Laughing Now: New Stories from Zimbabwe

Mpofu's Sleep

Mpofu’s Sleep Brian Jones IT WAS MPOFU BANGING AT THE DOOR, and it was 3.00 a.m. on a wet windy night in December. ‘What’s wrong,’ I shouted from behind the solid wood, burglar-proof door, for this was Zimbabwe at the start of the twenty-first century. ‘They’ve taken the rabbits.’ I unbolted and unlocked the door and looked out through the bars. Mpofu stood there under the security lights, looking even worse than usual. There was blood and dirt on the side of his face, and on his bare feet. ‘There were three of them. I ran after them and grabbed one, but I tripped and fell and they got away. I cut my feet.’ Mpofu was in his late forties, but looked twenty years older – he was simply known as Madala by everyone in the neighbourhood. He must have been quite a big, solid man when he was younger, but the wear and tear of life, plus the virus, had taken their toll. He had been sleeping in a hut by the animal pens when we arrived on the plot in Warrington some three years ago and we didn’t have the heart to kick him out. His job was ‘to guard the animals at night’. This involved sleeping in his hut, as always, but with the door open, so that if anything happened – a snake, a genet, a wild pig or a human visiting the chickens, the rabbits or the vegetables – his wife, MaDube, would rouse him so that he could make lots of noise and frighten the visitors away, or so we hoped. I never imagined that he would go so far as to tackle any of the local poachers. Mpofu had been born in Sankonjana, close to the Botswana border, 76 a hot dry area some four hours drive through the dust. Like all the males in the area, he had left to try and make his fortune elsewhere, initially as a ‘garden boy’ in Bulawayo. But he had moved on every few years to various other jobs – in factories and homes in Harare, Masvingo, Mutare, South Africa and Botswana. His education at the local Salvation Army Church school had been very short. He never learnt to read, though he often enjoyed demonstrating to me that he could get by in at least ten languages – Ndebele, Shona, Sotho, Kalanga, Tswana, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Tonga and English – not that I understood more than one myself. He’d also never got anywhere near to making his fortune, partly because he’d never listened to his teachers and had drunk much of his earnings. Lately, he had found God and had given up the demon drink for tea, but that didn’t stop his serial bigamy, not that he formally married any of his wives, even in the traditional sense. His ex-‘wives’, including his second wife, MaNcube, who lived locally, often tried to get him to support their children, but he denied that any of them were his, except for his twenty -five year old son Biggie. He had recently started to become restless again – three years in one place was too long for him – and he talked frequently of going to Egoli. ‘Biggie could get me work’. He refused to acknowledge his rapidly deteriorating health: it was just ‘the dust’ or ‘no meat’ which caused his coughing and his diarrhoea. He shuffled as he walked along with a bent back, the result of his misfortune in wandering across the unmarked Botswana border in early 1986, on his way home to Sankonjana. The Fifth Brigade happened to be in the area at the time and had taken him to Bhalagwe camp for ‘questioning’. Mpofu had no real interest in politics, but he spent the next eleven months being beaten each day, listening to the cries and screams of others. He still bore the marks, physical and mental , of that experience. Mpofu and I had become close over the few years I had known him. We’d spent many hours drinking our tea together, warming ourselves in the early morning sunshine. He’d tried to teach me a different useful phrase in one of his languages each day – he seemed particularly concerned that I, a white person in Southern Africa, could not speak any Afrikaans – but I’d forget them before the next morning. I tried to teach him a few phrases from my limited knowledge of French; he, of course, picked the...