Yet another disgrace to the game

Whenever my sister, Che Wedye, pays me a visit in town, I tell her arrival by her knock, if that would pass for a knock at all. This I say because Che Wedye never knocks; instead, she finds herself a small stone, which she turns into a knuckleduster with which to strike my gate, causing such havoc as though some welder under the influence was grinding his old metal right on my doorstep. I’ve hinted to her a number of times I don’t take kindly to the commotion, but every time I tell her she knocks as though she’s waking prisoners, her reply has always been the same: “It’s because you take ages to come to your gate.” With it, some sisterly giggle.

Last time she rattled my gate was some two weeks ago, on a Monday. I know Che Wedye, our firstborn, to be an early bird, but that morning she had arrived rather too early for my liking. “The issue that’s brought me here,” she said in her defence of the ‘raid’, “could not wait that I wait for the sun to rise.”

I knew why she had to come to deliver the news by hand: bucking for money as there was no way I was going to let her return without giving her something for fare, though every time I did that, she rode her feet, keeping the money for her man, Mpuko. “And when did you leave home?” I wanted to know. Home is some ten kilometres away, and one passes through a vast overgrown marshland to reach the city.

“There’re no hyenas these days.” She knew what I was hinting at.

“And your mobile phone, what’s happened to it?”

A slight twist of the head and a twitch of the mouth and then the usual quibble: “Were you going to pick up this time?”

Che Wedye was playing games. “Was Mpuko threatening again?” I decided to change subject.

“No, Mpuko is now a changed man, often talking about attending catechism classes once he gets a good pair of shoes,” she defended him this time. My sister never ceases to amaze me.

Only a month before, Che Wedye had come to me crying her eyes out, saying Mpuko had threatened to hang her to the roof of her hut after they had quarrelled over food. But today Mpuko was an angel, and she the bearer of a very bad piece of news, bad news with a strange twist in it—my younger brother, Nampopo, and my brother-in-law, Wakweramuntengo Mwafulirwa, were in hospital.

“What ha-”

“We had to plead with the Parish Priest to carry them there as neither could walk on his own, faces swollen like a pumpkin.” She looked shocked and afraid.

Che Wedye and I were born three years apart. She had chosen to come first; Che Wedye always came first. Even at school she always came first. Unfortunately, she had listened to Mother and got herself a man so early in life. She was in standard six when Mother married her off to Liphiko, a fool who never liked work. Liphiko was everything bad, a crook, a thief.

The other evening Che Wedye told him there was no money for relish, Liphiko promised her to wait an hour, and he went out. Two hours later, the village headman’s boys brought Liphiko home in chains—the village chief had been alerted by some unwelcome commotion in his duck coop. It was Liphiko, a sisal sack in his hands, trying to grab another bird. On behalf of the family, I paid an amount that would buy ten massive ducks. I had just started work as a young man, receiving barely enough for survival. When Liphiko recollected himself from this, he disappeared from the village, leaving my sister with a small girl. We never heard of him again.

Che Wedye married again, this time to a barber shaving soldiers at a nearby military unit. But three years later, it failed again, and from then on, Che Wedye married and remarried, just like that. In the end, she took Mpuko, that fool who knows nothing in the world except growing a beard, and beer and food.

Mpuko has never been short of scandal. Not long ago, drunk as a lord, he took the road to the local police station, straight to a green lawn of grass where he propped his frame against a flag mast. When police officers asked what the hell he was doing there, Mpuko told them he had killed a man in our village, and had come to surrender himself. He demonstrated using his hands how he had ably wrung the neck of that supposed victim. The officers believed him and so towed him to the village where the village chief apologised for Mpuko’s troubles.

“When drunk, he always creates stories, some allegations, very, very serious,” the chief, all-deflated, had told them. “No one has died here.”

The effects of the beer vanishing, Mpuko realised he had courted a very big trouble. He told them he didn’t know what he was doing, but the officers had none of that, and requested the chief to allow them to return with him to the station for them to close the case.

