Queen Nzinga

Dr Sekai Nzenza on Wednesday
“SAKA, Sis, makazowana ma equal rights aya?” Piri asked, meaning, did I ever achieve equal rights with men. “Is that what Sis wanted?” my niece Shamiso asked, not looking at me but gazing at a photo of an African woman carrying a baby on her back, a big bucket of water on her head and a hoe in one hand and a bundle of vegetables in the other. She lifted the page and showed it to everyone.

“Village women suffer for sure. This is why I never wanted to live in my husband’s village and suffer like this,” she said.

“We women have always been downtrodden for sure,” said Shamiso as she sat lazily under the village mulberry tree. It was a blistering hot day with that kind of October heat that you feel when the rains are near. We were shelling peanuts for planting. Our neighbour Jemba, my brother Sydney, Piri and a couple of other village guys sat on stools next to us, drinking village brew.

Piri was secretly drinking canned cold beer that she had poured into a mug. She did not want to share her cold beer from the cooler box with Jemba and the others.

Shamiso read from a magazine whose pages had been ripped off by Jemba for use as cigarette papers. But the article on the plight of African women in the old New Internationalist magazine was still intact.

There was a time when I used to read that magazine and collect copies for my brother Sydney so he could cut pictures as teaching aids for his students at St Columbus’s School. But that was many years ago, when I was a young student involved in every cause, from anti-apartheid, Green Peace, anti-nuclear, women’s rights and animal rights.

I tried to stop eating meat but that only lasted three days. But I embraced the Western feminism and marched at rallies alongside many European women and others from Latin America and America in support of equal rights between men and women.

“Munhu wemukadzi, haana kumbo- bvira aita chinzvimbo chinesimba,” said Jemba, meaning a woman has never held a position of power in society. He ripped off another page from the New Internationalist and rolled his tobacco. My brother Sydney, being the schoolteacher that he is, said Jemba has got it all wrong. There was a time when African women held positions of power but this is not documented in history enough nor is it taught in schools.

Sydney said there was history of African women not taught in the classroom. Sydney stood up, went into the house and pulled out a book on African people and history. I recalled bringing this book from America some years before. Sydney flipped through the pages and, smiling, he launched into a history lesson and we listened. Even Piri put her can of beer under her skirt and kept on nodding.

He said, among the most remarkable freedom heroes who fought against European colonialism are Queen Nzinga of Angola and Mama Asante Waa of Ghana.

Sydney said Queen Nzinga Mbandi lived during the period of the Atlantic slave trade and the rise of Portuguese traders.

She rose to power as the leader of the Mbundu people in what we know today as modern-day Angola.

She was a great leader, ruler, military strategist and strong opponent to the slave trade.

Before she became queen, Nzinga was the envoy for her brother, King Angola, at various peace conferences with Europeans.

In 1617, the Portuguese slave traders established a fort and settled at Luanda, deliberately encroaching on Mbundu land. Thousands of Ndongo people were taken as prisoners. The king then sent his sister Nzinga Mbandi to negotiate a peace treaty with the Portuguese Governor Joao Corria de Sousa in 1622 to end the hostilities with the Mbundu people.

It was at this peace signing conference that Nzinga made herself known for refusing to accept the Portuguese as superior to her and her people.

In preparation for the conference, the Portuguese had a chair for the governor only. They placed a floor mat expecting Nzinga to sit down in subordination to him during negotiations.

The Queen had a contemptuous smile, while her attendants moved around. They quickly rolled out a beautifully designed royal carpet they had brought before Nzinga, after which one of them went on all fours and expertly formed himself into a “royal throne” upon which the princess sat easily without being a strain on her devoted follower.

In 1627, after forming alliances with former rival states, she led her army against the Portuguese, initiating a 30-year war against them. To build up her kingdom’s martial power, Nzinga offered sanctuary to runaway slaves and Portuguese-trained African soldiers. She also stirred up rebellion among the people still left in Ndongo, now ruled by the Portuguese.

At the age of 60 years, Queen Nzinga personally led troops in battle. She ruled for 39 years. Despite repeated attempts by the Portuguese and their allies to capture or kill Queen Nzinga, she died peacefully in her eighties on December 17, 1661 in Matamba. After her death, the Portuguese accelerated the occupation of the interior of South West Africa and engaged the expansion of the Portuguese slave trade.

Today Queen Nzinga is remembered in Angola for her political and diplomatic acumen, great wit and intelligence, as well as her brilliant military strategies.

Flipping through more pages, Sydney found a story about women in Ghana. He said in Ghana, there was Yaa Asantewaa, an Ashanti queen who lived from 1832 to October 17, 1921. She was the queen mother of Ejisu of the Ashanti Empire which is part of modern-day Ghana. In 1900 she led the Ashanti rebellion known as the War of the Golden Stool against the British imperialists.

In March 1900 the European Governor of the Gold Coast, Sir Frederick Hodgson, demanded to sit on the Golden Stool throne. Such a demand belittled and showed no respect for the Asante sovereignty. The Council of Asante Chiefs was outraged by the arrogance of the British Governor.

They met to oppose the British imposition on that demand. At the same time they also called for the return of the Prempeh I their King who had been exiled on the island of Seychelles. The chiefs could not agree on the way forward. According to Ivor Agyeman Dua, an expert on African history, Yaa Asantewaa stood up and asked the English interpreter to translate to the Governor, that “tomorrow ghost widows would get husbands”.

The Queen was angered by the weakness in the men. The Queen then declared that if the chiefs were such cowards, then they should exchange their loin cloths with her underwear.

Sydney paused and quoting a passage, he said: “I will read you the Ghanaian Queen’s speech. Here it goes:

“Now I see that some of you fear to go forward to fight for our king. If it was in the brave days of Osei Tutu, Okomfo Anokye, and Opoku Ware, chiefs would not sit down to see their king taken away without firing a shot. No European could have dared speak to the chiefs of Asante in the way the governor spoke to you this morning. Is it true that the bravery of Asante is no more?

“I must say this: if you, the men of Asante, will not go forward, then we will. We, the women, will. I shall call upon my fellow women. We will fight! We will fight till the last of us falls in the battlefields.”

The Queen took on leadership of the Asante Uprising of 1900, gaining the support of some of the other Asante royal family. She was able to mobilise all the forces together and on March 30 1900 she led the troops to fight the British in the sixth and final Asante war against British colonialism.

Nana Yaa Asantewaa might have been in her 60s when this war started. She ordered the continued bombardment of British supporters in the capital Kumasi. As a result, the British and their supporters sought refuge in the fort. After several months, the Gold Coast governor eventually sent a force of 1 400 to fight the resistance.

In retaliation, the British troops plundered the villages, killed many and confiscated their lands. During the course of this, Queen Yaa Asantewaa and 15 of her closest advisers were captured. On May 17 1901, the British Queen ordered the deportation of Yaa Asantewaa and 13 Asante’s chiefs to the Seychelles. They lived there as political prisoners on the islands. The Warrior Queen Yaa Asentewaa died on October 17 1921 on the island of Seychelles.

In closing the history lesson under the mango tree, Sydney said the legacy of Queen Yaa Asantewa and Queen Nzinga has yet to be written for many students so they can understand that there were many powerful women in Africa before colonialism came.

Shamiso took a deep breath and said, “When I have a baby girl next, I shall name her Nzinga.”

• Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic.

The gonyeti was Spencer’s true love. Women and children came second

Dr Sekai Nzenza on Wednesday
At Spencer’S funeral last week, it was the girlfriend in the red dress who cried more than his two wives and the five children. We stood on a rocky outcrop in the blistering heat at the foothills of the Mhandamiri Mountains in the Eastern Highlands burying Spencer.

People pointed at the girl in red and whispered that she was the one from South Africa, “musikana waSpencer”. She was the one who bought him the biggest phone anyone had ever seen in the village. It was the phone that looked like a small television screen. I saw it being passed around when we arrived for Spencer’s funeral the night before his burial.

Then in the morning, that big phone disappeared. “Musikana waSpencer” demanded the phone back. But we believed Mai Mishi, Spencer’s wife number two, deserved the phone. Mai Mishi is our relative and the reason why we went to the funeral in the Eastern Highlands last week. We, meaning my cousin Piri, my niece Shamiso and her husband Philemon, were there to support Mai Mishi.

Mai Mishi is Shamiso’s cousin, on her mother’s side.

Philemon and Shamiso were separated for six months after Shamiso refused to live in Philemon’s village. Despite the separation, they have been seeing each other.

When Spencer was in hospital for one night, Mai Mishi had kept the big phone and responded to all the other girlfriends and lovers’ messages, pretending to be Spencer.

One long conversation on WhatsApp came from the girl called Farai with a South African number. In the message, Mai Mishi had written, “I love you” and Farai from South Africa had said, “I love you too and cannot wait to visit your mother at Christmas.” Farai was not her real name. It was just a unisex name that Spencer created, like what most men do when they think their wives will get hold of their phones and read messages.

We heard that Spencer died at home after arriving the night before to visit his mother.

His temperature just shot up, then he vomited and collapsed.

Then he stopped breathing and died.

Just like that. Maybe something had been eating his body. Maybe that malaria he had a month or so ago was not cured.

On the way to the funeral from Harare, Mai Mishi said she had spent a whole week with the phone before Spencer came back to take it.

During that one week when Spencer was with Mai Mishi, he was admitted into hospital overnight. Doctors suspected malaria. They gave him tablets and Spencer got better.

Then he returned to his cross-border truck driving job and Mai Mishi did not see him again.

We arrived in Spencer’s village late at night. Already, the varoora, wives of Mai Spencer’s nephews, were making funny skits, pretending to be Spencer’s wives. This was their traditional role, to make everyone laugh and ease the pain of mourning.

Spencer lay in a brown coffin, surrounded by his mother, relatives, five children, first wife, girlfriend from South Africa, ex-girlfriends, workmates and many others from the surrounding valley in the Eastern Highlands.

Singing and drum beating went on all night. In the morning, around 10, we all stood in line for body viewing.

Spencer’s girlfriend, “Farai” from South Africa had travelled all the way to the Eastern Highlands to mourn Spencer and to see where they would bury him. The first wife, Mai Rachel and mother of his two girls, looked on as the girlfriend stood at the coffin for body viewing. “Farai” looked at Spencer and broke into hysteric wailing. Her two friends held her gently and took her away.

“That’s her,” said Mai Mishi, pointing to the crying girl in the red dress.

“That’s her. She is wearing the same weave on the WhatsApp profile. She ate all Spencer’s money.”

I nudged Mai Mishi gently and pushed her forward to join the line of body viewers. Her face looked angry and there were no tears. Piri grabbed the baby boy from her and whispered, “Say goodbye to your husband.” Mai Mishi reluctantly walked towards the coffin, took one look at Spencer and she burst into tears. Then Shamiso placed her arm around her and they walked away from the coffin. I was next in line and I also took a quick glimpse of Spencer.

Apart from the darkened face, due to death, he looked much the same, beard and all.

Spencer was a handsome, truck or gonyeti driver. We all knew Spencer well. How many times had Spencer arrived in Chitungwiza with his big gonyeti to visit Shamiso and Philemon? It was too big a truck to be driven along suburban crowded streets. But Spencer did not care. He said there was no policeman around to stop him. Even if there was, he would try his luck at offering a little money to stop the policeman from giving him a fine. The children often stood around the truck, touching its big wheels, trying to open the big tent to see what cargo Spencer was taking to Tanzania or somewhere.

To get in the big truck, you climbed a few steps to where the driver and passengers sat. Just behind the driver and passenger seats there was space for a bed and enough room for two people to sleep comfortably.

Whenever Spencer had company, he stopped at the designated truck stops along the route from South Africa to Tanzania. To avoid boredom, Spencer often took his wife or girlfriend on the long journey. She cooked for him and they enjoyed a few beers along the way.

Before she got pregnant, Mai Mishi travelled in the truck twice from Durban all the way to Ndola. When Mishi was born, she was forced to stay at home in Glen Norah. She saw Spencer once or maybe twice a month for one or two days. Most times, Spencer was driving his cross-border long truck.

He loved his truck. Mai Mishi said the truck was his real love. Women and children came second.

“And so the girlfriend with the red dress and a long curly weave under a black headscarf fell down hysterically crying and shouting, ‘Spencer, ah, Spencer wandirwadzisa!’” Piri said, placing her hands on her head pretending to wail the way the girlfriend in the red dress had done.

“It was so sad. And what about the poor children? And his mother too,” I said, as we drove away, leaving Mai Mishi sitting among the mourners. She had to stay there until all Spencer’s clothes were distributed and the after burial formalities followed.

“You think she is waiting for the clothes’ distribution? Aiwa. She wants to know if her name is on Spencer’s pension as a beneficiary,” said Shamiso. “Chances are, Mai Mishi’s name exists nowhere. Remember, these people were not even married traditionally or in court.”

“That Spencer. He looked so big and full of knowledge. Yet he dies and leaves his business in disorder. If it was me, I would have written a will with my first wife, second wife and all the children’s names as beneficiaries,” said Philemon.

“And why would you put first and second wife on a will? If you are the type that falls in love so easily the way Spencer did, just put your mother’s name or your sister’s name and every single one of your children’s names on the will. At least you know that your mother or your sister will never leave you,” Piri said.

“And maybe Spencer had more children and more lovers in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Malawi and Zambia and Mozambique. Who can blame him? His work required travelling long distances alone. The guy needed company,” said Philemon.

“This is why I now want to go to church with Philemon. Over there, they only allow one wife. No funny games with girlfriends who buy phones that look like television screens!” said Shamiso.

“And you think the church will stop a man from finding a lover or a small house?” asked Piri, shaking her head.

I was driving up Christmas Pass, past Mutare, and did not want to comment and lose concentration. This is one of the most beautiful and most scenic places of the Eastern Highlands. We stopped on top of the mountain at the viewing point and looked down into the valley. Farther to the east going towards the Mozambique border, we could see the hazy picturesque Mhandambiri Mountains where we had been.

“Spencer failed to move with the times. There is no room for one more in a marriage, even if the cross-border truck has a bed for another. It should be left empty,” said Shamiso going back into the car.

We drove along the immaculately tarred road, silently, thinking of the handsome truck driver called Spencer. After only 40 years on this earth, Spencer was lying peacefully six feet under, and gone, leaving us to worry over his little estate, wives, his girlfriend and his many children. He should have written a will.

• Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic.

Sekai Nzenza On Wednesday
I HAVE a few grey hairs on the side of my head and a couple at the front. And maybe more on my head and elsewhere. Maybe. So I mention this to my cousin Piri, just in passing and also in reference to age. She laughs and says, “Sis, kunonzi kuchembera,” meaning I am getting old. The thought of getting old makes me shudder for a moment and also feel a sense of apprehension, perhaps, sadness almost.

But Piri does not stop laughing. She leans on my shoulder and pulls my hair without much gentleness. “One grey hair, two, three, ahaaah, many grey hairs,” she laughs counting the grey and white hairs on my head. “And have you noticed that you also have a line growing somewhere on the right side of your face? It’s a wrinkle I think,” Piri says. She pulls my chin and tilts it up, like a doctor examining a child.

Sometimes Piri forgets about private space. She is just like that. She moves to the back of my head and says, “You have more grey hairs behind your head. In fact, they are not grey, they are white. Mbuya VaMandirowesa started greying at the front. Tete Winnie went grey overnight. I think you will be all white by mid next year,” she says, pulling my dread locks and examining each one of them.

“Dye is not expensive you know, Sis. To keep up with the times, use a little, especially at the front.”

We are sitting under the mango tree in the village. It’s so hot and there is no sign whatsoever of rain coming. Yet we are almost in the middle of November. Philemon is using his big phone to google news and other stuff, while my niece Shamiso is looking at fashion trends on the Internet, using my iPad.

There was a time when we had no phone at all here. Then the phone we called a brick came and we climbed the anthill to get a network. During the past two years, we are getting network here including the expensive roaming network from overseas. We can get global news while sitting under the mango tree, like we are doing now. The world has become a small place.

“How old are you Tete?” asks Shamiso, looking at me straight in the face, smiling as if this was a normal question. “You do not ask a woman her age or anyone about age,” I tell her. My irritation with her surprises me.

“And why not? Kana zviine basa zvine basa rei?” asks Piri laughing, basically saying it really did not matter, this whole business about age. It may be important for some people but it may not be important at all. “Who cares about age and grey hairs?” she says, reaching for her beer from the cooler box.

“Because it’s just nice to be young,” Shamiso says. She can very well say that. I recall the time when I was 21 too. That was many years ago.

“Aging is bad I tell you,” says Shamiso, now going through the photos on my iPad. “Look at this one of you,” she says, pointing at a photo of me with an Afro, taken at Stella Nova studios when I first came to Harare just before independence. I was young and youthful, with a soft, beautiful flawless skin. The scar from a childhood barbed wire accident showing like a thin line on the left side of my nose. I am smiling into the camera. My eyes are big and clear. My teeth are even and almost perfect, not stained by years of coffee and red wine like they are now.

