Women losing the village rhythms

was holding a woman.
It was a beer promotion event and Bob Nyabinde and his band were playing some really good jazz.
My two cousins from the Diaspora had dragged me to Warren Park because they wanted to listen to a good Zimbabwean band in an open atmosphere surrounded by other Africans.
They also wanted to smell roast meat nearby and eat trotters, mazondo nenyama yemusoro.
When an old time classic called ‘Shambala’ started, I saw the dancing man put his beer down, embrace the tree with both arms and dance with his eyes closed and chin right up.
He knew every single word of the song. For a brief moment, I think I saw tears in the man’s eyes. When the song stopped, the man looked around, smiled, picked up his beer and said to me, or maybe to himself, “Where are the women? We dance with trees as if this country does not have women. Totamba nemiti sezvinonzi nyika ino haina vakadzi.”
I moved a bit closer to him and said, “The women dancers are still back in the village.”
He either did not hear me or he simply walked away. Maybe he thought I was not good company because my two Diaspora male cousins stood right  next to me like body guards, denying me the opportunity to dance to ‘Shambala’ with a stranger.
That dancing man brought back memories of one woman in the village called Matirasa. She is dead now, may her soul rest in peace but I shall always remember how she revolutionalised village music one Christmas when she brought us the gramophone and danced to a song called ‘Shambala.’
Long before Matirasa moved to Salisbury, we danced to the drum in the moonlight during the dry season. Nobody could beat Matirasa on the dusty dance floor. That girl could dance. They said she had the rhythm of her grandmother, VaManzwei.
Matirasa was a lot older than most children in our compound. We were related to her by marriage and her village was across the Chinyika River. She belonged to the home defenders team, that group of school leavers who did not make it past Grade Five in school. When there was a home defenders dancing competition, Matirasa was always number one. She could do all the traditional dances with such effortless ease, jiti, ngororombe, jerusarema and chinungu.
During one jiti dance, Matirasa met her future husband. After they got married, she stopped dancing because good daughters-in-law did not dance in public like they were still available to other men. When her marriage did not produce a child after three years, Matirasa’s husband said he could no longer endure the shame of a childless marriage.
He went back to Matirasa’s parents to ask for another wife, possibly a younger sister or a niece. Matirasa’s parents had no virgins left to spare. So Matirasa came back home, miserable and childless. Young men did not want to dance with her anymore because they said she was past her prime time, “spoilt goods”. Some people called her ngomwa, the infertile. Matirasa did not dance when we all danced. And yet she could not have been more than twenty one years old.
One day Matirasa packed her bags and went to Salisbury to look for a job. For a while she shared one rented room with a cousin in Glen Norah. Every day she walked around the whites only suburbs ringing door bells looking for a job as a maid. But white employers preferred men and not women as house servants. Besides, what madam would take a village girl with no English language skills?
Rather than return to the village, Matirasa reluctantly took advice from other newly arrived village girls in similar situations.
One afternoon she had the courage to go to the bar with a friend. She met a man who took her to his house. He paid for her sexual services. Within a few weeks, Matirasa could afford to rent her own one kitchen type room in Glen Norah, near Chitubu.
In the bar, she started dancing again and men would surround and praise her dancing styles. For a good two years she had one lover, a Malawian man who loved to dance. He also paid good money for her company.
Just before the liberation war, during the Christmas holidays, Matirasa brought home a gramophone to the village.
She invited all the village children to her corrugated iron roofed house. We sat on her verandah and she gave us tea and bread. Matirasa danced and drank Western beer.
Later in the afternoon, she threw big yellow round ball sweets on the ground and children fought over them. Then she put on the gramophone and played LP’s, long play English songs by Jim Reeves, Percy Sledge, Neil Diamond, Dolly Parton and Cat Stevens.
We noticed that Matirasa’s dancing rhythm had been perfected to something more stylish, mixed with new movements we had not seen before.
Matirasa looked happy and all the men who knew something about Western ways of dancing wanted to dance with her. Some of them even showed their desire for her openly and asked if she could be their lover. Among the men was the headmaster at St Columbus School, bus driver Mpumbuchena, Conductor Samuriwo and even the dip attendant Chigumira and Agriculture Officer Tsanana Zimbudzi.
When the song “Shambala” started playing on the gramophone, all the men stood back and watched Matirasa dance.
I can almost see her now, dressed up in an Afro wig, platform shoes and a very nice dress with red and white flowers, and a blue figure belt accentuating her bottom. Matirasa was beautiful. We admired everything about her.
Later in the evening, the Matirasa switched off the gramophone to serve the battery and traditional singing and dancing began. We stood afar and watched it all.
Older women, my grandmother Mbuya VaMandirowesa among them, drank more village beer and danced. Matirasa was the only woman of child bearing age dancing with the older women and the men.
Her father sat on a chair, dressed in a new suit that Matirasa had bought for him. He said Matirasa was now the man of the house because she had proved that she could buy a whole kraal of cattle and built a tinned roof house even though she was a woman. He challenged anyone who called her ngomwa, the infertile. As for Matirasa, she no longer cared what people called her, aiti handikendengi.
She could even light a cigarette like a man and speak some English words like, “stupid idiot.”
One New Year’s Day in the evening when my sister Jessie was about six, my mother casually asked what we wanted to be when we grow up.
Jessie was quick to say that she wanted to be a whore, hure like Matirasa. My mother picked up a burning stick from the fire and hit her hard with the other end of it.
Her voice full of sudden anger, my mother shouted, “Pfutseki! Haunyare? Are you not ashamed?”
Later on, when my mother was not there, Jessie and asked us why she had been beaten. In Jessie’s young memory at the time, being a hure or whore was a noble profession in Salisbury.
Matirasa was the only person who brought city music to the village. She even taught us the slow civilised rhythms of white people. 
There was a time before independence when prostitutes made money in the city. In our village, Matirasa was the most successful because she was quick to invest her money in cattle and also in educating her nephews. She bought a house in Highfields at a time when most Shona men thought urban houses were for migrant Malawian workers without a village base. Matirasa had a home in both places — the city and the village.
In those days, some clever prostitutes, or commercial sex workers and we call them now, struggled against racism and exploitation from both black and white men. It was not an easy trade.
They endured the stigma and discrimination from married women and were often blamed for breaking marriages. Like Matirasa, most of them were older and mature.
They did not become prostitutes out of choice. Often they were running away from infertile marriages, domestic violence, accusations of witchcraft or unresolved conflicts in the village. The city gave them new freedom of speech, and the liberty to dance and still maintain the village base.
Back at the Hilltop bar, when the man dancing with the tree had disappeared, I looked around and noticed a handful of women listening to music surrounded mostly by drunken men.
A couple of women sat on white chairs wearing heavy coats. Married women definitely. Further down, in half darkness were three or four women in tight pants.
Then a young woman came to join my cousins. She was pretty and light skinned. Possibly her skin had been enhanced by some creams. She had a long wavy black wig and the most amazing pair of breasts almost popping out of her little top.
With amazing confidence, she introduced herself to my cousins as Cindy or Chipo. They talked amidst the music sound and managed to exchange numbers. Bob Nyabinde then played an old song called “Connie, Mudiwa wangu, Connie, Wadarirei”.
One cousin asked Cindy for a dance but she said she did not dance to old village type songs. She preferred more Western style rhythms, she said, hoping to impress him. I was desperate to dance because Matirasa used to dance to that song called “Connie, My Lover, and Connie.”
But I could not dance because decent women do not dance in public in case they are mistaken for prostitutes. Ah, how negative historical perceptions of womanhood has interfered with our love for music and dance. We have killed the village dance and replaced it with melancholic church music or nothing.
And yet the village rhythms are still within us. It is not right that a man should dance with a tree. Let the women come out too, and dance.

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.