LINNET (1)
‘WHEN HAD IT ALL STARTED to go wrong, leading inexorably to this point?’ Linnet asked the woman she saw in the wardrobe’s mirror. She sought the answer in the defeated, lifeless eyes that stared back at her, at the plump but forlorn face with the dimples that no longer knew laughter, dimples in cheeks that no longer knew make-up. There were a lot of no-longers there, girl. Enough to write off a whole life. There was nothing left, except the woman in the mirror.
As if for the first time, she saw how the folds rolled around her neck. Her arms, bare in that T-shirt, were like thighs. She noticed too with a pang how the T-shirt was particularly cruel to her bosom; was it only last year she had strained against this very T-shirt? A shopkeeper had stared at her bosom, swallowed, then, regaining his composure somewhat, announced that he had just remembered to get the milk in from where the delivery van had left the crates. She had found that uproariously funny. Now, her T-shirt offered nothing more interesting to look at than its bright yellow colour.
And she was still three years from thirty.
And she was still three years from thirty.
*
THE DATE WHEN THINGS BEGAN TO GO WRONG for Linnet Nyasha Mashanda was 14 January 2001. It was an easy-enough date to recall, one that could always be cross-checked, as it was the first day of school in Zimbabwe. The Place Where It All Began To Go Wrong for Linnet Nyasha Mashanda was the bus stop at Chirunga Shopping Centre, Chitungwiza.
Ever since she had become aware of their existence, Linnet had watched the girls from the neighbourhood who went to the Former Group A schools in Harare, schools that had in colonial times been exclusively for white children but now accepted anyone who could afford the fees, and had never imagined that she too could, should and would become one of them. Yet here she was, in her bright green Girls High uniform with the sashes across her shoulders over a white blouse. Her hair had been done in thin braids that caressed her shoulders every time there was a breeze on that sunny morning.
Her parents had spared no effort to make her look like the sort of girl who attended Girls High School on Leopold Takawira Street in Harare. Actually, it was her mother who had spared no effort. Baba vaLinnet had scoffed at the idea of sending their daughter to a Group A School the first time it was suggested, when Linnet was in the seventh grade and had impressed the teachers with her fluency in English in a school play at St Aidans Primary School.
‘A waste of money sending these girls to a Group A School!’ Baba vaLinnet had declared, glaring at his four daughters as they tried to keep their eyes on the television.
Mai vaLinnet had felt that pang again, the one that came when one of her husband’s relatives expressed the family’s regret that its eldest son had failed to produce at least one male heir to carry on the name. She had named the fourth daughter Gamuchirai, ‘Accept/Embrace (verb)’. And then Mai vaLinnet had had the ectopic pregnancy, following which they had her tubes removed or something.
‘So, you would rather they went to schools where classes are split into morning and afternoon sessions, and books are shared one to ten students?’ Mai vaLinnet asked, vehemently. ‘Where sports and other extra-curricular facilities are non-existent? You remember how proud you were that Neliwe represented Zimbabwe in the Junior Olympics? Wouldn’t you want the same for any of your daughters?’
Baba vaLinnet had sighed wearily and seemed to be mentally counting to ten before answering slowly, as if to an incredibly stupid child. ‘Mai vaLinnet, what makes you think that sending them to better schools will make them better girls? Better than who, if I may ask?’
Mai vaLinnet opened her mouth, but her husband was not done and her response came out as a barely-audible gasp.
‘Have you seen how all the other girls from around here who are going to those schools are turning out?’ Baba vaLinnet cried. ‘Whats-her-name, the one with the birthmark across half her forehead…’ He clicked his fingers, as if that would bring the name up like a conjuring trick. ‘Her folks says she is taking care of her grandmother in the rural areas, but we all know she is at Mashambanzou.’
Mention of Harare’s most famous hospice for those dying of Aids always sent a chill down Mai vaLinnet’s spine. It was there she had last seen two of her siblings.
‘Then there is that one who took part in some beauty pageant, the Nhliziyo girl.’ Again, the name eluded Baba vaLinnet, but he was fully aware of the circumstances of her fall from grace. ‘She never finished her O Levels, and is now wife number seven to that tycoon who sponsored the pageant.’
He sighed. ‘I could go on. But we all see them, strutting around the streets in their tracksuits. Why are they wearing tracksuits when there are no sports facilities around here? Chirping in their ridiculous Nose-Brigade accents*. And every girl thinks they are to be emulated!’
He glared at his daughters, and they glared at the television.
‘They can’t all be as bad as that,’ Mai vaLinnet said, finding her ground again.
‘Well, name one girl from this area who has gone to one of those Nose Brigade schools and at least finished her O Levels!’ Baba vaLinnet challenged.
His wife sighed.
‘From the way you argue, Mai Linni, you think I do not want what is best for my daughters,’ Baba vaLinnet said. ‘Group A schools look attractive, your friends at church will be impressed to no end. But how long will that prestige last? Till the end of term, when she has been knocked up by some Aids-ridden businessman who buys her pizzas?’
But Mai vaLinnet too was staring at the television, she did not want to argue anymore. So, Baba vaLinnet continued the argument alone.
‘Our schools are poor, but what they lack materially, they more than compensate with a strong sense of ethics and motivation. This Neliwe you like to bring up, was not her mother educated in Mufakose? Her father was raised in the countryside and went to school barefoot until he was in Form Three.’
Having satisfied himself that she had practically conceded that a Group B school could quite easily produce a success story, Baba vaLinnet reminded her that they could not afford to spend money on expensive Group A schooling when they were yet to finish the house. Built after Independence, homes in the Unit L area had only two rooms. The idea had been that buyers would extend them, so prospective buyers had been qualified by the ability to present a payslip or other such proof of their capacity to carry out such extensions.
The Mashambas had managed to put a roof over the seven rooms they had added to the core house. But, three of them did not have floors yet and currently served as storage for Mai vaLinnet’s income generating projects.
And so, Linnet began her Form One at Seke 6 High School in Unit K. She attended the afternoon session, so she spent the mornings helping her mother with the chickens. The money from this project went towards the building project, while Baba vaLinnet’s job in Southerton Industrial Estate, Harare, met the day-to-day needs of the family. There was no money for Group A Schools.
Then, Mai vaLinnet heard that if you collected all the old clothes you could get your hands on, the villagers in Muzarabani were willing to exchange grain for these. The lady who told her this was someone she had had little conversation with before. But she agreed to take her to Muzarabani and show her around the villages there.
Mai vaLinnet sold the grain right there at Unit L Shopping Centre. The profits were such that she had enough to start on the flooring. With the proceeds from the second trip, Mai vaLinnet bought a VCR, to the delight of the girls. One day, Baba VaLinnet tried to show his wife a dirty movie on it his friend at work had sold him.
By the end of the year, their house was complete. It was then that Mai vaLinnet brought up the subject of sending their eldest daughter to finish her ‘O’ Levels at Girls High in Harare. She brought in Mai vaNeliwe, Baba vaLinnet’s sophisticated, widely-travelled sister to lobby the intransigent patriarch. Mai Neliwe pointed out that a strictly enforced rule of Girls High School was that students were only permitted to use designated streets to and from school, and any diversion from these was punished severely. So too was being seen in the company of males. That alone limited the chances of Linnet going places she shouldn’t go, at least while she was in Harare. And here in Chitungwiza, while it was a city of over a million people, there was no question of the sense of community and the looking out for each other’s children that existed. So, she was safe on the buses too.
