House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe. Christina Lamb
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away so she slept in the kraal with the animals even in winter when it was cold.
When he had finished beating his wife, he would return to the kitchen hut where the children all sat rooted to the spot and grab the food left untouched on their plates, smacking his lips with lusty pleasure. If they moved, he would cuss at them and sometimes beat them too. Once when I was about three, he picked me up and threw me out of the hut like a ball so hard that I still have the scar. My grandmother, the one who was a spirit medium, mixed a paste of herbs to rub in the wound which made it hurt even more. That was the year that Prime Minister Ian Smith had illegally declared Rhodesia independent from Britain. I didn't know what UDI was but from the way grown-ups talked about it I knew it was something very bad that meant that our people would never have their own country like our brothers had got in Zambia next door.
The next day as always her father was very contrite and hangdog, tickling her under her chin and calling her his little princess. The evenings when he was not drunk he would tell stories. Often they were about long-ago times when the Ndebele came and killed our men and took our beautiful women and cows, or when the whites came and drove out the black people to the hills and mountains and barren land and took away the good land.
Sometimes they were about Nehanda, the mhondoro woman from Mazowe who inspired the 1896 uprising of the Shona against the white settlers when they realized they had been cheated out of their land by the strangers. I loved those stories best of all My father said we were even descended from one of those who had led the fight with her.
The rebellion was known as the Chimurenga, a poetic Shona word which means fight or struggle, and it was one of the most violent and organized rebellions against white rule anywhere in Africa. Three hundred and seventy-two whites were killed-around 10 per cent of the settlers. Some of those scattered around on homesteads gathered together to form laagers such as that around the large thorn tree which eventually became the settlement of Enkeldoorn.
The Pioneers were taken by surprise by the revolt of natives they had seen as placid and submissive as the cattle they herded, and whom they had thought welcomed their arrival as protection against the raiding parties of the Ndebele. But the Shona were angry that not only had they lost their land but were also expected to pay hut tax which meant losing their menfolk to the mines and farms of the strangers. On top of that the year the white man arrived in 1890 coincided with a plague of locusts that returned again each year. By 1895 the numbers were so many that people said they blotted out the sun. On top of that, in 1894, a terrible drought had started. Lastly, in early 1896, an epidemic of rinderpest broke out among the cattle, leaving a trail of carcasses across the country. The authorities panicked and herded thousands more cows into kraals for slaughter.
To the superstitious Shona these were all signs that the spirits were angry and they were eager to take up their weapons and follow Nehanda in rebellion. Nehanda could summon up spirits and she instructed our people, ‘Spread yourself through the forests and fight till the stranger leaves’ She was so strong and brave, she just thought about the country, not like Lobengula who just wanted the sugar. When the whites tried to break her spirit by offering things, she just said No. The whites were very cunning but she was also cunning.
The Shona might have had numbers and spirits on their side but the settlers had guns and dynamite. The Shona chiefs were hunted down and the caves where they and their followers were hiding were blown up. In December 1897, Nehanda was eventually caught and taken to Salisbury. Father Richartz, the Jesuit priest from the Chishawasha Mission, was called for. He wrote in the mission records, ‘Nehanda began to dance, to laugh and talk so that the warders were obliged to tie her hands and watch her continually as she threatened to kill herself.’ She refused his entreaties to be taken into the Catholic faith, instead demanding to be returned to her people, and on 27 April 1898 she was hanged. Unrepentant to the last, on the scaffold she warned, ‘My bones shall rise again,’ then her body dropped through the trapdoor with a heavy thud.
Aqui lay on a rock in the long shadow of a tree, sucking on a chakata fruit and dreaming about becoming a nurse. She was supposed to be tending the mombes, which was an important job as cattle represented wealth in the village. But it was so hot that the heat rippled across the yellow plains and the cattle lumbered about slowly. As long as she gave them an occasional shoo to keep them away from the crops then she could drift off and let her thoughts dance away.
These days, she always thought about the same thing. A few years before, when she was about seven and her second brother had fallen ill, she had gone with her mother to the clinic in Sadza. Chipo Tamari had already lost one son and this time when rubbing him with pastes of ground bark from the nyanga did not work and his pupils started rolling back in their sockets, she resolved to take action, whatever the other villagers might say. She wrapped the infant in swaddling to absorb the diarrhoea, dripped some well-water on his lips which were permanently open like the beak of a small bird, and placed a knitted hat on his head to protect it from the harsh sun. Then she tied him to her back and gave Aqui a calabash of water to carry so they could keep wetting his parched mouth. By the time they had made the three-hour-long walk to the township in the blinding heat, it was too late; the child's body was limp and could not be revived. Her mother began sobbing that she would never have a son and that they must have done something to offend the spirits. But Aqui was entranced by the bustling figures in uniforms, full of purposefulness, with pens in their pockets and metal trays laid out with instruments-stethoscope, tongs and syringes. The clinic smelled of paint and disinfectant, not of death and fear, as she had imagined. It was enough for her to know she had found her dream.
I admired the nurses' uniforms, how smart they were, and saving lives, and wanted to look like them and also because being a nurse or a teacher was something very special in the community But she knew it was impossible because her body was turning into that of a woman and her parents would soon take her out of school. It was different for boys. Boys were so precious, more precious than girls, we were useless in their eyes. Her young brother Tatiwa who had been born after the death of her previous two brothers was even more precious because he was the only son to survive. He would get all the land and as much schooling as the family could afford even though he was dull and slow at learning.
As for Aqui, she might have been the brightest girl in her class but she would not go to secondary school because by the age of thirteen a girl was supposed to be married. The idea of a girl's education was just for you to be able to read the note asking for your hand, then you were fine.
At that time there were only about 150 secondary schools in the whole country and few black children did more than six years' education. But Aqui loved school, particularly English and geography. I did not want to marry one of the silly boys in the village or, worse, an old man who had lost his wife and would pay good lobola [bride price]. In times of drought, when the rivers and wells dried up, the land shimmered with heat, and people had nothing to eat but the small yellow fruits that baboons ate, families often sold their daughters to such men, some such Mr Banana, as she thought of them, who had built up good stores of crops.
I begged the missionaries to let me stay on at school with the boys but I knew my father would never agree. Her mother had not gone to school at all but she could read a little and it was clear to Aqui that she did most of the work. My father, like all the men, was just talking, talking. It was my mother who walked to the well every morning when the sun came up, a pot on her head to fetch water for tea; she who took the animals to the stand; planted and weeded the crops; mended our clothes and cooked the food. In the dry season she grew all sorts of vegetables-tomatoes, cabbages, onions and rapeseed for relish with the sadza. In the rainy season she grew maize, pumpkins and groundnuts.
Aqui's father worked as a contractor putting up wire fences on the big white farms around Chivhu, but the jobs came few and far between. I loved it best when he went hunting with his catapult and knobkerry and would bring back doves or guinea fowl or sometimes even a duiker which we would eat in thick rich gravy with the sadza. Then our bellies would be full and he would tell stories and life had never seemed so good.
But those days seemed long ago. Recently she had heard him and her mother arguing