Chimurenga, p.1
Chimurenga, page 1
First published in Great Britain in 2022 by
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Copyright © 2022 Wendy Wright
The right of Wendy Wright to be identified as the author of this
work has been asserted by her in accordance with the
Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This work is entirely fictitious and the characters bear no resemblance to any persons living or dead.
ISBN 9781915352101
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
I would like to thank songwriter John Edmond for his kind permission to use some of the lyrics from ‘Sling Your Slayer’, from John’s ‘Phase II – Troopiesongs’ album.
Contents
Friday 18th December 1981
Part One Land of Hope
Sunday 17th August 1975
Friday 8th December 1972
Saturday 27th January 1973
Tuesday 6th March 1973
Saturday 4th July 1970
Monday 6th July 1970
Thursday 26th November 1970
Saturday 21st November 1970
Saturday 12th December 1970
Saturday 24th June 1972
Saturday 24th March 1973
Wednesday 29th August 1973
Saturday 1st September 1973
Friday 28th September 1973
Saturday 6th July 1974
Tuesday 26th November 1974
Sunday 10th August 1975
Friday 15th August 1975
Sunday 17th August 1975
Part Two No Glory In War
Monday 3rd March 1980
Saturday 27th March 1976
Saturday 26th June 1976
Saturday 25th September 1976
Wednesday 6th October 1976
Sunday 10th October 1976
Friday 12th August 1977
Saturday 24th September 1977
Tuesday 21st February 1978
Friday 3rd March 1978
Saturday 18th March 1978
Friday 14th July 1978
Friday 18th August 1978
Sunday 20th August 1978
Monday 4th September 1978
Friday 10th November 1978
Saturday 11th November 1978
Sunday 12th November 1978
Saturday 25th November 1978
Saturday 2nd December 1978
Wednesday 27th December 1978
Friday 29th December 1978
Wednesday 17th January 1979
Sunday 25th March 1979
Friday 25th May 1979
Sunday 29th July 1979
Tuesday 31st July 1979
Friday 24th August 1979
Saturday 6th October 1979
Saturday 13th October 1979
Tuesday 6th November 1979
Sunday 11th November 1979
Saturday 1st December 1979
Sunday 2nd December 1979
Friday 25th January 1980
Thursday 28th February 1980
Part Three Freedom
Friday 6th November 1981
Monday 3rd March 1980
Tuesday 4th March 1980
Saturday 29th March 1980
Thursday 17th April 1980
Saturday 5th July 1980
Sunday 6th July 1980
Thursday 10th July 1980
Wednesday 23rd July 1980
Saturday 26th July 1980
Saturday 27th September 1980
Tuesday 18th November 1980
Friday 21st November 1980
Friday 5th December 1980
Saturday 6th December 1980
Friday 19th December 1980
Saturday 20th December 1980
Sunday 21st December 1980
Thursday 15th January 1981
Saturday 21st February 1981
Thursday 14th May 1981
Friday 15th May 1981
Sunday 17th May 1981
Saturday 30th May 1981
Sunday 31st May 1981
Thursday 17th December 1981
Friday 18th December 1981
Friday 18th December 1981
Think.
Think straight and get a grip.
You haven’t gone deaf, you silly cow. Listen. Yes?
That weird, muted woolliness and indistinguishable buzz in my ears is, here and there, starting to separate into individual sounds. Like strands of yarn, they’re unravelling and beginning to register in my senses as something real. Screaming. Someone is screaming. No, more than one person. Shattering and splintering. Glass. Glass falling from many windows in many buildings over many storeys. Going on and on and on. Then your voice. Behind me. Clear and utterly calm, as if you’re identifying fruit in the supermarket.
“That was a bomb.”
I know. I knew even as the air hit me and turned my eardrums to wool. Is that what they call a shockwave? Gave me a bloody shock. Probably how I ended up on my knees. As time seems to be standing still, I take the chance to inspect them. Yup. They’re grazed, and they sting.
Actually, thinking straight doesn’t seem to be an option open to me. Muddled doesn’t come close to describing my world right now. I don’t understand. The war is over. It’s all supposed to be all right now.
Time gets going again. It’s all happening. People are surging every which way around me, apart from you, with one steady hand against my back, the other one on my shoulder and your presence grounding me and keeping me from joining the frantic, aimless throng. A middle-aged woman in a blue pinafore-type dress appears in front of us, makes contact with her panicked eyes and yells, “It’s near that bakery! The bakery’s blown up!”
Your voice is still completely calm when you say, “The ZANU(PF) offices are above the bakery.”
There’s a log-jam of crazily-angled cars up ahead and an acrid sting in my nostrils. A haze of smoky, dusty stuff is drifting along Manica Road from the east, over the cars.
