Laughing Now: New Stories from Zimbabwe

The Mupandawana Dancing Champion

51 The Mupandawana Dancing Champion Petina Gappah WHEN THE PRICES OF EVERYTHING went up twenty-six times in one year, M’dhara Vitalis Mukaro came out of retirement to make the coffins in which we buried our dead. And in a space of only six months, he became famous twice over, as the best coffin maker in the district and the Mupandawana Dancing Champion. Fame is an elastic concept, especially in a place like this, where we all know the smells of each other’s armpits. Mupandawana, full name Gutu-Mupandawana Growth Point, is bigger than a village but it is not yet a town. I have become convinced that the government calls Mupandawana a growth point merely to divert us from the reality of our present squalor with optimistic predictions about our booming future. As Mupandawana is not even a townlet, a townling, or half a fraction of a town, there was much rejoicing at a recent groundbreaking ceremony for a new row of Blair toilets when the District Commissioner shared with us his vision for town status for Mupandawana by the year 2065. It is one of the biggest growth points in the country, but the only real growth is in the number of people waiting to buy coffins, and the lengthening line of youngsters waiting to board the Wabuda Wanatsa buses blasting Chimbetu songs all the way to Harare. You will not find me joining that queue out of Mupandawana. When the Ministry dispatched me here to teach at the local secondary, I was relieved to escape the headaches of Harare with its grasping women who will not let go until your wallet is empty and your eardrums have burst from their nagging. Mupandawana is the perfect place from which to study life, which appears to me to be no more than the punch-line to a cosmic joke played by a particularly mordant being. So I observe life, and teach geography to schoolchildren whose only interest in my subject is knowledge of the exact distance between Mupandawana and London, Mupandawana and Johannesburg, Mupandawana and Gaborone, Mupandawana and Harare. If I cared enough, I would tell them that there is nothing there to rush for, kumhunga hakuna ipwa, as my late mother used to say. But let them go, they shall find out soon enough. Mine is not a lonely life. In those moments when solitude quarrels with me, I enjoy the company of my two friends, Jeremiah, who teaches Agriculture, and Bobojani who goes where Jeremiah goes. And then there are the Growth Pointers, as I call them, the people of Mupandawana whose lives prove my theory that life is one big jest at the expense of humanity. Take M’dhara Vitalis. Before he retired, he worked in a furniture factory in Harare. He had been trained in the old days, M’dhara Vitalis told us on the first occasion Jeremiah, Bobo and I drank with him. ‘If the leg of one of my chairs had got you in the head vapfanha, you would have woken up to tell your story in heaven,’ he said. ‘The President sits in one of my chairs. Real oak, vapfanha. I made furniture from oak, teak, mahogany, cedar, ash chaiyo, even Oregon pine. Not these zhingzhong products from China. They may look nice and flashy but they will crack in a minute.’ On this mention of China, Bobo made a joke about the country becoming Zhim-Zhim-Zhimbabwe because it had been sold to the Chinese. Not to be outdone, Jeremiah said ‘Before the ruling party was elected, the Zimbabwe Ruins were just prehistoric rubble in Masvingo province. Now, the Zimbabwe Ruins extend to the whole country.’ We laughed, keeping our voices low because the District Commissioner was seated in the corner below the window. *** M’dhara Vitalis had looked forward to setting down the tools of his 52 Petinah Gappah trade and retiring to answer the call of the land. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are,’ he was often heard to say to the fellows who idled around Mupandawana. ‘You have no jobs so you can plough your fields.’ He had spent so much time in Harare that he appeared not to see that the rows to be ploughed were stony; when the rains came, there was no seed, and when there was seed, there were no rains. Even those like Jeremiah, who liked farming...