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diseases. Some of us might be dead by now.  Mbuya lost the battle to stop Western medicine and nhomba, immunisation, into the village compound.

In those days, Mbuya VaMandirowesa ruled the whole village compound. One day before sunrise, she dragged me, my two sisters, Charity and Paida from the mat where we sometimes slept with her, close to the fire in her kitchen hut.

When Mbuya ordered us to wake up like this, there was trouble lurking somewhere in the compound.  She took us to the front door of my parents’ grass thatched two roomed mud brick house.  Mbuya stood there, wearing her usual long light brown dress, black quilt with frills draped around her and tied over the shoulder, shaved head, and bare feet, back slightly bent.

She called out to my parents to ask why they were still sleeping when the sun could rise any time now.  My mother came out, hurriedly tying her apron on top of her dress and cardigan.

“Mangwanani Mhai,” she greeted Mbuya, gently and clapping her hands together. My father stayed inside, but only for a short while.
“I hear the men from Mudzviti, in Enkeldoorn are coming to give injections to the children to stop them from getting diseases. Is that true?” Mudzviti was the white Native Commissioner. My mother nodded.

“What diseases?” Mbuya demanded to know as if this was the first time she had heard about the immunisation program. News about that was on the radio all over Rhodesia.
“All native children must be immunised. No immunisation scar on the arm, no school,” was the message broadcast in Shona and Ndebele.

My father, a former teacher who was now working as a clerk for the Salisbury Grain Marketing Board, had repeatedly told us that when the immunisation van finally found its way to St Columbus School, we should not be scared of the long needle or the man called Odhari who was going to administer it. This was a program organised by the Rhodesia Ministry of Health.

“The children must be immunised against measles, polio, chicken pox, whooping cough and Tuberculosis,” my mother said listing the diseases on her fingers.  
My father then came out in his white shirt, black trousers and shoes.

He held a comb and a small mirror. He greeted his mother and asked how she slept. Mbuya said she did not sleep well because she was worried that Mudzviti, wanted to immunise all the children. “Ndinorara sei iye murungu weku Inkiridhori achida kubayisa vana nhomba?”

Baba kept on combing his moustache as if he had not heard her. Mbuya snatched the mirror from him and said, “Mugomeri, Dhavhidi, you want the children to be injected with something you have never seen? I was never injected.  My grandmother and VaNjanja people went to their graves without an injection. Today, you come here with your tie and trousers, as if you are a white man to tell us about injections.  Iwe ndakakubayisa nhomba here?” Mbuya was furious.

She moved back and forth, sometimes thrusting her chest forward, pointing at my father. My mother remained quiet. She never argued with Mbuya openly. But we knew that my mother would still find a way to do what she wanted, without engaging in an open confrontation with Mbuya.

My father then asked Mbuya if they could go and sit down in her hut. We were not allowed in there during the long discussion with Sekuru, my grandfather and some of the uncles and aunts. After a while, Mbuya came out shouting that if we got sick after the injections, she was not to be told. If we died after the injections, she was not going to be at the funeral.  She said they were allowing white man’s witchcraft to poison us.

“Kana vana vafa musandidaidze!  Baba we Moyo! Kuroya vana masikati machena!” she shouted, storming out and holding on to her black quilt. My mother came  out and quietly told us to get ready for school and for the immunisations. We did.

The immunisation van came in the afternoon.
More than half the school children did not come to school that day. Either they feared the needle or because their parents and grandparents had said no, they would have nothing to do with the white man’s needle. There were two African men and a woman who was wearing a white uniform with a Red Cross  sign tagged on the shoulder.

We knew one of the men as Tsanana Zimunhu, the health and sanitation officer from Hwedza. The other man wore a blue shirt and tie underneath a white knee length coat. He was tall with a moustache . His eyes were deep set and red. Aive nemahobi.

Mr. Muchando, the headmaster and our teacher, Miss Rwodzi, ordered us all to stand in line with short sleeves rolled right up. The man with the red eyes spoke in English only, shouting to tell us to stand in a straight line.  He held a long shiny needle and syringe with a clear liquid in it. The nurse checked our arms to see if we had been immunized before.

Then she pushed us to Tanana Zambezi who then dipped a ball of cotton wool in a jar of blue spirit and cleaned the spot to be injected.  It was a strange smell. Someone said it smelt like a hospital.  We had never been to hospital so we did not know that smell.

The man with mahobi, the deep set eyes, then pulled our skinny arms and jabbed the needle in, pushed the liquid through a bit then pulled it out. He dipped the same needle in the  jar of spirit and went on to the next child. Same needle.

Takaita kujukwa jukwa netsono imwe.  I remember the pain and the triumph, celebrating that we had been  immunised against  all the diseases of witchcraft and any other future diseases we might catch in the future.

A few days later, there were raised small red spots on the spot injected. It wept a little for some time, maybe a week or two. Then it dried up and left the scars we still carry today. That scar was also an entry pass to admit you to a new school. No scar, no enrolment until you have been jabbed with  a needle. Did we suffer any repercussions from the use of that one needle in those colonial days? Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows?

