The Eye Of The Leopard Read online

  'It wasn't important until now,' Motombwane replies. 'Besides, I'm a cautious man. I'm an African. I know what can happen if I'm too generous with my knowledge, if I forget that I'm an African.'

  'If Eisenhower Mudenda knew about what you're telling me,' Olofson asks, 'what would happen then?'

  'I would probably die,' says Motombwane. 'I would be poisoned, the sorcery would reach me.'

  'There isn't any sorcery,' Olofson says.

  'I'm an African,' replies Motombwane.

  Again they fall silent as Luka passes by.

  'To fall silent is to talk to Luka,' Motombwane says. 'Twice he has passed by and both times we were silent. So he knows we're talking about something he's not supposed to hear.'

  'Are you afraid?' Olofson asks.

  'Right now it's smart to be afraid,' says Motombwane.

  'What about the future?' Olofson asks. 'My close friends have been slaughtered. Next time a finger in the darkness could point at my house. You're an African, you're a radical. Even though I don't believe you could chop people's heads off, you're still a part of the opposition that exists in this country. What do you hope will happen?'

  'Once more you're wrong,' says Motombwane. 'Once more you draw the wrong conclusion, a white's conclusion. In a certain situation I could easily raise a panga and let it fall over a white man's head.'

  'Even over my head?'

  'Maybe that's where the boundary lies,' Motombwane replies softly. 'I think I would ask a good friend to chop off your head instead of doing it myself.'

  'Only in Africa is this possible,' Olofson says. 'Two friends sit drinking tea or coffee together and discussing the possibility that in a certain situation one might chop off the other's head.'

  'That's the way the world is,' Motombwane says. 'The contradictions are greater than ever. The new empire builders are the international arms dealers who fly between wars offering their weapons for sale. The colonisation of the poor peoples by superior powers is just as great today as any time before. Billions in so-called aid flows from the rich countries, but for every pound that comes in, two pounds wander back out. We're living in the midst of a catastrophe, a world that is burning with thousanddegree flames. Friendships can still form in our time. But often we don't see that the common ground we stand on is already undermined. We are friends but we both have a panga hidden behind our backs.'

  'Take it a step further,' Olofson says. 'You hope for something, you dream about something. Your dream might be my nightmare, if I understand you correctly?'

  Peter Motombwane nods.

  'You're my friend,' he says, 'at least for the time being. But of course I wish all the whites were out of this country. I'm not a racist, I'm not talking about skin colour. I view violence as necessary; faced with the prolongation of my people's pain there is no other way out. African revolutions are most often appalling bloodbaths; the political struggle is always darkened by our past and our traditions. Possibly, if our despair is great enough, we can unite against a common foe. But then we point our weapons at our brothers by our side, if they are from a different tribe. Africa is a seriously wounded animal; in the bodies of us all hang spears that were cast by our own brothers. And yet I have to believe in a future, another time, an Africa that is not ruled by tyrants who imitate the European men of violence who have always been there. My anxiety and my dream coincide with the anxiety that you are noticing right now in this country. You have to understand that this anxiety is ultimately the expression of a dream. But how does one re-establish a dream that has been beaten out of people by the secret police? By leaders who amass fortunes by stealing vaccines that are supposed to protect our children against the most common diseases?'

  'Give me a word of advice,' Olofson says. 'I'm not sure I'll follow it, but I'd still like to hear what you have to say.'

  Motombwane looks out across the yard. 'Leave,' he says. 'Leave before it's too late. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe it will be many years before the sun goes down for mzunguz of various skin colours on this continent. But if you're still here by then it will be too late.'

  Olofson follows him to his car.

  'The bloody details,' he says.

  'I've already got those,' Motombwane replies. 'I can imagine.'

  'Come back,' Olofson says.

  'If I didn't come, people on your farm would start to wonder,' says Motombwane. 'I don't want people to wonder for nothing. Especially not in such uneasy times.'

  'What's going to happen?'

  'In a world on fire, anything can happen,' says Motombwane.

  The car with its coughing engine and its worn-out shock absorbers disappears. When Olofson turns around he sees Luka on the terrace. He stands motionless, watching the car drive away.

  Two days later Olofson helps carry Ruth and Werner Masterton's coffins to their common grave, right next to the daughter who died many years before. The pallbearers are white. Pale, resolute faces watch the coffins being lowered into the red earth. At a distance stand the black workers. Olofson sees Robert, motionless, alone, his face expressionless. The tension is there, a shared rage that flows through the whites who are gathered to say farewell to Ruth and Werner Masterton. Many of them are openly bearing arms, and Olofson feels that he is in the midst of a funeral procession that could quickly be transformed into a well-equipped army.

