SLAP. The sound echoes across the small shack so that it seems to Aqui she hears it rather than feels it.
‘Tell me, where's the money!’
He's twisting her wrist now, his nails digging grooves into her skin, and she's calling out in pain but she will not tell.
Behind her their two young daughters Heather and Valerie are chewing the collars of their T-shirts and crying silently, their scared monkey faces reminding her of herself as a child.
‘Where's the money?’ Her husband's fist smashes her face and she feels the salt taste of blood in her mouth. Instinctively she tries to protect her swelling belly. It's a boy this time, she knows it is. She has already chosen the name, Wayne John after the star of the films that Tendai likes. As always the Shona name would be chosen by her in-laws who had given her first child Heather the name Pamhidzai which meant ‘Do it again’. Maybe things will be better when he is born.
‘Where is it, bitch? I know you have it!’ This time the resounding smack knocks her to one side and Tendai begins turning the shack upside down. First he empties the tea tin but there is nothing there. The sugar tin has been empty for a long time. Then he kicks out at the pots and pans, scattering them across the floor. All the time he is cursing, the veins on his forehead bulging. The shelves are almost empty when he spots the sack of maize on the floor. Aqui weeps as he tips what little they have left onto the dusty ground. A column of ants instantly marches out from the bottom of the wall to investigate.
Finally his gaze fixes on the basket full of balls of wool she uses to knit pullovers and bobble hats to sell for chilly winter mornings. It is by the chair where his old father used to sit, the only chair they have.
‘No!’ she cries and his eyes light up. They both move towards it at the same time.
‘Aha!’ he laughs.
It was too late. He began tossing out the balls of wool one after another. He pulled out the roll of notes triumphantly from their hiding place then stuffed it in his shirt pocket.
‘What about the children, Tendai?’ she begged. ‘How can I feed them or clothe them for school? And the bills? We'll lose the house.’
But her husband was gone, footsteps fading along the road. Aqui sat sobbing on the floor, the tears mixing with the blood streaking down her chin from the cut lip. She knew he was off to the shebeen. His drinking had got worse after their second daughter was born, and eventually, after too many absent mornings, the school had sacked him. He would just drink and drink and drink and it was a problem, he was a drunkard.
Although they had no income apart from odd jobs he picked up, Tendai refused to let Aqui work. We would have terrible arguments about it. He would just kick me or punch me or chop me and shout, ‘Do you think I'm not man enough to look after you?’
Some of the women in the township made money by taking goods back and forth to neighbouring Botswana where there were products available that could not be found in Zimbabwe because of the country's strict import controls or were much cheaper. When they told her that they were selling the goods back home for more than five times what they paid, she started doing the same. I would take apples, dried vegetables, embroidered pillowcases, lace shawls and stuffing for cushions to sell and I would bring back tinned sardines, cigarette lighters, mayonnaise, cans of foods and car parts.
It was an arduous journey. She would get the Travel with the Lord bus to Harare then catch the evening train at seven to Bulawayo, crammed in one of the third-class carriages. If she was lucky and there were no delays, she would be there the next morning and in Gaborone, Francistown or the mining town of Selebi Phikwe the following day. She would then sell her goods and use the money to buy as much as she could to take back, mostly from the South Africa-run supermarkets. In Selebi Phikwe she had an uncle with whom she could stay but in the other towns she would have to sleep in the station waiting rooms. These would be packed with men returning from the mines and women like her with mounds of shopping, sitting curled up around their goods to protect them from robbers. Most of the smugglers were female as shopping was seen as a woman's job. When she finally returned to Marondera bus station a week or so after she had set off, she would pay one of the boys with barrows to push the goods to her house.
When people knew I was going to Botswana they would say, ‘Bring me this, bring me that,’ and sometimes they'd give me half down and then when I brought back the thing they wanted they would just finish up.
