by Wilbur Smith
Starved to the leanness of greyhounds, and worked to the hardness of iron, half their nights were spent in the political rallies, the endless chanting and singing, and shouted massed responses to the commissar’s catechism.
‘What is the revolution?’
‘The revolution is power to the people.’
‘Who are the people?’
‘Who is the power?’
After midnight they were allowed to stagger away to the thatched barracks and sleep – until the instructors woke them again at four o’clock in the morning.
After three weeks, Tungata was taken to the sinister isolated hut beyond the camp periphery. Surrounded by instructors and political commissars, he was stripped naked and forced to ‘struggle’. While they shrieked the foulest abuse at him, calling him ‘running dog of the racist capitalists’ and ‘counter-revolutionary’ and ‘imperialist reactionary’, Tungata was driven to strip his soul as bare as his body.
He shouted aloud his confessions, he told them how he had worked with the capitalist tyrants, how he had denied his brethren, how he had doubted and back-slid and harboured reactionary and counter-revolutionary thoughts, how he had lusted for food and sleep, and had betrayed the trust of his comrades. They left him utterly exhausted and broken on the floor of the hut, then Wan Lok took him by the hand, as though she were his mother and he her child, and led him stumbling and weeping back to the barracks.
The next day he was allowed to sleep until noon and awoke feeling serene and strong. In the evening at the political rally, he was called to take his place in the front rank amongst the section-leaders.
A month later, Wan Lok summoned him to her sleeping-hut in the instructors’ compound. She stood before him, a dumpy squat figure in her rumpled cotton uniform.
‘Tomorrow you are going in,’ she said, and took the cloth cap from her head.
He had never seen her hair before. It fell to her waist, as thick and black and liquid as a spill of crude oil.
‘You will not see me again,’ she said, and unbuttoned the front of her uniform. Her body was the colour of butter, hard and immensely powerful, but what startled and intrigued Tungata was that her pubic hair was as straight as that upon her head, without any kinking or curling. It excited him inordinately.
‘Come,’ she said, and led him to the thin mattress on the dirt floor of the hut.
They did not use the drifts on the return but they crossed the Zambezi in dugout canoes at the point where the river flowed into the immensity of Lake Kariba. In the moonlight the stark silhouettes of the drowned trees were silver and tortured as the limbs of lepers against the starry sky.
There were forty-eight of them in the cadre, under a political commissar and two young but battle-tempered captains. Tungata was one of the four section-leaders with ten men under him. Each of them, even the commissar, carried a sixty-kilo load beneath which they toiled like pregnant hunchbacks. There was no place for food in their packs, so they lived on lizards and bush rats, and the half-incubated eggs of wild birds. They competed with the hyena and vulture at lion kills for the putrefying scraps, and at night they visited the kraals of the black peasant farmers and emptied the grain bins.
They crossed the Chizarira Hills and struck southwards through trackless forest and waterless wilderness until they hit the Shangani river. They followed it southwards still, passing within a few kilometres of the lonely monument in the mopani forest which marks the spot where Allan Wilson and his patrol made their last heroic but futile stand against the impi of Gandang, son of Mzilikazi, brother of the last Matabele king, Lobengula.
When they came to the lands of the white farmers, their work began. On the dirt roads they laid the heavy landmines that they had carried so far upon their backs. Freed of this onerous burden, they attacked the isolated white homesteads.
They hit four farmhouses in a single week, secure in the knowledge that the security forces were no longer moving to the rescue of a beleaguered homestead during the hours of darkness because they were aware that the attackers mined all the approach roads before commencing an attack. So the guerrillas had all night to finish the job and escape.
The technique was highly developed by this time. At dusk they poisoned the dogs and cut the ring-wire. Then they fired rockets into the windows and doorways and rushed the breaches they had made. At two farms they were held off by a dogged defence, but at the other two they penetrated. The horrors that they left behind them were a deliberate provocation to the rescuers who would come in at first light. What they found might drive the security forces to take out their shock and rage and frustration on the local black population, and in doing so drive them into the ZIPRA camp.
