When we were Boys

Why the fuck were we fighting again?

I don't know.

I do not have any fucking idea why.

And that, honest to God, is the truth. You may have asked me the question yesterday. You may ask me today. You may ask me tomorrow, the day after or the year after. My answer will remain the same – I don’t know. I really do not know. We just did it. Maybe it was just written somewhere in the stars that we had to exchange blows and pretty much every dangerous weapon we could get our hands on every time we met as two gangs in the grazing lands.

I don’t know why we always engaged in our own mini-version of the Waterloo Battle – only our battles were sporadic and never seemed to come to an undisputed conclusion – whenever we met while looking after our cattle at the pastures. All I knew was, there was a this village that shared our border due South, and for some reason every young male offspring from this village was an enemy whose life we were supposed to make a living hell whenever we could. But there was a catch – there was only one place where we could do this. The pastures. We had to wage these wars only when we encountered each other in the unfortunate circumstances of being in the company of our livestock.

Oh Madambi. How we pasture-hated thy children. How they pasture-hated us.

The funny thing was we were not even fighting for fertile patches of turf in the grazing lands. No. We couldn’t even put a finger on it. Maybe it was the cattle’s fault. Because there was this look that the neighbours’ cattle would give you that raised all the superstitious demons of witchcraft suspicions in you. Yea. Because it was always the other party that had domesticated the art of sorcery and could use their livestock for evil deeds, in addition to their nocturnal fleet of bats, owls and hyenas. And they had the cheek to accuse us of exactly the same things, the shameless cunts. Fuck them and their cross-eyed animals that ate people for lunch! Fuck them all!

Sometimes, I think it would have been better if we had to fight for pastures. Fighting for the food security of one's livestock would be a noble way to live one's youth, I imagine. Sadly, on the front line of desertification called Chivi District, where stunted mupani and acacia trees reign, vast swathes of stubby grasslands was one thing we did not lack.

Our interpersonal relations in other spheres of our lives were fine. Exemplary even. We shared a well, where we would gather for hours and race our wheelbarrows backwards while waiting our turn to draw water. No fights there. Testosterone levels remained firmly in check; only maybe because there would be a lot of girls around, and you did not want to be caught pants down starting a brawl in front of girls. What if you lose that fight? What then?

At school, we were classmates and shared the same intense, but fearful hatred for Sairai, our cruel Grade 1 teacher. Oh. Sairai. With his raspy voice, dark face and completely bald head. In my head he was the villain in every horror movie ever made whose villain wore a hoodie. I knew this because Gansu told me all about horror movies years before I had the chance to see one. Sairai would not stop hitting you until he drew blood; and there was a time when I was really convinced that he had to draw children’s blood to live. Behind his back, we speculated over the legend that Sairai had driven twenty-four chisels all over the inselberg overlooking the school, and would never retire unless all those iron bars were somehow found and uprooted. I feared and hated him, and prayed that the gods that had stolen all his hair strike him down in front of class one day.

But I digress. The Madambi boys and we were teammates in the school’s soccer team, and shared the same eleven red t-shirts as a soccer uniform for all my seven years as a pupil at Mangwana Primary School. The very same shirts. Of course, with time and repeated washing, they ended up looking like something out of an ass' arse; and we ended up having to tie a lot of knots, especially around the neck-line, to keep them from falling apart while we were still in them on the field of play. When they were finally forced to let them rest in peace, I’m sure those ‘skippers’ looked like they had been hanging onto the two wings of that Malaysian plane all the way until it was downed by those heartless fuckers in Ukraine. 

Maybe the school could have made better efforts to purchase a new soccer kit. I remember sometime around the great famine of 1992, some enterprising Chinese people came to our area and put a bounty on all the bones we could gather. They could not have timed their visit more aptly if they tried. It was a drought year, and even donkeys became magwachara during the Mfecane of 1992. Bones were the adornment of choice in our dry, parched fields. They were like sand in the sea, and we collected a humongous lorryful for the school to sell in Masvingo. That business venture earned us a whopping $507; an amount our young callow minds had difficulties comprehending those days. $507! How many dollars are actually in five hundred and seven dollars? Five. Hundred. And seven more dollars to top them. What would you do with $507?

Anything, as it turned out. As long as that thing did not involve buying any soccer kit. In fact, I can’t recall the money being used for anything at all. I’m sure they used it for the school’s benefit, however – teachers those days were very honourable professionals we all idolised and aspired to become. Except Sairai. Surely our role models could not ask children to roam around forests collecting the fetid cattle and donkey skeletons so they could share the proceeds among themselves. Would they? 

But I digress. Tattered uniform or not, as soon as we took to that field, those jerseys were our identity, and the rest of the pupils would cheer us no end as we sought to subdue our nemeses from neighbouring schools. We would literally forget that Tamuka was a son of Madambi Village; because with the ball on his feet, the guy was an absolute beast on that right wing. I think Tamuka monopolised the number seven jersey for all the years he spent as an elementary scholar. Such a small guy he was those days, almost exactly like Leo Messi was before doctors at Cuntilunya pumped him with those drugs that had him mutating somewhat into the green ogre called the Incredible Hulk. No offence, but I really hate Barcelona, man. And Manchester United. And Caps United. And Chelsea. And the Scum of Tottenham. I hope they all drown in a cesspool of dog shit. And…

Ok. I digress. Again. Tamuka Madambi. He had a wicked right foot; so wicked it was worth all the right feet in his village. Pity we never got to kick that football while wearing any boots, because I think Tamuka would have blasted one into several fragments. I remember the time before I myself had made the grade into the senior school team, when Tamuka scored from the mutomato during a friendly match against Taru. Mutomato was our lingo for the penalty kick. We were playing away from home that day, the atmosphere was damp and humidity was about two hundred percent. The freezing drizzle had been with us for days on end, turning our bare feet into dull, bloodless stumps that had lost all feeling. Chivi is always like that in winter. So cold it will freeze the teats on a brass statue. Still, we cared no less if it rained cats and dogs, or snowed, or dropped rocks of hail from the skies – nothing was going to stop us from playing a friendly against Taru. Certainly not this drizzle; we just wiped the mucus from our noses and went on with it. Fuck the cold. Fuck the drizzle.

