Petina Gappah - An Elegy for Easterly

My mother liked Sisi Blandina for different reasons. She did things without being told like arranging the clothes in all our cupboards according to colour and polishing the floors with Cobra polish with such vigour that my father complained that they were too slippery and my mother said he should buy the fitted carpets that she had set her heart on. Instead, my father said, ‘Well, well, we may as well invite the Prime Minister to hold his next rally here and not to bother with Rufaro or Gwanzura,’ because Sisi Blandina sang songs from the war as she bathed and scrubbed her skin with a pumice stone.

Munya and I knew that there had been a war, but it was only through Sisi Blandina that it came to life in our house. She told us stories of the war, the guerrillas marching to her village in Lalapanzi and demanding food, the soldiers following the guerrillas and threatening to shoot the villagers who gave the guerrillas food, and then more guerrillas coming and threatening to shoot all vatengesi , traitors who sold them out to the soldiers or refused to give them food. They shot into the air to frighten people, and when her grandmother’s dog Pfungwadzebenzi barked, a guerrilla shot him in the stomach and he limped off to the forest to die. Munya put his hand on Sisi Blandina’s knee and said, ‘When Chenai grows up and buys me a dog, I won’t call him Spider, but Pfungwadzebenzi.’

She told us that the villagers stayed up all night in a pungwe , a night rally at which guerrilla commanders with bushy beards denounced the Smith regime, told them about gutsaruzhinji , the socialism they would bring upon ending the days of Smith. Their voices were hoarse as the villagers chanted the new slogans and sang the new revolutionary songs, while young men with rifles danced to those same songs that Sisi Blandina taught us.

‘ What to do with Smith?

Hit him on the head until he comes to his senses!

What to do with the ugly crow?

Hit him on his head until he comes to his senses!

What to do with Muzorewa?

Hit him on the head until he comes to his senses!

Until when?

Until we rule this country of Zimbabwe! ’

I remembered that for the first five years of my life, I lived in a country called Rhodesia with Ian Smith as Prime Minister, and then in Zimbabwe-Rhodesia with a Prime Minister called Abel Muzorewa, and now the country was called Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe was Prime Minister. As for Munya, born on the cusp of independence, just one year away from being among the special born-frees, the songs meant nothing at all.

And so we held our own pungwes in my bedroom with Munya and me taking on the role of the villagers and Sisi Blandina as our commander; we played out the stories that we thought had happened only in Lalapanzi.

‘I learned even more songs at the camp in Mozambique,’ Sisi Blandina said. ‘The guerrillas came back and asked for young boys and girls to go with them to be trained and we went all the way through to Chimoio and Nyadzonia in Mozambique.’

We sang those training camp songs as Sisi Blandina walked Munya and me to school, swinging our arms in hers while we swung our book cases on the other arms; we marched to their rhythm and chanted hau as she led us in our favourite song, the one we asked for over and over again.

‘ We shall go from here (hau)

And head for Moza (hau)

Yugoslavia (hau)

And China (hau)

They shall give us (hau)

An arsenal of weapons (hau)

To take with us (hau)

To Lancaster House (hau)

Do you doubt us? (hau)

Do you doubt us? (hau) ’

‘Everyone took a new name, a war name, a strong name,’ Sisi Blandina said. ‘I wanted to call myself Freedom, but there were already seven with that name, and even one called Freedom-now, and four other people called Liberty. Then one of the commanders told us that we were fighting for autonomy and for self-rule and for self-determination, and so that became my name.’

‘That is a long name,’ I said in wonder.

Sisi Blandina laughed and said, ‘No, just Autonomy. I am Blandina Autonomy Mubaiwa. Some of us girls were trained to fight, but the younger ones like me, and some who could not do the exercises, cooked for the guerrillas and washed their clothes and we sang and we kept them company at night. But the first night, they said I was in Geneva, and they sent me back to the other girls who were also in Geneva.’

‘Is Geneva in Mozambique?’ my brother asked.

‘That is not for you to know,’ she said. ‘Your sister will know soon enough. See, already her breasts are poking out.’

I stormed off without hearing more, furious that she had voiced my deepest shame. My breasts had started to sprout three months earlier, and I walked with a stoop to hide them. I thought no one had noticed, but Sisi Blandina noticed everything. When my period came, Sisi Blandina was there to say, ‘Well, you are in Geneva now, and you will be visiting regularly. Better make sure those boys you like to play with keep themselves to themselves.’

I was mortified because I knew what she was talking about. The women from Johnson & Johnson had come to the school, and separated us from the boys so that they could tell us secrets about our bodies. They said the ovum would be released from the ovary and travel down the Fallopian tube and, if it was not fertilised, it would be expelled every twenty-two to twenty-eight days in the act of menstruation. It was an unsanitary time, they said. Our most effective weapon against this effluence was the arsenal of the sanitary products that Johnson & Johnson made with young ladies like us in mind, they said, because Johnson cared.

I came to know many things about Sisi Blandina. I spied on her and read her letters; I read the ones she wrote before she posted them, letters written in her small rounded handwriting, letters with long elaborate beginnings and little news. ‘Chenai is growing breasts,’ she said in one, and I was angry that she would tell my secrets to people in Lalapanzi. I tore up the letter, and dropped it to the floor. Sometimes, she cried, for no reason at all, and I heard her when I woke up late at night in our bedroom.

She had admirers at the shops and all the gardeners in our road whistled if they were out in the road when she walked past. Even Mukoma Joseph who worked for Mr Shelby from number twenty-five and had married Sisi Maggie and sent her off to the rural areas said in his lisp, ‘ Ende sister makabatana , you are so well put together.’

She ignored Mukoma Joseph and the others and talked only to Mukoma George who worked at the Post Office and who made sure to watch for us as we walked past.

‘Ah, hello sister Chenai, hello mfana Munya, masikati masikati ,’ he said.

‘ Masikati Mukoma George,’ we greeted him back.

‘ Hesi kani , Blandina,’ he said.

‘ Ho nhai , so I am the one that you greet last?’ she said.

‘Last but not least, Blandina, you know that,’ he said.

They lingered and talked while Munya and I moved ahead of them. One day, Mukoma George ran after me as I walked home alone from recorder practice.