My Shoes

I have always dreamed of living in a house made of shoes...

Fuck

This Used to be Easy

Did the Address

Go to the Right

Or to the Left?

Dear Headmaster

You know; I have been to Manicaland Province in Zimbabwe – I have actually been there a lot of times and been to a lot of places around the area where you work. I have been to the old growth point in Buhera that gave me a practical lesson about ghost towns I had only heard of in my Geography classes; I have been to the new growth point at Murambinda too (and I have heard about the political shenanigans that led to the death of good ole Buhera GP). I have been to Nyanga and Chipinge and a whole lot of beautiful places in that green province. 

Bizarrely, I have never been to Bocha. Which means I have never heard of your school. I am very tempted to think you had never heard of your school too – otherwise you would never have let your wife do what she is said to have done under your watch. That could be the only logical reason why she did it – for publicity. For the record, I still cannot believe a whole teacher can actually be accused of such a callous deed. Somebody who has been entrusted to mould young brains so they can think up a lot of shit that can take this country forward; she is simply not capable of that surely. Please, tell me Mr Headmaster; teachers are really not that heartless, are they? They cannot be. They simply can’t. 

But then again; meh. This is a country that is now slipping more in than out of that dreaded cesspool of failed states – I guess expecting teachers – those yesteryear beacons of hope and growth and prosperity and success – to be accountable for the children they are entrusted with is asking for too much. We already have corrupt leaders, corrupt security authorities, corrupt business people, rebellious children, and an underground economy; so what if we added a heartless teacher who specialises in killing our future for us? I mean we were already doing a pretty good job of fucking up our country ourselves before ample help came from that your wife. 

Come think of it, headmaster – what could that that boy have become after graduation? The highest qualified vendor in the country? Or just another degreed hwindi at Market Square Bus Terminus? Only today, I was reading that, out of 189 countries ranked according to living standards, ours was 153^rd – and it was only there because we have not degenerated into civil war yet. So you see, Mr Headmaster; it was good that your wife killed that kid’s hopes for him before he realised for himself just how thin his prospects were. This way, he will always blame your wife for a futureless future he sure as hell knew was always coming. 

Besides, I take it you and your wife had never been to rural Zimbabwe before you took up the job of bringing enlightenment to the children of that poor school. Before then, the only relationship you had had with poverty was through your television set. Where you saw poor children being eaten by flies and vultures and your father told you never to waste food because there was a lot of starving kids out there. So you ate on behalf of all starving children. And I guess before you, your father was bourgeoisie too, most probably a teacher like you eventually became. So you must come from a fine dynasty of educators. You have never seen poverty on your doorstep, and the first time you stepped out onto the cursed ground of Mweyawetsvina…, sorry, Mweyamutsvene Mission School, you must have had a very hard time recovering from the culture shock. 

Well, those kids you saw are the children of our democracy, headmaster. On our ladder of social stratification, they and their parents are called peasants. The down-trodden. The hoi polloi. They are the base of the base of the pyramid. They cannot even afford to live on a dollar each day, and they rely on handouts for almost everything from food to clothes and sometimes even shelter. I know, because they remind me a lot of me. I was one such kid not too long ago. And I vividly remember that each time one of us had the mother of all good fortunes and had a donor throw a few clothes and shoes at him, there would be a mother of all celebrations. I remember it like it was yesterday. 

Everybody in the village – and even beyond – would never let this mother of all rituals pass them by. Growing up in the 80s and 90s in those threadbare environs in Chivi, we were such a closely knit society that the very minute a girl got herself tricked or tricked someone into the mating game in the pastures; or a notorious thief got nabbed for his crimes; or a faraway relative died; or a pupil in our area produced extremely outstanding, or extremely shameful results from his Grade 7, ZJC or O Level examinations – everybody would know. Literally everybody. They were not the days of Facebook or Whatsapp or Twitter, or any of the myriad fancy social media applications the kids of today waste their time on, pretending that their lives are great while they engage in a vainglorious megaphone kind of socialising that leaves them lonelier and bereft of real life; but the people would still know. They even had an adage for it too – kure kwemeso zheve dzinohwa (if the eyes cannot be there, the ears will certainly hear of it). 

