Changing seasons, rhythm of time

never rise before you do. Everything we did was decided by the seasons. The cicadas sang to tell us rain was imminent.
When the rains were late the elders 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.”

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 debris and dust to the Indian Ocean. Our cows grew fatter. My mother and all the women everyone 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 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.

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 lay spread the peanuts, red sorghum – zviyo, mapfunde and mhunga to dry in the sun at the flat granite rocks to dry. Everything obeyed the natural rhythm of time.
While my older brothers and sisters did the harvesting, I spent all day guarding the crops from monkeys, goats, baboons and birds at the granite rocks. I was alone but never lonely. I sat under the shade of a tree for hours on end and kept myself busy. There were no books to read.

Yet there was plenty of play to be done, alone. Time just moved. I drew letters in the sand, made bracelets from the bark of a tree and wove small worthless baskets. I watched ants building their castles and talked to a snail taking forever to climb a rock while leaving a slimy trail behind it.
I helped cow dung beetles gently push their balls of manure. I listened to birds singing and tried to identify the type of bird from its song. With the clay left over from my mother’s pottery making, I moulded dolls and created a village compound complete with huts, people, dogs and cattle.

Sometimes I just lay on my back and watched eagles flying above as they searched for unsuspecting prey with their sharp cruel eyes. I sang to myself, talked to the ants, bees, butterflies, grasshoppers and other insects to avoid falling asleep. Only once did I fall asleep and the goats ate half the mumera, the fermented millet my mother used as yeast for brewing beer. She gave me a thorough beating.
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.

Later on in the dry season, muchirimo, the elders performed kurova guva – the ceremony to reconcile the spirit of the dead person with those who went before him with those who remain. They brewed plenty of beer, killed a beast and all night they danced, played the drum and mbira. At dawn, they formed a single file to the grave, varoora carrying beer pots on their heads. They poured it on the grave, ululated, clapped and called upon the spirit of the dead to cease wandering in the bush and come home to guide and protect the living.

When the moon was full, we followed the sound of the drum and danced until dawn. We played many games like, “choose your beloved”, sarura wako, chinungu, gwendere gwendere, jejejeje jerekuje, chidhange chidhange, dzwitswi, vasikana iwe, pfukumbwe, zvirahwe and many others.
During the time when the moon was dead and the night was so dark that you could not see your hand, Mbuya VaMandirowesa told us stories about the time when animals could talk. She said the world was different before the white man came. We could never imagine that there will come a time when we could eat and drink with white men.

On those dark nights, Mbuya also told us to stay inside because such nights belonged to witches and ghosts. The witches rode hyenas in search of fresh graves. They knew the time to dig up recently buried people and eat them at ceremonies attended by hyenas, owls, snakes, and zvidhoma – monkey like gnomes.
Through the valley and over the mountains, the bright lights of angry ghosts moved around. The very bright big lights belonged to the ghosts of murdered people. These angry wraiths moved around the scene of their murder and around graves demanding justice.

They could do this for many seasons, until the time came for them to receive a virgin and many cows as compensation for their wrongful killing. When November, the sacred month of the goat, mwedzi wambudzi arrived no ceremonies could take place. Getting married or performing any rituals would anger the ancestors.
The women shelled nuts and made peanut butter. Men thatched the huts and poured manure on the fields in preparations for the rains. How long we would wait was determined by God, Mwari and the Ancestors.
Everything in heaven and earth moved at a pace determined by the seasons. Time was not captured by one person; it belonged to all of us. Yet there were times we were forced to race against time. If the rains were coming and we were still out in the valley herding cattle, we ran home to beat the rains. We rushed to cross the river before it flooded. At school, we had to arrive at assembly on time or endure the beating with a stick from the headmaster. Time was forcing us to change.

One day my father came home from Kwenda mission armed with the village’s first clock. He announced that the Africans would never be civilised unless they learnt to obey time. Always obey time and the white man will respect you, my father told me and my ten sisters and brothers.
My father hung it on the wall of our hut and told us to watch it. And obey it. Stop gazing at the sun, let the clock tell you when to get up, when to fetch water and when to plough the field.
We looked at the clock and waited for six o’clock. We got up after sunrise and neighbours’ pointed fingers. They mocked us for being lazy. Mbuya and my mother were angry with us. “Are you white people that you should be in sleeping after sunrise? The clock belongs to the white people so they know when to order their tea,” my mother said.

