Baba raised his rifle until it was trained on Farmer Thornton. ‘Get away from here, mani, you fucking civvy!’
‘You dare to shoot me? You dare to shoot me, you munt, you dare to shoot a Rhodie?’
‘A Rhodie? You want to prattle to me about being a Rhodie? I was a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Rhodesian African Rifles, dammit, I served under Colonel J. F. Clayton and His Majesty Colonel-in-Chief King George VI, I fought alongside your superiors in Burma, the well-tempered Brits, bless their hearts, I killed men worthier of life than you, you Rhodie, and I will shoot you right here right now for nuisance behaviour in the presence of army personnel!’
Out of the corner of his eye, to his right, my surrogate father caught sight of his mama thrusting her head out of the kitchen hut, and then, upon seeing Baba and Farmer Thornton and the gun, she snatched it back in.
‘Step back, civilian! I’m warning you!’ yelled Baba.
‘Just give me the boy!’
Baba spat and cocked his rifle.
Off ran Farmer Thornton, back to his farm that flanked the Tribal Trust Lands, his red dungarees stopping just short of his ankles, making him look like a ragamuffin fleeing the scene of a crime.
Later that night in my pygmy room, I clickety-clacked on my MacBook and Googled this James Thornton. I found his blog, RHODESIANS NEVER DIE, which, along with a host of memories, patriotic ballads and tchotchkes of days gone by, plus the key words ‘Rhodesia’, ‘Prime Minister Ian Smith’, ‘platoon’, ‘munts’, ‘gooks’, ‘G. A. Henry’ and ‘terrs’, sports sixteen thousand email subscribers and an average of fifty thousand unique visitors each month.
I was surprised to see that my surrogate father and the farmer share a distinctive pair of wide, flared nostrils shaped like inverted teardrops, which seems to rather settle the question of fatherhood, even though immediately after recounting the Battle of the Fathers, Abednego had suddenly and vehemently declared to me that he was no son of a settler, that the old farmer was senile, that he had received his yellow skin from his mama’s side, passed down through the genes by an Indo-Caucasian great-great-great-great-grandma.
He’s going to have to come to terms with it all, sooner or later. Patrilineage is, after all, the well from which a man’s identity springs; we are our fathers’ sons, inheriting traits, mannerisms, talents and penchants. What delight to know your roots! To be firmly rooted. To look into a face and see in it something of your own. To notice a familiar tic. To come into knowing of your father’s fathers and their fathers before them.
What would his life have been like had he known, from the very beginning, his true ancestry? I wonder what my life would have been like, had I grown up knowing my father. There are terrible rumours, but no, this man who my Uncle Fani named, five years ago on his deathbed, has so much darkness in him, and me, haven’t I always leaned towards radiance? Besides, he was delirious, Uncle Fani; who is to trust the piffle of a dying man? But what would it have been like, to grow up knowing my forebears? What would it have been like for my surrogate father, had he grown up knowing his forebears? Would he have grown up roaming not the gecko-studded mud huts of his Baba’s compound but the dapperwood halls of that two-storey Thornton Farmhouse, his yellow skin made prickly by the disapproving glares from the framed photographs of his forefathers – the farmer’s temerarious grandpapa William Thornton Senior, slayer of natives and founding father of the Colony of Southern Rhodesia, and his equally valiant papa Captain William Thornton Junior, slayer of both natives and Germans in World War One under the flag of His then Majesty King George V – God Save the King!
These lives of our ancestors are chronicled on Farmer Thornton’s blog, which, given the farmer’s declared ambitions of attracting a large enough following to turn his Life and Times into a TV series, offers an embarrassingly uncensored hi-story of our patrilineage, the Thorntons.
This blood and sperm business started when the farmer lost his young Sonny Boy, killed in March of ’74 when those bantu terrorists puppeteered by World Communist Elements ambushed his regiment’s truck near the Rhodesian army camp at Fort Hare – the farmer’s words as per his blog, not mine! He was twenty-two and the only heir to the Thornton dynasty. Or maybe not. Though there aren’t outright confessions of Abednego as the bastard son from the farmer on his blog, I did find, amidst raunchy recollections of gyrating to the rhythm of cocoa-coloured hips in his younger days, a hangdog confession of ‘an ebony belle whose tsako made his heart lollop’. Can it just be coincidence that the pictures I’ve seen of my surrogate grandmother show a woman whose broad grin is split with a perfect gap between her two front teeth?
