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“It’s valentine’s day on Friday,” I told my cousin Piri. She frowned and said, “So?” “You may get flowers from a lover,” I said. We were drinking tea with corn bread, chimondi mwii, in Mbare, not too far from Rufaro Stadium where my cousin Laiza lives. We sat on reed
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Sekai Nzenza on Wednesday January arrived with bad winds. Deaths, illnesses and bad things have happened, forcing people around here to reflect on what could have angered the ancestors to bring so much suffering in just one month. Some of us, in fact, most of us, still believe that a bad incident does not
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Dr Sekai Nzenza She has never left Zimbabwe or crossed the border into South Africa like what most women traders do. Perhaps I had been a little unfair. Sometimes this lack of sensitivity happens when you move between cultures, places and somehow, unconsciously, you think your
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Sekai Nzenza WE are driving to the village. I have been away in Australia and other places for a whole month. As usual, my cousin Piri is in the passenger seat with her bottle of beer, her legs carelessly spread out. She is leaning back on the seat, almost reclining. No seat belt. I have
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Dr Sekai Nzenza And so people stayed close to home and married among themselves, carefully respecting totem differences. In those days, we did not marry people with the same totem. It was taboo, zvaiyera.
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While in Australia over the Christmas break, I tried as much as I could to avoid answering or commenting on questions about Zimbabwe. Unlike other countries in Africa, Zimbabwe is such a popular country. I think this is so because Zimbabwe is beautiful and some people
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Sekai Nzenza The idea of romance, like it used to happen back in the village, was no longer the same. In the old days, a guy chased a girl, kupfimba, for a while, before she said yes. These days, it seemed pregnancy happened first, and then maybe, love followed later. Couples are often tied
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Sekai Nzenza Once inside the Mbuya’s big kitchen hut, under the paraffin light, an excited middle-aged man calling himself muzukuru, or nephew came in singing, shouting and teasing. ON the way to deliver my pregnant niece Shamiso to her husband’s village, we stopped half way and she
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She is sitting on a rock in the middle of the bush, her head bent down, forehead touching her pregnant stomach. She is crying in hysterics.
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Sekai Nzenza ORAL storytelling in the village is dying. In fact, it is almost dead because we have stopped telling the stories our elders used to tell us. Like most elders in the village, my grandmother, Mbuya VaMandirowesa did not read but she carried many stories in her memory. We
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Dr Sekai Nzenza WHEN the men in our village get sick, they do not go to the clinic until we force them to get into a wheel barrow or a scotch cart. By that time, they are too ill to resist. That is what happened to our neighbour Bornwell. He was very ill for a […]
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Sekai Nzenza The retired policeman in the village next to ours has dementia, the disease that makes you lose your memory. He cannot remember a lot of what happened today or yesterday. MuBhunu is his name, which is a corruption to mean Boer. MuBhunu worked for many years in
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In the old days, long before the white man came, roora, lobola, dowry or bridal wealth was paid by use of a hoe made from iron smelted in the Hwedza mountains by the Mbire people. That was long before this country was colonised by the British.
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“IF you really want to be a man again, come back home to Zimbabwe. We will place you on the stool meant for men as fathers and husbands, pachigaro chababa,” said my cousin Piri.
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A YEAR after my father’s death, seven uncles and three nephews lined up to take my mother as a wife. That was before the liberation war arrived here. Up north, the Rhodesian army had put up protected fences to stop people from feeding the guerillas. Gatherings were banned.