New Daughters of Africa

by Margaret Busby

  It is almost 3 a.m. now. I am in my kitchen and wondering what beverage one should drink at this time of the day, or night. It is too early for coffee and too late for wine. Water would be tasteless, and I forgot to buy juice. I take milk out of the refrigerator and I twist the cap off. The pungent smell punches my nostrils. I chuckle to myself, thinking that cultured milk—which I now call “bad”—used to be a favourite part of my cuisine. Mhai really knows how to prepare sour, or cultured, milk. Never too rancid, never too watery, just the right amount of mutuvi to add to the cream that rises to the top. But this milk I have in my hands right now, this is bad milk.

  I drag my feet to my kitchen bin and throw the bottle in. I have not had fresh food in my house since the last time I fell in admiration. That was the last time I had any reason to have fruit, vegetables, and fresh milk in my house. He, like me, was from another country; came to this big city to try to make a living. Tried to understand what making a living in a dead place meant. We were both swimming against the current that is London, both without anyone to throw us life-jackets or teach us how to swim. So we floated towards each other and our half-living flesh and bones would occasionally merge in an act of loveless love.

  But Mweya came along and ripped our tired bodies apart. Once, she held me in a corner for so long I could not move. I could not answer when he asked me what was wrong. Mweya sat on my lap and choked me, and told me that love was an illusion. With her foul cold breath in my face, I listened. She told me that, ultimately, we would all end up alone.

  And so, he left, on a grey rainy Sunday afternoon when I had once again been unable to move. He had asked me, politely and apologetically, if he could stay and pry apart Mweya’s scrawny arms. I stayed in her deadly embrace. The embrace that had once held my great-grandfather Chandapihwa. The same arms that had raised my grandfather VaMazivisa, long after Chandapihwa was gone. Chandapihwa had returned from the war with Mweya on his back and a limp in his leg. Only in a few moments, when Mweya was not sitting on his shoulders, and death had taken a short leave from his eyes, would he sit with a son who had learned to walk and talk while he was away fighting Britain’s war.

  VaMazivisa was a life made in the absence of death, a lightness not weighed down. Mhai says she cannot tell me much about VaMazivisa’s childhood. VaMazivisa himself would seem to forget some parts of it when she asked, but Mhai was certain of one thing: growing up in a world that tried to whip him into something he was not made him embrace Mweya more. VaMazivisa grew up in the absence of Chandapihwa, who was always away trying his hand at one job or the other. At eighteen, VaMazivisa left Ambuya’s compound for a job in the city. He joined his cousin in a township, Mbare, and they would occasionally exchange passes when they were leaving the neighbourhoods Black people had been relegated to, for the white suburbs where they would do menial jobs. Those days, Baba tells me, passes had no pictures, just a description of a feature, such as “birthmark on left arm”. The pass they shared read:

  Name: Jairos Mutasa

  Date of Birth: 01 January 1941

  Village Chief: Mutasa

  Prominent Mark: Scar on right arm

  Mhai tells me that VaMazivisa met her mother after three years of living in the big city. That was 1963. Mhai was already two years old at that point. Her biological father had passed away before she was born. Word that had reached Mhai’s mother said it was a work-related incident in the industries. But Mhai tells me he was killed by the white police force during a strike. Mhai says her father was not the only one who lost his life then. Mhai was not born in the rural areas, her mother had moved to the city to clean houses and take care of white children to make a living. Mhai grew up with a void that even VaMazivisa could not fill. VaMazivisa was what the white people derogatorily called a “tea boy”; he worked in the kitchens of the headquarters of mining and insurance companies. He rarely returned to kwaChiundura, but he occasionally wrote to Ambuya and asked about Chandapihwa. He sent some money back, but the city was his home now. Mhai was his daughter, his daughter with a void.

