Copyright & Information
Hold My Hand I’m Dying
First published in 1967
© John Gordon Davis (LM) Ltd.; House of Stratus 1967-2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The right of John Gordon Davis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
This edition published in 2014 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,
Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.
Typeset by House of Stratus.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
EAN ISBN Edition
0755154029 9780755154029 Print
0755154169 9780755154166 Kindle
0755154223 9780755154227 Epub
0755154096 9780755154098 Epdf
This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.
www.houseofstratus.com
About the Author
John Gordon Davis was born in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and educated in South Africa. He earned a BA in Political Science, paying his way through university by working as a deckhand on British merchant ships and on the Dutch whaling fleet at the Antarctic. He went on to take an LL.B. degree whilst serving as a judge’s clerk in Rhodesia.
Called to the Bar, he was appointed an assistant public prosecutor in the Magistrate’s Courts during the troubled years leading up to Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence, before becoming Crown Counsel in the Attorney General’s Chambers. He was later appointed to the same position in Hong Kong.
He quit this post to become a full-time writer when his first book, “Hold My Hand I’m Dying” became an instant best-seller. Other bestselling novels followed.
A veteran seaman; he and his Australian born wife, Rosemary, sailed round most of the world in a succession of yachts. Upon retirement, they travelled widely and from their home in a lovely old Spanish farmhouse in Andalucia, Spain, he also ran highly successful writing courses for both aspiring and published authors.
John Gordon Davis sadly died in 2014 leaving behind a rich literary heritage, including several unpublished novels he had worked on even as he supposedly slowed the pace.
Part One
Chapter One
It is hot in the Zambezi Valley. In the spring it is pregnantly hot, feverish, and the loins of all the valley’s creatures itch for the new season. In the spring the bull elephants trumpet and seek out and mount their cows again, the lions rumble over their slinky lionesses, indeed all living things snort and chase their willing womenfolk. In the springtime, more than other times of the year, the young men of the Batonka tribe woo their bare-breasted black maidens and, according to the custom, drag them off into the bush and rape them, so that their fathers may claim both damages and bridal price. In the spring the Sikatonga witch-doctors begin their ritual to make the rain come, and the tribesmen watch the sky and wait for the Sikatongas’ orders to begin to hoe the hot dry soil. Then comes the summer with thunder like cannon, and the rain rushes warm and fat and straight down upon the valley, the great Zambezi river swells and roars and the valley is full of steam and slush and sog, the valley jungle turns a reckless riotous green, and the Sikatongas know they have done their work well and that the ancestral spirits have not deserted them.
But this springtime the tribesmen of the Zambezi Valley were uncertain whether they should plough their clearings in the jungle, although the Sikatongas had begun their ritual to summon the rain. There was gloom in the valley. For the past year the Native Commissioner had been warning them of a great flood that was to come to the valley, a flood which would stay forever and drown the whole valley and its huts and animals and jungle gardens. The white men, the Native Commissioner had explained over and over again, were building a great wall across the river where it flowed through a great gorge called Kariba. The wall would stop the mighty river and cause it to flood the valley and turn it into a sea two hundred miles long and twenty miles wide. And all the people would be moved to new lands which the Government was providing for them above the escarpment of the valley. The Batonka people were unconvinced. They trusted the Native Commissioner and called him Elder Father, but how could the white men build a wall across the mighty river? Every man knew that the mighty river was the home of Nyamayimini, and the gorge called Kariba was his den. No man could stop the river. And there were some strange men who came to the valley, black men in city clothes who said that they were going to rule the country, and these men said that the story of the flood was a white man’s trick to steal their land, that the Batonka people should refuse to move and that they should gird themselves for war.
