After he had poured some red wine onto the ground for the spirit, he had told the listening population not to burn our trees, that forests were important and the heritage of future generations of Mozambicans.
He had also warned them not to steal from us and had threatened that if they did, he would cut off their noses before handing them over to the police and they would go to jail with two holes in their faces. The listening population had roared with laughter at the picture he had conjured up.
Afterwards, we had been severely tested when almost four hundred people had converged on our kitchen, all expecting to eat. Somehow, we had managed to give almost everyone a little rice, a little sadza, a piece of chicken, some goat stew. We had cut Douglas’ delicious sweet bread rolls into quarters and Mr. Alberto had ladled out mahewu, the innocuous maize and sugar drink and douro, the not at all innocuous maize beer.
There had been a lot of jollification on the verandah of the shop afterwards. The people had watched music DVDs on the television and had drunk Mozambican alcoholic drinks called ‘Dynamite’, ‘Knockout’, ‘Buffalo Gin’ and ‘Temptation’. Mr. And Mrs. Maforga had both downed several ‘Knockouts’ and had become very merry, giving a dancing demonstration that had finished with Mr. Maforga having to use his walking stick to help him get back up from his knees. On his feet again, he had given us a salute and two or three bows.
The war between the people and ourselves had at last ended.
And as for the drums, which had disturbed my sleep for so many years, they’ve grown weak and faint, overpowered by the television on the shop verandah and Arnold Schwarzenegger. They’re losing their power, just like the green and red ghost that wandered around at night for so many years down by the Nhamacoa River.
“The sawmill ghost isn’t around that much anymore,” Afonso told O’D the other day. “Since the shop opened, people have only seen it a couple of times and it doesn’t frighten them anymore.”
Well, you know what I think? I think that the red and green Nhamacoa ghost’s increasingly rare appearances may have had something to do with the fact that the people have chopped down all the trees along the banks of the Nhamacoa River, including those around the lovely fairytale pool our workers once used to bathe in. It was probably some kind of insect that glowed in the night and is becoming extinct because its habitat has been destroyed.
On the other hand …
Afonso and the people may well be right and there is a ghost – a ghost that is beginning to vanish, along with all the other old things that once held sway here in the Nhamacoa.
EPILOGUE
THE NIGHT THE BANDITS CAME
By 2010, the once large and beautiful Nhamacoa forest had virtually disappeared. All that remained were small areas of trees dotted around, here and there.
We had managed to save about 28 hectares around our house and as the population destroyed their habitat, machamba by machamba, all sorts of animals, birds and reptiles started fleeing into our trees for refuge.
The baboons were gone, though. Unlike the other animals that had found sanctuary with us, they had been trapped in the local cemetery and had been killed by the locals and their dogs.
Some of the other monkeys had been luckier and soon our trees began to teem and heave with Vervets.
The shy Samango monkeys were no trouble at all, as they kept to the treetops but the Vervets became a real menace. They weren’t monkeys in my garden anymore but had become monkeys on my verandah, monkeys in my laundry room and monkeys in our outdoor kitchen. If we weren’t careful, they would soon be monkeys in our house and maybe I would even catch them bouncing on our bed! We were going to have to do something about them, but what? It was all very well saving a bit of forest and some animals but there were obviously some negative consequences to this!
The solutions people were proposing weren’t helpful. “Hunters,” Idalina told the population, “to kill them all.” Others suggested poisoning the Vervets or selling them to the Chinese.
“We’re going to have to get help,” I told O’D. Killing the animals was a sickening thought, especially as the problem was a man-made problem.
And so we decided to turn O’D’s films of the forest and its inhabitants into a video blog and to put them onto the Internet. Perhaps we could raise interest this way, enough interest to raise funds to protect what little was left of the Nhamacoa and to transport the Vervets to Gorongosa. Perhaps also to raise funds to reforest and to give the animals now living in this cramped space more room.
But first, we needed someone to help us to edit O’D’s films ...
