by Ruth Hartley
“Can’t see any problem. We’d best just get on. It’s as far to the camp as it is to the last village and there’s no mechanic that I know in that area. I wonder if the last lot of diesel was slightly adulterated. Can’t trust the guys at the petrol pumps these days.”
Whatever Oscar had done or not done, it was true that the Cruiser did run better for being checked. They were almost at the camp site when it stopped abruptly. Nothing Oscar could do made the engine fire up again. Lara had got out of the Cruiser and found a thicket dense enough to crouch behind for a pee. As she returned to the vehicle she could see from the position of the sun that they had perhaps an hour before it set and maybe with luck another half-hour of poor light after that. It was not yet winter but the African twilight became shorter with every passing day.
“We’re a couple of kilometres from the camp by road.” Oscar, a little distracted by some tsetse flies, was beside her pointing out the route. “It’s only half a kilometre from us as the crow flies across this valley where there’s also a bit of a swamp during the rains. The road has to make a long curve round to the east here to avoid the steep rocky hillside in front of the camp and straight opposite. We are going to have to walk, Lara.”
Lara shook her head in wonder at the sight before her.
“Look!” she said. “Can’t you smell them and see them – there are just hundreds of them! That’s why the tsetse flies are so bad here.”
“See what?” began Oscar then said astonished. “Damn! What a bloody nuisance! What an absolute bugger! I didn’t see them – too focussed on the Cruiser!”
From her acquaintance with Oscar, Lara knew that he almost never swore and seldom repeated himself. They both stood in silence watching the buffalo herd spread out on the valley plain below them. It was the biggest herd that Lara had ever seen. There must have been almost a thousand buffalo. They were moving very slowly and grazing quietly on the rich vlei grass of the dambo. As Lara stared, more and more of them became visible. At first their dark hides and the dust they made had helped to obscure them among the light woods that dotted the valley but the longer she looked the more there were to see. They filled the valley between them and the Tin Heart Camp and spread out into the bush on either side and over the road that would take them into the camp. It was amazing that so many animals could be so quiet. They could hear them breathe and snort gently, hear them chomp and tear the grass, but their great bodies and hard hooves made little noise.
Oscar grinned at Lara then shrugged his shoulders.
“Well that is some sight isn’t it? But Lara – what are our options here – what shall we do? What do you think? I can leave you with the Cruiser and walk to the camp, but it will be dark before I get back.”
“If you walk I’ll come with you.” Lara responded. “We’ve only got one rifle between us. I don’t fancy being left without it in an open Cruiser and you’ll need it if you’re on foot. We’re not going to get to the camp in what’s left of daylight if we take the long road around the valley in order to skirt the buffalo. I think that this herd of buffalo will have every predator in the area prowling around it and we will be just in the right place in the dark if they want a change of diet.”
“It’s a risk.” Oscar agreed. “Right now the buffalo seem quite settled and it’s hard to judge without spending more time watching them where they came from and where they’re moving to. They may be moving across our route anyway. If predators attack and they stampede while we’re out on foot – well!”
“They’re quite relaxed and spread out aren’t they?” Lara observed. “If we go straight across the valley where the herd is thinnest how long will it take us and how serious a risk is it?”
Oscar drew in his breath and let it out slowly.
“My thoughts exactly, Lara. If we do walk straight through the herd we’ll have to go very steadily and slowly – no faster than they move when they are grazing and without sudden movements or sounds. We’ll go together but not too close together. Be like an innocent young buffalo calf, Lara, but without any frolicking.”
Oscar’s hand was dusty and smeared with engine oil. He used the back of it to lightly touch her face. He raised his eyebrows in question. Lara nodded once.
“Let’s go girl! Sorry about the smudge on your cheek.” he said.
Oscar collected his rifle and Lara took the heavy rubber-encased torch from the Cruiser. They made their way down the slight incline to the point where they judged the buffalo herd to be least dense. It was also where the ground was hardest, the grass sparse and the dust heaviest.