This springtime a strange young black man walked down the escarpment and through the jungle of the southern bank of the Zambezi Valley. He was tall and broad and handsome and he wore long baggy trousers with bright patches upon them, he wore miner’s boots and he carried three spears, and an axe and a knobstick. He was a Matabele man from far above the escarpment and he had no rightful business in the Zambezi Valley. He was hunting elephant illegally for their ivory, which he proposed to sell to the white traders in Bulawayo.
He watched the ground for spoor of elephant and he walked noiselessly down the hot white sand of the river-bank and then he came upon a naked girl washing in the river. He sat down on the sand and watched her.
She had her back turned to him and she did not hear him. The water came up to her knees and she bent her supple back and hips and threw water over her shoulders and she rubbed her wet-black skin with white river sand. Her legs were long and strong and her buttocks were round and firm and as she bent to scoop water over herself he glimpsed that part of her which will always hold strong men captive. The elephant hunter was a stronger man than most.
‘Eeeeh!’ she cried when she saw him. Both her hands shot down to cover her nakedness.
The hunter did not move but he smiled.
‘Your breasts are very beautiful to see.’
The girl did not worry about her breasts. All women had breasts and they were never covered in the Zambezi Valley.
‘Who are you?’ she cried, still clutching herself.
‘I am a crocodile,’ the hunter said happily, ‘and if you try to escape I will devour you.’
‘Go away,’ she said, ‘or my father will come with his spear and kill you.’
The hunter lifted his three spears and showed them to her.
The girl looked very upset. ‘I want to come out of the water,’ she said.
‘Come out then,’ the hunter said. ‘You will find that I have not only the jaws of a crocodile but also the testicles of a lion.’
The girl looked up and down the bank.
‘And I have the feet of an antelope,’ the hunter said leisurely.
The girl tried again. ‘My lover will come soon.’
‘Pah!’ said the hunter. ‘He is a Batonka, I am a Matabele. The Batonka always paid tribute to the Matabele before the white man came.’
‘I will complain to the white man Native Commissioner, and he will place you in his jail,’ the girl said.
The hunter looked unperturbed. ‘He is far away above the escarpment.’
Her hands still covered t
he apex of her plump thighs. Her skin shone in the sun. She liked the hunter.
‘If you are a Matabele,’ she said, ‘how is it you speak my language?’
The hunter puffed his chest a little. ‘I have just come back from Johannesburg,’ he said, ‘where I was digging for gold on the mines. There were two of your tribe working there. We talked because we came from the same country. On the mines, they emptied the latrine buckets,’ he added.
The girl was impressed.
‘So you are rich, because you come back from the mines.’
‘Very rich. I have fifty pounds in my kraal.’
‘How are you called?’
‘My name is Samson.’
‘Samson?’ the girl said. ‘That is a strange name.’
‘It is a white man’s name. It is the name of one of their great forefathers. He once pulled a big hut down upon his tormentors.’
The girl was impressed, for it is very important to have a white man’s name.
‘What is your totem?’ she asked.
‘My totem is Ndhlovu, which in my language means Elephant. I am as strong as an elephant,’ he added.
‘What are you doing in our valley?’
‘I seek another bride,’ the hunter said easily and untruthfully, although he liked brides.
‘How many wives have you?’ the girl asked.
‘Three,’ the hunter said, ‘one in Johannesburg and two at my kraal. I have many children.’
‘You must be rich indeed,’ the girl said seriously.
‘I am,’ the hunter said.
‘Then why do you trouble me?’
The hunter looked at her. ‘Because I love you,’ he said from the hot white river-bank. ‘I think I want you to be my junior wife.’
The girl was not displeased, but it would not do for a Batonka girl to appear too pleased. She hung her head a little coyly and scratched the river bed with her toes.
‘You cannot love me,’ she said, ‘because I am already betrothed. My lover has already begun to pay the cattle for the bridal price to my father.’
Such formalities did not bother the hunter.
‘Where is your lover now?’
‘He has gone to work far away in the white man’s town of Bulawayo,’ the girl said proudly, ‘to earn some money to buy more cattle to pay my father.’