Typical of any model rural area in in this great country, Chivi did its proscribed – or rather stereotyped – civic duties to a fault, and contributed its fair share of deserving candidates to the penurious population of independent Zimbabwe. Maybe it was more than a fair share; because the poverty in Chivi has a legendary status among all poverty-stricken areas in the country. Somebody might be living off the repugnant and putrid bin food from the murky streets of Harare, but if you offer to marry them and take them home to Chivi, they would knock themselves out laughing hard first before they say no; hell no. Chivi! Gimme the Devil himself and I might consider a marital union. Not a boy from Chivi – what the fuck do you think I am; a nut case? I am a charity case, for fuck’s sake; not a nut case! 
For some strange reason, every Zimbabwean seems to think that however dire his circumstances are on the social stratification ladder, he cannot be worse off than any native of Masvingo; let alone one from Chivi, the home of witches and donkeys and droughts and famines of the Mfecane proportions. Nobody wants to be there; even Chivi itself doesn't want to be in Chivi.

But Chivi is the land of my fathers and their fathers before them. It is where I was born; it is where I shall be buried. We played our football barefoot in the abandoned fields of one old man called Chenjera while our cattle grazed in the pastures. Chenjera was our uncle who had migrated for the celebrated greener pastures of Gokwe – or so the elders said, but it was whispered in the village that he had been excommunicated because people were fed up of him stealing their goats for his relish. One day, Uncle Chinjera's wife hosted a beer party - she brewed a few drums of millet beer for resale, and for a day, her home smelled of beer and urine and fights and makasi and drunk people giving a drunk rendition of Majukwa, Mbhakumbha, Kongonya and Jerusarema dances. It so happened that the dancing got so heavy in the kitchen that the hearth gave way - to reveal a cache of goat meat that weighed into tens of kilograms. 
Naturally, the revellers feted upon all the cabrito; and in the morning when everybody was recovering from the hangover, Uncle Chenjera was called to court, got convicted a banished from the village.

On some years we had good rains – normal to above normal, as the weatherman on tv was fond of saying – but others were not so generous; and on these we had erratic or no rains at all. The great famine of 1992 wiped out all my father’s herd and it took him a lot of years to open another kraal again. But we children were so blissfully unaware of the discriminatory tag the world had stamped on us; we just thought poverty was the way of life in the rural world out there, with a few selected homes which looked out of place. They had big houses with asbestos or zinc roofing, bright painting, big windows and they had solar panels which they used to fire up the black and white television set that nobody else in the village even dreamed of possessing. 

I have to admit sir, that it is kinda hard to dream of a television set when one cannot even guarantee the presence of breakfast on one's bullshit-smeared floor the following morning. From above, you could easily mistake our huts for those big beach umbrellas – but after a tsunami coupled with a cyclone has swept the beach, leaving everything in its wake tattered. Including the big ass umbrellas. That’s how the huts we grew up in looked like. Mushrooms around an anthill.

Every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday, our rich neighbours tensed themselves in readiness for an invasion of their homely peace and privacy from a posse of kids eager to watch Gringo, Ezomgido and WWF. 

(I did that once you know; it was getting dark one day as we pushed home our water containers from the communal tap that supplied about four or five villages. To the kids in the know, it was WWF day, and somebody mentioned that there was a tv at the house we were passing, and that all kids from this village gathered there to watch Howgogan (I only learnt his actual name was Hulk Hogan when I became old enough to know that wrestling was a stupidly prejudicial fake sport of men on steroids), Sting and The Undertaker and Jeff Jerret and who else do their stuff. The kids of this village were our friends, with whom we played football and shared desks at school; they were practically brothers from our other mothers. I had never seen a wrestling match in my whole life. Don't look at me like that - the only time I had seen a television set at work was through the window, and it was three years ago. Now I was worried about getting home late, worried that my mother would worry. But I did not want to look like mommy's boy - so we all dumped our wheel barrows and buckets by the roadside and made a detour).

We looked at these families and their achievements and we regarded them as the ultimate epitome of success. We envied their solar panels and stereos and televisions and dreamed of marrying their children; and automatically marrying into all that awesome wealth. So we tried hard to lure the girls in class by talking loudly and pretending to know everything in the world of books. Given how our success rate at these endeavours was between zero and none, we really must have been doing it the wrongest way there ever was. But we never stopped salivating at their khaki and maroon uniforms and jerseys, and skilfully placed broken mirrors at strategic positions under the table so we could see what kind of panties they were wearing today. On the way home, we would talk about them and their underwear no end and imagined ourselves married to those silk undergarments and white stockings and those little school shoes that got fastened up by pinning them shut onto the little pin on the outside of the foot. And we would swoooooooooooooooooon...

