another explanation

This time to do with snakes and witches.

An 18-year old witch was arrested in the communal lands near Mutare. She confessed that she worked for her uncle, who kept a python and a spitting cobra. They travelled on the back of the python whenever they needed to, she said.

The judge -- a traditional chief -- was not amused. He said that it was because of the snakes -- especially the spitting cobra -- that there was no rain.

There may be a logical explanation to this. We killed (or rather my mother-in-law's gardener did) a spitting cobra in the garden last week. Grey, not too long: first we thought it might be a male boomslung. But then we saw the black strip under its neck. It bulged in the middle, obviously from the frog my six-year-old had also had his eye on.

What did she get out of being a witch? Apart from free transport, possibly. Actually what the girl wanted was NOT to be a witch. She was confessing because her baby boy had died. She thought witchcraft was to blame.

heard at the vegetable shop

"I hear the magoda (diamond dealers) are back," she says, leaning on the counter.

"Yes. But so are the soldiers," says the cashier. "If they catch you, they will hit you. Like a snake you find in your house."

bits from the braai

Sheena was arrested for overcharging on...roses.

"The supplier had put them up. I wasn't going to make a loss, was I? But the inspectors came round and said I shouldn't have put my prices up."

"They put me in cells. It was filthy. You couldn't even put your head back: the walls were covered in black slime."

She spent half a day there before her husband came to bail her out.

"The police said to him: Take her, take her. She's a cheeky madam, that one."

....

Elias' birth certificate gives his D.O.B as 1948. In fact, this Classics professor was born in 1942. He went to school six years late, aged 12.

He spent most of his childhood herding cows and goats near the Runde River.

"We were coming back late, one day. I was with Edwin, my small cousin-brother. This snake appeared, a python, big as an anaconda. It took the goat before Edwin."

The villagers turned out en masse -- including Edwin's mother -- and beat it to a pulp.

Elias' parents had never registered his birth, and he needed a birth certificate to get into school. So he took himself to the District Office -- and knocked six years off his age.

...

C. T, in his early 20s, is due for a finger amputation today or tomorrow. Dr Cut-Cut (that's how most people refer to the local surgeon) warned last week he'd lose his whole arm.

He put his finger into the grill of the swimming pool at home and got bitten by a Biberon burrowing adder.

"It was probably looking for frogs," says my MIL with a shudder. The Snakes of Rhodesia book says burrowing adders -- which look deceptively like harmless brown house snakes -- are most often seen in the rainy season when chasing their prey. "Inquisitive children" are frequent victims.

"His flesh has gone all rotten," she says. "And his poor mother is off caring in England."

after the attack

Two days after the snake attack, I develop heart pains.

I pore through an ancient Snakes in Rhodesia book (no-one appears to have brought out a Snakes in Zimbabwe edition). The map for black mamba distribution is shaded for the whole of the country, bar a tiny corridor along the southeastern border.

There are mambas everywhere.

"What happens if my child gets bitten?" I ask our GP. "It's a problem," he says (as a young premed, he used to do post-mortems on villagers who'd been killed by mambas). Anti-venom isn't used these days to treat snake-bite: the modern way is to use drips and blood transfusions immediately.

But immediate hospital treatment is well-nigh impossible in Zimbabwe, where doctors are on strike and private clinics won't let you through the door unless you can produce wads of US dollars (3,000 for our local one) in cash, straight away. And -- as a friend who recently went for a C-section found -- you have to provide your own drip.

Our dog was Labrador-sized, chunky. She probably weighed more than my son. It took her just 20 minutes to die.

I remember that terrible scene in Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, where missionary daughter Ruth-May gets bitten by a green mamba that someone's deliberately enticed into the chicken house. She dies in a matter of minutes: her mother weaves her a shroud out of mosquito nets.

White friends offer tales of horror ("I have a neighbour who lost two Staffies that way" or "There was that kid in Chirundu recently. His parents found him playing with what he said were worms. They were puff-adders. Not a thing they could do for him.") Black friends offer suggestions. Clear out the fallen leaves between your banana trees. Keep the bottom part of the kitchen door shut at all times (so that's why there are stable doors here). Don't go out at night.

