Tshuma was still angry and embarrassed by the racial snub and his voice was gruff.

  ‘The old man was homesick,’ Richard answered.

  ‘Perhaps he should have gone home,’ Tshuma growled.

  ‘Why should he?’ Richard asked lightly before twisting the knife. ‘He’d found the land of milk and honey.’

  Tshuma lapsed into a brooding silence.

  They suddenly burst out of the deep shade of the forest. The road swept around a hill. The land opened up and stretched into the distance. The Nyanetsi river wound, like a flat ribbon of pasta, across a vast plain. Nyala, as Richard had promised, stood in small groups of six to eight and showed no fear as the vehicle approached. One group stood obligingly still for five minutes while Steve took photographs, using the river as a backdrop, before they cantered away. The house, when it came into view, had all but Richard and Penny gaping.

  Three stories, with gabled windows and doors, small panes of leadlighted glass, a mixture of Gothic and Tudor styles with, on a single-storey extension at one end, a bit of classical French chateau thrown in for good measure, it was a building of mammoth proportions. Rambling over almost half a hectare, the house was built from roughly hewn sandstone and heavy beams. ‘Couldn’t the old boy make up his mind?’ Steve murmured.

  Richard laughed. ‘It kind of grows on you.’

  The gardens were formal and beautifully kept. Statues of naked women with fountains of water bursting through their nipples were at both ends of a formal rectangular lily pond. Through a stone arch they glimpsed a walled court garden. The formality of the two symmetrical rose beds on each of the three terraces was emphasised by pillars of clipped Irish yew. A path running through the centre led up to a side door in the house. Low, neatly pruned box hedges divided the various garden compartments. In one section a scalloped pool was enhanced by elaborate flowerbeds. Fine spray blew off the Italian fountain in the centre of the pool. Large terracotta and stone pots plus garden seats were strategically placed in every section and an old stone sundial surrounded by rhododendrons had pride of place near the front door.

  ‘It must take an army of servants to keep it looking like this,’ Steve exclaimed, then blushed when she remembered Joseph Tshuma in the back seat. ‘I mean gardeners,’ she finished lamely, thinking how much she must have changed in the short time she had been in Africa.

  Joseph helped her out. ‘Don’t you have servants in Australia?’

  ‘Some people have help or cleaning ladies or men who work in the garden,’ Steve told him. ‘We don’t call them servants.’

  ‘It’s okay, Stephanie.’ Penny was still not calling her Steve. ‘Joe has servants too.’

  ‘Do you call them servants?’ Steve did not think he would.

  ‘Of course, that is what they are,’ he replied, surprising her.

  They pulled up on the circular drive, at the bottom of huge, wide stone steps. The door opened and a woman came out, surrounded by five scurrying white Maltese poodles. She was a small, dignified-looking woman who would not have been out of place at the Queen’s annual garden party. Richard jumped out and went to greet her, hugging her and kissing her cheek. The others climbed stiffly out of the Land Rover and waited to be introduced.

  Eileen Saunders greeted Steve and Penny warmly. A shadow passed over her face as she met Joseph but she was charming and welcomed him to her home. The poodles jumped up on everyone but Joseph, who they treated to several seconds of hysterical barking until Eileen told them to be quiet. Dogs in Africa owned by Europeans must pick up on their owners’ vibes, Steve mused to herself. The truck trundled in behind them five minutes later.

  Samson, and a bleary-eyed and sheepish looking Philamon, were taken away by a dignified old African dressed in white trousers and tunic. The rest of them went into the house. Inside, the house was delightful. A blending of formal and large dark furniture with a lighter, more casual touch of relatively modern pieces. Steve calculated that none of the furniture was of this century.

