As there is nothing less likely to promote goodwill and trust than the threat of being hacked to death, this meeting was to set the tone for the future relationship between the people and us, especially when the stream of invaders turned into an unstoppable torrent.
Aghast at what was taking place, we wrote letters of complaint to the Director of Agriculture and to the Department of Forestry. They didn’t acknowledge our letters but responded by sending the Head of the District Department of Agriculture in Gondola to the Nhamacoa. His name was Mr. Manhoca, a rather unfortunate name meaning ‘diarrhoea’ in the local Chitewa dialect, and he came not to put a halt to the destruction of the forest but to aid it. Loaded down with large supplies of maize seed, Mr. Diarrhoea gave free handouts of seed to the people to plant in their new machambas!
The fact that the very Mozambican government officials who were supposed to protect the forest were themselves helping the population to destroy it filled me with panic. Frightening visions of financial loss and a lifetime of poverty flashed before my eyes. We had invested our hard-earned money in a forest that was now rapidly being turned into a desert!
“I think the Mozambican government has sold us a bum steer, as the Americans call it, ” I said to O’D and Caetano. “At the rate these people are cutting down the forest, we’ll be out of business before we’ve even started! What are we going to do?”
Ever optimistic and unfazed by the destructive behaviour of his countrymen, Caetano replied, “We’ll just have to cut down the trees we need faster than the people are cutting them down.”
O’D was as optimistic as Caetano. “That won’t be a problem,” he said with a grin. “We’ve got chainsaws and all they’ve got are axes.”
When larger and larger areas of the forest began to disappear as if a gigantic swarm of locusts had been through it, even O’D and Caetano’s optimism began to wilt. It was quite obvious that modern technology in the form of three heavy-duty Stihl chainsaws was no match at all for thousands of primitive Mozambican manual axes!
Unlike us, who only felled trees of a certain species and of a certain size, the people were cutting down everything in sight, leaving not one tree standing in the now bare brown and empty earth. And even worse, unlike us who paid the Department of Forestry for licences to cut timber, the people were cutting with impunity; breaking the law by cutting illegally without licences, as well as turning valuable indigenous hardwood trees into ash and smoke.
Sensing defeat in the face of the massive devastation going on around us, Caetano began to look for other ways to stave off what was beginning to look like certain financial ruin. “What we have to do,” he told us, “is to get hold of another felling area. I’ll start looking for one, right away.”
From the way things were going, I could see that there was little likelihood that we were going to be able to pay John Phillips’ loan back to him on time. To salvage something, I sent Willy a fax from the post office in Chimoio asking him not to renew our rental contract with our German tenant, Uwe Heitkamp, but to give him notice to leave our house and then to put Arrojela on the market. With the sale of Arrojela, we could pay back the loan and have plenty of money left over.
A few days later, Willy faxed back. Arrojela was up for sale.
We were not the only ones whose plans were going awry. About a month after they had run away from us, Pocas and Avelino returned from Cahora Bassa. The dreams Chuck had woven for them had fallen far short of reality. While Avelino came back to work for us, Pocas remained at home with an illness that no one could diagnose. Sadly, by the end of the year, young Pocas would be dead.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
NORA SWETE AND THE NIPPA DEMON
I come now to a very strange part of my story. If you remember, at the beginning of our renovation of the old mud-brick house at Arrojela, O’D had been hit by a plank that flew off the roof in a seemingly ‘freak’ gust of wind. Then, after my father’s funeral, my mother and I had been pretty shaken up by some eerie and ghostly sounds we had both heard during the night in the house in Kleinbrak. Now, in the Nhamacoa, O’D and I, along with about a dozen of our workers, were about to be given the fright of our lives when we watched a large Mozambican woman being transformed into a demon … in broad daylight … and in front of our very own eyes!
It all began with Daringua, and the awful mistake he made.
