Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [18]
“One hundred little baboons playing on the minefield. One hundred little baboons playing on the minefield. And if one little baboon should accidentally explode, there’ll be ninety-nine little baboons playing on the minefield.”
We had a policeman come to our school to talk to us about mines. Vanessa said he had come because I sucked my thumbs and the policeman was here to chop off my thumbs. I tucked my thumbs into my fists, but the policeman stood on the stage in the Assembly Hall and rocked back and forth in tight-squeaky shoes and stared over the top of our heads and didn’t look toward my thumbs once.
“Mines are hidden in cake tins and biscuit tins.” He showed us. The tins were bright and promising, with pictures of roses painted on their sides, or small children with rosy cheeks in old-fashioned winter clothes running behind snow-covered trees, or butter-soft shortbread with cherry-heart centers. “Would any of you open this tin?”
A few of us raised our hands eagerly.
“Children like you open the tins and get blown to pieces.”
We greedy, stupid few quickly sat on our hands again.
The policeman showed us pictures of holes in the ground where a mine had been.
A kid asked, pointing to the picture, “Was a kid blown up by that mine?”
The policeman hesitated, caught between wanting to scare the hell out of us and wanting to preserve our childish innocence. He said, “Not this particular mine. But you can never be too careful, hey?”
We shook our heads solemnly.
“Mines can also be buried, and you will never know where they are.”
A little voice from the assembly hall asked, “In your driveway even?”
“Oh, ja. Oh, ja.”
There was a rustle of titillated fear among the audience. The teachers looked bored, cross-armed, cross-legged, watchful. Waiting for one of us to misbehave so that they could send us to detention.
I only know a few people who have gone over mines.
A girl who attended the high school in Umtali went over a mine and had her legs blown off but she lived. She was brave and beautiful and when she got married in South Africa a few years after the accident, Fair Lady magazine wrote a big article about her and showed photographs of her walking down the aisle of a church all frothy in a white dress and a long white veil and with the help of bridesmaids and crutches.
Fanie Vorster, who is a farmer in the Burma Valley, went over a mine, too, but he did not get his legs blown off. If he had, it might have given children a chance to run away from him when he tried to trap them in his spare bedroom and pin them to the single bed with his fat gray-hair-sprouting belly while mums and dads drank coffee in the kitchen with his stick-insect purple-mottled bruised-and-battered wife. Fanie Vorster didn’t even get a headache when he went over the mine because he was in a mineproofed Land Rover, so the back end of it blew off and left the cab intact with Fanie inside, not at all hurt. He sat on the side of the road and smoked a cigarette until help came along.
Which just goes to show, all prayers aren’t answered.
Once Vanessa and I were driving back from a Christmas party with Mum and we were behind an African bus that had gone over a mine. It left a hole the size of the bus in the middle of the road and the bus lay blindly on its side like an eyeless, legs-in-the-air dead insect. Mum said, “Put your heads down!” Mum said, “Don’t look.” So I put my head down and squeezed my eyes shut and Vanessa looked out the window