WILL IN VANCOUVER : 2325 GMT+2
Hi there Robert! My mother met my father in South Africa. They married and moved to Vancouver. But Rosaleen was the name of her aunt not her mother.
ROBERT THE BRUTE : 2327 GMT+2
I can assure you I am not mistaken, Will. Uncle Doug and Aunt Rosie were our neighbours and I knew them well.
WILL IN VANCOUVER : 2330 GMT+2
That can’t be right. You are saying my granddad married his sister. That can’t be right at all.
TOBAIWA NEHASHA : 2333 GMT+2
Chabvondoka paEnkeldoorn! Now this is explosive stuff!
BHOKI YABABA JUKWA : 2335 GMT+2
I am getting the popcorn for this one. Just bring your own drinks! Zvaatori madhambudhanana masokisi ejongwe!
AMAI BHOYI : 2338GMT+2
Huya zvako dhali timboti chachacha kuno. I tell you Will, Will, Willowvale muzukuru waDougie, in my arms all your sorrows will disappear. You will forget that you ever had a grandfather. In fact, by the time I am done with you, I will have taught you how to say ‘Grandfather’ in Yoruba – and I don’t even speak Yoruba!
BHOKI YABABA JUKWA : 2340 GMT+2
TOBAIWA NEHASHA : 2345 GMT+2
Ki ki ki
WILL IN VANCOUVER : 2351 GMT+2
That just can’t be right. You must have the wrong people.
GREATZIM FORUM MODERATOR : 2355 GMT+2
Just to say we will shortly be closing this thread for the night. Goodnight all and thanks as always for your contributions. It is you who make this forum GREAT!
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Comrade Piso’s Justice
Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.
– The Book of Psalms –
Regai kuvimba namacinda, Kana nomwanakomana womunhu, usingagoni kubatsira.
– Buku yaMapisarema –
When I heard his name called out three times in Courtroom B at Rotten Row, I did not immediately recognise it. It was only when I saw him mount the three steps to the dock from the door to the left, which led to the narrow corridor used by prisoners on remand that I realised it was Comrade Piso. The surprise was not seeing him there, because it is never a surprise to bump into a legal practitioner at Rotten Row, the surprise was seeing him in the khaki garb of a bhanditi in the dock. Although, come to think of it, even in his heyday as a solicitor, the criminal courts at Rotten Row were not where you would have expected to see Comrade Piso.
After we graduated and left college, Piso went on to one of those three-name white firms that specialised in corporate and commercial law and recruited only though selective headhunting. This was a stunning achievement for him. In our very first week at the law faculty, Kempton Makamure, the Dean of the Faculty, had divided us into two groups.
We were either members of the Nose Brigade, those educated at the former white schools who spoke English through the nose, he declared, or we were SRBs, those with Strong Rural Backgrounds with accents to match. As we SRBs made up the majority of the class, it was a joke we took in good spirit. A small-town boy from Chipinge, and not even Chipinge proper but one of its outlying villages, Comrade Piso came to the UZ from his mission school, St Augustines – ‘Ndakafunde kwaTsambe’, as he said in his Manyika accent – as a full-grown SRB. By the time he left to join his white firm, he had become a full-blown member of the Nose Brigade.
At the University of Zimbabwe, we had been part of a group of male students that called itself the Quorum. We formed the Quorum just after we had completed a first year course on Roman and Roman-Dutch Law, and though we sometimes called each other ‘Paterfamilias’, that title did not stick. Instead, we addressed each other as Comrade. The aim of the Comrades in the Quorum was primarily to gossip about fellow students – paying particular and speculative attention to the sex lives of the female students – and to pass exams without doing a jot of work. It was not as hard as it sounds.
Most of the lecturers were a lazy bunch: they had not adapted their notes from the country’s Marxist heyday of the eighties. It was all Marx and Engels this and dialectical materialism that, with just enough law to keep the Law Society satisfied. They tended to set questions like, ‘It is not the consciousness of man that determines his material being but his material being that determines his consciousness: Discuss.’ You just had to put in enough guff about dialectical materialism and the withering away of the law, private property and the state and you would get through. And if you failed, you always had a second chance with a re-sit or supp, as we called it.
