Miss Lizzie

"But she's beautiful," Miss Lizzie says as the baby squirms away.

 

Esther is here too -- a grown-up Esther in a purple dress with sequins on. Not so long ago, Esther was eagerly taking my twice-read magazines (because I got them secondhand already) to cut up and use for her Fabrics O-level coursework. Then her mother put her into a private academy (which isn't the same as private school. It's a lot cheaper, for one. And less regulated. The only thing the authorities seem to do is to close lots of academies down for "not being licensed." But often the exam results are better, partly because the teachers don't strike).

 

Esther wants to be a teacher, or at least, her mother wants her to. Miss Lizzie has dreams of a better future for her only child. She has enrolled her at the local teaching college.

 

"Look at me," she says. "No exams, no house. Nothing."

 

Esther suddenly seems downcast. We exchange pleasantries. How my elder child is growing. How Christmas was. How it's good the rain came.

 

"She has a husband now," Miss Lizzie says. "She's having a baby, you know. In March. I was not angry. But now - "

in the bank

"They should do e-banking here," the woman behind me says loudly. "It's dangerous to be moving round with large sums of money this time of year."

 

I look down at my fistful of dollars: an advance payment on next term's school fees. Inside the crowded banking hall, I feel safe.

 

"It's getting like Jo'burg," she tells me. She is youngish, bespectacled, well-dressed. Spends six months of every year in the UK "where my parents are. Wandsworth. Do you know it?"

 

The night before last, she tells me, she found a taxi idling on Herbert Chitepo, the main street. It's a busy street, lined with flamboyant trees in full bloom this time of year, dotted with phone card vendors. It wasn't late. Glancing inside, she realised something wasn't right.

 

"The driver was dead. He had a bag on his head. His wallet was open on the seat. They'd taken everything."

 

She called the police, who confirmed the man had been murdered for his takings. It was a Saturday. Somebody -- some people -- must have reckoned that by the end of the day, he'd have made a pretty penny.

 

"The worse thing was, he was old. And from Malawi. His family are all there. There's no-one to bury him here."

security

The officer follows me beyond the battered wire fence of the station. "Do you know anyone who is interested in machines?"

Machines?

"I am only a policeman because of security," he says. His black boots are well-shined, unlike (I noticed earlier) his superior's. He is 24, he says. I imagine his mother ironed his grey shirt that morning. "There were white people coming to my place to look at my machines. They said I was an MDC supporter. It was better for me to join.

"But really, it is not what I want to do."

His eyes light up when he talks about his inventions. Machines for grinding nuts, machines for irrigation. What he wants to do is make something big. Like Daniel Shumba's helicopter in Harare (which hasn't taken off -- yet).

I feel old standing next to him and his eagerness -- old and aware people are watching. How many other kids, brimming with potential, joined the force "because of security"?

oxbridge

"Auntie, what do I have to do to go to Oxford?" A asks.

He appeared in the kitchen a little while earlier, a rucksack full of books in his hands. We sit at the table, green bananas in a bowl in front of us. He declines tea. I know there is something he wants to ask me.

I will have to wait to find out.

So I ask first after his mother, his sister, his grandmother. He asks after my baby, my son, my husband.

I ask how his lessons are going, at the private academy next door to his grandmother's that offers a better -- very slightly better -- education than the strike-plagued government boys high school.

He tells me about his old school in Matero, the township in Lusaka where he lived for five years with his parents. "I always wanted to come home, Auntie," he says. "They were so rough there."

(Later I will look up Matero on Google as I try to picture him there: "a section of populated place in Lusaka", travelingluck.com tells me. Barclays bank has a branch there. There's a football team called the Matero Tigers. Greataupair.com tells me to find "all Housekeepers available near Matero, Lusaka" and then it tells me to find "all Senior Caregivers available near Matero, Lusaka. Redemption Shalom Church is somewhere there: 'Peter' has a strong heart for evangelism and community development, apparently. A crime wave is haunting residents after the murder of a female student, says the Lusaka Times two days ago).

"I took up martial arts," A tells me. "I loved it so much." I wait.

"Auntie, if I get 25 points at A-level, do you think I can go to Oxford?"

I take a deep breath.

in this part of Africa...

you unfold a pushchair -- a nice pushchair, given to you by a Swiss diplomat -- and a snakeskin falls out.

and if the baby doesn't breastfeed...

