Sometimes, when he visited, they did not talk much. Jack sat on the veranda making his wire cars while Madzibaba Bob smoked a pipe and read his newspapers. It was during one of these silent sessions that Jack finally worked up the courage to ask the one question he had wanted to ask after the second and third time that he had seen Madzibaba Bob. ‘Do you always wear the same clothes?’ he asked. ‘The blue shorts, the green shirt? Do you wash them every day, to wear the next day?’
‘I have six shirts,’ Madzibaba Bob said. ‘And seven pairs of shorts. My wife makes them on her sewing machine.’
‘I have different clothes,’ Jack said. ‘They are all sorts of colours. Don’t you ever want different clothes?’
‘These suit me just fine.’
It was these visits with Madzibaba Bob that made Jack begin to think for the first time of what it meant to be a white person. He knew there were different people in the world, people who looked like his sister and her grandmother, people who looked him, like his classmates at Hartmann House, his old school. Somewhere were whole countries like Britain, full of people who looked like him and Madzibaba Bob. He could go there, one day, to Britain, or he could stay in Chitungwiza, stay and become another Madzibaba Bob, with a wife who made him six green shirts and seven pairs of blue shorts with her sewing machine.
Something in him rebelled at that notion, at the idea of himself in twenty years’ time, with blue shorts, and a green shirt, cycling his bicycle with Chitungwiza’s children screaming murungu, murungu after him. He would always be a person apart, a murungu like Madzibaba Bob, different, always having to be called by what, and not who he was, always identified by the striking singularity of his difference, just like Jonas who sewed overalls at the shop, known only as chirema, the cripple, or Lameck, the old albino man who lived in Seke, who was only ever called musope.
That there were only two whites in this entire place of thousands meant that this was surely not his place. But where was his place? Greendale, Hartmann House; that was no longer his life. Where else was there, if not here? Where was it that he ought to be?
‘You are British, you know,’ Madzibaba Bob’s voice said in his mind, but what did that mean? Britain, he knew, was the place people went to get money. They worked as nurses, and sometimes doctors, they went and sent money home, like the two aunts of his friend Kudzai, like the brother of his friend Tauya, like the sister of his teacher Mrs Marere. Like his father John and stepmother Anatolia who often went to Britain and came back laden with presents like his favourite Spider-Man T-shirt. Britain was the place people went to get things.
Then one day, Madzibaba Bob asked to go with him to his sister’s grandmother’s house. He sat on the veranda, and after meandering from the price of sugar, the scarcity of bread and the possibility of rains, said what he had come to say. Jack had come to know by now that his sister’s grandmother disliked vana vakaganhira, children who, among other things, listened in to adult conversation, and so he listened without being seen to be listening as Madzibaba Bob said, ‘The boy is a British citizen, it may well be that he is best among his own kind, they will advise you better at the British Embassy. I suggest that you go there with him, it is in town, at Corner House on Samora Machel.’
But Madzibaba Bob’s visit was followed by a funeral whose wake was held at his sister’s grandmother’s house. Jack slept on the floor, listening to the wails of the newcomers over the coffin in the living room. He tried to keep his memory from remembering that these songs too, had been sung at the wake for his father, and Anatolia, his stepmother.
That funeral was followed by more illness, then his grandmother went away to see her sick sister. When she came back, she brought two more children with her. The new children stared at Jack. They laughed and pointed at Jack. But worse was to come: the new additions put pressure on the household.
They went through a bad period of hunger in which his sister’s grandmother was reduced to cooking some of the wares she sold on her stall. The food was well cooked, but there was so little of it that eating it made them hungrier still.
Jack went to Madzibaba Bob’s house. He was dead, the neighbours said. He went suddenly in his sleep. Just like Jack’s parents, he was there one day, then the next, not. That night, his sister Manatsa had cried that she was hungry and her grandmother had broken down in tears. Jack knew he had to do something.
