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By Root 1446 0

part industrial, with horse-racing, song and dance of all kinds, parades, fashion, not to mention the Show Ball. The Show Ground covers many acres, and people came in from everywhere, South Africa and Northern Rhodesia too. This year apprehension darkened anticipation: last year, in 1981, the first Show after Liberation, a group of drunk and armed Freedom Fighters had rampaged, overthrowing stalls, threatening to beat people up, singing snatches of revolutionary songs. The War was only a year away, and everyone knew that all over the country were these men, and not a few women, who had fought for Liberation and who–many, if not all–were bitter that the whites had not all been instantly thrown out of Zimbabwe. ‘This is not what we fought for,’ was what they yelled, seeing so many white faces behind the stands and stalls. But it was not only white people they insulted and threatened. They were people who needed to fight, to hurt…and suppose it all happened again this year? My brother had decided not to take his feather pictures, bone buttons and key-rings to the Show, but then said he was not going to be panicked by a bunch of ‘terrs’.

I walked past the place where prize cattle were being led in front of the judges, their foreheads adorned by large rosettes, Second Prize, First Prize, Champion, like girls with bunches of flowers in their hair at an old-fashioned dance. At Light Industry groups of men, white, stood together talking in low voices, their shoulders held defensively. There were quite a lot of people, but ‘in the old days’–but that was only three or four years ago, on the other side of The Divide–the Show had been so crowded you could hardly move. Around a large circle of bare earth were the stalls of Arts and Crafts, and there was my brother waiting for customers.

‘There’s no one here,’ says Harry, calm but angry. ‘I might just as well not have come.’ All the people behind the stalls selling the kinds of beads, belts, flowers, clothes you would find anywhere from Camden Lock to the Market Square in Helsinki or a country fair in the States were white. The thin crowd was mostly white.

I sat in a deck chair in the sun outside his booth and watched the people drift past, slow, slow, with the steering loitering look of fish in a tank, hesitating at this stall, nosing gently at the next, wandering about over the great circle of brown dust. The faces…many were dream faces, distorted but familiar. These were people I had gone to school with, danced with at the Salisbury Sports Club, raced dangerously about with in cars, before one had to feel that cars were a threatened species. I knew them and I didn’t know them. And since I do dream so much about old Rhodesia, probably I had encountered them disguised in my sleep.

An elderly woman, in a tea-party suit, with a flowered hat and white gloves, stops, stares, and advances cautiously to my brother.

‘Is that you Harry? I thought it was. Long time no see. I’ve been in The Republic to have a look. But I’m sticking it out here. I like our Affs better. They’re a nice lot compared with there. You can always have a good laugh with our Affs.’

He did not say he was Taking the Gap, only remarked that the Show was not what it used to be. ‘I’m only here because I thought we should show the flag a bit.’

A pause. She looks hard at me. She goes close to my brother. She lowers her voice. ‘Harry, who is that lady in the deck chair?’

‘That’s my sister,’ he says, lowering his.

‘You mean that’s…?’

The two faces turn to stare at me.

‘But I thought she was…’

‘Yes, but with this government–she’s on their side. So she’s not Prohibited now.’

Her face is harassed, with that it’s-all-too-much-for-me look, like a housewife whose saucepan is boiling over while her baby has spilled the custard over her clean floor. She laughs nervously, while Harry confides, ‘She’s still got all those funny ideas of hers, you know.’

As she walks off, she gives me a dignified inclination of the head, while the flowers on her hat nod gently. I raise my hand in that gesture that says, Hi there!

Harry comes