Hamba Gashle

Ian Hassall

Description

Hamba Gashle is the inside story of white society in colonial Southern Africa during the 1950s and 1960s. Ian Hassalls edgy memoir provides a vivid and disturbing depiction of childhood and family life against a background of racial exploitation, political change and the disintegration of his white community. Written as a diary from childhood through to early adulthood, the deceptively simple style provides a sense of immediacy, building a vivid picture through apparently unconnected events. The child narrator arrives in Northern Rhodesia from England aged four. Soon after, his parents divorce and he is fostered for several years. His mother marries an anti British Afrikaaner who is a strong influence on the boy. As a teenager he becomes delinquent and fails at school. He moves with his fathers family to Rhodesia as it is approaching UDI. The narrator has developed anti-racist views and joins the protest movement at university in South Africa. Finally he returns to London in 1970, alone, a stranger. Ian Hassall produces a rich and informative picture of this period, honest, critical and unflattering, attacking its racism. The work is carefully researched so that key historical events are portrayed accurately and intimately. The youthful narrators preoccupations, adventures, sexual encounters and daydreams contrast with more sober political observations, sometimes hilariously. This is also a study of childhood, and a celebration of youth which transcends time or location.Hamba Gashle means both chameleon and take it easy, because of the animals leisurely pace. The books title reflects the authors admiration for this wonderful creature and its attributes, some of which he required to survive his upbringing.

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 24 avril 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456612689
• Langue: English

Extrait

Hamba Gashle
 
by
Ian Hassall


Copyright 2012 Ian Hassall,
All rights reserved.
 
 
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
 
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-1268-9
 
 
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Hamba Gashle
Mufulira December 1957
 
Everyone knows that a three year old can’t write a diary so I’m doing it now for the time when I was small.
England January 1951
 
