The Fig Tree and the Wasp

It was 1979 and I had just started primary school. That summer was the first time I witnessed what later became known as iskokotsha, a craze that would, in the euphoria of a newly independent Zimbabwe, trigger the focus of motion in popular dance to snake decisively, seductively, up the body, from the feet to the hips – a sex pantomime of outrageously suggestive moves that enthralled our young nation for the decade to come.

Being onomatopoeic, iskokotsha is derived partly from the beat of the snare-drum rim and the appropriate twirling of the body to that rhythm. The dance takes on a fuller character when understood by its other name, kongonya, which alludes to the carefree, if not contemptuously deliberate, rhythm in the gait of a large stubborn animal.

The day I first saw the dance was the day we had expected to end with the execution of my maternal grandfather.

Across the country and in my mother’s home village of Monde, ten kilometres outside of Victoria Falls, the war was drawing to a conclusion and the principles and ideals of the guerrillas had become frazzled. Where they once asked villagers for food, they now made demands; where they had sought to operate by consent, they now issued ultimatums. On the military front, because the Rhodesian Army tortured and killed people for intelligence about them, the guerrillas’ response came in the form of a blizzard of reprisals that were meant to keep communities silent. Soon entire villages were living in terror of both the army and the guerrillas. Their orders and demands were beyond questioning by then – at least that was how everyone understood it. Everyone except my grandfather.

He was only a week out of prison, having served ten years for collaborating with the guerrillas, and he must have been genuinely or wilfully unaware of the new order, or perhaps he was simply still possessed of an inmate’s pointless recalcitrance. So when word was sent that it was the turn of the Mnkandla family and a few others to offer food towards the pungwe (the night­long rally that ‘the boys’ had called) and my grandfather sent back apologies that the family could not afford to give anything this time round, the stage was set for him to take the role of intransigent geriatric in the finest Nguni tradition.

The word that got back to the guerrillas was that there were some uncooperative families needing a ‘gentle’ reminder of how things were supposed to work. This was, after all, the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) that was being slapped in the face.

A little less than an hour after my grandfather sent back the mujibhas (the young villagers who acted as scouts and messengers), half a dozen combatants accompanied by an equal number of mujibhas appeared on the brow of the hill that lay in front of the homestead. My uncle Elliot, also visiting with his wife at the time, got up to meet them amid a cacophony of dogs barking. On the veranda with us, my grandmother must have been regretting having let my grandfather have his way. A bit of beef or goat meat was not such a high price anyway, if the alternative was her husband’s death.