Late in the afternoon, they began to arrive, when the sun glowed low and rosy on the horizon. They came over the hills and down through the valleys, crossing rivers until they reached the footpath that wound up through the shady trees and led them up the final hill to the dazzling white shop with the green doors and green windows.
Climbing the steps up onto the shop verandah, they sat down on the dark panga panga benches Carlito, the carpenter, had made for them and waited in noisy, chattering anticipation. Old and young, men and women, these were the subsistence farmers who had destroyed the Nhamacoa forest, hacking and chopping at it and burning until thirty thousand hectares had gone up in smoke in the form of charcoal.
They enjoyed Kapfupi, the Shona films about the ragged Zimbabwean who was always up to tricks and trying to outsmart his neighbour. Another favourite were the bushmen in the South African film ‘The Gods must be Crazy’ and its sequel. Then, there were all the action films. Although these films were American and in a language they couldn’t understand, the people liked them because there wasn’t a lot of boring incomprehensible talk. Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, Chuck Norris, they enjoyed them all but there was one whom they admired above all the others and that was ... Arnold SCHWARZENEGGER!
Schwarzenegger was unstoppable in his fight against villains. In the film ‘Eraser’, despite being spiked in the hand by roofing nails, blown up in a gas explosion, knifed right through a leg, sucked out of an aeroplane with a parachute that failed to open, not to mention being shot in the shoulder and attacked by crocodiles in a zoo, their battered bloodstained hero only swayed unsteadily on his feet for a few seconds. And when he fought his last great battle, the Nhamacoa film club got so carried away that they stood up on their benches and screamed and shouted and shook their fists in their support for him. He was their hero. Someone who made them dream. He was a man who fought for justice and always beat the bad guys.
Most of the American action films, I noticed, were filled with villains who were Chinese or who looked Chinese.
“Do you think the people are getting the idea that the Chinese are the bad guys of the world, Douglas?” I asked. Douglas operated the DVD player and television O’D had set up on one of the verandah walls for the film shows.
“They are the bad guys of the world,” Douglas said grimly.
Like Lloyd, Douglas was another Zimbabwean economic refugee working for us. He had once been a chef at the luxurious Leopard Rock Hotel in the Vumba until Mugabe’s destruction of the country had led to the demise of the very lucrative Zimbabwean tourist industry.
Not only did Douglas dislike the Chinese for the support they were giving Mugabe in the form of money and arms but he also had a personal beef with them. This had taken root when he had been forced to buy a tube of Chinese toothpaste at the Mutare market when the country had been going through a particularly tough time and the shops had been empty of Colgate.
“It had a picture of a cat on the tube,” Douglas had told me, “and it was called ‘Le Miaow’ or something. It had a very funny taste and, even worse, it had a terrible numbing effect on my taste buds! I couldn’t taste anything for hours after brushing my teeth with that zhing zhong stuff!”
For a cook, the loss of sensation in his taste buds was, naturally enough, not something to be taken lightly! Eschewing fresh breath and dental hygiene, a disgruntled Douglas had thrown his ‘Le Maiow’ toothpaste into a dustbin.
“My best friend also brushed his teeth with this ‘Le Miaow’,” Douglas had continued with a shudder, “and in his case, all the skin on the inside of his mouth peeled off in little bits and pieces!”
“Shows you what they think of us,” I had told Douglas.
We made sure we never bought Chinese DVDs. These were also of the ‘zhing zhong’ quality, as the Zimbabweans had taken to calling the shoddy goods the Chinese thought were fit for Africa. We kept their products out of our shop as well. We didn’t want our customers coming down with strange illnesses or complaining that the article they had bought the day before had broken or stopped working.
I had come up with the idea of the shop when Idalina Fiosse Gavumende, the large, fat and new Chefe do Posto in Macate had closed down our business in 2006. We had got on well with Sainete and fairly well with his replacement, Musapata, but Idalina, who had trained as a nurse in Cuba, had something against us before she had even set her eyes on us.