Said belle was the cause of his fall-out with his Ennis (Mrs Thornton) who threatened to leave him, foul-mouthed with fury, using words she never used, like Fassyhole and Quashie, until the farmer asked her if she’d been hanging around a Mrs Willoughby again. Ennis’s threats must have won the day, because there is little much else said about this ebony belle in the pages of his blog. Instead, these amorous accounts give way to the farmer’s rants against Her Majesty’s government for betraying his beloved Rhodesia.
These rants are very lengthy, at times talking about Rhodesia as though the past were present, cursing the ‘Mother Country and her cronies for selling the whites down the river’, at other times devolving into fantasies of a twenty-first-century Rhodesia that has been reinstated to its former glory … ‘Make Rhodesia Great Again!’ These diatribes bring him a surprising number of views for each of his posts, but none so much as the one that went viral about how he found his Ennis lying on the floor one day in the ’80s, during the time of the Gukurahundi Genocide, having been raped and strangled by the dissidents. I cried when I read about Mrs Thornton’s brutal murder. She would have been my step-grandma, my surrogate-surrogate grandma. Reading the farmer’s reminiscences, I felt that I’d lost my very own flesh and blood – my very own grandma!
Yesterday, Abednego asked me, for the umpteenth time, where it is I think ‘he’ could have gone.
I could feel something hot and crusty rising in my chest. ‘Who?’
His shoulders fell. ‘No, wena. Don’t do that. You know who.’
I leaned over and tipped the bottle of Bell’s into his glass. I needed him to stay focused. I wanted to find out what happened after Farmer Thornton had tried to claim him as his son. ‘You were telling me about being sent to Bulawayo, after your Baba sent the farmer packing?’
He just sat there, blinking at the damn glass. ‘I was going to take him to watch soccer that Sunday, you know. Highlanders was playing at Barbourfields Stadium. I had thought … He was behaving strangely, did you notice?’
‘What was it that made Baba suddenly decide to send you and not Zacchaeus to—’
‘The other day, he raised his voice to his mother. It was like a fist, the force of it, and I saw how she flinched—’
‘—why did Baba send you to Bulawayo?’
‘Maybe he spoke to you, did he tell you anything? About where he was going?’
I sighed.
‘Did he tell you anything?’
‘He didn’t.’
‘You don’t have even one idea, nje, where he might have gone?’
‘… hmm hmm.’
‘What?’
‘I said, I have no idea where he went.’
‘But you’ll come with me tomorrow morning to look, isn’t it?’
‘OK.’
‘He liked you … Likes. He likes you … I always tried to be a good father. He knew that, didn’t he? Knows. He knows.’
How creased his yellow face became! It flitted between an inward, mustard despair and a jaundiced hope that radiated outward, towards me, enveloping me, filling the room, filtering between the burglar bars of the living room windows and out into the Monday afternoon. I was suddenly overwhelmed by the urge to lean over and squeeze his arm. Instead, I fisted my hands and tucked them beneath my armpits. ‘Yes, of course, he knew you loved him.’ I could have told him what the
boy had really thought of him; but is there a point in crushing a man with the truth? ‘He always told me how he loved you.’
A light glinted in his eyes.
‘Don’t worry!’ I said. ‘We’ll find him!’
He seemed to consider this. ‘You think so?’
‘Certain hundred per cent!’
I am, of course, certain of nothing. But what does it hurt to give a man a little hope? He is, like me, floating, my surrogate father. He, like me, never managed to get close to his Baba. Like him and Bukhosi, him and his Baba had a rather tenuous relationship. He and Uncle Zacchaeus were born after their Baba’s abrupt return from his service in the Second World War, where he had fought on behalf of the Mother Country under the Rhodesian African Rifles, serving for four and a half years. For four and a half years, Abednego’s mama was a fresh, young, supple bride without her husband to cultivate her. No wonder she and that Farmer Thornton … And then, he returned to her an old-young man, my surrogate-surrogate grandfather, with voices in his head. This version of the old man, with his voices, is all my surrogate father knew of him, although he remembers his mama relating wistfully another Baba only she had known, a charming young man with wild ambitions of one day acquiring enough education to become someone important, like a teacher or even a lawyer, forced by the times to work as a labourer in the Tsholotsho Mines, a job that began to kill his dreams piece by piece … And then, like most young men at the time, he had, taken over by the querulous passions of youth, run off after the romance of war, that unbearably seductive mistress who promises the kind of ecstasy young men dream of in their sleep, wetting them with excitement.
