The Fig Tree and the Wasp

In early 1982, my father had just been promoted to officer-in-charge and transferred to head a police station in the small town of West Nicholson. The family had to uproot and follow him. The country was caught in an exhilarating maelstrom of change and myth­making: Zimbabwe had been delivered, the nation was free. Salisbury had become Harare, Essexvale became Esigodini, Victoria Falls briefly became Mosi-oa-Tunya before reverting back to Victoria Falls, and each guerrilla made a personal decision whether or not to shed his or her nom de guerre. My family, not to be left out, soon had an American pit bull named Marx. That was when, for the first time, the blur of hip motion that was iskokotsha came into our house, brought by our new housemaid, Silingiwe, much to the consternation of my mother who made it clear she did not want to see ‘that kind of thing’ in the house.

It is probably accurate to say that it was in 1982 that I became aware of the potential of iskokotsha as shorthand for social survival. Silingiwe was capable of displaying near Victorian propriety one minute and being impossibly exhibitionist the next. She would be the most proper maid in front of important guests, but as she got to know the family better there would be those times when in the kitchen, with my mother out of sight, she would show my brothers and me, in exaggeratedly slow motion, the techniques behind iskokotsha: legs astride and back arched in a posture that short-circuited my adolescent brain and rendered me mute. Her hips would turn into a riveting kinetic spectacle as the snappy sounds of a Four Brothers tune urged her into taking the horse-riding position on an imaginary pleasure chair, surrendering in absolute abandonment to that primitive delight that reaches its pinnacle in the spellbinding stretch of music where the essential elements in both song and dancer are revealed: the song is pared down to the staccato rhythm of the snare drum and a hypnotic snaking guitar line, while the dancer, no longer of this world, pulsates to a most naked instinct. In this way, she would later find street cred in the eyes of my mother and her friends.

Surrounded by ranches and gold mines, West Nicholson was a small town organized around the canning and mining industries – canned beef, Fray Bentos, Oxo and gold were what it produced and freighted to the rest of the country. Culturally it punched way above its weight, attracting virtually every significant band or musician in the country. It was here, in the beer gardens, shebeens and community halls, where the legend of a young man popularly known as ‘Screw Vet’ was whispered. This was someone to whom even Silingiwe sat up and paid attention when he took to the dance floor.

Screw Vet was in his early twenties. He was one of the groundsmen at West Nicholson Primary School (where my brothers and I were enrolled) and blessed with an athletic body sculptured by manual labour. Had he had enough in his wardrobe to choose from, he would have been a dandy. As it was, most of the time he was seen in his gumboots, a white vest tucked into his flannel trousers which in turn were unfailingly tucked into his boots. This was his trademark outfit throughout the year. He took great care with his trousers – they were always immaculately ironed, with a crease on each leg sharp enough to sever in two any fly that made the mistake of landing on them.

People were mildly amused and took him for an eccentric and semi­literate young manual labourer. But all of this is not why Screw Vet made an indelible mark on my memory. Obsessive about his looks, affected and semi­literate as he was, when it came to what mattered – iskokotsha – Screw Vet was peerless.