Painting a Mirage

By Samantha Rumbidzai Vazhure

The Mire

The Mire is a series of fiction novels set between post-colonial Zimbabwe and the UK, exploring an intergenerational legacy of trauma, narrated in first person through the eyes of Ruva, a 1st generation immigrant living in the UK. In this series, Vazhure relentl

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carnelian Heart Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Dec 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781838048051

Book preview

Idid not hold a gun to my mother’s head to make her speak. In fact, I do not recall ever asking her to divulge the state of her relationship with my father; but she did.

Mhamha had relocated to the UK from Zimbabwe to work as a nurse in order to pay my university tuition fees. She arrived during my second year of university and I was relieved to have Mhamha to myself. I had looked forward to Mhamha’s undivided attention and vicariously shared her relief for escaping. I hoped my relationship with Mhamha would blossom into a more intimate mother-daughter relationship as we got to know each other better. We were now liberated women living in the absence of the fear, obligation and guilt that had plagued our earlier lives.

During my childhood, I had never felt close enough to Mhamha. I was always fully aware of the efforts Mhamha made to show that she loved me; the kisses, the hugs, the lectures, hearty meals, taking us to church every Sunday to ensure we developed into forthright upright individuals. Despite all Mhamha did, I never felt the bond I knew should have existed between us. I could never open up to Mhamha like other children did with their mothers. I was afraid of her affection and protection. I could not trust her.

Baba had come to visit us from Zimbabwe and his mobile phone was resting on a frosted-glass side table in Mhamha’s lounge. A text message notification on his phone roused Mhamha’s attention. Baba nonchalantly reached for his phone and suppressed a smile. He tensed up his jawline as he clenched his back teeth, then his right leg began to tremor in uncontrollable vigour. The ball of his foot laid firmly on the ground as his knee rapidly jerked up and down. It was his bouncing leg syndrome that prompted Mhamha to grab the mobile phone from Baba’s hand and read the message aloud.

I miss you daddy. Please don’t forget to buy me a leather jacket and electric blanket. Mhamha parroted the message from Baba’s small house with the vigour of a student who had been picked by a teacher to read out a comprehension passage to the whole class. The tension in the room was tangible, so we muted. We had been playing happy families in Mhamha’s lounge, watching television, cracking jokes and reminiscing about the good old days.

Who is sending you this message Davis? Hhmmm? Baba Ruva! Mhamha’s enquiry was uncharacteristic yet calm and stern, as if she was asking Baba a normal question. Her facial expression screamed with quiet pain, and I hoped I was in a bad dream I would soon awake from.

"Iwe Gamuchirai, you don’t talk to me like that in front of the children, do you hear me?" Baba bellowed.

I had never heard my parents addressing each other by their first names. Next, the couple scrambled for Baba’s mobile phone and squabbled as they ineptly removed themselves from the lounge, headed towards Mhamha’s bedroom to argue about the message.

I had never seen my parents quarrelling. The only recollection I had about previous dissonance between them was the time Mhamha attempted suicide when I was around seven years old, at our childhood home. Mhamha had called me to her bedroom and started taking several Chloroquine tablets sitting up in bed, saying she had had enough. Then she instructed me to look after the family when she was gone.

"Usare zvakanaka mwanangu, take care my child," she bid me farewell then sunk into the blankets for her final sleep. I subsequently rushed to phone Baba at work, who in turn commissioned our family GP, Doctor Mbeva, to dash to our home to induce the expulsion of pills Mhamha had ingested. After the incident, no one ever shed light to me on what had happened, and life carried on as normal.

Tension colonised the atmosphere in the days that followed the text message incident, as we feigned normal respectful conduct with Mhamha who was clearly still upset, and Baba who was embarrassed because he got caught cheating, but was not sorry for what he had done. Baba seemed annoyed that Mhamha had exposed him, but he offered his usual punchlines and prolonged, loud boisterous laughs that made us doubt our perception of what had actually happened. I understood the situation painfully and distinctly remember that event marking the very first time I felt pure disgust for Baba, for being precisely the opposite of what he raised me to be – a good, compliant perfectionist. It was also the first time I felt disappointed by Mhamha who had raised me to be humble but forthright, truthful at all times and calling out misdemeanours of any sort.

