FOR MY LOVE
by
Dave Namusanya
I won't be there
when they lose themselves
to the ecstasy of the muse
and burry themselves
in the passions of politics.
I won't congregate with them
under the dark thursday night
as they fail to see the dangers
lurking on the corners
in their stupor of art
I won't join them
as they scratch the nose
of the roaring lions and leopards
with their skill of writing
in their ignorance of danger
I will be here, dear
composing sweet verses and lines
that will sound as mellodies
to fill you with happiness
I will lie on your lap
and wander into distant worlds
before coming back with beautiful poetry
in the chambers of my heart
I won't join them dear
for my poetry
is of love (Is for you)
and they say:
they don't need it
for theirs is political.
Instead, I'll be with you
and watch my nation
being sold at a low price
while our love blossoms!
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Monday, September 20, 2010
SPECIAL POEM FOR THURSDAY, 23RD SEPTEMBER 2010 (POLITICAL NIGHT)
I CANT WAIT
by
Edgar Chipalanjira
I can't wait for thursday
Where political musings will be the order of the day
elongated pens laying truth bare
corrupting the chests layer by layer
I wont wait for the coming week
where long kept secrets will leak
silent papers fast becoming too loud
pin-pointing the conspicous evils abound
I shouldn't wait for the following session
where we will feel the true dynasty impression
the elevation of dominance by a single family
the sibling gallantly ascending slowly but steadily
I cant wait for September twenty third
where those we love and loathe we will grade
Who is biting the finger that fed?
Who are setting a trap on the long used path?
who is busy destroying what he single handedly built?
I cant wait for that day
by
Edgar Chipalanjira
I can't wait for thursday
Where political musings will be the order of the day
elongated pens laying truth bare
corrupting the chests layer by layer
I wont wait for the coming week
where long kept secrets will leak
silent papers fast becoming too loud
pin-pointing the conspicous evils abound
I shouldn't wait for the following session
where we will feel the true dynasty impression
the elevation of dominance by a single family
the sibling gallantly ascending slowly but steadily
I cant wait for September twenty third
where those we love and loathe we will grade
Who is biting the finger that fed?
Who are setting a trap on the long used path?
who is busy destroying what he single handedly built?
I cant wait for that day
Thursday, September 16, 2010
POLITICAL NIGHT
Next Thursday,23rd September 2010,we have a political night.There will be recitations of various political works by our writers in room B from 6:30 pm.Poems, features and short stories that are nothing but political will be recited.Whether plain articles or cryptic articles,all will be entetratined.The event is not in support of any political party,it just is a pure event.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
SHORT STORY FOR THURSDAY,2 SEPT 2010
Little Boys in White
Manyekhula was born short and thin with a long, thin face with very small eyes. He grew with these features. So some forty-six years later, there was very little change on him – he still looked that same old hatchet-faced small ‘boy’.
He was born in a family of five children, all boys. He was the last and the odd one out. While he was still a toddler, his parents stumbled on some soul-destroying character about him, something that made them fear they were rearing a problem for a child.
To them as parents, a normal child should smile at people and not shy away from looking people in the face as though he was born with some congenital guilt. Thus, solicitude personified, they decided to do something before it was too late. At first they tried to encourage him by taking him to as many houses as possible. But he quickly realised his parents were doing it to expose him to as many faces as possible, and so he quickly devised a counterplan that taught them they were dealing with a formidable force – whenever they took him to some stranger, young Manyekhula always faked sleep.
Later they tried the power of the lash to whip the shy person out of him, but that too failed to serve the purpose. Soon he got used to it and so they could give him as many lashes as they could in a week and young Manyekhula would not squirm a whit. Even the ngaliba, that feared instructor at the initition ceremony, confessed he had never before seen a worse pain-proof devil.
One night, in order to teach them all a bitter lesson so they should let him free, Manyekhula fought fire with fire. When all the children were out, listening to fireside stories from their father and mother, Manyekhula secretly entered his father’s bedroom, a few grains of kitchen salt in his hand. There he poured the salt into a bowl containing his father’s raw tobacco. That done, Manyekhula retired to his bedroom, waiting. He knew that his father never retired to bed before rolling one or two cigars.
An hour later, he heard some spliting noise from his father’s bedroom. Manyekhula chuckled in his room – he had hit back.
The man cursed. He guessed who among his children could set such a trap for his own father’s life. He never openly criticised him, however.
From then onwards, the whole family left it to him, Manyekhula, to find his own solution. And he responded manly by taking to the bottle while he was still in his teens. They were surprised that in drinking, their son seemed to have found some trusted companionship, and that it worked where everything else had failed. So, as he staggered home, in slurred speech, he talked all the way – the new pleasure had finally helped him find his tongue and even the courage with which to speak.
In his mid-twenties, the age at which he should have gathered courage to approach a woman, reality came face-to-face with him, however. This time it dawned on him that whatever revolution drinking had brought his life, it had failed to completely floor one great weakness in him – his ineffable shyness before women.
Out of concern for him as their child, some years later when he was forty or thereabout, the elders jumped in to intervene. Through them, he got to live in one house with a woman, one he began to call ‘wife’.