Daringua Dzadza and Alfixa Gatia were two of our most experienced chainsaw operators. We had stolen them from our longhaired, old Italian enemy, Giancarlo Bertuzzi and felt absolutely no remorse at our action. This was because we had discovered, much to our amazement and ire, that Bertuzzi had been cutting illegally in our part of the forest using a Department of Agriculture map that he had FORGED in order to enlarge his area with parts of ours. Only he knew how much of our timber he had purloined and so, as far as we were concerned, the gloves were off!
Pleased with our ability to hit back in the rough and tumble of the timber industry, we had no idea, however, what a fearful thing lay in the background of one of the two men we had ‘head hunted’.
Both Daringua and Alfixa were in their forties and like the majority of Mozambicans, they followed the practice of polygamy. While Alfixa appeared to live a life of contentment with his two wives, the same couldn’t be said for Daringua.
Short and plump, with a little pot-belly that hung over the belt of his trousers, Daringua had added a new woman to his family rather late in his life and what a woman she had turned out to be! A few months after tying the knot, poor old Daringua had discovered all sorts of things about his new wife. Things that were enough to chill the blood of a strong man …
Out of all the women he could have chosen to marry, it soon became dreadfully clear to him that he had tied himself to a woman who was possessed … possessed by a demon!
Yes, a woman who was none other than the terrible Nora Swete!
Unaware of what was lurking under the seemingly placid surface of Daringua’s second wife, Eileen used to buy tomatoes from Nora Swete. I had been present during some of these transactions so I had seen her a couple of times. Hardly a beauty, Nora Swete was a large, heavy-boned woman and as she worked extremely hard in her machamba, she was also immensely strong.
It was when Nora Swete decided to put the profits from her tomatoes into a more lucrative business, that she let the genie right out of the bottle!
Noticing a gap in the market, she began to turn sugar cane or very, very ripe bananas into Nippa, that heady brew rural folk like to drink so much. Unfortunately, Nippa is a potent drink and Nora, like all of us who like to cook and brew, was irresistibly tempted to have a taste of her concoction, and then another taste and another and another, until all her tastings led to a dreadful change in her character … a change that could only be described as similar to the one that overtook Dr. Jekyll and turned him into Mr. Hyde.
O’D and I first became aware of Daringua’s sinister matrimonial problems on a fine and sunny day in March.
One morning, while Biasse was busy currying a chicken in the cook hut for lunch and I was in the upstairs kitchen of the house preparing a lettuce, cucumber and tomato salad, garnished with cubed feta cheese and a sprinkling of oregano, I suddenly noticed that a strange quiet had descended over the normally noisy sawmill. Silence had replaced the whining sound of the saw slicing through logs and even the low hum of the generator had been stilled. Wondering if something had gone wrong, I placed a large net cover over my salad to protect it from flies and walked down to the saw to find out what was going on.
I was on my way across to the planking area, when I saw a sight that brought me up short. There, standing on the saw operator’s small platform was a large woman. Nora Swete, Daringua’s second wife. Waving her arms around, she appeared to be giving a speech to an audience of empty air while our saw workers, having abandoned the saw to her, were tip-toeing among the planks and moving them from one place to another in uncharacteristic silence.
O’D was working on a
piece of equipment near the workshop while Madeira, our foreman, and two or three other workers stood silently in a huddle next to him. I walked over to him.
“What’s going on?” I asked O’D.
It was Madeira who answered me. “Too much Nippa. It has caused a confusion in her brain,” he told me in a whisper, and added the warning, “Stay away from her. She could get violent.”
“Are you mad, Madeira?” I whispered back tartly. Why on earth would I want to go near a large, immensely strong, drunk Mozambican woman?
Nora Swete’s dark eyes caught mine and she stopped speaking in mid flow. The sight of me seemed to fill her with a strange excitement – and an anticipation – almost as if she was thinking “Ah, SHE’s here!” Keeping her eyes fixed on me, she stepped off the platform and began to stride eagerly towards us. Alarmed by her purposeful approach and mindful of Madeira’s warning, I shrank towards O’D for protection.
