Starting at the end of the alphabet

Zimbabwe 1985
 

At Great Zimbabwe

One way to cross a vast grassland

We stayed in the former home of the former Attorney General. The first entry in my journal was that the burglar bars looked like lace. The huge living room windows were unbarred, and I speculated that they had possessed more than one giant German Shepherd. Our hosts had no large dogs and one morning we woke to find the windows had been used as doorways. My watch had vanished from my bedside table, a laundry basket - full of clothes the evening before - had been ransacked and was almost empty.

There was an unfenced swimming pool in the grassy grounds. The houseworker and I took turns holding our sons' hands as they toddled around the perimeter. This proud woman spent her free hours studying secretarial skills and participating in street theatre with a workers' freedom group. 

With her, we explored the rural villages where her family lived, viewed and failed to capture on film a range of wildlife that made me gasp, and felt the pull of a powerful past at Great Zimbabwe. My son, not yet two, often slept tied to  my back and, when awake, demonstrated the art of mimicry, doing as we did, experimenting with actions that made little sense to him.  He remembers nothing of his five-month stay in Africa.

Though we bonded in the shared knowledge of single motherhood, my new friend's world was vastly different to mine. A world where clerks expected women to "fall in love with them" and therefore pave the way to receiving maintenance payments from absent husbands. A world where widowhood meant being "inherited" by the brother, or even nephew, of the deceased, and then to be required to stave off all his advances until the time when the mourning and dependence could end. A world where a difficult birth meant you'd been unfaithful, and to "tell" was the way to make the birth easier.

Less intimately, I discovered how to prevent water spilling out of the tins women carry on their heads. Do you know how?

The young explorer

Afternoon tea in the back yard