The Leopard Hunts in Darkness (29 page)

Nigel thought of the steel gun safe in his office at the end of the veranda. Then he remembered that it was empty. At the end of the war, one of the first acts of the new black government had
been to force the white farmers to hand in all their weapons. It didn’t really matter, he realized. He could never have reached the safe, anyway.

‘Who are they, Daddy?’ Alice asked, her voice was small with fear. Of course she knew. She was old enough to remember the war days.

‘Be brave, my darlings,’ Nigel said to all of them, and Helen drew closer to his bulk, still holding baby Stephanie in her arms.

The muzzle of a rifle was thrust into Nigel’s back. His hands were pulled behind him, and his wrists bound together. They used galvanized wire. It cut into his flesh. Then they took
Stephanie from her mother’s arms, and set her down. Her legs were unsteady from sleep and she blinked like an owlet in the flashlight beam, still sucking her thumb. They wired Helen’s
hands behind her back. She whimpered once as the wire cut in and then bit down on her lip. Two of them took the wire to the children.

‘They are babies,’ Nigel said in Sindebele. ‘Please do not tie them, please do not hurt them.’

‘Be silent, white jackal,’ one of them replied in the same language and went down on one knee behind Stephanie.

‘It’s sore, Daddy,’ she began to cry. ‘He’s hurting me. Make him stop.’

‘You must be brave,’ Nigel repeated, stupidly and inadequately, hating himself. ‘You’re a big girl now.’

The other man went to Alice.

‘I won’t cry,’ she promised. ‘I’ll be brave, Daddy.’

‘That’s my own sweet girl,’ he said, and the man tied her.

‘Walk!’ commanded the one with the flashlight, who was clearly the leader of the group, and with the barrel of his automatic rifle prodded the children up the back steps onto the
kitchen veranda.

Stephanie tripped and sprawled. With her hands tied behind her she could not regain her feet. She wriggled helplessly.

‘You bastards,’ whispered Nigel. ‘Oh, you filthy bastards.’

One of them took a handful of the child’s hair and lifted her to her feet. She stumbled, weeping hysterically, to where her sister stood against the veranda wall.

‘Don’t be a baby, Stephy,’ Alice told her. ‘It’s just a game.’ But her voice quavered with her own terror, and her eyes in the lamplight were huge and
brimming with tears.

They lined up Nigel and Helen beside the girls, and the flashlight played back and forth into each face in turn, blinding them so they could not see what was happening out in the yard.

‘Why are you doing this?’ Nigel asked. ‘The war is over – we have done you no harm.’

There was no reply at all, just a beam of brilliant light moving across their pale faces, and the sound of Stephanie weeping, a racking piteous sobbing. Then there was the murmur of other voices
in the darkness, many subdued frightened voices, women and children and men.

‘They have brought our people to watch,’ said Helen softly. ‘It’s just like the war days. It’s going to be an execution.’ She spoke so the girls could not
hear her. Nigel could think of nothing to say. He knew she was right.

‘I wish I had told you how much I love you, more often,’ he said.

‘That’s all right,’ she whispered. ‘I knew all along.’

They could make out a throng of Matabele from the farm village now, a dark mass of them beyond the glaring torch, and then the voice of the leader was raised in Sindebele.

‘These are the white jackals that feed upon the land of the Matabele. These are the white offal that are in league with the Mashona killers, the eaters-of-dirt in Harare, the sworn enemies
of the children of Lobengula—’

The orator was working himself up into the killing frenzy. Already Nigel could see that the other men guarding them were beginning to sway and hum, losing themselves in that berserker passion
where no reason exists. The Matabele had a name for it, ‘the divine madness’. When old Mzilikazi had been king, one million human beings had died from this divine madness.

‘These white lickers of Mashona faces are the traitors who delivered Tungata Zebiwe, the father of our people, to the death camps of the Mashona,’ screamed the leader.

‘I embrace you, my darlings,’ Nigel Goodwin whispered.

Helen had never heard him say anything so tender before, and it was that, not fear, that made her begin to weep. She tried to force back the tears, but they ran down and dripped from her
chin.

‘What must we do with them?’ howled the leader.

‘Kill them!’ cried one of his own men, but the massed farm Matabele were silent in the darkness.

‘What must we do with them?’ the question was repeated.

