New Father for Phunzo and I

 There was one thing I didn’t understand about Mother and her love of school bags for us, her children. For her, a new class meant a new bag, and this regardless of whether the bag you had used the previous year was still in good shape. So, at the beginning of every academic season, a day or two before the opening day, Mother always asked Likaka, the old village tailor, to make my sister Phunzo and me canvas bags to use to carry exercise books to school. These bags were the same design every year—flowery with a flap and a button, and a long strap to put across the shoulder for easy carrying and support. But things changed the year I was going into standard five. Mother had told me to collect one bag, and I felt like I hadn’t gotten her right, but I had. Old Likaka gave me one, and when I asked him where my sister’s bag was, he replied with another question: “Did your mother say two?”

I said I wasn’t sure.

“She told me to make one this time,”

“One?”

“One, yes. Why?”

I didn’t have an answer.

I collected it home, not sure whether that was mine or Phunzo’s.

Mother told me it was mine, no explanation, nothing.

The opening day Mother gave me a surprise—a new pair of ashen shorts that went all the way to the knees.

“I want you to grow into it,” she said. “Money is scarce these days; you’ll use the same pair next year.”

Anything from Mother was good.

“Remember, Phunzo is a girl,” Mother had replied after I had asked why Phunzo was not getting ready for school.

Phunzo would be starting standard 6. From standard 5, she had taken position 4 in a class that packed like a market day. Unlike her, in my previous class, standard 4, I had taken position 53 in a class of 70, but by the grace of God, I had been allowed to proceed.

On our way to school, many wanted to know why Phunzo was not coming along. I told them she would start the following day.

All my friends were on me that morning for wearing overalls and for carrying a market fee collector’s bag to school. They said it didn’t make a nice combination: overalls, a market fee collector’s bag, a pink silk short-sleeve and naked feet, toes scratching the hard cold earth like a hen. Others said I looked like a security guard at the nearby poultry farm. I cared less; Mother had given me these things, and Mother never gave us anything that was bad.

“Please, don’t give Phunzo a man, eh?” one senior had teased me when he noticed Phunzo’s absence.

“Phunzo is thirteen,” I told him.

“So?”

I noticed that he wanted to cause trouble, so I didn’t go along with him. But if he could come again, I had a ready answer for him, the same one Mother had given me: “Remember, Phunzo is thirteen, and Phunzo is a girl.”

At break time, another senior, a girl this time, approached me and pulled me aside. She looked all around and then whispered in my ears: “Why is your mother doing that?” Her low voice was laced with concern, emotion.

“What?”

“Well, that’s the gong. Later.”

On my way home I found myself trailing my friends, lost. Could she have been unwell?

Phunzo was my own sister; there were only three of us in our family—Mother, Phunzo, and myself. Phunzo and I had different surnames. His was Mkize, South African-like; she was Phunzo Mkize. Mother didn’t give any explanation, and I didn’t ask.

That afternoon Phunzo was not home. Mother who was wearing her red plastic earrings in the shape of a heart told me Phunzo had visited the village women elders. These were the same women who had been her instructors at her zoma, the initiation ceremony. Two weeks before, Phunzo had graduated with pride from a three-week camp for girls at the compound of the village woman chief. I was going to join a similar one for boys at the stream next year when I reached eleven.

Our courtyard was never short of people, men mostly. Every day a new face came; I never bothered to remember them all by names. They all came to drink ukana; Mother distilled ukana.

The revelry happened a lot during the harvest season after the villagers had sold their produce and had money and time to relax their bodies. The harvest season coincided with the opening of schools and Mother made a lot of cash to pay for our school fees.

Mother welcomed all customers the same. But on the day Phunzo didn’t go to school, Mother gave too much attention to a new face, a man I had never seen before in our village. That excitement, I felt it would just be a matter of time before she would tell Phunzo and me, eyes rolling like a small girl, as usual, “Children, this is your new father.”

The last man that had come to marry Mother had stayed in our house for two weeks or so, during which period Mother, all smiles, had kept telling Phunzo and me he was our father and had come to stay with us. His name was Samu Gasitini, and my surname is Mphikeni, but Mother being Mother, I accepted it without question. Come the third week when Samu Gasitini would not return, Mother called him names: “But I never told you this,” she told us, “Samu Gasitini is a fool, a crook, a thief.” Her lips pursed, she was looking at a crack in the wall. “He steals metal to twist it into those hoe blades; he can’t be your father that fool.”

Phunzo and I looked at each other.

Two or three days later, she told us to always forgive others. “You know what, Samu Gasitini has sent word is coming back. Please, welcome him as your father. To err is human, you know, my stars.” Throughout she had looked away, avoiding eye contact.

Samu Gasitini never returned, and this time, Mother never returned to us with an update.

Hardly four months after cursing Samu Gasitini, now “a thief”, here she was again, Mother, entertaining, in a very suspicious manner, another stranger. To show how much she cared, she had gone an extra mile, giving him a medium clean bottle of ukana, a chair, a table and a glass cup resting on Mother’s blue and green doily. She had found him a place, alone behind our house, Mother protecting him like an egg that would break if it fell.

