I would like to tell her that poverty holds no terrors for me, because I have known it and I have conquered it. I want to tell her, but I am not sure that she would ever understand it, that even the big mansions hold their secret miseries. I would like to tell her that they hold more of them because there is more room for them.
3
They still come to me sometimes, my father and my mother. They come to interrupt the rhythm of my waking moments, they come unbidden when I am in the laundry room or the Condemn, when I am singing hymns under Synodia’s direction before breakfast. They come into me in the prison garden when my thoughts are on something else and I have not willed them into my mind. They come with my sisters, Joy, whom we called Joyi, and Moreblessings, called Mobhi. They come with my brother, Gift, whom we called Givhi.
Until you attempt to write the story of your life, you cannot quite understand just how hard it is to grasp at the beginning. I wish I could start this the traditional way, by telling you all about my father and mother and how they met and who their parents were and all the begats that preceded their lives, but I cannot. Until they sold me to Lloyd, and I moved away, I knew nothing about them beyond the fact that they were my mother and father.
The ritual of oral autobiography here is that we introduce and begin stories by locating our position in the family. ‘I am the eldest in a family of seven.’ ‘I am the last-born in a family of four.’ ‘I am the middle child in a family of seven; two died, and only five are living.’ Identity begins in that one sentence: I am the first, the middle, the fourth, the second, the last.
So perhaps my proper beginning should be there. I was the second child in a family of three. The eldest was my sister Joyi, who was an equivocation in that she was the oldest living child but not the first-born child. That sainted place, of coming first, and thus bestowing the name by which my parents would for ever be known, belonged to my dead brother, Gift.
My mother and father were called MaiGivhi and Ba’Givhi, but instead of a living Gift, there was my sister Joyi, who was a year and a few months older than I was, then me, then Mobhi, the youngest, who was only four when she died.
When they come to me, they come as I remember them, except Givhi, who was only ever a name to me, or at most a small blurry face in the black-and-white photographs in my mother’s album. He comes to me as a form without shape, wrapped in the green blanket with dark-grey stripes at the edges, the blanket that was also his shroud. When he comes to me in my dreams, he is drowning. Sometimes we are drowning together. I reach for him, but the Chimera pulls me down, down, down … It will not let me go and I see him no more.
Joyi is small and fast with skin like heated caramel. She comes with the voices of the children on Mharapara Street. From the spare bedroom, I can hear the songs to their favourite games. ‘Tinotsvaga maunde, maunde, maunde. Tinotsvaga maunde, masikati ano.’ ‘Tauya kuzoona Mary, Mary, Mary. Tauya kuzoona Mary, Mary, Mary woo.’
Mobhi comes on fat toddling legs, behind her a trail of water. Up in the air she goes, she laughs, then down she comes. My father catches her and throws her up again. The world seems to shake with her laughter.
My father comes with the voices from his wireless radio set, with ‘Mirandu’ and ‘Sina Makosa’, with ‘Sweet Mother’ and ‘Celebration’, with the lugubrious music that preceded the announcements on the death notices programme, Zvisiviso Zverufu, and with the joyous greetings on Kwaziso.
He comes with Evans Mambara’s voice rising to a staccato of excitement as Moses Chunga and Joel Shambo bring the crowd to their feet in the Castle Cup final at Rufaro Stadium, and with Peter Lovemore’s voice that rises and rises as the invisible horses that he wills into our living room thunder from a place we had never been. ‘Here comes Prince of Thieves, closely followed by Midnight Oil, and taking it away is Prince of Thieves, oh, I don’t believe it, Midnight Oil has fallen behind and it is Prince of Thieves, Prince of Thieves, Prince of Thieves that wins this magnificent race on this wonderful afternoon at Borrowdale Park.’
They come with the novels that we listened to on the radio, stories with portentous titles hinting at unpropitious destinies and at the heaviness of life. You Shall Remember Me One Day, I Am Now Dead, and I Hope You Will be Successful, Embarrassment is Often Worse than Death, What Did I Ever Do to You?, If You Have Made a Plan, You Must See it Through to the Bitter End. The radio brought to us the world of these books, a world that was hard and cruel, full of betrayal, conspiracies and unexpected danger.
