Memoirs of Innocence & Experience: Through the Eyes of a Village Boy

By Innocent (Hondo) Chirawu

I was born Innocent Murambiwa Hondo on 11 January 1961, in Chinyemba Village, Glendale, Mazoe District of the then Rhodesia. I had an official change of my maternal surname ?Hondo? to my paternal surname ?Chirawu? and acquired the middle name ?Blessed? in 1983. Since my childhood I have always aspired to utilise every opportunity that helps me help my fellowman best. I was brought up in colonial Rhodesia which was dominated by ?divide and rule? politics in favour of the white minority population. As a result the black child?s school was far inferior compared to his white counterpart?s. There was also a deliberate public policy to provide the average black child with an education only adequate for him to perform a subordinate role to his ?white master? and only 12% of the black children were expected to proceed to secondary education. These would form the ?elite? part of the society taking up occupations like nurses, teachers, clerks, agricultural extension officers and others.

I was very fortunate to fall into the category of the ?elite? group, who made it through the bottleneck system into secondary education ? Salvation Army?s Howard Secondary School which was a syndicate examination centre for The University of Cambridge whereby GCE ?O?Level examinations were set and marked at that reputable university. I sat for those Exams in November/December 1978 and passed with grades B and C in 8 subjects including Maths, Science and English ? thus obtaining a University of Cambridge GCE certificate in First Division.

I later on proceeded to a private institution, Ranche House College where I did my English and Sociology at Advanced level. My first job after school was working as a bank clerk for Standard Chartered Bank from May 1980 to Sept 1981. I then intercalated from banking to study for my Diploma in Theology at the International Bible Training Centre (Lagos) in 1982, resumed banking for a stint then did my initial teacher training from 1984 to 1987. I then taught Woodwork, RE and English in Zimbabwean secondary schools for 11 years, during which period I rose through the ranks of being an ordinary class teacher, head of department (Religious Education & English) and deputy head teacher. While in full-time teaching, I managed to study for a degree in educational administration, planning and policy studies as well as a part one in BA Media studies through Zimbabwe Open University ? the latter which was interrupted by socio-politico-economic problems in Zimbabwe that time. I was doing all those study programmes paying the fees from my salary and without a penny of assistance from the government. In Zimbabwe switching from being a teacher to being a journalist for the independent press was and still is, like jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

In April,1999, I then joined the Daily News, the then Zimbabwe?s once most popular and best seller tabloid later banned and defunct from 2003-2010, where I served as a subeditor-cum-proofreader until the time I migrated to England in December 2001. By the time I left Zimbabwe there was every sign that the future of my colleagues, our newspaper and I was very gloom. After the bombings of our offices and printing press, our then editor-in-chief, Geoff Nyarota announced that due to the political situation and the hostility that time we were experiencing, he could not guarantee our safety anymore. So, I had no choice but sell my family property, buy a ticket, flew into self exile in England, and I have always lived here since then. Later on I called my family over to join my stay in the country.

My grandmother, my childhood mentor

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Jan 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456828028

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Copyright © 2011 by Mudi P. (Muchirahondo).

ISBN: Softcover    978-1-4568-2801-1

ISBN: Ebook        978-1-4568-2802-8

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Contents

A Briton in a Village in the Heart of Africa

A Briton in a Village in the Heart of Africa

A Memo to my great-great-grand father

A Teacher’s A Teacher

A World of Double Standards

Accused But Not Cursed

2nd Part: Struggling But Not Alone

Culture ShockNaked!

Culture Shock Smile

From Mars and from Jupiter

Funda Munhu

Give Them Cake

Haruna’s Bicycle Pump

Haruna’s Bicycle Pump

IBTC—Lagos

Notintone Place, Sneinton, Nottingham

Just Me

Kubika Mbeva

Kushingirira

Loneliness

Makaisika Sei Shana?

MARATHON VERSION 2: People R People

MARATHON VERSION 3: People R People

MARATHON VERSION 4: People R People

Mbende

Mr Cockrel

My Culture

Nhika

Of A Truth, Truth

Paradox of Life

God’s Rock

God’s Rock (Part 2)

Spirental Gymnastics

One Female House Mate

A World of Double Standards

A World of Double Standards

People Are People

Refused A Dream Career

Sat Where They Sat

Struggling But Not Alone

That Man

The 2nd Scar

The Invisible Scar (from the system)

The Street Light Beam

Who Is Your Refuge

Gondo Harizi Huku—Uri Gondo

Xmas 2009

A Briton in a Village in the Heart of Africa

Old man British

I speak English like Lo-ndon

He’d say

‘A small British’

He’d call himself

Precisely . . .

