Wilfred Mutemajiri

The road is this straight as a die grey ribbon vanishing into the hazy blue beyond. The dome overhead is pupil-contracting quicksilver. The sun, at its highest point, is angry as hell.
   “Look at those kids ahead, Joseph,” shouts Wilfred over the blaring radio – it’s Thomas Mapfumo’s Mbuya Nehanda. He indicates an amorphous blob rising out of the nearest mirage a half mile in front of us. “They are going to have something nice for us.”
   We are thus: Machona, the driver of the Sunday News pool car, a Peugeot 504 estate; Wilfred riding shotgun; me in the back, sandwiched between two enormously matronly ladies, one of whom is doing a good job of compressing her skinny husband into the farside rear passenger door.
   In the adjoining boot behind us are seven more adults, one with a bulging-eyed infant strapped to her back.
   Wilfred has confided in me his latest enterprise. He’s written a series of exclusives which have spiked the paper’s Sunday sales. The subject is a inyanga, a traditional healer (it’s not polite to say witch doctor). The inyanga at the heart of Wilfred’s startling revelations possesses the magical severed hand of a tikoloshe. This is a wicked little African sprite that steals into homes and enjoys secret nightly carnal encounters with the spellbound wives.
   The inyanga also has a giant python, which lives where we are now headed – in the ancient granite citadel and spiritual centre that is the Matobo Hills, 20 miles south of Bulawayo.
   When tempted with warm goat’s milk, the serpent may emerge from a deep crevice beneath the balancing boulders – and has been known to speak great words of wisdom.
   This is something people will part with good money to see, which explains the ten paying customers in the company car with us. Wilfred is turning a tidy profit and the editor is turning a blind eye for now. This goose is laying golden circulation figures.
   “But what if the snake doesn’t appear, or if it doesn’t feel like chatting? Do you give the money back?”
“Let me tell you,” Wilfred schools me patiently, “how a good story works.”
   He recounts the tale of a gecko that needs the help of a crocodile to reach an island in the middle of a river. This is where the flies and other insects are juiciest. But the gecko will also need the crocodile’s help to get back. ‘I am visiting my brother,’ says the little lizard. ‘His wife just had ten babies.’ The crocodile licks his lips and thinks, ‘This one will lead me to the others.’ So he carries the gecko to the other side. He follows behind as the gecko darts about the island eating until he is full. ‘Where is your family?’ asks the crocodile. ‘I want to say hello.’ The gecko replies: ‘They must have found a way to visit me. Take me back and you will meet them if we are not too late. By the way, did I tell you my brother has eight legs and two tails?’.
   “If your story continues to give people hope,” explains Wilfred, “they will continue to come back. Because they want to believe.”
   It’s another way of saying never let the truth stand in the way of a good story. But in the scheme of things, he’s just presenting a different kind of theatre, or church. The parable hurts no one. The people in the car with us will return feeling luckier, happier – more full of hope – simply for being in the presence of an otter’s paw and a saucer of milk. There’s nothing wrong with hope.
   Machona pulls over and a dozen dusty village children from toddler to teen converge on all four open windows. They are selling plastic cups filled with dried macimbi, caterpillars of the mopane tree. Wilfred buys their entire stock of the crunchy delicacy without haggling over price, one portion for every person in the car. He winks at me and laughs, “Popcorn for the show”.
   But he thinks I don’t notice when he quietly hands a crisp note to the astonished eldest child – it’s way more than the caterpillar cups are worth. When I ask him about it later, he explains that as a child he sold roasted mealies at a busy bus terminus in order to survive. He remembers how it felt to get unexpected help from a stranger.
   “We must share,” he says simply. And he did. Siyabonga kakulu, Wilf, rest in peace.

* Machona, I remember you also Mdala, RIP.

