Malawian migrants and memories of colonial days
Since colonial days, Zimbabwe became a melting pot of various migrants and others from the region. Malawians like Mai Kaliati’s father were an integral part of Zimbabwean social, economic and political history.
“Ndakakura ndichidya maleft-overs evarungu kumapurazi. Taste iyi, ndiyo chaiyo yandi-norangarira,” Mai Kaliati says as she picks another piece of meat from the gango without asking for permission. By this she means that she grew up eating white people’s leftover food when she used to live on the white man’s farm as a young girl.
She chews slowly, savouring the taste. “And what kind of leftovers were those?” I ask her.
She smiles, showing a small gap between her teeth. “Meat. Mostly meat of various types. Those white people had cattle, sheep, chickens, ducks and pigs. There was no dish without meat. Up to this day, I do not eat a meal without meat. My father was a cook for many white people.”
Mainini Mai Chirati winks at me and says Mai Kaliati was Malawian.
“They think they are Europeans because they lived so closely to white people when they came to this country to work,” Mainini whispers.
It is Sunday afternoon at Mhishi Shopping Centre in Mufakose, on the outskirts of Harare. We are sitting on concrete steps leading to a barbeque area opposite Mai Rati’s bottle store and Weston’s butchery. We are here for a funeral which is being held not too far from these shops.
My companions are Mainini Mai Chiratidzo and Mai Kaliati. We have taken a break from the funeral proceedings in order to get some drinks at the shops. Both my companions are elderly, in their late 70s, but very active and mobile.
They met for the first time at the funeral. Mai Kaliati is married to the deceased lady’s brother. My cousin Cephas is the deceased’s mother-in-law.
Since Mai Kaliati is the muroora, she plays the joking or good humour skits at the funeral. Earlier on, she had stood up in the room full of mourners and declared that the deceased used to drink beer.
It was therefore appropriate that a few bottles of beer should be drunk to celebrate her death. But most of the women in the room were Christians from various churches and would not have welcomed beer drinking so openly.
Since I still do not belong to a specific church and am not spiritually restricted from buying beer or wine, I felt it my duty to provide my aunt and the deceased’s muroora with beer.
Some beer would help them to relax and ease the pain of mourning a close friend who died at Harare Hospital last Saturday late afternoon, just before the visiting hour.
I could tell that Mainini and Mai Kaliati, as fellow drinkers, would bond easily. After all, we get to know our new relatives at funerals or weddings.
I drive away from the funeral gathering with Mainini and Mai Kaliati in the back seat. Outside Weston’s Bar we find several young men who are mostly drunk or simply intoxicated with more than just beer.
Some of them stand aside and greet us with respect. “Ah, vana mai, titambire! Pindai tinwe tese. Hapana chakaipa vana moms.” One of them staggers and nearly falls over as he claps his hands in front of us.
In the bar, there are guys playing snooker and next to them are three girls in tight pants dancing with each other in the most exaggerated seductive and sensual manner.
Mai Kaliati orders a big bottle of Eagle beer and Mainini takes a Castle Lager. We leave the noisy bar. Outside, we see the sun setting over the grassy plains belonging to Harare City Council.
We stand next to a man with long neat dreadlocked hair. He is roasting meat in a big fry pan on top of a gas tank. The smell of fried meat is appetising. When I look closely, I notice that what is being fried here is not just pork and beef. It is a mixture of pork, beef, chicken gizzards, chicken necks, feet, livers and other various bits of kidney and fat. Mr Dreadlocks throws in vegetables and tomatoes and some pink looking spice from what used to be a tomato sauce bottle.
“Gango sister, this is gango. Have a taste,” says Mr Dreadlocks. He gives me a piece of chicken or pork. There is no water to wash my hands. I take it anyway and taste. It’s nice. I could do with some more. Mai Kaliati leans over my shoulder, says, “Manje maZezuru makazodzidzawo kubika! (Now you Zezuru people know how to cook)”.