Since I was the middle girl, I am sitting on a chair with my two sisters, Charity and Paida. They are standing next to me and resting their hands on my shoulders. We are wearing similar dresses with big, bold black and white flowers, a Christmas present from our older sisters. Charity has her hair plaited in beautiful criss-cross and then made into some kind of a crown. She looks graceful.

People always said Charity was the beauty among the three of us. Paida was the light skinned one and beautiful too. She looked more like my mother. In the photo, Paida’s Afro is even bigger than mine and she is very skinny.

This photo was taken soon after independence, when we went to Machipisa from Glen Norah to get it taken. It was later framed and placed on the wall, back in the village. It sat there for years, attracting small brown marks from cockroaches and nibbles at the frame corners from the rats. One day, it left the wall and found its way to Australia or the USA. Maybe Paida or one of the younger sisters felt that it was time for the photo to leave the village. The photo was made digital. Recently, someone put it on the family WhatsApp forum and everyone had a good laugh, saying how young and innocent we all looked then.

Piri takes a closer look at the photo of us and points at Charity. Speaking slowly and almost whispering, she says, “If only we could turn back time. We would make her live again and she can return here to brew beer and help manage this homestead the way she used to do. Ah, that one, she inherited the strength of Mbuya VaMandirowesa.” We felt the sadness in her voice. Charity died three years ago. She was the one to go first, before her time.

“Nguva haisi yedu,” I tell them, meaning time does not belong to us. We grow, with age and time moves on. That is the way we are created. “Some of us depart this life long before we have grey hairs on our heads,” says Piri. She turns to me again and starts counting my grey hairs.

I shrug and move a little from her. “What about you? Let me check your head,” I say. But she says I was not to touch her hair. And I said why not. “Because you will see that I have been dyeing my hair!” she says, laughing. She changes the subject and tells me to look at the photos on the internet that Shamiso was now displaying for us to see.

“I want to look like this,” Shamiso says, pointing at a picture of Beyoncé. Then she searches for more images and comes up with another one of Kim Kardashian. “Or this one,” she says, admiringly staring at the model or actress standing next to her husband and baby called Blue.

“Or this one,” she says, placing the Ipad on Piri’s lap showing her a photo of Jennifer Lopez. Piri pushes the iPad away and says, “Iwe, unopenga here? Why do you want to look like these women?”

“Yes, tete, ask her,” says Philemon, dragging his stool and coming closer to us. “Ask Shamiso why she wants to look like American women. Look at her fake hair and her nails. I want her to be normal, to be the way she was when I first met her in Glen Norah more than two years ago. Her hair was plaited with thread even.”

Shamiso laughs dismissively, “One must move with the times. Hapana chekumiririra,” she says, meaning there was nothing to wait for.

“How long do you want to stay young?” Philemon asks. “You are already Prince’s mother. Age is not about years. It’s about what you have achieved in life.”

Maybe Piri is discovering my grey hairs for the first time. But I know about them and lately, that had started to bother me. But why should that be a worry, I cannot figure that out. Is getting old not part of who we are? Shall we remain youthful and ageless forever? Life is not like that.

When we were growing up here, we used to celebrate age.

“Ndiyani mukuru?” was the question asked when a group of us children were seen together, meaning, who is the oldest among you? Then we would look at each other and the oldest always stepped up to take responsibility. Mwana we dangwe, the first born, had many responsibilities that came with being the oldest.

In those days, we all wanted to be older and go to school. We then wanted to be in a higher grade. When sharing sadza and meat, it was the oldest child who picked the biggest piece of meat from the plate first. Being older was nice because it gave you more privileges and respect.

But that time is gone now. The world of the internet, fashion, advertising and social media keeps on reminding us to be young, beautiful and energetic. And yet, getting older gives us memories of the past gone by. Why not look at the present and celebrate life in all its fullness?

Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic.

Dr Sekai Nzenza on Wednesday

Mai Joseph and Mai Ruth laughed together and drank their tea. Taking turns to speak, they said their lives were what they were and once married, their commitment was to the husband, the family and the church.

“You cannot stop a man from admiring a beautiful woman,” said my cousin Piri. “You are not the only beautiful girl in this world.” She was saying this to my niece Shamiso. We were back in the village last Friday. They had burst into my room, waking me up from a beautiful dream which I could no longer remember.

One reason I keep coming back here to the village is to have a very good night’s sleep. I listen to the sounds of the night until I fall asleep.

Aroused from my slumber, I sat up and I looked at the time on my phone. It was 2am. Outside, it had started pouring with rain. Piri and Shamiso sat at the edge of my bed. Shamiso wore a pink floral night dress and a stocking wrapped around her head, covering the long weave.

How many times have we told her that a woman does not wear a stocking to protect her hair before going to bed?

It is the most unbecoming look. Once Piri told Shamiso in no uncertain terms that no man wants to stick his nose near a head covered with a brown stocking. But did Shamiso listen? No. She argued that stockings make the best head covers because they stretch and they are light on the head.

Piri wore just a wraparound cloth and nothing else. She is not into night- dresses or anything that might make her feel hot or uncomfortable in bed. I pulled the stocking off Shamiso’s head and said: “So, what have you and Philemon been fighting about? Could this not have waited till morning?”

“No Tete. No. I do not want to be with this man any more. No. Enough is enough. He keeps looking at other women all the time,” Shamiso said, her voice dropping, like she was on the verge of crying.

The events leading to the domestic fight between Philemon and Shamiso had been witnessed by all of us during the afternoon. Philemon had paid too much attention to Anna or Mai Joseph, Apostle Jeremiah’s wife number three.

Earlier on before sunset, we had all gathered in the kitchen hut as the rain poured outside. Among the women were Madzibaba’s two wives, Shamiso, my cousin Piri and myself. On the kitchen bench were our neighbour Jemba, Philemon and baby Prince.

Mai Shalom, the lady who looks after the homestead, was also there, busy making tea for everyone. Once you have the Mapostori in the house, it’s almost mandatory that we must make tea. Mai Joseph sat with her legs outstretched, feet almost touching the ashes in the fireplace.

There were four wives to one man, all very industrious. Wife number one, Mai Ruth, moves around the villages making clay kitchen shelves or zvidziro with Mai Joseph, who is wife number three. Wife number two and wife number four work in the gardens, growing potatoes, pumpkins and tomatoes. All four wives are under 25 years old. Madzibaba himself is 32. Shamiso went to school with Mai Joseph. They are the same age.

“Sure? Are you really the same age?” asked Philemon, looking at Mai Joseph then at Shamiso again. Mai Joseph was this tall, slim young woman, with long legs and a shaved head, wearing no head scarf. She had no earrings or any sort of jewellery. She wore a long, cream or almost colourless skirt covering well below her knees and a pink blouse. Wife number one, Mai Ruth, had a baby on her back.

“Did you really go to the same school?” Philemon asked Mai Joseph, looking at her with eyes that appeared to be full of admiration. She smiled back at him, showing the most beautiful and even set of white teeth.

She said: “Ehe, Shamiso and I were together from Grade One to Seven. Then she went to St Clara’s School and I stayed home because my parents had no school fees.”

“That was not the reason why you did not go to Form One, Mai Joseph,” said Shamiso. She was kneeling down and pouring a whole cup of sugar into the teapot. “You stopped going to school because in your church, girls never go beyond Grade Seven. Did you not become wife number three when you were only 15? Is that not true?”

The tone of Shamiso’s voice was rather harsh.

Mai Joseph was quiet for a moment. Then the senior wife answered for her. “She married my husband when she was 16.”

“But why did you do that?” asked Philemon smiling almost flirtatiously, with his eyes focused on Mai Joseph’s face. “Were there not enough men around? Why did you become wife number three?”

“That is what their church demands,” said Shamiso, adding powdered milk into a cup of cold water. She stirred it and then added in to the teapot.

“Mapudzi anowira kune vasina hari,” said Jemba, meaning those without claypots harvest the most pumpkins. He was clearly referring to the beauty of Mai Joseph and how it has landed on Madzibaba Jeremiah, a man who already had two wives.

Then Piri quickly said that if Jemba wanted a wife as beautiful as Mai Joseph, he should join the Apostolic church that allowed many wives.

“Then you will find yourself a wife as beautiful as Mai Joseph here,” said Philemon smiling at Mai Joseph again. “And do you ever want to leave the village and find a job in the city like the way some village women like Shamiso have done?” Shamiso kept on pouring tea in to the cups, saying nothing.

Mai Joseph and Mai Ruth laughed together and drank their tea. Taking turns to speak, they said their lives were what they were and once married, their commitment was to the husband, the family and the church.

Jemba said Philemon was unfortunate to have married into our family because we belonged to VaHera of the Eland totem. He pointed to Shamiso and said: “The women are headstrong. You will not win any battle with them,” Jemba said.

“Find another one, my friend, this one will not go and live in your village.” Maybe Jemba was joking. But this was a sensitive issue. Shamiso had since refused to go and live in Philemon’s village, down in Bocha, way past Buhera. And now Jemba was bringing up a subject we had all decided was a no-go area.

After everyone had gone, we sat around for a while. Then Philemon and Shamiso went to their room to sleep.

According to Shamiso, once they settled to sleep, Philemon then said: “When the rains come, women start complaining of many diseases because they do not want to return to the village and plough the fields.” Shamiso ignored the comment. Instead, she sang a religious tune, made a couple of messages on her phone, then joined Philemon in bed.

“Mai Prince, did you hear what I said? Women complain of many diseases when it rains because they do not want to work in the fields,” Philemon said. Shamiso then asked Philemon to explain. He described the beauty and strength of women of the Apostolic faith. “For example, that Mai Joseph. Ah, that woman is beautiful. She said you are the same age? You would not think that she already had two children. In another world, that woman could have been a model.”

Shamiso picked up her phone and started texting again. Philemon then sat up in bed, pulled Shamiso towards him and said: “Why don’t you shave your head and join the Apostolic faith, Mai Prince?” he was smiling. But by this time, Shamiso was feeling some anger inside her.

“Baba va Prince, you are looking for a fight. But I will tell you what I think. Number one, I am not jealous of the Mupositori Anna. Number two, I am not joining the Apostolic faith. Number three, I am going to bed,” Shamiso said, pulling the blanket over her head. She pretended to sleep.

Philemon then started talking about the virtues of a good woman. He quoted Bible verses about love, marriage and disobedient wives. With more anger rising inside her, Shamiso tried to remain silent. She sat up in bed again and started texting. Philemon grabbed the phone and said Shamiso was not to text in bed. For the next two or more hours, the two of them argued and shouted at each other picking upon unrelated marital issues.

“Are you jealous of women who are more beautiful than you are?” Philemon asked, laughing. At that point, Shamiso left the room and knocked on Piri’s door. That was when the two of them came to wake me up. This was not a time to do marriage counselling. Shamiso shared the bed with Piri and we said the matter of jealousy would be resolved in the morning.

It was not.

Philemon argued that it was in man’s nature to appreciate the beauty of other women.

 Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic

Dr Sekai Nzenza on Wednesday
On the plane, Piri sits quietly in the window seat. Her excitement is beyond bounds. She is not speaking but is twiddling her fingers and taking short breaths. I let her be. We are going to South Africa. Piri has a new passport, the first one she has ever got. It has been stamped just once, as we were leaving immigration in Harare. We are Zimbabweans, so we do not need a visa to South Africa. We are going to visit our cousin Mainini Erica and her husband Richard, who are among more than one million Zimbabweans living in South Africa.

Zimbabweans work in every sector of the South African economy, from mines, factories, wineries, farms, gardens, restaurants, law firms, hospitals and universities. Many have made South Africa home. Some have forgotten that once, they lived in the village, back here in Zimbabwe. Forgetting too, that the people they left behind miss them. But then these days, you must follow the trail that leads to work and a better lifestyle.

As the plane speeds along the runway and takes off, Piri remains unmoved for a while, looking through the window. Suddenly, she says: “Honai Sis, Chitungwiza, ah, Hunyani, honai, mota, honai!” I tell her to keep her voice down, conscious that other seasoned travellers might be listening to us.

We are given a beef sandwich but Piri is not interested in eating anything. I ask for a beer on her behalf and she takes it down slowly. An hour and 20 minutes later, we start our descent into Johannesburg. As we walk to the immigration desks, Piri says: “The people are like ants, moving so fast in one direction.”

After collecting our suitcases, we go to the train. Sitting on the train, Piri takes a deep breath and says: “Ah, Sis, kuti isu tichasiya makombi tigosvikawo ipapa pakufamba?” (Are we ever going to leave the kombis and get to this level when we travel?)

I nod and tell her that all countries start from somewhere and they develop at a different pace. But I hide my doubts because I do not think this will happen when I am still alive. Perhaps later. But we must have hope.

I remind Piri that there were days when our grandparents left Southern Rhodesia to work in Johannesburg, kuJonhi, as they called it. They walked, travelled on buses and on trains to get to South Africa. Those who walked slept in the jungle, making a fire at night to scare away lions.

In Johannesburg they endured the apartheid system and came back home with very little. Some never returned. Others went to Fort Hare and studied for big degrees. Now, the grandchildren of the first Zimbabweans to South Africa are also coming here to study.

In Johannesburg, we stayed with my cousin, Mainini Erica. We are related on my mother’s side. She is an accountant and her husband Rich, is an engineer from Zambia. After 20 years living here, the couple are what you could call comfortable.

They live in a gated community where you need a pass to visit them. Their house has six bedrooms and four bathrooms. In the garage are four cars, including a Mercedes-Benz and another 4WD. They have three children, two at university and the youngest boy is in a private boarding school somewhere outside Johannesburg. Once or twice a year, they travel overseas on holidays and visit Zimbabwe at Christmas.

Since their Zimbabwean maid was away, to do the cooking and washing of dishes, Mainini Erica said we could all have a variety of takeaway food to choose from. Food was ordered on the phone from different shops. One by one, the deliveries of various foods arrived. There was fried chicken, bar-b-que ribs, Chinese duck, and Indian curry with roti bread, fish and chips and pizza.

Confronted with such varieties of food, Piri said: “South Africa is heaven.” But Rich and Erica quickly corrected her, saying life was not easy for most Zimbabweans. But Piri was half listening, enjoying a big can of Castle and eating big barbecue ribs with her eyes were focused on the TV series called “Generations”.

“We have the same show in Zimbabwe. Everyone in the movie is beautiful, even the old ladies. I think I can live here,” she said, reaching for another rib that was smothered in red sauce. “They exaggerate about South Africans not liking other people from Africa.”

The following day we went shopping in Sandton. Mainini Erica drove us in her brand new Mercedes. Piri paused for photos in front of Nelson Mandela’s statue at Nelson Mandela Square. Soon as we entered the mall, she asked for money to buy a shorter jean skirt so she could show off her thick brown legs a bit more, since the women walking around the mall had shorter skirts and were proudly swinging their bottoms.

Piri also put some bright red lipstick on. “Ndabvuma, South Africa has money and beautiful full people,” she said, admiring people walking around the mall. “People lie when they say life is bad in South Africa.”

Erica told Piri that Sandton was not the real South Africa. What Piri was seeing in Sandton was very similar to an upmarket New York or London shopping centre where most people with money walk around, shop, have dinner and enter into bookshops to read or spend time in a coffee shop meeting and chatting with friends.

Outside Sandton, there was another world, where poor people, both South Africans and other migrants and refugees from Africa, struggle to make a living.

But Piri did not believe anything Erica said. Piri stopped and pointed to a coffee shop a few steps below and pulled my arm: “Look, this place is just like what you see on television. See, down in that shop, the only people drinking coffee and eating cakes are white people. On television, you see white people too serving other white people. But here, it’s the black people serving the white people. I have never seen so many white people in one place except on television. ” She stood there staring below. Erica then said: “And most of those people you see in there serving as waiters and waitress are from Zimbabwe.”

“But you lie,” said Piri. To prove the point, we walked down the stairs into the café and were allocated a table by a young friendly guy dressed in a white shirt and blue jeans. “Table for three?” he asked, smiling. Then he gave us the menu and left us for a few minutes.

When he came back, Erica said: “Tirikuda two cappuccinos and one Coke.” The guy immediately replied in Shona and in a brief moment, he told us that he was an electrician, he came from Guruve, up in the north of Zimbabwe and he has been in South Africa for four years.

His wife works as a receptionist in Sandton and they have two children being cared for by his mother in Harare. Before the rand dropped, they used to send money very often to the family, but lately, they have struggled to make enough to pay for the children’s school fees and for the rent in Warren Park where his parents live with other younger siblings and relatives.

“Are you coming home for Christmas?” Piri asked. Richard smiled and said, he was. Piri then asked if his wife was coming along as well. Richard said no, she was not coming because they take turns to come home. “We should catch up when you come over. We can all go to Mereki and roast meat together. Do you have a car?” Richard said he did and Piri smiled even more and asked for Richard’s phone number.

We reminded Piri that Richard was married and there was no need to give him one of her usual flirtatious smile. “There will be no harm in welcoming a brother back home. We can all ride in his car. How many cars with South African number plates have you seen at Mereki’s during Christmas?”

On the way home, Erica pointed to Alexandra township and said there was a lot of poverty and violence in that area and in many other towns too within South Africa. She told us many stories of people being robbed and killed at gunpoint. In another story she said the robbers climbed a fence, raped the woman and killed the husband then took away all the money and the car. Erica’s stories about violence in South Africa were many. Piri kept on saying, “Maiwee, sure?”