Our interest in our studies extended mainly to the use of stock phrases. We dismissed opinions as frivolous and vexatious, we said claims were vague and embarrassing. We talked about the man on the Clapham Omnibus; we made crude jokes about piercing the corporate veil; we described the law student who lost her head in an exam as an unfit and improper person. We showed off the new language we learned: contra bonos mores and in flagrante delicto, mutatis mutandis, and mero motu.
We laughed at Makamure’s aphorism that if you want to hide something from an African, all you have to do is to put it in a book, but as far as we were concerned, the law was hidden from us because we opened no books. We gave the name Denning to the one Quorum member among us who had read just one entire case and not stopped at the headnote. That case was R v George Joseph Smith and we sometimes we made him recite our favourite part of the judgement: ‘to lose one wife is careless, to lose two unfortunate but to lose three begins to look like murder.’
Indeed, we only took down any notes because we had to pass exams. We called it ‘Defending our Pay Out’. The Pay Out was the stipend that each student received as part of the government grant that went to all students. If you did not pass your exams, you forfeited your right to the grant, and to the Pay Out. So that was the Quorum. We were not law students at all, just gossips and layabouts, and Pay Out Defenders.
For no reason at all that we could see, in third year, Piso started to take it all seriously, going to the library at night and at the weekend, studying for more than two weeks before the exams, and reading more than the headnote of each case. Then, one day during a tutorial in Company Law, he had a twenty-minute argument with Emily, an eager beaver Nose Brigade, over whether Salomon v Salomon had been properly decided. The argument turned into a quarrel that continued even after the tutorial. After that, he started to track down cases that were not on the reading list. He talked of doing case notes on In Re Southern Rhodesia and Madzimbamuto v Lardner-Burke for the Law Review. There were perspectives, he said, that had not been fully shared. He tried to convince us that there was more to R v Beding field than the statement: ‘See what Bedingfield has done to me.’ He talked of working at the Law Development Commission during the holidays.
The final nail was when he joined the Moot Court team and spent his weekends preparing to argue fictitious cases with his partner Emily, the eager beaver student he had argued with after the Company Law tutorial. That same year, she lost her head in an exam, and instead of making jokes about her with the Quorum, about how she was an unfit and improper person who qualified for coverage under the Mental Health Act, Piso bought her flowers from the Interflora shop at Bond Street and went to see her at the Annexe, where she had been locked up after her breakdown.
The Quorum began to worry for him.
Comrade Piso got that name from the Quorum because he is the one who told us one of our favourite stories in first year. As he told it, there are these three soldiers who lived in Roman times. One day, two of them go out of the camp together on leave, but only one returns. The governor of their province, who also controls the army, a particularly flinty-hearted fellow called Piso, tells the First Soldier that as he has returned alone without the Second Soldier, he must
have killed his companion. So Piso orders a Third Soldier to take him out and kill him. Just before this soldier does so, the Second Soldier returns and claims that he has escaped from the enemy.
All three then appear before Piso to explain themselves. Piso starts to eat hot coals. He orders all three of them to be killed at once, the First Soldier because the sentence had already been passed and must be carried out, the Third Soldier because he had failed to obey a lawful command and the Second Soldier because he had caused the death of two innocent men. We laughed like hyenas when it came to that part.
I suppose we should have known from his reading of Seneca, the narrator of the original story, that our Comrade Piso had the potential and ambition to rise above the Quorum’s ingrained laziness. It was an ambition that led him to modulate his vowels and shorten his consonants, thus beginning his ultimately successful conversion from an SRB to a Nose Brigade.
