Scribbling The Cat: Travel With an African Soldier

by Alexandra Fuller

  "And she eventually spoke. She eventually told us where they were. They were close, they were hiding nearby. So we went in there, the four of us, and we killed twelve of them. Then the helicopters came and I was so busy with body bags and the adrenaline and taking care of the boys—my ous needed to get out of there, man. We were exhausted.

  "And . . . and I forgot about her. I forgot about her. I had wanted to take her into hospital and get her fixed up, but I forgot. And she had run into the shateen to hide and after that we couldn’t find her."

  K’s voice was high and broken. He said, "She died two weeks after from her injuries, she had got an infection. . . ."

  "Oh God," I said, swallowing a surge of nausea.

  "I didn’t need to do that to her. I was an animal. An absolute fucking savage. I had been fighting for so long by then, I had seen so much of what these guys did, I was exhausted. . . ."

  And I thought, I own this now. This was my war too. I had been a small, smug white girl shouting, "We are all Rhodesians and we’ll fight through thickanthin." I was every bit that woman’s murderer. Back then—during the war—I had waved encouragement at the troopies, a thin, childish arm high in the air in a salute of victory, when they dusted past us in their armored lorries with their guns to the ready.

  I said, "I had no idea. . . ." But I did. I knew, without really being told out loud, what happened in the war and I knew it was as brutal and indefensible as what I had just heard from K. I just hadn’t wanted to know.

  "So her family had me up on a manslaughter charge. The commanding officer said I needed to plead insanity. For three days, I had to talk to psychologists, and I have never lied so much in my life. That’s what the CO told me to do. He said I had to sound insane. So I told those stupid, waste-of-time shrinks that I needed to drink blood. That I was hungry for blood. I told them . . . lies. They’re such a bunch of wee-wees. They wrote in their books and they asked me questions.

  "But they were so scared of me. They knew that if they had been in my position they might have done the same thing. They were so shit scared of being who I was."

  K wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Fuck," he said softly. Then he said, almost with disgust, "It didn’t even go to trial. I got off."

  "What did they do to you then?"

  "They sent me back to barracks for six months. They made me a training officer. I trained boys to be soldiers."

  Then K veered off the road and we lunged down a mild bank through the scrubby remains of goat-picked grass until the pickup rocked to a halt under the shade of a stink tree. K switched off the engine and the air sung with the sudden silence of where and who we were.

  He said, "I have to go for a walk."

  "Okay." I stared out the window at the undulating innocent land. It spread out like a stain; earth and sun and huts as far as I could see, interrupted with the odd kopje. It was a land dotted with goats intent on forage, on cattle intent on water, on birds trying to evade the crudest part of the hot day. The bones of some long-ago-eaten cow had been left here by the side of the road and had lent a pink outline against the red soil, a barely pressed reminder of an entire beast.

  We both got out of the car. K came around to me. He looked as if he had been crying with his whole body. His army green shirt was soaked down the front, his face glistened, his eyes were splintered with thin red veins. He stretched out his arms toward me and I noticed that his hands were shaking. I walked into his arms.

  He put his face on my neck and breathed deeply, as if trying to breathe me into himself. I closed my eyes, and I let him rock me. Under the pungent warm shade of that deep green, leafy stink tree, I was inhaled in the embrace of a man whose anger had once spilled into something so hateful and so uncontrollable that it had killed a woman too young to have been as brave and upright and courageous as she was. She was a martyr and K and I were free. More or less free. Never free. Not if we thought about what we had done.

  And then K left me, walking up into the shadow of a nearby kopje. I watched him leave and it seemed to me that the heat and fumes of his hatred danced after him. I slung down the way I had been taught as a child, African style, so that haunches hang between spread knees. It’s a stance that can be sustained for waiting-hours at a time. I pressed my back into the shade of the tree. My mouth was salty and dry. I pushed the palms of my hands into my eyes until I saw dots, but I could not erase the woman from my mind. And then I cried for a long time, until I was a film of sweat and my mouth was stringy with tears and my throat ached.