With the game winding down to stoppage time while the score was still nil-all, we won a penalty. Well; the referee said it was a penalty; I don’t think it was a penalty at all. Tamuka curled a tricky cross into the box, one of the many he had been delivering all afternoon, and there was a melee as the panicking defenders scrambled to clear their lines. There was certainly no handball, and nobody from our side went down – for us kids those days, football was just a simple game where one team tried to score more goals than its opponent, through pure skill and sheer hard work; none of all this Drogba, Robben, Suarez or Young nonsense that soccer is ninety minutes of a grown man flip-flopping about the pitch like a fish looking for water.

But then the man in the middle on that day of freezing temperatures, was K Zendera, staggering about the pitch in his beige trenchcoat like a polar bear. Zendera was our teacher, our own Howard Webb, and we expected our Howard Webb to do what Howard Webb does; give us something to talk about as we trudged on the long way back home. Taru was about ten kilometres away, and the thought of embarking on a ten-kilometre walk back home while discussing a loss was really unpalatable. Thankfully, our teacher knew that – and he chose a perfect moment for us to cherish. Of course the opponent wailed long and bitterly in protest. But the referee’s decision is final. Oh; the beauty of football laws. 

Tamuka got the spot kick and he rammed the ball off one of the thick gum poles that acted as goal posts and into the nets. I mean there were supposed to be nets, but the multitudes of screaming kids behind the goal did the netting job just fine. The keeper never moved. We celebrated so long on that pitch that there was no time for a restart; our girls lifting their dresses so high up their nubile bodies that all the boys drew a collectively long, wide-eyed woooooooooooooooooooow. It came out like wistful whistle. And we celebrated with good reason too; we might have been just a bunch of naïve school kids then, but the feeling of winning a match away from home is something you really never have to teach any soccer addict.

Once in a while, Tamuka would pass by our yard on his way to the shops, and we would invite him in for a game of five, six or seven-aside at our soccer pitch. Fucking lie. It was not a soccer pitch; just a good portion of the yard which we converted into a football pitch from time to time. And by that I mean every fucking day. There was one of my late fathers, whom we all knew affectionately as Dirty Game (for that was his favourite phrase), or VaInona (this was a very apt description of the way he would administer corporal punishment on an errant child; the switch in his hand felt like heavy rain relentlessly lashing at your young arse and shins – you really didn’t want Vainona’s hand anywhere near you when you knew you had lost his cattle).

Mr Rain had a vast yard, and there was a really wide gate at the main entrance into his homestead, used by both people, livestock and the family scorch cart. The cart had its shade directly opposite the gate, so strategically positioned that we would have no trouble trying to manoeuvre the donkey-drawn thing into its garage. But for the boys in and around that homestead, there was no pitch in the world more perfect than the space between that gate and the cart shade. It was sandy in most parts, and there was no sign of grass on it. It was taboo for a yard full of women to have patches of grass on it; unless the residents thereof did not mind unflattering talk behind their backs.

We could spend all the hours between sunrise and sunset chasing chikweshe around that yard, and hitting the wire net at the gate and the cart too, which acted as the net on the opposite goal whenever it was home. And on some days, guest players like Tamuka would grace our stadium and we had the mother of good times. Growing up, Tamuka was a football god of Messi-like proportions, and we would brag to our mates at school that we played football with God during the weekend. Which was close to the truth really.

But come across Tamuka at the pastures with the rest of his home boys and Tamuka was not Tamuka at all; he was just another boy to hack at. He was the Barcelona to my Real Madrid; the Tottenham to my Arsenal. You couldn’t even identify him by name; he was just another target to maim, and maim good. But not leave for dead. Of course, we were honourable barbarians; there was an order to our savagery. Thou shalt not kill. And you ask again; why fight at all then? And my answer still stands today – I don’t fucking know. I know it wasn’t because one of them went out with one of our sisters; neither did any of our older brothers date anybody from our neighbouring village. Not that their girls were ugly, no. In actual fact, their girls were too cute. Fighting for their honour would have been our lives’ wish. But there-in lay the problem – they were so cute we automatically turned mute whenever we came into their vicinity.

Maybe it was just the mere fact that they were our closest neighbours and the urge to swing dicks among the boys was always at its adrenaline peak. We could simply have chosen to compete on a soccer pitch, and everything would have been well in the end. Which we did too, once in a very rare while. Those face offs always had to end with one group of boys having to flee the pitch, under a rain of rocks from a chasing pack of livid losers. And since we always played these matches away from our own turf kwaChenjera, we were always the ones to do the running. Which was understandable, because they only had Tamuka in their fold, and even he could not be everywhere on the pitch. Our only job was to starve him of the ball, and everything else fell into place. The rest of their team comprised a whole bunch of kids with either two left feet or two right feet that were not even good at kicking a ball. In goal they had a guy called Claudius who would promise us, the little forwards, that there was going to be hell to pay if we dared sneak the ball past him and his goal line. He was almost always the guy who started the fights on the football field. There was also Rufira, who would show us the myriad scars on his hands, which he claimed he got from engaging in lone battles with cobras and black mambas as he hunted for mice in the fields.

