Failing to share the pillar-box
Sam Leith
HOUSE OF STONE: THE TRUE STORY OF A FAMILY DIVIDED IN WAR-TORN ZIMBABWE by Christina Lamb HarperCollins, £14.99, pp. 290, ISBN 0007219385 ✆ £11.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Remember that bit in the old Peter Cook and Dudley Moore film Bedazzled, when Pete, playing the Devil, is trying to explain to Dud why the whole revolt in Heaven took place? ‘I’ll be God and you be me,’ says Pete, who enthrones himself atop a pillar-box, and enjoins Dud to circle the bottom of it praising him. After a good while of hosanna-ing away, Dud slumps in exhaustion and says something to the effect, ‘I’m tired of all this. Can’t we swap places for a bit?’ To which Pete responds, ‘That’s exactly what I said.’ Applicable to lots of different situations is that scene. In South Africa, Pete and Dud eventually arrived at a way of sharing the pillar-box. In Zimbabwe, given every opportunity to do the same, they elected instead to blow the pillar-box to smithereens.
It didn’t look, to begin with, as if that was what was going to happen at all. In his first speech to the nation, Robert Mugabe — feared by the British government and white Rhodesian minority alike as a murderous Marxist ogre — confounded expectations:
There is no intention on our part to use our majority to victimise the minority. We will ensure there is a place for everyone in this country ... I urge you, whether you are black or white, to join me in a new pledge to forget our grim past, forgive others and forget, join hands in a new amity and together as Zimbabweans trample upon racism.
In isolation, the speech is moving; in retrospect, it’s heartbreaking. Most readers of The Spectator will know pretty well — some at first hand — the bare bones of Zimbabwe’s recent history: how one of Africa’s great breadbaskets turned into one of Africa’s great basketcases, with more than half the population starving, 70 per cent below the poverty line, and a third infected with HIV/Aids. Urban infrastructure was bulldozed (Mugabe flirted with the species of stone-age agrarianism that worked so well for Mao and Pol Pot). The Zim dollar, stronger than the pound sterling at the time of independence, is now so worthless that the country is returning to a barter economy; not that there’s a lot left for anyone to barter.
Christina Lamb’s compelling short book, telling the intertwined stories of a white farmer named Nigel Hough and a Zezuru woman, Aquinata, who worked as his maid, puts human flesh on those bones. Its climacteric, described in a prologue, came in August 2002. Nigel, the last white farmer in the Wenimbi Valley to hold out against the invasions by ‘war veterans’, returned home to find a drunken mob looting his property and chanting ‘hondo, hondo!’, Shona for ‘war’. At their head was Aqui, his family’s maid and nanny for six years, shouting at him, ‘Get out, or we’ll kill you. There is no place for whites in this country.’ Lamb’s story then circles back to the beginning, and moves in alternate chapters through the stories of Nigel’s and Aqui’s own lives towards that moment at the farm, and towards its peculiar postscript.
Nigel was hearty, good-natured and grew up imbued with the ambient, gin-inthe-golf-club sort of suburban racism of white Rhodesians under Ian Smith. The bleks — ‘Affs’ or ‘munts’ — were ‘a kind of supporting cast’. He grew up on a farm, was sent away to boarding school as a small child, and lived in many ways an idyllic existence. As a teenager he dreamed of joining an elite unit fighting the ‘communist terrorists’ in the Bush War. Riding shotgun during the school holidays, he says, ‘I’d sit in the back with an FN and I always used to think it would be really good to see a black guy and shoot him because then you’d become a hero.’ White schoolmates boasted of dropping a bomb at a bus stop and killing three black civilians.
Aqui’s childhood was less privileged. As a girl she used to walk two hours a day between the Catholic mission school she attended and her family’s hut in Zhakata’s Kraal, a mud settlement featured on no maps and a day’s walk from the nearest town. She was raped at the age of 12 by the headmaster of her secondary school. When she got married, her husband turned out to be a mean drunk, who came home only to beat her and steal the money she squirrelled away to feed the children.
We follow Aqui through her furtive support of the Bush War, her growing involvement in politics, her escape from her husband; and Nigel through a shedding of his childhood prejudices and the establishing of a family of his own. In the background, meanwhile, we watch Mugabe’s regime grow ever more corrupt, and the repressions it visits on its populace ever more drastic.
By the time the story had its unhappy end, Nigel was a model boss. He had established an Aids orphanage for his workers, was employing 300 people and was putting Aqui’s 15-year-old son Wayne through boarding school in Harare. Aqui was regarded as part of the family. Were they bound to end up enemies? Aqui says at one point, ‘I knew our people needed land and thought it was quite right that the government take these farms and land, but it should have been properly worked out, not like this.’ Model boss Nigel may have been, but Boss he was.
Lamb has a remarkable pair of stories to tell, and does so extremely well. One of her strengths is the weight of direct quotation she uses: whole italic paragraphs of speech. It helps, more than any amount of her competent journalistic colour-writing, to bring Nigel and Aqui to life on the page, to give them their own voices. Aqui’s habit of metaphor and Nigel’s yarpie-isms — he has the tic of saying ‘a hang of a’, for ‘a hell of a’, for example — give you a good sense of who they are. As much as their stories are representative, they are also individual. That comes out in strange and sometimes hilarious detail. There’s the sketch of Nigel’s eccentric father, for example, a man whose dearest delights were reading William Blake on the verandah and taking his pet crow Mr Ponsonby for a spin in his RAF Spitfire: ‘Once he flew so fast ... the bird lost all his feathers and John had to stick some back in.’ (Can this be true?) Or there’s Nigel’s disastrous entrepreneurial adventure, trying to sell live ostriches to the Chinese in the early 1990s. And as a surprising coda shows, the relationship between Nigel and Aqui is neither quite over, nor quite what it looked like in the generic hate-filled snapshot we glimpse in the prologue.
Yet for all the occasional laughs and small evidences of redemption or, at least, of human kindness, this is not an uplifting read. In fact, it makes you want to cry at the stupidity, the viciousness and the sheer wastefulness of what Robert Mugabe’s kleptocracy did when they had an unrivalled opportunity to do something really good. And, on the local level, it shows you the individual histories of selfishness and hatred that brought it about. I finished Lamb’s book in a café in central London on a sunny Saturday lunchtime and reeled away in a positive rapture of distress that people could be so awful to one another.
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