Halfway towards me, her eyes alighted on the blue Gaz, which was parked near us. The sight of the vehicle stopped her in her tracks and, distracted from her original purpose, she veered away from me and headed instead towards the lorry. Heaving herself up, she clambered awkwardly onto the open back of the Gaz and sat down on the spare tyre.
Unfolding a small cloth bundle she’d been carrying, she took out a large, grey-blue hardcover book that I saw was a Bible and opening it up in the middle, she balanced it carefully on top of her head.
For a while and with her hands folded on her lap, Nora Swete sat still and quiet on the tyre. On top of her head, the pages of the large Bible flipped over in the slight breeze.
And then, before our horrified gaze, Nora Swete underwent a hideous transformation!
Suddenly, her eyes rolled up in her head until her brown irises and black pupils disappeared completely, leaving only the whites glaring blankly out at us from her dark brown face.
Then, her mouth opened and the deep brassy tones of a man’s voice boomed out from between her lips.
The hairs on my arms stood up as if I’d been electrified and an icy chill ran down my spine. This did not look like a drunk woman to me. I’d seen a lot of drunk people in the past and even I, in my younger days, had had a glass or two too much of wine, but none of us had ever reacted in this way! No, Madeira had not been telling me the truth.
This looked more like a woman who had been taken over by something supernatural ... something just like … a demonic spirit!
Nora Swete, or whatever it was, spoke for some time in Chitewa, an indigenous language I naturally couldn’t understand. Her ghastly eyes never left mine and I had the distinct impression that there was a mocking expression in those eyes, blank and white as they were. Incredibly, they seemed to be laughing at me … and gloating ... as if she knew something I didn’t know …
“What’s she saying?” I whispered to Madeira.
“Many things,” he whispered back, “and all of it is rubbish.”
“Oh come on, Madeira,” I insisted, unconvinced by his reply. There was a definite whiff of ancient evil in the atmosphere and apart from that, what was the meaning of the open Bible balancing on top of her head? “Even if she is talking rubbish, I want to know what it is.”
“It is nothing,” Madeira shook his head, refusing to give me even an inkling of what everyone, except O’D and I, were hearing.
The booming voice went on and on until eventually I’d had enough. I decided to walk back to the house but not wanting to make any move to encourage whatever it was that had taken possession of Nora Swete to see this as an opportunity to rush at me and grapple with me, I slid imperceptibly over to the other side of O’D. Once I thought I was hidden from her view, I crept quickly behind a bush and then made my way back to the house in a roundabout way, screened by the long yellow grass.
Some time later, while I was sitting in a chair in the sitting room and trying to make sense of what I had just seen, out of the corner of my eye I noticed a movement at the east-facing window. I turned my head to have a look and gave a gasp of fright. Aah! Nora Swete! Horrified, I wondered if she had come looking for me. As her large form loomed into view, I sank down in the chair, trying to make myself as small as possible in an attempt to hide from her. Would she see me and if she did, what would she do? Forgetting to breathe with the suspense of it all, I watched her walk past the window. Fortunately, she didn’t look in but stared straight ahead as she clumped on past. After she had gone, I sat up slowly and let out a long breath of relief. Wow! There was nothing like living in a house with glassless windows while a demon with blank white eyes and a booming voice walked on by.
At twelve o’clock, the gong rang out and O’D came in for lunch.
“Well,” I said, “what did you think about THAT? It was a bit like that film “The Exorcist”, wasn’t it? Do you think she’s possessed?”
“It certainly looked like it,” O’D replied thoughtfully. “It’s just as well her head didn’t start revolving and whizzing around her neck.”
I pictured the scene. “Imagine if it had! Our workers would have made a mad dash for it!”
“They wouldn’t have been the only ones,” he said. “We would probably have been in the lead.”
“You bet!” I agreed, and we both laughed. Not because we thought it was funny but to ease the tension we felt. The devil had just paid us a visit and we knew it.
A few days later, Madeira and the workers had a meeting with O’D. They told him that Nora Swete was becoming more and more impossible to control and that during the night she had attacked and beaten up poor old Daringua - her own husband! - and then had left him tied up in his hut.
