Word on the street was that the Commission was taking testimonies. There were powerful men and women behind the whole thing, white priests all the way from Italy. The Pope himself was rumoured to have flown into the country, flapping about in his red and white robes that twirled about him like a dress, on a secret mission to meet all devoted Catholics from Matabeleland and heal them with the touch of his hand. They would even get to kiss the holy ring! But Catholics only. The Pope’s power would not work on any of the devil-worshipping fools who served other denominations.
Word was, they would be taking the government to court. Oh yes! They would put the President on the stand, like a normal person. They would parade his crimes for all the world to see, and afterwards, they would throw him into Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison and throw away the key. Oh yes! Him and and and Black Jesus and The Crocodile and General Bae and the Others …
Word was, the white priests were lawyers too, and they would get com-pen-sa-tion for the victims of the … unmentionable era. Oh yes! All you had to do was to go to your village and give your testimony. Oh yes.
I am pretty sure that my Uncle Fani went to see the Commission of Inquiry People, at least, I remember him mentioning it, although when I asked him what a Commission of Inquiry was, he just gave me a sad, mysterious grin. I have calculated the days, and when the Commission of Inquiry People came, it was round about the time that Uncle Fani really took his drinking to new heights. I zoom in with sepia-tinted lens to see myself reading in horror and awe as Simon speaks to the pig’s head in Lord of the Flies in this very living room, which did not contain its pretty maroon sofas and its bright cobalt kitchen table back then, boasting nothing but three Formica chairs. I am frowning with affected concentration at the pages. I suspect he’s just come in from seeing the Commission of Inquiry People, Uncle Fani. He’s busy sniffling on the chair beside me. He’s a grown man, for goodness’ sake! What the hell is he crying for?
His sniffles gather momentum and break into sobs. I’ve never heard him cry like this before; cry so freely, as though he were dying. Anybody who has ever heard the anguished, naked sobs of a man knows what a frightening sound it is.
‘Zamani …’
I pretend not to hear and instead raise my voice to read from Lord of the Flies: ‘Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! …’
‘Zamani!’
‘You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you?’
‘… Zamani …’
‘I’M THE REASON WHY IT’S NO GO? WHY THINGS ARE WHAT THEY ARE?’
He gives up, thankfully, my uncle, gives up trying to beckon me to his lap so he can cling to me like I’m his mama. But that’s a fatal mistake, my mistake, for that’s when he really takes to the bottle like a newborn to the teat. Perhaps, if I’d once more lent him my bony, thirteen-year-old chest to cry on … !
Mama Agnes went to see the Commission of Inquiry People. She woke up as though it were a workday like any other and left for her rural home Kezi without telling my surrogate father where it was she was going. It was a pleasant April morning in which a brilliant sun dazzled the sky.
In the khombi from Bulawayo to Kezi, she sat amidst passengers who were squashed like a rural laity being carted off to a rally. The air was hot and sticky, and rose only to condense and settle on the passengers in sweaty, oppressive mists. Mama Agnes felt faint; she crinkled her nose against the mingling odours of boiled eggs and fried chicken. She felt otherworldly, watching the hawkers patrolling the sides of the road at every stop, mostly women and girls, and young men with the oiliest skin, their armpits dripping wet. They scrambled for the khombi as it rumbled to a halt, almost falling over one another in a bid to offer their wares to the open windows. Mabhanzi, Korn Kurl chips, Marie Biscuits, fizzy drinks, bananas and oranges. Maize that was not quite ripe, sizzling on a stake, and freshly plucked cane, the stalks sticky with sap.
She watched the hawkers as they punched and elbowed, their voices both crude and saccharine as they yelled obscenities at one another while attempting to coax the passengers into purchase.
She wondered about their lives, which villages they were from, whether the Commission of Inquiry People had passed through their hamlets. If they’d been eager to speak, or whether the warnings of shrill mothers had long ago muted their voices. Why they were over here, instead of over there.
