Reluctantly Surrounded By Politics

Growing up in a dictatorship

Chapter 1

JOURNEY TO MUTARE

As the tropical summer mid-afternoon sun did its worst, I decided to stop and cool myself with a soft drink at a roadside cafe. I had just passed a road sign which read ‘WELCOME TO MARONDERA’ and, apart from feeling a little dehydrated, my six-foot fourteen-stone frame needed stretching.
The driver’s seat in the brown twelve-year-old Peugeot 504 was in an advanced state of dilapidation. Due to wear and tear, the leather upholstery covering the seats was light brown and black, and there were more traces of the original shade of brown on the passenger’s seats than on the driver’s. Likewise, the springs on the left side of the driver’s seat had completely relinquished their responsibilities, and the owner, a close friend of mine, had advised me that to have a comfortable drive, I would need to sit on one buttock, the right one. He was the kind of chap who could be relied upon for helpful suggestions like that! As to the general state of the car, well, let me say I was quietly confident that I would be able to complete the three-hour drive from Harare to my destination, the small border town of Mutare, a town on the north-eastern border with Mozambique and back to Harare, a well over five-hundred-kilometre round-trip.
As I parked the car under a huge mango tree, which danced with the odd rhythm of a drunken Ngoma dancer at a ‘welcome’ party, a gentle fruity breeze, the most agreeable present from the spirits, one might say, wafted by.
Marondera seemed to be a popular country oasis for drivers in transit. There were several cars and a few trucks parked at the far end of the row of shop fronts. Standing or squatting next to the mango tree were vendors, mostly young women, selling, among other things, all manner of vegetables, wood carvings, and traditional clay pots.
My heart skipped a beat at the sight of a woman near a café door carrying a bamboo basket full of mushrooms of many varieties. She immediately reminded me of my mother, Mai naMlauzi. She knew all the edible mushrooms which grew in the bushes around our farm in Thondwe, and she used to tell us, ‘Davie, sight isn’t everything when it comes to mushrooms; they can be any colour. What you must look for is the ant test. Look at the mushrooms, and if ants are attacking them, they are not poisonous to human beings.’ We lived safely by this rule, and I now wondered if this woman had also used the ant test when she picked her mushrooms.
At the café, I bought myself a can of ice-cold Coca-Cola and a piece of soft smoke-cured wild-game meat. I was told it was buffalo and very tasty it was too. Inside and even on the veranda, all the seats were occupied, so I walked out into the car park and ate my snack leaning against my brown chariot. The temperature was considerably lower under the tree, and the ice-cold drink helped to cool me down by making me sweat a little before cooling me down. Naturally!
On the other side of the street, the little market was busy. Cars stopped by the roadside, their occupants picking what they wanted from the variety of goods on offer, quickly paying, and speeding away. I could imagine that prices were cheaper here than in the bigger towns, where most of the customers would be living. For a few minutes, I watched some children play hopscotch noisily at the far end of the car park, shouting and calling each other names for cheating. I saw myself in them and thought, how time flies.
Suddenly, my interest was distracted by an old, gaunt-looking man carrying two charcoal-grey medium-sized pots traditionally decorated with dark-brown triangles around the rim. They looked beautiful. He addressed me in the local language, Shona, which I was not very good at, which he soon grasped, judging by how I responded and quickly changed to English. ‘Pots, Bwana, clay pots, very cheap. Only three dollars each,’ he exhorted as he proudly handed me one for a closer appreciation and hopefully a sale!
His bushy white beard had a light-brown nicotine stain, which, I am sure, had been left by years of smoking, just above and below his mouth, and I noticed that when he smiled, his teeth, the ones he still had, were also tobacco-stained dark tan.
I can truthfully say that I did not want to buy pots. I did not need pots, and I was just about to return the pot I was holding when he began to cough violently. His fragile body looked as if it were going to fall apart under the intensity of the coughing fit. Still, after about a minute it relented, and he swallowed hard and seemed temporarily to have recovered. I do not know what he saw in the direction where the children were playing, but at that moment he started to laugh, slowly at first and then hysterically. Tears poured from his sallow, dark eyes and like narrow, flowing streams, disappeared into his bushy beard. Turning back to me, still smiling broadly, he continued with his sales pitch. ‘Are you taking both, then? They are locally made – our cottage industry, as they say, in Harare. The wife will certainly be good to you tonight. Women just love pots.’ He did not know all my defences were already down the moment I saw him cough; this was overkill.
I quickly paid him the asking price of six Zimbabwe dollars, plus two extra dollars for the effort, anxious to escape before the salespersons launched another attack on me. ‘Thank you, Bwana,’ he said, pocketing the money gleefully. ‘These are the last ones I am selling today. The money doesn’t last, though. I’m like a productive mango tree. As soon as there is a ripe one, someone plucks it. It’s the wife, you know. She never lets me near her if I fail to sell at least two pots a day. Sometimes she even refuses to cook for me. She is Manyika, from Honde Valley in Mutare. Difficult women, if you ask me, but then, if I had not married her, I would probably have married someone exactly like her. It’s fate, I suppose,’ he concluded philosophically. I could only smile compassionately.
As I pulled away, I noticed the old man had lit another cigarette and gone into another coughing fit. I wondered whether I should have used the extra two dollars to buy him a cough mixture, but then again, perhaps the Manyika wife had everything under control.
I had also expected a road sign showing which direction Marondera Prison was located. My father and other nationalists, fighting against the imposed Federation of Rhodesia and NyasAaron d in 1960, had spent some months there. Perhaps I may have to make a special trip to visit this eerie structure and connect with the macabre stories of torture Father had narrated to us after his release. I am not sure the other seventy-two detainees incarcerated at various detention centres fared any better.
Between Marondera and the next town of Rusape, there were many tobacco and maize farms along the road, with the occasional barn silhouetted against the vast canvas of a cloudless sky. Now and again, I could see herds of cattle grazing lazily, fertilising the land with their waste as they did so. It was a sight which reminded me of the late Frankie Howard, a British comedian, who once said, ‘Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, for it’s the other end that feeds the rhubarb.’

