Rotten Row Read online

  Now, I hope that I am not giving you the impression that I am a scientist of any kind, because that is the last thing I am. I cannot claim to be of a particularly scientific bent. I did Core Science in school, of course, like everyone. I remember some of the periodic table, you know, hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen and all that. I remember my biology lessons about Mendel’s experiments and Pavlov’s dogs and the peppered moth. I know the difference between an atom and an amp. At least, I think I do. I have just always been suspicious of things that cannot be proved. So I placed value in things that could be demonstrated as truthful without needing to have faith, and without having to believe the say-so of a man who knows a man who knows a man who knows another who saw a ghost. I considered both ChiKristu and Chivanhu to be equally irrelevant to my life, because as far as I was concerned, they were both superstitions and I believed in neither. This is who I was, until the death of Wonder.

  *

  Wonder Pasipanodya was just twenty-one years old when he died. It is a great thing to be a young man of that age. I remember my own early twenties with extreme nostalgia. At that age, you have not only discovered the delectability of girls, but you have also realised that some of them, with the right inducement, can be taken to bed. You have discovered the pleasures of beer. You are probably in your first job, or if you are really lucky, you are learning a trade or, if you are luckier still, you are at college or university. You have a bit of money, but are not yet weighed down with the turgid responsibilities of being a full adult. The world seems yours to conquer. Unless, that is, you are living in a place like Gokwe or any of the other shitholes in this country.

  What can I tell you about Gokwe that you don’t already know? Keeping with the religion theme that I have started, there are places so beautiful that they are considered God’s own countries. The kindest thing you can say about Gokwe is that it is a place that the Devil once called home until he abandoned it altogether as he ran shrieking from its ruins.

  Back in the 1890s when Cecil John Rhodes and his band of merry marauders established Rhodesia by taking over the fertile land on the Mashonaland plateau, they dumped the people who lived there in places they called native reserves. It is where the term kumaruzevha comes from, and it is generally agreed that such a life, hupenyu hwekumaruzevha, is one of unremitting hardship. Gokwe was one of the first native reserves. The keen injustice of it was that this abandoned land onto which people were dumped from their fertile land had been abandoned for a reason.

  With a harsh and unforgiving terrain, bad harvests and worse roads, Gokwe’s other claim to fame used to be that it was one of the main tsetse fly base stations for Midlands province. I suspect that many of the tales of witchcraft deaths there arose from plain old sleeping sickness. Its recent elevation to town status has not changed it much from the days it was a reserve, apart from the addition of a bank or two, a small dusty branch of the country’s biggest supermarket chain and the requisite mobile phone steel towers. It is still the same poor community in the middle of nowhere that it has always been, only now it has a Town Council, complete with a chairperson, a secretary, an administrator and a clutch of other councillors who earn salaries running it when there is really nothing to run.

  I can hear you ask, why, then, it is that I find myself here. It is important that you believe me, so I will tell you the truth about myself. I will say right away that I am here because I took bribes. There. I took bribes. Or, perhaps I should say that I took too many bribes. I got careless. I got caught.

  No one in the police gets fired for corruption any more. If they did, all that would be left would be some skinny bald-headed recruits from Chendambuya who don’t know their docket-books from their traffic-books. So bent cops like me are not removed from the force. We just get sent to places like Gokwe, like Checheche, or the aforementioned Chendambuya. And there we stay until we can plot our return to the streets of Harare that are full of drivers to milk.

  There was a curious symmetry to my career, such as it was, in Gokwe. Wonder’s case was my last case. My very first case also involved the supernatural. A week after I got to Gokwe, I was informed by my new private, Phiniel Zuze, that we had to look into a case of missing women’s underwear. I was still smarting from my transfer, and thinking of the half built house that I had left at Mainway Meadows and that I could have completed in a few more months of collecting traffic fines and keeping them for myself if I had not been caught. So when this underwear case came to me, I was not in the best of moods.