“Here in South Africa, you find two worlds. Some of the richest people in the world live here. Many of them are black like us. Then you find the poorest of the poor living in shacks around Honey Dew, Soweto and other only a few kilometres from the richest people. Life is like that.” Erica said.

“One day, it should get better,” I said, hoping in my own mind that a change would come when there will be less violence, less inequality and less xenophobia. I remembered the time when apartheid was the norm here. Black and white people did not mix.

During that that time, Nelson Mandela and many black South Africans were in prison for fighting the system of racial segregation. In 1976, black students in Soweto demonstrated against the forced study of Afrikaans in schools. Many were shot dead and that began a big exodus of refugees outside South Africa. Steve Biko, the founder of the Black Consciousness movement and an anti-apartheid fighter, was killed on September 12, 1977.

South Africa has a history of pain and suffering during apartheid. But, like everything else, apartheid passed. Hapana chisingaperi. After apartheid, South Africa is confronted with the problems of increasing poverty, xenophobia and many other economic and social problems. That too, hopefully, will come to pass.

Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic

Pottery is a skill to be celebrated

Dr Sekai Nzenza on Wednesday

We are known for what new professions we have learnt in formal schooling. And yet, there are those skills we used to learn just by seeing or observing. Or simply by virtue of genetic talent.

My grandmother Mbuya VaMandirowesa used to say that if you do not have a skill, you will never get married.

This did not apply to just us girls, but to boys as well.

Every single person must be known for that which they are good at, Mbuya would say. Then she sat there, on the footsteps of the granary, taking in her snuff and pointing to the people in the village around us and way beyond, who were known for their particular skills.

There was VaZizhanga, the village midwife. She was a short woman with very big breasts.

When someone was in labour, you saw VaZizhanga cupping her full breasts in her hands to stop them from swinging as she ran to deliver a baby across the river or over the mountain.

When my sister Paida was born, it was VaZizhanga who did the delivery.

I was too young to know what happened, but the story is that VaZizhanga had already gone to the nhimbe, or village communal field work when the message came that my mother was in labour.

VaZizhanga immediately placed a small stone on her back, wrapped a cloth around it and carried it like a baby. Somehow that stone had magic powers to stop a baby from popping up its head too soon before the midwife arrived.

Paida was delivered well and the umbilical cord was cut with a razor.

Then it was buried in the fields near the homestead so Paida will always remember where it is. That way, she would not forget where she came from.

Then there was Sekuru VaMhofu, my grandfather Sekuru Dickson’s brother. He was the blacksmith, traditional healer and wise elder. I recall that Sekuru VaMhofu was this tall, quiet-spoken man with white hair who never left his dare, or the man’s place. The dare was on the northern side of the anthill not too far from the village homestead.

Sekuru VaMhofu lived under a tree at the dare and slept there. Many boys received lessons on how to be a man at the dare. Women in the village homestead took sadza and various relish to the dare where the men tasted the dishes and commented on the best cook among all the women. Every young man brought his proposed bride to Sekuru VaMhofu so he could inspect her with his eyes, ask about her totem and her people. Then he would smile gently at her, before giving his confidential comment on whether she would make a good wife or not.

One time, my brother Charles brought a very skinny, light-skinned, pretty woman from Salisbury, before it became Harare.

Charles was so proud of his girl and was ready to pay lobola for her.

He took her to meet Sekuru Mhofu.

Soon after she clapped hands to Sekuru, she was told to leave the dare and join the other women.

On that day, Sekuru was carving a wooden stool with a little axe and a sharp knife.

As the proposed urban bride walked away, Sekuru paused, looked at her again, shook his head and spat very far away from Charles.

Then he said: “Chorosi muzukuru, Harare inonzi ukapfira mate, anomhara pamukadzi. Karukonikoni aka unokadii? Kanorima? Washaya mukadzi? ” meaning something like this: “My dear grandson, they say there are so many women in Harare to the extent that when you spit, you will hit a woman, why would you take such a skinny woman as a wife? Can she work in the fields?” But at that time, my brother Charles wanted a Western- type woman, urban-based, light-skinned, skinny and glamorous.

He married his bride. She never came back to work in the fields. Sadly, for other reasons, the marriage did not last. Sekuru Mhofu blamed it all on the woman, saying she was too urban and lacked any skills or talents to make a good wife.

Down in the Save Valley, was the Goredema family, the fishermen and hunters.

Soon as the rain came, they trapped the cat fish in big nets, smoked them and placed them in a sack.

The father and son walked around the villages, exchanging smoked fish with sugar, salt or flour.

Because their soil was very fertile, they grew large quantities of okra. Long before our small fields of okra were ready, the Goredema family brought us fresh okra and also sun dried tomatoes. Occasionally, they killed a hippo and walked the steep hills to sell the fresh meat. People said the Goredema men had their bodies “treated” or kurapirwa against crocodiles. They could jump into a pool infested with crocodiles in the Save River.

They fearlessly caught fish and none of the crocodiles dared eat them.

Mbuya often pointed to the Goredema young men and told us to consider marrying one of the sons. But my mother would take us aside and say: “Aiwa, those boys have not seen the door of a classroom.” Mbuya then argued that seeing the door of a classroom or spending days sitting on a desk listening to a teacher did not make a good wife. That argument between Mbuya and my mother went on for years. My mother said we should combine village skills with Western education. That way, we would know how to survive in the city, because the village was not going to be there forever.

Today, if you come to our village, you only need to ask what food the Goredema family have to sell and people will tell you that they have dried okra, fresh vegetables, fish or even smoked rabbits.

Their skill has been passed on from generation to generation.

Mbuya also said one of us girls must spend hours with my mother and learn how to make clay pots.

My mother’s skill was to find the right clay by the river, pound it to the right consistency, and then sit there for hours carefully moulding big and small pots.

On some pots she made chevron patterns. Then she left them to dry, periodically smoothening them with a special stick or stone.

Once they were dry, she dug the ground and made a special furnace. We helped her strip the dry barks of a tree, makwati and leaves. She burnt the pots until they were red hot and nicely brown. My mother sold her pots and raised money for our school fees.

Up to this day, people say, thank your mother for her skill to mould. Vaive shasha pakuumba hari. But we did not learn how to mould pots.

At that time, we believed that pottery making was done by poor people.

We did not know that it was an art to be celebrated. That ability or talent to work with clay is long lost in my family.

Mbuya also used to point at people who did nothing, especially, the man across the river called Isaya.

He was the lazy one who sat by his hut and watched people rush to the fields, plough or weed all day.

A lazy person was often referred to as doing nothing like Isaya, “kuti gada saIsaya”.

People said laziness was Isaya’s talent, shavi or bad spirit. Isaya died with nothing to his name.

Not everyone had a celebrated talent or skill. In our family, there was Tete Sara, who was known to love men beyond what was considered normal. Varoora, or those women who had a joking relationship with her said Tete Sara was the first African woman from the village to share the same bed with lonely European traders during the colonial days. Her skill was to keep men happy, be they Europeans, Malawians, Mozambicans and Zambians.

When Tete Sara got older, she came back home bringing a Malawian husband with her.

Before he died, he handed over to her the skills of a traditional healer.

Then Tete Sara became known as the healer with a skill to provide good medicine to men suffering from various bedroom ailments.

Tete Sara restored fertility confidence in men, even if they were beyond 90 years of age. As her great nieces, the same varoora teased us, asking why we did not inherit such a skill, because in this day and age, a traditional approach to such male ailments is much needed. If only we had gained such artistic knowledge and skill from Tete Sara.

“What does your partner do?” We often ask new friends.

The answer is: he or she is a lawyer, a teacher, a nurse, builder, an electrician or a plumber. We are known for what new professions we have learnt in formal schooling. And yet, there are those skills we used to learn just by seeing or observing. Or simply by virtue of genetic talent.

Most of the old artisans from our village have since died.

But their sons and daughters, who missed out on going to school, are still there. You find such celebrated skills also in other villages around Zimbabwe and beyond the borders. These skills which need no formal schooling are to be celebrated.

Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic.

Dr Sekai Nzenza on Wednesday
“Village marriages last longer than urban ones,” says my cousin Piri, wistfully looking at a couple sharing soft drinks and fresh buns at Muzorori & Sons store. We have stopped at our old shopping centre. This place was the life of all the villages around here before independence. I take another look at the couple and recognise them immediately. The woman with a light pink skirt, matching blouse and head scarf, characteristic of the Mwazha Apostolic Faith Church clothing, is Chingasiyeni. Next to her is Zivanai.

He is a tall man with a shaved head and a long beard.

I played a major role in the courtship between Zivanai and Chingasiyeni, many years ago, when I was living here in the village.

Before the war came to our village, long before independence, I went to St Columbus Primary School. I learnt to write love letters for Chingasiyeni and delivered them in person to Zivanai, when he was the boy from behind the mountains. Chingasiyeni, or Chinga as we called her, could not write.

During that courtship period, even Zivanai did not know that I wrote the letters on Chingasiyeni’s behalf because I always signed: “Yours truly Chinga, Ndini wako Chinga.”

The reason why Chingasiyeni could not read and write by the time she became a woman ready for marriage had nothing to do with her lack of intelligence. She suffered an unfortunate incident that stopped her from getting an education.

I started Grade One and Grade Two together with Chingasiyeni. We sat on goatskin mats next to each other in class. She had a distinctive lisp and sometimes people laughed at her. Our class teacher was Miss Rwodzi. She used to speak softly in English most of the time.

Miss Rwodzi said there was no point in coming to school unless we memorised how to request for permission to leave the classroom and visit the toilet in English. She also made it very clear that it was the toilet or the lavatory that we went to when the need arose and not the bush. Miss Rwodzi smelt nice because every day she sprayed a perfume called Impulse in her armpits and all over her clothes.

One day Chingasiyeni was desperate to go to the toilet but she could not remember how to excuse herself in English. Shona was not allowed. Chinga moved closer to my ear and asked how she could make a toilet request in English. Miss Rwodzi saw her and ordered her to stop whispering immediately. A little while later Chingasiyeni whispered again. She said if I did not do the toilet request on her behalf, she was surely going to wet herself.

So with the confidence of one who spoke more English words than most of my peers I lifted up my hand high and asked for permission to speak. Madam Rwodzi said I could speak.

I stood up and with my voice in full volume, I shouted, “Ekesukuzi mi Misi Rwodzi Chingasiyeni wants to go lavatory!” The whole class burst out laughing.

Miss Rwodzi frowned like she had just smelt something really unpleasant. She grabbed a ruler and slapped me hard, on my bare shaved head. “Why do you speak for her? What happened to Chingasiyeni’s mouth? Has she lost her lips?” Humiliated, I sat down.

Miss Rwodzi then told us to shut up or she would send us all out of the classroom to water the school gardens as punishment. Suddenly, the whole classroom was quiet. Chingasiyeni shuffled around and struggled to squeeze her legs tightly together. Miss Rwodzi continued with the English lesson.

Chingasiyeni could not hold back her need to use the lavatory. Then we saw a stream of water emerging like a thin snake from under her legs. It flowed slowly over the polished mud floor.

Those of us in the way of the stream jumped up, pulling our goatskin mats with us. Others pointed and jeered at Chingasiyeni.

Miss Rwodzi slapped her hard on the head with the ruler and told her to leave the classroom immediately. Chingasiyeni did. Fearing punishment from Miss Rwodzi and more humiliation from the other school kids, Chingasiyeni never came back to school. She never learnt to read or write love letters.

At that time, Zivanai was a few years older and already in Grade 5, reading and writing well in English. After Grade 5, there was no high school nearby so Zivanai joined the home defenders sports team. These were teenagers who left school and had nothing much to do at home during the dry season. They had their own soccer and netball teams, competing with other school leavers from nearby.

A few years later, Chingasiyeni was in the home defenders netball team. After games, we saw her and the others talking, flirting and laughing in the school grounds for a while before the girls hurried straight home before sunset. A good girl was not to be seen with a boy after sunset. She waited to be approached by the boy through a love letter.

One day Chingasiyeni received her first love letter from Zivanai. She secretly came to our village homestead, hiding the letter in her pocket. We sat on the flat rocks, kuruware, away from prying eyes. Inside the envelope was a folded letter with intricate patterns of various shapes, triangles and hexagons. Chingasiyeni unfolded it slowly and gave me the letter. Then she sat next to me with legs stretched, her hand on her cheek and she listened.

The letter was written in both English and Shona. It read something like this:

The green land of love,

P.O. The Big Rocks,

Via Kiss me quick.

Mudiwa Chingasiyeni, my flower, my honey, huchi, dapitapi rangu. Your cheeks are the colour of a ripe cucumber and they are as soft as a bun soaked in tea. Your eyes are as bright as the moon in the dry season. You are my star so bright it shines during daylight. Kangu kanyeredzi kanovaima nemasikati. Whenever I see you, I shiver with love.

Tell me, flower of my heart, ruva remwoyo wangu, and tell me that you love me. I want you to be the mother of my children, to be my mother’s daughter-in-law. I dream of sailing away with you on the high seas. Tiri kumasaisai egungwa. Give me peace. Tell me that I have won the heart that so many men have tried to capture and failed.

Yours who loves you forever and ever,

Zivanai Mudoti.

When I was reading the letter, Chingasiyeni could not stop smiling. Other times she laughed out loud and asked me to read it again. Her favourite lines were the ones to do with a bun soaked in tea and sailing on high seas. I touched her cheeks and said they did not feel like a bun soaked in tea at all.

“Have you ever seen the sea?” Chingasiyeni asked, looking romantically beyond the grass huts and the mountains into the horizon. I said, no, I had never seen the sea but I suspected it looked more like a flooded river full of crocodiles and hippos. She pinched me gently and laughed.

I tore a page from my exercise book and she dictated the words for the reply. I wrote:

To Zivanai.

I am glad to receive your letter. I have heard your words and will sleep thinking about them. Then one day I shall give you a reply. I do not know if the reply will be one that will please you.

Ndini Chingasiyeni.

It was not a rejection letter but the first one in a pretend “I do not love you” letters. After the fourth letter, Chingasiyeni asked me to write a letter declaring her love and willingness to marry Zivanai. I wrote:

To my darling Zivanai.

I write this letter to say I have heard your cries seeking my love. Today I accept you with all my heart. Ndinokuda nemwoyo wangu wese until Amen. When I look into your eyes my heart melts and all I want to do is to kiss you. Each time I smell a rose, I think of you. When I see you I shall kiss you a thousand times until we are breathless. I love you to the moon and back.

Your future wife

Chinga.

I took the liberty to add the last romantic sentences from a Mills & Boon novel. Then I drew flowers and kisses on the letter even though Chingasiyeni said she was never going to kiss Zivanai because, as far as she knew, kissing was for white people only.

Many years later, we meet Chingasiyeni with Zivanai at our village shopping centre. They look mature, calm and content.

We go over to them and do the several handshake greetings. When the laughter and jokes stop, Piri asks: “So, how many Christmas days have you two shared together since Sis wrote the love letters for you?” The secret of my past ghost letter writing skills is well known in the village.

Chinga sips her Fanta, chews a bun and smiles. “Many. And God be praised.” Piri then asks for the recipe to a long lasting marriage. Zivani strokes his long beard, looks at Chingasiyeni with warm eyes and says: “A long marriage has nothing to do with education. A mix of love, shared spirituality, friendship and trust is what has helped us to see so many Christmas days together.”

Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic.

Christians in Africa are growing in numbers more than anywhere else in the world. During the past 10 years, Zimbabwe has witnessed the mushrooming of Pentecostal churches as well as numerous other African Apostolic indigenous churches

Dr Sekai Nzenza on Wednesday
Robert Moffat, the great missionary, came to this country and opened up the first mission at Inyati near Bulawayo on December 26, 1859, more than 160 years ago.

If he returned to Zimbabwe this Christmas, he would praise the Lord to see increasing multitudes of people praying in churches, houses, under trees, on top of mountains and everywhere.

When he arrived in Africa, Moffat dreamt and fervently prayed that the gospel might reach the darkest parts of Africa.

In The Matabele Journals of Robert Moffat, 1829-1860, Moffat says this to David Livingstone, his son-in-law: “In the vast plain to the north I have sometimes seen, in the morning sun, the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary has ever been.”

Such penetration of the gospel in our land, even as far as remote villages like mine behind the Hwedza Mountains, would make Robert Moffat very happy indeed.

But he may not find much joy in someone like me, whose ability to worship regularly has not improved at all during the past few years.

My early spiritual life was measured, managed and dominated by my grandmother, Mbuya VaMandirowesa, my mother and the Anglican Church.

I was brought up by my mother who early in her life had adopted the denomination that offered her education.

When she was in Sub A and Sub B in the 1940s, she belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church.

In Standard Three she attended the Anglican Church of Christ the King at Daramombe Mission near Buhera.

Then she married my father and they moved to the banks of the Save River, near the Hwedza Mountains where my father built the first school in the area, Mufudzi Wakanaka School.

My parents preached about Jesus during the building of this school, way back in 1948.

When I was born my mother was the chairwoman of the Anglican Church.