ZANU(PF) headquarters. The North-West Bakery. Dad, and his jokes about the leadership party operating out of a tiny, dingy office over a bread shop. Mum, telling me it sells the best bread in town. Lasts well, no maize-meal in it, if you need good bread, my girl, you go there to get it, yes? I may well have done that this morning if Moira hadn’t been grocery shopping yesterday.
While I have this completely inane nonsense rattling in my head, down below a deep chill of pure horror is seeping into my legs. In a matter of minutes, you and I might’ve been walking past the bakery, looking for a gap in the traffic so that we could cross the road to Meikles. And Mum might’ve been queuing there today.
But we’re all still in one piece, me, you and Mum. Us here on the pavement in First Street and Mum – where would she be now? – probably on the way down to Southampton, trying to get used to the winter cold and totally oblivious to this. For now at least. It’ll hit the world news later today of course.
And I told them it’ll be fine. I told them, go, I’ll be okay, I know what I’m doing. I said that more than once, didn’t I? To parents, to Rosie and even to Charles and Moira and Gill. And you.
Right. Come on, get back to the here and now. Think. What do I do? Now where’s that guy going?
He’s the one who helped me to my feet and, together with you, held me upright. He peered into my face and asked me if I was all right, but now he’s let go of my arm and is running across the road, dodging round a stationary car, shouting. He’s yelling in Shona; looks like he’s recognised someone on the other side of Manica Road.
Christ, when Mum and Dad hear about this they’ll go berserk. They’re more than likely to command me to leave on the next available flight and join them. Will they try to come back and fetch me?
How the hell was I supposed to know which was the right choice? It’s not like I made the decision just like that – snap. No, I did months of agonising, running pros and cons, creating arguments, upsetting the whole bloody family, driving myself crazy. Then I thought I knew. I chose. And now? Now it all, quite literally, blows up in my face.
Well okay, not in my face. Not even right near me, thank God.
God?
Come on, you don’t believe in God so why do you even say that?
Think, think.
Part One
Land of Hope
Sunday 17th August 1975
I need to treasure those memories, because Mushandike’s a thing of the past now. We met a hippo and some eland, a family of warthogs and some jackals and we learned how to track animals and abo ut ecosystems. We climbed a rockface near the dam wall and we ate our dinner and sang songs around a campfire in the middle of nowhere. We watched a sheep being dissected and measured the length of its small intestine, and Elizabeth threw up. We imagined ourselves to be a band of Mashona escaping the marauding Matabele by using that natural rock tunnel hidden in a hillside, crouching and scuttling along it in the dark. We just had such a good time. And then, yesterday, it was over. The birdsong woke us early and the dawn was all pink and misty and we ate bacon and eggs around the revived campfire while the sun gradually rose up over the tops of the trees and its light crept down towards the ground. Then we had to go. None of us wanted to leave, just like, I’ll bet, so many other school children over the years, but we had to go home. We left a bush school and soon it will be just an army barracks. Maybe Barry will stay there, in the dormitory where Jess and I were. Maybe Nathan will get to go back.
I guess hope is a thing of the past too. This is real, isn’t it? There really is a proper war and it’s just arrived on my doorstep.
Friday 8th December 1972
“It’s what you get after years of, well, exploitation, frankly.”
That’s what Nathan said. I remember it exactly. He never says very much so I guess that’s why I can remember every single word. Even exploitation. The dictionary in my lap says this means “- the act of using for selfish purposes…” I’ve re-read it several times. Enough times. I look up, out into the garden through the French doors in front of me.
Elijah’s weeding and tidying the edges of the beds. I allow my mind to be absorbed for a while by his steady and methodical progress – take a weed in forefinger and thumb of the left hand, insert the trowel tip into the soil with the right, wiggle it, free the roots, shake off the crumbs of earth, deposit the tiny plant into the bucket, move on to the next one. A peaceful, tranquil activity, and watching him releases a small plug somewhere in me so that some of that gnawing humiliation starts to drain away. And also the anger. Yes, anger. The wanting to scream and throw something across the room and then cry type of anger. But if I throw the dictionary across the room I’ll end up breaking something, or damaging the book and how will I explain it? There’s nothing I can do but sit and keep it inside and concentrate instead on admiring those straight and squared off edges, the weed-free paving slabs. Elijah’s so tidy and thorough, like Daddy tells us a good garden boy should be.
Oh hell, no. Not again.
Those words – those very words I’ve just said to myself – have dumped me back in time to the roadside by the school. Simple words, they were, but they’ve brought my peaceful, tranquil thoughts to a grinding halt.
Yesterday, if anyone had asked me, I would’ve said the words formed a perfectly reasonable compliment. And they did, or at least that’s how I meant them to come out. But not now, today. After all that happened earlier, the voice that says those words sounds as if it comes from someone just like the person the policeman took me for. Am I really like that? I never, ever thought what he said I did. I wasn’t thinking at all. I was just… well, I guess I did ignore him. But not deliberately, like I was mocking him. Why did he get so angry?