I did not stop at Rusape, but judging from the buildings I saw from the car, the town seemed larger than Marondera. Before long I reached the lower slopes of the eastern highlands on which Mutare is situated, and from then on the journey would be uphill.
When I had been driving for less than an hour, I needed to rest my right buttock and relieve the pressure on my bladder. Pulling into a deserted lay-by where the only signs of human life were empty cigarette packets and Coca-Cola and beer bottle tops, there was also a little hut with a large window, on top of which were the words ‘KUMBIRAI NO.1 TEA ROOM. OPEN 24 HRS A DAY’. It was closed! As I took a few steps into the bush, the sun was still up but far off and weak, as though being forced out of the sky at the end of the day against its will. Standing in front of a huge Masuku tree, I took in my surroundings. A rainbow carpet of wildflowers spread itself towards the nearby hills to my right. Red-chested mpheta, the yellow-winged pumbwa, maphingo, African starlings, and other birds sang above and around me. Wild fowls raised a cry in the bushes to my left as they flew and disappeared over the ridge. I felt a great sense of tranquillity. I was at peace with myself, at one with nature, and lost in my world.
I was brought back to earth by the sound of a huge over-loaded lorry which made such a commotion as it struggled uphill, leaving behind a trail of dark diesel clouds, that one would have been excused for thinking that an old steam locomotive was approaching. Awakened from my reverie as the birds contemptuously took flight, I jumped back into the Peugeot 504, into my favourite position in response to the state of wear of the driver’s seat. It was time to continue my way.
The going was slower now. The road had become very winding and steep, and the car could not be encouraged to go any faster. Now sulking as it slipped out of sight behind the many layers of hills and mountains, the sun had turned the blank sky to a pale, murky, and sombre blue extending to a pale yellow and finally, a bright orange as it was approaching the western horizon in the distance. The fact that there would be stars any minute now, millions of them, taking their places in the night sky, did seem to make quite a difference to the way the sun slowly moved out of sight.
I had been driving for over an hour when I finally saw a road sign which readCHRISTMAS PASS 5MLS. MUTARE 8MLS’.
On reaching the top of Christmas Pass, arguably the highest point in Mutare, the road veered suddenly to the left, making a bow shape, and still rising. The town, now visible below, appeared as a collection of tiny lights, nestling in the natural bowl in which it sat at the foot of the surrounding hills.

