Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [15]
Anyone who has existed on the soil on which a war is fought knows the look of the returned soldier—the haunted look of someone who has seen more than his fair share of horror. People who have inflicted pain, who have destroyed, who have been in pain and been destroyed. People whose words for killing reflect the casualness with which they have learned to view the act: “scribbled,” “culled,” “plugged,” “slotted,” “taken out,” “drilled,” “wasted,” “stonked,” “hammered,” “wiped out,” “snuffed.”
By the late seventies, the Rhodesian government was finding it more and more difficult to finance its efforts and to persuade the increasingly weary population that this gruesome war was a viable alternative to black majority rule. In December 1979, the United States and Britain brokered a cease-fire, which led to all-party elections in 1980.
It is a measure of how brainwashed white Rhodesians were that they were stunned to hear, on March 4, 1980, that Robert Mugabe, a leader of one of the guerrilla factions and a Marxist terrorist—a man whom many of them had never even heard of—had won an absolute majority in the parliamentary elections. As blacks celebrated in the streets of newly independent Zimbabwe, the white residents who had just fought, and lost, a long and bitter war stood by in appalled silence.
In their book, Rhodesians Never Die, Peter Godwin and Ian Hancock wrote that the Rhodesian authorities estimated that there were 20,350 war-related deaths in Rhodesia between December 1972 and December 1979. Fewer than 500 white civilians were killed while at least 7,000 black civilians and 10,000 guerrillas were killed. Over 1,000 members of the Security Forces were killed (under half of them white). Black civilian deaths were certainly underestimated and high casualties inflicted on black Rhodesian refugees in external raids (in Mozambique and Zambia) were ignored altogether. The African population bore the brunt of the war, but the European minority shed proportionately more blood. All came out of the war scathed in some way.
What is harder to document are the nonfatal casualties of the war. The victims of suicide (sewerage pipe, it was jokingly called), the alcoholics, the drug addicts, the homeless, the psychologically damaged, the people who (knowing nothing else but war) became mercenaries in other African wars (and ended their lives in South Africa, Mozambique, Angola, Somalia, or Namibia). The horror of the war remained largely unspoken and unacknowledged in the celebration of the freedom fighters’ victory. The whites either left the country, and sometimes the continent, or melted back into everyday life and tried to adjust to majority rule. The blacks found that independence had brought them little of the freedom and power they had been promised.
My family left Zimbabwe in 1982, when I was thirteen, a little over two years after the end of the war. We headed first for Malawi and then, when Dad’s contract on a tobacco plantation was up in that country, to Zambia. As part of the physical act of forgetting those years and the Rhodesian land for which my mother and father had fought so inadequately, and so pointlessly, we burned everything that might implicate us in that struggle.
A bonfire at the top of that farm near Umtali turned into ashes the T-shirts that declared “Rhodesia Is Super, Especially Umtali,” “Come to Umtali and Get Bombed,” and “Burma Valley Operation Thrasher.” We burned our Wrex Tarr Zonke Chilapalapa record (featuring “A Terrorist’s Lament” and “Picannini Red Riding Hood”) and our Clem Thollet “We Are All Rhodesians” tape, and we watched our propaganda magazines (distributed by the Rhodesian Ministry of Information) spiral into smoke. Then we packed up the dogs and cats and as many possessions as would fit in the back of a Land Rover and we headed north into African countries that had been independent for nearly twenty years.
WHEN DAD CAME OUT of the shower, he said, “Water