I had indeed learnt these principles the hard way growing up. I as the eldest would have been beaten up thoroughly for my younger siblings’ non-compliance, because I should have known better and should have stopped and reported their misbehaviour. I should have been the exemplary one, the perfect one who made no mistakes. Yet here we were, faced with the reality that Baba was not perfect after all, and that Mhamha had covered it up all our lives. Inevitably, I felt compelled to choose a side. Without consciously engaging a reasoning process, I naturally chose team Mhamha and mentally declared war on Baba.

I was around 22 years old when Mhamha first exposed my father, the hero she had raised us to know and admire. It was British summer time, and I patiently awaited the commencement of my masters’ degree in September, while I rekindled romance with an old flame.

Mhamha had recently upgraded her living accommodation from a room she had rented in her younger sister’s house to a three-bed terraced house in a densely populated area in Aldershot. She rented the new accommodation from a rude, elderly landlord of Pakistani origin who never repaired his property. Mr. Khan often turned up unannounced to check that his unkempt investment was not being vandalised by us. The interior walls of the house were covered in grotesque jade green textured wallpaper which reminded me of the colourful tie and dye kaftans worn by African women, except that kaftans were beautiful. A leafy oriental ochre design border broke the green wallpaper in half to create the most incongruous wall design. I blocked out that reality and pretended the walls were white to resist the compulsion to rip the wallpaper off. The senile floral maroon and canary carpet felt dirty no matter how much we vacuumed, so I never walked barefoot on it.

The house had been advertised as furnished, but it came with two derelict brown velvet sofas in the lounge, one of which had a front right leg missing and was propped by a brick. There were double beds with stained mattresses in each bedroom. The beds had no headboards, an oddity I was not accustomed to. Quasi-functional obsolete dark wooden wardrobes were placed in each of the three bedrooms. They were ugly and tattered in a way that made me think ghouls hibernated in them and might break out at night to wake me from my slumber. Had the wardrobes been in a beautiful house, they may have qualified as antiques in need of restoration.

I tried unsuccessfully to avoid imagining the tenants who might have lived in Mhamha’s house before us. We avidly smeared bleach everywhere we could, and wiped surfaces with antibacterial spray to gain comfort that we would not catch unwanted surprises that might have been left by previous occupants. Mhamha insisted she would return to her home in Zimbabwe eventually, so she would not invest in furniture or anything that contributed to her comfort while she lived in the UK. I despised the physical appearance of Mhamha’s imperfect home, which was nothing like our bonne maison in Zimbabwe. However, I could not bring myself to share my honest thoughts with her, because I knew the progress Mhamha had made on her own in the UK was a significant achievement.

I decided to sacrifice a little over £200 from the money I was saving for my masters’ degree to buy a few modest accessories to make Mhamha’s house more habitable. Two beige soft faux fur throws with matching cushions to cover the hideous sofas, chrome and medium density fibreboard breakfast set for the kitchen. A coffee table with a matching nest of chrome and frosted glass side-tables for the lounge, one of which had been holding Baba’s mobile phone when he received the contentious text message. I had also bought a plain metal Roman numerals kitchen wall clock that we hung up in the lounge. Whenever I travelled to Zimbabwe for holidays, I always brought back curios and crafts that I hung up and dotted around the rooms to make Mhamha’s house feel more homely. Mhamha lived with me, the younger of my two brothers, Tongai and my sister Runako. The accommodation was sufficient for our needs, and I learned to accept that reality. There was also something very comforting and liberating about living imperfectly within a community that did not judge or have great expectations of us.

A year or so before Mhamha made the decision to emigrate to the UK, Baba’s youngest brother, Babamunini Benjy, had taken his own life. He had been found hanging from the ceiling of the one-bedroom he rented in a shared house located in a high-density suburb of Masvingo. Such areas were commonly known as ghetto location, or simply rokeshen. My uncle had behavioural challenges that nobody cared to acknowledge or resolve. He was depressed and had taken drugs for as long as I could remember, drank excessively, and lived a very wilful life, as did most men in my family, and many of the men within the society I grew up. Despite being a very intelligent boy, he was labelled as one who had managed to sabotage his progress in life and resisted everyone else’s efforts to raise and mentor him into a respectable man. Amongst several dramas, he had been involved in arson at a rural mission boarding school to which he had been sent to help him focus on his education with less distractions. He had naturally been expelled from that school and got arrested.

