Monkeys in my Garden

Valerie Pixley

Description

It's hard to believe Mozambique is a country which rarely has stories written about it, when truly extraordinary things happen to the people who live there. Valerie Pixley is one of these people, and she believes that the life experiences she went through were too incredible to keep to herself. Monkeys in My Gardenis a true-life adventure story of Valerie and her husband O'D's life in the Nhamacoa Forest. From an idyllic life in the Algarve that was destroyed by an enormous fire, to a ruin of a house in Mozambique with grass for a roof and no doors or glass in the windows, this is a wild mix of hilarious and hair-raising experiences that involved witchcraft, corruption and even a life-saving miracle. Colourful characters wander in and out of Valerie's story, including a dangerous spitting cobra and seven armed bandits who attacked her home and stole many of her possessions, including the manuscript for this book - which would have been lost had she not already emailed a copy to her brother inLondon.Monkeys in My Gardenprovides a unique insight into life in Mozambique. Valerie's remarkable experiences reflect the situations that many people living in Mozambique and Southern Africa have often found themselves in.

Sujets

• Mozambique

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 13 mars 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783068715
• Langue: English

Extrait

MONKEYS IN MY GARDEN
Unbelievable but true stories of my life in Mozambique
Valerie Pixley
Copyright © 2013 Valerie Pixley
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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ISBN 9781783068715
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE: THE NIGHT THE BANDITS CAME
CHAPTER ONE: HOW IT ALL BEGAN
CHAPTER TWO: AFRICA!
CHAPTER THREE: AN ENGLISH JAILBIRD
CHAPTER FOUR: CHUCK AND EILEEN, AND MITZI, OF COURSE.
CHAPTER FIVE: BIASSE
CHAPTER SIX: A GHASTLY AND A GHOSTLY EXPERIENCE
CHAPTER SEVEN: AT HOME IN THE NHAMACOA
CHAPTER EIGHT: THE BEGINNING OF THE INVASION OF THE NHAMACOA
CHAPTER NINE: CAETANO AND MR. GONCALVES THE WITCH DOCTOR
CHAPTER TEN: ANIMAL FARM!
CHAPTER ELEVEN: KANDONGAS ACROSS THE BORDER
CHAPTER TWELVE: BABES IN THE WOODS
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: NORA SWETE AND THE NIPPA DEMON
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: THE DROUGHT BREAKS
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: A SITTING TENANT CALLED UWE
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: THE RETURN OF NORA SWETE
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: BLACK KITTY
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: MR. YING, MR. CHANG AND MR. DELIGONG
CHAPTER NINETEEN: ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MATAQUENHA AND OTHER WILD ANIMALS
CHAPTER TWENTY: A DREAM IN THE NIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE: THE WORLD’S BIGGEST PARTY
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO: BRENDA, THE MONKEY LADY
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE: MURDER IN THE NHAMACOA FOREST
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR: BETTER EYESIGHT WITHOUT GLASSES
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE: THE TRIAL OF JAN WESTH
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX: THE FUNERAL
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN: THE PISTACHIO GREEN JUDGE
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT: BIASSE TAKES OFF HIS APRON
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE: MOZAMBIQUE UNMASKED
CHAPTER THIRTY: GOD’S RADIO STATION
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE: THE NHAMACOA FILM CLUB
EPILOGUE: THE NIGHT THE BANDITS CAME
PROLOGUE
THE NIGHT THE BANDITS CAME
Saturday, 4 th December, 2010
We were happy that day, I remember. It was a day of sunshine, of laughter, and perfect for filming. The sky was a pure, pure blue and light danced and sparkled all over the leaves of the Nhamacoa forest around us.
I remember the simple pleasure on Douglas´ face when he spotted the female bushbuck in the trees right in front of our house and came to call us. “Quick, quick, get the camera before she goes back into the forest!” I remember our laughter while we were filming the little Mupupu tree and the hundreds of insects feeding on its beautiful mauve-pink flowers rained their water down all over us. “Don´t let them pee on O’D’s camera, Lee,” I had told him. “It´s the only one we´ve got!”
How innocent and carefree life had seemed … and how naive we had been. Completely unaware of the danger that was on its way to our secluded little forest … completely unaware that in a few short hours our lives were going to be turned upside down.
Actually, Lee had sensed the danger but had been side-tracked by something very strange and almost supernatural that had happened to him.
One evening, earlier in the week, he had been overcome with a premonition that something terrible was about to happen. The premonition had been so dark, so powerful that he had even phoned his mother in Zimbabwe to tell her about it.
Then, a few evenings later, when he had been opening the gate to his rented cottage in Chimoio, he had felt something moving under his right foot, something wriggling and struggling under his shoe. He had looked down and had got the shock of his life. He had been standing on the head of a black mamba!
