The Verdict of the Ghetto

Issue 19

​The Verdict of the Ghetto
Part One
The sun had barely climbed above the rooftops of Chitungwiza when the street court convened.
It always met in the shade outside Ticha's tuckshop.
No invitations. No agenda. Just men with nowhere urgent to be and opinions that arrived before breakfast.
Leon dropped onto an empty Coca-Cola crate and opened a scud. Xolisani was already there, smoking mbanje which seemed to survive longer than logic.
“Bra X,” Leon said, shaking his head. “That Moyo guy is gone upstairs.”
Xolisani laughed.
“Which one? The journalist?”
“The same one.”
“The one who stays there?” He pointed across the road.
“Who else?”
Xolisani leaned forward.
“What has he done now?”
Leon lowered his voice dramatically.
“I was in Borrowdale yesterday.”
“Doing what? Looking for rich relatives?”
“Shut up and listen.”
The vendors nearby immediately tuned their ears.
Leon grinned.
“That guy owns a five-bedroom house in the best part of Borrowdale.”
Xolisani blinked.
“A what?”
“A five-bedroom mansion. Red brick. Massive yard. Swimming pool. Electric gate. Durawall higher than Chikurubi Maximum Prison wall. Borehole, solar, everything.”
“You're lying through your teeth.”
“I swear on my mother's grave.”
Xolisani sat upright.
“Wait. You mean the same Moyo who catches kombis every morning?”
“The very same.”
“The same guy living with us in Chitungwiza?”
“The very same.”
Xolisani slapped his thigh.
“Haana kukwana saka!"
The vendors burst into laughter.
Madzimai Rute nearly dropped some onions.
“Mentally disturbed?” she shouted.
“Completely finished,” Xolisani declared. “Finished! What kind of person leaves a mansion and chooses Chitungwiza?”
Sis Angie nodded thoughtfully.
“Maybe there's a goblin in that house. This guy will harm us all one day. In South Africa they burn such people.”
“Or maybe he was bewitched,” Leon added.
The group exploded.
Xolisani stood dramatically and stretched his arms.
“Look around you.”
He pointed at the potholes.
Then the blocked drainage ditch.
Then a group of children playing football with a plastic bag.
Then a heap of uncollected garbage.
Then a group of women carrying buckets of water.
“Any sane person with a mansion would run away from here. Mark my words, there’s more to it. Chokwadi chichabuda pachena (The truth will come out).”
More laughter.
“Maybe he's hiding from girlfriends,” Jimmy shouted from across the tuckshop.
“No woman can force me to stay in fucking Chitungwiza if I own a bloody mansion. We need to find out more about him before it’s too late,” Xolisani fired back.
The gate opposite opened. Conversation stopped. Moyo emerged wearing a neatly ironed white shirt, dark trousers and polished black shoes.
The man looked like he belonged in a boardroom. Not on Hombarume Crescent. Not in a road with piling garbage. Not in a neighbourhood where unemployed men held daily conferences about other people's lives.
He locked the gate calmly. Adjusted his laptop bag. Started walking. The entire group, under the shade, watched him.
“Look at him,” Xolisani whispered.
“Exactly,” Leon replied.
“Looking like a CEO.”
“Yet he catches kombis.”
“Black magic is involved, I tell you.”
“No. It’s just pure madness.”
Moyo reached the stop, a few metres away. A battered kombi screeched to a halt. The conductor hung halfway out the door.
“Town! Town! Town!”
Moyo climbed in. Without complaint. Without embarrassment. Without looking back. The kombi disappeared in a cloud of smoke. The man with the laptop bag was on the road to town, carried along with everyone else, ordinary as dust.
Xolisani stared. His face carried the certainty of a judge passing sentence.
“That man is crazy.”
Nobody disagreed.
The verdict of the ghetto had been delivered. Moyo was a fool. A rich fool. A fool who preferred dust when he could have marble. A fool who preferred kombis when he owned a car. A fool who chose Chitungwiza over Borrowdale.
The case was closed.
 
