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Craig Higginson appears on three panels at the Franschhoek Literary Festival. On Friday, 17 May, at 16:00 (session 30), he discusses ghostly things with Michele Magwood and fellow novelists Morabo Morejele and Shubnum Khan. On Saturday, 18 May, at 13:00 (session 61), he, CA Davids, Karen Jennings and Ivan Vladislavic tackle the issue of readers and readerships. On Sunday, 19 May, at 13:00 (session 100), in an event sponsored by News24, Higginson, Barbara Boswell and Pip Williams will consider whether fiction still has any power to shape culture and history.
Click here for the full FLF programme.
Writer Daniel Hawthorne is packing up his mother’s house in Johannesburg when he hears about the disappearance of Sam Webster, the beautiful daughter of his friend, the famous historian Bruce Webster. When the body of Sam appears briefly on the banks of the flooded Buffalo River, Daniel decides to visit the Websters’ luxury lodge in the heart of Zululand. Under the guise of researching a new novel about his disgraced ancestor, the lepidopterist Lieutenant Charles Hawthorne, who fought in the Battle of iSandlwana, Daniel starts to investigate the reasons for Sam’s disappearance. The Ghost of Sam Webster (Picador) is at once a war novel, a murder mystery, a multi-layered love story and a reassertion of what it is to remain human during the most challenging times.
Here is the prologue of the novel.
BOOK: The Ghost of Sam Webster by Craig Higginson (Picador)
All night, she is rolled around in the Buffalo River
The river turns her this way and that, worrying at her like an unwanted thought. Try as it might, it can’t unravel her. She is rippled and revolved, sucked in and spat out, perfectly paced with the mood of the water. She is half fish and half girl, and both halves are equally dead.
The girl belongs to no one. She has no home, no parents, no name. Her tongue fills her mouth, swollen and dark, like a sod of earth. Her hair is one long weed trailing her. Her head is a thought less rock. Her hands move rhythmically, and her arms drift at her sides, opening to accommodate the willow trees, the breathing herds of cattle, the weeping, starless heavens. But these gestures are without meaning. She is nothing but the body of a girl being moved swiftly along, her story long gone with her. She is equal to the broken branches and the rolling stones that accompany her. She has no more history, and no less history, than they do.
A storm hangs over the Drakensberg
It is like the smoke above a great fire, pumping water into unseen flames, until every hill is filled with it and every bird on every branch drips with it. A whole embankment dissolves and consumes a village, filling every room of every house with sticky muck, digesting grandmothers, television sets, chickens and children. The whole landscape is on the move. The air is filled with a distant roaring. The old world lies numb, no longer recognising itself. Mountain streams bounce beyond their bounds to join rivers that have never been there before. Where there was once an elegant waterfall hemmed in by bracken and ferns, there is now a mound of rubble. Where the river circumvented a pasture filled with grazing, honey-coloured ponies, there is now an abandoned lake. Where the river curved left, it now veers right.
Her body is found on a Sunday morning
Zwelibanzi Zimba is grazing his grandmother’s goats in the rain when he sees the dark-blue anorak washed up against the rocks. He has been rained on for a week now and he no longer notices the rain. But he likes the look of that anorak. It is the only thing of colour in a world of diminishing greys. It floats near the edge of the river. Something forbidden but tempting. He suspects it has been washed down from the campsite where the people from England come to dwell with their stories of the dead.
Zwelibanzi walks into the water until it reaches his hips, his feet finding their way amongst the stones. Usually, there is no water here. He is walking across a piece of land where before he has sat and roasted a mealie cob. He has never experienced the uMzinyathi River like this. So angry and restless. A bad mood looking for a place to settle. But even under these conditions he knows the river. He has been crossing and re-crossing it since he first learned how to walk. The nearest bridge is a mile away. In weather like this, it will be deep underwater.
He stops when he sees her face. It is so pale that it seems to have no eyes, no mouth. The face is a blank space waiting to be filled in. It is no longer human. It no longer needs eyes from which to see or a mouth from which to speak. The girl’s hair lies against the rock like a rope that has just been used to strangle her. Her hand is a small, folded star. Her body is a larger, folded star. All around her, the water boils its blood-coloured froth.
Zwelibanzi only stops running when he reaches the priest’s house
There he learns that the priest is away, preaching at Msinga Top. He tells the wife instead.
"A dead body? Uqinisekile?"
"Yebo, Mesis. Ngisibone silele emadwaleni."
‘Uthintile anything?’
"Cha, Mesis."
"Ungasondeli kuso. Ngizoshayela amapolice."
He returns to the river and waits with his goats in the rain for the police. The rain carries on falling on the dead girl with as much indifference as it falls on him. The goats continue to graze at the edge of the river as if nothing has changed. A heron stands on the opposite bank like a folded umbrella, its hunger a wet pebble sitting inside it. But now that Zwelibanzi knows that the girl is there, he can think of nothing else, look at nothing else. She is lying pressed into the rocks while the river urges her this way and that, trying to draw her away to the sea.
