Roses Under the Miombo Trees (3 page)

As much salt as required.

Slice of bread and jam and tea or coffee remaining from the table.

Mark, who had grown up in households with servants, encouraged me to take this advice with a large dose of common sense, for there seemed little point in buying Daniel food he did not want. And despite the leaflet's comments, vitamins or no, he was keen on the vegetables he was allowed to consume from our portion of the back garden, and I'm sure I bought him packets of Tanganda tea and cheap local jam. I remember meat as being very important. The butcher's cuts and prices were whitewashed on his window, largest letters always reserved for the price of ‘BOYS MEAT' – in practice rough off-cuts and tough bits such as shin – but meat, mainly lean, just the same. My friend Jiff Bowmaker, who grew up in Salisbury, remembers a sizeable parcel being delivered for her parents' household twice a week. (Jiff's e-mail contrasted sadly with what has been reported from Zimbabwe in recent years: empty shop shelves and near riots when goods were delivered, a boy of 15 and a security guard crushed to death in a stampede to buy sugar in Bulawayo.)

The small size of the cottage struck me again when, like a sudden reminder of the entirely different world I had left, our wedding presents arrived, in two separate consignments. That's another clear memory: a crane preceding a lorry up the drive and depositing a huge crate, weighing 1,000 lbs according to the manifest, in front of our little cottage. The excitement felt like Christmas and birthday rolled into one as I unpacked gifts from mountains of tissue paper and newspaper padding, unfolded the ‘trousseau' of linen my mother had insisted on buying me at Marshall and Snelgrove's in Oxford Street, just as, I knew, her mother had for her. Only her mother had not been facing the prospect of saying goodbye to her daughter for an indefinite period. Am I imagining it now, or did I sense her well hidden distress, disguised as extravagance as we chose candy striped sheets, Lan-air-cell blankets, towels (both terry and linen) and ordered monogrammed linen table napkins?

Mark was out, but I at once set to, mit hammer, and by lunch we had all the main bundles out, inc. 4 tea chests. All p.m. was spent sorting, and getting rid of packing material – a vast amount. Final accident tally was: 1 dinner service plate (meat) wh. are obtainable here, no ‘weights' to the pressure cooker (15/-) 1 plate missing from the L-J's early morning tea set and worst – 2 claret glasses of Uncle Paul's smashed… but I gather Brierley crystal is obtainable and/or orderable here so I'll try that first. Oh yes, and the sugar-jar from Mrs S's lovely set, and one of Joan W's precious grapefruit glasses … It is amazing how one appreciates all these lovely things now. The lovely linen to sleep on – a bathmat! – a dinner service all smart and nice, and my desk, which I am now at – it has quite changed the sitting room. The kitchen is the difficulty, because it is all the china and glass we shan't be able to fit in when the second ‘lot' comes, and the d.room sideboard is full of glass and dinner service! with the [silver] canteen looking v. smart on top. Mark is going to fix wall shelves in the kitchen to fit a bit more in, but already we have had to pack a few duplicates away. Daniel is fearfully impressed with all our stuff, and seized on the pressure cooker with glee – he knows how to use it which is a relief, as I don't! he keeps saying – Is nice madam, is nice.

With Daniel installed to do everything needed in the house, and with Mark often out of town for the day, I had plenty of time to explore and get to know Bulawayo's city centre. Its particular character is still very clear to me in one of those vivid memories: I am emerging from the shade of one of the arcades of shops that line the downtown avenues, stepping out into the bright burning sunlight and feeling that it is taking for ever to reach the shade on the other side. That long hot walk is due to the decree of Cecil John Rhodes that the original town be built with streets wide enough for the turning of a cart drawn by a full span of oxen. I am not, at this point, very interested in the country's history, though like most recent British immigrants I am aware of the country's close links with South Africa, from whence Cecil John Rhodes's British South Africa Company had driven northwards in its constant search for more mineral rights. Rhodes is still a presence in the city, not only in those spacious streets, but in the form of a large bronze statue of him standing, gazing northwards to lands yet undiscovered. I know that a Land Apportionment Act defined areas of land reserved for whites and for blacks, that blacks were restricted to certain jobs. But if I think about it at all, I reason that this is not South Africa, there's no full blown apartheid here, and our government under Sir Edgar Whitehead is promising reforms that will surely bring greater democracy closer, though not too quickly. Things, I feel, are working pretty well. I do not add, pretty well for us whites.

It was to be some 45 years before I would recognise how little I knew of the country's colonial past, and the extent to which it has coloured the country's politics and development since.

