‘Business,’ he said. ‘Cattle. Bloke selling up lock stock and barrel for a song.’
‘You buying the ranch?’
‘Ranch, hell, nobody’ll buy the ranch. I’m after his cattle.’
And as we came round the bend we saw it, the great tree lying across the road, the stump end white and freshly hacked. It was sixty yards ahead of us, right across the road, the branches crumpled and sticking out.
‘Oh Jesus,’ he said – ‘here we go.’
He slammed his foot on the brake. Eighty – seventy – sixty – fifty – and the tree loomed closer, the bush flashed by crazily, weaving. The great car swayed on the dirt. I put my hands on to the dashboard then I remembered and I dropped my hands to the seat and tried to sit limp. Forty, thirty, twenty yards to go, forty, thirty miles per hour. The tree was very large now, swinging across the road in front of us. Thirty miles an hour. Words came to my mouth automatically, words that I had not said since I was a schoolboy, words I do not believe in, but as I said them I believed them: ‘God surrounds us.’ At twenty paces they emerged from the bushes on both sides of the road, twenty black youths scrambling through the bush with shouts and in their hands were rocks and sticks and stones and spears and pangas. They waved their sticks and pangas and shouted and scrambled towards the road and on their black faces were smiles and shouts and creases of glee. Fifteen paces and he tried to make for the bush at the right hand side, and the great car went into a skid, into a broadside and she heaved and keeled. She broadsided on to the tree, crushing the branches and she banged against the trunk. She teetered and she dropped back to her wheels. And they swarmed over the tree and round the car with their jumping and their brandishing and their sticks and the world was full of the crashing of their weapons and the metallic crunch of the car.
‘Doors!’ the driver shouted and we slammed down the lock buttons.
A rock loomed through the air and shattered the windscreen.
‘There’s a monkey-wrench under the seat,’ he shouted. ‘Beat the hell out of any one who sticks his head in!’
The engine roared as the rocks clattered on to us.
‘Jesus, you black bastards!’ he screamed.
He let out the clutch and the car bucked alongside the side of the tree tearing itself free from the branches. A spear bounded through the broken windscreen and ricocheted into my leg, but it was a shallow jab.
‘You bastards,’ he screamed. He drove the car straight into the black jumping bodies. They scattered and beat at the car with their sticks. He drove straight for a man with a rock poised for throwing and knocked him down.
‘Got you!’ shouted the driver, but I could not tell if we rode over him. The back of the car was taking the beating now. The back window went in a crash and they chased behind us throwing rocks. They ran behind, swiping with their pangas. My window smashed and I held the spear in both hands and jabbed it out the. window. He drove the car straight into the bush. It heaved across the sand and grass. He swung the wheel round the top of the fallen tree and put his foot flat on the accelerator. He rode over saplings. Trees bent and crumpled and beat the shattered glass and crumpled sides. He headed her back for the road and charged the road. She lunged into it and jolted over it. They leaped over the tree and ran to meet our flank. He swung her hard left and pressed the accelerator to the floor. And with many knocks and rattles she surged off down the road and we left the Africans behind waving their sticks and looking disappointed. I leaned over the seat and looked out the window and stretched out my hand and gave them the V sign. Then I remembered that God had surrounded us and I stopped doing it.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘you saved our lives.’
‘Look at this,’ he said angrily and waved his hand round the car. He drove until we were a mile from the scene then he pulled up at the side of the road. The Africans were mere dots on the road behind us. He motioned me to get behind the wheel.
‘Keep her ticking over,’ he said. He looked at the car. There was a panga wedged into a long cut in the door. He pulled it out and slung it into the seat beside me.
‘Keep it handy,’ he said. He filled his lungs and faced down the road and bellowed the gravest African insult at the black dots. ‘Your mothers’ privates,’ he yelled in the vernacular.
Then he chuckled and went to the bonnet and opened it and looked at the engine.
‘Radiator’s got a leak,’ he said. ‘And I’ve got no water.’
‘Then we’ll both piss into it,’ I said, ‘I, for one, have got plenty.’
‘Good idea,’ he said.
I leaned over to my haversack and pulled out the brandy bottle. I took a slug and my hands were shaking and then I passed him the bottle. That night we slept at the hotel at Mpika and he and I got pretty drunk together. I got talking to a young farmer and after a while he said: ‘Keep going north.’ He put his finger to his lips and said ‘Pfftt—’ and shot his finger through the air like a missile. ‘Right north,’ he said, ‘till you’re off this godforsaken continent.’ For the next four days I rode on native buses north, and so I came to Arusha, Tanganyika.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Politics.