  I thought at first that there had been a breaking and entering at one of the two clothing shops in what passes for the town, but Phiniel soon put me straight. By the way, before I had even arrived in Gokwe, Phiniel had somehow ferreted out my totem title. Instead of addressing me by my name, as Mafa, my official title, Chief Inspector, or even as just ‘Chef’ as is normal, he addressed me as ‘Mwendamberi.’ This, combined with his self-effacing and over-confiding manner always made him sound like a man touching up a recalcitrant son-in-law for a loan when he still owed on a previous one. Indeed, he had asked to borrow money within two days of meeting me, spelling out his request in an elegant note written on a page torn from the Charge Book and signed Constable Phiniel Zuze, Gokwe, just in case I mistakenly gave the money to another Phinel Zuze not in Gokwe. Don’t let the gentle exterior fool you; when Phiniel places his unforgiving hands on a criminal, it is all we can do to restrain him. So fearsome is his reputation around these parts that his nickname is Boko Haram.

  Someone, Phiniel said, was taking the underwear off women at night all across the outlying village of Nembudziya. ‘The women go to bed at night all there, but in the morning, Mwendamberi, they have no underwear. It just vanishes. Disappears. Like it was never there. They suspect it is a chikwambo.’

  Now, in a full demonstration of the limitations of the English language to capture fully the fetid inventiveness of the Shona imagination, a chikwambo is usually translated as a goblin, when in fact it is a combination of a familiar, a good luck charm and a sort of unpaid messenger. Sure enough, our chikwambo soon made its debut in the papers as the ‘Gokwe Goblin’. I became the butt of jokes among my old colleagues. Any time I went back to Harare and stopped for a drink at the Police Club and went into the officers’ mess, I would get slaps on the back and questions about whether I had caught the goblin yet.

  In Gokwe itself, I was inclined to ignore the whole thing, but the matter became serious when the female teachers at the local school demanded that I do something at once or they would all of them leave, en masse. This was followed by angry calls from the provincial head of the education ministry in Gweru. The goblin appeared undiscriminating: old women, young women, fat women, thin women, tall women, short women, all had their underwear removed.

  Phiniel muttered darkly about mubobobo spells, he believed that someone in the village was using the goblin as a succubus to have virtual sex with all the women in the village. I did not believe a word of it. I told him that while I admired this mysterious man’s ingenuity and redoubtable stamina, there were surely more pleasurable ways to be with a woman than by remote control.

  I considered the whole thing to be a big waste of my time, to be honest with you, and did not always listen to Phiniel’s witterings about the latest developments. I did attend a few village meetings, and found myself in the middle of accusations that flew faster that an Air Zimbabwe plane taking the President to his annual Asian holiday. Talk about long memories. Someone remembered a grandfather saying that person’s grandmother had said something about a chikwambo to that other person’s tateguru in the time of Hitler’s war; another’s mother-in-law had done this to that one’s great-aunt two years before the mission school was built and this person had been told she was to inherit her aunt’s witchcraft shavi spirit and it had been passed on to her children. But so it is with people who do not ever leave the places they are born in until they are eventually buried there. All they have are memories, petty strif
e and grudges handed down along with the inherited clothes of the dead.

  In the end, it apparently took the combined effects of both ChiKristu and ChiVanhu to restore nocturnal dignity to the women of Nembudziya. A local sikamutanda joined forces with a Harare prophet of the fire and brimstone variety. They called an assembly of all the villagers. Together, they pointed to a cluster of men. One of them fell in a heap to the ground and confessed and produced the goblin, which apparently chose to make its entrance in a pair of moth-eaten underwear belonging to the village headman’s wife. On seeing it, she immediately had the vapours. After she had been restored to her senses, and the chikwambo burned and buried, the matter was considered closed.

