Fiction

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Issue 8

The Mupandawana Dancing Champion

The Mupandawana Dancing Champion
by Petina Gappah

When the prices of everything went up ninety-seven times in one year, M’dhara Vitalis Mukaro came out of retirement to make the coffins in which we buried our dead. In a space of only six months, he became famous twice over, as the best coffin maker in the district and as the Mupandawana Dancing Champion.

Fame is an elastic concept, especially in a place like this, where we all know the smells of one another’s armpits. Mupandawana, full name Gutu-Mupandawana Growth Point, is bigger than a village but it is not yet a town. I have become convinced that the government calls Mupandawana a growth point merely to divert us from the reality of our present squalor with optimistic predictions about our booming future. As it is not even a townlet, a townling, or half a fraction of a town, there was much rejoicing at a recent ground-breaking ceremony for a new row of Blair toilets when the district commissioner shared with us his vision for town status for Mupandawana by the year 2065. Ours is one of the biggest growth points in the country, but the only real growth is in the number of people waiting to buy coffins and the lengthening line of youngsters waiting to board the Wabuda Wanatsa buses blasting Chimbetu songs all the way to Harare.

You will not find me joining that queue out of Mupandawana.

When the ministry dispatched me here to teach at the local secondary, I was relieved to escape the headaches of Harare with its grasping women who will not let go until your wallet is empty. Mupandawana is the perfect place from which to study life, which appears to me to be no more than the punch line to a cosmic joke played by a particularly mordant being.

So I observe life, and teach geography to schoolchildren whose only interest in my subject is knowledge of the exact distance between Mupandawana and London, Mupandawana and Johannesburg, Mupandawana and Gaborone, Mupandawana and Harare. If I cared enough, I would tell them that there is nothing there to rush for, kumhunga hakuna ipwa, as my late mother used to say.

But let them go, they shall find out soon enough.

Mine is not a lonely life. In those moments when solitude quarrels with me, I enjoy the company of my two friends: Jeremiah, who teaches agriculture, and Bobojani, who goes where Jeremiah goes. And then there are the Growth Pointers, as I call them, the people of Mupandawana whose lives prove my theory that life is one big jest at the expense of humanity.

Take M’dhara Vitalis, the coffin maker.

Before he retired, he worked in a furniture factory in Harare. He had been trained in the old days, M’dhara Vitalis told us on the first occasion Jeremiah, Bobojani, and I drank with him. “If the leg of one of my chairs had got you in the head, vapfanha, you would have woken up to tell your story in heaven,” he said. “The president sits in one of my chairs. Real oak, vapfanha. I made furniture from oak, teak, mahogany, cedar, ash chaiyo, even Oregon pine. Not these zhing-zhong products from China. They may look nice and flashy but they will crack in a minute.”

On this mention of China, Bobo made a joke about the country becoming Zhim-Zhim-Zhimbabwe because the ruling party had sold the country to the Chinese. Not to be outdone, Jeremiah said, “A group of ZANU-PF supporters arrives at the pearly gates. Saint Peter is greatly shocked, and goes to consult God. God says, But ruling party supporters are also my children. Saint Peter goes to fetch them, but rushes back alone shouting, They’ve gone, they’ve gone! How can the ruling party supporters just disappear? says God. I am talking about the pearly gates, says Peter.”

We laughed, keeping our voices low because the district commissioner was seated in the corner below the window.

*

M’dhara Vitalis had looked forward to setting down the tools of his trade and retiring to answer the call of the land. “You don’t know how lucky you are,” he was often heard to say to the fellows who idled around Mupandawana. “You have no jobs, so you can plow your fields.”

He had spent so much time in Harare that he appeared not to see that the rows to be plowed were stony; when the rains came, there was no seed, and when there was seed, there were no rains. Even those like Jeremiah who liked farming so much that they had swallowed books all the way to the agricultural college at Chibhero had turned their backs on the land, in Jeremiah’s case by choosing to teach the theory of farming to children who, given even an eighth of a chance, would sooner choose the lowliest messenger jobs in the cities than a life of tilling the land.

M’dhara Vitalis was forced to retire three years earlier than anticipated. His employer told him that the company was shutting down because they could not afford the foreign currency. There would not be money for a pension, he was told, the money had been invested in a bank whose directors had run off with it kwazvakarehwa to England. He had been allowed to keep his overalls and had been given some of the tools that he had used in the factory. And because the owner was also closing down another factory, one that manufactured shoes, M’dhara Vitalis and all the other employees were each given three pairs of shoes.

Jeremiah, Bobo, and I saw him as he got off the Wabuda Wanatsa bus from Harare. “Thirty years, vakomana,” he said to us, as he shook his head. “You work thirty years for one company and this is what you get. Shuwa, shuwa, pension yebhutsu. Heh? Shoes, instead of a pension. Shoes. These, these...”

The words caught in his throat.

“Ende futi dzinoshinya, all the pairs are half a size too small for me,” he added when he had recovered his voice. We commiserated with him as best we could. We poured out all the feeling contained in our hearts.

“Sorry, M’dhara,” I said.

“Rough, M’dhara,” said Jeremiah.

“Tight,” said Bobojani.

We watched him walk off carefully in his snug-fitting shoes, the plastic bag with the other two pairs dangling from his left hand.

“Pension yebhutsu,” Jeremiah said, and, even as we pitied him, we laughed until tears ran down Jeremiah’s cheeks and we had to pick Bobojani off the ground.

For all that he did not have a real pension, M’dhara Vitalis was happy to retire. Some three kilometers from the growth point was the homestead that he had built with money earned from the factory, with three fields for shifting cultivation. Between them, he and his wife managed well enough, somehow making do until the drought came in two consecutive years and inflation zoomed and soared and spun the roof off the country. M’dhara Vitalis went back to Harare to look for another job, but who wanted an old man like him when there were millions unemployed? He looked around Mupandawana and was fortunate to find work making coffins. M’dhara Vitalis was so efficient that he made a small contribution to the country’s rising unemployment—his employer found it convenient to fire two other carpenters. And that was how he became known as the coffin maker with the nimblest fingers this side of the Great Dyke.

*
We had seen his hands at work, but of his nimble feet and his acrobatics on the dance floors of Harare, we had only heard. As the person who told us these stories was the man himself, there was reason to believe that he spoke as one who ululated his own praise. As Jeremiah said, “There is too much seasoning in M’dhara Vita’s stories.”

All his exploits seemed to have taken place in the full glare of the public light. “I danced at Copacabana, Job’s Night Spot, and the Aquatic Complex. There is one night I will never forget when I danced at Mushandirapamwe and the floor cleared of dancers. All that the people could do was to stand and watch. Vakamira ho-o,” he told us. We laughed into our beers, Jeremiah, Bobojani, and I, but as we soon came to see, we laughed too much and we laughed too soon.


To read the rest of “The Mupandawana Dancing Champion”, buy Issue or start a subscription today.

Read more in Issue 8

Poetry Powers of Recuperation by Adrienne Rich
Poetry Trans-Neptunian Object by Suzanne Buffam
Poetry The Blackberries by Francis Ponge
Fiction The Mupandawana Dancing Champion by Petina Gappah
Fiction Li Ling by Atsushi Nakajima