African Dawn

by Tony Park

  Sithole had been charged with treason, found guilty and sentenced to death. When asked by the judge if he had anything to say, Sithole had replied: ‘My Lord, I wish to publicly disassociate myself in word, thought and deed from any subversive activities, from any terrorist activities, and from any form of violence.’

  As a result of his plea, Sithole had been brought back to Chikurubi and placed in isolation, in maximum security, but there was no sign of an imminent execution.

  ‘I have no news about the reverend and it is not my place to undermine him.’

  Kenneth nodded again. The subject was closed, although Kenneth could only wonder what was going on behind the scenes in the secret meetings of the ZANU leadership. Other, less tactful members of the party were calling Sithole a coward. The rumour was that he would soon be deposed as leader. The front runners for the post were Herbert Chitepo, the revolutionary army's military commander directing the war from across the border in Zambia, or the man sitting on the bed opposite Kenneth.

  Robert forced a smile, and stood. ‘Perhaps, Kenneth, you might consider taking a greater role in the struggle, and come join with us. There are already senior men from your people in the ranks of our leadership.’

  Kenneth thought about the offer. ‘Perhaps. To tell you the truth, I don't believe we serve ourselves well by having two separate parties fighting in the struggle. If we are to govern ourselves it should be a government of unity, not of two different tribes.’

  Robert nodded. ‘I agree. You'll consider the offer, then?’

  The offer? ‘I am not a soldier, Robert. I cannot fire a gun and I do not want to learn how.’

  The Headmaster pursed his lips as he considered the caveat. ‘To tell you the truth, neither am I. I believe you and I, as educators, are on the right path. Our power is in the pen and the book. Our country will need thinkers as well as warriors. Thank you for the book. I will return it soon.’

  Exercise time was over and the other inmates from Kenneth's cell were walking down the corridor. Two stepped aside, deferentially, as Robert walked to the door. ‘You'll think about what I said?’

  ‘Yes,’ Kenneth said.

  ‘Come on, move inside,’ a white prison warder called from the hallway. The man stood in the doorway, confronting Robert. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Robert held up the law textbook, excused himself and walked past the warder.

  ‘Get back to your cell and be quick about it, Mugabe,’ the warder said.

  8

  Rhodesia, 1979

  Natalie Bryant lay on her back on Aunty Hope's bed, looking up at the ceiling. Something was scurrying about in the ceiling and it gave her the creeps. She liked coming to Grandpa Paul and Grandma Pip's house to stay, but it always took her a couple of days to get used to the different sounds and smells of the farm.

  Aunty Hope was at university in South Africa, but she would be coming home in a few days and after that Natalie would have to sleep in her dad's old bedroom. But her nanny, Petronella, would have to clean the room first and make up the bed. Natalie thought it was odd, thinking about her dad being a little boy once upon a time.

  On Aunty Hope's dressing table there was a picture of Natalie's father standing beside his helicopter, smiling. He looked young and happy. These days, he was away from home most of the time, and he'd missed Natalie's tenth birthday, just the week before. Natalie had cried, even though her mother had told her she should be used to it by now. Her mother was in Salisbury, looking after Grandma Susannah, who was in hospital busy dying, and not before time, according to something she'd overheard her father saying. Dad and Grandma Susannah didn't get on – everyone knew that.

  As was her habit, Natalie had already had a good snoop around Aunty Hope's room. There were pictures of Hope and her friends in bikinis on a houseboat at Kariba, a couple of shots of her and Natalie's dad, George, together as kids, and some horse riding ribbons and a tennis trophy. On her dresser, waiting to be framed, were more recent pictures of Hope and her university friends. Hope had long straight blonde hair and Natalie thought she was beautiful. Natalie's hair was wavy and she would ask Aunty Hope how to straighten it when she got home.