Three or four months ago he lost that woman. She left him two girls: Daniyela, now three; and Mwatitha, two.
As is the custom, her kinsmen had taken the two children to their village only a few hours after the death of their daughter, Manyekhula’s wife. They wanted to relieve Manyekhula of the burden of looking after the two kids in the same period he was carrying the burden of the death of his friend, his wife. Two weeks after the burial, the kinsmen returned to Manyekhula’s house, bringing with them a small shy girl almost half Manyekhula’s age.
The morning after the cleansing ritual, the cleansing ritual always took place at night, during which he had been ‘introduced’ to the girl all night long, the elders asked him whether he had felt warm enough and so whether he felt she was a proper replacement for his late wife.
Whether out of genuine satisfaction or mere shyness, he received the traditional mat, a symbol of acceptance. By accepting that mat, Manyekhula was declaring to all and sundry that after spending a few hours with her, he had come out satisfied, that the girl would give him the comfort and rest every bull looks forward to after exhaustion from long hours of work.
Because Polina, Manyekhula’s new wife, had never had a child before, both sets of kinsmen felt that the time was not ripe yet for the two children to be under her custody. She had to be given time to understand marriage first hand. She had to be given time to put into practice the lessons she had received at the initition ceremony, the lessons that centre on the full set of expectations of any black man of his black woman. So, in the third month, when she started feeling intense nausea, there were two of them in the house.
To her, these three months in this man’s house were like a millennium spent on some lifeless island. She found his presence intimidating and what with that ever-present odour of stale tobacco and that characteristic reek of beer! Often she prayed that she should not fall pregnant soon. But nature was looking at things differently, and here she was, vomiting. She did not like it.
When she told him she was vomiting, his face lightened. The vomitting excited him. Right from day one, he had wanted her to bear him a child. He often confessed to himself that there was something in her that he had never found in his late wife. To keep her close to him, he had to give her as many children as possible.
That Saturday afternoon, only a few hours after learning his wife was vomiting, Manyekhula climbed Menje Hill to cut bamboo to use in making cane furniture. In case that vomiting meant some beginning of some good news, he did not want to be taken by surprise. He wanted to make money for her to buy a few balls of wool and a knitting needle for her to knit their child a jersey with some matching bootees.
Saturday afternoons were always a time of activities in the village. That day a villager crier had blasted from as early as cock crow, calling on every villager to a meeting by the health officials from the mission hospital. Even before Polina had disclosed to him about the vomiting, Manyekhula had made up his mind to skive off that meeting. An incident last year made him lose appetite with every activity arranged by people from the mission hospital. Every time he recalled the incident, his blood boiled and he always ended by cursing or confessing: “I wasn’t in a mood; otherwise I’d wring someone’s neck there!”
It wasn’t the whole programme that had been disagreeable, but one activity by a young girl in a tight jean trousers and a skimpy white T-shirt. That event had demonstrated to him that many people take the amiable spirit of those living in the village for granted.
The girl had started it well, mixing her speech with some English before coming on to that terrible part of the actual exhibition. So, a black thick rod in one hand, and a condom in the other, the girl demonstrated the wearing act itself! Manyekhula recalled that the girl was doing the lesson with all the freedom before her.
The scene was obviously a source of amusement to young boys and girls who kept interrupting her with their huge clapping of hands, but it was a huge disappointment, a bitter pill of sort, to every grown-up. They, the grown-ups, had looked either away or down on their feet throughout that shameful scene. Many left the playground at that time, vowing never again to attend any meeting in which youth would be part of.
Manyekhula attributed the problem of youth at the mission hospital to the leaving of the wimple-wearing white nuns from Brazil. The last one, Sisita Daniyela, left a year ago, and since, secrets done at the hospital were being heard even in beerhalls. Whenever he thought about services at the mission hospital, he remembered her, Sisita Daniyela Feronandozi. It was Sisita Daniyela that had delivered his first child, that girl now three. And it was Sisita Daniyela herself that had asked his wife if she, Daniyela, could give her name to the girl. When Sisita Daniyela was still at the mission hospital, his daughter never lacked toys and dolls to play with. Sisita Daniyela always provided her with as many as she could use in a month.
Manyekhula felt that the mission hospital was a different world today. What his late friend, Ndafakale, had seen at the mission hospital the other day, strengthened his case.
Like him, Ndafakale had married a second wife after the death of his first. But unlike him, Ndafakale had married youth. He was over fifty and his new wife was in her mid twenties. When the girl fell pregnant, she began to exprience terrible stomach aches. The elders tried a number of tradtional doctors but with every visit to a tsangoma, the condition worsened. When the elders could not see any way out, they asked women elders to take her to the hospital. This the women did.
At the hospital the doctors identified the problem and advised that she should come along with her man so that both should receive treatment at the same time.
At first Ndafakale hesitated and for an obvious reason – the hospital people would not understand that there are things culture imposes on a people, things doctors and others with jaundiced perceptions can deem hazardous. However, on the advice of the village chief himself, Ndafakale gave in.
On his return, Ndafakale never had words with which to describe what had befallen him at the mission hospital. There, young boys and girls in white had charged at him, accusing him of ‘deliberately wanting to kill the young girl’.
