“WHAT?” Caetano’s voice rose higher.
Realising that something was wrong from the strong reaction his words were causing, Caetano Jorge’s voice began to falter. “He told me the Company had given him permission … given him permission … to take the wood away.”
How Caetano ever got safely back to Chimoio down the steep roads of Tsetsserra in his disturbed frame of mind, we never knew. First Ribeiro on his back, messing everything up and now this!
By the time he found Jan Westh, the Dane who owned the company Aloe Vera and who had stolen our pine, Westh had already sawn it all up into planks at his sawmill and transported it away for sale.
The confrontation between Caetano and Westh had been brief. Showing absolutely no sign of guilt or remorse, Westh was quite barefaced about his theft. Yes, he admitted, he had taken the pine. He would recompense Caetano for this, of course, by giving him what the pine was worth … six million meticais (U.S. $250).
“Six million …”
Caetano took Westh’s offer as a personal insult, which indeed it was. Turning on his heel, he jumped into his pickup and drove off to the Police Station. He was going to have the Dane from squeaky-clean Denmark arrested!
O’D and I were in town on the day Jan Westh was taken in for questioning. We were driving down the main road towards the roundabout when we heard a ‘toot’ behind us and saw Caetano grinning broadly through his windscreen at us. We pulled off the road and stopped under the shade of a tree. Caetano pulled up behind us.
“The police arrested Westh this morning and when he was questioned by Mr. Shutar of the Commercial Fraud Section, he admitted everything. Everything!” Caetano laughed triumphantly. “They’ve got him in a cell at Primeira Esquadra now.”
We were still gloating and wondering if Westh was occupying O’D’s old maggot-infested cell, when Treciano arrived. Treciano was a tough Mozambican war veteran Caetano had employed to work at our estaleiro in town and to deal with our paperwork. He habitually wore a lugubrious expression on his craggy face and now looked more lugubrious than ever with the news he had for us. News that completely wiped the smiles off our faces.
“The criminal Westh is out of jail,” he told us. “A Danish organisation got him out.”
Furious that some interfering Europeans had perverted the course of justice, Caetano decided on a rash course of action.
“Westh’s not going to get away with stealing our timber!” he fumed. “We’ll take him to court!”
O’D shook his head. “You know the justice system in Mozambique is as corrupt as hell, Caetano. And anyway, after all that’s happened this year, we just don’t have the money to throw away on lawyers.”
Caetano was silent for a while. He was as fed up as I was with all these people who were always stealing from us and getting away with it. Eventually he said, “We can do it through IPAJ, the legal service available to people who can’t afford lawyers.”
“Alright, Caetano,” O’D said, “If you really want the Company to take Westh to court, take him to court. But you deal with it all. I don’t want to have anything to do with it.”
Caetano nodded his head. “I’ll start on it right away,” he said. “We can’t afford to let him get away with what he’s done. We’ve lost too much money already.”
The news that we were going to take Westh to court brought a warning from Jinho, one of our Mozambican friends. “Let’s hope you don’t get Judge Magaia trying the case,” he told us. “He’s got a really bad reputation!”
Our financial position was now grimmer than ever. What with the floods, the Communist Ribeiro and the thieving Dane, we were almost at the end of our resources. There was nothing left for it but to start using the small nest egg that remained from the sale of Arrojela.
“What we have to do now,” Caetano told us, “is to find another area, far away from Ribeiro’s jurisdiction.”
The area Caetano found for us was in Tete Province, about an eight hour drive from the Nhamacoa. It was a dry part of Mozambique, hideously hot and at the time more or less ignored by the rest of the country. With some of the money from Arrojela, we bought a licence to cut some Leadwood and sold it to Mr. Chen of Chen Investments. It helped, for a while.
While this was going on, there was chaos and disaster of another sort unfolding across the border from us, in Zimbabwe.
Ignoring the end-of-year riots in Harare and disregarding his people’s feelings and their growing dissatisfaction with his rule, President Mugabe held a referendum to change the Constitution and to give himself the powers of a dictator. The Zimbabwean people responded with a resounding ‘NO!’ Used to adulation, this rejection shocked him and he reacted by throwing his toys out of the cot in a rage.