Sitting at the Arusha Hotel, drinking cold Tusker. Politics in the bars, on the hotel verandahs drinking tea and cold Tusker and gin-slings, over the dinner table, at the Club, over shop counters, in the newspaper – politics, politics, politics. Everybody waiting, everybody hoping, everybody thinking: what’s going to happen to me and mine? The Safari Hotel? – closed down by the Government because the guests didn’t stand up when the Minister of something came in. Get your money out of the country, send it back to England, back to India and Pakistan, down to South Africa. Lorries coming down from Kenya, farmers’ lorries loaded high, the backs built higher with planks and netting wire, loaded with furniture, beds and mattresses and stoves and refrigerators and food for the road, children curled in nests among the furniture and mattresses and sacking, all heading south to the haven of South Africa. Uhuru’s coming in Kenya, it’s come in Uganda and Tanganyika, flee from Uhuru. Abandon your farm, give up your green acres, sell your cattle for what you can get, put a match to the homestead so at least they won’t have it, throw your maize to the chickens and pigs and eat as much as you can: it’s a long haul to South Africa. Thank God for South Africa and old Hennie Verwoerd—
Sitting at the Arusha Hotel: I’m sick of politics.
Look at this, just look at this will you, what it says in the paper: this M.P. asks why are we being flown to parliament by white pilots? It’s not wise to entrust the safety of our M.P.s to white pilots, he says. And why, asks the same M.P., have we still got some white magistrates? And here it says another M.P. asks: And when is private enterprise going to be Africanised? Why is the manager of a large oil company still white? Politics, politics, I’m so sick of politics.
‘So I went to the police station. I said to the sergeant: I want to report a trespass, Africans have taken to walking across my garden in broad daylight, trampling over my flower beds and so help me, they sit down in my backyard and have a crap. And the sergeant leans across the counter and he says to me: “I don’t quite hear you, white man.” So I say: “Africans are trespassing and buggering up my garden.” And he says: “I still don’t hear you.” So I get the message and I slip a pound across the counter. And he says “I hear you a little better, but I still don’t quite hear you.” So I slip him another quid. And he says: “I hear you much better, but I still don’t hear you quite properly.” So what can I do? I slip him another quid. And he says: “Ah, now I can hear you nicely.” So I have to go through the pantomime of telling him all over again how the munts are trampling across my garden and he says he’ll see what he can do. That’s a week ago and they’re still crapping on my doorstep.’
‘It’s a hell of a set-up,’ I said.
‘I tell you,’ he said, ‘keep going north, right north. Or right south.’
Politics.
And the labourers thought t
hat they would be given the factory. Sort of share it out. And when they found the old management still in control they were as injured as hell. And when the management threatened to sack the whole damn lot if they didn’t pull up their socks, the Trade Union comes down like a ton of bricks and threatens seven kinds of strikes. And the Indian shopkeepers! Jesus, they’re having a time of it. They hate the Indians, you know, and they thought they would get the Indian shops. Now they’re boycotting and throwing bricks—
Lorries coming through from Kenya heading down south, the sad salvage of a lifetime piled on the back of one lorry, caution thrown bitterly to the winds with an angry cry over the shoulder, getting the hell out of it.
‘—iron bars on my windows: that’s what I’m putting on. Iron bolts on my door. I won’t let my kids cycle to school any more. I sleep with a .38 next to my bed. That’s a nice way to live, isn’t it? And me forty-three years old. What can I do? How can I sell my house? Who’ll pay a cent for it? And even if I sell my house, where’ll I get a job? And if I get a job, what kind of bloody job? Or maybe I can get a job. But then, how can I sell my house? All my money’s tied up in that house. Hell, I don’t want to start all over again living in some poky flat in South Kensington—’
‘Quite,’ I said.
‘So what do I do, just tell me what do I do—?’