“Ndafakale was a good person,” Manyekhula said. “They can’t call me a witch and I just let them get away with it!” he screeched. “Who is better placed to judge another whether a woman he has married is a child? I thought it’s the one who sleeps in the same house with her?” He clinched his fists and gnashed his teeth as though he was about to grab a neck of one girl or boy in white, about to wring it with a vengeance.
Ndafakale had personally told him that after the insults, they gave them two very painful injections, one on each buttock, and numerous sachets of capsules of all colours of the rainbow to take in for the next two weeks. Ndafakale had also disclosed to him that they had also given him a number of packets of condoms, advising him to always don them on and to come and collect another bunch once he had used up the ones proferred.
Manyekhula giggled when he recalled what Ndafakale had confided in him on the whereabouts of those condoms. “Straight from the hospital I fed them to flames!” he quoted his late friend, Ndafakale, word-for-word.
A few months down the line, they buried Ndafakale’s new wife. And in the week for a sexual cleansing ritual when Ndafakale was expecting a replacement, her wife’s relations stomped, saying they would never give Ndafakale another woman because he had very bad blood for young women.
“If they’d refuse me a replacement, I’d demand my goats back!” Manyekhula said, almost shouting. “Lobola doesn’t end when your wife dies!”
Ndafakale himself died single shortly afterwards.
Manyekhula recalled that once or twice he had been to the hospital with his wife for treatment for a female condition but none of the white missionary workers there had ever accused him of anything. Today he confessed that if Polina would fall pregnant, he would never allow her to visit the mission hospital. He was not afraid of the age gap between him and Polina – she was in her mid-twenties – not bad on village age mathematics. He simply didn’t want the young boys and girls in white to make fool of him.
If Polina would carry him a child, he would prove a few liars wrong. There were some in the village who never wished him well, those who kept arguing that past forty and being a man who had been on beer almost all his years, he would never have life in his shorts to share to the young girl. He wanted to show them that his blood was still powerful and that in it was a life, a life big enough to share even with a young woman.
After finishing with the tying, he raised the tappered end of the bundle, leaning it against a huge naphini tree. It was now time to smoke.
He found himself a smooth rock, where he perched, sucking placidly at his hand-rolled cigar of raw tobacco.
From that rock he had a perfect view of the life and village below. It had been long since he had climbed this hill this up. He usually cut the bamboo in a small bamboo bush near the marsh right in the village itself. Today he had chosen to come this long because he did not want people to notice he had chosen to cut his bamboo at a time the rest of the villagers were at the meeting ground. For the same reason he had left behind a machete for a hacksaw. The cutting noise from a machete can attract attention.
Today he realised that many houses in the village were carrying corrugated iron sheets. Those still supporting thatched roofs looked like dark spots opposing the heavily penetrating reflections from the silver of those metal roofs. He looked with concentrated attention to spot his house. It was being hidden by that biggest structure in the village – the newly built orphanage centre. To him, perhaps because he looked at all that through smoked eyes, things had really changed and the village was no longer that same old one he knew. He felt that even the people themselves were no longer one and that perhaps the only thing that gave them a feeling of oneness was that fact that they lived in the same village, but nothing else apart from that.
“No, I’m one with Polina,” he whispered to himself, correcting himself.
At this he remembered that when coming here, he left her vomiting. He smiled. Many had said his bibulous habits would block his power to deposit life in Polina.
Now he noted that the cigar was burning his lips. He pressed its end with his bare fingers, and threw away the end. He scrambled to his feet, making it towards his bundle. The dry leaves scrunched under his bare feet. He slid the hacksaw in it, before giving it a good heave onto his left shoulder. A stick from his right hand went above his shoulder, resting on it gently, to the bundle – this was meant for balancing, to reduce the weight somehow by spreading it evenly.
He would sidle his way round the hill. Those returning from the meeting at the village playground should not see him.
At home, he stood the bundle against the mango tree facing his door. Then he went straight through the open door. There was no sign of his love, Polina. He dashed out and went round the house. And there she was – squating, vomiting. He smiled grossly before posing: “Still vomiting?” His borrowed tone gave the game away.
She looked him up, her eyes red and exhausted. “It’s now too much,” she said.
He felt some strength going round his body and he giggled insanely. “It must be it.” Sensing that perhaps he was not being sensitive to his woman, he assumed some concern: “But have you had anything since?”
She shook her head.
At this, Manyekhula turned round and took the direction of Polina’s parents’ village. He wanted to fetch someone there to come and cook for their daughter, Polina.
In the evening, he decided to share the story with Gwamula, his bosom friend. Gwamula also liked drinking though not as much as Manyekhula. Besides, Gwamula was not as garrulous when drunk. He worked for the mission hospital.
He passed by the grocery to buy two bottles of Coca Cola. He could not visit Gwamula and return without celebrating life over a bottle or two. The two had a tendency of fortifying the jang’ala with Coca Cola. It made the beer change colour and produce a lot of bubbles like Castle Lager.
Gwamula sent his last born to buy them a veremuti of their beer.
The burning water loosened their tongues. Like little children, they began to tackle one subject after another with unimpedded directness.