The first few times I had come back so proud, saying to my husband, ‘Look at all this money,’ and he would say, ‘Great,’ and take it. I'd protest ‘But this is for electricity and rent and my children want bread,’ but he would snatch it and drink it. So I started hiding it, first in the tea tin, which was too easy, then I got the idea of hiding it in the balls of wool as he would just think this is a woman's thing. He would go mad, scratch and scratch and scratch, looking, but then he found that too. Eesh, I cried, how would I buy more things to sell?
* * *
Aqui was not sure which had been the biggest disappointment-marriage or independence. At the beginning she had been so proud to be a wife, sweeping and polishing the shack, swabbing the floor, beating down cobwebs. Once the house was clean she would go to market, baby Heather tied on her back, weaving her way through stalls of cabbages, rubber shoes, ngangas with fetishes, to choose some special food to cook for her shamari. He loved my food. He said he could eat from no one else. The hours could not pass quickly enough for Tendai to come home, put up his feet, take the mug of chibuku which she had ready and tell her stories about his day. She did not mind that he always went out after dinner. But three babies in succession had all been girls-Heather, Valerie, Vivian-and Tendai had turned up late and breathing fumes of whawha for his job at the school one too many times, and everything had changed.
We have an expression in Shona: ‘The sugar is over,’ and that's how I felt. She had started carrying a pad and pen to note things. Thoughts she had; things she remembered.
Tendai hated her noting, tried to grab the pad from her. She was still secretary of the local ZANU cell but life was no better-the whites still lived in big houses and just a few black Chefs were getting rich.
Throughout the Liberation War, Mugabe had promised that when the whites were defeated every black would have their own land. Aqui and her friends had imagined some kind of utopia where everyone would get free electricity and water and no one would have to pass exams but they would all get jobs. Instead, life had barely changed. The skies over the township were still yellow with smoke from all the little fires. It was true that these were free schools and mobile clinics with free inoculations for the babies. She, like everyone else, had celebrated when four and a half of the soapstone birds from Great Zimbabwe had been returned in military planes from South Africa. But prices had gone up and there did not seem to be more jobs. Tendai certainly could not find one. Aqui knew many of the ex-freedom fighters could not get work; she had seen them spending the days roaming around. In a strange twist of fate some of them were now working as security guards for the whites against whom they had fought.
Under the Lancaster House Agreement the government could only acquire land at full market value, which was prohibitively expensive, so hardly any families had been resettled. In 1982 Mugabe had promised that 162,000 families would be resettled within three years of independence. But ten years on less than a third had been given land and these were on socialist-inspired cooperatives which often collapsed because of lack of infrastructure and know-how. Many of the resettled peasants drifted back to towns or commercial farms in search of a steady wage. The whites still controlled more than a third of all land and about 80 per cent of the best.
Aqui's people were still living squashed on the reserve. The name had been changed from Tribal Trust Lands to Communal Areas but nobody brought cattle to replace all those poisoned by the whites or looted by fighters. One of Mugabe's first acts as Prime Minister had been to build Heroes' Acre on a hill west of Harare to commemorate the fallen comrades. There was a 40-metre-high tower protecting the eternal flame, and expensive steel-lined coffins and plaques for those buried there. But in the bush around Zhakata's Kraal, skeletons of fighters were found every year with the rains and no one came with coffins to give them a proper burial.
I would have died for Mugabe but once he was in the Big House he had forgotten all about the people that put him there.
For all Mugabe's conciliatory words at the independence rally, it had not taken long for him to start waging war on his enemies. First of course was the Ndebele leader Joshua Nkomo who had been forced to flee. Less than a year after independence, in January 1981, he had been abruptly demoted from Home Minister to Minister without Portfolio, then in February 1982 he had been sacked from the government. Mugabe had accused him of planning insurrection after a series of bombings and the kidnap and murder of some tourists near Victoria Falls. Aqui did not trust the Ndebele. I knew them as windy people-like a leaf that if a wind came from the east they would go that way and if a wind came from the west they would go the other way. Like Lobengula they just want nice things, the glitter, they don't care about tomorrow. I used to become angry with the stories from the past when the Ndebeles came and killed our men and took our beautiful women, killed the ugly women and children then went back to Matabeleland.
