African Dawn

by Tony Park

  ‘If I take you to Winston, will you do something for me?’

  George looked at Thandi and tried to shrug nonchalantly. ‘I suppose so, what is it?’

  She stopped and he had to reverse the bike a bit when he saw she wasn't going to follow him.

  ‘I don't have any money on me, Thandi.’ He saw her eyes flare and knew he'd said the wrong thing. ‘I'm sorry, I didn't mean …’

  She strode off, and this time he had to jog to keep up with her. He wasn't paying attention and the bike veered off the track into a thornbush. He cursed and left it there and ran after her. Each footfall set up a little explosion of dust on the track.

  ‘Thandi! Wait!’

  She was running now and he had to sprint hard to catch her. Her legs were long and slender and her stride was fluid like a beautiful female kudu racing from a predator. George chased her, but he wasn't a predator. He had no idea what this game was about, but he felt it was important that Thandi wasn't mad at him.

  He caught up with her and when he laid a hand on her shoulder she stopped and turned to face him, her chest heaving. She stared at him and when she reached out her hands he flinched, then stood still. She put her hands behind his neck, drew him to her and kissed him on the mouth.

  George thought his heart was going to explode from his body. Her lips were the softest, most delicious thing he'd ever tasted. He had no idea if he should touch her, but one thing he knew was that he never wanted this feeling to end.

  It was she who broke the kiss. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘Oh God. What have I done?’ she said. ‘My mother would kill me if she knew I'd kissed a mukiwa.’

  Oddly, he thought his mother might do the same thing to him if she caught him with a black girl, but it didn't seem an appropriate thing to say.

  ‘Thandi? Is that you?’

  George looked to the direction the voice was coming from. It was Winston.

  ‘Thandi,’ George whispered, ‘I –’

  ‘Shush. Winston would kill me, too. We must never speak of this again.’

  What did she mean? It was the first time he'd ever kissed a girl and now she was telling him they couldn't talk about it. Did that mean it was never going to happen again, or that he wasn't allowed to tell anyone?

  George followed Thandi through the bush. The rocky ground didn't seem to bother her, even though she was barefoot. He thought of the succulent taste of her lips. The sight of her bum in her tight pedal pushers was hypnotising.

  ‘George. You shouldn't have come. I don't want to get you in trouble.’ Winston scowled at his sister. She shrugged in reply.

  ‘What's going on, Winston?’

  ‘My father's been arrested and so now I'm running away from home.’

  George laughed. He'd run away from home when he was eight, after his mother had scolded him for playing with matches. He'd come home before dusk. ‘Only children run away from home.’

  ‘I am not a child. It is why I'm leaving.’

  George saw that Winston had collected some clothes and a pot and a couple of utensils in an old blanket, which was spread out on the ground. He had made a fire and was smoking a bream over it. Sadza, the thickened mealie-meal porridge that was the staple diet of all Africans, was cooking in the pot on the coals. ‘But why?’

  ‘My father has been arrested. My mother says he might be in prison for two years – perhaps more.’

  ‘So,’ George said. ‘She needs you. You are the man of the house now. You need to look after her and the others.’ He looked at Thandi, who rolled her eyes.

  ‘I want to join the army, George. I was serious. They won't take me if they know I am the son of a communist.’

  ‘Your father's not a communist, he's a schoolteacher.’

  Winston shook his head. ‘I found a book in his bedroom, hidden. It was by Karl Marx. We learned about him in school, in South Africa. The Jesuits say that communism is evil and that they kill Christians in Russia.’

  George didn't know about any of that, but he was sure Winston's father was a good man. ‘It's not illegal to read books in this country. Come home with us, Winston. It'll be all right. Don't you want to visit your father? He could tell you what's going on.’

  Winston clenched his fists. ‘I never want to see him again. He has brought shame to us. My mother said that without his income I will have to stop going to school in South Africa. There is nothing for me here in Rhodesia, George, and I am tired of schooling. It is time for me to go and become a man.’

