Ethnic Wars

I was not a model pupil at school. No, I wasn’t. Even the very idea that I could do anything exemplary during my years at Mangwana Primary or later at Vuravhi Secondary School was at the very least ludicrous. Granted, I was neither your archetype of the opprobrious pupil who bullied fellow students; nor was I a right nuisance for the authorities. You could say I secretly waged my wars from somewhere near the oblivion of furthest corner of the back benches where the teacher never bothered to look when looking for answers to his questions; because he knew no hand would venture from there, except if someone wanted to leave class for the loo. I was not one to strive for those extra, goody two-shoes things that children who ended up being prefects did; when the teachers were looking the other way. I actually stuck my nose at such sacrilege.

Take bathing, for instance. I hated it. I think there was time when even my own mother grew tired of having to chase me into the bathroom every day. So she left me alone for a while, hoping I would finally embarrass myself into the bathroom. But I would come home from school and head straight to the grounds where we chased the plastic ball until it was dusk, then I would make a beeline for the reed mat, my body so ashen it looked like I had spent all day swimming in a landfill of ash. With a bunch of farty, ash-loving donkeys. The blankets would to their best to help themselves to almost all of the dirt during the night, and in the morning I would inspect myself and wonder, where did all the dust go? Then I would take a cupfulla water and splash my face, then take a dive into a jar of Vaseline before taking off for school. By Friday I wouldn’t have trouble passing for a mechanic's enslaved underage assistant; what with my uniform having acquired layers of petroleum jelly and dust for five days.

But the teachers barely noticed me. They almost caught me one day though, when they just up and decided that they had had enough of children attending classes while reeking of all kinds of smells  - piss, shit, halitosis; even alcohol (our parents brewed beer for sale). The kids also played kind hosts to a lot of unsavoury insects, especially those belonging to the tribes Pediculus Capitis and Pediculus Vestimenti. But we commonly referred to these as lice. They would make themselves a home in the elastic seams of our slimy pairs of shorts and gave our loins a healthy taste of Hades.  

Our loving teachers could take it no more; so they lined us up class by class and made their way down the queues, inspecting the elastic crevices on our shorts and rubbing this depression at the centre of the jugulum, to see whether it was clean or whether it produced a sticky, greasy layer of dirt, which we called chikoko. Sometimes they did not have to rub anything at all; just one disdainful glance, and they would give you a piece of washing soap and order you to run down to the nearby dam where you were to scrub yourself until they were satisfied. If you just had to bath yourself you were lucky; others had to wash themselves AND their clothes, so they spent half the day loitering around the dam in the nude. Hahaha.

I was only lucky that day because my mother had waylaid me at the door before I could escape and soaked me a good round in warm water. So when I got to class I was smelling fresh and good to eat; and how lucky I felt for not having to make that humiliating journey to the dam in front all my friends and the girls we secretly admired.

Another thing I hated about primary schooling was being forced to speak English throughout the day, for fear they would hang a discriminatory label around my neck that said some unflattering things about my scholarly acumen. I hated speaking in English, man. I hated it more than I hated wearing shoes to school in the summer. I hated it so much I could feel the bile rising each time a prefect approached with a threatening noose in her hand, to order me to speak in English. I think I laid the seeds for my love-hate relationship with prefect-ism and authority during those days.

Perhaps it was a good thing that, with all the secret rebellions I waged, I was largely anonymous at school, and generally, most teachers wouldn’t name me among a bunch. Only those who taught me could tell the difference, and a few of them even had the insight of what I was capable of doing. And I had a generally good relationship with my teachers; even liked a few of them. Maybe it was just a small issue of me making woeful first impressions; because I cannot recall even one teacher whom I had direct contact with for a prolonged period who ended up not looking to seeing me again. All of them would light up each time we met, many years after they tried to open my mind to the ways of the world. They would always start by pontificating on how bright I was, though they never made it a point of actually telling me that when it mattered. One of them even remembered my dirty uniform. How touching.

One such teacher was Marindo, a short guy whose attempt at keeping a humongous Afro hairdo did not do any favours to his height. It was Marindo who made me aware of a lot of things about myself that I had no idea I could do on a level decent enough to be called something. He knew I loved a game of football, but there were no surprises there. I knew I loved football. Everybody knew I loved football. I loved football so much I wondered whether I was not a football too. But Teacher Marindo also discovered that, while I despised English as a spoken language, I was something of a prodigy when it came to expressing myself in English on a piece of paper. He figured that was maybe why I did not give a flying fuck about the language; because I was very good at it. I wrote my first verse and short prose under his fatherly tutelage.