After the battering we had received from the Mozambican government officials in 2002 and 2003, we had managed to struggle back onto our feet, selling the remains of the panga panga from Gondola and buying new timber licences with the money to begin operating again.
Then, deciding to have something of a clean up, O’D had sent our tractor driver Fernandinho off down the forest track with several trailer loads of offcuts for the people now living around us. Not only was this wood given to them for nothing, but word had also been sent out that they could come to the sawmill and under our foreman Naison’s supervisory one good eye, take away as much as they could carry of more free offcuts in the form of thin beams. It had taken them three whole days to demolish this huge pile and soon afterwards all the huts around us had boasted doors and windows, tables and benches.
Then, at the end of 2005, Idalina had paid us a visit, accompanied by the new Administrator of Gondola, a woman even larger than herself.
Tramping around the sawmill with her entourage, Idalina had asked O’D for the (naturally) free donation of some doors and windows for a small maternity house she was planning on building in Macate and O’D had told Luis Raoul our carpenter to get busy on this. When the work was finished, O’D had driven off to Macate to deliver the doors and windows and although the new nurse who had taken Mario’s place had thanked him for the gift, there had been no word of gratitude from Idalina, although the doors and windows had come to a considerable sum of money.
Trouble had started when more people had decided to move onto sawmill land. Emboldened by the witch woman’s success, Isaac had enlarged his machamba on the other side of the Nhamacoa River by moving across the river and helping himself to half of a piece of sawmill land next to the bit she had taken. Then Maqui, who had worked for us as a scout, had moved onto another part of sawmill land, in the north. Despite O’D’s attempts to remove them, they had refused to budge.
Driving down to visit us one weekend, Teofilo Mendonca had been visibly shaken by these land grabs. “You’d better get the Land Registry Department to mark out your boundaries all over again,” he had warned O’D. “Quickly!”
Our request to the Land Registry Department had coincided with our request for a new felling licence for 2006 and when Idalina had sent word to O’D to attend a meeting, she had given him the impression that the meeting had concerned his new timber licence. Before the Forestry Department would give us permission to carry on with our business, we now had to get permission from Mr. Maforga, the very important and traditional tribal chief of a huge area stretching from the Nhamacoa right down to Inchope.
Accompanied by Naison and Afonso, O’D had driven off to the meeting place and had been surprised to find not Mr. Maforga but a large and rather belligerent crowd of the people now living around us. The mood of the crowd had lightened momentarily when someone had produced a chair for O’D to sit on – a chair with a rickety leg – and which had immediately toppled over. The sight of O’D on his back on the ground with his legs in the air had delighted the crowd and they had roared with laughter.
Then the true nature of the meeting had been revealed. O’D had been tricked into coming to a ‘People’s Court’ where accusations were going to be leveled at him by the population.
“He never gives us any wood,” someone in the crowd had complained to Idalina. “He burns it instead!” There had been growls of angry agreement.
“He never gives us any lifts in his car!” an ancient old woman had screamed.
Their voices rose in a babble. “He won’t fix the road! He won’t give us wood for school desks!
He hasn’t given us a clinic!”
Taken aback by Idalina’s trickery and the peoples’ hostility, O’D had said nothing in his defence. It had been obvious that the new Chefe do Posto had not been out to create harmony.
A week later, when Marcelino had arrived from the Land Registry Department to mark out our boundaries, the people’s mood had turned even uglier. Already whipped up against O’D by Idalina’s communist Cultural Revolutionary type Peoples’ Court, they had followed along behind Marcelino and his GPS machine, making a threatening buzzing sound just like a swarm of angry bees. The land was theirs! We were trying to take it away from them!
“They are very dangerous,” Idalina had warned O’D. “You must be careful of them.”
