A rainbow arches in the sky during my grandmother’s funeral. My tears must be the rain that invited the rainbow here. I tell it to go away. Its beauty is vulgar on such a terrible day as this. Gogo is buried next to Sekuru, who died five years ago from complications of his injuries during the liberation war. It is a dignified funeral with no fuss. Gogo never liked fuss. After the funeral we go back to Gogo’s house. I pass the basement door, my eyes lingering on the locked door that Gogo never allowed me to enter. Whatever secrets the basement holds, Gogo took them with her to the grave. I lock myself in the guest bedroom and take out Gogo’s cookbook from the shoebox I hid it in.
The cookbook is the last piece of my grandmother that I have. I hold it tightly to my chest, imagining Gogo’s toasty hugs and trying to will her laugh back into my ears. Tears stain the cookbook, for I know I’m slowly forgetting the sound of her laugh.
Gogo’s cooking was unmatched. She even bragged that she once cooked for a British prime minister, but Gogo was always prone to exaggeration. Sekuru never denied her outlandish claims. The corners of his mouth would turn upwards into a little smile as if the two of them knew something I didn’t. I swallow nervously. I don’t know why opening her cookbook feels like I’m walking in on her in the bathroom, like I’m about to see something not meant for my eyes. A photograph falls out from the first page. It’s in black and white, of Gogo and Sekuru smiling, a young black couple in colonial Southern Rhodesia.
Last week Gogo’s belongings were divided amongst her relatives at the gova ceremony. People are greedy, always eyeing what they can take even before the deceased dies. I’d heard stories of widows who were kicked out of their houses by relatives who claimed possession of the dead husband’s house. My relatives had acted no differently when Sekuru died, fighting over his tiny house and even tinier car. Vultures, Gogo called them. She fought to keep the house, angering my uncles, who called her a list of things ranging from hure to muroyi. While my relatives were fighting over Gogo’s property, no one paid attention to her musty cookbook sitting on the kitchen counter, so I’d taken it for myself.
The cookbook smells like its age, earthy and comforting. My skin tingles a bit from having it in my hands. More tears stream down my face. On the first page is a note signed by my grandmother.
The soul would have no rainbow if the eyes didn’t have tears, Langa. If you’re reading this, my mzukulu, it looks like my cookbook has called to you, which means I have passed on. Wipe your tears before reading on, I don’t want you staining the pages.
Gogo M.M.W.
Instantly I rub the tears from my face with my sleeve, laughing at Gogo’s cheekiness. I frown. How did she know that I would take her cookbook? I turn the page expectantly, hoping to find a food prep method or one of Gogo’s delicious recipes, but I am met with the words NOMKHUBULWANE: GOGO MAGERA written in all caps at the top of the page. Below the words is a rough sketch of a praying mantis. The name Nomkhubulwane is unfamiliar to me, but I know what Gogo Magera is. Why would my gogo have a drawing of a creature from fairy tales in her cookbook?
The mantis has prominent front legs, bent and held together at an angle that makes it look like it is praying. The compound eyes on its triangular head are so lifelike that I can imagine it blinking. I trace the drawing with my index finger, thinking of the bedtime story Gogo used to tell me about the illusive creature Gogo Magera. That was when I’d lost my tooth and she told me to keep it under my pillow for the tooth fairy to visit.
“Better the tooth fairy than Gogo Magera,” Gogo had said darkly.
“Gogo Magera? As in Granny Snip Snip?” I’d asked. “Is that another tooth fairy?”
Gogo laughed sharply. When she spoke, her voice was a whisper. “The tooth fairy takes and gives you something in return. Gogo Magera, on the other hand, takes and never gives.”
I already didn’t like the sound of this Gogo Magera creature as I slowly drifted off to sleep.
“Gogo Magera is a praying mantis,” Gogo said. “Have you noticed that a praying mantis’s legs look like shears?”
“I thought they looked like prayer hands!” I said.
“No, no, they look like shears,” Gogo insisted. “Gogo Magera comes while you are sleeping and cuts off a strand of your hair or both your eyebrows with her shears and disappears into the night with your hair!”
I’d bolted up in bed, instinctively touching my face in horror, imagining what I would look like without eyebrows.
“That’s why you must sleep with a doek covering your hair,” Gogo said, gently pushing me back down onto the bed and tucking me in. “Gogo Magera only cuts people who don’t wrap their hair at night.”
Gogo patted the bonnet on my head proudly. I breathed a sigh of relief, grateful that the tooth fairy was coming and that I was protected against Gogo Magera.
Looking at the sketch of the praying mantis now, my hands go to my locs and I chuckle. Gogo Magera is just another cautionary tale grannies tell their granddaughters. I wrap my hair every night so that it’s not a tangled mess in the morning, not because of some mythical praying mantis. I wonder, why would Gogo have a sketch of Granny Snip Snip in her recipe book?
I turn another page, and a booklet the size of a passport falls out. I know immediately what it is.