“Ah, what does that mean?” asks Mr Dreadlocks, looking slightly offended. But Mai Kaliati does not answer because she is busy asking me to take off my shoes so she can borrow them to go to the toilet back inside the bar. She had forgotten to wear shoes when we left the funeral.
I stand there at the gango, barefoot, waiting for my shoes and looking at small puddles of water and scattered empty containers of Chibuku, cigarette packets, plastics and other rubbish. Mai Kaliati comes back with my shoes.
In order to assist Mai Kaliati with her memories of good food, I go in the butchery and buy various cuts of meats for $5,38. I hand them over to Mr Dreadlocks to do a special gango fry for us. We move away from the smoke and sit next to the concrete steps facing the bar and the gango.
This is when Mai Kaliati tells us about her memories of leftover food from the white man´s table. “My father came from Malawi. He was a cook. I was born here. Every night, my father brought leftovers from his white bosses back to the compounds,” says Mai Kaliati.
“What year did he come to this country?” I ask. Mai Kaliati shakes her head saying she does not know because there were many Malawians coming to Southern Rhodesia looking for work during the Federation of Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland.
Historically, from the 1890s, Southern Rhodesian recruited African labourers from Nyasaland (Malawi), Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique).
These migrants worked on the farms, mines and other industries. European employers preferred migrant labourers compared to the Shona and Ndebele who did not always want to live in town but would come for short periods then return home to their villages, kumusha.
According to Charles van Onselen in his book titled “Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia: 19001933”, the Rhodesian settler government assisted European employers to hire labourers by making agreements with Mozambique, Zambia and Malawi.
These included the Tete Agreement of 1913 signed with Mozambique and the Tripartite Labour Agreement of 1937 signed with Malawi and Zambia. The Rhodesia Native Labour Bureau recruited migrants at an average of 13 000 workers to employers per year between 1903 and 1933.
The workers from Malawi were provided with free transport to come to Southern Rhodesia from 1927 and onwards. Such migrant labour helped to boost the Rhodesian economy after 1923.
The migrant workers were subjected to rigorous medical tests before they entered Southern Rhodesia because the colonial administrators wanted fit looking workers with no diseases or disability.
There was a belief that the migrants were carrying contagious diseases such as tuberculosis, silicosis, sleeping sickness, small pox, scabies, syphilis and gonorrhea.
Through a humiliating medical examination system called chibeula, the men were forced to stand in a long line, stripped naked and ordered to open their mouths, armpits and legs. In Chinyanja, the Malawians called this cruel practice kuvhuliwa maliseche.
Arriving in Rhodesia, the Malawian migrants often suffered from painful demonising by indigenous Zimbabweans who gave them derogatory names like Mabvakure or MaBhurandaya.
But the Malawians, like other migrants within the region, were able to resist some of the problems. They stayed and added more to the cultural diversity, freedom and pluralism that is important to the development of this country.
Among us are prominent musicians with Malawian backgrounds such as Alick Macheso who grew up with his mother at a farm in Shamva and around the Glendale area.
He became known as the King of Sungura and he remains very popular. Apart from Macheso, there are a number of popular Zimbabwean musicians with Malawian ancestry. These include Nicholas Zakaria, the late Simon Chimbetu, Daiton and Josphat Somanje, Fred Manjalima and many others.
Apart from musicians, there were many prominent soccer players from mining towns and townships with Malawian parentage. The teams with such players include Rio Tinto, Mhangura, Hwange, Ziscosteel, Lancashire Steel and Eiffel Flats. Among the key footballers were Joel Shambo, Shacky Tauro and Moses Chunga.
Since colonial days, Zimbabwe became a melting pot of various migrants and others from the region. Malawians like Mai Kaliati’s father were an integral part of Zimbabwean social, economic and political history.
The smell of food in Mufakose brings back fond memories of a historical past. Though, when we look to that era, we see problems to do with land dispossession, racism and oppression. And yet, for Mai Kaliati and some of us, we do not want to always remember the pain of the past. We want to accept memories of the white man’s leftover food and still celebrate the gango taste of the moment.