  The night after the burial the Mastertons' house burns down. In the morning only the smoking walls remain. The only one they trusted, Robert the chauffeur, has vanished. Only the workers are left, expectantly waiting for something, no one knows what.

  Olofson builds barricades in his house. Each night he sleeps in a different room, and he barricades the doors with tables and cabinets. In the daytime he tends to his work as usual. In secret he watches Eisenhower Mudenda, and receives his still equally humble greetings.

  Yet another egg transport is plundered by people who have built a roadblock on the way to Ndola. Indian shops in Lusaka and Livingstone are stormed and burned down.

  After darkness falls, nobody visits their neighbours. No headlights play through the darkness. Pouring rain washes over the isolated houses; everyone is waiting for a finger to point to them out of the darkness. Violent thunderstorms pass over Kalulushi. Olofson lies awake in the dark with his weapons next to him in bed.

  One morning soon after Ruth and Werner's funeral, Olofson opens the kitchen door for Luka after yet another sleepless night and sees at once from Luka's face that something has happened. The inscrutable and dignified face is changed. Olofson sees for the first time that even Luka can be frightened.

  'Bwana,' he says. 'Something has happened.'

  'What?!' shouts Olofson and feels the panic rising.

  Before Luka can reply, he discovers it for himself. Something is nailed to the mangrove tree that stands facing the drive, a windbreak planted by Judith Fillington and her husband many years earlier. At first he can't see what it is; then he has an idea but doesn't want to believe what he suspects. With his revolver in his hand he slowly approaches the tree.

  Lashed fast with barbed wire to the tree trunk is the severed head of a German shepherd. The dog he received from Ruth and Werner, the one he named Sture. The head grins at him, the tongue cut out, the eyes open and staring.

  Olofson feels terror well up inside him. The finger has pointed in the dark. Luka's terror – he must know what it means. I'm living among insane savages, he thinks desperately. I can't read them; their barbaric signs are unintelligible.

  Luka is sitting on the stone steps to the terrace. Olofson can see that he's so scared he's shaking. The sweat is glinting on his black skin.

  'I don't intend to ask you who did this,' Olofson says. 'I know what answer I will get – that you don't know. Nor do I think it was you, since I can see that you're afraid. I don't think you would be trembling over your own actions. Or at least you wouldn't reveal yourself to me. But I want you to tell me what it means. Why would someone chop off the head of my dog and lash it to a tree during the
night? Why would someone cut out the tongue of a dog that's already dead and can't bark any more? Whoever did this wants me to understand something. Or is the intention just to frighten me?'

  Slowly Luka's answer comes, as if each word he utters were a mine threatening to explode.

  'The dog is a gift from dead people, Bwana. Now the dog is dead too. Only the owner lives. A German shepherd is what mzunguz most often use to protect themselves, since Africans are afraid of dogs. But he who kills a dog shows that he is not afraid. Dead dogs protect no mzungu. Cutting out the tongue prevents the dead dog from barking.'

  'The people who gave him to me are dead,' Olofson says. 'The gift has had his head cut off. Now only the owner remains. The last link in this chain is still alive, but he is defenceless. Is that what you're telling me?'

  'The leopards are hunting at daybreak,' Luka mutters.

  Olofson sees his eyes, wide open from something he carries inside him.

  'It wasn't a leopard that did this,' he says. 'It was people like you, black people. No mzungu would fasten a severed dog's head to a tree.'

  'The leopards are hunting,' Luka mumbles again, and Olofson sees that his terror is real.

  A thought occurs to him.

  'Leopards,' he says softly. 'People who have turned themselves into leopards? Dressed in their skins to make themselves invulnerable? Maybe it was people in leopard skins who came in the night to Ruth and Werner Masterton.'

  His words increase Luka's anxiety.

  'Leopards see without being seen,' Olofson says. 'Maybe they can hear at long distances too. Maybe they can read people's lips. But they can't see or hear through stone walls.'

  He gets up and Luka follows him. We have never been this close to each other, Olofson thinks. Now we are sharing the burden of each other's fear. Luka senses the threat. Perhaps because he works for a white man, has the trust of a white man, and receives many advantages? Maybe a black man who works for a mzungu is unreliable in this country. Luka sits down on the edge of a kitchen chair.

  'Words travel in the dark, Bwana,' he says. 'Words that are hard to understand. But they are there, and they come back. Someone speaks them, and no one knows whose voice it is.'

  'What are the words?' Olofson asks.

  'They speak of unusual leopards,' says Luka. 'Leopards who have begun to hunt in packs. The leopard is a lone hunter, dangerous in his loneliness. Leopards in packs are many more times as dangerous.'