“I can’t believe Gogo kept this all these years,” I say, leafing through the booklet.
The year is 1955, and Gogo is not yet Langa’s gogo. She is twenty-five—in mortal years, anyway. She is much, much older than that, older than this patch of sand they call a country. But she can’t look down on the humans; after all, she chose to become one.
As a human woman, she works as a cook in the white suburbs. Every day she makes the journey from the slums to the suburbs. She has to walk half the way and then take three buses. The bus always screeches to a halt when they reach the roadblock right before town. Rhodesian police officers order everyone to get off the bus, crinkling their noses at the sea of black faces. Every Rhodesian is taught that the natives smell. Even native shit smells more than white shit, pure Rhodesian shit. The officers would never call themselves white Africans. They are too pure-blooded for such a label. “Rhodesian,” however, sounds like the name of a conqueror.
“Passes!” a Rhodesian screams, his spittle kissing the black face nearest to him.
Gogo takes out her booklet. Everything of hers is in order. It has her ID, her job title, and the travel permit to the suburbs.
The two men in front of Gogo in the line are taken into the police van, their pass booklets deemed unfit for them to proceed to the white side of town.
“Purpose of travel?” the Rhodesian barks at Gogo as he flips through her pass booklet, almost ripping apart the pages.
“I am a house girl at Governor Moffat’s,” Gogo says.
The Rhodesian frowns down at her booklet.
“They are expecting me soon so that I can cook lunch for their esteemed guest,” Gogo adds. “The British prime minister.”
The prime minister is doing a tour of the colonies to make sure that the Crown’s territories are still in order. The name-dropping works. The Rhodesian throws the pass booklet back at her. He can’t inconvenience his fellow good Rhodesians and the PM by delaying the arrival of the help.
Gogo gets back on the bus. This is how every morning in the mortal world starts.
Most people from my grandmother’s generation burned their pass booklets after Zimbabwe’s independence. The painful memories and humiliation of being stopped constantly by Rhodesian policemen were greater than the need to preserve such a historic document. In my hands, the pass booklet looks innocent enough. If you don’t examine it closely, it looks like any other passport. The tiny thing feels heavy in my hands, as if it can explode in my face if I hold on to it any longer. Such a small, small thing to have such weight. I carefully place it back between the pages of the cookbook.
“Langa, come eat!” Mama calls out from the kitchen.
I bury the cookbook under the pillows and plushies populating the bed and head to the kitchen. Mama is still wearing all black, her hair hidden under an austere doek. We eat in silence. Mama has been stripped of all joy and rarely says a word these days.
I try to distract her from the pain chewing away at both of us by complaining about my journey back to Zimbabwe from the States. Talking about the humiliation of air travel is an easier thing to do than facing the wrenching knowledge that my grandmother is gone, disappeared forever under the soil, with only a slab of stone above her grave to remind us of who she’d been.
“Can you believe that they took one look at my African passport and dragged me to a back room?” I say, shoving a ball of sadza into my mouth. “They interrogated me for an hour about drugs.”
Whenever I recount my American airport horror story, I try to brush the indignation off my tongue so that it comes out more like an anecdote than the humiliation it was. When I was dragged away from the line, the good white travelers sporting shiny blue passports had stared at me as if I were a criminal. I was detained in a cold, dark room when all I could think about was getting back home in time to grieve. An interrogation turned into a strip search. Naked and trembling in an unventilated room, I yearned to jump out of my own skin. If I wasn’t me, I wouldn’t be treated this way. Only when I showed the Americans my documents proclaiming that I was a student at an Ivy League university did they let me go—without an apology.
“You can never be too sure,” one of them said.
My heart races when I think of how I will have to go through all this again on my return trip. I wish I could take buses across the sea. Anything to avoid being made to feel like a criminal.
Mama sucks on her teeth. “They come to our countries like we are a Blair toilet, but they harass us when we go to theirs.”
“I’m just glad I got here in time for the . . .” I trail off, unable to say “funeral” just yet, because saying the word will make it real. I quickly change the subject. “I remember whenever we visited, Gogo used to tell me bedtime stories about Gogo Magera. Then she would spend hours in the basement.”
Mama stops chewing for a moment, her body tense.
“Did she ever tell you what she was doing down there all the time?” I ask.
“Who knows,” Mama says.
“Do you know what a Nomkhubulwane is?” I press. “Is it another name for Gogo Magera?”
Mama chokes on a chicken bone. Her coughs make her heave so much that I think something is going to burst out of her chest. She reaches for the nearest glass of water, her hands shaking.
“Why are you suddenly interested in this?” Mama says. Her words sound like an accusation.
“I’m just curious, that’s all,” I say.
“Gogo Magera is a children’s story, Langa,” Mama says. “Nothing more.”
I’ve seldom heard my name since moving to the States. Everyone at school calls me Lana. “Langa” twists their tongues into too many knots for them to bother to learn it. I know Gogo would have been disappointed in me had she known I’d bastardized my name. Gogo named me for sunshine.