Defeated on that front, Baba vaLinnet brought up the subject of money. At this point, Mai vaLinnet disclosed that she had set aside enough for not only the first two terms and the examination fee, but also transport costs, sports equipment and other needs. Baba vaLinnet threw his hands up, sighed, and declared that he was conceding under protest. God alone saw and heard everything, and God alone knew that it was not because he did not love his daughter or value her education… but what did it matter anyway if the women had ganged up on him?
On that first day of school, the day when Things Began To Go Wrong, Mai vaLinnet had spoken to her. ‘My daughter, I want you to go to this superior school. Your father doesn’t. This is the first time I have acted against his wishes. I put my marriage on the line.’
Linnet had nodded, not really understanding.
‘I am doing this for you. I am doing this so that you can have a future beyond the Manyame River*. I may not really know what is out there, but I am convinced it is a lot better than some low-expectation boy who will keep you in one room at the back of someone’s yard, away from your potential, while he grapples with a world he never got educated properly about either.’
Linnet had nodded again.
‘Your father thinks such a boy is a better option than what lurks beyond the Manyame,’ said Mai vaLinnet. ‘I agree there are dangers there, men who buy the innocence of young girls such as yourself with the fast food that you see all those sophisticated Americans eat on the television or rides in cars. But Harare has more to offer than cheap experiences. It boils down to what you seek, really.’
She had looked at her daughter. ‘If you let me down…’ Mai vaLinnet shook her head sadly. ‘As it is, I am judged harshly for giving birth to only girls. We are not that far off from when it was held that educating girls was a waste of family resources. My sisters, your Senior-Mothers, are barely literate. Our father was told he was better of paying for his nephews tuition than the three of us, since they carried the family name. I was lucky, attitudes had softened somewhat when I came of age.’
‘I know all this, Mama,’ said Linnet.
‘Knowing is not enough!’ said Mai vaLinnet, with sudden passion. ‘You must understand what it means to be a girl child in Zimbabwe at the turn of the century. I am not placing a heavy burden on your shoulders, my daughter. I am just reminding you of it. I am also reminding you that you have the power to at least lighten it for yourself.’
Linnet had nodded again, not really understanding.
‘I have done all I can,’ said Mai vaLinnet, resignedly. ‘It is now up to you. If you fail, then I have failed. So, will your sisters, and your unborn daughters.’
Linnet had nodded again, not really understanding.
Ever since she had become aware of their existence, Linnet had watched the girls from the neighbourhood who went to the Former Group A schools in Harare, schools that had in colonial times been exclusively for white children but now accepted anyone who could afford the fees, and had never imagined that she too could, should and would become one of them. Yet here she was, in her bright green Girls High uniform with the sashes across her shoulders over a white blouse. Her hair had been done in thin braids that caressed her shoulders every time there was a breeze on that sunny morning.
Her parents had spared no effort to make her look like the sort of girl who attended Girls High School on Leopold Takawira Street in Harare. Actually, it was her mother who had spared no effort. Baba vaLinnet had scoffed at the idea of sending their daughter to a Group A School the first time it was suggested, when Linnet was in the seventh grade and had impressed the teachers with her fluency in English in a school play at St Aidans Primary School.
‘A waste of money sending these girls to a Group A School!’ Baba vaLinnet had declared, glaring at his four daughters as they tried to keep their eyes on the television.
Mai vaLinnet had felt that pang again, the one that came when one of her husband’s relatives expressed the family’s regret that its eldest son had failed to produce at least one male heir to carry on the name. She had named the fourth daughter Gamuchirai, ‘Accept/Embrace (verb)’. And then Mai vaLinnet had had the ectopic pregnancy, following which they had her tubes removed or something.
‘So, you would rather they went to schools where classes are split into morning and afternoon sessions, and books are shared one to ten students?’ Mai vaLinnet asked, vehemently. ‘Where sports and other extra-curricular facilities are non-existent? You remember how proud you were that Neliwe represented Zimbabwe in the Junior Olympics? Wouldn’t you want the same for any of your daughters?’
Baba vaLinnet had sighed wearily and seemed to be mentally counting to ten before answering slowly, as if to an incredibly stupid child. ‘Mai vaLinnet, what makes you think that sending them to better schools will make them better girls? Better than who, if I may ask?’
Mai vaLinnet opened her mouth, but her husband was not done and her response came out as a barely-audible gasp.
‘Have you seen how all the other girls from around here who are going to those schools are turning out?’ Baba vaLinnet cried. ‘Whats-her-name, the one with the birthmark across half her forehead…’ He clicked his fingers, as if that would bring the name up like a conjuring trick. ‘Her folks says she is taking care of her grandmother in the rural areas, but we all know she is at Mashambanzou.’
Mention of Harare’s most famous hospice for those dying of Aids always sent a chill down Mai vaLinnet’s spine. It was there she had last seen two of her siblings.
‘Then there is that one who took part in some beauty pageant, the Nhliziyo girl.’ Again, the name eluded Baba vaLinnet, but he was fully aware of the circumstances of her fall from grace. ‘She never finished her O Levels, and is now wife number seven to that tycoon who sponsored the pageant.’
He sighed. ‘I could go on. But we all see them, strutting around the streets in their tracksuits. Why are they wearing tracksuits when there are no sports facilities around here? Chirping in their ridiculous Nose-Brigade accents*. And every girl thinks they are to be emulated!’
He glared at his daughters, and they glared at the television.
‘They can’t all be as bad as that,’ Mai vaLinnet said, finding her ground again.
‘Well, name one girl from this area who has gone to one of those Nose Brigade schools and at least finished her O Levels!’ Baba vaLinnet challenged.
His wife sighed.
‘From the way you argue, Mai Linni, you think I do not want what is best for my daughters,’ Baba vaLinnet said. ‘Group A schools look attractive, your friends at church will be impressed to no end. But how long will that prestige last? Till the end of term, when she has been knocked up by some Aids-ridden businessman who buys her pizzas?’
But Mai vaLinnet too was staring at the television, she did not want to argue anymore. So, Baba vaLinnet continued the argument alone.
‘Our schools are poor, but what they lack materially, they more than compensate with a strong sense of ethics and motivation. This Neliwe you like to bring up, was not her mother educated in Mufakose? Her father was raised in the countryside and went to school barefoot until he was in Form Three.’
Having satisfied himself that she had practically conceded that a Group B school could quite easily produce a success story, Baba vaLinnet reminded her that they could not afford to spend money on expensive Group A schooling when they were yet to finish the house. Built after Independence, homes in the Unit L area had only two rooms. The idea had been that buyers would extend them, so prospective buyers had been qualified by the ability to present a payslip or other such proof of their capacity to carry out such extensions.
The Mashambas had managed to put a roof over the seven rooms they had added to the core house. But, three of them did not have floors yet and currently served as storage for Mai vaLinnet’s income generating projects.
