Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [17]
“Yurrah man!”
“Does that hurt?”
“Ja, ja! Oh it hurts!” I start to cry.
“See?”
“Ja.”
“Now, don’t cry.”
“Okay.” I wipe my nose on my arm.
“Don’t wipe your nose on your arm, man, yuck.”
I cry harder.
“It hurts worser than that to get your lips cut off.”
“Okay.”
“So would you cry?”
“Ja, ja. I’d cry, hey.”
Robandi, the farm, had been named by the original owner’s two sons, Rob and Andy. Robandi. Almost an African word. Like the Lozi word banani, they have. Or the Tonga word ndili, I am. Or Nyanja pitani, to the . . .
We have moved, mother and father with two children, a couple of cats, three dogs, and one horse, right into the middle, the very birthplace and epicenter, of the civil war in Rhodesia and a freshly stoked civil war in Mozambique. There is no way out of the valley for us now. We have borrowed money to buy the farm. Money we might never be able to repay. And who is going to buy the farm off us now? Who is going to buy our farm and take our place in the middle of a civil war? We are stuck.
We erect a massive fence with slanting-backward barbed wire at the top around the house. Mum plants Mauritius thorn around the inside of the fence for good measure; it bushes out with its forward-backward hooking thorns. We stop at the SPCA in Umtali and collect a host of huge dogs, and then we collect dogs abandoned by civil-war-fleeing farmers. These dogs are found tied up to trees or staring hopefully down flat driveways, waiting for their nonreturning owners. Their owners have gone in the middle of the night to South Africa, Australia, Canada, England. We call it the chicken run. Or we say they gapped it. But they gapped it without their pets.
One day Dad says to Mum, “Either I go, or some of these bloody dogs have to go.”
“But they don’t have anywhere to go.”
Dad is in a rage. He aims a kick at a cluster of dogs, who cheerfully return his gesture with jump-up licking let’s-playfulness.
Mum says, “See? How sweet.”
“I mean it, Nicola.”
So the dogs stay with us until untimely death does them part.
The life expectancy of a dog on our farm is not great. The dogs are killed by baboons, wild pigs, snakes, wire snares, and each other. A few eat the poison blocks left out in the barns for rats. Or they eat cow shit on which dip for killing ticks has splattered and they dissolve in frothy-mouthed fits. They get tick fever and their hearts fail from the heat. More dogs come to take the place of those whose graves are wept-upon humps in the field below the house.
We buy a 1967 mineproofed Land Rover, complete with siren, and call her Lucy. Lucy, for Luck.
“Why do we have the bee-ba?”
“To scare terrorists.”
But Mum and Dad don’t use the siren except to announce their arrival at parties.
There are two roads out of the valley. We can drive up to the Vumba highlands to the north or through Zamunya Tribal Trust Land to the east. Neither road is paved, and therefore both are easily planted with land mines. We are supposed to travel in convoy when we go to town.
A convoy is: a Pookie, the mine-detecting vehicle that can drive over a matchbox without squishing it. There is something in the Pookie that beeps if it detects metal. And land mines are cased in metal. Then two or three long crocodile-looking lorries, which are spiky with Rhodesian soldiers, their FN rifles poking out of the sides of the vehicle like so many bristles, ready to retaliate if we are ambushed. And finally, us. Farmers and their kids in ordinary vehicles, or mineproofed Land Rovers, our own guns poking from windows, on the way to town in our best clothes. If we are killed in an ambush or blown up on a mine, we will be wearing clean brookies, our best dresses, red and black necklaces made out of the very poisonous seeds from lucky-bean trees. We’ll be presentable to go and sit on the left hand of Godthefather.
The third way out