A morning came on which he feigned illness, and did not go to school. As soon as his grandmother had gone to her market stall, he put his plan into action. He climbed a chair and took down the box from the top of the wardrobe where he knew his grandmother kept her important papers. Inside, he found his father’s passport, his stepmother’s passport, and his own. He saw his face, two years old in this passport, his hair like an upside-down bowl resting on his head. He read aloud the first words on the first page, tracing them with his finger. ‘Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State requests and requires in the Name of Her Majesty …’
He turned his attention to the other papers in the box. His and his sister Manatsa’s birth certificates. Some old photographs, including a series that made his heart stop; his father Jack and stepmother Anatolia, dead in their coffins, eyes closed as they rested on white shiny pillows. His hand shook as he put these back. He thought again and took out the photograph of his father. He placed it in the middle of the passport.
He took only the passport but there was this: how to carry it into town? Not in his jeans pocket, that was certain. ‘Town is full of thieves and vagabonds,’ his sister’s grandmother always said. She kept her money and national ID card in her bra when she had to go to town. He knew because when his aunt got mugged, his grandmother had yelled at her for not being careful.
‘You walk around with your money in your bag, inviting thieves to mug you, and then what happens? You are mugged, that’s what happens, all your money is stolen,’ she had said. ‘Mari ndeyekuviga mubhodhi, I have kept my money in my bra all these years and not once have I been mugged.’
‘How can I keep money in my bra?’ his sister’s aunt had said. ‘Don’t you know there is inflation, you need at least twenty notes just to buy a loaf of bread, how can I put it all in my bra? And you know how that money smells, all those thin notes, all that sweat.’
He had no bra, but he had Sellotape for sticking on the covers of his exercise books. Carefully, he held the passport to his chest, with his father’s photograph in the middle, and wound the roll of Sellotape round and round his body until the passport was stuck to his skin. He looked under the bed and extracted some notes from the thin wad he knew his sister’s grandmother kept there for emergencies.
He sat down and wrote a note on a page torn from his English exercise book, tracing out the Shona words carefully in his round handwriting. ‘Dear Gogo, I have gone to the British Embassy so that they take me to Britain to become a doctor. I have taken 20,000 dollars to go to town. I promise that I will send you lots of money when I get there. I will send money for everyone, but especially for you, Gogo, and for Manatsa. Don’t worry about me. From Jack.’
He cancelled out ‘From Jack’, and wrote, ‘Yours Jack.’
He put the note on the coffee table in the living room, put on his school shoes and went out to the main road to get a kombi to town. He sat in the corner, his bus fare tightly clenched in his hand. The kombi was not full, and apart from one or two people who turned to stare at him, he was completely undisturbed. When it came time to pay, he counted out his money carefully. In town, he walked from Fourth Street bus terminus, asking every few metres for the way to the British Embassy. The black people he asked seemed more interested in his life story than in showing him where Corner House lay, they tried to get him to say more things in Shona. A man ran after him, and, frightened, he ran across Jason Moyo Avenue, almost colliding with a blind beggar who was led by a small boy. On the other side of the street, he was grabbed by a burly white man who gripped him tight and would not let go. ‘Where’s the fire, my boy?’ the ma
n asked him.
‘Ndisiye,’ he responded in Shona and struggled to free himself.
‘Where are you trying to get to?’ the man asked.
Jack looked up.
The man looked rough, but his voice seemed kind.
‘The British Embassy,’ he said. ‘Corner House.’
‘Come on, I’ll take you there,’ the man said. Jack’s need was greater than his caution. He got into the passenger seat of the car that was parked a short distance away. The man barked a few more questions, but soon gave up when Jack refused to talk. They drove in silence for about six minutes. The only landmark that Jack recognised was the Meikles Hotel. He had been there once with his father John and his stepmother, to attend a wedding. He and Manatsa had begged to ride on the backs of the lions outside the hotel. His father had said they could not but had taken them to Greenwood Park afterwards. A lump formed in Jack’s throat. He swallowed and blinked hard to push back the hot tears that he could feel gathering. ‘That’s Corner House,’ the man said and indicated the building with a stubby finger. Jack got out, and so concentrated was he on not wanting to cry that by the time he remembered his manners enough to say, ‘Thank you,’ the man had driven off, shaking his head.
