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By Root 1434 0

struggle to stay awake, but soon felt myself failing, and tried hard, and saw my mother bending over the fire in her pyjamas, dropping wood into nests of sparks, her face, for once, not presented to be looked at, but full of emotions I was determined would never be mine. ‘I will not, I will not. Remember this moment, remember it,’ I admonished myself, seeing the fire-illuminated face of that powerful woman, but she looked like a small girl who had had a door slammed in her face. The moment went to join the others on a list of moments that I kept in my mind, to be checked, often, so they did not fade and go. And I fell asleep and woke with the sun on my face, not the moon, my brother curled like a cat, my mother already at work folding up the bedding, and perhaps the ‘boy’ still asleep, his back to us. Or it was in a thick whiteness that sometimes in the very early morning rolled through the trees and over us, a mist that clung to our eyelashes and our skins, and made us all shiver as we sat drinking mugs of hot sweet tea around the revived fire. This mist was the guti of the Eastern districts, and we never saw anything like it in our district, and so it was part of the excitement of these trips, another bonus, to be watched for and welcomed. When it was cold and damp like this, and we sat waiting for the sun to climb higher and dispel the mist, we were kept around the fire and my mother summoned Isaiah–or Joshua, or Aaron, or Matthew, or Luke, or John–away from his little fire and made him sit inside the hot reach of ours, but perhaps a yard further away than we were. ‘You’ll catch cold,’ she fussed at him, as she did at us, pressing on him more mugs of the sweet tea. And then, it seemed always suddenly, the mist thinned and went and left us sitting in the brilliant sunshine.

GIVING LIFTS

It took me two hours to drive that short distance from Harare to Marondera, not because the car went so slowly; on the contrary, it was a powerful car that did not like being slowed. I kept stopping to salute this view, that cluster of toppling boulders, or at a turn-off to a farm I used to visit. No, the landscape had not lost its magnificence, nor grown smaller, the way things do, although I had seen the Arizona deserts, and California and Australia, been immersed in space and emptiness in various parts of the world. The road still rolled high in sparkling air, and, as you reached the crest of one rise, blue distances unfolded into mountains and then chains of mountains. But there was a new dimension to the landscape, because the War had ended only two years ago, and I was looking at a country where contesting armies had moved, often secretly, often at night, for, a decade. In these distances you do not see villages, it is still, apparently, an empty land, but that is only because huts melt and merge into trees, hills, valleys.

I had been told by white friends, ‘On no account give any lifts to the blacks, it is dangerous.’ Public transport is bad and large crowds of black people waited at every stopping place. If a car showed signs of slowing, they crowded after it, shouting and waving. I stopped at a bus-stop and at once the car was surrounded. Such a scene would have been impossible in old Southern Rhodesia, where blacks had to know their place. I said to an old man who bent to peer into the seat near mine, ‘Get in,’ and he beckoned peremptorily to two women in the crowd. He opened the door for them to get into the back seat, and he got in beside me. He made threatening gestures at the crowd, who were expressing loud dissatisfaction. ‘Go on,’ he said to me, in the same peremptory way. I tried to start a conversation with him but he answered Yes and No, or not at all. I tried with the women, but he said, ‘They don’t know what you are saying.’ I could see from their faces this was not true. I said to him, ‘I am back in this country after twenty-five years. I was brought up in Lomagundi.’ He did not reply, and I was stupidly disappointed. What did I expect? My intelligence expected one thing, and my emotions another. About ten miles