In addition to that incident, there had been reports from the same school that Babamunini Benjy and his cronies were notorious for stealing pigs and goats from nearby homesteads, which they slaughtered and roasted in the wild to get relief from unpalatable boarding school food. Prior to that, he had also been expelled for drinking from a city boarding school, where he had been accepted because the head of the school was a relative. There had been numerous other incidents highlighting his emotional and mental instability; yet we had been conditioned to laugh and joke about it, and indeed talk about it as if it were nothing.

After my uncle was found dead, a bombardment of abuse and humiliation of Mhamha by my angry paternal aunts followed, as they publicly claimed that Mhamha was the cause of my uncle’s death. We lived in Masvingo, a very small town where my parents were well-known and respected. My paternal aunts who lived in larger cities, had descended on our home and hurled profanities to Mhamha, in the presence of people who respected her and had come to pay their last respects to Babamunini Benjy. It was a widely held belief in Shona culture that when someone died, someone must be blamed for it regardless of the cause of death. Accidents, illnesses or even suicides were never considered valid causes of death. Instead, an unsuspecting, innocent, unfortunate individual was picked and the blame for death was placed on them – a heavy burden they would take to their grave, as I learnt the hard way through Mhamha’s experience. Mhamha had apparently sold my uncle’s soul to the spiritual realm in exchange for successful businesses, kuchekeresa, my aunts claimed. That was their story and they stuck with it.

The aunt who led this offence, Tete Gwinyai, had fallen out with Mhamha a few weeks before my uncle died. Someone had left money to be passed on to my aunt at one of our shops, and Mhamha had taken it as settlement for a long-standing debt owed to her by Tete Gwinyai. Being a gambling addict, she had habitually turned up at my parents’ shops and intimidated staff, demanding money from the tills or groceries from the shelves, with no intention of ever paying back. She had an astounding sense of entitlement, which she imposed not only on all her siblings, but friends, relatives and anyone who knew her. Tete Gwinyai, the eldest of Baba’s sisters, was also the most charming woman who had the gift of convincing people to repeatedly lend her large amounts of money, none of which she paid back. Growing up, I could never decide whether it was her beauty or brains that did the job. I thought she had both.

My parents studied in the UK in the seventies, after Baba received a Rhodes scholarship to study Politics, Philosophy and Economics at the University of Oxford. He had been awarded this privilege for achieving the best A level results in the country, he told us. Mhamha followed Baba to the UK and studied nursing in Peterborough. My parents had met on a train in Rhodesia, on their way to boarding school, in their early teenage years. Mhamha would travel to a mission school in the South West region of the country, passing through the Midlands, where Baba attended secondary boarding school. Their love blossomed quickly into a whirlwind romance promising a lifetime of bliss.

The liberation struggle in Rhodesia was in full swing during this time. My paternal grandfather, Sekuru, was a well to do businessman, community organiser and secret humanitarian who had been providing food and clothing to guerrillas fighting in the war. In the late seventies, Sekuru had been travelling back to his rural homestead in Chivi about 60km south of Fort Victoria, when he was stopped by Ian Smith’s soldiers, searched and killed for being in possession of provisions for the liberation guerrillas. Sekuru was hit in the face with the back of an AK47, which broke most of his facial bones and damaged his brain. He called out for Baba on his deathbed, until he passed away. Sekuru had been planning to visit Baba in the UK, but Baba had discouraged and postponed the visit due to exam pressure. By this time, Baba had graduated from Oxford and was training to become a Chartered Accountant with one of the big four firms. The untimely death of his father left a chronic oozing lesion on his soul.

I was subsequently born in London in the early eighties, where my parents worked. I came at an inconvenient time, so Baba arranged for one of his sisters, Tete Gertrude to come and take me to Zimbabwe, where I would be raised by my paternal grandmother, Mbuya, in Chivi. Mhamha was neither consulted nor involved in these arrangements. Our separation tattooed an everlasting scar on our relationship. A detachment that birthed separation anxiety and a plethora of abandonment insecurities that would torment me for life.

When Baba completed his articles and qualified as an accountant, he returned home to take on the role of father to his eight siblings. Baba arrived in Zimbabwe at the age of 27 and received several executive career opportunities from reputable multinational firms based in Harare. Mbuya, however, had other plans. She decreed that Baba would carry on the family legacy by finding a job locally, simultaneously managing the family businesses, and helping her to raise the other eight. In return for that inconvenience, Mbuya bought him a brand-new Volkswagen Golf and provided a £20,000 cash deposit for a large property in Masvingo, whose mortgage my parents would service. This became our home, with vast farming land, a large five-bedroom main house with several reception rooms, a separate large three-bedroom grandparents’ cottage several yards away, a secluded drab four-bedroom servants’ quarters, a large swimming pool with nearby detached changing rooms, tennis court and immaculately manicured gardens.

Although my parents were already married when the properties were gifted to Baba, only his and Mbuya’s names appeared on the title deeds to the property, including the businesses Mhamha later managed after sacrificing her nursing career. His financial partner was his mother. Baba worked briefly for a local accountancy firm before beginning a career as a senior official of the city council in Masvingo. During this time, Baba ensured all his siblings were educated in reputable institutions and played the role of father in their lives. He had been the one to interrogate their boarding school shopping lists, asking his teenage sisters patronising questions which always made them leave for boarding school heartbroken and in tears, Why do you need tinned beef? Why lotion instead of petroleum jelly?

Baba had also been the disciplinarian, inflicting a variety of methods to keep the herd in line. A mboma, hippo’s tail whip, was one such tool he did not hesitate to unleash on troublemakers. Babamunini Benjy had on several occasions presented delinquencies that warranted the mboma treatment. One such instance was when he decided to take Baba’s collectible classic Mercedes on a joyride out of town with his friends without Baba’s permission. When my uncle returned, Baba fumed with rage and barked, "Uri duzvi remunhu haikona?! You’re a piece of shit, aren’t you?!" then propelled several punches into my uncle’s face, before finishing him off with the mboma. Mboma beatings seemed to silence my uncle only when the wounds were fresh, but the chastisement aggravated his behavioural issues once the physical pain wore off.

On quiet days, Baba would occasionally bring out the mboma and let us touch it and feel it, as a gentle reminder that non-compliance was not tolerated in our home. A gentle tap on the hand with the mboma tip left one’s skin itching aberrantly. When challenged by inquisitive visitors why he needed it, Baba would declare that its main use was to hit snakes and other wild animals that might have trespassed into our house, then he would burst into a roar of contagious laughter. He claimed that one strike with the whip would break a full-size cobra or python in half. Depending on his mood, age of perpetrator and perhaps the severity of misbehaviour, gentler tools such as leather belts, mulberry tree branches and his own fists, were very much at his disposal.

Baba was also very charitable. He not only funded his siblings’ education, but he extended his kindness to distant relatives. Anyone remotely related to us who had the potential to excel but could not afford to pay for their education was taken care of. Baba enjoyed feeding the masses and felt obliged to provide food and medicines to distant relatives who were not his responsibility.

From a very young age, I sensed a growing fear and resentment by Baba’s siblings towards him. Occasionally, they would descend on our home and after devouring five-star meals that Mhamha always managed to produce, the children were sent to bed. Arguments and tears followed, and sometimes we woke up to find that our aunts and uncles had driven back to their homes in other towns, drunk and upset. It was at such events that Mhamha was usually singled out and verbally terrorised by Baba’s family. Baba neither defended Mhamha nor participated in torturing her, but instead he watched and stated he would not get involved. One such occasion was when Mbuya tried to impose a sanction on my parents, which Mhamha challenged.Mbuya had then quickly shifted the conversation to the fact that Baba loved her more than he loved Mhamha, so she would have the last word. The two argued persistently about who was loved more, while Baba absorbed the debate in silence, until Mbuya posed the question to him directly, Tell us now Davis, once and for all, who do you love more, me or that wife of yours, to which Baba responded by leaving the room.

There were only two varoora, daughters in law, in Baba’s family; Mhamha and one of my uncles’ wife, Mainini Gemma. Varoora were very easy targets of emotional abuse because they were, culturally, viewed as inferior alien beings. Mainini Gemma, stopped turning up at family events when she had had enough, and was considered a rebel. No one confronted her absentia, however, and she seemed to earn herself some respect by not playing the games my family liked to play. Mhamha, on the other hand, religiously delivered kindness and first-class service to her persecutors. I never understood why Mhamha continued to care and look after people who clearly did not love her. Perhaps it was what she was taught to do, at those long after-church women’s meetings she attended every Sunday while my siblings and I waited for her in the blazing sun after Sunday School.

