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

  “Ja.”

  “Now, don’t cry.”

  “Okay.” I wipe my nose on my arm.

  “Don’t wipe your nose on your arm, man, yuck.”

  I cry harder.

  “It hurts worser than that to get your lips cut off.”

  “Okay.”

  “So would you cry?”

  “Ja, ja. I’d cry, hey.”

  Robandi, the farm, had been named by the original owner’s two sons, Rob and Andy. Robandi. Almost an African word. Like the Lozi word banani, they have. Or the Tonga word ndili, I am. Or Nyanja pitani, to the . . .

  We have moved, mother and father with two children, a couple of cats, three dogs, and one horse, right into the middle, the very birthplace and epicenter, of the civil war in Rhodesia and a freshly stoked civil war in Mozambique. There is no way out of the valley for us now. We have borrowed money to buy the farm. Money we might never be able to repay. And who is going to buy the farm off us now? Who is going to buy our farm and take our place in the middle of a civil war? We are stuck.

  We erect a massive fence with slanting-backward barbed wire at the top around the house. Mum plants Mauritius thorn around the inside of the fence for good measure; it bushes out with its forward-backward hooking thorns. We stop at the SPCA in Umtali and collect a host of huge dogs, and then we collect dogs abandoned by civil-war-fleeing farmers. These dogs are found tied up to trees or staring hopefully down flat driveways, waiting for their nonreturning owners. Their owners have gone in the middle of the night to South Africa, Australia, Canada, England. We call it the chicken run. Or we say they gapped it. But they gapped it without their pets.

  One day Dad says to Mum, “Either I go, or some of these bloody dogs have to go.”

  “But they don’t have anywhere to go.”

  Dad is in a rage. He aims a kick at a cluster of dogs, who cheerfully return his gesture with jump-up licking let’s-playfulness.

  Mum says, “See? How sweet.”

  “I mean it, Nicola.”

  So the dogs stay with us until untimely death does them part.

  The life expectancy of a dog on our farm is not great. The dogs are killed by baboons, wild pigs, snakes, wire snares, and each other. A few eat the poison blocks left out in the barns for rats. Or they eat cow shit on which dip for killing ticks has splattered and they dissolve in frothy-mouthed fits. They get tick fever and their hearts fail from the heat. More dogs come to take the place of those whose graves are wept-upon humps in the field below the house.

  We buy a 1967 mineproofed Land Rover, complete with siren, and call her Lucy. Lucy, for Luck.

  “Why do we have the bee-ba?”

  “To scare terrorists.”

  But Mum and Dad don’t use the siren except to announce their arrival at parties.

  There are two roads out of the valley. We can drive up to the Vumba highlands to the north or through Zamunya Tribal Trust Land to the east. Neither road is paved, and therefore both are easily planted with land mines. We are supposed to travel in convoy when we go to town.

  A convoy is: a Pookie, the mine-detecting vehicle that can drive over a matchbox without squishing it. There is something in the Pookie that beeps if it detects metal. And land mines are cased in metal. Then two or three long crocodile-looking lorries, which are spiky with Rhodesian soldiers, their FN rifles poking out of the sides of the vehicle like so many bristles, ready to retaliate if we are ambushed. And finally, us. Farmers and their kids in ordinary vehicles, or mineproofed Land Rovers, our own guns poking from windows, on the way to town in our best clothes. If we are killed in an ambush or blown up on a mine, we will be wearing clean brookies, our best dresses, red and black necklaces made out of the very poisonous seeds from lucky-bean trees. We’ll be presentable to go and sit on the left hand of Godthefather.

  The third way out of the valley is too dangerous for casual travel now. It was possible, before the war, to climb up over the mountains, on footpaths unguarded by customs officials, to Mozambique. But these secret paths have been blocked by the minefield that has been laid along the border. Almost daily, and often at night, a mine erupts underneath the unsuspecting legs of a baboon, or a person—a fisherman coming back from the fish-rich dams in Mozambique, or a soldier in a troop of terrorists. We cheer when we hear the faint, stomach-echoing thump of a mine detonating. Either an African or a baboon has been wounded or killed.

  “One hundred little baboons playing on the minefield. One hundred little baboons playing on the minefield. And if one little baboon should accidentally explode, there’ll be ninety-nine little baboons playing on the minefield.”

