by Muriel Spark
The boat stopped at Madeira. Down the precarious rope ladder we climbed, into a waiting rowing boat, which took us to the island. Madeira was truly an island of dreams in the days before the tourist boom. Flowers proliferated – mainly dahlias, bright-coloured daisies, carnations, anemones. The Madeirans pressed garlands on us, and bouquets of flowers. I saw, for the first time, the rich cultivation of guavas, mangoes, bananas, papaws, oranges. The women had a special way of embroidering white linen tea cloths with coffee-brown thread. (This embroidery had been introduced to the island in 1850 by an Englishwoman.) Some of the designs were magnificent. I bought a modest tea cloth for less than five shillings and that was the only item in my ‘trousseau’. My husband was not trousseau-minded and neither was I. To people like us, the gifts of the intellect were considered enough. But my Madeira tea cloth reminded me for many years of my day on the beautiful island, where the flowers and fruit luxuriated, where the cathedral held only a few worshipping peasant women with dark-grey shawls.
South we went along the coast of Africa, crossing the tropic of Cancer, crossing the Equator (with a great deal of ducking ceremony around the swimming pool), and passing into the tropic of Capricorn. I was amazed to see the legendary Southern Cross hanging in the sky, in bright reality. The waters at night glittered with phosphorus. All day, the flying fish leapt like ballet dancers. I felt like a real adventurer of the globe.
My South African friends made me promise to write often and come to see them soon. When the boat reached Cape Town we said only a temporary goodbye. It was very strange. For some reason that family of three, the father, the mother and the boy student, were convinced that I wouldn’t stay long in Rhodesia. They gave me their address: ‘always a home to come to’. In fact I never saw them again. My shipboard boyfriend wrote to me in Rhodesia about a year later. He sent the photographs they had taken on board and in Madeira. I didn’t reply. I was already facing problems.
At Cape Town, as I was a minor, Thomas Cook, the travel agents, had an official waiting for me with ‘Thomas Cook’ printed prominently round the band of his peaked cap. He was to deliver me to the guard on the train to Salisbury (now Harare), capital of the then Southern Rhodesia. Behold, he had a brown-coloured young attendant with him, bearing a bunch of flowers for me! I was taken right back to my school-days: Miss Christina Kay describing to the spellbound class her thrilling experiences in Egypt and the dragoman coming to say goodbye, bearing a bunch of flowers for her; I remembered my mother’s comment, ‘Thomas Cook paid for those flowers.’ (In my case it had been my future husband – bearer of flowers – who had ordered them.) On the train to Salisbury, the flowers were placed on my table in the dining-room. I felt very much a woman of the world.
Southern Rhodesia was a self-governing colony, which meant that it had its own parliament and also a Governor representing the British monarch. The country came under the vague shadow of the Dominions Office, allied to the Colonial Office, especially in the field of Native Affairs. But the parliament, consisting of elected members, all white, ran the internal business of the country. The law, like that of most of colonial Africa, was Roman Dutch. It was an unusual situation, never very satisfactory. The number of whites in 1937 was about fifty-five thousand. The blacks numbered about one and a half million, rapidly increasing.
I don’t know how anyone could have thought of this situation as anything but temporary. To me at the time, there was no feeling of permanence, and I marvelled at people newly arrived from England, who had every intention of remaining for ever. They thought the country was an extension of South Africa. But the spirit of the times in those years between the two world wars was already decidedly against the South African model. Southern Rhodesia was then fifty years old and the pioneering spirit pervaded the atmosphere. I didn’t and couldn’t pretend to belong. I intended to stay for the pre-arranged three years and gain as much human experience as I could.
Because most of Zimbabwe is on a plateau four or five thousand feet above sea-level, the climate is sub-tropical. I arrived in the spring, just before the beginning of the rainy season and the hottest months. I was married in Salisbury, in the magistrate’s office, on 3 September 1937, but not before there had been a technical hitch.
I was a minor of nineteen. Where, demanded the magistrate, a Mr Smith, was my father? Without his permission I could not get married. It had never occurred to me to bring a letter of permission from my father. Cables were sent off to my parents and also to the High Sheriff of Edinburgh; only his word, on the strength of my father’s affidavit, would satisfy the Rhodesian authorities. My father, in Edinburgh, swore his assent – reluctantly, as I knew, and as he later confirmed. Finally the permission reached Rhodesia and the marriage took place.
