This Christmas: A village renewal

Hwedza mountains, near Save river. I also tried to forget my childhood friend Beatrice. She had married young and stayed back there.
I went away to become an African migrant in the Diaspora.
My father, a teacher, had instilled in me the drive to get an education to make money so I could escape the poverty of our childhood.
And I followed his instructions well.
I lived in London for two years, in Melbourne for 22 years, Los Angeles for three years then back to Melbourne again.
Wherever I lived, I decorated my home with African artefacts. There was always a mask on the wall, photographs of an African woman with a baby on her back and a bundle of firewood on her head, two barefoot African boys running on a rocky path.
Before I could differentiate good art from bad art, I had the painting of a dancing topless black girl that I always kept in the toilet.
My cultural identity was confused.
I even tried to forget the name my mother had given me, Sekesai. On the day I was born, my mother was not prepared for my arrival. She went into labour while out in the valley herding cattle.
There was no clinic for about 60km away. No hospital bag, no nappies, no blankets. Nothing. Except the mbereko that my mother had used to carry my older sister Charity and a torn towel.
But my mother was creative.
She tore open a sack and joined it with her thick cotton petticoat to make a baby blanket.
Everyone in the village laughed. My mother said, “Sekesai (zvenyu asi mwana wangu arikudziyirwa, you can laugh as much as you like but my child is warm.)”
This history behind my name was embarrassing. I wanted a civilised English name.
After memorising the Anglican Catechism, I was due for baptism. Baptism meant forgiveness from the sins of my ancestors, a new life in Christ and a change of name. My father called me Irene after an American missionary, Miss Irene Taylor.
In the 1920s and 1930s she had travelled around Hwedza and Daramombe on horseback condemning the practice of the killing of twins.
At that time the Shona believed that twins were a bad omen. Soon after birth, the midwife strangled or suffocated one baby by stuffing ash in its throat.
The poor innocent child would be placed in a big clay pot and cast into the Save River, into the deep dark pools where crocodiles waited.
The baby and the bad omens disappeared in the river, far away from hungry village witches.
On the way back, the midwife did not turn her head or shake hands with anyone in case the spirit of the dead baby followed her.
Such a death had happened to my mother’s twin brother in 1929. He was one of the last to die because Miss Irene Taylor stopped this evil practice. And so I was baptised as Irene, a name that spoke of progress and Englishness.
Later on, I was to learn that Irene is actually a Greek name.
At boarding school, I was embarrassed to tell people that I came from a village behind the Hwedza Mountains. There were students from the big city in my class. One girl, Patricia Samuriwo came from Mufakose. She was beautiful. Her body was fat and her skin was like the colour of that beautiful bush fruit, mashuku.
I was envious of her because I was skinny and very dark. Every school term Patricia Samuriwo had two or three new dresses. I had none, other than the hand me downs from my older sisters. Patricia and the other girls from town talked about going to the cinema. I had never been to the cinema nor had I ever eaten an ice-cream.
Patricia’s trunk was filled with wondrous treats – assorted biscuits, marmalade jam, bread sweets and bottles of Mazoe. I still remember everything she had. In my mind, I had only roasted peanuts, a tin of peanut butter and sun dried ipwa, the thin stalk that looks a bit like sugar cane. Everything I had was home grown. Sometimes Patricia swapped a handful of peanuts for one cream layered biscuit. I was determined to study hard and go overseas.
Back in the village my childhood friend Beatrice had stopped school in Grade Six.
Her father said girls had no reason to go to school. Why give a woman knowledge that will only benefit her husband’s people, he said.
At the age of 15, Beatrice eloped to her lover’s village. By the time I went to London three years later, Beatrice had two kids.
Whenever I came back to visit my mother, there was Beatrice with yet another child.
When I wrote essays about “the rural woman” it was Beatrice I had in mind.
She lived under a patriarchal system, disadvantaged, marginalised, vulnerable, abused and ignorant of her rights.
During tutorial, my fellow university students asked me to describe in detail the nature of village poverty in Africa.
Then I got a big senior Executive job in an international organisation. It was a demanding job requiring a lot of global travelling in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
I got invited to women’s groups and conferences to talk about how I escaped village poverty. I flew around the United States and gladly spoke about my poor relatives in Zimbabwe.
Back in my hotel room I often relaxed in the spa bath and pinched myself.