As we hit the pillows every night (it was the elbows actually, but who is counting?) we promised ourselves that we would be like them one day. Today, we might have no shoes or uniforms or drawers or any of that other fancy stuff like socks and hats and jerseys that we could wear to school to show off to both friend and foe, but behold, there shall come the day. The day. The day when our real lives would arrive and all our poverty got wiped out. T-minus ten years, six months, two weeks,  twelve hours, thirty minutes and thirty seconds from now... It is coming.

 

Which was why it was such a ritual when one of our own received a pair of shoes from whatever sudden strike of lightning from the good heavens. Our fathers stayed at their work vicinity in the farms, the mining towns and the big cities while our mothers took care of us in the rural homes. So, like Christmas, we saw our fathers once every year. At Christmas. I think that was one of the most important reasons why we all loved Christmas in the rural areas – the knowledge that dad would be here with all the stories of the big city, and he would also lend a fully drunk ear to our annual requests and promise to grant us our wishes the following Christmas. Dad and his empty little promises to the prayers that meant everything to his children - I really want to puke… 

Our prayers to dad were simple enough – we wanted shoes. Yes. Shoes; you know – those fabled little things that were designed to cover the feet and keep them out of reach of destructive forces of nature like thorns and stones and frosts, which had the power to leave calluses on our heels, dark scars on our underfoot and bloody blots on our toes? Well, a good pair of shoes would magically cure all these diseases. Dad simply nodded; and every Christmas, dad would bring home bottles of Green Valley, some bars of soap, sugar, the 2kg pack of rice, loaves of bread, a couple of P9 or P10 batteries and the latest Christmas offering from Barura Express or Khiama Boys – but no shoes. He would just bring more promises that next year would be the year. T-minus one more year, Houston. We have no problem. Hang in there...

It was little wonder therefore that when father finally got attacked by that very rare bout of responsible fatherhood and actually thought about his children, it was a spectacle of world class proportions; for it meant one of us briefly got a taste of the life of our rodomontade neighbours. Even if it was just a pair of hand-me-down tennis shoes that left your little toe poking out – where I grew up, owning a shoe was a grandiose feat. I mean come on; you could look at that pair of miracles and actually call them your own; you could kick rocks with them and take them to school with you and on your way back you would take them off and marvel at your clean feet, then hang your shoes around your neck by the laces, because it was almost criminal for a rural boy to possess such soft feet; and you had the opportunity to say no when your friends asked to try the shoes on, before you changed your mind and let them taste your comfort for a few minutes. You would wash them until they were drained of all colour and - if they were originally white - smear a cupful of maize meal on them as they dried in the sun. Shoes. And they were yours. And you could do damn anything as you pleased with them. I really think the first love of every rural kid out there was the first pair of shoes that he called his own.

I had a few such achievements of grandeur myself and each time they came by, they were memorable. My friends, neighbours and all relatives would do the ritual - they would spring up on me at unannounced times and pinch me so hard on my body or feet - depending on whether I had gotten a new shirt, a pair of shorts or shoes - until my eyes swelled real tears of pain and I was on the verge of shedding them, all the while yelling, "Matsvani! Matsvani!" I did not mind them one shit; mind you; I actually believed them when they told me that snapping away small chunks of flesh from my body via my brand new garments was a way of making sure that they would last and last like a mother's love. Which could have been true, because some of the clothes and shoes I outgrew and handed them down to a younger cousin or anybody who needed them.

My first love affair with shoes arrived when I was in Grade One, sometime in the very late eighties. They were black tennis shoes and my sister had them too; except hers were brown in colour and she took the laces and wove them into some intricate pattern in and around the lace holes. So when she put them on, her feet looked like they had two little dots of dark flowers on them, and she did not have to tie or untie her shoes; she just slipped in and out of them, like Varmyr Sixskins warging in and out of the skin of another animal in George Martin’s masterful Game of Thrones series. I mean the books, not the tv show. None of which sadly could be said of me, because I lost the laces the very day I first took the shoes to school. When I returned home, I had two identical cotton tongues sticking out of my feet like a pair of inexperienced puppies after a run around with a clever hare.