We just sucked up all the shenanigans and went about our job in a halting bravado. Inside, we wished Rufira was like his father – a funny, light-skinned little old guy called Bhosvo, or simply, Mimimi. There was never a day in his life that I saw Mimimi sober. He was always stoned, and as kids we would follow him all the way to the edge of our village as he cracked joke after joke and sometimes chased us. He almost got us arrested one year when he stole the wire that the Chinese road construction guys had used to peg the sides of their road, and blamed it on us. We were masters at making toy cars out of wire, so he must have figured the allegations would stick. Mimimi. With his goatee and high pitched, three-syllable laugh and a flaccid, staggering gait as he made his way home. Some people should really never grow old and die.

But I digress. Our neighbours to the south were not that good on the football pitch, and we never had to combine forces with our brothers from across the shops like we did when we had a date with the more advanced and more organised guys from Nyambi. Nyambi was another village, with which we shared the North-Eastern border; and that border was just about everything we shared with them. They did not share a tarred road with us, a school, or a water point, and they came to our business centre for supplies. Our relations were platonic, and we only thought they were more organised on the soccer pitch because most of them attended Vuravhi Primary School, which we rarely played any friendlies with. Those that we knew well – the likes of Upenyu, Frank, Energy and his younger brother, Jeffreys – were older and really good, both on and off the ball. In our own team were my uncles Tomlo, the de facto leader; and the now late Emmanuel, whom we called Nha, with his sweet left foot. Then there was me, Lot, Lloyd, Virimai, Koto, whose dribbling skills and scoring prowess were something akin to wow; and Tambu. We did not fear anyone; but all round, the team from Nyambi matched us man for man, and went further. They had Shepherd, whom they called Pizza for some reason, Energy, Frank, Jeffreys, Ushe, Zishe; and sometimes Madho. Our matches were always closely fought blood-and-thunder encounters. But almost none of them ended in physical combat. Maybe heated arguments now and again, but none of them ended in fist fights. 

Jeffreys was particularly naughty; he once dared three of our young kids to a bet, where he was to take the three of them on his own, on a whole football pitch. It was easy money for the kids. In no time, they were three goals to the good; before Jeff pulled a novel strategy that the young ones – already dreaming of mini soccer at Tongofa’s shop – never in their lifetimes dreamed of. Jeff the son of Mabasa got a grip on the ball and let rip this very loud and very long faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaart. Another. And another. They said he was going bbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, and as the kids scattered in excitement and disgust, Jeff scored four goals in lighting succession – and took home the money. The kids were so amazed they could not stop talking about it, but this was really no news to us – Jeff was our guy;  we knew he would always try to fart his way out of trouble whenever he was about to lose a game of checkers. He was that cunning.

But I digress. These were the type of characters one would get from Nyambi. Sneaky, cunning cheating bastards. But we held them in grudging respect because they were good at what they did. And we never had to fight them, most probably because they had their own pastures where they would spend their days picking fights with other striplings from villages sharing boundaries with Nyambi. No; the guys from Nyambi were not enemies. They were friends.

Our nemeses came from Madambi. They were neither sneaky nor cunning; neither were they even cheats. The guys from Madambi were downright violent when in the company of their animal wealth and dogs. Like I said before, they had Rufira and Claudius. And Tichaona, whom they always made to lead their fights because he was deaf and mute and always angry. Like the Incredible Hulk. We feared Ticha only on the strength of his reputation as an angry deaf mute. And it was a wise fear too; for when Ticha attacked, he did not care to look what was in his hand or what it could do to his opponent. It seemed like he was not bound by the rules of not leaving his prey for dead. I guess I am lucky, because I never got face to face with Tichaona Madambi in any of the duels we waged as we fought for the honour of our respective villages. He must have been about five or six years older, and big as he was, he would simply have picked me up and repeatedly bashed me against a tree trunk until I was pulp. 

But that is not to say I did not get close. Oh I did; twice actually. The first time was during my initiation into these wars about whose existence I had no prior warning. Outside of the pastures, these wars did not exist. Nobody would dare talk about them at home, and injuries had better find a very good excuse. There was a lot of stuff that was not allowed to leave the pastures, really. Swimming. Fighting. Masturbation. And this bilateral war. Hell, I didn’t even know people could harbour so much violence in their little bodies that they would remind me of two bulls decapitating an anthill before going horn to horn in a blood and thunder showdown in front of cheering herd boys.

But on that day of initiation, I came face to face with death.

It was another good rainy season, our streams were full, and we had been out swimming, as we always did in summer. Some things never change. You could never get us out of the water during the rainy season; just like you could never get us out of the soccer field in spring, or whenever school was out. And right on cue, the cattle we were supposed to be looking after always managed to creep away as we soaked in the murky waters. Actually, the cattle never had to creep away; they just grazed their way out of sight and out of mind, but we still blamed them for leaving our guard for people’s fields. On this day, we lost only a few of the cattle and all the donkeys; the latter which were led by Porina. Sometimes I think Porina had the brains of a human being, because she always knew the precise moment when her keepers were busy with something, and she would make good her escape.