  We had a policeman come to our school to talk to us about mines. Vanessa said he had come because I sucked my thumbs and the policeman was here to chop off my thumbs. I tucked my thumbs into my fists, but the policeman stood on the stage in the Assembly Hall and rocked back and forth in tight-squeaky shoes and stared over the top of our heads and didn’t look toward my thumbs once.

  “Mines are hidden in cake tins and biscuit tins.” He showed us. The tins were bright and promising, with pictures of roses painted on their sides, or small children with rosy cheeks in old-fashioned winter clothes running behind snow-covered trees, or butter-soft shortbread with cherry-heart centers. “Would any of you open this tin?”

  A few of us raised our hands eagerly.

  “Children like you open the tins and get blown to pieces.”

  We greedy, stupid few quickly sat on our hands again.

  The policeman showed us pictures of holes in the ground where a mine had been.

  A kid asked, pointing to the picture, “Was a kid blown up by that mine?”

  The policeman hesitated, caught between wanting to scare the hell out of us and wanting to preserve our childish innocence. He said, “Not this particular mine. But you can never be too careful, hey?”

  We shook our heads solemnly.

  “Mines can also be buried, and you will never know where they are.”

  A little voice from the assembly hall asked, “In your driveway even?”

  “Oh, ja. Oh, ja.”

  There was a rustle of titillated fear among the audience. The teachers looked bored, cross-armed, cross-legged, watchful. Waiting for one of us to misbehave so that they could send us to detention.

  I only know a few people who have gone over mines.

  A girl who attended the high school in Umtali went over a mine and had her legs blown off but she lived. She was brave and beautiful and when she got married in South Africa a few years after the accident, Fair Lady magazine wrote a big article about her and showed photographs of her walking down the aisle of a church all frothy in a white dress and a long white veil and with the help of bridesmaids and crutches.

  Fanie Vorster, who is a farmer in the Burma Valley, went over a mine, too, but he did not get his legs blown off. If he had, it might have given children a chance to run away from him when he tried to trap them in his spare bedroom and pin them to the single bed with his fat gray-hair-sprouting belly while mums and dads drank coffee in the kitchen with his stick-insect purple-mottled bruised-and-battered wife. Fanie Vorster didn’t even get a headache when he went over the mine because he was in a mineproofed Land Rover, so the back end of it blew off and left the cab intact with Fanie inside, not at all hurt. He sat on the side of the road and smoked a cigarette until help came along.

  Which just goes to show, all prayers aren’t answered.

  Once Vanessa and I were driving back from a Christmas party with Mum and we were behind an African bus that had gone over a mine. It left a hole the size of the bus in the middle of the road and the bus lay blindly on its side like an eyeless, legs-in-the-air dead insect. Mum said, “Put your heads down!” Mum said, “Don’t look.” So I put my head down and squeezed my eyes shut and Vanessa looked out the window as we drove past the bus. She said bits and pieces of Africans were hanging from the trees and bushes like black and red Christmas decorations. Some of the passengers were
n’t dead, Vanessa told me, but sitting on the side of the road with blood on them and their legs straight out in front of them, like people who have just had a big surprise.

  She said, “Did you look?”

  I said, “No ways, hey.”

  Once at the police station I saw the army guys unload bodies in black plastic body bags from the back of a pickup and I heard the damp-dead sound of the heavy flesh hitting the ground.

  I told Mum I had seen dead terrorists.

  She said, “Don’t exaggerate.”

  “I did. They were in bags.”

  “Then you saw body bags,” she told me, “not bodies.”

  That’s how I think of dead bodies, as things in long black bags, the ends neatly tied off. And I think of dead bodies as strips of meat hanging land-mine-blown from trees like strips of drying, salted biltong, even though I have only Vanessa’s word for it.

  We drive through the Tribal Trust Lands to get to town, past Africans whose hatred reflects like sun in a mirror into our faces, impossible to ignore. Young African men slouch aggressively against the walls of the taverns. Their eyes follow us as we hurry past, and we stare at them until they are swallowed in the cloud of dust kicked up behind the armed convoy and the mine-detecting Pookie and the snake of farmers coming into town to sell green peppers and mealies, tobacco and milk. Outside one of the African stores (which advertise Cafenol for headaches and Enos Liver Salts for indigestion and Coke for added life on bullet-pocked billboards), there is a gong hanging from a tree. When our convoy thunders through, an old woman squatting under the shade of the tree gets painfully to her feet and beats the gong with surprising vigor.

