Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [61]
Nor did the Rhodesian government appear to register the irony that, for such avowed anti-Communists—“The war against Communism is ultimately a religious war in which the very thing that makes life worth living is at stake”2—their policy of land allocation put much of the country, namely, the Tribal Trust Lands, into communal ownership. By default, this forced millions of black Rhodesians into massive collectives where their every move could be monitored and controlled by an increasingly militaristic and paranoid government. Still, most of the two hundred fifty thousand or so white Rhodesians were unwilling or disinclined to question an official government policy that gave them preferential treatment over six million blacks, instead preferring to believe that theirs was a just and justifiable life of privilege. Critics accused these whites of belonging to the Mushroom Club: “Kept in the dark and fed horseshit.”
SO, “SHANGRI-LA!” Mum announced triumphantly one Sunday, stopping her finger on its way down the real estate page. She read aloud, “Robandi Farm; seven hundred acres for sale in the Burma Valley.” She named the price—reasonable enough—so together my parents looked at the map. From what they could tell, Robandi was a handful of miles (as the bird flies) from Umtali, a small city on Rhodesia’s eastern border with Portuguese-controlled Mozambique. “Oh!” Mum cried. “Portuguese wine, stinky cheese, piri piri prawns! We must have this farm.”
Phone calls were patched through various telephone exchanges until at last the line crackled with the voice of an estate agent in Umtali. He told my parents that the farm’s executor was an Italian farmer by the name of John Parodi—he lived in the Burma Valley and he could give my parents a tour of the place if they were interested. “Interested?!” Mum cried. “Of course we’re interested.” She hung up the phone and turned to Dad, her eyes shining. “Italian!” she cried. “I do think that shows the proper romantic spirit, don’t you?”
A day or two later, my parents left Karoi before dawn and drove across the country. Along the way, in preparation for meeting the farm’s executor, Mum dusted off the handful of Italian phrases she had picked up over the years. “Ciao, come stai?” she attempted as my parents drove across the Angwa River. “Il mio nome è Nicola,” she practiced as they skirted the Inyanga Highlands. “Arrivederci!” she cried as Christmas Pass faded into the rearview mirror and the car dipped into the jacaranda-lined main street of Umtali.
“For heaven’s sake, Tub, are we going to buy a farm, or are you planning to run away with this chap?” Dad asked.
Mum shot Dad one of her ravishing smiles. “We shall see what we shall see,” she said.
At the southern end of Umtali, Mum and Dad stopped for a cold beer and a plate of eggs and bacon at Brown’s Hotel. As they were leaving, they asked directions to the Burma Valley from the handful of diehards at the bar. “Oh no! No, no, no, you don’t want to go down there,” a man said. “They’re all wife swappers, drunks and madmen.”
Dad raised a hand. “Two for the road then, please, barman,” he said.
MY PARENTS DROVE out of town through the second-class district, where the Indians had their warehouses, tailor shops and stores; under the railway bridge; past the paper mill, pungent with the scent of freshly peeled pine; and around the knot of hills surrounding Umtali (Kumakomoyo, the local Manyika called it, “the place of many mountains”). The tarmac ended and my parents bumped onto a dirt road in the Zamunya Tribal Trust Land, with its bony cattle, its ribby red earth and its goat-shredded trees. Then they crossed an enormous cattle grid and suddenly the barren world of Zimunya lifted away. What took its place were a rich, humid