I recall how she helped line us up as children during prayers at church and taught us the Nicene Creed, in Shona and in English.

Without reading the Bible we were expected to recite: “Ndinodavira kuna Mwari mumwe, Musiki wedenga nepasi … We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father . . .”

However, we did not know all the words so we mumbled along under mother’s voice until the final sentences which we shouted out loud. “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end!”

Yet, despite a good Christian image, my mother also brewed beer which she regularly sold to believers and non-believers alike.

At home, my mother told us to look out for Father Mutemarari, the Anglican priest who used to ride his bike past our house on his way to mass once a month. She instructed us to cover the beer pots with a blanket when the priest entered our homestead. Then she closed the kitchen hut door and welcomed the priest. They sat under the tree and discussed the procedures for mass on the following day.

My mother always reserved a small calabash of beer that she poured on the ground to honour the ancestral spirits. Such beer making was unChristian and totally unacceptable in the Anglican Church. But for my mother, there never seemed to be a conflict.

During the liberation war, my mother deserted the Anglican Church and became a Catholic. One late night, the fighters gathered the villagers and told them that Anglicans were no different from the British colonialists. “The Anglicans told us to close our eyes to pray and while our eyes were closed they stole our land,” the fighters said. “Catholics are better, because they support our freedom.” On that night, everyone in the village became a Catholic. After the war, some of the village women went back to the Anglican Church while the majority remained Catholics.

When I left the village, I went to a Methodist boarding school and I became a serious born-again Christian.

I moved around with my pocket King James Version Bible. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was going to stop me from aspiring to enter the Kingdom of God. I even helped towards the conversion of some old friends who have remained strong Christians up to this day.

Down in Lusaka, somewhere near Highfield in Harare, I led youth prayer groups during the liberation war. Some people over there still remember me as the young and skinny, dark-skinned girl who wanted to be so close to Jesus.

Then this girl left and went to England, Australia, and the United States and years later she came back.

My faith in God began to slide when I moved to England. Without friends or family, I replaced the church congregation with various freedom rights groups. I marched on every cause that had to with women’s rights, socialism, communism, racism, class, animal rights, Greenpeace and every other cause advocating for rights. I ceased to pray regularly.

By the time I returned to the village many years later, I had moved a long way from meaningful Christian worship. I no longer belonged to any church. Many years later, I find myself continuously persuaded and almost harassed by my friends to return to Jesus.

Christians in Africa are growing in numbers more than anywhere else in the world. During the past 10 years, Zimbabwe has witnessed many denominations – Anglican, United Methodist, Methodist Whisiri (Wesley), Anglican, Salvation Army, Zionist, AFM, Vabati VeZviratidzo (the miracle workers), Mughodhi, Prophet Johane Marange, Prophet Mwazha, Manhango, Roman Catholic, Dutch Reformed, Seventh Day Adventist, Johane Masowe, Muponesi, and many other African Apostolic indigenous churches.

The name of Jesus is heard in every village while in the cities more people identify with the new prophets Magaya, Makandiwa, Assemblies of God Africa, Glad Tidings, End Time Message, Christ Embassy and many other American-type Pentecostal churches. From huge billboards, African visionary prophets beseech us to join the churches.

This Christmas, I feel no nearer to God than I did three years ago when I first mentioned in this column that I was looking for a church.

At that time I desperately wanted to wear a uniform and belong to a group of prayerful upright people.

And yet, I feel less guilty of my sins. In fact, I feel more content than I did during the days when I was a born-again Christian.

On Boxing Day, we shall follow Mbuya VaMandirowesa’s ritual and a cow will be killed in this village.

An axe is likely to be used to do the slaughtering. It is such a primitive way to do it. But this village, unlike other villages in America and elsewhere, does not have a gun. We still use an axe and knives sharpened on a rock. The killing of an animal, any animal, is not a good sight.

We do not have a refrigerator so the rest of the meat will be hanging in my mother’s kitchen hut above the fire away from flies. It will be smoked beautifully to make nice dried meat, chimukuyu. I believe the ancestors will be happy with the Boxing Day ceremony and the spilling of blood.

As I look towards Christmas Day, I shall celebrate Jesus’ birth in our little church on top of the hill. Then on Boxing Day, we must do what is right by our ancestors and allow the feast of the beast. We will play the drum, dance and drink to the thirst of our ancestors. Just as my mother and grandmother would have wanted it.

• Dr Sekai Nzenza is a cultural critic

The art of Zimbabwe, as expressed in the clay pots of our mothers and grandmothers, is under assault by new religious movements

Sekai Nzenza On Wednesday
On New Year’s Day, some women from around here woke up very early to smash their traditional household clay pots. “I no longer want to be associated with you because I am a new creature in Christ!” each woman shouted as she threw small and big clay pots onto the rocks, breaking the pots

into pieces.

Over the years, these pots had been bought from various pottery makers and also inherited from the women’s aunts and other close female relatives.

We discovered this massive destruction of clay pots towards sunset, when my cousin Piri, cousin Reuben from Australia and I were taking a New Year’s Day stroll to the big rocks, kuruware, for a nice sunset drink.

Piri carried the cooler box with a block of ice, a few beers and a bottle of wine on her head.

We were still in the festive mood.

Reuben, as usual, was busy taking pictures of everything with his big lens camera and IPhone.

Then we saw several clay pots smashed to pieces right on the side of the anthill near the Mutsamvi tree where a new group of Apostolic people gather to worship.

I picked up the pieces of a broken mhirimo, or the big clay pot.

I recognised the faded red chevron patterns as those done by my mother, many years before, when she sold these pots to raise money for our school fees.

I started gathering the broken pieces while Piri looked on, bemused.

“Leave the pieces of clay pots. They have been condemned by God. Clay pots belong to the Devil,” Piri said, laughing with sarcasm, like this was yet another funny episode she had witnessed in the village this Christmas and holiday period.

“What is so funny about beautiful art work that has been broken into smithereens?” I asked.

Reuben adjusted his camera and started taking pictures of me and the broken clay pots.

“Ah, why should I not laugh?” asked Piri.

“If women are gullible to take orders from so-called prophets and prophetesses who tell them, ‘Destroy everything that links you your ancestors! Destroy any possessions that are associated with women only!’ It’s a big joke, Bhudhi Reuben.”

Piri placed the heavy box of drinks and ice on the sandy footpath.

She pulled out a beer, sat on the box and started drinking.

“Hari idzi dzemadzimai dzinoyera ka Sis?” Reuben asked me, meaning, these pots are scared to the women, are they not?

I nodded and started laying the pieces on the ground.

I wondered if there would be any sense in gluing them all together.

Then I just stood there, staring at the massive pile up of broken pots.

I recalled that there were some beautiful stacked clay pots in Mbuya VaMandirowesa and my mother’s kitchen hut when I was growing up in the village homestead.

The traditional kitchen represented the artwork of elaborate shelves made of polished clay.

The kitchen hut was the heart and the centre of everything that happened in the homestead.

Children were born there, food cooked there, ceremonies held there.

When people died, which was rare in those days, their bodies were kept in the hut overnight because Mbuya said the kitchen hut was where we started and where we were all expected to spend our last night on this earth.

The decoration of kitchens was made colourful and beautiful by the use of clay pots nicely polished and oiled with peanut butter oil.

Women were the pottery makers and main decorators of kitchens and other household rooms.

Making pottery was an art.

The clay was collected from particular layers in the subsoils by the river.

Dry clay was ground into fine powder on flat grinding stone.

Then sifted with a winnowing basket and the dry powder left behind was mixed with water and prepared for making pottery.

Then a circular platform was created and used as a base for the pot which was built up meticulously in a series of coils.

Still standing there, under the Mutsamvi tree, I recalled how my mother used a wooden shaping tool to shape the pot into the size that she wanted.

She then drew chevron patterns with a pointed stick that looked like a pencil.

She left the pot to dry in a cool place for two or maybe three days before smoothing it with a hurungudo, the rounded river stone.

A day or more later, she placed the pots in a hallow or a furnace, ready for high heat firing.

My mother made big pots, mhirimo, for large quantities of beer, for storing grain, pfuko, the small clay pot for beer, water or any other drink, hadyana, for cooking tasty dishes.

Each clay pot had a name and a type of decorations.

Her style or ruoko rwavo, was known around here and beyond the river Save, all the way to Hwedza Mountains.

In those days, when I was growing up here, a woman’s kitchen and her clay pots were sacred.

When a woman died, all her clay pots, hari dzake and belongings, returned to her maternal home, because tampering with what belonged to her would bring ngozi or bad luck.

That was the tradition.

Men were always careful never to break the village clay pots.

Reuben found a stone and sat on it.

Then he started googling something about clay pots from his iPhone.

He said pottery and the making of clay pots were Zimbabwe’s historical tradition that dated back several thousand of years ago.

Clay pots were an essential part of our culture and evidence of broken pots could be found at various archaeological sites.

Pots were used in various occasions and purposes to hold grains, water, and for preparation of food, brewing of beer or non-alcoholic drinks.

Fresh milk was left in a pot until it was ready to be made into sour milk with plenty of yellow cream on top, hodzeko.

As Reuben googled on the Internet, Piri kept on nodding her head, saying nothing because all this talk in English often bored her.

But Reuben did not stop.

He said there was a WordPress website on the Internet with an article on Zimbabwean pottery and the background to when it was started.

He handed the article to me.

It stated that Zimbabwe’s archaeology includes many pottery objects, “which assist in the reconstruction of linguistic and cultural groupings within what is here termed Shona. The pottery indicates that the people of the late Iron Age were settled agriculturists and they have been categorized as forming groups such as the Harare culture and the Leopard’s Kopje culture: the latter established in 980 AD ……This group moved to Mapungubwe….”

I realised that early missionaries condemned the destruction of anything they regarded as anti-Christian, especially wooden carvings and masks.

Many years later, as we continue to celebrate our independence from colonial rule and other mental bondages, we find a different kind of African Christianity rearing its head in the villages, telling people that clay pots belong to the Devil because they can be used to store beer or other such witchcraft objects kept privately by women.

The art of Zimbabwe, as expressed in the clay pots of our mothers and grandmothers, is under assault by new religious movements.

In rejecting our clay pots, we throw away the memory and the power of women bestowed on us by our grandmothers and all the generations of women whose history we do not know because it was not written. Some of that history lies in the broken clay pots.

The clay pots are innocent.

They are part of our identity. Let us save the clay pots of our memory.

• Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic.

It is tough looking after the elderly in London when you are also getting old

Sekai Nzenza on Wednesday
On New Year’s Eve, when we were all in the village and still celebrating after 2am, we saw Mainini Maggie disappear with her phone behind the kitchen hut. Piri whispered to me saying: “Yaa, Mainini Maggie has an English boyfriend. Listen, she is speaking to him. If she has a man at her age, then there is plenty of hope for me! ”

Mainini Maggie lives in England.

She is our aunt, from Piri’s mother’s side.

Mainini left Zimbabwe in 2008, when there was so much hunger in town and also in this village.

Some people blamed the hunger on the sanctions, Tony Blair, George W Bush and everyone else who lived outside Zimbabwe and knew very little about Zimbabwe.

Piri and I hid behind the other side of the hut and eavesdropped on Mainini Maggie’s conversation.

It was rude to do that, but it was New Year’s Eve. There was no harm in listening to romantic talk between lovers wishing each other Happy New Year in Zimbabwe and Britain.

After all, the relationship between Zimbabwe and Britain goes back a long way, from the time we lived in Rhodesia, to Zimbabwe Rhodesia, to independence, to Margaret Thatcher, to Tony Blair, to sanctions and to the emigration of so many Zimbabweans to England, the country that we used to call our mother country. A little love talk between two people in two different continents was a good thing and something to listen to.

“I miss you too darling and happy New Year to you!” said Mainini Maggie, smiling into the phone. Then she paused, listening.

“Don’t worry darling, I will be there in a couple of weeks. Hang in there my dear,” said Mainini Maggie.

Then Piri giggled and Mainini Maggie saw us.

I made the sign of blowing a kiss, just to say how nice it was for Mainini to be wishing her loved one happy New Year over the phone.

Mainini Maggie whispered, telling us to keep quiet. She put the phone on speaker phone and this is what we heard:

“No, Maggie, you do not understand. It is only you that I want.”

Piri and I looked at each other and our faces dropped. It was not a man’s voice on the phone, but an old English lady’s voice. She sounded irritated and unhappy.

“Maggie, listen, I said I do not want this Ukrainian or Russian woman nursing me. I only want you. Please come back soon. Why do you want to stay in Zimbabwe for so long? That country is no good for you. It has never been any good to anyone! ”

“My dear Mrs Hamilton. I want to spend a bit more time with my family. I have not seen them for many years. But you know I will come back soon. Take care and happy New Year darling,” said Mainini Maggie with an English tone of voice we had never heard before.

Mrs Hamilton spoke a bit more about her pains and the rough treatment she was getting from the bad nurse. Piri and I listened. This was no romantic conversation. We left Mainini Maggie to her phone call and continued to enjoy dancing and looking at the village stars on New Year’s Eve.

“So, is there anyone else you call darling apart from the old lady?” asked Piri, laughing, when Mainini Maggie came to rejoin us.

“Iii, where would I get the time to even think of romance at my age? I am 65-years-old,” said Mainini Maggie, sitting down on the bench near the kitchen hut.

I have known Mainini Maggie for many years. She used to come over to our village and stay with Piri’s mother before the liberation struggle.

In those days, she was a Red Cross nurse at the clinic in Buhera. She married an agricultural officer or a mudhumeni. They had two sons. One day, when her husband was coming back home from the Native Commissioner’s office in Enkeldoorn (Chivhu), the vehicle that he was a passenger in hit a landmine.

He died on the spot, together with many others who died in that place near the steep hill at Hokonya.

Everyone said it was the war.

Nothing could have been done to stop such bad luck.

Mainini Maggie left her husband’s village during the war and moved to Mbare, in Salisbury, before it became Harare.

Then we heard she had married an elderly Malawian man who had no children of his own. The man had a small house and he treated Mainini Maggie’s sons as his own.

Just before the land reform and the turmoil and sanctions that followed, Mainini Maggie’s husband died. She was a widow again for the second time.

Her sons were already in their early 30s. In 2008, Mainini Maggie left for London.

She did not come home at all, because her immigration papers were not in order.

Last year, Mainini Maggie got her residence, which was followed by a British passport.

She did not tell Piri, Reuben or anyone, how she finally managed to get a British passport. Some people said she told the British government that she was a refugee, or that she feared persecution for her religious beliefs. People made up stories. But whatever Mainini Maggie said to get a British passport must have worked.

She was legally a British citizen now and could live in the UK and work wherever she liked as well as travel anywhere in Europe without being stopped by any suspicious immigration officer.

“I wish I had a British passport, or an American one or even an Australian one,” said Piri as we sat on the hard benches last Sunday at Harare International Airport.

Mainini Maggie’s holiday was over. She had already checked in but there was time for one last beer with us before she boarded the plane to London via Lusaka and Dubai.

“Even an Australian one?” said my cousin Reuben, the one who lives in Australia.

“Do no scoff at the Australian passport. It’s just as good as any other Western passport. The only bad passport is an African one. It needs a visa to get to get into Europe. ”

Then Piri started begging Reuben again to take her to Australia. Reuben said there was nothing for Piri to do in Europe, Australia or anywhere unless she has a visa. Besides, Piri had no qualifications. We had gone through this whole argument before. But Piri would not listen. She said, “I will clean the bottoms of elderly white people, I will serve tea with cakes, make beds, cook chips and make salads. I will say ‘please’ and ‘thank you madam’ even if she scolds me. Because me I want money, I will say, sorry madam thank you madam. What is so difficult about that?”

Then Piri carried on about neighbours or people she knew whose relatives had helped them to go to the Diaspora and work hard. She said those people have houses all over Harare.

One day, they will come back and enjoy their retirement here in Zimbabwe. Piri accused us all of being selfish. She said we did not understand the meaning of family any more.

Mainini Maggie told Piri that living in London was not as easy as it looked.

Life was hard and the English weather did not make it any better. As a nurse aide who cared for the elderly and the disabled, Mainini Maggie said she barely made enough money to pay her the bills or to send home to build a new home for herself. As it was, she had only managed to renovate the old Mbare house that she inherited from her husband.

But Piri would not believe her. Mainini Maggie lifted the heavy fur coat she had on her lap and showed it to Piri, “You think I want to go back to London and freeze? I am 65 years old and want to stay here, enjoy the sun and the laughter, go to church, come back and sit here on the veranda in Mbare, play with my grandchildren, listen to stories and watch people go past.”

“So, for how long will you look after another old lady when you are getting old yourself?” asked Reuben, taking yet another picture of us.

“You must start thinking more about yourself, your physical and spiritual needs, your material and also your emotional needs. Life is too short to give it all to the care of one old lady in London. Come back home, Mainini,” said Reuben, as he poured Mainini another Zambezi beer.

“I want to retire back to Zimbabwe soon. But if I do so, where would I start? What would I eat?” Mainini said.

We could sense the sadness, or perhaps, the despair in her voice. I could not avoid looking at her hands and imagined what work she must do when caring for the elderly in British homes for so many years.

• Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic.

Films such as “The Adventures of Tickey”, popular in Rhodesia, were made by the Colonial Films Unit of the British Empire with the aim of ridiculing Africans

Dr Sekai Nenza on Wednesday

When we look back at those colonial movies and books with new knowledge, we may very well say, perhaps Mbuya was right, after all. We were taught many lies and propaganda about who we were and what we wanted to be.

DURING the colonial days, we learnt a lot from books and bioscopes at school. When we came back to the village homestead, we described to Mbuya VaMandirowesa, my grandmother, what we had seen and read.

She was not interested.

She said everything we saw were lies meant to corrupt our young minds.

Mbuya was like that. She did not like us going to school, getting immunised, being baptised and going to church.

She was against the dipping of cattle because she said there were diseases in the dip-tank.

Mbuya did not like radios because she said they only played for a short time then the battery died.

She did not like books, because she said everything written was a lie.

For her, the only truth were the stories passed on from generation to generation and not written.

Mbuya believed in stories of the days gone by before the white man came. She even went as far as telling us that the stories in the Bible about Jesus were untrue.

“But Mbuya, it is all true because it’s written down,” we tried to tell her. How can a child be the Son of God and yet He is born to a virgin? How was that possible? Mbuya would ask us, then scoff and take in her snuff and drink beer from a gourd.

In the end, we did not tell Mbuya about the Bible at all. But, after school, we still wanted to share stories with those children from the compound who did not go to school because education was not seen as very important in those days.

My father was a teacher and he introduced us to books and told us that education was the future. There was an ongoing battle between Mbuya and my father because Mbuya said why should children spend all day sitting on a desk listening to lies from the teachers when work was waiting to be done in the fields? My mother was never part of the education argument between Mbuya and my father. She quietly ignored this conflict and sent us to school without ever getting into any direct confrontation with Mbuya.

And so we went to school and brought books home to educate some of our friends who had never seen the door of a classroom.

“Mbuya knew the truth,” said my cousin Reuben, the one who is visiting from Australia. “These days, you can watch all kinds of unreal stuff in the movies and on the internet. I am so sick of the lies and the propaganda.”

“What is propaganda?” asked my cousin Piri, picking her teeth with a piece of grass that she had just picked up from the ground. We were relaxing back in the village, as we often do.

“Propaganda means lies and untruths. It’s a message that you are given to convince you to believe that something is true when it is not,” said my brother Sydney. Being a teacher, Sydney would know.

At one time, Sydney was the oldest son and grandchild in the whole extended family. Mbuya VaMandirowesa always referred to him as Mhofu, the eland, the first heir to the clan who was born after the family settled here, in what was then called the Tribal Trust Lands. This place was a jungle when my grandparents were moved from Chiwashira or Charter Estates to make room for European settlers in the early 1940s. Many girls were born here before Sydney came along.

Sydney went to boarding school at Kutama College and was educated by European priests. He learnt to swim wearing shorts and brought home pictures of himself, standing among many boys wearing only shorts. These were real pictures and not lies.

We showed Mbuya the photo of Sydney, standing next to European priests in robes that looked like long dresses. Mbuya laughed and said, why would Sydney want to be taught anything by men wearing women’s clothes?

I recall my mother telling us that we should not carry Sydney’s Kutama College Yearbook around anymore. What if Mbuya woke up one day and declared that her favourite Mhofu the eland will no longer be educated by the white man?

One day at school we learnt a story about Zuze, the boy who went to work on the white man’s farm and was asked to deliver loaves of bread to the next farm. The book had a picture of a very tall white man in a red jacket and tie, towering above a short confused Zuze holding a basket with loaves of bread.

In the story, Zuze also carried a letter from his boss to the other farmer. Zuze could not read. Somewhere along the path, Zuze decided to eat one whole loaf of bread. He convinced himself that nobody would know that one loaf was missing since there was no one around at all when Zuze made the long journey from one farm to the other.

In those days, European men had big farms. You could spend all morning walking on one farm and even get lost, because most of the land was virgin forest. But Zuze knew his way around the winding narrow paths. So Zuze went behind an anthill and ate the bread. With his stomach now full, Zuze continued on his delivery journey.

After receiving the eight loaves and reading the letter, Murungu, the European farmer, asked Zuze in Chilapalapa, the language used between masters and their servants in colonial Rhodesia: “Upi ro munye bread, Zuze? Ro Baas kaena ena nika wena nine bread but mina kona eight kupera. Why?” Surprised, Zuze asked Murungu where he got the information about eight loaves. Murungu said the letter told him so. Zuze was very alarmed. How can a letter speak?

Zuze asked for the letter and took it to a secluded place behind the anthill for interrogation. Speaking in Chilapalapa, Zuze said: “Imwe Akalata, munapita kumuzungu mudakanena kuti ndadya chingwa seli kwachizere ine!” Zuze went back to Murungu and said the letter did not speak.

Murungu ignored Zuze but he wrote to Zuze’s boss to say one loaf was missing. When confronted by his boss, Zuze said: “Zvino yatyenyi kududza kuneni?” meaning why was the letter afraid to speak to me? Zuze was immediately fired from his job.

We grew up singing a song about Zuze saying: “Zuze wakaba chingwa chemurungu akanochidya seri kwechidzere.” If we wanted to call someone a fool, we called him or her Zuze.

After Zuze, we discovered Tickey, the bioscope trickster. One year, long before independence, a bioscope arrived at St Columbus School. We sat in the dust in front and all the elders sat at the back, including the village head men and kraal heads. A big light shone on the classroom wall and suddenly, we saw people on the screen moving and talking. We screamed with excitement. The film called “The Adventures of Tickey” started rolling on the screen. Tickey was a very naughty young man who went to Salisbury and played funny tricks, cheating people and each time he did that, a white man chased after him.

Tickey ran very fast and almost flew (fast forward) over hills, rivers and mountains.

But the white man in the film always caught him and slapped him hard on the cheeks, telling him what a bad native boy he was.

We all laughed at Tickey’s silly tricks and called him a fool. At the end of the film, there was some music and scenes of white people walking in the city. Some people in the audience shook their heads, and marvelling at the film, they said, “Ah, murungu akangwara” (The white man is smart).

Back in the homestead, we called each other Tickey and emulated how he ran backwards and forwards until Mbuya said we will not be allowed to see any more lies or ghosts on the screen.

Over the years, we have learnt a lot from films and books. Tadzidza zvakawanda. But, some of what we learnt to be the truth in the past was not truth at all. These movies were made by the Colonial Films Unit of the British Empire with an aim to educate, entertain and laugh at ourselves through movies.

When we look back at those colonial movies and books with new knowledge, we may very well say, perhaps Mbuya was right, after all. We were taught many lies and propaganda about who we were and what we wanted to be. Some of these stories have stayed with us and shaped the way we see ourselves, up to this day.

 Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic.

Dr Sekai Nzenza On Wednesday
WE got beaten up at the village school. At home, we were occasionally beaten up for stealing, lying, using swear words or showing disrespect to adults. But in some villages, children were always beaten up even for very small offences or for no offence at all. Sometimes I look back at the pain that was inflicted upon us as children so we could grow up to be better people and wonder if all that beating worked.

Being beaten at school was normal.

We got beaten for going to school late, having uncombed hair, dirty nails, unclean teeth, torn uniforms, failing to get all the mathematics right, bad handwriting, making noise in class, singing out of tune and losing a school match against a rival school.

Our headmaster, Mr Zitaguru, was a champion pupil beater.

He took pride in wielding the stick, the ruler on your bottom or hitting hard on the skinny calves of your legs.

Sometimes half the school was sent away to the bush to clean teeth with a muchakata tree, to comb hair with a thorn tree branch and to file nails against a rough stone.

For those children with very bad nails or long hair, bush instruments did not help much to clean nails or cut hair.

These children had to go home.

But rather than go back straight home to clean themselves up, they spent the rest of the day playing in the forests, looking for wild fruits and swimming in the river.

Some of them never came back to school. Their parents said, what is the use of education if it causes you to be beaten so much?

Students at St Columbus School had black scar marks on their calves from Headmaster Zitaguru’s stick.

In his office, he kept a thick wooden stick nicely polished and stripped of its bark then warmed against the fire to make it harder.

It was about a metre long so he did not have to bend down too much to beat our thin legs.

He lined those who reported late for school in front of the school assembly and hit each one of them in turn.

Five strokes for Grade Ones and 10 to 15 for older kids.

Headmaster Zitaguru was particularly harsh on prefects and senior boys.

Prefects got as much as 20 strokes because they were meant to lead by example.

In our class, there was a girl called Enifa Tambe.

This girl was always at the top of the class in everything.

She never got her arithmetic wrong and she remembered a lot in the history lessons. She could recite everything about Cecil John Rhodes, the founder of Rhodesia (before it became Zimbabwe), the names of ministers in Ian Smith’s government and the important dates in Rhodesian history.

Enifa’s village was in Manhika further down the Save River.

She had to trek up and down three hills and cross two rivers to get to school.

In the cold months when the sun came out late, Enifa left her village when it was still dark.

Enifa was brave. She loved school. But she was often late for school and whenever that happened, Headmaster Zitaguru beat her up.

Sometimes Enifa could not sit properly because her bottom was very sore from the regular thrashings.

Then during the winter of our Grade Seven year, Enifa was late for school for the third time in one week.

Headmaster Zitaguru could not contain his anger. I remember his eyes being unusually red on that day.

He ordered the head boy to get a whip from under his desk. The whip rarely came out except for serious third time offences.

Headmaster Zitaguru ordered Enifa to stand in front facing the whole assembly.

Then he moved a short distance from her and raised his whip. Enifa took one quick look at all of us.

Then she looked at him, then at the raised whip. She steadily took one step back. Then she took off and ran away like the wind.

Enifa was also number one in marathon. But this time, her speed was like that of someone in a 100-metre race.

The girl ran. She did not look back and kept on going and going. We all watched her run. One student giggled. Then what started as suppressed giggles broke into a huge uproar of laughter. Headmaster Zitaguru said he was not called Zitaguru, “big name”, for nothing. With the whip still raised, he said he did not have the time to beat so many skinny legs in one morning. The punishment for our lack of respect was to cut grass around the school all morning.

Headmaster Zitaguru was feared by a lot of people, even by the headman and all the other village elders.

Nobody complained openly about his excessive methods of corporal punishment. Since there was no other school for a good 10 to 15 kilometres nearby, parents kept quiet.

At home my mother used the stick to discipline us but she hardly ever beat us. My mother had a certain presence about her that spoke volumes.

If you did something wrong, she would give you a certain look, then simply say, hatidaro, we do not do that.

Those words were bigger than the stick. But my grandmother Mbuya VaMandirowesa had no time to say hatidaro or use the stick.

She could “beat” you up with her sharp tongue.

Mbuya said beating up children made them nhinhi, meaning they became resistant to pain.

So, instead of using the stick, Mbuya scolded and humiliated you.

Her sharp words were more painful than a beating.

Recently, someone has captured how and why children were beaten up in a WhatsApp message that has been going around people’s phones.

I got the message too from my cousin Reuben.

He obviously got it from another Zimbabwean living here or in the Diaspora.

Wherever these Zimbabweans are, they dream and think of their earlier lives when some of us lived in the village and we got beaten.

The message on WhatsApp started like this: Vana vamazuva ano havazivi kuti taingorohwa (ivo vasati vazvarwa), meaning, children of this day and age do not know that we grew up being beaten up, (before they were born.)

We were beaten up for crying after being beaten up. Crying when no one has beaten you meant you got beaten up for crying.

Failing to cry when you had just been beaten up resulted in a beating.

To remain standing up in front of adults resulted in a beating.

Sitting down when adults were standing resulted in a beating.

Walking around near seated adults led to a beating. Answering back to an adult resulted in a beating.

More beatings came if you did the following: remaining quiet when an adult was talking to you. When a long time passes before you got a beating led to a beating. To sing a song when you have just been told off about something led to a beating. You could also be beaten for not greeting adults, eating food prepared for adults even if the same adults had asked you to join them in the eating.

You could be beaten for staring and salivating at a piece of meat being roasted or for asking to taste it.

We were beaten over very little issues. Zvese zvataiita, tairohwa kani. It did not matter what small offence or no offence, we still got beaten.

But the beating at school was worse. It was too much and cruel.

It stopped children like Enifa from ever going to school.

Maybe some teachers must have been prone to being sadists.

These days, children hardly ever get beaten up. In most Western countries, a child has the right to pick up a phone, call the police and say his or her mother has beaten him up. The parents will be taken to the police station and charged for child abuse. The law says you simply do not beat up children because children have rights.

Are we giving the children too many rights?

Looking back to my village days, I recall that a little beating at home helped us to behave.

Just a little beating, not too much. Today, such a little beating should not be done in anger, but only to correct small offences. Perhaps, we do not have to beat the children at all. We should only withdraw some of their benefits temporarily. Or maybe we should slap them a little on the knee? Just a little.

Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic.

“When we moved to the city and learnt about Valentine’s Day, our expressions of love and romance became so English, so Western, so commercial and so foreign”

Sekai Nzenza On Wednesday
“Say I love you with flowers on Valentine’s Day,” said the message on television. There was a picture of red roses and a red heart symbol with an arrow going through it. Shamiso, my niece, stood there, with little baby Prince suspended on her hip.

She was admiring the picture. Shamiso wore tight jeans and a colourful African print shirt with blue, yellow and red dragon figures on it.

Shamiso was visiting me, along with her husband Philemon.

We still refer to Philemon as Shamiso’s husband even though these two sometimes tell us that they are no longer together.

Their relationship has never been smooth going anyway.

It all started when Shamiso said she was never going to be a village wife while Philemon stays in town selling airtime, belts, phone chargers and other gadgets.

Last year at Easter, they were back in Philemon’s village, in Bocha, way past Buhera, where it does not rain much.

During a family gathering, Philemon’s uncle, from his mother’s side, said it was time Philemon chose a new wife who was prepared to live in the village.

Philemon tried to tell them how much he loved his wife and that with time, Shamiso will eventually settle in the village.

But Shamiso made it clear that she was never going to live without her husband. Those days are long gone, she said.

The elders then told Philemon that he should let Shamiso go. Philemon did just that and Shamiso and baby Prince moved in with my cousin Piri in Harare.

A few weeks later Philemon came to beg Shamiso, asking her to come back.

Last week, they arrived at my house for a barbecue together, wearing similar African print shirts and blue jeans. Now they seem to be together again.

It was a braai or roasting meat lunch at my place. My cousin Reuben from Australia was hosting everyone. He is still around and planning to stay here a bit longer.

He wants to begin a business in mining, real estate or farming. He does not stop telling us that Zimbabwe’s economy is going to change and this is the time for people living in the Diaspora to come home. Reuben has been singing this tune for the past year. Some of us think Reuben is right. Even though there is a drought this year, life will get better in Zimbabwe.

So Reuben, Philemon and a couple of ladies related to Reuben’s Australia-based wife, also came for the braai.

Reuben called it a Valentine’s Day get together, even though Valentine’s Day was a week away. Some men were standing around the braai stand, looking at the pork chops, T-bone steak and sausages that Philemon was carefully turning over.

Piri was busy cooking sadza rezviyo. Meanwhile, Reuben was monitoring his big three legged pot of cow trotters, mazondo. A few ladies stood a little away from the roasting meat, drinking various wines, sweet champagnes and other alcoholic stuff.

But today, on Valentine’s Day barbecue, Piri and I can see that Shamiso is merry and a bit more talkative than before. We know she has been sneaking into the kitchen to sip sweet wine from a hidden glass.

There was an unmistakable sparkle in Shamiso’s eyes. With baby Prince on her hip, Shamiso went over to Philemon and kissed him gently on the cheek.

Everyone looked at her with surprise. Since when do couples kiss in public like that? Reuben was the first to laugh, “Ah, what was that? An open demonstration of love and affection? So people lie when they say you two are no longer an item?”

“Who says we are not together? Who knows what goes on between two people except those two people themselves?” said Shamiso with a lack of care in her voice.

Reuben closed the pot of his mazondo and came over to Philemon and said, “So, mukuwasha, tell me the truth. As Shamiso’s uncle, or her father, I want to know, are you two still in love?” Philemon did not respond. He looked a little embarrassed because you do not expect such a question from a man who is like your father-in-law.

Shamiso quickly said, “We are together, on and off. It all depends. Like this week, if Philemon does what other men do for their wives and girlfriends on Valentine’s Day, then I can tell you that we are still husband and wife.”

“And what am I supposed to do?” asked Philemon, his eyes focused on a juicy T-bone steak sizzling on the fire.

“Ndidewo pachirungu Sha,” said Shamiso, kissing Philemon on the cheek again. By this, she meant, love me the English way.

“And what does that mean?” asked Philemon, looking puzzled.

“It means, you will buy me flowers and chocolates. Then you will call me darling, honey or sweetheart. You can also call me nice sweet names like Sugar Pie. You know, call me something that shows you really love me, the way white people do on Valentine’s day and even when it is not Valentine’s day.”

“And what makes you think I do not love you?” asked Philemon, resting his barbeque tongs on the edge of the braai stand.

