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By Root 1415 0

ground nuts, and some pogo meal. That night there was great feasting and rejoicing in our camp, our own boys, who had long been living upon meat and longing for a little vegetable diet, buying large supplies of maize, beans, meal, beer and tobacco from the equally meat-hungry Mashonas. Lo Magondi had brought with him all the rhino horns, etc. that we had left in his charge, but no ivory. He however said that he would send for two tusks the following day, upon which I showed him my stock-in-trade consisting of cotton shirts, beads, coloured handkerchiefs, etc.

It seems the district Lomagundi was named after Chief Lo Magondi. There is confusion because close to Lomagundi, stretching from northern Mozambique up into Malawi, is a tribe* called The Makondi, known for their work in wood and in stone, which is bought by collectors. Wonderful, enigmatic, beautiful statues–but that was long before any whites saw value in African art. They are also storytellers. As well as all that, their women are famed for their skills in lovemaking. If, having heard this, you ask a black man from almost anywhere in Central and East Africa, How about those Makondi women, then?–his face will at once put on the look of one who knows he has to pay tribute. But ask just what these skills are–for after all they might contribute to the joy and well-being of humankind–and nothing more is forthcoming. One man said that the women scar their stomachs. All right: a rough surface, fine–and then? But so far, that’s it.

POLITICS

If, as soon as you arrived in Zimbabwe, first London…then Britain…then Europe…then the rest of Africa, receded, dwindled, instead rose up, threatening and powerful and unscrupulous, South Africa, the southern neighbour, the exemplar, the ‘last bastion of White Supremacy in Southern Africa’. In 1982 few conversations did not come around to South Africa, either as a threat or a promise. Not only civilians left every day to this bastion: the soldiers of the disbanded white armies, their occupation gone, talked of Taking the Gap and then forming guerilla groups who would return to fight against the black government. In fact Renamo had been born in white Rhodesia as just such a group. The South Africans employed ‘Rhodies’ not only to train Renamo, but in all kinds of ways subversive to Zimbabwe. They incited ‘incidents’ that reached the British newspapers as the work of isolated adventurers, but in Zimbabwe they were believed to be the long arm of South Africa. (Nothing is more useful as a diagnosis of Britain than going to a country remote from European sets of mind and finding out what has not been reported in Britain, or reported inadequately.) Everyone, black and white, believed that the anti-Mugabe Terrorists, mostly supporters of Joshua Nkomo, whether he welcomed their support or not, were inspired by South Africa. ‘Near Bulawayo there are whole areas of bush the government troops can’t go into at all.’ Everyone knew South Africa sent agents to the international conferences where investment and development were discussed, to spread rumours of the precariousness of Zimbabwe, every achievement minimized, every setback exaggerated. And, in 1982, newspaper correspondents met bombastic blacks, or whites who confidently talked Treason. I listened to feverish whites, in Harare, in Mutare, mostly ex-army, plotting the downfall of Mugabe. Crazed, they were, but could not see it. Smith was their hero. Smith, Smithie, Good-old-Smithie, in every conversation. Easy to hear, instead, ‘Daddy’, ‘Nanny’, even ‘Mummy’, and the terror of children left alone in the dark, children who had been brought up to know they were due everything, and could not lose what they had, for safety had been promised them by ‘Smithie’. But they had lost everything; they had lost their White Supremacy, and still could not believe it. And their plots and intrigues could not have the consequences of Treason because how could it be treason to take back what is rightfully your own? While listening to these infants I used to think of the black man in London (on Liberation