And so, Linnet began her Form One at Seke 6 High School in Unit K. She attended the afternoon session, so she spent the mornings helping her mother with the chickens. The money from this project went towards the building project, while Baba vaLinnet’s job in Southerton Industrial Estate, Harare, met the day-to-day needs of the family. There was no money for Group A Schools.
Then, Mai vaLinnet heard that if you collected all the old clothes you could get your hands on, the villagers in Muzarabani were willing to exchange grain for these. The lady who told her this was someone she had had little conversation with before. But she agreed to take her to Muzarabani and show her around the villages there.
Mai vaLinnet sold the grain right there at Unit L Shopping Centre. The profits were such that she had enough to start on the flooring. With the proceeds from the second trip, Mai vaLinnet bought a VCR, to the delight of the girls. One day, Baba VaLinnet tried to show his wife a dirty movie on it his friend at work had sold him.
By the end of the year, their house was complete. It was then that Mai vaLinnet brought up the subject of sending their eldest daughter to finish her ‘O’ Levels at Girls High in Harare. She brought in Mai vaNeliwe, Baba vaLinnet’s sophisticated, widely-travelled sister to lobby the intransigent patriarch. Mai Neliwe pointed out that a strictly enforced rule of Girls High School was that students were only permitted to use designated streets to and from school, and any diversion from these was punished severely. So too was being seen in the company of males. That alone limited the chances of Linnet going places she shouldn’t go, at least while she was in Harare. And here in Chitungwiza, while it was a city of over a million people, there was no question of the sense of community and the looking out for each other’s children that existed. So, she was safe on the buses too.
Defeated on that front, Baba vaLinnet brought up the subject of money. At this point, Mai vaLinnet disclosed that she had set aside enough for not only the first two terms and the examination fee, but also transport costs, sports equipment and other needs. Baba vaLinnet threw his hands up, sighed, and declared that he was conceding under protest. God alone saw and heard everything, and God alone knew that it was not because he did not love his daughter or value her education… but what did it matter anyway if the women had ganged up on him?
On that first day of school, the day when Things Began To Go Wrong, Mai vaLinnet had spoken to her. ‘My daughter, I want you to go to this superior school. Your father doesn’t. This is the first time I have acted against his wishes. I put my marriage on the line.’
Linnet had nodded, not really understanding.
‘I am doing this for you. I am doing this so that you can have a future beyond the Manyame River*. I may not really know what is out there, but I am convinced it is a lot better than some low-expectation boy who will keep you in one room at the back of someone’s yard, away from your potential, while he grapples with a world he never got educated properly about either.’
Linnet had nodded again.
‘Your father thinks such a boy is a better option than what lurks beyond the Manyame,’ said Mai vaLinnet. ‘I agree there are dangers there, men who buy the innocence of young girls such as yourself with the fast food that you see all those sophisticated Americans eat on the television or rides in cars. But Harare has more to offer than cheap experiences. It boils down to what you seek, really.’
She had looked at her daughter. ‘If you let me down…’ Mai vaLinnet shook her head sadly. ‘As it is, I am judged harshly for giving birth to only girls. We are not that far off from when it was held that educating girls was a waste of family resources. My sisters, your Senior-Mothers, are barely literate. Our father was told he was better of paying for his nephews tuition than the three of us, since they carried the family name. I was lucky, attitudes had softened somewhat when I came of age.’
‘I know all this, Mama,’ said Linnet.
‘Knowing is not enough!’ said Mai vaLinnet, with sudden passion. ‘You must understand what it means to be a girl child in Zimbabwe at the turn of the century. I am not placing a heavy burden on your shoulders, my daughter. I am just reminding you of it. I am also reminding you that you have the power to at least lighten it for yourself.’
Linnet had nodded again, not really understanding.
‘I have done all I can,’ said Mai vaLinnet, resignedly. ‘It is now up to you. If you fail, then I have failed. So, will your sisters, and your unborn daughters.’
Linnet had nodded again, not really understanding.
*
TWO GIRLS IN THE SAME GREEN UNIFORM walked past Linnet to the back of the queue. Linnet’s face had lit up when she saw them, but they had looked straight on ahead.
‘They think they are better than you,’ the girl in front said, turning to face Linnet. ‘They know this is your first day, and they have been at Girls High since Form One. They have less of the ghetto than you. They do not want to encourage you to hang around them, so you don’t show them up to their suburban friends.’
This girl wore the uniform of a school from the southern suburbs of Harare. It was a Group A School, but it had been created in colonial times for children from the buffer zone of the colour bar; the so-called Coloureds*, Indians etc. For this reason, while it was still better than any school in Chitungwiza, it would never be as good as the likes of Girls High School.
Linnet realised her place in the scheme of things. She was at the bottom of the pile at Girls High School. Her peers went to school in places like Sunningdale and Cranborne. If there was any consolation, it was in the fact that, nonetheless, she was no longer in a Group B School.
Linnet soon made friends at Girls High School. There were enough girls from similar backgrounds. Like Thokozile, who had been taken away from Lalapanzi by an uncle who had gotten custody of her following the death of her parents from Aids. From idyllic rural Matebeleland to the metropolitan confusion of Harare, Thoko had a lot to deal with all at once. There was also Maria, whose parents had suddenly come into money and moved to the suburbs from some small town out west. But, for most of the time, Linnet was a loner.
Still, her lowly status did not hurt her grades in the least. She came in the top ten in most of her subjects, including English Language and Literature in English. She joined the Drama Club. At home, her father began to thaw towards the women of the family. Mai vaLinnet thanked her profusely, reciting her daughter’s clan name and the praise poem associated with it as she clapped her hands slowly.
Her father had walked in on this little performance. ‘What are you thanking her for?’ he demanded, planting himself in his favourite chair.
‘For not letting me down,’ Mai vaLinnet answered proudly. ‘She and her sisters almost ended my marriage just by being born. But now, she has saved it.’
Baba vaLinnet had looked astonished. ‘How has she saved it, Mai vaLinnet? I do not love you any more or less from the day I married you. But don’t think I won’t send all of you away if she brings disgrace to this house!’
‘But she won’t, my husband,’ Mai vaLinnet said. ‘Surely, you can see that now.’
‘Hmm,’ Baba vaLinnet murmured. ‘It is only April. Wait for August. August is when they go completely deranged and do something stupid.’
Mai vaLinnet had risen to her full height, an imposing matriarchal figure with a colourful cotton wrapper tied around her ample waist, put her hands together before flinging them in her husband’s direction; the traditional gesture of exasperation. She waddled towards the kitchen.
Baba vaLinnet had looked at his daughter. ‘You beat all those stuck-up Nose-Brigades at English?’ he asked.
Linnet had nodded, not sure where this was going.
With a grunt, Baba vaLinnet had leaned to one side to dip a hand into a pocket. He had obtained a wad of notes, counted $100 and held it out to her. ‘If you can hold your own against that lot, there is hope for you yet!’
She had squealed with delight, and leapt at him. He had tried to pushed her away with feigned disgust, but laughed all the same. The other girls erupted in a spirited protest, but Baba vaLinnet reminded them that they had not yet demonstrated any academic prowess worth acknowledging. ‘Your big sister has my brain!’ he declared.
‘That is quite possible,’ Mai vaLinnet had interjected as she returned from the kitchen. ‘I still have my mine.’
