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We must continue to balance Western medicine and tradition, especially when the hospital is too far

Dr Sekai Nzenza: On Wednesday
“IF you were born in a hospital, please raise your hand,” said Miss Rwodzi, our Grade One teacher at St Columbus School. There were about 50 or more pupils in the class. We sat on reed mats and goat skins holding our writing boards or zviredhi, on our laps. This was a long time ago, long before Independence. We were still living in Rhodesia.

Ian Smith was the Prime Minister and there were whispers of a war to fight Europeans so we Africans could vote and rule ourselves. These were just whispers. At home and at school, we were told never to talk about war.

Miss Rwodzi paced up and down the classroom, tapping a ruler against her palm. She asked the same question again. We all looked at each other and not a single child raised a hand. We had all been born inside our mother or grandmother´s village hut, under the hands of the traditional midwife, VaNyamukuta. There were three or four midwives in our area. There was VaWanzirai, VaVeronica, VaChimunyu and my own grandmother VaMandirowesa. My mother preferred the services of VaWanzirai because she said Mbuya VaMandirowesa was not always kind and patient especially during the labour of childbirth.

Miss Rwodzi laughed at us and called Mr Muchando, the Grade Five teacher who came from Seke near Salisbury. Mr Muchando laughed at us too and joked that we were primitive. Then he said we were lucky to have survived the old dirty hands of village midwives. He said those old ladies must learn to give up delivering babies in smoke-filled grass-thatched huts. They should allow clinics and hospitals to take over village births.

In those days, Mbuya VaMandirowesa ruled our village compound. One day before sunrise, she dragged me, my two sisters, Charity and Paida from the mat where we sometimes slept with her in the kitchen hut. When Mbuya ordered us to wake up like this, there was trouble lurking somewhere in the compound. She took us to the front door of my parents’ grass thatched two-roomed mud brick house.

Mbuya stood tall with her shaved head, bare feet and back slightly bent. She had a black quilt tied over one shoulder. She called out to my parents and demanded to know if it was true that the white Native Commissioner based in Enkeldoorn (Chivhu) was sending his people to give injections to the children in order to stop them from getting diseases. My mother said this was true.

“What diseases?” Mbuya asked. My parents took turns to slowly explain that news about the immunisation of children in the Tribal Trust Lands had been all over the Rhodesia Broadcasting Service. “All native children must be immunised. No immunisation scar on the arm, no school. This is the message from the wireless spoken in Shona and Ndebele,” said my father.

My father, a former teacher who was now working as a clerk for the Salisbury Grain Marketing Board, had repeatedly told us that when the immunisation van finally found its way to St Columbus School, we should not be scared of the long needle. This was a programme organised by the Rhodesia Ministry of Health.

“The children must be immunised against measles, polio, chicken pox, whooping cough and tuberculosis,” my mother said listing the diseases on her fingers. Mbuya said she had never heard of such madness. She frowned and hissed in anger. She said she had never been injected. All the members of her VaNjanja clan and those who died before them went to their graves without an injection. With her hands on the hips, and piercing angry eyes, Mbuya asked my father if he was ever immunised as a child. “Iwe ndakakubayisa nhomba here?” He shook his head and said, “Kwete Moyo.” My mother, as always, remained quiet. She never argued with Mbuya openly.

After a long discussion between Mbuya, Sekuru and the other elders, Mbuya lost the battle to stop us from being immunised. She stormed out of the kitchen hut, shouting that if we got sick after the injections, she was not to be told. If we died after the injections, she was not going to be at the funeral. She said they were allowing white man’s witchcraft to poison us.

“Kana vana vafa musandidaidze! Baba we Moyo! Kuroya vana masikati machena!” My mother came out and quietly told us to get ready for school. We were going to be immunised against measles and all the other new diseases.

I recall that the immunisation van came in the afternoon. On that day more than half the schoolchildren did not come to school because they feared the needle. Some did not come because their parents and grandparents had said no to immunisation.

There were two African men and a woman wearing a white uniform. We knew one of the man as Tsanana Zimunhu, the health and sanitation officer from Hwedza. The other man wore a blue shirt and tie underneath a white knee length coat. He was a tall man with a moustache.

Mr Muchando and Miss Rwodzi ordered us all to stand in line with short sleeves rolled right up. The man with the moustache spoke in English only, shouting to tell us to stand in a straight line. He held a long shiny needle and syringe with a clear liquid in it. The nurse checked our arms to see if we had been immunised before. Then she pushed us to Tsanana Zimbudzi who then dipped a ball of cotton wool in a jar of blue spirit and cleaned the spot to be injected. Some parents who had come to witness this event said the blue or purple liquid smelt like a hospital. Since we had never been to hospital, we did not know that smell.

When my turn came, the man with the moustache roughly pulled my skinny arm, pinched the skin and jabbed the needle in, pushing in the liquid. It hurt so much like I had just stepped on a big thorn. There was an immediate lump before the man quickly pulled the needle out. A trickle of blood followed. He dipped the same needle in the jar and went on to the child who was next in line. Although the needle was painful, I recall how we came back home and showed off our injection marks, boasting that we had been immunised against all the diseases of witchcraft and any other future diseases that might threaten us in the future.

A few days later, there were raised small red spots on the part injected. It wept a little for some time, maybe a week or two. Then it dried up and left the scars I still carry today. That scar was also an entry pass to admit me to a new school. No immunisation scar, no new school enrolment.

The following year, after our immunisation, my mother announced that she was going to a hospital in Buhera to deliver her 10th baby. Two had already died at childbirth. This one, she said, was going to be the last one. She even had a name for the baby, be it a boy or girl.

The baby was going to be called Gumiso, meaning, the one who closes the door. In Shona, this was her gotwe, the last born. “If I have any more children, I shall die,” we would overhear her talking to her friends in good humour. But we feared she might die in childbirth. After all, her own mother, VaZviyo had died while delivering her third set of twins around 1934. Mbuya VaZviyo was buried together with her unborn twins, in the valley, near a spring waterhole, as was the tradition in those days. My mother often spoke or swore by her mother, saying, “Ndinopika na mai vangu vaZviyo varere nemapatya avo mubani” meaning, I swear by my mother who sleeps with her twins in the wet valley. Each time she swore like that, we knew the matter was serious. But speaking like that also helped us keep the memory of our grandmother alive.

Mbuya VaMandirowesa said my mother should not go and deliver at the hospital in Buhera. There was plenty of traditional medicine, mushonga wemasutso, to help open the cervix. But my mother said she needed special medical intervention to deliver what she felt was an unusually big baby.

My mother was right. A few weeks later, news came to say that there were complications with my mother´s delivery. The baby had presented with a hand and my mother was transferred from Buhera Hospital to Rusape where a European doctor did a Caesarean section and cut her “stomach” to deliver a big healthy baby girl.

The baby came home and my mother said her name was Vongai, meaning, let us be grateful or thankful for the last born, who survived due to the benefits of Western medicine.

If Mbuya VaMandirowesa had her way, only traditional medicine would have prevailed and some of the children in the village compound would have been dead by now. And yet, we must continue to balance Western medicine and tradition, especially when the hospital is too far.

Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic.