Scribbling The Cat: Travel With an African Soldier

by Alexandra Fuller

  The civil war in Mozambique finally ended in 1992, soon after the close of the Cold War. By then there had been more than a million military and civilian deaths. An estimated six million Mozambicans had been dislocated and displaced. The savagery reported from both sides was legendary in scope: rape, torture, forced murders, sex slaves—every possible abuse and insult against humankind and nature can be found in the conflict that had exploded on Mozambican soil.

  It would be accurate to say that the only thing to come out of the war was some of the most profound misery to be found anywhere on earth. When the war ended, Mozambique was judged by the United Nations to be the poorest country in the world and 1993 statistics showed it, alongside Angola, having the highest infant mortality rate of any country. Land mines contributed significantly to the crippling legacy of the war.

  The United Nations initially put the number of mines in postwar Mozambique at two million, but officially revised it down to one million (roughly one land mine for every eighteen people). Before the devastating floods of early 1999 and 2000 (when mines shifted as far as twenty kilometers, and fishermen were catching mines in their nets), it was reported that four people were killed every month by mines. The United Nations estimates that nine thousand Mozambicans have been killed or injured by land mines since 1980. Few maps were made of the mines laid during the civil war, but the entire country contains minefields. The highest concentration of land mines was in its westernmost province, along the Zimbabwean border, where K and I were traveling.

  At one time, there was a lively if limited black market trade in signs pilfered from Mozambique that read PERIGO (danger) or HOKOYO CHIMBAMBAIRA (beware of mines), some ofwhich had the added decoration of a skull and crossbones. It wasn’t uncommon to see these signs nailed proudly to the doors of some of the best bathrooms in South Africa. These signs replaced the more mundane WARNING: CROSSWINDS, which had been in vogue in the eighties. The result, of course, is that although a few South Africans had all the warning they needed lavatorially speaking, the poor Mozambicans were left even more clueless than they had been before about the location of the potentially fatal flotsam of their recent conflict. In the absence of signs, the locals resorted to marking known minefields or areas with unexploded ordnance (UXO, in the lingo of the war-weary) with red rocks, rocks of any description, or even branches pulled into a line.

  I LOOKED OUT the window at the life that struggled on either side of the road. There were villages spread out thin and continuous, beside the road. Nothing looked old and established; it all looked rash, and temporary—something that had been erected out of ruin, with a watchful eye toward the next possible catastrophe. Outside one hut, a woman was scraping at the ground with a hoe. Along the verge, a small boy was herding goats; a man was whipping a donkey that lunged weakly under the heavy and ungraceful weight of an overloaded scotch cart. A woman swayed under a bucket of water, a baby bulging from a cloth sling on her back and a toddler trotting in her wake. Life expectancy in Mozambique was about thirty-five. Given the country’s history, that figure seemed miraculously high.

  "Why is it," asked Graça Machel, former Mozambique education minister, widow of President Machel, and now the wife of Nelson Mandela, "that the worst of everything that is evil and inhuman is to be found in Africa? What is wrong with us Africans?"

  In the 1970s, K had endured five years of war. The experience had left him (as far as I could tell) still tortured, angry, aggressive, lost. While it is impossible, and perhaps useless, to measure one person’s war against another’s, it is hard to imagine how almost thirty years of continuous war have affected the local population of Mozambique; millions of children have grown up knowing nothing but war. For Mozambican youth living and, too often, dying in a sustained, saturated atmosphere of chaos and conflict, the choices were grim. They could either fight (there are no reliable estimates, but it is thought that there were as many as eight to ten thousand child soldiers recruited—some of them kidnapped—during the civil war) or risk life and limb trying to scratch out a perfunctory existence amid the minefields. Girl children who were recruited into the armies and who escaped the fighting were used as sex slaves. "This was all under martial law when I was here," said K, nodding into the villages. "All these villagers had to clear out during that time. Some of them went to the cities, or across the borders in Malawi, Rhodesia, and so on, but others went and hid in the shateen. We’d come across their little camps. Just a little bush structure—like a tent made out of branches—and maybe, a mile or two away, you’d find where they had cooked their meal for the day. Then they’d walk miles and miles to their gardens—they’d never sleep close to where they ate or grew their crops. And if we found their gardens, we destroyed those too. Those poor buggers. They lived like animals the whole time. When they could, they caught rats and snakes and ate those. They ate roots and leaves and berries. They were starving and shit scared. They were shit scared of us and they were shit scared of the Porks and they were shit scared of the gooks. Then there was always a pretty good chance of standing on an antipersonnel mine. Imagine! One hundred and ten percent shit scared morning, noon, and night."