This time the leader leapt down from the veranda and shouted it into the faces of the farm people, still they were silent.

‘What must we do with them?’ Again the question, and this time the sound of blows, the rubbery slap of a rifle-barrel against black flesh.

‘What must we do with them?’ The same question for the fourth time.

‘Kill them!’ An uncertain terrified response, and more blows.

‘Kill them!’ The cry was taken up.

‘Kill them!’

‘
Abantwana kamina!
’ A woman’s voice, Nigel recognized it as that of fat old Martha, the girls’ nanny. ‘My babies,’ she cried, but then her voice was
lost in the rising chorus. ‘Kill them! Kill them!’ as the divine madness spread.

Two men, both denim-clad, stepped into the torch light. They seized Nigel by his arms and turned him to face the wall, before forcing him to his knees.

The leader handed the flashlight to one of his men and he took the pistol from the belt of his jeans, and pulled back the slide forcing a round into the chamber. The breech made a sharp snapping
rattle. He put the muzzle of the pistol to the back of Nigel’s head and fired a single shot. Nigel was thrown forward onto his face. The contents of his skull were dashed against the white
wall, and then began to run down it in a jelly-like stream to the floor.

His feet were still kicking and dancing as they forced Helen down to her knees facing the wall beside her husband’s corpse.

‘Mummy!’ screamed Alice as the next pistol bullet tore out through her mother’s forehead and her skull collapsed inwards. Alice’s pathetic little show of courage was
over. Her legs gave way, and she crumpled to the veranda floor. With a soft spluttery sound her bowels voided involuntarily.

The leader stepped up to her. Her forehead was almost touching the floor. Her gingery curls had parted, exposing the back of her neck. The leader extended his right arm full length, and touched
the muzzle of the pistol to the tender white skin at the nape. His arm jerked to the recoil and the shot was muffled to a jarring thud. Blue tendrils of gunsmoke spiralled upwards in the beam of
the flashlight.

Little Stephanie was the only one who struggled, until the leader clubbed her with the barrel of the pistol. Even then she wriggled and kicked, lying on the veranda floor in the spreading puddle
of her sister’s blood. The leader placed his foot between her shoulder blades to hold her still for the shot. The bullet came out through Stephanie’s temple just in front of her right
ear, and it gouged a hole not much larger than a thimble in the concrete of the veranda floor. The hole filled swiftly with the child’s blood.

The leader stooped and dipped his forefinger into the cup of dark blood, and with it wrote on the white veranda wall in large erratic letters, ‘TUNGATA ZEBIWE LIVES.’

Then he jumped down off the veranda and, like a leopard, padded silently away into the night. His men followed him in Indian file at an easy swinging trot.

‘I
give you my solemn promise,’ said the prime minister, ‘these so-called dissidents will be destroyed, completely
destroyed.’

His eyes behind the lenses of his spectacles had a steely, blind look. The poor quality of the television projection added haloes of ghost silhouettes to his head, but did not diminish his anger
that seemed to spill over from the set and flood the living-room of King’s Lynn.

‘I’ve never seen him like that,’ said Craig.

‘He’s usually such a cold fish,’ Sally-Anne agreed.

‘I have ordered the army and the police force to move in to hunt down and apprehend the perpetrators of this terrible outrage. We will find them, and their supporters, and they will feel
the full force of the people’s anger. We will not endure these dissidents.’

‘Good for him,’ Sally-Anne nodded. ‘I can’t say I’ve ever liked him very much – until now.’

‘Darling, don’t be too happy about it,’ Craig cautioned her. ‘Remember this is Africa, not America or Britain. This land has a different temper. Words have a different
meaning here – words like “apprehend” and “hunt down”.’

‘Craig, I know that your sympathy is always with the Matabele, but this time surely—’

‘All right,’ he held up one hand in agreement, ‘I admit it. The Matabele are special, my family has always lived with them, we’ve beaten and exploited them, we’ve
fought them and slaughtered them – and been slaughtered by them in return. Yet, also, we have cherished and honoured them and come to know them and, yes, to love them. I don’t know the
Mashona. They are secretive and cold, clever and tricky. I can’t speak their language, and I don’t trust them. That’s why I choose to live in Matabeleland.’

‘You are saying the Matebele are saints – that they are incapable of committing an atrocity like this?’ She was getting irritable with him now, her tone sharpening, and he was
quick to placate her.

