ALEXANDER KANENGONI

Born in 1951, Alexander Kanengoni was trained as a teacher before he joined ZANLA, an African nationalist guerrilla force. Much of his fiction was inspired by the anticolonial struggle and Zimbabwean war for liberation. After Zimbabwe gained its independence in 1980, he attended the University of Zimbabwe and majored in English literature. He became a member of the Ministry of Education and Culture, where he worked as a project officer and was responsible for overseeing the education of ex-soldiers and refugees. From 1988 to 2002 he worked for the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Service, but then returned to his familial roots when he became a farmer. He recalled that his father had owned his own land and that he himself had grown up “living on and knowing the land.” He thinks that the relationship between the people and the land has an almost spiritual quality about it. Kanengoni’s works include Vicious Circle (1983), When the Rainbird Cries (1988), Echoing Silences (1997), a collection of short stories titled Effortless Tears (1993), and Writing Still (2003).

Effortless Tears

(1993)

We buried my cousin, George Pasi, one bleak windswept afternoon: one of those afternoons that seem fit for nothing but funerals. Almost everyone there knew that George had died of an AIDS-related illness but no one mentioned it. What showed was only the fear and uncertainty in people’s eyes; beyond that, silence.

Even as we traveled from Harare on that hired bus that morning, every one of us feared that at last AIDS had caught up with us. In the beginning, it was a distant, blurred phenomenon which we only came across in the newspapers and on radio and television, something peculiar to homosexuals. Then we began hearing isolated stories of people dying of AIDS in far-flung districts. After that came the rumors of sealed wards at Harare and Parirenyatwa, and of other hospitals teeming with people suffering from AIDS. But the truth is that it still seemed rather remote and did not seem to have any direct bearing on most of us.

When AIDS finally reached Highfield and Zengeza, and started claiming lives in the streets where we lived, that triggered the alarm bells inside our heads. AIDS had finally knocked on our doors.

For two months, we had watched George waste away at Harare Hospital. In desperation, his father—just like the rest of us—skeptical of the healing properties of modern medicine, had turned to traditional healers. Somehow, we just could not watch him die. We made futile journeys to all corners of the country while George wasted away. He finally died on our way home from some traditional healer in Mutare.

All the way from Harare to Wedza, the atmosphere was limp. January’s scorching sun in the naked sky and the suffocating air intensified into a sense of looming crisis that could not be expressed in words. The rains were already very late and the frequent sight of untilled fields, helplessly confronting an unfulfilling sky, created images of seasons that could no longer be understood. The crops that had been planted with the first and only rains of the season had emerged only to fight a relentless war with the sun. Most had wilted and died. The few plants that still survived were struggling in the stifling heat.

Now, as we stood forlornly round the grave, the choir sang an ominous song about death: we named the prophets yielded up to heaven while the refrain repeated: “Can you see your name? Where is your name?”

This eerie question rang again and again in our minds until it became part of one’s soul, exposing it to the nakedness of the Mutekedza communal land: land that was overcrowded, old, and tired. Interminable rows of huts stretched into the horizon, along winding roads that only seemed to lead to other funerals.

Not far away, a tattered scarecrow from some forgotten season flapped a silent dirge beneath the burning sun.

Lean cattle, their bones sticking out, their ribs moving painfully under their taut skin, nibbled at something on the dry ground: what it was, no one could make out. And around the grave the atmosphere was subdued and silent. Even the once phenomenal Save River, only a stone’s throw away to the east, lay silent. This gigantic river, reduced to puddles between heaps of sand, seemed to be brooding on its sad predicament. And behind the dying river, Wedza Mountain stared at us with resignation, as if it, too, had given up trying to understand some of the strange things that were happening.

The preacher told the parable of the Ten Virgins. He warned that when the Lord unexpectedly came and knocked on our door, like the clever five virgins, we should be found ready and waiting to receive Him.

Everyone nodded silently.