“Because you never ever tell me you love me, nor do you call me with loving names. You call me Mai Prince. Mai Prince all the time, as if I do not have a name. When you met me, was I Mai Prince? I ought to have married a European man, a Nigerian or a foreigner who can love and speak to me in English only. English is full of love,” said Shamiso.

Our other guests moved closer to the braai stand, smiling and adding their views on love.

“Ah, Shamiso, unopenga here? Why do you want to be loved in English only?” asked Piri.

“Because love means something more in English. If Philemon tells me he loves me in Shona, I know he is lying or he is trying to hide something. But if he says so in English, that takes some courage. It means he has to think in English before he talks about love. In Shona, iish, these guys can lie I tell you.”

“You talk as if you women do not lie as well,” said Philemon.

“So if I tell you that I love you in English on Valentine’s Day, it means I am telling you the truth?”

“Yes,” said Shamiso and everyone laughed. “Just say to me, Shamiso, Shami, you are my one and only Valentine!” Then Shamiso danced a little.

Three years ago, this girl was the picture of a soft, pretty and naïve village girl. Not anymore. She was openly demanding to be loved. Maybe a little stolen wine was giving her more courage to speak.

Then Piri said she was tired of all the talk about love and romance on Valentine’s Day. “Every year in February, it’s Valentine’s day. On television, on the radio and even on shop windows, it’s the same. What is it all about anyway?”

A lady among the guests said Valentine’s Day was named after Saint Valentine, a third-century Roman priest executed for secretly marrying young couples at a time when there was a ban on marriage during war times. He was executed on February 14. As a result, that day is historically connected to romance and love. On this day lovers show their feelings to the person they love. But it’s also a day that is connected with buying various presents. You can buy chocolates, flowers, lingerie or something nice for your loved one.

“I want flowers and chocolates,” said Shamiso. Then she turned to me and said, “And you Tete, you lived in the Western world where Valentine’s Day was worshipped. Tell us what you like.”

I was put on the spot. Lately, Shamiso has this habit of forcing me to talk or to reveal a past or present life. She claims that she can learn a lot from my love life. But I doubt that. Everyone travels a different journey of love.

I paused to think.

Then I told them that on Valentine’s Day, I just want a poem, written or recited to me in Shona. I want to dream of the days when we used to live in the village and we saw young men sing the lyrics of love deeply rooted in nature, the moon, the stars, the sound of doves, and the song of frogs after the rains. I want to recall a time in February when it used to rain a lot, and we ate plenty of roasted maize cobs, nyevhe and mangoes. At that time, we did not know about Valentine’s Day.

We loved in the rain season, in the dry season, muchirimo and when the rain clouds gathered in November, promising good bountiful harvests. Our way of loving was simple and tied to real romance, marriages and the deep respect of family relationships and totems.

Then we moved to the city and learnt about Valentine’s Day. Our expressions of love and romance became so English, so Western, so commercial and so foreign.

On Valentine’s Day, we must recall with fond memories our first village love. But we must also appreciate the flowers and the chocolates, (if they come) because, on Valentine’s Day, there are many ways of expressing love.

Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic.

Cecil John Rhodes. . . Europeans come from all over the world to pay homage to him at Matopos

Sekai Nzenza On Wednesday

In the Eastern Highlands, the Rhodes Nyanga Hotel is a beautiful place where you can enjoy an English type lunch, visit the museum and see some of Rhodes’ personal items. You can also go bird watching in peaceful surroundings. You would not believe you are in Zimbabwe, a country still viewed by some Westerners as a scary place to visit.

“WE cannot run away from our history,” said my cousin Reuben, talking to guests at the Valentine ’s Day barbecue at our house more than a week ago.

“Cecil John Rhodes came here, conquered the country, named the country after himself and he is buried at Matopos. Now some crazy students at Oxford University want to pull his statue down. They think that takes away the history of the past.”

Reuben was busy stirring his three legged pot of mazondo, cow trotters, on the fire and adding more salt and chilli.

My cousin Reuben normally lives in Australia. He has decided to come back home and do business, maybe in farming, mining or real estate. Reuben has many ideas regarding his future and where he should live. The truth is, he has never been happy living in the Diaspora.

He is the type who prefers to live in Zimbabwe and go overseas often.

But his wife, Mai Tinashe, has no interest whatsoever of coming back to live in Zimbabwe.

She says she is done with the hardships of no electricity or water.

Among our guests were Mai Tinashe’s relatives, including her brother Tich, the businessman with several trucks that travel through South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. His wife, a school teacher, was also at the barbecue, helping my cousin Piri to cook sadza and vegetables, while Philemon roasted meat.

I sat near the barbecue stand, holding baby Prince on my lap.

Earlier on, we had been talking about love and Valentine’s Day.

Then this whole subject of Cecil John Rhodes came up because the controversy about Cecil’s statue at Oxford University was global news.

At first, my cousin Piri thought we were talking about Cecil the Lion who made headline news last year when an American dentist paid $50 000 to hunt him down and take him to America as a trophy.

There was a global outcry. Even those who had never heard of Cecil cried. How could anyone be so cruel to shoot Cecil the Lion in cold blood?

“The name Cecil is part of our history guys, there is nothing you can do about it. Cecil John Rhodes, akauya, akaba nyika, akagova nyika, vanhu vake vakauraya, iye kuda akaurayawo, akaita mari, akafa, akavigwa munyika menyu macho,” said Reuben laughing, meaning Rhodes came, stole the country, gave away the country, his people killed our people, he made money, he died and is buried right here in our country.

Tich, sipping his third or fourth glass of whisky on ice, said we Zimbabweans are too forgiving. “We should never have let Cecil Rhodes’ statue and grave stay here after what he did to the country,” Tich said.

Others disagreed strongly, saying history is history, we cannot wash it away.

“I remember learning something about Rhodes in school. But he died a long time ago. So why do we keep talking about him?” asked Piri, dishing out the sadza to everyone. Sometimes Piri catches the tail end of conversations and adds what she thinks.

“Tete, kana musingazive History nyararai,” said Shamiso, meaning, Piri should keep quiet if she does not understand the subject of history.

“Iwe, learning does not end. Some of us did not stay long in the classroom to understand History,” said Piri. Others laughed. Tich’s wife said Piri was right in wanting to learn.

“So, what difference does it make if you learn about Cecil Rhodes now?” asked Shamiso.

“Iwe, leave Tete Piri alone. History is part of you. You are nobody if you do not know how you came to be here and how other people affected your past,” said Reuben.

During the past few weeks, I have been following the whole debate about Cecil John Rhodes and how a student movement at Oxford University started a Rhodes Must Fall campaign. The students argued that Cecil Rhodes was the greatest empire builder of all time, a megalomaniac and a staunch racist. He made a lot of money from fraudulent mining and land claims. The biggest theft was committed when he cheated Lobengula into signing the Rudd Concession.

King Lobengula succeeded his father Mzilikazi in 1870. At the height of his power Lobengula commanded an incredible army modelled similar in discipline and structure to that of the great Shaka the Zulu.

Many prospectors, traders and hunters were moving rapidly up north from Johannesburg, crossing the Limpopo River looking for gold.

At first, Lobengula was friendly to the missionaries, hunters and prospectors, thinking they were just visiting.

He allowed the London Missionary Society to establish centres near his capital at Bulawayo. But Lobengula’s friendship to the European visitors did not last long when he realized that they wanted to take over the land and the minerals.

Meanwhile, in 1888 Cecil John Rhodes was making plans to move into Matabeleland following his dream of expanding the British empire from the Cape to Cairo.

At that time, he was already the managing director and the largest shareholder in De Beers. He wanted to quickly make a mining or lands concession with Lobengula. Cecil Rhodes then sent some men, led by Charles Rudd, a member of De Beers and also known as an expert in managing mining claims.

Under the Rudd Concession, Lobengula and his successors were to receive shipments totaling 1000 Martini-Henri rifles and 100 000 cartridges, gold sovereigns, an armed steamboat and other goods.

In exchange, the king gave an exclusive mineral concession “together with full power to do all things that they may deem necessary to win and procure the same.”

Lobengula did not receive most of what was promised to him.

In simple terms, Lobengula was cheated and that is how the country was taken by Cecil John Rhodes and his British South Africa Company. Lobengula, the once powerful Ndebele king, was duped into signing the infamous Rudd Concession.

According to historical records, the flag was attached to a Musasa tree and erected in the middle of the Cecil Square on the morning of September 13, 1888.

Three years later the Union Flag was raised at Bulawayo, on November 4 , 1893.

Cecil John Rhodes had taken over this country and called it Rhodesia, after his name. He controlled vast amounts of land and minerals.

Rhodes died in March 1902, aged just 49. His last words were recorded as follows: “So little done, so much to do.” Since then his legacy in education includes a famous scholarship that carries his name. You hear of men referred to as Rhodes Scholars. Among them are a former Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott and former US President, Bill Clinton.

Last year in South Africa, a student called Chumani Maxwele started a campaign to get the Rhodes statue removed from the University of Cape Town, saying Rhodes was a racist and a murderer. The statue was removed by the university.

Two weeks ago, Oxford University resolved to keep the Rhodes statue standing. They said removing it would have angered those who give money to the university under the Rhodes Trust. Also, what would the beneficiaries of the Rhodes scholarships say? The New York Times on January 29, 2016, said: “For months, the authorities at Oxford University have struggled with an awkward dilemma over the fate of a statue of Cecil Rhodes, an imperialist benefactor seen by many as an architect of apartheid.

“Now, after a vigorous debate, Oriel College, one of 38 largely self-governing colleges at Oxford, has decided it will keep the monument to its famous, if divisive, former student.”

Back here in Zimbabwe, the Rhodes statue was removed from Cecil Square, now Africa Unity Square, soon after independence. It was not defaced or demolished. The statue stands today, like a ghost from the past, at the back of the National Archives.

In the Eastern Highlands, the Rhodes Nyanga Hotel is a beautiful place where you can enjoy an English type lunch, visit the museum and see some of Rhodes’ personal items. You can also go bird watching in peaceful surroundings. You would not believe you are in Zimbabwe, a country still viewed by some Westerners as a scary place to visit.

“You see, memories of Rhodes remain with us,” said Reuben. “We cannot touch his grave. The Europeans come from all over the world to pay homage to him at Matopos. We need that tourist dollar.”

“Eeka, why should they not visit their ancestor?” asked Piri.

Then there was a heated argument among us, some people saying Rhodes should be forgotten once and for all. In the end, most people seemed to agree with Tich’s wife, the teacher.

She said, “You see, taking Rhodes away from the public areas is a good thing. It means we do not want to celebrate him, or to be reminded of the evils committed by this man. But we cannot take him out of our history.”

Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic.

When we were young we used to dance and sing joyously in the rain in anticipation of a bumper harvest

Sekai Nzenza On Wednesday
The big black dog with four eyes and no tail walked into Bokina’s kitchen hut. Bokina said he was the first one to see it. Then his wife also saw it and told the three children not to be afraid. This big dog had been seen elsewhere in some other villages. The dog went over to the kitchen mud shelf and sat just

below the row of yellow and white plates on display. On the dog’s right side was a white big bucket with brown coloured drinking water dug out from the dry river bed.

Bokina and his wife left the dog and the children in the house alone.

They tied a little skinny goat to a rope, took two chickens and walked to our homestead.

It was still early morning last Sunday. My cousin Reuben and I had just come back from a long walk half way down to the Save River when we saw them coming.

We welcomed Bokina and his wife. They sat under the tree, on the bench opposite my mother’s kitchen hut.

We know Bokina well because he is the village fencer. All the barbed wire around our village homestead and the school is done by Bokina’s rough hands. You must brace yourself to greet him because his hands feel like a roughly paved cement floor. When he laughs, move away from him, because he would want to clap your hand.

But this morning, Bokina is not laughing. He is here to tell us about the black dog that has walked into his house and is refusing to leave.

“Imbwa yekwaani?” I asked. They did not answer immediately. Bokina’s wife looked down and smiled with a gentle sweetness. She turned to her husband and let him speak.

Bokina said the dog’s name is called Bhoko Haramu. This dog has nothing to do with Nigeria, or any other place in Africa. It is an unusual dog, seen once before back in 1992. In that year, it stayed for a short while and most people do not remember this dog or any of his ancestors.

But Bokina can describe that dog very well because at that time, he was already an adult. He had just returned from Zambia where he was training to be a priest. He came home in March 1992, before his course was completed because the ancestors had told him that priesthood was not part of his calling.

Bokina speaks English well.

Apart from the local teachers, Bokina is the only one who collects newspapers that I bring to the village.

He reads all the pages before he uses the newspapers as cigarette papers.

We soon learnt that Bhoko Haramu was the phantom name for hunger. Nzara. “There is hunger in my house. Because I fear it, I call this the scary black dog with four eyes and no tail Bhoko Haramu. It’s going to devour me, my wife and the children,” Bokina said.

“So why walk around with a goat and two chickens?” asked Reuben.

Bokina’s wife said there was no cash in the house. There was no cash anywhere.

“Ever since we pounded our Zimbabwean dollar with mortar and pestle, we are suffering. The American dollar is killing us. Bring back the money that we are used to.”

Bokina’s wife is from Bocha, the same place where our niece Shamiso got married. She says back in Bocha, the cattle are dying and maize is $10 per bucket. But people have no money to buy maize. One goat can be exchanged for three buckets of maize and two village “road runner” chickens can be exchanged for one bucket of maize.

“We are back to the barter trade of the past. What can we do when a black dog with four eyes sits in your house?” said Bokina, now laughing and reaching out to shake Reuben’s hand. I saw Reuben wince at the outstretched hand before he offered his hand. They shook hands and laughed together.

Vakaseka nhamo serugare. They laughed at poverty with that self-depreciating tone that eases the pain of suffering.

“Why do Zimbabweans laugh at something that is not even funny?” asked Reuben, as if he was not Zimbabwean himself.

Piri offered Bokina and his wife sweet tea with two slices each smothered with peanut butter.

Then Bokina and his wife talked about the severe drought that was not only ravaging their fields, but had spread right across all the places traditionally known to have poor rainfall. Maize was turning brown, then falling down due to the heat and lack of rain. We have never seen anything like it, they said. “Take a walk down to the village fields and see for yourself,” said Bokina’s wife, as she dipped a piece of bread into her tea, the way we used to do when we were children.

We said the story was the same around Southern Africa. Rueben said it was the El Nino effect caused by climate change. This year, there is hunger, kune nzara.

When I was growing up in this village, I do not recall a time when there was this type of hunger, or a time when the rains did not come. At times, they were late and the elders, vakuru vedu, summoned spirit mediums and they paid libations around the muchakata tree to ask the ancestors for rain. When the rains came we danced and sang: “Mvura ngainaye tidye mapudzi.” Let it rain, so we can eat pumpkins.

I recall that at night we heard frogs joining our praise songs to the ancestors. Within weeks of the rain falling, the once dry countryside was green. Trees had new leaves and the birds sang. The squirrels were out in the sun. The Save River flowed, taking away all the dry debris and dust to the Indian Ocean. Our cows grew fatter. My mother and all the women in the village shared and exchanged groundnut and pumpkin seeds.

Before sunrise we ploughed the fields and sowed maize, sorghum and groundnuts. The crops came up competing with the weeds. For weeks, we pulled the weeds out. Our backs ached.

Some mornings my mother and the other women went to the hills to gather wild mushrooms. They knew when the mushrooms would come up and where to find them. By late afternoon they presented baskets of fresh mushrooms to my grandmother Mbuya VaMandirowesa. Mbuya carefully examined the mushrooms and threw away all the poisonous ones. She instructed her co-wives and my mother to cook the good ones. My mother boiled and salted the rest of the mushrooms and sun-dried them on the granite rocks, kuruware.

Friday was chisi, a special rest day for us to remember and honour the ancestors. We did not work in the fields then. When all the weeding was over, we rested our aching backs and waited for the end of the rains. Then harvest time began.

We spread the peanuts, red sorghum — zviyo, mapfunde and mhunga — to dry in the sun on the flat granite rocks to dry. Everything obeyed the natural rhythm of time and got dry at its own pace.

When the harvest was over and our granaries were full, my mother and all the women in the compound spent seven days brewing beer to thank the ancestors for the good harvest, goho rakanaka. The beer was strong and intoxicating.

But that was some time ago, before and after the liberation war, before the land reform, before the sanctions and the 2008 hunger.

Now in 2016, we are seeing a hunger that we have not seen before or ever imagined. Since when do we feel such unforgiving heat in the middle of February, see fields of maize turn into brown then falling down, rivers running dry and granaries swept empty?

In our village this week, they have started to do barter trade for maize, while they wait for donors to arrive. Last week, one donor came with 20 kilogrammes of beans and rice. People lined up in the heat and for a few hours. They had food on the plate for a few days. But next week, they will have nothing.

Bokina offered us his goat in exchange for four buckets of maize. We had 10 bags in the house. But if we took the goat, what do we do with it? My brother Sydney said we could be in business, if we bring maize from Harare and exchange with goats and chickens. Reuben was excited. He immediately reached out for his IPad and started working on what he called, “The Barter Trade Business Model.”