‘Good God, no! They are as cruel as any other tribe in Africa, and a hell of a lot more warlike than most. In the old days when they raided a foreign tribe, they used to toss the infants
in the air and catch them on the points of their assegais, and throw the old women in the watch-fires and laugh to see them burn. Cruelty has a different value in Africa. If you live here you have
to understand that from the beginning.’

He paused and smiled. ‘Once I was discussing political philosophy with a Matabele, an ex-guerrilla, and I explained the concept of democracy. His reply was, “That might work in your
country, but it doesn’t work here. It doesn’t work here.” Don’t you see? That’s the crux. Africa makes and keeps her own rules, and I lay you a million dollars to a
pinch of elephant dung that we’re going to see a few pretty things in the weeks ahead that you wouldn’t see in Pennsylvania or Dorset! When Mugabe says “destroy”, he
doesn’t mean “take into custody and process under the laws of evidence”. He’s an African and he means precisely that – destroy!’

That was on the Wednesday, and when Friday came round it was market day at King’s Lynn, the day to go into Bulawayo for shopping and socializing. Craig and Sally-Anne left early on that
Friday morning. The new five-ton truck followed them, filled with Matabele from the ranch, taking advantage of the free ride into town for the day. They were dressed in their best, and singing with
excitement.

Craig and Sally-Anne came up against the road-block just before they reached the crossroads at Thabas Indunas. The traffic was backed up for a hundred yards, and Craig could see that most of the
vehicles were being turned back.

‘Hold on!’ he told Sally-Anne, left her in the Land-Rover and jogged up to the head of the line of parked vehicles.

The road-block was not a casual temporary affair. There were heavy machine-guns in sandbagged emplacements on both sides of the highway, and light machine-guns set back in depth beyond it to
cover a breakthrough by a speeding vehicle.

The actual barricade was of drums filled with concrete and spiked metal plates to puncture pneumatic tyres, and the guards were from the Third Brigade in their distinctive burgundy berets and
silver cap-badges. Their striped camouflage battle-jackets gave them the tigerish air of jungle cats.

‘What is happening, Sergeant?’ Craig asked one of them.

‘The road is closed, mambo,’ the man told him politely. ‘Only military permit-holders allowed to pass.’

‘I have to get into town.’

‘Not today,’ the man shook his head. ‘Bulawayo is not a good place to be today.’

As if to confirm this, there was a faint popping sound from the direction of the town. It sounded like green twigs in a fire, and the hair on Craig’s forearms lifted instinctively. He knew
that sound so well, and it brought nightmarish memories from the war days crowding back. It was the sound of distant automatic rifle-fire.

‘Go back home, mambo,’ said the sergeant in a kindly tone. ‘This is not your
indaba
any more.’

Suddenly Craig was very anxious to get the truckload of his people safely back to King’s Lynn.

He ran back to the Land-Rover, and swung it out of the line of parked vehicles in a hard 180-degree turn.

‘What is it, Craig?’

‘I think it has started,’ he told her grimly, and thrust the accelerator flat to the floorboards.

They met the King’s Lynn truck barrelling merrily along towards them, the women singing and clapping, their dresses fluttering brightly in the wind. Craig flagged them down, and jumped up
onto the running-board. Shadrach, in the cast-off grey suit that Craig had given him, was sitting up in his place of honour beside the driver.

‘Turn around,’ Craig ordered. ‘Go back to Kingi Lingi. There is big trouble. Nobody must leave Kingi Lingi until it is over.’

‘Is it the Mashona soldiers?’

‘Yes,’ Craig told him. ‘The Third Brigade.’

‘Jackals and sons of dung-eating jackals,’ said Shadrach, and spat out of the open window.

‘T
o say that thousands of innocent persons have been killed by the state security forces is a nonsense—’ The Zimbabwean minister
of justice looked like a successful stockbroker in his dark suit and white shirt. He smiled blandly out of the television screen, his face shining with a light sheen of sweat from the brute arc
lamps which only enhanced the coaly blackness of his skin. ‘One or two civilians have been killed in the crossfire between the security forces and the outlaw Matebele dissidents – but
thousands! Ha, ha, ha!’ he chuckled jovially. ‘If thousands have been killed, then I wish somebody would show me the bodies – I know nothing about them.’