Date posted:Mon 28-Sep-2009
The imposing cross atop the brick church looms out of the bush like a beacon. The bells sing out with impatience, urging the faithful to hurry along, and one small bellringer is swept right off his feet. A peremptory roll from a handmade wooden drum topped with goat skin is followed by a call from a cow horn. The choir breaks into an a capella hymn.
It's a far cry from the stately Gregorian chant of my youth, all in Latin, which I could recite from memory with no idea what it meant. Everyone stands as a dozen altar boys, one carrying a large cross, escort the Rev. Johannes Maseko and two seminarians up the aisle. It's the first time I've seen altar boys in robes of brilliant African fabric - orange and green.
Those in the congregation tap their feet, clap their hands and sway to the music. My face is wet with tears. And I tear up again at the end, when the priest introduces me to the congregation as "baby Michelle" who was born here and is coming back after nearly five decades away. "You have returned to your home," he says. "We are your family. We are happy to have you with us."
On closer inspection, many collars in the pews are frayed, jerseys darned, Sunday-best shoes worn down at the heels. And at the offertory, only coins are placed in the basket along with offerings of tea biscuits, a packet of sugar, some tea leaves. These are precious commodities: Someone is doing without to make this gift.
Embakwe Mission once was an example of progress and success. But now it is suffering along with the rest of the country, and in particular the province of Matabeleland - land of the Ndebele people. Many people here are worn down by back-to-back wars and crises that keep this southwestern corner, on the brink of the Kalahari Desert, the poorest in a deprived nation. I find a place where no textbooks have been purchased in nearly a decade, where children come to school faint from hunger, where life savings have been wiped out.
Embakwe Mission was founded in 1902 by the spirit medium Njemhlophe, who gave up throwing the bones after he converted to Christianity. He came at the behest of Catholic missionaries who soon followed, a Jesuit priest on horseback and three intrepid nuns fresh from England in an ox wagon loaded with provisions, including a hen, a cock and a cat. First they turned back because of a thunderstorm with forked lightning. On the second attempt, the wagon got bogged down in mud. So the nuns, from the Belgian-based Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, trudged through the sludge to their new home, a loaf of bread under one arm and a bottle of altar wine tucked under the other. I think of them as I follow a rusting sign off the road onto a dirt track. I slow to cross the dry bed of Embakwe River. Some women are digging holes in the loose sand to collect water. A barefoot child waves hello. "Salibonani," I yell back out the window.
A grey lourie responds with its fish-wifely "go-away" squawk - hunters hate it because it warns their prey. The familiar song of cicadas hums through the bushes and the blue, blue sky is painted with clouds drifting lazily and so low you want to reach out and fluff them up. "Embakwe Mission," announces the same old carved stone, once whitewashed but now weathered grey. The mission's signature red-brick buildings are also weathered, including a church, clinic, a primary day school, a high school, hostels for boarders, a pigsty, playing fields.
Outside the mission, the air has a homely whiff of woodfire and cattle dung. The bush is thinned out because trees are used for fuel; the grass appears shaved from overgrazing. There's no running water, no electricity, no telephones. And we're out of reach of cellular phone service unless you climb a certain tree on the mission. Villages are also strangely bereft of young people.
James Mapegani Macebo Ncube, 78, taught at Embakwe for 45 years. His elder son went to neighboring South Africa and has not been heard from in 15 years. But his younger son graduated from Embakwe two years ago, got a job working with computers in South Africa and hopes to visit at Christmas. "Because of this government, I cannot enjoy my children around me. They could not tolerate staying, like all the young people: There are no jobs, nothing for them."
Macebo is caring for a 13-year-old orphan, the son of his wife's sister, who died in 2004 followed by her husband in 2006, presumably of AIDS. Like all aging Zimbabweans, his pension was wiped out by dizzying inflation as the government recklessly printed money to mask the collapse of the economy. Zimbabwe's dollar was on a par with the US dollar at independence in 1980. The government abandoned the local currency in January, shortly after printing a 100 trillion-dollar note.