We found Lee Shoniwa in a room at the International School, working on a documentary for a Danish Aid Agency. He was a young Zimbabwean refugee, thin as a rake and living on a shoestring and he desperately needed all the money he could get.
Bored with his bread and butter work, his eyes lit up with enthusiasm when he saw our films. The beauty of our little forest and its creatures enchanted him.
“How long will it take to edit them and put them onto the Internet?” I asked.
Lee was overly optimistic. “About a week,” he told us, “if I really concentrate on it.”
It was May when Nora Swete paid us a visit. We hadn’t seen her since 1996. She came marching past our house and when she saw O’D, she asked him for some money. He gave her a little and she left.
After Nora Swete had gone, I went for my usual walk down the forest track with Bandit and when I got to our entrance, I saw evidence of her handiwork. Salt and charcoal, used in witchcraft, were scattered over the two large concrete flower tubs Naison had made and the nostrils and ears of the two wooden guards carved into the gate posts were filled with cooked sadza. Was this a fetish? I wondered, as I cleaned away her mess and if it was, what did it mean?
We began to have problems after Nora Swete’s visit.
During a trip to Tete, someone stole O’D’s car keys and after a Mozambican electrician had worked on the pickup so he could start it without the key, it developed a fault no one could fix. Every now and then and without any warning at all, the pickup would suddenly stop dead and all the lights would go out.
Then, Lee found himself caught up in the middle of a food riot and had to flee for his life with bullets and stones whizzing around his head.
The Internet went down for three weeks.
O’D had three freak car accidents and was lucky to escape unharmed.
Lee had his scary encounter with the Black Mamba.
And then, to cap it all, there was the terrifying bandit attack on 4th December …
They attacked Douglas first, before coming to us.
He was sound asleep when the double doors of his room whispered open. Torchlight shining in his face woke him up and thinking it was O’D, he mumbled, “What is it, Boss?”
Then he saw them, all seven of them, standing around him, and his blood turned to ice in his veins.
They were violent, kicking a chair and breaking it. Then they dragged him up onto his feet and ripping off his clothes, they half-strangled him with a piece of his T-shirt which they had torn into strips.
Naked, gagged, blind-folded and with his arms and legs too tightly tied up with electrical cable, Douglas found himself roughly manhandled down to the Nhamacoa River. There, they threw him down on the ground and left the seventh bandit to guard him while they walked up to our house.
After what seemed like an interminable time, during which Douglas had been certain he was going to be killed, he heard someone shouting the name “Zito! Zito!”
His captor moved off and as soon as Douglas was sure he was alone, he began the struggle to free himself. Managing to slip off the gag, the blindfold and the cable from his legs, he struggled to his feet and, numb with pins and needles, hobbled off to the nearest house.
This turned out to be the witch woman’s house and knocking on the door, he called out for help. Although alone and fearful, she opened the door and peered out. With his back to her, so she woul
dn’t see his full and shameful nakedness, he spoke to her over his shoulder.
“Bandits,” he told her, “they’ve got guns and one of them is dressed in police uniform. Please cut this cable binding my arms.”
The only thing she had was a large old blunt kitchen knife and she sawed through the cable with difficulty. Once he was free, she ran for her life and hid herself in the banana trees, terrified she would be next on the bandits’ list.
Douglas walked back up the path to his room in the shop to put on some clothes. His heart heavy with his dreadful experience and unaware that we had been the bandits’ real target, he set off to tell us what had happened to him.
Reaching our house, he stumbled up to O’D and Lee who were standing outside anxiously calling for me and when he heard that the bandits had also attacked us and I was missing, the shock was too much for him and he collapsed onto the ground in a dead faint.
The bandits had left shortly after I had made my escape. Clutching their loot, they had asked, “Where is the Senhora?”
“I don’t know,” O’D had said.
