AFTER THE STORM

1982

For the survivors of killing fields, the 1970s hit: Tie A Ribbon Around The Old Oak Tree struck a romantic, welcoming cord. Not so for Africa’s returning guerrillas. The warmth of the lyrics never sipped into their weary frames.

In 1980, a virtually unknown racist conflict, the Rhodesian Bush War, ended with the country renamed Zimbabwe under President Robert Mugabe. We were free! Jubilant. Rid of the minority government of Prime Minister Ian Smith’s apartheid policies. The future lay before us like an asphalted highway devoid of curves and turns. A victory? Thousands of lives on both sides of the conflict perished in a war that ended in polling stations.

My womb bulging with a souvenir from the resistance camp in Zambia, I waited out the chaotic aftermath of hard-won independence by working as a nurse in that country’s general hospital until the birth of my daughter, Zenzi. And in her letters to me, Ma insisted I remain in safety with the baby until ex-freedom fighters from different political parties and Ian Smith’s security forces rooted out their lingering animosity and trod the path of genuine reconciliation.

My work, raising Zenzi and juggling correspondent courses as a Nurse Practitioner, sped the wheel of Time. As though within a couple of weeks, my daughter had cut not one but two first teeth and was proudly making tentative steps across the linoleum floor of our cottage on the hospital grounds. Time to ignore Ma’s words of caution—and mine. Without bidding my employer farewell, I packed my scant belongings, tied the baby on my back and took the train to my hometown of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe.

 Compatriots wore suspicion on their faces like masks—fear, a flimsy layer beneath forced smiles. One never knew which stormy guy (or woman) in civvies had been one of ‘the boys’ from differing guerrilla camps or the league that had murdered for paychecks in the Rhodesia African Rifles.

Not that I missed a White minority government’s administration or stepping into the curb for a White person, but a mere two years after the war, Main Street in Bulawayo not only exhibited signs of decay but reeked of poverty and dust. Beggars and peddlers in every corner—pantyhose, cigarette lighters and video cassettes on the number-one list.

Before sunset, I stood before a gate hanging on a single hinge and surveyed the rugged, bullet-riddled façade of my old home, Ma’s once flourishing beds of violets and carnations a ghost of the past. Cardboard had replaced the windowpanes of Moyo’s cottage to the left, and the homestead appeared deserted. Barren earth had strangled the English lawn and Mrs Jhowe’s rose bushes to my right. Euphorbia—the hedge of the poor—stood in place of the hibiscus enclosure. The white-washed walls peeled like onion skin, the once-gleaming stoep under layers of dust.

On the verge of closing the curtains against the approaching dusk, Ma stared at me before ululating to the heavens. Zenzi added her screams to her grandmother’s, bringing neighbours running to Mother’s aid. Women shrieked as though I were a bride or the died-and-risen-again patron of Zimbabwe’s famous Mai Chaza sect. The mother of my late Camp Commander, Comrade Sizwe Dhlomo, folded me to her bosom, my tears wetting the front of her dress. Mama yanked me away and closed the door behind us.

At first, I did not recognize the scarecrow in the children’s room. My fears behind a heart thumping in my ears, I hugged my eighteen-year-old brother Thamsanqa to my chest. We shared jokes, his mind wandering off unseen paths and back again. Recognizing in him the incurable disease I encountered in Zambia was a spear struck into my heart.

Neighbours’ little ones poured into the house and fought over my baby as though she were a toy, and Zenzi revelled in the attention. She perked up in an attempt to race them on her unsteady legs. After tucking her and Thamsanqa in bed, Ma and I sat in the living room and broke into sobs.

Mama had aged within six years—her hair more silver than grey at age fifty-six. She had never been overweight but now looked like a reed whose sturdy pith held against all kinds of storms—swayed with them.

“Your father, Themba, Nompilo and your grandmother together with my baby Joey—gone! You and I are the only ones left,” she wailed.

My heart pounded against my ears. “Father, Themba—what do you mean? What could she—Before I left, Papa was on the eighth of a twelve-year sentence for subterfuge in Ian Smith’s domains. My brother Themba had disappeared into the unknown after mortar fire razed his boarding school. We never found out if a guerrilla or Rhodesia’s security forces were responsible. Grandmother and Ma’s last born child, my little brother Joey, had died in flames when their bus hit a landmine. A year later, my sister Nompilo, aged sixteen, died from a grenade attack on a discotheque, her death finally prompting me on a quest for revenge and the hazards of a guerrilla camp.

Ma moaned. “In my last letter, I did not have the strength to write about your father’s death. Independence released political prisoners and the cotton factory re-employed him. He was happy for a fortnight before a stray bullet hit him as he cycled past a fray between rival ex-guerrillas on his way home from work.”

The screech of a hawk erupted through my dry lips. I threw my arms around her neck—clung to her rigid body. She wrung her hands to the rhythm of pain, her voice rising and falling—falling and rising—an ebb and flow of anguish. “Hundreds perished that evening. I searched for his body at the morgue, the City Stadium and McDonald’s Football Stadiums, the railway station and various Youth Clubs where the Red Cross piled the dead like stacks of wood. I found him—your father—my husband—among a mound of bodies in Stanley Square, the picture you sent of you and Zenzi in his wallet. Your father carried your image to his death.”

