The Dust Diaries
by Owen Sheers
(Faber & Faber)
“Travel,” advises Owen Sheers in his new book, “for the movement only, not the conclusion; that way you will be part of the journey, and not a victim of it.” This strikes me as excellent advice for tourists. For anyone else — and especially for writers — it is likely to result in a prolonged and possibly lethal lethargy.
Sheers has a rollicking good story to tell. But he writes (as he says of his distant uncle’s method of constructing letters), “well-defined words placed one after the other, carefully building the sentences like a bricklayer laying his bricks tenderly in the wet cement to build himself a wall”. It makes for a suffocating read.
This book describes the author’s exploration of the life of his distant relative, Arthur Shearly Cripps — a tough, independent missionary to Mashonaland. Arriving in Africa in 1901, Cripps, an Englishman, “felt he was inhabiting someone else’s life, a Rider Haggard-type fiction”.
If it is any consolation to his resting bones, the reading of this book gave me a similar sensation. The book is overly earnest and astonishingly archaic, and the reader is plunged back into a time when women allegedly fainted at dinner from tight corsets and black children tugged at the jackets of white visitors “chanting softly, ‘Meester, meester'”.
Romping across the harsh terrain that surrounds modern-day Chivhu in Zimbabwe on foot and bicycle, Cripps was unimpressed by the conventions that he found in his adopted country. He preached, healed and lobbied tirelessly for the emancipation of the people he truly cared about — the black Rhodesians.
His life is described in a beautifully simple passage at the start of the book, running in reverse as the dying Cripps surveys his 83 years on the planet: “He listens to his breath and counts backwards … 10 years since he lost his sight … 37 years since he went to war … 38 years since he built the church … 51 years since he came to Africa … 55 years since he fell in love.”
What follows is a disappointment. Sheers has not taken the time he needs to let the country about which he is writing get under his skin. His words feel steeped in pedantry. The Zimbabwe Sheers describes is the myth-and-dust-infused land of an innocent abroad whose baggage of preconceptions I wish had been lost at the airport.
Sheers mistakenly asserts that the Mashona, who make up the majority of Zimbabwe’s population, are nomadic. In fact, the Mashona were empire-builders, farmers and sophisticated traders. Great Zimbabwe was first occupied in about 3000AD. And, during the 1400s, there is evidence that the empire of the Monomatapa had links with Arabs on the east coast ports, as well as with Indonesians who had settled in Madagascar.
Sheers claims that the Mashona have been threatened for centuries by the warrior-like Matabele impis. But by the time Cripps arrived on the scene in the early 1900s, the Matabeles had only been in the country for about 70 years, having crossed over the Limpopo from modern-day South Africa in about 1830.
If I cared more about the flesh that propelled this book into existence, the facts would matter less. More of the spontaneity and optimism that inspired its eccentric protagonist might have rescued its humid prose from itself. — Â