  Natalie was staying on the farm, near Bulawayo, for her school holidays, and that was fine by her. She loved the farm, although her mother said her grandparents spoiled her rotten. That was fine, too. Grandpa Paul had told her he would take her on a game drive in the morning. There were kudu, wildebeest and zebra on the farm, as well as the dairy cows.

  The dogs started barking.

  There were four of them – the two ridgebacks, Cleo and Katie, a boerbull called Zilla, and a tiny Jack Russell cross called Bart, who was Natalie's favourite. They were making a terrible racket. Natalie sat up in bed. It was a moonless night and she could see nothing beyond the steel mesh box bolted to the wall outside the window. When she'd first asked Grandma Pip what the mesh was for she'd said it was to keep the baboons out. Aunty Hope later told her it was to stop terrs throwing hand grenades into her bedroom.

  Natalie strained her ears and over the noise of the dogs she heard a faint crump, crump, crump, like someone jumping on a cardboard box and blowing the air out. Her grandparents were awake and Natalie could hear their voices out in the hallway.

  ‘Natalie!’ Grandma Pip called.

  Then the world exploded.

  *

  Winston Ngwenya, who still went by the name of Ndlovu, sat on the log by the smouldering fire in the middle of the kraal and spoke to the village headman in a low voice. He rested the butt of his Russian-made AK-47 assault rifle in the dust between his blackened tennis shoes and took off his floppy bush hat to wipe his brow. Instead of a Rhodesian Army uniform, these days he dressed as a ZIPRA freedom fighter, in East German camouflage. Thunder rolled across the veldt and the horizon was lit by far-off lightning.

  ‘We need food, baba,’ Winston said to the headman, addressing him respectfully as ‘father’.

  The headman scoffed. ‘Want, want, want. You claim to be of the people and bring grand promises of land and freedom, but you always take from us, never give.’

  Winston nodded, understanding the man's frustration. ‘You have already given your spare food to other comrades … tonight?’

  The headman looked at him through narrowed eyes. ‘I know nothing of other comrades.’

  Winston leaned forward and traced his finger around an elongated oval indentation in the dirt by the fire. When he lifted his AK-47 he pointed to the mark it left – it was exactly the same as the one he had just highlighted. ‘I just arrived, old father, but someone else rested his rifle here as well, not too long ago.’

  The old man pursed his lips and nodded. ‘Why do you not travel together? Why must I give to one group and then again to yours?’

  ‘We travel separately, in small groups, for safety and security. The other group, the ones that were here, do not know of my orders, just as I do not know of theirs. That way, if the kanka catch one of us, we cannot tell of what the other is doing.’

  The old man bobbed his head. Winston knew he'd heard the story many times before. ‘They … your comrades threatened to kill me if I did not give them food and shelter. What will you threaten me with that I have not heard before?’

  Winston smiled at the old man's defiance. No doubt he was harassed as much by the security forces as he was by ZIPRA. There could have even been ZANLA in the area, such was the latter organisation's determination to take over the whole of the country. Winston knew, too, that the freedom fighters' threats were not empty – they enforced their will by beheading chiefs, burying opponents alive, and raping and mutilating women.

  ‘I will not threaten you, and I will not steal from you,’ Winston said.

  The old man stared at him.

  ‘We are all in the struggle together, old father. My men and I need you, just as you need us to set you free.’ He spoke the words with the conviction of a zealot, but he could see that the headman was weary of words and of war.<
br />
  ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘I wish to address your people, to give them some pamphlets, and to explain to them we are here for them … for all the people. If my comrades have caused you trouble, or threatened you, I apologise for them. For myself and my men, all we want is some food and somewhere safe to sleep tonight.’

  The old man seemed to weigh the words. ‘I will do as you ask … and perhaps there will be a little mealie meal to spare at the end of your talk. But tell me, how do I know you are not Skuz'apo?’

  Winston smiled. ‘Think about it. I want a bed for the night and a chance to speak to your people of freedom. If I was a Selous Scout, would I want to talk to your village about revolution? Might I not, instead, threaten to kill you, or perhaps beat you and steal from you, so that you might think less of the real comrades?’

