By Farayi Mungoshi

ONE of the most horrid memories I’ve had to live with throughout my life happened when I was about six years old.
I recall that day vividly.
It was back at my grandfather’s farm in Maronda Mashanu, Chivhu, and we were out cultivating the fields.
My grandfather was on the plough and I was behind him inspecting the cultivated crop.
My sister, Junior, was ‘heading’ the cattle upfront.
In those days, most of us youngsters were crazy about break-dancing or robot dancing.
In fact, this kind of dancing took the world by storm back in the 1980s, of course inspired by African-Americans.
Whenever I got a chance, I would break-dance; it could be anywhere and everywhere, from my room to the dining-room, kitchen, anywhere I got a chance to strut my stuff.
It so happened that on this particular day while we were taking a breather as grandfather inspected something on the plough in the middle of the field, I decided to showboat once again.
It did dawn on me the danger this posed as my sister upfront actually had the rope tying up the cattle wrapped around her finger.
I did not see anything dangerous for me to dance a little.
Maybe it was the city life in me.
As soon as I lifted my hand, ready to do the caterpillar (a type of dance), I ticked off the cattle and they took off in fright, reaping apart my sister’s finger.
I watched in confusion as blood gushed out of her little finger.
My grandfather was shouting at me, but I cannot remember what he was saying; it is all a blur now.
Grandfather ran with my sister to the house just across the field.
He presented Junior to my grandmother, VaChinhobvu, who immediately rushed out of the house and into the bush.
She soon returned with some herbs that she crushed and made into a paste.
She applied the paste on Junior’s finger.
Over time, the finger healed and even started growing its nail back again although she had been maimed for life.
Much later I relived this moment in my life.
It filled me with goosebumps, but above that, it made me more curious since my sister and I had managed to fix our differences and I had healed from my guilt.
I never thought this experience would one day influence the way I think or contribute to the mindset I have now.
I realised then how we’d survived through the ages as a people without hospitals, not that there were no doctors in our villages; we had them but just like our spirituality and religion, that trade was attacked.
The wise men and women were attacked and labelled witchdoctors and outcasts.
Myths were circulated about them and before long, we all forgot these were our respectable medicine men/professional herbalists who knew the land, its herbs and their purposes.
They were the very people we’d run to whenever somebody within the family got sick or ill.
Nearly every family had such a person with such knowledge and it was passed on from one generation to another.
Others would actually dream of these herbs and their purposes but it soon became unfashionable with the coming of hospitals and Western medicine.
Somehow we got the twisted notion (and I speak on behalf of the later generations) that they were dabbling in witchcraft when in actual fact they were doing what they had always been doing for generations – serving the people.
The problem was that there was a new player in town but we were oblivious of his intentions.
Little did we know that he was here to influence our culture with his own and to dilute our spirituality and beliefs till we started questioning the purity of our origins.
We became more of a religious people than a spiritual people, serving more a structure and system than God, like we’d always done.
We started looking down on ourselves.
The time of reckoning only begins when a black child starts asking questions about who he/she is and his/her purpose in life.
And that normally happens when one’s eyes become open to the injustices that the black people have had to endure at the hands of the whiteman.
For as long as his/her eyes are closed, he/she will never know that even some capsules given at pharmacies are a concoction of natural herbs picked from his/her ancestors’ backyard.
I, for one, was very sceptic about herbs as I grew up.
Now that I am grown up, I know why I was sceptic.
It was because I had a twisted understanding of what Christianity was/is. I was fed on what I was told by the mfundisi at church and not what I read from the Bible.
Mfundisi’s church doctrine became the backbone of my beliefs. Lots of people in Zimbabwe today still live their lives according to what the prophet or pastor says.
Sadly, many are deceived.
They do not even bother to at least check the scriptures to confirm that what their pastor is saying agrees with what God truly expects of them as individuals or maybe the prophet like the whiteman is just trying to find a way to control the minds of people so that they can give more money to the church or rather to him (prophet).
The same thing happened to our predecessors.
Some stopped passing on age-old information and knowledge systems, like that of our plants and herbs, simply because they are now ‘Christian’ and according to the pastor, making ‘paste’ from a concoction of herbs picked up in the field in order to heal a fellow brother is devilish and evil.
How could this be evil when a life has been spared?
No spirit was conjured up from the ‘dark realm’ to pour out its powers to heal the person, just herbs and plants that God put on the earth for our consumption and use.
The day I realised I had been lied to, I became more curious about everything African, so I went back to my grandmother.
I asked her about her knowledge and understanding of herbs and she told me that everything she knew about plants and herbs was taught to her by my great-grandmother, Japi.
In other words, it’s information passed down through the ages and could be as old as the earth we walk upon.
She (VaChinhobvu) did not dream dreams like others, neither did she see visions or hear voices.
She was simply told and shown.
How different then is that from a person who goes to school to learn medicine?
We just had a different way of doing things and that too should be respectable.
At 94, VaChinhobvu is a Christian, but her Christianity has not deleted old VaJapi’s lessons.
Over the years, Westernisation has reprogrammed our thinking, programming us to accept Western culture over our own.
We have subconsciously looked away from our own capabilities and focused on what others are doing, but I would like to believe that now is the time for us to look to ourselves.
As Africans we need to look to ourselves to find our way back to greatness because it is from within that we find true liberation from colonial mental shackles.