  ‘Go home to your mother, Winston,’ George tried again. ‘She needs you. I'll come with you. My dad can pay for your school fees. I know he'd want to.’

  Winston exploded. ‘You don't understand, George! My mother hates your family … hates you. She hates the fact that your father helps pay for my education. She says it makes us like beggars. She says one day we black people will run this country, and that all the whites will work for us, or be forced to leave.’

  George was shocked. He'd never heard such nonsense before in his life, and he struggled to work out what it was that he or his mother or father might have done to offend Patricia Ngwenya so. He was speechless.

  ‘She is poisoning me … and Thandi.’

  George looked at Thandi. ‘I don't hate white people,’ she said to him. He was fairly sure she was telling the truth, after what had happened a few minutes earlier.

  Winston exhaled. ‘I just want to do the right thing, George, and I don't know what that is. I think the best thing for me to do is to go away from Bulawayo, to somewhere where people do not know me or my family.’

  ‘But what about your education?’

  Winston shook his head, and knelt to turn over his fish. ‘I don't want to be a schoolteacher, George. Maybe my mother is right, and that one day Thandi, Emmerson and I will be able to do whatever we want to in life. Until then, I can beg from your father to pay for me to become what my father was, or I can do something for myself.’

  ‘When will I see you again?’

  ‘I don't know. Perhaps never. My mother will be poor with my father in prison. I would be a burden for her.’

  ‘No! Don't go. It isn't fair …’ It was growing dark and George knew he should be getting back to the hospital. His father had enough to worry about without him going missing. At the same time, he didn't want to leave his friend, or Thandi. It wasn't right that Winston's life should be changed like this.

  ‘Come, George,’ Thandi said, and took his hand.

  Winston looked at his friend's white fingers intertwined with his sister's, then from George's eyes to Thandi's. He said nothing. George thought he saw hurt there.

  ‘It is time for you to go … both of you,’ Winston said at last.

  *

  Humans had fled from Makuti and his mother when, exhausted, they had touched shore. Makuti's mother had snorted her challenges and tossed her head, but she had been too intent on making for high ground to stop and attack any of the two-legs that fled from her.

  When she stopped running, she settled into a plod, not seeming to care whether her tiny calf could keep pace with her or not.

  Makuti paused and sniffed the air. The stench was foul: acrid and burning. He had an instinctive fear of fire, inherited from his mother, and she, too, had caught the hated scent. In a valley behind the township was the humans' mountain of refuse.

  Wooo-ooop. Wooo-ooop.

  Makuti froze at the alien sound that echoed through the valley. His mother trotted away from both, and Makuti gladly followed. There was something terrifying about that sound.

  Wooo-ooop. Wooo-ooop.

  His mother crashed through a forest of mopane saplings, the new growth from a previous fire. In the valley she would have lived in thorn thickets and dense jessie bush, but these tiny trees with the butterfly-shaped leaves provided scant cover for such a big beast.

  Wooo-ooop. Wooo-ooop.

  The noise was following them. Makuti's ears were his best defence. Big and out of all proportion to his
tiny body, it would be years until he grew into them, but with his naturally poor eyesight, and his hornless head, they were essential to his making it into adulthood alive.

  He ran faster, to try to close the gap with his mother, but she only increased her pace. The mournful whooping changed to a high-pitched cackle. Whatever they were, they were laughing at his pathetic attempts to outrun them. Makuti glanced to the side and saw a dapple-coated phantom in the light of the moon, flashing between two tree trunks.

  Wooo-ooop, another taunted from behind him, while off to his other flank was a third laughing beast, silvery ropes of drool hanging from its bared fangs. They loped along, and when Makuti saw them his tiny heart beat faster.

  He snorted in alarm, but his mother paid no attention. His nostrils were filled with the dust and old ash her great running feet stirred up. He heard them loping along on either side of him and caught their fetid smell on the wind that chased them uphill from the flooded valley. He tried to call another warning, but they were on him before he could draw a breath.