There was a security guard at the desk in the reception of the building. His nametag said Boniface. Jack spoke, but the desk was high, Jack was small and the guard did not hear him. Jack raised his voice. The security guard came round the desk and loomed down at him. With all the authority that he could muster, Jack looked up at him and said, ‘You have to take me home.’ He lifted up his Spider-Man T-shirt to expose the passport taped to his midriff. Then he sat on the floor without waiting for a response and, to the astonishment of the security guard, he pulled up his knees to rest his head, put his arms around his face and cried.
A Kind of Justice
So shalt thou put away the guilt of innocent blood from among you, when thou shalt do that which is right in the sight of the Lord.
– The Book of Deuteronomy –
Saizozo unofanira kubvisa ropa risinemhosa pakati pako, kana waita zakarurama pamberi paJehova.
– Buku yecishanu yaMosesi inonzi Deuteronomio –
On the third of Pepukai’s eight days in Freetown, the Land Cruiser in which she rode with her assistant Anton and their driver Johnny drove over and killed a local chicken. A scrawny bird both fleshless and featherless, the chicken’s death was soundless. So quick was its passing that Anton sitting with Johnny in the front failed to see it, Johnny failed to see it and the car drove on in a whirl of red dust. Only Pepukai, who sat in the back, saw the gathering congregation of mourners around the flattened body.
‘You killed a chicken back there, Johnny,’ she said.
‘Jah, Jah, Jah, bless sweet Salone,’ Johnny sang along to the music.
‘Johnny, we have to go back, we killed a chicken.’
Above the volume, Johnny shouted, ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, I am. We should go back.’
‘I saw nothing.’
Pepukai fought her mounting irritation. It was only three days since she had met Johnny but she was already beginning to tire of him. The terrifying helicopter ride across the estuary from the airport at Lungi to Freetown had not put her at ease, nor had the lengthy process of being harangued over every item in her bag at Customs. So she had been singularly unamused when Johnny, who held up the name of their organisation, had reached for Anton’s bags ahead of hers and fawned over him while giving her a look that suggested he was appraising her only to assess her desirability. He had then spent the journey to the Mamba Point Hotel refusing to believe what Anton told him, that Pepukai was not his secretary but in fact, was, in Johnny’s own words, Anton’s ‘Big Bussman’.
‘Pretty girl like you can’t be Big Bussman, no, no, that is not possible.’ Then had come the personal questions, was she married, and why not, what was she waiting for, all women should have baby, many baby, but maybe she was too big, too important to have baby. And now this. Did he think she had flown all the way from London to Freetown to make up stories about squashed chickens?
Anton said, ‘Perhaps we should drive back, Johnny. Just to check.’ As Johnny turned the car around with no further protest, Pepukai thought wryly that, here in the continent of her birth, where a black woman could only suggest, coax, hint, cajole and hope to persuade, a white man could command and expect obedience.
They found a family group gathered around the body of the chicken, its blood vivid against the red dust of the road. It had clearly come from a house with a short driveway that led into the road. A man and a woman spoke to each other in furious Krio as they looked at the dead chicken. Two children, about six and eight, danced at the side of the road, next to them stood a bare-chested prepubescent girl who held a naked baby. They all looked as Johnny, Pepukai and Anton left the car. Johnny approached them with a greeting.
On hearing Krio, the woman broke into a mix of English and Krio and said, ‘Wetin mek yu kill mi fol?’
‘Ah-ah! Mttsshw!’ Johnny said as he screwed his mouth into a hissing moue. ‘Udat kill yu fol? Nor to di fol run kam na di road?’
His voice was rough, his manner insolent.
The man immediately said, ‘Padi man, nor ala pan mi uman so. Nor tok to am so.’
‘Eh! Wetin mek yu uman in sef for tok to me so?’ Johnny said. ‘If ee respect me, ar dey respect am but if ee hala pan me, misef dey hala pan am also.’
