Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [53]
The “Groot Trek” of 1835, when more than ten thousand Boers, the Voortrekkers, left the Cape Colony and came north. They left the paradise of the Cape because they were fighting with their Xhosa neighbors and because they were dissatisfied with the English colonial authorities, who had forbidden the slave trade and who believed in equality between whites and nonwhites. So many men, women, and children died during the Great Trek, their bodies draped gorily over wagon wheels and under wagon wheels and next to horses in the illustrations in our history books. They died because they believed that the British policy of Emancipation destroyed their social order, which was based on separation of the races. They saw white predominance as God’s own will.
So, now the Little Trek.
But the next day some of the English Rhodesians are driven away too. There is only a handful of us left at supper that night; no more than twenty children in a dining room designed to hold ten times as many. My sister has already moved from Chancellor Junior School to the Umtali Girls’ High School. So she is not around for me to ask, “Where are Mum and Dad?”
Tomorrow, the children who have gone to “B” schools, for coloureds and Indians, will be here. The children from “C” schools, for blacks, will be here too. Tomorrow, children who have never been to school, never used a flush toilet, never eaten with a knife and fork, will arrive. They will be smelling of wood smoke from their hut fires.
Tomorrow child soldiers will arrive. They can track their way through the night-African bush by the light of the stars, these mujiba and chimwido. They are worldly and old and have fixed, long-distance stares.
Eating with your mouth closed and using a knife and fork properly can’t save your life.
It only takes a minute to learn how to flush a toilet.
But still Mum and Dad don’t come and fetch me away.
Instead, the first black child is brought to the school. We watch in amazement as he is helped out of a car—a proper car like Europeans drive—by his mother, who is more beautifully dressed than my mother ever is. She smiles as she leads her son, confidently, head held high, one high-heeled foot clacking smartly past the next high-heeled foot, through the tunnel that leads around the sandbags and into the boys’ dormitory.
We won’t be needing those sandbags anymore.
This woman is not a muntu nanny. This child is not a picanin. He is beautifully dressed in a brand-new uniform. The uniform is not a worn and stained hand-me-down like the one I wear.
We wait until the mother and father of this little black child drive away, spinning up gravel from the back wheels of their white-people’s car as they leave. And then we make a circle around the little black boy. The boy tells us he is called Oliver Chiweshe.
I have not known the full name of a single African until now. Oliver Chiweshe. Until now I only knew Africans by their Christian names: Cephas, Douglas, Loveness, Violet, Cloud, July, Flywell. I am learning that Africans, too, have full names. And not only do Africans have full names, but their names can be fuller than ours. I try and get my tongue around Joshua Mqabuko Nyongolo Nkomo; Robert Gabriel Mugabe; the Reverend Canaan Sodindo Banana; Bishop Abel Tendekayi Muzorewa: these are the names of our new leaders.
I say, “That’s a nice name.”
“Actually, my full name is Oliver Tendai Chiweshe,” says Oliver, emphasizing his middle name. He speaks beautifully accented, perfect English.
We say, “Was that your father who dropped you off?”
Oliver looks at us with pity. “That was my driver,” he tells us, “and my maid.” He pauses and says, “Daddy is in South Africa this week.”
We are stunned by this news. “Why?”
“Business,” says Oliver complacently.
“And then he’ll come back?”
“Ja,” says Oliver.
That night at supper, Oliver sits alone. None of us will sit next to him. We wait to see if he eats like a muntu. We wait to see if he cement-mixes. But he has perfect European manners, which are quite different from perfect Mashona manners. He takes small, polite