  'Leopards are predators,' Olofson says. 'Leopards are looking for the prey?'

  'The words speak of people who gather in the dark,' says Luka. 'People who turn into leopards that will chase all the mzunguz out of the country.'

  Olofson remembers something that Peter Motombwane told him.

  'Mzunguz,' he says. 'Rich men. But there are both black and white men that are rich, aren't there?'

  'The whites are richer,' says Luka.

  One question remains, even though Olofson already knows what Luka's answer will be.

  'Am I a rich man?' he asks.

  'Yes, Bwana,' Luka replies. 'A very rich man.'

  And yet I will stay here, he thinks. If I'd had a family I would have sent them away. But I'm alone. I have to stay put or else give up completely. He puts on a pair of gloves, takes down the dog's head, and Luka buries it down by the river.

  'Where's the body?' Olofson asks.

  Luka shakes his head. 'I don't know, Bwana. In a place where we can't see it.'

  At night he stands guard. He dozes fitfully in a chair behind barricaded doors. Guns with their safeties off lie across his knee, stacks of extra ammunition are stashed at various spots in the house. He pictures himself making his last stand in the room where the skeletons were once stored.

  In the daytime he visits the surrounding farms, telling people Luka's vague story about the pack of leopards. His neighbours supply him with other pieces to the puzzle, even though no one else has received a warning sign.

  Before independence, during the 1950s, there was something known as the leopard movement in certain areas of the Copperbelt; an underground movement that mixed politics and religion and threatened to take up arms if the federation was not dissolved and Zambia gained independence. But no one had heard of the leopard movement using violence.

  Olofson learns from the farmers who have spent long lives in the country that nothing ever actually dies. For a long-vanished political and religious movement to reappear is not unusual; it only increases the credibility of Luka's words. Olofson declines to take on volunteers as reinforcements in his own house. At twilight he barricades himself in and eats his lonely dinner after he has sent Luka home.

  He waits for something to happen. The exhaustion is a drain on him, the fear is eating deep holes in his soul. And yet he is determined to stay. He thinks about Joyce and her daughters. People who live outside all underground movements, people who each day must fight for their own survival.

  The rain is intense, thundering against his sheet-metal roof through the long, lonely nights.

  One morning a white man stands outside his house, a man whom he has never seen before. To Olofson's astonishment he addresses him in Swedish.

  'I was prepared for that,' says the stranger with a laugh. 'I know you're Swedish. Your name is Hans Olofson.'

  He introduces himself as Lars Håkansson, an aid expert, sent out by Sida, the Swedish aid agency, to monitor the development of satellite telecommunications stations paid for by Swedish aid funds. His mission turns out to be more than merely stopping by to say hello to a countryman who happens to live in Kalulushi. There is a hill on Olofson's property that is an ideal location for one of the link stations. A steel tower topped by a satellite dish. A fence, a passable road. A total area of 400 square metres.

  'Naturally there is payment involved, if you're prepared to relinquish your property,' Håkansson says. 'We can arrange for you to get your money in real currency, of course: dollars, pounds or D-marks.'

  Olofson can think of no reason to refuse. 'Telecommunications,' he says. 'Telephone lines or TV?'

  'Both,' says Håkansson. 'The satellite dishes transmit and receive the radio frequency waves desired. TV signals are captured by television receivers, telephone impulses are bounced off a satellite in stationary orbit over the prime meridian, which then sends the signals on to any conceivable telephone in the whole world. Africa will be incorporated into a network.'

  Olofson offers his visitor some coffee.

  'You've got a nice place here,' Håkansson says.

  'There's trouble in the country,' Olofson replies. 'I'm not so sure any more that it's good to live here.'

  'I've been abroad for ten years,' Håkansson says. 'I've staked out communications links in Guinea Bissau, Kenya and Tanzania. There's unrest everywhere. As an aid expert you don't notice much of it. You're a holy man because you dispense millions from up your khaki sleeves. Politicians bow, soldiers and police officers salute when you arrive.'

  'Soldiers and police officers?' Olofson asks.

  Håkansson shrugs his shoulders and grimaces. 'Links and satellite dishes,' he says. 'All types of messages can be sent by the new technology. The police and the army then have greater opportunities to check what's going on in remote border regions. In a crisis situation the men who hold the keys can cut off an unruly section of the country. Swedish aid workers are forbidden by the parliament from getting involved in anything beyond civilian objectives. But who's going to check what these link stations are used for? Swedish politicians have never understood a thing about the actual realities of the world. Swedish businessmen, on the other hand, have understood much more. That's why businessmen never become politicians.'