I fantasise about setting fire to the next-door neighbour's bamboo (apparently a favourite snake haunt). I decide that DVDs are a great idea: they keep your kids indoors, away from snakes. Mostly I grieve for the dog and for what her death makes me think of now in Zimbabwe: hope gone sour, the sense of hidden evil waiting in the wings.

christmas eve

So this is how it happened. It's shortly after lunch. It's rained a bit in the morning. My son and Audrey are in the back garden. Mai Agnes and Tommy are drinking tea. Audrey moves towards the banana grove. (Is she going to wash a plate at the nearby tap?).

"Snake," she shouts.

Tommy jumps up, seizes his catapult. The snake, a long grey thing, slithers quickly across the wet grass (snakes do not like clear open pieces of land) to the daisy patch by the washing line. There's a young tree there, a custard apple. Tommy fires stones at the snake as it slithers into the branches.

This is an aggressive snake. Which means only one of two kinds.

Mai Agnes calls the dogs, our semi-Rottweilers. One of them (the older, greying round the muzzle, probably not too much longer for this world anyway) stays well away. The other, two years old, not much more than a puppy in manner though bigger than either of the children, sees the stone-throwing, thinks this is some kind of a game. She rushes towards the snake. There is a yelp. Tommy beats the snake to death on its head.

My son comes running inside. My husband's in his office. I'm on the bed, still trying to shake off tick-bite fever and pneumonia (and no, I don't have heart problems, the Diagnostic Heart Centre confirmed this week).

"Daddy, Daddy, Tommy's killed a big snake." He goes to see what's happened, sees the snake still writhing. It is black inside its mouth.

"You've killed a mamba, Tommy," my husband says admiringly. Black mambas: one of the most deadly snakes in Zimbabwe. Green mambas are bad too, and pythons might take a small child. No-one mentions the dog.

A few minutes later - no more than five surely -- when my husband's back in his study, I decide to go to see for myself. My son is already sketching the dead snake, his piece of torn-out diary paper lodged on an upturned cardboard box.

"This is a bad snake, Mai Agnes," I say with a shudder. I did not know there were black mambas in town.

"Yes, but not too bad. It bit Wubie, but she's alright."

Bit the dog? I turn to look at her. She's drooling. She is definitely not alright. I run screaming into the house. "The snake got her, the snake got her." My husband scoops her up (as far as you can scoop up a heavy semi-Rottweiler). Frantically I 'phone the vet. No answer, but the surgery is only five minutes down the road.

I 'phone my in-laws. The children jump on the pushbikes, scoot happily across the verandah. I hope for the best. The bakkie drives back in through the gate 20 minutes later. "She's gone," says Tommy. The vet tried. He put in drips, injected her with anti-venom. It was too late. Twenty minutes from bite to death. And my child and Audrey were two metres from that snake.

We bury her in the garden, beyond the banana trees, metres from the fence where she loved to annoy the dogs next door. My son (four still, how can he understand?) puts a bunch of daisies and frangipani on top of the pile of earth. He does it carefully and solemnly, making a little hole to lodge the bunch in, as if he were planting a tree. His feet sink into the freshly-turned red clay.

In the drizzle, we turn away.

no they don't

Tadiwa's mother remembers being out in the fields in Mutare a long time ago. She was a child at the time. There was a mother with a young child there, ploughing. It was a strip -- Tadiwa measures with her eyes -- from this table to the fence round the swimming pool. What mothers did then when they got to the fields was to dig a small hollow to put their babies in while they were working. This way a child learned to sit up on its own ("though I think it's awful, leaving your baby like that," Tadiwa says). When this mother got halfway along her strip, she dug another hole, sat the baby in and carried on. She looked round.... and saw a snake coiled round the child (a python?). She started to scream, wanted to yank the child away but she was stopped by an elderly man nearby. "Leave the snake," he told her. "If you grab your child the snake will squeeze." The mother did as she was told and eventually, the snake slithered away. Snakes do not bite babies, the man said.