Deciding to forget about me, they left by the front door and noticing O’D’s red Toyota parked nearby, went over to it. While one of them slashed its tyres with his machete, another, eager for blood, wanted to disable O’D as well and in a most unpleasant manner.
“Shoot him in the foot! Let’s shoot him in the foot!” he urged the leader.
But the leader ignored the suggestion and they finally walked off, with a few mocking parting words for O’D.
“Why don’t you get yourself a better car?” they laughed, cocky with success.
For a while, O’D and Lee stood and watched the bandits disappear down the track.
“If we had a phone, we could get them caught,” O’D said, “but they’ve taken them all.”
“They didn’t find mine,” Lee told him. “It was under my pillow.”
Without his own phone, the only number O’D could remember was the number of his old friend Teofilo Mendonca and as luck would have it, Mendonca just happened to be in Catandica when he received O’D’s sms.
Mendonca alerted Lt. Col. Tomo, the Head of the Protection Police and Wilson in Gondola, and scrambling for cars, drivers, petrol and armed police, they hit the road.
In the meantime, O’D and Lee started looking for me. They were worried that the seventh bandit had met me in the dark and had killed me.
“Val!” they called. “Val!” and then, when I didn’t answer, they became desperate. “Vaaal! VAAAAAL!”
When I heard them calling, I raised my head warily. Was this a trick? Were the bandits searching for me and forcing O’D to call me? No way was I going to come out of hiding, only to be caught again and dragged off by those hideous creatures! I would only leave my hideout at dawn, when the bandits would be gone.
When the first tinge of light touched the sky, I walked out of the forest and past the still empty shop. Now I heard other voices calling me, also with a touch of desperation.
“Vaaaal!” Lee shouted. “Madam!” Douglas shouted.
“I’m here!” I shouted back.
Inside the house, I went into the bathroom and turned on the taps. I needed a bath to wash off the mud. I was covered in scratches and my ribs hurt where Red-shirt had held me while he’d been dragging me around.
Clean and dressed again, I walked back into the kitchen on feet that were full of thorns and threw my torn and bedraggled capulana into the dustbin.
“Tea? Coffee?” I called out to O’D, Douglas and Lee.
They were sitting in silence at the table in the middle of the mess the bandits had made of the sitting room, each thinking their own thoughts. The offer of coffee revived them.
When I placed the cups down on the table, Douglas was the first to break the silence. “I was sure they were going to kill me,” he said. He chose a cup and drank down some coffee. “I was praying and praying all the time.”
“I was praying too,” I said. “I’m sure God saved us. Those people were definitely killers.”
“It was spiritual warfare,” Lee said quietly. He was off to Theological College in 2011 and was convinced the devil was trying to take him out.
And then Douglas opened his mouth and said the words that were to have fatal consequences for him a few weeks later. “This has only made my faith in God stronger,” he told us, not knowing that what he had said was like a challenge.
There was the sound of cars racing down the forest track and then several pickups came to a screeching halt outside the house. The police. About thirty of them, and bristling with rifles! Followed closely by Mendonca and his friend Luis.
Inside the house, Tomo looked around our ransacked sitting room and a speculative gleam came into his eyes. “I’ve seen this before,” he murmured thoughtfully. “It looks just like the modus operandi of the bandits who attacked the Chinese sawmill at Tembwe in November. They shot one of the Chinese in the leg and then sprayed the windows with AK-47 bullets.”
Mendonca, who was an expert when it came to human nature, exchanged a look with Tomo. “The first thing the bandits are going to do is to go to a bar and spend some of that money they’ve stolen,” he said, “but if the police go looking for them, they’ll go underground.”
Turning to Douglas, he asked “Do you think you would recognise any of the bandits if you saw them again?”
Douglas nodded his head. “I think so.”
“Then Douglas must come with me and we’ll go looking for them,” Mendonca told Tomo.
Wilson gave Lee a hard look. “And I’m taking HIM back to Gondola for questioning,” he told us.
