Author’s Note
This is a work of creative non-fiction – a blend of memoir, family story and political history. I draw on a diverse array of sources to tell this story, ranging from interviews to photo albums to books to conversations and much more. But, crucially, I rely on memories – mine and others’. What I present here is my version and understanding of events.
Where I didn’t have access to written or recorded sources, the dialogue is necessarily an approximation of what was said or conveyed to me. Some of the characters that appear are composites of people I’ve known, and their names have been changed to guard their privacy.
I’ve moved between worlds throughout my life, and so this book does too. This complicates word choice and terminology. One issue that arose for me in the final stages of the book was whether or not to capitalise ‘Black’. Given the centrality of race to this story, I have decided – against the prevailing convention – to use the lower case. This reflects the contexts in which I grew up, and where I first became conscious of race as a marker of social identity.
Chapter 1
I was scarcely five years old and already collecting rejection letters. It was 1991 and my parents were trying to secure me a place at a primary school in Harare. They belonged to Harare’s up- and- coming black middle class and were determined to make the most of the opportunities emerging from Zimbabwe’s independence. Nothing focused their attention more than investing in my education. Education to them was everything. It meant social mobility. It meant respect.
In Zimbabwe in the nineties, for those who could afford it, education also meant a frantic, dog- eat- dog scramble to access the best private schools. Schools with names like St Michael’s or St John’s, like Bishopslea or Eaglesvale, not schools named Dzivarasekwa Primary No. 2. In other words, the ‘best schools’ were those that had, not so long ago, been run by white people for white children when Zimbabwe was still Rhodesia, when the white settler minority governed the country, when education was largely segregated. Since the fledgling nation was just over a decade old, the school system was riddled with the inequalities, enmities, allegiances and suspicions left by colonial rule and the war of liberation against it. And if all that wasn’t difficult enough, my performance in school admissions interviews didn’t help.
At one school interview, I asked my father if I could take home a trophy from the school’s display cabinet. When he said no, I wept shamelessly and without restraint. The teachers looked on in choked disgust, concluding that I was too unruly for them. At another interview, I was asked to draw a picture of my mother.
My rendition in blue crayon was badly misshapen and compared poorly to the drawings of the other kids. The teachers there thought I was too dim- witted for outright admission but they were willing to offer me a spot on the waiting list. My mother turned it down. She was troubled by the teachers’ proud embrace of the rod as an instrument to keep children in line. An interview at one of the most selective schools in the city seemed to go fine – it was incident- free, at any rate. But all the teachers there had been teaching since before independence and showed little sign of overcoming old prejudices. When we drove home from the school, a letter of rejection was already waiting for us in the mailbox. My parents complained for years to come about that letter. The school must have sent it earlier that week. Typical behaviour from Rhodies, they scoffed. Those conservative white Zimbabweans were trapped in the habits of mind of the Rhodesian era. They had no intention of assessing me fairly, given their arrogance, their ever- tumescent self- regard, their preference for their own.
* * *
Both my parents came from large families. My mother, Hope, was born in Uganda, the sixth in a brood of ten. My father, Tafi, was born in Rhodesia, the youngest of seven siblings. I was the first child born to my parents. They then tried and tried for another child. To their excitement and relief, my mother finally became pregnant again in 1990.
She was close to term when doctors in Harare went on strike against the government. The doctors demanded better working conditions and remuneration in the country’s public hospitals. Meanwhile, my mother had started to worry that something was off in her pregnancy, though she struggled to articulate what exactly. It just didn’t feel right. She tried to arrange a check- up with a doctor but there were no appointments available in the city’s public clinics during the strike.
After many phone calls, favours and fistfuls of cash, a doctor in a private hospital agreed to see my mother on a Saturday.
In the doctor’s room, my mother lay supine on the bed and exposed her large belly. The room’s fluorescent light washed her in a brilliant white halo while the smell of carbolic acid soured the air. In slow, deliberate movements, the doctor lathered her abdomen with a cold gel before pressing an ultrasound probe onto her skin. Gently at first, then firmer and harder as he performed the scan.
She waited for him to say something. The intensity of his concentration chilled her to the marrow.
When, eventually, he looked at my mother, his eyes were full of sorrow.
‘Mrs Chigudu, regretfully there are no signs of foetal life.’
A curtain of darkness descended.