“Don’t look at any one of the buffalo for long.” Oscar said. “Try and use your peripheral vision. Buffalo can’t see straight ahead but they can see on both sides of themselves. Most animals have an extra sense of being watched and they will look back at you and realise you don’t belong among them. As it is they rely on each other by listening as well as watching. They act as a group – if one of them is spooked they will all react.”
I should be terrified. Lara thought. Why aren’t I?
She walked slowly and carefully keeping her gaze low but using every nerve of her body to feel any changes in the behaviour of the animals around her. She was aware of Oscar half a pace behind her and to her side. He varied his step so the two of them did not move in unison. The dust floated around her head, out of the corner of her eyes she saw tails flick at the tsetse fly, heavy lashes blink over dark liquid eyes, heads lift as they made little tugs at grass clumps, hooves stamp and hides twitch. Ox peckers with bright red beaks hung on the sides of the buffalo. White black-legged cattle egrets among the buffalo’s legs tilted their yellow beaks up to watch her from one eye. The rich smell of the beasts and their dung filled her nostrils. She and Oscar were buffalo too, making their quiet and certain way to the other side of the valley.
It took half an hour to cross the valley and begin the scramble up the steep rocks below the camp site. Half way up they turned to look back. The herd seemed quite undisturbed by their passage through it. The Cruiser was just visible under a distant grove of mupane trees before the road began to curve around the valley.
“Lara – you wonderful, beautiful girl!”
With his left arm, Oscar gathered Lara and pulled her against his chest. His right arm cradled his rifle in the safe position. Its butt pressed into her hipbone. Oscar put his face close to hers so their noses touched and with his tongue he tickled her dusty lips. She put her arms right around him and the gun and squeezed him tight. Then they kissed until she had to pull away to get her breath back.
By the time they reached the camp Enoch was arranging to send Mainza and Tembo out to look for them. Instead they all met at the main gate. Enoch flung his arms around Oscar with a huge smile of relief and patted out a rhythm on his back with both hands.
“Oh my friend! Glad you are fine! What’s happened to the Cruiser? Did you see the buffalo?”
He clasped Lara’s hand, his left hand supporting his right wrist as he did so and made a short bow.
“Welcome to the Tin Heart Camp, Lara. We are so happy you are with us!”
Inonge appeared from the kitchen and the two women hugged each other.
“The sun is well down.” Oscar said. “Double up on the sundowners and we’ll tell our story.”
An hour later and delightfully woozy from several gin and tonics, Lara bathed under the hot water bucket shower in the enclosure behind her tent. The air was cooling and the night sounds of the bush were all around her. She was hungry for supper. She could smell the wood smoke of the kitchen mingled with the flavours of a meaty stew. There would be wine and company for supper. Oscar would come to her bed and they would make love all night until she feel asleep with her head on the dark wiry pelt that covered his torso..
Chapter Two
Samuel’s Stories
Lara sat on a traditional stool while
she sketched. A Kasama village craftsman had shaped the stool for her from a pale light-coloured wood, probably – Lara thought – a fig tree trunk. Following her instructions he had carved a hand grip on one side of its solid single leg, then burnt a decorative black pattern onto it with metal adze heated on a fire. It was low but comfortable to sit on and allowed Lara to balance a large lightweight drawing board on her lap. Two spindly folding legs held the board at a convenient angle and a shoulder strap allowed her to carry it around easily when she had to move. All her tools, pencils, knives, watercolour pans, brushes and palette and a plastic bottle of water went into a sturdy flat-bottomed basket together with cans of personal insect spray and pastel fixative. Lara had always to check to make sure that she had picked up the correct can before she used it. So far at least she had only glued some mosquitoes to her shins with the fixative but had not yet put insect spray on her drawing. She found it was almost always the better drawings that suffered accidents but she had become used to working in a rather rough and ready way, trusting to her ability to reuse or remake any damaged work and to have a large number of sketches from which to work on her return to the city. It was almost the end of her first safari season at Enoch’s camp.
