The dearth of creativeness
purazi

Back in the day, young people would spend considerable time in the fields

Once, there was a lazy man who lived across the river from us. His name was Isaya. He sat on his hands or used them for scratching or eating. Most times he simply placed them on his lap doing nothing. When the rains came and everyone was busy preparing the fields for ploughing, sowing or weeding, Isaya sat under the shade of his kitchen hut watching people and the world go by. That is how the saying, “Gada sa Isaya,” came about, meaning “just sitting doing nothing like Isaya.”

My grandmother, Mbuya VaMandirowesa said Isaya’s laziness was genetic because there was one great uncle of his who used to sit like that all day. As a young man, Isaya was even too lazy to leave his village to go looking for girls.

Noticing the genetic laziness, Isaya’s mother found a wife for him. Isaya clapped his hands and said thank you and that is how Isaya became a husband. Mbuya used to secretly whisper that Isaya got some help to become a father from his nephews and other kind relatives. That might not have been true at all.

Sometimes you saw Isaya sitting under the shade of a tree, with his chin cupped inside his right hand, like there was a something sad going on his head. Such a posture always spoke of sadness or loneliness in the mind because you did not just sit there doing nothing, wakabata rushaya.

In those days we worked with our hands and each task was often accompanied by a creative activity. No. We did not exactly say, we are going to do something creative. It was not like that. We thought and used our hands without naming our work as creative.

And yet, when we look back, there was a creative art to cooking rupiza the bean soup, plaiting hair, grinding, making and diluting weak and strong beer, molding pottery, making pea nut butter, winnowing grain, carving cooking sticks, drums, stools, making fishnets and working on so many other activities that we learnt as part of our growing up.

We were always busy thinking, creating and working with our hands. Taishanda nemaoko nepfungwa.

As part of play, we struggled and wrecked our brains to explain riddles and metaphors. When the dry season came with its activities, we learnt various dance movements in the moonlight and the boys learnt the art of courtship.

During the day, we went down to the river and learnt the creative games to do with rituals of passage into womanhood.

Our minds were ready to be filled with the philosophy of life, all based on the knowledge passed on from one generation to the other over time.

At night, we sat around the fire shelling nuts, roasting corn or removing the maize seed from the cob, kutokonora chibage. An activity with our hands was part of what we did every night. Mbuya VaMandirowesa told us stories and filled our minds with images and fantasies of what the world was like long before the white man came.

She would begin a story by saying something like this: “Kare kare kwazvo kunyika iri kure kure mhuka dzichiri kutaura . . . ” In translation, “Once upon a time, in a land very faraway, when animals could still talk . . . ” Whenever Mbuya began a story like that, we moved closer to her, put away whatever work with were doing with our hands, ready to listen, our skinny knees touching, sitting cross legged around the fire and looking at Mbuya in the dim fire light. Throughout the story telling, she paused, and to show that we were attentive and not missing a single word, we answered in agreement, “Dzepfunde”.

Sometimes she would tell a whole story in metaphors, proverbs and riddles, using tsumo nemadimikira. Each story had a moral or educational message, challenging us to think and learn.

In the evening, the boys sat around the fire at the men’s meeting place, padare. Every man was busy carving, weaving, smelting or making mbira, the musical instruments and chipendani. They also made tools for fishing nets, maduwo. They were busy with their hands and their minds while talking, singing and telling stories.

Here, padare, the young boys learnt about manhood, sex, marriage and how to be a father.

Once a year, my mother’s nieces and her nephews’ wives walked close to 40 kilometers to visit us during the weeding or harvesting time. When we saw them coming from afar, we ran so fast to meet them, hugged and almost fell over with joy. They always came with presents from their fields like pumpkins, dried vegetables, mushrooms, dried meat or nuts. Upon arrival, they sat with my mother and we asked about their health, as was the protocol.

Then we made sweet tea for them with corn bread, chimbondi mwi or fat cooks. Soon as they had eaten, they joined us in the fields and for the next few days, they got up before sunrise and to help my mother. After a week or so, when they were satisfied that we could now cope with the field work, they said farewell and departed, laden with gifts including groundnuts, dried meat or even the latest doilies or a knitted cardigan that my mother had made for my maternal grandmother.

Creativity, work and sharing the produce of our work were part of the village rituals and way of life.

On the bus to Salisbury, you saw women sat crocheting doilies, knitting hats, shawls and booties for babies or sewing cross stitch to make intricate patterns on little girls’ dresses. At home, the women ironed with starch their spotless clean church hats and white blouses.

Then my sisters and I went to boarding school and we started reading more and did less with our hands. During the school holidays we brought borrowed books to the village and read novels by Enid Blyton and Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines. We read them all.

But, for me, all that reading came to an end when I found Jesus in Form One. From then on, only the Bible would do. Everything else was sinful to the mind. I sat next to the paraffin lamp and read the Bible.

My sister Charity pulled the light closer to her so she could finish a romantic Mills and Boon or an Agatha Christie novel. She even read books banned by the Rhodesian government like D.H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Stanlake Samukange’s On Trial for my Country.

Late at night, when everyone had gone to bed, we stayed by the paraffin lamp with me studying the Bible.

My mother would then wake up and tell us not to burn the paraffin oil so late into the night because there would be nothing left. During the day we found secret places to hide and read. The more we read books, the less we worked with our hands.

These days, back in the village, when my cousin’s wives and other women stop by, you will notice that they no longer do anything with their hands. It is very rare to see anyone knitting or making cross stitch. Because some of them wear all kinds of wigs, there is no need they say there is no need to spend hours getting hair plaited nicely in beautiful and intricate patterns. “Our women have become lazy,” my cousin Piri said, speaking to our sisters in law the other day.

“Look at you all, sitting there, with empty lazy hands. Knit, sew, crotchet or do something like a woman should.” This, coming from a woman whose best pastime is to hold a beer in her hand. The women laughed and said they would really like to sew and knit but why waste time when you can buy a second hand cardigan from China for a dollar at Pedzanhamo market in Mbare? Besides, where would they get the material or cloth even if they wanted to sew and crotchet?

Our post independence generation has forgotten how to teach children the creativity that we learnt when we were growing up. Change and technology is good, but it has killed the creativity in our minds and made our hands idle. Not only that, some of us hardly read books to learn anything new. With our hands on our laps, we simply sit alongside our children, our minds and eyes fixed on cheap entertainment coming from the television.

How long are we going to think less and allow the hands to do nothing? The more we sit doing nothing, the more someone will feed information into our idle brains. Like Isaya from the village, our hands and minds have become lazy and forgotten how to be creative.

Because we are not thinking or creating something new from our past or present, we take and swallow whatever comes our way.

Dr Sekai Nzenza is Chief Executive Officer of Rio Zim Foundation. She writes in her personal capacity.

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