We rounded up the rest of the livestock and followed her hooves as they made a beeline for the fields. Porina never stopped to graze when she was on a mission; and her mission that day was one that almost led to me dying. As we got closer and closer to the fields, Uncle Tomlo and the rest of the older guys realised that Porina had led her pack of Beliebers into fatal territory this time round. Actually, I think our seniors saw the Madambi gang rounding up our cattle and donkeys from their fields and keeping them guard as they waited for us to show up. They had seen us approaching, so they must have mobilised their weapons of choice – an armoury of catapults, zvigodhos (a kind of a wholly wooden hammer with one end that has this club as big as a human head), horikotyos (another weapon similar to a chigodho, only with a small head because this one has to be tossed at faraway things – or at people) and dogs – and laid in ambush.  

Only that our eagle-eyed elder brothers had no intention whatsoever of walking into a death trap with their eyes wide open. The first telltale sign of trouble must have been the sight of Porina and her herd grazing on a patch outside the nearby fields. For a mere rural donkey, Porina was a sneaky and cunning piece of work. You had to give that to her; she was the Machiavelli of donkeys. Passing up an opportunity to sneak into an unmanned field was simply not her forte. Even I, with my very limited experience of a career as a herdsman, knew Porina’s reputation as an artful dodger. On spying her and the rest of our lost livestock behaving like... well... like such well behaved human beings – our big boys knew something was amiss. They knew we were walking into ambush.  

Still, the lost livestock needed to be retrieved if we did not want to risk the legendary switch rain from the hand of VaInona. I must have been nine or ten then, blissfully unaware of the storm that was coming. I was just thrilled to be one of the boys and herding cattle in the grazing lands, instead of following the skirts of my mother around the yard. Our road – the one that passed through our village from Mhandamabwe on its way to Chivi Turn-off where it petered out into the Masvingo-Beitbridge Highway – was still under construction, so the rumours of mabhinya patrolling our villages in search of young heads to decapitate (and take them to South Africa where each head a worth a mini bus) were not yet part of our superstition lingo. So I was literally afraid of nothing. These were our lands, the lands of our fathers, and as long as I was on these lands, I was home. No harm would come to me.

It was Tomlo who called me to the side. There was this brotherly love-hate relationship between me and Tomlo, my father’s youngest brother, which only the two of us could understand. He was my father’s youngest brother and I was my father’s only son, so he looked at me as his younger brother, and I looked up to him as both my father and older brother. We had our moments of madness, but basically when it came right down to it, he was the only guy whose orders I obeyed when we were out herding cattle.

“Young man, we need to find these beasts,” he held me by the shoulder. “You know if we fail to find them today, our arses will be fried by VaInona and we will have to sleep on empty stomachs. I know I’m not about to go a whole night hungry because Porina is not in the pen for the night. No.

Tomlo knew how to get my juices going. I was already marking time on the double, impatient to save us all from a meeting with the dreaded sjambok. Looking back now, I wonder whether Tomlo took me aside only because I was the risky pawn, and nobody wanted to take responsibility of what would happen should their counter plan go awry. So the onus of losing me behind enemy lines had to fall to the person closest to my father.

"So we have to split up. One of us is going to search again in the direction of the swimming pools. The rest of us will take different directions.

"You, my young man, are going that way.”

He was pointing in the direction he knew well Porina and her legion of blinkered followers was being kept under lock and key by the enemy. But how could I know? I was small and could not see past the smallest bush in the forest. And I was excited at being given the onerous opportunity to save our bellies from a night of forced fasting. After a day spent swimming, the last thing you needed was to sleep on an empty stomach. Trust me, swimming was a wonderful appetiser. You emerged from that muddy, murky pool with leeches boring into your shins, an ashen body that told how your day was spent, and a grumbling stomach. 

“If you find the donkeys, just drive them home, we will find you there. But if you still haven’t located them and the sun goes behind that tree, go home. I’m sure one of these guys would have found them and taken them home. Ok?"

I nodded.

"Run along now, and be safe.”

He did not release me then. He kept his hand on my shoulder, like he was about to let go of the last ten cents lost on a bet.

So I had to physically disentangle myself from his grip, and along I ran. I did not look back, but behind me, Uncle Tomlo and the rest of the guys were rounding up our cattle and driving them out of the bushes to a prairie-like higher ground where there was not even one single tree and – had I bothered to look – even I could see them and feel safe in their proximity. But how could I even fathom that I was a mere pawn in a deadly game of hide-and-seek the two groups were playing, a game I was blissfully unaware of?

But all that did not matter at the moment, because the important people discovered that our cattle had changed direction just as they were about to enter the kill zone. Boy, did they go mad! I heard the whistles first before I could make sense of anything. Then I saw the dogs before they started barking. The dogs could catch my scent, an advantage their owners did not have, and it was only they that could warn the boys of an intruder among their midst, and drive the nails in my coffin. I did not know what was happening here, but I knew if I stayed in that open spot, I was going to be on the nasty end of some horrible fate. In those divine moments of clarity when my whole seven or eight years on this earth flashed before me in pureview 4K slow motion frames, I knew there was no way in hell I was going to run these vicious dogs and their sanguinary owners to the ground. 

But they were coming. At the speed of sunlight. 

I dived into the bushes – and came face to face with a howling tailless Rottweiler that had only one thing on its mind – blood. We looked at each other for a very loooooooooooooooooooooooooong moment, with the dog deciding whether I was the target or the one who called the shots. He was still barking and making slow tentative steps in my direction. I picked a pebble and tossed it in one direction before ducking behind an anthill. The dog growled so furiously that I regretted my action, thinking his desperate sounds would attract the ire of the rest of his friends and they would come and tear me into right atmosphere. He came into view, and I noticed that he was barking in the general direction where I had thrown the stone, before he realised that all his friends were fast zooming out of view as they chased some bigger fish to fry. Curved into a ball under that hill, I was not breathing at all. Soon, I espied our Porina and the rest of our lost cattle and donkeys galloping home, with dogs and a posse of whistling youths in hot pursuit.

It was only recently, when I thought of the incident, that I wondered whether Uncle Thomas knew what would happen when he thought of doing what he did that day.  Maybe he did. That guy was a Sun Tzu and Machiavelli rolled onto one. He knew the Art of these Wars.

But on this day, I doubt he had foreseen a scenario that our cattle might be driven to plunder our own fields by a group of angry boys who could not get over the fact that they had been denied a perfect opportunity to flatten their pasturelands rivals, at least for a rightful excuse this time. But again, maybe he did.

I followed our cattle from a distance well clear of the marauding boys’ line of sight, and as soon as they had abandoned the offending animals in our fields, they took to their heels. Kudyisa was a crime that crossed the boundaries of childish rivalry, and none of these guys would have been caught dead while in the act of consciously driving cattle into someone’s flourishing fields. Even at that tender age, we knew the effects of a drought-induced famine on our population; it was not something you wished on even your worst enemy. Willfully letting animals plunder a field would attract an automatic death sentence. I had counted on them fleeing the scene as soon as they got to the edge of our fields – and our village – and it turned out I was right. So as soon as they turned tail I took over, in the full braggadocio’s knowledge that they were not going to touch me now. I was home. All they could do was just mark this day as the one they almost caught Captain Jack Sparrow. And they would try again. We would do exactly the same if we were in their shoes.

But that would come later. Today was our day to pat ourselves on the back and tell tall war tales about how we almost walked into the line of fire. As it turned out, Tomlo and the rest of my gang had not exactly managed to wriggle themselves out of Sekuru VaEni’s hot rod; it did not escape the elders’ keen eyes that when the boys got home that afternoon, they were one short. They were an important one short. Like that time when Joseph's brothers returned home, and they had lost the one thing they had no right to lose – Joseph himself. It wouldn’t have mattered if it was Tomlo himself or Nha who was missing; as long as it was not the youngest guy among the brood. I was the youngest; and I was missing. All the boys in that homestead could not Machiavelli themselves out of this one.

Not that I had been gone for that long, mind you; neither was I in any danger of being captured by a bhinya. Sometimes I think our elders loved to grab any excuse to beat their children, just to show them who was boss. So the boys got their arses whacked a bit and chased out of the homestead, with promises for more of the same if they did not return home by such a time with me in tow. I found them huddled on the outskirts of the village and they gave me a hero’s welcome. Young as I was, there was this uncanny creativity with words that I already reckoned I possessed, but on this occasion, I violently shook the urge to do a fandango dance around the facts of how I had rescued the Israelites from the vice grip of King Pharaoh. They would not believe me anyway.

In the end, we did not go home as ordered; instead we sneaked our way kwaChenjera for a late game of football while our cattle rested under the mupfura and muvora trees.

But the adage goes, chinokangamwa idemo, chitsiga hachikangamwi. I was reminded of this idiom a few months after my close shave with Mr Death, and this time I thought about another saying where our elders talked about the ancestors tearing the cradle. For our cradle really got ripped apart on that day, leaving us as exposed as any goalkeeper in Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool would often feel. We had nowhere to escape.

Like I said before, we knew the boys from Madambi would always be on the lookout for a perfect opportunity to catch us unawares again; especially after they became the laughing stock in pastures when word leaked about how so daft their planning was that they had let us slip through their sloppy fingers. Of course, after such a great escape, word always leaked in the pastures. But we did not expect revenge to be so soon. Neither did they expect to be so lucky so soon. And this time they cornered us like you would do a pack of mice that has fled into a dead-end hole. Mbeva dzapinda mudiziro risina mbudyo.

We were breast-stroking, back-stroking (this is a very poor equivalent of the Karanga word for the backstroke – ngege. Tairova ngege) and generally flip-flopping in and out of the water like dolphins while playing chitsvambe in the pool.

It was an elongated, deep and narrow landform, with two steep cliffs facing each other on the longer sides. And it was like a proper swimming pool because it had a deep end from where we would dive and emerge as we got near the shallower end about fifty metres away. Once, I dived into the pool from a tree hanging over from the top of the cliff. It was about five or six metres above the water, and for the first time in all the years I had played in that pool, I felt my feet touch its bottom. It took me so long to break back to the surface that I opened my eyes almost halfway there, in the hope that I would see where I was going. I never pulled that trick again.

We called this pool, Dhidho Guru, to separate it from another shallower pool – Dhidho Duku – just beyond the shallower end of the deeper and bigger waters where we played. Younger children and everybody else who was yet to catch the art of swimming would be relegated to this area where they would spend their time furiously kicking away the muddy water while their palms were firmly placed on the sandy bed underneath. Once in a while, someone would declare themselves skillful enough for promotion into the premier league of swimmers, and we would conduct a ceremony where we all lined up at the shallow end and cheered and jeered while an inductee struggled to get across.