At last, after six weeks in the field, low on ammunition and explosives, they began to pull back, laying ambushes as they withdrew. They abandoned the first ambush after two fruitless days. However, at the second ambush on a remote country road, they were lucky.
They trapped a white farmer who was rushing his wife, suffering from a peritonitis following a burst appendix, to the local hospital. The farmer had his two teenage daughters in the vehicle with him. He almost broke through the ambush, but as the armoured vehicle passed Tungata’s position, he jumped up and ran into the road behind it. He hit it in the soft rear section with an armour-piercing RPG-7 rocket at point-blank range.
The farmer and his eldest daughter were killed in the blast, but his sick wife and the younger daughter were still alive. The political commissar let the ‘boys’ have the dying women. They queued up and took them in the road beside the shattered vehicle, one after the other.
When Tungata did not join the line, the commissar condescended to explain, ‘When a honey guide leads you to the hive, you must leave him a piece of the comb. Since the beginning of history, rape has always been one of the rewards of the conquerors. It makes them fight better, and it will madden the enemy.’
They left the road that night and moved back into the hills, back towards the lake and sanctuary. Ballantyne’s Scouts caught them in the middle of the following afternoon. There was very little warning. Just a tiny Cessna 210 spotter plane circling high overhead, and while the commissars and the captains were still shouting the orders to deploy and set up a perimeter, the Scouts came in.
The delivery vehicle was an ancient twin-engined Dakota that had seen service in the Western Desert during World War II. It was painted with grey non-reflective paint to thwart the infra-red seekers of SAM-7 missiles. It flew so low that it seemed to scrape the ragged rocky crests of the kopjes, and as its shadow momentarily blotted out the sun, the fighting men spewed out of the gaping belly-port.
The olive-green umbrellas of their parachutes popped open only seconds before they hit the ground. As the silk flared, they were down. They landed on their feet, and even before the parachutes settled softly in billowing folds, they had snapped their harnesses and were running forward, firing.
The commissar and both veteran captains were killed within the first three minutes, and the Scouts swept forward, rolling up the green panic-stricken guerrillas against the foot of the kopje. Tungata, acting without conscious thought, gathered the men closest to him and led them in a desperate counter-attack down a shallow donga that bisected the line of Scouts.
He heard the Scout commander give the order on the bull-horn. ‘Green and red, hold on your position; blue, clean out that gulley.’ The distorted voice echoed against the hills, but Tungata recognized it. He had last heard it at Khami Mission on the night Constance was murdered. It turned him cold and clear thinking.
He judged his moment finely, and then pulled out of the donga, under the whipping crackle of the FNs. His calm steadied the men with him, and he started the running defence as Wan Lok had taught him. They were in contact for three hours, in contact with élite battle-hardened troops, and Tungata kept his little band in hand and they counterattacked and laid AP mines behind them and held at every natural strongpoint, until it was dark. Then Tungata broke off the con
tact and pulled his men out. By that time there were only eight of them left and three of these were wounded.
Seven days later, in the morning before the dew dried, Tungata opened a passage through the cordon sanitaire, probing with a bayonet until he found the key to the pattern, and he took his men across the drifts. There were only five of them left. None of the wounded had been able to stand the pace, and Tungata had personally finished them with the commissar’s Tokarev pistol to save them being interrogated by the pursuers.
In the town of Livingstone, on the north bank of the Zambezi opposite the Victoria Falls, Tungata reported to ZIPRA headquarters, and the commissar was astonished.
‘But you were all killed. The Rhodesians claimed on the television—’
A driver in a black Mercedes with the party flag fluttering on the bonnet took Tungata up to the Zambian capital of Lusaka, and there in a safe house on a quiet street he was ushered into a sparsely furnished room where a man sat alone at a cheap pine desk.
‘Baba!’ Tungata recognized him immediately. ‘Nkosi nkulu! Great Chief!’