A five-month old baby exposed his mother's affair, a local paper reported -- because he refused to breastfeed. When the baby refused to feed for three days, the parents went to ask why at a local church. "The wife was told to confess her transgressions," according to the Manica Post. When 17-year-old Laiza Makufa revealed she'd had an affair with a married neighbour since the baby was born and begged for her husband's forgiveness, the baby started to feed again. The three -- and the baby -- were photographed in the paper: the neighbour in his blue city council trousers, Makufa in a red top holding her baby. "I just felt like I loved him," she said.

the colic remedy

"She's a screamer, your daughter," says S.

"Have you tried putting her on your back?" asks S's mother.

I haven't, not yet. Not that I wouldn't, but I worry that I wouldn't tie the blankets right and she'd come crashing down. We talk -- in the flickering light of a candle, this late Sunday afternoon -- of babies, their babies, my new one, nappies and nappy rash cream and colic... Colic. My mother Fedexed two bottles of Infacol, the UK remedy, when the baby's colic was at its worst. The local remedy is:

"Half a cup of cooking oil. You boil it, then leave it to cool. Then you give her a spoonful. It's an old remedy, but it works," says S's mother.

visiting

"But where is the blanket?" Mai D asks me. Blanket? It's 30 degrees at least this afternoon. The baby doesn't need a blanket, surely? Mai D tut-tuts. "I have never held a baby without a blanket," she tells her husband, who is sitting dutifully in the living-room next to her, summoned no doubt, to welcome The Baby. He nods awkwardly.

I've always been fascinated by different approaches to child-rearing. And now I'm getting a Zimbabwean lesson first-hand. Mai D asks me about nappy rash, tells me she washed her babies (and she had four, and she raised a grand-daughter, who, aged 12, has finally left for mission school) in Sunlight washing-up liquid (same as green Fairy), used Vaseline on their bottoms (Blue Seal is the best, she told me firmly), and always, always used a blanket. She watches me breastfeed critically. "Are you sure you're not suffocating her?" I shift position as I'm told. "Did you come on your own?" she asks. "But who held her?" Mai D is envisaging my daughter bumping around in the backseat, unrestrained. "I have a seat," I tell her, and think of all the mothers I've seen clutching their babies in the backseats, wrapped up thickly like sausage rolls. No-one checks you have a baby seat when you leave a Zimbabwean maternity ward.

Every time the baby opens her mouth, Mai D tells me to feed. (The baby, unused to being offered milk every few seconds, licks hesitantly, to cries of horror from Mai D). She plies me with Coke. I already know -- because my doctor told me - that locals think this increases milk supply. Ditto for peanuts. Once, visiting a friend in a maternity ward, I watched her aunt ululate when she saw the baby -- and promptly hand over a bag full of peanuts.

Mai D rummages in her freezer. "You must have this chicken," she says, handing me a huge lump of frozen bird. "It'll help you make good milk."

gifts

"My father sent you some things," she says.
"He went into his fields, got you some pumpkin. The big white pumpkins. And cucumbers."
"He said to me: Take them to Mai S - because she has given me food."
I put my hand to my chest to say thankyou, I'm touched. Gently, the way I've been taught. In Zimbabwe, I've learnt to receive. I think hungrily of big white pumpkins, of the chopping they'll necessitate but of the roasts too, they'll make.
"But he put them in the hut," she says. "And then I got up at 3 o'clock and it was dark and I forgot them."

The Fear

"Don't go into town. That's the consensus. They'll be driving people to the stadium," she says.

This is the other side of The President's Birthday: The Fear. The fear that makes so many stay at home this Saturday, including the elderly residents of a cluster village near the centre of this eastern city. They'll be closing the shops anyway, goes the whisper. Trucks swerve past, laden with chanting supporters. Buses -- dozens of buses -- pull into the stadium. The fresh produce market, normally dotted with huge baskets, pyramids of fruit laid out on plastics and tarpaulins and ancient zambias, has been razed to make a VIP carpark. Across the road the new Spar store makes a good vantage point.

By night, the curry takeout on the golf-course in the lushly-green Murambi suburb has run out of everything but pork-chops. The VIPs did not stay in the stadium to feast on the huge pots of sadza, then.

a good wedding

"Was it a good wedding?" I ask. I've staggered out of the bedroom, baby in hand, to greet our guest. We were supposed to go to his daughter's wedding in December, but were out of the country. Secretly, we weren't quite sure we'd be able to afford to attend anyway. Guests have to dig deep in this place.

"Very good," he says. He ticks off on his fingers. "Two fridges, a stove, a deep freeze. Six microwaves."

"And lots of dinner services. The biggest one had 65 pieces. Oh -- and they got about 6,000 dollars."

community

"Amai Tinashe?" The shelf-stacker (milk section) positively runs across the store. "It's your baby?" She stretches out her arms to hug me.