Then I climbed around the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, just some miles from Arusha. I walked up the approaches to Kilimanjaro from the town of Moshi, and the sun shone warm and fecund and golden on the warm green grass, still wet in the morning’s freshness. The sun burned my body and there were no people to be seen, no houses, no streets, no trinkets and chromium plating and Madison Avenue, no Wall Street, just vast green empty spacious great forevemess, pregnant and primitive and exciting and virgin and even dangerous under the great vast blue sky – I walked up the long slopes of Kilimanjaro through towering trees and bush veld pregnant with the lazy sounds of Africa, I came to the cool green slopes and places where ice-cold rivers tumble and froth and grass grows thick and tropics vie with winter shades, I walked and walked up the winding slopes where it grew so green and dark and the very air vibrated with that hot cool life of Africa, with birds and palms and creepers and jungle leaves, where paths cross streams and tumbling brooks. I walked and black men and women and children came out of the jungle huts and smiled and waved and shouted: Jambo! And the children gambolled beside me and smiled and laughed and begged to be allowed to carry my haversack – I walked in the lengthening shadows of the afternoon up the winding paths of Kilimanjaro, through the mauving jungle and the evening nesting noises of all the things that live and throb in the African evening. ‘Rest well, Bwana, has the Bwana enough to eat? My huts are near and there is there food and warmth, and shelter for the Bwana.’ And I walked up and around Kilimanjaro and I passed through tiny villages of black men and many fell into step beside me and we went to nearby huts and shacks and we drank kaffir beer and sat in the sun, and it was very warm and friendly. And in the evening I sat at my fire and watched the flames and the coals and the flickering shadows in the middle of great dark green Africa and I listened to the great quiet noises of Africa in the night, the noise of insects and the great silence and the faraway sounds and shouts of village life, and I smelt the woodsmoke and I knew that never again, nowhere else, was all this to be recaptured. And I was very sad, for I knew my life was changing and would never change back again.
And then I strode back down the mountain, back on to the plains of Tanganyika and I set out on to the road to Ngorogoro where the wild animals and the Masai people live in a great lush crater so big that the old volcanic walls are distant mountain ranges. And I spread my sleeping bag in the camping site near the log cabin rest huts at the top of the crater and in the evenings I sat in the grass at the lip of the crater and I watched the sun go down on Africa in furious red and orange, and I watched the animals in the great crater below go down to the watering holes in turns, to drink, and it turned mauve down there below, and you could hear the distant squeal of elephant and the roar of lion. When the sun had set I went into the log cabin bar and sat at the wooden counter with the tourists and drank cold Tusker and I thought: ‘Never more.’ And in the mornings I went down into the crater in the back of a Land Rover and bounced and churned over the great jungle plains below and watched the animals. I felt the heat and sweat and smell and languor of midday, and the lengthening shadows in the afternoon and the movements of animals down to the waterholes to drink and the bush turning mauve and the night noises starting. I watched a pair of lions making love on a green hill. The sun was hot and they had full bellies and they were very happy with each other. She lay on her side, growling and her tail flicking and he climbed all over her, growling. At last she got on to her stomach and she flicked her tail aside and he got down on her, his giant paws and mighty legs astride her back and gripping her, his great back haunched and shuddering and his muscles and thighs bulging. And he groaned and pounded at her, his great mane and head bent down to her ears and she pressed her rump up to him and she whimpered as a woman whimpers. Their bodies beat each other savagely and rhythmically and he looked as if he could not get enough of her, nor she of him. And when it was all over he rolled off her, and sat down heavily beside her and she toppled back on to her side and lay panting in the sun. He looked at her very tiredly and gently and he yawned and she yawned and she stretched out her great paws and stretched her claws, and her tail was no longer flicking. I thought: You will never see it again. And I felt very bad. And when I sat at my fire that night I wanted to make up my mind to get up with the dawn and pack my gear and set off down the roads of Tanganyika and south again, back to Rhodesia to find Suzie and say: ‘We’re going to stay where we belong.’ But I did not. After three days I packed my gear and set off down the road back to Arusha, to the road that leads north to Kenya, the Mau Mau territory whence the farmers were fleeing. And from Arusha I took a bus to Nairobi. And with that bus, Africa, my Africa was gone.
This is it, I said – you’re an emigrant. And it got me right here, right here in the heart.
I got myself a seat at the very back of the bus, in the corner, and the bus filled right up about me.
There was a notice: ‘This vehicle is licensed to carry 32 seated passengers and 12 standing passengers.’ As we pulled away from the bus terminus in the mid-afternoon there were thirty-two seated passengers and twelve standing. As we pulled through Arusha the driver honked his horn for passengers. He turned down side streets honking his horn and searching for passengers. He stopped wherever he was flagged down and he jammed them in, one on top of the other and then two on top of one. He sat them in the aisle, he sat them four to a double seat, sitting on each other’s laps. And what made me mad was that the passengers did not mind. And still the driver drove round the blocks honking for passengers. And what made me madder than all hell was that those passengers were helping him: they were leaning out the windows with big smiles and shouting encouragement, shouting: ‘Come on! We’re going to Nairobi!’ All night on the bus I thought about my decision to quit Africa, and I hashed over all the things I had seen and done and heard in Africa.