  "Madam?"

  I looked up.

  Two children had materialized out of the sun-danced road and sidled up to the pickup. They stared at me shyly, their bellies pressed out at me in greeting.

  I wiped my face and said, "Masikatü?"

  "Taswera, maswerawo?" they asked.

  "Taswera zvedu," I lied.

  And we all grunted in recognition of one another.

  "Where are you going?" asked the taller child after a respectable pause had allowed us a decent amount of time to stare at one another.

  "Mozambique," I said, blowing my nose.

  "You are one?"

  "No," I said, "we are two." I lit a cigarette and waved it at the flies that had come to feast on my tears and sweat.

  The older boy fished at his feet for a dry stalk of grass, which he put to his lips and pretended to light, in imitation of my cigarette. He eyed me sideways, hungrily, and waved his pretend cigarette blade of grass at me. "Fodya? Madam? One stick?"

  I shook my head. "You’re not enough years. How old are you?"

  "Ah come, mummy!" The boy laughed. "I am many years." He pointed to his younger companion, of whom he was obviously guardian.

  "No cigarettes."

  "Ah, mama."

  I stood up. "Okay. I’ll give you something to eat. I think there’s something for you." I dug into the back of the black tin trunk. K’s green peppers, nuts, and wild mushrooms had fermented into a bubbling brown-green stew. The potato chips and beer had survived.

  "Hurrah." I emerged victorious. "Here," I said, handing the children four packets of chips.

  Then I sat with the children and they tried to pretend that they were not half starved and I tried to pretend that I could not see that this was the first food that had passed their lips for some time. I lit another cigarette. The children finished the chips and licked the packet. Then the older child lifted his eyes to mine and smiled crookedly, and he didn’t need to say anything.

  I sighed. "Okay," I said, "just quit before it kills you." I handed him a cigarette from the packet and my own cigarette with which to light it.

  The child sucked the smoke deep into his lungs and shut his eyes, a transformed smile on his lips.

  The smaller child grinned up at me winningly, his lips greased with chips.

  "No," I said. "I’m certainly not giving you a bloody cigarette. So don’t even try."

  I hoped no one was at home feeding chips and cigarettes to my children.

  WHEN K FINALLY BATTLED his way back through the bush to the car, the children had fallen in a gentle half doze next to the car and I was drinking warm beer.

  I asked, "Are you okay?"

  He nodded, but I could see from his jumping jaw that he was tense.

  K frowned at the pickup. His look made me feel as if I should have been doing something useful with myself in his absence—as if he, in the same circumstances, would have had the vehicle gleaming inside and out by the time of my return. All I had to show for three quarters of an hour of free time was a few cigarette stompies, empty chip packets, a drained beer bottle, and two starving children.

  "My friends," I said, pointing a toe at the children.

  He nodded.

  I said, "Your mushrooms, green peppers, and nuts turned into mushrooms-green-pepper-and-nut wine. The kids ate all the chips."

  He said, "I’m not hungry." He walked around the pickup and kicked the tires, and then he said, "We need petrol."


  So together we lifted a container of petrol off the back of the pickup. We made a siphon out of a used water bottle, holding it open into the lip of the tank with a licked-open penknife. I held the cut-lipped water bottle and K poured; the liquid throated down into the belly of the pickup. A great wash of the fuel splashed up my wrists and dried in an itchy, oily film.

  "Sorry," said K.

  "It’s okay."

  The children roused themselves and offered to pour petrol for us. Their stringy arms would not have held anything much heavier than a very slim dream aloft for long. K’s unexpected smile surfaced. He said something in Shona and gave the children a few dollars each and they dissolved back into the bush. He picked up another twenty-liter container and began to pour that into the tank.

  "I should just swallow this," he said, watching the last of the pink stream of fuel spill down the throat of the homemade filter. "Then there’d be one less asshole in the world."