He’d say,

one needs to take care of his health

Pinching the front bit of his cap

Before adjusting the cap’s position

From a rakish angle

To a decent central position

As if it was his cap of knowledge

I am hundred percent certain . . . definitely,

He’d add, winking his eye

To that mesmerized and tantalized

Malnourished lad among his listeners

Who to say the truth are now his fans

Turning to Shupi the teenager village belle

Whose heart Mr Try himself has won,

impressed and overwhelmed

The village celebrity & hero of a learned tongue

Says, "Hullo, my chocolate, my sunshine,

My Tot-one, my Luba-luba

I hear you’d vanished from our map

For a while taking hibernation in the city.

Welcome back to roots"

Trust him, although he has read

Shupi’s facial expressions & body language

He had vowed never to repeat his previous mischief

‘Twas an open secret, though he was Kai’s granddad

Yesteryear he’d fathered a baby boy

With Furuwa of more interesting looks than Shupi

And I clearly recall one village girl, Maku

Narrating the story to my wife, with tickling humour

"She must have got knocked out by Try’s grammar,

wicked smile, clean shave, sharp eyes, handsome looks,

and his short curly hair always covered by his cap"

Maku sighed, made a naughty giggle and continued,

"What I don’t understand is this:

How could Furuwa allow an old man

Whose puberty hair I can imagine had all turned yellow

because of age, to deflower her in a world so full of younger men?"

She sighed again & exclaimed, What a cunning old fellow!

Believe you me, mate

The old man’s name was Try, just Try not Trymore but Try

But ever since he deflowered Furuwa

When village younger men caught wind of it, they weren’t amused

Fully understanding that they couldn’t reverse the process

Any of their hopes and dreams to have her were thwarted

They decided to spite the two love birds

By chanting, Trymore! (a nickname they coined from, Try)

Each time they saw either of the two or both

Or if they were too close to shout, they would look at each other

And say, Never fear or hesitate to TRY anything you know

Then suddenly burst into:

"Try, Try, Try again!

If at first you don’t succeed

Try, Try, Try Again!

Until the Good is Better

And the Better Best!"

One of them would then, tie it all up with,

I shall definitely Trymore!

And the other one would nod his head and say,

Precisely

A Briton in a Village in the Heart of Africa

Three villages away from

Sana Village according to

Paparazzi village girl

Maku there was

yet another

interesting,

humourous, crafty and equally cunning

old man. Although his actual name was

News, in the last quarter or so of his life

For reasons best known to them

The local folk started calling him

Newspaper, Not Bulletin

or Newsreel but Newspaper

I tried to dig out why but

before my peak struck the earth

S’thing fell from the grapevine

Big enough to make one gap

At the size of the wild grape

The only news on Maku’s lips

A Newspaper . . . headline

That only Maku & Crew

Could chew & propagate

‘Grapefruit, propa grapefruit’

Only Maku

Could smuggle

From News’ garden

By the local stream bank

That he’d fathered a child

With a popular village belle.

Those who spread the rumour

Did so with the speed of lightining

And I wondered if they themselves were pure

‘Coz they sounded Badnews Newspapers themselves.

All I decided to do was take Maku’s story with a pinch of salt

‘Coz on the other hand Maku is shorter version for Marukarukanyaya.

A Day In Mudi’s Childhood Life

For Mudi it had been a day as normal as the previous one—starting with an early getting up out of bed after hearing grandma’s seventh shout, Mudi it’s time to wake up!. Muzanenhamo (poverty victim) is already on his way down to the cattle pen. Mudi thinks he is only having a dream in which grandma was calling out his name. So, he coiled himself again, so neatly that if one looked at him they would have mistaken him for a zongororo (centipede). It’s only his head which would betray him as he never covered it always trying to spare himself from the stench of urine under his blanket. The stench quiet strong because it was a product of accumulated daily wetting of that blanket dating back three weeks before. Each day before he left for school he would make sure that he spread it on the small quarry a few meters away from that little round hut where he slept. By the time he came back from school he would find it dry and sometimes feeling hard like a dry cow skin mat, but sometimes if it rained and grandma was busy in the field and forgot to remove that blanket from that place, Mudi would find it proper wet and smelling even much worse. Today, Mudi remembered he still had one more week before he takes his blanket to the one mile away Sawi river for a good washing, rubbing on the chimugondiya (soap tablet) which his grandma gave him to use for that purpose once a month. After applying the soap, Mudi would trample over the blanket with his bare little feet, hold it by one end and use it to beat that smooth warren rock on the river bank until he felt naked. He would then give it one good rinse in the peacefully flowing waters of the river, wrinkle it and spread it on top of a dwarf bush which he could manage and leave it dry before he take it home.