“I’m Lady Rainbow,” Gogo always used to say. “And you are sunshine.”
Mama stands up abruptly, clearing her plates.
“No more talk of Gogo Magera and Nomkhubulwane in this house, do you hear me?” Mama says. “Those stories died with Gogo.”
Blue eyes
Water from a spring in the forest, blueberries and yoghurt blended together to make a smoothie, the eyebrows of a Scandinavian toddler
British accent
Yorkshire pudding, a biscuit, the beard of a gentleman fresh off the boat from London
White skin
Spoiled whole milk
Cruelty
Vermillion, a pebble from a cold land, a piece of wood from a ship, a thorn stolen from a black rose
The prime minister and Governor Moffat enjoy afternoon tea in the garden. The prime minister is visiting the colonies to show his full support behind keeping the colonies in check. He has brought with him weapons to be used to quench the little flames of rebellion amongst the natives.
“I say, Moffat, these scones are delicious,” the prime minister says. He rubs his sweaty forehead with a napkin, not quite used to the African heat.
“The natives are quite excellent at making our food,” Governor Moffat says. “I’m tempted to take my cook with me when I go back to England.”
As the prime minister gorges on the scones, a praying mantis hops onto the back of his breeches and makes it all the way up to his neck. The prime minister is none the wiser when the praying mantis nicks off a lock of his hair with its scissorlike legs. The praying mantis jumps away, hopping back into the grass and darting across the backyard into the kitchen. There the praying mantis morphs into a human woman wearing a cook’s uniform. She seals the prime minister’s hair away in a mason jar.
When I open another page in Gogo’s cookbook, a key falls out. The key chain has the word BASEMENT on it. The basement has always been off limits to me, so walking down the creaky wooden stairs feels like I’m sneaking into Gogo’s kitchen to steal Choice biscuits. I pause before the gray door, a place that has been unknowable all these years but now seems to be the last piece of the puzzle that was my gogo. I’m scared to open it. I’ve always wondered what was behind the door, yet here is my chance to know and I am shaking all over, unable to will my limbs to open it. With a deep breath and hands trembling, I slide the key into the keyhole and twist, and the door swings open.
The basement looks like an abandoned pantry with mason jars lining the shelves.
Gogo heads to a funeral wake at a neighbor’s house where the freedom fighters gather at night, the Rhodesians none the wiser. Gogo runs her finger over the red ribbon tied at the gate. Comrade No Rest Muhondo ushers her to the back of the yard where all the comrades are gathered around a fire.
Gogo is a small woman, but she casts a long shadow in front of the sea of hardened faces. They are silent as they watch her dark skin crack like broken glass, an unsettling paleness emerging from beneath. Her short legs elongate, honey brown hair springs across her legs like weeds, a mustache stretches above her lips, and her voice deepens to a British accent. Within moments, the British prime minister is standing before them where Gogo once stood.
“We didn’t have enough weapons to fight the British,” Gogo says in her new voice. “But now we do. I walked right into their garrison and walked out with most of their weapons in the image of their beloved prime minister.”
The freedom fighters erupt into cheers and whistles as they distribute the firearms.
Dear Langa,
You have found the key to the basement at last. You’re probably curious about the mason jars lining the shelves. Let me start at the beginning, my sunshine.
I am a goddess. Well, not quite anymore. I chose to be human, you see. I will get to the reason later. You know me as Gogo Mbaba Mwana Waresa, but before I was your gogo, I was Lady Rainbow, the rain goddess. Why would a goddess choose to be human? you may wonder. In the heavens all the gods were arrogant bastards. An eternity is so long. It yields no surprises, no joy, no flavor. I watched the humans, and I wanted to know what it meant to live and to treasure existence because it might end at any time.
So I went down to Earth, and it so happened that I fell in love with a human man, your sekuru. He was a freedom fighter, passionate. All he wanted was to see his people free.
My father, the sky god Umvelingangi, said I would regret my choice. He told me humans were violent, fickle creatures. Still, I would not return to the heavens.
I was stripped of my immortality, stripped of my powers. When I set foot on Earth, I was born anew as an African woman in a settler colony on the verge of revolution. I could never make rain again but, look, I made your mother, who is a storm, and she in turn made you, sunshine.
I was my father’s favorite, he still had a soft spot for me, so he left me with one power. Nomkhubulwane, the power of shapeshifting. That is why I told you the story of Gogo Magera, the praying mantis who steals hair from those who sleep without doeks at night. The hairs I stole as a praying mantis—what does the science you learn at the school in America call it, DNA?—are the ingredients I used to make recipes that would turn me into anyone I desired to become. I used the recipes to win the liberation war for our people and never touched them again, locking them up in this basement. If you could have the power to become anyone you chose, would you stay yourself? This is your inheritance. I leave the recipes to you, my sunshine, all the ingredients pickled into mason jars.
Your loving Gogo