But I liked them that way; they let the air in, especially in the latter days when my feet had mutated and the shoes had utterly refused to grow with them. I started to feel them pinching my toes, and I was forced to take them off in class. One day, my mother – after watching me hopping from one corner of the house to the other as I tried stubbornly to force my feet in the black number – decided that enough was enough and told me to leave the shoes alone. She told me that I was now a big boy and big boys do not wear shoes they used to wear when they were in Grade 1. These were Grade 1 shoes I was forcing myself into, and did want to repeat the grade? I violently shook my head no. If there was anything I hated more than anything in my young life, it was repeating a grade for whatever reason. But that is a story for another day.

My mom went on, gushing that the next time daddy came home, he would bring me nicer shoes that befitted my status as a Grade 2 pupil. There she went again with dad's empty promises. But I kept my silence, savouring the irony of juxtaposing the words 'my dad' and 'promises' in one sentence. I wondered if mother saw it too.

I gave the shoes one last loooooooooooooong longing look, and forced my naked feet to carry me out through the door. I felt the tears in my eyes. I’m sure that relatively self-important episode of my life was my introduction to poetry; because I looked at those shoes and sang them a silent dirge in farewell. I pled with them to sit tight until my return so that I could find them a safe place to live until I figured out how to reunite them with my feet again. I knew I had abused them; in the final days, the two largest digits would stick out through the cloth like they were short, stubby sore ears on one side of the head, and it was all the soles could do to barely hold themselves together. They looked like a permanently damaged couple of two-month old rape victims. On that day, my dying pair of once-black tennis shoes lay there without even the strength to lift a tongue and plead their need for rest. I really, really, really had to let them go.

I got out. And I have hated poetry ever since.

When I returned from school, I did not enquire about what had become of the first love of my life. I had mourned for her the whole day, and it was time I let her rest. 

It was not until two years later that I finally got to boast of another pair of lovely footwear that I grew to love like I had loved the first pair; which I still thought of and mourned for now and then. Given the time lag between the tennis shoes and my latest acquisition – a pair of white canvas shoes that we called tender foots – I have to say I had ample time to properly grieve for my very first pair of shoes. But to be fair, this new pair was the virtual prototype of awesomeness and beauty rolled into one. It was the Bently, the Mercedes Benz of my feet. It had red, blue and yellow lines that ran from the sole to right where the shoe levelled off around my talus, on both sides of the middle of my foot. The laces ran from where my toes started to the top of the shoe itself. I know, I know – there were a few other people who had shoes like these at school; they were virtually a school shoe in my years as an elementary scholar – but while the rest where black and black all over, my version stood out because of its white colour and its colourful stripes. 

My dad had bought the shoes for me during one of those rare-as-a-solar-eclipse holidays when he actually took us to his lodgings in the white city of Kadoma. It was August of 1991; I know because there was a special day during that holiday when we had all bathed and I had slipped into my new tender foots and matching Adidas shorts (they were yellow and white, and had no connection whatsoever to Adidas, but for their little conical slit at the sides), and was all ready for a day at the local agricultural show – when my young sister chose that very day to writhe like a worm on the ground, wailing that her intestines were afire. 

So, instead of a memorable family outing at the show, we ended up anxiously biting our nails in the hospital foyer waiting for hopeful news from the doctor. After that missed opportunity, I was to never set foot near any show however small, under the aegis of the Zimbabwe Agricultural Society, until I was twenty-three. As for the Kadoma show, I was never to set foot in the place until July 2013. Pity I could never conjure up all the childish feelings of excitement I would have experienced twenty years previously. I could neither buy candy, nor fill my pockets with those naked,  variously coloured sweets we called zvimbhuru, nor with biscuits nor with freezits; nor walk around the show premises sucking at that mind-blowingly sweet stick of Sherbet or icing sugar from Rumwe Shopping Centre. And I could never do this in my new pair of shoes.