  Beware of Land Mines and Speed Guns

  Nyamapanda

  THE NYAMAPANDA BORDER post was as poetic by name as it was in real life. There was, after the feeling of stagnation that seems to have struck the rest of Zimbabwe, a sense of life and activity and vibrancy here. Bougainvillea wobbled bright blossoms over the dust-rutted road. Small vegetable gardens surged out from the tiniest and least likely patches of spare ground. Cyclists laden with bales of goods pedaled down the road. Cross-border traders, balancing loads of maize meal and soybeans and cooking oil on their heads, haggled loudly in the streets. A herd of schoolchildren in tatty blue uniforms came tripping past, barefoot and exuberant, kicking up dust as they walked.

  The fuel station (the only place in the whole of Zimbabwe where we were able to find petrol) held a TOTAL sign in the wrinkled, pink-gray skin of an elephantine baobab tree. Next to that sign, also nailed to the enormous tree, was a marker advertising TOILETS, although, when I investigated, it seemed that the long drops intended to serve that purpose had long since received all the human waste they were designed to contain. I went back to the pickup.

  While we filled up our empty containers with petrol, a very old blind woman (she had shrunk to the size of a child and her hair had turned vivid yellow) was led up to the car by her helper (a young, bored-looking boy). Without any difficulty, she extracted money from K, who said, "The Almighty is very specific about this." He added, "Zambian kwacha too."

  We had to bribe our way out of Zimbabwe because of the extra fuel we were carrying. Zimbabwe’s fuel crisis had become a national emergency, so it was illegal to carry more than a full tank of fuel out of the country’s borders—in this area of vast distances and few amenities, it was not only inconvenient but potentially dangerous to have only one tank of petrol at hand. While K negotiated with the customs official (who was threatening to send us back to Harare for police clearance), I sat on the back of the pickup and kept a wary eye on our belongings.

  A lorry carrying a load of fertilizer was parked at the border gate, which opened into no-man’s-land and from there into Mozambique. I watched as a group of six or seven young men unhurriedly pulled back the tarpaulin that covered the load, sliced several bags, and filled buckets with the spilling white product.

  "Thieves!" I shouted and pointed.

  The customs official blinked at me lazily and returned to the business at hand, which was negotiating the highest bribe possible from K. The thieves themselves laughed at me. I glanced at the immigration building, where the owner of the lorry was obviously held up under an avalanche of paperwork.

  K was now rifling behind the seat of the pickup, where we had stashed our money. I said, "Look at those guys nicking the fertilizer."

  K nodded. "Ja."

  "If you wait with the car, I’ll run inside and find the owner of the lorry. Half his load will be gone by the time he gets back."

  K shook his head. "Leave the gondies to thieve from each other," he said. "Now that they’ve stolen everything they can from the wazungu, they have to pinch from their own kin. Special bloody people, hey? Aren’t they? Special."

  The customs official received his bribe and accompanied us to the gate, where the gate guard also insisted on a "price to open the border for you, Mister Petrol." So we paid again and—in another process of negotiation I was now too hot and too demoralized to follow—the gate guard paid his cut to the customs agent and to another man (dressed in camouflage fatigues, dark glasses, and tennis shoes, with a gun slung across his belly). During this time the owner of the lorry came out of the immigration building. He was a fat black man, perspiring heavily, and overdressed for the Nyamapanda border post. He was wearing a purple, long-sleeved nylon shirt that gleamed in the sun, thick, black nylon trousers, shiny black cowboy boots, and rows of gold chains that appeared out of the folds of fat at his neck and wrists as if they had been surgically imbedded into his skin.

  I leaned out of the window of the car. "Those boys stole from you," I shouted, pointing at the youths who were lounging, without apparent panic, against the wall of a kiosk selling packets of cigarettes and bottles of orange juice.

  The owner of the lorry ignored me, but approached the boys, hand extended. The boys counted out money and handed it to the fat man. "Look at that"—I jabbed K in the ribs—"what is going on? He’s getting money from the boys that stole from him."

  "Read the sign on the door of the pickup," said K in a weary voice.

  I craned my neck around and saw the name of a European aid organization emblazoned in blue letters on the white door.