“If this black dog called hunger was visiting me alone, I would hang myself,” said Bokina laughing again. “But, what can you do about a situation that affects us all? We share the misery. God and the ancestors must have something to do with this hunger. What else can we say?”

• Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic.

In bountiful years, it was normal for rural folk to eat sadza for breakfast or munya, sadza for lunch and sadza for dinner

Sekai Nzenza on Wednesday

That warm weather called El Nino has come to Zimbabwe and to the rest of Southern Africa, causing the current drought. This is why you see the maize falling before it ripens. The stalks are becoming fodder, cattle food or mashanga.

“THIS year, you Africans addicted to sadza will have to learn to eat potatoes, rice and spaghetti!” said my cousin Reuben, the one who lives in Australia.

After many years in the Diaspora, Reuben talks as if he is not from here, like he is a tourist visiting us.

This attitude happens to some of us who have been away from this country for a long time.

We come back talking like we do not belong here.

Sometimes we are not even conscious of it. Reuben is like that. But we often remind him to come back to the soil and remember where he came from.

He grew up right here in the village where he used to herd cattle down in the valley and walk several kilometers to school barefoot.

Like all of us, Reuben ate sadza for breakfast or munya, sadza for lunch and sadza for dinner.

But, in those days, when we were growing up in this village, we ate varieties of sadza.

Not just white sadza, but many types and colours of sadza.

My grandmother, Mbuya VaMandirowesa, cooked sadza from millet, sorghum, rice and other grains such as mapfunde. Our sadza was eaten with varieties of vegetables.

Mbuya VaMandirowesa also spent a long time preparing the red millet or rapoko sadza.

Then she cooked a village road runner chicken to accompany the millet sadza, rezviyo.

At times, we milked cows and made the village sour milk.

Meat was in abundance from cattle, goats, sheep, ducks and chickens.

Fishermen dodged crocodiles and hippos and caught big fish in the Save River. My grandfather, Sekuru Dickson, used to take his gun and go hunting in the Mbire Mountains. He brought home big game meat. Sekuru did not kill elands, because that is our totem.

Our childhood years were full of plenty even though the Rhodesian government had forced us to live in the tribal trust lands or TTLs. Most of the good land with lots of rainfall had been given to British settlers soon after the First World War. We worked hard in the fields, ate sadza and survived.

Food handouts were unknown. Donors or the word donor did not exist. The chief looked after widows and many other poor vulnerable people through what they called Zunde Ramambo. Although there were stories of poor people who used to move from one village to another asking for food, hunger was rare.

I recall that there was a man called Munhenga whose fame for growing rapoko or millet stretched from here to Mbire, way across the Save River. Sometimes Munhenga hired labourers to cut the millet and harvest the maize.

Munhenga’s jakwara, or the rapoko threshing and harvesting ceremony, was the marker of village time.

He grew varieties of millet and not once did he not have a jakwara in August. The women brewed beer for the jakwara at Munhenga’s homestead. On the seventh day, relatives and neighbours began drinking warm beer in preparation for the main ceremony the following day. At sunrise, the millet was laid out in a huge pyramid on the flat rocks, paziru- ware.

Men brought long threshing sticks cut from branches of the mutondo trees. They drank a lot of beer claiming it brought more energy to beat the millet. The women swept the grain around the ruware, ready for the winnowing at the completion of threshing. Munhenga’s millet and sorghum filled many granaries.

Munhenga had many cattle, goats and sheep. We used to help Munhenga’s sons to round up all the livestock towards sunset. We counted them all in the school grounds, in case one strayed away. Munhenga was so rich that his two wives and many children ate meat every single day. His family had more food than they could eat. He gave away many bags of grain to widows and those who were unable to harvest from their poor soils.

During Munhenga’s time, rains came when they were expected.

This year, for the second year running, our maize crop is a disaster. We would be lucky to harvest anything at all from our five hectares of sandy soils.

In November last year, when the rains came, we said God and the ancestors had not forgotten to send us rain at the right time. Then we got the ploughs out and planted commercial type maize seeds. We no longer use the seeds from last year’s season from the granaries, because those seeds will not germinate well. A few days later, the maize germinated and the whole field was a beautiful sea of green. People stopped to admire our field, asking what seed we used and what fertiliser we were going to apply.

Then the rains stopped coming.

In December last year, for the second year in a row, our first crop died. We replanted again and waited. The germination of maize was very good again. We added fertiliser at the right time. When the maize was just above knee in height, the rain disappeared again. Every day, people looked to the sky. But no rain came.

For the past month, people have been praying in churches, hoping that the El Nino effect repeatedly mentioned on the radio would go away.

“El Nino, El Nino. What El Nino? We have forgotten to worship God and to acknowledge our ancestors. We are being punished by higher powers,” said my cousin Piri in exasperation.

Reuben then explained that El Niño means the “Little Boy”, or “Christ Child” in Spanish. It is a complicated weather pattern caused by changes in ocean temperatures. A long time ago this El Niño was discovered by fishermen on the coast of South America in the 1600s when they felt that there was very hot weather on the coast of the Pacific Ocean around December.

That warm weather called El Nino has come to Zimbabwe and to the rest of Southern Africa, causing the current drought. This is why you see the maize falling before it ripens. The stalks are becoming fodder, cattle food or mashanga.

My brother Sydney, being the teacher that he is, held a dry maize stalk that dried up before tasselling. He agreed with Reuben. “El Nino is a fact, especially to those who read and understand geography and the environment. El Nino can return after seven or more years.”

“In the year of El Nino, people must learn to eat other foods, apart from sadza, in order to survive,” said Reuben.

Reuben then said maize came from Mexico and was introduced to us by Portuguese traders more than 150 years ago. The British settlers offered it to us because it was easier and quicker to cook sadza than to prepare rapoko flour. To save food preparation time, road workers, miners and farm workers were encouraged to make a quick sadza meal to be eaten with vegetables, dried fish or small pieces of salted meat.

Over the years, we have adopted maize as our staple food. Now we eat it every day, because we are so accustomed to growing and eating it. Without maize meal in the house, the face of hunger is everywhere.

“This year, pregnant women will give birth and call their children El Nino,” Reuben said, laughing and filming the fallen maize in the fields, caused by the severe drought.

“It’s not funny,” said Piri. “Why do you always find humour in serious painful situations?” Reuben laughed even more. He turned his video camera towards Piri and started filming again.

“The point of my story is this one: We Africans have learnt to ease our pain through humour. We share the pain. Remember what Bokina said last week? He said, if the rains were not falling in his field alone, he would have hanged himself. But, has he done that? No. Why not? Because Bokina is not the only one without maize around here.”

Piri did not see any humour or joy in Reuben’s filming. “Itori hapana hapana gore rino. Chibage chakaroverwa pasi nezuva. Zvegore rino inzara takarima,” said Piri, meaning this year, all the maize has been hit hard by the sun. It is the year of hunger, despite all the hard work that has gone into growing maize.

Shall we continue to long for sadza, in the year of El Nino? Perhaps it is time we learnt to eat something else.

Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic.

International Women’s Day is a day set aside in honour of the struggles and achievements of women

Dr Sekai Nzenza on Wednesday

As the world remembers and celebrates International Women’s Day, we must still speak about injustice to women and girls. But we must also reclaim and celebrate the wisdom of African women in their various roles as mothers, grandmothers, spirit mediums, the historians and custodians of knowledge.

“On the 8th of March, every year, the world celebrates International women’s day,” I told my cousin Piri. We were relaxing in the village on Sunday afternoon. The rains were gathered in the east and there was a cool breeze blowing around us. In the village courtyard, the chickens and the turkeys walked around aimlessly looking for anything they could pick on from the ground. The big red rooster was giving the hens a good run across the fields and under the granary. Our neighbours, Jemba and Bokina, sat on the village bench, enjoying a plastic container of scud or chibuku, the commercial type village brew.

Piri casually asked what International Women’s day was all about. I explained that it was the day in honour of the struggles and achievements of women.

“What is the matter with you? You call yourself a woman and you do not know that there are days in the year set aside to celebrate women, children, the disabled, the environment, water, animal rights and many other important causes,” said Bokina. Unlike other village guys around here, Bokina, the former trainee priest who did not complete his studies in Zambia is an avid reader of papers and books.

I told them that at one time, I had been a keynote speaker at International Women’s Day in Australia. I spoke about the hardships and suffering of African women. I had all the statistics. Besides, I had done studies in women and development. At that time, I had learnt so much about Western feminism and was fighting hard for the right to be equal with men, even though, when I look back, I realise that I did not know what the meaning of equality with men meant.

I was applauded when I told the audience that African women were silent victims of male oppression and colonialism. Even after independence, African women still lived in bondage. That is what I told the audience in Australia, a few years ago.

“They should also set aside a day to mourn the end of power for women,” said Piri. “There was a time when women were so strong in this village.” She said so with a wistful and also sad expression.

“What do you mean? How has that power ended for women? Are you not listening to what your sister is saying? She was among women who have been fighting men for equal rights for a long time. These days’ women have power I tell you. They wear the trousers. Yet they still want more power. Every day you hear something new about women wanting more power,” Jemba said. As usual, he was rolling yet another cigarette using newspapers he had not read.

“They want the power that was taken away from them when the white man came with Christianity,” said Bokina. “Piri is right. We should mourn the end of power for women. Remember how our grandmothers used to teach us so much and told us stories about the past? Remember how they would command these villages at ceremonies?”

My thoughts went back to the time when we were young and growing up in the village homestead, long before independence. In those days, my grandmother, Mbuya VaMandirowesa, used to rule this village. Mbuya was a tall and formidable woman, the daughter of Chief Kwenda. With her back bent a little, she often walked with hands clasped behind her back. Her face had a deep dark brown colour. Imposing and bare foot, she walked around the village compound, inspecting and examining everything with her sharp eagle eyes. On each of her cheek bones were two small black tattoo lines, nyora, and the traditional marks of beauty. Her whole stomach was covered with these various patterns of beautiful nyora. During the days of Mbuya’s youth, a girl without nyora all over her stomach was not considered beautiful.

Mbuya VaMandirowesa and her elderly women friends used to sit under the mutondo tree drinking village beer, taking snuff, talking and laughing all day during the dry season. Sometimes we sneaked behind the granary near the mutondo tree and listened to their conversations. They often gossiped and talked about other people’s sex lives. But we understood nothing when they spoke in tsumo nemadimikira, riddles and metaphors.

During ceremonies, these powerful old women sang songs in praise of the ancestors.

In those days, everything we learnt about our history and culture came from my mother, Mbuya VaMandirowesa, uncles and aunts and the whole community at large. There were many dark nights when we sat around the fire and Mbuya told us stories about the mischievous Tsuro the Hare and Gudo the baboon. Each story had a moral lesson to it. We also learnt about our past and developed a sense of who we were through storytelling, riddles, sayings, proverbs, metaphors, songs, ceremonies, rituals, games, dances and performances.

During bira, the traditional religious ceremonies to praise and appease the spirits of our great ancestors, we would dance along among the elders until svikiro; the sprit medium was possessed by the spirit of Mbiru, the family great ancestor of the VaHera clan.

We were told that, long before the white man came, Mbiru had migrated from Chishanga, to a place called Chiwashira, near present day Chivhu. They said Chishanga was the original home of our people, the VaHera clan. The ancestor spirit of Mbiru wanted recognition in the living. He could dwell in the physical image of a woman.

One time I saw Mbiru’s svikiro arrive and possess Tete VaHwedemwe, my aunt. Before Mbiru arrived to possess her, Tete had fallen ill when she was in her husband’s village. She could not move at all. The traditional healer was called and he said that Tete’s grandfather, Mbiru, wanted to possess her. Tete came back to our village. Mbiru, the bull named after the great ancestor was killed.

A ceremony to welcome the spirit of Mbiru was held. Late at night, before dawn, they played more mbira and started singing the song calling the people to make tracks back to Chishanga saying, “Hwirira Chishanga kwawakabva”. Tete slowly went into a trance and became possessed with Mbiru. She sat like a man. In a deep male voice she spoke to the elders, giving them guidance and answering questions about troubling family matters.

“We must mourn the power of women that has been lost with the coming of Christianity and rapid Westernisation. Gone are the powerful svikiros, rain makers and other spirit mediums,” said Bokina.

Bokina reminisced more about the days when mothers and grandmothers were strong and powerful. “Not anymore,” he said, shaking his hands. “Poverty has made women poor and powerless.” He then told us about his journey to the donor food distribution centre with his 75-year-old mother the previous day.

The donor wanted widows, the elderly and the most vulnerable poor village people. Bokina said his mother waited in line, under the hot sun, silent and hungry. Her name was called out by a young man. “Raina Mutsvenguri!” said the young man. Bokina’s mother lifted her hand. She was rushed to the front, past the children and others, to receive a 10kg bag of beans and another 10kg of rice.

“Poverty does not remember the past nor does it have the knowledge to respect the elderly,” Bokina said. We agreed. Times have continued to change as power shifts from the village women to elsewhere.

As the world remembers and celebrates International Women’s Day, we must still speak about injustice to women and girls. But we must also reclaim and celebrate the wisdom of African women in their various roles as mothers, grandmothers, spirit mediums, the historians and custodians of knowledge.

Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic.

Breastfeeding is best, our medical practitioners always tell us, but NOT in church, according to the white missionaries of old

Dr Sekai Nzenza on Wednesday

If the young English missionary who came to our village many years ago was to come back to our village today, he would praise the Lord because there are so many Christians now. We will look at each other and acknowledge how much we have departed from who we were, to become who we are today — a people struggling daily to balance cultural practices with new waves of Christianity.

The first English missionary who came to our village failed to handle the sight of women breastfeeding in church. He said bare breasts with suckling babies was abominable in the house of the Lord. He left and opted to preach among the already converted and civilised in town.

I first heard this story about the young missionary from my father. After all, my father was responsible for bringing the young zealous missionary to our village in 1948. At that time, my father was building the school he named Mufudzi Wanaka School. It was the first school in our area, built on a hill overlooking the scenic Save River Valley along the Hwedza Mountains.

The year was 1947, when my father graduated as a teacher from Kwenda Mission. He wanted to bring education and Christianity to his people. But this was an uphill battle, because ancestor libations and rituals dominated spiritual worship. My grandmother, Mbuya VaMandirowesa, was at the forefront of resisting Christianity, even though her own father, Chief Kwenda, had allowed the Methodist missionaries to open Kwenda Mission, which still stands today, in Chikomba District. Mbuya said Christianity threatened our culture and the way we worshipped Mwari or God.

According to the story told by my mother, the young English missionary had arrived in Africa from England after the Second World War. He was based at Kwenda Mission and made outreach visits to remote new churches. He arrived at the grass thatched church accompanied by my father. People gathered to see a white man for the first time and also to listen to the sermon. Mbuya VaMandirowesa joined the congregation.

Among the congregation were a few men and mostly young women with babies. The women sat, listened to the sermon quietly and breast fed their babies. On the second or third day, the English missionary stopped preaching in the middle of a sermon. My father was the translator. He looked at the missionary and waited patiently for more divine words. Instead of preaching, the missionary pointed to the young mothers suckling their babies.

“There will be no naked breasts in the house of the Lord,” he declared. “This is primitive. David, tell them to stop breastfeeding and cover up or to take the children back home.” My father went around and explained the missionary’s orders to the women. The women were surprised. They looked to Mbuya for advice. Mbuya said nothing. Instead, she rose with some dignity and walked away from the gathering. One by one, the breastfeeding women followed her. Then the sermon continued, because the preacher was no longer distracted by the naked breasts.

The following Sunday, the church was almost empty, with only a few boys and girls. The missionary paced up and down looking at his watch. My father sent a messenger to the village reminding the women to hurry for the service. But word came back to say Mbuya VaMandirowesa had advised the women to stay behind until such time that children were no longer being breastfed in the village. Then the men stopped coming to church, too.

Deprived of a congregation, the missionary left our village in despair. After the missionary’s departure, my father ignored the bare breasts and kept on preaching the Word. I was born many years after this breast feeding incident that drove away the young English missionary. By the time I went to the Methodist boarding school at Kwenda Mission, I was determined not to be like Mbuya. I wanted to know more about Jesus and salvation.

After four years, I was a seriously born-again Christian. The missionaries said I was fit to be a leader and they made me the head girl of the boarding school.

As head girl, there was no time for jokes or laughter in my presence. My role was to lead by example. I led Bible studies in the morning, at lunchtime and before bed time. Those who went to school with me, would remember that I was a favourite student of Miss Hutchinson, the Methodist missionary from Sheffield, England.

At night, I moved around the dormitories with Miss Hutchinson’s torch checking for girls who were making noise. I wrote the names of the offending ones down. In the morning, I took the names to Miss Hutchinson and she gave me permission to punish the girls. I presided over the punishment by making sure the girls cut all the grass in the school yard.

I was also responsible for punishing the girls who showed unrestrained sexual type desires. At night, these girls jumped through the windows to meet their boyfriends in the bush just outside the school gate. When caught, the girls were sent home and could only be admitted to the school if they came back to ask for forgiveness accompanied by their parents.