The pool was dangerous; there was a place at the deepest part where the water had eaten into the sedimentary rock and created a narrow cul-de-sac we referred to as a cave. But it was no cave at all; it was a death-trap. Once you got yourself wedged into its muddy core; the best they could do was to only retrieve your lifeless body. 

It was in this place, that looked like the path created by Moses in the Red Sea for the Israelites to pass, with solid walls of water on both sides. It was in this place that we were caught out. Naked. Defenceless. Oblivious. Outnumbered.

It must have been around two in the afternoon; I could tell because the sun had passed the mid point in the sky and was casting longer shadows on the three trees adjacent to our pool. My cousin, Gansu, had decided that he was too old and too skillful a swimmer for the amateur pool, and had chosen that day for his walk – swim, rather – of fame as the latest inductee into Dhidho Guru. We lined up for him at the shallow end and started to sing;

Dudu muduri!

Kapwe!
Dudu muduri!
Kapwe!
Gansu muduri!
Kapwe!

Between us and Gansu, the water was dark and eerily silent. Even nyungurugwi knew how to behave on initiation day; they watched with silent wonder as Gansu summoned the gods to accompany him across the valley of death. Then, into the murky waters Gansu dived. We screamed louder as we cheered him on, willing him to cross on his first attempt. For a few seconds he was submerged, before his head bobbed out into the open as he kicked furiously with both hands and feet. We all knew how scared he was trying to negotiate his way across a deep dark pool for the first time. And how brave he was too. This pool had claimed at least one life, a boy who had dared swim alone and got swallowed by the notorious cave. Such was his concentration at that moment, you could have strapped two pythons onto his back – Gansu wouldn’t have noticed.  

He was halfway across when the first stoned plunged into the water, with an eerie plop just in front of him, its feeble waves gobbled up in the tempest of Gansu’s frantic strokes. But it was a really big stone, and we all drew a collective intake of breath when we realised what was happening.

They were here.

Our frenemies from across the village; and this time we knew we were truly fucked. So many they were it seemed like the whole village was here, surrounding the pool. In their hands were these terrifying mupani logs, and their cold hard stares told us this was going to be our longest day ever. None of the bullshit that the teacher sold us during a Geography lesson that the 20th of December was the longest day of the year with the shortest night. Today’s day would be long. Maybe as long as the longest Westerosi winter. Or that day in the bible when that commander guy ordered the sun not to set because they wanted to win a war against the evil Amorites. And the sun obeyed.

On this day, I wished I had the power to believe in prayer like Joshua did in Gibeon. I wished I could pray to God to bring a blanket of darkness over the land so we could make a safe, if groping, escape out of this pool that had suddenly morphed into a perfect killing zone. And we were the prey. With nowhere to hide, we huddled in a daze on one side of the pool, waiting for them to attack. And they needed no second invitation. First, they took our clothes, tied little rocks inside and tossed them high up a big, thorny mutsviri nearby. Then they sent Ticha and the rest of the bigger guys to shepherd us out through the shallow end where countless, stick-wielding youths were waiting. 

Their plan was perfect, and it took most of us just a moment before true panic set in and we shrieked in all directions. The rocks were now falling in a steady hail that dazed us into panicked confusion. I turned to the middle of the pool where Gansu had been negotiating for his rites of passage into manhood.

And froze.

Gansu was not there.

In the mayhem that had followed the invasion of our pastime by our arch-nemeses, I knew there was no way Gansu had made the mad dash to relative safety at the finish line. It was my second rainy season swimming these waters – I knew he had been at the most dangerous part of his journey when disaster struck. The tree hanging over the pool would be directly above him, and below, the deadly cave called. If you paid enough attention, you would feel its fatal pull twirling around your nether limbs. You needed all your wits and water dancing experience about you to ignore this mortal attraction. I swear that cave had inherited the intoxicating femme fatality of Delilah into its inner core. It was a right old granite mouse trap calling out in the dark to greedy mice with the alluring scent of peanut butter laced around a maize grain.

Gansu was aware of these dangers only by word of mouth, and to be fair, he had no business paying heed because we thought it would take him a few more years to graduate. Right now he was simply too fat to be among the company of the virtual eels that were his cousins. A thorough-bred born-location, Gansu was our cousin whose job was to amuse us with stories about the movie and sports stars he watched on their black and white tv back in Zvishavane where his parents had made a home. He was our favourite town-based cousin because he just wanted to be one of the boys, and would abandon his shoes and walk barefoot with us all over the pastures. His soft feet could not take it at first, and I remember we had to pull out a thorn that had pierced its way right through to emerge like a unicorn on top his foot. Twice it happened, and twice we pulled it out, using thorns to cut into a little flesh and creating space wide enough for our hardened nails to grab the foreign body and extract it. Then we would suck all the blood out to prevent swelling and puss. What expert surgeons we were.

And today, Gansu’s coronation as a proper village boy who only lived in town would be complete. He was halfway there. Or had been. Because now he was not there at all. Gansu had disappeared. Streaks of blood danced in the turbulent waters where I had last seen his face physically willing his chubby body to stay afloat.

“Gansu!” I shouted as I raced towards the exit. “Gansu is drowning! Boys! Gansu is drowning!”

