Monkeys in My Garden

by Valerie Pixley

  Eventually, in December, I made a hard decision – and a dangerous one. I would have to borrow money for the pump from a member of my family in Harare (more debt!) and on top of this, I would have to engage in the criminal activity called a ‘KANDONGA’ (smuggling) to get the money out of Zimbabwe and into Mozambique.

  Currency restrictions were extremely tight in Zimbabwe. If I got caught smuggling a large amount of Zimbabwean dollars out of that country, I would end up in the most terrible trouble. All the money would be confiscated and I would be thrown into a Zimbabwean jail – a prospect too ghastly to even contemplate!

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  KANDONGAS ACROSS THE BORDER

  In Harare, I stayed with my cousin, Leslie, pondering for about a week on how I was going to smuggle fifty thousand Zimbabwean dollars (the equivalent of about four thousand U.S. dollars) across the border without being caught. The quantity of the notes made a bulky pile, difficult to hide.

  As Leslie had just become a devout Christian, she made no suggestions to help me out and so I had to turn to my brother, David. David and his friend, John, who would be driving me back to Mozambique.

  Two days before we were due to leave, David told me he had finally thought up a plan. “We’ll buy twenty chickens,” he said, “and stuff them with the money.”

  A vision came into my mind, of plump Zimbabwean Customs officials poking around a cold box overflowing with chickens. They would be sure to find the quantity suspicious.

  “We’ll just tell them we’re having a big barbecue in Mozambique,” David went on optimistically.

  The vision grew worse as I saw a Customs official examine one of the chickens and, exclaiming “What is THIS?” pull an incriminating wad of Zimbabwean dollar notes out of its cavity.

  “No,” I said, “that’s not a good idea. Not a good idea at all, David!”

  While I wracked my brain for a foolproof plan, my mind roved over several other successful Kandongas that had been perpetrated in the past by various people I had known or seen at it.

  There had been the time when the Tabex farm had needed a new water pump and Tim, one of the Zimbabwean farmers, had driven across the border into Zimbabwe to get one. In Mutare, he had cut off the bottom of a 210 litre drum and had put the pump inside it. It had been a tight fit but no one had remarked on the drum of ‘fuel’ in the back of his pick-up as he had driven through both Forbes and Machipanda border posts.

  Another time, sitting in the pick-up at Machipanda border post, I had watched a band of about eleven barefoot and tattered Mozambican women gear themselves up to blatantly smuggle eleven large sacks filled with bottles of Coca-Cola and Fanta out of Zimbabwe and into Mozambique.

  Their Kandonga had been a simple but a daring one. Balancing the clinking sacks on top of their heads, the women had drawn together in a tight group. Then, at a whispered signal, they had stormed towards the wooden barrier blocking the road into Mozambique.

  Taking everyone by surprise, especially the guard at the barrier, they had stampeded onwards, crashing so mightily against the wooden pole that it had cracked in half and fallen onto the ground A loud roar had risen up in the air from the spectators as everyone had exploded with laughter and the women had dumped their sacks down on the ground and had flung their arms around each other, laughing and dancing with triumph.

  The women’s extraordinary enterprise had put the Mozambican officials into such a good humour that day that they had decided not only to overlook the breaking of the law, not to mention the wooden barrier, but they had also waved everyone else through into Mozambique without bothering at all to check on their goods.

  And then there had been the time when O’D had driven off to Mutare with Faruk, his Indian friend, to buy a mattress. They had gone in Faruk’s pick-up and when Faruk had brought O’D back to our house on the Tabex farm, I had asked them if they would like some tea. “Yes, that would be nice,” they had told me, and sitting down on the dralon-covered armchairs, they had immediately begun to take off their shoes and their socks.

  At first I had thought that this was some sort of Islamic tea-drinking custom and that O’D was also removing his footwear in deference to Faruk’s culture but then, when Zimbabwean dollars began to emerge from their socks, I had realised that the Customs officials had once again been foiled.

