Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [36]
I know enough about farming to know that the Africans are not practicing good soil conservation, farming practices, water management. I ask, “Why?” Why don’t they rotate? Why do they overgraze? Where are their windbreaks? Why aren’t there any ridges or contours to catch the rain?
Dad says, “Because they’re muntus, that’s why.”
“When I grow up, I’ll be in charge of muntus and show them how to farm properly,” I declare.
“You’re quite a little madam,” Scott tells me.
“I’m a jolly good farmer,” I tell him back. “Aren’t I, Dad, aren’t I a good farmer?”
“She’s an excellent farmer,” says Dad.
I smirk.
Vanessa sinks further into herself. She waits until I look over at her and wipes the smug look off my face with one, mouthed word: “Freak.”
Bo and Burma Boy
CHIMURENGA,
1979
The young African men whom we used to see sloped up against the shebeens in the Tribal Trust Lands have disappeared as the war has intensified. They have left their homes and have headed into neighboring countries to join the guerrilla military camps there. On a clear day we can see where there are new trails snaking up through the rocky scrub into the hills where the minefields are. Now, when those young men come back from Mozambique or Zambia, picking their way across the minefields and scrambling down into jungles or flat, hot savannah, they don’t go home to their villages but stay in the bush to fight the war of liberation.
As we dust our way through the Zimunya TTL on our way from the farm into town, we see only the women, the elderly, and young children. They shrink from our gaze, from our bristling guns. Some of the bigger children run after us and throw rocks at the car. Their mothers shout but their words are snatched away by dust, sucked up in the fury of our driving.
The guerrillas come back into Rhodesia from their training bases under cover of darkness and hide in the bush in secret camps. The camps are easy to disassemble if Rhodesian forces are nearby. Ghost camps. Sometimes, my sister and I find the ghost camps on the farm; cold fires, empty tins, smashed bottles, bits and pieces of broken abandoned shoes. The grass is crushed in small circles, like the circles left by sleeping animals, when they are gone. The wind blows dryly though the hills. The traces of the camp are covered with dust, leaves, grass.
If we perch on rocks around the ghost camps we can look out and see what the guerrillas must have seen when they were camped here. We see that they have watched us, that they must know where we go every day, our favorite walks, the way we ride. They can see me running down to the dairy first thing in the morning, and Mum and me leaving the house (too late to be back before it is dark) for her evening walk. They have seen Vanessa alone in the garden painting and reading. They have seen Dad striding down to the barns or kicking up sand as he scuds off on his motorbike. Still, they have not swooped from the hills and killed us, leaving us lipless, eyelidless, bleeding, dead.
The guerrillas only come back into the villages from their bush camps at night. They come to hold pungwe (political rallies) and to recruit mujiba (young boys) and chimwido (young girls) to bring supplies to their bush camps. Under the black, silent, secret, careless African skies, they urge children, barely older than my sister, to come back into the bush with them, to join them in their fight for independence. They tell the mujiba and the chimwido to supply information about the movements of the Rhodesian forces.
The mujiba and the chimwido are the small, dark, moving shadows in the thick jungle terrain. They are the high, crying voices, like hooting owls, on the still night air. They are the scurry of activity in the bush on the sides of the road. They can secrete themselves in culverts, in hollow trees, behind