His discharge papers, according to Uncle Zacchaeus, who’d started snooping around the souvenirs decorating the old man’s hut ever since he’d learned how to read, said, Reason for Discharge: Severe Stress Response Syndrome. Recommendation: No longer fit for service.
Abednego was nineteen when his Baba sent him off to Bulawayo, in April ’74, just a month after the death of Farmer Thornton’s Sonny Boy and, I’m guessing, about the same time that the farmer would have visited the Mlambo homestead.
I tried one more time to get him to speak. ‘Come on. Let’s talk about other things. Tell me, why did Baba send you to the city?’ I already knew, of course. I can imagine how angry Baba would have been when Farmer Thornton marched in demanding his progeny back. It’s easy to pretend that some things aren’t true until some loudmouth speaks them into being and makes them concrete. And once out of the mouth, a secret cannot be taken back. It hovers in the air and becomes pregnant from all that potent silence, birthing, inevitably, a new course for a life.
Abednego turned the tumbler of whisky and then drained it. As if the alcohol oiled his voicebox, he settled back into his chair, and finally resumed his story.
‘Atte-nnn-tion!’
He had been summoned to the old man’s hut. He raised his hand in a reflexive salute.
‘Right, soldier, get on the floor and give me fifty!’
‘Sir, yessir!’ he said, and lowered himself to the dung-and-mud floor, where he began to huff and puff out fifty press-ups. Baba began pacing the length of the hut, his boots making muffled thumps that Abednego could feel vibrating through his palms.
‘The enemy is upon us, soldier,’ Abednego heard him say, his voice rising and falling with his pacing. ‘I’d say we attack, but a tactical retreat would be the wiser thing to do, for now.’
‘Whatever you think is best, sir!’
‘Don’t interrupt your Lieutenant, soldier, I’m doing some thinking.’
‘Sorrysir!’
‘I’d say we withdraw further south. Tsholotsho’s probably too close, and too small, hardly a hamlet, they’ll find us there. Hmmm, what to do …’
‘… twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four …’
‘… I’d say Bulawayo’s the place.’
Abednego stumbled and flopped. ‘Did you say Bulawayo, Baba?’
He could scarcely believe what Baba seemed to be saying – he, and not Zacchaeus, was going to experience big-city living! Zacchaeus whose eye, at sixteen, had already taken on the sheen of arrogance as it cast itself across the rocky, scraggly Tribal Trust Lands to see not sand and scrub but faraway places, big-city living in Bulawayo.
‘I shall forage towns and cities, brother, and even whole countries, for worldly wisdom,’ his younger brother had taken to declaring of late during such moments of haughty-eye-roving. ‘I shall fashion myself into a Great Colonizer, a Cecil John Rhodes, a David Livingstone, a Christopher Columbus. I’m destined for great things! Everyone sees it in me. Say, what do they say about you, brother?’
And so there he was, my surrogate father, having been in the city of Bulawayo for four days, failing still to name one auspicious thing anyone in his village had ever said about him. He was standing outside the Rhodesia Railway Station, carrying an application for the position of train driver, which he’d happened upon in the classifieds of the Bantu Terrorists: Rhodesia’s Communist Threat newspaper sheet he had in hand, ogling the station’s red-brick facade and its tusk-coloured entablatures, and squinting horribly, so as to better see, through the mist of his humble roving eye, the blurry visions of the towns cities and countries he intended to forage, and the foggy self-fashioning into a Great Colonizer a Cecil John Rhodes a David Livingstone a Christopher Columbus, when he saw, flickering past, neither flash nor vision, but Thandi, a distraction he would otherwise have ignored were it not for the fact that his manhood reared to attention, like a flag suddenly thrust at full mast.
‘Thandi?’ I asked, desperately intrigued.
‘Shut up, mani, I’m talking,’ he barked back.