Ah; these my barefooted days; how I miss thee. No; not the bare footedness. But the innocence, the naïve illusion that the world was really a fair place where everything worked according to plan. Innocence. You ever heard them say innocence is bliss? Or is it ignorance is bliss? Well; whatever it is, they were right, whoever they are. I mean, here I was walking three kilometres to school every day, my feet squirming in the canvas shoes that I had to wear because the Chivi winter mornings are biting and weepy and the frostbites would have chopped off my lovely feet for me, starting with the toes; and my collar always turned up all around my neck, not because I was a bad boy; but I had no jersey at all, let alone a school jersey and a scarf – but the only thing that worried me was why CAF had stolen our rights to host the 2000 AFCON. 

There was this day when we were just starting out as Form 2 pupils, and it was so cold my mother gave me my father’s oversized blue chequered jacket. I was down with something that day; I don’t know what it was, but I was so cold my very spleen was frozen, and I remember slumping in a cold huddled heap at my corner in the back row and going dead until somebody knocked me back to earth when it was time to go home. It was a girl. My heart was hammering an earthquake in my small chest and the cesspool of my mind was the very Syria of obfuscation – where the hell was I, and why was I the only boy looking back at a sea of soft faces peering at me worriedly like a confused group of novice medical students pondering at a urine sample in a case study of premarital sex?

“Jere, are you ok,” one of the girls spoke. I dragged my head up.

She had one of those voices that girls use when girls know they are done with you and they now want to break your heart but they want you to feel good about it. Margie. I remembered her now. Margaret. The lightest girl in class. She had on a ghastly green jungle hat that she had folded on the front, leaving her looking like Captain Jack Sparrow fleeing the charge of the British Royal Navy in the Caribbean Islands. It was ugly; but then I found nothing amusing about a school uniform beyond the shirt, the shorts, the skirt, the trousers and the jersey. Did I really have to add a hat on top of that? And a tie? Did I not look ridiculous enough without those appendages? So really, her hat must have been cool, but I still hated it – because it was a hat. 

I snapped why back at her; and where the fuck was everybody? What was I doing here with only my female classmates? Where were the boys? Where was Brighton? Where was Robert? Where were my friends? The girl told me to relax; the guys were out gathering rocks for some maintenance work to be carried out at the assembly point – and I was only here because I had been completely knocked out for the past four hours. They thought I was not feeling well so they did not want disturb me.

Oh.

The cold returned to my body at that very instant. I winced. That sowed the seeds of my hitherto no-love-lost relationship with cold weather from that day. I really hate it when it’s cold, man. Nowadays I have a chest full of coats and jackets and jerseys, just for that day when the temperatures even make a show of dropping to the levels that I do not like. The chest is so full that it scares me sometimes; it feels like I am buying warm clothing in retrospect. But back then… I really do not want to think about back then. The children of rich parents, bless them, would bring their extra school jerseys and loan them to the needy ones for a day. Whatever reasons why they did it, I was eternally grateful for their largesse. But sometimes they would be late, or we the poor would be late – and the teacher would catch us red-handed with the wrong jerseys on top of the frayed uniforms. Now, most of our teachers – having had first-hand experience of the rigours of rural life themselves – would just pay lip service to this little indiscretion and leave us be. 

But one day the teacher we called the senior master surprised us when we were just settling down for the first lesson of the day (what should have been the first lesson of the day anyway; but it was a week before closing and the teachers were busy marking examinations and we were busy arguing and chasing girls and having a time of our lives); and the first thing he saw was me standing at my desk, in my very brown polo neck that stood out from all the green and grey in the classroom like a lump of coal on a wedding gown. 

He ordered me to take the jersey off. 
I did. 
He ordered me come over with it. 
I did. 
He ordered me to hand it over. 

I stopped. 
And took a step back. And another.

It was July, the coldest month of the year, and this guy was asking; no, ordering; that I surrender the only item of clothing that kept my blood hovering just above freezing point in this world. Not only here at school, but at home too. I looked at him like he was crazy, and took another step back. He dashed to my desk and grabbed my school bag. If I wanted to keep my books I had to hand over the jersey. 

I stopped dead. 