Through a haze of fury, he looked around for a scapegoat and a way to bolster his waning popularity and came up with some really bad ideas. Blaming the whites, a new opposition party called the MDC and the British for Zimbabwe’s troubles, he organized the violent invasion of white-owned farms, supposedly to redistribute the land to landless indigenous people.
The ‘War Vets’ spearheaded these invasions. These were young men who were much too young to be the real War Veterans and whose leaders had given themselves ridiculous names like Hitler Hunzvi, Stalin Mau Mau and Black Jesus.
They began their campaign with a series of horrifying acts, the first of which took place on a farm east of Harare when they abducted a white farmer called David Stevens and dragged him off to the local police station. Hearing the news of the abduction, five other farmers rushed off to the police station to help him but on their arrival, they discovered that the War Vets had taken David Stevens off to their headquarters where they had beaten him, tortured him, forced him to drink diesel and then shot him in the head and back.
Where were the police while all this had been going on? we all asked.
With this murder, the violence escalated. Farmhouses were surrounded by the War Vets and their screaming mobs armed with machetes, axes and sticks who drummed their drums all day and all night long. When they got their hands on the farmers, they beat them up, smashing and breaking bones, sometimes killing them, sometimes simply evicting them and their families. Then the farmhouses were looted and trashed and the farm animals sometimes also killed; horses set on fire and cattle herded into dams and drowned. Having done their worst, the War Vets and their followers set about parcelling out the farmland amongst themselves.
White Zimbabwean farmers weren’t the only ones targeted by the violence. Hundreds of thousands of farm labourers and their children lost their jobs and their homes when they were also evicted along with their former employers, the farmers. Forced to live from hand to mouth in the bush, they began to starve.
And in Harare, my young nephew Thomas woke up in the middle of the night, screaming from nightmares. The Wovets, as he called the War Vets, terrified him. One day he had seen Fatima, the family’s maid, standing at the sink in the kitchen and washing the dishes while tears streamed silently down her face. She had just heard the news that her brother who had gone to the family home in one of the rural areas had been beaten to death by the Wovets on suspicion of being a supporter of the MDC opposition party.
Now, when O’D and I drove across the border to shop in Mutare or to visit David and Caroline in Harare, we took our own supplies of fuel in jerrycans tied up in the back of the pickup. There were long petrol queues in Zimbabwe and no guarantee of fuel
Along with other industries in Zimbabwe, our small and once successful ethnic duvet business with David and Caroline took a nose-dive. Manufacturing costs were now just too high to carry on.
Sadly, my brother and his family decided to go back to London and like so many others, they would never return to Zimbabwe or Africa.
There were a lot of things to sort out, though, before their departure. Another job for Fatima, if possible. And then there were their animals, the three dogs and the three cats. The animals, unfortunately, would all have to be put down.
When Car
oline walked into the Highlands Veterinary Surgery to make the arrangements, she walked into a scene of chaos. The rooms were bursting with traumatised people and their pets, grown men breaking down in tears and weeping at the thought of what they had to do. Growing pale and unable to join them, Caroline fled.
A South African organisation offered help, flying Zimbabwean dogs out of the country and into South Africa, to new homes on farms on that side of the border. With the reprieve of the family’s dogs, that left their three cats: Stinky, a large and laid-back handsome ginger with a propensity to emit incredibly noxious fumes from his nether regions, hence the name! Sidney, a small and dapper cat in black and white, and a fat and cuddly grey tabby with a gammy leg, called Huffle. As there were no offers of help for the cats, I rashly forgot our own Miss Sydney’s reaction to Grumpy and made an offer of my own. It would be a shame to put the family pets to death.
“We’ll take them,” I told Caroline. “Organise their papers for the border crossing into Mozambique.”