  Eileen Saunders dispatched several waiting girls to show the guests their rooms. Then, turning to Joseph she said firmly, ‘I’ve put you in one of the cabins, Mr Tshuma, I hope you don’t mind. I thought it best for everyone,’ and, not waiting for his response, she beckoned for him to follow her through the house, out through what was obviously a family room, under a long tree-arched arbour leading to the house garden, and to a wooden gate beyond. ‘Your cabin is the first one,’ she said, handing him a key. ‘It’s just beyond that little wood.’ Then she added, ‘You are welcome to join us for dinner, Mr Tshuma, or use the provisions in the cabin, as you wish,’ before nodding crisply and returning to the house.

  Joseph Tshuma was uncertain whether to be amused or angry at her manner. Her arrogance was something he was used to. The lady of the manor was accustomed to giving orders to black people and probably too set in her ways to see how much her attitude hurt them. He was amused because he savoured the day when Eileen Saunders and others just like her would be run out of Zimbabwe with nothing more than the clothes they wore. He was angry because she had dismissed him for no other reason than his colour. He walked towards the small wood she had pointed out, longing for that day to come, when the whites of Zimbabwe would finally be given a taste of what the blacks had been living with for more than a century.

  Ever since Cecil John Rhodes had been granted a Royal Charter in 1889 and went on to form the British South Africa Company, promising a torrent of wealth would flow from the Mashona goldfields, the trickle of white pioneers soon became an avalanche of settlers. They came in their thousands. And they all held the unshakable belief that they were superior to the blacks, which, in their eyes, justified the rape and expropriation of black land.

  In the early 1890s the British South Africa Company gave any white settler who was interested 1,200-hectare farms, something they had no legal right to do, a fact the black people were ignorant of and thus powerless to stop. In addition, the company robbed the land of the little gold it possessed and, as more and more goldminers became disenchanted with the slim pickings to be had, they turned to farming. Despite Matabele raids at the command of their chief, Lobengula, and later Shona rebellions, the march of the white man could not be stopped.

  The completion of the railway, linking Rhodesia with South Africa and joining the ever-expanding towns within Rhodesia, made communication faster. By 1897 the whites had effectively conquered the country.

  Joseph Tshuma was determined to change all that. He reached the cabin and unlocked the door. It was simply and tastefully f
urnished, comfortable and homely. He threw his bag on the bed and went to the kitchen. A quick inspection showed he had everything he needed. He almost capitulated and made his own meal but quickly discarded the idea. Penny would bear watching. The row in the car told him her dependence on cocaine was total and, if denied the drug, she would be unpredictable. She was becoming something of a nuisance but he was not finished with her yet.

  He had introduced her to drugs slowly, starting with dagga. She enjoyed the feelings it evoked and it soon became something they did together most weekends. Then he suggested she try something a little stronger. ‘You won’t get hooked,’ he assured her. ‘Just try it once.’ Knowing Penny as he did, he was certain that once she tried cocaine she would want to try it again. And she had. In a very short space of time Penny began to rely on the drug and then demand it. Now, she was unwilling to function without it. Joseph’s next step would be to introduce her to heroin.

  This was all part of his plan to ruin Richard Dunn. He knew how much the man loved his daughter. The second part of his plan took a little longer for Penny’s participation. He wanted to make her pregnant. Then, with his daughter pregnant with a black man’s bastard child, and addicted to hard drugs, he intended to drop her, broken and ruined, at the feet of the man he hated. Penny had reacted negatively when he suggested she stop taking contraceptives. ‘I don’t want a child.’

  ‘Or you don’t want a black child,’ he accused her.

  ‘That’s not true. When I have children I want them to be yours. I’m just not ready for motherhood now. Couldn’t we get married and wait a while before starting a family?’ Much to her surprise, Penny had fallen in love with Joseph. At first their affair had been a game, something to shock her friends and, particularly, her father. But there was an elusive quality about him which intrigued her. She never felt sure of him. She hoped he felt the same way about her but discovered early on in their relationship that he was a hard man to manipulate. Penny had left a string of broken-hearted young men behind her but this one was different. This one played the game better than she did.

  Joseph had no intention of marrying Penny. ‘You know how important children are to Africans,’ he said. ‘They are his insurance against old age and proof of his manhood. How can I marry you if I don’t know you can give me a child?’