Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [12]
“Smell that,” she whispered. “That’s home.”
Vanessa was running up and down the deck, unaccountably wild for a child usually so placid. Intoxicated already.
I took in a faceful of African air and fell instantly into a fever.
By the time we were on the train from Cape Town to Rhodesia I was so racked with illness that I was almost unconscious: trembling and shaking and with a cold-burning sweat.
Some Africans would say, “The child is possessed, of course.” On account of the Coming-Back Baby. “And there are various magics you can perform with the help of a witch doctor if you wish to keep her.”
Some Africans would say, “What a load of rubbish. There’s no such thing as returning babies. Wrap the child in vinegar paper.”
Some Africans would say, “Good, let her die. Who needs another white baby, to grow into a bossy, hands-on-hips white madam?”
But I was made of my own soul already. I was here to stay.
Mum made them stop the train. I was raced to the nearest hospital. No one could say what was wrong with me. They took my temperature and fed me aspirin, which I puked up in bitter streams through my nose. They bathed my arms and legs with a damp washcloth until I sat up and demanded food.
“Say ‘Please,’ ” said Mum.
Although I had been conceived in Africa, I had been started in urban England (like a delicate vegetable started indoors, where it is safe—at a vulnerable age—from pests and too much sun). I had the constitution of a missionary.
Within a day I was well enough to continue the journey to Rhodesia.
Up through South Africa, the train labored in the heat, pulling herself up hills, chaka-chaka (an Ndebele war sound) through burning flat savannah that looked as though it might ignite at the sight of our metallic speed, slicing on hot wheels, ever north. This was where Cecil John Rhodes had intended for we British to go. From Cape to Cairo had been his dream. One long stain of British territory up the spine of Africa. He himself, the great white bald-headed one, made it only as far as Rhodesia.
Our train left South Africa, traveling up over the Great Grey-Green, Greasy Limpopo (all set about, said Rudyard Kipling, with fever-trees). Up to the long flat place where the dust blew all day and night and the air was raw with so much blowing. To Karoi, Rhodesia.
House at Karoi
KAROI
A colored topographical map of Rhodesia shows the west and the northwest of the country as pale yellow fading to green, which means that it is low and hot, barely undulating as it humps toward the Zambezi River valley. It means that when the wind blows it picks up fists of stinging sand and flings it against your skin.
Dete is there, in the flat part, in the west. “Dete” meaning “Narrow Passage.” Shithole.
When we first came back to Rhodesia, we lived in the northwest, in the flat, pale-yellow area, melted into orange in places, which meant that, unlike Dete, the land had some lift off the sunburnt lowveldt. But not enough so you’d notice the difference.
You could not look to the relief of mountains or banks of green trees on a day when the heat waves danced like spear-toting warriors off the grassland and when the long, wide airstrip above our house and the pale-yellow maize fields below it shimmered behind dry-season dust.
Grass, earth, air, buildings, skin, clothes, all took on the same dust-blown glare of too much heat trapped in too little air.
We lived on a farm near Karoi.
“Karoi” meaning Little Witch. In the olden days, which aren’t so olden as all that (within living memory), witches had been thrown into the nearby Angwa River (barely deep enough to drown a small goblin). Only black witches were drowned, of course. No one would have allowed a white woman, however witchly, to be sent plunging to her death in this way.
Vanessa went to the little, flat school in