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Sekai Nzenza  On Wednesday—

My grandmother, Mbuya VaMandirowesa hated soap. Any soap. She said soap smelt bad and it was full of white man’s medicine that was not good for the skin.If you went to the river, you were not allowed to bath or wash your clothes with soap next to her.

She had many beliefs about the negative effects of soaps bought from the stores.

Mbuya said why should we celebrate and embrace soaps we never knew existed?

Why do we require a bar of soap from a store after we have lived for so many generations without it? She said soap kills fish in the river. Soap stops vakadzi kuenda kumwedzi, meaning women who use soap will not have menstrual periods.

Soap makes your skin dry. Soap smells foreign. Soap is bought with money and the village has no money.

If your skin gets used to using soap from the store, it will resist any other traditional healing soaps used for bathing.

“No soaps in my house or anywhere near where I bath,” declared Mbuya VaMandirowesa. We obeyed.

Down at the river, we used ruredzo to wash our hair, bath and even wash our clothes. Ruredzo or feso is the vine like plant that grows on the ground and has purple flowers.

Ruredzo has various names in other languages. In English it is called boot protectors, stud plant or devil thorn.

In Ndebele it’s inkunzane or intekelane. It is described in the dictionary as the “prostrate perennial (plant) with annual creeping stems with almost hairless stems. Its flowers are solitary, axillary, and very pale to deep pink or mauve, usually with darker spots on the lower lip and in the throat. The plant is mostly restricted to sandy soils. Its distinctive fruits have a pair of sharp points, which easily penetrate animal hooves, boots and even car tyres, aiding seed dispersal and also preventing soil erosion.”

If you grew up in the village like I did, you will never forget the pain of stepping on a feso thorn when barefoot and running in the valley. It was painful. Feso raibaya.

My mother said Mbuya hated soap only because she wanted an excuse not to bath often or to wash her clothes.

My mother loved soaps and she hid the soaps at the bottom shelf of her wardrobe in the corrugated iron roofed house. She said we could use the soap when Mbuya was not there.

My father said educated people used soaps to wash, not ruredzo. Soap was a sign of civilisation. This message of using soap was repeated even more strongly by the teachers at St Columbus School.

Our Grade five teacher, Miss Rwodzi, used empty Lifebouy soap packets as decorations in the classroom. She also sprayed Impulse deodorant on her clothes and cleaned her teeth with Colgate and not with the Muchakata stick as we did. Mr Muchando, the deputy headmaster, boasted that Pears, not Lifebouy, was the soap of the future.

He used to place his empty packets of Pears soap on the window sill, asking students to come over and smell them.

Both teachers said soap bought from a store showed that you belonged to a new class of people on the road to civilisation. We admired the pictures of Europeans on the Lifebouy and Pears packets and longed to look like them. At church, when Baba Mutemarari came to give us Anglican mass, we could smell Lifebouy very strongly emerging from his black, white and purple robes. It was the smell and look of Christianity and cleanliness. This reinforced the teachers’ messages that, “cleanliness is next to godliness”.

Our teachers at St Columbus School may not have known, at the time, that Lifebouy and Pears soap were not soaps for just Rhodesia but for many former colonies of the British Empire. Lifebouy was created by William Hesketh Lever and his brother James when they started a small factory in Warrington, England. They used palm and vegetable oils instead of the then common tallow to produce soap. Their first brand of soap that they made was called Sunlight, which was used in household cleaning.

Later on, as the business grew, the Lever Brothers built a larger factory and a whole village for their workers.

This village was called Port Sunlight, not far from Liverpool. It was during their various experiments in soap making that led to the creation of Lifebuoy in 1894.

This was the first soap to use carbolic acid, giving it a distinct red colour and strong hospital-like smell. Carbolic was often used by doctors during operations because it had disinfecting purposes.

In 1911, Lifebouy was being sold in stores around the United States, Germany, Switzerland and Canada.

Because of its cleansing nature, the Lifebuoy brand was then seen as promoting personal health and hygiene.

A Lifebouy special bar was developed in 1933 and this was used mostly for hand and body washing.

By the 1970s, the Lifebouy bar soap had another distinctive light perfume scent. On its the package, it was written “Knocks out B.O.” Meaning any body odour or sweat smell would disappear if you used this special soap.

At home, we felt that only Lifebouy could make us feel clean. Then one day, my father came back from Salisbury (where he worked as a clerk at the Grain Marketing Board) and announced that he no longer wanted to see Lifebouy in the house.

My mother was disappointed but she said nothing, as she often did when there was disagreement between her and my father. She waited for the right time to question or even politely challenge his decision. But my father did not wait for the private conversation.

He said, back at the GMB in Salisbury, Lifebouy soap had been introduced by their European boss during a team meeting. He said the boss gave each employee a bar of Lifebouy because he said Africans smelt badly and only Lifebouy could cure their body odour.

He explained that Lifebuoy killed germs. Then he showed the workers how to wash their hands, especially after using the toilets at GMB.

My father said all the employees had found the demonstration from the European boss very offensive. Some of them said this was just a way of showing rusaruraganda or racism against Africans. But nobody said anything because black people were not allowed to speak to white men on equal footing, let alone to their bosses.

After my father finished narrating his story to us, I recall that Mbuya laughed and ululated, saying it was the soap that caused the smell, not the person.

“Munhu anogeza neruredzo haanhuhwe,” Mbuya said, meaning a person will not smell if they bathed with ruredzo. But my father said there was no ruredzo in Salisbury. It was a big city full of houses and factories.

Mbuya said she could sun-dry some for my father and he can always return home for more during holidays. My father shook his head and said he would use other soaps from the store. My mother did not openly disagree with my father’s choice of soaps. She still kept a bar of Lifebouy at home and we took it to boarding school, because it was still the soap we believed could provide cleanliness and better hygiene.

Looking back, we now know that the introduction of soaps like Lifebouy was done through a marketing technique to convince the African customer that by using certain brands, he or she would achieve a higher status and social standing in society.

We also discovered that soap marketing messages were subtly telling us that white skin was more beautiful and more superior than African skin.

It was not just simple advertising but a way of selling products and the civilising mission idea. As black Africans, we were supposed to use new soaps and other cosmetic products in order to get closer to being white and to become civilised. While the soap was sold to make money, we unconsciously or consciously accepted the link between soap and the ideas of civilisation and racial superiority.

As village consumers of commercial soaps, we reached a certain degree of civilisation that made us feel better than Mbuya VaMandirowesa and those other villagers who were using ruredzo instead of the carbolic smell of Lifebouy.

Today, marketing of soaps and other cosmetic products are part of our lives.

We see advertisements of products on buses, billboards, television, newspapers and everywhere. Beautiful, mostly skinny models with brown, soft looking, clearer skin with no blemishes advertise the soaps.

The varieties of soaps in advisements promise lovely, smoother, firmer, lighter and healthier skin. And yet, in reality, there are many factors that define a person’s beauty besides skin colour, tone or type of firmness.

In this global world, we have the choice to choose what products we can use. Mbuva VaMandirowesa would ululate today, if she was to see that some health stores promote the use of ruredzo as shampoo or soap.

She chose a cheaper, and perhaps, healthier soap.

Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic