New Daughters of Africa

by Margaret Busby

  Today, the food girl and other women with muddy feet in Owino, calling buyers to look at their wares, became the women in Miriam’s village.

  “See dress? Perfect for you.” A woman on her left was tugging at her arm. “Come. I am not expensive. I will give you good price.”

  “Don’t you see she wants children’s clothes? Come. I have them,” another woman was saying, with so much confidence, one would think she was Miriam’s neighbour.

  “Don’t be confused. I know what you want. Come over here. See this?” Another woman was waving a pair of knickers almost in her face.

  “Thank you. Another time,” Miriam said.

  The first woman was still looking at her. Her lips widened into a smile and she winked at her. She was still holding the dress.

  “Office dress, madam. Come. You can try it. There is a dressing-room here,” she said, spreading a multi-coloured kanga lesu, with a Swahili phrase printed on it: Maisha Ndivyo ya Livyo. Miriam smiled at the message: Life is like that.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Please, madam, promote my business. I am looking for school fees for my children.” The woman was now blocking her from continuing. Desperate. “And you need office wear.” The woman’s smile widened, her eyes rolling from one direction to the other.

  “I said no, thank you.” Miriam hoped that was not a betrayal.

  The woman’s lips slid back into a tucked-in position before she started jeering at Miriam.

  Miriam hurried away. Struggle for survival sat at the wheel that propelled state of mind in Owino.

  When Miriam got home her partner was cleaning the fridge, refilling it with his favourite beers, already in festive mood.

  “What were you buying that took so long?” he asked.

  “I wasn’t long,” she said, as she headed for the bedroom. He followed her. She placed the travel bag on the floor and the handbag on the bed. Through the razor-cut opening, she removed the book and placed it to the side. Next she took out her phone—a shimmering silver Sony that her girlfriends had nicknamed Sexy Sonny. She placed it on her chest and closed her eyes before putting it to her lips.

  “Why the phone? And remember, you left me in bed,” her partner said, closing the space between them, one hand reaching for her breast and the other trying to cup her chin to redirect her mouth from the phone towards his lips.

  “Oh, please.”

  “What?”

  “Not now,” she said, louder than was perhaps necessary, as she disentangled herself from him.

  “Okay, Madam Not Now. I am a patient man.” He moved away from her but remained in the room.

  Miriam ignored him. She reached for the bag again and picked out her cream purse, which she had bought herself on her thirtieth birthday.

  “People are merciless,” she murmured.

  “Which people?”

  “People people.”

  “Like you and me?” he said, leaning over her shoulder to see what she was looking at. “What’s wrong with your purse? And your bag? What happened? Eeh! Bakushara enshaho? Jesus Christ! They cut your bag! You were robbed in Owino?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did they take?”

  “My power-bank and the Samsung tablet.”

  “Why did you take the tablet to Owino?”

  “I wasn’t taking it to Owino. I just wanted to do some work in the taxi on my way.”

  “You see! Now you have no tablet and no work. I always warn you about going shopping during the festive season. Everybody is looking for survival. How did they cut the bag?”

  “How would I know?”

  “What else did they take? Hmm? I always tell you, but you never listen.”

  Typical, Miriam thought. It was always: I told you. So how was she supposed to tell the story without feeling guilty and careless?

  “Do you suspect anyone?”

  “In Owino, it could be anybody.”

  But she could not tell him she had bumped into her former boyfriend in the market and he too was among the suspects. Why had he wanted to detain her longer than necessary? He had looked so unkempt . . . Yet it could as easily have been the boys at the jeans stall; they could have done it before urging her to leave their stall. Or they could have followed and robbed her without her noticing. The more she tried to recall at what point the theft might have happened, the more confused she became.

  “Do you need anything?” Her partner’s voice cut through her thoughts.

  “No. Not now. But maybe yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “A glass of water.”

  Letting the tip of his tongue play between his lips, he smiled and she knew exactly what he was thinking about.

  Yvonne Vera

  (1964–2005)

  Born in Bulawayo, in what was then Southern Rhodesia, she went in 1987 to Canada, where she married, completed an undergraduate degree, an MA and a PhD, and taught literature at York University, Toronto. Her first book was a collection of short stories, Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals (1992), which was followed by five acclaimed novels: Nehanda (1993), Without a Name (1994), Under the Tongue (1996), Butterfly Burning (1998) and The Stone Virgins (2002). Her awards included the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Zimbabwe Publishers’ Literary Award and the Macmillan Writers’ Prize for Africa. For a while in the 1990s she was director of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, but returned to Canada, where she was working on a new novel at the time of her death. She said: “I would love to be remembered as a writer who had no fear for words and who had an intense love for her nation.”