The hunter was unimpressed.
‘He is working for the Municipality emptying latrine buckets too,’ he said.
The girl did not deny it. Most of the Batonka men who left the valley for Bulawayo did this work, she had heard.
‘Do you love me?’ the hunter said.
For reply the girl dashed for a corner of the bank and ran up it and into the bush. She cried ‘Eeeh – Eeeeh – Eeeeh – Eeeeh’ as she ran, and she cried ‘Oh – my mother – my mother,’ but she did not cry it too loudly, nor did she run as hard as she could.
Samson let her get a little distance then he climbed to his feet and loped through the bush after her. He grabbed her arm and he spun her round and thrust his hand on her breast.
‘Today you will love me,’ he announced.
The girl pulled against his hands and wriggled and tried to cry tears but none came.
‘Eeeh! Oh my mother! Today I am killed at this place by a bad man. Today I am dying. Oh my mother—’
She stuck out her buttocks and made to dig her heels into the sand and she cried out but the hunter pulled her along easily enough.
‘Oh my mother—’
The hunter got her to a place of his liking, a clearing with warm dry grass upon the ground and he spun the girl round to him again and slapped her softly on the side of the head and he put his heel behind her ankle and pushed her. She tumbled back on to the ground, and he fell on top of her.
She wriggled and cried ‘Oh my mother’ and crossed her legs, but the hunter put his knee between her thighs and forced her legs apart and he unbuttoned his trousers. The girl beat him on his shoulders with her fists, but not very hard.
She still struggled a little as he began to find his way inside her, but then her wriggles grew less and her cries turned to moans and she stopped beating him and her arms went around his shoulders and held him and her body began to move with his.
Her father was not displeased, for now he could claim damages, but he pretended to be.
‘How did he do this bad thing to you, my daughter?’
‘I was washing my body in the water and he came up to me and caught me and did this bad thing,’ the girl sniffed.
‘And who is this bad man?’ her father asked, very indignant.
‘He is called Samson.’
‘From whose village is he?’
‘He is a Matabele from over the escarpment,’ the girl snivelled.
Her father was genuinely angry.
‘What! No Matabele will have my children!’
He set off with his elder sons to find the hunter to claim his damages. But he had some difficulty capturing the hunter and he was very angry because he was a Matabele and when they overpowered him they took him up the long jungled footpath of the escarpment to the post of the Assistant Native Commissioner at Nyamanpofu.
Chapter Two
Hot. The sun was behind the thunderclouds, but they refused to rain. Heat hung motionless, moist hot over the vast brown bush, and in the old courtroom it stank, the heat wettened with old sweat on black people sharpened up with new sweat. Joseph Mahoney slid a fresh piece of blotting paper under his writing hand to stop his sweat smudging his notes of the evidence and he flicked the sodden piece on to the floor. His hair stood up, spiky from running his sweaty hand through it. He took hold of the lapels of his black gown and flapped them to try to cool his wet shirt and said: ‘Yes, next case, Mr. Prosecutor.’
The fat sergeant was pink with moisture.
‘May it please Your Worship to proceed with case number four on the roll. Regina versus Tickey—’
The black constable was leading the little black man into the dock. Tickey saluted Mahoney anxiously.
‘Regina versus Tickey, indeed?’ Mahoney said.
Big deal, he wanted to say – big deal, and I’m drunk with power. Elizabeth the Second, no less, By the Grace of God, of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the Colonies and Dominions beyond the Seas, Queen, Defender of the Faith, versus—?
Versus Tickey. That’s who.
‘And what’s Tickey done?’
‘Drunk whilst riding a bicycle on a public road, Your Worship,’ Sergeant Sheerluck Holmes said pinkly.
Drunk in charge of a bicycle, was he? Why that’s a hideous crime, terrible, scandalous. The Queen just won’t put up with that kind of stuff in Her Colonies. She told me so Herself.