And they come with the music that we listened to on the nights we did not listen to novels on the radio, with my mother’s records, and the songs that we loved the best, which were the ones that were also stories. We did not always understand all the words. What did it mean that the Gatlin boys took turns at Becky? What did it mean to ‘know when to fall down’, and to ‘know when to hall down’, in ‘The Gambler’? What was an almanac? Where were all these places, almost heaven, West Virginia, where was my Tennessee mountain home, where in this world was Sweet Home Alabama?
And my mother? She is all of these songs and more. She is Jeannie, who was afraid of the dark. She is Tommy, the coward of the county. She comes with the scratchy sound of a record player. She carries a birthday cake that she hurls at the wall. She is the long, thin branch from the peach tree next door. She is the voice of the Chimera that haunts my dreams. She is the stranger that glances back from my mirror when I least expect to see her. She is my beating heart, my palpitating fear.
4
In the time that I have been here, I have come to know well this formatted place, its long corridors and narrow cells. The Condemn, where we bleed our fingers on blunt needles as we try to restore to wearability the uniforms that should have been thrown out a long time ago; the laundry, where we wash and iron the guards’ clothes; the ablution block, where we wash our bodies in basins meant for faces; and the canteen, where the infernal din of four hundred spoons scraping against four hundred metal plates accompanies every meal.
For reasons that will be obvious to you, we are not allowed forks and knives. But nor are we allowed to use our hands like normal people. We eat all our food with tablespoons, everything from the waterlogged porridge to the lump-filled sadza and the cabbage that smells of sweat. I have even learned to use a spoon to cut into the slime-brown rubber that the guards, in a simultaneous combination of euphemism and optimism, give the name of meat.
There is no happy medium to our food; it is either overcooked or undercooked, or it has too much salt or not enough, or there is not enough oil in the fried vegetables or there is so much that you almost fear that America will invade. And like the food at the Jewish wedding of the joke, our food is almost inedible, but there is never enough of it.
We march from the canteen to the grounds, from the laundry to the Condemn, a regulated army in our green dresses and, when it is cold, red-and-white-striped jerseys with matching socks. In the winter months, the prison looks as though Dr Seuss has run riot through it with his Cat in the Hat inks.
Every aspect of our lives, from where and how we sleep to what we eat and how fast we eat it, from how much water to how much toothpaste we use, is chosen for us.
Our companions, our words, our very thoughts and dreams, are not ours to choose but are given to us from the sixth floor of the New Government Complex. We live on rations. Each woman has only half a roll of toilet paper, if that, twenty-five millilitres of toothpaste a week and four and a half sanitary pads a month. And it is half a pad, cut neatly down the middle, complete with a dangling wing. It is all written down somewhere, in some statutory instrument or other. Vernah Sithole can probably tell you the precise number.
If the products run out before the next allocation, we make do with what is there. So we use newspapers for tissue, or any other printed material. There was a huge commotion when Synodia conducted an inspection in Block C and found pages of the Bible mixed in with the leavings in the toilet bucket that we call gamashura, or the Catcher of Wonders.
After she saw pages from the Proverbs and Psalms and the First Letter to the Corinthians mingled in with other wonders, she gave us a two-hour sermon in which her voice reached a pitch of such anger that she found herself unable to speak. Better than the sermon, though, she authorised more toilet rolls.
In the endless moments that I spent in the cells at Highlands police station, I did not imagine that I could ever be in a worse place. That was before Chikurubi. As it turns out, hell is other people, especially when those other people are your fellow women prisoners and there has been no water for a week and flies are buzzing over the gamashura and the only ablution possible is to run a dry towel across your body, hoping that the dirt and smell that cover you will somehow be absorbed by as inadequate an object as a prison-issue towel with a visible thread count.
I should be accustomed now to the strange rhythms of the jail, but it seems the two years that I have been here are not yet enough to make me used to the distorted sense of time. Rising at four thirty. Breakfast at six, followed by chores and lunch at eleven in the morning. This is followed by more chores.
