Friday, January 23, 2015

Grief


"Khumbulani has phoned," she says. "The police know who the tsotsis are."

When I first saw her after Christmas, her face was hollow, her cheeks sunken. Grief has aged her: grief, and horror too. Her sister Sekai, an energetic mother-of-two was murdered.

Sekai was managing a general store well off the beaten track in Nyanga, eastern Zimbabwe. I have not seen the store but I imagine what it is like: the long wooden counter, and behind it, bottles of cooking oil, bars of soap, bags of kapenta. Not a lot of choice but the basics, enough to keep a family that grows its own maize and vegetables going.

Sekai slept at her workplace in a room off the back the store. The tsotsis came at 10 pm on the Saturday night after New Year. Sekai heard them truck arrive. She tried to lock herself in. The tsotsis blocked the door. "Do not close it," they told her (the male worker at the bottle store heard this conversation and recounted it to police). "We want the money." "There is no money," Sekai said. But the tsotsis, their heads tied in plastic shopping bags so that she couldn't identify them, had been watching. The owner of the store had not collected the money that night. "Give us the money." Sekai tried to pull out her cellphone. That's when they stabbed her in the chest. She staggered away, screaming. "You've killed me, you've killed me." One of them pulled out a pistol.

Her sons found her by the step just outside the store.

Now what Sekai's sister is telling me is this: that the tsotsis may have disguised their heads with OK bags but Sekai's male co-worker recognised the pair of trousers that one of them was wearing. In the village, clothes are not a commodity endlessly renewed as they might be in the towns which have a market. Here, clothes have to last several seasons, if not years. A pair of trousers is as recognisable in some cases as a person's face.

"The police beat that man. He said: Do you want to kill me? And the police officer said: Yes, I will kill you because you killed Mai Khumbulani. So then the tsotsi cried: OK. I will talk."

There is no relish on her face as she says this. Only pain.

The attacker is from the village. He says it was not him who stabbed Sekai. That was his friend from Rusape, a two hour-drive away. The one who owned the truck. The police have gone to find him.

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