Simukai rises from the dead

and an old battered suitcase.
She had built herself a one-roomed house with a roof of eight asbestos sheets and a small thatched kitchen hut in her brother’s compound.
As a child, I remembered the tall beautiful woman who occasionally came back to the village from Salisbury in her finery telling stories of life in town.
The adults said that Mandifusa had earned her living as a commercial sex worker. It seemed like a glamorous profession to us village kids back then.
It was not her choice but she had made the best of the hand she was dealt. Long before independence, Mandifusa had married her village sweetheart but the union had produced no children after three years of being together.
Her husband blamed her and sent Mandifusa to a n’anga for treatment but to no avail. “This womb was bewitched by the dead, (wakaroyiwa nevakafa), and will never bear any children,” the n’anga said.
So Mandifusa left her husband and headed for town where she stayed for 40 years with a Malawian man in a rented home in Kambuzuma.
In 2005, after her Malawian husband died, Mandifusa returned to the village. One of the first things she did was to join the Tsungai Women’s Burial Society.
As a widow with no children, she did not want to burden her three brothers with burial expenses upon her death.
The joining fee was one dollar with a monthly subscription rate of US$1 as well. Membership covered the burial expenses of the member and two close relatives of their choice. The fee covered the cost of the coffin, cooking oil, sugar, milk and bread for the mourners at the wake.
Members who could not afford a dollar paid in kind – a five-litre bucket of maize.
It did not matter where a member died, Tsungai Burial Society would bring the body back.
Depending on distance, they either hired a lorry or sent a scotchcart with the coffin to collect their member. They even had a song, “takatenderana kuvigana, kunyangwe ukafira ku Binga tinonokutora iwe, we agreed to bury each other, even if you die in Binga we will come and get you.”
The Tsungai Burial Society was different to others around the district. Comprised of more than 200 women and just 20 men, it was formed as a breakaway from another organisation in 2000.
This older burial society was dominated by men who set the rules and their constitution dictated that they would refuse membership to people who appeared to be sick.
As HIV and Aids swept the villages, many people were refused membership. It was a practical decision based on the society’s meagre resources.
A short-term member would take out more than they contributed, so they could not be covered. It’s how insurance companies stay afloat. It makes sense for them to balance premium income with their payouts.
The Tsungai committee decided that anyone was free to join, regardless of their health status, location, age, religion, totem or background.
When a death occurred, no matter the time of day, the burial society committee appointed a team of women to manage the funeral proceedings. They provided water and food to the mourners. Every member brought a plate of maize meal and vegetables. The bereaved relatives did not have to do anything.
The society provided the coffin and a white shroud to wrap the body for burial. Regardless of their denomination, Tsungai women sang and danced to farewell their deceased. Nobody was allowed to return home hungry from a Tsungai funeral.
The structure and management at the funeral was like a nhimbe, the concept of helping on a field day.
The name Tsungai (be determined) reflected the mission of the society.
Together, they would persevere. Like Jesus Christ’s feeding of the multitudes at the wedding, love would somehow multiply the loaves and fish and no one’s needs would be neglected.
If only they had a loaf and a fish to begin with!
Mandifusa’s Tsungai membership was up to date and they buried her with as much dignity as they could muster.
The basic coffin they buried her in was too small for this tall woman and her body had to be literally folded for it to fit. But it was a coffin, nonetheless. All the village coffins used to be like that. One size fits all.
I was there for the funeral, visiting from overseas, and witnessed an inspiring devotion.
All night, we sang and danced around the small coffin. We sang a mix of Christian and traditional songs which must have confused Mandifusa’s spirit since nobody seemed to know if she was still a Christian.
But that did not matter at all. By late morning, kukanda, the smell of death, was rising from the corpse. Beatrice brought zumbani, the strong smelling mint-like plant that cleared the air. We buried Mandifusa by an anthill soon after 2 o’clock in the afternoon.
The following day Mandifusa’s brothers and other relatives distributed her clothes and few possessions. The family argued over her little bedroom. They could not agree on who should inherit it.
In the end, they pulled the roof apart and shared the asbestos sheets. There was nothing but her grave by the anthill left to remind people she had ever existed.
But for me, something happened on that day. As Beatrice, her sister and Winnet walked away from the funeral through the dry barren fields, I wondered how long the community could withstand the pressures it was facing.
Was a good song and a decent burial the only thing left to hope for?
In some ways, the people of this valley were marking time, even gradually moving backwards. Was there a future for the village where I had grown up, the people I had known all my life? Over the years, donors have come to give food handouts, seeds, fertiliser and sometimes condoms.
In between handouts, the rainy season and the harvest time people were getting sick and they were burying each other.
We are all related in the valley along the Save River between Hwedza and Dorowa. Our families have lived there since the forced removal from what became white farm land in Charter District surrounding Marondera in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
Our relationships are defined by totem lineages, blood or marriage. Every dry season, the people walk several kilometres together to line up for donor handouts.