Mugabe called Nkomo ‘the cobra in the house’ and said, ‘The only way to deal effectively with a snake is to strike and destroy its head.’ So in March 1983, at the age of 66, the head of ZAPU had fled for his life from the country he had helped liberate and was now in exile in London. He spent the third anniversary of independence in a cramped rented flat off the Edgware Road. Aqui was shocked about the things Mugabe said Nkomo had done but she still did not think that was the right way to treat an old man.
Many of Nkomo Zipra fighters had been brought into the new national army at independence, but once he had been sacked and they no longer had any representation in government to protect them, they found themselves increasingly victimized. Some fled back into the bush, taking their weapons with them, surviving by holding up buses, robbing stores and raiding farms. Several white farmers had been killed in the attacks. Such banditry, along with intelligence reports that the apartheid regime in Pretoria was training up ex-Zipra combatants in a so-called ‘Super ZAPU’ to destabilize the new black government, gave Mugabe an excuse to show what would happen to ‘dissidents’. He warned in parliament in 1982 that ‘some of the measures we shall take are measures which will be extra-legal… an eye for an eye and an ear for an ear may not be adequate. We might very well demand two ears for one ear and two eyes for one eye.’
Nobody could have dreamt how literally this was meant. When we heard about these dissidents haunting people in the area and the President decided to recruit the Fifth Brigade to fight them I thought he was doing the right thing because I was very suspicious about the Ndebele and Nkomo. He was the one recruiting the dissidents and I thought he was a hypocrite.
But after a while Aqui began to hear rumours about terrible things going on in Matabeleland, worse they said than what happened in the bush during the war. One of her neighbours with relatives there told stories of entire villages being killed. On a train crossing the barren Matabele plains from Bulawayo to Gaborone train, Aqui first heard whispered the word Gukurahundi, a Shona expression for the storm or wind that blows away the chaff before the spring rains.
It was whispered because these days you did not really know who might be listening. Mugabe said there were a lot of enemies trying to destabilize Zimbabwe and had already arrested some South Africans so it was important to have eyes and ears everywhere.
Aqui knew Mugabe was right that dissidents had to be dealt with and shared his anger that people should be trying to disrupt their new independent country. Large arms caches had been discovered on four farms occupied by ex-Zipra fighters. Because of that he had kept the country in a state of emergency, using exactly the same powers that Ian Smith had implemented. One of the first things he had done was set up a trust to buy out the South African publishing company that controlled most newspapers and sack the white editors. Now the Herald and other newspapers sold on street corners were all about his speeches and travels overseas, as was the news on television and radio.
Of course we were proud to have a leader who was met by top people all over the world. Not only was he the newest independence leader on the block but in those Cold War days he was seen as bravely standing against the Soviet Union. In fact he had no real choice in the matter because of his closeness to China which had trained and armed his fighters, but that was conveniently overlooked. He had been received by US President Ronald Reagan at the White House, treated to lavish state banquets in Ireland, and awarded honorary degrees by a number of universities including Edinburgh and Michigan as well as prizes by the United Nations.
But what Aqui heard on the train chilled her blood. From the small fragments she could piece together, Mugabe's armies were terrorizing Matabeleland and decimating villages. Each time they left behind a few survivors so they would warn others, making them watch the rest of their village be burnt alive or dance and sing songs praising ZANU-PF on the graves of the dead. This, they were told, was in revenge for 100 years earlier when the Matabele drove off their cattle, burned huts and took their women.
One woman in a knitted lime-green cap, whom Aqui had met on several occasions when going to sell things in Botswana, told her that after her last trip she used the proceeds to buy maize in Bulawayo but on the way back to her village it was all taken from her at gunpoint by soldiers. When she pleaded that her family had nothing to eat, they laughed and told her, ‘Good, then you will you eat your children and then your dissidents., Her area had had no rains for three years but their shops had been closed down and aid supplies cut off, forcing them to live on rats, lizards and grasshoppers. In the village where the woman's sister had gone to live, they had herded people into huts, then fired bazookas into them to leave pieces of bodies scattered about as warnings.