As opposed to Mother who was slim, small and beautiful, this man was frighteningly enormous, awkward. His scalp glistened except where stood wisps of cigarette ash hair. He wore like a leading member of some old rock ‘n’ roll band—black leather jacket with frills and a pair of brown chequered trousers. His feet were bare, and as he sipped his ukana, and the fire squeezed his old life into a hatchet face, his toes came apart like tines of a garden rake.

We didn’t have a chair or a table or a glass cup in our house; Mother must have borrowed from our neighbour, the paprika farmer, all for this stranger, to entertain him. She had done the same with that tinsmith, Samu Gasitini. Mother seemed not ready to learn. Sometimes I felt like she lacked the courage to tell men “No, not you!”

“I’ve cooked local chicken for you; you’ll enjoy your meal today,” she told me.

I knew it wasn’t for me. “But in the morning I left you preparing nyenje,” I said, hoping she’d read me.

“I can’t give him crickets―insects? Him? He’s a gentleman, this man. No, I can’t give him insects like a bird.” Mother was a proud woman.

As I was about to open my mouth to ask who he was exactly, Mother came in too quick, “And, you have greeted him, uh?”

“No. But he called me and gave me bubblegum.”

“Bubblegum? See what I meant? He’s different,” Mother glowed.

There are people who never learn no matter how serious an experience is; Mother is one such. As for her choices, I didn’t know what Mother—and Mother had the face of a nun—looked for in a man. I can never say of Mkize, the taxi driver and father to Phunzo, because I never knew him though I could guess from Phunzo’s spindly legs. But I can of my father, Mphikeni. Well, my father was handsome despite his long mouth, that proboscis. As for Samu Gastini, he had the moustache of a marsh rodent and a face that resembled a perpetual mourner. I couldn’t tell exactly what it was Mother had seen in him. However, if you put Gasitini side by side with this new acquisition, Gasitini was by far the better. This one when he looked at you, he squinted his punched face like a witch. Even in terms of age, Mother must have been half his, at least, but Mother had her own way of defining choice which I had to respect.

Perhaps Mother had been affected by what had happened to her when she was young. This I say because years later, Mother’s brother explained to me how Mother had come to stay alone with us her two children, with no man about us.

He told me that when Mother was a young girl, she had been given to some man, my sister’s father. Mother, like all village girls, had been trained to say little and nod a great deal. Phunzo’s father might have taken advantage of this, turning her into a slave, sending her on errands and beating her. Mother had to run away, little Phunzo in her arms. And that’s how she later came to meet my father, Mphikeni, another disappointment, a waste in the honest sense of the word.

My father, Mphikeni, was working for the City Assembly, going round city roads in flak jackets, confiscating baskets of merchandise from women who were avoiding the designated market yard. Mphikeni took advantage of this, and confiscated and brought home basket upon basket even from women on their way to the designated square itself. The women reported him to the Councillor, who took the matter to the Mayor, and the City Assembly sacked him. Even Mother didn’t know where he had gone or whether he was still alive or not. Some three years after my father had disappeared, came Samu Gasitini, that film star who wore braces all over him.

Mother had failed with Mkize, with my father, Mphikeni, and with Samu Gasitini, yet here she was, unrepentant, taking in another, a worse one this time.

“But he looks honest, don’t you think he does?” Mother was trying to embroil me in her affairs. Out of respect, I kept my mouth sealed. Thank goodness this was Mother, but I had wanted to tell her something along this line: “Woman, if you keep refusing to learn from all the things that have happened to you, you’ll learn it the hard way after someone has died in your hands someday.”

“He has a bicycle; it’s behind the house. And where he comes from, the people are polite, and he has a very big fertile land,” she added. Mother had found gold.

Now a cockerel blasted, drunk, confused, and suddenly, the sky went grey. A biting wind, one I had never experienced before, descended upon the peace of our village. The rains were well away, two or three months. But now everything seemed scattered and misplaced.

“Something is going to happen today,” I said.

“Why?”

“The weather, Ma, the weather. Can’t you see, Ma?”

At dusk, when the dark sky began to gobble the remnant of our light, a group of women brought Phunzo back. She had been to the chief’s compound where, the whole day long, the women elders had been running her through a list of important tips on the topic of life and marriage in a polygamous compound.

After exchanges of goodwill, Mother asked my sister Phunzo to scale it. Thrice Phunzo failed, but there was a way out: the man, looking all set, just scooped Phunzo onto the carrier of that old Humber. There, poor Phunzo adjusted herself, trying to fit.

“Give it her,” Mother ordered me. It was a plastic bag in which were her old clothes. I had seen Mother stash her old uniform in there too.

Then, with our blessing, the man, now Mother’s son-in-law, led away the big Humber on which was Phunzo, my only sister. She was desperately clinging onto the saddle, her legs flailing.