St Mary’s: Another day, another life

to avert the stench and stains from the contents.
Now on the street, she splashes the contents on the ground and lo and behold, it is raw sewage! She has just used the bucket to scoop the raw sewage from her “flooded” pit latrine.
A spitting distance away, young girls gather to play boxes – their dresses tucked into the seams of their panties. They are not amused by the pouring of the human waste onto the street and continue playing as if nothing has happened.
Scooping toilets with buckets and throwing the contents on the streets or open space is common disposal practice!
The girls cover their mouths and nostrils with their hands to ward off the foul smell but when the game gets hot, they must bark instructions.
“Foul . . . foul . . . foul, wadzva! Foul, foul, foul, wadzva, next one ndiani?” the girls shout.
On the other hand, boys, their legs coloured ashen grey from a previous dusty street soccer match only abandoned when the rains started falling, resume their rivalry, on brick gates, and their stadium is the same street.
The game intermittently stops and resumes, with the passing of vehicles or the elderly, but otherwise its game on.
Up the street, another resident has decided to channel sewage from his house into the street, via a hoe-made channel.
His attitude is that those next door will see what to do when they are equally affected.
On the street sides, vendors silently compete for customers, but the problem is that there seems to be more vendors than customers.
They vend from vegetables to electric gadgetry, clothes and vehicle accessories.
Then comes the tuckshops, the autochthons of family businesses in St Mary’s and one in almost every five house, backed by backdoor hair salons.
If you have experienced ghetto life or passed through any ghetto in Zimbabwe, you have not seen anything until you experience St Mary’s in Chitungwiza.
Every day brings in another dimension of life and so does, every hour, every minute and every second.
Life is complex and dynamic but it is being lived, as if there is no tomorrow.
There, unemployment, carefree attitude, fist fighting, broad daylight prostitution, gambling, vending, spilling raw sewage and all vice, inexplicably confront the visitor.
Life is a web of intricately joined fabric, which you need to manoeuvre skillfully by knowing when to be carefree and when to be careful, for, the dictates of life at times force you to be a wild beast in one moment and a well behaved person in the other.
Imagine that there, a whole generation of children has grown up playing with rivers and rivulets of raw sewage, in the same manner this writer’s generation played with rivers and rivulets of fresh rainy water in the villages, making dams from the flow. Almost every five houses, has one.
From the home blaring radios compete for the ear lob while gamblers gather around a reed mat, eyes glued to the fancy and dazzling handiwork that goes with the shuffling of the cards.
Home-brewed beer from the elicit kachasu to opaque beer is sold in the multifarious array of shebeens, which open round the clock.
It is common to meet the wafting smell of mbanje, then prostitutes inviting passersby for sex, for, you hardly see a policeman on the streets in St Mary’s.
One wonders if the officially employed exceed 10 percent of the population of the area.
Weekends are quite a rollercoaster! There is street boxing, with no rules except that you leave the ring when you feel you have been beaten silly. They call it wafa wafa.
Unlike conventional boxing, there are no stipulated rounds, you fight on for as long you can, and once you are beaten, you hand over the set of gloves to the next challenger. If beaten into submission, someone will have to pull you out, otherwise you die there. The winner remains in the ring until someone bits him.
More often that not, the ring is used to settle old scores. Some pseudo boxers only leave the ring after soiling themselves especially those who enter the fray after drinking one too many. That is St Mary’s for you.
The Nyau dancers add another dimension to the casual life in St Mary’s. Being the caricatures of real people, the nyau freely mix and mingle with the people, at time scantily dressed like the one called Chimwiimwii. The one has the proclivity to trudge the length and breadth of the township, only covering its nudity with smeared mud.
In a township where most of the original residents are of foreign origin, no one really cares about this and Chimwiimwii cris-crosses with people without causing a stir.
Chigovanyika business centre, otherwise called Mesina, after the South African border town in Beitbridge, is the epicentre of trade and commerce.
The language there is streetwise from tongues that are fast, sharp and sleek. Vulgar!
At night when Zesa is switched off, vendors have devised a lamp in which a candle is neatly tucked into a well-cut Mazoe drink container. From a distance, you cannot separate the vendor from his or her product. Street vending goes right into midnight.
Still on vending, meat is one of the major products on display and the cuts are out of the conventional. You cannot distinguish chicken from pork or any other meat.
Once in a while there are stories of dog meat having been sold to people or some unknown type of meat. But people still buy and life goes on.
There is one particular vendor, Barnabas Chiku, who brings the Harare City Council type of rubbish plastic bin full of chicken legs, where the hell he gets them no one knows.
“Unoda kuziva mukoto wangu mudhara, hazviite. (You want to know my source, I won’t tell you.) I am in business,” he claims.
There is also this other place where there is a backyard takeaway, selling sadza and chicken skins. Where this proprietor gets several kgs of chicken skin, no one knows. But the place is filthy and surrounded by overgrown grass.
By 7am, some drunkards are already having chicken skin, after spending a night at a beer-drinking binge. No one cares the least for a better life.
Children on their way to and from school circumvent routes that are sewer laden but more often than not, they have no option for the sewage is at their door step.
Also amazing in St Mary’s is the high incidence of school drop-outs among both boys and girls and how they spend most of their time playing for vending.
For lack of diction, the life in St Mary’s is something stranger than fiction, yet life goes on. As for the future of the township and generations to come, only time will tell.