The man laughed, a throaty bellow of sound. ‘You may call me that when we are alone, but at other times you must call me Comrade Inkunzi.’
Inkunzi was the Sindebele word for a bull. It suited the man admirably. He was huge, with a chest like a beer-keg and a belly like a sack of grain. His hair was thick and white, all the things that the Matabele venerate, physical size and strength and the hair of age and wisdom.
‘I have watched you with interest, Comrade Tungata. Indeed, it was I that sent to fetch you.’
‘I am honoured, Baba.’
‘You have richly repaid my faith.’
The big man settled lower in his chair and linked his fingers over the bulk of his stomach. He was silent for a while, studying Tungata’s face, then abruptly he asked, ‘What is the revolution?’
The reply, so often repeated, came instantly to Tungata’s lips.
‘The revolution is power to the people.’
Comrade Inkunzi’s delighted bull-bellow crashed out again.
‘The people are mindless cattle,’ he laughed. ‘They would not know what to do with power if anyone was fool enough to let them have it! No, no! It is time you learned the true answer.’ He paused, and he was no longer smiling. ‘The truth is that the revolution is power to the chosen few. The truth is that I am the head of those few, and that you, Commissar Comrade Tungata, are now one of them.’
Craig Ballantyne parked the Land-Rover and switched off the engine. He twisted the rear-view mirror on its goose-neck and used it to adjust the angle of his peaked uniform cap. Then he looked around at the elegant new building that housed the museum. It stood in the middle of the botanical gardens, surrounded by tall palms and green lawns and bright beds of geraniums and sweet-peas.
Craig realized that he was putting off the moment and clenched his jaw determinedly. He left the Land-Rover in the car park and climbed the front steps of the museum.
‘Good morning, Sergeant.’ The girl at the enquiries desk recognized the three stripes on the sleeve of his khaki and navy blue police uniform. Craig still felt vaguely ashamed of his rapid promotion.
‘Don’t be damned silly, boy,’ Bawu had growled when he protested at the family influence. ‘It’s a technical appointment, Sergeant Armourer.’
‘Hi!’ Craig gave the girl his boyish grin, and her expression warmed instantly. ‘I’m looking for Miss Carpenter.’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t know her.’ The girl looked unhappy at having to disappoint him.
‘But she works here,’ Craig protested. ‘Janine Carpenter.’
‘Oh!’ she brightened. ‘You mean Doctor Carpenter. Is she expecting you?’
‘Oh, I’m sure she knows I’m coming,’ Craig assured her.
‘She is in Room 211. Up the stairs, turn left, through the door that says “Staff Only”, and it’s the third door on the right.’
Craig pushed the door open at the invitation of ‘Enter!’ that greeted his knock. It was a long narrow room with skylights and fluorescent tubes overhead and the walls lined as high as the ceiling with shallow drawers, each with a pair of bright brass handles.
Janine stood at the bench table which ran down the centre of the room. She was dressed in blue jeans and a brightly checked lumberjack’s woollen shirt.
‘I didn’t know you wore glasses,’ Craig said. They gave her an air of owlish erudition, and she whipped them off her face and hid them behind her back.
‘Well!’ she greeted him. ‘What do you want?’
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I just had to find out what an entomologist does. I had this bizarre picture of you wrestling with tsetse flies and beating locusts to death with a club.’ He closed the door quietly behind him and kept talking as he sidled up to the table beside her. ‘I say, that looks interesting!’
She was like an affronted cat, back arched and every hair upon it erect, but slowly she relaxed.
‘Slides,’ she explained reluctantly. ‘I am setting up microscopic slides.’ And then with fresh irritation in her voice, ‘You know, you show the typical prejudice of the ignorant and uninformed layman. As soon as anyone mentions insects, you immediately think of pests like locusts and disease-carriers like tsetse flies.’
‘Is that wrong?’