There was no culture of authenticity, and pathological lying was a common family trait which was never rebuked, and so it was unconsciously encouraged. This unfortunately meant even those who told the truth were also not trusted but were often labelled insane. Mhamha despised these family features and was known for what they called cash talk, which opened her up to further animosity. As if she suffered with Tourette’s syndrome, she often shocked everyone by announcing the truth, usually in a short single sentence, when she felt tired of listening to fabricated accounts of events that had or had not happened. "Inhema! It’s a lie!" was one of Mhamha’s usual once and for all responses to predictable mendacities.

We were taught to forgive and love one another regardless of the repeated pain we inflicted on each other as a family through endless spectacles. Interestingly, love was taught without the mention of the word love, or the accompanying actions to exhibit the feeling. Forgiveness translated to forgetting, and there was a default expectation to forget previous offences, and to keep one’s guard down in readiness for subsequent violation. Our family loved drama and therefore cherished celebrations – weddings, graduations, birthday parties, Christmases, and funerals too. The order of these events was very expectable. Everyone turned up seemingly contented, then got drunk and left feeling very angry and unrecognisable. As I grew older, I learnt that family functions were extremely important to our family, because they presented an opportunity to reunite without apologising or addressing previous issues. Sometimes, those who got drunk and angry were simply airing their frustrations over unresolved issues. They became nasty and dished out offenses they would later deny, claiming no recollection of their behaviour.

Our family was well equipped with beautiful and handsome faces, academically smart, charismatic characters who loved to laugh and live large. There were, however, roles in the family that were assigned to selected individuals whose conduct was dictated. There were caretakers required to be compliant and do as they were told or suffer harsh consequences if they did not. There were others who got away with doing whatever they wanted, with no repercussions, and were usually rescued by the caretakers when things went pear shaped. The latter seemed to receive love and forgiveness no matter what they did. Double standards were the norm, and those affected by family hypocrisy were made to doubt their truths. In fact, they were quite often labelled crazy in order to discredit their grievances.

One of Baba’s sisters, Tete Vimbai, was a beautiful, obedient, perfectionist. She had met her husband to be, Babamukuru Batanai, at a local mission boarding school. He had been a haughty, egotistical senior student who had transferred from another high school to my aunt’s mission school. As a son of a successful businessman, he felt justified to beat other kids up and tortured those who did not comply with his irrational demands. With permed hair and tight-fitting pants, most girls worshipped the ground he walked on, but he was condescending to everyone except Tete Vimbai. He was despised by many and nicknamed the Prince of Soul Glo by my uncles, like Darryl Jenks in the movie ‘Coming to America’. Most onlookers had feared their union was a blatant mismatch that would not end well.

Like clockwork, Tete Vimbai had completed her GCE O-level, then went on to A-level to study subjects Baba had chosen for her, one of them being Economics which she did not enjoy and was not particularly good at. Naturally, she was made a school prefect. Despite being quite sharp, my aunt attained average grades as a result of studying subjects she was not especially competent in, then went on to complete a Secretarial course.

Tete Vimbai was subsequently employed at a local car dealership as the Personal Assistant to the owner of the business. At this time, she lived at the grandparents’ cottage on our property, as did Baba’s other siblings who had completed their education but were not ready to move out to live independently. I spent a lot of my spare time with my aunt during my primary school years, learning to be just like her. She loved sewing, and she would make me adorable little outfits that I would wear with love and pride. She would teach me to wear make-up, and I looked forward to wearing clothes she made me for mufti days at school. On one occasion, when I was around nine years old; I had worn a mini skirt and tank top Tete Vimbai had designed and made with make-up on. I felt beautiful in my yellow outfit with red polka dots. I returned home to find a disgusted look on Baba’s face, who told me I looked like a whore, should stop dressing like one, and to wash the make-up off my face immediately.

Tete Vimbai and I spent a lot of time listening to American soul or rhythm and blues music. She would fuss over her weight and I would join her jogging sprees, although never quite understanding why such a beautiful woman would ever doubt her perfection. Babamukuru Batanai would turn up, and sometimes park his car outside our property, several yards down the road, to avoid any encounters with Baba. He would take us out for meals and buy me ice cream. Everything seemed perfect, except that Mbuya called Babamukuru Batanai a snake in the grass. Babamukuru Batanai’s father had been a regional salesman of household goods before establishing his own family business, and Mbuya knew him as a conniving colporteur. He was the bigger snake! Mbuya insisted.

Babamukuru Batanai married my aunt,