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 - "

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."

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.

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!"

what I thought then

I never dreamt I'd stay a whole decade in a troubled southern African country, much less raise a child here. I grew up in rural England, the oldest of three girls. We wore Laura Ashley dresses on Sundays. I kept rabbits -- pedigree Himalayan dwarfs -- in the backyard. The nearest I ever got to any kind of a snake was a sign saying 'Beware of Adders' in the Chambers Woods in Lincolnshire. After university, I moved to Paris. If I ever thought there of having kids (and I don't think I did much), I imagined a bigger flat avec vue sur la Tour Eiffel. A jeune fille au pair. Saturday afternoons sailing those wonderful boats with big white sails on the pond in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Chic ensembles from Petit Bateau. Arriving for Sunday afternoon tea at Tante Marie-Jeanne's bearing one of those beribboned white boxes full of dainty little multi-coloured patisseries. This was not the life I got.

They Will Use Machetes

Oh, and they play with machetes.

Scene: Child delivered home from playdate. Dusk in an African garden.

Me (absentmindedly, crouching over hole my son is digging): "Did you have a lovely time with X?"

Him: "Oh yes. We cut down a tree."

I look at my husband. He seems...shifty.

"It was a giant strelitsia. Hanging down over the drive. Had to be cut down, the mother said."

"What with?" enquires the Wary British Mother.

"We used a machete," my son, 7, says proudly.

totem

"Do you know what my totem is?" Fadzie asks.

She and my son are climbing in my pantry, legs splayed out to balance on the shelves that line the walls. It's not entirely permitted behaviour but my mind was -- until now -- elsewhere.

"Mum, what's a totem?"

I look at Fadzie. "It's an animal, isn't it, that represents your family?" I'm not sure that that is everything there is to a totem, but Fadzie nods.

"It's a porcupine." She must have just seen the porcupine quills, collected when we were last in the Lowveld. They're on a shelf next to the lightbulbs and a grubby lump of plasticine. She has already corrected me on my housekeeping skills, taking the broom to sweep the floor as I wash up hurriedly in cold water: "If Gogo could see this floor, she'd say: 'Do humans live here?'"

"Porcupine is nungu in Shona," she says importantly.

"Mum, what's our totem?"

She laughs, but it's a good-natured laugh. "White people don't have totems," she says.

interviewing in a bikini

"You've been to Hot Springs?" queries the policeman at the roadblock just by the Chimanimani turnoff. "For leisure purposes?" He looks suspicious.

Yes, we assure him, for leisure purposes. My wet plait and the child in the back convince him. He waves us on.

Now I'm beginning to wonder if I was wrong. Honestly and truly, we did go to Hot Springs -- a rustic resort (if you can call it that -- Doris Lessing in "African Laughter" says it's ruined and that book was published back in 1993) on the edge of the Chiadzwa diamond fields -- for leisure purposes. It was a Saturday afternoon, mid-winter, and the idea of swimming in a naturally hot pool was tempting. So that's what we did: took a picnic, bundled up the child, filled a couple of thermoses, and stayed an hour-and-a half. Hot Springs has just been controversially "sold" by the Chimanimani Rural District Council for 60,000 US to a company to house mainly South African workers on the diamond fields, but it is still open for day-trippers. It was a dreamy afternoon, mostly spent lolling in the hot water under a mopani tree.

Maybe though I think now, I should have been a bit more diligent, more of a newshound. There was a group of four (fairly loutish, half-drunk) Afrikaans males also in the pool. I should have probed, asked them what was going on.

The thing is, I was wearing a bikini. Can one interview in a bikini? Especially when you're interviewing undercover, which necessarily entails a bit of banter. My husband was a couple of metres away. He understands the work drive -- he does it himself -- but this was a wee bit delicate. "Thanks for bringing your wife," they'd shouted to him. "Don't you want to come to watch the rugby with her?" After that, could I really have swam over to them, smiled innocently and started chatting?