At the moment she was seated in the middle of the village near the ramshackle grass-walled church with its left-leaning crucifix of twisted branches. Behind her the boys of the village played football on a dusty sloping patch of beaten orange earth. Their lop-sided football made of plastic bags was held together with odd knotted bits of string. Their goalposts were rickety sticks.
The old man, Samuel, sat outside his mud-brick house on a low home-made bed, its frame strung with bark strips. He was thin and shrunken. His hair was tiny white hailstones, sprinkled thickly over his dark head. His cheeks were hollowed and his mouth sucked in over a few yellowed teeth, but his eyes were bright with life and he chuckled often. Inonge, his daughter-in-law, sat respectfully on the ground close by his side. Samuel spoke good English but his mumbling voice was difficult to follow and Inonge repeated his stories in answer to Lara’s questions as she worked on his portrait.
“Three wars,” the old man said. “There have been three wars in my life. Soon there will be another war. It is coming.”
“We hope there won’t be any more wars, Ambuya, Grandfather.” Inonge reassured him. “Lara wants to hear about the first war and why there are graves of white men here.”
“There are many dead among my people in the first war.” Samuel said. “Many, many, too many – but my people were not buried – they were left in the forest for the animals to eat.. The British army was defeated right here by the German general and his Askaris.”
“General von Lettow-Vorbeck,” Inonge interjected.
Lara nodded. She had heard of him.
Samuel moved his head slowly sideways and back again, considering.
“He was a great leader but a hard man to his Askaris. The British died from malaria. My people died because they were used like animals by the British and the South Africans to carry guns and supplies. There was fighting here. When we heard the guns my mother and my sisters and brothers left the village and ran to hide in the hills.”
“For four years all our crops were destroyed or stolen along with our cattle. First by the Germans – then again by the British. All those years there was famine and hunger and many people starved and died. The last battle of the Great War was fought near here. Von Lettow-Vorbeck was not defeated, he surrendered. Only when the white armies made peace were those of us left alive able to return to our villages.”
Lara knew that the regional rains produced only one crop a year. Often the stored grain didn’t last very long and people were hungry before the next harvest. If enemy soldiers also stole or destroyed crops and animals local people would die of hunger.
“Huge numbers of people starved.” Inonge said. “The estimated figure is of many, many thousands.”
“So is that why there’s a cemetery and soldiers’ graves at the mine?” Lara asked.
“The white soldiers too sick to travel were left here. It took them many months to die,” Samuel said.
“Missionaries nursed these men,” Inonge said. “Black-water fever comes from repeated attacks of malaria. It kills slowly by destroying the red blood cells and turns the urine black. Oscar says it’s because the kidneys stop working.”
So that was the reason for the war graves in the cemetery with the tin heart. These images and Samuel’s accounts of his life must be used somehow in her painting of him. Lara looked up again from her sketchbook at Samuel. She wanted him to keep on talking.
“What about the Second World War, Samuel? Why did you join up – why did you enlist?”
Again Samuel chuckled and again shook his head.
“They told us we had to go. We did not choose to go!”
“Really!” Lara was concentrating on her work but she was shocked.
She looked again harder at the subject of her drawing. What extraordinary experiences he had had and all to do with the wars that she had thought were centred in Europe. She supposed that Tim would know all about how the world wars had impacted on Africa.
“I was about 30, I think. The District Officer came here and looked for the strongest men who had been to school and could read and write. They made me sign papers – I was the teacher then – and two other men from my village also signed. Then we went far away for training to another part of Africa. After that they took us by ship across the sea – that was a long journey across much water. Most of the soldiers who went there to Burma were from Africa – only our officers were white. They said that Africans knew best how to porter heavy loads through the jungle without getting malaria.”
“The rationale was the same as in the Great War.” Inonge said pursing her mouth.
Lara frowned. This wasn’t the war that she had watched on television and in the cinema where even black American soldiers were seldom on the screen.
