THIS week I received the sad news that Mbuya Nduna had passed on in the village.
I had always known her as Ambuya since the late 1960s.
Her grandchildren were my age mates.
One of them, Petros, I remember for teaching us how to trap birds using home-made glue.
He also recited to us Shona stories from upper primary school grades.
He was my original source of the Zizi naNhengure story.
I laughed uncontrollably when he finished.
Much later I came across the stories in books and realised I had been too generous to credit him with literary creativity.
It was in Ambuya Nduna’s kitchen hut that I first tasted sadza remhunga.
Great aroma, enticing colour, but not so great a taste, I felt then.
Today I love this sadza.
At her homestead there was a dog called ‘Tigerenendye’, a contemporary of our Zvirimumoyo.
I want to think this dog naming was beyond her.
Eating at her place was not considered kukwata (forbidden eating) for us.
Forty three years ago she lost her husband, Sekuru Nduna.
This was to be the first funeral in the village that I had opportunity, as an infant, to spy on.
Ambuya, or Murehwa, as we now called her, was by my calculation over 100 years though a national registry clerk had put her age closer to mine.
Today she reminds me of the passing of an era.
She was the epitome of unhu/ubuntu in the village; generous, morally upright, polite, submissive to authority and a pillar of spirituality, albeit Methodism.
Right-thinking villagers were justifiably riled when a team of Tsikamutanda fraudsters conned her of her beast a few years ago.
I still feel, as a community, we did not do enough to protect our elder in her time of vulnerability.
Ambuya has gone away with a big chunk of the village’s unhu/ubuntu.
As I lament this village loss my mind keeps straying into Unyetu of the 1970s.
I recall how Ambuya’s son had, during zoro, lost three of our cattle after they mysteriously strayed from the village herd.
Mbuya Nduna, my parents and my own grandmother, for several months, covered every square mile within a 50 kilometre radius of home searching for the lost cattle.
Together the team also sought the intervention of diviners, but without success.
Eventually they gave up.
Yet when one would expect relations to be dented by the incident, the two families grew closer.
And as fate would have it one of the beasts turned up a couple of years later.
The occasion was jointly celebrated.
The 1970s village also reverberated to mbira sounds.
There were daylight sessions on Unyetu Hill and night encounters kwaErisha.
Erisha was a renowned spirit medium of the Njanja.
He would get possessed with the spirits of Muroro (Njanja) and Chirwa (Hungwe).
Erisha had an able assistant in Masiyambi.
The village had other gwenyambiras of note like Bhereni, Munaro and my classmates Wonder and Paradzayi.
During the Erisha biras, Erisha and aides would usually disappear around 10 pm shortly after Muroro’s dare and come back around 3 am for Chirwa’s dare.
We soon learnt the party would have gone to Magangara for a sacred mbira performance
Magangara is the ancestral home for the Njanja and Hungwe people.
In the 1940s/50s Magangara autochthons left to make way for Matenganyika Native Purchase areas under the colonial ‘land reform programme’. These land buyers came from Chivi, Gutu, Chipinge, Bikita and Zaka.
The Njanja and Hungwe became trespassers to their Magangara, which was bought by these ‘matenganyika’.
Relations with new settlers became frosty and mbira sounds left Magangara.
The sound occasionally returned during Erisha’s night visits.
The war came and Erisha and Masiyambi were swallowed by it.
Mbira sounds left Magangara and the village for good.
The recent land reform has left the injustice intact.
On a recent visit to the village, I found young men from the village at sixes and sevens trying to find a solution for a firewood crisis threatening the upcoming kurova guva ceremony for our late Sabhuku.
The titled owners of Magangara will not relax their ban on firewood collecting by the villagers.
Departed Sinyoros are witnesses to this abomination.
I also recall how, towards the end of winter, village elders arranged for the collection of gifts to give to the delegation that went on the annual Matonjeni pilgrimage.
The gifts consisted of cash and small grains cereals.
The delegations returned with Matonjeni water which was distributed and used in brewing of beer at various mutoro.
The beer was used in the subsequent mikwerera (rainmaking ceremonies).
Not long after rains fell signaling the start of the cropping season.
The mikwerera dances, that were important for their symbolic expression of inducing rain to fall, like mbira sounds and Mbuya Nduna’s hunhu/ubuntu, have left the village.
To the sounds of Methodist hymns Mbuya Nduna has bid her farewell.
She leaves behind a village struggling to right its pasts and identify its spiritual identity.
Mbuya Nduna was a rare icon from Unyetu.
Go well Murehwa.