The prisoners allowed outside go to the farm, where they hoe and weed and tend the vegetables meant for our table, but which go to the guards. I spend almost all my time with the other offenders in ‘D’ section. Of the four hundred-odd women in the prison, we are considered the most dangerous inmates – our sentences are the longest; we need the most watching. In the men’s prison, they call the longest-serving prisoners the ‘staff’. There are so few of us here that we do not qualify as staff.
‘A’ is for the remand prisoners who were refused bail. The main distinction between them and us is that they can wear their hair as they please, except that no weaves are allowed, lest they dim the glory of Synodia’s fake-hair weaves. They spend much of their time outside. ‘B’ is for the petty thieves, the pickpockets, shoplifters and drunken brawlers with less than two years to serve. ‘C’ is for the majority of prisoners here who have more than two but less than five years to serve.
‘D’ is for Dangerous, for Deadly, for Death.
There are fourteen of us in D at the moment, women from all over the country: Mavis Munongwa, Nomvula Khumalo, Ellen Gumbo, Ruvimbo Mherekuvana, Benhilda Makoni, Manyara Makonese, Sinfree Mapuntu, Evernice Gundani, Jimmy Blue Butter, Verity Gutu, Monalisa Mwashita, Beulah Shereni, Esnath Matema, and me, the only woman on death row.
Mavis Munongwa has been here longer than anyone, even the guards. She is the only other woman in here for murder, but she is not on death row. She poisoned her brother’s young children, two boys and two girls. They were all under the age of twelve.
Esnath Matema was a housemaid in Mount Pleasant. She lived in the same quarters as the gardener of the house, who was also her father’s brother. After they had sex, she fell pregnant. When the baby came, they strangled it and buried it in a shallow grave in the grounds of the university. Unable to live with what they had done, she confessed the truth to their employer. When their case to came to trial, she was charged with incest and infanticide. Her uncle was convicted of incest and murder.
As Vernah can tell you, when a mother kills her own baby it is infanticide. If the same child were to be killed by a man, even where the man is the father of the child, it would be murder. The judge found no extenuating circumstances in her uncle’s case. He is on death row.
In the night, when it is still, we sometimes hear the men from the male section singing away dead prisoners. When they raise their voices, and the air trembles with songs of sorrow, we know that a prisoner has died. Every time the songs reach our section, Esnath screams in the terror that her uncle is dead.
Nomvula is in for culpable homicide. She and her boyfriend were in a car that knocked over and killed a cyclist in Enthumbane Township in Bulawayo. She says she wasn’t the driver, that it was her boyfriend who was behind the wheel. They had been driving back from inspecting the venue where they had hoped to have their wedding. She only agreed to say that she had been driving because her boyfriend had asked her to. She would get a lighter sentence than him, he said, because she was a woman. She would probably just get a fine.
She got five years.
He married someone else.
Ellen is blind in one eye. She has a gash on her cheek. Her husband did that to her. Synodia calls her ‘small house’, the derogatory term for a woman who is somewhere between a mistress and a spare wife. Only the wealthiest men have small houses. Ellen was the mistress of a man who was seeing other women. She seduced a homeless man to use his semen for medicine. She hardly ever speaks, and until you see her staring out of her good eye, you hardly remember that she is there.
Ruvimbo was a teacher at a school at a platinum mine near Kwekwe. She hit one of her young pupils so hard across the face that he fell and hit his head against the blackboard. He died after a concussion. She is serving six years for culpable homicide, just like Benhilda Makoni, who poisoned her married lover. Benhilda told the court that she had given her lover a powder that she had bought from a herbalist who specialised in love potions. She merely meant to turn his affections away from his wife, she said, but instead of turning to Benhilda, he went into some sort of anaphylactic shock and died. ‘Now,’ Benhilda says to us, her eyes shining with malice, ‘his wife does not have a husband either.’
Manyara is in for stock theft. She and her brothers stole five cows belonging to a farmer near their village in Chivhu. Each cow was considered a separate count, and each count carried three years, so she and her brothers were each sentenced to fifteen years, which were reduced to seven on review.
