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By Root 343 0

—lost in all her talk of chemicals and pills—is that she knows not only the route grief takes through blood but also the route it takes through the heart’s cracks. What she won’t tell me is that recovering from the madness of grief wasn’t just a matter of prescriptions, but of willpower. “I sometimes used to envy the people you see running up and down the Kafue Road in hessian sacks,” she said once. And it is true that Mum seriously considered that level of deep, irretrievable insanity an option. But instead, she took a different route and she regained herself and that had very little to do with the very talented psychiatrist and everything to do with forgiveness: she forgave the world and her mind returned. She gave herself amnesty and her soul had a home again. The forgiveness took years and it took this farm and it took the Tree of Forgetfulness. It took all of that, but above all it took the one thing grief could never steal from my mother: her courage.

FOR NEARLY A YEAR after Mum had been strapped down in the mental ward of the hospital in Zimbabwe and given various doses of mad pills, happy pills, panic pills and sleeping pills, she stayed in bed in the little borrowed cottage outside Lusaka, utterly exhausted. By now Vanessa and I were both married with young children of our own (I in America, and Vanessa, for the time being, in England), and neither of us could easily come home. So Dad fussed around Mum; brought her tea; took the dogs out for their evening walk so they would leave her in peace; ran her a bath each evening and tuned her radio to the BBC World Service. But in her midfifties, it would seem Mum had finally given up.

She took the pills prescribed to her by the very talented psychiatrist and drew the curtains. A bat took up residence in her closet and ruined her Royal Ascot hats and Mum did not go to war with it; charcoal burners came onto the place and their axes sang against old-growth mukwa trees and she did not go to war with them; thieves took off with her old treadle sewing machine (the device responsible for helping my mother create our infamously tortuous Fancy Dress costumes) and she just sighed.

Dad tried everything. “I think I saw an oribi this evening when I was out with the dogs,” he would say (a sighting usually guaranteed to make Mum leap to her feet, binoculars in hand). Or he’d bring Mum piri piri prawns and proper wine (in a bottle as opposed to a box) from the Italian merchant in Lusaka, but she would retire after a single prawn and half a glass of wine. And even when Dad brought home a new puppy, a comical, smoke-colored Great Dane cross Labrador (“the best halves of both,” Dad promised), Mum could manage little more than a wan smile of thanks.

So at night while Mum slept, Dad built a campfire outside their little cottage; he propped up his chin on a thumb, two fingers nestled around a cigarette on his bottom lip and he worried his way to a solution. “There was no question of letting her give up,” Dad says. “No, I knew all she needed was a little encouragement and she’d be all right.” Dad pauses and rubs his fist under each eye. When he continues, his voice is thicker. “She never gave up on me through everything,” he says. “No, as far as I am concerned, she has always been the most number one lady in all of Africa.”

AFTER WE’D LEFT ROBANDI, my father said he would never again try to own an African farm. “You put your blood and sweat into a place and then . . .” Dad shook his head. “The government goes apex over teakettle—there’s a coup, squatters show up, or the wind changes direction—and suddenly it’s all gone. No, there’s no point; you can still work in Africa without trying to own any of it.” And then Dad quoted Marcus Garvey, “Africa is for the Africans.”

So to begin with, Dad took a position as manager of a massive tobacco estate in Malawi. His boss was Malawi’s president for life, the aging dictator Hastings Kamuzu Banda, or His Excellency as he preferred to be called (H.E. for short). It was, Mum says, a useful and humbling experience to have a very powerful, very