The descent into the town itself was very hazardous and slow, due to the many bends which needed to be negotiated with care. Barely visible to the northeast, in the dying sky, were mountain ranges that seemed to go on forever. Somewhere there lay my homeland, my country, Malawi. A five-hour drive would put me among my people, those to whom I would not have to explain who I was. They knew me. They had known me since birth. They were people who would offer me food, water to drink, and a place to sleep without question. They were people who knew the source and meaning of my name in the land of my ancestors, Land of the Lake, where laughter comes easily, and the welcome is as golden as the rising sun.
Bringing the Peugeot to a halt in front of the Mutare Sun Hotel, which was situated on the left side of the road, I thankfully stretched my legs and reflected on the story which had first brought me to this place and had been told to me by my maternal uncle, whom I had met only once during my school holidays, some twenty years or so earlier.
Uncle Davison Filipo had spent around eight years working in a South African asbestos mine. Each time, he was contracted to work for three years. In the end, he would pack all that he had amassed and book a train ticket, destined for Blantyre, Malawi. The train always passed through Botswana and overnighted at a place called Francis Town, which he pronounced Forest Town. This town, he said, had the most beautiful women one could ever wish to see. As he waited for his connection, which was on the following day, he was drawn into conversation by one of these women. He may have used the phrase ‘picked up’, and he may even have given the impression that it was he who did the picking up, but now I know a thing or two about Botswana women, I somehow don’t doubt who did the picking up – this woman, whom he described as being so beautiful that she had a ‘beauty spot all over her body!’

The following morning, she lifted him and carried him on her back to the bathroom, which was about ten metres from the house, bathed him all over – she was thorough too! – and carried him back into the house the same way. After breakfast – a calabash of fresh milk, which was still warm from the cow’s udder, and a huge piece of roast beef – he decided to marry the woman. Who would not? Marriage-deserving women don’t come any better than this. After a few months, he had used all his money and most of his hard-earned goods, some of which were intended for his parents, brothers, and other members of the extended family in Malawi. Everything was gone. Now there was only one thing for him to do: go back to Johannesburg, back to the mines.

Three years passed, at the end of which he got as far as his beloved Feresi Town and met yet another woman with a beauty spot all over her body. So, he had apparently described her to his buddies. This time she was better behaved than the first, or so he thought, but he was wrong, and after a year, it was back to the mines yet again. Another three years passed and this time, on his way home, he knew he had to be strong. When the train stopped overnight in Francis Town, my previously weak uncle decided to sleep standing up at the station. Offers did come, but he resisted them all.
The following day, everything moved smoothly, and my uncle was in Harare by late evening. After a few hours of rest, the train continued its journey, arriving in Mutare just before midnight. One of his workmates was getting off there and since the train was overnighting in Mutare, the friend offered my uncle accommodation at his home, which wasn’t far from Central Mutare station.
As the family was celebrating the return of their son, my uncle’s eyes caught sight of someone, a young woman, who just happened to be his friend’s sister. Her eyes were also arrested by him. Yes, you have guessed it, he missed the train to Blantyre the following morning and set up home with his Mutare lass, encouraged by his friend. Once again, all his money was ‘lost’ there.
There were gold mines in Mutare, where my uncle could have sought work, but the pay was more attractive in Johannesburg, so he made yet another trip to South Africa. This time he worked for only one year before his employers, the same ones he had worked for previously, discovered he had cancer of the lungs. Rather than tell him the truth about his condition, they told him that one of his parents had died and that he had to go back home. At the same time, a letter was secretly sent to the recruitment office in Malawi, alerting them of the true state of my uncle’s health. He was sent by air directly to Malawi, and somehow his wife, my auntie, was not told of this turn of events. By then she had borne him a son, and he believed she loved him. Shortly before he died, he mentioned her name to my maternal grandmother, Mai aNakhoni, and that of her village in Mutare. As far as I knew, no one had made any attempt to contact the widow in Zimbabwe. This could have been because of the disappointment caused by my uncle marrying a foreigner, and worse still, a Zimbabwean. The belief was that Zimbabwean and South African women married for money and were lazy. To quote my grandmother, aNakhoni, ‘They spend all their time painting their nails and looking into a mirror to see if their faces have changed.’
I had first come to Mutare to meet my auntie and give her the news about her husband’s death and reassure her that he had not voluntarily deserted her. The sad truth is that my mission had not been a success. The whole village had been wiped out by the Smith government during the liberation struggle, and those who lived there now were all new inhabitants.
Never mind, I had thought, they are now reunited, and he would have told her everything himself and probably a lot more.
Leaving Mutare, I paused in the same hotel car park, resting my weary buttocks, and I asked an old man about the mountain ranges I could see in the distance. In answer to my questions, he could only say, ‘Yes, Malawi is beyond those mountains. It is very far from here; it takes us the whole day on a bus ride to get there.’ He could not have known that with those few words, he transformed the nature of my journey from a one-off search for a disowned lady to one of a regular pilgrimage. Somewhere behind those mountains, my parents, brothers, sister, and friends were going about their everyday chores, unaware of my whereabouts, my hopes, my dreams, and sometimes my despair. If only I were a bird. All that freedom of movement, no passport, and no fear of shadowy figures in the night, but for now, only my eyes could take me, a political outcast, to where I could not go myself – to Malawi, my home country, still under the tyrannical rule of the president for life, Dr Kamuzu Banda.



