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Safirio Madzikatire alias Mukadota’s hilarious song “Ndatemwa Negogo” tells the story of an errant husband so vividly that it evokes visual images

David Mungoshi Shelling The Nuts
Across the years certain words have crept into our languages and taken on new meanings. They have even become more significant than in their original contexts. Take the word “pleasure” for example. What the people call “purezha”.

Many people will agree that if you want to know and understand society at any point in time you are best advised to look at what the artistes are doing and saying.

Our own bad boy of Zimbabwean hip hop, the naughty but supremely imaginative and venturesome Maskiri, exudes some of this enigma and fatal attraction in his hit song “Wenela”. Some recapitulation and a bit of reminiscing here will do us some good.

The trek down South has always been something of a compulsion for many people in certain parts of our country — long before what we know now. It was fashionable to cross the Limpopo to go to Johannesburg, in particular. In the early to mid-1970s signing up as labour for the mines in the Witwatersrand was something that many young men from this side of the Limpopo did with great alacrity. In doing this, they were, in fact, just continuing a long-standing tradition established over many years and sustained by riches and rumours of riches.

As far back as the 1940s, the Gold Mines of South Africa had set up what they called the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA) later and more popularly known as Wenela. It was such a vast labour recruitment organisation that it spread its wings right across Southern Africa to Basutoland (Lesotho), Swaziland, South West Africa (Namibia), Bechuanaland (Botswana), Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Nyasaland (Malawi), Angola and Mozambique. Labourers even went to the gold mines from as far as the Belgian Congo (DRC) and Tanganyika (Mainland Tanzania)! With time the acronyms Wenela and Soweto (South Western Townships) became words. Today no-one raises an eyebrow when you speak of Wenela. So with your permission Dear Reader, I will dispense with the italics.

Over the years we had many people going into South Africa but never coming back or only doing so after they had become tramps and hobos, reduced to paupers by riotous living in the land of gold. That was the story. And when those Wenela boys came home, my word! You never saw anything like it. An uncle of mine arrived from Wenela in style. One cab had his clothes and various glorious acquisitions while the second cab had him sitting at the back like a nabob with his cigars, his beer and all sorts of trinkets for the poor natives back home. Lol!

Money was treated with a lot of disdain by the Wenela boys. They behaved as if they had endless reserves of it. So when Maskiri says, “bhebhi randiinaro kuno, purezha ndiuraye asekuru” you can begin to see what a life of dissipation can do to someone. His lyrics remind me of something I read somewhere many years ago. A man so liked his rye whiskey that he dedicated himself to it. Obviously inebriated he sang: “Rye whiskey, rye whiskey, you killed my poor father. Now damn you, kill me!” When purezha and excitement are your only objectives, nothing else matters but your gratification. The nearest to that today is what socialite Zimbabweans call “joyi”, their equivalent of purezha. So Maskiri says it would be foolhardy of him to leave this unbelievable girl just because someone back home has decided to die. He can still make it, maybe later next year, perhaps at the memorial service where he can dutifully commiserate with everyone else over the terrible loss! For now he would rather die from excess, killed by purezha, than forego the absolute bliss he is swimming in. The girl attends to his every whim and that’s rich!

When the purezha bug bites you, you throw all caution and all morals to the wind. Nothing and no-one is of the slightest importance. Only your own imagined needs and preferences matter. You probably justify all that by saying it’s the way of all flesh and you’re just being typically human. Such reckless bravado from the likes of Maskiri and others! I suppose creativity means always being one up in any direction. It’s party after party in pleasure unlimited binges and I can hear Wezhira System Tazvida singing about pint after pint day in and day out with the ladies.

Safirio Madzikatire AKA Mukadota did a hilarious song called “Ndatemwa negogo” which told the story of an errant husband so vividly as to almost make the song visual. When you listen to this gem of a song the duet with Susan Chenjerai you are transported to the scene of the debaucheries. How many of you ladies remember that once very popular synthetic fabric known as “tererini”? Those were the days when wash and wear garments were in vogue and this wondrous polyester fabric with its pleats and fine finish was a must-have item for all ladies who were savvy with fashion.

In days gone by playing house or living together was a popular urban thing, perhaps due to the fact that many wives were domiciled in the reserves (now our communal lands) and luxury was associated with fried eggs, liver and fashion. With these symbols of good living a man’s paramour ministered to his yearnings, frying the eggs and frying the liver before making the make or break request. In Madzikatire’s song the partner asks the man for a tererini and when he’s not that forthcoming she gives him a taste of her stiletto heel and the now remorseful husband, blood oozing out of his head, rushes back home to his ever-loving and weeps his misadventure. “Ndatemwa negogo mukadzi wangu,” he cries as he laments his cracked skull. Watch out hapless man. Stilettos don’t mess around.

In another of Madzikatire’s hilarious songs a man has himself the time of his life with a good time girl while his wife is away at the rural home. It’s paradise until she returns unannounced. Rather lamely the man begs his wife to keep her voice down. Knowing that the level of esteem accorded him by the community will plummet and help reign him in in future, the wife lashes him with her justified tongue until he pleads for forgiveness. That’s a familiar story that, and that’s because quite often artistes are a mirror of society. We see ourselves in their work and get to know what’s going down so to say.

Lest we think only musical lyricists can show us something, let me hasten to state that writers too have had their fair contribution to the sub-genre of stories about estrangement and debasement. Patrick Chakaipa’s Garandichauya though a living sermon on how repentant prodigal sons get forgiveness is also a graphic portrait of scenes and sins in places of loose living. For chasing the fashionable Muchaneta, Matamba gets his comeuppance. In the end Matamba is physically brutalised and spiritually belittled. Ironically, he sees things more clearly now that he is blind. And true to the ideal of old time rural wives, though once so neglected and abandoned, Matamba’s wife comes to his rescue. She takes him back regardless. Garandichauya is another story about the things that the pursuit of “purezha” can do to its disciples and adherents.

Marangwanda’s classic “Kumazivandadzoka” is a story concerned with the alienation brought about by life in the towns. After many years of absence from home and a yawning silence in terms of communication Saraoga’s worst is still to come. His mother traces him to the city. Happy to see her long lost son again, she makes to embrace him and is shoved off coldly. With decided venom and indifference Saraoga says, “Woman, I tell you I do not know you. I am not Saraoga. My name is Southey Valentine and I’m not a native. My father’s workers taught me to speak this language.” The poor woman returns to her rural home broken-hearted and dejected and begins her wait for the end of time. Saraoga must have been having a real whale of a time.

Life must have been very sweet for him with all the trappings of city life and the pleasures that money can buy. He had come up in the world and was not going to let some flea-ridden woman from the reserves drag him back to those deprived days from far away and long ago. And purezha had him enthralled beyond retrieval.

The dramas I speak of are still being enacted today. Men and women alike chase after carnal pleasure and all forms of excess. And the germ called purezha glitters like a gem, and we, like T.S. Eliot’s “Tiresias”, old man with shrivelled woman’s breasts, foresee all and fore suffer all that is enacted around us. From our vantage point we watch the falling world and can’t help the cackle that escapes our lips.

Life goes on.