Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier by Alexandra Fuller Read Free Book Online

than 500 white civilians were killed while at least 7,000 black civilians and 10,000 guerrillas were killed. Over 1,000 members of the Security Forces were killed (under half of them white). Black civilian deaths were certainly underestimated and high casualties inflicted on black Rhodesian refugees in external raids (in Mozambique and Zambia) were ignored altogether. The African population bore the brunt of the war, but the European minority shed proportionately more blood. All came out of the war scathed in some way.
    What is harder to document are the nonfatal casualties of the war. The victims of suicide (sewerage pipe, it was jokingly called), the alcoholics, the drug addicts, the homeless, the psychologically damaged, the people who (knowing nothing else but war) became mercenaries in other African wars (and ended their lives in South Africa, Mozambique, Angola, Somalia, or Namibia). The horror of the war remained largely unspoken and unacknowledged in the celebration of the freedom fighters’ victory. The whites either left the country, and sometimes the continent, or melted back into everyday life and tried to adjust to majority rule. The blacks found that independence had brought them little of the freedom and power they had been promised.
    My family left Zimbabwe in 1982, when I was thirteen, a little over two years after the end of the war. We headed first for Malawi and then, when Dad’s contract on a tobacco plantation was up in that country, to Zambia. As part of the physical act of forgetting those years and the Rhodesian land for which my mother and father had fought so inadequately, and so pointlessly, we burned everything that might implicate us in that struggle.
    A bonfire at the top of that farm near Umtali turned into ashes the T-shirts that declared “Rhodesia Is Super, Especially Umtali,” “Come to Umtali and Get Bombed,” and “Burma Valley Operation Thrasher.” We burned our Wrex Tarr Zonke Chilapalapa record (featuring “A Terrorist’s Lament” and “Picannini Red Riding Hood”) and our Clem Thollet “We Are All Rhodesians” tape, and we watched our propaganda magazines (distributed by the Rhodesian Ministry of Information) spiral into smoke. Then we packed up the dogs and cats and as many possessions as would fit in the back of a Land Rover and we headed north into African countries that had been independent for nearly twenty years.
     
     
     
    WHEN DAD CAME OUT of the shower, he said, “Water’s nice and cold. Why don’t you hop in?”
    “I’m thinking.”
    “Do you want a piece of advice from your old father?”
    “Not really.”
    “Don’t look back so much or you’ll get wiped out on the tree in front of you.”

Curiosity and Cats

    Dad
    BY THAT AFTERNOON, the rain had returned. And by late evening, when we sloshed down to the end of the farm to see what remained of its west bank, the river had abandoned all pretense of making its way toward Mozambique in a stately manner and had gathered up its skirts and was racing with unseemly haste, tumbling great chunks of Fuller real estate with it in the process. The island in front of the watchman’s hut was washed away from its foundations and could be seen sailing hurriedly down the Pepani.
    Two enterprising young crocodiles, flushed out of the roiling river, worked their way through the bananas to the breeding pond at the top of the farm and inhaled hundreds of fish before they were discovered by Mum.
    “Now that,” she said as the pond was drained, “I really cannot allow.”
    The crocodiles sank guiltily into the shrinking muddy puddle.
    But Mum hardened her jaw. “Nope,” she said, “no clemency.”
    Erasmus, the man whose job it was to take care of the breeders, and who had been a poacher before he found employment with Mum and Dad, told Mum, “I have a good trick for killing crocodiles. It is only that I need a torch and a gun.”
    “For heaven’s sake,” said Mum, sniffing. “Just bonk the little blighters