I croaked, “Themba?” Dare I hope my brother is alive?

Her shoulders sagged. “My son talks to me from the Beyond.” She stifled a sob and sat up against the gale, her pith steady. “When the security forces shelled Rungwezi Mission, he and a comrade played dead then crossed the border into Mozambique. His friend returned after the war to tell me my son died after drinking from a poisoned well.”

My tears were exhausted, my throat dry—the shock too deep. Mama rocked back and forth like a disturbed child in a psychiatric ward. It was my turn to crush her to my bosom and mother her—lend her a strength I did not have in me.

She cried until the well of her tears dried, sat up and, with a sigh, accepted her fate. “Your grandmother’s death is too painful to recount. The new regime promoted Baba Jhowe to a cabinet minister. He used his position to speak against the atrocities of the Fifth Brigade on minor tribes.

“The Jhowes next door perished in a car accident after a speech he gave in a protest rally. Bulawayo residents wonder how the truck overturned on a lonely stretch of road. After their death, their twin sons migrated to America. Your girlfriend Reggie is now a nurse in London.”

In my mind’s eye, the image of a seven-year-old Nompilo and an eight-year-old me eavesdropping on Father and our neighbour, Mr Jhowe, as they discussed political matters too complicated for us to understand. Yet I could never forget Mr Jhowe saying a future government will seek scapegoats for its blunders. He died fighting his prophecy!

Ma snatched back the thread of her account. On and on—familiar faces, gone. Those not lost to the war had perished from an illness similar to Thamsanqa’s, the lucky ones like my girlfriend Regina, overseas. Comrade Camp Commander Sizwe Dhlomo’s mother returned for news of her son. I led her to the bedroom and placed my daughter in her arms. She read the story in my face, in the baby’s nose, and the flat forehead of the Dhlomos—sank to her knees and sobbed. My lover perished to the bark of a Rhodesian FN MAG 7.62 calibre before Zenzi’s birth.

Comrade Maria’s mother, in all the snowy head-to-toe glory of the Mai Chaza sect, stormed the living room and pressed me against her heavy bosom. Her husband stroked his beard, turned his eyes ceiling-ward and addressed God. “We thank Thee, Almighty, for sparing one of our daughters.”

His wife answered, “Amen,” and released me. For once unmindful of the laws of his religion, Maria’s father promptly folded me in his arms. To their questions, I said I’d been in a different camp from their daughter. What else could I tell them after I witnessed her death when the Rhodesian Airforce bombed our camp?

MaSondo stepped up in a grey cashmere suit and matching high heels. She placed a cauldron of stew on the stove and embraced me with nce-nce sounds of pity. Weeping, she sat at the table. Somebody rushed off to pay phones at the post office and called Reggie’s father, a car mechanic who had made it out of the crowded township by purchasing a house in the once, Whites-only suburbs., His truck, laden with food and drinks, screeched to a dusty halt before the gate within an hour.

Sobs mingled with laughter in recollection of those gone. Ma laid a Ladysmith Black Mambazo record on the turntable, and the room hushed in memory of my little sister Nompilo—the kid who played the gramophone to everyone’s liking during fund-raising weekend parties for Baba’s lawyer.

I charged the linoleum floor in remembrance of my sister, the nymph. The older people cry-laughed and danced as if yesterday had never happened. Their passion, as unabated as their appetite for alcohol, the Nxumalos' hip-to-hip waltz prompted Maria’s pious father into taking his wife’s arm and leading her home. Ma gestured to the lovey-dovey couple on the floor and gave me a ‘hopefully their joy will not end up in a fight tonight’ kind of smile.

The party in full swing, MaSondo urged me to the kitchen. “I’m so happy you’re back home, sweetheart. Life is a sackful of surprises.”

Some things never change. Her chuckle grated like sandpaper.

She sighed. “My eldest boy made it to a bookkeeper at the Standard Bank. School fees ceased to be a problem for the rest of my children until the Minister of Internal Affairs declared Whites, Asians, and Indians were dying at the front for the comfort of future Black terrorists. The army forced Elneth and several boys into trucks and unleashed them to combat zones after seventeen days of military training. My son never returned.”

I mumbled condolences and hugged her, my mouth too dry to release more comforting words.

She broke from my embrace. “Life is indeed a sackful of surprises. Angie married a hero from the ZANU forces, Lieutenant Samuel Nengomasha.”

The grin of a nurse trained to hide emotion pained my cheeks. I congratulated MaSondo on her daughter’s fortune.

She flicked an imaginary speck of lint from her cashmere skirt. "They keep me in comfort. They own a mansion in Harare, a farm in Rusape, and insist I move in with their girls. But it’s not in me to leave old friends.” Smiling, she waited for confirmation.

Angie and Sam! Angela and Nompilo used to be rivals of sorts. Storming MaSondo’s speakeasy, my sister would dance Angie into the sidelines. I also remembered her waking up residents of Block 50 with grating croons to The Rolling Stones ‘Angie’, strutting about the township as though she were Mick Jagger’s bride. Sam, my first boyfriend and now the owner of immense property triumphed in the war against a five-dollar salary in his youth. Well, he died in my youth. I prayed he would stay buried on his farm with his silly wife. God knows: they deserved each other.

I rewarded MaSondo with a nod—hugged her with such force my joy at her luck felt genuine—even to me. “I’m happy for you. For Angie too.”

Ma caught my eye and beckoned me outside. “Your Samuel married our neighbour’s daughter. People change. Go back in there; the old people are all waiting for you.”

The township had turned into a desolate village—the only constant, the Salvation Army, which won the competition against the deafening bongos of bush churches in an area now turned into a bivouac of two-roomed brick hovels for returned heroes from differing guerrilla camps who, kept intermittent clashes alive. Children with the angry faces of the war-weary no longer admired the gleaming brass buttons on cardboard-stiff, grey uniforms or scampered behind the Pied Piper symphony.

As much as I yearned to rekindle a connection, my hometown would—like me—never be the same. I mopped like a foreigner in once-familiar surroundings devoid of old smells and friends. No maize cobs charred under scraggly trees—the ghosts of photographers, tailors, fortune tellers and carpenters wailed from under old dust-coated trees in the roadside market. The YMCA gardens of my deflowerment were as dead as the love I once shared with Samuel Nengomasha. The boulder I leaned against when Sam and I shared our first kiss had shrunk to my midriff. Christ! The past is a whirlwind of distorted memories.

  The hospital administrators where I trained promised me employment that never materialized.

Before I sneaked across the border to the camps, television showed black bodies blown apart by the security forces and villagers supposedly or truly mauled by terrorists. Neighbours would rush to garner horror stories and console victims pouring in from the scorched countryside. But when teenagers disappeared from their homes, it was best to quietly assume they had stolen off to guerrilla camps across the border. Surmise—not question. Who, in their right minds, dared talk out loud about the youths’ vanishing acts without incurring the wrath of the authorities?

After independence, the old tradition of sharing grief ceased. Inhabitants avoided battered villagers trickling into the townships. See no government atrocities—hear of none. The tables now turned; evening news opened with a new national anthem, followed by a display of the corpses of White soldiers in a ditch, bloated and silvery-white against the dark earth—the same images night after night. A guerrilla, active or ex, was faithful to his family, then his tribe, as depicted by the President.

One night with Zenzi and Thamsanqa sleeping—four months after my arrival—I was reading a letter from Reggie, Ma’s knitting piled on her lap, the needles click-clacking in protest to the television announcer’s voice. I murmured, “I want Zenzi to grow up in a healthier environment than this.”

The music of her needles paused. Ma stood up and switched off the telly. Sighing her way back to the sofa, she picked up her knitting. Said, “Regina has offered you a place in her apartment?”

Surprised, I nodded at her vision that lasered paper.

Her words, in tandem with the click-clack of her knitting needles, she said, “There’s nothing for you here. Jobs, including good posts in nursing, are parcelled to the ruling party and tribe. A different war has begun.”

A sad smile flittered at the edges of her generous lips. “A long time ago, I saved thirty pounds from the money friends and neighbours showered on me at my wedding ceremony. I used part of it for school fees and the rest for your father’s useless attorney and the second-hand ‘fridge from which I have been able to sell cold lagers whose proceeds have sustained us through the years. After breakfast, we’ll call the ineffectual lawyer’s father from the post office.”

After talking to the Indian trader on the public phone, Ma propelled me towards a photographer’s shop and paid for my ID photographs. We left with passport forms for me to fill out. A week later, she took the documents and pictures to Mr Naidoo, the “useless lawyer’s father” who would help speed my exit from troubled, independent Zimbabwe.

Mother lost three children, and Thamsanqa was not going to make it to adulthood. But her heart and perception remained huge enough to sacrifice joy in me and her granddaughter for our safety. Her generosity undid me. I wept all the way to Heathrow Airpot, where Regina met us with a chuckle and a bundle of blankets against the biting English winter.

Three years later, in front of the TV set in Regina’s London apartment, the evening news interrupted a crucial report on a forever declining world security with a picture of a skeletal figure ushered into the awning mouth of an ambulance. “Rock Hudson,” said a dubbed voice straggling a thin line between celebrity worship and tragedy, “… was, this morning, taken to the University of California Hospital in Los Angeles shortly after his return from a failed diagnosis-finding mission in Paris.”

A week before, my brother Thamsanqa succumbed to a similar illness in Zimbabwe-one our witch doctors could not cure. Through the diagnosis of a Hollywood star, I now knew what my brother and the fate of hundreds of patients I met in Lusaka General Hospital meant—Aids and HIV—as in, waiting for Help In Vain.

Should I have lived my post-guerrilla years in independent Zimbabwe? Comforting Ma against her fate? Was it fair of me to scurry off to England—the colonial master of our woes—and leave my ageing mother with the ghosts of four of her five children? Was my spirit of independence a curse? Selfish?

No! Even before Mama’s death, I claimed a safe space in this world for Zenzi and me, a place filled with memories of a family that once was. Perchance, a future for my daughter.