Sekai Nzenza

IN the dry season, long before the missionaries arrived in this country, the elders always gathered for the bira, an all night ceremony to honour the spirits of our ancestors. Although most of us in this village are Christians, we have not stopped the bira. Last week, we gathered in one big kitchen hut to remember, celebrate  and drink to quench the thirst of my late grandmother, Mbuya VaMandirowesa.
Most people from Mbuya’s maiden village, vekwa Kwenda and all the relatives from the VaNjanja and the VaHera clan arrived at sunset.

The drum beat, mbira, singing and dancing to century old traditional songs went on all night. Several women from the church  were on the kitchen hut dance floor throughout the night.

These women can dance. Sometimes they applied the same steps and rhythmic feet movements often used  when dancing  and praising the Lord at various  Methodist, Anglican, Catholic, African Faith Mission and other evangelical gatherings. Mbuya would have been happy to see them. These men and women had put away their Bibles and church uniforms in order to enter the spiritual world of our ancestors and drink to Mbuya’s thirst, kupedza nyota yezitateguru.

Mbuya VaMandirowesa did not like missionaries and Christian education. Many years ago, before the liberation war, when my parents announced that they were going to send us to school, Mbuya said no. There was no need to educate us outside the village compound.

Mbuya said the children should stay home, (there were 11 of us, eight girls and three boys) and work in the fields throughout the planting and harvesting season. During the dry season, muChirimo, she wanted all the girls to go down to the river, swim, bath, wash, scrub and learn the lessons of womanhood with all the other women and young girls.

But my mother already knew the values of Western education, having studied up to Standard Five at Makumbe Mission. She could see the change coming. But Mbuya did not. One day, Baba announced that my brother Sidney was going to Kutama Catholic Boys College in Makwiro.

Sidney was 12 or 13. Mbuya was livid.
Sidney was the first grandson born here after the whole family was moved from what became white-owned farms  in the Charter Estates.  Sidney was going to be the heir to our clan.

“If he goes to a school so far away, who will look after him?” Mbuya asked. My mother said the missionaries were very kind and they would take good care of Sidney. And Mbuya said, “Do you know these missionaries? Are you related to them?
But both my parents were determined to give us education, having realised earlier on that only education and a skill would spare us from manual labour.

Maybe my parents already knew that the Rhodesian government had deliberately designed social, economic and educational systems and barriers that would make it very difficult for Africans to achieve education.

As a teacher, my father might have read that George Stark, the Director of Native Education in colonial Rhodesia from 1934 to 1954 had  introduced an education policy of “practical training and tribal conditioning.” Its main purpose was to develop a vast pool of cheap unskilled African manual labour.

In 1956, The Rhodesian Education Ministry had introduced a Five-Year Plan stipulating that the African rural child, up to the age of 14, should be given only five years of education. Every year, an increase of 60 pupils was allowed at any given primary school. In the city, students had access to eight years of education only. They were not allowed to be over 14 by the time they reached Standard 4. As a result, many parents forged birth certificates and altered their children’s ages and birth places so that children could gain admission into a school. No birth certificate, no entry into Form One.

Despite Mbuya’s protests, my brother Sidney, my mother, Sabhuku and the village midwife  travelled to the Native Administrator’s office at The Range  and applied for  a birth certificate for Sidney. It was important to bring witnesses when applying for a Birth Certificate. After much questioning to prove that Sidney was really my mother’s son, they failed the interview process. On the third visit and after much coaching of the midwife and Sabhuku, they got the Birth Certificate. When it was  presented to Mbuya, she could not pronounce the words Birth Certificate.

She called it ‘Chiferefere’ and demanded to know why my mother would have spent so much money in bus fares just to get ‘Chiferefere.’
Sidney left for Kutama, followed by my other siblings who went to Tegwani in Plumtree,  my sister Charity went to St Francis of Assisi. I went to Kwenda Methodist mission. Soon as I settled at this  Methodist boarding school, I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Saviour. In no time at all I could quote Bible verses in English without looking at the Bible.

I placed Mbuya VaMandirowesa on the list of prayer points. Everyone in my prayer group prayed for her. Whenever I came back from the school holidays. Miss Hutchinson, the English missionary, often inquired about Mbuya. I would reply that darkness and paganism persisted and the ceremonies to honour the ancestors continued without any sign of ever coming to an end. “Have you spoken to your grandmother about Jesus?” Miss Hutchinson asked me once.

I shook my head and said no. Even the power of Jesus that I believed to be within me at that time could never have given me the courage to approach Mbuya with such a message. If my mother had failed to convince Mbuya that Western education was good for us, how could I possibly think that the Good News of salvation would mean something to Mbuya VaMandirowesa?

During Bible Studies and prayer sessions, I sat there, next to gray haired Miss Hutchinson, with the Bible sitting on my lap, facing all the other prayer colleagues, both boys and girls. I could smell Miss Hutchinson and her friend Miss Davies. They were clean missionaries committed to serving the Lord. They  were old but they lived alone, slept alone and had no lovers, husbands or children. They carried the spirit of purity, love, kindness and godliness.

I wanted to be like them and go to England one day. Once I got to there, I would pray and sing in English all the time. That way, I would  be nearer to Heaven.