The problem was not with him, Mudi would reason within himself, it was because his ‘little thing’ the expression he was brought up to use when referring to his penis, would very often spray a shower of that yellowish liquid from his bladder onto the canopy above him when he was fast asleep on his back under that only blanket of his. He hated the habit but Mudi always asked himself the question: what could he do about it.

It usually all started with him dreaming having a piss in the field, on the wall of his primary school toilet which maggot-covered floors he always wanted to avoid stepping on with his bare little feet since he had no shoes at that age or in some other convenient places during day time. Even many years later in his adulthood Mudi could still vividly see the picture of that pit latrine in his mind—those horrible and always wet floors, several squat holes and the chocking stench that filled their four walls.

In his efforts to end his bed wetting habit, Mudi had even tried the piece of advice he had got from one of grandma’s close friends but it had not worked. The advice was that he should find a gently sloppy warren rock somewhere in the bush, urinate on it from it’s top bit then quickly get to its bottom and lick once or twice his own urine trickling down there.

Mudi, can’t you hear me calling?, grandma would say knocking on the little boy’s door, wake up, Muzanenhamo is already at the cattle pen waiting for you. Mudi doesn’t hear a word. He is fast fast asleep. Then suddenly, Mudi feels as if his canopy has been snatched by a hurricane and he wake up to find himself face to face with grandma who is now stooping over and commanding him with her finger, Quick, out you go now join that old chap at the cattle pen.

Mudi grabs his long shirt from the floor next to the bamboo mat where he slept, goes into it and dashes to the pen without saying a word.

At the pen Mudi finds Mzee as he affectionately called him, having already put a leather rope around Hwashkit the njuma (hornless)’s neck and he is going round and round from the ouside of the pen trying to throw a lasso leather rope (through the gaps between the pen poles) onto Gavumendi’s c-shaped wide apart horns but is not winning.

As soon as he gets near Mzee, the old chap whose patience by now is obviously about snap shouts, You passing the rope to Mudi get inside, quick! Lasso Gavumendi and lets go. You see the moon is going down quick. And what have you been doing? I got here when the moon was still somewhere there, he said with pointing finger towards the sky. Then he gave Mudi one of those looks of his which reminded one of the scary eagle stare, with his eyes slightly squinted stressing the obvious point to Mudi.

That must have been 3am, I guessed, because I heard just heard the village cocks crowing from a distance marking start of dawn which was 4am.

Mzee was a 6ft plus tall old man approximately 75 but seemed to have the bone of a teenager. He had a long face with sharp eyes and high cheekbones, thin lips, dark complexion and a bald head which Mudi and his peers jockingly referred to as ‘airport’.

The bald area occupied more than three quarters of his head leaving only an inch wide horse-shoe shaped track of hair around the lower sides of his head. When properly angry as Mudi and his peers would say, Mzee’s forehead quickly displayed three horizontal contour ridges.

Without even looking at Mzee, Mudi pushed his head into the pen through one of the gaps between the poles and wriggled the rest of his tiny body into the cattle pen. Since it was the rainy season and that pen had seen better days if all the cow dung in it was scoped out it would fill a 5-tonne trailer and leave the pen looking like a huge bowl inside. One could hardly seen Mudi’s knees with all his feet and both legs buried in the one-footplus deep pool of cow dung. Mudi manoeuvered his way towards Gavumendi whistling gently to calm the beasts down as he mingled with them wading them to his sides like he did with the dew on the grass along his daily path to school. Europe one of the cheeky cows waved his murky-dung soaked tail across Mudi’s face, giving him a generous sprinkle of that stuff. Bru-rr-rr! goes Captain as its left horn caught Mudi’s shirt the side giving it a slight tear. A close shave. Captain, was one young ox with the most challenging behaviour in that pen. Mudi gives a blind eye to that as he throws the lasso around Gavumend’s horns and quickly shakes that rope sideways, the skip rope style—making the lasso grip tightier. As he takes away his catch from the pen the rest of the beasts start waving their tails like nobody’s business not only sprinkling Mudi’s face with some more dung but here and there lashing the little lad’s face.

