A sentimental journey to Manyene in Chikomba
The hills of Manyene are a rich cultural heritage and those who know them appreciate what they symbolise.
MY communal home lies in a place known as Manyene on the outskirts of Chivhu town. The word Manyene speaks of wide plains with sparse vegetation as well as occasional thickets of forest. We also boast a few hills.
Being so poorly-endowed in terms of vegetation, Manyene is inevitably inhospitable at times, especially on cold nights. That becomes worse if you have no lusty fires burning.
In most cases, particularly in the early to the middle parts of the 20th century, people would be scantily-dressed, and therefore, at the mercy of the elements.
The hills of Manyene are a rich cultural heritage and those who know them appreciate what they symbolise.
It is not unusual to see small herds of ngururu (mountain goats) negotiate their way nimbly up the hillsides.
On the granite rock face of the hills, ancient men left a record of their having been there.
For me, there is something that always seems just a little too pathetic and futile in works of art.
Works of art somehow always seem to want to do the impossible.
They make vain attempts to capture and freeze moments of time in perpetuity. This is why whenever you look closely at a photograph of a deceased dearly beloved of yours, it always seems that they were always dead. Try as you might, you just cannot coax any warmth from their fixed smiles.
So you tread softly around the Manyene Hills because you respect the place.
The elders say you should because there is history, mystery and heritage in them. There are, in these hills, many underground enclosures into which in the past, especially during a war, people could hide away with their livestock and be safe from marauders.
The Manyene Hills are also the place where in the old days, the family of the man whose duty it was to pray for the rains lived.
His name was Dembutembu, a hardy old man with dreadlocks and a voice that seemed to mock strangers.
Every new rainy season he received emissaries from the villages and he would give them instructions about what to do and about the taboos as well.
For example, any beer to be brewed for rain-making purposes had to be brewed by old women who could never again be in the family way.
In other words, no woman of child-bearing age could be entrusted with the responsibility of brewing the sacred beer that was a must for all such rituals.
The act of conjugal intimacy was perceived as something that could introduce an unwelcome element of contamination into the proceedings.
Not too far from the hills is a place that the locals refer to as “mangondo” - the rapids!
After the rains have fallen really hard, you hear the river roaring quite fearsomely and if you care to look, you might even see a bit of the spray as it rises into the surrounding air.
And when the river goes into flood, it forms rivulets that define their own course as they flow into the vleis. Some quite big fish also happily follow this rivulet branches and those who are savvy with this phenomenon go home with handsome catches of bream and catfish.
This is what tells you that it is summertime indeed and that the living is easy, to paraphrase a popular pop song.
People do not have to struggle too much to rustle up a meal. What with wild mushrooms everywhere, and the fish and the wild vegetables that you can pick on the plains!
Manyene is the place where I learned what it means to feel the chill inside your bones.
One day my mother misplaced the keys to our bedroom and after a hard day’s labour in the fields, we spent the night in her little hut that served as a living room and as kitchen.
There were no blankets there and my younger brother Jake and I had to fit ourselves into jute bags to try and keep warm. It also happened that we did not have that much firewood to warm the night into day.
That was the longest night I had ever spent till them. The sacks made your skin itch and you could not resist having to try and scratch the itches away.
The Suka River meanders its way to the Munyati River in the sunset. This is the river with the dangerous slope on either side of the low-level bridge that Charles Mungoshi depicts in his classic first novel “Makunun’unu Maodzamwoyo”.
Just after the bridge, and just after you had safely made it up the slope, you could quench your thirst at a perennial spring.
It is said that the spring dried up after a demented woman from the village washed her linen in it. So now only old-timers like myself remember its exact location.
Further down the river from the bridge, there used to be this very deep pool that hardly anyone swam in except a man called Ngadha, who had the “shakes” and went about carrying a small tin into which he let his unending slobber fall.
Due to the fact that at most beer drinks, most people wanted him to go and sit somewhere by himself where he could not be found nauseating by anyone, they quickly filled his ghastly tin with opaque beer.
It goes without saying that Ngadha would in the end be the most inebriated at these gatherings.
But surprise, surprise, after drinking himself almost senseless, Ngadha would go and dive into the feared dark pool and come out of it when he chose, none the worse for tear. This was probably his way of taking a bath and sobering himself.
Manyene is the land of the legendary white missionary, the Very Reverend Arthur Shearly Cripps, who has willy-nilly been elevated to the position of saint by the devoted many who crave for a hero of the faith.
You hear so many stories about him. It is said that if he saw you carrying a heavy load, he would volunteer to carry it for you despite the fact that he himself had his own heavy load. Some say he would even give way to an ant and stop or slow down until it was out of reach of his boots.
Many a village witch found the man of God irresistible as a witching target.
Invariably, he would rise and give each naked witch a blanket to cover herself.
“Take this, my child, and cover yourself. You must be feeling very cold. We do not want you to catch a chill do we? Now go home and be a good girl.”
Baba Cripps, as he was popularly known, habitually walked to and fro Manyene to Harare, some 230 kilometres distance.
He usually had business there, including fighting some of the battles of the people among whom he lived and worked and to whom he ministered.
When colonial governments began their series of Land and Animal Husbandry Acts, he bought a farm which he bequeathed to the families domiciled there who were in great danger of being evacuated.
According to his will, the families were never to be removed and remain settled there to this day.
The Anglican Mission Centre of Marondamashanu (the five wounds of Jesus on the cross) is part of this tract of land bought by Father Cripps to secure tenure for his flock and its offspring.
For some years now, worshippers have been visiting the Arthur Shearly Cripps Shrine on annual pilgrimages that might in time rival the annual pilgrimage to the Bernard Mizeki Shrine in Marondera.
A 15-minute drive from the Arthur Shearly Cripps Shrine takes you into what used to be the Republic of Enkeldoorn, a one-hick farmers town with a bank, a post office, a few Indian shops, a wishing well and a hotel where you could hear the ebullient laughter of the white imbibers inside.
On occasion, there were fist fights there. Whoever lost the fight was locked up inside a mock prison cell inside the bar. The mock prison cell was littered with dry bones thrown in for good measure.
The Enkeldoorn Hotel now goes by a different name and is less-daunting to visit.
You can buy a pizza at the Pizza Inn or have a cold beer where you choose.
The location (now a high-density suburb) has grown and is a far cry from what it used to be. We used to stand beneath a cork tree and watch boxing matches between locals and passers-by on their way to wherever they were going.
If you spent the night in the crowded, dirty, little waiting room, peopled with vicious bedbugs, a disabled man there languidly lamented the cold.
The cold respects no one, he crooned all night: an unwitting anachronism, given Paul Matavire’s song about how the cold can kill, especially in the forlorn town of Gweru.