Granddad pushes me to the market in my wheelchair. I’m eating an iced bun. Mummy’s with us for a while. A veil hangs from her hat. A woman at an upstairs window bangs on the pane with one finger, “Oi!” Mummy shouts something back. At the market they’re unloading pigs from a lorry. One squeals and runs back up the ramp, he wants to go home. Two men block him.
Anne holds my face with both hands and kisses my nose. “Little brother.” Her breathing smells of sweets. She squeezes my lips into a bow. “Say book.” “Bfwook.” She watches carefully. “Say it again.”
At a lady’s house we watch Renfrew and Kelly, the Mounties on her new television. Kelly is standing on a bridge and has to shoot Renfrew in the stream below. “But Mummy, Renfrew is Kelly’s friend!” “Kelly has to,” says Mummy.
One bright winter morning a parcel arrives from Auntie Beth in Africa. She’s Daddy’s sister. It’s full of shiny blue slabs of Cadbury’s chocolate, lined up sideways. So many! You can riffle them and they click. Africa is hot and sunny, with lots of good thing to eat.
It’s Christmas Eve. Anne and I are asleep in Nanna and Granddad’s house in Bethnal Green. In the middle of the night I wake, and there standing in the doorway is Father Christmas! He’s holding a lantern that lights his face, and his eyes are jolly and sad, like Granddad’s. Anne’s staring too. He smiles, then turns and goes downstairs.
On a train, a funny man sits down. Anne says, “Mummy, why’s that man got a big black face?” Mummy goes red and says, “Shush!” and to the man, “Sorry!” He smiles and his teeth are all white.
We’re going to live in Africa. That’s where the Aunts are. Mummy gets us a book, Tintin in the Congo. African children have black skin, fuzzy black hair, big pink lips and don’t wear shirts.
I pick up a woodslice, it waves its feelers at me and curls into a ball. Daddy says, “Put that down and wash your hands, you’ll get tetanus.” Mummy says, “No he won’t!”
Anne’s being naughty. Daddy tells her off. Nanna says, “Leter be, she ain’t urtin no one.” So he slaps Anne hard and she screams. Nanna shouts, “I spose you’rappy now! Lookow ee paider!”
Granddad shows us the sights of London before we leave. The pigeons at Trafalgar Square sit on your head. You can feel their feet gripping, tingles down my spine. Then at the Tower of London the beefeater says he’ll lock me in and I’m scared, but everyone’s laughing.
Sailing April 1951
At the docks the ship above us is big, big like a building. Nanna is crying. “I’ll never see my daughter again, or my grand children, and it’s your fault! I wish she’d never met you!” Daddy says nothing and Granddad looks away.
On the Windsor Castle, there’s more food than you can eat, fruit we’ve never seen before. The waiter called Mike teases us, custard and jelly and a punch in your belly. He’s a Cockney like Mummy, and they’re always joking together. Daddy doesn’t talk to him much.
Mummy looks different, with trousers like a man, and when you look up, her legs and tummy look big. “Slacks,” she says, “it’s the new thing.” Daddy and Anne are seasick for a week but Mummy and I are fine. We have a porthole. “Close it,” Ann says, “if the water comes in the boat will sink.”
Las Palmas, hot sun. The taxi drives fast along the dockside, near the sharp edge. It might go over on to the boats below. It would smash right through them and then we’d be under water. Tonight’s warm, with buzzing insects. The air feels soft and smells of fruit. Mummy’s putting on perfume and saying they’ll be just outside having a drink. Through the upstairs window we can see red, white and green lights in the trees. Below are tables with candles. Cats sit around on the dusty ground. I’ve got a red racing car nearly as big as me, soft and bendy, but it pops back again. Anne has a huge pink doll made of the same stuff. “Plastic,” says Daddy.
The ship has stopped in the middle of the sea. The day is dark and grey, the water like iron, full of strong black fish swirling around. Two men throw orange peel into buckets, then lower them. The fish pile in. The men pull them up and empty them on to the deck. People stand in a circle, watching. The fish flap hard, making a drumming sound, then lie still, gasping, then flap again even harder, then stop, then flap again, then stop altogether. Their eyes stare up and go dull. After a while the men throw them back into the sea.
Our next stop is St Helena. It’s sunny and warm. To visit the island you have to go by small boat. As you step off the ship’s ladder there’s a big gap of deep, deep blue water which seems very thin. If I fall into this I’ll go down and down, to the bottom. A sailor helps me on to the boat. That night I dream I’m swimming deep in the soft warm water with the fish, and can breathe.
Across the equator in the southern seas the air is hot and mixes with the thin green water. Flying fish move between the two.
Africa April 1951
The train to Northern Rhodesia is brown and cream and we have our own sleeping compartment, with a washbasin. The train pulls in to a station. There’s no platform, just yellowy sand far below. I get a shock, strange dark creatures running around shouting, smoking, all dressed in brown rags. “African children, picaninnies,” Daddy says, but not like the children in Tintin. Now they’re jumping up and down waving to us. “Throw them some of your liquorice allsorts.” No, my sweets, but I throw a handful into the dust. The children dive on them, fighting and grabbing. But they mustn’t eat them off the ground! “It’s all right, they’re used to it,” says Daddy.
At night the seats turn into beds. The train goes tiggedy tig as we fall asleep and it feels good and safe. Next morning we wake with the sun big and yellow, level with the ground, shining on off, through the trees. It’s cold. Some animals are standing in an open patch. “Deer,” says Mummy from above. “Buck,” says Daddy. There’s a knock on the door and the train man comes in. “Mora/morning,” he says, “Coffee.” He talks funny. It’s sweet like caramel.
Later it gets hot but the air feels soft and fresh. I have a warm easy feeling all down my body. You can hear people talking and laughing along the corridor, bright and clear. I go through the carriage making friends. If you lean out of the window you can see the engine when the track curves, and hear it chuffing, but you get soot in your eyes. The trees have flat tops and the ground is red. Slowly, as the sun sets we cross the Victoria Falls, you can hear its roar. “The black North,” says a man to Daddy.
Northern Rhodesia April 1951
It’s late afternoon at the Aunts’ house in Ndola. Auntie Mary rings a little bell and a black man, Thompson, comes from the kitchen with drinks. He’s dressed in a white uniform with a red fez like the waiters on the train and he smiles a lot. Auntie Beth calls him the houseboy. The room is dark with white walls and wooden carvings. I’m scared of a face with real teeth. “It’s a mask from the Belgian Congo,” says Auntie Mary. That’s Tintin’s Congo in the middle of Africa, only ten miles away.
Daddy’s working for Costains in Chingola, building houses and roads. He says, “We’re carving a town right out of the bush.” We live in a rondavel, the toilet is outside down a path. It has grass walls and is called the PK. Your poo drops far down and bugs eat it. For toilet roll we use newspaper cut into squares. We have hurricane lamps and candles. Everything smells of paraffin and tar and petrol.
I watch the bush being cleared. Some anthills are twice as big as our rondavel. They’re hard red mud and need to be soaked before the bulldozers can break them down. You have to put in a hosepipe for more than a week because there are also underground tunnels. Yesterday I watched one being filled. Suddenly the African workers shouted “Nyoka!” A big black snake came out, and went straight at them, head steady, body zigzagging. They yelled and scattered and it disappeared into the bush, its tail flicking. “Black mamba,” said the boss man. Then they bulldozed the anthill and there were all sorts of things like spiders and snake eggs and toads.
Daddy drives a Ford van with a long gear lever that wobbles in time to the engine. It smells of old leather. His boss is called Len Brand and he visits quite often in the evening. This morning he came for tea with us while Daddy was at work, and helped Mummy fix a shelf. We’re moving to Mufulira. Daddy will work on the mine. Everybody says Muoff but Daddy says Muff like someone muffled up.
Mufulira October 1951
We’re in a camp of rondavels, and the toilets and showers are in the latrine block. There’s real toilet paper and electricity. In the evening hundreds of insects fly around the light at the corner. Two cats sit below steadily crunching their way through those that fall. Daddy stands nearby smoking, and talking to the other men, I sneak off with some children to play in the dark. Then we go to dinner in the mine mess over the road. In there it’s bright and you can eat all you want. Natives are human beens but they’re not europeens. We’re europeens but not human beens or something like that. Everyone talks about the colour bar. The bar at the club is brown wood, but it’s not that.
Ndola October 1951
Mummy and Daddy say there isn’t enough room for Anne and me