To cement his Nose Brigade status, he began to go after girls who studied things like French and Portuguese, who played tennis and squash and swam for leisure. He joined a French-named society for students that seemed to exist only to have picnics at Cleveland Dam. He even had a semester-long affair with a German exchange student. We mocked his sheepish grin as he walked with her around campus, his hand firmly clutched in hers. He knew as well as we did that no self-respecting member of the Quorum would demean himself so far as to hold hands with any girl in public.
And there was the matter of English. It was our official language, of course, and we spoke it when we had to in our lectures and tutorials. We wrote it when we were compelled to in our essays and exam scripts. But the idea that anyone would willingly and voluntarily subject himself to its constricting confines and give himself up to a life that required that he speak English even in his most intimate moments seemed something that only a Nose Brigade would willingly do. It was preposterous to us that anyone would choose to speak English when he did not have to. According to Bakunin, a stalwart of the Quorum who took his admiration of the Russian anarchist to a degree that in the end cost him his studies, Piso probably dreamt in English because evidently he screwed in English.
Even after his flirtation with the German student ended, he no longer attended the Quorum. When he drank at the Students’ Union at all, it was not in the main Union bar, but in the smaller bar between the squash court and the swimming pool, the small bar with unbroken chairs and proper tables that we called October 4. We knew then that Comrade Piso was lost to us. He broke all ties with the Quorum after his falling out with Bakunin.
Bakunin was not only in the Quorum but also in the SRC, the Students’ Representative Council that was supposed to represent the students in the meetings of the University Council, but instead spent student dues on parties and travel. On the SRC, Bakunin held the coveted Entertainment portfolio.
Bakunin was the first person we knew to rig an election. To support his challenge for the presidency, Bakunin gave out free beer, threw wild parties at the Students’ Union and was rumoured to have secured the remaining Bhundu Boys to play at his victory party. He also manipulated the presidential debate by bribing a blind student called Kuda to ask a question to the leading candidate, an Economics student called Frederick Alumeda. Kuda raised his white stick, was given the floor in the Great Hall and said, ‘I have a question for Alumeda, Arumedza, Tarumedza.’
The commotion that followed drowned out the rest of the question. Kuda’s play on Alumeda’s name was meant to appeal to the Shona chauvinists who made up the majority of students. By drawing attention to the L in Alumeda’s name, Kuda meant to imply that he was a muBhurandaya or Nyasarandi from Malawi or else a Mosken from Mozambique, and not, therefore, a son of this soil. When the ensuing fall-out resulted in Alumeda losing the election, he gained the nickname Moshood, after Moshood Abiola, the politician who was in the news at that time as ‘the man who is said to have won the presidential election in Nigeria’.
Though Bakunin toppled Moshood, he was still beaten and so he left the SRC to become Sub-warden in New Complex 5, the male hostel known as Baghdad. Sub-wardens were meant to keep the peace and ensure that students lived by the rules, but under Bakunin’s subwardenship, Baghdad became positively ungovernable.
Girls were often spotted in the mornings, and not just girls girls but also prostitutes, scuttling from their companions’ rooms, lost in the maze of Baghdad’s corridors. When Piso complained that the Engines student next door to him was playing his CDs far too loudly and disturbing both his sleep and studies, Bakunin had come over for an inspection in loco. He took one listen to the Engines student’s music and said, ‘But this is not noise, Comrade. This is Gregory Isaacs. This is the author of “Night Nurse”, Comrade. How is this noise? You must surely concur, Comrade, that he has no competition, the man has no equal.’
Over Piso’s protests, he had turned up the volume even further and shouted, ‘Listen to this. This is why he is the Ruler of them all, Comrade, the Cool Ruler. The only quarrel we might have is over whether “Cool Down the Pace” is greater than this one. Listen to this, listen to this. “Please give me a chance, so I can make my confession.” Obviously, Comrade, if we can’t agree on Gregory Isaacs then perhaps Baghdad is not the right place for you, Comrade.’