The girls had found this uproariously funny, and their father had grinned indulgently. Looking back, Linnet was to remember that day, the 9th of April, as the last day the family laughed together so heartily without the prompting of the television. The next day, Baba vaLinnet discovered that he was HIV+. Five years prior, while attending a workshop in Gweru, he had run into an old girlfriend and spent the night at hers. That one time, just that one time. And then he read about her musician husband’s death in the papers, ‘after a short illness’. Five years prior, things had started to go wrong for Baba vaLinnet.
It is quite possible that things would have not gone wrong for Linnet at all. At least not during her school years, and certainly at least not from that day. She had already allayed her parents’ anxieties about a girl from the township attending a Group A School, and raised their hopes that such a girl could actually make something for herself. They could already see her at university, then after that, a career at the United Nations. Anywhere that involved flying on a plane.
But there were always reminders of the dangers. The girl Linnet had befriended, the one from the school in Sunningdale, was chased away from home by an irate father after she came home past her curfew. She had been to a dance at her school, and had not been able to get transport back to Chitungwiza. She had spent the night at a school mate’s, but the damage of not coming home had been done. She moved in with her boyfriend, and he eagerly redeemed her honour by paying the requisite roora*. All’s well that ends well was one way of looking at it. Here was one more girl who had gone to a better school but was not going to university and then after that a job at the United Nations or NASA.
It was the increasingly worsening transport problem that was the catalyst for the ruin of Linnet. Zimbabwe’s economy, reeling under the Structural Adjustment Programme and the increasing political uncertainty, was heading for meltdown. Fuel shortages were frequent and set to become perennial. The recent invasion of white-owned, cash-crop growing farms by land-hungry black peasants led (sometimes prodded) by Zanu-PF activists had led to severe losses of traditional foreign currency earnings. Zimbabwe could no longer afford to pay for fuel imports. The official position of the regime, aired in the state-owned media, was that British ships were blockading oil tankers in the Indian Ocean bringing supplies from Kuwait.
Linnet could not remember the exact date, but it was a Monday of July, the time of the mid-year exams. The bus broke down in Hatfield. Every bus coming from Chitungwiza was full. Cars stopped, and were set upon on like a lame antelope by a pack of wild dogs. Jobs were not paying as much as they used to at the start of the month, but they were still worth keeping and one way to keep a job was to be punctual. A fistfight broke out when a man pulled another back from entering a vehicle. However, someone else had slipped past both of them and taken the seat. The two pugilists had sullenly avoided eye contact as they waited for the next possible ride.
The driver and conductor of the broken-down vehicle had realised that they were the only ones in a position to manage the small, frustrated crowd before things got absolutely mediaeval. The other week, three people had to be hospitalised after a scuffle over limited seats and standing room on a bus.
Brandishing their knobkerries*, the same ones they used to persuade passengers planning on a free ride to pay up, the driver and conductor managed to get their little crowd into a neat queue in order of priority. School kids came first, as it was exam-time, you see. The adult passengers grumbled about these kids who went to Nose-Brigade schools. Surely, if their parents were rich enough to send them there, they ought to have cars to drive them about? How could any child who had to deal with the insanity of the Harare-Chitungwiza public transport twice every day be expected to achieve anything even at those superior schools?
However, when a sleek blue Hyundai pulled up, they all agreed that the school kids should go in.
Looking back, it would have been a lot better for Linnet if the law of the jungle had prevailed and the adults had pushed the school kids aside, and got into the Hyundai themselves. Or at least pushed the girls aside. Or at least pushed Linnet alone aside. But, there is no such thing as the law of the jungle really. Just a jungle.
The other girls were going to a school in Sunningdale. So, Linnet went into the centre of Harare alone with the driver of the Hyundai.
He said his name was Francis Zvenyika, and he was nineteen. He had just inherited his father’s office equipment supplies company, following the death of his parents and only sibling in a car accident near Kwekwe. He did not like a lot of people to know this about his background because it made them pity him and he did not want their pity. He did not want people to like him for his money either, so he tried to act like someone who did not live in a big house in Marlborough. That probably explained why he did not have the Nose Brigade accent.
Many boys had declared their love for Linnet. They had done so with a bravado fuelled by the hormones of adolescence, or, sometimes, the booze or the weed, or a combination of all three or the first and one of the others. They rehearsed lyrics from their favourite hip hop or dancehall songs. One guy even did a Michael Jackson, jumping on to the shell of a car and doing the routine from the iconic video for ‘The Way You Make Me Feel’. She did not know this, of course, but he got caned by his headmaster for getting his hair relaxed and wearing it in a ponytail.
She had never reacted to any of these declarations of love with anything more than contempt. Books before boys, the inscription on her exercise books proclaimed. The motto her own mother, who had left school to get married, had given her.
But with Francis showing himself to be as vulnerable and cautious of the world as she was, Linnet’s guard went down. She could not believe that a man who travelled frequently to the States and Canada, and had been to a Destiny’s Child concert in the UK just last week, liked her.
All the things her mother had told her about boys applied to boys, Linnet told herself. Francis was a man, things were different. Moreover, he wanted to marry her after she did her O Levels. They could go and live in the States for some time, while she did her degree. You did not need A Levels for a degree in the States, he said.
Linnet’s parents were stunned when she asked to be allowed to spend the August holiday at Neliwe’s in Marlborough. Mai vaLinnet had started to demand an explanation for this request, pointing out that Linnet had always said Neliwe was a stuck-up brat. Linnet had replied that Marlborough had a library, and she thought she could read better there. Baba vaLinnet however, just swigged his beer and stared at the television thoughtfully.
So, Linnet and her sisters all went to spend the holidays at their paternal aunt’s place. Michelle, Neliwe’s older sister, had returned from the UK where she lived to spend what were the summer holidays there in Zimbabwe. She was studying nursing in the UK. She was particularly interested to learn that her cousin had a boyfriend who frequently visited the UK. ‘Ask him where in the UK he comes to,’ she begged.
Linnet never got round to asking him. Things moved very quickly when she came to stay in Marlborough that winter. She lost her virginity to Francis at his huge mansion near Lomagundi road. It had hurt when he entered her, but she had bit her lip and looked away so that he would not see her grimace. She so badly wanted it to be right, and the other girls had told her it hurt at first. And just like they had told her, the pleasure would come almost immediately afterwards. As they had said, it rose like a bird. Higher, and higher, and higher. And then…
He shuddered, and groaned, and she was sure she felt a spurt of hot wetness burst inside her groin. Then he rolled off her. Linnet felt like someone had just wrenched the plug off the euphoria that she had been feeling just seconds prior, leaving her hopelessly unfulfilled.
But he was grinning triumphantly at her. ‘My God!’ he exclaimed. ‘A virgin!’
It was alright then, she told herself. He was pleased with what she had done for him. He was pleased with the way he had used her. If he was pleased, then she was still his girl. That was a good thing, right?
She missed her August period. It took her a whole week to establish that there was not going to be any girl-ketchup this winter. Linnet knew what was going on, they had learnt all about this at school. What they had not learnt, and Linnet was learning now, was the terror, the confusion and other emotions that came in a torrent.
