whites are moving out. She lives in Apartment 321, on the third floor. Even before I reach 321, I hear the screaming of little children and the bass throb of a Bob Marley song. I knock loudly but get no response. I wait for ‘No Woman, No Cry’ to finish.
When I knock again the voices go quiet. A woman’s voice says something in Shona which most likely is directed at me. She might be telling me to come in, but I can’t be sure and the war wasn’t that long ago.
A frosted window to the left of the door swings open. A young girl peeks at me through ornately shaped white burglar bars. She shouts something with the word ‘murungu’ in it, then closes the window. ‘Murungu’ means ‘white man’ in Shona.
A large woman answers the door. Florence.
I explain who I am, that I want to interview her on questions of the liberation war and reconciliation. I lick my lips, trying to get some moisture back in my mouth. My feet start to shuffle.
Florence tilts her head back as if to catch me from a different angle. Then she smiles and stretches out a carpenter-sized hand that swallows mine as we shake. ‘I never thought a white man would come all the way from America to talk to me about anything,’ she says. ‘Come in.’
Loose tiles in the parquet floor click under our steps. She limps just a little.
The living room window overlooks the street. A woman sells tomatoes on the sidewalk. Two men ride by on those black, balloon-tyre bicycles. Florence directs me to a beige armchair with a crocheted doily laid over the back. A bigger version of the doily covers the dining room table in the corner. A long-legged spider clings to the wall.
Florence sits on a sofa that matches my chair but has three doilies, one on the back of each seat. Black lettering on a wall poster just above her head reads: There is no liberation without the full emancipation of women. The brightly coloured figure of an African guerrilla with a baby on her back reinforces the slogan.
Florence closes a khaki-coloured notebook sitting on the coffee table. She places it on top of a foot-high stack of similar books.
‘So much marking these days,’ she says.
‘I don’t have the patience,’ I answer.
‘You can learn. Zimbabwe needs lots of teachers. Without education we’re doomed to failure.’
Her voice is deeper than most women’s. Before I can respond, she calls someone from the kitchen.
‘Maybe I should come back another time,’ I suggest.
‘We can start today. It’s not a problem.’
I’ve never interviewed anyone before and I haven’t prepared any questions. My tape recorder still sits on the cable-spool table.
The girl from the window comes in. She’s wearing a faded flowered print dress, carrying a tray of glasses and a bottle of bright orange liquid. She sets the load down and fills the glasses. She hands me one and curtsies. The drink is too sweet. Florence finishes hers in two swallows and places the glass on a cardboard coaster of a seascape. The thin extensions tied into her hair are pulled back and bound together in a sort of pony tail. She leans forward, resting her bulky forearms on her knees.
‘Can you bring some potato crisps, please musikana?’ Florence asks the girl.
‘Yes, auntie.’
Florence wears at least a dozen silver bangles on each arm. The oversize turquoise t-shirt with a flamingo in front does little to conceal her girth.
‘One day a group from our school just left and walked to Mozambique,’ she says. ‘We weren’t far from the border. It was a boarding school, so we didn’t tell our parents. Better security. Is that the sort of thing you want to hear about?’
‘Sure,’ I reply, ‘keep on going.’ I’ve already thought of questions to ask her.
‘Aren’t you going to write something down?’ she asks.
‘I’ll just listen and write later.’
The young girl arrives with a bowl of potato chips. She offers me some, then sets the bowl in front of Florence.
‘We walked for three days,’ Florence continues. I try to imagine her as a gangly schoolgirl traipsing down a rocky path in the bush.
‘We ran out of food after the first day. We were so proud to be joining the liberation struggle.’ She likes to lift her hands as she speaks. Each time she does, the silver bangles jingle down her arm.
‘We reached the camp just after sundown on the third day. The comrades gave us sadza, and water to bathe. When you are so young nothing seems impossible.’ She pauses to eat two handfuls of potato chips. ‘Nothing,’ she repeats, grabbing some more chips. ‘They took us to Accra, a camp for women. Life was harsh. Many women couldn’t read, so I became a teacher. Children died there due to a lack of milk. But we didn’t lose hope.’
I stay at Florence’s house for five hours. It turns out, though, not to be her house at all. Her cousin, Kundesai, has the lease. Florence rents a room.
‘My cousin’s hardly here,’ she tells me. ‘She usually stays at her boyfriend’s, but there’s no rest for me here. I need my own place.’
Despite staying for so long, I don’t hear much of Florence’s story. People come in and out. Between pieces of our conversation, Florence changes a baby’s diaper, cooks lunch for half a dozen children, settles some financial matter for another cousin who drops by, hangs a basketful of clothes on the outside washing line, walks to the shop to buy beer and helps a neighbour rearrange her living room to make way for a new sofa.
I find this all very interesting.
Everyone who enters the apartment comes and shakes my hand as if I’m a normal feature of the living room landscape. Each time I think I’ve worn out my welcome something lands on the end table next to my chair. Faith, the thirteen-year-old in the blue flowered print dress, brings me some tea and some poker-chip-like cookies with a vague taste of butter and sugar. After that come rounds of Castle and plastic bowls filled with nuts and more potato chips.
By late afternoon an even younger girl, Hope, kneels at my feet with a metal bowl for hand washing. Meat and sadza follow, without silverware. We eat at the big table with the doily on top. Florence tells me that ‘nyama’ is the Shona word for ‘meat’ and that I should eat with my right hand only as the left is intended for ‘other things’.
She shows me how to squeeze the sadza into a ball, then use it to mop up the gravy. ‘You can also grab some meat or vegetables with the sadza,’ she says putting a lump of the white porridge and a few strands of green vegetables in her mouth.
I try to imitate her, but the sadza burns the palm of my hand. I lick at it, feeling like a dog cleaning the bottom of its bowl.
‘It’s a little hot,’ she says, ‘but we are used to it.’ She doesn’t laugh at my awkward efforts. She just keeps eating.
‘Sadza is like our bread,’ she continues, ‘the staff of life as they say in English.’
When the sadza cools a little, I try again. I get into a rhythm, rolling the sadza into a ball, picking up meat and