Was this really me? Memories of the past flooded my mind. I remembered the days I went herding cattle in the rain and being drenched to the skin. Spending the whole day sitting at the ruware guarding grain from baboons and goats.
Weeding long fields of maize in the heat and sowing zviyo in the rain. Then there were all those diseases that came without warning: Bilharzias – chipfungwa. Ringworms – zvisasa. Scabies and mumps. Measles and small pox.
My mother force feeding me fanta and buns because she believed these would increase the appetite of a sick child. Carrying my little sister Vongai on my skinny back when she was being weaned off the breast and wanted nobody else but me. Playing with Beatrice and my sisters in the dirty puddles in the riverbed during the dry season.
The moonlight dances of jiti and playing the game sarura wako kadeya deya – embracing sweaty boys whose bodies did not know the feel of soap. How did I survive it all?
I thanked God that I was not a long-suffering village woman like Beatrice.
During my business trips to African countries, I often stopped in Harare and drove to the village for one night to see my mother.
Whenever I visited, I always saw Beatrice. I did not look for her. She looked for me. But our friendship had changed.
I was the donor with money and she was the poor rural woman with lots of children.
I always gave her and others one dollar and five dollar notes as small donations to cover some children’s books and bus fare to the health centre.
I had not forgotten that this was still my village and my relatives. I took more pictures and videos for use in my global presentations on poverty.
Back in California, I made sophisticated PowerPoint and edited my videos.
I was invited to speak at large church gatherings about the scale of poverty in my village and how I had escaped it.
The congregation loved my testimony. Sometimes the same church would invite me twice and offer donations for me to send home so “my people” can find education and receive the empowerment and spiritual transformation that comes with knowing Christ.
I had everything Beatrice did not have. Technology at my finger tips, a big king size bed, an expensive car, a nice house and plenty of good food. I went to expensive restaurants where the wine was only filled to less than half the glass and a small portion of food was placed in a huge white plate.
I ate food Beatrice would never dream of eating. Prawns, crabs, oysters and octopus. I went to galleries and mingled with the rich, sipping a glass of wine slowly, pretending to understand all the art. I smiled and nodded even when I understood nothing. I had cultivated a polite, civilised laugh.
Never too loud. I was at the height of a civilised western lifestyle. When I was not working, I relaxed by buying more clothes and more shoes. It felt good.
But I was happy for a short time.
I had stopped laughing the way we used to laugh back in the village.
I missed that kind of laughter you get when someone tells you a story and you beg them to pause for while because your ribs are aching from laughing, your eyes are filled with tears of laughter.
I could not remember when that had last happened. Life was stressful.
I was getting more and more restless. Where was the happiness I had been hunting for all these years?
When the recession hit America I packed my bags and went back to Australia.
I sat in my little house and continued to eat and drink. I was never hungry. But the hunger and thirst of my soul was not satisfied.
Australia did not feel like home. I dreamt of the village and longed for the sound of drums, hands clapping, the rhythmic dance of my ancestors, their toes buried in the soil where their blood has been spilt fighting for freedom.
I wanted to see the moon rising over the hills. That moonlight so bright that you could learn to read from it. Stars scattered all over like maize on a footpath.
The sounds of the night and the bush baby, the gwee calling out.
The frogs and crickets singing to their lovers down in the valley.
The changing colours of the mountains and the faithful Save river and her big water holes full of water in all seasons. I longed to go back to the past. Yet that past was only memory and there was something else in its place.
I realised that it did not matter how far we travel and how much we try to forget, we cannot erase our past.
There is no meaningful future and no real identity without acknowledging our past. Because the past, its memory and its language is a part of us. For me, it was time to peta muswe, fold my tail and make the tracks back to reclaim the past I had tried to forget.
After 25 years living in the Diaspora I am back home. By the time I returned to the village earlier this year, Beatrice was already back in the village. Her husband was dead and she had lost three of her brothers, all in one year.
I had lost some of my siblings too. But through it all, Beatrice could still laugh. She could still smile, sing and dance to the drum even when she had nothing in her granary.
The source of her peace of mind was right there, in the village, where we both grew up.
I am celebrating the return kumusha this Christmas.
My mother will instruct us on how to make the seven-day village brew.
A goat or two will be slaughtered.
We shall eat what we grow. And I shall dance and laugh like an African again, unrestrained by Western civilised decorum.
Beatrice and I will sit and recall the memories of our youth. Our lives are filled with the shared pain of village loss and the promise of life and a village renewal.

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.