Take the blues away on Mother’s Day
These children who make their mothers cry should listen to Leonard Zhakata’s “Nzombe huru” (the prize bull) in which a mother wails, “Son, why are you doing this? Are you saving for a ship so that we go on ocean cruises? Do you want us to live in the air, my son?” Another Mothers’ Day calendar year has begun. Make each day count. Make it Mothers’ Day every day. Make her forget the aches and pains of motherhood.
GONE are those days now. I mean those days of old when the world as most people knew it then meant one’s village and the village that your mother had come from — just a little way, as the crow flies, from the confines of the next village. Village life then is an exact antithesis of today’s globalisation.
You knew people by name as they did you and fun was not expensive because you created it yourself and did not have to pay for it. Whatever direction you travelled there was always someone who knew your father or knew his father before him. They also knew your mother and her mother. So social safety nets were in plenty. But things are vastly different now.
The world has become a much smaller place and people are always up and about everywhere. Gone too are the days when you attained eternal fame for walking a long way in a certain direction. That was what Marco Polo did. He went to China and came back with fabulous tales about the orient. In the villages the man with stories to tell never went hungry or thirsty. He was welcome everywhere he went and his next meal was assured.
After you started a family you would most likely live somewhere not too far from where your parents lived. Every one of you siblings would be within reach of each other. And you all generally stuck together like glue. Mothers and fathers became known as Mother-of-so-and–so and Father-of-so-and-so. You sat together around a warm fire at night, outside if you were men and inside the hut if you were female or if you were still a child, too young to be independent of your mother. All in all there was a lot of quality family time. Grandparents told the same folk tales year after year, but each time the telling was as animated as the last one if not better.
Sometimes we think that our people had no romance in them, that they were dull and unimaginative and did not know how to make loved ones feel good inside. Nothing could be further from the truth than that. You must have heard about the special bowl of sadza with something tasty that pampered husbands had the pleasure of eating just before the break of day. This was always a very special meal prepared with love and care for the man. At harvest time when there was plenty of everything and people were spoilt for choice you could see how the lady of the house gave a loving bowl of shelled roundnuts to her man.
Lest you think there was no reciprocity let me disabuse you of that notion. A man walking out in the bush often came across choice wild fruits in season. While he would eat some of the fruit he always made sure to leave the choicest selection for madam at home. On arrival back home she would clap her hands and ululate in appreciation.
Love is fruit brought home with love to give to one’s beloved. Some men would risk life and limb just to score good marks with the queen in the house. That is well-illustrated in the folk tale of the pregnant woman whose palate craved for snake eggs and how she endangered everyone with her outlandish taste. Her man never said no. He did as he was bid.
Sunday the thirteenth of May was Mothers’ Day this year and the shops and supermarkets had plenty of goodies to tempt doting children to spoil their mothers with something: greetings cards, chocolate, fabric and exotic perfumes. Some mothers were taken out and gorged with goodies in gorgeous environments with calm soft music. For them, the order of the day was barbecue, salads and imported wines. In all that love and fun, not many give thought to those mothers whose children are either uncaring or just too far away to be able to do anything about anything. Such was the case with a lady I met at the supermarket.
She saw the Mothers’ Day cards, wiped away a little tear from the corner of her eye, like someone with a foreign body in her eye. She had this far-away look in her eyes. You could tell that she carries around deep pangs of longing in her heart. My mind wandered to the story of an old man who dies alone and leaves behind a great oaken table made with his own hands. Inside the table, on the underside, were the words he carved: FOR MY CHILDREN.
None of his children came to see him laid to rest. And there was no one to speak about him or claim the table. The words he carved became his epitaph: For my children. That is the story in Neil Diamond’s song, “Morningside”. But I bet my last dollar that this a story that is more than common in real life. Hosiah Chipanga has a song that stirs quite a few painful thoughts. It is called “Zvichandibatsirei mwanangu” meaning, “How is that of use to me, my child?” Chipanga’s song is a sad litany of parental neglect by insensitive children steeped too much in fleeting luxuries and keeping up appearances. The persona in Chipanga’s song gives a posthumous commentary on her life, telling all and sundry how hunger slew her and wondering at the irony of the mountains of food at her funeral — she the emaciated woman whose children let her starve.
Musicians and song writers often claim that they sing about what they see around them. Certainly Chipanga must have seen something that informed and inspired his composition.
A few years ago an old woman in a Gweru neighbourhood died after a brief stay in hospital over in bustling Harare, our erstwhile sunshine city. She was a jolly old lady with the gift of a golden voice that she used to effect in church and at social gatherings, and was as cheerful as they come.
You could never have guessed the things she was having to endure. The community, fully knowing her predicament, took it upon itself to lessen her burden.
People invited her over to their homes, mostly for supper so that they could feed her and spoil her and also get her praying and singing. Afterwards, it would be too late to go home so they made her sleep over. But, as our people say, “Rine manyanga hariputirwi” meaning that there is no way you can conceal the protruding horns of an ogre for any length of time because at some stage the horns will out. And so it was for the woman’s ungrateful children that the horns they were concealing became public knowledge.
As custom demands, the old woman’s corpse was taken to her house where it lay in state before burial. That was when the horrors of her life became public knowledge. For years she had lived by herself in a house with no electric power or running water because none of her children cared enough to do anything about the situation. But now that honourable pastors and the neighbourhood had gathered at the forsaken house the woman’s children were faced with a reality they could not shirk or escape. They cleared years of water arrears and also cleared the electricity bill that had gone unpaid for years. The hypocrisy almost made the pastor choke on his sermon. He decided to tell it like it was, pointing out the ironies and the irresponsibility and saying never again should anything like this be allowed to happen to anyone.
Back to the lady in the supermarket. She said at the height of our country’s miseries, her son had, like many others, skipped the country to start a new life in Europe. He has been away for twenty-two years now. His problem is that he is an illegal immigrant in the country of his choice. He has a good job, earns good money and has a family, but cannot come home to see his mother, even on a day like Mothers’ Day. She smiled and said, “Thank God for technology. I speak to my son regularly on video calls. Unfortunately, I can’t touch him. It hurts so much.”
In the background they were playing that phenomenal number by Slim Ali and the Hodi Boys of Kenya: Sweet Mother.
I saw how she dabbed once again at her eyes. The song seemed to make her bluer on her special day. These children who make their mothers cry should listen to Leonard Zhakata’s “Nzombe huru” (the prize bull) in which a mother wails, “Son, why are you doing this? Are you saving for a ship so that we go on ocean cruises? Do you want us to live in the air, my son?”
Another Mothers’ Day calendar year has begun. Make each day count. Make it Mothers’ Day every day. Make her forget the aches and pains of motherhood.