“I’m sure my wife has a child in her. Soon you’ll see her bulge,” Manyekhula said, introducing a completely new subject.
“For what Manyekhula, you animal!”
“Fool! Didn’t you all say beer was killing me? What other way to prove all you wrong!”
“Is it a matter of proving me or the chief or anyone else wrong, wastrel? No. I thought they gave you the girl to take care of you and the two children? Was it meant to start a new family, Manyekhula?”
“Is it a problem?”
“It doesn’t sound like one? Do you know feeding children is not as easy these days?”
Manyekhula slipped into a guffaw before coming out: “You go to church, Gwamula?”
“I do, and I eat mgonero too.”
“You believe in the bible?” Manyekhula asked again.
“Then why do I go to church every Sunday?”
“Gwamula,” he said, crocked his neck and came in again, “you have heard of birds of forest which do not have hoes?”
“Which do not sow? Yes, I have; but are you a bird, Manyekhula?”
“Thank you, Gwamula.” He nodded his head and came again: “You mean those words are for real birds, birds that fly like this?” He waved his hands in the air as though he were a bird of the forest that never sows.
“Aargh, Manyekhula, you’re mixing issues here.”
They argued and argued. Sleep found them both there. In fact it was Gwamula’s wife that came to wake the celebrants up, reminding them they were sleeping so close to the log fire and would immolate themselves like senseless moths.
The following morning at Gwamula’s advice if not threat, Manyekhula borrowed Gwamula’s Humilton bicycle to take his wife to the mission hospital. Gwamula had told him about the new reproduction policy, that every pregnancy must be verified by a hospital otherwise the police would consider a hidden pregnancy case gone wrong a murder case for which he, Manyekhula, would be answerable.
He was going to use the bumpy laterite road passing through three villages on the way to the hospital. What he had heard about police officers on the tarmac road scared him. At a drinking joint one evening someone had told him that policemen had now bought a very small machine which they were using to detect beer in men. That instrument, he was told, was able to detect how many bottles one had drunk, where and even when he took the liquour. He had been told men were being forced to breathe into it, and like a traditional doctor’s nsupa that can show all witches in a mirror, it smoked out imbibers. The speaker had added, saying once detected, the imbibers were being bundled into a windowless police van to the station where they received lashes before being given long brooms to sweep outside the district assembly offices. He didn’t want that shameful mode of punishment to befall him.
He waited for her at a grocery, not far from the mission hospital. He noted an increase in the number of boys in white taking the direction of the hospital.
After an hour of waiting, he saw her approach, looking not herself. When he asked what was wrong, she said the doctors had told her she was carrying a life at which he gave a wide smile.
That evening, he left her at home and went to treat himself to a few bottles. He wanted to do two things tonight: to ask Gwamula whether the many young boys he had seen taking the direction of the mission hospital also worked with expectant mothers; and to make announcement of the good news.
What Gwamula told him shocked him. Previously Manyekhula was of the mind that the boys in white were only employed to dress wounds. But Gwamula had told him some were in fact working in the maternity ward itself, helping women at childbirth itself.
That night, after announcing the village over the mission hospital had confirmed his wife was expecting his child, he turned his waspish tongue on the mission hospital itself. “How can young boys work in a birth ward? Isn’t that an accident waiting to happen?” he shouted.
He said he was going to pay the Bishop a visit to ask why, he as a man of God, was allowing boys, black boys at that, to see other people’s women in the labour ward. “How can young boys work in a female ward? If the Bishopo or the Monsinyo won’t sort this mess, I’ll visit a witch doctor!” He sounded serious. Those who heard him say this were without doubt that he was indeed going to say the words to the bishop, and that he was not joking. They knew what he was capable of.
The other time, a few years before, he walked straight to the gate of the house of the bishop and there asked the gatemen if they could please allow him in, that he had some important message to the bishop, Bishop Kambiyaso.
Bishop Kambiyaso, an Italian, had arrived in this country way back in the days of the fight for independence. He was said to have been influential in the negotiations for the country’s freedom itself. He spoke the vernacular as well as the owners. His sermons, both in churches and on funerals, were always in the vernacular. The people felt he was part of them not only because he believed in the power of giving, but much more because he always encouraged people never to judge others by their skin colour because skin colour was not an issue at all in the sight of God. They liked him and they respected him. Before his death, he died in his dotage, he had requested that he should be buried among his people, black people. And on his death, the people granted him, a man that had slogged all his life for them, his wish.
The gatemen, one of them came from the same village with him, refused him entry, saying the man of God was preparing to go to a funeral of one of the parish priests in the diocese. Manyekhula refused to listen and challenged them he was going to keep a constant vigil outside the gate well until they would give him access to the bishop.
When he saw the bishops’ vehicle approach the gate, Manyekhula went on his knees in supplication and started presenting his case.
The real drama began when he asked him whether, as a bishop, he had ever read about Davite, the servant of God, and Uliya, Davite’s servant, a soldier.
In wondering dismay the bishop wanted to know what it was he wanted to mean.
Manyekhula said Father Danileki was Davite, and Uliya was Che Nsungwi, the tea room owner.