My heart sank. This was just like the Mozambican police, to take the easy way out and try to pin the crime on a foreigner. “Lee’s a friend of ours,” I said, “he didn’t have anything to do with this.”
Wilson ignored me. “Vamos!” he said, with a last look around the room. “Let’s go!”
After the police left, we had a surprise visit from Kashangamu’s son.
“We saw the bandits’ car yesterday,” he told O’D. “It was dark blue and,” he handed over a scrap of paper, “this is the registration number.”
‘AAM 201 MC”, O’D read out. Puzzled, he looked up. “Are you sure this number is right?”
“I’m sure,” Kashangamu’s son told him.
Now a new problem arose. How were we going to get this information to Teofilo? Wilson had whisked Lee off to Gondola police station, taking away our only access to a phone!
I grasped at a straw. “The shop phone! Perhaps the bandits didn’t take it.”
Sure enough, the bandits hadn’t seen the shop phone and although it was practically out of credit, it got us through to Mendonca.
“Look for a dark blue car, Teofilo!” O’D shouted, “Registration number AAM 201 MC!”
“What?” Teofilo shouted back. “Are you sure about that number?”
“Yes!” O’D shouted, just as the phone went dead. We had run out of credit.
In Chimoio, Mendonca and Douglas trawled the streets, stopping off at every bar for a beer. They were sitting at Soalpo, drinking their twelfth beer and still surprisingly stone-cold sober when Teofilo gave a sudden start. A voice out of nowhere had spoken to him and had given him a message. “The car is at Fepom!” the voice told him.
Putting his unfinished beer down on the bar table, he stood up. “Come on!” he told Douglas. “I know where the car is! It’s at Fepom! ”
It didn’t take long to find the car. As they drove into Fepom, there it was! Up in the air at the carwash, being cleaned of the mud it had picked up on the road down to the forest.
“Look! Look!” Douglas pointed excitedly at the dark blue Toyota Mark II. “There it is! There!”
Mendonca slapped his pointing finger down. “I see it but we don’t want anyone to know that we’re looking for it.”
Pretending he also wanted his car washed, Mendonca parked his car right behind the bandits’ Toyota, bl
ocking its exit. “Now,” he murmured to Douglas and raised his cell phone to his lips. “The car is at Fepom,” he told Tomo. “At the car wash.”
Tomo’s men were on standby and within minutes the inhabitants of Fepom were startled by the appearance of the Rapid Intervention Force who surrounded the area and secured it. Arrests were made and then when it was all over, Mendonca and Douglas drove back to our house.
Sitting at the table under the big old mango tree, they drank even more beers while they described what had happened. Mendonca was euphoric at the part he had played in the arrests. “You’ll get all your things back now,” he told me with a beaming smile. “You”ll see!”
By the end of the week, five of the bandits were in jail, as well as a policeman called Tinga and his nephew. Yes, the Mozambican police had lived up to their reputation of eating at the same table with bandits and had been involved in the attacks, renting guns, ammunition and police uniforms out to our attackers. Far from doing their duty to protect us, they were hand in glove with criminals and murderers.
Although there were still some bandits evading capture, including the extremely dangerous leader, I was in high spirits. Only a few days had gone by since the attack and they were getting picked up. Teofilo was right. Any minute now, we were going to get our things back!
Douglas was in the kitchen making pancakes when I gave him the news. “It’s only a matter of time now before they get the rest of them, Douglas,” I told him.
Douglas gave a grim smile. He was still simmering over his treatment by the bandits and the wounds they had left on his arms with their too-tight cable.
“I hope they go to jail for the rest of their lives!” he said.
And then I opened my mouth and uttered the words that were also to send out a challenge.
“Yes!” I said, thumping a fist into the open palm of my other hand and giving a gleeful laugh. “That’ll teach them to mess with us Christians!”
Two weeks after the attack, I discovered just how much the bandits had learned from ‘messing with us Christians.’
Monkeys in My Garden Page 46