links.
‘Shamwari, how are you today?’ he asks.
I assure him I’m well and tell him I’m an American who’s come to learn about peace and reconciliation.
‘I knew you weren’t one of these local whites,’ he says. ‘Something about the style of dressing. They have their own places. Sports clubs and the like.’
‘I thought reconciliation meant everyone came together,’ I reply.
‘In a way that’s true,’ he says. ‘That’s what the Prime Minister is saying. We’ll see if these whites change. I doubt.’ He offers me a cigarette. I don’t often smoke, but I accept. The first puff goes straight to my head.
‘Are none of the whites changing?’ I ask.
‘Some are. My employer, Diane Johnstone, now calls me Mr Mzondiwa at work. Maybe their children will be different. It’s hard after a war.’
He takes a sip of his Castle and holds up two fingers to Obert. He scoots his chair a little closer to the table and leans toward me.
‘Saka shamwari, don’t you think we can do some business?’
‘What kind of business?’
‘You know, import–export. Zimbabwe has been hit hard by sanctions. There are so many things we don’t have. I’m thinking of stereos.’
‘Stereos?’
‘Famous brands. Sony. Panasonic. Here we just have our locally made Supersonics. After a month or two they’re finished. Marantz too. You buy them and bring them in. I sell. We share the money. As easy as eating porridge.’
‘I’m not much for business,’ I tell him. ‘I’m an academic.’ I slide my chair back and try to find a way out.
‘They won’t bother you, these customs people. It’s too perfect.’
‘I don’t think so. I’ve got my hands full.’
‘But you’ll think about it?’ he asks.
‘Okay.’
‘That’s great,’ he says, pulling a business card from his shirt pocket. ‘You can always get me on this number. Let me borrow your pen.’
He scratches out something on the card and replaces it with his name and number. We have two more beers. He tells me he was a mujiba during the war.
‘We pretended to be herding cattle or running errands. We were spies. Who would suspect a nine-year-old boy with no shoes?’
‘What were you doing?’ I ask.
‘Looking for Rhodesian soldiers. We were the eyes and ears of the vakomana, the guerrillas. Girls did it too – chimbwidos.’
I try to ask him more questions about what he did during the war and what he thinks about Mugabe and reconciliation. He steers the conversation back to stereos. He has heard that Pioneer is also a good brand and ‘not too dear’. I leave him with one more promise to ‘think about it’ and retreat to the company of my giraffe.
Harare has only one daily newspaper, The Herald, formerly subtitled The Voice of Rhodesia. The new government took over the paper at independence. Every day the lead story dwells on the latest activities of the Prime Minister, always referred to as Comrade Robert Mugabe. Occasionally his middle name, Gabriel, is added for emphasis. Whether Mugabe receives a delegation from United Nations Headquarters or goes to the rural areas to pick ticks off sheep, his photo appears on page one.
Even for someone who admires the man as much as I do, this treatment is a little excessive. On the rare day that Mugabe’s actions don’t warrant headlines, his wife, Comrade Sally Mugabe, features, handing out food parcels to orphans or accepting donations for the destitute from a local bank.
While the Herald actively propounds Zanu’s vision of a socialist Zimbabwe, the paper remains capitalist enough to advertise on behalf of local landlords. Under ‘Flats to Let’ I find: Greendale: granny flat, kitchen, Christian, non-smoker. Tel. 63721.
I speak to the owner, Mrs van Zyl, on the phone. Van Zyl is an Afrikaans surname. One of my 3×5 cards, No. 25, fills me in: Afrikaans: a hybrid Dutch language spoken mainly by whites known as Afrikaners or Boers, ancestors came to South Africa from the Netherlands beginning in 1652, large Afrikaner population in South Africa, few in lof, typically associated with hardline, racist views.
I travel to Greendale in a Rixi taxi that is parked in front of the hotel. Rixis are fashioned from Renault r4s, the smallest car I’ve ever ridden in. Built in the shape of a work boot, the r4’s cane-shaped gear stick comes straight out of the dashboard. The driver slides it out for first, pushes it back into the dashboard for second.
Mrs van Zyl is short with blue hair. She tells me she is a widow. She sits in a puffy chair and pets her snorting Pekinese. Princess Hildegard, Hildie for short, blinks contentedly in her lap.
While she questions me, a black man in khaki shorts whom she calls Amos serves us tea and cookies. ‘Since I lost my husband,’ she says, ‘I’ve had a hard time with tenants.’ Her previous tenant packed up his things in the middle of the night even though he’d paid two months in advance.
‘I’m holding thumbs this time,’ she says.
I duck, dive and smile my way through various queries, selling the idea that I’m a quiet, conscientious researcher. I try to remember to pronounce the ‘z’ in her name like the hissing of a snake, as someone told me it sounds in Afrikaans.
Mrs van Zyl’s granny flat is a small cottage that more than meets my needs. The double bed has a foam mattress, the small kitchenette comes with a two-burner hotplate and a bar fridge. The furniture includes a wooden cable-spool table and two accompanying pine chairs – unvarnished. Reader’s Digest Condensed Books fill the metal frame bookshelf. She promises to remove them to make way for my history texts.
Mrs van Zyl doesn’t charge me a deposit because I am so ‘polite and well mannered’.
I celebrate my newly acquired granny flat with a trip to the Princess. Obert delivers my usual two beers. I ask him if he, like Mzondiwa, was a mujiba during the war.
‘We did what we had to, sir,’ he replies. ‘Now the war is over. Let us carry on.’
By the following afternoon, I’m on my way to Mrs van Zyl’s in another Rixi. Within a couple of hours I’m settled in. The cards are on the wall. Three dozen works on Zimbabwean history, including my all-time favourite, Zimbabwe before Rhodes by Callistus Dlamini, have replaced the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. What more could an historian need?
Chapter 5
Florence Matshaka is the first name on my list of interviewees.
Peterson didn’t know much about Florence other than that she was once a guerrilla fighter. I try to phone her half a dozen times. The line never connects. Mrs van Zyl tells me this is common, ‘especially when it rains’.
Luckily I have Florence’s home address. She lives in The Avenues, an area adjacent to the city centre. The Avenues is the only