I realised that the dignity of Matinetsa’s funeral was our hope for a village revival. A day after the funeral, Winnet and the Tsungai Burial Society members asked me to become their president. At first I was reluctant. I was living in the USA. What about my long absences, I asked? You will be fined each time you are not present for meetings, said Winnet, laughing.
The fines were based on income so I should pay a lot more because I earned US dollars, she jokingly said. My resistance was futile and soon I was duly elected president. The committee decided that as president my role would be to ensure that there was an adequate supply of coffins at any given time of death.
I soon discovered that the committee “lent” coffins to other burial societies in the area. This generosity from Tsungai was not unanimously accepted by all the members.
Some argued that if the society kept lending coffins to other burial societies, it would run out of coffins for its own members. That would not happen, stronger voices argued. God is kind, they said, He rarely allowed two deaths to happen at once.
Ignoring the negative comments, the Tsungai committee determined that the society would always have at least four coffins at any given time.
Not only that, these coffins would be from better wood from Harare with real handles, unlike the village made ones which sometimes had no handles at all.
I became president of Tsungai Burial Society because I wanted to be involved with the people at grassroots level. Not only that, this was an excellent opportunity to take pictures to take back to America and use in my flashy PowerPoint poverty presentations.
The women celebrated my appointment as their president. I took pictures and videos as they danced. Sometimes I gave the camera to a woman who looked clever, akangwarira, to take a picture and include me in the scene. This way my presentations would look more authentic. I was right there in the village, among the poor.
We were never without a coffin, never without food and certainly never without hope. Women like Mandifusa departed over the years, some left the area to find their fortune elsewhere. But many like Winnet and Beatrice stayed to keep the spirit of resilience and unity alive.
Our ancestors had endured colonialism, the resettlement to dry rocky reserves, the liberation war, several droughts, the hyperinflation 2008 and so many deaths.
And yet the community resilience and generosity among people so poor was still there. Alive and vibrant. How could we harness this energy? How do we keep the village alive? I went away to look for donors. We are poor, we are dying, we have orphans, we need education, roads, clinics and food, I said. But every disadvantaged community from all over Africa was asking for the same. Like anyone, donors get tired of hearing the same sad story. It was not surprising that after knocking on so many doors none was forthcoming with dollars.
The story of my village was not new.
Then Winnet said we should ask for a loan to start a business rather than just ask for donations. I was sceptical. I had seen and evaluated many failed community development projects in other countries.
There were no business skills around here. But Winnet and Beatrice insisted that we should tell the donors how we have survived, not how helpless we are. We are looking for partners, not hand-outs.
We want to rise, she said, not sit in the dust waiting for the next group of donors passing by in their big cars to find us.
A friend from Australia gave us a small loan to be repaid in three years. And so Tsungai agreed to rise, kusimuka. We formed the Simukai Development Project, beginning with a grinding mill and chicken project two years ago.
Earlier this year, I returned to give my 20 years of international development experience to the communities in my village and the villages along the Save River basin between Hwedza and Dorowa. The challenges were immense.
Two years since we commenced, we are still standing and the momentum is building. The Diplomatic Wives of Harare paid for a bush pump and a new garden managed by members of Tsungai Burial Society. Near my old school, the Australian Ambassador, His Excellency Matthew Neuhaus, gave us another bush pump and funding for a training centre and a big kitchen to begin a feeding programme.
The ambassador opened the centre last Saturday as Beatrice led the women of Simukai through a new song to celebrate hope and life.
There was no outside involvement in the formation of Simukai. I joined a structure that was already there before I came back. Rather than focus on just burying people, our project is now focusing on self-determination, hope and micro-enterprise.
The strength of this project is derived from group members with a shared vision, similar spiritual beliefs and cultural values.
Power structures are governed by traditional codes of behaviour based on blood relations, marriage or totemic lineages. We are learning that our community values, morals and ethics can be translated into sound business practices and accountability.
The solution to poverty in these villages was homegrown, allowing political and economic freedom for the community to make decisions and to be accountable for them. There were no large aid bureaucracies or Government agencies involved although we welcome them. Because the decision-making process is centred on just a few people and the budget is very small, there is no room for corruption and inefficiencies.
The Tsungai Burial Society transformation has given us a lesson about community development.
The donors could do well to spend more time in building trust and understanding with the community structures that exist. Coming from outside this is a big challenge. But with some humility and time to listen, they can spend less money on overheads and administration and more on connecting with the people.
The greatest problem is not to find money. There is, in fact, so much of it in the world. What we need is to reclaim and harness that old community spirit of nhimbe already working in burial societies across the country.
Mandifusa’s funeral was a turning point for Tsungai Burial Society. Not everyone in the village will move to the city one day. We resolved not to sit back and wait for the donor to arrive. We decided to rise. Donors will come and go. But we will still be here. Our culture, our language and the village must survive.

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