Years later, we are back in the village, leisurely sitting on a log in front of my mother’s kitchen hut.  My mother, Nyati the Buffalo, passed on last July. Now her kitchen hut and the whole homestead belongs to my brother Sidney, me and my sisters.

This has been our home ever since we moved from the main village compound where we used to live. That was when all the villages around here were part of the Tribal Trust Lands.

Mbuya and the whole extended family including my cousin Piri lived down by the river right up till the liberation struggle.
Over on the flat rocks a couple of kilometres away is the ruware where Mbuya VaMandirowesa is buried.  Not too far from the flat rocks, on the left side towards the west, kumavirira, lives the new Mutumwa or the Messenger Prophet Ezekias.

If Mbuya was alive today, she would be very proud of   Ezekias because he preaches against immunisation and the swallowing of tablets. Over the past year, the message of Prophet Ezekias or Mutumwa, the Messenger is spreading and converting people fast. The   long queues at the clinic are gone.

Prophet Mutumwa Ezekias grew up in the villages nearby. In school, he was a lot younger than us. He was a tall light skinned guy who spoke softly. After independence he went to Harare and worked for a furniture company.

One day he dreamt that he had to start a church. He came home and God asked him to start the Sungano yeVatendi white garment church.
Prophet Ezekias says there is no need to immunise the children anymore because God heals in miracles.  People need not take any medicines in the form of tablets, roots, liquids or injections because God knows where they feel pain and with faith, they will be healed.

But, without faith, they will continue to suffer and live in pain. With steadfast prayer and climbing the mountains and praying in caves, God will do miracles, minana nezviratidzo.

Among Mutumwa Ezekias’ new followers is our sister in law, Mai Jasi, my Cousin Bhudhi Tobias’s wife.  Mai Jasi stopped by here yesterday evening on her way from the grinding mill. Mai Jasi walked in through the gate, the bag of maize meal balancing on her head. She gave me a big warm and strong hand shake, the way she has always done. She shook hands with my cousin Piri, who was busy doing the dishes on the outdoor village sink, pachitata.

Mai Jasi put her bag of maize meal down and sat on the log near our kitchen hut. I noticed that Mai Jasi had grown smaller in size since the time of the election run-off and the hunger of 2008.  I offered her some Mazowe drink and plain bread.  I asked about her health and that of the children. Then she suddenly got very excited and put the two pieces of bread she was holding back on to the plate.

“Tete, I was sick in 2008 but I survived.  Then I nearly died last year.  My whole body was sore, like it was not mine. I went to Mutumwa Ezekias’s church and I got healed.” 
Mai Jasi described the miracles and spiritual awakenings at Mutumwa’s homestead church over the past year.

“God  has given him the power to heal  infertility, Aids, diarrhoeas and vomiting in children, nhova,  chest infections, back aches and migraines. Do you believe what I am telling you?” Mai Jasi asked, directing the question to Piri. But Piri kept on washing dishes and handing the plates for drying to Madube, our village homestead keeper. In between doing the dishes and scrubbing pots, Piri took a sip of village brew from a metal mug.

Then Piri said, “Pastors, prophets and traditional healers are the same.  Even doctors too. At the end of the day, they all want money from anyone who believes in what they say. Ezekias is no different but he should stick to praying and let the children get immunised. He does not know science.”

Then there was a long heated argument between Piri and Mai Jasi. Mai Jasi said Piri was, as usual, belittling other people as if she knew it all. She took her sack of maize meal and said good bye to me only and not to Piri.

Looking back to the time in the village compound, Mbuya VaMandirowesa believed in the spiritual power of the ancestors to give us knowledge of disease and its causes.  For her, an illness did not just happen; it was linked to the world of our ancestors.  With the coming of Christianity and Western medicine we lost the spiritual connection to our health.

The doctor touches, feels and examines us, then he prescribes drugs from the pharmacy.  Nothing spiritual here. The drugs are available and labelled with the side effects clearly stated.  And yet, quite often, we cannot afford them. In the absence of money, it is easier and reassuring to turn to faith healers because it does not cost anything other than small gifts to the Prophet.

Besides, with the breakdown of the village compound and the disappearance of the elders who were knowledgeable of the medicines, we flounder between the past and the present without direction. Ezekias, like the other new prophets everywhere, connects people to others with similar experiences. He takes them away from the knowledge of the past which is already fragmented anywhere and places them in a spiritual place, somewhere safe in the company of others like them.

He offers no medical science other than the symbols of water, mica, the clay pot and stones. But, as Piri says, he should leave the science of immunisation to those who can save the children.

Piri and I passed by the village clinic on our way back to Harare last Sunday. The nurse said a couple of kids had already died of measles behind Dengedza Mountain because the parents belong to Ezekias’ church. She shook her head and said, we have gone back to the old days of ignorance, when our grandmothers rejected immunisation. But I said, no, we have not actually gone back, we are in a state of identity confusion worsened by economic hardships and the search for good health and a spiritual identity.

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