Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [64]
I LOOKED OUT the window at the life that struggled on either side of the road. There were villages spread out thin and continuous, beside the road. Nothing looked old and established; it all looked rash, and temporary—something that had been erected out of ruin, with a watchful eye toward the next possible catastrophe. Outside one hut, a woman was scraping at the ground with a hoe. Along the verge, a small boy was herding goats; a man was whipping a donkey that lunged weakly under the heavy and ungraceful weight of an overloaded scotch cart. A woman swayed under a bucket of water, a baby bulging from a cloth sling on her back and a toddler trotting in her wake. Life expectancy in Mozambique was about thirty-five. Given the country’s history, that figure seemed miraculously high.
“Why is it,” asked Graça Machel, former Mozambique education minister, widow of President Machel, and now the wife of Nelson Mandela, “that the worst of everything that is evil and inhuman is to be found in Africa? What is wrong with us Africans?”
In the 1970s, K had endured five years of war. The experience had left him (as far as I could tell) still tortured, angry, aggressive, lost. While it is impossible, and perhaps useless, to measure one person’s war against another’s, it is hard to imagine how almost thirty years of continuous war have affected the local population of Mozambique; millions of children have grown up knowing nothing but war. For Mozambican youth living and, too often, dying in a sustained, saturated atmosphere of chaos and conflict, the choices were grim. They could either fight (there are no reliable estimates, but it is thought that there were as many as eight to ten thousand child soldiers recruited—some of them kidnapped—during the civil war) or risk life and limb trying to scratch out a perfunctory existence amid the minefields. Girl children who were recruited into the armies and who escaped the fighting were used as sex slaves.
“This was all under martial law when I was here,” said K, nodding into the villages. “All these villagers had to clear out during that time. Some of them went to the cities, or across the borders in Malawi, Rhodesia, and so on, but others went and hid in the shateen. We’d come across their little camps. Just a little bush structure—like a tent made out of branches—and maybe, a mile or two away, you’d find where they had cooked their meal for the day. Then they’d walk miles and miles to their gardens—they’d never sleep close to where they ate or grew their crops. And if we found their gardens, we destroyed those too. Those poor buggers. They lived like animals the whole time. When they could, they caught rats and snakes and ate those. They ate roots and leaves and berries. They were starving and shit scared. They were shit scared of us and they were shit scared of the Porks and they were shit scared of the gooks. Then there was always a pretty good chance of standing on an antipersonnel mine. Imagine! One hundred and ten percent shit scared morning, noon, and night.”
IN THE FACE of such profound human misery, the trifling fact that I was desperate to find a tree behind which to pee seemed almost unmentionably trite. Nevertheless, I finally drew K’s attention to my plight.
“Too many gondies,” he said. “They’ll see you.”
“I’m sure they’ve seen it before.”
“Not a peeing mazungu. At least not a lady.”
“I’m sure it won’t kill them.”
“Okay, okay,” K said. “I’ll find you a tree.”
“It really doesn’t have to be a very big tree,” I said. “In fact, it doesn’t have to be a tree at all. It could be an anthill. A shrub. A pebble. Oh look, you’ve just driven past another hundred million possible places.”
K gazed out at the huts, imperturbably. “Let’s just get through this village.”
“But as far as I can tell, Mozambique is all one solid village,” I protested.
“I’ll hurry,” said K, stepping on the accelerator.
Which was how we were caught, in the middle of what looked like nowhere (but was actually the town of Changara), by two policemen with a speed gun who were sitting