I must have been shouting as loudly as a referee's whistle, but nobody paid heed. Under the circumstances, paying any heed could have been a really expensive risk. I was not the only one scrambling for the shore. The opponent had made the mistake of unleashing its best weapon too early into the war. Or maybe it was simply the fact that they only had one Tichaona, and we were scared of only Tichaona. As for the rest, we could take our chances. Besides, we knew our best chance of coming out of this with fewer scars than they intended to inflict upon us was out of the pool, where the only thing to do would be to run faster than the wind. We were massively outnumbered and there was no way we were going to take them all and still remain standing at the end.

In the water, we were sitting ducks, and now the ducks were flapping all over in a skirmishing attempt to avoid being hit by rocks from above. Ticha must have seen his chance to attack then.
But no sooner had he hit the water than my gang surprised everyone by scrambling for the end like a group of gazelles fleeing the charge of famished lions. In a way, we were a group of gazelles fleeing the charge of famished lions. In no time, we were at the other end where we splashed water right into their eyes, just like a crocodile traps its prey into a surprised freeze by splashing water on the prey’s eyes.

Okay. First blood was ours again. We were out. Now to run for it. Now to run like fucking hell.

Sandy dust billowed in thick clouds as we scattered in different directions, dark bodies with a lot of variously shaped phalluses furiously flapping this way and that in rhythm to the speed with which our legs carried us. But our state of dishabille – nay, utter nudity – was not the one under test here. Our test of the day today was speed.

I did not check where everybody was going. Frankly, I did not care. Because I was not running away. No, I wasn’t; I was not going to leave Gansu alone in that grey murk he knew nothing about. Every holiday, Gansu would steal a few novels from his brothers and lend them to me for the four weeks he was home. Pafunge. Friend Billy and the Msasa Avenue Three. Crossing the Boundary Fence. Kusasana Kunoparira. Pfumo Reropa. Karikoga Gumiremiseve. Garandichauya. Countless books just for my reading pleasure. Ok; also maybe because Gansu just wanted to annoy the fuck out of his elder siblings, but what the hell. Billy was the best cousin ever. Fuck. I meant Gansu. Gansu was the best cousin ever. There was no way I was going to stand by and just scream as he got his stomach filled to death with that filthy water.

Neither did I stop screaming Gansu’s name. Not with him trapped in that cave that would only spit him out after claiming his soul. I just waltzed past the bemused Madambi boys, scrambled up the overhanging tree and took a deep breath before...

...before I had a voice cursing behind me.

“Oh shit! Oh shiiiiiiiiiit!”

I did not recognise that voice.

“Look, Claudius! The kid is gonna jump back into the pool! From there! Who the fuck does that?”

I could have stopped to learn more of how crazy I was to plunge back into that dirty pool from high in the sky. But I didn’t; another shocked curse followed as I went tumbling down head first into the dark waters. I was up and off that tree faster than Usain Bolt would chase the finishing line for his fastest 100m race yet. I figure if they introduced tree-climbing as a competition at the next Olympics, I may try, but I will never replicate the supple agility and swiftness with which I climbed that mupani tree.

“Claudy... boys; that kid is gonna die in there! Get his brothers back! Boys! This is not right!”

Body straight. Both sets of limbs tightly glued to each other. It was a perfect, ripple-less dive as I shot for the bottom, fighting hard to keep the sinking feeling gnawing the fringes of my intestines at bay. It was Mission Impossible. I thought of the ghosts our elders spoke of in folktales, and how they loved to lurk in the murk and catch you when you least expected them to. Which made me wonder whether it was a good idea to be thinking about ghosts right now when all that engulfed me was palpable darkness. And maybe Gansu, sticking out his hand so I could brush against it and pull him up with me.

I hit a rocky patch at the bottom. Nothing had brushed against me so far, and as I blindly groped in all directions, I wished I had grabbed one of the sticks from the boys above and made my hands longer. Hell, I wished my hands were longer by themselves right now. Come on Gansu. Come on you ghetto child. Right now would be a good time to show some of the ghetto toughness you always brag about. Do it like the Main Actor does in the movies you always tell us about. You are the Main Actor today, Gansu. Main Actors don’t die, do they? Come back, and I promise we will fetch you all the fruits you have ever wanted. I will climb that Mukosvo tree and risk the hornet’s lair. And the hute on the edge of the stream. I will get it all for you, Cuz. Dzvirimombe. Shavhi. Sviravava. Tuzvidzembwa.

Come back. Please. Come back.

Nothing. Litres and litres of thick dark water everywhere. No limb sticking out in frantic panic, groping for anything to get a grip on and pull himself out of this sticky mess. Bouts of panic were beginning to attack the fringes of my own conscience, weakly at first, then with the steady thump thump thump of the heart. Louder. Faster. Doom. Doom. Doom. My hands and legs were starting to go afire. My affinity with water was akin to that of a fish itself and water. But I was no fish. We had been in the pool for hours and hours playing chitsvambe, and now the body was giving in. I knew if I returned to the surface for air, I would not have the energy to come back.

Doom, doom, doom, my heart went. The aches were knotting themselves into nasty cramps all over. My small lungs were running out of oxygen. Doom. Doom. Doom...

I stepped on his hand a few moments later, half buried in the muddy cave and no longer even fighting for his life. If he still had the life in him. When I located his shoulders and tugged at them, he did not react. I wrapped my arms around him and heaved...

Just as, at that very moment, something strong gripped my own ankles and puuuuuuuuulled!

Dooooooooom! Doom! Doom! Doom!

