HomeOld_PostsMarking time through bembera memories

Marking time through bembera memories

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THIS week I was in the village doing the seasonal ritual: delivering maize and fertiliser to muchembere.
Never mind her advanced age or the fact that Mwari has been kind to her through off spring that can take good care of her.
Muchembere still insists on tending her own maize crop.
She also looks forward to having her fair share of government inputs support and food aid.
When I query the latter she reminds me she also fought the war, ndakabikira wani.
She derives great pleasure in giving us maize for sadza each time we visit the village.
During my village visits I never cease to marvel at the happiness of people as they go about their routine and simple lives.
This is particularly pronounced during maguta like this past season.
The happiness is a celebration of plentiful harvest and regular water and forestry supplies.
But on this last occasion the mood in the village was subdued.
In hushed tones, they spoke of the abominable act.
This was a village angry and united in condemnation and sorrow.
The sombre atmosphere brought back sad memories of an incident that happened several decades ago at our homestead in the same village.
It is a paivepo/once upon a time story that I should perhaps share with my son on one of the occasions he asks for ngano.
Images came back of a white policeman, mujonhi, never mind this was initially a term for black policemen recruited from South Africa.
He was standing on a rocky outcrop near the smouldering remains of what had been our granary, surveying the homestead and its surroundings.
I stood sorrowfully, close to a group of men, who included my father and were all too eager to share their views with the mujonhi’s black assistant.
Our homestead had been razed to the ground in a suspected arson attack.
Village suspicion fell on an old woman who days before had had a heated argument with my father over agricultural fields boundaries.
In the heat of the moment she had threatened my father, ‘uchazviona’.
The village itself had many tensions not least accusations that we had been resettled on a neighbouring village’s grazing lands.
But on this occasion the villages were united on the identity of the arsonist.
She cast a forlorn figure among the women group that came to commiserate with my mother and grandmother.
My mother refused a handshake from the suspect.
Emotions got the better of her.
Mbuya did her bembera act.
Bembera is a dignified Shona way of naming and shaming a suspect without naming!
I cannot recall the words used in the bembera, but perhaps went like Memory Chirere’s poem, ‘Bembera’;
“Pamakambondishandisa
Ndakati kudii?
Zvandave kuzvishandira
Moti kudii?
Moti hero rombe
Riri kuita zvinhu zvaro?”
My mother targeted the suspect while my grandmother used a long known tradition of naming without naming a culprit.
The passage and mischief of time brought back those old images.
These are images of an incident from a distant past.
Time flies.
This incident happened way before village elders shared with us the heroics of the Njanja and Chikonamombe people in anchoring the First Chimurenga in Chikomba.
This was long before history textbooks acknowledged an 1895 incident in Njanja as the spark to the First Chimurenga.
On this particular occasion, the Native Department’s tax police were shot at and ‘sjambokked’ by the Njanja people.
The Njanja had long had guns as a result of their Portuguese ‘ancestral’ links.
My Ambuya’s bembera took place way before Mbavarira’s Scotch cart, chikochikari, made its way to the village.
Until then sleighs, zvireyi, were the common means of transporting grain in the village.
Today every other homestead has a chikochikari such that it’s now hard to imagine life without this Scottish heritage.
This was before Comrade Max and his notorious gang of madzakutsaku (Muzorewa’s Auxillary army) at Manyene started making their forays into the village, claiming to be ZANLA, and even singing our “Zanela ishumba Smith inyama…”
Ambuya’s bembera show happened way before the first Pentecostal crusade at Unyetu where upon village cripples we had never seen before, and never saw again, threw away crutches and wheel chairs in a show of miraculous healing.
This bembera performance took place way before my fellow villagers had been exposed to food aid or food for work, queueing and jostling for ‘gifts from the USA and EU’.
It was several decades before agricultural inputs; ‘fertiliser nembeu yaaMugabe’ became our seasonal right.
This happened before I knew fertility, specifically; that procreation was the foundation of our humanity.
A few years after mbuya’s bembera I found myself in the arson suspect’s house enjoying a secret meal, kukwata, of sadza nemowa.
My friendship with her grandson grew until we could openly have meals at each other’s place.
Our families also grew closer to each other.
The arson incident is now a distant past, karekare zvako.
Time heals.
The arsonist is still unknown.
The unnamed culprit must be suffering eternal guilt each time the village stereo belts ‘Ndiyaniko wapisa musha’.
Named and shamed without being named by ambuya.
That is the beauty of bembera.
My sojourn into this distant past did not help in dealing with the village’s current struggle with the recent abominable act.
I counselled the villagers this is the mischief of time.
Soon all will be well and the incident will be another time marker to life’s tales.
They just stared at me.
But I know time heals.

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