On a fine Spring day in Harare, Sithembiso and I buried her brother, Fitzpatrick ‘Fitz’ MacDonald Muzanenhamo. A week after he had been found dead in a lodge in the Avenues, the police still had no idea of the culprit. Had he been alive, even he would probably not have been able to provide a motive. You could say his ingenuousness or political naïveté was his problem – or was it weakness? Sithembiso once told me that he’d dropped his middle name, Madla, given to him by his mother – a Zulu name meaning strength. Not that it made any difference to her, my wife continued to call him Madla: it made her father furious, she was always hard on her brother.
Even as we were chauffeured to the cemetery, she said, ‘My brother was weak – gutless. The name Madla might have given him the strength to resist the old man’s whims. MacDonald? Who was he?’That was Fitz, though,’ she continued. ‘Challenge his father? On a cold day in hell!’
Sithembiso had told me not to worry about delving into their family’s history. ‘You’re a journalist,’ she said. ‘Your job is to expose, unveil what’s hidden – you told me that. Remember? What does it matter that you’re married to me?’ She was right. And I did have a dossier on Fitz: he may have radiated none of his father’s brilliance, but he ran a string of good-time girls at a lodge in the Avenues. Perhaps you didn’t need a spectacular IQ to do that, but people said it was a gold mine. Scruffy, uneducated, unsophisticated girls, newly arrived from the sticks, were scrubbed, shampooed, deloused, disinfected, and had their fingers and toes manicured by a middle-aged woman whom Fitz called ‘The Madame’. She was a buxom ex-combatant whose boyfriend had squandered her Z$150,000 war veterans’ gratuity on a weekend binge. Fitz said he found her when she was on her uppers, scrounging for clients in the red-light district of the Avenues. She transformed the girls into bright, saucy maidens who could engage their clients in sparkling conversation on almost anything, but particularly the liberation struggle, a topic she spoke about from first-hand experience.
I had a dossier on their father too. At the university, his colleagues called him ‘that pompous prick’. But he knew his job, lecturing in political science, and knew how to interpret the facts to meet official approval. He was in his sixties, a man wedded to traditional culture, in spite of his outward appearance as a sophisticated, Western-educated intellectual. Sithembiso said that Madla took after their father, culturally, at least in his contempt for women. But he wasn’t unkind to his girls; he paid them reasonably and visited them occasionally, to give them rousing pep talks laced with such giddy patriotic platitudes as ‘Work to end poverty and hunger in our land’, ‘Work for the Party’. I suppose he could say this with a straight face, given how many of their clients had political connections.
Fitz, like me, was in his early forties. I was a journalist, and an aspiring novelist, working as a senior proof-reader for slave wages on a daily newspaper. Nonetheless, I still had the indefatigable curiosity of a cub reporter, even after years in the trenches. Fitz was a reluctant politician dealing in girls and foreign currency on the black market. Fast cars were his passion, and he changed them like shirts. His father would deny him nothing. He counselled his daughter to look after herself.
‘Your mother did,’ he would say, the sarcasm almost tangible. Sithembiso had long taken his advice to heart. He had funded her education up to her O-levels, but after that she was on her own, and she told me she had sweated blood to gain a degree in political and public administration by correspondence.
On the other hand, the Professor had set Fitz on a course: ‘Parliament or bust!’ was what his sister told me with a wry chuckle. On the face of it, this was outlandishly ambitious. His intellect, even the kindest people said, was sluggish. Nonetheless, he struggled valiantly to live up to his father’s aspirations. Professor Pedzisayi Macmillan Muzanenhamo held an indestructible faith in his son’s intellect. ‘Some people,’ said Sithembiso, ‘found his faith endearing, but he is a superstitious man. The ancestral spirits wouldn’t foist a stupid heir on him.’
Nonetheless, my research had thrown up astonishing evidence of Fitz’s extraordinary, if dubious, political talents – whenever there was a whiff of money, Fitz would be found in its proximity. The ruling party, of which his father was an éminence grise, counted him among its protegés.
Not too strangely, so did the main opposition party. Perhaps he was not the half-wit that people thought he was.
The burial was private, in a quiet cemetery nestled among the rolling hills overlooking Glen Lorne. Most of the mourners, in elegant black, were what we journalists liked to describe as the city’s glitterati, the movers and shakers, the decision-makers, of Harare society. People who knew how to put on a face and hide their real feelings.
