wrong joke about the wrong child, and the pack could turn against me. Laughter can dry up quickly when you are a child: one minute you are making the gang howl, and the next you are in tears because someone has called you a refugee.
I had to choose how I would distinguish myself and I knew that it had to be safe.
So, I never joined Terrence in his attacks and I never laughed too heartily. I was simply one of the pack – playing hopscotch on the bumpy pavement in front of the steps of Building One in the evenings as twilight settled on the city and cars whizzed past. No one would have thought to look twice at me, nor at my little toddling sisters. We were children like all others; our skinny arms flew and our brown legs kicked high into the air. It was the same, evening after evening: we jumped and landed, threw the stones further and faster, desperate to get in one last skip before we were called inside.
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There were three of us. I was the first. Then came Mandlesilo, born in 1977 when I was already three, and then Zengeziwe, who followed in 1979. As a child, Mandla was stubborn in the way that middle children must be if they are to survive childhood emotionally intact. She was quiet in a manner more thoughtful than it was shy. She also cried easily – a trait that has followed her into adulthood and which has a great deal to do with the fact that she is the kindest and most sensitive among us. Wedged between an overbearing older sister and a younger sibling who never met a show she couldn’t steal, Mandla was our conscience, the moral ballast that kept us out of trouble simply by virtue of her own principles. Zeng and I would happily have hidden our crimes from our parents, but Mandla wouldn’t let us. She preferred that we not sin in the first place.
Zeng was a crowd-pleaser and remains one today. She was the kind of baby who woke up singing and then gurgled her way through the day, a sweet manipulator whose every sin you forgave because she was too brazen and too gorgeous to resist. This has been her enduring trait. She makes you laugh until your belly aches, even as you know you ought to be weeping with the knowledge that she is not as happy as she seems and is far more complex than she would have the world believe.
As children we were moon-faced and medium brown with plaited hair and ashy knees. We were observant and thus preternaturally sarcastic. We wisecracked our way through breakfast and joked through lunch and told hilarious stories as we played in the dimming light. And because the world was not yet cruel we were innocent in a way that softened our repartee.
Bath time was special. In the tub, Mummy often teased us about our dirty fingernails and scraped knees, about our blistered palms and our chapped feet. She would run a wet cloth over our torsos and soap our backs wondering aloud how we got so filthy. ‘And this cut?’ she would ask in an exaggerated voice. ‘Where did this one come from?’ She would wag a finger playfully and smile. Her staged anger made us laugh and her delighted voice was like honey in warm water. We knew that other mothers hated it when their kids came home with torn dungarees and bloody knees, so Mummy’s revelling in our constant state of raggedness was a novelty of which we never tired.
Mummy loved the small casualties of childhood that marked our bodies. She was riveted by our stories – playground triumphs and the physical indignities of falling and getting scratched – because she knew that the little dings and nicks on our bodies would forge our personalities. We were wriggly and outsized because she encouraged us to exaggerate and amplify. In our retelling, every cut was actually a gash, every scrape a laceration. At home, we were brave, even if outside we navigated with a little more caution.
We were little black girls born into an era in which talk of women’s rights swirled around in the air, but in which those rights were still far from tangible. The first ten years of my life coincided with the UN Decade for Women, so there were always speeches and conferences bringing people together to talk about the urgency of equality. Africans took the UN seriously back then; so, perhaps sensing the imminence of women’s liberation, Mummy set about raising us to be ready for the tipping point – the moment when assertions of female independence would be met with praise rather than admonition. She did this deftly. Somehow she knew that the key would lie in the cuts and the bruises and the shared laughter of our baths.
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Although most of the Burley Court mothers didn’t work, in our house Mummy earned the money and Baba – being a botany and entomology student at the University of Zambia (UNZA) – went to school to learn about plants and insects. Baba’s other job was being a freedom fighter, but the income from that line of work was negligible. Before he met her, he had been wedded to the Movement for the Emancipation of his People. But then he had seen her one day and liked her smile and liked her legs. They had talked and he had discovered that she played tennis and there was something about that he liked, too. Soon he began to think about her all the time: the Swazi girl with a killer backhand who pretended not to notice him when he and the other guerrillas stood at the courts, watching.
For her part, Mummy liked the tall handsome man whose corduroy pants fitted him just so. She liked his sense of moderation. He drank, but seldom to the point of forgetting. He spent time with the others, but was often on his own. He smiled often, but wasn’t the type of man who laughed gratuitously. In her experience, those types of men always had something to hide.
She qualified as an accountant the year after they met and soon after that he borrowed a tie and she wore a pair of white knee-high boots and a cream-coloured minidress that barely covered her swelling belly and they got married at Lusaka City Hall.
The women of Burley Court gossiped about all manner of apartment business but nothing occupied their time and energies quite like a good discussion about the Guerrilla who refused to work and the Swazi who was so in love with him that she allowed it. Whenever the subject of my parents and their relationship came up – which was often – the women would speculate about the peculiar madness that besets some women when it comes to matters of the heart.
Because their area of specialisation was rumour-mongering, Mummy and her friends referred to them as the Rungarers. Mama Tawona was the lead Rungarer. She couldn’t accept the unchristian relationship that was unfolding before her eyes: Zambia was then, as it is now, a deeply conservative society. Women and men had separate domains and never the twain should meet except where it was sanctioned by God.
Mummy was casually pretty and had nice fit legs, which she was always showing off in miniskirts and dresses that stopped far too high above her knees. She knew how to drive a car and generally lived her life as she wanted. Yet in the eyes of the Rungarers Mummy possessed a number of traits that would doom her to a failed marriage. For one thing, she worked too much, sometimes only arriving home after six, while her Guerrilla came and went whenever he pleased, collecting insects that were ostensibly related to his ‘studying’ and dragging the children along with him in dungarees and denim. They always came back muddy and sticky. It was obvious that he wanted to turn those three poor little things into boys – their hair was cut short and they did not have pierced ears, among other notable offences. Worse, they never went to church. There just didn’t seem to be any order in the lives of the Swazi and the Guerrilla and their children. It was not clear what the organising principle was that kept their household together: it was not God, nor was it family or tradition.
The Rungarers often huddled together in the hallway next to Mama Tawona’s house, bent towards one another in conversation. When they were not laughing loudly, they spoke in hushed tones. They cackled with their mouths behind their hands and then smiled and said hello and imitated politeness when someone walked by. Mummy couldn’t stand them. She smiled broadly whenever she passed them in her smart work suits, but never slowed down to have a conversation. She did nothing to cause them to twist their faces and turn their lips upside down at her but they did it anyway, rolling their eyes as she passed, staring at her new shoes or eyeing her old handbag. She couldn’t win and knew it. She was either a show-off for having too many nice things, or a pitiable mess for having too many