I think my heart broke my ribs, so hard it beat against my chest I thought it would escape. But I did not open my mouth to scream. If I let any of that water in, that’d be it for me. Neither did I let Gansu go. I held tightly to him as I felt him steadily pull free, until he popped out and up we went. I was so tired I let the force gripping my legs pull me wherever. Subconsciously, I was glad that whatever had grabbed my ankles was not pushing me into the cave, but pulling me away from it. Small comforts, but comforts nevertheless. I knew there were not a lot of fish in our pool, let alone crocodiles. Still, it was good to feel that it was definitely not teeth that were wrapped around my ankles. I did not care where the thing was taking us; I just wanted the fire burning my small body to die...

“...They found him!” Somebody screamed as my feet stepped on the shallow water, and immediately capitulated under the weight of my limp body. “They found him!”

“Gansu! Somebody take Gansu out of the water! Take him to the sand!”

The sand. We had this belief in the pastures that somebody who had suffered the misfortune of letting pool water into his belly and lungs could be revived by tossing sand across his stomach so he would retch all the water out of his system. Yea; that was us – we did believe in some weird shit. But so far it was total Ebenezzer; that shit had worked hundred percent of the time. We played the same cat and mouse games with our livestock too; sometimes Porina or her flock would act so naughty it drove us crazy and we would unleash our ire on her poor head using our catapults as weapons. One or two times we caught her in a specially sensitive part of the head and she would literally drop dead – catapults are a deadly weapon – and all of us would will her back to life by blowing into our hands while rubbing them together. She would spring up suddenly after a while, give fresh air kicks before fleeing into the bushes. Porina. I don’t think I will ever see a cleverer donkey in my life.

For Gansu we did both on that day. We did the hit the stomach with sand thing, blew our hands and went further. I mean the rest of the boys did both. I was too busy drifting in and out of consciousness, I could not be even be surprised when I noticed that the person who had carried me to the sands was actually Tichaona Madambi, the deaf boy I feared more than anything on earth. He was making unintelligible noises as he set me about on the sandy edge of the stream. Just hearing him talk, you’d be forgiven for thinking he was one of those Chinese men ordering his workforce to pucker up on the construction site.

“Hae! Hae! Hae! Haena, dololotchi, dokotchila!” He mumbled, before he suddenly smacked my belly with a handful of wet sand. I was too weak to scream. But I did turn over and retched a mouthful of water; gulping gallons of pool water was not a mistake I was ever going to repeat again after my first and only experience with the ordeal.

I lifted my head a little and had a blurry glimpse of Tomlo and another boy propping Gansu up by his shoulders as he vomited the whole pool back from his pot belly that right now looked like the four stomachs of an overfed bullock. I feared he might even regurgitate his intestines too. His bloodshot eyes poured out more liquids. Around us, a myriad boys rubbed and blew into their hands like cavemen trying start a fire with wet logs. I swear I heard the name God escaping from a few lips around me. Boys from my hood. Boys from across my hood. Boys who were supposed to make this moment worse for us. But they were praying for Gansu’s life. And one of them had actually gone one better and pulled Gansu and me from the deathly hallows of the cave at the bottom of the pool. There was nothing to understand.

Suffice to say there was no more breaking of ribs or limbs that day; the older boys sat on rocks and conversed while they fervently waited for colour to return to our skins. Taking us home in our current state was virtual hara kiri. So we stayed, and the conversations got lighter and lighter as Gansu’s health got restored. There was nothing we could do about the gaping gash on his head though. A flying rock had opened a large hole just at the base, and it had been a real war trying to stop the bleeding. Trying to explain this deadly injury to our elders was going to take some real creativity. But these were the odds we were gladly ready to accept – I really do not want to think how we were ever going to return home had Gansu emerged from the pool short of his life.

Mususu leaves had been chewed before being applied to the wound, which was then sealed with a bandage taken from Tau. Tau claimed to be a better footballer than Tamuka, so he kept his ankles always bandaged to get noticed sooner than everyone on the football  pitch. Soon it became an obsession, and Tau would traverse the pastures with dirty bandages holding his shins hostage and depriving them of good blood circulation.

But on this day were so grateful for his obsession we almost kissed his beloved shins.

“What happened?” Gansu finally asked. He looked to his uncles, confused question marks swimming in his eyes. And looked to his enemies. No wonder he rubbed his eyes endlessly – the poor child thought he only ought to be dead to see boys from the two neighbouring villages sitting as one. Laughing at the same jokes. Somebody pointed out that Gansu had swollen so badly he looked like a small chicken that has been slaughtered for the home of a very large family at Christmas – a chicken for which the only way all its consumers would get a piece was when the bird had been beaten so well that all its blood would swell the veins and make it bigger.

The boys laughed again.

This was too much for Gansu. He closed his eyes and lapsed into sleep. I guess it could have been too much for me too if I had a hole in my head and had lost a lot of blood. But I sat there, looked at Tichaona, and dared not even think.

I can only remember no more inter-village melee after this wake-up call. Not that we suddenly grew an allergy to violence; because I can recall a time when we ganged up against our very own city-based brother, whom we had discovered he was actually the one behind the false testimony to the police about us stealing the wire that Mimimi got nabbed for. But we all grew up finally and left the haven of Mangwana Primary, and learned that there were more positive ways to expend our energies on. Of course, it could be that we all scattered to different parts of the country after that and we rarely met at the pastures. Our younger siblings had taken over the cattle herding business from us, and – having heard the legend being told and retold of Gansu drowning and then resurrecting after a knife had slit his throat – they seemed more level headed.