Soon I was settled in rooms in the hotel at Fort Victoria, where my husband’s job was. Fort Victoria, a small town in the southern part of the country, was close by the famous Zimbabwe Ruins, and in those comparatively early days the ruins were still surrounded by thick jungle bush and vegetation. The approach was a narrow clearing. I am still glad that I got my first sight of this wonderful complex of Bantu antiquity more or less as it must have been when it was first ‘discovered’ by the intrepid explorers of the nineteenth century. The ruins are now said to date from about the ninth century and to be the product of a local African folk who lived and worshipped there. The remains consist of a stone-wall maze covering the floor of a valley. The walls are high, about eight feet; at one point they surround a cone-shaped tower about thirty feet high. A short distance away, a hill of granite stones and boulders leads up to what is known as the ‘acropolis’ – layers of enclosures, which are thought to have been dwelling places – and to a distinctive building that fulfilled a religious function. Frieze carvings along the walls led many early archaeologists to speculate that the ruins were the original King Solomon’s Mines, of Abyssinian or Phoenician origin. But whether or not this evidence of the Zimbabwe civilization, rising as it does out of the harsh, uncultivated jungle, was the original inspiration of Rider Haggard’s novel, the evidence of radio-carbon and other more recent tests appears to prove that the ruins are indeed of indigenous African origin.
During my first weeks in Rhodesia I loved to go there. Life in Fort Victoria was too lazy and slow for me. It was simply an adaptation of English village life, of which I knew little at first hand. The wife of the chemist, the doctor, the Church of England vicar, the wives of the other schoolmasters all called on me, leaving two cards (or maybe three), one with the corner turned down. I had no calling cards and didn’t intend to have any. Actually, I felt too young and too intelligent for all that formal married-woman business. Almost immediately, I was looking forward to getting home again in three years’ time, and for that reason I was determined to absorb all I could of these exotic surroundings. The flowers were exceedingly quick-flowering and bright, especially the convolvulus, which sprinkled the veldt half an hour after the rain. The first colours of spring were yellow, brown, gold. Later they turned to green.
It struck me right away what good-looking people the blacks of that area were. It was rightly said that education could give whites an intellectual advantage over blacks, but what was never mentioned, never breathed, was that in spite of a poor diet, spartan shelter, and inadequate medicine the African natives of Southern Rhodesia were, as physical examples of the human race, vastly superior to the average white men and women around them. A great many of the Rhodesian blacks were magnificent. Compared with them, the conquering race looked as if it had only just emerged milk-fed from some nursery. The European women were wrinkled early, parched with the sun.
I had nobody to talk to. Some miles away – but too many miles, as I know now – lived Doris Lessing, then a young girl like me, still in her teens. How I would have loved to have someone like Doris to talk to. She was a Rhodesian by upbringing, and I am sure she already had a distinguished mind. But I didn’t meet Doris till many years later.
The white women mainly
went around clutching a hundred-cigarette box of Gold Leaf cigarettes (the Rhodesian brand) in their hands, with a lighted cigarette perpetually drooping out of the side of their mouths. I didn’t like these women. When we next moved, to Salisbury, they proliferated. They were very sure of themselves as women. In the colony, there was one white woman to three white men, which led to violent situations – sometimes to murder – among the men.
Some women of my acquaintance wore a key on a cord around their necks. This key was to lock up the sugar against the black servants. ‘They steal as much as a pound at a time,’ said one of the women to me. I ventured that maybe the servants needed the sugar. This observation was regarded as blasphemy. Indeed, there was no way in which one could really befriend a native African, for dire penalty wrought by Heaven and earth for such a course of action fell not in the least on the white befriender but on the black befriended. I think if I had sat down in the kitchen to have my morning coffee with my cook, Moses, nobody would have said a word to me. But Moses would have been made to feel ‘his place’ in a hundred different, petty ways.
All the same, by the time I reached Rhodesia, various reforms had been introduced (always by pressure from London, against the wishes of the Rhodesian whites). In my day, no black African stepped off the pavements to make way for a passing white, as had been required previously by law. Young, homeless blacks who did not want to work on the land were not beaten into submission but were left alone, thanks to a public outcry in England. But sometimes I was horrified by the stories I was told, mainly by Afrikaners, or people of South African Dutch origin – who would proudly narrate this or that story of how an impertinent black had been ‘fixed’. My story ‘The Curtain Blown by the Breeze’ contains such an incident: a farmer, I was told, on returning home found a piccanin (as we called a small black boy) standing outside the windows of his wife’s room, peeping at her through the curtains while she breast-fed the baby. For this crime, he shot the piccanin dead. This story was told me by a smug, self-satisfied South African Dutch woman of about forty-five, whom I met in one of the many boarding-houses I lived in during my married life. (My husband was quarrelsome; we were always being posted elsewhere.) The woman seemed to think the farmer was quite right and to regret that things were changing or had changed. I was unable to speak. I simply stared at the woman. She didn’t notice this, but went on talking in her self-righteous way. The farmer, she lamented, went to prison for three years.
I remember a similar woman (and she was typical of many men) sitting at our table one mealtime, describing how a man of her acquaintance, driving along one of the Rhodesian highways (which were tarmac only in strips), deliberately knocked dead a black cyclist who refused to get off one of the strips to accommodate the car coming behind him. ‘That fixed him, that fixed him,’ said the woman, heaving her prominent bosom with the utmost satisfaction. Again, I was struck silent, as was my husband. Our friends of British origin were much more reasonable and civilized in their attitude, but the rough, frontier-type atmosphere was often unpleasant; it entered one’s soul. I knew I could never make my home in such conditions.
