Promise Me - You Will Take Care of Your Brother: A Memoir of Faith, Dreams and Everyday Miracles

By Fungisai Nota

In this memoir of his late mother - who herself was ever ready to lend a helping hand to whoever was in need, regardless of how little she had - the author derives greater meaning from her last words to him, "Promise me, you will take care of your brother." This broadens the author's perspectives and approaches toward life and eventually makes him realize that not only his biological brother but also his brothers in humanity at large need his presence and involvement. The author believes that the last message that his mother left him has kept him motivated in all adversities of life and that divine intervention has also helped him along the way by orchestrating situations, events, and people that continue to help him better his own situations and then of those related or unrelated to him anyway.
Overall, it is a well-written insightful book that helps us understand how ordinary people can have extraordinary impact in someone's life and how nothing happens by accident even if we don't understand it at times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781667815336

Book preview

CHAPTER 1:

Six Square Meters

In the summer of 2017, I took my son Samuel to my home country Zimbabwe for the very first time. On one of the many days blessed with beautiful weather, I was sitting out in the garden, watching him play on the lush green lawn. As I began to reflect on my own childhood, it turned into a bittersweet experience that had a stark contrast between my son’s childhood and mine. This house reminded me of my mother, Lucia Nota. She was a maid in this very neighborhood for most of her life, cleaning, washing, and cooking for the then-minority, wealthy White Rhodesians of British heritage in the then Rhodesia. When she could not find childcare for me, my mother would take me along to her workplace. I reminisced the pattering of my little feet when they hit the uneven road as I trotted behind to catch up with her as she briskly navigated the human and vehicle melee of the morning rush hour of Chitungwiza and Harare. We would take public transportation, sometimes two or three buses. Although getting on the bus was a little adventure for me, neither did I particularly enjoy getting up that early nor did I like the hullabaloo that characterized the atmosphere in the buses. Smoking in public was not only permitted back then but also upheld by its ardent partakers as a status symbol. I would watch these men blow plumes of smoke upward toward the roof of the packed bus with ironic curtesy. I disliked the choking fumes. To this day, I can smell cigarette smoke only from miles away. Once we alighted the smoke-filled bus with our clothes smelling like a tobacco-curing kiln, I would naturally slip my little hand into my mother’s warm and safe hand as we walked to her place of work. I must have been only two when I had occasionally started going with mom to her workplace.

As we walked through the sprawling Whites-only neighborhood toward mom’s workplace, I couldn’t help but wonder how it felt to live in such a place. The tranquility of this area was heavenly, and it would only be interrupted by the continuous chirping of birds or the intermittent drone of the large Range Rovers and Station Wagons that were the preferred mode of transport for the residents of this exclusive paradise. On arrival, we would make a beeline for the boys’ kaya (the derogatory name for separate single-room living quarters for domestic workers). Once inside, there would be the usual recital of the dos and don’ts that I had not only become accustomed to but remembered verbatim. I would literally finish my mother’s sentences as she issued the instructions. There were three basic rules: rule number one—stay inside, rule number two—do not leave the room, and rule number three—do not go outside. It was crystal clear that mom’s employers would not welcome the sight of a little Black toddler clad in ordinary clothes skipping around their opulent dwellings and lounging on the plush lawns in their yard, let alone, mingling with their privileged offspring. Mom would be fired instantly if I dared break any of the three basic rules. I would sit in that tiny room, and, most of the times, by the window, and watch what was happening outside. After school or on weekends, I would see little White children of my age playing in this big yard. I still wonder how my young mind processed this and what meaning had I assigned to it all. I do recall, however, imagining the freedom and happiness they enjoyed. Sometimes, I would see them run through the clothes that mom had washed and hung out to dry. If any clothes fell or got stained, she would quietly pick them up and rewash them without uttering a word in protest. Of course, they were only children, and so was I.

Thirty years later, I am sitting in the garden, pondering and watching my son, who is exactly the same age as I was at the time, skipping around this beautiful garden, laughing loudly, giggling, and splashing water over the lush green lawn. I see him chasing the butterflies as they dash from one flower to the next with colorful elegance. I am overcome by the freedom and absolute happiness that my son exudes in the same grand neighborhood where I had to be confined to the boys’ kaya for hours on end to save my mother’s job. I longed for her and wished she was alive to witness and be part of this joyous milieu and experience. I hoped she was in Heaven, looking down and watching her own grandson playing joyfully in the once-forbidden gardens where she toiled day in and day out for meagre wages.

Then I wish to say to my mother, Now we have come full circle. The picturesque view from that little window, with all its grandeur, now fully belongs and is entitled to your son, dear mother Lucia. Owning a house in this same neighborhood where my mom used to work had been a lifelong dream that had now come true. It took almost thirty years to make that dream come true. This house, which I named Casa de Lucia (Lucia’s house), is a sanctuary for the whole family to come together and thank God for what he can make possible. It is a symbol of love, hard work, and resilience, which I hope will inspire the younger generation in the family to aim higher and dream bigger. It is a toast and a dedication to my mother and all the hardworking women in my family who carried the weight of the family on their shoulders—most of them as underpaid and undervalued maids to the British.

