chest and forced her breathing into an asthmatic wheeze. Then I could walk head high for I was back in my territory, crossing the lands where the ancestors lay buried. The wood-smoke on the wind came from the fires of her people, a subclan of the Zezuru, one of the biggest Shona tribes, and the thump-thump she could hear was the pounding of millet by their women.
Aqui lived among the prickly cactus trees in the so-called Remote Areas of Mashonaland. Her village was named Zhakata's Kraal, after a former headman, and it lay on the highveld in the stony shadow of the Daramombe Mountains behind which the birds chased the disappearing sun every evening. It was not on any map or road and was a long day's walk from the nearest town of Chivhu, a small cattle-ranching settlement that the whites called Enkeldoorn after the Dutch for ‘single thorn’, about 90 miles south of their capital, Salisbury. Zhakata's Kraal was in one of the Native Reserves, communal lands into which blacks had been shunted when the whites came, and it was a desolate place, the surrounding trees all having been shorn of limbs for firewood. The village consisted of a line of round mud-and-pole huts with thatched roofs all facing east and dotted amid large rocks and thorn trees. Chickens scratched in the dust and a stray dog with a withered leg scooted about on its bottom. The headman's place stood on the other side, and a little away was the house of the witchdoctor or nganga near the sacred muchakata tree under which the elders would hold their meetings and lay offerings to appease the ancestral spirits.
Aqui was proud that her parents were very clever and, unlike most of the villagers, did not believe in ghosts or tokoloshis that could possess you, poison your food or bewitch your enemies, but that did not stop her quickening her step as she passed by. Sometimes lightning could turn itself into a ball and chase a person round a hut to strike him dead, as had happened to her father's cousin who let his mombes trample his neighbour's fields and she wasn't sure what that was if not witchcraft. ‘Better to be safe than late [as in dead],’ said her grandmother who saw faces in the fire and was a mhondoro, which meant she had the spirit of a lion and could act as a medium to talk to the ancestors.
Aqui was the eldest of five children. There had been eight of them but two of her younger brothers and a sister had died as infants. Such deaths were common in the village. I think one brother and sister died of dehydration from diarrhoea and one brother from jaundice but my mother said it was because the spirits were not happy The first boy was almost two when he died and my mother said it was because she had met another mother whose child had muti on his head to protect him. The weeping after the death of the first son had gone on for days and he had been buried in the banks of the first river Aqui crossed on the way to school. The elders had explained that children could not be buried in dry places like older people because they are weak and their souls not yet formed so had to be buried in the soft clay of the riverbanks.
Their home was a small compound comprising three rondavels, round windowless huts, inside a fence of jagged branches. Like all the huts in the village, theirs were made from mud from anthills that the women would mix up with water from the river to form sticky dough then plaster it on with their hands. I loved watching them doing it and longed for the day I would have my own hut. Some of the more artistic women used sticks to decorate them with swirls or a sharp stone to cut a diamond pattern, but her mother left theirs plain. The roof was made of dried elephant grass that the women carried on their heads in bundles from the river, and for the floor they mixed cowpats with water, which set as solid as concrete.
The biggest hut in their compound was the bedroom hut where her mother, father and surviving baby brother slept and their few belongings were kept. The only decor was a small cracked mirror and a yellowing 1966 calendar advertising tractor parts that her father had brought back from a job; there was a thin lumpy mattress on the ground and a tin trunk held clothes and a Bible.
The second hut was on stilts with a ladder of crooked logs leading up to it. That was the storeroom for mealie meal to dry, safe from the white ants that got everywhere and the rats that kept Aqui awake with their scrabbling at night as they tried to tunnel under the hut walls. The third and last hut was the kitchen hut in which they cooked the meals and Aqui and her sisters would sleep. The kitchen hut also served as the sitting room and as the female members of the family entered they would squat on the ground on the left while the men veered right to sit on a raised bench that ran all along the side. It was always smoky inside, but once a visitor grew accustomed to the gloom they would see shelves at the back moulded from the wall. On these were arranged the family's few cooking utensils and tin cups as well as two green enamel plates decorated with red flowers that her father had brought from town. The back of the hut was considered the sacred abode of the mudzimu, the ancestral spirits that protect the family, and when Aqui's siblings died they were laid on one of the shelves before being buried to help them cross the boundary to the spirit world.
In the centre of the floor was a fire in a round hearth where her mother would cook sadza. Sometimes they would eat it spiced up with relish from her mother's garden or wild fruits like marula or chakata that the chief had forbidden the villagers from selling because he believed that would cause lightning.
If the mealies were ready in the field they would roast them brown and crispy, and this was Aqui's favourite food. She thought there was nothing better than blowing off the ash and biting into the crunchy sweetness. Apart, perhaps, from the first rain when the children would all run outside and dance about, holding their hands out to try and catch the little liquid rocks which burst all around them and would turn the brown land green overnight and wash away the red dust that coated their feet and shins. In winter the cooking meant the hut would be nice and cosy to sleep in but in summer it was like an oven and horrid.
The happiest days were those when she arrived home to a yeasty smell in the air and a large oil-drum bubbling away on a fire. This would mean her mother was making Seven Days, a homemade beer of maize and rapoko millet mixed with well water, so named because it took seven days to be ready. It was this that paid for Aqui's school fees and the uniform of blue and white striped dress that she always kept immaculate.
Her mother's beer was renowned in the village. On the first day of brewing, beer drinkers would pass by and give a long sniff then say, ‘Eh, eh, that smells good, I am looking forward to drinking this one.’ After a day of simmering, the drum would be left to cool in the hut for two days and on the fourth day more rapoko added until the mixture was of porridge consistency. It was then repeatedly boiled and simmered to reduce it and more water added from the well. When the beer was ready it had a thick froth which had to be poured off through a sieve.
On the seventh day if the beer drinkers did not automatically return to the hut, Aqui would climb an anthill or rock and shout, ‘Seven Day is ready!’ Her mother would then sit by the big drum, her wide skirt arranged around her considerable girth, and ladle out the lumpy yellow liquid with a cup hooked to a long stick. She usually told me to give the first cup to the biggest beer-drinker because if he pronounced it good then others would flock in. People gave ten cents a cup if they had money, otherwise they paid in kind with cobs of corn or cabbage heads, and would sit there from morning till night, talking, drinking, playing tsoro [a kind of backgammon with bottle-tops] and fighting. The customers were almost all men but there was one married couple who would arrive early in the morning holding hands nicely, and, by the evening, be fighting like dogs.
Aqui hated fighting. Her full name Aquinata meant peacemaker and she was the family's firstborn in a land where everyone wanted a son. She also had a Shona name-Wadzanai-which her mother said meant ‘Don't shout at each other’. It was only later that Aqui would ponder the circumstances that on the long night of her birth in August 1962 had led to her parents choosing such a name rather than Precious, Blessing or Joy like her friends, or Chipo, which means Gift, like her mother.
Aquinata