On this fine day, death seemed a cruel interloper. Spring filled the air with love, romance and the beauties of creation. Beautiful purple jacaranda flowers canopied the small neat cemetery. It seemed that all the birds of Harare had gathered in their finest plumage, to fill the air with silver song. It was Spring, a season for birth and blessings, not death and curses. Sithembiso was pregnant with our first child and glowing even in funereal black. Tall, like her father, she was endowed with the light complexion, full lips and nose of her mother’s people.
Fortunately, she was not taller than me, for in African culture a man must be taller than his wife, or how would he gain her respect, in and out of bed? I suspect her father, albeit grudgingly, paid me at least this compliment.
The Professor was dominating the ceremony with his deep baritone. He looked distinguished – conscious of his magical impact on women, as his voice rose above the marble headstones. He had studied, then lectured, in South Africa where he made his academic name, as Professor Vusimuzi Dlamini, and his fortune.
Fitz had inherited his father’s voice and height, and possessed just a smidgen of his potent village cunning, a skill the elder Muzanenhamo could disguise with consummate ease as the wisdom of Solomon, or Kwame Nkrumah. The Professor’s soliloquy seemed to blend with the birdsong and the soft chorus of sniffles from women who’d once been captivated by Fitz’s looks and money. ‘On this fine day,’ said the Professor, ‘my heart is heavy with the sadness of his mother’s absence. She would have wanted to share with me this moment; the moment when her son is accorded this magnificent send-off by people who loved, respected and admired him for all that he had achieved.’ The Professor was not shy when it came to public displays of power.
I imagined rather than saw Sithembiso’s reaction out of the corner of my eye. Her middle finger was raised eloquently, and she stuck her pretty pink tongue out at her father, her eyes cold. I was fortunate to love and to be loved by her. I reminded myself that she was intelligent, pragmatic, sensitive and beautiful. The Professor, oblivious, continued with the mellifluous narration of his son’s life. ‘Curse you!’ Sithembiso hissed. Her hot fingers sought mine, as we stood above the open grave, looking down at the expensive casket.
‘You hypocrite!’ She seemed unaware of an audience. ‘My mother let you use her name, because with your own makwerekwere name you’d never have studied or prospered as a political scientist. She paid for your education from her shebeen in Soweto. This is where we were born – this clown who’s got himself killed and who should never have been pushed into politics in the first place.’ She spoke in a fierce whisper, a multi-layered tirade: part plea, part accusation, part confession, spiced with a dash of The Avenging Angel. It was the closest she ever came to grief. The Professor, however, heard nothing, or pretended to hear nothing.
I had met Sithembiso six months before her brother’s Spring funeral. Three months prior to that, she had sneaked me into her cottage, behind the main house, a residence of palatial pretensions she had nicknamed Bleak House. ‘I would love my father to see us together,’ she said. ‘Me, a good girl from the best, the only tribe, and you a Chewa from Malawi.
He would kill you, because he’s a bigot. I know that. But he would not kill me. That would scare him, because he is very superstitious. The spirits would haunt him into an early grave.’ But if our relationship had developed in passion, we had to tie the knot when she could not conceal her expanding waistline any longer.
Initially, she had scrupulously protected us against pregnancy. I was a reluctant co-conspirator until she realised how much it would mean to me to have a child together. Then she changed course without drama, simply looking at me one night and saying ‘We’re going to make a baby.’ I was as surprised as I was joyous and, yes, perhaps naïve. I did not think she might want to produce an heir that her father would never accept. I had not had a relationship like this one before, and I did not want it to end.
I had married into a rich family, but there was a weirdness about them which I would have preferred to avoid. Most men deeply in love with their women would rather not wax poetical about the specific cause of their inebriation. Sithembiso had introduced me to a world of love in which its physical component was as dominant as its emotional, spiritual sides. She was my soul-mate, but it came with some very difficult territory.
About the Author
Sylvester William Saidi (1937) was born at St David’s Mission, Marondera and educated in Zimbabwe. A writer and a journalist, he has had his work published in Ghana, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia and elsewhere and in magazines such as African Parade, New Writing from Zambia, Okike and the Negro Digest. They have also been published in various anthologies such as Voices of Zambia, Writing Still and Writing Now. His latest short story, ‘The Nightmare’ was published in Norton’s Introduction to Literature (2010). His memoir A Sort of Life was published in 2011.
Post published in: Arts