House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe. Christina Lamb
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body started sprouting in all directions. ‘No man is going to want a wife with so much knowledge in her head,’ he pronounced, and the beer-drinkers enjoying some Seven Day in the yard all nodded agreement.
The pressure to get married beat like a drum on her temples until sometimes she thought her head would explode. I wished I was like the other girls in the village who just wanted to find a man to look after them, then life would be easier. Most of the time I could just busy myself with tasks and not think beyond. But then I remembered the books I had read at school and the nurses I had seen and I knew there was more out there than Zhakata's Kraal.
She hated passing the Apostolics gathered for one of their sessions, their white robes flapping around. I wasn't scared of them any more, but if they saw me one of them would point a finger and declare that I should marry this Mr Banana or that Mr Pumpkin.
At the well or washing clothes in the river, she noticed women hushing their voices as she approached and guessed they had been discussing her marriage prospects. Sometimes one of them made pointed pronouncements like, ‘An unmarried woman is a troubled woman.’ At the New Year's dancing which always took place after a small portion of each crop had been left for the spirits and the babies born that year had been blessed, a wealthy widower from the next village had tried to grab her hand. So old was he that skin hung in webs from his arms and it was all Aqui could do not to curl up her lip in revulsion. But he had cows and goats and a storeroom of maize and told her he would give her the best hut in the village and take her on the bus to Chivhu to buy a shop dress.
If she married him, her father would receive a hefty lobola of several cows. There was a proverb in the village that ‘a son-in-law is like a fruit tree; one never finishes eating from it’. I knew as the eldest I should help my family and marry a man like that with stocks for bad times, but it did not seem fair. Her only hope was if he shared the same totem as her, the animal spirit which all Mashona are given at birth as a way of safeguarding against incest. Mine was impala like my father because in Shona society men are more powerful than women so the children always take the totem of the father. It would be completely taboo for me to marry another impala.
Even Aqui's mother, who she had thought was on her side, had started saying that now she was twelve her eldest daughter should be taking more care of her appearance. One day she sat Aqui down and smeared her hair with a paste made of water and ashes from burning the dry bark of the mutsvedzabeni tree to try and tame its frizziness. I was quite sure Nehanda never did such things.
Aqui wondered about appealing to the headmaster of her school to see if there was some kind of scholarship that would let her study to be a nurse. She had always had glowing reports, which she read out to her mother, and she knew he liked her. At a sports day for schools in the area they had camped on the field of another school, St Judes, because it was too far to get back to their homes. While she and some friends were sitting round the fire they had made, a boy had come running with a message that the headmaster was calling for her. I went to him, he was standing and I knelt down because we were always taught to kneel to big people. He lunged at me and started groping. Fortunately he was so inebriated that he could hardly stand and she had managed to run away. When she got back to her friends the fire had gone out and they were already sleeping in their blankets. She huddled inside hers and shivered. I didn't sleep all night.
Under the tree, a light rustling disturbed her reverie and she watched a chameleon pause in the wind and lift its head before scuttling away. The sun had already disappeared behind the Daramombe Mountains and Aqui realized she should be moving the cattle back to their pen before the wild animals came out and she was scolded for dreaming again. As she hurried back, flicking the cows' haunches with a large twig, darkness fell and seemed to grow thick and black around her until the moon took pity and showed half its face to light her path.
‘LET ME, LET ME!’ The white boys on the train took turns fat holding the lighter flame to the pennies until they were burning hot, then placed them ready on the window ledge.
Outside the window the countryside from Umtali to Salisbury flashed by, hills and valleys, grass and streams, and strange balancing rocks that defied all notion of gravity. Unique to that part of southern Africa, the granite boulders strewn about the landscape looked like Easter Island figures tumbled on their heads by a mischievous giant. White Rhodesians often referred to their homeland as God's Own Country, and this part was the most beautiful of all.
On the racks above the seats were stacked the boys' straw boaters and black tin trunks with their surnames stencilled in white above the words ‘Prince Edward School, Salisbury’.
There was a shrieking whistle and the train shuddered to a halt at Marandellas station. As usual the platform was packed with natives hoping to sell sodas and biscuits. To Nigel, the crowd of women in colourful prints resembled a cloud of butterflies that parted as the train approached. Most rushed to the whites-only carriages in the front, urgently pressing their wares and black faces against glass panes etched with the words Rhodesian Railways. The schoolboys, smart in their maroon blazers, white shirts and maroon ties, hair cut into fresh pudding bowls by heartless mothers, stared out at the dusty children and strangely humped women with babies strapped to their backs. Then one of them wound down the windows a little to toss out the scalding pennies. They laughed uproariously as the black children jostled each other, hands outstretched, only to drop the coins in wide-eyed agony.
‘Works every time!’ shouted Nigel. ‘The piccanins are so stupid.’
‘Have you heard?’ asked Charlie Tibbets. ‘They are talking about having munts at our school.’
‘No!’
‘Ja, Freddie Wilderkamp's dad is a governor and he told me.’
‘Ach, those munts have a hang of a smell. They don't wash, man. Imagine having them in the same dormitory.’
‘They don't even know how to use a bog. I heard the ones at St Georges stand on the seats!’
‘Imagine getting one of them as your fag!’
They all fell silent contemplating this prospect as the train chugged on its way. Occasionally it stopped at farms to leave mail or collect churns of milk and boys in similar school blazers who would clamber aboard with a cheery ‘Howzit?’
Nigel watched as a small black boy in torn red shorts held up with a pin jumped on clutching a plastic container to fill with water from one of the train's taps, then scampered off with a delighted smile. Outside a handful of dove-white clouds chased each other across the wide blue sky and one of his friends mimicked taking aim and pulling a trigger with his fingers.
I guess we were thinking about the munts we had on our farms, recalled Nigel, how they smelled and stole things and how our parents always said the black man couldn't be trusted. We knew that blacks were way behind in civilization.
Just before the previous election in 1970 in which the Rhodesian Front had won every single seat for the second time since declaring UDI, Smith told a rally: ‘Sixty years ago Africans here were uncivilized savages, walking around in skins. They have made tremendous progress but they have an awful long way to go.’
White boys like Nigel talked of the black population as ‘they’ and thought it not at all unreasonable that they should be barred from white hospitals, schools, bars, swimming pools, restaurants and shops or from voting.* After all, Smith described them as ‘the happiest blacks in the world’. Besides, these were people who did things like leaving a tractor and trailer on a main road with no lights at night, which had led to his brother's tragic death.
Growing up in Rhodesia it was so easy to be drawn into generalizations. When you have all these incidents at the farm, endless theft and betrayals by servants, you have one or two ways of going. You can either