He chooses a rock from which to watch her. He is known to have the patience of a kingfisher. He also understands that some where in the world there is a family that is waiting for her to come home. They will be pleased with him for finding the girl. But not so pleased when they understand what has happened to her. Although the lower half of her body is submerged in the water, she is wearing nothing except the dark-blue anorak. Zwelibanzi tries not to think too much about this. Or about how she might have come to be there. It will be the police’s job to worry about that. When the police arrive, it is three hours later. Zwelibanzi suspects they have come from Greytown. He watches the splattered white bakkie dodging the dark-red termite mounds, the engine labouring over the sodden earth. The vehicle stops where the earth flattens out and after three heartbeats the policemen emerge. A small, round one and then a taller, more attenuated one. They look up at the sky as if cursing their fate, but they do nothing to protect themselves. They come like cats over the wet grass. Their boots are soon heavy with the orange mud. The priest’s wife stays inside the vehicle for a moment and then she too emerges, balancing under a black umbrella, jumping from rock to rock. She is one of the few white people to whom Zwelibanzi has ever spoken. The memory of her isiZulu makes him smile.
Zwelibanzi finds he is relieved that he will no longer have to carry the dead girl alone inside his head. The men arrive and nod at him. They look at the girl and murmur between themselves. The priest’s wife – a pale-limbed, wet-eyed woman – stands as if for protection amongst the scattering of goats.
"Akufanele sithinte umzimba," the thinner man says. "Kepha ungathathwa ngumfula," the other man says. The current is getting stronger. The policemen are worried the girl will be washed away. They link arms and wade into the water, the two men becoming the beginning of a bridge between the girl and the place where Zwelibanzi stands waiting. The river, sensing this new invasion, grows deeper and stronger, working against the two men from surprising angles. The river has never been more confident. It will carry on growing until it has swallowed the world.
The policemen, who looked sturdy enough in their blue-grey uniforms and muddy boots when standing on the shore, are now two big babies, floundering. The smaller man is leading the way. He is clearly the one in charge. He is leading by example. The other man keeps looking upriver as if expecting a huge wave to come hurtling around the corner to consume them. But the smaller man isn’t letting his gaze stray away from the body of the girl. There is something doomed and heroic about this smaller man. The way he is prepared to take on a whole river in order to reach something that is already dead.
A bloated cow, its legs stuck out like sticks, floats past them, but neither of the men pays it any attention. The first man has already reached the girl. He is holding onto a rock that is only one rock away from her head. He shouts something to the other man, his words lost in the wildness of the water. Now that they have reached the girl, they are unsure of what to do. Neither of them has looked at her face. The smaller man manoeuvres himself around the crop of rocks that holds her so that there is a man on either side of the body. The water is building up against them, thumping up against their shoulders, cascading now and again over the smaller man’s head.
Time has slowed right down, as if Zwelibanzi’s whole life was nothing but a preparation for this moment. The two men pull at the girl for a while, trying to wrestle her away from the rocks. She wobbles, a large doll filled with water, her head flopping from side to side. While the smaller man pushes his hands under her shoulders, the other man wraps an arm around her ankles, both of their faces averted. The girl has become little more than a problem they have to deliver to the shore.
As the smaller man hauls her towards himself, the anorak is lifted briefly – and then, before anyone can grasp the horror of what is happening, her body flops forward into the water, and the taller man’s free arm waves briefly, and the three of them spin away together with the current. Zwelibanzi follows them downriver, just as the taller man, who was always the less committed of the two, releases the girl – but the smaller man is still holding onto her for dear life, shouting something to the other man, perhaps calling for help, perhaps reprimanding him for letting go – and then, at the moment when it looks as if he may be able to find a rock and get a foothold against the river, he too lets go of the girl and grabs onto a half-submerged sapling instead. The dark-blue anorak bobs like a balloon for a moment. The water revolves around the girl and gives her the once-over and swallows her whole.
The girl has vanished.
The river becomes a river again.
Zwelibanzi stops running. There is nowhere left to go.
The dead girl is later identified as Sam Webster
She is the seventeen-year-old daughter of Bruce Webster, the famous historian. The Zulus in the area call him "Isicabu", which is an abbreviation of ‘isicabucabu’, the isiZulu word for ‘spider’. Bruce Webster runs a luxury lodge on a mountain overlooking iSandlwana. The tales he has spun about the Anglo-Zulu wars are so famous that they even reached the ears of the British Queen. The two young princes have stayed at Mr Webster’s lodge. When Sam was a young girl, she was once seen on the shoulders of the Prince of Wales, walking across the battlefield where the whitewashed cairns still mark the piled-up bodies of the British dead.
Craig Higginson is an award-winning author and playwright. Among his previous novels are The Landscape Painter (2011), The Dream House (2015) and The Book of Gifts (2020).