  A couple of years passed, and Chandapihwa passed on to another world. He died young. Life had long left his body by then. Death had made a permanent home in his eyes. Mweya had chained herself to him with metal too heavy to break. Everyone had tried. But every night Mweya would remind Chandapihwa of the time they met in Burma. She would drag his feet through fields of dead bodies. She would choke him, to remind him of the gas canisters that had been thrown at him. With every passing day, she used the chain to drag him to his grave, a journey he seemed to welcome more and more with every setting sun.

  The funeral was the first time in a long while that VaMazivisa had returned to kwaChiundura. As Chandapihwa’s body was lowered into the earth, Mweya loosened her end of the chain and embraced VaMazivisa. Her breath on his neck was cold. He felt uncomfortable, she was a new weight, but he carried her back to the city. He carried her to work, where she pointed out how he was treated by his superiors. He carried her on the street, where she reminded him that it was impossible for him to amount to much, that he might end up like his father. He carried her to the bottle store, where she held his hand as he drank one beer after another. He carried her home.

  I settle on making some tea. I do not know why I had not thought of making tea before. Time is moving slowly. It is only 3:30 a.m. and sleep has completely left me. I could sit at my laptop and try to write a quick article for a blog or I could finish editing an audio project I recorded months ago. None of that sounds appealing. Nothing I could possibly write about has not already been written about; and if it has not, someone somewhere can surely write it better. As for the sound project, it sounded good while it was in my head—a combination of street sounds, poetry and song. It was an exploration of how I feel in this city. As soon as I finished recording each part, I realized the masterpiece I thought I had was worthless. So no, I am not going to edit that.

  I half-fill the kettle with water and turn it on. I have only the option of either green tea or lemon and ginger tea. I should have bought that cranberry-raspberry tea they have at work. I snicker. I am here thinking about different tea flavours when, growing up, all I drank was black tea that had all the flavour boiled out of it, with ridiculous amounts of sugar and milk added. I miss that tea. Baba hates it. He says boiled milk makes him sick. I remember having that boiled tea every day when we visited Baba’s mother in the rural areas. All the grandchildren would be rounded up and we would sit outside on the ground with metal cups full of boiled tea, and metal plates with two thick slices of white bread. Those days, my cousins were my siblings. That was before Mhai told me about the siblings that could have been. The siblings that Mweya took away.

  Panashe Chigumadzi

  Born in Zimbabwe and raised in South Africa, she had her debut novel Sweet Medicine published in 2015, winning the K. Sello Duiker Memorial Literary Award. She is the founding editor of Vanguard magazine, a platform for young black women coming of age in post-apartheid South Africa, and a contributing editor to the Johannesburg Review of Books. Her work has featured in The Guardian, the New York Times, Washington Post, Die Zeit and Transition. She combines reportage, memoir and critical analysis in her second book, These Bones Will Rise Again, published by The Indigo Press in 2018.

  From These Bones Will Rise Again

  On 15 August 1991, my mother gave birth to me at the Mbuya Nehanda maternity ward of Parirenyatwa, Zimbabwe’s largest hospital.

  How fortunate to be born in a place named after the most famous person in Zimbabwe’s liberation history, a political leader who defied expectations of African women’s place by leading an anti-colonial war. A military tactician remembered in popular mythology for commanding, “tora gidi uzvitonge”, take the gun and liberate yourself. A spiritual leader who held to her beliefs and refused to convert to Christianity. A visionary immortalized through her dying words, uttered as she faced execution for her role, “My bones will rise again”.

  How can I not be proud of
this birthplace, when I have seen Mbuya Nehanda’s restless spirit carried by many women, my grandmother Mbuya Lilian Chigumadzi, one of them. How telling is it that the word mbuya, or ambuya, refers to both grandmother and spiritual woman?

  Having moved to South Africa in 1994, the year of its first democratic elections, I am a “born-free” of Southern Africa’s two dominant former settler colonies. The thrusting of this title on the young is part of an understandable desire by the old to be free of their past, as if the mere passage of time will erase injustices. To grow up as a young black woman moving between Zimbabwe’s post-independence and South Africa’s post-apartheid eras is to understand that time does not erase history; so I seek guidance from these mbuyas who have led men and women in ways big and small, ahead of their time, defiant of the body’s limits.

