Laughing Now: New Stories from Zimbabwe

A Dirty Game

94 A Dirty Game Daniel Mandishona IN JANUARY 2003, WHEN I WAS THIRTEEN YEARS OLD, my eldest sister Bernadette sent us an e-mail saying she was planning to marry a Kenyan doctor she had met whilst studying medicine in England. She said the special wedding invite was on its way and the event itself would take place on Boxing Day in an old stone church in a town called Cambridge, which was near London. My other sister Primrose and myself had never been to England and were very excited by the news of this proposed event. All I knew about Cambridge was that its university was the source of grief for many teenagers because that was where the O-Level exam papers were set. My father, elated by the news that he was finally to have a son-inlaw , started making hurried arrangements for the trip even though there was still almost a year to go before the big event. In 2003 my sister Prim was sixteen years old and in the fourth form at a very expensive Catholic school. Prim was not terribly bright and could never grasp the simplest scientific concepts. Quadratic equations completely baffled her, matrices and geometric transformations made her develop goose bumps and for a long time she couldn’t tell the difference between cirrostratus, cirrocumulus and stratocumulus. She also thought mensuration and menstruation were one and the same thing. The only subject she was good at was Fashion and Fabrics, mainly because she spent a fortune on glossy magazines and watched a lot of daytime soap operas. Even when we watched a film on television Prim was more interested in what the characters were wearing than in the dramatic nuances of the story. She hardly read her books, but preferred to spend her time text-messaging friends on the latest celebrity gossip. She had a pointless but all-consuming interest in the day-to-day adventures of pop and film stars – who was sleeping with who, who had checked into rehab, who had the weirdest sexual fetish and so on and so forth. Her end-of-term reports – despite diplomatic phrases like ‘tries very hard’ and ‘needs to unlock her true potential’ – pointed to a hopeless student firmly on the path to academic oblivion. But this did not deter her; she harboured vague ambitions of being someone very important in the government when she finished school, just like our father. We all knew she wasn’t going to do well in her O-levels and had mentally prepared ourselves for the worst. My mother said even if it meant she had to re-write it wouldn’t exactly be the end of the world. ‘I know many people whose children have failed exams,’ she would say. ‘Exams don’t mean much these days. Some of the world’s most successful people were not very good at school. Everybody knows that America, the world’s most powerful nation, has had a failed actor as one of its presidents. Prim has her dreams, and that’s good enough for me.’ In a way my mother was right. Everyone who is successful must have dreamed of something. Bernadette has always been the clever one in our family. In her younger years we used to call her ‘Brain Box’, a nickname she loathed with a passion. She won prizes from Grade One to Grade Seven and sailed through secondary school. She achieved a record breaking five ‘A’s at A-Level, which was how she had won a Rhodes scholarship to study medicine in England. She had even overcome that other notorious pitfall of teenage-hood, the driving test, at her very first attempt. I remember how at the time she won the scholarship my father greeted the news of her achievement with mixed feelings. On the one hand he was happy for his daughter’s good fortune but on the other hand, as a senior government official, he resented the fact that her benefactor was none other than that infamous British colonialist, Cecil John Rhodes, an individual whose exploitative and manipulative skills my father put in the same mould as those of history’s worst blackguards – Hitler, Napoleon, Stalin, Bismarck. My father didn’t like the British, always telling us that they were thieves and plunderers who had stolen the black man’s wealth under the guise of religious philanthropy . 95 A Dirty Game [3.149.234.251] Project MUSE (2024-04-16 16:05 GMT...