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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.
She was speaking to Reuben on Skype, the face-to-face Internet communication which is a lot cheaper than using landlines or cellphones.
Modern technology has made our lives so much easier. Reuben is my cousin, the one who migrated to Australia with his wife Mai Tinashe and their three children 12 years ago.

Reuben and Mai Tinashe are having problems.
Mai Tinashe said Zimbabwe is not home to her any more. There was a huge argument and Reuben called me.
He began by saying that Mai Tinashe is not interested in Zimbabwe any more. She does not even read anything about Zimbabwe.

When she is not at work, she spends hours watching television, reading glossy women’s magazines or talking to her friends on the phone.
Almost every weekend she goes to girls’ nights out, Zimbabwean kitchen parties and wild baby showers where the women do not have any plans to return home to Zimbabwe to live one day. They have forgotten that Zimbabwe is their permanent home.

Reuben asked me to call Mai Tinashe and mediate as aunt, satete. But I was not at all confident in this role.
After all, there was a time when I thought the same way as Mai Tinashe is doing. When I left Zimbabwe more than 25 years ago, I did not see myself living in Zimbabwe again.

In those 25 years I sought a nice life in Australia, UK and the US. I wanted to be very far away from poverty, Piri and all the memories of village hardships. I was the first one in the family to go to England.

That was the place I wanted to call home. Even though Zimbabwe was independent, I had no plans to live in this country. I went to England when I was young and I planned to get old and die there.

My grave was going to lie in British cemeteries, hopefully not too far from the great British explorers, members of the Pioneer Column, gold diggers, hunters, colonial administrators and all the missionaries who did a splendid job in ‘civilizing’ Africa.

But I came back. Who would have thought that one day I would spend so much time as I do now in the development projects at Simukai, back in the village?

Sometimes life is a circle. Something calls you. One day you return back to where you started from.
Mai Tinashe said there was nothing to come back to Zimbabwe for. Both her parents were dead. Her two brothers live in America; there was one sister in Zimbabwe and another in New Zealand also working as a nurse.

Migrating overseas and never coming back home was nothing new to her family. Her aunt Stella left Zimbabwe when it was still Rhodesia in 1974 and she has been in Texas ever since. Then Sekuru Tobias on her mother’s side went to Italy after independence, married there, got ill and died.

The family travelled to bury him over there. It does not matter anymore where you were born because the world is one global village. We can make our homes wherever we are secure and happy, she said.

At one stage, Reuben shared Mai Tinashe’s view.
But that was during their visit in 2008 when there was nothing on the shelves to buy. They had stopped in Hwedza to buy some extra groceries on their way to the village.

But all they could find on the shelves were Protector Condoms, battery water and salt. Reuben stood there and demanded an explanation from the shopkeeper.

“Why would anyone want to buy condoms when they are hungry?” Reuben asked.
The shopkeeper politely told Reuben not to blame him because all Zimbabwe’s troubles were caused by the Western countries that imposed sanctions and now the poor people were suffering.

Reuben stormed out of the shop.
When he arrived in the village, the people were surviving on hacha, the custard hard nut fruit mostly favoured by donkeys.
Since 2008, Mai Tinashe has not been to Zimbabwe.

But Reuben came here three times including recently, when he came for the elections.
A couple of days after the elections, Reuben’s engineer friend had driven him around Glen Lorne, Borrowdale Brooke and many other new places around Harare.

Reuben sat in the passenger seat of the engineer’s Mercedes 4WD and enjoyed the tour of the new houses.
He had seen nothing so ostentatious like that anywhere else except in America during a tour of Hollywood houses.
Right here in Zimbabwe, there were people living like kings and queens.

After the tour, Reuben was convinced that this was the right time to build a house on the land they had purchased back in 2006. With only a precast wall surrounding it, this one acre in Borrowdale has been sitting vacant and overgrown ever since.

Reuben and Mai Tinashe would borrow money in Australia and build their own big mansion following the example of their friends in the UK who are working day and night to complete their dream homes in this country where beautiful weather is a gift from the ancestors.
Reuben made the decision that he would come back here once the house was complete then start his own business. Once he was established, Mai Tinashe would follow. By that time, Tariro, the youngest of their children would have finished high school.

The children will remain over there in Australia and come over for a visit from time to time.
When Reuben discussed the plans with Mai Tinashe, she flatly said no.
First, there was no need to invest in rebuilding the village the way Reuben was doing, wasting money paying the salary and upkeep of the herd boy and his wife.

Secondly, there was absolutely no reason to build a new house in Borrowdale because they already have a nice one in the outer suburbs of Melbourne.

This house has everything except a swimming pool.
She reminded him that they have three flat screen television sets, two double door fridges, granite tops in the kitchen and a state-of-the-art Smeg oven that cooks and roasts in no time.

