Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [8]
In April 1966, the year my parents moved to Rhodesia with their baby daughter, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) launched an attack against government forces in Sinoia to protest Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain and to fight for majority rule.
Sinoia, corruption of “Chinhoyi,” was the name of the local chief in 1902.
The Second Chimurenga, it was called by the black Africans in Rhodesia, this war of which the 1966 skirmish in Sinoia was just the start.
Chimurenga. A poetic Shona way of saying “war of liberation.”
Zimbabwe, they called the country. From dzimba dza mabwe, “houses of stone.”
The whites didn’t call it Chimurenga. They called it the Troubles, This Bloody Nonsense. And sometimes “the war.” A war instigated by “uppity blacks,” “cheeky kaffirs,” “bolshy muntus,” “restless natives,” “the houts.”
Black Rhodesians are also known by white Rhodesians as “gondies,” “boogs,” “toeys,” “zots,” “nig-nogs,” “wogs,” “affies.”
We call the black women “nannies” and the black men “boys.”
The First Chimurenga was a long time ago, a few years after the settlers got here. The welcome mat had only been out for a relative moment or two when the Africans realized a welcome mat was not what they needed for their European guests. When they saw that the Europeans were the kind of guests who slept with your wife, enslaved your children, and stole your cattle, they saw that they needed sharp spears and young men who knew how to use them. The war drums were brought out from dark corners and dusted off and the old men who knew how to beat the war drums, who knew which rhythms would pump the fighting blood of the young men, were told to start beating the drums.
Between 1889 and 1893, British settlers moving up from South Africa, under the steely, acquiring eye of Cecil John Rhodes, had been . . . What word can I use? I suppose it depends on who you are. I could say: Taking? Stealing? Settling? Homesteading? Appropriating? Whatever the word is, they had been doing it to a swath of country they now called Rhodesia. Before that, the land had been movable, shifting under the feet of whatever victorious tribe now danced on its soil, taking on new names and freshly stolen cattle, absorbing the blood and bodies of whoever was living, breathing, birthing, dying upon it. The land itself, of course, was careless of its name. It still is. You can call it what you like, fight all the wars you want in its name. Change its name altogether if you like. The land is still unblinking under the African sky. It will absorb white man’s blood and the blood of African men, it will absorb blood from slaughtered cattle and the blood from a woman’s birthing with equal thirst. It doesn’t care.
Here were the African names within that piece of land for which we would all fight: Bulawayo: the Place of Killing. Inyati: the Place of the Buffaloes. Nyabira: the Place Where There Is a Fjord.
The white men came. They said, “What name do you give this place?”
“Kadoma,” they said. Which in Ndebele means, “Does Not Thunder or Make Noise.”
The white men call that place Gatooma.
“And what name do you give this place?”
“Ikwelo,” they said. Which in Ndebele means, “Steep Sides of the Riverbank.”
The white men called the place Gwelo.
“What is this place?”
“Kwe Kwe,” said the Africans, which is the sound the frogs make in the nearby river.
The white men called the place Que Que.
“We will live in this place.”
“But this is the chiefdom of Neharawa,” said the Africans.
“And we will call it Salisbury.”
The white men named places after themselves, and after the women they were with or the women whom they had left behind, after the men they wanted to placate or impress: Salisbury, Muriel, Beatrice, Alice Mine, Juliasdale, West Nicholson.
And they gave some places hopeful names: Copper Queen, Eldorado, Golden Valley.
And obvious names: Figtree, Guinea Fowl, Lion’s Den, Redcliff, Hippo Valley.
And unlikely, stolen names: Alaska, Venice, Bannockburn, Turk Mine.
In 1896 the Ndebele people had rebelled against this European-ness.