Trymore was waiting for her at the Sisters’ Office at Tshelanye Mission Hospital. He hugged her for a long time, with his one good, strong hand, and when he finally pulled away, she saw that his eyes were wet. But he was smiling. She, too, smiled.
He had on their father’s only suit, with the empty sleeve pinned to the shoulder with a thorn.
He told her that their mother had refused to come. Mama Agnes hadn’t expected that she would. Trymore’s hand was trembling as he showed her the photo of Mwangi and Promise. They startled her, her dead brothers’ faces, in a way she’d never thought after so long they would. It had been torn halfway down the middle, so that the bit with herself and Trymore and Nto shoving their faces into the frame at the last moment was missing.
Promise had his head thrown back, in playful arrogance, so that his gums showed. It came alive, his laugh, and, standing in the middle of Tshipisane village square, amidst a crowd that was rapidly growing, Mama Agnes could hear her brother’s guffaw. Next to him, Mwangi’s look was more pensive, as though the camera had caught him in the middle of a thought. His forehead had a slight furrow, harrowed by a gash where Nkani the donkey’d kicked him one afternoon in their father’s fields as he attempted to bully her into driving the plough. How they’d laughed at him as he made his way back home with the blood dripping from his forehead! But later, he became the centre of their envy, didn’t he? After their father said he’d marry well, and have many cows, for women loved the scars of a man, they told stories of valour, which was doubly rewarded by the ancestors.
‘He was always Father’s favourite,’ Trymore said, as though reading her thoughts. ‘He was never the same man afterwards, Father.’
Trymore thrust a crumpled sheaf of papers into her hands, and left her to go and sit beneath a mopane tree, where a cluster of men was sharing a calabash. She was reluctant even as she straightened the papers, for she already knew what they were: a confessional about Bhalagwe.
Though I begged Mama Agnes to share the contents of the letter with me, she wouldn’t. She couldn’t, she said. I implored, but to no avail. All she told me was that after reading the letter, she carefully squared off the pages and handed it back to Trymore, sniffling as her brother was called in to testify.
She spoke at length about the chap who interviewed her, how exhausted he looked, avoiding her gaze as he addressed her in a crisp, accounting tone. His curt questions hurt her. She’d spent nights tossing and turning, willing herself to remember, desiring to forget, promising to go, swearing to retreat. She sat on the wooden chair in that classroom at Tshipisane, walls sullied by graffiti and bits of plastic fluttering from the windows where the panes ought to have been. Glanced furtively at the other two desks that had been arranged next to them. The voices of the occupants were too loud, the space too public for their harrowing, private confessions.
When she opened her mouth and began her speech, rehearsed and re-rehearsed and re-re-rehearsed weeks and days and hours before – ‘My name is Agnes Ndiweni-Mlambo I lived in Kezi I am here to give testimony on Gukurahundi my family—’
‘I don’t need to know your name,’ the chap said.
‘Sorry?’
‘I only need to state whether you are male or female. For your own protection, you see.’
‘But. You said it was safe. You said we were going to be safe, that the government said it’s OK, that we can speak freely—’
‘We are just being careful.’
‘All right. All right all right. I am a female. One night my family was—’
‘When?’
‘What?’
‘Do you know the
date of the incident in question?’
She stared at him. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Could you give me an estimate, please?’
‘I don’t know.’
The chap rubbed his temples and sighed. ‘Madam, I cannot do my job if you don’t co-operate.’
Co-operate?
‘1984. I think it was 1984.’
He picked up his pen and resumed scribbling. ‘Which month?’
‘November,’ she lied, because he was clearly expecting an answer.
‘All right. Please tell me what happened. Stick only to the very essential information.’
What was essential information? she wondered. Should she skip the part where she woke up to the screams coming from outside her hut, the thudding of feet, her mama screaming get up get up get up! Get up mani lina lifuna ukufa yini do you want to die leave everything and run leave everything and run! Should she tell this young man how she clutched her breasts as she ran, because they seemed like the most important thing to protect, cushioning as they were her heart, begging to be let out, pounding so hard her chest hurt? Was this essential information? Should she just move on to the part where they were rounded up in the village school?
