Call of the Litany Bird by Susan Gibbs

Author:Susan Gibbs [Gibbs, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781907991035
Publisher: Loose Chippings
Published: 2011-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

19 Sunray: the designated name for the Member-In-Charge

22

We had driven back from the Police Camp to Bonisa in silence. The younger children slept while David and Mkava stared out of their windows. I tried to talk with David but he just looked at me blankly and when he’d gone to bed I returned to the map on the verandah, removed the blue pin on Beale’s farm and replaced it with two red ones. It was another day before Tim came home. He said they had caught up with some of the group and engaged them in a fire fight but, if they’d inflicted injuries, there were no signs that they’d had a kill.

Over the coming weeks and months I tried to draw David out, to persuade him to talk over the incidents at the Police Camp but despite my efforts he locked the memories inside, covered them over, and never referred to the events of that day again.

It was 1981 and as his seventh birthday approached we began making preparations for him to begin school in Bulawayo. Whitestone School was re-opening following a period of closure during the early years of the bush war and it gave great pleasure to MG and GG that their own grandson would be in the first intake of pupils. It also provided boarding for boys from the outlying areas, and had been a success from the beginning. Pupils were drawn from all over Matabeleland and beyond. Seretse Khama, President of neighbouring Botswana, had caused a commotion in South Africa and amongst the tribal elders of the Bamangwato by marrying a white English woman, Ruth Williams, and, as Rhodesia remained largely unconcerned, Bulawayo seemed the obvious place to educate their sons.

Spread over the veldt along the edge of their Mzinzini Estate six miles south of Bulawayo, MG and GG built schoolrooms, dormitories and a small thatched chapel complete with custom-made Mukwa pews. They added a swimming pool, tennis courts and sports field with cricket pavilion. Substantial houses for staff nestled privately amongst the rocks of surrounding kopjes and, in order to make a professional start, they recruited a headmaster and teachers from England. And now, after several years, it was re-opening.

“You will be safe here David,” I assured him when we took him there on the first day.

“But you’re not safe,” he shot back, clinging to me weeping. “And anyway they don’t kill children.”

We were not to know then how wrong he was, and I reminded him that we were constantly vigilant, we took every precaution and couldn’t be more cautious. Mrs McIntyre, the house mistress, gently peeled his arms off me, wrapping him in her own, and held him tight. Over his shoulder she mouthed imploringly: “Go! go quickly.”

“It’s not the end of the world, it’s only a new stage in life,” Tim said as we drove away. But I was bound up in David’s anguish, aware that, since Duncan’s death and S’iponono’s forced return to her tribe in Botswana when her own beloved

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