House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe. Christina Lamb

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СКАЧАТЬ that would happen to us too. Also I dreaded the idea of being in a rugby scrum with an African. I thought they were dirty and would smell. Peterhouse School used to have black guys and when we went to play against them we used to be very reluctant to eat off their plates because they seemed greasy and we thought it was because blacks had been eating off them.

      White Rhodesia was an outdoor society where sport was very much part of life and enormous value was placed on sporting achievements. The first cricket pitch was laid by the Pioneers in Salisbury in 1891, as early a priority as building a school or hospital. At Prince Edward, schooldays started with a crosscountry run and there was no greater honour than being in the rugby first fifteen. Most of the national sports teams had ex-PE boys, and when Nigel joined the school, both Duncan Fletcher, the Zimbabwe cricket captain who went on to coach England to win the Ashes, and John Bredenkamp, the rugby captain (later better known as an arms dealer and one of Britain's richest men), were Old Hararians, as alumni were known. All other schools feared playing Prince Edward, said Nigel. Even St Georges boys spent most of their time running away from Prince Edward men.

      The few black boys who managed to get places at white schools found life almost intolerable. James Mushore was one of the first in the 1970s, a scholarship boy at St Georges who went on to co-found Zimbabwe's largest merchant bank, NMB. ‘I had a terrible time,’ he said. ‘The white boys did something called “ball brushing,” which was pulling down my pants and painting my balls with bootblack. But worst of all was “bog washing”. There was one boy in particular who would defecate in the toilet, leave his faeces there, then force my head down into the bowl and flush it over me.’

      When James won a nationwide spelling bee, his parents were not allowed in the hall to watch the competition and had been forced to sit outside in the car park waiting for him to come and tell them the result. Afterwards, he watched the mother of a white boy slap the cheek of her son, the runner-up, and loudly demand, ‘How could you let a kaffir beat you?’

      Nigel admits he would have shared that mother's feelings. I clearly remember when I was at Prince Edward that there was an article in the newspaper where some American scientist had proven that blacks were w per cent more stupid than whites and they didn't have the same brain capacity and I remember us discussing how they must have been further down the evolutionary scale. This was a very politically correct view then; I suppose it sort of justified the behaviour.

      At school they studied ‘Builders of Rhodesia’-Rhodes, Rudd, Jameson and Alfred Beit, the diamond and gold magnate-and were left under the impression that before the Pioneers arrived the country was a no man's land. Nigel had heard adults tell the story of the border between Rhodesia and Portuguese East Africa being decided by the toss of a die. Every white schoolboy had been taught the story of the last stand of Allan Wilson's patrol who died so bravely on the banks of the Shangani river as they were outnumbered by Lobengula's hordes. When they ran out of bullets they started singing ‘God Save the Queen until one by one they all fell. In fact what Nigel had learnt about as ‘a glorious sacrifice in the name of founding the country’ had no factual basis as no survivor lived to tell the tale. The deaths of the 34 men were probably caused by a reckless blunder during Jameson's barbaric war on the Ndebele in 1893.

      The war ended with Lobengula telling his people, ‘Now here are your masters coming … You will have to pull and shove wagons but under me you never did this kind of thing … the white people are coming now, I didn't want to fight with them.’ The King apparently then swallowed poison after learning that the last of his impis had surrendered, though other reports suggest that he fled across the border. Inkosi yanyamalala, the Ndebele say, ‘The King has vanished.’

      But Nigel had never heard of this, nor of Rhodes's tricking of Lobengula that had led to the creation of Rhodesia. Even when I left school all I knew was that Lobengula was fat and primitive and that's all.

       For us the history of Rhodesia started with the arrival of whites to civilize warring kaffir tribes. At school I learned all about the two world wars and the threat of Communist advancement but I never knew anything about the Shona or Ndebele people or any local language or culture. We didn't think they had a culture. I knew how to say ‘mangwanani in Shona, which means ‘good morning,’ and nothing else. I knew nothing about how blacks lived.

      Ian Smith's description in his memoirs typified the Rhodesian view. On the Pioneers’ imposition of hut tax on the natives, he wrote: ‘They [the natives] were happy to have the opportunity to work and for the first time in their lives, earn money which enabled them to join in the excitement of this new adventure of purchasing and selling-something they had never previously known.’ As for the white settlers taking the best land, he explained: ‘Because of the primitive agricultural implements used by the black people which were wooden as opposed to the iron used by the white man, they were concentrated on the light sandy soils which they found easier to work.’

      History had been rewritten to fit a white notion of Rhodesia and it did not stop with politics. Revisionism also turned to cultural artefacts. Great Zimbabwe appeared on Rhodesian maps as the Zimbabwe Ruins, the remains of a white empire in Africa built by Phoenicians, Greeks or Egyptians, because the Rhodesian government did not want to believe that black Africans could have built such a place. In the 1960s the Smith regime even commissioned a history promoting that view despite the complete lack of supporting evidence. Postcards were sold showing it as the possible palace of the Queen of Sheba, the view propounded by the first Europeans to come across it.

      Nigel's dislike of authority made it hard for him to settle at school and he always felt in the shadow of his bright elder brother Edwin. Although his sporting prowess made him popular, he had also inherited his father's eccentric sense of humour, which led him into all sorts of trouble. One of his masters, George Armstrong, who was partial to a drink, owned a lime green Vauxhall. Nigel managed to acquire a Corgi model of the exact car and one night, when they had seen the master coming back more than a little unsteady on his feet, they moved his car from the car park and replaced it with the tiny replica. As the master stood there, blinking in confusion, they fell about laughing.

      Rhodesia was an extremely rigid society and its boarding schools, based on the English model, highly disciplinarian. Nigel was soon notching up large numbers of cuts. Although he quickly learnt to wear extra underpants as protection, he never got used to the pain and would stand nervously, waiting for the crack of the Irish housemaster's stick on his backside that would leave him with such a set of red welts that he was barely able to sit down.

      His bad behaviour was always a source of tension when his parents drove up for sports days and afterwards took him for tea and scones in Meikles Hotel. There they sat in the cane chairs among the potted palms of the colonnaded coffee lounge, sipping their drinks and trying to talk over the sound of the band.

      Nigel's parents were not sure what to make of their sports-mad son. He was in almost every school team yet at the same time was steadily building up a school record for the highest number of cuts or canings, usually for being cheeky to teachers.

      But they had other things to worry about. In December 1972 the Houghs had been spending the Christmas holiday in Centenary with their cousins the Wallers, when the farm radio suddenly crackled into action. An urgent voice called for all men to get their guns and help. A nearby white farmhouse had been attacked, that of farmer Marc de Borchgrave, and his two young daughters asleep in their parents' main bedroom had narrowly escaped death. The shaken family moved to a neighbouring homestead where two nights later they were woken by rocket and grenade fire. Again they had a lucky escape, de Borchgrave and his eight-year-old daughter suffering shrapnel wounds. The next morning when an army patrol went to investigate, their vehicle hit a landmine and a white officer was killed.

      For Rhodesia's white population, the audacious raid on Altena Farm would be seen as the start of the civil war. СКАЧАТЬ