Piso exchanged rooms with a fellow who lived in Carr Saunders, the residence shared by mature-entry male and female students where all was much too clean and civilised for comfort. Piso thrived in his new halls of residence. He then went a step further and served as the researcher for both Pearson Nherere, the brilliant lecturer in the public law department who had been born blind and yet still managed to go to both Cambridge and Oxford, and Lawrence Tshuma who was the country’s leading land law expert. That was the year of his biggest success, getting firsts in six subjects as well as the University Book Prize, an honour he shared with Emily who by then had recovered her wits, only she now insisted on being called by her second name of Pepukai.
Piso and Pepukai also went on to get first-class passes and receive the Law Society Prize for the top students of the last four years. They received their prize directly from Eddison Zvobgo, the Minister of Justice who was also the first black lawyer in our country to go to Harvard Law School, and to do so, too, in a Rhodesia when education had been constricted for those of our race. It may have been the gun that got Smith to the table, but it was Zvo bgo’s legal skills that guided the Lancaster House talks that created the constitution. As we saw Zvobgo joking and laughing with Piso and Pepukai as he handed them their prizes, it was Bakunin who expressed the general view of the Quorum that maybe there were rewards in hard work after all.
By the time we left college, Piso had changed everything about himself. From his voice to his clothes, from his girlfriends to his work ethic, from his attitude to his books to where he drank and his sense of dress, the essence of Piso had changed so completely that you could have sworn he had been born a Nose Brigade.
The Quorum did not keep up with him after college. In only his second month of employment, he was heard to declare that he could not tolerate any other drink but whisky, and not just whisky, but Scotch, which he pronounced ‘Scarch’. It was just as well that by then had he left the Quorum behind because with his Scarch this and Scarch that, he would have been much too expensive a drinking partner for our shallow pockets.
Over the years, we watched the rise and rise of Comrade Piso. We heard that he had left his white firm and moved to work as in-house counsel for a listed beverage company. Then he moved to a bank. Not a retail bank, but a merchant bank, a crucial difference because this was in the days when there were probably only two such banks in the whole country. From what we gathered, he left the bank under something of a cloud, though the details were never explained. There was a whiff of criminality about his departure, there was something about it that smelled of fraud, which we pronounced frowd, and those who whispered said he had tried to take a few short-cuts to riches, but as he was never prosecuted, nothing was ever proved and he r
emained on the Law Society’s Roll of Legal Practitioners as a fit and proper person.
We then heard that he had set himself up as a tuckshop practitioner, a one-man band. I only knew about this because I had gone to see a client in Chipinge and found myself forced to spend an afternoon there to be followed by an overnight stay in Mutare. There is nothing more tedious than attending court in these little out-of-the-backwoods spots. They never have decent places to stay in so if your magistrate decides not to turn up two days in a row, well, too bad for you because that’s your two days wasted driving between Harare and whatever backwater you are in.
There is only one high street in Chipinge with its sole doctor’s surgery that is also used by the town dentist, it is a one-hotel and one-solicitor town and it seemed that solicitor was Piso. As I crossed the road to buy lunch from the supermarket, I saw him trying to hide behind the crumpled pinkness of a Financial Gazette. I gave him no choice as I grabbed him jovially by the elbow. He looked good, I will give him that, he looked quietly prosperous in his well-cut suit, a shirt that was just the right hue of blue, an impeccable tie, and shoes that shone without the slightest hint of patent leather.
I hailed him as Comrade, but he spoke to me in a most uncomradely manner. Indeed, he spoke to me like I was someone he had once known but long since forgotten. I must say that I pressed my claims on his notice so persistently that I left him with no option but to recognise me, or at least to pretend to, even if he did not actually remember the days of the Quorum. He was defending a man who had killed two people, he said, a drunk driver. It was a tough one, because the man had killed about three other people before. A real menace this one, Piso said as he laughed, the usual inducements are unlikely to work in this case. I was startled to hear him say this, we all know how the usual inducements work, but it was shocking to hear a fellow solicitor admit so breezily that he used such methods. Throughout our conversation, he kept laughing a shallow, hollow laugh whose mirth did not reach his eyes.
Rotten Row Page 22