Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood Read online

  Between 1889 and 1893, British settlers moving up from South Africa, under the steely, acquiring eye of Cecil John Rhodes, had been . . . What word can I use? I suppose it depends on who you are. I could say: Taking? Stealing? Settling? Homesteading? Appropriating? Whatever the word is, they had been doing it to a swath of country they now called Rhodesia. Before that, the land had been movable, shifting under the feet of whatever victorious tribe now danced on its soil, taking on new names and freshly stolen cattle, absorbing the blood and bodies of whoever was living, breathing, birthing, dying upon it. The land itself, of course, was careless of its name. It still is. You can call it what you like, fight all the wars you want in its name. Change its name altogether if you like. The land is still unblinking under the African sky. It will absorb white man’s blood and the blood of African men, it will absorb blood from slaughtered cattle and the blood from a woman’s birthing with equal thirst. It doesn’t care.

  Here were the African names within that piece of land for which we would all fight: Bulawayo: the Place of Killing. Inyati: the Place of the Buffaloes. Nyabira: the Place Where There Is a Fjord.

  The white men came. They said, “What name do you give this place?”

  “Kadoma,” they said. Which in Ndebele means, “Does Not Thunder or Make Noise.”

  The white men call that place Gatooma.

  “And what name do you give this place?”

  “Ikwelo,” they said. Which in Ndebele means, “Steep Sides of the Riverbank.”

  The white men called the place Gwelo.

  “What is this place?”

  “Kwe Kwe,” said the Africans, which is the sound the frogs make in the nearby river.

  The white men called the place Que Que.

  “We will live in this place.”

  “But this is the chiefdom of Neharawa,” said the Africans.

  “And we will call it Salisbury.”

  The white men named places after themselves, and after the women they were with or the women whom they had left behind, after the men they wanted to placate or impress: Salisbury, Muriel, Beatrice, Alice Mine, Juliasdale, West Nicholson.

  And they gave some places hopeful names: Copper Queen, Eldorado, Golden Valley.

  And obvious names: Figtree, Guinea Fowl, Lion’s Den, Redcliff, Hippo Valley.

  And unlikely, stolen names: Alaska, Venice, Bannockburn, Turk Mine.

  In 1896 the Ndebele people had rebelled against this European-ness. They killed about one hundred and fifty European men, women, and children in a matter of a few weeks. But within three months the settlers, with the help of military reinforcements from South Africa, had defeated the Ndebeles, and Cecil John Rhodes had negotiated a cease-fire with the Ndebele leaders at Matopo Hills.

  In camp

  Matopo Hills, where Cecil John Rhodes is buried, staring out over Ndebeleland in perpetuity. Matopo Hills, a corruption of “Amatobos,” meaning “the Bald-Headed Ones.”

  In the same month, June 1896, that Rhodes was settling with the Ndebeles in the south of the country, the Mashona in the central and east of the country rose up in a separate and more serious rebellion against the whites. When farmers, such as the Mashona, go to war, they are not like the Ndebele warriors, who come into the open savannah flashing their bare chests under the clear sky and waving their plumed headdresses and flaunting the skins of slaughtered lions and hunted leopards on their thighs and brows. Farmers fight a more deadly, secret kind of war. They are fighting for land in which they have put their seed, their sweat, their hopes. They are secretive, sly, desperate. They do not come with loud war drums and bones of powerful animals around their neck. They come with one intent, sliding on their bellies, secret in the night. They don’t come to be victorious in battle. They come to reclaim their land.

  The Mashona killed four hundred and fifty settlers.

  Reinforcements to help the settlers arrived from South Africa and England. The Africans developed a system of hiding in caves to escape from the white man’s army. The settlers used dynamite to force the Africans out of the caves, killing whole villages at a time when the caves collapsed—Mashona men, women, and children died by the hundreds, buried together. Survivors of the collapsed caves were executed as soon as they crawled out of the ready-made tombs. It took almost two years for the first Chimurenga to be quelled.

  The Africans did not forget their heroes from this first struggle for independence.