The stories the Ndebeles told on the border train were so bad you couldn't believe this could be in our Zimbabwe. I learnt they were even killing the children. I didn't like the way the Ndebeles jumped around like grasshoppers, but hurting children is something that makes me too mad.
None of this was being reported in the state media. These were deaths that would never be registered, and the government denied foreign press reports as propaganda spread by ‘Jeremiahs’. When Catholic bishops presented a dossier of atrocities, Mugabe-a Catholic himself-denounced them as ‘mischief makers in religious garb’.
Aqui didn't know what to believe. The woman on the train trembled and sprayed flecks of saliva as she talked and spoke of zambies with yellow faces and slit eyes and Aqui wondered if she was quite right in the head. But in her experience stories came from somewhere. There were no flies without dung, we said.
What would later emerge was that Mugabe had accepted an offer from the secretive Communist dictatorship of North Korea to train a special political regiment to guard him and deal with internal dissidents. A hundred and six North Korean military advisers had slipped into the country in August 1981. The resulting Fifth Brigade was commanded by Colonel Perence Shiri, a former Zanla guerrilla commander, and answered directly to Mugabe rather than the army chief.
The Fifth Brigade was unleashed onto Matabeleland in January 1983. Years later in a brave report called Breaking the Silence, published in 1997, the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace would catalogue in chilling detail how thousands of Ndebele men, women and children were rounded up and taken to interrogation centres where they were held for weeks. Based on testimony from more than 1,000 people, it told of pregnant women beaten with clubs, daily deaths from torture, of people being shot in latrines and told ‘filth joining filth’, and truckloads of bodies being dumped in mineshafts. At one of the detention centres, Stops police camp in Bulawayo, people were kept in cages smeared with the blood and faeces of previous occupants. Nobody knows how many people died in those four years of madness but estimates are more than 10,000, and twenty years on mass graves are still being uncovered.
The whispers from Matabeleland were not the only troubling matters. Once when Aqui went to Harare to get the train to Botswana, she saw Mugabe's motorcade, his long shiny black Bentley with tinted windows, flanked by a dozen armed motorbike outriders. Everyone froze as they heard the sirens and all the cars on the road had to dart out of the way into side streets or they would be shot.*
She had also seen the new ZANU-PF headquarters, a gleaming black office block with a cockerel on top, paid for by the Chinese Communist Party. Set on Rotten Row, it was the tallest building in Harare and the car park seemed to be full of gleaming cars like Mercedes-Benzes. These belonged to the so-called Wabenzi, the Chefs who were getting rich buying hotels and businesses, and demanding bribes for people to do anything. Even the owner of the nearby shebeen in Dombotombo had complained that she was having to grease palms to keep open. Everyone had heard how the Wabenzi all had Swiss bank accounts, sent their children to expensive schools in England and America and held lavish wedding parties for them.
Aqui knew that Mugabe and his wife Sally lived a very decent life, and he had issued a leadership code for senior government and party members to adhere to, restricting their income and forbidding them from owning businesses or more than one farm. But everyone seemed to ignore it. While 30,000 ex-combatants from the war were unemployed, General Mujuru, the army chief, had allegedly made a fortune on kickbacks from defence contracts, and had purchased a hotel, a supermarket chain and three farms. She found it hard to understand why Mugabe could not stop his ministers being so greedy.
For the first few years after he took over she had defended him, telling people that change takes time and pointing out the important work done by Sally's charity, the Child Survival Foundation. Mugabe was always alone, people doing things behind his back. We saw ministers using the money that should have been for building roads and schools for themselves. Sometimes I felt angry with him because I was the one who was suffering, but then I thought, what could he do?
But by the late 1980s she thought it was time enough. In 1988 the Chronicle newspaper had exposed a car scandal which it called Willowgate. Mugabe had banned the import of cars, resulting in a shortage of vehicles. Only ministers or the well-connected could obtain locally made Toyotas from the state-owned Willowvale factory, so they were buying them, then selling them on at several times the price. A commission of inquiry found five ministers guilty as well as a number of MPs and army officers. One minister, Maurice Nyagumbo, who had actually drawn up the leadership code, committed suicide but the others were granted a presidential pardon. ‘Who amongst us has not lied?’ asked Mugabe. ‘Yesterday you were with your girlfriend and you told your wife you were with the President. Should you get nine months for that?’ The only person to lose his job was Geoffrey Nyarota, the editor of the Chronicle.