  The sound of that gong echoes through the flat, dry TTL and bounces against the hills that border them. Anyone camped in those hiding, thick hills or crouched behind boulders by the side of the road can hear the warning. We know now that we are being watched. A blink of binocular glass against the rocks up in the hills. An unnatural sway of thigh-deep grass on a still day. The shaking foliage of a tree as branches are parted, then allowed to spring back.

  Mum sits back in her seat and slides the Uzi forward out the window.

  She says, “Be ready to put your heads down, girls.”

  Dad on call-up

  WAR, 1976

  Mum and Dad both join the police reservists, which means Dad has to go out into the bush on patrol for ten days at a time and find terrorists and fight them.

  I watch him strip his gun and clean it; it lies on the sitting-room floor in pieces and the house and our clothes and the dogs reek of gun oil afterward. Dad lets me press the magazine full of bullets.

  “Faster than that. You’d have to do it a lot faster than that.”

  In the back of my cupboard, stacked under my one hanging dress (which is too hot to wear and was sent to me from England by Granny and which smells of mothballs), are the rat packs. Small government-issue cardboard boxes in which there are pink, sugar-covered peanuts, small gooey packets of coffee which leak on everything else, two squares of Cowboy bubble gum, a box of matches, teabags, a tin of bully beef, a packet of powdered milk, sugar, Pronutro. Dad packs five rat packs and a flask of contraband brandy into his camouflage rucksack along with ten boxes of cigarettes.

  He puts on his camouflage uniform and he has a camouflage band that Mum made to put over his watch so that it doesn’t blink in the sunlight and alert the terrorists. He paints black, thick paint on his face and arms and when I ask, “Why?” he says, “So the terrs won’t see me.” But he doesn’t blend in. He stands out. He is a white human figure, hunched with the weight of a pack and his gun. He walks with his head down and his legs striding and bandy like a cowboy, without his horse, in a movie. I can see him all the way to the bottom of the driveway when he climbs into the Land Rover that has come to take him away and he doesn’t turn around and wave although I am waving both arms in the air and shouting, “ ‘Bye Dad! ‘Bye Dad!”

  I want to warn him that I can see him the whole way down the driveway, that he doesn’t blend in at all. The terrs will easily see him and shoot him. He shouldn’t walk down driveways. I shout, one last thin hysterical message into the hot air, “Don’t let the bugs bite, Dad!”

  Mum says, “Shh now. That’s enough.” Dad has heaved his rucksack onto his lap and turned to take a light from a friend for his cigarette. The Land Rover pulls away. As Dad disappears from sight, as the Land Rover jolts over the bump where the snake lives in the culvert at the bottom of the driveway, he raises his hand and I think he’s waving. But he’s just taking a pull off his cigarette.

  There’s a lump in my throat that hurts when I swallow and I can’t talk or I’ll start to cry. Mum puts down her hand. She hardly ever lets me hold her hand. I slip my hand into hers and we begin to walk back to the house. It feels strange to hold Mum’s hand and too quickly there is an uncomfortable film of sweat between us. I slip out of Mum’s grip, wipe my hand on my trousers, and run ahead to the house, banging into the warm, meat-smelling, fat-greasy-walled kitchen where July is making bread and the kitchen is becoming rich with the smell of bubbling yeast (which is like the smell of puppy pee).

  Mum wears a neat gray uniform—a dress with silver buttons and epaulets and the letters “BSAP” on the sleeve.

  “What’s that for?” I finger the letters.

  “ ‘British South African Police.’ ”

  “But we’re Rhodesian.”

  “Mmm.” She tucks her hair under a peaked hat and looks in the mirror, lips crooked the way people look when they are pleased with themselves. “How do I look?”

  “Pretty.”

  She flashes me a rewarding smile. I am kicking-legs bored on her bed.

  Mum tugs a pair of nylon tights onto humid-hot legs and slips into a pair of black lace-up shoes, which look like school shoes.

  “Are you a policeman?”

  “A police reservist.”

  “Oh.”