  Eventually, on the day before I returned to Mozambique, I decided how I was going to carry out my own Kandonga. Like O’D and Faruk, I decided to wear the money. As far as I knew, searching the underclothes of white women was unheard of and quite unthinkable.

  Choosing a fairly loose top and a gathered skirt, I hid the money around myself, under my clothes. In Leslie’s bedroom, I carefully examined myself for telltale signs in her long mirror. A woman who looked a trifle too bulky to be true looked back at me and so I began to subtract the packets until I looked normal. This left me with four large wads of dollars and I had no idea whatsoever where to hide them.

  John, David’s friend, came to my rescue.

  “Give the money to me,” he said, “I’ve got a place I always use when I smuggle money out of the country,” and unscrewing the plastic covers of the back lights of his 4 x 4, he stuffed the money inside, at the far end of the light compartments and screwed the back light covers on again.

  During the journey, I became more and more nervous, worrying that something about my appearance would betray me at the border. The thought of jail terrified me. Another dread was that some of the money would fall out of my clothes, leaving an incriminating trail behind me as I walked across the floor of the Immigration and Customs building at Forbes. That would be just my luck!

  Forbes Border Post was busy when we arrived. The path over the mountain separating Zimbabwe and Mozambique was busy too, with a very visible trail of people all Kandonga-ing away with large sacks and bundles on their heads. Inside the small building, pockets of potatoes and boxes of eggs, confiscated from unsuccessful Kandongas were piled up against the Immigration and Customs Officers’ desks. No wonder they were all so plump!

  At the crowded counter, I stayed close to David and John. Africa was macho country and as a woman and therefore a second-class person, I knew I would be ignored while they got all the attention.

  “How many Zimbabwean dollars are you carrying?” a Customs Official asked us.

  My heart gave a nervous thump at the question and a sudden explosion of perspiration misted my face like a veil. I turned my head towards the windows, pretending interest in the Vervets rummaging around the piles of empty crisp packets under the trees.

  “About forty dollars between us,” John lied, without blinking an eyelid.

  Outside the building again, we walked past a dilapidated grey Peugeot Stationwagon where a large female Customs Official was examining the contents of the driver’s suitcase. She had unearthed a hundred and thirty eight T-shirts which he was claiming were his personal clothes.

  Grilling him, she asked “How is it - if these are your personal clothes as you are claiming - that these one hundred and thirty eight T-shirts are all still in their original pristine plastic packets?”

  We climbed into the 4 x 4 and drove towards the barrier. The border guard examined our gate pass and then raised the pole and waved us through. It was only when Machipanda border post was completely out of sight that I closed my eyes and fell weakly back in my seat, blowing out a long breath of relief. I felt no guilt at what I had done. It had been the only way. Foreign currency was hard to get and life was short. Trying to find a legal way through the tangle of red tape African governments love so much just wasn’t worth the effort.

  One morning, a week later, O’D carefully lowered our new borehole pump down the 80 metre hole Vic Vorster’s old rig had drilled. Then, checking that everything was in order, he turned on the generator.

  As Vic’s workers had told us they had found very little water, we waited tensely. Our whole future depended on the borehole. Was water going to come cascading out of the short hosepipe
O’D had attached to the pump, or were we going to end up with an extremely expensive deep, dry, hole?

  Nothing happened … and then there was a gurgling sound. With a gush, precious sparkling clean water spouted out of the pipe and soaked into the hard, drought-stricken earth. Gathering all our plastic containers together, Seven hurriedly inserted the pipe into one of them and began to fill it up.

  The hole pumped dry within 15 minutes and our spirits drooped with despair. “I’ll try again this afternoon,” O’D said “and see what happens.”

  In the afternoon, the borehole gave us another fifteen minutes of water before running dry and as it did this, day in and day out, we were grateful and learned to live with it. The water was just enough for our own personal needs and to operate the saw.