And close they did, as a few hours later, Mpuko returned to the village alone, hobbling on a long walking stick. He spent half the night in the keen wind cursing the chief.

Mpuko is an unwelcome passenger in our extended family. In essence, the responsibility to take care of Che Wedye and her eight children falls in my lap. Like her man Mpuko, Che Wedye tells lies straight from the textbook. And when she said Nampopo and Wakwera were in hospital, my initial suspicion was that she was at it again, as usual. Three weeks before she had told me Mpuko had secured a job at a Chinese shop.

“They’ve given him a megaphone and he’ll be going places announcing his boss’s merchandise, bicycle spare parts. But his boss has asked him to buy a good pair of shoes and nice clothes to wear around locations or the people will think him a thief.”

I’m not sure why I had given in so easily. I produced K50,000 for that. When one woman from the village greeted me on my way to work and I asked how Mpuko was faring on his new job, she laughed uproariously: “Must be idle chatter whosoever told you that; Mpuko, that jester, working? All the hills will grow wings and fly away.”

Shoulders shrugging, Che Wedye, as usual, spun an explanation: “How could I tell he was lying? I had been lied to myself.”

According to Che Wedye, Nampopo and Wakwera had indulged themselves in fisticuffs over football. Two jokers with such cult zeal, you would think football was their religion.

“The whole thing started Saturday,” Che Wedye started, “when Wakwera’s team played one team from the city. I hear Wakwera’s team lost by two goals.”

“Teams from Kabula?”

“Yes, but Wakwera was home; he didn’t go to Kabula. He was following from his radio.”

Last time I visited the Democratic Republic of the Congo to perform official duties, I bought Mpuko, Wakwera and Nampopo a solar-powered radio each. Straight away Mpuko exchanged his for magagada, his beer, but Wakwera and Nampopo kept theirs to enable them to follow football.

“Perhaps bored, Wakwera left his home soon after the game had ended.”

“To drown the frustration?” I said in jest.

“I wouldn’t say that,” she said, before picking up from where she had left off. “Shortly after, Nampopo, wearing a red jersey, a red and white vuvuzela in his hand, raided Wakwera’s house.”

“To see Michele?”

“No, to taunt Wakwera.”

“Bullshit, taunt him for what?”

“For supporting a team that had let in two goals.”

“Gosh! These guys will never grow up! These teams live hundreds of miles away. Where’s reason in them, fools?”

“Wakwera returned at midnight, and even then advised Michele never to tell Nampopo he was around. And early Sunday morning, Wakwera disappeared again, and shortly after, Nampopo arrived, yearning to talk to him face to face.”

“On the same issue?”

“What else?” she agreed and went on, “Wakwera had done his best to evade meeting him. Now come Sunday afternoon, it was Wakwera’s turn—Nampopo’s team was playing I don’t know where.”

“And which team is this?”

“I don’t know, but I think his team wears red and white,” she said. “That’s the colour of his jersey; whenever his team is playing, he wears this one, it’s almost a ritual now.”

“And Wakwera’s?”

“It must be blue and white. For him, whether his team is playing or not, weekend is always blue and white, always.”

“Red and white must be Giant FC Bullets, and blue and white I think is Superior Wanderers,” I put together the pieces. Later, I asked whether Wakwera had returned home by then.

“I think he had, but he had advised Michele never to tell Nampopo he was in.”

“These guys are turning themselves into the sort of fool that casually drinks water that has been used for shaving, complete fools,” I feared for them.

“And that Sunday afternoon as Nampopo and a number of friends were listening to a live coverage of the game I talked about—”

“The capital city one?”

“Exactly; Nampopo’s team scored first, we could tell by the celebrations, for he walked about the village a packet of long-life milk in his hands, a red and white scarf around his neck, blowing his elephant, the vuvuzela. A few minutes later, the other team equalised, and a while later, another goal—two!”

