Writing Lives

Better Build Boys than Repair Men

24 The funeral wake was at a small house on the southern end of Ardbennie Road, near George Stark School. The dead man’s name was Conrad ‘Square’ Ruwizhi, a notorious robber who had died during a shoot-out with police near the busy flyover on the Beatrice Road. Conrad Ruwizhi ’s nickname had much to do with his birth, when an inept midwife had deformed the upper part of his cranium into an odd, rectangular shape. On being shown his newborn son, the proud father had asked, ‘Why’s his head so square?’ And the nickname had stuck. All the township’s well-known criminals were at the funeral – Johnny ‘Danger’ Machipisa, Solo ‘Razor’ Kahungu, Christopher ‘Violence’ Phiri, Elijah ‘Mabhini’ Nyembe, Eddie ‘Sugar’ Mushita and the biggest criminal of them all – Innocent ‘Godfather’ Masaga. The names of these gangsters were scrawled in bright paint on the school walls. Their daring deeds were the subject of hushed conversations in township bars and on the commuter buses. These men were rumoured to possess magical charms which made them immune to bullets. There were rumours, especially amongst the township’s good-time girls, that ‘Square’s legendary fearlessness was due to the fact that he Better Build Boys than Repair Men Daniel Mandishona September 1968 25 Better Build Boys than Repair Men by Daniel Mandishona only had one testicle – a mass of withered and wrinkled tissue that took up half the space in his underwear. Men with a single testicle were supposed to be as fearless as a hundred warriors. It was said that Square, could go to bed with as many as a dozen women at once because of the sexual powers he derived from that single testicle. Eddie Mushita was known as ‘Sugar’ because that was what the township girls said he tasted like. Elijah ‘Mabhini’ Nyembe’s nickname had been earned early in his criminal career when he single-handedly hijacked a truck carrying a consignment of plastic rubbish bins. The truck had been found a week later abandoned on the Old Bulawayo Road, minus its consignment of bins and all its tyres. Another criminal, present at the funeral, Innocent ‘Godfather’ Masaga, was a ruthless extortionist famed for acts of random brutality. People who crossed his path immediately moved their entire families to live in other neighbourhoods , far from Masaga’s vengeful tentacles. Solomon ‘Razor’ Kahungu earned his nickname after slashing off the ear-lobe of a boy who had made persistent but unwanted advances towards his sister Mary – a busty pre-teen whose promiscuity had earned her the nickname ‘Mary Go Round’. Johnny ‘Danger’ Machipisa was the first township criminal to commit a solo armed bank robbery. At the tender age of seventeen, he had walked into the isolated branch of a large commercial bank and held up the staff at gunpoint before walking out with thousands of dollars bulging in his pockets. The money had been squandered in an orgy of reckless living that had eventually attracted the attention of the police. He served a ten-year sentence for that crime and because the colonial penal system put emphasis on punishment rather than rehabilitation , he had used his incarceration to become an even more hardened criminal. Later in life, he would become a founder member of the Zimbabwe African Thieves Organisation (ZATO), a loose affiliation of pickpockets, bag-snatchers, loan sharks, burglars and muggers whose sole objective was to emulate the notoriety of the American and Sicilian mafias they admired so much. It was during the body-viewing ceremony, while the top half of the coffin was opened to allow mourners their last glimpse of the dearly 26 Writing Lives departed soul that Square suddenly sat up, yawned silently, climbed out of his coffin and started walking casually down the street. The mourners who had been lining up to view the body scattered in terror in all directions at this unexpected development. Some of Square’s female relatives , including his mother, his eldest sister and three aunts, fainted in a twitching heap in the fierce midday heat. The hearse, a white Cadillac station wagon from the Heaven Is Waiting Burial Society (motto: We are the last ones to let you down) had already reversed into the narrow driveway ready to ferry the coffin to Strachan’s Cemetery. As Square walked past, the ashen-faced hearse driver just stared, his toothless...