adminback, he brought with him the uniform, a bicycle, a Bible and a gun. Mbuya VaMandirowesa said Sekuru must have stolen the gun because only chiefs were allowed to have guns. But Sekuru argued that his ability to speak English meant he was not only allowed to keep a gun, but the Southern Rhodesian government also allowed him to drink Western beer.
When he fought alongside the askaris from the East Africa regiment, they were times when they drank beer together as Africans and they only spoke to each other in English. After the war, Sekuru’s English helped him to get a job at the Rhodesia Railways, the Salisbury Municipality and at TM Meikles before coming back to the village in 1940.
Whenever he wanted to revive his memory of English words, Sekuru rounded all the compound children to show us how English soldiers marched during the war. He dressed in his full khaki Rhodesian African Rifles army uniform, brown knee length boots, above the knee shorts, jacket with belt and golden buttons.
He wore a cone shaped red hat with a bright red ribbon on it. Sekuru looked the picture of an English colonel, with his moustache twisted at the ends. He held his gun in the air, marched up and down the village compound singing his favourite war song “Sweet Banana”:
I will buy you a sweet banana
Shield spear and knobkerrie
Soldiers in war and peace
In war she fights with bravery
I will buy you a sweet banana
Rhodesia, Burma, Egypt ne Malaya takarwa tikakunda ( We fought and won).
For a long time Sekuru Dickson was the only man who spoke English in the village and in all the villages beyond the Save River. Even Chief Svinurai and all his advisers did not speak English at all.
On the rare occasion that a white policeman came to the village, Sekuru Dickson spoke English better than the policeman’s native assistant Black watcher, mubhurakwacha. Sekuru became the chief English translator for the white policeman, the dip tank supervisor, the Native Commissioner and the missionaries.
My grandmother Mbuya VaMandirowesa did not speak a word of English. Sekuru encouraged Mbuya to go to church for some Christian education. He hoped becoming a Christian would stop Mbuya from taking snuff and drinking beer.
One day Reverend John Osborne, a white missionary arrived in the village on horseback. Sekuru welcomed him and became his official translator. For many people, this was the first time to see a white man up close. Reverend Osborne stayed for a while preaching the gospel and teaching English to some men and a few women.
Father Osborne preached against the worship of ancestors, practicing witchcraft, polygamy and murder and all other evils such as fornication and drinking alcohol. Mbuya VaMandirowesa came to church a few times and listened to Sekuru doing the translations. The people listened with interest when Sekuru introduced the Ten Commandments to them.
Mbuya said she liked the Ten Commandments because they were no different from some of the village beliefs such as respecting your mother and father, not to kill, lie or steal. But Mbuya did not convert to Christianity. By the 1970’s, a school had been built where the old church used to stand. I went to the school with my friends, Enifa, Beatrice and Winnet. Enifa was the brightest girl in class but she ran away from school because she could not bear corporal punishment any longer. Beatrice and Winnet stopped going to school because their parents did not believe in the education of girls. All three never learnt to speak English. They married early and stayed in the village.
Years later, I am back from the Diaspora wonderings and focusing energy into bringing development and English to the village. We have transformed the village burial society into Simukai Development project.
Winnet is the chairperson, Enifa is the treasurer and Beatrice is the secretary. The training centre built with help from the Australian ambassador stands solid and ready for the first group of students.
My white friends from an American NGO are visiting the village. They want to meet the women, interview them, take pictures and they may ask us to apply for funding to develop business skills. The proposal must be written in English. Sekuru Dickson would have spoken better English than any of the village women here.
I am the president of the Burial Society and director of the Simukai project. At the same time I am part of the NGO educated elite, well versed in the English language and idiom of modernisation.
My job here is to translate everything into English using the NGO language our visitors understand, then take the visitors’ questions back to the village women.
Apart from what I tell the village women, they do not know anything about the Americans. On the other hand, I must find a language that suits the understanding of the donors. Such a language inevitably includes words of pity and the rhetoric of empowerment and sustainable development.
The village women begin by saying that they want to stand on their own legs, kuzvimiririra. I write that “they want to be empowered and sustainable.” Some meaning is lost in the translation process.
At this meeting, I take part as the intellectual elite complicit in silencing my village friends because English has given me the power to speak, the same way it gave Sekuru Dickson a voice.
My speaking English renders Beatrice, Enifa, Winnet and all the other women mute. They are separated from hearing the voices of the Americans because of their inability to master the English language, donor culture and power.
I realise that I have been complicit in creating silencing conditions of the very voices we need to constantly hear when doing development.
I write about a situation and about people I know from childhood. Confronted by a white donor, Winnet, Beatrice and Enifa cannot speak, the same way Mbuya and our mothers did not speak when missionaries and colonial administrators came.
The English language silences them, making them appear vulnerable and disempowered. The donor women smile at them with pity and assume that their lack of material wealth or food represents lack of knowledge. Yet silence does not mean they are not speaking. They are. They are just not being heard.
There are echoes of a silent continuing breakdown in dialogue between our past interaction with white missionaries, with the colonialists and with the donors. Missionaries never fully understood the perceptions and thinking of the village people. The donors are in a similar position.
Big cultural gaps continue to exist between whites and blacks, donors and communities. What they know about each other is what they have been told by people like me, the modern interpreters.
I am caught in a dilemma. On the one hand, I occupy the privileged position of the NGO workers, an elite class sometimes living in the city away from village poverty. English and knowledge gives me power to speak to both communities and donors.
On the other hand, by speaking for and on behalf of the village women I silence and disempower them. I also portray them as always oppressed and vulnerable because I associate them with the language pity
when I speak about them to the Americans.
The village women become objects of a development study rather than producers of indigenous knowledge. Because they are thinking of the dollars they could get from donor money, the women deliberately look miserable when pictures are being taken of them.
Addressing poverty is an uphill battle which requires relinquishing power from educated locals like me and the donors.
There is need for a dialogue with the Western world of donors. This dialogue may very well begin where colonialism started. This means we begin to address the question why, after so many years of food handouts, we continue to be poor.
The donors are not hearing, nor are they asking the critical questions about whose voices they are not hearing and why they are not being heard. The problem lies in the manner in which we are begging and using a contradictory language of pity alongside that of empowerment and sustainability to get money from donors.
We face the challenge to enable the voices of village communities to speak directly in truth to the donors without begging for pity. After many years learning to engage with the Western world only through our ability to speak English, we should go beyond asking for salvation from the missionary and pity from the donor.
The era of my grandfather’s performance mimicking the English man is gone. What he thought he saw and heard in English then translated to us was not always true. A dialogue is needed to promote the practice of speaking with the village people rather than speaking to them or for them.
This way, we can begin to bridge the gap between the donor and the village communities, then unravel the historical silences that have come as a result of not speaking English.
Indeed, the donor could do well to let go of the dominant power of speaking only English through translators and learn a more open and humble engagement with the village communities.
- 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.
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