There is water and electricity 24 hours a day.
A short distance away are all the fast food shops from pizza, chicken, roast beef, pies, stews, Indian curry, Vietnamese soups, Chinese fried rice, Thai broken rice with pork chops, everything.

Sometimes they spend a whole week without cooking because all they do is pick up the phone and order food to be delivered at their doorstep.
In their back yard, they were growing the Zimbabwean kale, chomolia and pumpkin leaves. Soon, they will grow maize and okra.
The soil is good. This is home.  She had no intention of ever living in Zimbabwe again. So why build another house in Harare? Who will live there?

I told Rueben that Piri would be the best person to remind Mai Tinashe of her connection to Zimbabwe and her duties to husband and family. Not me.

We then organised a Skype call.
On the screen, Mai Tinashe was wearing a pink track suit, with her hair nicely plaited and pulled back. She looked very well, but big. Australia suited her.

Once Piri got the hang of speaking to a person on the computer, she teased and joked with Mai Tinashe as we do with all our varoora, the wives of our brothers.

Piri said Mai Tinashe was very fat, like an elephant.
We all laughed because coming from Piri, Mai Tinashe did not take offence.
After the small talk, Piri put on her serious “I am tete” look and asked Mai Tinashe why she will not support the idea of building a house back here.

Mai Tinashe was very calm.
She spoke directly to us, not moving or shaking her body as some people do when they are on Skype. The line was clear. She said the world is now one big village full of people from all over.

“At the nursing home where I am charge nurse, we have Indians, Italians, Slovakians, Bulgarians, and Africans from Nigeria, Ghana and many other Zimbabweans like me. They have made this country their home. If I come back to Harare, what salary will I get? Ever since we arrived here, the children go to school with white kids.

“They learnt to speak English very quickly and they even have the accent. In Zimbabwe, they will be back to schools in the high-density suburbs where there is no electricity and no water in the toilets. No. I am not coming back there to live.”

I tried to tell her that in comparison to many other countries, Zimbabwe was still a paradise, despite the hardships she mentioned.
Mai Tinashe then launched into this long complaint against Reuben saying he had no reason to want to return to Zimbabwe one day.
He has been spending money coming back there almost every 18 months or even less.

She said, in Australia, when Reuben is not at work, he hangs out with his Zimbabwean mates at soccer and in bars.
“He might as well be back home. Zvasiyana chii? He is free to come back there where a whole lot of women will apply to become his second wife. I will not spend any money building a house because I know that I am never going to live in it,” Mai Tinashe declared, raising her voice. We all paused for a while.

Then Mai Tinashe asked if I was still around since she could not see my face on the computer screen. I shouted that I was She suddenly surprised me by saying that she really did not mind me writing about this because there were so many women living in the Diaspora in a similar situation to hers.

Before I could say, yes, I would write this in the column, Piri thought she would ease the tension by reminding Mai Tinashe that as vana tete, we are her husbands.

Since we paid the bride price or lobola for her, Mai Tinashe was our wife and she cannot make the decision not to return back to us. Did she not have a kitchen hut in the village? Why would she want to abandon it now?

Mai Tinashe completely ignored Piri and the suggestion linking her to the cultural obligations.
She repeated that she was not leaving Australia except for short visits to Zimbabwe.
Australia was home. Full stop. The Skype call ended without us resolving anything.

“Inga mukadzi atove kupenga uyu?” Piri said, meaning Mai Tinashe had lost her mind. “What is it that women overseas eat to make them think they can remove the men off their stools like that, kubvisa varume pachigaro chavo kudaro?”
We briefed Rueben later about our discussion with Mai Tinashe.

“I do not know where I sit as a man any more. I am not on top of things,” he said. We noted the sad tone in his voice. Then he told us that only the day before, at the usual Friday night rowdy bar, Reuben and his Zimbabwean friends talked about returning home one day.  As usual, the views were mixed with some saying they had no intention of ever settling back in Zimbabwe.

But others were saying, what about our role as fathers and the memory of our ancestors?
Reuben then described how one young guy from Masvingo studying for his PhD stood on the table to give a speech.
He said Zimbabweans should accept that they were fools and copycats of the highest order.

Giving the example of India, the student said India was colonised for 400 years while we Zimbabweans were colonised for less than a hundred.

And yet we have embraced everything given to us by our former colonisers, from religion, dress, food, language and even the way we see ourselves, wigs and all.

“Why do we love the Western lifestyle more than the Indians, the Chinese and all the other formerly colonised people?” he asked.
The young man then blamed Christianity and the missionaries for cleverly forcing us to drift away from our culture.
“Where is this drifting away from culture going to stop?” he asked. “Even if we go back to Zimbabwe, we will not get back to our cultural roots because we no longer know who we are.”

Reuben said some people clapped hands and others said there were 3 million or more Zimbabweans living in the Diaspora and we have to accept that many, if not most of them, will never return home to live.
Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic. She holds a PhD in International Relations and works as a development consultant.