Storms Over Africa (41 page)

Hambalaze cleared his throat. ‘South Africa will play no part in the new Zimbabwe. Once Mugabe has gone, South Africa will be our enemy. The radio your friend carried stinks of that country. When I am President I will not tolerate interference from outside, particularly from South Africa. We will get our technology from our friends.'

‘Really,' Richard said, bored. He filed the information away.

Conradie laughed up at Richard. ‘So how do you feel about that?'

Hambalaze glanced sideways at Conradie. The look he gave him was one of pure hatred.

Oh ho! Not all is well here.
He ignored Conradie's question. ‘Your English is very good, Brigadier.'

‘It should be, I was educated in Britain.'

‘Prerequisite for an African leader,' Richard nodded.

‘How do you feel about that?' Hambalaze repeated Conradie's question. ‘About me running the country?'

This guy is on some kind of power kick.
‘I don't give a shit who runs this country, just so long as they know what they're doing.'

‘I know exactly what I'm doing, Mr Dunn.
I'm going to do what Mugabe should have done. I'm going to give this country back to its rightful owners.'

‘Back to the Bushmen?'
Go for it, Dunn.

‘Very funny, Mr Dunn.'

‘It was their land, wasn't it?'

‘We fought them and beat them.'

‘And we fought you and beat you.' He glanced at Conradie but the man appeared to be thinking about something else.

‘Not the last time, Mr Dunn. We won it back.'

‘With a little help from your Whitehall pals.' Richard gave a short laugh. ‘The wisdom of world opinion is really something else, isn't it?'

‘You are trying my patience, Dunn,' Hambalaze snapped.

‘And you, my friend, are trying mine. I don't like you. I don't like what you're planning for this country. For Christ's sake, another war is the last thing Zimbabwe needs. If you've got an axe to grind why don't you grind it on a democratic wheel?'

Conradie laughed suddenly. ‘Don't be naive, Dunn. How far do you think we'd get?'

Richard moved his shoulders impatiently. ‘Look, I'm not entirely unsympathetic with your cause. Mugabe's jobs-for-the-boys policy must be frustrating the hell out of the Matabele. But you're going about it the
wrong way. You're behaving like thugs. I know the democratic process is slow but it beats the bejesus out of war.' He stared down at Kobus Conradie. ‘Samson . . .' He stopped, his throat constricting. ‘. . . Samson is just a man going about the business of life. Killing him makes no sense. It makes you nothing but murderers.'

Hambalaze looked at him, his eyes gleaming. ‘Have you quite finished?'

‘How long have you got?' Richard asked angrily.

‘A lot longer than you, Dunn, I promise you that,' Conradie replied softly. Then he added, ‘We're not murderers. Your man Samson is a fool. His death will give my men a focus, something to hate. It will also . . .' he grinned, ‘. . . be highly entertaining.'

‘You're an ugly bastard,' Richard ground out. ‘Someone should have drowned you in a bucket at birth.'

Conradie laughed at him.

He was taken back to the tent.

‘How'd you go?' Greg had wriggled himself into a sitting position.

‘I didn't go anywhere.' He tried to get comfortable. ‘I stalled, and delivered a sermon on the niceties of political change, I got my face slapped by Conradie and I got the distinct impression they'll kill us too.'

‘What did you tell them about the radio?'

‘That you were a businessman who didn't want to stay out of touch.'

‘That's what I said but they're not buying it.'

‘Would
you
?' He could hear men talking in the distance. ‘Conradie's crazier than ever. ‘In fact, I think he's gone over the edge.' He finally found a position where he could see Greg and be comfortable at the same time. ‘Hambalaze doesn't like him.'

‘Wonder what happened to Kenneth Mafuta?' Greg mused. ‘We thought he was Conradie's man.'

‘No sign of him here and no mention of him either. In fact, Hambalaze told me he's going to take charge when they seize power.'

‘God help Zimbabwe,' Greg said with feeling.

‘God help Samson.' He looked across at Samson who was staring at nothing, oblivious to everything.

‘Old Didd?'

‘What?'