The matter was not a mere allegation. The whole village knew that Father Danileki was stealing Che Nsungwi’s wife, Abiti Malefula; none, however, talked it openly. Even poor Che Nsungwi himself knew it, but he too was impotent on the issue. As a parish priest, Father Danileki was a representative of heaven.
When asked what the bishop’s response was, one of the gatemen who had witnessed the drama said the bishop had simply remarked: “I’ve heard your concern, sir.” and then he gestured for them to open the gate for him to pass.
A week later, Father Danileki was transferred to another diocese. The bishop had, in a way, slaked Manyekhula’s demand for justice.
And so when Manyekhula said he was going to ask the incumbent bishop, Bishop Zikopa, why he, black as he was, was allowing youth to brood in female wards, even at a mission hospital itself, those who knew what Manyekhula was capable of, took him at his word.
In the wee small hours, only a few days after making that statement, he startled the village again: “If I say that I have talked to the Bishopo himself, then I’m a dog! A liar! But I’ve talked to Monsinyo Mateyu himself. He has assured me no bull will ever see her in the maternity! He says he will ask the matron herself to be in the ward when Polina’s time is ripe. Believe it or not!” He exploded into maniacal laughter. Then there was silence. The village sighed with relief.
Many men agreed with him – there are some things one cannot surrender to youth, just like that, no matter the English they speak.
Manyekhula was born short and thin with a long, thin face with very small eyes. He grew with these features. So some forty-six years later, there was very little change on him – he still looked that same old hatchet-faced small ‘boy’.
He was born in a family of five children, all boys. He was the last and the odd one out. While he was still a toddler, his parents stumbled on some soul-destroying character about him, something that made them fear they were rearing a problem for a child.
To them as parents, a normal child should smile at people and not shy away from looking people in the face as though he was born with some congenital guilt. Thus, solicitude personified, they decided to do something before it was too late. At first they tried to encourage him by taking him to as many houses as possible. But he quickly realised his parents were doing it to expose him to as many faces as possible, and so he quickly devised a counterplan that taught them they were dealing with a formidable force – whenever they took him to some stranger, young Manyekhula always faked sleep.
Later they tried the power of the lash to whip the shy person out of him, but that too failed to serve the purpose. Soon he got used to it and so they could give him as many lashes as they could in a week and young Manyekhula would not squirm a whit. Even the ngaliba, that feared instructor at the initition ceremony, confessed he had never before seen a worse pain-proof devil.
One night, in order to teach them all a bitter lesson so they should let him free, Manyekhula fought fire with fire. When all the children were out, listening to fireside stories from their father and mother, Manyekhula secretly entered his father’s bedroom, a few grains of kitchen salt in his hand. There he poured the salt into a bowl containing his father’s raw tobacco. That done, Manyekhula retired to his bedroom, waiting. He knew that his father never retired to bed before rolling one or two cigars.
An hour later, he heard some spliting noise from his father’s bedroom. Manyekhula chuckled in his room – he had hit back.
The man cursed. He guessed who among his children could set such a trap for his own father’s life. He never openly criticised him, however.
From then onwards, the whole family left it to him, Manyekhula, to find his own solution. And he responded manly by taking to the bottle while he was still in his teens. They were surprised that in drinking, their son seemed to have found some trusted companionship, and that it worked where everything else had failed. So, as he staggered home, in slurred speech, he talked all the way – the new pleasure had finally helped him find his tongue and even the courage with which to speak.
In his mid-twenties, the age at which he should have gathered courage to approach a woman, reality came face-to-face with him, however. This time it dawned on him that whatever revolution drinking had brought his life, it had failed to completely floor one great weakness in him – his ineffable shyness before women.
Out of concern for him as their child, some years later when he was forty or thereabout, the elders jumped in to intervene. Through them, he got to live in one house with a woman, one he began to call ‘wife’.
Three or four months ago he lost that woman. She left him two girls: Daniyela, now three; and Mwatitha, two.
As is the custom, her kinsmen had taken the two children to their village only a few hours after the death of their daughter, Manyekhula’s wife. They wanted to relieve Manyekhula of the burden of looking after the two kids in the same period he was carrying the burden of the death of his friend, his wife. Two weeks after the burial, the kinsmen returned to Manyekhula’s house, bringing with them a small shy girl almost half Manyekhula’s age.
The morning after the cleansing ritual, the cleansing ritual always took place at night, during which he had been ‘introduced’ to the girl all night long, the elders asked him whether he had felt warm enough and so whether he felt she was a proper replacement for his late wife.
Whether out of genuine satisfaction or mere shyness, he received the traditional mat, a symbol of acceptance. By accepting that mat, Manyekhula was declaring to all and sundry that after spending a few hours with her, he had come out satisfied, that the girl would give him the comfort and rest every bull looks forward to after exhaustion from long hours of work.
Because Polina, Manyekhula’s new wife, had never had a child before, both sets of kinsmen felt that the time was not ripe yet for the two children to be under her custody. She had to be given time to understand marriage first hand. She had to be given time to put into practice the lessons she had received at the initition ceremony, the lessons that centre on the full set of expectations of any black man of his black woman. So, in the third month, when she started feeling intense nausea, there were two of them in the house.