  One spotted hyena, the youngest of the three, latched on to Makuti's stubby tail and yanked him off his rear legs. Another, the big matriarch of the clan, grabbed the little rhino's right ear in her jaws and tore his head to the ground. Makuti wailed in pain and terror as the third beast scurried to join the execution.

  Makuti kicked out with his legs and shook his head as they rolled him over. His mother was a disappearing cloud of dust. She wouldn't know of his death until it was too late. Makuti squealed as the queen of the hyenas tore off the top of his ear and wolfed it down as the other one tried to fasten its jaws around his neck. Makuti tried to buck his way out of its reach, but the hyena merely shrieked with joy at his futile protests. The leader closed in again, to end the play and take her share of the meagre meal. Makuti dimly saw the third predator closing in on him before his head was yanked down again by teeth clamped to his good ear. He squealed in agony.

  The ground shuddered to the rhythmic sound of great three-toed feet beating a war dance out on the dry earth as Makuti's mother returned for him. Makuti glanced up again in time to see the advancing hyena lifted off its feet and carried sideways in midair. Makuti's mother shook her head and tossed the gored hyena off her horn like a rag doll.

  Makuti's mother bellowed and charged again, heading straight for the female who held her son pinned to the ground. The matriarch looked up and snarled, not surrendering her prize so easily. The second hyena, not so brave, tried to flee, but was stomped under Makuti's mother's foot.

  The queen of the hyenas dragged little Makuti towards her, taunting his mother to come closer and risk trampling her offspring to death. Makuti's mother paused, tossed her head, then lowered her horn and charged, calling the hyena's bluff.

  Makuti could do nothing. It seemed as if the queen might die defending her meal, but just before his mother's hooked horn impaled her, the hyena let go of his ear and bolted off into the night.

  His mother paused, near breathless. She snorted and panted for a while, her nostrils flaring and head held high as she tested the air for fresh scent of an enemy. When she was satisfied the hyenas were no longer a threat, she turned and trotted away.

  Makuti, bleeding from both ears and sore all over, followed her into the hills.

  4

  Rhodesia, 1969

  The corporal looked down the long barrel of his FN rifle. He pulled the steel-plated butt deeper into his shoulder. There was no moon, and the river was the colour of his rifle, but its surface still shone enough to allow them to see the boats.

  ‘Now?’ whispered the private beside him in Shona, the language they shared in the section when they weren't talking to their white officers.

  ‘Hush, no. Wait until I tell you,’ the corporal replied.

  ‘Wait for it …’ said the white officer needlessly – the black African corporal knew his job well.

  There were two rubber boats on the Zambezi River and the corporal could hear the soft splash of the oars in the water. A hippo grunted nearby, the sound echoing down the valley. The corporal sensed the private shifting nervously. He was new to the battalion, and new to the bush.

  The terrorists in the boat called themselves freedom fighters; members of the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army, or ZIPRA. The corporal called himself a noncommissioned officer in the 1st Battalion of the Rhodesian African Rifles.

  Ironically, culturally and linguistically the corporal probably had more in common with the men in the boat than he did with his comrades strung out in the bush on either side of him. He was an Ndebele, sometimes called the Matabele by the whites, a descendant of the Zulu impies that had ranged north and west into Rhodesia from South Africa in the previous century, slaughtering all who dared stand in their way. The ZIPRA men would all be from his home province, as that was where Joshua Nkomo recruited from. By contrast, the majority of the men in the RAR – the Rhodesian African Rifles – were drawn from the Karanga, one of the tribal groupings of the Shona, the traditional rivals of the corporal's people. The Karanga came from the area around Fort Victoria, but some of the men in the boats might very well be from Bulawayo, like the corporal. They might have even gone to school together or played together, but tonight they would try to kill each other.

  ‘If a firefighter fights fires,’ the white officer had said to him once, jokingly, ‘what does a freedom fighter fight?’