Once they were readmitted to school, Miss Hutchinson advised that I should introduce them to Jesus. I gave them counselling on sin and forgiveness. To prove that they had repented, I used to ask them to sing “What a friend we have in Jesus” without looking at the hymn book.

I also monitored the way girls dressed at weekends when they were not in school uniform. I advised them not to show any flesh above the knee, no bare shoulders and nothing to suggest cleavage. I told them quite often that a good woman always covered herself up and kept her virginity only for her future husband. And that husband was going to be provided by God.

Because my English was so good, I was the official translator for Miss Hutchinson. At weekends, I accompanied Miss Hutchinson to the nearby villages to translate her sermons to village women. Our Methodist Mission was surrounded by many villages full of people who did not know about Jesus.

I recall one Sunday afternoon when we crossed the Rwoomba River to Nyamuramba village. We followed the narrow path winding through the tall grass with Miss Hutchinson leading the way. I followed right behind her in my Sunday girls’ Methodist uniform. Miss Hutchinson wore a long, plain blue skirt, a white long sleeved blouse buttoned up to her neck. A silver cross was pinned to the last button just below her chin. She had a white hat, flat cream sandals and white gloves. She shielded herself from the sun with a white umbrella.

I carried my Living Bible, a present from her. I followed Miss Hutchinson’s footsteps, placing my foot where hers had been. We always sang little hymns and choruses once we got past the school gate and entered the thick bushes leading to the river. I admired her and often told myself that when I finished high school, I would become a lady and dress just like her, though I would not want to remain single into old age like she had done.

I recall that one day, after we crossed the river, she stopped and turned to speak to me. With her blue eyes penetrating right into me, she addressed me by my English name and said, “One day, you must go back to your people to preach the Good News. I must encourage you to go deep into the calling and serve the Lord. I pray and exhort that you will never abandon that evangelistic conviction that your people need Jesus. Find your own true joy in Jesus and Jesus alone, so that your people may see Jesus in you.”

“Thank you, Miss Hutchinson.” I said and gave a little curtsy. In my not so fluent English, I told her that I had a grandmother who needed plenty of prayers so she could be saved from her sins. “My grandmother’s heart is like a stone,” I said, thinking of Mbuya VaMandirowesa, who was probably guzzling village beer from a gourd and pushing deep brown ground tobacco up her nostrils.

Many years later, I was in Gutu last weekend, visiting my aunt, Tete Winnie. She is the youngest child of Mbuya VaMandirowesa. Most of the elders from our village are dead now, including Mbuya herself, my father, my mother and many others who were alive when the English first missionary came to our village.

I am no longer as religious as I was in boarding school. In fact, I do not even try to be holy, despite my earlier preaching habits. But my aunt, Tete Winnie, has become a serious Apostolic Church follower of the Johane Masowe we Chishanu sect. She dresses in white all the time. Accompanied by members of her sect, they sing and pray every three hours beginning at 6am until 6pm the next day. There is a regular solemn gathering of people at her house. The people are always covered up in white. They sing softly and beautifully, repeating over and over again, “Halleluiah Hosanna” or “Mai Maria Emmanuel”.

Once when I stayed the night with her in Gutu, I could hear Tete and the widowed young lady who lives with her wake up at midnight, at 3am and at 6am to sing and pray. At 6am, she woke me up to say Mweya, meaning the Spirit, had asked me to join them in prayer. Before I could kneel next to the women, they said I should take off all jewellery, remove my pyjamas and wear a plain below knee-length dress, cover my hair and remove shoes.

Tete does not participate in any village ceremonies at all. She will not allow young women to breastfeed babies in public.

If the young English missionary who came to our village many years ago was to come back to our village today, he would praise the Lord because there are so many Christians now. We will look at each other and acknowledge how much we have departed from who we were, to become who we are today — a people struggling daily to balance cultural practices with new waves of Christianity.

 Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic.

Njelele, Matonjeni or Mabweadziva, is the religious name for Matopo Hills. It was the spiritual shrine of Murenga, which is where the name Chimurenga or liberation war, comes from, ironically, it is here that Cecil John Rhodes is buried

Dr Sekai Nzenza on Wednesday
Whenever Easter time arrives, I feel guilty. I think of the sins I have committed over the years. I desperately want to be free and happy. As Easter time draws nearer, I feel no nearer to God than I did four years ago when I first mentioned in this column that I was looking for a church so that I can also

wear a uniform and belong to a group of prayerful upright people.

“If you come with me to worship the Ancestors at Matopos, you will not feel guilty of sin at Easter time,” said my cousin Reuben, the one who is back here after living for many years in Australia. I said I had already been to Matopos, 40 kilometres out of Bulawayo, as a tourist, many years ago. I would, of course, want to go back there another time when I have visitors from abroad who may want to see Cecil John Rhodes’ grave because that is where he is buried.

Many Europeans, especially those from the UK, always make it a point to visit Matopos and reminisce about the colonial period and how Cecil John Rhodes managed to conquer this country and call it Rhodesia, after his name. When I went there, I stood by as my friend Alison from Australia sat on the grave and I took photographs of her.

I also recall meeting another Zimbabwean on the same day, (whose name I do not remember), and his teenage son. They were visiting from America where the guy taught African studies.

I listened as my fellow Zimbabwean told his teenage son that Rhodes was a colonialist who was now lying at Matopos as some kind of a deity among our ancestors.

My friend Alison had also read quite a bit about Rhodes. She added that Rhodes was very close to a guy called Neville Pickering, the first secretary of the De Beers Diamond Corporation. They lived together for many years in a cottage opposite the Kimberley Club in South Africa. Some people have inferred that Rhodes and Pickering’s relationship was somewhat unnatural.

At Matopos, we also noticed that next to Rhodes’ grave was that of his close friend Dr Leander Starr Jameson. These two men, apparently liked each other very much and they never married. That relationship too, they say, was not natural.

Then the Zimbabwean from America told Alison that if we were not around, he would have rudely passed water on Rhodes’ grave. In other words, he would have urinated on it. Alison was horrified. But we told her that many African people are often tempted to pass water on the graves of the two men. But we all know that such an act would offend the ancestors, both black and white.

I told Reuben the story about my visit to Matopos. He said that we should not treat the graves of other people’s ancestors badly, regardless of what evils they may have done to us. As usual, Reuben then did a google search to find out why Cecil Rhodes was buried at Matopos. He found sections of Cecil Rhodes’ will which said: “I admire the grandeur and loneliness of the Matopos . . . and therefore I desire to be buried in the Matopos on the hill which I used to visit and which I called the ‘View of the World’ in a square to be cut in the rock on the top of the hill covered with a plain brass plate with these words thereon — “Here lie the remains of Cecil John Rhodes” and accordingly I direct my executors at the expense of my estate to take all steps and do all things necessary or proper to give effect to this my desire and afterwards to keep my grave in order at the expense of the Matopos and Bulawayo Fund hereinafter mentioned. . . ”

My cousin Piri and I listened quietly. I could visualise once again the image of Rhodes’ grave at that scenic place in Matopos. Then I told Reuben that we must force ourselves to accept some aspects of our history that we cannot change.

“Despite that whole history about Rhodes, there is spiritual uplifting at Matopos,” said Reuben. “Believe me, you will get closer to the ancestors and feel no guilt about sin at all.”

Reuben tried to persuade us to join him on his trip to Matopos. He explained why everyone, black or white, Shona, Ndebele, Kalanga, Karanga, Ndau, Tonga, and other ethnic groups around Zimbabwe, must visit Njelele, the place of worship at Matopos. Before Reuben left Zimbabwe, he was not that spiritual nor did he care much about history. But something has made him want to know more about himself and Zimbabwe since he returned from the Diaspora. This is not surprising. Some of us only get to know who we are when we are outside this beautiful country of ours.

Reuben said Njelele, Matonjeni or Mabweadziva, is the religious name for Matopo Hills. It was the spiritual shrine of Murenga, which is where the name Chimurenga or liberation war, comes from. Murenga had a daughter called Nehanda and a son, Chaminuka.

It was and still is “Malindidzimu” in Kalanga, which means “The Sacred Place for Our Ancestors”. In Shona, Matopo Hills is “Mabweadziva” meaning the place of spring waters. Our ancestors practised the Mwari religion here, for more than 500 years.

Before colonialism and the mapping of boundaries, this sacred place was visited by people from east, central and southern Africa, including countries like Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, Angola, Uganda, Kenya and South Africa. During the First Chimurenga, the Ndebele and Shona fought together and invoked the spirit of Murenga from Njelele or Mabweadziva to guide them in the fight against Cecil Rhodes and his BSAC, British South Africa Company.

“I am therefore going to Njelele to remember my ancestors at Easter,” said Reuben, closing the google page on Matopos that he had been reading on his iPad.

“I could join you at Matopos this Easter, but, I would prefer to go to the village, attend a church service on Good Friday, ask for forgiveness, then sit under the mango tree and enjoy village beer and roast goat meat,” said Piri.

Piri never seems to suffer from the guilt of sin around Easter the way some of us do.

“Sis, next time we should listen to Reuben and go to Mabweadziva to worship. You will be relieved from feeling guilt of sin,” Piri said, pointing at me. Then she started laughing, almost in hysterics. Piri has the tendency to think of something then laugh before she even tells you the joke or the humorous aspect of the story. She said; “Kutadza kwei kusingaperi gore negore? Good Friday, tochema kufa kwa Jesu, Sunday tofara kuti Jesu amuka. Monday tosuwa zve kuti tiri vatadzi?” By this, Piri was asking us about this ongoing sinning which has no end.

She said on Good Friday, we mourn and are sad that Jesus is dead. On Sunday we celebrate His resurrection. Then on Monday we are back to feeling guilty that we are sinners again. Reuben started laughing too, saying we should learn to question this whole idea of perpetual sinning and asking for forgiveness.

“There is relief for us if we look back and think about the way our ancestors used to worship. They did not suffer the same kind guilt of sin that we experience now,” said Reuben. Piri agreed, nodding her head.

Sometimes, I think these cousins of mine, Piri and Reuben, go too far in questioning matters of faith, Christianity and sin. We can never know for sure what God really wants us to be. But what we know for sure is that we are born, we live, we struggle, we are happy at times and we suffer at times. Some of us die young and others die in old age. But there is no question that one day we will die.

Back here in the village, we think of the ancestors and hope to rejoin them when we die. But then again, these ancestors did not receive salvation and they died in sin. This means we may never see them in heaven but we might meet them in hell.

This is spiritually confusing. Perhaps, the best way for us is simply to believe in doing what is morally right and ethical by God or Mwari. We can also escape from the guilt of sin or fear of hell, if we believe in hunhu, ubuntu, humanness, our African philosophy of life.

At Matonjeni, Njelele or Mabweadziva, the spirits of our ancestors meet today with those of our colonial masters. During Easter time, may Jesus forgive us our sins, and may the ancestors help us to reach out to Mwari, who was worshipped at Matopos, in the days gone by.

• Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic.

Hope Masike is one of the artistes who continue to revive mbira music and uphold it on the national platform where it belongs

Dr Sekai Nzenza on Wednesday
It was full moon on Saturday last week when we danced to mbira music in the village. Among the guests dancing with us were Mbuya Gambiza and Mbuya Chizanga, the sisters whose ages must be around 86 or close to 90. These two elders lost their husbands many years ago. Five of Mbuya

Chizanga’s six children have since died, while Mbuya Gambiza never had any children of her own. For the past two years, these two have shared the same village hut.

Mbuya Gambiza used to be our neighbour. She told us that she was a child bride at the age of 10 or 12. Her father married her off to Sabhuku, the village head, who was a widower and already quite old when he paid several cows in bride price or lobola.

When I was born, Mbuya Gambiza was the midwife who delivered my mother. She was the first person to hold me, kundigashira, and announce that I was a girl. That was many years ago, when the whole extended family lived in the big village homestead by Chinyika River.

After my mother died three years ago, Mbuya Gambiza’s health seemed to get worse. She could no longer walk the one kilometre or more to our homestead to share sweet tea with corn bread or eat dried meat in peanut sauce with her best friend.

Mbuya Gambiza was lonely and cataracts were causing her to go blind. Her brother’s grand children living in South Africa and other relatives contributed some money for her cataracts removal in Mutare. After she regained her eye sight, Mbuya Gambiza left our village and moved in with her sister, Mbuya Chizanga. For the past year, these two old ladies have become inseparable, in their old age.

For as long as I remember, Mbuya Gambiza and my mother were close friends. In those days, the elders grew plenty of mhunga, rapoko and mapfunde. In the dry season, the women brewed beer and held ceremonies to honour our ancestors.

I recall the dances to mbira music. As children we used to join in and dance, learning the rhythms from the elders and stomping our feet in unison with everyone. Rhythm seemed be so effortless.

Back then, we listened to poetry through song when the gwenyambira or, the mbira players gathered together. They played dandanda, the heavy drum and a smaller one called mhito, the lead drum and the other one to support it, rekutsinhira, playing the interlocking part. All these instruments were accompanied by the rattle or hosho.

Mbira was not just music. It was a communal means of communicating with the ancestral spirits. It was also played to help bring rain during drought, stop rain when the Save River flooded for weeks, cure or chase away bad spirits, mashavi and assist the traditional healer in his divination and healing practices. Alongside drums or without any drums, mbira was played at funerals, the installation of chiefs and during rituals to quench the thirst of our ancestors, nyota yemadzitateguru.

During kurova guva or the ritual to bring back the spirits of the dead to the fold, there was a certain mbira beat played at the beginning of the ceremony and also at the end. The singing was very much in harmony with the drum and hosho.

Sometimes we danced to mbira just for entertainment and we would perfect our rhythms that way.

Then our ability to dance to mbira was gradually killed by Christian conversion in boarding school. In the Methodist church we were taught to sing the soprano, alto, tenor and bass accompanied by the piano. No stomping of feet or spirit possession was allowed.

The missionaries said mbira had a telephonic line to the ancestors, haunting and invoking the call to the spirit world that was so alien to the Christian world. Mbira belonged to primitive devil worship because it made people go into a trance and connect with dead ancestors. At the mission school, there was no drum, no mbira, no hosho or anything that resembled traditional African musical instruments. Other Shona instruments like chipendani, chigufe or the hwamanda were not allowed either.

During the liberation war, the Rhodesian colonial authorities said mbira was a dangerous instrument because it provided zeal and ancestral courage to the fighters. Anyone seen playing mbira during the war was quickly arrested and thrown into prison.

Over the years, the sound of mbira gradually disappeared from our ears. I saw mbira as an African piece of art, something that you buy, take back to the Diaspora where I used to live and display somewhere visible for people to see and acknowledge my African heritage. The mbira instrument stayed on top of the bookshelf or on the mantel piece. My European guests and other African friends picked and played with my mbira. They fingered the keys for a while, made a comment and then put it back on the shelf, treating it the way you would do to any other piece of exotic African artefact.

At that time, I dreamt of buying a piano so I could put it right in the corner of the dining room even though I never owned a house big enough to carry a grand piano. I hoped that one day, I would entertain guests and among them, someone will play the piano, the way I had seen it being done in old English style movies showing the lives of the civilised upper class.

But the piano has not made its way into my house. Instead, I have acquired a few mbira instruments, treasured and stored nicely in my mother’s granary back in the village.

I have since learnt that mbira was a sacred instrument central to Zimbabwean Shona culture. This little Zimbabwean instrument has been around for more than a thousand years. The original mbira consists of 22 metal keys but nowadays mbira players have added a few more to 28 keys fixed on a small wooden board made from the mbubvamaropa, special healing tree.

By shunning mbira, I had lost the musical genre that defined our origins. It has taken some time, since Dhumisani Maraire took mbira to the United States for mbira to be recognised. The late Chiwoniso Maraire, Stella Chiweshe, Mbira DzeNharira, Hope Masike, Albert Chimedza and many others continue to revive the music and uphold mbira on the national platform where it belongs.

Last Saturday, over Easter, my brother Sidney, cousin Piri and I went to Mbuya Gambiza’s maiden home to collect her and her sister, Mbuya Chizanga.

We drove to their village which is only 20 kilometres away along the Save River valley on the road to Dorowa. When we came back to our village homestead, a goat and a big turkey were killed. Piri smoked the turkey over the fire for 24 hours because you should never eat a turkey when it’s still fresh. Haridi kudyiwa richiri nyoro.

The two elders sat in the village courtyard, exactly where my mother used to sit. They ate, slept, walked, talked and laughed. Several neighbours and relatives came to welcome Mbuya Gambiza and her sister.

On Saturday night, under the moonlight, we played mbira music for them. Mbuya Gambiza and Mbuya Chizanga danced slowly in perfect rhythm. We all joined them in the dancing. As the women danced and sang melodious old tunes, we felt the power of mbira.

Mbira is still an instrument symbolising who we are and where we came from. It is authentically Zimbabwean, beautiful and sophisticated. It is a historical genre of music the church did not want to recognise. Surely, the era when mbira was seen as demonic and primitive is gone.

Hopefully, the mbira instrument will one day enter the church because it is part of Shona culture. This sophisticated musical instrument is both sacred and secular. It is an important part of who we were and who we are. It connects us back to our spiritual past and brings us close in rhythms to the joyous footsteps of our elders.

• Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic.