by Ann Harries
I back away. I find a voice which says: ‘Maria, are you allowed to swim like that?’ She looks at me slyly. ‘I got all dirty from the ice-cream. So I had to have a barf.’
And in she plunges once more.
I return to the summerhouse and unpack my camera. In spite of the sun I drag the tripod, the black hood, the plates, down to the pool. I ask Maria to pose for me. She stands waist-deep in the water, hands held up high beneath the spray which slithers down her torso. Snap! She crouches on hands and knees, so that only her smiling face surrounded by hair that has quadrupled in size protrudes from the water. Snap! She stares pensively at the water-jet, a self-conscious forefinger on her chin. Snap!
I remove my head from the black bag and say as casually as possible: ‘Would you like to pose for me again among the rosebushes?’
‘Wif no clothes on?’
‘Whichever you please.’
The child springs out of the fountain and streaks over to the roses. I hardly dare to follow her with my eyes.
Her buttocks would fit precisely into my cupped hands. The slit between her legs seems to have been drawn with a pencil. I can see the stripes of her ribcage. She begins to dance.
I wriggle my head into the hood and begin taking photographs. Maria points her toe, her hands in an arch above her head. Snap! Maria bends down and trails her fingers over her feet. Snap! Maria lifts one leg into the fountain. Snap! Maria bends her knees and prepares to dive. Snap!
Maria’s hand extends slyly into the oleander bush. She plucks out the chameleon, a miniature dinosaur who has not moved from his twig for a millennium of micro-seconds, and places him upon her shoulder.
‘Come closer!’ I call out. ‘So that I can photograph the two of you together.’
O, how Maria plays with the chameleon! She lies in the grass. I adjust my camera lens. He runs up and down her body. She giggles at the prickling sensation. He holds himself still, his own body now a diagonal slash across her navel. Maria’s fingers explore the grass idly and release a cloud of small flies. From the chameleon’s jaws a long coiled tongue thrusts, abruptly, but accurately.
My head under the cloth, I view the antipodeal scene, upside down, upon the plate glass. In the heat, my fingers tremble violently as I press the button to open the shutter.
And suddenly Maria is no longer there. I tear my head out of the hood and for a moment can see nothing with my dark-adapted eyes. I can hear bodies struggling. As my pupils dilate I can see that a woman has swept the child under her shawl, a woman whose frowning brow is now turned upon the extended lens which is fixed upon her like the barrel of a gun. Maria struggles and squawks but Mrs Kipling is used to dealing with children. She makes Maria don her abandoned clothes, ignoring me as I emerge from the protection of my hood.
I stand beside my camera, smiling sheepishly. She is already bustling Maria out of the rose garden, away from my contamination. Before descending into the gorge she turns to me with bitter eyes: ‘For shame, Professor!’
I have no reply to that.
Ujiji
1907
Dear Miss Schreiner,
You will no doubt be somewhat startled to receive this manuscript – a form of diary, I suppose – from someone you have undoubtedly dismissed with the greatest contempt as a man who did not keep his word. Eight years have passed since my peremptory departure from Cape Town, and not one day goes by without my resolving to write you an explanation, an apology, an excuse, call it what you will. For I live in hope of your forgiveness. Now Selous, who is visiting Central Africa, has very kindly agreed to deliver the enclosed to you on his return to Cape Town. It will reveal more than any letter ever could.
I still retain vivid memories of the last time I saw you – in the upper reaches of the Great Granary gardens, on the day before the Release of my birds was due to take place. In your arms you held two brightly painted toy automobiles which you had procured from a shop in the village below – I forget its name. (I often wonder whether you found it within yourself to present them to Salisbury and Chamberlain, even though my sudden exit meant it was no longer necessary for you to lure them away.)
I could have given you the telegrams then and there, and, bearing in mind the unmitigated disaster of the War that was to follow – a War that might just possibly have been prevented by the exchange of eight telegrams for two toy motorcars – I now regret most bitterly that I did not.
May I assure you that I had every intention of keeping to my side of the bargain.
However, an unforeseen chain of circumstances was to prevent this intention from being honoured. On returning to the Great Granary, I immediately shut myself up in the dark-room and spent the next hour developing and printing the photographs I had taken on the mountain slopes that morning. I pegged the pictures on the drying line and returned to my room to clean myself up and prepare for a light lunch. Imagine my astonishment when half an hour later, Huxley, the major-domo, knocked on my door and ordered me to join his master in the latter’s magnificent bedroom, wherein he often conducted his interviews.
