behind the clay pots in the kitchen hut.
It was true that I moved around quite a bit over the years, seeking a good home in a Western country as far away as possible from the village. For 25 years, I just wanted to live a nice life in a big city in Australia, UK or USA. Village poverty was only a memory.
I was the first one to leave this village and go to England, the country where the Queen lived and where they said civilisation came from. In that place called England, I was going to make a lot of money and live like a white person.
I was not going to come back and live in this country again, even if it was now independent and there was plenty to eat. England was going to be my home. I might even get old and die there.
My grave will lie among the graves of great British explorers, hunters, colonial administrators and all the missionaries who finished their work in Africa and went back to England.
And so I fulfilled my dream and went to England. After three years, that place did not feel like home. The British had stiff upper lips and they hardly smiled.
Most of them did not even go to church. Then there was the lack of sunshine, the terrible gray sky, the cold, wind, snow. I was working very hard in the hospitals but I still did not make enough money.
I started seeing this image of myself as an old black woman in a nursing home surrounded by English old women like me.
I did not want to get old and die in England. My grave would have to be somewhere else warmer.
I left and went to Australia. I then made Australia my home for 20 years. There were hardly any black people there. I was exotic. People stopped me in the streets just to touch and feel my hair.
Because I was often the only black person at university or at a party, people said I was beautiful. On two separate occasions, I was called Whoopi Goldberg. In Australia I grew the kind of vegetables we used to grow in the village like rape, tsunga and spinach. Then one day I did not like Australia at all.
It was cold and they were saying unpleasant things about the Ethiopian, Somali and Sudanese refugees and all the other Africans. What if I tried America, the land where African-Americans had shown that they can run, fight, play basketball and act in movies?
The land of freedom and plenty. I would fit perfectly in America. I left Australia and moved to Los Angeles, California. Americans, black and white, were very friendly and they did not care where I came from.
They did not even know where Zimbabwe was. The weather was very nice and I grew rape and pumpkins.
It felt like home. But after just three years, it was not home.
America was big, fast and lonely. This dzvatsvatsva spirit took over, like a spirit possession, kunge shavi.
I did not want to grow old and die in such a faraway place and be buried by my Mexican neighbours. They might even cremate me; grow a rose on the spot where they put my ashes. Who would remember me?
Who would bring me back here to the anthill where all my people are buried? A lonely flower to mark the grave of a lost African woman. An ancestor remembered by no one. I just had to get out of America and move to somewhere. Without close relatives or friends, some Zimbabweans in the Diaspora are lonely and lost. 
Because when they made the move to leave Zimbabwe in search of a better life elsewhere, they went on their own, without relatives or the support they would get if they lived here.
It is true that life overseas can be good and there is plenty to eat. But life can also be bad, when we are lonely and sick, and we die alone. Death in a faraway cold country has become very common.
Some of us are dying, without achieving the wealth or the good life we dreamt about.
That is what happened to my friend Pepetua in Melbourne, a few years ago. Pepe came from Chikomba, not too far from Hwedza, where I grew up.
We used to be good friends, but I was a dzvatsvatsva and moved places and countries so I lost contact with her, until Pepe’s funeral some years later. By the time she fell ill from depression and other diseases, Pepe was living alone.
I first met Pepetua in 1987, two years after my arrival to study in Melbourne, Australia. Pepe, as we called her, was one of those women who left Zimbabwe during the liberation war and settled comfortably faraway in a suburban house in Melbourne.
She had a partner, but they never had any children. We met at parties and celebrated being Africans with others from all over Africa as black people do in the Diaspora.
One day Pepe lost her job as a legal secretary and could not find another job for months. Her partner met someone else and moved out of the family home.
Pepe was alone. Pepe said she could not think of ever returning home to Zimbabwe because both her parents were dead. Pepe stayed in her house and moved little.
She was lonely. Then she became ill with depression and the doctors put her on anti-depressants.
Pepe had episodes when she became hyper-active and manic. She was restless and she said she heard voices. She laughed incessantly and was abusive.
She refused to eat and sometimes she just sat on the one spot for a whole day without talking to anyone.
Pepe had high blood pressure, headaches and was often drowsy and dizzy.
Sometimes she shuffled when she walked and she had skin rashes everywhere.
She had unusual and uncontrollable movements on her face, stuck out her tongue and smacked her lips when talking, chewing at nothing.
