The Fig Tree and the Wasp

And so followed a spell in which my grandfather had to fend off questions about talismans for luring girls. He protested, saying what they were looking for was something that only Malawians and other exotic peoples knew how to do. As pointed as their bayonets, the carnal desires of these young men, who out of necessity had spent years living beyond the reach of their traditional social norms, would shape those of the nation.

We departed with a handful of figs which, on our way back home, my grandfather eagerly introduced me to. Two decades later, I would come to know about the uniqueness of the fig tree. Over millennia, the fig tree has developed a co-evolutional relationship with the fig wasp: the wasp cross-pollinates the plant and can only perpetuate itself through the plant’s fruit. The female wasp lays its eggs inside a fig, the eggs hatch and the larvae develop into adults. The females, who are winged, do not possess the big jaws required to gnaw their way out of the fruit, while the males, who possess tearaway jaws, are wingless. At this point a dubious compromise is struck: each male tunnels his way to the skin of the fruit and then crawls back to lead the female up the new tunnel, but before she can escape completely, he grabs her in a final desperate act of coitus, deposits his seed and then, exhausted, allows her to fly away. With all the females having escaped to lay their eggs elsewhere and propagate the species, the fig fruit rots and, at the whisper of a breeze, obligingly breaks loose and plunges down to earth, taking the male wasps with it.

In 1980, when Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, the country woke to the full impact of the cultural tremors that had flattened much of sub-Saharan Africa: the boys and girls from the bhundu (the bush), as the guerrillas were called, brought iskokotsha from their training grounds in Zambia, Tanzania and Mozambique. A new way of being had arrived. They emerged from the bhundu hot-stepping to the Zambian copper-belt sounds of Dr N. P. Kazembe & his Super Mazembe, Tanzania’s Orchestra Super Mazembe and others – all of them mutations of Cuban rumba-inspired sounds from the Congos.

These ex-combatants revelled in being strangers among their own people: on the street, at the beer garden or in the shebeen. Here they were, with a glint of danger, revolution and a new exoticism from north of the Zambezi. The way they moved on the dance floor made people sit up – they had to decipher this language, to learn new ways. You are one thing today and then, in this new tomorrow, as old notions of the self fall away like masks of mud-cake and turn to dust, you are something else, someone else. At least that seemed to be the case. Iskokotsha arrived and people found, to their amazement, that they too could do it; it seemed inconceivable that beyond pantomime, words would be necessary. With iskokotsha, faces would light up with recognition, yet no one could actually name what it was that they recognized. Then again maybe, with hindsight, people left unmentioned what they recognized here because, as the girls walking past us and the guerrillas by that fig tree had made clear: whatever had the shadow of death behind it, we pretended not to see. We could not be witnesses. We had, in Zimbabwe, found a way of acting out our sexual urges but not a way of talking about the more difficult questions around sex, my mother would say a few years later. By then the dance had taken on a life of its own and was now a far cry from its freedom-fighter origins.