I was disappointed. We knew we were a rich, country, you could see in the white mans land, and I thought wed live comfortably, all of us. But instead they were grabbing everything just for themselves and leaving our children with nothing.
The party was controlled by a Politburo and Aqui's cell did not even seem to have any input into who became their candidate for Marondera in the forthcoming elections. The person chosen was someone who never came to the area. There had been complaints about some of the ZANU-PF youths roaming the streets with bricks and bars, threatening people not to vote against the party. But she never thought of resigning. It would have been hard to leave the party without raising questions. Besides, Mugabe was the father of Independence.
Tendai laughed when she talked of such things. ‘This is what you wanted, you and your Chimurenga,’ he would say. Aqui, the peacemaker, was tired of quarrelling. Was this what marriage was about? she wondered. She found herself staring at other couples wondering if their lives were the same as hers. How could this man who had looked into her eyes with what she had thought was love now kick her like a stray dog? She should have seen the slyness in his eyes. She rarely went out except for party meetings and when she did she felt pitying eyes on her. She could not confide in their neighbours, many of whom were Malawis, like Tendai's late father, who had come to the new Zimbabwe for a better life. But the shacks were so close together and the walls so flimsy that she knew every word and punch was heard.
When she complained to Tendai that the neighbours talked of him as being always out late enough to hear the hippo cough, meaning the early hours, he replied, ‘What do you expect? A good Shona bull impregnates many women.’
I knew he was seeing other women. My neighbours stopped me from confronting one at the shebeen but once I managed to get the address of one of his girlfriends and went to see her. I told her my children are going hungry because my husband is spending the bread money buying you beer and trinkets. She just laughed. The woman was sturdily built with thick painted lips pouting as if they had been stung by a bee and tottered on heels sharp as daggers. I thought she looked like a witch. Tendai beat Aqui harder than ever when he found out what she had done.
Although Tendai no longer played football, he refereed matches, and would often say he was going refereeing, then come back with lipstick smears on his collar and smelling of perfume. Occasionally when he could not find a lady-friend for the night, he would come home drunk and farting and take Aqui from behind, pumping himself into her as if it were punishment. Even when he hurt her, she stayed quiet, face buried in the mattress so as not to wake the girls. In the morning when she awoke she would look at his handsome features sleeping so gently and hope an arm would reach out like it used to and caress her face. Now he no longer played football he was developing a paunch-he was obviously finding food somewhere even if they were not, a bowl of sadza and peanut relish at the shebeen perhaps. Aqui's stomach growled at the thought.
Aqui's family were surviving on her shopping trips to Botswana but these were becoming riskier. According to the authorities, by 1990 more than 500,000 trips a year across the border were being made by women like her, spending some Z$185m in precious hard currency. It would have been easy to stem the trade by lifting strict import controls to make the goods available in Zimbabwean shops. But instead, the government had started clamping down, opening a new customs post at Plumtree, which meant having to cross the border on bush trails and avoid patrols. The police were so poorly paid that anyone caught could usually bribe their way out, but some women were imprisoned and Aqui decided she would have to stop. If I was caught, then who would feed my children?
Not Tendai. As she lay next to him, she wanted to reach out to smooth a curl of his greased-back hair that had strayed onto his forehead. But if he woke, he would shift away angrily and grind his teeth as if she disgusted him.
Her own face was pinched and drawn and her eyes puffy from tears that never seemed to dry. Every day when the girls came home from school she would be crying. They would say ‘Mama why are you crying?’ but I could not stop. In those days, every day I used to cry and cry and cry. It was God who was looking after me or I would have gone mad. The girls were thin and I grew thinner and thinner as if I were fading away.
*Later he would bring in a law making it illegal for pedestrians to move their upper body in view of the motorcade.