Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [98]
Mum with horses
MKUSHI
Depending on the state of the roads, our farm is three to six hours from Lusaka and two to four hours from the Copperbelt.
Either way you arrive at it, the farm does not come as a surprise.
Drive out of Lusaka, its shantytowns spreading like a tea stain away from the city center and its hum of commerce. Drive away from the clamor of market women in their shack-shanty stalls where they trade vegetables, oil, cloth, clothes. Drive past the Planned Parenthood building and under the great, stark, concrete archway proclaiming Zambia’s freedom, one zambia, one nation. Leave the city concentration of poverty behind—leave behind its stench and the place where social diseases come together to shout the misery of the truly almost-dead-from-it poor. And the one-in-three with AIDS and the one-in-six with TB. Leave behind the Gymkhana Club, where red-faced expats-like-us drink and shout their repeated stories to one another, cigarettes waving. Leave behind the expat, extramarital, almost-incestuous affairs bred from heat and boredom and drink. Leave behind the once-grand, guard-dogged, watchman-paced, glass-top-walled compounds of the rich and nervous.
Msasa forests are thicker here.
And the trees are swollen against one another, giving the impression that they can outlast the humanity which presses up against them. Charcoal burners trudge toward the gray haze of the big city, pushing piles of charcoal in burlap bags strapped high onto bicycles, but their axes don’t seem to have dented the forest yet. The road is a narrow strip of potholed black on which few vehicles swing and rock, avoiding the deeper holes and slamming into some of the shallow, surprising dents.
We hurry through the rotten-egg stench of Kabwe, which belches smoke from copper and cobalt mines. There are, here, some reminders of our European predecessors, who long ago returned to the ordinariness of England where they now remember (with a fondness born of distance and the tangy reminder of a gin-and-tonic evening) the imagined glory of sunburnt gymkhanas and white-clothed servants. These long-gone Europeans had tried to turn Kabwe into something more powerful than its smell (which is strong enough to taste; bitter, burning, back-throat-coating, like the reminder of vomit). There are some surviving trees from the dream of the Kabwe Gardening Club—dusty, droughted, diseased, root-worn. These expat trees (brittle frangipani, purple-flowered jacaranda, and pod-exploding flamboyant) line the streets like soldiers who continue to stand, even as their comrades fall.
The mine houses, which are now sand-covered and chicken-littered, contain some reminders of the mazungu madams who once designed water-sucking lawn and rose gardens around a gauzed veranda. There is the Elephant Head Hotel (peeling paint, stained green plaster, urine-smelling), a Church of England, and a hospital (where lines of fevered patients curl out of the door). A magnificent green and white onion-domed mosque rises out of the center of Kabwe; neither colonial decomposing, nor yet postcolonial socialist (which is to say gray cement-block), but of some other resilient culture, defying time and place.
At Kapiri Mposhi (comprising a railway stop, whore-riddled bars, and an Indian store where everything from bicycles, to nylon scarves, to made-in-China sunglasses, pencils, and alarm clocks is sold) we will turn right. But first there is the third of the four roadblocks we must negotiate from the city to our farm. Back-to-front spikes tooth the road, sandbags burst heavily and spill white onto the tarmac, and the military lounge on their rifles. We must produce passports, reflective triangles, the car’s registration; but all this can be avoided if we would only produce a fistful of notes and some cigarettes, soap, oil.
Dad loses his temper. It’s hot and we have been up since long before dawn in order to make it to and from town before dark, when bandits, the poor roads,