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ISBN: 0-86925-666-1
By Chemist Mafuba
SUE took freedom of association to extremes.
She was among people who were drinking beer in the shebeen of Machipisa on a Friday night. There was a horde of revellers who had been paid that day.
The woman who was taking care of the braai stand was kept busy. The strains of cha cha cha from the grams were floating throughout the whole neighbourhood. The queen of the shebeen was in good company. The company that Machipisa kept that night could only have made her rich.
But, as has always been the case when joy becomes a fulltime enterprise, something unsavoury is bound to happen.
The wags started talking about the hazards of drinking beer in a place which the relevant authorities had not licensed. One of them made a crude remark about shebeens and police raids. What he said did not go down well with the other people. Dickson was one of them.
He told the man who had abused the hospitality that Machipisa had made her burden of labour to provide to mind his speech. The rest of them agreed with Dickson in a riotous fashion. That chorus emboldened Dickson to tell the man that he had had enough for the night.
He would do well to retire home with his companion. He made the mistake of observing that she was young enough to be doing her homework at that hour. This was the kind of talk which the men who had lost their heads in drink wanted to hear. They made fun of the young woman in the foul language which was pouring from their lips.
This did not go down well with the charming creature that had come from out of this world. She had been holding her glass well right up towards midnight.
“Old man,” she snapped at Dickson, “I’m not a schoolgirl. There is no school which gave birth and told that child to drink beer in the shebeen. I know what I’m doing.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Dickson hit back. “You’re too young to drink beer. You should be doing your homework at home.
“This place is for mature people. You’re the kind who gives women a bad name. You ought to be home.
“Don’t be jealousy of men who know how to propose beautiful women,” shouted Sue. “You’re man enough to find your own girlfriends.
“You’ve nothing to do with me, even if I’m a schoolgirl. You’re not the one who is paying my fees. You’re the one who should go home. Your wife is waiting for you.
“You don’t have money,” Dickson shouted.
“You’re a pest relying on other people to buy beer for you. If you were intelligent, you would use that money to buy exercise books, you pest!
“Don’t call me a pest, you! I said don’t call me a pest. You don’t know where I came from. You’ve squandered money.
“You’re afraid to go home. Your wife is going to beat you. She wanted that money to buy mealie meal.
“Get off with you. Go home and asleep, strumpet. Don’t call me names. I said don’t call me names. I’m still on the market. I don’t have a husband at home. The one I have is this one that I move around with.
“You should be ashamed to call that man your husband. You should call him your father,” shouted Dickson. “He isn’t your size.
“Don’t talk of size as though he is a pair of shoes,” shouted Sue. “I know why I fell in love with him. I won’t love you.
“Even a man needs a woman of his size,” shouted Dickson. “That Sugar Daddy of yours is too old for you. You break up houses of other people. You should be ashamed of yourself.
“Leave me alone, old man,” cried Sue. “I said leave me alone. I haven’t started you.
“I don’t know why your parents waste money on you. You don’t learn thinking of men in beerhalls.”
During the scuffle which followed, the school uniform of the poor child fell out of her bag. The allusion which Willie Chigidi is making is quiet clear.
In the way of the African people, the queen of the shebeen should have thrashed Sue the moment she set her foot in her establishment.
She would have told her parents what she had done later. The parents would have given Machipisa a goat as a thank you for the wonderful service she should have performed.
The quest to be seen as enlightened has swept that custom away. You don’t discipline that child of another person that you would have seen misbehaving. Doing so would provoke a swarm of bees.
Moralising aside, Willie Chigidi highlights the characters in his play through dialogue. He does it so well that you don’t struggle to see that Sue is a spoiled child. She is proud as well. He does the same with the queen of the shebeen. Machipisa is nauseating with her I don’t-care attitude. She doubles up prostituting herself with deceitfulness. The artist shows why.
“Machipisa!”, shouted the voice in the middle of the night. “Open the door, I want to get in. Machipisa, what are you doing in there? I said I want to come in.
“Who is there?” asked Machipisa, pretending as though she had failed to recognise the voice.
She wanted to give Dickson time to wear his clothes and get out of the bedroom through the window.
“When I’ve slept I don’t want to be bothered. I’m not one of the people wanting to drink beer,” shouted Gafuto. “I have come home and I want to sleep. I said open the door.”
There were whispers in the bedroom.
“Is he your husband?” asked Dickson. “What will become of me? How should I get out?
“Hurry up!” hissed Machipisa like a cobra.