  Skuz'apo, which in the Shona language meant ‘excuse me for being here’, was the nickname given by ZANLA and ZIPRA to the hated Selous Scouts, an integrated black and white unit of the Rhodesian security forces consisting of turned terrorists and experienced black soldiers from the Rhodesian African Rifles. The Scouts posed as freedom fighters, made contact with the real terrorists, then either killed them or set them up to be ambushed by other units. They were feared, respected and hated by their enemy. The Selous Scouts boasted the highest kill ratio in the army, and Winston was proud to serve in their ranks. He dressed as a terrorist, but he still fought for the government.

  Much had changed in the country since Winston had first donned the uniform of a soldier in the Rhodesian African Rifles. The security forces still bested the terrorists time and again in the field, but whereas the flow of newly trained ZIPRA and ZANLA cadres from across the borders of Zambia and Mozambique seemed never-ending, fewer black Rhodesians could be convinced to join the police or the army. Africans serving the Smith regime were hunted and killed when they were off-duty, and their families were persecuted. Estranged from his own blood relatives by an unbridgeable gulf of time and ideology, Winston fought on more for the comrades in his stick – they were his family now – than for the intractable politics of either side of a society polarised by war. Winston knew he couldn't have changed sides now if he'd wanted to: while Skuz'apo's commanders could see the value in turning an enemy and recruiting him, Winston knew he would have been shot on sight if he'd tried to defect to the guerillas. Besides, he still liked fighting and winning, and the Scouts almost always won.

  The old man scratched his chin, but said nothing.

  ‘There is one more thing I need from you, old father,’ Winston said.

  The man raised his eyebrows.

  ‘You know in which direction the last group of comrades left. I see by the sign their leader left by your fire that they were here not long ago. They will have tried to cover their trail but you and your sons know this area better than they do. If they were of your people they would not have acted as they did. What I want, baba, what I ask for is that you send a trusted mujiba to go to them, to make contact with them, on my behalf.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘As you see, we are small in number. My masters have given me a mission that I believe would be better served with more comrades. I want to contact these other men and propose that we join forces, to strike a greater blow against the kanka.’ What Winston really wanted was to track down the band of real terrs, make contact with them, and kill them, that was his mission.

  The headman used his bare foot to wipe out both of the marks left by the AK-47 butt plates. ‘And what if these other men, who my son may persuade to come to you, are Skuz'apo? What will you do then?’

  Winston grinned. ‘Kill them.’ There were no other Selous Scouts operating within fifty miles of the village, so Winston knew the men who had just passed through the village before them were definitely ZIPRA.

  Later, after Winston had stood in front of the tired-looking mothers nursing infants from sagging breasts, the wide-eyed juvenile boys, the shyly flirty older girls and the old men of the village and preached his parables of revolution and freedom, the headman came to him and whispered that he had sent his youngest son to make contact with the recently departed comrades. Winston could have asked him why there were no able-bodied young men of fighting age present at his talk, but he knew the answer. They were in the bush, in hiding for fear that they might be recruited and taken away.

  Winston lay down in an empty hut with two of his men, leaving the fourth member of their band to stand picket in the shadows outside, watching for the return of the other group. They wouldn't be far off, and Winston hoped their curiosity would get the better of them and they would come back to check out this new group of comrades operating in their territory.

  He pulled two curved AK-47 magazines from the canvas pouches on his chest and laid them on the hard polished floor made of dried cow dung mixed with water. The magazines made a good enough pillow and they would be close to hand if he needed them in a hurry.

  Acting his part as an impassioned freedom fighter, he'd spoken to the villagers of a utopian world, where all men and women were equal, where land was owned by all, and where people worked for the good of the state and each other. He'd talked of a world where education was free, and available for all, no matter their gender or colour. Ironically, he thought his father would have been proud to hear him say those words.