I looked round at the wogs jabbering in the bus and picking their noses and spitting, black and woolly-headed and ignorant and primitive, and I liked them. I realised I loved Africans. I was used to them, but I do not want to be ruled by them, I am an Anglo-Saxon and I want to be ruled by Anglo-Saxons, by Anglo-Saxon standards. You are doing the right thing, I shouted at myself. When the dawn came we rattled into beautiful Nairobi, tall new elegant buildings rising up white out of the jungle into the dawn, built by white men and now lost. Spacious avenues carved through the jungle and I cried to myself: See—see! The same will happen to Rhodesia, and to the whole of Africa in the end. I walked from the bus terminus to the nearest travel agent while my anger was still hot. I had intended going overland through Uganda to the Sudan, and taking a Nile steamer to the Mediterranean, but I was so up
to here with Africa and Africans and African politics, I bought myself a ticket on the next boat sailing north out of Mombasa through Suez to Europe in ten days’ time. Then I went to the Stanley Hotel and drank cold Tuskers very angrily and I washed my hands of Africa.
That day I took a train down to Mombasa, then a bus a hundred miles up the East African coast to Malindi, and I checked into the hotel there, on the palm-slung white beach. Might Suzie be waiting for me in Mombasa? She had planned on arriving in Mombasa on the Eden Roc at about this time. If so, I would be safely out of the way when Suzie’s ship came in.
Mornings I lay on the beach trying not to think about Suzie, or about Africa, trying not to think about anything except the million I was going to make in America in the noble subject of Death Tax and the Life Underwriter. There were a number of American tourists staying at the hotel, resting up for or between or after their passion-wagon package-deal safaris. Whenever I thought about Africa I went up to one of these Yanks and started asking him about his home in Hartford Connecticut or Buffalo New York or Boise Idaho, and we yapped about what a great country the ole U.S.A. is, how it’s saving the world for there is nothing a Yank more dearly loves to talk about than how they are saving the world. I used all my Dale Carnegie on them and I became great buddies with them and I got a number of invitations to make nice long visits to Hartford Connecticut and Buffalo New York and Boise Idaho. One of them was a millionaire and one evening when my heart was breaking for Africa I went straight up to him and started talking about the Estate Tax problem his poor widow would have when he kicked the bucket and he said ‘Tell me more,’ and he gave me a list of his assets and I figured out his death tax and told him his little woman would have to flog most of his shares in his corporation, so his post-mortem income would be all shot to hell, along with him, and she’d have to flog the mansion and the yacht and move into an apartment and sonnyboy wouldn’t be able to vote himself president of the corporation, nor any of the subsidiary corporations of which his corporation was presently major shareholder, and he said to me: ‘What do I do, Joeyboy, just tell me what I do?’ with tears in his eyes. So I said: First of all we decrease your New York State Succession Duty by forming another company in Alberta, Canada, where they ain’t got no Succession Duty, and you become major shareholder of the Alberta Corporation, and you flog your shares in your New York company to your Alberta company and then for New York Succession Duty purposes your New York company will be legally situated in Alberta, Canada, and not in New York, and therefore it would not be subject to New York Succession Duty, but only to Canadian Federal Estate Tax which is lower than New York Succession Duty and on a million bucks that’s a lot of potatoes. He was very impressed. Then, I said, you insure your life through my company, to an amount equal to the balance of your tax, which is now only two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, so that when you slip off this mortal coil your little old lady can pay the death tax with the insurance money and then she can go right on enjoying your loot. Say! that’s a great little old plan you got there, Joe-boy, he said. And we made a date for me to visit him in Buffalo New York in ten weeks time and I would write him up. I figured my commission on the policy would be over nine thousand dollars in the first year, and with a few beers inside me, and the prospect of that kind of potatoes and the trips to Miami and Bermuda, I was glad I was going back to America. Whenever I found myself thinking of Suzie, I went straight up to one of the dolls and turned on the charm, brittle, hard-arsed, bedward charm. In the evenings it was not very hard to stop thinking about Suzie and about Africa, because there was the sundowner hour that went late into the night, and I concentrated on the problem of trying to lay a different bird every night, and if I didn’t make it, at least I went to bed drank; but in the mornings when I woke up, I remembered the soft woman feel and smell of Suzie and I remembered her dresses I recognised from America and London and even from Bulawayo, hanging in her cupboard, and I remembered the warm woman sights and sounds of Suzie getting up in the morning and getting dressed and getting breakfast, I remembered the soft sweet bulge of her breasts and the long smooth line of her legs, and I thought of the summer and the fall, and the winter and the spring of America, the sunshine and the snow, but no Suzie waking up with me in the morning. I thought of Suzie, waking up to the sounds and feel of Africa without me, in another man’s bed, not even thinking about me any more: and it felt very bad. And I felt the warm smell and feel and familiarity of Africa, and it felt very bad in the mornings.
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