The woman immediately shouted, ‘Haaay! Hot sun today o! Wey you don kill me fol don you dey kam opin you ass tok bout respect o? You wan tif me fol den yu dey can tok to me anyow? Nor tok to me so o. Me no to yu uman o!’
In high dudgeon, Johnny said, ‘You krase ehn? You dey mek lek say na by wilful I kill di fol!’
He turned to Anton and said, ‘This crazy woman talk like I murder the chicken, like I kill it wilful.’ He turned back to the conversation as he and the couple talked over each other. Pepukai was about to remonstrate with Johnny when Anton put his hand into his pocket to produce a five-thousand Leone note. He offered it to the woman and said, ‘Take this. It’s for your chicken.’ At the sight of the coloured note, the woman looked even more offended.
‘Mttssssshhw,’ she said, and she made an even louder hissing moue with her mouth than Johnny had. She spat on the ground and curled her mouth in contempt. Anton took out another ten-thousand Leone note, and pressed the money on to Johnny, who tried to press it into the man’s hands. The man did not grasp his fingers around the notes and they fluttered unclaimed onto the ground next to the chicken. One of the dancing children made as though to reach for the money before receiving a sharp slap on the shoulder from the woman.
‘We nor want yu moni, yeri?! Na for ol am,’ she shouted.
People from neighbouring houses began to gather, and sensing that the atmosphere might get mutinous, Anton asked Johnny to drive on. Johnny moved to the car, Pepukai and Anton following, while the woman continued to gesticulate after them.
‘God bless you una,’ she shouted as they drove off.
These words seemed a strange benediction under the circumstances but they were familiar to Pepukai. Words such as these were used seven thousand kilometres away, further south in her part of Africa, where Mwari ngaave nemi, God be with you, was said when the speaker was so consumed with helpless anger and rage that the most that could be done was to leave any vengeance in the hands of the Almighty.
‘These people are a problem,’ Johnny said as they drove on. ‘Refugees from the war who came here with their chickens and rural habits and who never went back.’ He paused in his speech to send a gob of spit through the window before continuing, ‘This is Freetown; it is not Bo or Makeni.’
The incident had made him loquacious, and instead of singing to his music, he lowered the volume. ‘This very nice part of Freetown,’ he said as he avoided a pothole in the road. ‘Up there is home of Chinese ambassador, Guinea ambassador, all the Big People.’ He pointed in the direction o
f a dust road that seemed littered with shacks more suited to little people. Then beyond the shacks and through the trees, Pepukai saw them, the houses of the big people, shapeless, newly built constructions, box-shaped concrete promontories over the ocean.
‘So you here to make a film,’ Johnny said.
‘Yes,’ Anton said. ‘We work for an organisation that works on transitional justice. We are doing a documentary on three countries.’
‘We are thinking of making a documentary,’ Pepukai corrected.
Johnny ignored this and directed his talk to Anton. ‘You make film about the war? Like Blood Diamond. That is good film, very good film. Very, very good film. It was very bad war, long war, very, very bad war.’
‘Well,’ said Anton, ‘it is not quite like Blood Diamond, and it is not about the war, it is about what happens now that the war is over, with the main guys being tried by the Special Court and everything.’
‘Ah, Special Court,’ said Johnny. ‘Very good news for us, very good, Special Court from United Nations. It create many, many jobs. Like mine. The United Nations is very good, many jobs.’
He laughed as he swerved to avoid another pothole.
‘But they don’t get everyone,’ he said. ‘Special Court don’t get everybody. Foday Sankoh, he die. Johnny Koroma, he escape, run away to Guinea, maybe he dead.’
They drove on in silence until Johnny said, ‘We have same name, I am also Johnny Koroma, but not Johnny Paul Koroma. Maybe I am real Johnny Koroma, maybe you make film about me, and you pay me for interview. You pay US dollar.’
He laughed again. ‘But better to forget the war. Too much talk talk about war is no good.’
At the intersection, a car beeped at them, and Johnny beeped back, and shouted ‘How di bodi!’ and laughed loudly as he waved at the driver.
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