Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [51]
“Look,” Mum says. “That sun is very nearly down.”
“So it is,” Dad says.
There’s a pause and then Mum flings her arms in the air, “Drought! Nicola Fuller of Central Africa is experiencing severe drought!”
Dad laughs. “Waiter!” he shouts. “Barman!”
“Help!” shrieks Mum. “Emergency!”
Nicola Fuller in Rhodesia: Round One
Mum with Van. 1966.
Dad with Van. 1966.
The last day of our South African holiday dawns stifling hot. During the night a wind from the northern desert has blown the last of the moderate temperatures south. We’re all suffering from slight headaches—“self-inflicted,” Mum says—so we sit on the veranda after breakfast drinking tea, too lethargic to bother with our usual morning walk. Dad is smoking his pipe. Mum has a pair of binoculars resting on her lap in case she sees a bird and then the glasses flash to her eyes. “Look at that sweet little thing with a stripy head,” she says. She consults her bird book. “It’s a Cape bunting, I think. Oh dear, they say in here it’s a very common resident.” She glares at the disappointingly common bird. “We don’t get them in Zambia. Do we, Tim?”
“Say again?” Dad says.
“CAPE BUNTING!” Mum shouts. “NOT ONE OF OURS.”
THE WORDS THAT CHANGED my parents’ lives were few enough and small enough to fit comfortably onto a postage stamp: “Wanted: Manager for ten thousand hectares in Africa.” The advertisement, tucked into the classifieds at the back of the Kenyan Farmers Weekly didn’t name the country in Africa on which these ten thousand hectares existed. It didn’t need to. “There was only one country on the continent whose name could not be mentioned,” Mum says. “Rhodesia.”
At exactly eleven in the morning, Greenwich Mean Time, on November 11, 1965, the Rhodesian government, led by Prime Minister Ian Smith, had rendered their country unmentionable by presenting a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) to British Prime Minister Harold Wilson. The telegram announcing UDI was timed to arrive at Number 10 Downing Street precisely as Britain began its traditional two-minute silence to mark the end of the First World War. UDI expressly flew in the face of Britain’s assertion that there should be no independence before majority rule (NIBMAR).
The next day, on November 12, 1965, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 216 condemning UDI as an illegal construct of “a racist minority.” On the same day, the front page of the Rhodesian Herald announced, UDI RHODESIA GOES IT ALONE. Above that headline, in smaller letters, was the news that state censorship had been imposed. On that day, for the first time in its history, blank columns of white space appeared in the newspaper. In the minds of the Rhodesian government, the country was now entirely independent of Britain and it was—and would remain—governed by the white minority.
The “ten thousand hectares in Africa” turned out to belong to John Lytton-Brown, a Kenyan settler. “We didn’t know him,” Mum says. “He wasn’t really one of our set.” Not a pukka-pukka sahib, in other words. Dad applied for the job and in January 1967 he set sail from Mombasa to Cape Town en route to Rhodesia. He took with him a change of clothes, a sleeping bag and his Black’s Veterinary Dictionary. Mum stayed behind to pack up Lavender’s Corner. “I didn’t hear much from Tim once he got to Rhodesia because of UDI,” Mum says. “No telegrams, no phone calls. Letters had to go via Malawi, postmarked Blantyre.”
My father’s first letter from Rhodesia was cryptic. “Dear Tub,” he wrote,
I’ve settled down alright at Berry’s Post. We’re not far from the Hunyani River. It’s a bit off the beaten path. There’s 400 acres of cotton, 200 acres of maize, 200 acres of sunflowers. Also 400 head of cattle. There’s rather