It had soon become clear to us what Idalina had been up to. She had been using us as a political football in order to curry favour with the people and had played a game that might well have ended disastrously for us. The people were, indeed, dangerous. In Chimoio about a year later, they rioted and burnt a member of a gang of thieves to death by putting a tyre around his neck and setting it alight. Even a policeman had been killed.
Now, thanks to Idalina, when O’D had driven past Lica on his way home in the evenings, angry words and abuse had been hurled at him along the way. Abuse such as “Boer! Go back home to your own country, Boer!” and once, someone had even chopped down a tree on the forest track to block his way. Naison and Afonso had also been reviled as traitors to their race. “Filhos do branco!” people had insulted them, accusing them of being “Sons of the white man!”
Kashangamu’s son had been caught pulling out my little panga panga seedlings on our southern boundary.
An enormous fire had been started up suspiciously close to the Maqui family’s hut and thousands of O’D’s precious little teak seedlings had been burnt.
On our western boundary, there had been more arson. Isaac’s brothers had set the long dry yellow grass on our side of the boundary alight and had succeeded in incinerating eight hundred and forty one of my panga panga saplings.
“They want you to go,” Jose, one of our night guards, had told me, “because they want the last of the trees and to make machambas on sawmill land.”
And then, when Idalina had reluctantly put her signature on the document Mr. Maforga had finally signed and O’D had handed it in to the Forestry Department, he had discovered that the new Head of Forestry had given him a licence to cut in the very same area as another forester.
At last, O’D had given up the unequal fight. A minor government official trained in Cuba, with the aid of the subsistence farmers living around us, had closed us down.
“Let’s go,” I had said to O’D. “Let’s leave Mozambique. What are we doing living here among people who are always telling us how much they hate us?”
“Where will we go?” O’D had asked.
“Back to England,” I had told him. “To a place where people keep to the rules and there’s justice.”
My suggestion hadn’t gone down well. O’D had been born out of his century and living a cramped, constricted life in a cold, grey, drizzly country would never do for him. He needed challenges to overcome and he loved the wide open spaces of Africa, its colour, its warmth and its people, crazy as they often were. He was also not going to take failure lying down, especially a failure caused by other people.
We had lost a small fortune in Mozambique and to leave the Nhamacoa where we had spent 12 years of our lives, planted thousands of indigenous trees, put in a dam, not to mention the expensive borehole, and renovated three houses the Mozambicans had destroyed during the war, would cause us to lose even more.
I had heaved a sigh. “They’re not going to let us stay here now that we haven’t got a business anymore,” I had told O’D.
The expression on his face had turned stubborn and it had been obvious what he intended to do. Never a quitter, he was going to grind it out and unfortunately for me this meant that I was going to have to grind it out as well. Oh, how I hated all this grinding it out!
“Don’t worry,” he had told me, “I’ll think of something.”
For a while, we got by and made a little money by hiring out our chainsaw operators, our chainsaws, tractors and trailers to all those Mozambican foresters who had no equipment of their own but were now allowed to fell timber for all the Chinese who were flooding into the country.
And then, when Marcelino had told us we had to have another meeting with the people and the Chefe do Posto to redo our boundaries all over again because our papers had been lost, an idea had popped into my head.
It had happened when I had gone along to this meeting to give O’D some moral support and had been sitting next to Mr. Penembe.
During our long wait for Idalina (Mozambican government officials are notoriously unpunctual and she was no exception) we didn’t talk much and the people had been on their best behaviour this time. No doubt this had been something to do with Mr. Penembe’s presence - another of my ideas!
Dignified and white-haired, Mr. Penembe was a longtime friend of O’D’s. His mother had been a Mozambican woman, his father a Greek and his real name was Ernesto Hazakis. Well-respected and a journalist, he had taken on the pseudonym of Penembe, the Mozambican name for that giant rock lizard, the leguaan, in order to write his articles. I had invited him as a witness and for our protection. Everyone knew Frelimo were scared of him, because of what they had done to him during the civil war.