Part Two
The street knew my addresses. It did not know my story.
I had come to teaching the way most men of my generation came to it, by calculation. My parents had sacrificed for my education. My mother had resorted to vegetable vending to raise my school fees.
We can’t afford further education for you now. Your siblings also need to go to school. We hope you find something to do. They seemed to be saying.
I began saving from my first teacher's salary, setting aside money with a monk's discipline, buying a house in Kambuzuma and extending my parents’ core house with a loan and mortgage that felt like a physical weight on my chest. I joined the newspaper industry and got married. Then we sold the Kambuzuma house, moved to Tynwald North, sold that, moved to Cranborne. Each house a step. Each step away from where we had started.
Most people in Chitungwiza now only see the polished shoes. They never saw the feet that had walked through fire.
Every morning I leave my gate carrying a laptop bag. Every morning people watch. Every morning they guess. But nobody asks.
And I never volunteer. Some truths are too heavy to explain at a kombi stop.
My father taught me many things. The most important lesson arrived without words.
He worked hard his whole life. Then one day a company letter informed him that his services were no longer required. Retrenched. One word. A lifetime erased.
I still remember the silence that settled over him. The silence was worse than tears.
A proud man who had spent decades providing suddenly became a man counting coins.
Eighteen months later he was gone. The funeral ended. People went home. Life continued.
But something inside me never stopped hearing the sound of that retrenchment. The sound of a man's dignity being folded into an envelope. I promised myself I would build something permanent. Something nobody could take away. I had a dream.
Then came that Sunday. A church service. A truck. A teenager driving without a licence.
And a phone call that split my life into before and after.
Nothing prepares a man for identifying the body of the woman who helped him plan to build his future. Nothing.
The world speaks of grief as though it arrives once. It doesn't. It arrives every morning.
Every empty chair. Every birthday. Every school event. Every family photograph. It arrives again and again. Like a debt collector.
I buried my wife. Then I went home to four children whose eyes asked questions I could not answer. I became father and mother overnight.
The youngest cried himself to sleep. The eldest tried to act brave. I would hear him weeping after midnight when he thought nobody could hear. Those nights nearly broke me. But grief doesn't pause responsibility.
School fees still arrived.
Food still had to be bought.
Uniforms still tore.
Children still got sick.
And my mother was growing older.
Her blood pressure worsened.
Arthritis tightened its grip.
Dementia developed.
Medication became as regular as groceries.
The numbers never added up. Not on a newspaper salary. Not in Zimbabwe. Certainly not with extended family depending on me too. Something had to give. So, I made a decision. A painful one. Sell the house, buy a bigger stand and build a bigger house. A house that I was not going to live in for some years.
That dream became a stand in Borrowdale. I bought it before I could afford it. Built it before it made sense. Brick by brick. Salary by salary. Sacrifice by sacrifice.
One day I would grow older there. One day.
I rented out the Borrowdale house.
The house I had dreamed about.
The house my wife never entered.
The house my father never saw.
The rent paid for medicine. It paid school and university fees. It kept futures alive
Mine could wait. The children could not. My mother could not. The extended family could not.
People saw something else. I saw mathematics. Cruel mathematics.
The Honda CRV remained parked most days. Because fuel cost money. Tyres cost money. Suspension cost money. Spare parts cost money.
I reserved it for emergencies. The midnight rush to hospital. Unexpected crises. Moments when life refused to wait for public transport.
For everything else there was the kombi. So, I stood at bus stops. I squeezed into overcrowded vehicles. I travelled beside hustlers, vendors, students, security guards and office workers.
The street interpreted this as madness. I called it survival.
One evening I arrived home after work and found my mother sitting quietly outside. She looked smaller than I remembered. Older. Fragile. Time was winning.
“Ali,” she said softly.
“Yes, Amai?”
“When are you moving into your big house?”
I smiled.
“Soon.”
She smiled too. The kind of smile mothers wear when they know more than they say.
“You always say soon.”
I sat beside her. For a moment neither of us spoke.
The air smelled of burning garbage. Neighbourhood sounds drifted through the gathering darkness. Someone screamed. A dog barked. A child cried. Someone played Zim-dancehall music.
Then she touched my hand. The same hand she once held while crossing roads. The same hand she once guided through childhood.
“You have carried too much.”
I looked away. Because suddenly my eyes burnt. Because suddenly I was tired. Not physically. Soul tired. The kind of tiredness that accumulates over decades. The kind built from funerals, sacrifices, postponed dreams and silent responsibilities.
“I am alright, Amai.”
“No.”
Her voice trembled.
“You are surviving.”
That word hit harder than any insult. Surviving. Not living. Not thriving. Surviving.
I thought about my father. I thought about my wife. I thought about my children sleeping inside. I thought about every decision people called foolish.
Every kombi ride. Every delayed dream. Every sacrifice nobody noticed.
My mother squeezed my hand. One day, her eyes seemed to say. One day.
That night I opened the journal I had kept since my wife's death. The pages had yellowed. The ink had faded. But the promise remained. I read the words I had written years earlier:
I will move on. I will finish what I started.
For a long time, I stared at the sentence. Then I closed the book. Outside, Chitungwiza slept. Inside, my children dreamt. And somewhere in Borrowdale, a red-brick house stood waiting. Patient. Faithful. Uncomplaining. Like the people I had lost. Like the people I still loved.
The street thought I was mad. Perhaps that was understandable. They saw a man with a mansion living in the ghetto. What they never saw was a son keeping his mother alive. A widower raising four children. A provider carrying an entire extended family on tired shoulders. A man postponing comfort so others could survive.
They mistook sacrifice for stupidity. Endurance for madness. Discipline for foolishness.
But every morning I still polished my shoes. Every morning I still opened the gate. Every morning I still climbed into a kombi. Because plans are not always visible. Sometimes they look like madness from a distance. Sometimes they are sacrifices. Sometimes they travel in overcrowded kombis. And sometimes, while the street is busy delivering its verdict, a man is quietly building a future that only he can see.
This is not who I am. This is what I have chosen to do until I can choose otherwise.
I do not judge anyone.
We make choices. Sometimes people do not understand why we make these choices.
But understanding is never required.
Only endurance.
And the house in Borrowdale, with its red bricks and its painted rooms and its long yard and the evergreen lawn, waited.
As the right things always wait, with a patience that does not diminish.
 
 

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BLACK EDWARD is a Harare-based author, retired educator and veteran journalist, and the author of "Retrenched" and "The Silence of Rocks". His fiction and essays have appeared in Brittle Paper, Literary Yard, Empyrean Literary Magazine, The Kalahari Review and other literary journals.

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