William and me

William and me – Part 3

Most of the older musicians and talented youth in Zimbabwe live in poverty and are unable to find the funds for equipment and recording. Talent smothered at birth and once successful men from a generation or two before united in poverty and inertia, still proud and talented but nothing much to show for it. forgotten heroes no one celebrates.

The big stars like Thomas Mapfumo, Stella Chiwese and the late great Chartwell Dutiro have emigrated to USA, Germany and UK respectively, and only people with access to funds from outside the country or Zimbabwean big business sponsors are now able to record and release music. I can’t help but wonder what the music scene would be like if the country didn’t have a government of brutal thieves and the Forex reserves of a small UK town (fact).

In 2010 I visited Malawi for the first time. I was keen to see the country and meet the family that remained in the country: His wife Junior, the two younger sons Ropafadzo and Frank and the two grandchildren Natasha and George, who had been left behind to be looked after by the Grandmother when their mums Rachel and Sharmen left to work in South Africa. Part of the “Grandmother Love” that is so prevalent in Africa as the children grow up, get pregnant young by accident then move abroad to find work, leaving the product of their teenage pregnancy at home to be looked after by their mum.

Much of Africa's population lack access to enough calories and their basic needs of food, clothes and shelter and cannot afford or grow enough for them and their children to have a healthy, nutritious diet. Most do not have access to fresh drinking water or sanitation and cannot gather the recommended calories throughout the day. Faced with this enormous need I had to choose to help on family only, not people I barely know, or my money would be quickly exhausted. I remember the Irish World Food Programme Director who sat with me on Ethiopian Airways cattle class telling me that "one person could not make much of a difference even in Malawi, even if they were a millionaire", he struggles and he has access to millions of Euros of EU money." It isn't the money or the buying of the food, that can be sourced, it is the logistics of getting it to the starving people in the countryside before they die, the majority of Malawi's 6 million hungry live off the main road, down another road which turns into miles of muds tracks, then of another deeply rutting and muddy track and so on.

It pains me that so many people are starving considering this considering the land is endowed with natural resources. The reason is government corruption, greed, a monetary-based system, unstable weather that causes crop failures and too many children being born. Each woman has an average of 4.25 children. William had 11 with Junior and 9 survived infancy. “That one is a Terminator” his daughter would always say. “Strong as an ox with the heart of a lion” “he will never die”. So far she has been proved right. He has survived all those times of hardship, several bouts of malaria, growing up in the bush in Malawi and Zimbabwe where dangerous wild animals and snakes were common and sleeping on the freezing streets of London where dangerous wild humans and knives are common.

William was married to Junior from when he was 25 to 67 years old when she died. Of the nine children who survived infancy the eldest son Gilbert died in a mining accident in Zimbabwe in 2011. Gilbert did not go with the rest when they fled Zimbabwe but stayed behind and had four children. Their whereabouts are not known to date. His parents could not go to the funeral because his mother was in Malawi and William was in the UK with no money or visa. William was sad many years after that but kept his grief concealed from the public. Bernard was the second eldest and he also stayed behind in Zimbabwe when the family left.

Sharmen visited her mother as often as she could, making the two-day bus journey from her home in Pretoria, through Zimbabwe and the Tete Corridor in Mozambique to Blantyre. She still visits William now and her most recent journey in October 2020 took five days due to Covid restrictions and enhanced border security. The South Africa / Zimbabwe border at Beitbridge, the Zimbabwe / Mozambique border at Forbes, near Mutara and the Mozambique / Malawi border at Lizulu is slow at the best of times but during the Covid of 2020, they were unbearable. Also, Zimbabwe's roads are getting worse and worse as this regime clings to power and keeps all the money and spends nothing. I cannot imagine five days on a bus, sleeping overnight in the seat for four nights. She said that her legs swelled up like balloons for the last two days, which was very uncomfortable and very dangerous as she could easily have fallen victim to Deep Vein Thrombosis.

Rachel does not visit at all. Maud and Bathsheba are both presumed to be shacked up or married to unknown men. They did a midnight flit into their secret boyfriend’s waiting car with suitcases secretly packed with clothes and all their other meagre possessions. That was 2012. Frank went with them too and he took the family laptop, the coins for the electricity meter and the clock on the sideboard. He is still missing and is now presumed dead. At first, they thought that he was in Zimbabwe as that is where he had his education, and he missed the place badly. Then they thought that he had gone to join Sharmen or Rachel or Bobby in South Africa, but they had not seen him. About a year later he was spotted on the streets in Blantyre where they live. He had not gone far, just downtown, to stay with Maud and Bathsheba and Maude joined the petty criminal underworld of Blantyre through their boyfriends and Frank tagged along and joined the same fraternity. Questions were asked to local youths in the same circle and cash incentives to talk were handed out. The found out that Frank had stolen things from the house and some money and went to a witch doctor who told him that William and Junior (his parents) were witches and that is why he has never made anything of his life in Malawi. The witch doctor said that he should kill them in their sleep. Frank luckily could n0t do that, so he indoctrinated his sisters against his parents and hatched the midnight escape plan. He believed every word that the witch doctor said, such is their power over desperate minds. That is their "modus operandi", they seek to split families and cause more pain and grief so that they will use their services more. Some also get a perverse pleasure in saying such upsetting things and inciting people to murder. When William found this out he knew that his and his wife's lives were in danger from their son, who they had brought up, nurtured and done their best for and was now feral and at loose in their city with the words of the witch doctor in his ears "kill your parents, they are witches and that is why your life has turned out as it has, they have done it with Muti because they hate you and they want you to fail and live in poverty”.

It was not uncommon for the boys to go off the rails, but this was the worst one. When I visited Junior in 2010, she told me that Bobby would run into the street with a big stick and shout “I want to rob a bank!!”. He would then steal some money or things to sell and buy a crate of beer and sit in his room and drink the lot until comatose. Ropa would chain smoke. 60 a day if he could. Staring blankly into space. Silent and brooding. Same parents but different children and different personalities. Both unhinged due to poverty, lack of opportunities and boredom.