so they do bite

L. has a story about boomslangs. Her brother-in-law was bitten one Christmas. He was walking under a tree with a chameleon balanced on his forearm. It's an easy thing to do: adults and kids alike are fascinated by a chameleon's slow movements. What the brother-in-law didn't realise was that on a low-lying branch a boomslang had spotted its prey. It reached down, missed and bit the man instead. "Fortunately it was a dry bite," L. says. "But it caused a bit of stress for a short while."

boomslang in the bathroom

The cat sees it first: a snake, a metre long, vivid green, swaying on the blue tiles in the shower cubicle.

"Snake!" I shout, "Nyoka!" (one of the first words I learnt in Shona). I bundle cats, kittens and protesting child into the pantry.

It's a boomslang, a bright green tree snake. I saw one earlier this year just outside my study window, raiding a nest. Boomslangs are highly-poisonous snakes, but they're back-fanged which means they won't strike out at you like say, a cobra will. You're only in danger if you're actually handling the snake.

Still, I'm afraid I subscribe to the general Shona feeling: a snake within the house precincts has to be a dead snake.

Showers will never be quite the same again.

snippets

Things are never as black and white as they seem.

"Where's Mai X?" I ask. I'm in a sitting room again, barefoot. I have handed over my basket at the door as you do, inquired after everyone's day, assured all present that my husband and my child are fine. I like these slow unhurried rituals. Speed begets tardiness, the Shona say.

"She has gone to a funeral. It is her aunt. In fact, the aunt was like her mother. Mai X's mother passed away so the aunt, who had no children, brought her and some other children up."

I like Mai X. She is careful, funny, gentle and she treats me like a daughter, buying me a huge box of soap powder for Christmas. When I injured my head last year and had to have a cyst lanced at a local hospital, it was Mai X I turned to.

"The burial was supposed to be Sunday. But then her cousin-brother said, no, it could not be Sunday because he had business to do. He's that boxing man, you know? Stalin Mau-Mau. Well, Stalin Mau-Mau said there were relatives who wanted to come from England...

I've stopped listening, trying to digest what I just heard. Stalin Mau-Mau was a ruling party bigwig back in 2000, before he turned into a UK-based businessman. White farmers say that he -- backed up by war vets -- played a part in the early wave of land invasions in Harare (though he claims he was merely "negotiating" with farmers to help alleviate a housing shortage).

Mai X was brought up with Stalin Mau-Mau?

********************************

Illegal gold panners are an increasing problem.

"They wreck all the greenery," says a friend whose parents -- by hook or by crook and most probably because the powers that be have realised Zimbabweans need minimal amounts of milk -- have managed to hold onto their dairy farm. Gold panners are panning in the stream that runs through their farm in eastern Zimbabwe and there's absolutely nothing her parents can do.

"My mother never used to have any problems in her garden," she says. We're sitting round a sparkling pool, eight or nine mums, munching coffee cake and watching our horribly-privileged preschoolers splash around with rubber bazookas imported from South Africa. There is no power but no-one notices that anymore. "Now she's got monkeys and pythons. They come because it's the only bit of greenery left. She lost the whole of her lychee crop and then last week a python took her dog.

She takes a breath. "My little boy (aged three, approximately goat-size, just right for a python) was playing with the dog three minutes earlier."

There's silence, white coffee mugs stopped staccato in the air. We do live in Africa, girls.

***********************************

In the morning, I drive past the Anglican cathedral with the huge red AIDS ribbon painted above the entrance, under the flamboyant trees, past a nursery school. Through my open window -- it's going to be a sweltering 30 degrees today, the radio says -- I hear the sweet sound of childrens' voices, one adult voice leading the song: "...everybody here, in His hands/He's got everybody here in His hands." Nothing could ever happen here, surely?

The police chief appears on the eight o'clock TV news bulletin. His officers are empowered to use "full force, including firearms," against protesters before, during or after next month's polls, he says.