  IN THE FACE of such profound human misery, the trifling fact that I was desperate to find a tree behind which to pee seemed almost unmentionably trite. Nevertheless, I finally drew K’s attention to my plight.

  "Too many gondies," he said. "They’ll see you."

  "I’m sure they’ve seen it before."

  "Not a peeing mazungu. At least not a lady."

  "I’m sure it won’t kill them."

  "Okay, okay," K said. "I’ll find you a tree."

  "It really doesn’t have to be a very big tree," I said. "In fact, it doesn’t have to be a tree at all. It could be an anthill. A shrub. A pebble. Oh look, you’ve just driven past another hundred million possible places."

  K gazed out at the huts, imperturbably. "Let’s just get through this village."

  "But as far as I can tell, Mozambique is all one solid village," I protested.

  "I’ll hurry," said K, stepping on the accelerator.

  Which was how we were caught, in the middle of what looked like nowhere (but was actually the town of Changara), by two policemen with a speed gun who were sitting on wooden milking stools on the side of the road.

  One of the policemen sauntered up to the car. He was very polite. He showed us the speed gun, of which he was evidently very proud. "You can’t excuse this gun," he told us, rather obscurely. "Man he can lie, but not this equipment."

  K stared with, what I thought was, unnecessary interest at the machine and then asked—in what I assumed was a deliberate snub to my bladder—to see how it worked.

  "No, no," said the policeman. "You can’t unless there is a speeding car."

  "Well, how many cars come on this road every day?"

  The policeman wobbled his head, considering. "Maybe one hundred. Or two."

  "How many of those are speeding?"

  "If they are foreign," said the policeman slyly, "then it is one hundred. Or two."

  "Nice little business," commented K.

  The policemen laughed appreciatively. "Come back to where I am sitting with my friend. Let us talk."

  "Pay anything," I implored as K got out of the car, "and let’s find a place for me to stop."

  By now a curious cluster of children had congregated noiselessly around the car. They had approached me crouched, like soldiers, bellying their way over the ground toward the road and making silent "feed me" gestures with cupped hands. I couldn’t understand their reticence, until they caught the eye of one of the policemen, who threw himself after them with handfuls of rocks, shrieking at the top of his voice. The children exploded back to the hut from which they had snuck, backs arched in a futile attempt to avoid the barrage of rocks that hailed down on their little bodies.

  I turned to the policeman with the beginnings of a protest on my lips, but he cut me off, saying, "Those childs. You know! If you are not looking, even if
you are looking—they steal even the shirt you are wearing on your body."

  K returned to the car and announced that the fine was astonishingly steep and payable only in American dollars, which seemed suspect and I said as much. K said, "I can haggle if you want. But we’ll be here for hours."

  "Forget it," I said. "Let’s just pay and get to the nearest tree."

  We’re Not Really Lost

  Double-story hut—Mozambique

  WE TOOK A LEFT turn before Tete, on the road that declared itself (on a grand, green sign) to be leading to towns that we never reached, or if we did, they didn’t exist when we got there. We were heading for the area around Wasa Basa Lake. K had a friend in Harare who knew someone by the name of Connor who had a fishing camp on the lake and who had said that he would be willing to let us camp on his premises. When K was a soldier here, the lake had not existed. At that time, the place that the lake now covers was the lower end of the Pepani River. It had been a land of many kopjes, dry and densely covered with mopane woodland. The acid soil gave the air a slightly saline scent.