‘It would be unfortunate to cut you open under these circumstances,’ the doctor said in reference to a Caesarean section. ‘It would take many days for you to recover. I suggest that we book you in for an induction to deliver the stillborn.’
My mother called my father to tell him what had happened. As she tells it, my father’s first – perhaps only – concern was how he would break the news to his mother, who was eagerly expecting another grandchild. I’m sure my father remembers it differently, but that phone call is etched in bitter recall for my mother.
An anxious wait followed because of the ongoing doctors’ strike. At the time, my mother was employed by a Danish organisation giving development aid in Zimbabwe. Her well- meaning European expat colleagues offered to buy her a ticket to Botswana and to pay for the procedure there, away from the uncertainty in Zimbabwe’s health system. But the mere thought of packing her bags, boarding a flight, travelling to an unknown country, finding a new doctor, conveying her medical history, and most likely doing all this alone, enervated my mother. Instead she went back to the private hospital in Harare four days later with a friend who stayed with her through the induction. When the baby was delivered, my mother shut her eyes, refusing to look at her lifeless daughter, at the dead sister I would never meet. Her friend held the body tenderly for a few moments before handing the swaddled child over to the midwife.
My mother came home from the hospital, anguished and alone. I sat with her, took her hand and said, ‘I’m still here.’ I was four years old and don’t remember this, of course, but it’s what she tells me. The two of us were bound in a melancholy whose depth I could not comprehend, aware only that my mother needed to be soothed. My father cried too. But not with us. He cried with his own mother. Despite their shared affliction, my parents could not find comfort in each other.
Grief, as rendered by the poet Denise Riley, is time lived, without its flow. To escape the smothering feeling of suspended vitality, my mother decided to return to Uganda. She was hired for a two- week consultancy there and took me with her. It would also be a chance for us to be with her family. My father stayed behind. We were not in the habit of travelling together as a family.
From as far back as I can remember, I wanted nothing more than to please my mother. Her sadness was crushing to me; I would do anything to make her happy. Throughout my childhood, then my adolescence and well into my adult years, I would see myself as her ambassador and steady companion, someone she could always count on and who would make her proud.
My mother and I ended up staying in Uganda for several months after the stillbirth. When we returned to Zimbabwe, my mother used the money from the consultancy to buy my father his first car: a sky- blue Toyota Corolla.
After the months in Uganda, I had changed in one fundamental way: I had forgotten every word of Shona I knew. Before my mother and I left, I used to speak to her in English and to my father in Shona – the most widely spoken vernacular language in the country, the language my father grew up speaking, my native tongue. Now, my attempts to speak Shona left me feeling like a short- sighted driver trying to find my way at night through a maze of side streets and narrow passageways in a foreign city, in an unfamiliar car. From then on, we only spoke their shared language in the house: English.
* * *
There is nothing unusual about an unhappy couple trying to rescue their relationship by focusing on their child. In my family, this added another subterranean layer of meaning to my education: investing in my education was not only about my future, it was also about saving my parents’ union. I suspect that this is why my parents had enrolled me in an exclusive, racially mixed nursery school called Head Start even before the hunt for a primary school began.
One day, my father picked me up at around lunchtime. I must still have been about four years old at the time. I was sullen during the car journey. He tried to coax me into opening up but I refused to speak. As he parked the Toyota and turned off the engine, I started to cry. I pointed at my skin: ‘Is this black?’ I asked.
‘I can’t quite remember how I answered you,’ my father says now, ‘but I knew what had happened.’ He picked up his keys and drove back to the nursery to confront my teacher, a white woman in her mid- twenties called Debbie. She wasn’t surprised to see my father charging into her classroom that afternoon; she was expecting him. She looked at him with a mournful expression, not unlike a concerned physician delivering a cancer diagnosis.
‘Mr Chigudu,’ she said, ‘we recently admitted eight new children to the school. They grew up on farms, you see.’
As she continued, my father tuned her out. He noticed for the first time the flamboyant colours painted on the walls: lilac, pistachio and hibiscus pink, crowded with clusters of children’s drawings. He didn’t need to parse Debbie’s words, he’d already got the gist of it. The new children were Rhodies. He knew the type. They had been raised to take black people for granted, to see us as farm workers, domestic helpers, not as neighbours with whom they now shared the country on an equal footing. Their mothers no doubt kept them from playing with black children. Rhodie farmers were notorious for letting their dogs chase black men up a tree or down the road. Their kids grew up laughing at black people ’s indignity. My father clucked in disgust. Rhodie parents passed on their racism to their Rhodie children with near- genetic efficiency, like a dominant allele on an X chromosome.
