elongated as they squelched through bog and marsh. Nonsense may have spewed from their malarial lips in Kongwa but they were free. They marched across Africa singing freedom songs until they lost their voices. They sang until they were dry-mouthed and croaking so that, by the time they arrived at the end of all their convoluted journeys in Lusaka, this place of cigarettes and laughter and hard-soft women, they were exhausted and ready to smile.
Having made it to the headquarters of their movement, which was supposed to emancipate the people, many of them simply collapsed. I see, now, that this is how we found them. We found them fathering fat brown children and loving free women. We found them sitting on red polished verandas feeling the warmth of the Lusaka rain on their brown shoulders. We found them smoking zol and singing Bob Marley’s ‘Buffalo Soldier’.
They came to Lusaka broken by many more things than the struggle for justice. But their demons did not matter here. What mattered was that they had decided to make our little city with its outsized ambitions and its orderly roundabouts their place of safety. For them, Lusaka became the place where black was equal to free, where nobody, not Queen Elizabeth or John Vorster or Richard Nixon, could tell them anything. Lusaka – in all its peaceful futuristic pan-African glory – was theirs and they meant to burrow in its peace for a while.
Some of the residents of Burley Court did not find the women and the men who visited us especially interesting. They found them loud and they resented the fact that their president – His Excellency Dr Kenneth Kaunda – had given all these revolutionaries special status in the country. Dr Kaunda was a dreamer who believed that Africa belonged to Africans. He had said that independent Africa had a responsibility towards the parts of Africa that were still in chains. And so, because Africans in South Africa and Zimbabwe and Mozambique were not free, Dr Kaunda had given us refuge in Zambia.
For ordinary Zambians, our presence was a daily reality, not just an empty political slogan. Most were gracious and embraced our cause. But for others, like Mama Tawona, we were rule-breakers and layabouts. For them, the word ‘refugee’ was a slur. The refugee women took Zambian men while the freedom-fighter men caroused and broke Zambian women’s hearts.
I crouched on the ground, waiting to be found. But the problem with Mummy and Baba was bigger than their being refugees; problem was, they were in love and that idea struck her as laughable.
Their gossip was about this strange and laughable fact. Mama Tawona threw her head back and cackled, talking about my mother as though she were a silly child. ‘Ha, mwana! That love she is feeling for that man makes her think he is wonderful. Meanwhile we all know that is just foolish. Isn’t it that when you are in love even a desert can have the appearance of a beautiful forest?’ She roared with laughter, and Mrs Mwansa (who had no children but at least had a husband, so she was spared from total irrelevance) and Mama Terrence nodded their heads in agreement.
‘She will learn,’ said Mama Terrence.
‘Ehe, she will learn. It will be pain that teaches her,’ said Mrs Mwansa sagely.
Mama Tawona continued. ‘Mmn, but you know men. One day he will wake up and decide that the only thing he wants in this life is the one thing that she has not provided him. Then we will see if she still smiles and says “Good morning” like that in her high heels. Eh! I don’t think so. No. Instead she will be crying, crying, crying tears of sorrow. Eh-eh! Because men are like that. If they don’t get their heir, they will leave you. Until she has a son, she will never be guaranteed that man’s love.’
And so the world’s obsession with boys revealed itself to me. We needed to have a baby brother and it needed to happen soon because my sisters and I would never be enough. The absence of brothers would bring untold misery to our parents. I hadn’t known boys mattered more than girls, that one fictional first-born boy was more important than a fistful of girls. This revelation – that a family without boys is really no family at all – was so significant I didn’t hear Terrence thundering around the corner. I was sitting there turning over our family’s boylessness in my mind, thinking about how I would formulate the question to Mummy when she got back from work, when I felt Terrence’s skinny knee connect with my face. I screamed, and the Rungarers jumped. My cheek puffed out instantly and I saw no sympathy in Mama Tawona’s eyes. She looked at me as though I was a thief.
It hurt.
I only learnt the word ‘primogeniture’ much later in life, but this was my first lesson in the concept. What an absurd idea: that my father may have grounds to find another woman so they might make another child, a boy who would ostensibly be made more in my father’s image than any of us. With my cheek swollen and this new idea thudding in my head I wasn’t sure if I should laugh or vomit.
How could anyone be more like Baba than me? Wasn’t his face in mine? Wasn’t he our dad who loved us more than anything in the world because he took us places – to the market and the mechanic and to visit with his friends to show us off?
Yet once it had been spoken I understood it. It explained all the other times Mummy had been asked – by women she had just met – whether she was going to try one more time. It provided a basis for all the times someone had said, ‘You can’t stop until you get a boy,’ all the times Mummy had turned her face away in anger and pulled us along quickly.
◆ ◆ ◆
A few days after the hallway collision, my cheek was still tender and slightly bruised. Tawona and I were playing hopscotch and – unusually – she was losing. I threw the stone and it landed firmly in its box. I began to hop. ‘You touched the line,’ she shouted.
I hadn’t touched the line. ‘I didn’t,’ I said.
‘You did. You’re a cheater.’
‘You’re the one who’s cheating. Because I’m winning you want to make up stories? You get out of here and go and cheat somewhere else!’ I shouted. I was still angry with her mother, still mulling over the conversation I had overheard, still mad that my face was sore.
Tawona was never one to take an insult lying down. She shouted, ‘Maybe it’s you who needs to go to the witch doctor, and not your mother!’
I had no idea what she was talking about but I felt my face flush. ‘Oh! Now you have no words, eh?’ she continued. ‘Let me tell you something, you stupid girl. If your mother was from our tribe they would have taken her to the witch doctor by now. Anyway, maybe it’s because you people are foreigners. In Zambia we don’t have such things. How can a woman have three girls in a row?
Non-stop. Three? Two is okay. But three!? Eh! Three is a curse.’ She ploughed on, determined to do maximum damage.
‘If she doesn’t fix this problem your father will leave her for a woman who can give him what he wants. No man on this earth doesn’t want sons. I mean! Eh! She should be careful. Do you think that man will stay in the house where there is no one to inherit?’
She continued.
‘A man can never ever love his daughters the way he will love his sons. Boys belong to their fathers. So now, what does your father have? Just girls? So then? Eh! So then he has nothing.’
I don’t remember going for her. I only know there was blood everywhere and I was not sorry that I punched her. I was not sorry at all and she was shocked and no longer smirking and that made me feel better although not much because she had just broken my heart.
Then there was a ring of screaming excited kids around us and she was up and livid, and storming towards the stairwell with the crowd billowing out behind us as she cradled her split lip and
