Life With The Zimbos Turns Sour

| Monday November 17, 2008 00:00

 

FRANCISTOWN:It was in the middle of winter in 1978 as we sat huddling together, trembling like hung-over alcoholics in a classroom that had broken windows.

Our teacher at Tsienyane Primary School was a lanky and dark-skinned Ndebele from the then Rhodesia called Sengwayo, who was always smartly dressed.

Taking pity on us, he suggested we should go outside and bask in the sun as he conducted his lessons. A stone's throw from where we sat was the home of a mentally retarded man whom we had always known to be as harmless as a kitten.

But that day, he stood by the gate spewing profanities and gesticulating like a village pope imbued with the Holy Spirit as he stood by the gate.

The mad man had one crooked forelimb that made him look like a one-armed praying mantis. Though some of us kept casting furtive glances at him and stifling giggles in the process, Sengwayo soon had the class in thrall with his oratorical skills.

We did not notice the man until he was a few paces behind our teacher and he was advancing on the unsuspecting teacher with huge strides.

And then there were shrieks all round as he lifted a huge fist and landed it on our teacher's nape. The students remained temporarily shell-shocked before springing into action. He was about to tear into the deranged man when another teacher passing by noticed and came rushing towards us.

The teacher begged Sengwayo not to beat up the man lest he find himself in trouble for harming a mentally disabled person.

The story here is not about the mad man's incident. It is about my contacts with Zimbabweans from an early age.

Still at Tsienyane Primary School where, by end of the year, I was one of the two Standard Seven leavers who attained an A pass.

There was also another Zimbabwean by the name of PJ Mloyiswa.
A chubby fellow who usually sported a goatee seemed out of place in a remote and rural place like Rakops. He had what we perceived as an urbanised way of talking in rapid staccato and his inclination for the wayward was always at hand.

Not only was Mloyiswa good at teaching day-to-day subjects, he was an expert reader of music and he conducted the school choirs impeccably. His rivalry with the late DL Samakabadi in Khumaga was legendary.

Sparks flew whenever the two met on stage with their choirs. Although I was in the intermediate choir conducted by former Boteti Member of Parliament, Gabofele Masusu, Mloyiswa always roped in to give tips to Masusu who was also quite adept at reading music.

That year, 1978 saw our choir, together with the senior one, going for the finals in Gaborone after conquering the Boteti sub-region. It was my first time ever to step into a train, let alone see the bright lights of Gaborone. However, my sojourn to Gabs helped dispel idle talk by folks who had been to towns who always regaled us with their experiences out there.

One such story was that in Francistown and Gaborone you can never differentiate between night and day. At night, the idle talkers would tell us as we gaped in awe, stars descended to just above our heads and their light was such that it was like day time. Also, we were told that there were mirrors everywhere you went.

'You can see yourself in the mirrors as you walk about,' they would tell us.
We travelled by truck from Rakops to Palapye before embarking on a train that took us to Gaborone.

Although I was in awe of the streetlights and the lights inside the Lesedi Primary School where we slept with out teachers, I could tell that these were not stars that fell from the heavens!

Tsienyane Primary School choirs performed quite commendably. Mloyiswa's choir came third and we were placed fourth.

Then it was my time to go for my junior secondary education at Shashe River School where, among the Zimbabweans I met was a Mutambara who taught mathematics. I was never good with numbers, but Mutambara, a strict disciplinarian who always demanded his homework like Shylock demanding his overdue skoloto from shipping merchants who took loans from him when their businesses were not making headway, always simplified the fractions and decimal multiplication.

In the end my grades were not so bad and adding them to other subjects, which I passed with flying colours, I was always in the top five with the likes of Musa Dube, now a professor at the University of Botswana, and the late Tafanana Dithele who were simply peerless.

The year I started school in Shashe was the time Chimurenga - the Zimbabwean liberation struggle - was in full swing. I remember we used to host the ZIPRA and ZANLA guerrillas from the battlefront in Zimbabwe.

They used to teach us songs like 'Nabo Chitepo Ti fa ti cha taura sure. Ta uya ku wondo'. But the one I liked most was the song which compared the likes of Robert Mugabe, Joshua Nkomo and Seretse Khama to lions and Ian Smith to game meat: 'Simiti I nyama, Mugabe I shumba, Nkomo I shumba, Muzorewa I nyama. Una ngozi Mugabe'.
All in all, it was a time when we held these Zimbabweans in high esteem because they were a highly sophisticated lot.

It is a far cry from what I see today. When mention is made of a Zimbabwean to a Motswana, it is met with dismay. Then the Zimbabweans did not come in droves like it is the case now because perhaps a lot of them were far too engaged in the liberation of their country than in looking for greener pastures in poor countries like Botswana.

The other day I was on a Gaborone-bound train which was chock-a-block with Zimbabweans. In Mahalapye, some Batswana men embarked and one of them claimed an empty seat. He had not realised that the occupant of the seat had slipped under the seat to take a few winks, and fellow Zimbabweans who were sitting nearby alerted the sleeper.

A fistfight nearly erupted as the Motswana man wanted to refuse to vacate the seat.
'This is our train. Why don't you go and occupy your train in Zimbabwe?' the Motswana man was shouting.

The Zimbabwean was rolling up his shirt sleeves when he was shouted down by his compatriot not to fight the Motswana man.

As I write this article on the second floor of Ngilichi House, a group of Zimbabweans are sitting, blocking the back entrance of the double storey flat. They are busy munching their lunch.

I had to negotiate a narrow passage on my way down for a puff of smoke and up again when I returned. I thought, impatiently, about the time when I would have never thought that so many bedraggled Zimbos could block my way at my place of work.

I also thought whether with the political impasse that has engulfed their country, they are ever going to give me space to move about freely, or I should just put up with them.