‘Why should he do that for you?’
‘He has money!’ Reywa screamed. ‘I am poor!’
‘He owes twenty-two million dollars to the bank,’ I said.
‘I don’t care. If Mr Drummond does not plow for me then’ — Reywa paused and scowled at Troy, conveying a message — ‘then we do not understand each other.’
Having invaded the land and staked his claim, and put up four big huts, he now wanted free seed, free fertilizer and the fields plowed at his bidding, his victim working the tractor. It was like a thief who had stolen a coat insisting that his victim have the coat dry cleaned and tailored to fit. Reywa was very cross in anticipation of any delay in these demands being met.
We sat in front of the largest hut and I sketched a hypothetical episode. Reywa had seized a large piece of Mr Drummond’s land, too large for him to plant it all — that was obvious. What if, I said, someone came and saw that little work had been done on the farthest acres — for ‘neglected land’ was one of the conditions that sanctioned a farm invasion; what would happen if someone wanted to squat and build a little hut on that corner of his land? What would Reywa do to an invader on his farm?
But almost before I finished speaking, Reywa was frowning with aggression and he was hyperventilating through flared nostrils. ‘No! No! I have nothing! I would chase them away!’
He saw no contradiction; the thought of someone taking even a small part of his land just enraged him. He got up and began to pace. He shook his fist and then pointed to his stunted maize.
‘It almost happened. A stupid war vet from here needed some money, so he sold some of my land. People came! They said, “This i our land.” ’
‘What did you do, Reywa?’
He clamped his teeth and said, ‘I send them away!’
So what I had given as a grotesque hypothesis of ingratitude had actually taken place.
Troy said, ‘You want to see the others?’
But I said no. I didn’t have the stomach for this absurdity. I hung around and looked at Troy’s horse and then at an old 1962 Land Cruiser he was restoring to its original luster — ‘Notice the bullet holes in the door? They’re from the struggle.’
Near the lake, later on, I chatted with an African who owned a fishing cooperative. He was Joseph, a Malawian, who said the farm invasions were ‘a disaster.’ I asked him what he thought of his homeland, Malawi. ‘Hopeless,’ he said. But he added that he seldom went home, because it so happened that he was successful in his fishing business.
‘If I go back to Malawi my relatives will borrow money and eat my food and make me poor.’
Joseph explained that protecting what you had achieved was a serious problem in this part of Africa. He was not speaking of the white farmers whose land had been invaded, but he could have been. If someone had money or land or food, onlookers were attracted, feeling they were entitled, and everyone tried to take something.
Later that day, Troy drove me back to Harare. He pointed out various farms that had been invaded. He indicated something else — how Africans took short-cuts through fields of maize on the white farms, both as a convenience and as an insult. These tracks ran willy-nilly through otherwise neat rows of maize.
Seeing an African man and woman hitchhiking, Troy slowed, asked them where they were going. ‘Harare,’ the man said, and Troy said they could get into the truck. This was the countryside. It was usual to pick up hitchhikers or people waiting at bus stops.
I said, ‘If I were hitchhiking here, would an African pick me up?’
‘Probably,’ he said. ‘But they’d expect you to pay them something. They know we never ask. But they always demand money from each other.’
Like his father, he spoke without bitterness. Then we jogged along the country road in silence, in sunshine, under a big blue African sky, until the people in the back rapped on the window, asking to be dropped off.
I stayed in Harare a few more days, fascinated by the apparent order — children in school uniforms, solemn policemen directing very little traffic, big empty department stores, flower sellers, coffee shops, street sweepers — and a serenity which I now realized was extreme tension.
One of the Americans I met in Harare was a former journalist who owned a house in the suburbs. He had no plans to leave. He said, ‘This the best city in Africa. This is a wonderful country. It’s going through a bad patch at the moment.’ Another man was a diplomat. He said, ‘I want to stay here, to see how things turn out.’
18. The Bush Border Bus to South Africa
Southward one hot morning down the hot straight road out of Harare, a farm fence on either side, past the grazing land of white-owned cattle ranches with names like ‘Broad Acres’ and ‘Sunset,’ a sentry at every gate, a raptor on most telephone poles, always a watching hawk here: to South Africa. What a pleasure it was to leave Harare on a sunny day, sitting in an upholstered seat in this long-distance bush bus, on the road that began in Cairo.
Low white farm buildings were dwarfed by bougainvillea as high as apple trees. Little rivulets and streams, and the land so flat and rural I might have been on a back road in Ohio. But every now and then there was an emphatic reminder of Africa: a bungalow-sized anthill, an African in a blue suit and porkpie hat pedaling a bike, a fat-bellied zebra and a skinny horse grazing side by side, an ostrich under a tree, glaring in disapproval, a monkey picking his teeth on a fence post, and the distinct signs of farm invasions — crude huts, the Zimbabwe flag, stacks of gum tree poles for another hut, and in large farm fields small circumscribed maize patches where there should have been a whole hillside of stalks. In the bright dusty town of Dryton twenty-two cars were lined up at a gas station because of the shortage of fuel.
The pious voice of the driver animated the bus’s loudspeaker: ‘With the help of Almighty Goad we will be guided on our jinny and shall be safe in His Divine Hayns.’
Had I chuckled? Perhaps. All I ever thought of when on an African bus was the standing headline, ‘Many Dead in Bus Plunge Horror.’ Whatever noise I had made provoked the man sitting next to me who was fingering a devotional pamphlet to lift his face near mine.
‘Are you a Christian?’ he asked.
This impertinence I found to be a frequent inquiry in Africa.
‘Let’s say I have a lot of questions.’
‘I was like you once,’ he said.
Where do people learn to talk like this? I could see that he believed himself to be, as the man said, in sole possession of the truth. The odd thing was that I happened to be working on my erotic story of the young man and the older woman, started in Egypt, now more than half complete in a notebook. I smiled at the evangelist, indicated my work and went on writing, the notebook on my knee.
In that somber starry light was a specter handing me a wine glass, and still she wore her lace gloves. I drank and touched her hand and was surprised by the warmth of the lace, how her flesh had heated her gloves, and when I reached to touch her breasts I was surprised by the way in which her body had heated her silk chemise, her gown, her sleeves…
The land was dry, the grass a dusty green that made it silver in the sun. One hour passed, and another, and a third, all of unvarying pretty pastures. Every so often the sign of a farm — a hot straight road running at right angles to this main road — white dust, the soft talcum of the deep countryside, two parallel wheel tracks disappearing into the distance.
The African man next to me was smiling the triumphant patronizing smile of the true believer.
‘What sort of questions?’ he asked.
‘Like do you eat crows?’ I said, to keep it simple, and I quoted Deuteronomy, chapter and verse, and added a few more inedible abominations of the Mosaic Law that most people in Zimbabwe would have been delighted to eat in a stew with their evening sadza porridge.