  At the foot of a hill behind the homestead belonging to my great-grandfather, Sekuru Ifayi Dzumbira, there is rock art painted on granite outcrops, etched in vivid reds and brown. Hundreds, if not thousands, of years old, the images here are older than Zimbabwe.

  It is 26 December 2017. We have driven almost 70km from my maternal grandmother Mbuya Beneta Chiganze’s home in Makoni District. Our visit is to my late paternal grandmother, Mbuya Lilian Chigumadzi’s surviving relatives living in Mutare, Zimbabwe’s fourth largest city, located in the eastern highlands, on the border with Mozambique.

  We begin 20km outside Mutare in Doradombo, a ruzheva, or what used to be called a “native reserve”. This was where my father had always known his maternal grandfather Sekuru Ifayi Dzumbira to live, so he assumed this to have been her ancestral home. The homestead is tucked into a valley surrounded by towering granite mountains. As we approach, my father points to the adjacent mountain. “It used to be said that a njuzu lived on top of it.” As the surviving children of my grandfather’s second wife show us to Sekuru Ifayi’s grave at the foot of a set of hills, they confirm that the menacing water spirit is there. They know, because whenever rain is about to fall, it is preceded by the sight of smoke at the top of the mountain where there is a stream. They take us to the cave-like overhang, under which Sekuru Ifayi practised his profession as an iron smelter. We pose for pictures with the remnants of his implements.

  The perfect foundation for an origin story. A rock-solid moment on which to stake my family’s claim to Zimbabwe and its history.

  My own struggle for history begins in dislocation. Having grown up in South Africa, away from my extended family, I’ve always been at a physical remove from my culture. The kind of “loss” of heritage I experienced is maybe best understood through my relationship to my mother tongue. At some point, my brother and I had “forgotten” Shona. I couldn’t tell you how exactly it happened. It felt swift and painless: I arrived at my predominantly white pre-school in the South African coastal city of Durban not speaking a word of English and, within a short time, I could barely speak any Shona, despite my parents speaking it at home.

  By the time I was a pre-adolescent, Zimbabwe was dipping into crisis. Since independence in 1980, the government had been under pressure to deracialize an economy firmly invested in the domestic white landowning class allied with international capital. By 2000, liberation war veterans were fed up with the government’s refusal to shake up an agricultural sector dominated by 4,500 white commercial farmers. Over that year’s Easter weekend the war veterans staged a carefully organized campaign seeing 170,000 families occupy 3,000 white-owned farms. Initially opposing the move, the increasingly unpopular ZANU—PF government backed the veterans, sanctioning the chaos that Shona-speaking Zimbabweans refer to as jambanja, which spread to the economy; as inflation began to rise, the currency became worthless, and queues outside supermarkets, banks, fuel stations, hospitals and work places became longer and longer. Living in Polokwane, 220km from Beitbridge, which soon became the busiest of all the continent’s border posts, we felt keenly the effects of this crisis, as every other weekend relatives would stay over to stockpile groceries unavailable on the shelves back home. I was now being called a “lekwerekwere”, a pejorative for black foreigners, at school.

  The stories we found in books and listened to from the mouths of my parents on frequent journeys back home held me as steady as they could against the onslaught of dislocation.

  The struggles over history are complex, because the present continuously slips into the past, marking history as ambivalent, incomplete, a work in progress. History is like water—it lives between us, and comes to us in waves. At times, it is still and unobtrusive; at others, it is turbulent and threatening. Even at its most innocuous, water poses hidden dangers, enclosing contested histories, and so we are always living in the tension between tranquillity and tumult. When we walk along the water’s edge, it’s easy to take for granted the complex process of how that water reached our feet, to overlook what is washed away, what alters and what holds in the sands of time. It is history as a series of waves, always in flux, a site of discovery in the past, present and future, and not something stable, foreclosed, that is most troubling to nationalist agendas because it is too difficult to control.