‘And bring the telegrams with you!’ he barked, in a voice entirely devoid of respect.
On entering the bedroom, I was further surprised to find the Colossus, Mr Jameson, Mrs Kipling and Huxley standing in a row in the great bay window, for all the world like a quartet of opera singers about to break into a four-part fugue.
The Colossus said (his thatch of hair more dishevelled than ever): ‘You have completely betrayed my trust.’
Jameson said: ‘Come on, old chap, hand them over. You know I know you’ve got them.’
Mrs K said: ‘I have told them everything.’ (Her nostrils flared as she spoke, as if I were emitting an unpleasant odour.)
Huxley merely grunted.
Miss Schreiner, if you read my document, you will understand.
My host said: ‘I must ask you to leave this house within the hour.’
His best friend said: ‘Sorry it had to end this way.’
Mrs K said, or rather, spat: ‘You ought to be locked up.’
It seemed to me that, one after the other, the foursome then proceeded to lift their voices into an angry arpeggio – an accusing appoggiatura – an indignant discord – suspended in that great bedroom, requiring resolution.
‘Paedophile!’
‘Traitor!’ ‘Pervert!’
‘Thief!’
I looked around for help.
Oscar was standing beside the bed. Once again he wore his martyr’s arrows, and he was offering me his blackened smile.
Inside my ribcage a nightingale began to sing. The silver music slid around my fortressed heart, Miss Schreiner, and found some secret aperture into the very sanctum of my life’s blood. Then how the thrushes trilled! the wrens fluted! the blackbirds crooned! the starlings warbled cakewalk and telephones! Out of my mouth bubbled the song of my birds, liquid as the stream in the mountain’s cleft, potent as any wine. For my tormentors, I performed an entire dawn chorus.
‘Professor Wills, please stop that whistling! You look quite ridiculous!’
Yes, I am a ridiculous person, I can see that. And always have been. Worthy of ridicule: a laughing stock.
Oscar caught my eye and pursed his lips. His life has always perched on the edge of ridicule, a stylish bird who depends on song rather than wings for survival. Now he threw back his head sideways in the manner of his favourite saint, and winked.
The laughing stock began to laugh. Almost immediately unused muscles round my diaphragm went into spasm, causing me to bend over in pain, clutching my stomach, stamping my feet. Yet in the midst of my physical discomfort I sensed the draining away of a great weight; I became a light thing, as if borne by wings.
‘The man’s hysterical,’ said Dr Jameson.
‘I cannot see that this is a laughing matter,’ shrilled the Colossus.
‘This has gone too far!’ snapped Mrs K, and whirled out of the room, causing Oscar to jump sideways and raise an imaginary hat.
‘The telegrams, please.’ Huxley extended a hairy hand.
‘And you can have your dirty photographs back,’ smirked Jameson.
‘And what of the Release?’ I enquired.
The Colossus was towering above me. Had he suddenly grown or had I shrunk? His blue eyes, set within their red rims, had become transparent. ‘The birds can be released without you.’ He turned away to fiddle with papers on his desk.
I withdrew my hands from behind my back and placed the telegrams in Huxley’s extended palms. I said: ‘Tell me, Huxley, was it on your grandmother’s or your grandfather’s side that you are descended from an ape?’
A couple of hours later I stood on Cape Town station, surrounded by baggage and awaiting the Trans-Karoo Express. Mary the poodle pranced around my bags and left her mark upon them, while Challenger drew a map of the shortest route to his verandah-encircled house in Ujiji. He promised to join me within six months, a promise I am glad to say he has kept.
His Dodos turned out to be Whaleheaded Storks, more accurately known as the Shoebill species Balaeniceps rex. Though the bird looks like a stork or a heron it is neither, and has the honour of being the only species of its genus. I have become extremely interested in this clumsy wading creature, and somewhat concerned for its survival. It lives only among the local waterways and marshes, which hunters set on fire so as to flush out their prey. I fear that this can only result in the destruction of the habitat and the ultimate extinction of this unique species. I plan to lend my support to the creation of a National Park.
Mr Selous brings much news of Cape Town. He tells us that in the last year of the War the Colossus died in Jameson’s arms, in his little cottage by the sea. A massive lump of ice was lowered through a hole in the ceiling in an effort to cool the unusually hot and sultry temperature. I hope he did not curse me as he lay dying.