‘Yes?’ he said tiredly.
Tickey had been drunk all right. Weaving down the Nyamanpofu road after thirty-six convivial hours drinking beer at Jonah’s huts, he crashed at the feet of African Constable Tobias. Tickey had nothing to say for himself.
‘This,’ said Mahoney most heavily, ‘is a most serious case indeed. The Nyamanpofu road is a road in Law, even if it is not one in fact. You might have injured somebody. And you might have ridden into one of those potholes and never been seen again.’
He paused between each sentence to allow the interpreter to translate to Tickey. Tickey looked very worried and very sorry.
‘Fined one shilling,’ Mahoney said. ‘Next case.’
Christ he said to himself.
It was not that Joseph Mahoney disliked the natives. Joseph Mahoney knew kaffirs. He knew kaffirs. Old man Mahoney had been a Native Commissioner, Joseph had been bom on a bush station like Nyamanpofu, and when he was an infant his mother had put mustard on his tongue to break him of the habit of speaking Sindebele in the house, instead of English. His earliest memories were the warm sweet sweaty smoky smell of the inside of the mud huts of the servants’ compound, the fire flickering on the black faces squatting’ round the cooking pots, stories of the jungle and warriors and ghosts and witc
hes. The first fairies he learned about were black ones, the first tales of might and glory and chivalry he heard were about black warriors, indunas of the mighty Lobengula who swept all before them from the Limpopo to the Zambezi, the first games he played were with wooden spears and ox-hide shields, screaming Matabele battle cries with black boys also brandishing spears and shields and battle cries, the first heroes he worshipped were the black men who worked for his father, who taught him to stalk and hunt with stick and spear long before his father gave him his first .22 rifle for his tenth birthday. And now, at twenty-five, Joseph Mahoney, Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and Bantu Languages (Cum Laude) and holder of the Civil Service Law Certificate (third class), had been working in the Native Department of the Southern Rhodesia Government for five years. He knew kaffirs, he liked kaffirs and he was good at administering them: it was not because of the heat and stink in the courtroom, nor the tedium of recording the evidence in longhand, nor the delay in interpretation when he could understand everything perfectly in the vernacular: Joseph Mahoney was beginning to say Christ rather frequently because down there a valley was dying, a way of life was dying, and there were more important things for a man to do than try the case of Regina versus Tickey.
‘… Regina versus Samson Ndhlovu,’ Sergeant Sheerluck Holmes was saying, ‘a preparatory examination into an allegation of rape.’
Samson Ndhlovu sat big and sweating and patient in the dock and listened woodenly to the evidence. He kept his eyes fixed on the wall above Mahoney’s head and only looked at the girl when a new exaggeration came out. Once he caught Mahoney’s eye, and brown eye held blue eye as Mahoney tried to sum him up professionally and as Samson tried to sum him up as a man. They stared each other out for twenty seconds, then simultaneously Mahoney reverted to his notes and Samson looked down with embarrassment.
The girl lied in the witness box. Dressed in her best loin cloth and a pouch for her breasts made of a flour bag – for she had heard that the Matabele people above the escarpment considered it a curious thing for a woman to bare her breasts in public unless suckling – the girl was a confusion of pride at being the centre of attention, the necessity to put up a good show for her relatives crowding the public benches and squatting outside the Court, the injured virtue she had had drummed up in her, and the lies that it all necessitated. She cried in the witness box. She cried and lied in confusion, the sergeant had to coax the story out of her. She had not tacitly consented to the sexual intercourse, oh no, she had cried out and struggled as hard as she could. The accused had run up to her as she stood washing her body in the water and he had seized her and thrown her to her back in the water and there and then he had raped her. It looked as if her tears were tears of distress at the memory of what had happened to her. There were only two people in the Court who knew she was lying: Samson Ndhlovu and Joseph Mahoney. Mahoney called rape the National Sport of the Natives.
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