House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe. Christina Lamb
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or say, ‘No, they're just an inferior breed and what do you expect?’
None of us could imagine them in our school Prince Edward was one of the oldest and most prestigious schools in Rhodesia. Founded as Salisbury Public School in the early days of the Pioneers back in 1898, it was renamed after the Prince of Wales who visited Rhodesia in 1925, and even today the school prospectus states that it ‘seeks to build balanced gentlemen’. The flag fluttering over the red-brick tower of the main building bore the school crest of a lion and a sable holding up a shield on which was the three-feathered coronet of the Prince of Wales. The lion carried a flag emblazoned with the English Tudor rose and both animals rested on a grassy knoll decorated with a Tudor rose, the African flame lily and the Welsh leek. Underneath was the Latin motto Tot facienda parum factum—So much to do, so little done, a translation of Rhodes's weary words on his deathbed in 1902.
The school was divided into eight houses named after Pioneers and heroes of the colonial era including Jameson, after Leander Starr Jameson, first administrator of the British South African Company; Baines, after Thomas Baines, the explorer; Selous, for Frederick Selous, the adventurer; and Moffat, for John Moffat, the British government emissary who first persuaded Lobengula to keep out the Boers. Nigel was in Rhodes House, where the initiation process included stealing fruit from the neighbouring convent and being woken in the middle of winter at 2 a.m. to swim in the pool and do a cross-country run. I thought it built up camaraderie but then one year a boy died doing it because he had a weak heart that no one knew about.
Apart from extensive rugby and cricket fields, the school had its own observatory and memorial chapel funded by the donations of old pupils. Nigel had managed to find a hiding place at the back upstairs and would sleep all the way through Sunday service. Latin and Greek were key parts of the Prince Edward curriculum and there was a set of rules such as always wearing a tie inside-maroon with the three feathers or green-striped for prefects-but never a cap. Any violations were punished with a set of cuts, beatings with a cane, sometimes six at a time, which left the victim bruised black and scarlet although of course no self-respecting boy would allow himself to cry.
The school day began somewhat brutally with a junior blowing a bugle at 6 a.m. Nigel was fagging for one of the prefects, Philip Nicholas, so had to get up even earlier to polish his shoes, run his bath and carry his books. Inspection and roll call were at 6.30 a.m. Everyone then filed over to the main school building for morning assembly which started with a rousing chorus of the school song. This opened with the lines:
When the lion roared of old And the sable tossed his crest
It went on to become increasingly martial with verses such as:
When we lay aside the pen And abandon bat and ball We will acquit ourselves like men Answering our country's call
Under Rhodesian law, no government school was permitted to have more than 6 per cent blacks, and Prince Edward had never admitted black students. But it was not the effect on traditions that concerned Nigel-Prince Edward was the country's top sporting school and he was worried about the impact a black presence might have on the performance of their teams. I lived for sport-squashy cricket, rugby. Although he was small for his age, within days of arriving the eleven-year-old Nigel had beaten the school tennis and squash champions and by the following year he was playing first-team cricket.
Their main rival school, St Georges, had black boys and because of that their teams were not allowed to play away games. Some schools refused to play them at all. I was really worried that would happen to us too. Also I dreaded the idea of being in a rugby scrum with an African. I thought they were dirty and would smell. Peterhouse School used to have black guys and when we went to play against them we used to be very reluctant to eat off their plates because they seemed greasy and we thought it was because blacks had been eating off them.
White Rhodesia was an outdoor society where sport was very much part of life and enormous value was placed on sporting achievements. The first cricket pitch was laid by the Pioneers in Salisbury in 1891, as early a priority as building a school or hospital. At Prince Edward, schooldays started with a crosscountry run and there was no greater honour than being in the rugby first fifteen. Most of the national sports teams had ex-PE boys, and when Nigel joined the school, both Duncan Fletcher, the Zimbabwe cricket captain who went on to coach England to win the Ashes, and John Bredenkamp, the rugby captain (later better known as an arms dealer and one of Britain's richest men), were Old Hararians, as alumni were known. All other schools feared playing Prince Edward, said Nigel. Even St Georges boys spent most of their time running away from Prince Edward men.
The few black boys who managed to get places at white schools found life almost intolerable. James Mushore was one of the first in the 1970s, a scholarship boy at St Georges who went on to co-found Zimbabwe's largest merchant bank, NMB. ‘I had a terrible time,’ he said. ‘The white boys did something called “ball brushing,” which was pulling down my pants and painting my balls with bootblack. But worst of all was “bog washing”. There was one boy in particular who would defecate in the toilet, leave his faeces there, then force my head down into the bowl and flush it over me.’
When James won a nationwide spelling bee, his parents were not allowed in the hall to watch the competition and had been forced to sit outside in the car park waiting for him to come and tell them the result. Afterwards, he watched the mother of a white boy slap the cheek of her son, the runner-up, and loudly demand, ‘How could you let a kaffir beat you?’
Nigel admits he would have shared that mother's feelings. I clearly remember when I was at Prince Edward that there was an article in the newspaper where some American scientist had proven that blacks were w per cent more stupid than whites and they didn't have the same brain capacity and I remember us discussing how they must have been further down the evolutionary scale. This was a very politically correct view then; I suppose it sort of justified the behaviour.
At school they studied ‘Builders of Rhodesia’-Rhodes, Rudd, Jameson and Alfred Beit, the diamond and gold magnate-and were left under the impression that before the Pioneers arrived the country was a no man's land. Nigel had heard adults tell the story of the border between Rhodesia and Portuguese East Africa being decided by the toss of a die. Every white schoolboy had been taught the story of the last stand of Allan Wilson's patrol who died so bravely on the banks of the Shangani river as they were outnumbered by Lobengula's hordes. When they ran out of bullets they started singing ‘God Save the Queen until one by one they all fell. In fact what Nigel had learnt about as ‘a glorious sacrifice in the name of founding the country’ had no factual basis as no survivor lived to tell the tale. The deaths of the 34 men were probably caused by a reckless blunder during Jameson's barbaric war on the Ndebele in 1893.
The war ended with Lobengula telling his people, ‘Now here are your masters coming … You will have to pull and shove wagons but under me you never did this kind of thing … the white people are coming now, I didn't want to fight with them.’ The King apparently then swallowed poison after learning that the last of his impis had surrendered, though other reports suggest that he fled across the border. Inkosi yanyamalala, the Ndebele say, ‘The King has vanished.’
But Nigel had never heard of this, nor of Rhodes's tricking of Lobengula that had led to the creation of Rhodesia. Even when I left school all I knew was that Lobengula was fat and primitive and that's all.
For us the history of Rhodesia started with the arrival of whites to civilize warring kaffir tribes. At school I learned all about the two world wars and the threat of Communist advancement but I never knew anything about the Shona or Ndebele people or any local language or culture. We didn't think they had a culture. I knew how to say ‘mangwanani in Shona, which means ‘good morning,’ and nothing else. I knew nothing about how blacks lived.
Ian Smith's description in his memoirs typified the Rhodesian view. On the Pioneers’ imposition of hut tax on the natives, he wrote: ‘They [the natives] were happy to have the opportunity to work and for the first time in their lives,