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ROOTS

Over the years, the homes of my acquaintances or friends in Urban Zimbabwe, have exemplified the virtues that underlie the Shona traditional reception - Mauya. (You've come / welcome) that dearest of Shona words, approximated by our "cosiness" and more nearly by the Swahili "Karibu" but not as hearty as the German Gemutlichkeit, or Russian Uyutnost. Mauya- denotes the Shona talent for creating a warm, tender environment even in dire poverty and with the most modest means; it is associated with intimate scale, with small dark spaces, with domestic generosity, with a nurturing love.

It is a quality of soul my childhood was blessed with, thanks to my sisters, brothers - their friends, associates, neighbours and my parentage whose tiny Highfield Black African township cottage - filled with whatever icons and pieces of teak furniture and china they had sweated it out to purchase or salvaged from Europeans who having worked in the country or made enough money were going back to their continent or were moving on to South Africa, Australia or America - I spent the happiest of my first ten years.

Except for the erratic attentions of foreigners, I was brought up exclusively by Zimbabweans. They bullied me into taking my first steps, speaking my first words, surviving my first illnesses, learning my first manners, singing my first songs and memorising poetry, regarding every one as an individual human-being worthy of respect. They were my first loves and my first tyrants. Beneath their veneer of tenderness and pacifism, the prim gentility, their Zimbabwean provenance, there was a searing energy, an iron discipline, a formidable will to dominate, anguish to survive, to be free, it was in them that I first sensed the power of a liberated mind, of independence, to depend on oneself.

A treasured early memory are the stories of true life experiences before and after the advent of colonialism. The brevity and heroism of my ancestors, the legends, the humour, but no flutter of lullaby. You looked up to the elders and respected them. Any elder the age of your parents or older than you could discipline you for a misdeaminor, then inform your parents or never tell them at all. All elder women were Amai (Mother). Their word was decisive.

Zimbabwe is a region in which woman centred cults and social orders have lingered far longer than in most other cultures. Worship of the "Great Mother" and of other self-inseminating female deities common to agricultural societies prevailed long into the Christian era. Every curse will befall any family whose father did not pay "Mombe ye Humai" - a cow or equivalent given to the mother as appreciation for her bearing and mothering the bride.

Around 300 AD the Munhumutapa Emperor built the conical tower at Great Zimbabwe to reach the moon. To collect the moon and give it to his Queen as an ornament,- the legend goes. Shona folklore still remains uniquely rich in powerful archetypes - the Aunts who control marriage, health, fate, fertility. Mbuya Nehanda, Heroine of the resistance against British colonialism in 1897.

Little did I dream that in 1999 we could be accommodated at and courtesy of Fortune City and the Wonders of modern technology.

We are looking forward to meeting all our neighbours and get to know each other.

Face of Africa.
New Tenant in the Melting Pot.

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