Chronicle EditorDavid Mungoshi Shelling the Nuts
MANY years ago, just newly-graduated from teachers college with my newfangled T.3 teachers’ certificate, I was posted to a rural mission school. The mark of distinction as T.3 teacher was that where all others before 1968 had only two years of teacher training, we had three years of it. Although I had a very strong urban background, it did not take me long to feel at home in the picturesque environment of the mission school.
The year before one went out to teach in the schools was the cause of much speculation and anticipation.
If you were as green as I was and you happened to be classmates with someone who had been in the schools teaching without a qualification, you got a lot of free advice. Such people were, after all, veterans in the field of rural teaching.
A colourful classmate, given to comedy and exaggeration, had a rather tastefully adventurous piece of advice for me.
Zvumbukesi — not his real name, but one he gave to anyone he thought was a country bumpkin, became the name we called him by. His take was that you could only earn the respect of rustic drunks and scheming old men by showing them a thing or two about physical combat.
The idea was to go where they partook of the wise waters and pick a fight with someone you obviously could overcome.
After flattening this person no doddering senior citizens on shaky legs could ever threaten you.
Zvumbukesi’s scenario almost came true for me at the mission school.
One school holiday I happened to be on duty and had the responsibility of making sure the school garden was attended to. This meant that I had to supervise the children as they did their duties in the garden, tilling, weeding and fetching water in metal buckets to water the vegetables.
I also had to keep a strict inventory of all the tools used. One morning as I was going about my holiday duties, a villager who had obviously had too much to drink and was suffering the effects of inebriation, staggered over and drunkenly sought my attention.
“Young man,” said the villager, “Are you the new teacher that we hear is coming?” I said yes. He gave me a broken-toothed, but enigmatic smile, dregs from his opaque beer clinging to his enormous teeth. With a shaking finger and an equally tremulous voice he directed my attention to the school buildings — classrooms and staff houses. The man then told me that it was he who had built everything and that he would be really upset if he should hear that I was beating the children. He said he would be back in double-quick time to teach me a lesson if that ever happened.
As you can imagine, I had this happy feeling that I was being presented with a golden opportunity to make a statement.
If I felled this drunken villager with an uppercut, my fame would spread like a wild fire in the surrounding villages and I would teach happily ever after in my rural abode.
Mission schools were like today’s growth points. Everybody came there to visit or just hang around and even scrounge around for bits and pieces of food morsels cast off by the dining hall staff. Even those touched by the sun seemed unable to keep away. You saw them milling around like dogs at a rural wedding. Later I was to capture some of these characters in my first creative writing project — a collection of short stories.
One of these men, despite his going mental, so to say, still attended the school’s open days to see how his children were doing. You could tell he was not all there from the junk he towed around.
On one such open day, the drama club gave an exhilarating performance of Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer”. Soon it was time for the vote of thanks to end the day.
The senior teacher doing the honours kept hitching up his trousers as he droned on. This went on unchecked for some time. Suddenly the parent with the said junk boomed from where he sat on the ground, “Speak, what is the matter with you? Do you have lice inside your trousers? Why do you keep fidgeting like that? If you keep doing that I’ll speak for you.”
His nickname was Gumbospeak.
The resultant mirth ended the ill-fated vote of thanks. Further attempts at speaking were drowned in the amused laughter of the gathering.
So-called madmen are sometimes quite precise in their observations and because they can afford to dispense with diplomacy and etiquette, they pronounce truths that everyone knows, but cannot publicly acknowledge.
On moonlit nights you sometimes saw a silent light-skinned man. He moved with the stealth and precision of an assassin.
Rumour had it that he had committed a heinous crime in South Africa and that he was the victim of the avenging spirit of his deceased victim from years ago.
The man was always standing on one leg like a rooster or Maasai warrior.
Nobody dared go anywhere near him without courting disaster. The man was rumoured to carry a knife around with him. People said he used his okapi with dexterity.
Conversely, there was a very loud character who sang old Boy Scout songs to anyone who cared to listen. On his expansive days he claimed to be a servant of the Most High and said anyone who wanted a sure passage to heaven should follow him. People said he had been to the World Scout jamboree in Greece. One evening there was a spectacle when another man who lived by himself at the foot of a hill came by.
His mark of distinction was his whistling and eccentric parody of the Catholic mass.
I heard him recite verses from the Bible in the fashion of the Gregorian chant. The man’s singing reminded me of the Shona proverb that says, “Mapudzi anowira kune vasina hari”, a wry observation of the chances that go begging because someone is either too lazy or too obtuse to realise that fortune is knocking on their door.
With a bit of luck and a little help from friends, this man could have been a musical sensation in his day. But we live and learn that life goes on, nevertheless.
So-called mad people often produce inspired wisdom and beauty.
Alick Macheso must have had this in mind when he sang, “Vamwe vakaudzwa hondo, nemumwe wepfungwa vakamuseka. Kwahi anopenga uyu.” This is poetic and lateral (seeing things in an uncommon way).
Macheso’s song goes on to lament how people were warned that a war had started, but derisively dismissed the news, calling the informant mad.
If, in real life, this happened, the result is not difficult to imagine.
The wise person listens to everyone and everything, if only to separate the chaff.
Each city and town in Zimbabwe has some resident street dwellers who really ought to be inmates at the country’s mental institutions. They are not difficult to recognise. They are usually covered in soot, grime and oil so that it becomes difficult to distinguish face from garment.
They, of course, are unwashed as a rule. Yet, wonder of wonders, they emit no unpleasant odours! I saw one such person outside a supermarket in Gweru and just as I was wondering how to give him a wide berth something wonderful happened. The man began to sing Paul Matavire’s song on the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The words tumbled off his tongue as if from the tongue of a maestro. I saw then how futile it is to cry about misfortune. You can keep the hypertension away by being a free spirit.
At the height of our economic meltdown last decade I saw a virtuoso dancehall performance from another of those people we call demented. A loose standard off a fence became his mic and he danced fluidly as he chanted, “Ngwandangwanda, ngondongondo.” His ‘riddim’ evoked perfect images of collapse and struggle. A friend of mine later created a poem from this incident.
There is something about so-called madmen and music. One such man who used to walk the streets of Gweru singing off-key at the top of his voice apparently had a wife at home. The people said wives can cure madness because once inside his house he became a lamb. Everyone was awed by his perfect diction and wonderful sense of rhythm and mystified by his transformation at home. Next time you come across one of these comrades, take a listen to them. You might just come away with a pearl of wisdom and the unforgettable insights that can only be the product of a mind unencumbered by convention.
David Mungoshi is a writer, social commentator, editor and retired teacher.
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