‘How many were rounded up at the school?’ he asked.
She blinked at him.
‘Madam?’
‘Sixty-two,’ she said, randomly.
Scribble scribble scribble. Every so often a long, drawn-out sigh. Never looking up to meet her gaze.
She decided, then, that she would not tell him anything of value. Anything that was valuable to her. He didn’t deserve it. Had not earned the right to such intimacies. She regretted having come. Now, she’d been forced to remember things she’d worked so hard to forget, until they’d come to resemble a movie, someone else’s life that couldn’t possibly have any resemblance to hers, the brand-new, born-again Mama Agnes. Yes, she had been happy. Hadn’t she been happy? Hadn’t it been easier to pretend nothing had ever ever ever ever … Easier to ignore the dreams, the palpitations, the ghosts of Promise and Mwangi which, for a long time after Bhalagwe, took to following her around? Until she met Father Reuben, whose presence managed to soothe her, so that whenever she was with him, the ghosts of her brothers would leave her alone. Now, she’d been forced to remember all of it and more; the daily deaths at the camp, from starvation or torture or murder; the random shootings, so that you didn’t know if you’d survive any given day; the daily chore of digging graves; being made to watch, one time, a detainee, a woman who Mama Agnes knew well, a respected village elder who just the month before had delivered lovely cloth made from African print to Mama Agnes’s mama and asked her to make a dress for her daughter’s wedding, this woman who was singled out by the Men in the Red Berets and made to prostrate her rump for a donkey to mount.
She stopped abruptly here, my Mama Agnes; she was struggling to breathe. I squeezed her hand.
‘What happened next, Ma?’ I hissed. ‘What happened at Bhalagwe?’
But that word, Bhalagwe, was like a swear word – I shouldn’t have said it! I should have just said, ‘What happened over there?’ – for at the mention of it, she seemed to jerk out of a trance and, wiping her tears, which were streaming silently down her lovely cheeks, reiterated that she did not share with the Commission People anything that was of value to her.
Later, after the interrogation by the brusque chap, as she strolled aimlessly about the village square, waiting for Trymore to finish his interview, she happened upon a familiar sheaf of papers fluttering in a crumpled pile by a bin behind one of the classrooms. Trymore’s shaky, painstaking writing was legible on the sheets.
Afterwards, when the Commission People had packed up and left, Trymore walked her back to the tarred road where she was to catch a khombi back to Bulawayo.
‘They said they could not speak for too long,’ he said. The cheer in his voice was bilious. ‘So many people to document, more people than they had thought would come. But I gave them the letter. They promised to read it. Promised to get back to me. Promised to get us money from the government, as com-pen-sation. Promised to help with Promise and Mwangi. So, you see? Everything’s going to be all right.’
‘Yes,’ she lied. ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’
After a while, he said, ‘How much do you think it will be, sister? This com-pen-sa-tion? How much do you think the government would have to pay us to make us forget? How much do you think can make everything right?’
She stared at him then, sadly.
The promised compensation would never come.
As the khombi rumbled into the yonder, she turned for one last look, to find Trymore waving vigorously with his good arm, the pinned sleeve of their father’s jacket flapping in the wind.
It was raining by the time the khombi arrived back in Bulawayo. She was glad for the rain. It masked her tears. Her inability to forget the things she had now worked so hard to remember.
And how could she ever forget, Mama Agnes, that afternoon a year later when Trymore called her from the Sisters’ Office at Tshelanye Mission Hospital, his voice shaking as he told her he was going to see if Promise and Mwangi were among the skulls, femurs, humeri and other body parts that were being retrieved from Antelope Mine.
‘Perhaps at last, we can give our brothers a decent burial, sister!’
She’d told him, hadn’t she? To rein in his excitement, not to let it run so free so fast? Because she’d known, even as she begged leave from her teaching duties and boarded the Shu Shine bus to Antelope Mine, that they’d do something like that, those people from the government, murder hope with a few words penned on a flimsy piece of paper.