  But as I pointed out to Phiniel, who narrated these events to me in a breathless voice, it was astonishing that the journalist from the Metropolitan newspaper who reported the chikwambo’s exposure, or even Phiniel himself, for whom separation from his phone for more than an hour is enough to declare national mourning, had had no eye on posterity. They had not thought to actually record the creature with their cameras.

  For a man who claimed to have laid eyes on the thing, Phiniel was suspiciously vague in the details. In his placid, confiding tones, he said, ‘It was not quite human, Mwendamberi, but not quite animal, maybe a little bit birdlike but it had no wings. It was half and half, yah, half and half, Mwendamberi, with a head larger than a rooster’s but smaller than a very small baby’s, but a different shape, a bit like a mouse, not a house mouse as such but a field one, yah, that sort of shape but not quite. It also had quite a lot of fur, but not too much.’

  And clearly, I added, the goblin’s bottom must have been quite sizeable if it was able to fit into the underwear of the wife of Nembudziya’s village headman. She is not, by any means, a small woman.

  *

  This, then, was the Gokwe in which Wonder and his friends came to young adulthood, a backwoods hotbed of superstition, gossip and grinding poverty. If they had been in Tsholotsho or Beitbridge, the youth of Gokwe would have hot-footed it across the border to South Africa or Botswana, braving the crocodiles of the Limpopo just to get away. A few did leave, mainly to go to relatives in Gweru, Harare or the resort town of Victoria Falls, but they soon came back. Those cities soon spat them out; they have unemployed youths of their own.

  Wonder wanted the three things that any young man of that age wants: a job that gave him a bit of money, a girlfriend and a smartphone. The latter two obviously depend on the first of those. But in Gokwe, there are no industries, no farms, no jobs, no hope. Like many other young people, he and his friends saw their future as coming from the elections. With the right government, they believed, all things were possible. Poor deluded bastards. The one bit in the Bible with which I agreed with all my heart is that bit that says, how does it go again, put not your trust in princes and the sons of men.

  Wonder and his friends were burning for change. They joined the opposition party and went around in party regalia. They drank the free beer at rallies where they sang and chanted slogans. They stuffed themselves with opposition food. But the ruling party is strong in Gokwe. There were soon what the papers called skirmishes between youth groups of the rival parties.

  It was a busy time for us, I can tell you. In the run-up to the elections, my men and I got frequently called out to hear cases of tit-for-tat assaults, hut burning and that sort of thing. There were sporadic attacks across Gokwe North and South, from Kuwirirana Kana all the way to Zumba, and from Nembudziya all the way to Gandavaroyi, which was Wonder’s village. Mostly though, the youth gangs limited themselves to insulting songs and dances after their rallies and meetings. There is nothing as amusing as rival gangs trying to out-dance each other. It was like that video of Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’, I tell you, only with bare feet and ragged clothing, better moves and serious intent.

  As the police, we could afford to ignore most of it. It helped a lot that both parties were equally responsible. I know that the standard line is that opposition activists are a helpless lot who do no more than turn the other cheek meekly when presented with ruling party violence. Well, cry me the Zambezi at flood time, will you, because nothing could be further from the truth. Give a bunch of idle youths a bit of beer and a burning cause of whatever stripe and as sure as cows have calves, you can create your very own militia. Our only saving grace was that none of the parties could actually afford to arm their youths with guns.

  As I say, both parties were responsible for the mayhem that followed. Where we could not ignore it, we took a few of the more boisterous opposition activists into our custody, to keep them safe, we said, but of course the truth is that we would have had blue murder on our hands if we had so much as cast a glance in the direction of the ruling party youths. When you are in the police here, you know whom to arrest. And better still, whom not to arrest.

  Then came the two big rallies, one after the other. Without the distinction created by the differing party colours and empty slogans, you would have thought the politicians from both parties were the same people visiting on two consecutive weekends. The same big men from Harare in their four-by-fours came to promise the earth, along with their orange-toned women in big hats and vertiginous shoes. They sat on the same sort of tent-covered platform, in plush seats of violent colours while the poor women of Gokwe baked in the sun and ululated and the young men danced in the dust and chanted from the trees they sat in to get a better view. Then the politicians drove off in their air-conditioned vehicles, leaving behind them inflamed tempers and painful hope, leaving nothing for the young to hold on to beyond their hate and their rage.