Then he tried to lure me from the soccer field into a choir group he led – because he said I was a good singer. Now then. It was true that all the fame our school got in the district – and indeed in many parts beyond Chivi – was because of Marindo and his hugely popular choir groups. They went to all places; I have to admit that the very first time I set my foot on the streets of the City of Masvingo in 1993, it was all courtesy of the Singing Melodies of Marindo. The melodies I had rudely refused to join at first, choosing to spend my afternoons in the tedium of tending to our tender gum trees with the rest of the school, while the singing prodigies twisted their mouths into curls of all shapes and sizes in the Grade 7B classroom. Or whatever class Marindo was charged to teach that year.

I was in Grade 6 when the guy first came to me with his wild idea. Just as well that the soccer season was over, so he figured he might have a shot at headhunting. Even then, I wanted to laugh outright. Twice, I cut his singing class – for general work; of all choices. What was the fuss all about; we both knew I did like music. Loved it even. But I liked to listen to my music. Not sing it. That was why we had the gift of Leonard Dembo in this world. I once tried to sing to my sister’s child and he removed the dummy from his mouth and stuck it in mine. Yea; I am that bad. My singing is so bad that when I encounter a problem, I immediately start singing. I always stop worrying then, because I know whatever is troubling me, it cannot be as bad as my singing.

Marindo. His hair is greying now. Maybe whitening is the right word. I meet him now and then at the growth point whenever I return home to Chivi, and it is a pity that he doesn’t drink. I have always thought that buying somebody a bottle of Coke when there is a whole cornucopia of lagers and beers is such a waste of money. And I have always wondered what a short guy would do when completely sloshed.

I wonder where his roots lie too, but wherever he was born, they sure did give a world a fine specimen of a dedicated educator and music conductor.

But if my love for writing took root under Teacher Marindo while I was still in primary school, it blossomed during my very first year at Vuravhi, when I met Miss Dengezela, our English teacher. Yea, she was big and pretty, but my ambitions then were not as high as suffering a crush on my English teacher. Besides, there were two more important reasons why she was so easy to remember. Her name stuck out, and she was funny as hell. She came from somewhere in Matebeleland, but she liked reading Shona novels to us in her heavy Ndebele accent. It was through her that I read Sarura Wako and Ziso Rapindwa Nemhiripiri. Sometimes she would read our English essays to her colleagues in the staffroom. I remember one day when I was called to that room and I almost bolted because the only other time I had been there was to bend down and touch my toes while my ass received some heavy lashing.

It was just as well that it was Miss Dengezela herself who came to collect me that day, so proud that she was moulding my mind into some worthwhile piece of art. But the rest of the teachers were accusing me of having plucked my composition from some book they had not yet read themselves. I had a hard time trying to convince them that it was all me. So they made me write another piece of fiction. Oh; if only they knew how much I loved the sound of my voice on a piece of paper.

Yet I had known well in time that I was an avid reader before I knew I wasn't a bad writer. Notice I used the word avid; because it is trite and so clichéd. I could have chosen to be mundane and replaced avid with words as simple as keen, or eager; or used better jawbreakers I gathered during my teen romance with The Student's Companion - bibliophile, bookworm; the lot. You know. But I like avid, for the simple reason that avid is as old and tired as the time since I first saw the word avid and could make sense of it.

When she left Vuravhi, Miss Dengezela left us in the hands of another guy. Round glasses with wire rims. And one of his huge front teeth was missing. His name was Mlalazi, and it was he who introduced us to the Student’s Companion. And he too left a mark because he was so good at what he did that all I remember of him now is not his name, or his accent, or his drinking escapades. He is late now, but what I remember about him most is the power he granted our minds to be creative. He encouraged us to go crazy and blow our minds into places beyond the stratosphere where they had never gone before. It was such a wonderful adventure. It still is, in fact.

