Barbara Mhangami-Ruwende

 
Suko and Khethiwe walked back to the car, balancing bottles of soft drinks and loaves of bread.

“You are struggling with all that by yourselves, where is Khohlwa?”

“She’s coming. She is in the toilet.”

Khethiwe’s tone with me was rough. I would need to take care of this when we got to Jo’burg. No matter what she thought she was becoming, I was still her mother and she was growing wings. It was time to clip them. It is not a good thing when children grow wings.

“Is she Okay?”

Simon took a bottle of Fanta and Coke and a loaf of bread from Khethiwe.

“She is fine, baba.” Her response to her father was different. She was always polite with him, gentle almost. This bothered me in a way it shouldn’t have. I don’t know but it was, as though she was angry with me for weaning her from the breast. Because that was when I became a nobody and her father became everything.

Simon walked over to where Vusa and Mpofu stood. They were each puffing on a cigarette under a tree that looked as old as the world. He strode back and took a Coke for himself. Suko and Khethiwe had moved to the other side of the car. They used the bonnet as a table and were busy mauling the other loaf of bread, hungrily chewing chunks of it and washing it down with their drinks. Simon came and stood next to me, taking long gulps from his bottle.

“Suko Break off some bread for your mother and me. Why so greedy?”

“Sorry!”

Suko hurried around the front of the car with two chunks of bread on a newspaper. Suko and I had a special bond. I loved my girls but with Suko, it was different. It was more than love. More like adoration. I could imagine devastating sorrow if I lost Khohlwa or Khethiwe but I would go on. With Suko I could not even imagine life continuing if anything happened to him. Since he was born I worried about him constantly. Every time I looked at him my heart broke. I even had this recurring dream where I was putting him back into the womb to keep him safe and always with me. Simon would get angry when at three I still breastfed him. He told him I was damaging him. One day as my chubby baby, Suko, was climbing into my lap to nurse, Simon pulled him off by one arm, dangled him in the air and smacked him hard on his bare bottom. He told him if he ever saw him climbing into my lap like that again he would toss him in with the goats for the night. My Suko was terrified of goats at that age. I lunged at Simon, grabbing Suko but the look in his eyes stopped me dead in my tracks. That night Simon insisted that Suko sleep with Khethiwe and Khohlwa in the other hut. I cried myself to sleep.

 

Khohlwa appeared in the doorway of one of the stores and walked down the steps, off the verandah. She stepped gingerly around a thorny shrub and made her way to the car.

“Don’t finish that bread hey!” she yelled to her siblings, quickening her steps. I watched Simon looking at her, wondering what he was thinking. I ached to know what he was thinking. Years and years of unasked questions staggered around in my head, like drunkards, tumbling and falling and getting up only to fall again.

“We need to go now. You can finish eating in the car. Time is getting away fast.”

Simon signalled to the two men and soon we were all piled back in the car. The engine fired and with a plume of red dust billowing behind us, we left the bustling growth point and headed towards Beitbridge. The children next to me were chatting and arguing.

“That funny tree is a what?” Khethiwe threw out a question.

“It’s a baobab, dummy!” Suko laughed.

“It’s a funny-looking tree, with its thick trunk and branches that start way up. It looks like a woman with funny hair sticking up.”

Homestead after dusty homestead sped by as though they were moving with me inside the Kombi. Some of them looked deserted, thatch falling off, walls crumbling and no sign of life. Others’ homes were alive, with half-naked children running to the roadside and waving happily. Every now and then the Kombi swerved big craters on the tarred road. Sometimes Mpofu saw the pothole too late and we would dip and fall back, insides shaking like a carton of Chibuku beer. Amarula and Syringa trees were scattered in the vegetation, springing up unexpectedly like they were shooting out of the ground.

Mpofu slowed down, swerved gently and picked up speed again. I peered through my window and saw that he swerved to by-pass a donkey-drawn scotch cart trundling along the road. The lettering on the side of the cart were B.M.W. Suko laughed,

“Shame. The poor guy has big dreams!”

He shook his head. Vusa in the middle row laughed also.

“My man, if you own a BMW like that in Zimbabwe, you are a rich man. For many, even a bicycle is too expensive. And they go to work every day, coming out of a rented room because they will never be able to afford a house of their own. We are talking teachers and nurses here.”

Suko was quiet for a while. Then he asked Vusa.

“So, do you live in Zimbabwe then?”

“I live here, there and everywhere my man.”

Silence, like a blanket covered us once again. The monotony of a moving belt of green vegetation made me drowsy. Khethiwe and Khohlwa were also dozing off, heads tilted back onto the seat. The sun was high above us and it was hot. As if he heard my thoughts Vusa rolled down his window halfway and a refreshing breeze blew into the car. On the right side of the road was the skeleton of what was once a car. It was a rusty frame with a smattering of blue paint here and there. It reminded me of the toy-wire-frame cars that boys played with in Nkayi. I wondered if anyone had come out of that wreck alive. Then I spotted another carcass of a car on the other side, further along the road.

“These cars probably collided, Suko muttered. “Then caught fire and burnt until only the shells were left.”

The image of burning cars with people being roasted alive brought back horrible memories of people perishing in fire. I was not sure if they were real memories of things that happened or if they were remembrances of old dreams. But they were vivid. In the memory, I am five years old. Maybe six. There is a gathering at the neighbor’s homestead, the Mabuzas. My family- Aunti and Uncle Mapondo- were not invited, which is strange because we are good neighbors, sharing salt and sugar and everything. I look through a hole in the cactus hedgerow that separates our homesteads and I am jealous that we have not been asked to celebrate and eat with them. I vow that I shall never greet nakaZuzo or tickle baby Innocent’s toes when I pass her yard or meet her on the way to the farm. I will stop playing ara-wuru with Zenzo too.

I notice that there is are men in camouflage uniforms there. They are carrying guns. I know that there is war because that is all the grown-ups whisper about, hands covering their mouths. I know it is a bad thing, this impi where people are fighting and killing one another over land. I have also seen convoys of thundering camouflage trucks snaking along the main road, churning up clouds of dust. It looks like a sand storm during Nyamavuvu, the month of winds. The grown-ups have told us that when a convoy is passing through the village, we must stand still, like in the game ‘Statue’. We have to stand still until all the cars have passed by because if we walk or run the soldiers in the cars will shoot us.

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