SOWE rekuDomboshava had been the pastor’s choice.

He had said that there was power in those mountains; power to unlock God’s favour.

His sermon on God’s favour had been inspiring.

He had said: “God’s favour will give you the job you don’t qualify to have. God’s favour will give you the spouse everyone thinks you don’t deserve. God’s favour will open doors for you. God’s favour will get you the visa to the UK and the US nyore nyore with no questions asked.”

The detachment laboured up the granite slope in a rugged extended battle-formation.

It pooled the muscular young man’s entire imagination watching the possessed young people dashing from scanty cover to scanty cover in ‘virtual’ combat. It was more than he had learnt in his regular military training at Mbalabala or later on at Wafa Wafa on the shores of Lake Kariba when he joined the commando regiment.

The fascination was especially so with the possessed college girl and the girl who was medium to the spirit of the comrade whose bone had been recovered. Their masculine deportment, when possessed, turned their femininity into a joke.

The confrontational voices from the other side of the mountain top had stopped as if the disagreeing parties had fatigued themselves to a truce.

The pristine mountain air now carried a different sound … a mint trickle of sound that amplified with their ascent.

Cde Sarudzai, the elderly woman who had prayed without insolence, recognised the sound as mbira and her heart raced.

She stepped out, her basic instinct homing in on the signal of ancient rhythm and rhyme.

The small woman stepped out too, entranced by the new affiliation to the strange spiritual world.

Cde Sarudzai, the elderly woman who had prayed without insolence, strained her ears but still could not yet make out the identity of the mbira piece enchanting the graveyard hour …

She recognised the hour as the hour yematare and wondered as to who would be playing the instrument …

Pamusorosoro pegomo …!

At that hour …!

Her mind idled on the thing about mbira … the indescribable mystery thing about the ancient instrument.

The bishop of an Apostolic sect she had once joined had often warned kuti: “Mbira hadzizi right.”  

And it had been his constant boast kuti: “Ini ndakazvarirwa muchechi, ndikakurira muchechi. Saka zvemadhimoni handiite.”

She had found the reasoning archaic and parochial.

She had known deep inside herself that the sectarian’s limited worldview could not be depended upon to handle the complexities of their lives. He had known no other life except white garments and, to him, all problems had had a ‘one-size-fit-all’ solution — twumatombo, twusauti, mvura, mazai, tsono nemashura.

Cde Sarudzai, the elderly woman who had prayed without insolence, remembered that when she grew up in the village, the majority of the men had been mbira players, but not in the Western sense of classifying such people as musicians. 

Mbira had been a way of life and not at all equivalent to a profession. She remembered difficulties in handling similar cultural and semantic incongruities between religion and African spirituality at different stages of her life. She had noted that those who had equated African spirituality with religion had done so more often to the detriment of their own personal development. She had thought that African spirituality was a factor of their DNA and sustained their African identity in a manner no Abrahamic and, for that matter, no borrowed religion could ever do.   

Her paternal grandfather had talked about the mythical origins of mbira as the creation of Chaminuka, the son of Murenga, the godfather of Zimbabwe.

He had said that the first piece to be composed had been ‘Nyamaropa’ and it had been a song of war … a kind of siren that lured men to mortal combat.

Further up the granite slopes, Cde Sarudzai, the elderly woman who had prayed without insolence, could tell kuti the sound carried by the crisp midnight air was not ‘Nyamaropa’.

It was ‘Bangiza’.

And she remembered an old uncle’s description of ‘Bangiza’ as ‘serious business.’

‘Bangiza’ was the piece clansmen played knowing kuti the heroes of old would want to know why. It was a kind of ‘May-Day call’ to ancestral spirits in time of trouble.

And here it was, being played by as yet mysterious figures, in the dead of the night, pamusorosoro pegomo. Who could be sending the distress signal?

Her own flight from home to join the struggle had been preceded by the flight of three uncles and two aunties. She had watched her grandfather play ‘Bangiza’ more often than was usual. And she had seen her grandmother go kurukuva in the kitchen hut, clap her hands and whisper to the dead, her sallow face imploring them to protect her children from the carnage. And, at the end of the war, only two had returned. And they had not known where the others had fallen. The old man and old woman had endured a second and worse struggle of trying to come to terms with their loss. They had died broken-hearted and the trauma had been infectious. You could not watch their distress and remain untouched.

Cde Sarudzai’s energy to climb the granite slope seemed to increase with the strength of the signal from the ancient instruments. Maidei, the smaller and younger woman walking beside her, was finding it difficult to keep up with the elderly woman. It had not been so before the stampede and the sounds of mbira. Before the stampede, it was the elderly woman who had struggled to keep up.

They got to the top of the mountain. The moon was now to the west of the mountain and the other side was dark. They saw the glow of a fire. The sound of mbira was coming from there.

Cde Sarudzai had never heard ‘Bangiza’ played so crisply … so crisply, each note could knock you down with ecstasy.

To be continued…