Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [16]
On the way out of Umtali, heading always east, farther and farther toward Mozambique, we stopped at the little rural post office, Paulington, which serviced the Vumba highlands and the Burma Valley, to collect our new postbox key. And then we snaked across the rim of the mountains leading out of Umtali, barreled across the dusty Tribal Trust Lands, and dipped down off the mountains into the floor of the valley.
It was breathtaking, that first drive into the valley, dropping off the sandy plateau of the denuded Zamunya TTL, where African cattle swung heavy horns and collected in thorny corrals for the evening and where the land was ribbed with erosion, and then banking steeply into the valley, the road now shouldered by thick, old, vine-covered trees with a dense light-sucking canopy and impenetrable undergrowth. We had gone from desert to jungle in one steep turn in the road.
Then we drove almost as far across the valley as we could go in the direction of the Mozambican hills until we arrived, dusty and stinging with sweat, coated with dog hair, at the large, ugly squat house that was to be our home for the next six years. We were going to be here until the end of the thirteen-year-long civil war.
“Home,” Mum announced cheerfully.
We scrambled out of the car, seasick after the choppy passage across the unfolding hills (Coke and ham sandwiches churning uncomfortably). We stared suspiciously, unimpressed at the house. It looked like an army barracks, low to the ground and solid with closed-in windows and a blank stare. The yard, littered with flamboyant pods, was big and bald and red.
Dad
CHIMURENGA,
1974
That was 1974, the year I turned five.
That year, in neighboring Mozambique, a ten-year civil war between Frelimo rebels and colonial Portugal was just drawing to a close and a new civil war between Renamo rebel forces and the new Frelimo government was just beginning.
We could see the Mozambican hills from our house. Our farm ended where the Mozambican hills started.
In 1974, the civil war in Rhodesia was eight years old. In a matter of months, terrorist forces based in Mozambique under the new and guerrilla-friendly Frelimo government would be flooding over the border to Rhodesia to conduct nightly raids, plant land mines, and, they said, chop off the ears and lips and eyelids of little white children.
“Do you think it hurts?”
“What?”
“To get your lips chopped off.”
“Why would you get your lips chopped off?”
I shrug.
“By whom? Who told you that?”
“Everyone knows terrs chop off your lips if they catch you.”
My sister and I both have big lips. Tackie lips is what the other children call them. Africans have tackie lips, too. I try and remember to suck in my lips, especially for photographs in case anyone thinks I’m part muntu. I wouldn’t mind getting my lips chopped off, or at least pared down a size or two, and then I wouldn’t be teased by the other children.
“You’ve got tackie lips. Like a muntu.”
“I do not.” I suck them in.
“You’re sucking in your lips.”
“Am not!”
Mum says, “They’re not tackie lips, they’re full lips.” She says, “Brigitte Bardot has full lips.”
“Is she a muntu?”
“No, she most certainly is not. She’s very glamorous. She’s French.”
But I don’t care how French or glamorous Brigitte Bardot is; she is not the one getting teased about my lips.
Vanessa says, “Getting your lips chopped off would hurt like sterik. Of course it hurts, man.”
Of course. It hurts.
“I wouldn’t cry.”
“Yes you would.”
“Would not.”
Vanessa takes my wrist in both her hands and gently