Writing Lives

Her Books

17 ‘Why did she die?’ we asked ourselves. She was only 24. A bee flew into my house the other day. I watched it as it circled the room once, twice, then it made for the window, which was closed. A bee will behave like the most stupid moth when confronted with glass. Insects will hit their heads against the pane until they drop dead. Even the honey-bee, the smartest insect of them all which lives in the most civilised community, is duped by glass. After about ten minutes, I opened the window but the bee remained on the pane. I’d imagined that fresh air streaming through the open window would provide it with the necessary cue to a way out, but the insect continued banging its head against the glass. Not wishing to be stung, I took a newspaper and marshalled the insect through the open window and into dizzy freedom. Would it return to the hive or remain disoriented? Our funeral cortege slowed down as we approached the steelworks, the residential location, and finally the cemetery that lay beyond. The Her Books Nevanji Madanhire 18 Writing Lives women, in open trucks, sang the solemn hymns composed for such occasions ; the men, crowded into their cars, exchanged dark jokes, as is their wont. There was comic relief. As my car slowed down, a young cyclist, wearing a white shirt and a pair of stone-washed blue denims with holes in them, as is the fashion these days, was trying to outdo the motorcade , which was not easy on the narrow road. Blinded by his goal, he hit a pothole and fell into a rivulet of sewage. My male passengers guffawed , the female singers shrieked, and the young man picked himself up, crestfallen. The steelworks were dead. No smoke rose from the chimneys. The few men entering them were hunched figures with stooped heads, like vultures roosting on a tree, waiting to catch the scent of another dying animal. It didn’t use to be like this. This place was once proudly called ‘The Steel-heart of Zimbabwe’. You couldn’t miss the signpost as you approached the little town of Redcliff. The steelworkers walked with a bounce. They produced the best steel in Africa, which helped build some of the greatest cities of the world. The town was alive. Goods trains ran on an hourly basis. On their inward journey, they brought in iron ore from mines far away; and on their outward progress took some of the best steel in the world, to nations far afield. Then, Ziscosteel was the best employer in the country, paying its workers handsomely and proud of their welfare, which it ranked as one of its greatest achievements, and which could be seen in the glow of their children’s eyes or the happy laughter of women as they gossiped at club meetings. Now men could no longer look each other in the eye. ‘They say No.4 is down again,’ one of my passengers commented. Once it had been the plant’s biggest furnace, which the workers proudly called mabhaira. Most of the workers were straightforward, simple people who prided themselves as ‘the boilers of iron’, the ones who boiled rocks and produced molten metal. This was a feat which made them ‘real men’, and a cut above everyone else. Someone remembered, a worker, a sportsman, who’d run a marathon somewhere in Poland and 19 Her Books by Nevanji Madanhire seen the Ziscosteel insignia on the steel bleachers. ‘We made this,’ he’d told a Polish competitor, but his pride was all lost in translation. Beyond the plant, there is a little road to what was once called ‘the location’ and proudly sign-posted ‘Home of the Steelworkers’. There is a small bridge across the river and we could see the rusty water flowing beneath it; the roadside vegetation also a dull rusty red from the smoke spewed by the chimneys of yesteryear. ‘They have destroyed everything,’ another of my passengers said. ‘From the best in Africa, to the worst in the world.’ I could feel the venom in the way he spat out the word, ‘They’. The residential suburb is called Torwood, or simply Tod. The young call it Karaga, embracing in that single word, their steely lives. Our biker re-emerges: he must have stopped somewhere, to clean up. A small group of men...