Maybe. I just couldn't. So that's my defence. No interviews in a bikini. You have to draw the (bikini) line somewhere. Next time I'll wear a one-piece and shorts.

turning the tables

By the way," I ask. "Was it you who wrote that article in The Zimbabwean on Sunday?"

I've 'phoned a well-known political analyst for his comments on this week's party congress. A lecturer at the main University of Zimbabwe, he's the commentator EVERYONE calls since Professor Masipula Sithole died. I've spoken to him often, but am almost certain he doesn't have a clue who I am.

He gives me the soundbites -- he's good at them, he knows what's required -- and then we chat for a few moments.

"Yes it was," he says, surprised.

"I enjoyed it," I say. It was a small piece, on disciplining kids. "I have my own child and it made me think."

"Precisely," he says. (I guess he means that's what it was meant to do). He chuckles with pleasure. "That's great. Thankyou for saying that. Thankyou. Darling."

plump

Gibson is 5. "I'm five too," my son says, pricking up his ears. I've brought him along to the clinic where I'm observing a feeding scheme with Plumpynut, a supplement made of peanut butter, milk powder, oil and vitamins. (There's no power at home. No food either, but that's another story).

I look from Gibson to my own child. The difference is painful. Gibson is half the size of my child. He sits quietly on his mother's knee, while mine sits chunkily on the stone floor, drawing spaceships on a torn-out page of reporters' notebook.

"What's that?" he asks a little bit too eagerly, as a nurse counts out 28 silver sachets of Plumpynut. Gibsons's mother -- we've exchanged sympathetic smiles over the kids' heads --packs it carefully away in an empty maize-meal bag. Four a day for seven days. She'll be back next Monday to get more.

Gibson drank poison while he was young. It's a common enough tale in some townships, where people live close together and there's little storage space. Fertiliser or rat poison, those are the usual ones.

"He's got strictures in his oesophagus," the nurse says quietly. "Before, he could only have milk but this Plumpynut, he can digest it too."

Gibson starts to cry as his mother gets up. She hands him a sachet and he tears at the corner greedily.

Later, I send my child outside while I watch in silence a small boy with flesh hanging off his buttocks being weighed. The nurses insist on stripping the children naked to weigh them.

Guiltily, I lug my huge child home.

poundnote farm

The policemen flag us down not far from Penhalonga. There are three of them

"Tell them to go in the back," I hiss. Because while I'm not averse to giving lifts -- and policemen can be a very good source of quotes -- this is a quiet Sunday afternoon, the men are very obviously armed and my child is in the back seat.

He ushers them into the back of the truck. Two women jump in too. Both elderly, doeks on, struggling with suitcases. They want to go to Muchena communal lands. Fine.

On our right is what was Pound Note farm. It was where the tallest tree in Rhodesia stood, a eucalyptus. The tree was depicted on a pound note, hence the name of the farm. I think about farms as we drive along and about the gently-spoken woman with the quavery voice I spoke to this week. She and her husband have already given away 92 percent of their farm. The last 8 percent is threatened by a US citizen somehow linked to the prime minister. The "niece's" sister came to the farm in April, a handbag over one arm, a badza (hoe) in the other. She started digging daintily through the already-planted tomatoes. "Did your husband really call that woman a cold, stupid kaffir?" I have to ask the farmer's wife. Later she sends me a text message. "Thank you. These days justice seems so elusive."

There's a voice from the back seat. Someone's reading my thoughts. "Mum, how do you get a farm?" "Why?""I want one."

"You have to work very hard and then you can buy one," I say. "But best not to buy one in Zimbabwe."

"Why?" Careful now. "Because you can't always keep it."

My five-year old never saw his grandfather's farm. We were married on it, but the farm was taken over eight months later. My father-in-law went back there once. There was human excrement in some of the rooms. Someone had scooped out my sister-in-law's face cream from the bathroom cabinet, which made her very indignant.

"Why can't you keep it?" "Because sometimes the government wants it," I say. "But how has Z's papa still got his farm?" Some questions don't have answers.