“We do not know where time comes from or travels to. Time does not talk. Nguva haitaure,” Mbuya said. “The clock does not speak to us. What speaks to us is the sun, the moon, the stars, the shadows, the rain and many other signs. Each time these things move, we know what time says. Time talks to the rooster and he knows when to wake us up. Is that not a good enough sign?”
My father would not listen. Mbuya pointed a finger at him and said, “You have become a slave to a machine. It is making the children lazy. Inga chizungu manyoka, this Western civilisation is like the illness of diarrhoea,” she said.

One day my mother hid the clock in the granary. The rats nibbled at it and it died. My father could not fix the dead clock. Undaunted by this resistance to civilisation, my father brought another clock and also a wrist watch from the Mission. Every Sunday morning, at nine o’clock sharp, I carried my father’s clock as I walked barefoot behind him up the hill to the church. My father wore an old brown suit with pointy brown shoes, a gift from the missionaries.

An old broken plough hanging from the tree was our church bell. I hit the plough with a stone several times to tell the people across the hills and the valleys to prepare for church. My father and I waited for an hour before I hit the metal plough again to tell the people that service was about to begin. An hour or more later, one by one or in small groups the people came to church. They were not embarrassed or ashamed of being late. Theirs was a patient God.

At boarding school, everything was done according to time. No more staring at the sun to tell us what to do. The bell rang at 6am. Communal showers at 6.15am. Everything was done in quarterly or hourly intervals. We kept time. The missionaries spoke about the importance of justice, humility and love, and the connection between these concepts and modern business and progress. But none of this could function without adherence to time.

Beautiful Mother England – was a country that functioned according to time. There was a clock at Victoria Station in London and every train across the country moved in unison as if connected by an invisible thread.

It was at boarding school that I met Miss Hutchinson, my mentor and guide to time keeping English ways of living. When she was away for the weekend at a church conference, my friends and I hoped and prayed that she might leave the curtain half-open. We would peep inside to see where she slept and the kind of underclothes she wore. She wore huge cream coloured brassieres.
There was a big clock on her kitchen wall. In the dim silence of an empty house, we could hear it ticking – watching us. When we went back to the village during school holidays we told wide-eyed village children about the ways of civilised ladies. I boasted that I was the privileged African who knew everything about white people. Yes, Miss Hutchinson lives alone. Yes, she always rushes home to have ‘time to herself.’

At sixteen, Miss Hutchinson trusted me to carry the clock. I rang the bell, announcing the end or beginning of each lesson. When the clock was not working, I wore Miss Hutchinson’s wristwatch. It smelt like her. I was proud. Miss Hutchinson said my knowledge and respect for clocks would take me a long way from Africa. It did. In today’s fast moving world, everything is measured by the progress of those little hands around the dial. I wear a wrist watch. There is a clock in my car, on the radio, television, on my Blackberry phone and my computer, on everything.

When I fly back to Africa westward on an a jet, I can almost fool myself that I beat the sun, the moon and the stars moving through the heavens, simply by changing the time on my watch. Tomorrow, I can literally be in yesterday if I fly far enough but jet lag is a reminder that this is folly. We must all come to ground eventually.

Back here in the village this season I remember that it is only the natural world that keeps perfect time. The glory of the rising sun and its ever changing colours tell the story of a day unique in time and space. The clock has a face but no eyes. To it, everyday is exactly the same. We have a clock on my mother’s hut wall now. A kind of memorial to my late father and his worship of time. My mother pays no attention to it. It is only for decoration, having long ago run out of batteries.

The sun and the seasons still matter. And so my mother’s concept of time remains deeply rooted in seasonal activities. Her time has slowed down. She has no need to adjust to technology and change. But we do, because outside this village, the world continues to move and it wants us to obey time.

• Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic. She holds a PhD in Inter/Relations and is a consultant and director of The Simukai Development Project.