Managing to loosen his bonds and free himself in the morning when Nora Swete had gone off to her machamba, Daringua had discussed his marital problems with his fellow workers and they had come up with a solution. Nora had to be taken to Chissui where there was a clinic for the mentally disturbed and left there for treatment.
There had been one stumbling block, though, and that had been Nora Swete’s abnormal and supernatural strength. How were they going to catch her and take her, against her will, to the clinic? After more discussion, they had finally come up with a plan, a plan that would, of course, necessitate O’D’s help.
“We have decided, Patrao,” Madeira told O’D, “to capture Nora Swete early on Sunday morning. Because she is so strong, we will have to take her by surprise and so we are going to visit Daringua, one by one, until there are about ten or twelve of us at his hut. When Nora Swete comes out, we will surround her and rush at her all at the same time, overwhelming her with our superior numbers. Then we will tie her up and bring her to you.”
“Bring her to me …” O’D repeated slowly, hoping that there was more to our workers’ plan than this!
“Yes,” Madeira went on. “If you agree, Patrao, we’ll put her in the blue Gaz and you can drive us all to Chissui.”
O’D gave his approval to the capture and intended incarceration of Nora Swete and early on Sunday morning a large group of people arrived at the sawmill. Nora Swete was amongst them, standing docile and quiet with her hands neatly and securely bound up with rope behind her broad back.
This morning there was nothing about her at all to indicate that from time to time she underwent a ghastly transformation. She looked just like an ordinary, if rather unattractive, Mozambican peasant woman wearing a faded cotton capulana and standing patiently with her big toes and bare feet in the dust. Yes, just an ordinary woman until, that is, you looked closely at her dark brown eyes … and there it was … a flicker of something red … a kind of red glow … just waiting …
“Be careful, “I warned O’D.
“Don’t worry,” he assured me. “I’m going to be inside the cab while they’re all going to be outside, in the back with … HER.”
Nora Swete’s delivery to the Chissui clinic went off uneventfully and naturally enough, I forgot all about her. Then, one afternoon, several weeks later, she came back into our lives in a deci
dedly unexpected way.
I was relaxing in a chair in the sitting room and reading a book to the soothing background music of Zimbabwe’s Radio One, when suddenly and without any warning at all, I was blasted out of my seat by the magnified and stereophonic booming of indigenous African electric guitar music! Indigenous African electric guitar music battered at my eardrums, filled every corner of my house and drowned out the sound of my own music. I turned my radio off.
Shouting for Biasse over the incredible noise, I asked him what was happening.
“It is Nora Swete, Madam,” he shouted back at me. “She is back from Chissui and giving a Nippa party!”
“Well,” I shouted, “you go and tell her to turn the volume of her music down!”
For a moment Biasse stared at me in amazement. “Me, Madam?”
“Yes, you, Biasse! You’re the only one here at the moment!”
A mutinous expression bloomed all over his face at the thought of having to give orders to a large demon-possessed woman with glaring blank white eyes.
“Go ON, Biasse!”
Biasse was away for a very long time and when he returned the music was, if anything, louder than ever.
“She says she will NOT turn down the music, Madam! And she says she wants to see you!”
“Me, Biasse?” Now it was my turn to stare at Biasse in amazement. No way was I going to pay a visit to the dreadful Nora Swete in her Nippa reeking hut!
In the evening, when O’D returned from Chimoio, he sent for Daringua and ordered him to tell his wife to turn down her music. Without a word and with an unreadable expression on his face, Daringua went off to his hut and didn’t come back to work. The terrible music went on without a break for the rest of that night … and all of the next day … on and on … for three whole days and three whole nights, without even a minute’s break. It disturbed my sleep, it jangled my nerves and it made my voice grow hoarse from shouting. At night I wrapped a pillow over my head and during the day, I walked around with wads of cotton wool stuffed into my ears. The music was a form of mental torture and I took it personally. The demon inside Nora Swete had it in for me!
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