In their old age, Macebo and his wife, Lilliam, are forced to survive off the land, much as the missionaries found their great-grandparents. They have two cows, a handful of goats and some chickens, and they grow corn, sorghum, millet and a variety of other crops. They live in a brick home topped by a grass thatched roof. If they need the toilet at night, they walk outside to a small brick building. Bedtime is when it gets dark, because there is no money to buy paraffin for the lamp gathering dust in a corner. If there's a medical emergency, Macebo is lucky.
He has two donkeys and a scotch cart that could carry them to the mission clinic. The clinic is surprisingly well-equipped and squeaky clean. On this day it's filled with the cries of children getting vaccinated. Nurse Barbara Moyo says the drugs come from a European doctor who works at a nearby mission and gets donations from Germany. When AIDS antiretrovirals are handed out, scores of people line up, winding their way around the clinic. Moyo says as much as 75 percent of the working population is infected with AIDS - those aged from about 20 to 49.
That astonishing figure - five times the national average - she attributes to migration for work, including prostitution, and the booming cross-border trade with nearby Botswana. Men get infected there and bring the disease home to their wives. The mission's schools also reflect crisis. Halfway through the term, the primary school has only one box of chalk and no money. Frederick Chikwane, a Cuban-trained chemist who is headmaster of the high school, says parents would not agree to pay more than $250 for a 13-week term for a boarder. His student body has shrunk from about 700 to 420 this year, with some parents putting students into cheaper day schools, some sending their children to South Africa. Less than two-thirds of school fees have been paid. In June, Chikwane was forced to send home some students whose parents had not paid. "Some of our students are dropping their schooling altogether, going to Botswana or South Africa to do manual labor, or just turning delinquent," Chikwane says. "It's a sad story."
Worse off is the primary school. Deputy headmaster Mongameli Phakathi says he cannot even look at the account books without getting a headache. The government announced this year that children in rural areas must not pay school fees. Children come to school too weak to play sports. Some come only for the mid-morning bowl of high-nutrition porridge provided by a Catholic charity. "For some, that's the only food they are getting," Phakathi says. Still, Chikwane says, things are better since the government abandoned the Zimbabwe dollar. "Costs rose so much, there was no money to buy food and, even if you had the money, you couldn't get it from the bank," Chikwane says. "We had to ask the parents to pay school fees in groceries." Most people in rural areas, with no access to any kind of currency, have turned to primitive barter. A friend told me about an elderly woman who offered a bus driver at Lion's Den her live, trussed-up chicken for a four-hour ride. The driver agreed, but passengers argued the woman was owed change - at least three eggs.
In the dining hall at Embakwe, boys and young men gather for dinner. They're hungry and there's some pushing. Each holds an enamel plate onto which one server ladles sadza, the stiff maize meal porridge that is a staple, another some grey, watery cabbage. Sister Mary Anthony Madanga, who runs the kitchen, complains the boys are not getting a balanced diet: They have had greens only three times in six months, there is no fruit, meat is served three times a week if a cow is slaughtered. Most days it's a soup of whatever vegetables are available, often the cabbage, which "the boys hate." I remember Embakwe as a land of plenty, providing for more than 1,000 students, missionaries and lay teachers. The mission became near self-sufficient after 1953, when the biggest private dam in the country was built. Canals channeled water to a vegetable farm and orchard. Wildlife was plentiful and we ate so much venison I can't stomach it today.
But now most mission fields are overgrown by knee-high grass. There is bush where I remember hundreds of orange, nectarine and banana trees. Maseko, the youthful mission director at 29 years old, says he hired an experienced farm manager in 2006. But the crops failed, tomatoes rotted in the fields, a lot of money was lost. There apparently was corruption, greed and mismanagement - the same evils that have helped destroy the entire country. The headmaster was fired for theft and took off with one of the two tractors. Maseko turned to the sole remaining white farmer in the area, who now uses part of the mission land and provides the school with some vegetables. The fields are constantly pillaged. A few days before my visit, thieves were caught with more than 200 pounds of tomatoes. Much of the countryside looks like the road from Bulawayo to Embakwe - mile after mile of destroyed farm fences and land left fallow.