‘Sorry about this.'

‘Yeomans?'

‘Yeah?'

‘Shaddup.'

Neither of them could think of anything else to say. Richard must have dropped off to sleep when, around midnight, he was woken by a murmuring of voices. There was something expectant in the sound, an excitement or an
anticipation, which alerted him. He was suddenly fearful. Something was about to happen. Greg had woken as well and whispered, ‘Samson.'

Richard's gut lurched. A sudden movement at the tent flap warned them. A man entered and bent over Samson, untying his feet. Samson was forced to rise. In the gloomy interior of the tent, lit only be the pale flickering light of a fire outside, Richard watched Samson get to his feet smoothly and go with the man easily. He wondered how Samson could shut down his mind yet his body still worked. Another man freed them and then, pointing his automatic weapon at them, said, ‘Out.'

They followed him into the night. A main camp fire was roaring and several smaller fires burned as well. During the night more men had joined Conradie. There were at least a hundred of them as far as they could see. They were led to a spot at the front of the assembled men and ordered to sit.

Samson stood in the centre of a clearing made by the semicircle of men. Brigadier Hambalaze stood next to him, a sheet of paper in his hand. Shining a torch onto it, the Brigadier read aloud in Sindebele.

‘This man Samson is a traitor to his country. He is the puppet of a white master. He is a dog to whom the white man throws scraps from his table. He is weak like a woman and
he would be happy to live like this for the rest of his life. This man Samson is not a man. He is a woman-dog, a bitch with swollen teats. He is a bitch in a man's body. He is not only a traitor to his country, he is a traitor to his body. This man did not even fight for independence of his country. He stayed and looked after the white man's farm so that, when we had won independence, the white man could go back to being his master. This man is nothing. We sentence this man, this bitch in a man's body, to die like a woman.'

Samson merely stared ahead. Richard felt tears pricking behind his eyelids. If Samson could hear those words he would die before the men could kill him. It was the ultimate disgrace. Hambalaze lowered the paper and the men in the semicircle uttered a single, collective sound of approval. It was a long-drawn-out moaning hum, snapped off after three seconds. Total silence followed it.

Several men joined Hambalaze in the clearing and placed their hands on Samson's arms, forcing him to his knees. He went down easily. One of them put his hand behind Samson's neck and guided him so he lay, face down, in the dirt, arms and legs spread-eagled. Then, both men rolled him onto his back. Samson lay perfectly still, staring upwards.

Hambalaze spoke to the men gathered there.
‘See how he lies like a woman, on his back with his legs open.'

The men laughed, roaring their approval. Richard looked at them.
Fucking savages. Rot in hell, you bastards
.

Hambalaze was enjoying himself. ‘He cannot hear us. He has gone to his secret meeting place. But he will hear us soon. When the steel cuts his legs and his arms from his body he will hear us and feel us and see us. Then he will know that he is a woman and a dog. Then he will die in shame.'

The men roared out their approval, slapping their thighs in enjoyment. The horror of what was about to come did not concern them. Samson was Shona. Even the few Shona among them did not care about the fate of one of their tribe who was so clearly the possession of a white man. Samson was about to provide them with entertainment. They all hoped he would shriek and squirm and beg in his agony.

Richard felt a roaring in his ears. He concentrated hard on stopping his body shaking. He prayed Samson would stay in his trance.

Four men stood to one side. Wearing animal-skin skirts, with their upper bodies glistening with oil, they looked fiercely warrior-like. The significance of this was not lost on Richard. They would have been chosen for their size and strength to emphasise their masculinity.

Each man carried a
panga
, honed to razor sharpness and polished so the blade shone in the firelight. Hambalaze nodded to the two men who had laid Samson down and they pegged his arms and legs so he could not move, even if he had wanted to try. They used rounded iron bars which were hammered so tightly into the ground Richard could see the veins stand out in Samson's hands. ‘Please don't wake up,' he prayed.

