Zimpapers Logo

certain discomfort or fear that get­ting lost in the Diaspora could have happened to any one of us. We fear the loss of our brothers, sisters, cousins and many other relatives who left Zimbabwe and are living all over the world especially in the United Kingdom, Australia, United States, Canada, Europe and South Africa.
They went there looking for a better life, hoping to eventually come back home to Zimbabwe one day and enjoy the fruits of their many years of labour overseas.
But some will never come back. After making the journey to live and work in foreign places, they die pre­maturely from diseases or accidents before the journey is complete.
Then they come back in a coffin to be met by rela­tives at the airport. We bury them next to their ances­tors in the city or back in the village. But there are oth­ers like Pepe, whose bodies remain far away, pioneer Africans buried among Europeans in old cemeteries. Their lonely ghosts wonder the freeways and suburbs of distant cities. Minority foreigners still, even in death.
We do not want to think too deeply about Pepe’s life because we fear that death can happen anywhere and we too could have been lost like her. So we quickly dis­miss Pepe’s death by telling each other that people are free to make personal choices in life. Perpetua chose to go to Australia, to stay there and enjoy the freedom of a Western life style.
It is the same story overseas — individuals can make as many choices as they want. There are no village rules, relatives or community to stop them from doing anything. If she had stayed here in Zimbabwe, Pepe’s life might have been different. Maybe she could have ended up cooking sadza, roasting meat and sausages for Harare meat eaters at Mereki in Warren Park. 
Or maybe she could have stayed back in what was then called the Tribal Trust Lands, near Enkel­doorn (Chivhu) and married a good man. By now she would be almost sixty, enjoying her grandchildren, get­ting respect as an elder at village ceremonies. Or she could have died from HIV/Aids. Who knows how we all end up when the time comes, kana nguva yak­wana?
Pepe did not like the limitation on the choices she could make in the village. She left and arrived in Salis­bury (Harare) to live with an aunt in 1973. She trained as a secretary, at one stage she was a policewoman. 
Pepe used skin lightening creams and wore wigs even though she was naturally beautiful without all that enhancement. Several men proposed to her. Then Kevin from Australia came along and fell in love with Pepe. Kevin was backpacking through Rhodesia on his way to a Safari camp in Kenya.
Although the Rhodesian laws prohibited sexual rela­tions between white women and black men, there was no legal law to stop white men having relations with black women.
They were free to do what they liked to black women to the point of fathering children they did not look after. Kevin and Pepe did not feel free enough to live as a mixed race couple in a racially segregated environ­ment of Rhodesia. It was 1975 and the war to liberate Zimbabwe had intensified. Kevin and Pepe married and left for Australia.
In Australia, Pepe was free, just like many other Western women who had choices to do what they wanted to do regardless of what other people thought. Choices and rights were many. Over there, you could dye your hair purple, pink or whatever colour you wanted and you could go out there without anyone commenting on your hair style.
You could also get a tattoo on your shoulder with the name of your current boyfriend. When you break up, it was costly to remove a tattoo. So the choice was to leave the old boyfriend’s name on that shoulder and get a tat­too with the new boyfriend’s name on another shoulder or just above your breast.
The choice was yours to make. You could even put rings on your noise, your tongue, ears, nipples, belly button or in places that made other people wonder how a ring got there. You could also put a black dot on your forehead like a Hindu woman, wear next to nothing and still walk on the streets or the beach as you pleased.
It was your right and your choice to be who you wanted to be. This was not Africa, where some men at Mbare market in Harare had the liberty to reprimand and even beat you up for wearing a short dress.
When I arrived in Australia in 1985, pursuing my choice to study, Pepe had already been there for ten years. I was Pepe’s only Zimbabwean friend. I used to go over to her house when I was a student and we cooked sadza and spoke Shona together.
There was also another Zimbabwean guy called Tichaona who had come to Australia as a refugee via the UK. At that time, Tichaona worked for the bank and lived with a very nice Australian girlfriend called Kim. They already had one child together.
There were hardly any Africans in Australia those days. In fact, we could count the number of scattered Zimbabweans on one hand. Tichaona, or Tich, as he liked to be called, joined Pepe and myself for evenings of sadza and meat and we ate the way we used to do back in the village. One time, Tich and his Italian friend Mario brought a whole goat to Pepe’s house.
It was live. They wanted to kill it in the bathroom, but we said no, what if the RSCPA found out and then all those animal liberation people would demonstrate at Pepe’s house? Mario and Tich went to a friend’s abattoir and killed the goat, bringing back the meat and the intestines. Pepe, Tich and I had a party for three, eating the nicely prepared goat tripe, zvinyenze.