It seems inconceivable that JimJam is now the Colony’s Premier, attempting to unify a country riven with hatred. It does not help that Milner is busy anglicising the ex-Boer Republics. I am not surprised to hear he has been made a viscount out of gratitude for precipitating the Anglo-Boer War. Who gains by war? you once memorably asked him. We certainly know who the losers are: the British taxpayers who lost over two hundred million pounds in this venture, and more than fifty thousand British, Boer and Afrikaner men and women who lost their lives in bloody battle or in refugee camps (now referred to as ‘concentration’ camps, I believe), to say nothing of the thousands of black people who gave up their lives for what they thought was their country. Selous is convinced that JimJam will be knighted before long.
Selous also informs us that on the day of the Release, my songbirds flew off into the forest and were never seen again –except for the starlings, who have by now become a national pest. Some of them can sing like nightingales, he says.
Yours very sincerely, Miss Schreiner,
Francis Wills
The Impatient Imperialist
Today is the centenary of Dr Jameson’s birth. This worthy man, who always acted from the highest motives, owes his immortality solely to an act of impatient folly. It was his ambition to be an idealistic builder of Empire; and he served Cecil Rhodes with sincere devotion.
It was largely thanks to Jameson that Matabeleland was won for British authority without bloodshed. He meant to rescue the Transvaal by a similar act of daring. The men who encouraged him – Rhodes at Capetown and those still more highly placed in London – may have been without scruples; Jameson himself was an idealist, however mistaken.
But when the plans for a revolution at Johannesburg misfired, Jameson launched the supreme blunder of the Raid. He thought the failure would fall only on himself. Instead it ruined Rhodes and more remotely Joseph Chamberlain. Still more it ruined all hopes of a reconciliation between Boers and Britons.
Jameson devoted the remainder of his life to trying to undo the effects of his disastrous act. He served as Prime Minister at the Cape, held out the hand of friendship to Botha, and died, a respectable baronet, in 1917.
But the Jameson Raid had made an ineffaceable mark on South African life; we see its working even at the present day. Yet it was not without its good consequences, though Jameson might have deplored them.
The Raid was the high-water mark of aggressive British Imperialism. The reaction against it first brought together the ‘pro-Boers’; it was they, not Rhodes, Milner or Chamberlain who set their stamp on the modern Commonwealth of Nations.
Guardian, 9 February 1953
No gratitude
ZIMBABWE’S Marxist dictator Robert Mugabe is steadily removing all British names from streets and squares in Harare.
But if Cecil Rhodes and other British pioneers had not tamed the wilderness there would be no Zimbabwe and no towns.
And Mr Mugabe would not be sitting in state dressed in a smart western suit.
He would be roaming the veldt in a loin cloth and carrying a spear.
There ain’t no gratitude!
Sun, 1990
Acknowledgements
For the information about Cecil Rhodes’ ill-fated British songbird project, I have many of Rhodes’ biographers to thank; in addition, Appollon Davidson offered an unexpected sub-plot by linking the Jameson Raid with Oscar Wilde’s trials of 1895 in his extraordinary Cecil Rhodes and his Time (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1988). I have also drawn on details from: Robert I. Rothberg’s monumental volume The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power (Southern Book Publishers, Johannesburg, 1988); Elizabeth Pakenham’s insights in her Jameson’s Raid (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1960); Brian Roberts’ description of life in the New Rush diamond-mining camps in Kimberley, Turbulent City (David Philip, Cape Town, 1976); and the research of the many biographers of most of the characters in Manly Pursuits. Their revelations have provided me with the historical framework of this novel, which is narrated by practically the only character in the book who exists only in my imagination.
I should also like to thank those friends and family members whose enthusiastic support has encouraged me so much, and whose printing equipment was responsible for the original hard copy of Manly Pursuits.
A Note on the Author
Ann Harries was born and educated in Cape Town, where she worked in township schools and community centres. On moving to England she became active in the anti-apartheid movement. She now lives in the Cotswolds and is writing her next novel.
Copyright © 1999 by Ann Harries
First published in Great Britain in 1999 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
www.bloomsbury.com
This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written 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.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
eISBN 978-1-4088-4182-2
Visit www.bloomsbury.com to find out more about our authors and their books.
You will find extracts, author interviews and author events and you can sign up for newsletters to be the first to hear about our latest releases and special offers
yscale(100%); -o-filter: grayscale(100%); -ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share