They were already in full swing by the time she arrived at Antelope Mine, the government people, looking solemn as they stood in front of the cameras, frying in the Matopo sun. They proclaimed the remains to be from the liberation era of the ’70s. Brave men and women who fought heroically for the freedom that every Zimbabwean now enjoyed, they piped. They mopped their brows and showed their teeth to the cameras. Behind them stood withered maize stalks. Mama Agnes squinted at the crowd and tried to pick out Trymore among the clusters of frazzled villagers. Children took turns to run into the sights of the cameras, pull down their underpants and wiggle their bottoms. She didn’t see Trymore until later, after the scuffle, which started when she – realizing that the day was orangeing and the craniums, mandibles, clavicles, scapulae, sternums, humeri, ribs, iliums, sacrums, pubises, radii, ulnas, carpals, metacarpals, phalanges, ischiums, femurs, patellae, tibias, fibulae, tarsals and metatarsals of her brothers were not going to be retrieved – shouted, ‘That’s where you threw them.’
Before long, the crowd was chanting, ‘That’s where you threw them, that’s where you threw them,’ accusatory fingers aimed like pistols at Antelope Mine. Their fragile voices growing louder, carried on the wings of the wind, flapping in the faces of the government people.
But when a truckload of soldiers arrived, Mama Agnes turned and ran, hitching her dress up her thighs, just like she had when the Men in the Red Berets had come to Kezi. All around her, the villagers scattered like dissidents. They ran, even the old people, whose flesh swayed like heavy buckets and weighed them down as though they were carrying the burden of a whole nation.
And once aflutter, nothing could settle flippity-floppity hearts. Not even a report in the Daily News that the coins found among the skeletal remains dated from the early ’80s, after independence, during the time of the unmentionable era, and not the ’70s, as the government claimed. Afterwards, there was a shuffle of excitement from the people from the Lawyers for Human Rights, and the journalists from Amnesty International, who came and went clickety-click with their cameras, asking questions nobody wanted to answer. But it all died down, eventually, just like it always did. Just like it had the year before, when the Commission of Inquiry People had come to the villages with their bags of nugatory promises.
The remains, of course, were ne
ver seen again. Loaded onto a military truck, they chugged into the yonder and went poof! Hard to tell exactly how far back the remains dated, the people from the government stuttered, as they wet the cameras with their smiles. Difficult, what without forensic experts and the tampering of the specimens by the police, who had good intentions, rest assured … Rest assured, somebody will look into it … When Mama Agnes finally reunited with Trymore, at Tshelanye Mission Hospital after the scuffle, she fell into his good arm and wept. She shut her eyes and imagined him on the thirteen kilometre trek to Antelope Mine to confront the government people.
‘Leave it alone,’ she begged him. ‘Please, enough, won’t you just leave it alone?’
‘How can I leave it alone? They came, those people from the Commission of Inquiry, did they not come, and awaken sleeping dogs, and tell us they would put them to rest? Did they not say, “Tell us what happened, we will help you, we will make the pain go away”? They went away, and they never came back, but the dogs they woke up in me won’t stop barking.’
Bhalagwe
What Mama Agnes told me yesterday, about her experience with the Commission of Inquiry People, and that bit she slipped in unwittingly about Bhalagwe, the daily deaths, having to dig graves, the starvation, that woman and what they made her do with a donkey … I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.
I tried to catch her this morning to see if I could tease out a little more of her knotty hi-story, but she left early, bustling around the neighbourhood in preparation for another prayer meeting tonight. I even tried rummaging through her things in her bedroom, going through the tchotchkes on top of her wardrobe, thinking maybe I would find something about Trymore’s confessional, to no avail. When that didn’t work, I sought out my surrogate father, perhaps to play a game of draughts for old time’s sake, but he apparently didn’t come home last night – no doubt parked up in that cemetery of his, maybe enjoying the last of the baggie of ubuvimbo I gave him. It’s just been me, pacing around in my pygmy room, nothing to do, nowehere to go. Mani, a donkey.
House of Stone Page 25