  Kaguvi, Mkwati, and Nehanda.

  Kaguvi. Also called Murenga, or Resister. From which the word Chimurenga comes.

  Mkwati, famous for his use of locust medicine.

  Nehanda, the woman, supra-clan mhondoro spirits. She went to her execution (with Kaguvi) on April 27, 1897, singing and dancing. “We shall overcome. My blood is not shed in vain.”

  Now, how can we, who shed our ancestry the way a snake sheds skin in winter, hope to win against this history? We wazungus. We white Africans of shrugged-off English, Scottish, Dutch origin.

  Seven ZANLA troops died on April 28, 1966, the first battle of the Second Chimurenga. A memorial stands in their name in the modern city of Chinhoyi, “The Gallant Chinhoyi Seven.”

  Mum, Adrian, and Van

  ADRIAN,

  RHODESIA, 1968

  Mum says, “The happiest day of my life was the day I held that little baby in my arms.” She means Rhodesia, 1968. She means the day her son, Adrian, was born.

  Mum is on Chapter Two, weeping into her beer. It’s a sad story. It’s especially sad if you haven’t heard it a hundred times. I’ve heard one version or another of the story more than a hundred times. It’s a Family Theme, and it always ends badly. To begin with Mum is happy. She is freshly married, they are white (a ruling color in Rhodesia), and she has two babies, a girl and a boy. Her children are the picture-perfect match of each other: beautiful, blond, and blue-eyed.

  Mum

  Vanessa, signature tackie lips (lips that are rosebud full), a mass of fairy-white hair, toddling cheerfully, with that overbalancing, tripping step of the small child. And tottering after her, the little boy who could be her twin. In the background, a black nanny called Tabatha, in white apron and white cap, strong, shining arms outstretched laughing, waiting to scoop them up; she is half-shyly looking into thecamera. Mum is looking on from the veranda. Dad is taking the photograph.

  Then Adrian dies before he is old enough to talk. Mum is not yet twenty-four and her picture-perfect life is shattered.

  She says, “The nurse at the hospital in Salisbury told us we could either go and get something to eat or watch our baby die.”

  Mum and Dad take Vanessa to get some lunch and when they come back to the hospital their baby son, who was very sick with meningitis an hour earlier, is now dead. Cold, blond ash.

  Adrian

  The story changes depending on what Mum is drinking. If she is very drunk on wine, then the story is a bit different than if she is very drunk on gin. The worst is if she is very drunk on everything she can find in the house. But the end is always the same. Adrian is dead. That’s an awful ending no matter what she’s been drinking.

  I am eight, maybe younger, the first time Mum sits down in front of me, squiffy in her chair, leaning and keening and needing to talk. The Leaning Tower of Pissed, I say to Vanessa when I am older and Mum is drunk again. Ha ha.

  Mum tells me about Adrian. I understand, through the power of her emotion, her tears, the way she is dissolving like soap left too long in the bath, that this has been the greatest tragedy of our lives. It is my tragedy, too, even though I was not born when it happened.

  Usually, on nights when Mum is sober, and we are kissing her good night, she turns her face away from us and puckers her lips sideways, offering us a cheek stretched like dead-chicken skin. Now that she is drunk and telling me about Adrian she is wet all over me. Arms clasped over my shoulders, she is hanging around my neck, and I can feel her face crying into the damp patch on my shoulder. She says, “You were the baby we made when Adrian
died.”

  I know all about making babies, being the daughter of a farmer. I have already put my hand up a cow’s bum, scraped out the sloppy, warm, green-grass pile of shit and felt beyond that, for the thick lining of her womb. If the womb is swollen with a fetus I can touch the shape of it, pressing against the womb wall. A curved back, usually, or the hump of a rear, the bony fineness of a tiny head. I know about conception. Cows that don’t conceive have their tails cut to differentiate them from the fertile cows, whose tails are left long. The short-tailed cows are pulled from the herd and put on a lorry and sent into Umtali, where they become ground meat, sausages, glue. They become Colcom’s Steak Pie.

