• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 902 0

that he landed into trouble two days ago for impersonating the Police,’ Munhira explained. ‘He was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment without option of a fine. Fortunately three months were suspended for two years on condition he behaved well,’ he said. ‘But were you not working together?’ she asked. ‘We were but he has been so mischievous during the past years that this is his third time to be imprisoned, ma’am,’ Munhira said in reply. ‘Hatichke was never mischievous from childhood. You must have been the cause of all these troubles. I shall hate you more than I hate the devil, you swine!’ Hatichke’s father joined in. ‘Look, my dear friend! my son was not your son’s keeper. You either ask him nicely or do not ask him at all.’ Munhira’s father was annoyed by the last dirty remark. ‘Get out of my house immediately before I change my mind, you fools!’ he mocked. ‘Since when has your son been a well-behaved man? Out you go this very minute or else I shall make use of this sharp axe,’ Munhira’s father remarked. ‘We will meet again at a beer drink,’ Hatichke’s father warned.

I was not surprised, when I said to an African lady how much I liked this adventure story, that she replied: ‘I don’t see why they find room in the newspaper for a story about common urban rascals instead of printing material that would be of interest to respectable people.’

‘But,’ I said, ‘I’ve now read six novels written by Africans, and all of them very respectable men, and they all had this same atmosphere that makes the story of Hatichke and Munhira so attractive. To me, at least. It surely can’t be an accident that all the creative writing that has so far come out of the colony by Africans deals with these matters?’

‘They give the impression,’ she said, folding her hands before her on the band of her apron, ‘that we are not a law-abiding people.’

‘You have, I am afraid,’ said her husband, ‘anarchistical tendencies, otherwise you would not like these immoral stories. And besides, they put wrong ideas into the heads of the youth.’

‘I do not see,’ I said, ‘why it proves I am anarchistical if I prefer the light-hearted breaking of wicked and unjust laws, to suffering them in resigned patience.’

We argued about this for some time, but came to no conclusion.

An evening with my friends, the African schools inspector and his wife:

HE. Of course, like all you damned journalists, all you are interested in is the towns. You are interested in what is going to happen to the urbanized African. Oh, yes, I know, but shut up a minute about your proletariat. You’ve been looking at housing schemes and night-schools. The point is that all the white people, progressives or what-nots, have got a vision of this country that is dependent on something the poor Kaffirs haven’t got.’

‘Money?’

‘No, the motor-car. Take a look at the map…the road running north and south, from Beit Bridge to Chirundu, taking in Bulawayo, Gwelo, Gatooma, Hartley and Salisbury and Sinoia; the road running east to Umtali. The road from Bulawayo to Wankie. All the Herrenvolk spend their lives rushing up and down these roads in their motor-cars. But behind these roads and the white farms that lie along them there are thousands and millions of acres of sweet bloody nothing. Nothing. In other words, the Native Reserves. And do not tell me that you have seen Reserves around Salisbury and Bulawayo, that’s something different.’

‘Then,’ I said, ‘please describe for me in your words, so that I may record them for interested readers, what the Native Reserves are like in their natural state.’

‘Good. I get into my lorry and I drive 200, 300 miles into the bundu. I don’t need to ask when the Reserves begin, because they begin at that point where the roads become of interest to my insurance company. They aren’t roads, they are dust-tracks. Then I see a double row of thatched mud huts stringing out a mile, or two or three miles, with some miserable patches of mealies and pumpkins and rapoka around them.’

‘Why a string of mud huts and not a cluster, as is natural to a village?’

‘For two reasons.