We're in Muchena communal lands. The women want to get out. The policemen don't. We turn off the main road. There's not another car in sight, nor a pedestrian. I start to get edgy. There are too many stories of fake - or corrupted -- policemen in the Herald and on our daily email. Two policemen are currently on trial for bank robbery. In court last week, they complained they were being victimised for being in possession of 120,000 US. They were merely "enterprising," the cops maintained. Their monthly salary is 100 US. It wasn't clear from the Herald report if the magistrate had actually got round to asking them how they got the 120,000 if they didn't get it from Kingdom Bank. (He may not have done. Last month the Herald carried an obit for a 35-year-old Harare magistrate who was still studying for his law degree at the University of Zimbabwe)

"Just turn the car round," I say. "Let's get back onto the main road."

There's a tap on the back window. They want us to stop. "I'll get into the driving seat, shall I?" I say, boots at the ready. In the event, the police get out, grasping their guns. They back away. I slide, relieved, over to the passenger seat. Later, on our way back from the dam we see them, lolling in the long grass near the Rhodesian ginger.

"Mum, does the government take houses as well?"

president showerhead

"President Mugabe is a pooh," says my six-year old Afrikaans niece. My son chuckles. At five, toilet humour is his idea of fun too. "President Mugabe is a pooh, a pooh," he chants.

This could be a problem. Chloe lives in South Africa, where you're allowed to freely criticise your leaders. Ask her who the president of South Africa is and she'll giggle: "President Showerhead", the widely-used nickname for Jacob Zuma, who testified in a rape case that he'd showered to minimise the risk of HIV infection. Chloe has heard her Zimbabwean father (and no doubt many others) slam Mugabe at the dinner table. My son hasn't. In Zimbabwe, criticising Mugabe is a jailable offense. State media often carries stories of individuals picked up because a CIO officer sitting behind them in a commuter omnibus heard them badmouthing the Father of the Nation. At home, we use the code RGM when we talk about Mugabe so our child doesn't repeat what he's heard. Our neighbours are ZANU-PF as are half the kids at his preschool (which is why the school can't organise farm visits anymore in case the small visitors tell their parents where they can find a nice farm...) We've even had to hide what we do from our child ("When the teacher asks you what your mummy and daddy do for a living, you know we write BOOKS, don't you?").

Time to take him aside again. "You can't say bad things about President Mugabe," I tell him.
"Why?" "Because if people hear you, you could get into trouble." "But why can Chloe say it?"
"Because she lives in South Africa." Which will have to do, for now. But after reading South Africa's papers, I'm inclined to believe that Chloe's turn to watch every word may well come.

gakas for breakfast

They look like those stress-relieving balls, the rubbery ones that come with spikes that you're supposed to squeeze. These ones though are green and edible. I've never seen them before.

"Here," Mai Agnes takes a potato peeler. She cuts off the studs.

"Do you want to try some, Mum?" I take a bite. It tastes like cucumber, only sweeter. Much better than the Oxford cucumbers you get in the supermarket sometimes. Those ones are invariably sour at the ends.

"They're gakas," he says happily. "Mai Agnes grows them in her garden." He finishes both, puts down his plate.

"Maita shumba," he says, clapping his hands. Not tatenda or masvita or tinotenda or any of the other variations on thankyou in Shona that I've diligently learnt.

At five, my son is more of a local than I'll ever be.

tank

There may be no birthday presents (they've been holed up from October onwards somewhere in Zimpost's flashy "space-station" building on the Harare airport road: the authorities say there's no fuel to make postal deliveries) but I want my son to have a birthday cake, at the very least.

"I want an army tank cake," he says.

An army tank cake could be a good idea. It's an easy shape: squarish. Easy colour too: sludge (which is about what we'd get from mixing the dregs of various inherited food colourings).

But a tank cake may be a bit iffy in Zimbabwe's political climate, especially now British newspapers are calling for a military invasion of the country and there are ominous images from Gaza on satellite TV. "The dogs of war are barking furious," fulminated Mugabe's press secretary in a column last weekend.