Mudi felt proud of himself as he walked out of the pen pulling his catch hardly five minutes after he had got in there. Mzee with a suppressed smile on his face hands Mudi Hwashkit’s rope and he ties its end bit with that of Gavumend and drive them to the field approximately one mile away, in the opposite direction from Mudi’s school.

Once they get to the field they go to the spot where a yoke is connected by means of a chain to a plough ready for action, resuming the task from where they left it the previous day. Mzee, therefore, lifts up the yoke as Mudi drives Gavumend first under the right side part of the yoke. Mzee reaches for the chitorobo (fastening leather strap) and yokes up the beast. They do the same Hwashkit on the left side of the yoke and as was Mzee’s custom, he gives Mudi that eagle stare which told him what to do next and they get busy—Mudi driving the oxen and Mzee himself holding the plough. The only time Mzee allowed Mudi to hold the plough was when Mzee was feeling too well. C’mmon Hwashkit, move!, Mudi would shout unleashing the whip on to the ox’s back and at the same time observing how Mzee held and controlled the plough. Mzee held the plough at a slightly slanting angle with his waist a bit behind and aside so as to prevent the plough handles from catching his balls when the plough stumbled into a stubborn stub, root or any other form of huddle or barrier.

Furrow Gavumend, furrow!, Mudi say only when necessary. Rarely would he whip gavumend because that ox was exceptionally good in terms of pulling the plough—it’s nose was always in front of the other ox’s.

So, they would plough and plough and plough until around 7 o’clock, the hour which Mzee had taught me to read by observing a particular position of the sun, that is just above top of the small hill on the far eastern edge of the field.

Hoho. Ho-o—o Gavumend. Ho-o Hwaskit, I would announce and then leave Mzee to untie the beasts as I picked up the murara (palm) bag containing my school uniform and rush towards school, 3 miles away. Halfway between school and the field I would quickly wash my face and legs in the lukewarm water of the Munwahuku (Chicken pond) stream, take off my long shirt, put on my school uniform, place my dirty long shirt into the murara bag, hide it on the usual spot that looked like a mini cave covered with a lot of grass and he would pick it up on his way back from school. Mudi would also pluck off a fresh twig from the muhute tree which stood evergreen by the bank of the stream as its roots were right under the stream bed. He would then chew one end of the twig until it looked like the front tip of a colouring brush before he used it to brush his teeth. It’s amazing that even with that kind of teeth hygiene Mudi never had any dental problem even later in life after his 50th birthday. Too much eating of sweets and under age smoking ruin your teeth. Look at my full set of 32, Mudi would tell some young people in his neighbourhood in Vukuland North, proudly showing his milk white teeth. He would make sure he doesn’t do that in the company of other kids, though, so that meant he had to be a bit anti—social and either leave school before those from his village or leave later after they Mudi hardly had any time to spare once he washed himself and hid his old shirt away because school assembly was at 8.00 o’clock.

Even in his adulthood, Mudi still saw that tall greenish and brown Savannah grass through which the brown path to school wounded like an anaconda. It was the short grass usually on the edge of the path which gave Mudi the problem of dew and sometimes if some naughty older boys walked the path before he did they would tie together some potions of that brand of grass causing him once in a while to triple and fall down. Hence, he had to be very carefully not to walk or run blindly along that path.

Mudi even recalls the bustling sound of the bus that plighted that route on the main dust road up the stream usually around that time when Mudi would be having a quick wash.

It was the popular Number 6, Mutambo Bus which bore a picture of a racing hound dog on its sides and the words, Zvinamazuva Imbwa yaKachuta (The Trickster’s Unpredictable Dog) and for a fact it deed travel with speed of two dogs, like Mudi and his peers would say. It’s route was a real cross country one—Chamutengu town via ChanChan and Terevera . . . 150 miles and back same day.

Mudi had once overheard two friends of grandma chatting and one of them saying that she had heard that Blabi the driver of that number 6 bus had some juju (magic) which engaged a baboon to drive for him while he was resting or even asleep on the steering because he neither went for holiday nor took a day’s leave and yet had never got involved in even a single accident during all the 30 years of his plighting that route.

The sound of that bus had gradually became Mudi’s third watch besides the positions of moon at night and the sun in day time. Once Mudi did not hear that bus’sound he would