George’s grandfather mourned the strange doings of this earth. He wished it was he who had been taken away. But then such were the weird ways of witches and wizards that they preferred to pluck the youngest and plumpest—although George had grown thinner than the cattle we could see around us. We listened helplessly as the old man talked and talked until at last he broke down and cried like a small child.

George’s father talked of an invisible enemy that had sneaked into our midst and threatened the very core of our existence. He warned us that we should change our ways immediately or die.

He never mentioned the word “Aids,” the acronym AIDS.

George’s wife was beyond all weeping. She talked of a need for moral strength during such critical times. She readily admitted that she did not know where such strength could come from: it could be from the people; it could be from those gone beyond; it could be from God. But wherever it was from, she needed it. As if acting upon some invisible signal, people began to cry. We were not weeping for the dead. We were weeping for the living. And behind us, while Wedza Mountain gazed at us dejectedly, the Save River was silently dying.

The coffin was slowly lowered into the grave and we filed past, throwing in clods of soil. In the casket lay George, reduced to skin and bone. (Most people had refused a last glimpse of him.) During his heyday we had called him Mr. Bigstuff because of his fast and flashy style—that was long ago.

As we trudged back to the village, away from the wretched burial area, most of us were trying to decide which memory of George to take back with us: Mr. Bigstuff or that thread, that bundle of skin and bones which had died on our way back from some traditional healer in Mutare.

Out there, around the fire, late that Monday evening, all discussion was imbued with a painful sense of futility, a menacing uncertainty, and an overwhelming feeling that we were going nowhere.

Drought.

“Compared to the ravaging drought of 1947, this is child’s play,” said George’s grandfather. “At that time, people survived on grass like cattle,” he concluded, looking skeptically up into the deep night sky.

No one helped him take the discussion further.

Politics.

The village chairman of the party attempted a spirited explanation of the advantages of the government’s economic reform program: “It means a general availability of goods and services and it means higher prices for the people’s agricultural produce,” he went on, looking up at the dark, cloudless sky. Then, with an inexplicable renewal of optimism peculiar to politicians, he went on to talk of programs and projects until, somehow, he, too, was overcome by the general weariness and took refuge in the silence around the dying fire.

“Aren’t these religious denominations that are daily sprouting up a sign that the end of the world is coming?” asked George’s grandfather.

“No, it’s just people out to make a quick buck, nothing else,” said George’s younger brother.

“Don’t you know that the end of the world is foretold in the Scriptures,” said the Methodist lay preacher with sharp urgency. He continued: “All these things”—he waved his arms in a large general movement—“are undoubtedly signs of the Second Coming.” Everyone looked down and sighed.

And then, inevitably, AIDS came up. It was a topic that everyone had been making a conscious effort to avoid, but then, like everything else, its turn came. Everyone referred to it in indirect terms: that animal, that phantom, that creature, that beast. It was not out of any respect for George. It was out of fear and despair.

“Whatever this scourge is”—George’s father chuckled—“it has claimed more lives than all my three years in the Imperial Army against Hitler.” He chuckled again helplessly.

“It seems as if these endless funerals have taken the place of farming.”

“They are lucky, the ones who are still getting decent burials,” chipped in someone from out of the dark. “Very soon, there will be no one to bury anybody.”

The last glowing ember in the collected heap of ashes grew dimmer and finally died away. George’s grandfather asked for an ox-hide drum and began playing it slowly at first and then with gathering ferocity. Something in me snapped.

Then he began to sing. The song told of an unfortunate woman’s repeated pregnancies which always ended in miscarriages. I felt trapped.

When at last the old man, my father, stood up and began to dance, stamping the dry earth with his worn-out car-tire sandals, I knew there was no escape. I edged George’s grandfather away from the drum and began a futile prayer on that moonless night. The throbbing resonance of the drum rose above our voices as we all became part of one great nothingness. Suddenly I was crying for the first time since George’s death. Tears ran from my eyes like rivers in a good season. During those years, most of us firmly believed that the mighty Save River would roll on forever, perhaps until the end of time.

But not now, not any longer.