  From The Stone Virgins

  These women, lively and impatient, have secured a freedom that makes their voices glow. They know everything there is to know about anything there is to know, and have tasted their own freedom mature, because yes, it is truly theirs, this freedom. They have not misunderstood. They hold that freedom in their arms. With imaginations unencumbered they will have children called Happiness, called Prosperity, called Fortune, called True Love, called Moreblessing, called Joy, called Ceasefire. Why not? The names will cascade like histories from their tongues . . . Beauty, Courage and Freedom. All their children will be conceived out of this moment of emancipation. Born into their arms like revelations, like flowers opening. It will be necessary to give their offspring middle names which will provide them strength . . . Masotsha, Mandla and Nqabutho. Names to anchor dreams.

  These women are the freest women on earth with no pretence, just joy coursing through their veins. They have no desire to be owned, hedged in, claimed, but to be appreciated, to be loved till an entire sun sets, to be adored like doves. They want only to be held like something too true to be believed. They want to know an absolute joy with men who carry that lost look in their eyes; the men, who walk awkward like, lost like, as though the earth is shaking under their feet, not at all like what they imagine heroes to be; these men, who have a hard time looking straight at a woman for a whole two minutes without closing their own eyes or looking away; who smile harmless smiles which make the women weak at the knees and fold their arms over their heads; this man seems to say he has not killed anyone, that is all talk because the country needs heroes, and flags, and festivities, and the notion of sacrifice. Does she not know that? His tone is pleading for her to stop examining his wounds and hindering his view of the hills. At the start of each new day the question is on her lips, unspoken. Did he? Did he kill a white man?

  He gives her a can of sardines and then a yellow ribbon to weave through her plaited hair, and asks her if she is going to be a school teacher and teach their children to say a e i o u . . . with their mouths shut. He does not stop there with his questions. He asks. Is it fine if he contributed to the making of these children, now, under this tree with its arm touching the ground, beneath this warm rock which has absorbed a whole day, under this syringe bush with its petals fanning the air, here, under this open sky, upon the sands of the Kwakhe River, the driest soil there is throughout Kezi and beyond, and sure
ly, this river-sand sucking their feet in can keep any kind of secret including their own, he asks, and the woman surrenders all the freedom in her arms, nods her head within that softness of night, and she accepts those thighs which have climbed slippery rocks and the most severe hills of Gulati. Peace and calm pervades every nook, every crag, and surges through her waiting heels.

  It is only when he sleeps, his arms flailing about, his voice darker than night and lit with stars, that the woman awakes and pins him down. Then she knows that her journey with this man is long and troubled, and that she cannot keep leaving him each night to his dreams. She is frightened, excited, lost. This man sleeps, but his eyes are open wide. In the morning she is not looking at him but at the circling hills of Gulati. She could never suggest it. Even if he smiled and told her the truth about everything, she could never suggest it. That he take her out there to see the hills up close, to touch distant rock, distant water and sky, to drop into the vast space where his mind has wandered through, falling, constantly, even as she moves her lips and whispers his name on her tongue. She could never suggest it, of course not. Not even without saying it, without thinking it. Not even if he said it himself. Lying next to him under the shadow of night is as far from Kezi as he is going to take her. As near to smooth rock and to the torrent of stars, out there. She cools his feet, unlaces, pulls, twists the worn and weathered leather boots off him.

  The women who return from the bush arrive with a superior claim of their own. They define the world differently. They are fighters, simply, who pulled down every barrier and entered the bush, yes, like men. But then they were women and said so, and spoke so, and entered the bush, like men. To fight like men, and said so, to fight, like women who fight. They made admissions which resembled denials.

  They do not apologise for their courage and long absence nor hide or turn away from the footpath. These women understand much better than any of the young women who have spent their entire life along the Kwakhe River ever could understand about anything or anyone and they tell them so, not with words, but they let them know fully and well, they let them speculate, let them wonder what those silent lips are about, what those arms, swinging from hip to shoulder, are about.

  These women wear their camouflage long past the ceasefire, walking through Kezi with their heavy bound boots, their clothing a motif of rock and tree, and their long sleeves folded up along the wrist. They wear black berets, sit on the ledge at Thandabantu Store and throw their arms across their folded knees. They purse their lips and whistle, and toss bottle tops and catch them, and juggle corn husks which they toss at the young boys who leap to catch them before they touch the ground. They close their eyes and tuck their berets into the pockets along their legs, and button them up, and forget them. They watch, from this high plateau the young women who think freedom can be held in the hand, cupped like water, sipped like destinies. Who think that water can wash clean any wound and banish scars as dry as Kwakhe sand. These women whose only miracle is to watch water being swallowed by the Nyande River after the rain, if it rains, and they mistake the porous sands of Nyande for the substance of their laughters, their reckless joys, their gifts. These young women who possess intact and undisturbed histories, who without setting one foot past the Kwakhe River think they can cure all the loneliness in a man’s arms, hold him, till he is as free as the day he was born, till he cannot remember counting the stars overhead, counting each star till he is out of breath and ready to hold his own screaming voice in his hands, to fight. With their immaculate thighs and their tender voices and unblemished skin they will make a new sun rise and set so that yesterday is forgotten. Time can begin here, in their arms.

