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Sekai Nzenza On Wednesday
“ALL our seven children live in England. We have no one left here. This one is our first born. He is teaching maths in England. This one here is our second born. She is a nurse in England. And this boy, who is smiling at us, is a lawyer, also in England. And on this photo you can see all our grandchildren. They are 12 of them in England. Here you see them sitting according to their ages in a park. The young ones are in front. This photo was taken at our eldest son’s 50th birthday. We have two other children, also in England but their photos are not on this wall,” said Mai Jena.

We walked along the wall with Mai and Baba Jena, looking at the framed photographs of their children gracing their living room wall.

I was visiting Mai and Baba Jena’s home to deliver a church uniform that my dressmaker had completed. Due to lack of transport, Mai Jena could not collect her uniform and I volunteered to drop it off on my way home from town. Next week there is a big gathering in Chinhoyi for all Methodist women and Mai Jena was very keen to wear her Methodist women’s uniform like everyone else.

It was one of those nice old homes in a long crescent in Harare’s North Western suburbs. Soon as I entered the house, I complimented them on such a nice spacious and comfortable home with plenty of light. As Mai Jena led me to the living room, she said they were the first black people to live in this street soon after independence.

“All our neighbours were Europeans and they were very friendly,” she said, offering me a seat opposite a blurring television showing soccer.

“One-by-one the Europeans left this suburb. And now we sell tomatoes and maputi where ever we like.”

After formal introductions, we established that I shared the same totem with her, Mhofu the Eland.

Therefore, I was automatically her niece and should regard their home as mine. On the table, she placed Fanta, Coke, orange juice and Mazowe orange and water.

It was a big living room with burgundy sofas placed in a circle facing a tall brown wooden cabinet with various shelves. A big movable television stood in front of the shelves. You could tell that this home had been lived in for years. In between books and other objects were framed photographs of young children, graduating students, wedding couples and group photographs.

Baba Jena sat on one sofa directly facing the television watching soccer and changing the channels frequently to watch BBC news, a South African channel and then to an ongoing action movie.

After the cold drinks and biscuits, Baba and Mai Jena took me for a brief tour of the photographs on the wall. The line of photographs began with a black and white one of the two of them taken in 1959 when they got married in Highfield. They were young and beautiful. She described each child and what they were doing in England.

“We have no one here,” Mai Jena said again, sitting down and gently rubbing her hands. “One-by-one, our children left to study in England. They have made England their home. We are alone here.”

I poured myself some more Mazowe and diluted it with water. “These days, England is not so far away. There were times when people went to look for work overseas and did not come back for many years or did not come back at all,” I said

“Or they came back to the village with nothing at all,” said Baba Jena, laughing. “There was a song called ‘Aphiri anabwela, kuchoka ku Malawi.”

Then he repeated a song that was so familiar in my head and we all laughed, recalling the days before independence, when leaving the village for a long period of time without coming back was seen as strange behaviour.

Baba Jena was possibly my father’s age — the generation educated to speak good English back in the old days long before we dreamt of independence, during the time when Ian Smith, the then Prime Minister of Rhodesia was declaring that this country would never be ruled by Africans, “not in a thousand years.” But Smith was wrong. Independence came in 1980.

But we were also wrong to believe that the village was the only home and there was no other place we could call home.

I recall the time back in the village when my father came home from Salisbury with a gramophone. He set it up under the mango tree, on the edge of the village courtyard. The most popular long play record that year was called “Aphiri Anabwela, kuchoka kuMalawi.” Everyone in the village came to dance to that song.

Years later I learnt that the song was sung by Nashil Pichen Kazembe, a Zambian singer from Luapula province near the Congolese border. The lyrics told the story of Phiri, a migrant worker in South Africa or Rhodesia who returns home to Malawi after many years with nothing. He finds that his parents and all the relatives are dead; “Aphiri anga wose wose anamwalila kudhala.” He brings home nothing except an empty suitcase—Musuitcase kulibe chindu.

Pichen Kazembe was singing about the Malawians who worked for many years in Southern Rhodesia on farms, in houses and everywhere. Many of them did not go back home to Malawi. My father, my uncles and all the elders, men and women danced to the song. We memorised the song and we sang it everywhere.

The meaning of the song carried a lot of pain for my grandmother Mbuya VaMandirowesa because she always remembered her son Babamunini Nyika who left home to look for work and was not seen for many years.

Babamunini Nyika was my father’s youngest brother. He left the village in the late 1950’s or early 1960’s. He went to look for a job in Salisbury to pay for the hut tax, dog, cattle and bicycle tax. For years Mbuya and everyone thought he was in Salisbury, but later on, they discovered that Babamunini Nyika had moved to Blantyre, Malawi.

He had done completely the opposite of what Malawian migrants to Zimbabwe did. He stayed there for more than thirty years and during that time, Mbuya lamented the loss of her son.

A few years after independence, Babamunini Nyika made an appearance to my mother one evening in Glen Norah, Harare. Apart from the suit he was wearing and nice black shoes, Babamunini Nyika came back home with nothing. Not even a briefcase.

He said President Kamuzu Banda of Malawi had deported him for reasons never explained.

When he settled back in the village, people said he behaved liked a white man. After lunch, he took a siesta under the mango tree and listened to BBC world news on the transistor radio. When the radio batteries were gone, Babamunini still sat quietly under the mango tree, dreaming. Was he thinking of his lost loves back in Malawi?

He did not talk about his experiences as an immigrant in Malawi nor did he ever tell us why he was made persona non grata by the Malawian President Hastings Kamuzu Banda. He ought to have made Malawi his home.

“Because of technology, the world is so close to us now,” I told Baba and Mai Jena.

“But technology, mwanangu, cannot replace the hug of a grandchild,” said Mai Jena shaking her head. Baba Jena turned away from the television and said, “It’s a dilemma for our children. We can say, stay here so we can see you and also play with our grandchildren. But if they do not have a job and they do not have money, what will seeing them everyday do for us or for them?”

“The choice is hard. So we say to them, come home when you can. As long as you send us money and photographs,” Mai Jena said, pointing to the wall of pictures.

“But we have one son who cannot come here even if he wants to come,” said Baba Jena. “He told the British government that he was a refugee and they said he could stay there. But this means he cannot come here to visit because the British people will say, if your country is so bad, why do you want to go back there? Do you now not fear for your life?”

I could see the expression on Mbuya Jena’s face changing. Maybe she did not want to talk about the “refugee son”. She quickly interrupted Baba Jena and said, “Our son is not the only one who got papers saying he is a refugee in England. What else did you want him to do?” she asked her husband.

Baba Jena shrugged his shoulders and increased the volume of the television.

Mai Jena opened the parcel with her church uniform that I had brought for her. As I left, she pointed to the photographs on the wall again and said, “The problem mwanangu is this one, money, a phone call or a photograph cannot replace the laughter of a grandchild in these corridors. But what can we do? At one time, England took away our country. Now it has taken away our children.”

Dr Sekai Nzenza is an independent writer and cultural critic