  I can’t remember at what point the straight, new aid-donor tar road we were on disintegrated into a dirt track and when, in turn, that dirt track dissolved into something that looked like a footpath. But we were on increasingly rougher tracks, the kind that showed where cattle and goats had been herded but had no tire prints on them. Once or twice, K pulled a tatty piece of paper out of his breast pocket and said, "Would you have said that was a village, or just a cluster of huts?" or "Did that look like a left branch in the road to you?"

  I sighed. "This doesn’t look like a road to me at all, left branch or not."

  "Well, if that was a left branch in the road, there’s supposed to be a double-story hut somewhere here," said K, peering out into the failing light. He tapped the piece of paper. "That’s what it says here in these directions."

  "I’ve never heard of a double-story hut. That’s absurd."

  "I promise," said K, waving the piece of disintegrating paper at me. "Read my notes."

  I felt bruised by the road, battered by the pickup, assaulted by the border post, and incredibly grimy. "Maybe we should just camp right here," I suggested, "before it’s too dark to set up our mosquito nets."

  "No, no. We must be nearly there," K said.

  Evening fell as we drove, and the relative cool of night released into the air the smells of the bush. K shuddered. "Boy, that smell." He turned to me. "That’s the smell of being on patrol. Smell that?"

  Mostly, I could smell us: two sweaty travelers who have spent too long together in the humid steam of February at low elevations and on bad roads. So I hung my head out the window and took in a lungful of outside air and was rewarded with the fragrant scent of mopane scrub and the chalky smell of dust (the powdery white soil that mopane trees favor).

  I said, "It smells like the lowveldt to me."

  "Man, and the gun oil and the sweat and the kak." K shook his head. "I’m telling you, you’ve never smelled people until you’ve been in the shateen with them for three weeks. We used to hum. Mm-mm. I’m sure the only thing that stopped the gooks from smelling us is that they smelled just as bad themselves."

  We drove in silence for a while and then K said, "We were just like the gondies, the way we hid out in the bush and never slept in the same place twice and never ate where we slept. We used to stop, just as it was getting dark, and we made our supper over those little gas stoves that just got the food puke-warm and made everything taste like lighter fluid. We couldn’t cook with a fire—the smell of wood smoke carries too far."

  "But you smoked cigarettes."

  K shrugged. "Ja, we would have died without our cigarettes. We had to have something. But we smoked carefully, hey. Everyone lit up at one time, to limit the amount of time the smoke was in the air. It dissipates quite quickly out here, hey? And it was those old toasted cigarettes—they don’t have such a strong smell as those things you buy today that are all chemicals and foil of shit."

  "Did you ever get attacked at night?"

  "Oh ja. Some ous used to sleep in full gear because of that, but not me. Those fart sacks were clammy enough as it was."

  We drove along in silence for another half an hour or so. By now, there was no light at all. The brilliant sunset that had speared, in slices of orange and bleeding red, through the mopane trees had turned sullen. There was, as yet, no moon. The mopanes flashed past us, tall as soldiers, briefly illuminated and then shrinking quickly back into the homogeneous oblivion of the world beyond our headlights that sliced through the black world in front of us in two plunging beams. K and I were on a lonely, mad mission. The two of us lurching on an unlikely journey up a lonely road in the dark, thick beginning of a Mozambique night. As our pickup churned over rocks and through thick sand, the engine drowned out the night cries of the cicadas, the crickets, and the nightjars. Behind us, a plume of dust burned pink in our rear lights.

  Before complete darkness had fallen, we had caught sun-slurred glimpses of the lake but now it seemed to me that we had veered in a direction likely to take us farther from the lake.

  "Do you think we’re going in the right general direction?" I tried timidly.

  "Of course we are."

  "It’s just," I went on weakly, "we don’t seem to be getting there."

  "It’s a big country," said K.

  "Yes, but we don’t need to make it bigger than it already is by driving over every square inch of it." I looked out the window and said, in a carefully casual voice, "We could always stop and ask someone."

  K glared at me. "I know this place like the back of my hand," he said. "I’ve walked all over this land. Shit, I’ve crawled over half of it on my belly."