  Our workers were grateful, too. No more sweating trips up and down to the hole in the riverbed with heavy containers on their heads. That was women’s work! Now, using the new - and uncontaminated by Chuck - containers I had made O’D buy, Seven collected water from the borehole, a much, much shorter distance.

  As we hadn’t been able to find an experienced saw operator, O’D operated the saw himself at first. He’d never done this sort of thing before, of course, but he’d pored over books on saw milling and it hadn’t appeared to be difficult. You just had to get a feel for the wood and know when you had hit a knot or a series of knots. The wood was extremely hard and the best way of cutting through a knot was by slowing down and easing the blade through it.

  As he was now doing the work of three men - lorry driver, mechanic and saw operator - O’D soon turned his mind to finding a replacement to relieve him of at least one of these duties, preferably that of saw operator.

  “Where on earth are we going to find someone who knows how to do this?” I wondered.

  “I’m going to train one of our workers,” O’D told me. “Someone who has enough common sense for this type of work.”

  There were not many of these, I can tell you! However, O’D’s eye had fallen on Pocas, the bright and intelligent young Mozambican who used to help Chuck in the workshop.

  Once he’d been shown what to do, Pocas sawed well and planks and beams began to pile up around the sawmill. Now all we had to do was to find customers to buy them. Something easier said than done!

  One day, not long after Chuck and Eileen had left, Mario, the Chief of the Macate police, rode down the forest track on his ancient Honda government motorbike with a warning for us.

  There was bandit activity in the area!

  The warning made O’D realise I needed more protection than the mere presence of Biasse, Avelino and Pocas in the room underneath the house. “We need a night guard,” he told me, “but for the life of me I can’t think of anyone who would be trustworthy enough. Or brave enough.”

  While O’D and I were wondering where to find a suitable night guard, our Foreman, Madeira, and our workers came to us with the answer.

  One evening, when they arrived back from working in the forest, they complained to O’D about Steven, the big, ragged, Zimbabwean he had employed at the Railway Station. Steven, they claimed, was always starting fights and threatening to kill them with his knife.

  When O’D asked Steven to explain his behaviour, the man shrugged off the accusations and told O’D that as he had once been a soldier, he would prefer to guard our house and sawmill than work in the forest. He had, it seemed, been a member of the Zimbabwean fighter Tekere’s group during the Rhodesian bush war.

  O’D thought about Steven’s suggestion for a while. He rather liked the Zimbabwean. He was strong and worked hard.

  “I think we should try him out,” he told me.

  “Alright,” I said.

  The next day, O’D explained Steven’s new duties to him. They were quite simple. His first priority was to protect me when O’D was away and then to make sure that no one stole any of our equipment or planks during the night.

  Armed only with a paraffin lantern, Steven took up his duties and soon little scraps of paper, which looked as if they had been torn out of a school exercise book, began to appear all over the place. They were propped up on our equipment, they were stuck onto the windscreens or fuel tanks of our lorries and tractor, they were attached to various mango trees around the sawmill. All these notes had a message on them, a threatening message and were written in pencil in a large and uneven print.

  ‘TSOTSIES WATCH OUT!” the notes read. “I AM WATCHING YOU!”

  As these warnings were printed in English and our Tsotsies were Mozambicans who not only had no knowledge whatsoever of English but were mostly unable to read as well, it was difficult to gauge their effect.

  Some evenings Steven brought a battered Bible to work with him. He had learnt a lot of it off by heart and often recited great reams of it to O’D with an enormous amount of fervour and passion. Whenever I saw him doing this, I would get a feeling that something was wrong with Steven, that something was wrong with his mind and that it had been broken in some way by the war and by the things he had seen … and the things he had done.

  One late afternoon, while Steven was talking to O’D outside the house, he heard the baboons barking in the forest and the sound triggered off some of his wartime memories.

  “I will never hunt and kill the baboons,” he told O’D. “I will never kill and eat them like the Mozambican people do, because the baboons are my friends. Once, during the war in Rhodesia, they saved my life. This I will never forget.”

  He went on to tell O’D that he’d been trained to fight by the Chinese, in the training camps they had set up in Tanzania. It was the time of the Cold War and the Chinese had long term plans for Africa.

  “The Chinese helped us a lot against the Rhodesians,” he said. “There were many of us in their camps and when they thought we were ready to go back to Zimbabwe, they gave us guns and ammunition, uniforms and boots. When my unit and I got to the Zambezi, we paddled across the river in canoes at night and slipped into Zimbabwe. Then we began to make our way through the bush.”

  It was here that his unit had had their first and last encounter with the Rhodesian Army.

  “One day,” he told O’D, “we were moving through the bush when we had a contact with some Rhodesian soldiers. During the gunfight, they called up one of their helicopters to come and attack us and they killed all the men in my group. Only I was left alive and they would have killed me too, if it hadn’t been for the baboons.”

  A troop of baboons had been close by when the fighting had begun and the sound of gunfire and the swooping helicopter had panicked them, sending them scrambling for safety.

  “I grabbed at the opportunity,” Steven said, “I bent down and with my hands on the ground, I imitated their movements, running among the baboons for cover. To the Rhodesians in the helicopter overhead, I looked just like another monkey … and so I escaped death, thanks to my friends, the baboons.”

  Only a few weeks after Steven had become our night guard, trouble reared its head. Someone, whom we strongly suspected was one of our workers, had reported him to the Department of Immigration and the Department was threatening to deport him. They’d been told he was a Zimbabwean and Zimbabweans didn’t have official permission to work in Mozambique.

  Distressed, he came to O’D and appealed for help. He didn’t want to return to Zimbabwe, he told O’D, as there was now nothing there for him. He wanted to stay in Mozambique and make a new life here.

  Wondering how to help Steven, O’D talked to Caetano. As a Mozambican, Caetano knew the ropes and with the help of a government official, quickly arranged some false papers for Steven, who now became … Stefano.

  Thrilled with his new Mozambican papers and identity, Steven thanked O’D and told him that he was the only white man who had ever treated him decently in his entire life.

  By the end of December, Pocas had sawn our logs into large piles of beautiful planks. He had a natural bent for mechanics and had quickly turned into something of an expert saw
operator. As he was walking off on Saturday at 12 o’clock for his last weekend of the year, I smiled at him and said, “You’re doing really great on the saw, Pocas!”

  Strangely, Pocas didn’t return my smile. He merely gave me a nod. “Thank you,” he replied.

  Alone in the forest, O’D and I hadn’t had much of a Christmas and we didn’t have much of a New Year, either. On the last day of the year, while the Vervet monkeys foraged in the mango trees outside our windows, we ate a simple lunch of Biasse’s famous tuna fish cakes, crispy potato chips and a salad. We had no wine or even a glass of beer. But perhaps next year everything would be better - especially now that Chuck and the curse he had brought with him had gone!

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  BABES IN THE WOODS

  1996

  The new year began with another betrayal.

  When Pocas didn’t turn up for work on the 2nd of January, we thought at first that he had fallen ill, perhaps with malaria. However, when Caetano paid a visit to Pocas’ family in Chimoio to find out what was going on, he soon discovered that we’d been the victims of some skullduggery by someone of a decidedly low-down, underhand, sneaky, sly disposition!

  Yes, Chuck had done it again! Stabbed us in the back when we had least expected it.

  Now working for his ‘rich and successful’ kapenta-fishing brother-in-law on Lake Cahora Bassa, Chuck had connived with Pocas behind our backs and had stolen him away from us by telling him that he was going to make him rich. This promise was to lure another of our workers away from us. A few weeks after Pocas’ departure, Avelino also ran off to join Chuck.

  As Chuck and Eileen had given us no indication as to when they would be returning for their belongings, I spent about a week packing up all their things into cardboard boxes to clear the house of their possessions … and their presence. The fact that they had left me to do this filled me with resentment and I was looking forward to Chuck’s return to collect their stuff so that I could tell him exactly what I thought of him.