African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [43]
This talk went on, the young people getting more exasperated, but patient, while now it was the parents who exchanged looks that said, There’s no point, keep quiet.
But as their children left, the parents said, ‘Now you’ve got your Zimbabwe, I hope you’ll like it.’
THE VERANDAHS
And now here is the life of the verandahs at its best, because the houses are high in the Vumba mountains and the one where I am to spend a few days looks down on valleys and hills, forests and lakes. Also the border with Mozambique, four miles away. Sometimes there are little puffs of smoke, and the small sound of distant explosions. Renamo are again blowing up the pipeline, the railway, the road. Farmers who spent years fighting against the ‘terrs’ listened to the sounds, noted the exact size and shape of the smoke-puffs, and diagnosed such and such a mortar…type of explosion…gun. They spoke with the nostalgia of those who have learned expertise they will never use again. The Selous Scouts appeared in every conversation. I had known that as soon as I was in Zimbabwe, the certainties of ‘progressive’ Britain would recede, become less black and white (black, good; white, bad) but the hardest thing was to find myself in an atmosphere where it was taken for granted that the Selous Scouts were all heroes. I met as many people proudly claiming to have started the Selous Scouts, or whose uncles, brothers, nephews started the Selous Scouts, as in London I know people who invented the CND logo.
Among its other accomplishments the Selous Scouts ran training courses for people like farmers who could not be fulltime soldiers. One course was how to survive in the bush. Initiates were given a piece of string and a knife, told which plants were edible and which might have water in them, and left in the bush for a week or so to get on with it. It seems to me few people, or perhaps I should say few of a certain type, would not respond with all the energy of fantasies made real. No one brought up in, or near the bush, for a start. Because of the heroic and romantic aspects of the Selous Scouts many Rhodesian whites found it easier to overlook the brutality, the ruthlessness.
Within a couple of years, in South Africa, in every bookshop would be shelves full of books on the Selous Scouts (mostly ghosted, since the type of person who excels in commando or SAS styles of fighting are seldom those who take easily to writing books) and the Selous Scouts had become for the white right wing a symbol of excellence and of the heroic War for the survival of white Rhodesia. The expertise of the Scouts contributed to the brutalities and excesses of the South African troops in Angola and Namibia.
And who was this Selous? He was Frederick Courtney Selous, an illustrious and esteemed hunter. How many hundreds of thousands of animals did he kill during his years in the bush? He lived from 1851 to 1917 so he watched old Africa being overrun by the whites. He wrote a book called Travel and Adventure in South-East Africa, and here is a bit of it.
That evening we slept on a Kafir footpath not far from Lo Magondi’s kraals. About two hours after sunrise on the morrow, when we were quite close to the foot of the hills where the kraals are situated, we met a fine old eland bull face to face, coming from the opposite direction, upon which we at once shot him. As we had a little business to transact with Lo Magondi, in whose charge we had left several trophies of the chase in the previous July, and from whom I expected to be able to buy some ivory, this supply of meat, so near his town, was very opportune. We at once sent two Kafirs on, to apprise the old fellow of our arrival, and then off-saddling the horses (there was a beautiful running stream of water in the valley just below us) set to work to cut up the eland and camp.
In the afternoon our messengers returned, accompanied by Lo Magondi and about twenty of his followers. We at once presented the old fellow with a hind quarter and half the heart fat of the eland, while on his side he gave us a large pot of beer, a basket of