When other students asked me what my grandmother was like, I gave them detailed descriptions of her. I said Mbuya drank a lot of village beer; she took snuff and often blew her nose with a brown old rag. She was a spirit medium, a traditional healer well known for curing infertility. She was a dancer of mbira, that Shona instrument with a reputation for invoking the  primitive sacred spirits of the ancestors when played during ceremonies.  Because Mbuya enjoyed the power of being VaHosi, the first wife, she believed in polygamy, a sinful practice.

Back in the village, during school holidays, Mbuya ignored whatever it was that we were learning from the missionaries. She carried on as if no other knowledge was coming to us. She taught us to be good women and future wives. She showed us how to sundry tomatoes and vegetables, how to kneel down properly and serve the elders, how to gather wild mushrooms, cook rupiza, okra and various delicacies.

Then we went back to the mission for a whole term of Thomas Hardy,  Shakespeare, the King James Bible and European History. In Form Two, we knew everything about the Partition of Africa and Robert Moffat of the London Missionary Society.  Most important of all, we were expected to understand the history of The Pioneer Column, Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company and how they conquered the Matebele and Shona Rebellions.

There was a whole essay to be written on the Rudd Concession and how Lobengula signed it giving Cecil John Rhodes permission to occupy the country and gain land and mining rights. When the missionaries explained this history to us, it sounded very legal and totally acceptable.

Years later, we looked back and realised that the missionaries did not teach us our history. They taught us theirs. Since Lobengula could neither read nor write, he engaged the advice of the Rev C. D. Helm of Hope Fountain Mission and Mr John Smith Moffat, son of Robert Moffat. On October 30 1888 Lobengula signed the Rudd Concession granting Rhodes’s company “the complete and exclusive charge over all metals and minerals situated and contained in my Kingdoms, principalities and dominions”.

In return, Rudd promised to pay Lobengula £100 a month, 1 000 modern rifles and 100 000 rounds of ammunition, as well as a gun-boat on the Zambezi River. He never got all that. Lobengula did not know that this was not going to be a few white men digging some holes for gold, like makorokoza. Aiwa. This document was going to be seen as the reason for colonising the country and naming it Rhodesia, after Cecil John Rhodes. After the Rudd Concession, the Matebele Resistance started.

When Lobengula fled north, his wife Queen Lozikeyi courageously led the war called the Battle of the Red Axe.
Over in Mazowe, Nehanda, Kaguvi, Mashayamombe and others led the First Chimurenga, resisting British settlers. They fought hard and lost. After capture, Kaguvi was baptised. Then they hung him. But Nehanda said no, she was not going to be a Christian. She said, her bones will rise. “Mapfupa  angu  achamuka.” And they did. The Second Chimurenga would come much later.

Long before the 1893 and 1896 wars of resistance,  a powerful  war  to capture the spiritual minds of Africans  had already started. With the support of the Pioneer Column, the missionaries were busy penetrating the country. History tells us that in the 1890s  missionaries asked Cecil John Rhodes for land on which to build mission stations. Bishop Knight-Bruce founded St Augustine’s Anglican mission near Penhalonga in 1891.

During the same year, the  Salvation Army  received a farm of 3 000 acres in the Mazowe River valley. In 1893, Jesuits missionaries accompanied  the Pioneer column of settlers and  built Chishawasha Mission. Down in the eastern Highlands, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions  built their  mission station at Mount Selinda in 1893 and the American Methodist Episcopal Church  was given 13 000 acres at Old Umtali.

Meanwhile the The Berlin Missionary Society arrived in 1892 and built mission stations at Gutu, Zimuto, and Chivi. These were later taken by the  South African Dutch Reformed Church in 1907. Not too far from the Great Zimbabwe Ruins A. Louw founded Morgenster Mission in 1894. In that same year,  Cecil Rhodes offered the Seventh Day Adventist Church  missionaries a farm of 12 000 acres at Solusi just outside Bulawayo.

By 1914, the Wesleyan Methodists had opened four stations at Tegwani, Moleli,  Waddilove and Kwenda. The Methodist Mission at Kwenda was named after my great grandfather,  Chief Kwenda, Mbuya VaMandirowesa’s father. And yet, she herself was never to become a Christian nor believe in the Western education we vigorously sought to get.

Miss Hutchinson  is dead now and so is Mbuya VaMandirowesa. Miss Hutchinson must be sitting somewhere in heaven with Robert Moffat and other missionaries, reminiscing about their journeys  to convert, educate and civilise the natives. God is saying to them, well done, good and faithful servants because all over Zimbabwe, the church is growing as many people fill the  churches, stadiums, valleys and halls.

We have American inspired prosperity gospel, miracles with hand kerchiefs, bottled water, clay pots and colourful materials used for worship everywhere. On television you see some of the newly  born again Christians filled with the Holy Spirit crying in English only, the emotion of civilisation. The seeds sown by the missionaries continue to grow.

We need to find a medium of worship that recognises the historical  depths of our spiritual ways of worship to God, Mwari Musikavanhu, who was always there, long before the missionaries came.

We need a balance. Sadly the balance of worship is tipping more to the Christian way, leaving us holding on to  traditional  ancestral ceremonies that are fast disappearing. At least, back here in our village,  some of us still put the Bible away for a while and  offer the ancestors their clay pot of beer, hari yavo yenyota, because this is who we are. Tiri vanhu. But for how long? Who shall we become?

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

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