White Man Crawling

Aunty Aunty

53 Aunty Aunty Doctor Doctor Lisbet Schwartzenshaeger could not believe her good luck. Just when she thought she’d exhausted everything nasty to write about settler Zimbabweans, she had discovered, in a dusty corner of the Bulawayo archives, in quite the wrong place, tucked away behind a load of Flora Zambesiaca junk, the meticulously kept records of one William Fitzpackage, DC Gwanda District. These records covered the years 1950 to 1962, and they contained enough material for yet another PhD. Her Canadian rival and fellow researcher, world famous authority on Southern Africa, co-author of the ground-breaking ZIPRA: Sex and Death in the Zimbabwean Bush War, Doctor Bugle Negrapompie, would be jealous. Ausgezeichnet! Lisbet would show that Yankee (sic) bitch. They competed for the approval of their mentor, Professor Emeritus Plautus Strange, who, in turn, competed for the approval of none other than Eric Hobsbawm, that great communist historian, untroubled by Stalin and, in more sentimental moments, happy to quote Brecht: We, who wanted to prepare the ground for kindness Could not be kind ourselves. Lisbet’s initial PhD thesis: The Dog Motif in Racist Rhodesia had been published by Oxford University Press, and had won her many accolades; her second: White Kaffirs: Investigations into the Racist Sub-culture of Pre and Post Independent Zimbabwe had been published by Cambridge University Press and had placed her among the world’s historiographers to be reckoned with. Or, as she preferred to put it, ‘with whom to be reckoned’. This new study would probably push even her gaseous mentor, Plautus Strange, aside. We are in the year 2005. The last remnants of Zimbabwe’s white community (apart from the handful of exceedingly rich wheeler dealers who have sold their souls to ZANU-PF) are well and truly down. Lisbet, however, is not prepared to stop kicking. The ones she kicks hardest are the really quite decent - even by Austrian and Canadian standards: teachers, nurses, social workers, receptionists, 54 housewives, househusbands, researchers, journalists, general practitioners, poets, and – the majority – old-age pensioners. It fills Lisbet with disgust and resentment to find that most white citizens of Zimbabwe are not enormously wealthy, enormously cruel, and enormously insensitive; most of them are not tobacco barons, mining magnates, big game hunters; most of them (to misquote the Bard) are, unaccommodated, no more than poor, bare, forked creatures. Of these rassistin, positively the worst are the ones who have been personally kind to Lisbet herself: those who have (r)assisted her with a place to stay, a bite to eat, a story to tell against themselves. For a shag on a pile of trashy papers written by trashy Rhodesians like D. K. Shone, R. B. Drummond, J. C. Palgrave, E. V. Cook, D. G. Broadley, E. C. G. Pinhey, J. W. Sweeney, Oliver Ransford, Peter Ginn… she got glimpses of their scattered names while being pounded, from above, from below, from the side… thwap thwep thwip thwop thwup… a monologue was beyond her vagina but it could, since the archivist liked it dry, reproduce the five vowels… for a shag and a hundred dollars U.S. in small bills, she was allowed to take the DCs records away with her. ‘Away’ was the home of Kevon and Traycey Kitchen and three children, who insisted on calling Lisbet, much to her private alarm, Aunty Aunty (Are they mocking me?). Before the local governor and his team of youthful war veterans and middle-aged youths had driven Kevon off his farm, which he had purchased after Independence, he had been Bulawayo’s sole supplier of fresh garlic, jalapeno peppers, and globe artichokes. Under the auspices of the governor, the farm became, before dereliction set in – less than a year – a major supplier of firewood and bush meat. Now, since he was capable of doing domestic repairs and minor renovations, Kevon made a living as a handyman. In this he was ably supported by his handywoman wife, Traycey, and his handychildren children, ‘chuldrin’. Lisbet first encountered Kevon while she was researching White Kaffirs. She wanted to interview him about land ownership and other sensitive Zimbabwean issues. He invited her around for dinner, poured out his heart (and all his booze) to the sympathetic – she called it Einfühlung - and very pretty Austrian lady, invited her to stay, and 55 stay she did. She was tired of stale smelling two-star hotels; besides, think of the money she...