Visiting the farm in the early eighties, I was standing perhaps fifty yards away from where the house was. In front of me swayed a drunk black man, tall, very thin, poorly dressed, reeking of stale beer. With me was Antony Chennells, then from the Zimbabwe University. He was the best of companions for such trips, apart from the fact that he knew as much about old Southern Rhodesian history, laws, literature, people, black and white, as anybody could. His grandfather was Charles Coghlan, the first prime minister of Southern Rhodesia. It was hard for me to come back to the farm, to the kopje where the house was – to my memories. We were there, standing before this angry man, without permission from the owners of the farm, because we knew we had only to ask to get permission, and because being there was something of an impulse.
‘Why are you here?’ says the drunk man, belligerent and accusing.
‘Once I lived here. I was a child here,’ I said, bright and breezy, as if this was not bound to be a pretty awful occasion.
He was too drunk to sneer properly, but he made the attempt.
I said, ‘Our old house used to be there,’ and I pointed to where bushes and even young trees were springing up.
I said, ‘The people who came after us cut the top of this hill off. A good fifteen or twenty feet, it looks like.’
‘No one has cut off the hill,’ says the drunk.
He is, in fact, a mechanic, working for this annexe and the big farm it is now part of.
‘I assure you,’ I say, ‘this hill is much lower than it was. They threw the earth down the sides of the hill. That is why the track up here isn’t steep. It used to be so steep you had to change down into second gear to come up.’
No, I was certainly not so silly as to think my love, and you could say knowledge, of this part of the country had a claim on him as a fellow countryman. Of course not. And yet…
‘There used to be a big tree just there.’ I pointed to a hundred yards or so down the front of the hill.
‘There was no tree there,’ said the man, swaying and leaning. ‘There was never any tree.’
‘We used to call it the mawonga tree.’
‘It is the wrong name,’ said the drunk.
Interesting, watching history being unmade, the past forsworn.
A little way down the side of the hill a few black women were listening and they were curious. They were probably, too, pleased at this little excitement in what must have been poor and uneventful lives.
Some yards away was the bungalow someone had built. From the windows peered black children’s faces.
Not asking his permission, since he would not have given it, we walked to where we could see the crowded windows. Suddenly, no children. I stood, peering in. The windows were shut, on a hot afternoon. Inside a dozen or so children were immured. They stood shyly together in the centre of the room. Just children, of all ages. Not a toy, piece of paper, exercise book, any kind of book; nothing for them to play with or use their minds on. Where was the nearest school? Banket. Unless there was a farm school somewhere.
This was before Mugabe licensed the grabbing of the white farms.
It hurt, seeing that house, and the children without any kind of – well, anything. Nothing. It was a way of making sure children were safe and out of mischief. Lock them up in an empty house…
It hurts now. Give us education, give us books, give us exercise books – such is the cry, but perhaps not so much now, when there is so little food to go round, so little of anything. By now those children will be out-of-work adults.
They might easily be dead, from Aids, or hunger.
Long ago, in 1956, I was in Cold Comfort Farm, a ‘progressive’ farm that gave education to children and adolescents before the black government came. There I met an idealistic young man, planning to be a teacher, who said he wanted to be educated so as to help his people, ‘to give my life for my people’.
Idealistic youngsters don’t necessarily turn out well.
That idealistic youngster soon became Didymus Mutasa, a bosom crony of Mugabe. Not long ago he said it wouldn’t matter if so many people died of Aids or of anything else. ‘We would be better off with two million people less,’ said this man who has become one of the most corrupt, most unscrupulous black leaders in Africa.
I wonder, did someone cut down the old mawonga tree? Was it really old? Did it fall down? These trees are studded among the lower-growing trees of the highveld; they are taller than the other trees, whitish-trunked, and their boughs do not grow flattish and layered like the musasas.
Our tree was a sort of a landmark. It was always full of birds. Once a swarm of locusts came down from the north, settled on every tree, and loaded a branch of the mawonga. It broke under the weight.
Bees lived in the tree. You could see the hole, from yards away, with the insects buzzing about. At intervals, a group of men came up from the fields and made a smoking fire at the right place under the bees. When the bees, noticing the smoke, began to buzz and fuss and also to fall dazed, the men leaned a naked tree trunk against the mawonga trunk and one clambered up. At the level of the hole he inserted his arm, brought out shards and combs of honey, which were put into a paraffin tin. He brushed off bees but did not seem much discommoded. Then he came sliding down. A basin full of honey, combs, bee bread were for us, for the house, but a couple of big tins went down to the compound.
It must have been a large colony. They swarmed quite often. We would hear the swelling drone as the departing swarm passed over the house and away to find a place to make their new hives.
Of that tree my parents said: ‘We’ll never get off the farm, and they’ll bury us under the mawonga tree.’
‘Well, that old tree will still be here when we are gone.’
As it happened, it lasted not much longer than they did.
The swallows, when they came, at about the start of the rainy season, swirled about the front of the house, and around the lower part of the mawonga tree.
And when the swallows left, in April or May, my mother would mourn, ‘Oh, the swallows will be in England soon. They’ll get there before us. Can you imagine them dipping over the ponds? When the swallows came in spring you’d know summer would soon be here…’
‘I wish the rains would come properly,’ says my father. ‘Just look at those clouds. There’s not a drop of rain in the lot of them.’
‘They wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t going to rain soon,’ says my mother. ‘No rain, no insects, no swallows.’
The name ‘mawonga’ is Shona, how it sounds. Names for this tree are Pericopsis and Angolensis.