Kevin was away skiing and we had the house to our­selves. It felt like home, talking, laughing, and singing in Shona like we were back here. Pepe worked as a legal secretary. She was tall, slim and very beautiful. Kevin took her on holidays to Bali, Fiji and even to Italy. At one time, Pepe and Kevin went to a nudist holiday resort somewhere in the north of Australia. They joined a club of naturalist nudists, vanhu vasina kusimira nguo. 
She said she had fun and brought some pictures to prove it. Tichaona, Nancy from Uganda and Tich were having dinner at her house when Pepe pulled out the photos of her nudist holiday. In one photo there was a father, mother and their teenage daughter walking on the beach with nothing on at all. Mutwi.
We were all quite horrified. Pepe laughed and said, “What’s new? Because these are white folks doing this? Did we Africans not live like this before? What is wrong in going back to nature and live the way our ancestors lived?”
The missionary background in me said there was something not quite civilised in going around the house naked, let alone on the beach. Pepe then gave us leaflets advertising a whole chain of the best nudist holiday places in the world from Aus­tralia, UK, and Canada and all the way to Florida, United States.
On one leaflet it said naked holiday makers could find peaceful solitude under palm trees, relax by the pool, walk on the beach at sunset and later on mingle with the other naked guests for cocktails around the fire and get to know one each other in their most natu­ral state, the way God wanted them to be.
Pepe said she had information on how children could be raised nude if we were interested. We thanked God that Pepe had no children. Even Tich, who was normally disagreeable on most things, said there was a time when choices must be guided by basic humanness, hunhu. 
At the end of the day, some choices must stop some­where. But at that time Pepe was experimenting on everything. Pepe’s choices knew no boundaries, mim­icking everything other people did, kungoteedzera. 
As more and more Zimbabweans came to Australia and worked hard to send money back home or to buy property, Pepe decided to do the same.
She borrowed money against her house from the bank and send money to a cousin here to buy her a piece of land. She planned to come back to Zimbabwe one day and build a huge mansion in the more affluent former whites only suburbs like Borrowdale or Mt Pleasant.
Then everything came to nothing when her cousin died and she discovered that no land had been bought with her money. The cousin had eaten it all. So there she was working hard to pay the loan for a piece of land she did not have.
She said there was no point in coming back to Zim­babwe if she did not have a place she called her own. The village was already in ruins, after the death of her parents and also her grandmother. Pepe was distraught. She turned her back on Zimbabwe. Then she separated from Kevin and everything was downhill from there. Depression, loneliness and therapy.
Pepe has since died. But Tich is still there and some­thing has also happened to him during the past ten years. If you meet him in the streets, he would grabbed your arm to tell you that if you are a black man or woman living in a white man’s corporate world, you had to be three times better than anyone to reach the glass ceil­ing. He talked about his journey from Rhodesia to Eng­land and how he never paid much attention to his blackness until they called him African Bambata when he worked in factory in the UK.
Over there, they said Africans were primitive and he hated being African. He preferred to be called a Jamaican or some other black and not African.
Then he met Kim, the Australian girlfriend who con­vinced him that Australia was a better place with less racism. In Australia, he worked for the bank and for a long time his workmates loved him.
They said he was handsome and exotic. But everything changed when he rose to senior management level and some white peo­ple found it difficult to take orders from him.
Around 2000, Tich lost out on a promotion in the bank and he blamed it on racism. Since then, he has not been able to hold on to a job or maintain a long-term relationship with a woman. Even when you told him to move on brother because we cannot change some of history’s negative perceptions about Africa and the Africans, Tich did not do so.
When I was in Australia earlier this year, I saw him playing a drum next to an Aboriginal guy with a didgeridoo. They were basking at the market and people threw money into the open guitar case in front of them. Tich had dread locks and he wore an open green and yellow African shirt, brown baggy pants with a draw string and sandals.
I stood among the market shoppers looking at Tich. What happened to that handsome clean-shaven man who wore a suit and carried a briefcase to work some years ago? I did not see Tichaona or Tich. I saw a brother who was not just a Zimbabwean story. Here was an African story of lost manhood. Colonialism, missionaries, loss of culture and identity, Diaspora, alienation and now this person whose only link to Africa was the drum.
This place had created another African out of him. Just like Perpetua, another woman born out of the sad experiences of colonialism and misplaced choices of Diaspora living.
The elders used to say kusina mai hakuendwe! But we cannot pluck our mothers out of the village and throw them into the coldness of foreign lands. Let them stay where they are. If we made the choice to leave, we should also make the choice to return home.
To come and go between countries is a choice too. Europeans have done it for centuries, conquering and moving between Africa and the rest of the Western world. They did not forget where they came from. 
Even if some of them did, they kept their language and customs with them. Some of us left this country in a cultural vacuum.
We were already loosing the heritage of language and culture from our past. And we continue to blindly seek illusive choices and mimic the Western lifestyles, kutevedzera chirungu, even to the point of nudity.

Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic. She holds a PhD in International Relations and works as a development consultant.