My own memories of the nursery-school episode are misty. What’s vivid to me is the feeling of inadequacy that accompanied it and that has dogged me since: the sense of being forever out of place, prone to humiliation, my dignity a fragile and easily broken thing.
Towards the end of 1991, my father heard about a new school that was about to open. To help launch the project, he joined the school’s board of trustees, most of whom belonged to Harare’s small diasporic community of people from the Indian subcontinent. It was a secular school, but they named it Twin Rivers in honour of the twin rivers of Hinduism and Islam. Incongruously, the school was located behind a hexagon- shaped church, on grounds owned by the Holy Trinity Church Community. I joined Twin Rivers as part of its first cohort of pupils. ‘You’re a pioneer,’ my father said to me chock- full of enthusiasm. I didn’t know what it meant but I liked the sound of the word. When anyone asked me what school I went to, I told them I was a pioneer. In the early days, our school uniform was entirely grey, apart from our brown leather shoes. But in time and in keeping with the riverine motif, the school adopted turquoise as its official colour. Soon we were wearing turquoise hats, ties and jumpers. I liked the sound of the word ‘turquoise’ too.
The drive to school with my father was a sacred time in which he told me stories. He told me about Muhammad Ali and how he’d watched the great boxer dance around George Foreman during their rumble- in- the- jungle fight in Zaire in 1974. ‘Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee!’ my father said, his face a picture of glee. He told me about Pelé, who also danced but did so impishly around defenders on soccer pitches across the globe when he led Brazil to World Cup triumph in 1958, 1962 and 1970. My father would play music in the car too. Among his darlings was Tracy Chapman. I was mesmerised by her sultry, contralto crooning. I liked the looping rise and fall in tempo of ‘Fast Car’, the haunting a cappella of ‘Behind the Wall’, the elegiac lament of ‘I Used to be a Sailor’. My favourite song was ‘Bang, Bang, Bang’. I liked the clean simplicity and repetitiveness of its chorus. When I heard Tracy sing, I pictured a white woman with permed blonde curly hair; the image of Dolly Parton was my mental template for all American women. My father corrected the picture in my head. He told me that Tracy was black like us. She was a revolutionary spirit uninterested in fame for fame’s sake. She had dreadlocks and wore jeans and a T- shirt when she performed. She sang about important things like making the world a better place for other black people.
‘Your name, Simukai, it means to stand up,’ my father said. It does literally mean that but my father had a more figurative, more nationalist connotation in mind when he named me. I was born in 1986, and while I was ‘born free’ in independent Zimbabwe, the struggle against white settler rule in southern Africa was still ongoing in the eighties. Across the world, in churches and trade unions, on American college campuses, in the Congressional Black Caucus, at music festivals, there were calls for the end of Apartheid in South Africa and the release of Nelson Mandela from prison. On the ground, the anti- Apartheid struggle appeared to be reaching some kind of apogee: an all- out civil war or a negotiated political settlement or escalating street violence; these were all on the table. Elsewhere in the region, the South West Africa People’s Organisation was campaigning for independence against the South African Defence Force that occupied Namibia. I was too young to understand that my father’s selfhood had been forged in the gyre of anti- colonial conflict, that the cause of African liberation was my father’s lifeblood. It was essential to his identity, to the persona he presented to the world. More than anything, it was what he wanted me to know about him, so much so that he commemorated his politics through my name: Simukai, to stand up against colonialism in all its forms. I felt even back then that through my name a solemn and heavy mantle had been draped on my shoulders.
It was no small paradox, then, that my father took me to a school that aspired to educational elitism modelled on the recent colonial past. Despite Twin Rivers’ patronage from Harare’s South Asian community, the headmistress, the teachers, the secretary- cum- bursar were all middle- aged white women. Only the groundskeepers and cleaning staff were black. Nothing about the school was recognisably African when it started. For my first two years at the school, we didn’t have a Shona teacher. When I entered grade three, the school moved to a new building in a different suburb. The number of staff and pupils increased and we finally had two or three black teachers join the school. We now started learning Shona but only as an afterthought, a token acknowledgement that we were in fact in Zimbabwe. Shona lessons lasted a mere thirty minutes each day and revolved around singing songs and naming animals. Most of us would go on to fail the government’s mandatory Shona exam in grade seven.
My cultural education consisted of playing white people ’s sports like field hockey and cricket. We sang English folk songs about Henry VIII, the First World War and the streets of London. We held bake sales. We read about meadows and castles and kings. We learned to speak proper English. Assiduous attention to syntax was key, as was affecting a delicate, papery accent that linguists call Received Pronunciation. Before ever having left the African continent, I was learning to speak like the landed gentry of southern England, with the prestigious accent of the BBC. Etiquette at Twin Rivers mattered a great deal too: always walk in single file when moving from one room to the next, don’t run; walk with your back straight, don’t slouch; cover your mouth when you yawn, otherwise flies will come in; stand up when a teacher enters the class and salute her in unison, ‘Good morning, ma’am’; don’t shout; and most importantly, wherever you are and at all times, strive to be a credit to the school.
When my father dropped me off each morning, I would grow apprehensive about the day ahead. He had to cajole me to get out of the car. I feared my grade-one teacher. She was a severe woman who wore frilly, fuchsia- coloured dresses. She had curly hair and a wart on her nose that reminded me of the witch from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. My fear of her was so great that even when I was desperate, I didn’t dare ask her permission to go to the toilet during classes. The consequences were . . . well, there is no dignified way of saying this: I shat myself.
‘Ma’am,’ one of the kids said to the teacher, ‘something stinks.’
The other kids hovered around my desk, pinching their noses and making pee- ew gestures. ‘What?’ I said, shrugging my shoulders and playing innocent, ignoring the mess in my pants. The teacher came over to me. ‘Let’s go outside, Simukai,’ she said.
We walked out of the room, and I pretended that I didn’t know what was going on, but I could only feign ignorance for so long. With each step, we walked closer to acknowledging the mortifying truth.
‘Let’s see if you trod on something.’
Dutifully, I raised my right foot to show her the sole of my shoe. Clean.
‘And now the other one.’
I raised my left foot. That too was clean.
‘Ma’am. I didn’t step on anything. I did a mistake.’
She tried to be kind and didn’t even correct my grammar on this occasion. She found a spare pair of clean briefs for me to wear, but the school was out of spare shorts. And so, I spent the rest of the day wearing brown leather shoes, grey knee socks, a grey shirt but no shorts, only turquoise underpants.
I had a meltdown before every new school term. Sometimes I doubled over with crippling stomach- aches of no medically demonstrable cause, but these would nevertheless cause me to miss school. Other times, I couldn’t sleep for days before school re started because I had nightmares about witches and snakes hunting me down. My mother dreaded these periods. She often felt powerless and frustrated, shuffling me between doctors’ appointments and going to meetings with my teachers to tell them I tended to get ‘nervous’ in new situations. Maybe, she asked, they could go easy on me. This attenuated my nervousness. But, at the same time, my mother signed me up to a slew of extra lessons – in French, maths, pottery and horse- riding – which only heightened my nervousness all over again. I dropped out of every extracurricular activity she enrolled me in, with nothing to show for it. At the time, my mother complained that I was ‘very sensitive’, just like my father.
What springs to my mind as I reflect on my meltdowns is a game I used to play with my father that he found repetitive and annoying. We sat in the living room on a quiet evening, and I said to him, ‘Daddy, what will we do when the giant comes?’
He rose and gestured for me to follow him. I trailed him to the kitchen where he kept a series of garden tools behind the fridge. There was a garden hoe and a pitchfork, both were taller than me.
‘We will use these to defeat the giant,’ my father said. I grew giddy with excitement and felt safe and reassured. Within moments of returning to the living room, I asked him, ‘Daddy, can you show me again? What will we do when the giant comes?’ He sighed and took me back to the kitchen.
All the fear I carried with me was a symptom of how I had learned to read the world as impossibly overwhelming. I was not much bigger than a chair, but I had an impression, however vague, of the enormous weightiness of every expectation and task set before me, of the contradiction of having to honour my proud black name while flourishing in a white- run school, of my family’s fragility and my desperate need to keep us together. It was as if the world was saying to me: I am powerful and you are not; I am big and you are small; now find a way to deal with that.
What if the giant came when I was all alone, left to face him with nothing but my puny hands? Everything I loved would fall apart.