And I remembered of all these guys because I read a story in the paper recently about some villagers who ganged up to confront a school head in their area because she is not of their ethnic origin. I remembered because I wonder whether I would be half as good as I am at what I do today had our Karanga parents in Chivi barred Mlalazi and Dengezela from being part of the people who shaped my brain during it hatchling days. Yes, Mlalazi and Dengezela were Ndebele natives who lived among the Karanga, were proud of their origins and looked like they had a good time teaching the Karanga children the secrets of mastering the queen’s language. Granted their pool of pupils was really a dream pool – Rosemary Tizirai (every day I pray you are resting in piece Rosie. Maybe one of these days; after some proper and thorough research, I will write a proper eulogy of how we all killed you when we chose to stay silent and uninvolved. You will forever remain one of the best female brains that ever walked on earth), Blessing Chipare, Robert Takanai, Precious Dzimbanete, and the whole gang of about 200 fellow pupils spread across three classes – you could not wish for better students.

Add me as well. I wonder whether I would have been any better at the Queen’s language had Mlalazi and Dengezela not entered my life at that tender age. Given the foundation that had been laid by Marindo, you would have better odds betting for me doing well whatever teacher I got. Even the worst one. Like Nyangaswa, whom we had in Grade 5 – the guy was so short tempered he would make Mike Tyson look like St Peter. One year, Nyangaswa was asked to referee a match between two schools at the district competitions – and we once watched in awe as he threw a whistle to the ground and ground it with his feet until it turned into soil. Just because the coach of one team had protested one of his decisions from the touchline.  

Luckily, I did not get the worst teacher. I got the best – and he was Ndebele. No; I got that wrong; he was a human being who was born in Matebeleland, whose native language was Ndebele. Yet he blew our cognitive processes so widen open that – had Marechera been alive, he would have marvelled at the way we found the similarities between language and water. We knew we could drink in the words of the English language like we would a glass of cold water on a searing October afternoon. We could drown in it, or just float above it and let its waves carry us wherever the mind wanted. We got so close to Mlalazi that he literally fell sick right before my eyes when I revealed to him that I had failed to answer all the questions for the English Paper I.

But for their names and rather heavy accents, there was no way we could have known Mr Mlalazi and Miss Dengezela had been raised in the West or South-West of Zimbabwe. And that was way back in the 1990s, when people still talked about Gwesela and dissidents and Gukurahundi and whatnots. I’m sure they had their views on this disastrous piece of our history as an independent nation, and I’m sure they could have abused their position to tell us how so evil the Karanga people were that they had tried to wipe out all of their own Ndebele people out of existence. But no. They did not do that. They were teachers and they were good at teaching. So they did just that – teach.

Which is why I wonder who on earth would attack the head of a school where his children attend for such a fucked up reason as just being born on the wrong side of the ethnic divide and still claim to have his mental faculties pulling in one direction.  

It has always escaped my mind why people fight at all - whether it is in the home, at the church, in a bar or even inside a ring and you say it is a sport called boxing. Maybe I can understand war; because I really believe there in an evil lurking inside a soldier's uniform. If they meet in a forest while wearing those ghastly camouflages, the first and only thing they do is spill the blood of their young selves, which would have been utilised for a better purpose. Drinking, for instance. They could take off their murderous garments and go to a watering hole where they would clink pints, drink their asses into kingdom come and laugh at the folly of cowardly old men who let their diarrheic mouths run and then hide behind the haven of bullet proof walls while they send young men they did not even sire to die in defence the sickly motor mouths. Then they would go whoring. Anything that does not involve the senseless letting of blood.

I have never gotten to understand whether there is ever a good enough reason to attack your neighbour because he grew up speaking a language different from yours. I don't know whether the Tutsis and Hutus can find enough justification behind the senseless killing of nearly one million of their fellow citizens. I don’t know whether there is an excusable explanation why Dynamos and Highlanders fans fight after every match pitting the two football giants. I don’t know if we can find one good reason to justify the killing of one life during our own Gukurandi moment of madness.

What I wonder is whether I would have become the person I am now had Marindo, Dengezela and Mlalazi not entered my life at the time they did. And I wonder whether I would be as eloquent as I am at swearing in Ndebele had I not met good friends in the shape of Nkala, Thembi, Rodilux and others who were so instrumental in brainwashing me with the gospel that the only way to learn Ndebele in a day was to learn all the curse words without actually knowing they were curse words.

Unfortunately, all they could teach me was the sweary parts; and they did it so they would fight for me every time I lost my mouth at the bar...