  Three days after the second rally, Wonder was found beaten to death. I had, to say the least, a knotty problem on my hands.

  *

  Police work is not like you see it on television. I would say that in eighty to ninety per cent of the normal cases, it is easy to identify the culprits. One of the things they teach all would-be officers during training at Morris Depot is that the first and most important question to ask the victim of any crime is: ‘Who do you think did it?’ I can see you are looking sceptical, but it is much more effective than you would think. Of course, you get your armed robberies and stranger rapes and so on, but crime is, for the most part, an intimate matter, particularly in places like Gokwe.

  Even in this case, it did not take long to identify the killer. Wonder had last been seen in a fight with three youths, who were then seen dragging him towards the field in which he was found dead. There was no doubt at all as to who those three were. They were Takura, the youngest son of the local Member of Parliament, and Dakarai and Rangarirai, two cousin brothers who served as his unpaid minions and acolytes. The word was that all three had been heard boasting that they had fixed Wonder, the cousin brothers had held him while Takura beat him. So I had on my hands an opposition party activist killed by ruling party activists. And they were not just any old raggedy-taggledy activists either, one of them was the son of the local Member. I was in what you might safely call a quandary.

  I won’t lie to you, I thought if we did nothing for long enough, and gave a few soothing assurances to Wonder’s family along the lines that we were pursuing several avenues and soon a number of people would be called in to help with our inquiries, it would all die away. But the opposition sensed that they could make a meal out of this case.

  The newsmen soon descended, with their screaming headlines. Wonder’s death was a gift to the opposition, their strategy before each election was to trumpet any such deaths because, of course, they needed to discredit the government and the outcome of the election. The aspiring Member for the opposition raised a hue and cry. He even made an appearance on the BBC, his subtitled grief beamed to all the world. The president of the party wept for him like he was his own child. Overnight, Wonder was transformed from being just another ragtag youth who occasionally sang and danced at rallies in exchange for booze to the lynchpin of the entire opposition movement in Gokwe.

 
The government, for its part, was doing its damndest to dis credit itself without opposition help. I soon received instructions from Harare to do nothing at all. The Governor of Midlands Province himself summoned me and told me in no uncertain terms that if I or any of my men made as much as a move towards the Member’s son, I would know what it was that caused a dog to have the ability to snarl when it was unable to smile. As I had neither the burning curiosity nor desire to solve that particular riddle, I did nothing. It didn’t hurt at all that he followed up the stick with a carrot that came in the exceedingly pleasing faces of several dead American presidents.

  The most I did was to issue the usual anodyne statement that we trot out in domestic violence disputes, ‘Members of the public are urged to refrain from using violence to resolve family disputes’, crossing out the word family to suit the circumstances. The trouble began three weeks after his death.

  *

  After Wonder was found, I ordered that his body be taken to the mortuary in the government hospital next to the police station in Gokwe Town, where it was to stay until the post-mortem. I received instructions from Harare that I was to call the Provincial hospital in Gweru to speak to a government pathologist called Dr Ananias Rixon Ngabi. I spent the better part of the day calling him. He eventually called me back a day after I had tried to reach him.

  ‘So tell me about this Never,’ he said.

  ‘Wonder,’ I said.

  ‘What do you wonder?’

  ‘His name is Wonder.’

  ‘Ah. Tell me how you found him.’

  I described the finding of the body and how the body looked. As I talked, chewing sounds came down the line to me, and I imagined him at his desk, chewing whatever it was he was eating as he listened to me. The injuries to the front of his body appeared to be defensive wounds, I explained, but the real damage seemed to have been done by the blow to the back of his head that had cracked his skull.