  The next morning, Mum, who usually eats nothing for breakfast, has two fried eggs, fried bananas, tomatoes. A slice of toast with marmalade and butter. She swallows a pot of tea and then has a cup of coffee. She usually does not drink coffee. The coffee tastes bad because there are sanctionson, which means no one will sell Rhodesia anything and Rhodesia can’t sell anything to anyone else, so our coffee is made from chicory and burnt maize and tastes like charcoal.

  All morning, Mum is more bad-tempered than usual, in spite of her enormous breakfast. She yells at the cook and the maid and the dogs. She tells me to “stop twittering on.” I shut up. That afternoon, she sleeps for three hours while I sit quietly at the end of her bed with the dogs. We’re afraid to wake her, although the dogs are ready for their walk and I am ready for a cup of tea. I am watching her sleep. Her face has fallen away into peace. The dogs sit prick-eared and watchful for a long time and then they lie with their heads in their paws and worried eyes. They are depressed.

  Adrian is buried in the cemetery in Salisbury.

  Mum and Dad leave Rhodesia. They leave the small anonymous hump of their son-child in the huge cemetery opposite the tobacco auction floors in town. They go to England, via Victoria Falls, conceiving me in the sixties hotel next to the grand, historic, turn-of-the-century Victoria Falls Hotel.

  I am conceived in the hotel (with the casino in it) next to the thundering roar of the place where the Zambezi River plunges a hundred meters into a black-sided gorge. The following March, I am born into the tame, drizzling English town of Glossop, Derbyshire.

  The plunging roar of the Zambezi in my ears at conception. Incongruous, contradictory in Derbyshire at birth.

  Bobo—Boarfold

  COMING-BACK

  BABIES

  Some Africans believe that if your baby dies, you must bury it far away from your house, with proper magic and incantations and gifts for the gods, so that the baby does not come back, time after time, and plant itself inside your womb only to die a short time after birth.

  This is a story for people who need to find an acceptable way to lose a multitude of babies. Like us. Five born, three dead.

  I came after a dead brother, whose body had not been properly buried in the soul-trapping roots of a tree and for whose soul there had been no proper offerings to the gods.

  But I am alive.

  I was not the soul of my dead brother. He had a soft soul, I think. Like my sister, Vanessa, has. He was blond and blue-eyed and sweet like her, too. People wanted to pinch his cheeks.

  But I plucked a new, different, worldly soul for myself—maybe a soul I found in the spray thrown up by the surge of that distant African river as it plummets onto black rocks and sends up into the sun a permanent arc of a rainbow. Maybe I found a soul hovering over the sea as my parents made the passage back to England from Africa. Or, it was a soul I found floating about in working-class, damp-to-the-bone Derbyshire.

  I came to earth with a shock of black hair and dark green eyes. I had a look on my face as if somebody had already pinched my cheeks (so that they did not need repinching). I have a pair of the signature tackie lips. Fuller lips. On me, they look overlarge and sulky.

  My soul has no home. I am neither African nor English nor am I of the sea. Meanwhile, Adrian’s restless African soul still roamed. Waiting. Waiting to come back and take another baby under the earth.

  Adrian is a Coming-Back Baby, if you can believe what some Africans say.

  I should have been a Coming-Back Baby, but I didn’t believe what some Africans say.

  That Coming-Back soul searched for me. Undoubtedly, there was a struggle for my soul on the train coming up from Cape Town. That was the closest I came to being a Coming-Back Baby.

  Boarfold

  ENGLAND,

  1969

  To begin with they lived in a semidetached house in Stalybridge, Cheshire. But it was unthinkable to either of my parents to continue living in such ordinarily lower-middle-class circumstances. So, in spite of their lack of funds, but with their usual, brazen disregard for such details, they bought a farm in bordering Derbyshire with borrowed money. There was no house on the farm, just a barn, still rank with the smell of cow shit, ancient horse pee, old dusty chicken droppings. Dad was selling agricultural chemicals to suspicious, low-browed farmers, Mum was sleeves-rolled-up running after two small children, a goat, several chickens, and a hutch of rabbits whom she couldn’t bear to slaughter when the time came to turn them into rabbit pie, so she let them free where they overpopulated the Derbyshire countryside.