Chapter 2

FATHER AND MOTHER

My father was a no-nonsense character. An ex-politician and a very prominent businessman, anywhere he went, people either loved him, loathed him, or even feared him. As a man who had almost become a priest, Father commanded respect within the Roman Catholic Church from both blacks and whites. On most Sundays, he played the pipe organ at St Montfort Catholic Institute in Blantyre during Mass.
Although his job meant he knocked off very late at night, he never missed his early morning Sunday Mass, and all of us got used to going to church every Sunday.
I remember one day we arrived in church about two minutes after the Mass had started and found that the two chairs which Father had brought to the cathedral for his and Mother’s personal use were occupied by a white couple. There were, I must add, other chairs vacant, but my father chose not to take them. Instead, he insisted to the deacon that the couple be moved to the other seats. As the entire discussion with the deacon was carried out in Latin, the other party looked on somewhat bemused, but eventually the couple complied and my parents took to their pews, and we all peacefully paid attention to the prayers thereafter. This incident happened in around 1961, when such behaviour from the ‘natives’ was unheard of!
Father later told us, as he drove us home, that he knew the white couple personally. They worked at the African Lakes Corporation (Mandala), and they were very cruel to their workers. He told us that he was sure they were racist and that they had deliberately sat on those seats just to spite him and Mother. ‘That’s why I couldn’t take it! We are all created in God’s image, and we are also created equal. Boys, as you grow older and into the world, you should not allow anyone to treat you differently because of reasons known to themselves, whatever these reasons might be. Never allow that!’ he said assertively.
My father had dropped out of training for the priesthood at the age of thirty-two or thereabouts, by which time he was fluent in English, French, and Latin, . The reason he gave for failing to complete his training was ‘poor health’, but as I never saw my father ill in all my life, I found it hard to accept that poor health had been the reason for his change of heart. I prefer to think that he had probably found different ways of serving the Lord.
He also picked up Portuguese and Yawo later in his working life, in Mozambique and Eastern Malawi respectively, along the shores of Lake Malawi in Mangochi.
My father came to Mwanza from his home village of Ligowe, Traditional Authority Mlauli, with his parents, as a baby in around 1912.
His father had married an Ambo (part of the current Chewa) tribe woman with a Chibwe clan name. The history of the Ambo people is that they had trekked southwards from the Katanga area of the modern-day Democratic Republic of Congo and Northern Zambia area to the Zambezi valley in search of less congested and better agricultural land and pastureland for their animals. Their settling in this area coincided with the arrival of the warlike Mputa’s Ngoni people, who were running away from Chaka Zulu’s reach after the latter had defeated them on the battlefield fought on the veld of the Durban-Natal area of South Africa.
It didn’t take long for the Ambo people to capitulate to these warriors, and they were soon assimilated into the Ngoni culture after several skirmishes, and quite a good number of them started to identify themselves as Ngonis. By the time Grandfather betrothed her, a generation or so later, Miss Chibwe was a complete Ngoni lass, otherwise his parents wouldn’t have sanctioned the marriage in those days.