Leaping high up in the air with terror, he had made a wild dash for his cottage and had locked himself in. Peering through the window he had seen the snake coming after him, as if hunting him down, but then his landlord´s cat had appeared on the scene and launching a series of attacks, had sent the snake slithering off.
“I don´t think that snake could have been a black mamba, Lee,” O´D had told him.
“It was a black mamba,” Lee had insisted stubbornly. “I know what a black mamba looks like. I saw one in the Harare Snake Park.”
Overwhelmed by his narrow escape from death and convinced that the snake, a symbol of the devil, had been sent to take him out, Lee had relaxed, thinking that the danger was all over. But he had been wrong.
His premonition hadn´t been about the snake. It had been about a dark blue Toyota Mark II that was about to set off from Chimoio that very afternoon for the drive down to our forest and whose occupants were to prove just as deadly as a poisonous snake.
It was late afternoon when Lee and I finished editing the last of O’D’s films about the little genet he had raised. We were working at the table in the sitting room and the chairs were hard.
“We need a break,” I said, standing up and stretching my stiff back. “What about a Coke, Lee?”
“Thanks, Val,” he said. His eyes were bloodshot from the long hours we had spent working at his computer. “But I think I´ll go for a walk first.”
We didn’t know that the dark blue Toyota had been cruising around the area asking questions about us and that while Lee was walking around under the trees, it was pulling up next to the ramshackle little bancas at the entrance to our forest.
A big man climbed out of the Toyota. “I´m a friend of the foreigner who lives here,” he told the staring locals. “How do I get to his house?”
After he and his companions had walked off along the path to our shop, the locals examined the shiny Toyota with wonder. Cars like this never drove around rural areas.
“It´s a Mercedes,” they decided. “It´s foreign. Look at the number plate. It´s not Mozambican. AAM 201 MC. It must be from Alemanha, Germany.”
In the shop, Douglas was busy setting up the television, DVD player and speakers. Saturday nights were the nights we showed free films to the local people and tonight he had chosen ´Special Forces U.S.A.´ It was an exciting film, full of action. Just the kind of film the locals enjoyed.
He didn´t know that the big man who walked up the steps into the shop had been asking questions about him and had come to look him over.
“Four GTs,” the big man ordered, handing over a 200 meticais note, “and a Fanta.”
Everyone stared while the big man lit a cigarette and then drank some Fanta. No one in the rural areas bought four cigarettes and a drink with a 200 meticais note!
The staring made the big man uneasy. Halfway through the Fanta, he put the bottle down on the counter and abruptly left the shop. Douglas and the locals stared after his retreating back. No one bought a drink and then left half of it to go to waste!
When dusk fell, I plugged in a lamp and put it close to Lee´s computer so that he could see his keyboard. Douglas had turned on the generator to show the film so we had electricity.
“Look at this, Val,” Lee said, “look at what I´ve done to Amelia in Images of How We Live.”
He had speeded up the film of Amelia ironing with the charcoal iron and now she ironed away furiously, flipping O´D´s socks down one by one onto the ironing table in what looked like a very petulant manner. At the end, there was a shot of me holding up the ironing blanket which was full of iron-shaped burn holes.
I burst out laughing. “Oh, I like that. Let´s see it again, Lee.”
Suddenly, the cats began to growl. They had been lying all over the chairs, the sofa and the carpet but now they ran out of the room in a small bunched herd, growling and milling around uneasily in the corridor.
“That´s strange,” I said. I stood up and walked to the door. There was nothing to see and nothing to hear. “It must have been the male buck,” I told Lee. “They always growl when they hear it bark. For some reason they don´t like the sound.”
We didn´t know that while we had been bending over the computer laughing at Amelia, men had crept silently up the back stairs and had been watching us through the window. Watching and making a note of Lee´s computer, O´D´s camera, the solar inverter and the batteries.
We went to bed around about half past ten. As I drifted off to sleep, Douglas turned off the generator and I heard the large crowd of filmgoers making their way down the path through the forest to their huts. They were talking and laughing at the top of their voices … loud … always so loud. My eyelids closed and I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep … until about three o´clock in the morning …
BANG!
O´D and I started awake.
“What the …” he said.
The loud bang was followed by smashing, crashing, cracking sounds as our back door shattered.
O´D jumped out of bed, and grabbing his torch, ran to the door. He opened it and stepped into the corridor. The light of his torch picked out a horrifying sight and his heart quailed.
Men, armed men, were storming down the corridor towards him!
Running back into our bedroom, he slammed the door shut and locked it.
“Four of them,” he told me grimly. “Armed with an AK-47, a pistol and machetes! Bandits!”
Aah! Icy dark terror flooded through every fibre of my being and my heart speeded up wildly, thumping erratically and painfully in my chest. Bandits! Everyone´s worst nightmare in Mozambique! They were going to kill us! We were going to die!
I scrambled out of bed and fumbled around in the dark for my pepper spray I had so careless