Her mother would have seen straight away that something was wrong with her daughter. But she had her own reproductive health to worry about right now. A few weeks prior, Baba vaLinnet had finally mustered the courage to tell his wife the reason he had been avoiding sex of late. It was because of another woman, but not quite the way she was thinking. Then he showed her the HIV test results.
By the time the children had returned from Malborough, Mai vaLinnet had regained much of her outward strong matriarchal demeanour. There were some ornaments missing from the display cabinet. Mai vaLinnet’s explanation was that they had sold them off to someone who claimed they were valuable. And when the girls asked their father how he had got the swollen eye, he told them he had got it trying to stop a brawl in the pub. Mai vaLinnet had been tested at the new clinic and found to be HIV-.
When Linnet told him the news, Francis had been overjoyed. She could always resume her studies after the baby, he said. He was planning a trip to the United Arab Emirates, but he would introduce her to his maternal uncle and she could introduce him to her paternal aunt, in this case Mai vaNeliwe, and the customary marriage process would commence. So, it was all alright then.
On the second Saturday of October, Linnet was doing the laundry in the concrete sink outside. Her parents sat on the lawn in front. Baba vaLinnet had a Scud* in front of him, while Mai VaLinnet had a bottle of Fanta and a drinking glass. A neighbour had dropped in, and Mai vaLinnet had gotten up to get her a glass so they could share the Fanta. The door to the kitchen from outside the house was next to the sink. At that precise moment, Linnet had decided to make room in the sink by hanging up some of the clothes on the line behind her. She had picked up her blouse, and as she reached for the line, the blouse had slipped from her fingers. As she bent to pick it up, her mother passed her.
Bent over like that, with her large t-shirt obeying gravity, Mai vaLinnet caught a glimpse of her daughter’s belly. A glimpse was enough. Linnet’s grin vanished as she looked up and saw the look of abject horror on her mother’s face.
When Mai vaLinnet told her husband that Miss Mashanda was no longer ‘whole’, to use the popular idiom, he had stared at the television. He did not want to look at anyone just now. Not his wife. Not the younger girls, who were staring at each other wonderingly, not sure what the idiom their mother had just used actually meant. And certainly not her haunting the corner of the living room. His daughter, the one who had changed his name in society, from Lameck to Baba vaLinnet, the father of Linnet. Father of the girl who got herself a privileged education but still functioned in the mode of no-good ghetto trash. Pearls before swine.
‘Baba vaLinnet, did you hear…’
He cut his wife off with a raised hand. ‘What more should I say? I said all I had to say on the matter when this whole enterprise was only just an idea in your head. What I said would happen has happened. I ask again; what more should I say?’
‘Baba, I am sorry!’ Linnet whimpered, breaking the hush that had descended on the living room. Coca-Cola On the Beat was on, but it was as if someone had pressed the mute button.
‘I am sure you are,’ Baba vaLinnet said. ‘But what will it help? My wife worked so hard to get you into that school because she thought it would make you a better person. But all it did was expose you to the kind of predators that prowl the concrete jungle looking for silly girls just like you. You could have avoided this by saying that you did not want to go to that special school. The exam fee alone could have been better used. I am going to need pills for my HIV, and they are not cheap.’
A gasp erupted from the younger girls as yet another shocking family revelation hit them.
‘So, what shall we do?’ Mai vaLinnet asked.
This time, he looked at his wife. ‘What is always done in these situations. She must go to her aunt, and Mai vaNeliwe must take her to him. I am not going to keep another man’s woman and child in my house.’
He glared darkly at the other girls. ‘Our elders said that it was a waste educating girls. Yet we have all these experts making noises on TV, on billboards, in the newspapers, everywhere about the proverbial Girl Child. The facts speak for themselves. Send a girl to the best schools and she will still spare no effort to discourage you against educating females.’
‘Not all girls are like that, Baba,’ Ropafadzo, who came after Linnet, said. ‘We are doing well at school, aren’t we?’
‘Prove the elders wrong then, my daughter!’ Baba vaLinnet had said, almost pleadingly. ‘When they came up with that notion, black people as a whole were discouraged by their colonial overlords from getting educated beyond the skills needed to serve them. The best a black woman could hope to become was a teacher or a nurse. Now, in Independent Zimbabwe, the opportunities are there. Why are you not taking them? Us men are portrayed as chauvinistic oppressors, but did I not let her go to that school? The reasons I was opposed to this idea in the first place have been vindicated.’
No one could respond. They did not know how to respond to the patriarch of the family when he was in this state. They had never seen him break down and cry.
Tete* Mai vaNeliwe had never heard of anyone in Marlborough named Zvenyika. But she drove her niece to the address given. When they got there, her worst fears were confirmed.
The mansion belonged to a family called Dhliwayo, who did own a successful computer sales business, Dhligital Business Machines. Francis was the younger brother to Mr Dhliwayo’s cousin’s wife. He had only been staying at the mansion because they had asked him to mind the place while the family spent the August holiday in Israel. He was not nineteen years old, his real age was closer to thirty.
And that was not even the worst of it.
Francis had dropped out of ‘A’ Level at a missionary boarding school after misappropriating his own exam fee. There was also an unsubstantiated rumour about the headmaster’s maid, but she had run off to marry someone else. He lived in a shack at the back of a house in Dzivarasekwa. The Zvenyikas had owned a house once, but his mother had lost it to his father’s relatives after he died.
Zvenyika’s mother sold roasted peanuts, boiled maize and fried chicken legs near the Market Square bus terminus or outside Bible House, catering mostly to patrons of nightclubs in the area towards the Kopje or nightshift workers. She had also started to trade in traditional aphrodisiacs and strange pills from Senegal via South Africa that were supposed to make the buttocks grow bigger. She did not think Zimbabwean women needed it, but business was booming and she was contemplating a trip to South Africa to make a bulk purchase.
Plying her trade at night allowed him the room to himself. Then, by day, she slept there, while he stayed outdoors. Her hope was that he would get himself a job and that would lead to better accommodation. He still had good ‘O’ Levels.
When all this was explained to Tete Mai Neliwe, she decided that this stupid thing her niece had done would not be mitigated by any further association with this boy. She drove Linnet that same night back to Chitungwiza, but Baba vaLinnet was not prepared to take her back. So, she took her in herself.
Donnell Tanatswa Mashanda was born at the Avenues clinic. Baba vaLinnet received the news that he was now Sekuru vaDonnell when he got home. His joy was genuine; he called round the men from neighbouring households and sent a boy to the bottle-store to get Scuds. The only one of his neighbours who did not have daughter who was ruined had been spared from this evil by having only sons. But, he commiserated with his neighbours and admired their magnanimity in celebrating the birth of what was really a bastard. Was there not a proverb that said he who had lunatic, that lunatic belonged to him; when he tipped over the clay pot with the day’s milk, he could do nothing but ululate in appreciation of the deed?
When the last of his neighbours had staggered off home, Sekuru vaDonnell had yet another adage to share with his wife; the ancestral spirits have given you a wound so that the flies can eat you. That morning, he had been told that he was being sent on forced vacation indefinitely as part of a restructuring exercise at the factory he had worked for most of his adult life. It was a matter of time before his sister got tired of being so big-hearted about looking after Linnet and her child. He had a virus that was incurable. What else could possibly go wrong? But his wife had comforted him, and said she could keep working. Even with the rampant inflation, they could manage.