  We drive into Umtali. Mum stops to buy lunch. A sausage roll and a chocolate-covered sponge-cake mouse each from Mitchells the Bakery on Main Street, with a Coke for me.

  The police station is out toward the African part of town, in the Third Class district which is less than the Second Class district (with the Indian shops and mosques) and less again, by far, than the distant First Class district where the Europeans shop and live.

  There is a small gray duty room for the police reservists, with a wooden desk under a window at which Mum sits. She has brought a book. She sighs, slips off her shoes, and rubs her nylon-covered feet together while she reads. Against the other wall is a thin, narrow bed for the person who will be on duty all night. I sit on the floor nibbling the delicious, flaky, greasy luxury of my sausage roll, working my way through the pastry to the salty meat in the middle. I am in an agony of knowing that the sausage roll will come to an end. But I am also fat with the knowledge that I will have the chocolate mouse next and then my Coke. I make my lunch last, lick by lick, sip by sip, as long as I can. On the wall above the bed there is a chart with the army alphabet on it. After I have finished my lunch I press my back against the cool metal frame of the bed (my belly swollen) and stare at the wall quietly for a long time until the words are completely in my head: “Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot . . .” all the way to “Zulu.” I pretend that I have twenty-six horses named after the army alphabet and gallop them around on the bed, my fingers jumping wrinkles and dodging water hazards. Under my breath, “Come on, India. Chtch, chtch. Up we go, boy.”

  Next to the bed there is a map of Manicaland with lots of tiny lights dotted here and there.

  “What are the lights for?”

  “That shows where people live.” She points to where we live; our dot almost spills into Mozambique.

  “Why lights, though?”

  “If someone gets attacked then they press the alarm on their Agricalert and the light will go off here and I can tell who is getting attacked.”

  “What then?”

  �
�I call up the army guys and they go and rescue whoever it is.”

  “What if they’re all dead by the time the army guys get there?”

  “Don’t ask silly questions.” She goes back to her book.

  So I go outside and stare at the jail, which is behind the police station. It is a small gray two-celled building. The cells don’t have windows but there are little slots on the door and in front of the door there are two fenced off yards, like the yards at the SPCA where we sometimes go to rescue dogs to add to the pack. I squint against the sun long enough and peer deeply enough into the doors, and I am rewarded by the startled eyes—very white and staring from the depths of the jail—of an actual prisoner. I smile and wave, the way some people try and get a reaction from a bored animal at a zoo, to see if anything will happen. The eyes blink shut. The face disappears.

  I sit under the frangipani tree on the spiky, drying police station lawn with its ring of whitewashed stones and aloe vera flower beds, and I poke pieces of grass into ant lion traps to see the little ant lions leap up with sharp claws in anticipation of an ant meal, which I, and my little piece of grass, are not. Then one of the African sergeants comes out of the police station with trays of food for the prisoners. I lower myself onto my belly, flat against the speckled shadows of the frangipani tree. I don’t want to be told to “go inside now.” The sergeant opens the dog-run gate and bangs on the gray cell doors. The hatches open. The sergeant slides the trays halfway into the mouths of the slots, and they are swallowed into the police cells.

  And then Mum comes out and says, “Bobo!” And then, “There you are. Look, you’re all dusty.” She glances toward the prison cells. “Come inside now. It’s time to rest.”

  I have to lie down on the prickly gray army-issue blanket for rest time. Mum puts her feet up on the edge of the bed and reads her book. The sound of her breathing, her nylon-covered-foot-rubbing-foot, her gently shuffling pages, and the gathering force of hot-yellow sun are stupefying. And then I am asleep.

  In the late afternoon, Mum has finished her book and still no one has been attacked, although I have woken up from my afternoon sleep (dry-mouthed and eyes stinging) and lain on my side for ages staring at the little lights on the map, hoping. The flies are buzzing hotly against the windows and the sun has sunk below the level of the corrugated-tin roof and is sliding breathlessly against the wall with the army alphabet on it (fading Alpha through Golf and Hotel). There is a knock on the door and the police station’s maid comes in with the tea tray (a plate of Marie Biscuits, two chipped mugs, sweet powdered milk reconstituted in a plastic jug, a tub of white sugar, and a small government-issue metal pot for the tea so that Mum immediately asks for more, in anticipation of her second cup).