Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [9]
In camp
Matopo Hills, where Cecil John Rhodes is buried, staring out over Ndebeleland in perpetuity. Matopo Hills, a corruption of “Amatobos,” meaning “the Bald-Headed Ones.”
In the same month, June 1896, that Rhodes was settling with the Ndebeles in the south of the country, the Mashona in the central and east of the country rose up in a separate and more serious rebellion against the whites. When farmers, such as the Mashona, go to war, they are not like the Ndebele warriors, who come into the open savannah flashing their bare chests under the clear sky and waving their plumed headdresses and flaunting the skins of slaughtered lions and hunted leopards on their thighs and brows. Farmers fight a more deadly, secret kind of war. They are fighting for land in which they have put their seed, their sweat, their hopes. They are secretive, sly, desperate. They do not come with loud war drums and bones of powerful animals around their neck. They come with one intent, sliding on their bellies, secret in the night. They don’t come to be victorious in battle. They come to reclaim their land.
The Mashona killed four hundred and fifty settlers.
Reinforcements to help the settlers arrived from South Africa and England. The Africans developed a system of hiding in caves to escape from the white man’s army. The settlers used dynamite to force the Africans out of the caves, killing whole villages at a time when the caves collapsed—Mashona men, women, and children died by the hundreds, buried together. Survivors of the collapsed caves were executed as soon as they crawled out of the ready-made tombs. It took almost two years for the first Chimurenga to be quelled.
The Africans did not forget their heroes from this first struggle for independence.
Kaguvi, Mkwati, and Nehanda.
Kaguvi. Also called Murenga, or Resister. From which the word Chimurenga comes.
Mkwati, famous for his use of locust medicine.
Nehanda, the woman, supra-clan mhondoro spirits. She went to her execution (with Kaguvi) on April 27, 1897, singing and dancing. “We shall overcome. My blood is not shed in vain.”
Now, how can we, who shed our ancestry the way a snake sheds skin in winter, hope to win against this history? We wazungus. We white Africans of shrugged-off English, Scottish, Dutch origin.
Seven ZANLA troops died on April 28, 1966, the first battle of the Second Chimurenga. A memorial stands in their name in the modern city of Chinhoyi, “The Gallant Chinhoyi Seven.”
Mum, Adrian, and Van
ADRIAN,
RHODESIA, 1968
Mum says, “The happiest day of my life was the day I held that little baby in my arms.” She means Rhodesia, 1968. She means the day her son, Adrian, was born.
Mum is on Chapter Two, weeping into her beer. It’s a sad story. It’s especially sad if you haven’t heard it a hundred times. I’ve heard one version or another of the story more than a hundred times. It’s a Family Theme, and it always ends badly. To begin with Mum is happy. She is freshly married, they are white (a ruling color in Rhodesia), and she has two babies, a girl and a boy. Her children are the picture-perfect match of each other: beautiful, blond, and blue-eyed.
Mum
Vanessa, signature tackie lips (lips that are rosebud full), a mass of fairy-white hair, toddling cheerfully, with that overbalancing, tripping step of the small child. And tottering after her, the little boy who could be her twin. In the background, a black nanny called Tabatha, in white apron and white cap, strong, shining arms outstretched laughing, waiting to scoop them up; she is half-shyly looking into thecamera. Mum is looking on from the veranda. Dad is taking the photograph.
Then Adrian dies before he is old enough to talk. Mum is not yet twenty-four and her picture-perfect life