  The corporal was smart enough to get the joke, but he had thought long and hard about it the night after, until he decided there was no point thinking about such things. He had a job, and he was good at it. These ZIPRA freedom fighters and their leaders in their political party, ZAPU, the Zimbabwe African People's Union, might talk loud about how they were going to take over Rhodesia, but militarily they were no match for the Rhodesian security forces.

  The corporal came from a family who supported ZIPRA, but he had left home as a young man, ashamed by the fact his father had been imprisoned. His youthful decision to join the government's army had been nurtured by his instructors, superiors and peers. Also, he liked being on the winning side. He and the members of his section would win this fight, as they had won all their previous fights, and tomorrow they would eat and drink until they passed out. It was a warrior's life, and it was a good one. He looked through the circle on the flip-up rear sight and aimed at the centre of the black mass of men, who blended in with their boat. It was too far and dark to see their faces. He thought of them not as patriots, heroes or traitors – just as the enemy. Like the terrorists out there in the darkness the corporal also dreamed of a time when black men would be free to occupy any rank or any job in society, but he believed that promotion would come in time, and be awarded on merit, as was the case in the army.

  ‘Fire!’

  The corporal squeezed the trigger. There was a splash as the first terr tumbled over the side of the boat, and screams of fear and panic erupted from the enemy. Round after round punctured skin and rubber. The first boat started to sink. He didn't look at the other craft – that was two section's target. The corporal saw an AK-47 raised high out of the water and a head break the surface. He fired again. The lightning of the muzzle flash obscured his target, but when he blinked and looked again there was no sign of man or rifle. He shifted his aim and found another target.

  On either side of him was the crack of rifles firing and the occasional whiz of an incoming 7.62mm Russian-made bullet. Further down the line a Bren gun opened fire and sent up a neat line of silver water spouts on the river.

  ‘Forward!’ called the officer.

  The corporal would have waited a while longer. They had a perfect field of fire, with any living enemy silhouetted against the sheen of the river. Why not stay put and watch for survivors struggling to shore? Any who floated under a boat, or lay in the shallows, would soon be food for the ngwenya, the countless crocodiles that lived in the waters of the lower Zambezi. But the officer was an inexperienced mukiwa and this was his first contact.

 
; The corporal made a fist with his left hand and pushed his knuckles into the soft earth to raise himself up. He would follow the white man because that was his job. And he was good at it. ‘Come,’ he said to the private. ‘Now we finish the killing.’

  Two shapeless lumps, the deflated remains of the boats, bobbed in the shallows. A man floated face up next to one of the rubber carcasses. ‘Check for wounded,’ the white officer said.

  The corporal raised his rifle to his shoulder and fired a shot into the body.

  ‘Damn it, Corporal Ndlovu, I said check for wounded, not fire shots into every body.’

  The corporal bobbed his head in acknowledgement, but there was no way he was going to wade out into that river to see if some terr was still breathing. As if to underscore his fear, the water rippled and the private stepped back from the edge of the Zambezi as the jagged ridges of a crocodile's tail momentarily broke the surface.

  There was the smell of blood and innards and gunpowder in the air – the odour of war. This had been a one-sided affair so far and that was just fine by the corporal and his men. No one in war seeks a fair fight.

  The private knelt beside a man who lay face down in the mud, checking his pulse. ‘Sir?’ he called to the white lieutenant. ‘This man, he is still alive.’

  Corporal Ndlovu kept his rifle up to his shoulder and moved to another prone form and kicked it viciously in the ribs. The man was on his back, his eyes wide open. The corporal felt nothing for this man, who had died pursuing a foolish dream. The corporal heard a branch break in the thicket of jessie bush off to their right. He swung his rifle to check it closer, then the fire erupted.

  The officer screamed and went down and the private dived behind the body of a terrorist. Ndlovu pumped two quick shots into the bush, in the direction of the muzzle flash. Another AK-47 started firing on automatic, tracer rounds rising high as the untrained marksman forgot to compensate for the weapon's tendency to climb. Ndlovu fired again, then got up.