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the bananas with gongs and branches of fire and Dad’s brave, thin shouts ragged in the thick, Pepani night, “Come on, you buggers! Off my bananas!”
    I said, “K was in the RLI.”
    “Really?”
    “That’s what I thought at first too.” I took a sip of tea.
    “Ha.” Dad shook his head. “In any case, those baskets were tough, I wouldn’t want to argue with one of those troopies.”
    The soldiers in the RLI were called troopers (or, colloquially, troopies). The guerrillas nicknamed them MaBruka because the troopers wore very short shorts. Brookies, in Rhodesian slang, are little girls’ underwear.
    “Did you believe in the war?”
    “What?”
    “Did you think it was right?”
    Dad said, “Fergodsake, Bobo. The sun’s not even over the top of the bananas.”
    “Well?”
    “No.”
    “Then why did you fight?”
    “Call-up.”
    “You could have been a conscientious objector.”
    “A what?”
    “A pacifist.”
    “No, I couldn’t.”
    “Why not?”
    “I was there and the war was there and that’s what I had to do. That’s what we all had to do—they didn’t give you a choice. It was stay and fight or get out. We would have lost the farm. We would have lost everything.”
    “We lost the farm anyway,” I pointed out.
    Dad grunted. “In any case, I wasn’t going to sit the war out and let some other poor bastard get snuffed on my account.”
    “Do you regret it?”
    Dad stood up and rubbed his belly. “I’m going to have a shower and then I am going to see my fish,” he said.
    “Why won’t you talk about it?”
    “Nothing to talk about.”
    TALK KILLS, the posters above bars from the Eastern Highlands to Wankie had declared during the war. LOOSE TONGUES COST LIVES. I can just about guarantee Dad never killed anyone with his tongue.
    I said, “It might do you good to talk about it.”
    Dad grunted. “I tell you what would do me good.”
    “What?”
    “If my daughter left her old man a few bloody cigarettes for his breakfast.” He tromped off to the shower—a loose grass enclosure at the top of the camp that was open to the sky and occasionally sagged open at the edges, revealing glimpses of the soapy, white body within. A silver bucket was suspended by a rope pulley over a circle of red gravel, a rickety bush-pole table held a candle (in a green wine bottle), a dish of soap, and a bottle of shampoo. Frogs and snakes nested in the grass fence and scorpions peered with glinting black eyes from the drain. The dogs trotted after Dad, looking forward to their morning encounter with the shower’s variety of wildlife. In a few moments I heard the squeak of the bucket as it was lowered over my father, then a gush and Dad muttering under his breath at the shock of cold water. One of the Jack Russells came trotting out with her tail raised in victory and a lizard clenched between her jaws.

    BY THE MID - 1960S , all but a handful of African countries had gained independence from their European settlers. The Southern Rhodesian government, led by Ian Smith, in a panic lest the British prime minister turn their country over to the Africans too, made a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) on November 11, 1965. Under UDI whites retained power and black Rhodesians remained unable to vote. Wrex Tarr, Rhodesia’s resident wag, reflected the casualness with which whites regarded this momentous decision by tagging UDI a “Universal Declaration of Indifference.” A state of emergency was declared—but this was more a way to keep uppity blacks in line than to placate satiated whites.
    Britain and the United Nations Security Council responded to Smith’s move by slamming economic sanctions on the rogue state, and black Rhodesian nationalists began preparing for war, training in countries that were sympathetic to their cause: Zambia, Ghana, Tanzania, China, North Korea, and the Soviet Union. For a time, the nationalist guerrillas dispatched into Rhodesia were quickly captured and killed by