Land was once the bedrock of my country. Some 5,000 white farmers owned two-thirds of Zimbabwe's richest land at independence, employed the largest workforce and produced enough food to feed the country and export. Zimbabwean beef was famous, its steak considered on a par with Argentina's. But millions of black peasant farmers were crowded onto overworked marginal land. So Britain, the former colonial ruler, funded a land resettlement program at independence and made annual payments for President Robert Mugabe's government to buy white farms. It only stopped in 1997 when it became clear that the land was being given to Mugabe's generals and cronies. After Mugabe lost a referendum to entrench his powers, he ordered violent seizures of commercial farms in 2000, accusing the farmers of ordering their black workers to vote against him. Banks suffered since many of their assets were in farm mortgages. The land itself became worthless.
In the years after 1980, thousands of schools, clinics, dams and roads were built. But not in Matabeleland, where the minority Ndebele people had voted overwhelmingly for Joshua Nkomo's party, not the winning party dominated by Mugabe's Shona people. A handful of Nkomo's guerrillas attacked white farmers and killed some white tourists near the Victoria Falls. This led to a full-fledged battle in Bulawayo, the Matabeleland capital a two-hour drive from Embakwe. Mugabe got North Korean instructors to "train" the Fifth Brigade, which swept through the province like its nickname "Gukurahundi" - Shona for "the first rains that wash away the chaff." Under Perence Shiri, now commander of the Zimbabwe Air Force, those troops attacked and killed up to 40,000 civilians in a five-year purge that some human rights activists liken to genocide. Some were buried in mass graves. Others were thrown down mine shafts. Limestone was thrown on some bodies to disintegrate the bones.
Entire sections of Matabeleland were blocked from access to medicine and food during a drought. With some 3 million people facing death by starvation, a defeated Nkomo signed a unity accord with Mugabe in 1987, effectively making Zimbabwe a one-party state. Many wonder if the same fate does not await the latest unity government - formed in February between Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, the man many believe won elections last year. People still talk about "Gukurahundi" in whispers. Some watched siblings, sons and daughters tortured and gunned down. Others were forced to dig their own graves before being shot or bayoneted. Entire families were locked into their thatch-roofed huts and burned to death. Mugabe - who once taught at a mission neighboring Embakwe in the 1940s - denied anything was happening. Local and international human rights groups say Mugabe and Shiri should be tried at the International Court of Justice for crimes against humanity. Some say fear of prosecution is the main reason Mugabe and his cabal cling to power.
At a village near Embakwe, Mtabisi George Ndlovu wonders why he ever bothered to fight for independence. "Look at us," he orders, pointing to a wife with one baby in her lap and two others hiding in her skirts while other children chase fowls around the dusty compound. In her pantry are a couple handfuls of dried beans and a cupful of cornmeal - not enough to feed the family. How many children do you have? I ask Ndlovu. For an answer, he turns to his wife, who says there are seven. Ndlovu gets a war veteran's pension of $40 a month, but it costs him nearly $10 to travel to Bulawayo for the money. "We eat poorly, once a day," he complains.
"When we were in the struggle, they promised us land, good houses with water and electricity, free education for our children, free health care. What did I get? Nothing." As I drive away from the mission, I'm filled with a sense of trepidation. I stop at the untended cemetery where thigh-high grass prevents me finding the grave of that first Catholic convert, Njemhlophe. In a cleared patch, mounds of three new graves are a reminder of the high death rate in a country devastated by AIDS and the diseases of poverty.
These days the graveyard is so full that people must be laid to rest elsewhere.
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Note: Pics are of some Embakwe girls taken about 1960 and Embakwe boys taken in 1956
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