“Nampopo’s team losing.”

“Nampopo’s team trailing, yes, and then another goal.”

“Three?”

“Ehe, three. And wherever Wakwera was, he got wind of it, and just blew in, a blue and white scarf around his neck, in his hands freshly cut tree branches—”

“Symbol of bereavement?”

“That’s it, the way we announce a funeral in the village. It was now his turn to taunt Nampopo whose team, he said, was dying a worse death.”

“And they can’t spend this energy on their hoes in their gardens?”

“And Nampopo, sprawling on a pew and all the while distraught, did not take kindly to this, for he sprang out at Wakwera in a flying leap, grabbing him by the collar, violently shaking him to the ground, and a big brawl ensued.”

“Over football?”

“Over football, yes. And three times the people had managed to break up the fight, but their differences so unbridgeable, they quickly slid back into even nastier exchanges of swear words and blows. It was the Parish Priest visiting the elderly in the village that took them, all-bloody, to hospital.”

“Father Gudumani?”

“But to our surprise, as gory and groggy as they were, and even in the presence of the Parish Priest, the two kept exchanging snide remarks.”

“In the name of football?”

“Wakwera has received eight stitches on his upper lip, and Nampopo nine, here.” She was pointing with her finger a spot just above her left eye.

“They should’ve been eleven each. And the hospital didn’t demand some police report?”

“They should thank Father Gudumani, the two would have been appearing before a majisiteti as we speak.”

“Don’t you think it would have been better that way? I think it would send out some strong message. Crazy supporters like Wakwera and Nampopo, handful though, give a bad name to the game of football in this country.”

When I asked who it was that was taking care of them there, Che Wedye said Wakwera’s wife was. “They’re in the same ward,” she added.

“Have they made their peace now that they are down and bruised?”

“No, not at all. Michele says even there, they’re regularly exchanging curses and threats. Wonders will never cease.”

I will never understand my brother Nampopo. I first came to know what a fool he is the other time I had forced him to apply for a manual job, one he was to discard only days after reporting. Some animal hide-processing plant in the city had advertised for tanners. It worked for him, but the next thing I heard from one boss there was that Nampopo had disappeared, gone AWOL, back to the village, to waste himself again. When I asked Che Wedye whether he had told her why he had abandoned post, she said he had told her he didn’t want a job that always gave him bad dreams at night.

“Bad dreams?” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“He said cows as big as elephants licked him all over in his dreams,” Che Wedye had explained, leaving me in shock. It must have been the effects of this beer, magagada.

As for Wakweramuntengo Mwafulirwa, of course, there’s no knowing what a marriage can bring, but I think I should be honest with Michele, our sister, wherever she got him for a husband, because he too has turned out a worse addition. One fool in a village is enough; two disaster.

Not long ago and behind our back, Wakwera had visited a willowy widow in the village, asking to let him help her clear her field for a small wage. When the woman produced money for the work done, Wakwera changed his tune, now declining the sum. The truth came out later when the woman complained before the village chief that Wakwera was now saying he had not meant the payment to be in cash. Again, meeting the fine fell on me, this time, a female goat for disrespecting the spirit of the dead man, who also happened to be a relation to the chief.

“That’s the news I brought you, achimwene,” she said through glassy eyes.

“Your sister-in-law is preparing something for you,” I told her, this time hoping for a different result.

A nervous tic on her face, a nervous hand putting in place her cheetah-spot bucket hat, my sister tossed onto me her trademark riposte word for word: “If you know the cost of the tea and the sugar, put that together with what you’re going to give me today.”

A fixed smile of anticipation, but this time I read the trap a mile off.

“And I hear every coin I send them is being fed to betting?”

“That I don’t know.” Che Wedye, many times a victim of betting herself, jumped; she would never betray her teammates.

“Now, Sis Che Wedye, go tell them both I have better things to do with my money than servicing foolery. I’m not visiting them there, period. Tell them that, will you?”