  In the midst of these moving waves, far from the sturdiness of Sekuru Dzumbira’s granite boulders, the history I am trying to craft begins with a moment etched on a surface that is man-made and more flimsy. Perhaps less because of that fragility and more because of the dislocations and disjunctures across generations and space, this history begins with loss.

  The unsteady surface is, or was, a studio photograph of Mbuya Lilian Chigumadzi as a young woman. I don’t know whether it still exists. As a school child, this photograph was entrusted to my possession. I subsequently lost it, having, ironically, used it for a school project on family history. In it, she stands graceful, composed, sexy even. Her weight on her left leg and her right hip slightly tilted. A white cotton dress, stark against her dark skin, stretches a little over a rounded tummy and slim hips. A conical headwrap, the kind worn by Miriam Makeba, crowns her head. Lips part, revealing a cheeky gap to swallow the world. She doesn’t smile. Eyes wide, she meets my gaze, demanding that I bear witness.

  Her statement, if I hear her correctly: un-bought and un-biased. Just arrived in Umtali: with no young man preparing to persuade any uncles for cattle he has not yet worked to own; no white family with dirty kitchens and children which need cleaning and who need raising. Alone, unburdened, unattached, only Belonging to Herself.

  Or so it is, in my imagining.

  I look again. The photograph appeared to have been taken in the 1960s; she would have been my age, her early twenties. A black-and-white photo with contrasts softened by years of sun, sparks dulled by the weight of everyone else’s future but her own. I bear witness to an epitaph that life has taught me: sometimes, dreams are colder than death.

  To my knowledge, this was the only individual portrait taken of my grandmother for decades. Perhaps this is what I loved most about that picture: that she was alone. She stood with no baby in her arms or on her back or husband by her side. I was struck by the way she didn’t look like the grandmother I knew. And perhaps this is the point; she is not my grandmother in that picture. She is not Mbuya Chigumadzi, Mai Chigumadzi, Mrs Kenneth Chigumadzi, Ma Rophina, Tete Lilian, Yaya Lilian. She just is. She belongs to no one but herself. She is Lilian. That is who I mourn, more than for my grandmother.

  On the day Mbuya died, I felt the earth pull me down. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t read, I couldn’t watch TV. I think I could accept the death of Mbuya because I had known that person. What I found difficult to accept was the death of the Lilian Dzumbira I did not know. That is the person for whom I felt the deepest sense of loss. Unsure what to do, I wrote down some questions.

  What were you like as a child? What about your mother, and your grandmother?

  Mbuya Lilian met Sekuru Kenneth Chigumadzi when he was working as a clerk near Mutare.

  Was it hard to live apart when he worked away in town? What did it mean to become a young widow with five children
?

  She had a stroke that paralyzed her twenty-three years ago.

  Do you think your body was forcing you to rest after all those years of hard work? What kept you going all these years?

  I don’t have much recollection of her walking, except for the time she and Mbuya Chiganze came to visit us in Durban a few months before her stroke.

  What was it like to take a bus and leave the country for the first time? What about seeing the sea?

  You used to ask when we would come back to Zimbabwe. What made you stop asking?

  My life, freed by almost limitless opportunities, and her life, limited by the circumstances of her day, seemed to exist planes apart. For years, I looked at her with eyes clouded by a disturbing shallowness not allowing for realities too far from my own experiences. It wasn’t until I met the force of the unflinching stories of our mothers and grandmothers and aunts and sisters written by black women—Yvonne Vera, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Bessie Head, Ama Ata Aidoo, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, Maryse Condé—that I was compelled to ask more of my view of their worlds, to find an answer to the question: what did it mean to be a black woman in my grandmother’s time?