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Crispen’s memorial in Muzarabani just over a week ago.
Erica had travelled all the way from Nyanga in a kombi with five bags of maize to feed everyone at the memorial, nyaradzo. She took me behind the village huts along with my father’s youngest sister Tete Winnie, an elder in the Johanne Masowe faith. Draped in white from head to toe, we knelt down to pray. Erica started with a song, “Here we have the gathering of the angels — pano pane dare rengirozi.” She repeated this chorus over and over again. Then they sang Hosanna, Gloria and halleluya with their voices rising and falling. After the songs, they broke into loud prayer.
My prayer was a short struggle that came to an abrupt end because I ran out of words to speak to God.  I realised that it had been a long time since I last prayed in public. Not only that, I had never really spoken to God in Shona. In those days I only prayed in English because the missionaries had taught me to pray that way. But here, among the Johanne Masowe followers, only Shona is spoken and there is no Bible because the original founder did not believe in the missionary style of worship using the Bible.
After the prayers, Erica hugged me and said, “Mauya mhamha!” According to Shona tradition, as her mother’s niece, I took the role of a mother to her. She regarded me with the same respect she would give to her mother, regardless of the fact that I was younger. Erica had recently turned sixty and she already had seven grandchildren.
She said I could keep her munembo and I protested, saying I had problems in keeping anything white and clean in the village dust. But she laughed and said, “Aiwa mhamha, this is very easy to wash. Keep it.”
Had I known that this was prayer I would have with Erica and the munembo would remain a memory token of her forever, I should have prayed for her health and well-being. Many years ago, Erica used to visit us back in the village behind the Hwedza mountains. She came with her mother, Tete Emma, my father’s oldest sister. She would gather all the compound children to teach us Anglican catechism in preparation for baptism. In my memory, she was a tall, very light skinned beautiful woman. My father was so proud of her and he called her Erica Murungu, Erica white lady.
Erica soon grabbed the attention of teacher Francis, a handsome young man from Nyanga. During a lesson one day he saw Erica returning to her village. He immediately stopped the class, dashed out of the classroom and followed Erica. My father, as Erica’s uncle, approved of the relationship and within a few months there was a Christian wedding and Erica went to live with her husband’s people in Nyanga.
We heard Nyanga was beautiful and Erica farmed in fertile valleys where a certain Chief Tangwena was giving the Rhodesian Government a hard time by refusing to move from his land. Apart from Erica, nobody else married far or left the village to go and live somewhere else until the war came to our village in 1976. 
One day, at the height of the liberation struggle, Tete Emma, her husband and two sons were killed. As a result, my uncle and the rest of his family left the main village and escaped up north, to the flood plains of Muzarabani. 
In the early years of their settlement stories filtered back home about how well they were doing over there in Muzarabani in the Zambezi valley. They had their own kraal and were key decision-makers in the community. Their fame as big cotton growers was known in the district. A handful of other relatives including Erica’s brothers were inspired by stories of wealth and success in Muzarabani. Few years after independence, they too followed the journey to Muzarabani. This migration to a place so far away to live among the vaKorekore was very much against the will of the village elders. In the spirit of a family reunion, I made the journey to Muzarabani to attend my cousin Crispen’s memorial on February 24. Beatrice, my brother Sydney and Tete Winnie from Gutu came along with me. Beatrice said it was important that she came along because in my moment of chirungu — Western civilisation, I was likely to get bewitched by someone.
She told stories about some witches and sorcerers who had migrated to faraway places where nobody knew them so they could practice the art of killing, shavi rekuroya. Muzarabani was no exception and naïve people like me were likely to get poisoned easily.  I paid scant regard to Beatrice’s stories. My brother Sydney’s role was to officiate at the ceremony as the representative of my father and all the male relatives dead and alive back home in Hwedza.
It was a visit to attend a memorial. But for me it was a reconciliation mission, the sort of thing you do when you finally realise that, as the years go by and we get older, estrangement from your own blood does not make sense. Whatever misunderstanding or conflict that happened during the war between my relatives in Muzarabani and those back here had nothing to do with us children. In Muzarabani, I discovered that most of the cousins who were the same age as I at the time of migration to Muzarabani had since died from Aids-related illnesses, malaria, cholera and other diseases. Over the years, climate change caused frequent floods because Muzarabani is caught in between Lake Kariba upstream and Lake Cabora Bassa downstream at the confluence of Msengezi and Zambezi rivers.
My relatives were confronted with HIV and Aids, tuberculosis, unprecedented droughts relying mainly on donor handouts. The place looked bleak, a place prone to floods, droughts, cholera and starvation. Why did they migrate here, to a land meant for big fig trees, masawu fruit and roaming elephants  who come in day and night to destroy their crops and stomp past their graves?
As a way of coping with distress, most of my relative relatives in Muzarabani have become Johane Masowe followers. With so many deaths and so many graves scattered around the bushes, chizhou and other graves visibly placed not too far from the village courtyards, the beliefs and fear of witchcraft could be felt everywhere in the compound.
The following day after the nyaradzo, I asked Erica to come with us so she could spend a couple of days in Harare before proceeding on her journey back home to Nyanga. But Erica said she would stay a day longer to support her late brother’s family and do some more prayers. She sat cross-legged in the middle of the kitchen hut smiling. She said to me, “Mhamha, endai, you go, I will see you when I get to Harare tomorrow.”
As we drove off leaving her behind, all I could see was a desolate village waiting for yet another drought, floods, lack of food and death. It was a sad hostile environment with people pointing fingers and blaming each other for all their misfortunes.
That was on a Saturday afternoon. On Tuesday Erica called to say she had mild chest pains and was leaving Muzarabani on Wednesday morning. Around two in the afternoon, we got a call to say Erica  had collapsed. She was in a coma and I should come back immediately and take her to St Albert’s Hospital in Mount Darwin.  While I was still looking for the right car to drive back to Muzarabani, another call came. Erica was dead.
Exactly a week after our prayer in Muzarabani, I was among many relatives from Hwedza and Muzarabani gathered together to bury Erica in her husband’s family cemetery in Nyanga. She lay in a white coffin, in her house, surrounded by singing Johane Masowe mourners. I draped my munembo, the present from Erica and I took my turn to sit at the head of the coffin with Tete Winnie as expected by our African tradition.
All the other women dressed in white looked at me disapprovingly. Since I was not a Johanne Masowe member, they controlled the whole funeral proceedings and we, the close relatives should take back seats. Where now, was the role of the ancestors?
We buried Erica among her husband’s people on the foothills of the Nyanga Mountains. Kneeling and facing east by her graveside, the prophet handed over Erica to Prophet Maikoro, Prophet Gabiriero and King Peter and over to God. I knelt too, with my munembo draped over my shoulders and treasured the moment of the last prayer I had with her. I saw her, over there, we know not where, but she sat there singing her song, “Here, we have the gathering of the angels.”
l Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic. She is a consultant and director of The Simukai Development Project.