Deep down in him, when all that acquired sophistry and urbanity is taken away, my father is a peasant. Like his father before him.
I spoke to him to-day. He was visiting Nyanga town to refill his medical prescription and he sounded happy as a boy let lose in a sweet shop. I could imagine the crystal clear air after the rains yesterday (the beginning of the rainy season) and the wispy clouds cascading up the mountains as they gather for another storm, the red loamy soils bursting with nutrition and waiting anxiously to receive seed.
And there he was, liberated in every sense as I asked him how his new life was going. In my mind it must be boring, albeit relaxing to be in the village waiting for the rains to fall and to start the job of preparing the fields, planting, weeding, harvesting and coming full circle to waiting again – all the time praying to the gods that the rains will fall starting at the right time, for the right amount of time and in just the right amounts. A peasant’s life hangs so much on the natural elements, on the many facets outside one’s controls it is no wonder that they have so many gods and ancestors to appease and pacify.
For my mother, newly arrived from the city, it must be even tougher. Because the great amount of work falls on her shoulders. Women and children are the driving engine of the peasant economy, while the men are away drinking or, my father’s case a teetotal for life, “organising” one thing or another. He is the great organiser with an endless list of tasks to be performed while he watches over. He is very busy, he tells me in response to my enquiries. He has had to “organise” the building of the outhouse to serve as a granary and the cattle kraal (for which purpose I am not quite clear because as far as I am aware, they do not own any cattle). But then maybe he has or is organising a herd.
And his truck (which was a retirement gift from us his children), is it on the road? Apparently not. And not for lack of money. It would appear that the fuel stations do not think they will have supplies for the next three months. More probably 6 months or 9 or 18, or however long it is going to take to get some sanity back on the sinking ship of sovereign Zimbabwe. But that is another story, the sinking ship with Captain Bob shouting, “Ahoy! Full steam ahead”!
My father is not alone in trying to go back to a romantic past of the peasant life of his youth. My mother is his willing partner and accomplice. Men and women who were professionals in the narrow and limited sense that colonial Rhodesia allowed them – teachers, nurses, police officers – who became the new urbanites in 1980 and bought houses in the former white areas (the low density suburbs as they became known; but how population density gradually increased as the economy started sliding and owners were forced to let out spare rooms and garden cottages) and brought us up going to former white schools and speaking with clipped BBC accents or pseudo-American drawl. They achieved much more than their fathers had done in the leap from peasants to professionals, and sadly, much more than their children after them. We now languish in foreign countries driven out by Captain Bob shouting “Ahoy! Land is the Economy, to hell with anybody else who thinks differently!”
So our parent’s generation in the early years of Independence had access to jobs that paid living wages, good health care and they could dream of a better future with their children looking after them in their old age. They didn’t reckon with the revolution becoming sour and driving many out of the country nor with the grim reaper of HIV/ AIDS which has reversed all these gains and turned them into carers.
Despite being urbanised they maintained rural homes which they visited regularly as a link with their past; others bought farms they would retreat to for working holidays in the rainy season and at Christmas and Easter.
But now the boom times are over. My father and his generation have realised that the urban life is too stressful, and decided to go back to the village. For my father, it is also to live out his last days among the familiar and to be buried, when he dies, among his people – not in the lonely and crowded anonymity of Harare’s fast-dwindling cemeteries.
In all this reminiscence about my father and Zimbabwe and that generation that has opened opportunities for us, I realise that perhaps deep down in me, strip away the acquired sophistry, urbanity and the white man’s ways, is really a peasant awaiting my time to go back to the land of my father and get my hands dirty “organizing” things on the village plot.
Post-script – Nov 2010.
I too am a peasant at heart and will live out my days in the village, and the red earth beneath my feet will become my resting place…
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