To her, these three months in this man’s house were like a millennium spent on some lifeless island. She found his presence intimidating and what with that ever-present odour of stale tobacco and that characteristic reek of beer! Often she prayed that she should not fall pregnant soon. But nature was looking at things differently, and here she was, vomiting. She did not like it.
When she told him she was vomiting, his face lightened. The vomitting excited him. Right from day one, he had wanted her to bear him a child. He often confessed to himself that there was something in her that he had never found in his late wife. To keep her close to him, he had to give her as many children as possible.
That Saturday afternoon, only a few hours after learning his wife was vomiting, Manyekhula climbed Menje Hill to cut bamboo to use in making cane furniture. In case that vomiting meant some beginning of some good news, he did not want to be taken by surprise. He wanted to make money for her to buy a few balls of wool and a knitting needle for her to knit their child a jersey with some matching bootees.
Saturday afternoons were always a time of activities in the village. That day a villager crier had blasted from as early as cock crow, calling on every villager to a meeting by the health officials from the mission hospital. Even before Polina had disclosed to him about the vomiting, Manyekhula had made up his mind to skive off that meeting. An incident last year made him lose appetite with every activity arranged by people from the mission hospital. Every time he recalled the incident, his blood boiled and he always ended by cursing or confessing: “I wasn’t in a mood; otherwise I’d wring someone’s neck there!”
It wasn’t the whole programme that had been disagreeable, but one activity by a young girl in a tight jean trousers and a skimpy white T-shirt. That event had demonstrated to him that many people take the amiable spirit of those living in the village for granted.
The girl had started it well, mixing her speech with some English before coming on to that terrible part of the actual exhibition. So, a black thick rod in one hand, and a condom in the other, the girl demonstrated the wearing act itself! Manyekhula recalled that the girl was doing the lesson with all the freedom before her.
The scene was obviously a source of amusement to young boys and girls who kept interrupting her with their huge clapping of hands, but it was a huge disappointment, a bitter pill of sort, to every grown-up. They, the grown-ups, had looked either away or down on their feet throughout that shameful scene. Many left the playground at that time, vowing never again to attend any meeting in which youth would be part of.
Manyekhula attributed the problem of youth at the mission hospital to the leaving of the wimple-wearing white nuns from Brazil. The last one, Sisita Daniyela, left a year ago, and since, secrets done at the hospital were being heard even in beerhalls. Whenever he thought about services at the mission hospital, he remembered her, Sisita Daniyela Feronandozi. It was Sisita Daniyela that had delivered his first child, that girl now three. And it was Sisita Daniyela herself that had asked his wife if she, Daniyela, could give her name to the girl. When Sisita Daniyela was still at the mission hospital, his daughter never lacked toys and dolls to play with. Sisita Daniyela always provided her with as many as she could use in a month.
Manyekhula felt that the mission hospital was a different world today. What his late friend, Ndafakale, had seen at the mission hospital the other day, strengthened his case.
Like him, Ndafakale had married a second wife after the death of his first. But unlike him, Ndafakale had married youth. He was over fifty and his new wife was in her mid twenties. When the girl fell pregnant, she began to exprience terrible stomach aches. The elders tried a number of tradtional doctors but with every visit to a tsangoma, the condition worsened. When the elders could not see any way out, they asked women elders to take her to the hospital. This the women did.
At the hospital the doctors identified the problem and advised that she should come along with her man so that both should receive treatment at the same time.
At first Ndafakale hesitated and for an obvious reason – the hospital people would not understand that there are things culture imposes on a people, things doctors and others with jaundiced perceptions can deem hazardous. However, on the advice of the village chief himself, Ndafakale gave in.
On his return, Ndafakale never had words with which to describe what had befallen him at the mission hospital. There, young boys and girls in white had charged at him, accusing him of ‘deliberately wanting to kill the young girl’.
“Ndafakale was a good person,” Manyekhula said. “They can’t call me a witch and I just let them get away with it!” he screeched. “Who is better placed to judge another whether a woman he has married is a child? I thought it’s the one who sleeps in the same house with her?” He clinched his fists and gnashed his teeth as though he was about to grab a neck of one girl or boy in white, about to wring it with a vengeance.
Ndafakale had personally told him that after the insults, they gave them two very painful injections, one on each buttock, and numerous sachets of capsules of all colours of the rainbow to take in for the next two weeks. Ndafakale had also disclosed to him that they had also given him a number of packets of condoms, advising him to always don them on and to come and collect another bunch once he had used up the ones proferred.
Manyekhula giggled when he recalled what Ndafakale had confided in him on the whereabouts of those condoms. “Straight from the hospital I fed them to flames!” he quoted his late friend, Ndafakale, word-for-word.
A few months down the line, they buried Ndafakale’s new wife. And in the week for a sexual cleansing ritual when Ndafakale was expecting a replacement, her wife’s relations stomped, saying they would never give Ndafakale another woman because he had very bad blood for young women.
“If they’d refuse me a replacement, I’d demand my goats back!” Manyekhula said, almost shouting. “Lobola doesn’t end when your wife dies!”
