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Outside Magazine January 2003

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Bad Signs
More than 20 years after the guerrilla war that forged Zimbabwe from Rhodesia, fear and violence are once again convulsing that African nation—this time, with a black government pitted against white landowners. The author, who grew up on a farm in Rhodesia, recalls her child's-eye view of a world where even nature knew that luck had run out.

By Alexandra Fuller


	Land of omens: black workers on a white-owned farm, before the fire next time (Bert Hardy/Getty Images)

When Duncan, our neighbors' son, nearly shot Mum that night, it was almost a relief. It had been that kind of day. A day of trigger-happy nerves and accidents and omens—omens piling on omens like waves in a windblown, moon-sucked sea. The gun went off and the hot bullet sang through the air and lodged in the chair between Mum's legs and Mum only jerked, the way an impala flicks a fly from its shoulder. My older sister, Vanessa, and I weren't surprised at all. Given the kind of day it had been, it was a wonder Mum wasn't hit if not killed.

Duncan himself—the 12-year-old almost-murderer of my mother—had been too busy killing cats that day to pay attention to the omens, or he never would have been playing with guns. (Killing cats to ascertain, as scientifically as possible, which was the least pleasant way to die: by burning, by drowning, or by bullet.) There are days like that, especially on a bad-luck patch of land all bunched up next to the Mozambique border, when you hope you don't have to get out of bed because of the way the weather feels, all thick and ready and accident-prone. And if you must get out of bed, you'd better hope you don't find yourself near a loaded gun, or a heavily pregnant woman, or a badly wired toaster.

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