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Isdore Guvamombe
Saturday Lounge Reflections
The road to the proverbial land of milk, honey and dust or Guruve leads due north of Harare and all the way its verges are graced by a mixt of indigenous trees.

For over 150km it runs between vast farmlands, their homes set far back out of sight behind acre upon acre of intermittent maize and tobacco fields in Mazowe, Concession and Mvurwi.

Thereafter, three times the road winds its way between communal lands dotted with clay-walled huts and tiny fenced-off fields backed by a European house, then it straightens and flows through former commercial farms.

Under normal circumstances, on the side of the road, you would have noticed men hovering by the side of whitewashed shops and beer halls in their faded formal clothes.

Under normal circumstances, women would saunter through the grass verge, children at their heels, toddlers clad on their backs, firewood or water buckets balancing delicately on their heads. But it is Covid-19 time.

On rare occasions you would have come across a spirit medium clad in black regalia that exuded an aura of sacred spirituality. Jam-packed buses, tractors, trucks, ox-drawn carts and cyclists dash along or crawl between the villages and, the business centres and farms.

At Bakasa, just as the road starts to descend it makes a wide sharp curve around the edge of the Zambezi Escarpment, and lo and behold! . . . the Zambezi Valley spreads out yawning flat and wide, north, north and further north, east and west. Vast!

On a clear day, the Zambezi River sparkles from a vintage point of the escarpment, some 150km away. And then, within 15km, the road altitude falls by a whopping 6 000 metres! The break in altitude is felt sharp and critical as it announces your arrival at Mahuwe Business Centre.

At Mahuwe, the gravel road begins and the journey slows down. Crawl! The heat is fierce, remorseless, baking and caking.

As the road runs north to Mushumbi Pools (the pools from where lions drink), the great, stout hunches of the Great Dyke mountains rise up blunt and grey behind.

Four large rivers, Dande, Hunyani (Manyame), Kadzi and Angwa (Hangwa) drain from the escarpment into the Zambezi Valley and villages cling on to their banks and those of their tributaries. Away from these rivers and villages, Mbire is wild with pale sharp grass, dense with thin contorted trees and scattered with towering baobabs.

It is this land, that is the last vestige of African tradition. It is this land, that can be called the land of the spirit mediums. The land of life, where traditional medicines abound.

Here, there is a huge concentration of spirit mediums from Karitundundu, to Dumburechuma, Chingowo, Nyamapfeni, Gumboremvura, Chidyamauyu, to Gwati Chirambakudomwa and Mutota among others.

Here tradition is still strong and followed religiously. Here traditional medicine is the in thing. Here few cases are referred to hospital.

So on the height of the last wave of Covid-19 infections I went to the village and on this stretch of road, it became a cause for concern to see motorists, stop and break this tree or the other in search of traditional remedies.

From big cars, to the sleek and the ramshackle, the story was the same. Noting something was happening the villagers took charge and started selling zumbani and other remedies on the roadside. There was brisk business.

Each bush has its graveyard. Entombed in these bushes are the graves of village autochthons, here I used the word autochthons loosely to mean those who came from the ground or those who founded the area.

To date, the village autochthons must be smiling in their graves that their brigade of lost children is back to traditional remedies, albeit under a whip cracked by a virus. Does what goes around not come around?

Ode, ode, ode the village! It is a new portent, a barefaced exodus to traditional medicine based on organic knowledge, archived in the brains of cotton-tuft-haired village elders, normally derided by urbanites as outmoded, primitive and moribund, but are suddenly saviours.

Suddenly every living Zimbabwean has traced his roots to the village and gotten wired to traditional medicine.

Suddenly the knowledge of indigenous trees came into life as the urbanites sought to outlive Covid-19, ordered some concoctions or even physically went out into the bushes with the sleek and fast beasts, that the modern SUV vehicles present.

Back in the village, in the proverbial land of milk, honey and dust or Guruve, elders with cotton tuft hair say an owl does not fly during the day for nothing, when you see it flying, you must know something is after its life.

And, they content, with unwavering certainty that life gets its real and full meaning when it is under threat.

For many Zimbabweans the past month or so has not been rosy, the smells and sounds of death were all over the country as Covid-19 stole one life after another, with brutality that has never been seen before.

And so as the brute threatened lives, everyone from the slay queens to the rich and famous, went back to the archives of organic knowledge in the village, plucked from under the debris of our memories, that template we had long condemned and abandoned as the curse of our ancestors and replaced with Eurocentric trinkets and medicine.

We are not Europeans. We are Africans. We are villagers and the village is our shadow, no matter how hard we try to run away, the village will always be with us. Village!

Suddenly, the village became the source of hope and life. Suddenly the village became the hospital of our dreams. Suddenly our bushes became the pharmacies. Suddenly village elders became handy doctors and nurses. Suddenly village elders became repositories of the knowledge on how to make this concoction or the other. The village!

This villager, the son of a peasant, believes we have learnt our lessons from Covid-19.

While our traditional medicines have not been certified as cures from Covid-19, certainly they go a long way in dealing with some of the symptoms of the disease and in boosting our immunity.

The past few weeks have proved that and we do not need a doctor from America to tell us that. We know our concoctions, in their various forms, aid to body strength, which is what is required.

Even steaming has helped our people a lot. Our people do not just steam water, they add concoctions to the boiling water and steam.

This villager believes its high time we allow our traditional medical practitioners to try a Covid-19 treatment and detractors of traditional medicine in Europe can go to hell if they think we do not have a mind of our own.

We, however, need to have our traditional medicine scientifically proved. I am confident it works.

Finally, we must start a new chapter of how to harvest our traditional trees that we use in concoctions, because before we know it, they go extinct.

Ode, ode, ode the village!