Sekai Nzenza on Wednesday
“WHY do you always write about the village as if life was so beautiful back then?” asked the guy who had recently arrived from the UK. This question was presented to me as we sat with my cousin Reuben in a café in Harare. I had never met this guy before. He was well-dressed in jeans and a designer T-shirt. A pleasant looking guy in his late 40s speaking with a British accent.

“When I read your column online, I sometimes think, ah, this woman, why does she want us to miss kumusha so much?

“We struggled growing up in the village. We wanted to leave the place and find a better life elsewhere,” the guy based in the UK said.

Before I could explain or justify my return to the village position, we were joined by another one of Reuben’s friends who just wanted to talk about European soccer.

After leaving Reuben and his friends, I realised that this was not the first time someone had told me that I was very nostalgic about the village.

Sometime last year, when I was at a function in Harare, a European diplomat said that I was terribly nostalgic and romantic about the village past.

As a result, I was presenting a picture of the past that could be misleading to readers of this column.

She said village life was full of poverty. In fact, the situation in the village was much worse than what it was during colonial days. Rural people suffered from lack of food, water, shelter and education.

If life was so good in the village, why would the donors be coming here as they have been doing for so many years?

Why else would UN agencies and Western governments compete to give humanitarian aid to village people in many parts of Zimbabwe if the village was such an idyllic place as I paint it out to be?

After my encounter with the guy from London, I temporarily felt that he had been unfair to say I was nostalgic about the village and our past life.

Nostalgia is a big word. I googled its real meaning on the internet, as you do these days because we have information at our finger tips.

Nostalgia is defined as the state of being homesick, a wistful or excessively sentimental desire of yearning for the return to some past period or to a condition which cannot be recovered.

According to sociologists Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley, nostalgia is “the composite feeling of loss, lack and longing.

Nostalgia is an ambivalent feeling of pleasure about the past, but it has also to do with the sense that the past can never be returned to.”

After some quiet reflection, I realised that the guy from the UK had a point.

As a writer, I should not be defensive. I must accept the views from diverse readers of this column. Some readers may disagree quite strongly with issues, while others would agree and give praise on the same issues.

Over time, I have learnt to listen, accept criticism and write from a position of truth gained from experience, then take a position.

Was I really being nostalgic about the village or was I simply writing about the meaning of returning back to the village after many years in the Diaspora? Was my experience any different from that of others who have lived a similar life to mine?

As Zimbabweans, just like other formerly colonised people, we have moved from the pre-colonial, to the colonial and now to the post-colonial.

This movement in itself requires a shift, some of it traumatic, in the way we view ourselves. We struggle to combine the village experience with the urban and indeed, with the Diaspora lives.

You grow up speaking one language, eating various tasty traditional home-grown foods. Your culture is what it is.

Then one day, you move to another place and find yourself speaking mostly English, eating and dressing like the rest of the Western world. You want to fit in. In doing so, you throw away the past, as if it never existed.

But this position changes. You either dream or you wake up to memories of the village past. You recall the laughter of many voices in unison, the food and the happiness that was so common back then.

You miss that laughter, that feeling of belonging. There is sadness, a sense of loss. You think of history and the passage of time, the people, places, music, food, clothing even hairstyles that defined your past life in the village.

I recall many happy days in the village. At night all the children gathered in Mbuya VaMandirowesa’s big round hut.

She sat crosslegged, snuff in the palm of her left hand, telling us so many stories that usually began with “Paivepo,” or “once upon a time.”

We would immediately sit close to her, attentively say “dzepfunde,” loudly.

Mbuya’s stories often referred to a time before the men without knees came, meaning the Europeans. When the white man first arrived here, wearing trousers, people believed they had no knees and called them vasina mabvi, the people without knees and with long noses.

The white people were an enigma and our ancestors would have been full of curiosity. They welcomed them.

There are stories about how Mbuya Nehanda killed a whole beast to welcome the white strangers, as was the cultural custom of showing hospitality.

Little did Mbuya Nehanda know that she was welcoming an enemy into the homestead. This enemy would soon move in, take over the house and all the grain in the granary, the chickens, the cattle and the fields.

Mbuya Nehanda fought back in the First Chimurenga. The British captured this heroic ancestor, together with Sekuru Kaguvi and murdered them.

Life in the village changed as the British colonialists took over the country, killing many people. Among them the chiefs Mashayamombe, Chingaira and Chiwashira.

The white man had come to settle.

The Land Apportionment Act was passed in 1933 and our people were pushed and forced to live in Tribal Trust Lands. Chibaro, or forced labour and taxes were imposed on people. The idyllic village life was gone.

By the time I was born, our grandparents had well and truly settled in the dry and mostly barren parts of Zimbabwe, agro-ecological region 5.

Mbuya VaMandirowesa hardly mentioned how we ended up living where we lived. Maybe it was too painful for her to tell the story.

At school, the teachers taught us about the heroism of the British and how “uncivilised” and unChristian we were.

Growing up in this village, we ate, we loved, we laughed, we cried, we sang, we danced and we shared. Children were born. Hardly anyone died. We ate most of what we grew. Food was healthy.

We did not know about diabetes, high blood pressure, HIV and Aids, obesity, severe toothaches and other diseases.

We knew that one day, we shall get educated, leave the and look for employment. But we did not know that when that day came, our lives would change drastically for the good and the bad.

We would be driven by this rapid social change, commercialisation, the desire for money, new clothes and new cars.

Some of us will live in massive houses. Beautiful women will wear hair that was once owned by Brazilian or Indian women. The Chinese would bring us cheap goods that will look very shiny for a short time then fall apart.

We shall wear second hand clothes unwanted by Europeans, including bras from mabhero.

Our children will eat greasy take away food, watch good and bad movies and search for whatever information they want on the internet. They will see images not meant for children.

Who will decide what is good and bad for us and for the children? Parents? Teachers? Pastors? Vana tete, the aunts, uncles, grandparents? Or should the new prophets tell us what to do and how to behave?

I often want to place myself in the past. But I do realise that the past was not static. It must have moved.

My grandmother Mbuya VaMandirowesa did not always sit there and tell us stories while taking snuff. No. She became old and stopped commanding the whole village. She became quieter with age and by the time she died, we could see that it was now my mother taking over the role of the elder grandmother.

My mother did not tell us many stories. She later travelled overseas to visit us. She sat and watched American television and laughed at comedies in a language she did not understand.

My mother longed to return to the village because that was her home.

She loved the village and is buried over there.

We shall never live the lives of our parents and grandparents because the past is not static.

We have our own past and present to define, reject, accept and celebrate.

There is so much more reason to return to the village and reclaim that which gives us peace, happiness and contentment.

I have a strong nostalgic yearning for the village past, when happiness and laughter was common.

Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic

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