Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [81]
But then something happened halfway around the world that changed everything. In late 1989, the Berlin Wall came down and almost overnight, the predictable Cold War system on which Zambia (a socialist country) had relied for so long was far less certain. The markets opened up, currency controls started to collapse, American food aid poured into the country and suddenly farmers couldn’t sell their maize and soya beans locally for any price at all. “Why buy food when it’s being given to you for nothing?” Dad says.
By the early 1990s, the Germans were getting anxious. “They wanted to get their money out of Zambia,” Mum says. So the farm was sold and my parents found themselves without work and without a place to live. A friend offered them the use of Oribi Ridge, a little cottage with adjoining stables and an orange orchard on a hilly, msasa-forested plot twenty miles or so east of Lusaka. “Rent free,” Mum says, shaking her head in amazement. “Isn’t that kind? We’ve been so lucky with our friends all our lives. The only thing Graeme asked us to do in exchange was to stop the villagers around there chopping down his trees—all virgin forest you know, very wonderful, very old miombo woodland.”
So Mum and Dad moved into a tiny cottage on Oribi Ridge with half a dozen ponies, several dogs, Mum’s books, the hunting prints, the bronze of Wellington, and the Le Creuset pots. But even with her horses and her dogs, Mum was bored and restless. For most of the last twenty-five years, she had helped my father run a series of farms, and now, without the routine of the seasons, without the discipline of seedbeds and without the rigor of grading sheds, Mum’s inclination to be either subaqua, or cut afloat from the world, was more easily indulged.
For his part, without a farm to run, Dad did the only thing he could think of for work: he traded fish in Lusaka out of the back of a small truck. Trader Tim, Mum called him, and although she kept her voice light, there was a disparaging edge to the comment. Dad looked a little bewildered, as if his feet missed the pacing of earth. He complained of feeling out of shape and liverish, and he gave up eating breakfast. “It’s a farmer’s meal,” he explained, “and I am not a farmer anymore.” But still he couldn’t help himself, absentmindedly picking up and sniffing the soil wherever he stood; mentally calculating its probable pH; subconsciously assessing its appropriateness for tobacco, soya beans or maize; automatically feeling its ability to hold moisture.
And so one Sunday morning in 1995, Dad set out from the cottage and followed a poachers’ route off Oribi Ridge to the edge of the escarpment overlooking the Zambezi River and he sat out there until sunset, smoking and thinking and scribbling figures on the back of a cigarette packet. Dad can’t say exactly what resolved in his head that day, or why, but when he came back to the cottage that night, he told Mum he had a plan. “Why trade fish when you can grow them yourself?” he asked. “We’re going to get a piece of land on the river, and we’re going to start farming fish.”
Mum looked up from the campfire. “But I thought you said Africa was for the Africans,” she said.
Dad squatted in front of the campfire and turned a log until a flame shook awake from the embers. “I did,” he said. He lit a cigarette with the glowing end of the log and squinted through the smoke at Mum. “I did.”
The next week, Dad drove two hours to the banks of the middle Zambezi River and presented himself at the boma of Chief Sikongo. He took off his hat, handed a gift to the chief’s assistant (a bag of maize meal and some cooking oil)