Walter Mapango

The big man shuffles down the narrow corridor in front of me. He’s a heavyweight, Walter, but slowed by the fast-creeping effects of diabetes. He reminds me of my hero, Muhammad Ali, only at his most hostile. I’ll bet he could pack a punch in his day but now, like the Greatest, Walter is weakened by the ravages of his condition.
   Not so weakened that I don’t have the utmost respect. The dead malevolence in his measured, deliberate glance is chilling. It has quieted me mid-sentence on more than one occasion already, and I’ve only had a desk beside Walter’s at The Sunday News about two weeks now.
   He senses me slow-marching behind him, stops and turns – gradually – until he faces me. He fixes me with that glare.
   “Are you in a hurry?”
   It’s the longest string of words he’s directed at me to date. His voice is rich as black loam.
   “Uhm… No Mr Mapango. Well, yes, actually, I have a-”
   He swivels languidly away and continues his long shuffle toward the newsroom at the end of the corridor.
   I have a notebook full of scribbles. I sit myself down behind my vintage Remington Rand typwriter. Make a mental note to change the ragged ribbon. I flick open an A4 pad and, holding my notebook open in my left hand, commence writing.
   “What are you doing?”
   I don’t answer Walter at first. Then, in my peripheral vision, I see he’s turned in his chair to face me.
   “Oh, sorry… I’m… writing my piece.”
   “Writing it.”
   “Uhm, yes.”
   “Why do you always write by hand first?”
   “So I can rewrite it before I type it.”
   “You want to write it, then rewrite it, then type it?”
   I’m unnerved by this unexpected attention. I have come to see Walter as a solid constant, an immovable mountain. I never anticipated having to converse with the mountain.
   “Why can’t you just type it?” he glowers at me. “From your notes, or from your head.”
   He gets up in slowmo, approaches at his convenience to stand behind me. I’m intimidated. I pray he’s not going to ask me what my story is about.
   “What is your story about?”
   I give him the muddled version, it tumbles out – the way I’d write my first draft before numbering blocks of longhand text in order of priority.
   “No.” He raises a hand, not his voice. “Just tell me your intro.”
   “It’s about-”
   “One line. We are at the bus stop.”
   “This guy, he’s-”
   “I’m getting on the bus,” Walter shuffles toward the editor’s office.
   “Well, when he-”
   “The bus is leaving,” he knocks on the door, opens it. “Just tell me in one line.”
   So I do. He pauses at the door, fires a question each time I falter, driving the story on.
   “Okay,” he says when I’m done, before closing the door behind him. “It’s written. Now type it.”
   Thanks for all the lessons, Sekuru. I remember you well. RIP.

Gift Chaita

Martha Chirau-Nduku is the editor's secretary. She's like a mother hen with me:
   "Joseph, why are you smoking so much?"
   "Joseph, put on a jersey - it's too cold outside."
   Today, Martha is beside herself. Before I've even come into the newsroom she's heard the news: Joseph was found sleeping on the pavement outside the building.
She is waiting for me with arms crossed. "Mwana (small child), who did you go drinking with last night?"
   I'm not thinking. May have something to do with the dull pounding in my ravaged little 17-year-old brain.
   "Gift."
   "Right," says Martha. There's steel in her voice. "Gift."
   She picks up her phone, dials an extension, the photographic department.
   "Gift. Get up here."
   We stand before her like two schoolboys. Gift is ten years older than me, a grown man. From the moment we met, a year before, he has taken me under his wing. He calls me 'mfana', little brother. He copies valued contacts from his little black book into mine, the most generous thing one journalist can do for another.
   When we go out on the town, he usually sees to it that I get home safe, or at least to a bed somewhere. He's gotten me out of plenty of scrapes. My thanks has been to stitch him up with Martha.
   "Why did you leave the young man on the street? You were so drunk you just forgot him, is that it?"
   "Ah, he just-"
   "He got lost? At night? You let him get lost at night, after drinking too much. You know there are tsotsis in this place after dark."
   I do my feeble best to extract Gift from ground zero. "It was my own fault, Martha-"
   "You are still learning, mwana. This one is old enough to know by now."
   So I am excused - poor Gift has to skirt around Martha for a few days. But he's quicker than that to forgive me. "Don't worry about it, mfana. But next time I'm going to put a bell on you, like the one we use on a goat."
   Gift Chaita, January 9, 1959 - November 8, 2009
Lala ngokuthula, mfowethu.