  We dodged off the track we were on and started to crash our way down something that resembled a goat trail and continued along in this fashion (weaving our way, more or less arbitrarily, it seemed to me, from one narrow path to the next as trees allowed) for another half an hour or so, passing through several villages and, once or twice, narrowly missing an off-guard pedestrian or laboring cyclist.

  "Look at all the villagers," I said at last, "who are just waiting for an opportunity to tell us where we are."

  So that, at last, K stopped and asked someone, in Shona, where Mr. Connor’s camp was, and we set off in a fresh direction with fresh and (as it turns out) misplaced enthusiasm. We drove for over an hour, occasionally feeling and smelling (rather than seeing) that we were closer to the lake (it gusted a brief, damp coolness at us, soaked with a scent of mud and fish).

  Then K finally stopped and switched off the engine. Into the ticking silence that followed the relentless hum and whine of the car engine he said, "I have no fucking idea where we are."

  WE NEVER DID find our way. It was Connor who eventually found us. We had parked near a double-story hut that had loomed out of the darkness and shone yellow and black, shaggy-haired and strangely reminiscent of something I would associate with China more than Africa.

  "Looks like a double-story hut to me," said K, directing the headlamps on the hut and unfolding his piece of paper with the directions on it. "So we should turn left here. Except there’s no left turn."

  Suddenly, out of the monotonous darkness car lights bore down on us (we were, unusually, on something closer to a road than to a goat track) and a land cruiser slammed to a stop next to us.

  "Connor," said a man, climbing out of the land cruiser and extending his hand.

  "Oh, what a coincidence! We were just looking for you," I said, employing great restraint not to fling myself upon the man in relief.

  "I got a message that there were two wazungu out here. Get lost, did you?"

  "No, no. I know this place inside and out," K said. "We’re not lost, we were just—"

  "Lost," I said loudly.

  K tapped his paper. "My directions said to turn off at the double-story hut."

  Connor turned and looked at the hut. "Oh, those are all over the place," he said, wav
ing expansively into the nameless, deep bush.

  "It looks almost Chinese," I said. "Like a mini thatched pagoda."

  "That’s exactly what it is," said Connor, "these gondies were sent to China so that the Chinks could teach them how to be gooks. First against the Porks and then against each other."

  "Ah."

  "All these black limbs," said Connor, making a broad sweeping motion, "from Angola to Moz and Tanzania—they were all trained by the Russkies and the Chinks. Then the wall came down and suddenly no one gave a crap whose side the gondies were on. You could almost feel sorry for the poor bastards. All those years getting help from the Commies or the Yanks and then the Cold War is over and all of a sudden they’re on their lonesomes."

  I lit a cigarette and offered one to Connor. "No, no," he said, "I quit. Although I don’t know why I bothered. It’s not like I’m going to live any longer just because I don’t smoke."

  I said, "We’ve been driving around the lake for hours."

  "An hour," corrected K.

  Connor laughed. "Ja well," he said cheerfully, "good thing I found you before you went off on any of the side roads here. Mbambaira everywhere."

  "Mbambaira?" I said.

  "Ja, you know. Potatoes. That’s what they call them, potatoes—mbambaira in Shona. It’s a joke. It means 'land mines.' Place is riddled with them."

  I glared at K.

  CONNOR IS GARRULOUS in four languages (he speaks Portuguese, Shona, English, and Makua-Lomwe with ease) with the result that his accent has morphed from a white Zimbabwean accent (known as a Rhodie accent) into something resembling a scramble of black Mozambican and southern European. An energetic, cheerful man in his late thirties, with an insistently bright and pragmatic outlook on life, he seems uniquely suited to an existence on the banks of Wasa Basa. An ability to find a solution to the most crushing problems and an illogically optimistic outlook on the worst of circumstances are two of his most impressive survival skills. Five years before, after his farm in Zimbabwe was taken over, at the implicit encouragement of Zimbabwe’s president, by a gang of squatters calling themselves "war veterans" (supposedly of the Rhodesian War), Connor moved here to manage a kapenta-fishing operation.