Tete Mai vaNeliwe had an even better idea. She called Michelle in the UK. It was a coincidence, Michelle said, because she had been meaning to call her mother over the same matter. She needed someone to pick up the kids from school while she and her husband were at work. Yes, she could send the necessary documents for Linnet to apply for a visa.
The news was received with joy at the Mashanda residence in Unit L, Chitungwiza. From the looks of things, Mugabe would win the elections again. Rather, he would not concede defeat as readily as he had done so with the Referendum on the Constitution. Whether the country would descend into civil war or not was unclear, but given that it was only the ruling party that had the guns, the chances were it would not. What was clear though was the slide towards the economic precipice would go into Super-Pursuit Mode. Already, people no longer bothered to pick up $20 notes lying on the ground and prices changed weekly. Without an income in hard currency, no family in Zimbabwe would have a prayer.
Linnet going to the UK to be her cousin’s maid seemed like the first sign of things going right for her.
Some eleven years later, Linnet now knew that it was in fact the first sign of things going even wronger for her.
‘They think they are better than you,’ the girl in front said, turning to face Linnet. ‘They know this is your first day, and they have been at Girls High since Form One. They have less of the ghetto than you. They do not want to encourage you to hang around them, so you don’t show them up to their suburban friends.’
This girl wore the uniform of a school from the southern suburbs of Harare. It was a Group A School, but it had been created in colonial times for children from the buffer zone of the colour bar; the so-called Coloureds*, Indians etc. For this reason, while it was still better than any school in Chitungwiza, it would never be as good as the likes of Girls High School.
Linnet realised her place in the scheme of things. She was at the bottom of the pile at Girls High School. Her peers went to school in places like Sunningdale and Cranborne. If there was any consolation, it was in the fact that, nonetheless, she was no longer in a Group B School.
Linnet soon made friends at Girls High School. There were enough girls from similar backgrounds. Like Thokozile, who had been taken away from Lalapanzi by an uncle who had gotten custody of her following the death of her parents from Aids. From idyllic rural Matebeleland to the metropolitan confusion of Harare, Thoko had a lot to deal with all at once. There was also Maria, whose parents had suddenly come into money and moved to the suburbs from some small town out west. But, for most of the time, Linnet was a loner.
Still, her lowly status did not hurt her grades in the least. She came in the top ten in most of her subjects, including English Language and Literature in English. She joined the Drama Club. At home, her father began to thaw towards the women of the family. Mai vaLinnet thanked her profusely, reciting her daughter’s clan name and the praise poem associated with it as she clapped her hands slowly.
Her father had walked in on this little performance. ‘What are you thanking her for?’ he demanded, planting himself in his favourite chair.
‘For not letting me down,’ Mai vaLinnet answered proudly. ‘She and her sisters almost ended my marriage just by being born. But now, she has saved it.’
Baba vaLinnet had looked astonished. ‘How has she saved it, Mai vaLinnet? I do not love you any more or less from the day I married you. But don’t think I won’t send all of you away if she brings disgrace to this house!’
‘But she won’t, my husband,’ Mai vaLinnet said. ‘Surely, you can see that now.’
‘Hmm,’ Baba vaLinnet murmured. ‘It is only April. Wait for August. August is when they go completely deranged and do something stupid.’
Mai vaLinnet had risen to her full height, an imposing matriarchal figure with a colourful cotton wrapper tied around her ample waist, put her hands together before flinging them in her husband’s direction; the traditional gesture of exasperation. She waddled towards the kitchen.
Baba vaLinnet had looked at his daughter. ‘You beat all those stuck-up Nose-Brigades at English?’ he asked.
Linnet had nodded, not sure where this was going.
With a grunt, Baba vaLinnet had leaned to one side to dip a hand into a pocket. He had obtained a wad of notes, counted $100 and held it out to her. ‘If you can hold your own against that lot, there is hope for you yet!’
She had squealed with delight, and leapt at him. He had tried to pushed her away with feigned disgust, but laughed all the same. The other girls erupted in a spirited protest, but Baba vaLinnet reminded them that they had not yet demonstrated any academic prowess worth acknowledging. ‘Your big sister has my brain!’ he declared.
‘That is quite possible,’ Mai vaLinnet had interjected as she returned from the kitchen. ‘I still have my mine.’
The girls had found this uproariously funny, and their father had grinned indulgently. Looking back, Linnet was to remember that day, the 9th of April, as the last day the family laughed together so heartily without the prompting of the television. The next day, Baba vaLinnet discovered that he was HIV+. Five years prior, while attending a workshop in Gweru, he had run into an old girlfriend and spent the night at hers. That one time, just that one time. And then he read about her musician husband’s death in the papers, ‘after a short illness’. Five years prior, things had started to go wrong for Baba vaLinnet.
It is quite possible that things would have not gone wrong for Linnet at all. At least not during her school years, and certainly at least not from that day. She had already allayed her parents’ anxieties about a girl from the township attending a Group A School, and raised their hopes that such a girl could actually make something for herself. They could already see her at university, then after that, a career at the United Nations. Anywhere that involved flying on a plane.
But there were always reminders of the dangers. The girl Linnet had befriended, the one from the school in Sunningdale, was chased away from home by an irate father after she came home past her curfew. She had been to a dance at her school, and had not been able to get transport back to Chitungwiza. She had spent the night at a school mate’s, but the damage of not coming home had been done. She moved in with her boyfriend, and he eagerly redeemed her honour by paying the requisite roora*. All’s well that ends well was one way of looking at it. Here was one more girl who had gone to a better school but was not going to university and then after that a job at the United Nations or NASA.
It was the increasingly worsening transport problem that was the catalyst for the ruin of Linnet. Zimbabwe’s economy, reeling under the Structural Adjustment Programme and the increasing political uncertainty, was heading for meltdown. Fuel shortages were frequent and set to become perennial. The recent invasion of white-owned, cash-crop growing farms by land-hungry black peasants led (sometimes prodded) by Zanu-PF activists had led to severe losses of traditional foreign currency earnings. Zimbabwe could no longer afford to pay for fuel imports. The official position of the regime, aired in the state-owned media, was that British ships were blockading oil tankers in the Indian Ocean bringing supplies from Kuwait.
Linnet could not remember the exact date, but it was a Monday of July, the time of the mid-year exams. The bus broke down in Hatfield. Every bus coming from Chitungwiza was full. Cars stopped, and were set upon on like a lame antelope by a pack of wild dogs. Jobs were not paying as much as they used to at the start of the month, but they were still worth keeping and one way to keep a job was to be punctual. A fistfight broke out when a man pulled another back from entering a vehicle. However, someone else had slipped past both of them and taken the seat. The two pugilists had sullenly avoided eye contact as they waited for the next possible ride.
The driver and conductor of the broken-down vehicle had realised that they were the only ones in a position to manage the small, frustrated crowd before things got absolutely mediaeval. The other week, three people had to be hospitalised after a scuffle over limited seats and standing room on a bus.