On the day of their evacuation from Zimbabwe, Caroline gave each cat a pill with their breakfast. This was a sleeping pill the Vet had given to her, to keep the animals sleeping and calm during their six to seven hour journey to their new home. Unfortunately, Stinky, who was a voracious eater, greedily ate up all his food and then proceeded to gobble up some of Huffle’s and Sidney’s as well – ending up with a double dose of the drug!
During the journey to the border, Stinky slept the hours away in the enormous cardboard crate in the back of our pickup, completely oblivious that he was being transported away from his home. The same couldn’t be said of his companions. Wide-awake thanks to Stinky, they began their attempt to escape from their prison.
Halfway home, I looked out of the pickup’s back window at the crate to check all was well and saw eyes staring back at me through the airholes O’D had cut out for them. “They’re awake!” I told O’D. “Don’t worry,” he replied. “They can’t get out.”
It was early evening by the time we arrived back in the Nhamacoa. Miss Sydney was nowhere to be seen but little Grumpy was home when O’D and Seven carried the crate of cats into the sitting room. They turned it on its side – slowly - and then O’D opened the lid. Three cats, one groggy and two clear-headed, cautiously tiptoed out and looked around the room, completely disorientated.
Just then, Miss Sydney padded into the house. In the sitting room doorway, she paused for one second, taking in the scene with her green eyes and then she reacted.
As if she’d received an electric shock, she leapt up into the air, fur and legs shooting out in all directions and let out a terrible screech. O’D, Seven and I fell back with shock, while Bandit scrambled over to the sofa in panic and squeezed herself under it for safety. Grumpy, Stinky, Huffle and Sidney scattered in all directions and cowered under chairs.
For several minutes Miss Sydney raged and rampaged around the room, pouring out all the pain her anguished little heart felt at the loss of her status. Just a few months ago she had been the only spoilt and pampered pet in the house and now she was just one of many. Eventually, she wore herself out and with a final angry hiss, ran out of the room and out of the house.
“Oh, what are we going to do now?” I asked, my heart sinking at the thought of all the tantrums that were going to shatter the peace of my house.
“She’ll get over it,” O’D said, turning his attention to the cardboard crate. He turned it upright again and examined its interior which showed clear evidence of Sidney and Huffle’s escape attempt.
“Look at this,” he told me, with a chuckle of admiration. “Sid and Huffle almost succeeded in chewing their way out of it. We got home just in time!”
Miss Sydney never did get over it. If anything, her fury increased. She especially hated Sidney, not only for his presence but for sharing her name. She tussled with Stinky. The one she really had it in for, though, was Huffle who appeared to be the dominant cat. Embarking on a bitter battle with Huffle, who had taken up residence on the grass roof of the house to get away from it all, she instigated yowling catfights that raged ceaselessly above our heads. They only came to a halt when Miss Sydney fell off the roof into a drum of water and had to be rescued by Seven.
Surprisingly, there was someone who benefitted from the chaos. Fighting on so many fronts left Miss Sydney little time to turn her attention to Grumpy. Before the arrival of the Zimbabweans, she had completely demoralised him with her constant bullying. Nerves shattered, he had been a candidate for a cat psychiatrist, timidly creeping around and jumping with terror at things that only he could see. The slightest sound frightened him, he was scared of his own shadow and even of his food bowl. Now, Stinky took him under his wing and acting as a role model, gave him some measure of protection. Glueing himself to his ginger hero, Grumpy began to blossom.
Mozambicans treated the turmoil in Zimbabwe with the same hard-hearted approach Miss Sydney had treated our refugees.
In the past, they had often cast envious eyes at the good life the Zimbabweans were enjoying on the other side of their border. Boasts from Zimbabweans that Zimbabwe was the best country in the world had irritated the Mozambicans. Now, they were gleefully appalled at the way Zimbabwe was rushing towards its ruin - learning nothing from its neighbour Mozambique which had gone to its ruin in almost the same way thirty years ago when it had kicked out the Portuguese.
Jethro, Manuella and Argentina paid us a visit from Macate, speeding past our house in their battered pickup and a cloud of red dust. “We’ve come to invade your sawmill!” they shouted, and screamed with laughter.