When I was expecting a baby, my husband suggested, very earnestly, that I have an abortion. He was beginning to feel uneasy and unstable. I refused. My son, Robin, was born in Bulawayo on 9 July 1938, at the Lady Rodney Nursing Home, after a labour of a day and a half – far too long. I was at the end of my strength and didn’t expect that either I or my baby would survive, and, indeed, it was a miracle that we both emerged strong and healthy. I had bitten down one of my nails. My husband brought me a manicure set and a bunch of flowers. He began to show signs of the severe nervous disorder from which he had suffered and was to suffer all his life. He had fits of violence, and continued to quarrel with everybody. I now had news from my parents, in Edinburgh, that his sister had been committed as an insane person. In a lucid moment, my husband said, ‘One day this will all appear to you as a bad dream.’ I knew he was right. Plainly, he needed professional help. We had no marital life after the birth of my son. I made one trip with my husband to the Victoria Falls, hoping this would make him feel better. That by itself was wonderful; but I knew my married life was over. Strangely, the experience of the Victoria Falls gave me courage to endure the difficult years to come. The falls became to me a symbol of spiritual strength. I had no settled religion, but I recognized the experience of the falls as spiritual in kind. They are one of those works of nature that cannot be distinguished from a sublime work of art.
I think everyone should try once to visit this true wonder of the world; it should become a sort of Mecca and place of pilgrimage for the human race. I don’t know why peace conferences are not held in the vicinity of the Victoria Falls. I can think of no other experience that makes for the reasonable contemplation of our humanity, and a sense of the proportions in which we should think.
Some years later when I was working on my own as a freelance writer in London I wrote a short story ‘The Seraph and the Zambesi’ specially for a story competition that had been announced in The Observer. In that story (which, happily for me, won the prize) I felt a compulsion to describe the Zambesi River and the approach to the falls through the mysterious Rain Forest as a mystical experience. I expressed, symbolically, how the aridity of the white people there had affected me.
The falls occur in the middle of the course of the wide Zambesi River, where it borders Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia) to the north, and Zimbabwe, to the south. The precipice that forms the waterfall is three hundred and fifty-five feet at its deepest. The waters drop into a churning chasm formed by the opposite wall of the precipice, and it is there one stands to watch the grandeur of the scene which no statistical measurement of widths, heights and depths can adequately convey. The usual route to the falls leads through a heavily wooded area known as the Rain Forest, since it is filled with the spray. I remember that on my way through this forest I saw a man covered with oilskins (as I was) for protection from the spray; this man looked about twelve feet tall, and the trees were equally magnified by some peculiarity of the incessant and beautiful vapour. At a distance of about two hundred feet, you begin to hear the tumult of the falls. Then it becomes a roar. Musioa-tunya – the smoke that thunders – is the name given to the falls by the local tribes. Amid this great roar, one looks up, one looks down, and from side to side: no more sky, no more forest – everywhere is a mighty cascade of water.
The Zambesi River itself was another unforgettable marvel. I went on a steamboat among rhinoceroses and crocodiles, with low trees lining the shore crowded with chattering monkeys and alive with happy and agile small boys making fun among the voracious-looking orchids.
My days in Salisbury and Bulawayo were nothing like as happy as the times I spent in the country. I loved to visit the farms. There was a more relaxed, democratic atmosphere on the land, where whites and blacks could work together unceremoniously.
In Bulawayo I contracted septicaemia and nearly died. I remember only a screen round my bed and faces peering at me. Dr Rose Sugarman, who later became a close friend, said, ‘You’re very ill.’ I said, ‘I know.’ Two days later, I sat up in bed and ate the best part of a box of chocolates that someone had brought me. There were still no antibiotics in those days. The cure was aspirins and, I suppose, youth.
I wrote home a nostalgic letter, pining for those games of golf that I used to enjoy in Edinburgh, even though sporadically. There were golf courses in both Salisbury and Bulawayo. My father sent me a handsome set of clubs in a smart golf bag. He had already bought me a small diamond watch to celebrate the birth of my son; he kept it for me, not wishing to trust the mail. I have the watch to this day but not the clubs, and I wonder what happened to them in all the vicissitudes of my life in Africa.
We were transferred from place to place. This was a drawback from the domestic aspect, and it certainly reflected an uneasiness in my husband’s career. But drawbacks can be advantages if you think in the opposite direction. This unse
ttled life gave me, at least, a full knowledge of the country. The place I enjoyed living in most was one that few people envied. It was Gwelo, a farming area in the central part. Gwelo was still primitive. I felt I was living in the real Rhodesia of the pioneers. We had no electricity, and instead used paraffin lamps, which needed constant attention. Water was carried for miles in petrol cans on the shoulders of our housemen every morning. We managed a weekly bath. The rainy season brought thudding rain and sudden storms followed by a hot calm, in which flying ants would wriggle out of cracks in the wall. My little son was immensely happy in Gwelo. The blacks there were amiable and extremely kind, especially to toddlers. My son was difficult to feed, but I would often find him down in the native quarters eating with them round the mealie pot.