House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe. Christina Lamb
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in the community revolved round the Club. There was cricket, tennis and golf and on weekend afternoons it would be crowded with farmers dressed in their uniform of khaki shirts with tight shorts and long socks with combs tucked in the top. They would gather for braais, grilling thick boerewors sausage and slabs of meat, and downing Lion or Castle beers from the bar as they conversed loudly in the flat vowels similar to the Boers'.
The topics were usually the same-commodity prices, the prospects of rain, hunting and guns, and complaints about workers – ‘the Affs’ or munts as they called them. It was rarely long before discussion turned to Ian Smith and the ramifications of his decision to secede from Britain. There were close relations between Smith's Rhodesian Front and the Commercial Farmers' Union and most farmers supported UDI, fearing that the British government had been about to ‘sell them down the river and hand the country over to the blacks’. Before entering politics Smith had been a farmer like them, and they referred to him as ‘good ol' Smithy’. Despite his long-winded speeches delivered in that nasal burr with a finger jabbing the air, he had come to be seen as the true Rhodesian, born and bred in a land he would never leave and guarding his country from an outside world full of evil. His lack of facial expression, the result of plastic surgery on his war injuries, gave him a heroic status.
The farmers liked to see themselves in the front line, feeding the nation, and finding innovative ways to keep selling their tobacco, the country's biggest foreign exchange earner. Undeterred by attempts by MI6 agents to tail the perpetrators, the Rhodesians had become adept at sanction busting and a nightly meat run flew around Africa delivering cargoes of Rhodesian beef.
The children liked the club because they could drink Coca-Colas with ice-cream floats and eat chips in greasy paper and sometimes there would be movies on the bioscope like Jungle Book or Alice in Wonderland. Every so often there were dances or gymkhanas, and at Christmas one of the farmers would dress up as Santa Claus to distribute presents. Occasionally a farmer with a plane would fly in, like their uncle Noel Waller, and might even be prevailed on to take some children up for a spin.
The whole family was in the car returning from the club one evening when they rounded a bend and found themselves heading straight into a tractor and trailer parked on the road without lights. A car was coming the other way, and as the bulk of it filled the windscreen it was too late to swerve. One minute the children were all chattering and arguing, their mother telling them to keep quiet, then there was a tremendous searing crash. The doors burst open with showers of glass as the car hit the oncoming vehicle and rolled over and over, then it was ground underneath the tractor. Nigel, who was only two at the time, was thrown straight out of the windscreen and initially presumed dead. His father was also thrown out and his mother's head smashed straight through the glass. The other driver was killed. Everyone had cuts, bruises and broken limbs, and as they started coming round groaning, his mother saw her nine-year-old son Terry lying inert on the roadside, literally cut in half. Those who heard her scream never forgot it. ‘It was horrible, devastating,’ she recalls, ‘but it also brought us closer together as a family.’
For a long time after Terry's death, once they were all back from hospital, the farmhouse was a hushed place. Terry's bed remained made and ready from the night he had never come home. Mary stayed in her room, and the children sometimes crept up to the door and could hear muffled crying, though never in front of them. Their father spent even longer periods out in the bush or up trees with his binoculars, leaving the children to be looked after by the nanny. The nightly drinking on the terrace took on a more relentless nature. Neighbours came with homemade pies and hushed condolences and averted their eyes as they spoke. For once it was a relief for the children to go back to school.
*According to the 1969 official census the population of Rhodesia was 228,296 Europeans, 15,153 coloureds, 8,965 Asians and 4,846,930 blacks (Rhodesia Central Statistical Office).
AQUI STOOD IMPATIENTLY, holding the donkey and shifting from foot to foot, as her mother stopped and exchanged the traditional Shona greetings with people along the way.
‘Mangwanani.’ (Good morning.)
‘Mangwananu’
‘Marara here’? (How did you sleep?)
‘Ndarara kana mararawo’ (I have slept well if you did.)
‘Ndarara’? (I slept.)
She was eager to get to the store because for the first time she and her sisters were going to be given a share of the money from the groundnuts and allowed to buy something for themselves. Groundnuts were the only crop that was paying well in those days and her mother had divided some of their land into strips for her and her sisters each to tend their own crop. Aqui had gone to the stand every day after school to check on hers, clearing the sandy soil of weeds and keeping away kudu and whorwe birds. When they were ready it was very exciting. We collected them in small mounds on the earth. My baby brother was strapped to my back in a sling and we borrowed donkeys from the headman to take the nuts to the stores in the township.
The shopping area was ten miles away in the growth point of Sadza where the daily bus stopped for Chivhu. It was reached by a dusty path and rather grandly called the Business Centre. The main shop, to which they were headed, was Musarurwa General Stores which stocked food and clothes. Next to that was a maize-flour mill, a butcher's with giant iron hooks from which hung fly-covered carcasses that stank in the heat, and the Come Again Bottle-store where the men would hang out drinking and making gob-shop.
Aqui's mother had kept back a few groundnuts to grind into oil to rub into the girl's skins at night but all the rest were solemnly handed over to Mr Musarurwa to be weighed and the price calculated on a scrap of paper. The money was then counted out and Aqui took her few coins and began to decide what to buy. It was hard to choose from such a treasure trove. On the floor were sacks of sugar out of which the storekeeper would scoop out a paper coneful for their mother. A large jar of coloured lollipops stood on the counter next to a tray of single cigarettes. Shelves along the back held bolts of bold-patterned cottons, thick blue cakes of laundry soap, pink plastic pots of skin-lightening cream, and dusty packets of Lobells biscuits. Pans and kettles hung on strings from the ceiling.
Aqui lingered long in front of a cupboard containing bottles of Cream Soda and Ripe'n'Ready, boxes of sweet cigarettes and bags of toffees in coloured wrappers, and wondered how they tasted. On the way to the shops I had thought I would buy a torch so that when I came back late from school or went to the bush in the night to relieve myself, I could spy any snakes or tokoloshis. But my mother explained that these would need batteries. There was the same problem if I bought a kerosene lamp to give light to do my homework. So I bought a blanket for winter and my sister bought tackies [canvas tennis shoes]. It was the first time the nine-year-old had worn shoes; usually the village children went barefoot. How we laughed at her, she walked like a duck.
They returned home in festive mood that night, singing as they walked. The blanket was soft and would be cosy for sleeping, her mother had mixed up a special drink of maize and sugar, and there was even meat from the butcher's for dinner. Aqui had just taken a mouthful of the rich stew when she heard loud shouting outside. The food which had been tasting so good turned bitter in my mouth. It was my father and he had been drinking. Her mother pretended not to have heard and carried on chattering gaily. But the girls fell silent for they all knew he would soon drag her out to beat her, then leave her under the shivering stars. They cringed like the ownerless village dog as they waited for the sound of the stinging slaps they knew would follow.
Our African men have this problem-when they get money they use it not for their family but on their girlfriends, forgetting their wives and children, and on beer. My father would go insane when he was drunk. He would beat up my mother, be abusive and chase