Thandi. She was walking down Customs Avenue, glistering umber limbs swaying one-two one-two, as though to a song, breasts bounce-bouncing and buttocks jounce-jouncing to the same tempo.
All at once, the railway was forgotten; the city could be foraged for wisdom another day; said manhood was busy conducting public misdemeanor; and before he knew what he was doing, he was following her.
Thandi
It felt good to accompany Abednego and the neighbourhood committee in search of the boy today. Honestly, I didn’t want to go, but the way Abednego warmed up to me after I offered to print out posters of Bukhosi’s blunt face to plaster all over our Luveve Township made it all worth it. He slapped me on my back, and said, ‘Yebo yes, boy!’ His hand lingered there, warm and solid, and I leaned into him slightly; I could smell Bukhosi’s Lifebuoy soap on him.
After the community search, which consisted of going door to door asking after the boy, and pasting up his posters, my surrogate father invited me to share a beer with him at the shebeen. My heart lolloped at the thought that it would be just us two, but then he also invited the other men from the township who had accompanied us on our search. And though I sat next to him, and tried to laugh louder than the other men at his jokes, which weren’t all that funny, he didn’t once look my way. It was as if I wasn’t there. I can’t stand him when he gets like that. Eventually, I slipped away, and took a khombi into town; I just couldn’t stand feeling as though I was back to just being his lodger again.
I found myself retracing the steps across the city my surrogate father took when he followed the young woman, Thandi, from the railway station all those years ago.
Yes, he followed her. What else could he do but follow her?
(I felt strange, having to look up the old, colonial names of the streets back in Thandi’s time when Zimbabwe was still Rhodesia. It was like I had been transported to another Bulawayo on another Earth in another multiverse. I found myself pussyfooting on those colonial streets of the past, as I’m sure my surrogate father had, too.)
She hurried down Customs Avenue, took a left onto Prospect then another quick left onto Jameson; a right onto Fourteenth Avenue; crossing the wide thoroughfares with incredible speed, past Fort, past Main, continuing across Abercorn, across Fife, across Rhodes; and then a left onto Grey Str
eet, where she slowed down and walked with her hands tucked in the front pockets of her sapphire frock, straining her neck as she ambled past the Royal Cinema to glimpse the white teenagers standing in line.
She crossed the street and entered Downing’s Bakery, redolent with the aroma of freshly baked bread, which my surrogate father could smell all the way out on the pavement where he stood looking sheepish waiting for her to emerge, too afraid to follow her in. She appeared a few minutes later with a steaming chicken pie and a Fanta, which made his stomach rumble, and turned left onto Selbourne Avenue, moving at a leisurely pace, munching on her pie and pausing every so often to tilt the Fanta to her lips. Down Selbourne she sauntered, across Rhodes Street he followed her, where he paused, gaping at the off-white building of the Bulawayo City Hall with its Tuscan columns and the tower clock chiming every quarter hour. She crossed Fife Street and was now strolling across Abercorn, then Main, where all of a sudden he dropped to the ground, startled before the Gatling Gun, which stood threatening him outside Asbestos House, its muzzle trained on him and Selbourne Avenue behind. But the gun was just a monumental relic, rusty and out of use, without a gun master. Embarrassed, looking furtively about to make sure no one had seen him, he stumbled after her, on Selbourne Avenue still, across Fort and then Jameson, and then a right onto Lobengula Street. Here the crowds became darker of skin and also more compact, the thoroughfare still impressively wide. Her shapely rump beckoned him, flitting seductively in and out of the throngs, until she swung quite suddenly into Ticki-Tai Convenience Store at the corner of Lobengula and Third Avenue.
Ticki-Tai Convenience Store, where the young woman Thandi worked, on Lobengula Street, is now a phone-and-internet shop. I stood on the pavement staring at it for a long time, much in the same way my surrogate father said he stood waiting for Thandi in April ’74. I even leaned against the broken parking meter outside the phone-and-internet shop, much like he said he had leaned against a parking meter all those years ago outside Ticki-Tai, in a pose of affected nonchalance. There he remained, sweating in an afternoon sun that seared the Bulawayo skyline, until the shadows began to spread across the pavement and cast a soothing shade where he stood. When his legs began to burn and still Thandi had not appeared, he shuffled back to the entrance, counted one, two, three, and ducked inside.
House of Stone Page 2