(I slept.)
She was eager to get to the store because for the first time she and her sisters were going to be given a share of the money from the groundnuts and allowed to buy something for themselves. Groundnuts were the only crop that was paying well in those days and her mother had divided some of their land into strips for her and her sisters each to tend their own crop. Aqui had gone to the stand every day after school to check on hers, clearing the sandy soil of weeds and keeping away kudu and whorwe birds. When they were ready it was very exciting. We collected them in small mounds on the earth. My baby brother was strapped to my back in a sling and we borrowed donkeys from the headman to take the nuts to the stores in the township.
The shopping area was ten miles away in the growth point of Sadza where the daily bus stopped for Chivhu. It was reached by a dusty path and rather grandly called the Business Centre. The main shop, to which they were headed, was Musarurwa General Stores which stocked food and clothes. Next to that was a maize-flour mill, a butcher's with giant iron hooks from which hung fly-covered carcasses that stank in the heat, and the Come Again Bottle-store where the men would hang out drinking and making gob-shop.
Aqui's mother had kept back a few groundnuts to grind into oil to rub into the girl's skins at night but all the rest were solemnly handed over to Mr Musarurwa to be weighed and the price calculated on a scrap of paper. The money was then counted out and Aqui took her few coins and began to decide what to buy. It was hard to choose from such a treasure trove. On the floor were sacks of sugar out of which the storekeeper would scoop out a paper coneful for their mother. A large jar of coloured lollipops stood on the counter next to a tray of single cigarettes. Shelves along the back held bolts of bold-patterned cottons, thick blue cakes of laundry soap, pink plastic pots of skin-lightening cream, and dusty packets of Lobells biscuits. Pans and kettles hung on strings from the ceiling.
Aqui lingered long in front of a cupboard containing bottles of Cream Soda and Ripe'n'Ready, boxes of sweet cigarettes and bags of toffees in coloured wrappers, and wondered how they tasted. On the way to the shops I had thought I would buy a torch so that when I came back late from school or went to the bush in the night to relieve myself, I could spy any snakes or tokoloshis. But my mother explained that these would need batteries. There was the same problem if I bought a kerosene lamp to give light to do my homework. So I bought a blanket for winter and my sister bought tackies [canvas tennis shoes]. It was the first time the nine-year-old had worn shoes; usually the village children went barefoot. How we laughed at her, she walked like a duck.
They returned home in festive mood that night, singing as they walked. The blanket was soft and would be cosy for sleeping, her mother had mixed up a special drink of maize and sugar, and there was even meat from the butcher's for dinner. Aqui had just taken a mouthful of the rich stew when she heard loud shouting outside. The food which had been tasting so good turned bitter in my mouth. It was my father and he had been drinking. Her mother pretended not to have heard and carried on chattering gaily. But the girls fell silent for they all knew he would soon drag her out to beat her, then leave her under the shivering stars. They cringed like the ownerless village dog as they waited for the sound of the stinging slaps they knew would follow.
Our African men have this problem-when they get money they use it not for their family but on their girlfriends, forgetting their wives and children, and on beer. My father would go insane when he was drunk. He would beat up my mother, be abusive and chase her away so she slept in the kraal with the animals even in winter when it was cold.
When he had finished beating his wife, he would return to the kitchen hut where the children all sat rooted to the spot and grab the food left untouched on their plates, smacking his lips with lusty pleasure. If they moved, he would cuss at them and sometimes beat them too. Once when I was about three, he picked me up and threw me out of the hut like a ball so hard that I still have the scar. My grandmother, the one who was a spirit medium, mixed a paste of herbs to rub in the wound which made it hurt even more. That was the year that Prime Minister Ian Smith had illegally declared Rhodesia independent from Britain. I didn't know what UDI was but from the way grown-ups talked about it I knew it was something very bad that meant that our people would never have their own country like our brothers had got in Zambia next door.
The next day as always her father was very contrite and hangdog, tickling her under her chin and calling her his little princess. The evenings when he was not drunk he would tell stories. Often they were about long-ago times when the Ndebele came and killed our men and took our beautiful women and cows, or when the whites came and drove out the black people to the hills and mountains and barren land and took away the good land.
Sometimes they were about Nehanda, the mhondoro woman from Mazowe who inspired the 1896 uprising of the Shona against the white settlers when they realized they had been cheated out of their land by the strangers. I loved those stories best of all My father said we were even descended from one of those who had led the fight with her.
The rebellion was known as the Chimurenga, a poetic Shona word which means fight or struggle, and it was one of the most violent and organized rebellions against white rule anywhere in Africa. Three hundred and seventy-two whites were killed-around 10 per cent of the settlers. Some of those scattered around on homesteads gathered together to form laagers such as that around the large thorn tree which eventually became the settlement of Enkeldoorn.
The Pioneers were taken by surprise by the revolt of natives they had seen as placid and submissive as the cattle they herded, and whom they had thought welcomed their arrival as protection against the raiding parties of the Ndebele. But the Shona were angry that not only had they lost their land but were also expected to pay hut tax which meant losing their menfolk to the mines and farms of the strangers. On top of that the year the white man arrived in 1890 coincided with a plague of locusts that returned again each year. By 1895 the numbers were so many that people said they blotted out the sun. On top of that, in 1894, a terrible drought had started. Lastly, in early 1896, an epidemic of rinderpest broke out among the cattle, leaving a trail of carcasses across the country. The authorities panicked and herded thousands more cows into kraals for slaughter.
To the superstitious Shona these were all signs that the spirits were angry and they were eager to take up their weapons and follow Nehanda in rebellion. Nehanda could summon up spirits and she instructed our people, ‘Spread yourself through the forests and fight till the stranger leaves’ She was so strong and brave, she just thought about the country, not like Lobengula who just wanted the sugar. When the whites tried to break her spirit by offering things, she just said No. The whites were very cunning but she was also cunning.
The Shona might have had numbers and spirits on their side but the settlers had guns and dynamite. The Shona chiefs were hunted down and the caves where they and their followers were hiding were blown up. In December 1897, Nehanda was eventually caught and taken to Salisbury. Father Richartz, the Jesuit priest from the Chishawasha Mission, was called for. He wrote in the mission records, ‘Nehanda began to dance, to laugh and talk so that the warders were obliged to tie her hands and watch her continually as she threatened to kill herself.’ She refused his entreaties to be taken into the Catholic faith, instead demanding to be returned to her people, and on 27 April 1898 she was hanged. Unrepentant to the last, on the scaffold she warned, ‘My bones shall rise again,’ then her body dropped through the trapdoor with a heavy thud.
Aqui lay on a rock in the long shadow of a tree, sucking on a chakata fruit and dreaming about becoming a nurse. She was supposed to be tending the mombes, which was an important job as cattle represented wealth in the village. But it was so hot that the heat rippled across the yellow plains and the cattle lumbered about slowly. As long as she gave them an occasional shoo to keep them away from the crops then she could drift off and let her thoughts dance away.
These days,
