ROMANTICISING the past is a natural human frailty.
Everything is cast in positive terms.
The good past paired against the bad present.
The tendency is for a past seen through the lenses of an appreciative youth, good old days in the village herding cattle, dip tank fights and coping with early adolescence.
In the ghetto, from my limited exposure, I recall street sport, money-makers, car parades, films and girls.
Every village experience, no matter how bad, is a treasured life lesson today.
Often I have written about the good that came out of Unyetu in the 1970s.
Digging deeper into the memory bank, I have now stumbled upon a darker, weeping side of this village.
I had almost forgotten about the lice (inda) menace.
These lived off us from the waistband of our shorts, in the seams of our clothing and in any other hidden parts.
I had never seen them in large numbers until an incident with Matambu during a swimming session in Mutorahuku stream.
Matambu got hold of my shorts and started inspecting the waistband.
Excitedly, he called over everyone to see the lice on my shorts.
I was going to give the inspection a miss, but the group started shouting my name and pushing me to the front.
It was a horror-show that I came face-to-face with; a waist band size colony of overfed lice.
I checked my waist and for the first time saw the scars from lice activity.
Later that evening, my big sister ran a hot iron along the waistband of my two shorts.
Now I have a feeling that lice have long since left the village.
No one talks about them anymore unlike in the 1970s.
As if lice were not enough bother, the village also had to deal with tsikidzi (house fleas).
These, unlike inda, I never saw with the naked eye, but they ravaged our bodies at night, especially when sleeping in shared dwellings with chickens.
It normally happened when we had visitors at home and ran out of sleeping space.
The ferocity of tsikidzis’ nightly attacks was captured in a jit song of then, “Tsikidzi dzinoruma, hadziuraye.”
In recent trips to the village, it appears only the tales remain and even these are fast-disappearing too.
Gwirikwiti and nhova were afflictions that terrorised babies in the village.
Gwirikwiti (measles) tormented infants.
The shrill, tiring and irritating baby cries, accompanied by shuffling of feet up and down by elderly women, was a prelude to a child burial along the banks of Mutorahuku the following morning.
Nhova (depressed fontanel), perhaps due to dehydration was the unmistakable death messenger.
The cruel harbinger kept traditional medicine experts on their toes, ensuring infant mortality remained high.
Today, measles attacks have become very mild, thanks to immunisation, while nhova, as understood then, has also since abandoned the village.
Lastly was the maperembudzi (leprosy) scare.
I have never seen a leprosy patient.
In Unyetu, the closest I came to witnessing this affliction was from my mother’s tales of how she nursed her leper grandmother in Nhohwe country in the 1940s before eventual transfer to Mutemwa Leprosy Centre in Mutoko.
Sunday school lessons as a BCU also gave me hope that this horrible disease could be cured, as in the case of Naaman the Syrian.
But that did not stop pranks on leprosy.
Once, word moved around that a talking baboon had appeared in a village kwaMudawarima and advised people to wear bangles of sack material in order to avoid a leprosy epidemic.
There was no modern social media then, but word spread like veldfire and teachers had a torrid time getting us to throw away our bangles the next morning.
Again this is largely yesterday’s disease.
There were to be a couple other leprosy pranks during my time in Unyetu.
But of all these horrors of the 1970s Unyetu, nothing beats my angry recollections of the school toilet.
To answer the call of nature at school, you had to ask your teacher, in good English, for permission to go to the toilet.
“Excuse me mistress, may I please go to the toilet?”
It was a very complicated sentence to remember and quite a number opted for the easier option of just wetting oneself.
But getting the sentence correct was no salvation.
The school pit latrine was a rectangular block with a urinary wall in the first compartment.
Each time I went there during the rain season, barefooted, there would be stool in the urinary drain.
How it got there, I was never able to figure out.
After the visit I needed some time to recover, spitting incessantly.
The latrine visit affected my appetite and most times I ended up donating my boiled pumpkins or green mealie cobs to the other schoolmates.
The school latrine traumatised me.
To this day, when looking for a place for my child, the school toilet is my first port of call.
Each time I recall the Unyetu school toilet, my feet itch and I feel like throwing up.
I have not been in one since, but I hope, like the other darker side of the 1970s, this has also since left the village school.