He forced his mind away and suddenly saw Samson, splay-legged, wrestling a fence post of thick box gum from the ground, beads of sweat on his forehead as he manhandled the post into the hole he had dug, a grin of determination on his face and an, ‘Ah ha, this post she is not so strong as she thinks,' as the heavy wooden pole slipped into the hole. The man's simple sense of humour and his habit of turning the most inanimate thing into a personality were two of his most endearing qualities. Richard had once caught him admonishing a shed door.

‘Why are you talking to the door?'

‘Because this door is very stupid, Gudo.'

‘How can a door be stupid?'

‘This door has very bad moods. She will not close when I want her to close and then, when she will close, she will not open again.'

He had hunted around for the reason and quickly found that the door sagged on its hinges.
When he pointed this out Samson replied, ‘This door she is like a woman. Just because some little part stops working she gets troublesome and refuses to work. When this thing happens with a woman we take another wife.'

‘Why don't we just fix the hinges?'

Samson looked pityingly at him. ‘Gudo, when a wife stops working she will never work properly again.'

‘Are you saying I should get another door?'

Samson beamed at him.

‘But there's nothing wrong with the door. It's the hinges which are causing the problem.'

Samson shook his head. The white man, for all his cleverness, could sometimes be very stupid. ‘If a wife cannot give a man children, then the little part which prevents this becomes the whole wife. To replace the little part does not change the whole wife because she thinks she cannot have children.'

Richard replaced the hinges and Samson developed a hate relationship with the door which he claimed was so used to opening and closing at an angle that it could not work properly now it was not sagging. Measuring the door to prove his point Richard was not surprised to see his head man was right. The door was indeed out of alignment. Try as he might—for he hated to be proved wrong—he never managed to realign the door correctly and, after six months, replaced it without
telling Samson. Samson was not fooled but the only reference he made to the new door was to say, ‘A new wife learns bad habits if she is not kept from the other wives,' which had Richard feverishly checking all the shed doors until he realised that Samson, in his roundabout way, was asking if he could have the old door.

Oh my father and good friend, how much you have taught me in your gentle way.

One of the four men stepped forward and raised his
panga
. There was no further ceremony. He brought the machete down in a sizzling arch, severing Samson's left arm just above the elbow. The
panga
went through flesh and bone with a sickening chopping sound. Thick ropes of blood poured from the stump. Samson did not move. The crowd moaned and pressed forward.

Perspiration ran down Richard's face and back. His teeth were clenched hard and his fists were bunched.

The man picked up the severed arm and held it above his head. Blood dripped and ran down his face and chest. Richard turned away and vomited. The crowd roared their approval and the man flung the severed limb to one side and rubbed Samson's blood over his chest and stomach.

‘Steady on, old Didd,' Greg said out of the side of his mouth.

The second man stepped up and raised his
panga
. Richard hunched one shoulder and wiped his mouth against it, tasting the bile, his stomach still heaving. He averted his eyes so he was watching Hambalaze but, out of the corner of his eye he saw the machete flash downwards and heard the same wet chopping sound as before. Hambalaze grinned.

He was losing it, he knew. Feverishly, he searched his mind for something to think about. He had to find something, anything. If he thought about it hard enough he could watch the pictures of it behind his eyes, use it to take up the space in his consciousness that was so filled with the barbaric scene he was being forced to watch.

Samson. There he was, grinning like a fool, sitting astride an old Harley Davidson Richard had picked up at a sale. ‘This garri-moto she is better than a horse.'

‘This thing can kill you if you're not careful.' He had bought the motorbike for himself but he could see the pleasure the idea of riding it was giving Samson.

‘How does she work?'

Richard took him through the steps. Then, before he could stop him, Samson had taken off on the motorbike. ‘Aaiiiii, Gudo, this thing is running away with me.' Samson weaved and wobbled around the garden.

Richard watched in increasing horror as
Samson roared up to the fence and went, full speed, into it. He flew upwards in a lazy arc, turned two complete somersaults and landed, flat on his back, on the other side of the fence. Richard raced up to his fallen head man, expecting at the very least a broken bone or two. Samson was still grinning. ‘Gudo, will you tell the garri-moto to stop growling.' Richard turned the bike off.