Short Writings from Bulawayo III

The Jazz Goblin and His Rhythm

132 The Jazz Goblin and His Rhythm Brian Chikwava Independence Day, Wednesday, 18 April 2001. I still remember the morning clearly enough. Save for my suitcase and sax, the bulk of my grubby belongings were still scattered in the open courtyard. Over the city of Harare, a dirty grey sky sagged like a vagrant’s winter rag, but I couldn’t care less. I had just moved into my new bedsit. One I didn’t have to share with anyone. Not with pimping goblins again. Never! The bedsit was in a state; paint peeling off the walls and ceilings, a quarter of the parquet floor tiling coming off. A broken geyser. Still I didn’t mind. The squalid loneliness of my new home was a welcome relief. Whilst I felt I now understood Harare and its people, I also felt that there was something that I had completely misunderstood about the city; perhaps nine months is not long enough to fully understand a city. Before he died, my grandfather always said you can never really know a place until you have 1) fallen in love with its music 2) fallen in love with its women and 3) tried the mbanje that grows out of its soil. I thrust my hand into my junk filled pocket and excavated a sachet of mbanje. I rolled it with care; Malawi Gold; the best that you could get in Harare then. With hindsight, I think this may be where I went wrong because Malawi Gold was smuggled from Malawi. I avoided Harare grown mbanje because I imagined there was not much difference between smoking it and smoking my grandfather’s white beard. “See where you got it wrong? You didn’t smoke mbanje from Harare,” I can imagine him croaking. As I puffed away I could hear the wailing of sirens from a distance. Being Independence Day, I knew it could only be Uncle Bob’s motorcade on its way to the National Sports Stadium where he would be addressing the nation; reminding it again why it should never forget the liberation struggle. Sitting on the dusty floor, I rolled more of my Malawi Gold and started to reflect. It had been nine months since I left Bulawayo for Harare. My mother had thrown me out of the family home because, as she had put it “I’m not disowning you my child, but it brings bad luck for a woman to keep looking after a child who has grown a beard.” I didn’t have much of a beard, but I didn’t want to start another quarrel. When I got off the bus in Harare, I flung my bag over my shoulder and headed straight for The Terreskane Beer Garden. I didn’t want to go to my cousin’s house straight away because I 133 wanted to defer exploiting her hospitality for as long as I could; but I also wasn’t quite ready to immerse myself in her heroic domesticity. She had a couple of toddlers and had just had twins that cried all the time and stuck to her breasts like ticks. It made conversation with her a bit like shovelling coal onto a truck with a teaspoon. And the arrival of her husband from work did not change much either. After walking into the house, he would come to stand in the kitchen doorway in his grey suit. Looking startled, either by my presence or what had become of his life, he would remove his heavy-rimmed glasses, rub his eyes, before saying “Hullo Jabu.” Then he would disappear to change his clothes. After that, I would only see him pottering around in flip flops, never saying much, never listening to much; just waiting for an opportunity to give my cousin another baby. I remember stopping to buy a cigarette from a street vendor at the corner of Herbert Chitepo Avenue and Second Street, not far from The Terreskane or TK as everyone called it. I put my bag down, stretched my shoulders and yawned. My bag was fat with a pumpkin that my mother had asked me to take to my cousin, two pairs of jeans, a couple of t-shirts and an African shirt that was Made in Malaysia. “Une Madson?” I asked. The vendor nodded, opened a box of Madison Red and shoved it into my face. I took one cigarette and lit it. “I’ve got a pumpkin, you can have it for a...