Ndafakale himself died single shortly afterwards.
Manyekhula recalled that once or twice he had been to the hospital with his wife for treatment for a female condition but none of the white missionary workers there had ever accused him of anything. Today he confessed that if Polina would fall pregnant, he would never allow her to visit the mission hospital. He was not afraid of the age gap between him and Polina – she was in her mid-twenties – not bad on village age mathematics. He simply didn’t want the young boys and girls in white to make fool of him.
If Polina would carry him a child, he would prove a few liars wrong. There were some in the village who never wished him well, those who kept arguing that past forty and being a man who had been on beer almost all his years, he would never have life in his shorts to share to the young girl. He wanted to show them that his blood was still powerful and that in it was a life, a life big enough to share even with a young woman.
After finishing with the tying, he raised the tappered end of the bundle, leaning it against a huge naphini tree. It was now time to smoke.
He found himself a smooth rock, where he perched, sucking placidly at his hand-rolled cigar of raw tobacco.
From that rock he had a perfect view of the life and village below. It had been long since he had climbed this hill this up. He usually cut the bamboo in a small bamboo bush near the marsh right in the village itself. Today he had chosen to come this long because he did not want people to notice he had chosen to cut his bamboo at a time the rest of the villagers were at the meeting ground. For the same reason he had left behind a machete for a hacksaw. The cutting noise from a machete can attract attention.
Today he realised that many houses in the village were carrying corrugated iron sheets. Those still supporting thatched roofs looked like dark spots opposing the heavily penetrating reflections from the silver of those metal roofs. He looked with concentrated attention to spot his house. It was being hidden by that biggest structure in the village – the newly built orphanage centre. To him, perhaps because he looked at all that through smoked eyes, things had really changed and the village was no longer that same old one he knew. He felt that even the people themselves were no longer one and that perhaps the only thing that gave them a feeling of oneness was that fact that they lived in the same village, but nothing else apart from that.
“No, I’m one with Polina,” he whispered to himself, correcting himself.
At this he remembered that when coming here, he left her vomiting. He smiled. Many had said his bibulous habits would block his power to deposit life in Polina.
Now he noted that the cigar was burning his lips. He pressed its end with his bare fingers, and threw away the end. He scrambled to his feet, making it towards his bundle. The dry leaves scrunched under his bare feet. He slid the hacksaw in it, before giving it a good heave onto his left shoulder. A stick from his right hand went above his shoulder, resting on it gently, to the bundle – this was meant for balancing, to reduce the weight somehow by spreading it evenly.
He would sidle his way round the hill. Those returning from the meeting at the village playground should not see him.
At home, he stood the bundle against the mango tree facing his door. Then he went straight through the open door. There was no sign of his love, Polina. He dashed out and went round the house. And there she was – squating, vomiting. He smiled grossly before posing: “Still vomiting?” His borrowed tone gave the game away.
She looked him up, her eyes red and exhausted. “It’s now too much,” she said.
He felt some strength going round his body and he giggled insanely. “It must be it.” Sensing that perhaps he was not being sensitive to his woman, he assumed some concern: “But have you had anything since?”
She shook her head.
At this, Manyekhula turned round and took the direction of Polina’s parents’ village. He wanted to fetch someone there to come and cook for their daughter, Polina.
In the evening, he decided to share the story with Gwamula, his bosom friend. Gwamula also liked drinking though not as much as Manyekhula. Besides, Gwamula was not as garrulous when drunk. He worked for the mission hospital.
He passed by the grocery to buy two bottles of Coca Cola. He could not visit Gwamula and return without celebrating life over a bottle or two. The two had a tendency of fortifying the jang’ala with Coca Cola. It made the beer change colour and produce a lot of bubbles like Castle Lager.
Gwamula sent his last born to buy them a veremuti of their beer.
The burning water loosened their tongues. Like little children, they began to tackle one subject after another with unimpedded directness.
“I’m sure my wife has a child in her. Soon you’ll see her bulge,” Manyekhula said, introducing a completely new subject.
“For what Manyekhula, you animal!”
“Fool! Didn’t you all say beer was killing me? What other way to prove all you wrong!”
“Is it a matter of proving me or the chief or anyone else wrong, wastrel? No. I thought they gave you the girl to take care of you and the two children? Was it meant to start a new family, Manyekhula?”
“Is it a problem?”
“It doesn’t sound like one? Do you know feeding children is not as easy these days?”
Manyekhula slipped into a guffaw before coming out: “You go to church, Gwamula?”
“I do, and I eat mgonero too.”
“You believe in the bible?” Manyekhula asked again.
“Then why do I go to church every Sunday?”
“Gwamula,” he said, crocked his neck and came in again, “you have heard of birds of forest which do not have hoes?”
“Which do not sow? Yes, I have; but are you a bird, Manyekhula?”
“Thank you, Gwamula.” He nodded his head and came again: “You mean those words are for real birds, birds that fly like this?” He waved his hands in the air as though he were a bird of the forest that never sows.
“Aargh, Manyekhula, you’re mixing issues here.”
They argued and argued. Sleep found them both there. In fact it was Gwamula’s wife that came to wake the celebrants up, reminding them they were sleeping so close to the log fire and would immolate themselves like senseless moths.
