Free African Dawn by Tony Park Page A

trouble, Winston. He's ZAPU to the core, and he's been involved in a few street fights with ZANU thugs.’
    ZANU, the Zimbabwe African National Union, was the other main black nationalist party in Rhodesia. Its membership was drawn from the Shona, the larger of the two main tribes in the country. Fights between the Ndebele-backed ZAPU and the ZANU cadres were regular and bloody as the two factions battled for supremacy in disputed black areas, while their military wings took on the security forces.
    ‘Your mother doesn't know whether to keep Emmerson locked up at home or to get him a bigger stick. She fills him full of hate for ZANU and Ian Smith and then fusses over him when he comes home with a split head or broken ribs.’
    Winston closed his eyes. George knew what he was thinking. If his brother had fallen in with the nationalists – it didn't matter which party – there was a good chance he would end up in one of the military wings. ZAPU's armed force was ZIPRA – who were mostly Ndebeles like Winston and his family – but ZANU had set up its own army, ZANLA – the Zimbabwean African National Liberation Army. The two tribes, the Ndebele and the Shona, and their political and military wings, hated each other almost as much as they hated the whites.
    ‘Good for Emmerson,’ Winston said, opening his eyes again and grinning. ‘At least he's sticking with ZAPU and isn't an mtengisi .’
    George laughed at the self-deprecating joke – Winston had just used the Shona word for ‘sell-out’, the name given to Africans like him who sided with the government. George didn't tell Winston, but he was scared of Emmerson. Physically, George was still more than a match for the fifteen-year-old, but Emmerson was growing up fast. Thandi had shuddered when she'd told him how she'd seen her little brother almost kick a ZANU cadre to death in a street brawl in Mzilikazi. The way Emmerson looked at George when he visited reminded him of a cobra, its head swaying and its dark eyes entranced with the thought of the coming kill.
    ‘How do you know all this, George?’
    ‘When I'm home on leave my mom gives me mealie meal, milk, eggs, nyama and other things to take to your family. Your mom still hates all white people, especially since your father's been in prison so long, but she tolerates me. Sometimes we talk.’ The lie, like all good ones, was based on truth. ‘My dad put a new roof on Patricia's house last year.’
    Winston's eye's narrowed. ‘And Thandi?’
    ‘She's in Mozambique, studying.’
    The sister walked over, clipboard in hand, and told Winston to open his mouth. The conversation stopped while they waited for Winston's temperature to be read. George gazed out the window. Thandi.
    *
    The last time he'd seen her was six months ago, when he was on leave. The time before that had been going on for a year, but every time he saw her it was the same.
    George and a few guys from his squadron had piled into two cars and driven nonstop from Salisbury, through the border crossing at Umtali, and then down to the coast at Vilanculos. The first night they'd got drunk in the bar at the Dona Ana and slept on the beach. The next day the rest of the boys hit the bullfights. George had begged off, saying he had to go visit a friend of his parents. He'd hailed a chapa and told the driver of the minibus taxi the address. As he rode he mused about how different things were in Mozambique, how much freer and easier than in Rhodesia. He wouldn't have been caught dead in a kaffir taxi in his homeland.
    He'd written to her, but he had no idea if she would be there. Vilanculos was a long way north of Lorenzo Marques, where Thandi was teaching English. She was already fluent in Portuguese.
    The beachside bungalows were down-market enough to be affordable and up-market enough, hopefully, to be free of bedbugs. George walked along a crushed coral footpath flanked by manicured grass. A light breeze stirred the fronds of the tall palm trees that