White Man Crawling

Goat Song

5 Goat Song I was chatting with my friend, Clair, who is a researcher for an NGO based in Bulawayo. She is working on a project to improve goat production for subsistence farmers in the more arid regions of Matabeleland. Her research takes her to some very remote areas where hunger and disease have become endemic. Clair is also interested in literature and, on that particular evening in early September, the air rich with the scent of grass fires and syringa blossom, a bottle of local red wine and a plate of raw carrots (Clair’s favourite snack) on the table before us, we discussed Ireland’s contribution to ‘English’ literature. I pointed out jokingly that without the Irish and the gays (occasionally combined) there wouldn’t be much ‘English’ literature to speak of. Even the Brontë sisters were half Irish. The conversation somehow got on to the playwright J. M. Synge, and his one-act tragedy, Riders to the Sea, which I had studied at university. I remembered our lecturer telling us that the life expectancy of fishermen on the Arran Islands was so brief that their coffins were built prior to their drownings. In the play, Maurya loses her husband and all six of her sons to the sea. I can still quote her haunting words: ‘holding a thing in the half of a red sail, and water dripping out of it’. The story prompted Clair to tell me of an incident on a recent trip to the Nkayi area of Matabeleland. I replenished our glasses and she began. ‘We came across this old woman, thin as a stick with bright, almost demented eyes, and a body permanently stooped in the posture of hoeing. Her compound was near Dakamela, on the Shangani River, and she was the sole remaining inhabitant. She told us that both her daughters had died –’ ‘Of AIDS?’ I interrupted. ‘Of AIDS and hunger. Her daughters and all her grandchildren. And her six sons had crossed the Limpopo to South Africa. This old woman was barely surviving on green paw paw fruit and a pod, which she called ihabahaba –’ ‘That’s monkey bread. Piliostigma thonningii. She must have been desperate.’ 6 ‘Yes, but the surprising thing was that she owned twelve healthy billy goats: six black and six white. We asked her why she didn’t sell a couple of them in order to buy food, and she said they were not for sale; they were for her sons’ funerals. She was convinced that all their deaths would precede hers. ‘I assumed that the goats would be used for ritual purposes. You know, there is an inkubalo rite, which is performed a day after the burial. They kill a goat, mix it with herbs, and say a protective spell over it. Then they roast the meat and one by one the mourners take a bite of it, while the inyanga knocks their joints. This helps strengthen the family by driving away the fear of death, and bad luck in general.’ ‘I thought they used an ox,’ I said, munching on a sweet, juicy carrot. ‘They do, the ingovu, but how many people own oxen these days? Then there is another ceremony called umbuyiso, which takes place before the rains start a year after death – stop crunching that carrot in my ear!’ ‘Sorry.’ ‘At sunset a goat is slaughtered, roasted, and eaten, just by the family; but before that it is taken to the grave and offered to the dead person–’ ‘To appease him?’ ‘Yes; and to persuade him to come home. It is driven back from the grave and killed. What the family don’t eat is left in a hut along with a calabash of beer and some snuff so that the spirits can feast and drink.’ ‘So that was two goats for each son?’ ‘Yes. I don’t know how she kept them so healthy. There was not a blade of grass for miles around, and very little foliage on the trees and shrubs. I’ve never seen such devastated land.’ ‘Isn’t that what goats do?’ Clair bridled at my suggestion. She is an agronomist who knows her livestock, goats in particular. ‘It’s simply a matter of husbandry,’ she sniffed. ‘In any case, what ruined the land was generations of forced overcrowding because of the Land Apportionment Act and other draconian Settler policies.’ 7 ‘You’re right, there, Clair...