“And the fighting – what was that like?” Lara wanted to know. This time Samuel did not give his beguiling chuckle. He looked down at his knotted lumpy fingers.
“It was very hard fighting. The Japanese were like wild ghosts from the forest. Always they waited in hiding and then surprised us and killed us. They did not like us black-skinned people at all. If we were captured they would only take the white people as prisoners. They killed all of us Africans.”
Inonge made a snort of angry derision and sucked at her teeth.
“The army barracks in Chambeshi City are named for the battle of the Arakan that took place in Burma.” she said with a grimace. “The same name has been given to other army barracks in other African countries where the British once ruled. Did you not know that, Lara?”
Lara scratched her cheek with the end of her paintbrush.
“No, I am ashamed to say, not until Tim told me. Years ago, when my grandfather came to Chambeshi on a visit, Dad took him to that run-down club – the ‘Memorable Order of the Tin Hats’ but there were only old white ex-army men in the bar. I had always imagined that Africa was pretty much untouched by the last war. I mean I know Oscar arrived in Africa as a refugee from the war but I hadn’t realised that so many Africans took part as soldiers.”
The stories that Samuel and Inonge told were already changing the ideas that were forming in Lara’s mind about her paintings. She couldn’t wait to get into her studio and start to explore ways of depicting and exploiting them. Though they were tragic and shocking, they mattered. She was filled with excitement and pleasure at the thought of how she could use them – how she would work them into her canvases. Lara knew that she wouldn’t sleep – she would spend her nights in wakeful dreaming until these new ideas found form and expression. She had already made a large number of preliminary canvases of wild life subjects and filled a folder with drawings and watercolours of wild creatures but
these images from history and from the intervention of humans into the wild environment would be challenging. How did she feel about them? What was her angle to be? Lara thought of Tim. It would be nice to talk to him about her plans. She didn’t want to report on events though. Or to be sentimental about the suffering of those inadvertently caught up in wars. Perhaps her work would centre on a portrait of Samuel? It was odd but here she was thinking of making paintings about war. At art school she had invented her Disasters of War drawings. Now she was making a portrait of Samuel who had lived through wars himself. Lara thought of the Otto Dix paintings in Oscar’s library. She wouldn’t want to make such art if it meant personally suffering trauma as he had done.
Oscar had also asked her to do a series of paintings of birds and these had occupied a good part of her time.
“All quite small and to a standard size,” he had said. “I have a client in the United States who is a collector of bird paintings from Africa. Do them in oil so they don’t have to be framed under glass.”
Lara hadn’t been too keen on the commission at first. She felt that birds needed a freer style of expression. This had sounded rather too commercial but in the end she had enjoyed doing them and was proud of what she had achieved. Making the birds look alive and not like studies for a bird book was a challenge.
“I’ll frame them here in the mine workshop using local hard woods – ebony and mubanga. The client is a bit obsessive but he is ready to pay for the freight charges even if the frames are heavy. It’s not a bad deal,” Oscar said.
Lara raised an eyebrow at the cost of the air freight for her work, but Oscar was talking about taking her on a trip at the end of the safari season. He had promised to show her the biggest art exhibition of wildlife artists in the world. It would be at the Jackson’s Hole Wildlife Foundation in Wyoming in the United States of America and it would be Lara’s first real opportunity to see a wide range of wildlife art. She would learn a great deal and she would make good contacts. She was very interested to see how her own work compared with world famous and reputable artists. Oscar had promised five star hotels, business class seats on their flights and good restaurants wherever they stayed. Living and working at the camp was demanding and much as she loved it, a change would be wonderful. Lara felt fit, she felt engaged, both creatively and physically. Her body was alive and a source of great pleasure for her and for Oscar. From her toes to the top of her head, Lara was delighted to be alive. A few things did niggle at her. Oscar’s secrecy about his business, for example. His insistence that she must not become fond of him and that they must never talk about love between them. He was intelligent company, however, supportive about her art and a lover who made her shiver with anticipation. Just thinking of the feel and smell and girth of him made her body melt and her joints loosen.