The following morning at Gwamula’s advice if not threat, Manyekhula borrowed Gwamula’s Humilton bicycle to take his wife to the mission hospital. Gwamula had told him about the new reproduction policy, that every pregnancy must be verified by a hospital otherwise the police would consider a hidden pregnancy case gone wrong a murder case for which he, Manyekhula, would be answerable.
He was going to use the bumpy laterite road passing through three villages on the way to the hospital. What he had heard about police officers on the tarmac road scared him. At a drinking joint one evening someone had told him that policemen had now bought a very small machine which they were using to detect beer in men. That instrument, he was told, was able to detect how many bottles one had drunk, where and even when he took the liquour. He had been told men were being forced to breathe into it, and like a traditional doctor’s nsupa that can show all witches in a mirror, it smoked out imbibers. The speaker had added, saying once detected, the imbibers were being bundled into a windowless police van to the station where they received lashes before being given long brooms to sweep outside the district assembly offices. He didn’t want that shameful mode of punishment to befall him.
He waited for her at a grocery, not far from the mission hospital. He noted an increase in the number of boys in white taking the direction of the hospital.
After an hour of waiting, he saw her approach, looking not herself. When he asked what was wrong, she said the doctors had told her she was carrying a life at which he gave a wide smile.
That evening, he left her at home and went to treat himself to a few bottles. He wanted to do two things tonight: to ask Gwamula whether the many young boys he had seen taking the direction of the mission hospital also worked with expectant mothers; and to make announcement of the good news.
What Gwamula told him shocked him. Previously Manyekhula was of the mind that the boys in white were only employed to dress wounds. But Gwamula had told him some were in fact working in the maternity ward itself, helping women at childbirth itself.
That night, after announcing the village over the mission hospital had confirmed his wife was expecting his child, he turned his waspish tongue on the mission hospital itself. “How can young boys work in a birth ward? Isn’t that an accident waiting to happen?” he shouted.
He said he was going to pay the Bishop a visit to ask why, he as a man of God, was allowing boys, black boys at that, to see other people’s women in the labour ward. “How can young boys work in a female ward? If the Bishopo or the Monsinyo won’t sort this mess, I’ll visit a witch doctor!” He sounded serious. Those who heard him say this were without doubt that he was indeed going to say the words to the bishop, and that he was not joking. They knew what he was capable of.
The other time, a few years before, he walked straight to the gate of the house of the bishop and there asked the gatemen if they could please allow him in, that he had some important message to the bishop, Bishop Kambiyaso.
Bishop Kambiyaso, an Italian, had arrived in this country way back in the days of the fight for independence. He was said to have been influential in the negotiations for the country’s freedom itself. He spoke the vernacular as well as the owners. His sermons, both in churches and on funerals, were always in the vernacular. The people felt he was part of them not only because he believed in the power of giving, but much more because he always encouraged people never to judge others by their skin colour because skin colour was not an issue at all in the sight of God. They liked him and they respected him. Before his death, he died in his dotage, he had requested that he should be buried among his people, black people. And on his death, the people granted him, a man that had slogged all his life for them, his wish.
The gatemen, one of them came from the same village with him, refused him entry, saying the man of God was preparing to go to a funeral of one of the parish priests in the diocese. Manyekhula refused to listen and challenged them he was going to keep a constant vigil outside the gate well until they would give him access to the bishop.
When he saw the bishops’ vehicle approach the gate, Manyekhula went on his knees in supplication and started presenting his case.
The real drama began when he asked him whether, as a bishop, he had ever read about Davite, the servant of God, and Uliya, Davite’s servant, a soldier.
In wondering dismay the bishop wanted to know what it was he wanted to mean.
Manyekhula said Father Danileki was Davite, and Uliya was Che Nsungwi, the tea room owner.
The matter was not a mere allegation. The whole village knew that Father Danileki was stealing Che Nsungwi’s wife, Abiti Malefula; none, however, talked it openly. Even poor Che Nsungwi himself knew it, but he too was impotent on the issue. As a parish priest, Father Danileki was a representative of heaven.
When asked what the bishop’s response was, one of the gatemen who had witnessed the drama said the bishop had simply remarked: “I’ve heard your concern, sir.” and then he gestured for them to open the gate for him to pass.
A week later, Father Danileki was transferred to another diocese. The bishop had, in a way, slaked Manyekhula’s demand for justice.
And so when Manyekhula said he was going to ask the incumbent bishop, Bishop Zikopa, why he, black as he was, was allowing youth to brood in female wards, even at a mission hospital itself, those who knew what Manyekhula was capable of, took him at his word.
In the wee small hours, only a few days after making that statement, he startled the village again: “If I say that I have talked to the Bishopo himself, then I’m a dog! A liar! But I’ve talked to Monsinyo Mateyu himself. He has assured me no bull will ever see her in the maternity! He says he will ask the matron herself to be in the ward when Polina’s time is ripe. Believe it or not!” He exploded into maniacal laughter. Then there was silence. The village sighed with relief.
Many men agreed with him – there are some things one cannot surrender to youth, just like that, no matter the English they speak.
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