"Why don't you rather choose a cake in the shape of a swimming pool?" I hazard. "Or what about one of Nana's lovely chocolate ones?"

bathtime

I give my son an orange bath. It's the water that's orange, not the tub. The mains water started to dry up last night. The taps spit angrily when I try to fill the kettle. What little water I get is the colour of weak Nescafe. Late at night my husband takes a torch, mutters something about lurking puff adders (front-fanged, can bite through leather, 50-60 babies per litter) and goes outside to switch on our (probably poo-tainted) borehole. Zimbabwe had more rainfall in December than any other year since records began around 120 years ago, and we're running dry. The state-run water company ZINWA (aka Zimbabwe No Water Available company) has admitted it doesn't have the chemicals to treat the water.

When I first got to Harare, I took the colour of the tap water as an ominous sign. The company paid to have me put up in a serviced villa complex, just off Greenwood Park. The quilts were lumpy, the cupboards empty and a grizzled colleague a few doors down the corridor who I think expected me to cook for him sneered when I brought back some pasta shells from the OK store in First Street. There were reports of buses being torched in the townships. The moss-scented bath water was definitely the straw that breaks the camel's back (and yes, once someone did try to introduce camels to Zimbabwe. He was called Colonel Flint and he thought camels would be a brilliant way of overcoming the transport difficulties faced by the BSAP. Flint had two baggage camels and 10 riding ones shipped out here in 1903. A year later -- and after at least one public camel race -- only one was still alive).

These days I know brown water is vastly better than no water. "But mummy," my boy says, languishing in the tub with sandy grit below his tummy, "I won't get clean and shiny in this water."

"A bit of dirt never hurt anyone," I say (Mary Poppins, anyone?). "Your father says he used to bath in brown water when he was a boy with yellow hair just like you and he came out absolutely fine". Actually, his hair mysteriously turned brown a few years later.

red dress

My husband says that if we have another baby he will D-I-E. He spells this out because we are at the table with a four-year-old with big ears.

I will D-I-E and be D-E-A-D, my husband says in case I didn't quite get the message. Zimbabwe with one child is bad enough, Zimbabwe with two of the things will be much worse. It's a definite no, darling.

So I plot and I plan and I buy a new red dress from my favourite Chinese shop in the arcade next to Wimpy. It is knee-skimming and bust-skimming and full enough to twirl in seductively. I have not had a new dress for some time because a) there are very few clothes shops in Zimbabwe b) the clothes shops that have anything half-decent are wildly overpriced c) there are cash shortages. Bad ones. The sort that should stop you buying a new dress. I have been trying to feed the whole family -- two adults (one a meat-eater), a calcium-craving four year-old, two dogs and two cats -- on around £2.50 per day for some weeks now. We eat spinach, by the way.

Next morning I float into the dining room nonchalantly, as if this were Paris and I donned a new dress every day. My four-year-old has already learnt how to twist his mummy round his little finger.

"You look SO pretty, mummy," he says. "I want you to wear that dress everyday." And then -- just in case I haven't got the message -- "I want you to throw out all your other dresses and only wear that one."

"What about when it has to be washed?" I ask.

"I want you to wear it wet," he says.

My husband looks up from his mealie-meal porridge. There is no honey today. "Did you know there are cash shortages?" he asks politely.

"It's only zhing-zhong," I say. Zhing-zhong is the word Zimbabweans use when they talk about cheap poor-quality Chinese imports. It was one of the first words my child learnt.

I am having second thoughts about the dress though. Once, when I lived on a different continent, I read a piece about riots somewhere in the East. The police scanned the angry crowds and then picked out and shot someone in a red T-shirt. Our dear leader loves the East. Note to self: do not wear red dress in public, not in the next two months anyway. There are elections in March and people are getting restless. I do not want to be D-E-A-D, not for a red dress.

"So how do you like it?" I give my husband a twirl.