Mr. Penembe had been living with a Bulgarian woman at that time and Frelimo hadn’t liked that. So, they had burst into his house one night and had given him such a terrible beating that he still bore the scars today on his face and body. Then, they had sent him off to one of their camps in Gorongosa to be ‘re-educated’. Torn away from the Bulgarian woman, he had never seen her again. She had been told to get out of Mozambique and although she had borne him a child, not surprisingly, she had never returned.
Idalina had arrived almost an hour late for the meeting, giving no apologies for our long wait. Loathing had bubbled up in me. She had used the people against us, playing the racist angle, the land angle and had ruined our business. What she had done hadn’t helped the people either. Over the years, many of the people at the meeting had come to us for jobs when their harvests had failed. Now, she had taken away this safety net.
After Idalina had lowered her bulk down onto a chair, which unfortunately didn’t have a rickety leg to topple her over, a thought had struck me. You fought fire with fire. Yes … The people were the key. We must do what Idalina had done, but with a difference. While she had used them destructively, creating disharmony, we would do the opposite, repairing the damage and paying back bad with good.
For years, the people living around us had been ignored and neglected by the government. Sometimes, when I had met Aid Agency workers at a social event in Chimoio, I had tried to persuade them to come down to the Nhamacoa to do something for the people but even they had overlooked their needs. Without a second look, flashy cars bearing the UNICEF logo had shot past the poorly thatched school where the children perched on poles and wrote in their exercise books using their laps for desks. The Missionaries, too, had been surprisingly blind to their existence, brushing off my suggestions of spiritual help and preferring to minister from the comfort of their homes to people in the towns.
We couldn’t give them a school but we could do something to save their money and the long, tiring trips they had to make to shop in Chimoio. We could also do something to brighten up their unutterably bleak and dreary lives, to give them nice things and some entertainment … to make them laugh … to give them dreams … a little knowledge of the world outside the Nhamacoa … yes, we would do something to help them, and in doing so, help ourselves too!
When there had been a lull in the conversation, I had opened my mouth.
“A shop,” I had told the people. “We’re going to build a shop for you.”
There had been a buzz of interest and a flicker o
f excitement had come into their eyes. Take that, Idalina!
“Promising to build a shop,” Mr. Alberto had carefully written down on the pad of paper he’d been using to record the minutes of the meeting.
O’D had given me an incredulous look.
“And as well as this,” I had continued, “we’re going to have a television and show films at the shop. Free films!”
At a signal from Mr. Alberto, applause had burst out and O’D had given me a glare.
“And now,” I had gone on rashly, “Senhor Pixley is going to buy everyone a Coke or a Fanta!”
“I’d rather have a beer!” a voice had piped up in the back row.
It had taken a while to get O’D to come around to my idea. “I’m not doing anything for that destructive rabble, that bunch of environmental terrorists,” he had grouched.
“But you have to,” I had told him, “I made a promise and as a Christian I can’t break it.”
The opening of the shop in May 2009 had been a great event and had gone off very successfully.
We had invited forty people to the inaugural lunch and Mr. Penembe had helped out with the cooking, drinking lashings of red wine at ten in the morning while he had stood over Douglas and Carlito the gardener and given instructions on how to barbecue chicken, making Carlito turn hot chicken drumsticks over the coals with his fingers! Teofilo Mendonca and his wife Bernadette had arrived suitably late as was the custom of government officials and Idalina, although invited, had been a poor loser and had failed to turn up at all.
Mr. Maforga had fasted for a week in order to prepare himself to perform the traditional ‘spirit’ ceremony at the shop and had brought about three hundred and fifty of the population with him - all, of course, expecting to eat!
Dressed in a khaki uniform adorned with a brilliantly coloured sash across his chest and with his old-fashioned Colonial type khaki cap on his head, Mr. Maforga had looked more like the president of an African country than a real African president.
Monkeys in My Garden Page 45