Brandishing their knobkerries*, the same ones they used to persuade passengers planning on a free ride to pay up, the driver and conductor managed to get their little crowd into a neat queue in order of priority. School kids came first, as it was exam-time, you see. The adult passengers grumbled about these kids who went to Nose-Brigade schools. Surely, if their parents were rich enough to send them there, they ought to have cars to drive them about? How could any child who had to deal with the insanity of the Harare-Chitungwiza public transport twice every day be expected to achieve anything even at those superior schools?
However, when a sleek blue Hyundai pulled up, they all agreed that the school kids should go in.
Looking back, it would have been a lot better for Linnet if the law of the jungle had prevailed and the adults had pushed the school kids aside, and got into the Hyundai themselves. Or at least pushed the girls aside. Or at least pushed Linnet alone aside. But, there is no such thing as the law of the jungle really. Just a jungle.
The other girls were going to a school in Sunningdale. So, Linnet went into the centre of Harare alone with the driver of the Hyundai.
He said his name was Francis Zvenyika, and he was nineteen. He had just inherited his father’s office equipment supplies company, following the death of his parents and only sibling in a car accident near Kwekwe. He did not like a lot of people to know this about his background because it made them pity him and he did not want their pity. He did not want people to like him for his money either, so he tried to act like someone who did not live in a big house in Marlborough. That probably explained why he did not have the Nose Brigade accent.
Many boys had declared their love for Linnet. They had done so with a bravado fuelled by the hormones of adolescence, or, sometimes, the booze or the weed, or a combination of all three or the first and one of the others. They rehearsed lyrics from their favourite hip hop or dancehall songs. One guy even did a Michael Jackson, jumping on to the shell of a car and doing the routine from the iconic video for ‘The Way You Make Me Feel’. She did not know this, of course, but he got caned by his headmaster for getting his hair relaxed and wearing it in a ponytail.
She had never reacted to any of these declarations of love with anything more than contempt. Books before boys, the inscription on her exercise books proclaimed. The motto her own mother, who had left school to get married, had given her.
But with Francis showing himself to be as vulnerable and cautious of the world as she was, Linnet’s guard went down. She could not believe that a man who travelled frequently to the States and Canada, and had been to a Destiny’s Child concert in the UK just last week, liked her.
All the things her mother had told her about boys applied to boys, Linnet told herself. Francis was a man, things were different. Moreover, he wanted to marry her after she did her O Levels. They could go and live in the States for some time, while she did her degree. You did not need A Levels for a degree in the States, he said.
Linnet’s parents were stunned when she asked to be allowed to spend the August holiday at Neliwe’s in Marlborough. Mai vaLinnet had started to demand an explanation for this request, pointing out that Linnet had always said Neliwe was a stuck-up brat. Linnet had replied that Marlborough had a library, and she thought she could read better there. Baba vaLinnet however, just swigged his beer and stared at the television thoughtfully.
So, Linnet and her sisters all went to spend the holidays at their paternal aunt’s place. Michelle, Neliwe’s older sister, had returned from the UK where she lived to spend what were the summer holidays there in Zimbabwe. She was studying nursing in the UK. She was particularly interested to learn that her cousin had a boyfriend who frequently visited the UK. ‘Ask him where in the UK he comes to,’ she begged.
Linnet never got round to asking him. Things moved very quickly when she came to stay in Marlborough that winter. She lost her virginity to Francis at his huge mansion near Lomagundi road. It had hurt when he entered her, but she had bit her lip and looked away so that he would not see her grimace. She so badly wanted it to be right, and the other girls had told her it hurt at first. And just like they had told her, the pleasure would come almost immediately afterwards. As they had said, it rose like a bird. Higher, and higher, and higher. And then…
He shuddered, and groaned, and she was sure she felt a spurt of hot wetness burst inside her groin. Then he rolled off her. Linnet felt like someone had just wrenched the plug off the euphoria that she had been feeling just seconds prior, leaving her hopelessly unfulfilled.
But he was grinning triumphantly at her. ‘My God!’ he exclaimed. ‘A virgin!’
It was alright then, she told herself. He was pleased with what she had done for him. He was pleased with the way he had used her. If he was pleased, then she was still his girl. That was a good thing, right?
She missed her August period. It took her a whole week to establish that there was not going to be any girl-ketchup this winter. Linnet knew what was going on, they had learnt all about this at school. What they had not learnt, and Linnet was learning now, was the terror, the confusion and other emotions that came in a torrent.
Her mother would have seen straight away that something was wrong with her daughter. But she had her own reproductive health to worry about right now. A few weeks prior, Baba vaLinnet had finally mustered the courage to tell his wife the reason he had been avoiding sex of late. It was because of another woman, but not quite the way she was thinking. Then he showed her the HIV test results.
By the time the children had returned from Malborough, Mai vaLinnet had regained much of her outward strong matriarchal demeanour. There were some ornaments missing from the display cabinet. Mai vaLinnet’s explanation was that they had sold them off to someone who claimed they were valuable. And when the girls asked their father how he had got the swollen eye, he told them he had got it trying to stop a brawl in the pub. Mai vaLinnet had been tested at the new clinic and found to be HIV-.
When Linnet told him the news, Francis had been overjoyed. She could always resume her studies after the baby, he said. He was planning a trip to the United Arab Emirates, but he would introduce her to his maternal uncle and she could introduce him to her paternal aunt, in this case Mai vaNeliwe, and the customary marriage process would commence. So, it was all alright then.
On the second Saturday of October, Linnet was doing the laundry in the concrete sink outside. Her parents sat on the lawn in front. Baba vaLinnet had a Scud* in front of him, while Mai VaLinnet had a bottle of Fanta and a drinking glass. A neighbour had dropped in, and Mai vaLinnet had gotten up to get her a glass so they could share the Fanta. The door to the kitchen from outside the house was next to the sink. At that precise moment, Linnet had decided to make room in the sink by hanging up some of the clothes on the line behind her. She had picked up her blouse, and as she reached for the line, the blouse had slipped from her fingers. As she bent to pick it up, her mother passed her.
Bent over like that, with her large t-shirt obeying gravity, Mai vaLinnet caught a glimpse of her daughter’s belly. A glimpse was enough. Linnet’s grin vanished as she looked up and saw the look of abject horror on her mother’s face.
When Mai vaLinnet told her husband that Miss Mashanda was no longer ‘whole’, to use the popular idiom, he had stared at the television. He did not want to look at anyone just now. Not his wife. Not the younger girls, who were staring at each other wonderingly, not sure what the idiom their mother had just used actually meant. And certainly not her haunting the corner of the living room. His daughter, the one who had changed his name in society, from Lameck to Baba vaLinnet, the father of Linnet. Father of the girl who got herself a privileged education but still functioned in the mode of no-good ghetto trash. Pearls before swine.
‘Baba vaLinnet, did you hear…’
He cut his wife off with a raised hand. ‘What more should I say? I said all I had to say on the matter when this whole enterprise was only just an idea in your head. What I said would happen has happened. I ask again; what more should I say?’
‘Baba, I am sorry!’ Linnet whimpered, breaking the hush that had descended on the living room. Coca-Cola On the Beat was on, but it was as if someone had pressed the mute button.
‘I am sure you are,’ Baba vaLinnet said. ‘But what will it help? My wife worked so hard to get you into that school because she thought it would make you a better person. But all it did was expose you to the kind of predators that prowl the concrete jungle looking for silly girls just like you. You could have avoided this by saying that you did not want to go to that special school. The exam fee alone could have been better used. I am going to need pills for my HIV, and they are not cheap.’