From the moment when Rhodes's pioneers raised the Union flag on a hill named Harare in Mashonaland in the name of Queen Victoria, a white administration began the process of making the territory fit for white development. Britain left its management first to the British South Africa Company, authorising it to raise taxes, promulgate laws, set up and maintain an administration and a police force, build roads and railways. So very soon the Masters and Servants Act made it a criminal offence not to obey ‘a lawful order of the employer'. When the local people proved reluctant to work for wages – since within their own way of life they had no need for cash – the company found a solution in the Hut Tax, levied on every adult male for himself and each of his wives. To pay it, he would have to work – in the settlers' mines, homesteads or farms. By 1900, both the Shona and the Ndebele people had seen nearly 16 million acres of their traditional lands handed out to the new settlers from the south, leaving them in native reserves on often remote and unfavourable land. Not surprising then, that in 1896/7 both peoples revolted, but inevitably the revolts failed. In the words of Martin Meredith, whose
The Past is Another Country
gives an account of Rhodesia up until the end of white rule:

As the British Government later acknowledged, Rhodesia was established by right of conquest. In their [the revolts'] wake, the whites did indeed bring law and order but not, in the African view, justice, and the memories of the 1896-97 revolt lingered long enough for the nationalists to draw inspiration from it sixty years later
.

In 1923, after a referendum of white settlers, Rhodesia became that odd contradiction in terms, a self-governing colony. Britain retained the right to veto legislation that discriminated against the African population, (though it never exercised it until 1965, when Ian Smith's government made its Unilateral Declaration of Independence).

By the time we set up home in Bulawayo, the country had been governed for 30 years by a white administration, and had flourished economically, welcoming hundreds of thousands of new settlers from Britain after the Second World War. The city was by now an important railway centre and had grown into a thriving industrial and business community, albeit with its nose rather out of joint for being overtaken by Salisbury as the capital city. Rather to my surprise, I found it had plenty of shops, even two department stores, Meikles and Haddon & Sly, where I went in search of replacements for china and glass casualties from our wedding present sets. There were restaurants, as I wrote home enthusiastically:

Balancing rocks featured in John and Toni Watson's Bulawayo garden

… a gorgeous Italian dinner: I was amazed that one could get such really good food in a place like Bulawayo – we staggered home groaning of a surfeit of zabaglione!

and

… a delicious dinner at a Spanish restaurant, masses of olé and a wonderful paella!

Meikles Hotel with its ‘lounge' was important to me: for Mark and his colleagues a few beers after work was de rigeur, but in Southern Rhodesia, as in neighbouring South Africa, women were not admitted into bars where liquor could be seen to be served. So without the hotel's lounge, where drinks could be brought to you by a waiter from a bar well out of sight, these get-togethers would have been off limits for me. City Hall was large enough to host concerts by visiting European orchestras, audiences photographed for the local daily paper, the Chronicle. None of these facilities was available to black residents, who were expected to live their non-work lives in designated areas called ‘locations' (with the required permit) or, in the rural areas, ‘native reserves' or tribal trust lands. I accepted these arrangements without question because they were there, nor do I recall entering a location more than once – for a display of tribal dancing which I described dismissively as:
… quite amusing but not really spectacular, and of course totally lacking in any organisation or timing!
It wasn't that I was not allowed to enter areas designated for Africans, but that I had no need.

Our weekends were now high points for us both, with tennis and sundowners at the club, braaivleis (barbecues) at friends' homes, the occasional drive into the countryside. Bulawayo beat Salisbury hands down in one respect, for the surrounding landscape is beautiful and more varied than Mashonaland. I was fascinated by the startling outcrops of rock, often weathered into huge spherical shapes and balancing improbably one upon another, which could even be seen in the gardens of some bungalows where they made the ultimate feature.

‘We must visit Rhodes's grave,' said Mark one day, and I carefully planned a picnic, visiting a downtown delicatessen for special treats of slices of salami, olives, unusual cheeses and breads to fill our wicker hamper, a wedding gift. We drove the 35 miles or so from the city into the hills known as the Matopos. Here, on a flat outcrop with a panoramic view of African hills lay Rhodes's grave, at the place he called ‘The View of the World', where he loved to sit surveying the vast and strange panorama, planning his next moves. He had planned his grave too, specifying the site, the plain granite slab inscribed simply ‘Here lie the remains of Cecil John Rhodes'. Close by stood a rectangular stone monument to the men of the Shangani Patrol, killed by King Lobengula's men in 1891. We admired the bas relief panels of figures, some on horseback, some marching, all shouldering rifles, their broad-brimmed felt hats tipped against the sun. History books say that the grave used to be guarded night and day by an African soldier, but I do not recall that when we were there. Nonetheless the site had a solemn, heroic feel to it, a sense of the greatness of empire. I did not know that the Matabele called this hill Malindidzimu – place of spirits – and buried their kings nearby. Nor could anyone have foreseen the atrocities witnessed in the area, when in the early 1980's it was to be at the centre of sustained and savage massacres of the Ndebele people on the orders of Robert Mugabe (himself a Shona, and perceiving them as disloyal). The special force used was his notorious Fifth Brigade, trained by the North Koreans.