  Girls at Boarfold

  When the rain came in the winter and as far as the eye could see a gray shroud hung over the hills, the adventure of England wore off. My parents were more broke than ever, but they were not going to rot to death under a dripping English sky. Dad quit his job. They rolled up the entire farm and sold it as turf to a gardening company, which would unroll it as lawn in suburban Manchester. They rented out the barn (now equipped with flush loos and running water, and the cow shit scraped out to reveal scrubbed old stone floors) to gullible city folk as “rural cottages” and fled.

  Dad went ahead to Rhodesia by airplane. Mum followed by ship with two dogs and two children.

  The ship trundled steadily down the African coast with the slow, warm winds pushing her south, past the equator, where the air felt thicker and the sun burned brighter, all the way past the welcoming, waving beaches of the tropics and to the southern tip of the continent.

  When the ship veered into the Cape of Good Hope, Mum caught the spicy, woody scent of Africa on the changing wind. She smelled the people: raw onions and salt, the smell of people who are not afraid to eat meat, and who smoke fish over open fires on the beach and who pound maize into meal and who work out-of-doors. She held me up to face the earthy air, so that the fingers of warmth pushed back my black curls of hair, and her pale green eyes went clear-glassy.

  “Smell that,” she whispered. “That’s home.”

  Vanessa was running up and down the deck, unaccountably wild for a child usually so placid. Intoxicated already.

  I took in a faceful of African air and fell instantly into a fever.

  By the time we were on the train from Cape Town to Rhodesia I was so racked with illness that I was almost unconscious: trembling and shaking and with a cold-burning sweat.

  Some Africans would say, “The child is possessed, of course.” On account of the Coming-Back Baby. “And there are various magics you can perform with the help of a witch doctor if you wish to keep her.”

  Some Africans would say, “What a load of rubbish. There’s no such thing as returning babies. Wrap the child in vinegar paper.”

  Some Africans would say, “Good, let her die. Who needs another white baby, to grow into a bossy, hands-on-hips white madam?”

  But I was made of my own soul already. I was here to stay.

  Mum made them stop the train. I was raced to the nearest hospital. No one could say what was wrong with me. They took my temperature and fed me aspirin, which I puked up in bitter streams through my nose. They bathed my arms and legs with a damp washcloth until I sat up and demanded food.

  “Say ‘Please,’ ” said Mum.

  Although I had been conceived in Africa, I had been started in urban England (like a delicate vegetable started indoors, where i
t is safe—at a vulnerable age—from pests and too much sun). I had the constitution of a missionary.

  Within a day I was well enough to continue the journey to Rhodesia.

  Up through South Africa, the train labored in the heat, pulling herself up hills, chaka-chaka (an Ndebele war sound) through burning flat savannah that looked as though it might ignite at the sight of our metallic speed, slicing on hot wheels, ever north. This was where Cecil John Rhodes had intended for we British to go. From Cape to Cairo had been his dream. One long stain of British territory up the spine of Africa. He himself, the great white bald-headed one, made it only as far as Rhodesia.

  Our train left South Africa, traveling up over the Great Grey-Green, Greasy Limpopo (all set about, said Rudyard Kipling, with fever-trees). Up to the long flat place where the dust blew all day and night and the air was raw with so much blowing. To Karoi, Rhodesia.

  House at Karoi

  KAROI

  A colored topographical map of Rhodesia shows the west and the northwest of the country as pale yellow fading to green, which means that it is low and hot, barely undulating as it humps toward the Zambezi River valley. It means that when the wind blows it picks up fists of stinging sand and flings it against your skin.

  Dete is there, in the flat part, in the west. “Dete” meaning “Narrow Passage.” Shithole.

  When we first came back to Rhodesia, we lived in the northwest, in the flat, pale-yellow area, melted into orange in places, which meant that, unlike Dete, the land had some lift off the sunburnt lowveldt. But not enough so you’d notice the difference.