“You can have it,” O’D told them.
Mario, the policeman, told us he was horrified to hear how the Zimbabwean police stood by and watched as two members of the opposition party MDC were torched by the War Vets and burnt to death in their car. “This is not the way the police should behave,” he told us self-righteously. “It’s the duty of the police to protect people and to ensure that law and order prevails.”
Ironically, two years later, Mario’s words and the very man himself would be put to the test. And he would fail. Fail miserably.
Not long after the arrival of the Zimbabwean refugees, we noticed a difference in Miss Sydney’s figure - a definite bulging around the stomach - and began to suspect that her absences from the house had had more to do with increasing the feline population in the Nhamacoa than with her sulking. Although we had taken Bandit to be spayed by Dr. Hangartner, the Vet in Mutare, in the turmoil of our lives we hadn’t managed to take Miss Sydney.
This forgetfulness on our part led Miss Sydney, one afternoon, to give birth to four little kittens in the most comfortable spot she could find - yes, on our bed. Surprisingly, there was absolutely no mess. O’D found a cardboard box and filled it with a soft blanket. He put the box in a quiet, dark corner of our bedroom and transferred Spike, Raji, Jasper and Missy into it. And Miss Sydney purred with a contentment we hadn’t heard for a very long time.
Cats now took over our house. In a matter of a few months we had gone from owning one dog and one cat to owning one dog and nine cats! Hygiene flew out of the window as cat hairs flew around and floated thickly in the air. The cats slept all over the place; on the bed, on the chairs, in the paper trays on O’D’s desk and in Sidney’s case, in the vegetable rack, amongst the tomatoes, carrots and green peppers!
“I now like Jacques, who work for Master Maciel,” Biasse grumbled, remembering his friend who cooked for Maciel’s 27 cats. “Cook for the kits!”
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
BRENDA, THE MONKEY LADY
As if the deluge of rain that had turned part of Mozambique into a vast lake in the year 2000 hadn’t been enough, when the 2001 rains arrived, we were treated to a repeat performance of another flood.
Once again, everything ground to a halt for about six months and once again, we were brought to the financial brink. The only way we managed to keep our heads above the water this time was by resorting to the us
e of our Arrojela funds. 2001, we knew now, was going to be a make or break year but in the meantime, we would just have to tighten our belts and sit it out, waiting for the waters to subside and the mud to dry out.
It was around about this time, too, that Seven disappeared out of our lives. One morning, he came to me and told me that someone was once again tormenting him with nails and razor blades in his legs.
“I am suffering very much, Meddem. I need to go to a curandeiro.”
Tired of Seven’s preoccupation with witchcraft, I was impatient with him. “Oh for Heaven’s sakes, Seven, if there’s something wrong with your legs it would be much better if you went to Chimoio hospital instead of these curandeiros of yours!”
“Yes, Meddem,” he said, softly. “Yes, Meddem.”
I was to regret my impatience, because the next day Seven didn’t come to work. He didn’t come to work the day after that either and although I asked our workers if they knew what had happened to him, nobody could tell me anything. He simply vanished into thin air.
With my mind filled with all the problems we were having, I didn’t notice that one of our cats also had a problem. There were now so many of them, it was difficult to give each cat individual attention.
One afternoon, Stinky came to talk to me and to ask for help. I was in the kitchen when he padded slowly into the room. He came right up to me and with a pitiful miaow, stared into my eyes for a long moment. Then, with a sigh, he collapsed weakly onto the floor and closed his eyes. Looking down at him, I noticed that the inside of his right ear was completely encrusted with some kind of brown stuff – obviously an infection - and was horrified. His ear looked a complete mess! How could I have missed seeing this?
“Oh, Stinky, I’m so sorry,” I said, and vowed to pay more attention to all the animals from then on.
The next day we put Stinky into a cat box and made a hurried trip across the border to see Dr. Hangartner. In an old house set in a pleasant leafy street near the centre of the town, we waited for his verdict.
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