My mother had a heart of gold. She was a gentle soul and a conscientious worker. She invested all her energy in cleaning those immense houses for what seemed an eternity as I sat by that small window. Her bosses had incredible tastes for luxury and tidiness, and they insisted that their houses always looked spic-and-span. She would do the laundry; provide morning and afternoon tea, lunch, and anything else the lady of the house wanted done. I doubt if she had any real job description. I observed her with great admiration as she industriously carried out her duties. She was very proud of her work, and to understand why, one needs to understand her own upbringing.

My mother mastered how to fend for herself at an incredibly young age. She had a very tough life when she was young. Her own grandmother, my great-grandmother, took in my mother and her two sisters when my oldest aunt was only three while my mother was eighteen months and my youngest aunt was less than a year old. They were very young and at a stage in their lives when they needed stability, but, alas, my maternal grandmother’s marriage to grandfather Ralph Nota had not worked out. (I will explain later why I use my maternal grandfather’s name.) Hence, my grandmother had taken my mother and her sisters to her village to live with her mother (my great-grandmother) who was affectionately known as Gogo Zvigwi and who lived in the eastern highlands of Zimbabwe, a place called Chimanimani on the borders of Zimbabwe and Mozambique. If you are a tourist, then you will find it to be one of the most beautiful places on earth, with undulating mountains and inviting views, but if you are an impoverished rural peasant farmer, the land can be mean and unforgiving. After leaving my mother and her two sisters in Chimanimani, my grandmother returned to the city in search of work.

Gogo Zvigwi was a vahosi (senior wife) in a polygamous household, prior to her husband’s death. The story goes that since she only had one child, a baby girl, the husband married a second wife who gave birth to several children. The new wife became the darling of the household while Gogo Zvigwi was relegated to the status of the other wife. She was subsequently neglected even when her husband was alive, and the situation got worse when he died. She only managed to have one small, grass-thatched mud hut to her name, from which she single-handedly raised my grandmother. So, when my grandmother dropped off my mother and her two sisters back in the village, Gogo Zvigwi, who was advancing in age by that time and literally scraping the bottom of the barrel to make ends meet, was faced with the huge challenge of raising three toddlers.

Leaving the children home to be looked after by Gogo Zvigwi was the toughest thing my grandmother had to do. This was by no stretch of imagination an abandonment of the kids, but the toughest decision any mother would make under such circumstances. She had to choose between watching her children starve and leaving them and hoping for the best in the city. With the hope of securing work in the big city and sending money back home to help her mother and her three little girls, my grandmother made the heart-wrenching decision and left for the city. After getting back in the city, landing a job was a painfully long process. One had to live with friends or relatives who were already reeling under the urban hardships emanating from low wages, deprivation, and discrimination. Domestic work in the so-called ma yard (meaning residential areas of huge yards) exclusive for the White folk was one of the only jobs a Black woman could get after several weeks or months of desperate searching. By that time, the wealthy minority British, who had colonized and looted the country, had enjoyed more than fifty years of uninterrupted plunder and exploitation of the Black masses. Although my grandmother eventually found work, she could barely survive on the paltry wages and had nothing left to send back home to her mother and her three little girls. Consequently, my mother and her sisters grew up in abject poverty that was characterized by hunger as they would go for days without food. Even before the tender age of ten, their grandmother would offer them for labor to other villagers in exchange for food and clothing. My mother and her sisters would later tell me stories of sleeping on empty stomachs, sometimes eating maize mash (sadza in Shona) with salt. Gogo Zvigwi must have suffered serious pain by watching her grandchildren going without food and without any means of addressing the situation. No mother, let alone a grandmother, can sleep peacefully at night after her children or grandchildren have gone to bed hungry. The hardship had taken its toll on her emotional well-being, and the distress must have driven her to using alcohol to try and numb her pain and the uncertainties. She had become known for resorting to drinking excessively in and around neighboring villages, leaving the three little girls alone at home.

My mother would later confess to me about herself that she could not even finish second grade as there was no money for school fees and uniforms. Before the age of ten, the girls had started seriously seeking work in the fields or as local maids to help provide for food and clothing and to alleviate the burden from their grandmother. It is hard to imagine children, who had barely been ten, taking on the responsibility to seek employment to relieve pressure on the adults. The sisters’ predicament at such a tender age had welded an unbreakable bond between them, which saw them through the toughest of encounters. They had stood by each other against life’s incessant adversities. The combination of colonial deprivation, rural poverty, and being a girl child had unleashed a torrent of trials and tribulations. Working in the fields meant waking up well before sunrise regardless of the weather. Breakfast was not on the menu, lunch depended on the employer’s generosity, and let’s not forget that they most likely wouldn’t have had dinner the previous night. The young sisters would wake each other up, throw oversized hoes over their tiny shoulders, and trudge along for miles to wherever a villager would offer them work in return for food or clothes. There were no designated breaks or working hours on the rural fields. Working hours stretched from dawn to dusk. The child laborers were at the mercy of the heavy rain or the scotching sun of Chimanimani year in and year out. As they grew older, my older aunt became weary of the scourge of rural poverty and sought to escape it in search of work and a livelihood in the capital city. Soon after her, my younger aunt followed suit. The sisters’ stories in the capital had striking similarities. The city did not offer the