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By Root 1439 0

them, their coming to a mature understanding. ‘And now we are going to need your help,’ they cried engagingly. ‘You must help us!’ They meant themselves, the whites, who were about to change their ways and become good citizens of a mixed society. It was they who deserved help, and they were appealing to the world with confidence they were going to get it. It was their due. All their lives they had been due everything, and they expected everything still. I watched this programme not really surprised, since I know my compatriots. The telephone rang. It was my friend the black man who might ring up to share certain moments. ‘Did you see that?’ he asked. ‘I certainly did.’ ‘Can you believe it?’ ‘Well, yes, I am afraid I can.’ ‘God,’ he breathed, ‘how is it possible? We have been exploited, we have been ground down, we have had our country stolen from us. But it is they who have to be given tender loving care.’

MISSIONARIES

Two young white missionaries, a married couple, have dropped in. They have been six months in Zimbabwe. For the whole of an afternoon they exchange with their hosts critical anecdotes about the Africans and the black government, watching to measure how well they are fitting in with what is expected of them. They radiate the self-satisfied cheerfulness I associate with a certain type of Christian. I find this scene more than usually depressing: I used to watch it as a girl. People who in England would be ‘liberal’ here can adjust themselves, are even more anti-black than their hosts. Their voices: condemning, sniffy, superior, cold. Again I listened to The Monologue.

LEAVING

It is time to fly home. I have not been back to the old farm, though for the six weeks of the trip I have talked about it. Yes, yes, of course I must go, it is childish not to. But really I don’t want to. The same reluctance that in 1956 made it impossible to turn the car’s steering wheel into the track to the farm, gripped me still. The person I should have gone with was my brother, already packing to Take the Gap. He had shut a door on the past and I understood him perfectly. ‘That’s it. Cut your losses! Goodbye!’ Besides, petrol was so short. And besides, it was the worst time of the year, the rains had not come to the farms in the north-east, the bush would be dry and the air full of dust.

I said goodbye to the humans, to the little black cat, to wicked clever little Vicky, to the sweet stupid ridgeback, and to the fierce bull terrier. Saying goodbye to humans is one thing: almost certainly you will see them again, but to animals, now that has to be a real goodbye.

THE SQUATTERS

As I turned off the farm on to the main road, which was not more than a track itself, soldiers from the battalion were marching up from the camp, through the gum trees. They were full of the raw confident energy of a recently victorious army.

Two miles from the farm I stopped for two women and they got in the back seat, with their baskets and their bundles. Yes, they were going down to Mutare, and the bus was late. They had already waited two hours. They looked about fifty, were probably younger. They were like poor women everywhere in the world, women you don’t notice because there are so many of them, shabby, overweight from poor food, old too early, tough, wary, cunning, surviving. They did not want to talk, though one had a good bit of English. They were Squatters, and I had come off the farm of an enemy. Five miles on I slowed to pick up an old man who was toiling up a hill, and using a stick as if he needed it to keep upright. They did not want me to, made annoyed sotto voce exclamations as they moved their things to make room. But when he got in, they all exchanged courteous greetings, and talked like neighbours until, five miles on, the old man tapped my shoulder to make me stop. He carefully got out. He lifted his hand in farewell to the women, and then, the hand allotting more formality, to me. He carefully made his way into trees, leaning on his staff. I drove on, down to Mutare, while the women chatted softly. I knew that if I understood