'The baby' is swaddled slug-like in fluffy blankets, Shona-style. She's not yet strapped on my back, though I haven't ruled out doing that completely. It's just I don't want to have to bounce her on my back in the middle of the night when she won't sleep.

"What did you call her?" And I tell her, slightly embarrassed we didn't use a Shona name again.

The vegetable weigh-er -- not my favourite one, who has a battered Old Testament that he reads between polishing tomatoes and parcelling out lychees -- breaks into a smile.

"It's a girl? I will be your son-in-law one day."

It rained this morning. I wondered whether it was wise to take the baby out. But it's five weeks since I set foot in a shop, and we only needed to go to two. Now, under the glaring fluorescent lights, I'm beginning to understand what community means. And how, half a world away from the community I grew up in, I have somehow tumbled into another one, just as warm, just as familiar.

"Like me," approves the till-supervisor. She has strolled over in her stilettos to take a look. "I have one girl, one boy. Now I am finished."

I am 'finished' too. At least that's what my husband says.

cheat

"L's having problems with her marriage," she says. "She found photos on his cellphone."

"Photos?" I went to L's hen party four years ago. She sat under a tablecloth -- well, it looked like a tablecloth -- with her feet poking out. Her sister-in-law, in a broderie-anglaise dress, looked on. Later, L's mother took us on a tour of her wedding presents, displaying with a flourish the a microwave, an oven, more kitchen appliances, a dinner service, linen, irons, toasters. I thought of the wedding presents I got -- a duvet cover, a vase, two cushions, some hand-woven table mats, nothing with a plug on -- and marvelled.

S looks away. "Photos of parts of his girlfriend's body. And Mummy --" S still says Mummy, even though she is in her 30s and Mummy is nearly 60 -- "Mummy is so mad, she won't talk to us, she doesn't want to see us."

"Last week I 'phoned L. I said: 'Do you want me to come?" She said: 'What for?' Can you imagine, my sister saying that?"

We sip our mango juice, look out on the swimming pool. The air is heavy and hot. Three-year-old Tapiwa looks at the baby nursing, pulls at her mother's shirt. S pushes her away. "No, you're a big girl now Tapie."

"The thing is, we told her. Mai L said, so did I. We knew he had another wife when she married him. We said: 'L, isn't he too old for you?' But she said: 'No, we love each other. He's on separation from his wife.'"

Turns out He, L's husband the banker from Bluffhill, has three wives. Five children, two with L. "He told her to move out today. Said she must find a house for 200 dollars rent for her and the kids." 200 dollars rent will get her a room in the townships, not in Bluffhill. Rents in upmarket suburbs like that start at 1,000 - 1,500 dollars now - as surely the banker must know. Harare rents are on a par with Maputo these days. Higher even.

"She wants to go back to Mutare. She says she'll start up her beauty business." Ah yes -- I remember L's beauty business. She gave me a facial once, on a doctor's bed on a breezy verandah. But L won't come home on her own.
A modern woman -- once she won a beauty pageant -- she wants her in-laws to suffer the humiliation of having to escort her home, the unwanted bride, the one they couldn't get their son to treat right.

moral fibre

"Are you still there?" she hisses as we near the gate.

She's called in, her braids freshly done, to drop off some cupcakes in honour of the addition to our family. Four beaded chocolate creations, trussed up in blue serviettes. I'm touched -- and struck again by the permeability of culture, of how cupcakes are no Shona tradition. And yet they are. Now.

"It's a lack of moral fibre we've got." There's a second before I realise what she's talking about.

"The MDC." She shakes her head. "That Morgan and his women. There'll be more too, crawling out of the woodwork."

She's referring to the Morgan marriage scandal that broke while I was out of the country. State media announced he'd got married, paid 40,000 US lobola (bride price), that his new wife -- a wealthy businesswoman of 39, with close ties to ZANU-PF- had gone to his rural home to perform the cultural rites a new wife must. More salacious online sources claimed she was pregnant with his twins. After his spokesman denied any marriage had taken place, Tsvangirai then admitted it had -- but now he was to divorce the woman.

"He's not wise," she says. "What is he -- nearly 60? But he still thinks he's a young man. They're all the same, these people. If you give a man a mattress, he will change."

"I was with these people from the start, through the trade unions," she says. "And I look at them and think I may have wasted all that time. What do I do? I've got to --"

"You got to see it through," I finish for her. It's a bad habit I have, of finishing other people's sentences if they seem to have come to a grinding halt. I think it's because I want to encourage them to go on.

"No," she says. "But there is one thing: he may not be wise but he is brave. I'll give him that."

She tosses her braids, gets back into her car. "They're (the cupcakes) are from Sheena's, if they're no good!"