‘Hexapoda is the largest class of the largest animal phylum, Arthropoda. It has literally hundreds of thousands of members, most of which are beneficial to man, and the pests are in the vast minority.’
He wanted to take her up on the ‘vast minority’ as a contradiction in terms, but his good sense for once prevailed. Instead he said, ‘I never thought of that. How do you mean beneficial to man?’
‘They pollinate plants, they scavenge and control pests, and they serve as food—’ She was away, and after a few minutes, Craig’s interest was no longer feigned. Like any dedicated specialist, she was fascinating while talking in her chosen field. Once she realized that he was a receptive and sympathetic audience, she became even more articulate.
The banks of shallow drawers contained the collection which she had boasted on their first meeting was the finest in the world. She showed Craig microscopic feather-winged beetles of the family Ptiliidae which were a mere one hundredth of an inch long and compared them to the monstrous African Goliath beetles. She showed him insects of exquisite jewelled beauty and others of repulsive ugliness. She showed him insects that imitated orchids and flowers and sticks and tree bark and snakes. There was a wasp that used a pebble as a tool, and a fly that, like a cuckoo, placed its eggs in the nest of another. There were ants that kept aphids as milch cows and farmed crops of fungus. She showed him insects that lived in glaciers and others that lived in the depths of the Sahara, some that lived in seawater and even larvae that existed in pools of crude petroleum where they devoured other insects trapped in the glutinous liquid.
She showed him dragonflies with twenty thousand eyes and ants that could lift a thousand times their own body weight; she explained bizarre forms of nutrition and reproduction, and such was her rapture that she forgot her vanity and put the horn-rimmed spectacles back on her nose. She looked so cute that Craig wanted to hug her.
At the end of two hours, she removed the spectacles and faced him defiantly. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘So I am primarily the curator of the collection of Hexapoda, but at the same time I am also a consultant to the Departments of Agriculture, Wildlife and Nature Conservation and Public Health. That’s what entomologists do, mister – now what the hell do you do?’
‘What I do is I go around inviting entomologists to lunch.’
‘Lunch?’ She looked vague. ‘What is the time? My God, you’ve wasted my entire Saturday morning!’
‘T-bone steaks,’ he wheedled. ‘I have just been paid.’
‘Perhaps I am lunching with Roly,’ she told him cruelly.
‘Roly is in the bush.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I phoned Aunty Val at
Queen’s Lynn to check.’
‘You crafty blighter.’ She laughed for the first time. ‘Okay, I give up. Take me to lunch.’
The steaks were thick and juicy and the beer was icy cold, with dew running down the glass. They laughed a lot and at the end of the meal he asked, ‘What do entomologists do on Saturday afternoons?’
‘What do police sergeants do?’ she countered.
‘They go sleuthing up their family antecedents in weird and wonderful places – want to come along?’
She knew all about the Land-Rover by now, so she put a silk scarf around her head and dark glasses over her eyes to protect them from the wind, and Craig restocked the coolbox with crushed ice and beer. They drove out into the Rhodes Matopos National Park, into the enchanted hills where once the Umlimo had held sway and the Matabele had come for succour and sanctuary in the times of tribal disasters. The beauty of the place struck Janine to the heart.
‘The hills look like those wonderful fairy castles along the banks of the Rhine.’
In the valleys there were herds of wild antelope, sable and kudu, as tame as sheep. They barely lifted their heads as the Land-Rover passed and then returned to graze.
It seemed that they had the hills to themselves, for few others would risk being alone on these dirt-surfaced roads in the very stronghold of Matabele tradition, but when Craig parked the Land-Rover in a shady grove beneath a massive bald dome of granite, an old Matabele guardian in the suntans and slouch hat of the Park Board came down to meet them and escort them as far as the gates that bore the inscription: ‘Here are buried men who deserve well of their country.’
They climbed to the summit of the hill and there, guarded by stone sentinels of natural granite and covered by a heavy bronze plaque, they found the grave of Cecil John Rhodes.