I stop watching Elijah, try to clear these thoughts of him from my brain, and stare at the tops of the msasa trees behind him instead.
What a horrible day. Can’t I go back to seven o’clock this morning, get up again and start over? Fridays are meant to be good days, whether you’re nine or as old as Daddy. He’s always more cheery on Fridays, even before he goes to work. If only Jess hadn’t been off ill today. If Jess’d been at school with me none of this would have happened.
Okay, so even if Jess is still sick in my new day, if I could start it over again I wouldn’t do what I did.
I wasn’t being deliberately naughty. Me and Jess made plans back on Monday for this afternoon. We were going to read my new Beezer, and the Barbies were going to go on a holiday to New York, which is why I packed Patsy’s clothes in her pink suitcase last night and left it out ready to take over to Jess’s house. When I crossed the road all this was in my head, plus the new plan I’d just hatched, literally seconds earlier. If my brain hadn’t been off in some other universe it would’ve all been normal and he would never have even noticed me.
So he’s been there, at the zebra crossing, every day since I started school and for all I know he might’ve been there every day for the last ten years. I know nothing about him, not even his name. He’s just the policeman who waves us across the road. When he lets us go over, he commands the traffic to halt with his arms raised outwards, a bit like Mrs Morris said Moses did with the Red Sea. Timothy Dunn says he must be a Matabele.
“My dad said – ” (Timothy starts nearly every sentence with “My dad said – ”) “My dad said we need to get tribalism to work for us so we have Matabele police in Mashonaland and Mashona police in Matabeleland.”
Do we do that? Why? Why did I never ask him why?
I’m seeing the traffic policeman in my head. He’s tall, and he’s very serious, unlike Elijah. He has what Daddy would call knife edge creases in his shorts, and crisp, dazzling white armbands that cover the whole of his forearms and make him look so smart. He never says very much, just like Nathan. He only ever speaks when he’s telling one of the boys to dismount and walk over the crossing. For that he always gets the two fingers – behind his back of course.
They’re always trying that, the boys, riding their bikes over the crossing. I never even thought about doing it. Until today. Well I didn’t ride it, did I? I scooted on one pedal, that’s all. That idea sprang on me and I reacted. I needed to go the other way and call by Jess’s house to see if she was feeling better, so our plans could be back on after all. Jess and Tess together again.
So suddenly I was in this big hurry, because I knew Mummy would do the Tessa-you’re-more-than-FIVE-MINUTES-late bit if I took too long.
I just made it worse of course, ending up more than half an hour late and having to tell a lie. If she finds out there never was a traffic accident I don’t know how I’m going to get out of that one.
She’ll try and talk about it to one of her friends, won’t she? I bet she’ll say something like, “Tessa told me about the accident near the school on Friday. Was anyone hurt? What happened? They were held up a long time.” And for sure the friend will be one of the mothers who pick up their kids, like Mrs Harrison or Mrs Pretorius, and she’ll say, “Accident? No. No, I was there and it was all fine. Where did Tessa say it was?” And then…
If I can’t throw the book then I’ll slam it shut and shove it onto the floor in front of me. I haven’t had a churning stomach and buzzing head like this, ever. What if I get reported and have to go to Mr Westfield’s office? The policeman doesn’t know my name but there were enough kids there who do. Good old Tessa Harmand, never disobedient, never swears, always does her homework, and now in trouble with the police. Mummy and Daddy will be disappointed and Rosie will be ashamed of me and I might even get expelled. I might never be able to ride Gill’s horses again. And I wasn’t even trying to be rebellious, or disobedient, or whatever the guy thought I was up to.
Go on, torture yourself. Relive the scene again, why don’t you? There I am, dodging round Robert Thacker, who’s fiddling about with the straps of his satchel right in the middle of the cycle track, and I get this strange sensation that something’s happened behind me. I’d ignored the first burst of shouting and laughing that rose above the general hubbub of voices and traffic, vaguely curious, yes, but in too much of a hurry to care. Then this weird, kind of sixth sense sensation comes to me just a fraction of a second before I hear my name.
“It’s Tessa!”
“Wey-hey, Tessa!”
“Tessa Harmand!”
So I brake, stop, look back. Always stop first, before looking round – I know this from experience. There’s the traffic policeman, punching the air with one fist and pointing the other forefinger directly at me, and I’m standing like a lemon with my head twisted round, staring at him, wondering what the heck is going on. He’s shouting but I can’t hear what because my heart is thumping so hard. For a few thumps I’m not even sure he’s speaking English. Then I can hear him. And so can everyone else in the world, and they’re gawking, whispering, all focussed on me.