  "Welcome to the New Africa," said K.

  I WAS INTRODUCED to Mozambique, at least the first hundred kilometers or so, from the point of view of someone who had (in the last three hours) drunk two beers and half a liter of water and had not braved any of the available rest rooms in Nyamapanda. From Nyamapanda through the heart of northwest Mozambique, there was a straight, new road (widely graded on either side) that had all the hallmarks of an aid project. It looked like an elaborate gift, hastily bestowed and incompletely explained. Road signs were impressive for the places they pointed to (declaring grandly EN103 TETE and EN258 SONGO and EN258 ESTIMA), but the distances to these towns were not given.

  K, who was last on this patch of earth more than twenty-five years ago, couldn’t remember how far it was to the next town either. "I think we bombed it anyway," he said, not very helpfully, "and if we didn’t, they did it to themselves."

  Until a few years before, this road (the original road, left over from the days of the Portuguese) was so damaged and broken that in the rainy season it could take up to a week to travel fifty miles. It suffered not only from neglect, but from mines, and had to be demined before it could accept traffic. The removed mines left holes in the surface of the already uneven road, which became a mire of craters and ruts as soon as the rains fell. But it wasn’t just roads that were mined; arable land, power lines, bridges, railroads, airports, schools, factories, and cattle-dip tanks were mined by both sides during the civil war.

  Mozambique had been colonized by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. In 1752 the Portuguese proclaimed Mozambique their colony and in the same year began to trade in slaves, which by the 1820s accounted for 85 percent of all exports. By 1912, when the diabolical practice was finally stopped, two million people had been shipped out to the sugar plantations of Brazil and Cuba.

  Like the rest of Africa, it was not until the early 1960s that the local people were able to exert the kind of pressure on their oppressors for the colonial power to take the threat of insurrection seriously. Until then, the population of Mozambique had been carelessly and brutally exploited for the benefit of Portugal. Peasants were forced to grow cash crops, either on their own smallholdings or on plots owned by Europeans, and the vast majority of the population was subjected to horrific working conditions, including forced labor. The only natives to have any rights of citizenships were the assimilados—the less than 1 percent of the population the Portuguese considered civilized.

 
The only way for blacks to attain the status of assimilados—which gave them the same civic and political rights as the whites—was to speak Portuguese fluently, abandon their traditional way of life, and hold down a "suitable" job. They were a people caught in a terrible purgatory: striving for trappings of whiteness in a world that was predominantly black but where blackness was treated with staggering disregard and abuse.

  The history of Mozambique’s wars reads like a synopsis of an idea to end the world, skip the Day of Judgment, and send everyone straight to hell. To be born in that country as a black person prior to 1964 was to enter a world of oppression and misery. To be born a black person in that country from 1964 until 1992 was to be born into a raging, illogical series of wars. To try to understand the events that led to such chaotic misery is a lesson in man’s inhumanity to man.

  From 1964 to 1974, Frelimo (Frente de Libertação de Mocambique) rebels fought against Portugal for independence, which finally came in 1975. Meanwhile, ZANLA rebels (massing against the Rhodesian government forces) had been using Frelimo camps in Mozambique as launching posts for raids into Rhodesia. The Rhodesian forces came into Mozambique in an effort to quell both Frelimo and ZANLA. To help serve this purpose, they formed Renamo (Mozambique National Resistance)—whose members eventually included disgruntled Frelimo soldiers, Portuguese who had lost their homes and land at independence, and ex—Rhodesian soldiers.

  After Mozambique had gained her independence from Portugal in 1975, the Rhodesians continued to fund Renamo, which was now set on overthrowing the Marxist-Leninist government of Samora Machel. In turn, Samora Machel relied on funds and support from the Communist bloc. When Rhodesia gained independence, Renamo was kept alive by the South Africans (who objected to African National Congress camps in Mozambique) as well as by the United States during the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan’s knee-jerk anti-Communist stance appeared to come at any cost to the people whose lives were at stake on the ground.