Faith's introduction

 

She spread her fingers and let her hand rest on top of the soil. Then slowly, as though stuck in a trance, Rudo dug her fingernails deeper into the dirt. Just until her fingertips were covered with a delicate lining of dust the colour of market spices. She began tracing her initials with her pinky. RGG. Rudo Grace Gumbo. Gumbo was her mother’s maiden name. And although mummy dearest Faith was contentedly married to Rudo’s father, her naming practices iterated a form of self-actualisation most people found insubordinate. She had hated the idea of a child she grew from scratch making it safely to this realm only to then be accredited to its father.

 

This gumption was one of the few remnants of Faith’s girlhood. An epoch backed by the soundtrack of Taketime’s Pamberi NeHondo! radio show; Gooooooooddddd afternoon Zimbabwe! They call me Taketime but just like you I am chasing our freedom! Coming at you from our sister in arms Mozambique, the updates from the frontlines… The air would ripple from the shift in energy coming from a place intangible to the likes of the Gumbo clan. Day after day, as the sun sat in that very ripe stage of the day, Faith would feel the moisture being syphoned out of her bones, wondering if she’d ever become a part of something bigger than herself. The cadence of ZANLA’s news presenters aimed to have this effect on the desolate and vulnerable blacks at the time. 1977. The war ablaze, Faith’s village asleep. If her family had valued educating little girls as much as they did little boys, she might have known that her homestead was actually located in the Mudzi Tribal Trust Lands.

 

She started to scratch at the eczema patch in the crook of her left arm. The news anchor’s voice had a way of triggering a wave of guilt that caused her skin condition to flare up. Fri—dhom...The word sat heavy in her mouth. Faith watched as flakes of her dead skin floated back to the earth against the background of draught-stricken farmlands. Farm-patches to be more accurate. The few cornstalks that had managed to wither further into their lifecycle hunched over as though nostalgic for the coolness provided beneath the soil. If not for the boisterous melodies from Taketime’s news-hour, she might have succumbed to the oblivion laced in the nature of the place. Would it be possible to escape? Would she ever leave behind the scales of decay and stagnation iridescently cast against all fated to bare the Gumbo name?

 

She shifted her hips to the left, slamming her train of thought to a halt. Her legs were spread open and in between lay a tarp of masau her mother had just bartered at one of the market stalls. The fruits’ preparation rites were stealing her appetite. She would have to sort through them later. She wondered what it might be like to rebuke Rhodesia and clamber towards a nation built for the people, by the people. But wondering only gets you so far, and all it gave her was a pair of buttocks now numb from the exhaustion of wasted potential.

 

As with every day for the last millennia, her brothers bustled towards her, all three having to bend slightly so as not to knock their heads on the marata roofing. They groggily wafted towards her. Each with his own bucket, each suddenly losing the ability to navigate through their labyrinth towards their only source of water. She pretended not to have seen them, her gaze gripping onto the chain link fence straddling the en masse of native bodies. The TTL’s cut off line lay just close enough to the mountains that they might be yearned for but never-ever claimed. Faith’s frustration rose up her chest until it sat at the edge of her nostrils. She was itching to knock one of her brothers in the jaw. She’d have the element of surprise right now, a split second that could give her some control over her life.

 

In some twisted act of fate, a shriek sliced through the air capturing the siblings’ attention towards their neighbours to the left. The ground began to tremble, bumping the masau up and down across the tarp and into the soil. Her eldest brother yanked Faith upwards, placing her behind him as the mob heading their way grew larger and larger. It seemed Taketime had finally made an impression. Her brothers didn’t seem to have an inkling of free will beyond their protection of her. They stood aghast, stunned by the amount of energy usually reserved for a truck loaded with bread or mealie meal. Forward the crusade rumbled, collecting battered limbs now festering with the breath of what they then thought to be hope;

 

Mbuya Nehanda kufa vachitaura shuwa

Kuti ‘Zvino ndofira nyika ino’.

Shoko rimwe ravakatiudza,

‘Tora gidi uzvitonge’

 

It seemed she had two choices in that moment. Become a relic of the old world or step into the unknown. The future. Where women could wear trousers and bear arms. Where words were more than confusing symbols and could actually impart a new dimension to her provincial life. There wasn’t even an inkling of doubt as she tore through her brothers’ bodies and allowed the Voice of Zimbabwe to consume her. The veil between fate and happenstance collapsed at the wake of her initiation into the cause. It was all one entity now. Coincidence, sacrilege, predetermination. It all melted into one valiant river that wove its way through a world where the white man’s laws were null and void.

 

Wasara kuhondo Shuwa here,

Tomhanya-mhanya nemasabhu,

Totora anti-air

‘Tora gidi uzvitonge’

 

To be frank, Mrs. Gumbo does not regret her decision to rip through the fence at the border of her purgatory that day. And when she caught sight of a group of Guerrillas in the veld, they felt it was pure dumb luck to have made Faith’s acquaintance. She decided to join them on their crusade, starting in Umtali. That’s where we’ll cross the border to the training camps. We learn to fight in Mozambique! Faith didn’t know exactly when she’d ever see her family again but the unabated serendipity of their collision settled her nerves at the prospect of joining the Chimurenga. Plus, Taketime said it best himself; The place where women could carry guns and tell men what to do. The place where they are fighting for everybody’s freedom! Faith was thirteen.

 

Mrs. Gumbo doesn’t like to bring up the two and a half years she spent fighting the good fight. She simply refers to it as ‘the time I ran away’. But with all the stories that came out about what it was really like being a woman in those training camps, Rudo definitely understood her mother’s selective memory. By the time the war had ended Faith had found God, in a very dark place as most believers tended to at the time. She returned to her liberated home with a child, a baby boy with no name but his mother’s. He had a scowl set in his face that could only be explained by his understanding of the kind of man his father had been. Faith named him David in the hopes that he too might inherit a throne one day. Perhaps as we go along we’ll come to know everything else that took place across the border. Or, at the very least, Rudo will be able to come to peace with the soldier her mother had to become while she was just a girl.

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                                                                                                                                                     - Matikudza Chiromo