Occasionally she jerked and twisted her whole body. When the episodes became more frequent she was hospitalised a few times.
Pepe and I did not see each other much but spoke on the phone regularly. Gradually Pepe and I spoke less and less.
Each time I called her she would go off on a tangent. Mid sentence she would start laughing or talking about her former lovers in old Rhodesia: “They were all white,” she said. “Ha . . . Ha I was beautiful, I tell you. They taught me a lot of things. I was a model. I entered the Miss Black Rhodesia contest for blacks once.”
One late afternoon Pepe’s former partner visited her.
He found her slumped on the couch. Pepe had been dead for two days. The post-mortem said Pepe had a massive heart attack. Since she no longer communicated with anyone back here, there was no one to call and let know that Pepe was gone.
A cousin from England said she was sorry to hear about the death but she had just had a baby so she could not attend the funeral.
The cousin also asked us Zimbabweans who knew Pepe to forward to her details of Pepe’s estate. 
I just happened to be in Australia when Pepe died. At Pepe’s funeral, her close friends were mainly the Maori people she used to be friends with.
When I arrived to pay my condolences, there was a group of Maori people and other Anglo-Australian men drinking beer sitting around an open fire.
In the corner was a barbecue with sausages roasting. A couple of women talked loudly and smoked in the far corner of the backyard.
It was like standing in the middle of the Hell’s Angels gang. Some grunted hellos and others mumbled sorry.
The women in the corner waved and kept their distance. A big Maori guy with tattoos on his face took me into the house where Pepe’s body lay.
He explained that Pepe was going to have a Maori-type funeral.
The Maori people believe that the tupapaku or body of the deceased person should not be left alone at any stage after death.
They bring the tupapaku to a marae, or meeting place, where it lies until the time for burial.
People then take turns to speak to the body because the spirit can still hear people talking to it.
I went in to see Pepe. How was Pepe’s spirit going to be united with the ancestors in such a faraway place?
Looking at her I saw the futility of life. Here was a woman who enjoyed the Western way of life — food, clothes, wine and cigarettes. She drank beer like there was no tomorrow.
Even the marijuana that makes men happy or angry, she smoked that too. And now here she was, alone, dead and surrounded by strangers.
The funeral took place at the Chapel of Eternal Rest within the cemetery grounds in Melbourne. It was a beautiful, peaceful place with gardens, water features and even some wild life.
Pepe’s former partner chose a headstone lawn grave and a flowerbed.
He said Pepe wanted to be buried and not cremated.
There were about 30 or so people, mostly friends and a handful of Zimbabweans.
At the graveside, the Maori pastor read some verses from the Bible and Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon, for there we wept, as we remembered Zion.” Some people sobbed.
After the Bible reading, the pastor lifted his arms into the air and looked to the sky and said, “Let us now join the lines of the dead to the dead and join the lines of the living to the living.”
He prayed: “God alone is holy and just and good. In that spirit we commend you Pepe to God and to your ancestors. We commend you to God’s judgment and mercy, God’s forgiveness and love.
“We now commend your body to be buried. To join the others who have gone before you. Go well, our sister.” We threw rose petals into the grave. Pepetua was dead. Never again to return to her village.
After Pepe’s death and the other deaths of some Africans I knew, I started to think that I really did not want to grow old in some faraway country and end up in a nursing home over there.
Then I woke up one day and said, no, I am not going to be a dzvatsvatsva anymore. I will go back to the damn place where I started, back to my village in Hwedza, kumusha chaiko Hwedza. But coming back to the source was not that simple.
When you grow up thinking everything Western is better, it takes something akin to kutendeuka, to be born again, to realise that everything moves in a circle and one day, you look back and you see that the past was not what the missionaries said it was. It was not primitive. It was our home.
I left and came back to where I started. Panichi was still here, older, missing a couple of front teeth, smoking and drinking chandada, skindo, chiparamazenge and still going strong.  My cousin Piri was here too. She was looking for a third husband.
She looked happier than I was. When she asked me why I came back leaving a better life in America, kuchirungu, I said, I did not want to get old and die faraway. “But you are not old?” she said. I said that was also true. But I was now wise enough to remember where I came from. 
The world has become global and we can be buried anywhere. For the love of a better life, we get consumed and forget where we came from, kukanganwa kwatakabva because we say, there is no one left back here.
But this does not mean we forget our past.
As long as the rivers, the mountains, the graves and the memories live, there is someone, something to come back home for. 

Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic. She holds a PhD in International Relations and is a consultant and director of The Simukai Development Project.

 

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