Oh, he knew me well, alright. Like most people at that school did – they knew I kept my books beside me as if they were some magic muteuro that I used to keep evil spirits at bay. Secretly, I wondered how many people actually believed this to be true; that I was really possessed, and the only thing that kept me from going round the sanity bend was my books. The senior teacher must have wondered that as well. He brandished my school bag like somebody who knew he had me by the balls and repeated his threat – the jersey. Or the books. The class was deathly quiet now. I did not say anything too. I think I was too stunned to speak – but I remember making very slow deliberate movements as I put my jersey back on and then strode silently out of the classroom, my burst pair of hand-me-down shoes squeaking against the polished floor as I made my exit.

That was the last pair of shoes I had during my school days. My mother had solicited them from an uncle who worked as some big or small shot at the National Railways of Zimbabwe, and they saw out the last two of my school years in Chivi. Between them and my white tender foots of the fourth grade, I had had two more pairs of canvas shoes, a pair of Sandaks, that burned my feet when it was hot and hacked at and ate into my anterior tibial artery when it was cold. Trust a pair of Sandak to be the only coldblooded type of footwear in the universe. 

My first pair of leather shoes came when I was in Grade 7. Do I really have to tell you that they were not new? The soles had seen better days, and judging by the way they had been pared almost bare at the outside corners, I deduced that their original owner must have been bow-legged. But they were mine now, and when they arrived by Kukura Kurerwa’s bus, nobody was home. Not me, not my mother, not my sisters. So our neighbouring uncle’s wife signed for them on my behalf and then hid them under the bed before I returned from school. She then had the time of her life as she sent me from pillar to post in search of something whose identity I did not know. Then, when the sweet pair of leather footwear finally revealed itself, I went berserk. Hello Christmas. Hello New Year. Hello leather. Oh yes, hello dreams.

But I had dreams of a new pair of leather shoes too. They were called Wein Brenner. Oh Wein, the most beautiful shoe ever made by Bata. Actually, I passed by this dream every day from school; there they lay on display at the top shelf in Masoso's General Dealer. Every day I would enter into that little shop and rest my elbows on the counter and let Wein Brenner fly me to Mars and back, through all the tourists resorts of Zimbabwe. Through the reg and hammada of the Sahara and the parabolic sand dunes of the Namib. This was my zone; my life. I never wanted to wake up out of it.  

But every day, it was Wein Brenner's price that always brought me back to reality. $75. That was a whole year's tuition. What parent in their right sense would blow a whole year's tuition just to fulfil their child's stupid dream? The whole point of sending the child to school was so he could realise his own dreams, silly. And I did, in a way - the very first pay I got, I bought myself a pair of black suede Wein Brenner. Then I bought another one - this was had a tan colour that always hypnotised me like a gazelle mesmerised by the deadly stealth of a python slowly closing in for the kill. One day I came back from work, and my tan boot was gone; taken away by a cousin who fled to a faraway place and did not return until five years later. This shoe business really has graves, I tell you.

I never had more than one pair of shoes at one time; that was a luxury too taboo to even dream of. And none of the shoes were the school type, may be because they had to be multipurpose when they were still living – taking me to school, to church when the mood stroke me, to the holidays if a relative was in the mood, and to see me through special occasions like the rare wedding in the village, and public holidays – but I do not remember ever being chased out of class because I had the wrong type of shoes on my feet. Maybe a warning here and there. But being chased out? Especially out of a national examination too? No. Never. That was for not paying school fees. Your wife really has them balls, man. Give that too her. 

Hell, there was one guy at my school who even had to rip away the top part of those industrial, heavy duty, knee-high gum boots so that he would find something just to starve of the frostbites. Today, he sells all kinds of very good quality second-hand shoes in town. And another one who had inherited the ominous black boots from a relative who was employed by the ZRP as a Support Unit trooper. We certainly did have a lot of memorable times as we grew up in our hood, and there are a lot of stories to tell that are far removed from our poverty – but that is not to say we had it easy. It was tough; just that the spirit of togetherness and hunhu kept us in one piece when we could all have easily gone astray and lost the way before we could even open our eyes – just because we did not have shoes.

And today, I may not be Addicted2Shoes like Pokello (you do know Pokello, don't you? Everybody knows Pokello; for right or for wrong reasons, but everybody knows Pokello) – if I had 200 pairs of shoes in my closet, I would most certainly give away 190 pairs of them – but I do get her addiction to collect these things. I have to violently fight the urge to splurge myself each time I come across a nice jacket or shoe on display…

Not Yours.

Jere Chikambure