“This isn’t the bedroom of your wife. The master of the house has come. It will be your fault if he finds you here. I had suggested that we go to the house of my friend. He wouldn’t have found us there. You had said he isn’t coming . . .
“I said he isn’t coming . . . He didn’t tell you that he isn’t coming. How was I to know that he’d come?”
Willie Chigidi paints Ferbie as a timid woman who isn’t sure of what she is doing. Though she sees the hazards of the work she is doing, she lacks the will to repent.
Following the night which was full of drama, she went to see Machipisa with, as what Shakespeare would have said, her mouth full of news.
“Tell me the news which has brought you to see me so early,” said Machipisa. “Some scandal should have happened where came from.
“You don’t have to tell me that you’re worried. It is written all over your face. What news have you brought with you?
“I’ve to come tell you what happened to Sylvia yesterday,” said Ferbie.
“As I’m speaking to you, she is fighting for her life in intensive care in Harare Hospital.
“She was slashed with knives in the bar. You remember the men that we ran away from after they had bought beer for us at Magaba during Easter?
“Are they looking for us?” asked Machipisa. “I don’t know,” said Ferbie, looking over her shoulder. “I wouldn’t say they aren’t looking for us. I was lucky. When they arrived, I saw them first. I was coming from the toilet. I stopped a distance from them.
“Sylvia wasn’t lucky. They arrived when she had put the mug to her mouth. One of them kicked the mug. Beer spilled on to her face and all over the front of her dress.
“One of them kicked her in the stomach. She vomited into the mug all beer she had drunk. One of them slashed her neck with a knife.
“Another gorged her eye out with a vicious kick. I don’t want to think of what I saw those men doing to our friend.
“I am surprised that there was nobody who restrained them,” observed Machipisa dryly.
“There must have been other people in the bar. They were afraid of them,” said Ferbie.
“They would have played with their lives if they had tried to restrain those men. They had knives.
“If you were there, you wouldn’t have looked at Sylvia. The beer which had gone into her eyes had blinded her. She couldn’t see where she could run to. She couldn’t defend herself either.
“I ran around looking for police to come and help Sylvia. By the time they arrived, those men had run away. As for Sylvia, blood was oozing all over her body.
“I find it difficult to believe what you’re telling me,” said Machipisa. “Was Sylvia hurt that much?
“She is fighting for her life. As I’m talking to you,” said Ferbie.
“It took place in a matter of minutes. I don’t know what will happen should they see us.
“I’m thinking of going to start a new life in Bulawayo. I can’t stand what is happening in Harare. You should have seen what those men did to Sylvia.
Machipisa laughed.
“What can you do in Bulawayo at your age?”, she asked her. “You’re a wreck both inside and outside. No man will look at you.
“We’ve come a long way and don’t have far to go before we die. Let’s struggle for the remainder of the life that’s left in us while we’re in Harare which we know. If you leave Harare, you’re finished.
“I’m leaving Harare,” said Ferbie, shaking her head. “We chose to be prostitutes; we’re going to die the death of prostitutes.”
Willie Chigidi reminds you that there is a prize for everything that people do during their moments of weakness.
Machipisa told Ferbie that the man she was staying with could have killed her, if he was not drunk, when he found her with another man.
“The man I find in there will go away without his head,” Gafuto had shouted, coming into the bedroom. “I don’t mind rotting in Chikurubi when I have killed him.
“Who is that you told to escape through the window? I heard you two talking to each other. Who is he? Answer me!
“There was nobody in here,” said Machipisa calmly. “The people who were drinking beer have gone.
“You heard me cursing them for the mess they left in the house and thought that I was talking to another person. You think I’m a fool, don’t you? You block head. You think I’m a fool. Whose stocking is this, eh? Answer me! I said whose stocking is this?
Machipisa burst out crying.
Ferbie put her hand round her shoulder. Machipisa was crying for her children.
She was thinking that the child she threw into the toilet could be the one who gorged out the eye of Sylvia. Sylvia could be the child she flung into the river.
“We made a mistake by refusing to listen to what our parents were telling us when we were young,” cried Ferbie, choking with sobs like a child. We were thinking that they wanted to spoil our fun. They knew that fun is like a hole which has an end.
“We thought we were clever and knew what we were doing. Where did that get us? The fun that we were following has come to an end.
“It’s no longer possible for us to regain our youth.”
Did Sue go the same way? Read all about it in Mufaro Mwena – Happiness is a Hole.
The play won Willie Chigidi an award from the National Arts Council in the writer of the year category.
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