  The female soldiers marked with unknowable places on their own faces, with an unquenchable sorrow around their eyes, unaccustomed to a sudden stillness such as this, a sedentary posture and mindset, no longer wanderers, not threatened or threatening, these women hold their peace and say nothing to condemn or negate, but keep their distance a while to gather all the evidence they can about the other’s cherished hope. This is a ceasefire. When they can they will avail themselves of destinations. The only sign they give of disapproval is to shake their heads sideways and look long and well as the young women walk into Thandabantu Store in their petticoats or with broken umbrellas to purchase some cream, some Vaseline, wearing leather sandals or with bare feet. They wait before they say anything or pass an opinion. They chew bubble-gum, bought by the handful, from Thandabantu.

  They stay in their camouflage and pull out cigarettes and smoke while standing under the marula tree. They hold their faces up and seem amused either by the sky or by passers-by: their mothers. They walk leisurely to Thandabantu Store; slowly, as though they have a lifetime to consider what independence is all about, a lifetime, to place one foot after another, a lifetime to send a ring of laughter past the wing of a bird. They have no haste or hurry, no urgent harrowing hunger to satisfy, no torment they would rather not forget. Independence is a respite from war, the mind may just rearrange itself to a comfortable resolution, without haste, at the pace of each day unfolding and ending naturally, and opening again like a flower.

  They sit on empty crates, like the men, then from here they watch the sun as though the watching of a sunset is simply a soothing pastime; but watching the sunset from Thandabantu Store and watching the sunset from the bush with a gun in your hand are related but vastly different acts. They are learning, with patience and goodwill, how it is to watch the sunset from Thandabantu. To watch a sun setting without a gun in your hand, so in this fair pursuit they forget that they are male or female but know that they are wounded beings, with searching eyes, and an acute desire for simple diversions. It is an intimate quest.

  The men who for years have been going to Thandabantu to watch the sun, to summarise the day and what they have just heard of the war in the bush, who are part of the quality of this veranda and the sound of it and therefore an essential aspect of a place named Kezi because Kezi starts and ends at Thandabantu Store, these Kezi men have moved without reluctance or amazement at their displacement, moved to the marula tree and brought their hand-carved stools with them and from here they watch these women exude an elegance more spectacular than anything they have ever watched set or burn, their posture more genuine than their own feet on Kezi soil. They watch from the corner of their eye, feeling tongue-tied and charmed and privileged. And these men, whose feet have never left the Kwakhe River or wandered anywhere further than Thandabantu Store, lower their eyes frequently and efficiently, and their shoulders too, and pull their torn and faded hats further down. Thus contrite they glance at those military shoes, at those arms like batons, and look straight away, enchanted but not betrayed. They avoid those eyes or those hips under those clinging belts. The breasts, held carelessly up as though they are nothing but another part of the body where some human life just might be nurtured and survive, the breasts only a shape on the body, like the curve of the shoulder, a useful but wholly unremarkable part of the anatomy. The men know but dare not discuss how those breasts have held guns, have held dreams, and that they could never hold anything overnight less burdensome, less weighty than a broken continent.

  Phillippa Yaa de Villiers

  An award-winning writer and performance artist who performs her work nationally and internationally, she is noted for her poetry, which has been published in collections and in many magazines and anthologies, as well as for her autobiographical one-woman show, Original Skin, which centres on her confusion about her identity at a young age, having been adopted and raised by a white family in apartheid South Africa, not knowing until she was 20 years old that she was half-Australian and half-Ghanaian. She writes, performs and teaches Creative Writing at Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg. She serves on the Editorial Board of the African Poetry Book Fund and has read and performed at poetry festivals in Germany, Denmark, the UK, Cuba, Sweden, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Ghana. Her poetry collections include Taller Than Buildings (2006), The E
veryday Wife (2010) and ice cream headache in my bone (2017).

  Marriage

  This is Afrika, you are the neck, your husband is the head.

  —Traditional healer

  My life as a pet sheep that I love and one day find out

  my parents are fattening for slaughter. How else did they get me? My life

  as a hardened chunk of cheese, forced to the back

  of the fridge by fresh groceries. We want you to have more. My

  life as that thick lump on an older woman’s nape. You have to

  work at relationships. My life

  as a spare bicycle in case another child comes to play. My life

  as a scorched shirt. My life as free plastic toys with every purchase

  over R50 from Pick ’n Pay. My life as an empty house dreaming of people.

  My life as the new cut, colour and style pour changer les idées.

  My life as a suicide’s favourite sweater. My life as

  a rainy afternoon. My life cleaning out

  my brother’s room. My life as a tight, tiny skirt (pink). My life as a perfect lawn

  whispering

  beneath your feet.

  Foreign

  I want to go into the world like an American girl, curious.

  Savouring the sun on my body at Ellis Park pool, our world-class leftover from the bad old days when everything was for the whites and they descended, loud like ibises, two Americans talking.

  I felt that pride of being indigenous, a snapshot of their experience, African woman sitting next to where the national swim team comes to train. Serious. And just around the corner the slum, unemployed men staying boys, still drunk from the weekend.