  What if it was true? he wondered. It was all well and good to win every battle, but what would happen if – when – the Smith government and the whites tired of the war?

  Winston laid his AK-47 beside him, half on the floor and half-resting against his right thigh, his fingers resting on the pistol grip. He closed his eyes, but just seconds later he was sitting up, fully alert and sliding the magazines back into their pouch. The rumbling echoing back across the night sky to the village was not thunder this time. It was the unmistakable sound of mortar bombs exploding.

  *

  The novelty of parachuting was fast wearing off.

  Braedan's stick had jumped twice the previous day. It was always the same. The first jump brought on a massive rush, but the second was just plain hard work. Your body was subjected to an adrenaline overdose – from the jump and the shooting – and if you had to do it all over again your legs were like lead as you shuffled towards the door, weighed down with parachute, ammo, FN and kit.

  Braedan licked his chapped lips as he watched the ordered patchwork of crops and the grey-brown carpet of untamed bush flash below the aircraft. Although only a lance corporal in the Rhodesian Light Infantry, he was the stick commander, so he was jumping first for the first time. His corporal had twisted an ankle on the second jump yesterday. It was also his first time in charge of the stick, so he had another reason for the dry mouth and the pounding he could feel in his carotid artery.

  The Dakota hummed and vibrated around him. They'd loaded in the pre-dawn darkness and the sun was punching gold through a gap in the clouds, still hanging low and menacing. The aircraft lurched and Braedan swallowed hard. It wasn't great weather for jumping, but the nearest choppers were at Wankie. All part of the job, he thought to himself as he mentally prepared for the jump and what might wait for him below. He'd known the risks when he'd joined his country's full-time army as a regular soldier in the all-white RLI, and despite the horrors he'd seen and the friends who had been killed or wounded, he knew this was what he was meant to do in life. He didn't fight for Ian Smith, or the government, or an ideology – he fought for himself and the ouens in the stick lined up behind him. He fought because he was good at it.

  The jumpmaster gave the signal to check equipment, and the stick ran their hands over their buckles and straps and gear, calling out the litany of checks that had become ingrained in their minds through training and action. They took these drills seriously – their lives depended on them.

  The tiredness had gone now they were getting closer to exiting. Braedan was pumped. The whole stick was. If what had happened on the farm was true, it was terrible. To make it w
orse, he knew the family.

  The jump lights were on red and Braedan shuffled a step closer to the door. When the light flashed green he stepped out into the chill of the slipstream and felt the sickening, exhilarating lurch as he dropped.

  ‘One thousand, two thousand, three thousand,’ he screamed. The count was to give the static line time to do its work, but the act of shouting was also a means of keeping focused and of venting some of that adrenaline. He looked up. The lines were twisted. It was the little okes who made the best parachutists. They kept their short arms and legs tucked neatly in against their body, but Braedan was pushing six-four, and he was weighed down with muscle. He spun, as usual, on exit. He grabbed the risers and held them apart while he kicked his legs in a pedalling motion.

  They'd jumped from less than eight hundred feet. He had fewer than thirty seconds under canopy. Braedan used up most of that kicking the twists out of his lines, and just had time to set himself up for a hard, fast landing. The wind, the remnants of last night's storm, was stiff. He could tell the speed and the direction by the pall of black smoke from the farmhouse. Something reached for his heart and squeezed.

  Braedan had turned into the wind, and although he pulled down on his rear risers, to flare the front of the canopy above him, the oncoming breeze was faster than his forward motion, so he was moving backwards when he hit the ground. He executed a back-right landing as best he could, to stop himself from ploughing the field with the barrel of his FN, which was strapped under his harness on his left side. He was arms and legs akimbo, as usual, but he was unhurt. He pulled down on a riser to collapse the chute and stop himself from being dragged along the furrows. Braedan released his straps and rolled out of his harness.