A gasp erupted from the younger girls as yet another shocking family revelation hit them.
‘So, what shall we do?’ Mai vaLinnet asked.
This time, he looked at his wife. ‘What is always done in these situations. She must go to her aunt, and Mai vaNeliwe must take her to him. I am not going to keep another man’s woman and child in my house.’
He glared darkly at the other girls. ‘Our elders said that it was a waste educating girls. Yet we have all these experts making noises on TV, on billboards, in the newspapers, everywhere about the proverbial Girl Child. The facts speak for themselves. Send a girl to the best schools and she will still spare no effort to discourage you against educating females.’
‘Not all girls are like that, Baba,’ Ropafadzo, who came after Linnet, said. ‘We are doing well at school, aren’t we?’
‘Prove the elders wrong then, my daughter!’ Baba vaLinnet had said, almost pleadingly. ‘When they came up with that notion, black people as a whole were discouraged by their colonial overlords from getting educated beyond the skills needed to serve them. The best a black woman could hope to become was a teacher or a nurse. Now, in Independent Zimbabwe, the opportunities are there. Why are you not taking them? Us men are portrayed as chauvinistic oppressors, but did I not let her go to that school? The reasons I was opposed to this idea in the first place have been vindicated.’
No one could respond. They did not know how to respond to the patriarch of the family when he was in this state. They had never seen him break down and cry.
Tete* Mai vaNeliwe had never heard of anyone in Marlborough named Zvenyika. But she drove her niece to the address given. When they got there, her worst fears were confirmed.
The mansion belonged to a family called Dhliwayo, who did own a successful computer sales business, Dhligital Business Machines. Francis was the younger brother to Mr Dhliwayo’s cousin’s wife. He had only been staying at the mansion because they had asked him to mind the place while the family spent the August holiday in Israel. He was not nineteen years old, his real age was closer to thirty.
And that was not even the worst of it.
Francis had dropped out of ‘A’ Level at a missionary boarding school after misappropriating his own exam fee. There was also an unsubstantiated rumour about the headmaster’s maid, but she had run off to marry someone else. He lived in a shack at the back of a house in Dzivarasekwa. The Zvenyikas had owned a house once, but his mother had lost it to his father’s relatives after he died.
Zvenyika’s mother sold roasted peanuts, boiled maize and fried chicken legs near the Market Square bus terminus or outside Bible House, catering mostly to patrons of nightclubs in the area towards the Kopje or nightshift workers. She had also started to trade in traditional aphrodisiacs and strange pills from Senegal via South Africa that were supposed to make the buttocks grow bigger. She did not think Zimbabwean women needed it, but business was booming and she was contemplating a trip to South Africa to make a bulk purchase.
Plying her trade at night allowed him the room to himself. Then, by day, she slept there, while he stayed outdoors. Her hope was that he would get himself a job and that would lead to better accommodation. He still had good ‘O’ Levels.
When all this was explained to Tete Mai Neliwe, she decided that this stupid thing her niece had done would not be mitigated by any further association with this boy. She drove Linnet that same night back to Chitungwiza, but Baba vaLinnet was not prepared to take her back. So, she took her in herself.
Donnell Tanatswa Mashanda was born at the Avenues clinic. Baba vaLinnet received the news that he was now Sekuru vaDonnell when he got home. His joy was genuine; he called round the men from neighbouring households and sent a boy to the bottle-store to get Scuds. The only one of his neighbours who did not have daughter who was ruined had been spared from this evil by having only sons. But, he commiserated with his neighbours and admired their magnanimity in celebrating the birth of what was really a bastard. Was there not a proverb that said he who had lunatic, that lunatic belonged to him; when he tipped over the clay pot with the day’s milk, he could do nothing but ululate in appreciation of the deed?
When the last of his neighbours had staggered off home, Sekuru vaDonnell had yet another adage to share with his wife; the ancestral spirits have given you a wound so that the flies can eat you. That morning, he had been told that he was being sent on forced vacation indefinitely as part of a restructuring exercise at the factory he had worked for most of his adult life. It was a matter of time before his sister got tired of being so big-hearted about looking after Linnet and her child. He had a virus that was incurable. What else could possibly go wrong? But his wife had comforted him, and said she could keep working. Even with the rampant inflation, they could manage.
Tete Mai vaNeliwe had an even better idea. She called Michelle in the UK. It was a coincidence, Michelle said, because she had been meaning to call her mother over the same matter. She needed someone to pick up the kids from school while she and her husband were at work. Yes, she could send the necessary documents for Linnet to apply for a visa.
The news was received with joy at the Mashanda residence in Unit L, Chitungwiza. From the looks of things, Mugabe would win the elections again. Rather, he would not concede defeat as readily as he had done so with the Referendum on the Constitution. Whether the country would descend into civil war or not was unclear, but given that it was only the ruling party that had the guns, the chances were it would not. What was clear though was the slide towards the economic precipice would go into Super-Pursuit Mode. Already, people no longer bothered to pick up $20 notes lying on the ground and prices changed weekly. Without an income in hard currency, no family in Zimbabwe would have a prayer.
Linnet going to the UK to be her cousin’s maid seemed like the first sign of things going right for her.
Some eleven years later, Linnet now knew that it was in fact the first sign of things going even wronger for her.
*The Nose-Brigade are the more westernised socio-economic class in Zimbabwean society, characterised by their affected way of speaking English. The term is derived from kutaura chirungu chemuminho, ‘speak English through the nose’ i.e. speaking English with a British or American accent rather than a broad Zimbabwean one. It was speculated by the first Zimbabweans to encounter the British that the strange nasal speech we now know as English was partly produced in their peculiar, straight noses
*Manyame River is the river separating the cities of Harare and Chitungwiza
*Coloureds, ‘mixed-Race’, but more accurately the children of European and Asian men and African women
*roora, ‘dowry’. Also called ‘lobola’ in the SiNdebele language. Often incorrectly translated as ‘bride-price’ in English
*knobkerries: Traditional club. Technically, ownership is illegal, but widespread due to its status as a ceremonial object
*Scud: A brand of opaque beer sold in plastic vessels designed to resemble the traditional calabash. So named because it came out at the start of the Gulf War
*Tete: ‘paternal aunt’
*Manyame River is the river separating the cities of Harare and Chitungwiza
*Coloureds, ‘mixed-Race’, but more accurately the children of European and Asian men and African women
*roora, ‘dowry’. Also called ‘lobola’ in the SiNdebele language. Often incorrectly translated as ‘bride-price’ in English
*knobkerries: Traditional club. Technically, ownership is illegal, but widespread due to its status as a ceremonial object
*Scud: A brand of opaque beer sold in plastic vessels designed to resemble the traditional calabash. So named because it came out at the start of the Gulf War
*Tete: ‘paternal aunt’
Masimba Musodza came to England from Zimbabwe as a young adult, settling in the North East England town of Middlesbrough. His short fiction has appeared in anthologies and periodicals around the world and online. He has published two novels and a novella in ChiShona, his first language, and a collection of short stories in English. He also writes for motion picture.
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