That is something that may interest you, by the way: that the magistrates here hand out stiffer sentences for stealing cows than for raping children. You only have to look at Sinfree’s case. She is from Binga, and is often the target of the guards’ wrath because she is Tonga and cannot speak Shona. She is here for attempted murder. Her maths teacher raped her when she was thirteen. Her teacher paid a fine for the crime. When she was sixteen, her family forced Sinfree to marry her rapist so that she did not have the shame of the rape following her all her life. After years of ill-treatment, she burned down his first wife’s hut.
Evernice Gundani was part of a protection racket in Mbare that promised market women security from harassment. The harassment came from Evernice herself, and her gang. She is serving six years for extortion.
Beulah Shereni is the youngest person in D. She should be in A category, with the other prisoners on remand, because she has not yet been sentenced. She has been on remand for more than a year. But in that time, she fought with the other women in A. After she tried to bite off the ear of a woman who had accused her of looking like a witch, Synodia decreed that she move to D, ‘where she belongs’.
Jimmy has served four of her six years for attempted murder. Her real name is Rejoice Saruchera, but she is called Jimmy for reasons you would not understand. Let me see if I can explain. There is a children’s game that is played to the rhyme:
Jimmy blue butter, Jimmy blue butter,
Zengeza my umbrella, my nylon,
My chachacha and my shoe!
I remember playing that game in Mufakose, or, I should say, watching the children on Mharapara Street playing that game while I imagined that I was a part of it, waving an imaginary umbrella, shaking the skirt of my dress at the chachacha, and sticking out my foot with a flourish at my shoe.
I don’t really know what it means; what do children’s rhymes ever mean? It is nothing more than a jumble of words and associations. The Zengeza of the rhyme is in Chitungwiza, where Jimmy lived before she came here. Jimmy looks like a cartoon lesbian would look, except that she has had sex with more men than all the women in this prison if they lived ten lifetimes. And she is not really from Zengeza, but from Chipinge.
Like our old neighbour MaiNever on Mharapara Street, Jimmy speaks in the lilting cadence of the Manyika dialect. ‘Ndakaende wonini,’ she says. ‘Ndakaringe wonini.’
She is in priso
n for biting the penis off a man who refused to pay her after sex at a nightclub. ‘Prostitute Bites Man’s Privates’ is a frequent enough headline in the papers to make it a commonplace occurrence, but Jimmy’s attack was so ferocious that her victim fainted from blood loss. When he recovered, it was to find that Jimmy had fled to the women’s toilets, where she spat out an essential part of him into Harare’s sewers.
Verity Gutu and Monalisa Mwashita should not be in D at all. They are both C-class offenders, each serving four years for fraud and theft by conversion. But they had money to bribe the guards into putting them into the comfort of D, such as it is.
Verity is the most notorious woman here. I remember reading about her when I came back from England; it was hard to miss her story because she was on every front page. The newspapers loved her: a beautiful woman, always groomed to the nines, who photographed well, gave good quotes and had a documented sexual history with well-known men. Verity is possibly the only prisoner here for whom remorse is a foreign word. She confesses freely to anyone who cares to ask that yes, it’s true, she defrauded the International Olympic Committee and she has nothing to be sorry about. ‘What they jailed me for is nothing compared to what I did,’ she says. ‘Who do you think bought my house and paid for my son to go to university?’
There is an Olympic programme to fund athletes from small, poor nations in sports that are not well known in their countries. Verity signed up Zimbabwean athletes to take up fencing, curling, the modern pentathlon, handball and the steeplechase. When the country failed not only to field a single athlete in these events, but also to hold any qualifying rounds at all before the last games, the Olympic Committee in Lausanne launched an investigation, which found that Verity had used the grant money to buy houses in Borrowdale Brooke and Zimre Park, a BMW and a Range Rover, and to pay for her son’s degree from a university in South Africa. The Olympics have also funded countless manicures, beauty treatments and shopping trips to Dubai.
The Book of Memory Page 2