Dictator

5

When he met Moses Mabeki at Buweku airport, Andy Stratten had greeted him with the words ‘Sawubona, mambo!’ In Ndebele, the Zulu dialect widely spoken in southern Malemba, it meant ‘Greetings, king!’

Moses had grinned as they bumped their clenched right fists against each other, then held them up to their hearts. Yet there was a serious truth behind Andy’s lighthearted greeting. To the vast majority of the Malembans who lived and worked on the Stratten lands, Andy was not the true aristocrat, Moses was. He could trace his bloodline back to Mzilikazi, founder of the Ndebele tribe, a man who combined a genocidal craving for the slaughter of his enemies with a statesman’s gift for leadership. The land over which they’d flown on the journey down to the Stratten family compound was territory Mzilikazi himself had conquered, a hundred and sixty years earlier. So it had surprised no one that Moses studied the art of government during his years in London. As Andy often told his friend, ‘One day, I will run the Stratten estates. But you will run the whole damn country.’

It had taken a little over half an hour for the Cessna to reach its destination.

‘Just look at that, hey,’ Andy had said when he spotted the girl frantically waving on the lawn. ‘I tell you, man, my sister’s the craziest chick in the whole of Malemba.’

Moses had laughed. ‘Don’t be cruel. Zalika has a good heart.’

Stratten brought the Cessna in to land with practised ease. By the time he was slowly taxiing to a halt, Zalika was arriving, trailed by a plume of dust, just a few yards away. She’d barely stopped the open-topped, olive-green Land Rover before she’d flung the handset down on to the passenger seat and was scampering towards the two young men emerging from the plane.

‘Moses!’ she shrieked delightedly, flinging herself at him and wrapping her arms round him. ‘It’s so great to see you again!’

‘You too,’ he said, patting her on the shoulder and smiling at her puppy-like enthusiasm.

‘Don’t I get a hug too?’ asked Andy.

‘Of course not,’ his sister replied, ‘I saw you at breakfast. You’ll have to be away for much longer than a few hours if you want a cuddle from me.’

Andy looked at his friend. ‘Like I told you, the girl’s crazy.’

‘And my brother,’ said Zalika, ‘is an arrogant, self-opinionated pig!’

The insult might have been more effective had not happiness been radiating from the girl like the warmth from an open fire.

They climbed into the Land Rover, Zalika slammed it into gear, and as the young men clung on for dear life she raced back up to the house.