Petina Gappah - An Elegy for Easterly

That Edna makes a spectacle of herself is not surprising. She is given to bursts of emotion calibrated for public consumption. She is always ready to be offended on behalf of others. When I told their family twenty-one years ago that I was leaving her brother, she spoke to her sister in a whisper of theatrical resonance, the better to reach my ears.

‘ Ngazviende ,’ she said, ‘and good riddance. Real women were divorced to make place for a mhanje such as this one.’

Thus my introduction to the word mhanje : their word for the lowest form of womanhood, womanhood without womanliness, mhanje being a barren woman, a woman without issue, unproductive, a fruitless husk. There was no question that it could be her brother who was infertile. He had proved his virility in the three children that he had with a woman he had been married to even as he was marrying me in London in a council office with no central heating before an official with mucus drip-dripping into his handkerchief.

I thought I loved him; but that was in another country.

I exulted to hear him say, ‘I want a wife who shares in my dreams; an equal, not a subordinate.’ I helped him to write furious letters of righteous indignation condemning the white-settler regime and the situation in his country. I forgot about the fight against apartheid in my own country as his battle seemed more urgent. We wrote letters and hosted exiles and through long nights we argued about Fanon and Biko and Marx and Engels. That was before we arrived in the country after independence. Before I found out that my husband already had a wife with three children, whose names were not gentle on the tongue.

Edna’s grave-diving attempts are the only hitch in the choreographed order of the funeral procession. After the immediate family, the important personages scatter earth over the coffin, the members of the Politburo file past, then the heads of the army and the air force, then the Police Commissioner and the Director of Prisons, then the parliamentarians and the judges according to seniority.

In the end, my words to Edna and my husband’s family were no more than empty threats. I was persuaded to stay, although I can no longer remember what empty promises I believed. I came to know the subtlety of the intonations of their language, that chimbuzi with the voice lowering over the middle and last syllable was a toilet, while chimbudzi with the extra d and the voice rising on the middle and the last syllable was a young goat. I learned to pronounce his children’s names, and in the end did not need him, as he had done at first, to explain words to me.

‘I named the first child Rwauya, meaning “death has come”, and the second Muchagura to mean “you shall repent”, and the last Muchakundwa, “you shall be defeated”. They are messages for the white oppressors, warning signs to the white man.’

Thus had he stamped his patriotism on his children before leaving them with names that could mean nothing to the intended recipient of the messages, to the white man who chose to live in ignorance of native tongues. The white man has been conquered now, twice over, first in the matter of government, and now in the matter of the land that has been repossessed, but the children remain with their ominous names. I got to know them well because I replaced their mother after their father divorced her.

‘There is no need for anything official,’ my husband said. ‘We are married under customary law, with no official papers. I will give her gupuro and she can take that to her family.’ He picked out a pot with a red and yellow flower on it and gave it to her as a sign that he had divorced her. She died three years after that, but still, with her flowered pot and her early death, she got the better end of the bargain.

Like the worthless dogs that are his countrymen, my husband believed that his penis was wasted if he was faithful to just one woman. He plunged himself into every bitch on heat, even that slut of a newsreader, the ruling party’s First Whore, who lends the services of her vacuous beauty to their nightly distortions. She has been bounced from man to man, first as the mistress of a businessman who died with the red lips that spoke of his illness and then as the mistress of the Governor of the Central Bank, and after that, as the mistress of a minister without portfolio. Just like my husband, to salivate over other men’s leavings.

Muchakundwa and Muchagura are solemn in their dark suits. They live in California now, where they study on government scholarships. They have chosen to seek their fortunes far from this sovereign land that will never, a trillion trillion times never, be a colony again.

They left and Rwauya remained.

He would have been considered a failure, Rwauya, with his two O levels, but he is just the sort of person who thrives in this new dispensation, where to keep ahead is to go to every rally and chant every slogan. Even with all the patronage that is meant to oil his path to success, he has run down two butcheries and a bottle store, and, of six passenger buses, only one remains. He is full of schemes and ideas that never come to anything.

‘ Ndafunga magonyeti ,’ he said to his father and me, from which we understood that he was thinking of investing in haulage trucks. ‘If I buy just two magonyeti , I will be okay.’

When the magonyeti scheme went down the primrose path along which went all others, he went from importing fuel and sugar to flying to Congo DRC and looting that country of cultural artefacts. And when Congo had been emptied of masks with cut-out eyes and old wooden bowls and long-phallused fertility figures, he turned his thoughts to local stone sculpture.

‘ Ndafunga zvematombo ,’ he said, and began to export substandard chiselled bits of soapstone that were called Eagle or Spirit or Medium or Emptiness. ‘If I make just two shipments, I will be okay.’

Now he wants his hands on the farm that my husband left. He arrived at the house four nights ago, looking like the death of his name, his eyes red from crapulence, with the mangy dreadlocks that are now a declaration of African authenticity if you believe that the authentic Africa is a place without combs or water to wash the hair. He gave me an embrace that lasted a fraction longer than it should have, his hand brushing my bottom far from the shoulder where it should have been.

‘You are looking very good, Mainini .’

I have learned to dispense with the niceties of social discourse with Rwauya and go straight to the heart of the matter. To my ‘What is it you want?’ he launched into a half-coherent account involving one of the six ministers without portfolio, the Minister’s three nephews, one of whom was married to the daughter of the Chief of Police in Mazowe District who was in turn married to a niece of the Lands Minister.

‘They have hired thugs to camp on the farm. Imagine, just two years after Father took it over from that Kennington,’ he said. ‘You have to do something to protect the farm. This is an invasion. They have no right to take it. My father died for this country. That farm is my birthright.’

‘What is it that I can do?’

‘ Izvi zvotoda President. Ask to see the President. Mainini , you have access, just ask to see the President.’

I could have talked to the President once, when he was still called the Prime Minister, before the Presidential Powers Amendment Act, before he ditched the Marxist austerity of his safari suits for pinstripes and gold cufflinks, before he married his second wife, Her Amazing Gracefulness, Our First Lady of the Hats. I was close to the inner circle then, close to his first wife, and we talked about women and education into the night.