Tambu Chirwa - Princess

 

Dickson and Lessa Manondo with Anna (standing) and Anthony (on Lessa’s lap), Pretoria South Africa 1950

Dickson Manondo Phiri was born in 1914 in the headman’s family of Manondo Village [1] in Dowa District of Malawi. The Lilongwe International Airport is less than five miles south of Manondo Village. The village is near the boundary between Lilongwe and Dowa. The boundary is Lingadzi River. Some employees who work at the airport in Lilongwe cross the district boundary every day as they live in Dowa including in Manondo Village. Dickson was born a prince and heir to the Manondo throne. He grew into a tall skinny handsome boy (he was a 6 feet 3 inches man by the time I met him as my father-in-law). If you were drawing his picture and wanted to color his skin using Microsoft Word, you would probably choose Gold-Accent4 (light brown). His upbringing included being apprenticed to become a village headman. The Manondo people are part of the larger Chewa group. The village leadership training included how to become a guardian of the Chewa traditions.

Let’s take a digression to look at the Chewa. The Chewa came to present day Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia from Congo in the 15th Century. They formed the Maravi Empire that covered from Lake Malawi on the East to near Lusaka, Zambia (Luanga River) on the West and to the Indian Ocean at Quelimane, Mozambique in the South. The empire existed from 1480 to 1891. The overall leader of the empire was called the Karonga. The provinces of the empire were governed by chiefs. Each province was divided into villages whose leaders were village headmen (yes, they were always men). Villages ranged in population from hundreds to thousands of people. The Chewas were mostly farmers with occasional stints as hunters.

One important tradition of the Chewa is the Gulewamkulu (“Big Dance”) tradition. The Gulewamkulu tradition spans many aspects of the Chewa society. It encompasses training of boys and girls in social living, work, role in family and society, morality, spirituality, and organization of festivals. The Gulewamkulu tradition teaches “umunthu” (popularized to the world as Ubuntu by Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu) to every individual of the community. Gulewamkulu glues the Chewa people. The early European colonizers did not know what to make of Gulewamkulu. They considered this tradition a threat to their governing structures. More especially, the Christian religion they were bringing could not figure out how to incorporate the ancestral spirits part of the tradition into the Gospel message. They decided that people had to choose between European education/Christianity and continuing with their Gulewamkulu tradition. With a few exceptions [2], most Chewa chiefs and village headmen chose the Gulewamkulu tradition.

Dickson Manondo found European education attractive. He found himself at the crossroads of either continuing with his headman training or abandoning it for the new way of life. Being destined to be headman, he felt trapped and unable to take his preferred path. He fled the village and travelled to Gatooma, Southern Rhodesia (now Kadoma, Zimbabwe) in his late teens or early twenties (1930s). There, he joined the Presbyterian church through which he pursued training in the European way of life and christianity.

The parents of Lessa Jessie Khomba relocated to Salisbury, Rhodesia long before Dickson travelled there. They hailed from Wanyemba Village, Ntcheu District, Malawi. Lessa was born in 1924. She was 10 years younger than Dickson. The Khombas belonged to the village headman’s family. Lessa was the youngest of three sisters. The oldest sister was Margaret Khomba and the middle sister was Lizinet Tambudzai Khomba. The Khomba family joined christianity through the Presbyterian Church. The Khomba family belongs to the Ngoni.

The Ngoni came from South Africa. They fled the raids of Shaka Zulu in the mid-1800s and migrated north. Some settled in northern Malawi, some in Zimbabwe around Bulawayo, and others in Zambia and Mozambique. The Maseko group of the Ngoni settled in the central part of Malawi in Ntcheu. Their chief is known as Gomani who sits on his throne to this day from his headquarters at Lizulu in Ntcheu, Malawi. The Ngoni were warriors and hunters. Their food came from plundering the spoils of war after conquering the Chewas and other people who had already settled there.

Dickson and Lessa met in Gatooma, Sothern Rhodesia and got married. They moved to Pretoria, South Africa in the late 1940s where Dickson learned bricklaying. He then worked for a renown Caucasian architect named Norman Eaton [3].

The first-born child to Dickson and Lessa was a boy born in Gatooma, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) named Wiskot. Mr. Wiskot Manondo grew to look just like his father. He was light-skinned, skinny, and tall. The second-born child was a girl also born in Gatooma, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) whom they named Anna. She was also light-skinned, skinny, and tall. The rest of the children were born after the move to Pretoria, South Africa. In chronological order, the children born after Anna were Anthony, Davie, Doris, Catherine, and Tambu. As the names suggest, Anthony and Davie were male and Doris and Catherine were female.

Dickson Manondo’s employer, Norman Eaton, died in a road accident on 19 July 1966. In his will, he left 1,000 South African Rand (about US$ 100,000 if this was today accounting for inflation) for his beloved employee Dickson Manondo Phiri. The Manondo’s used this money to start relocating back to Malawi. Malawi had just gained independence from Britain and was promising to become a country full of opportunities. The relocation was in phases. First, Mrs. Lessa Manondo took all her children and returned to Wanyemba Village in 1967. Being a brick-layer, Dickson momentarily came to Wanyemba Village and built a house for the family at the edge of the village. Lessa’s sisters also returned to Wanyemba village from Zimbabwe and built their homes next to Lessa’s. After building the house, Dickson returned to Pretoria, South Africa. The relocation was completed in 1978 when Dickson returned to Malawi and settled in his wife’s village of Wanyemba. Both of Tambu’s parents were in Wanyemba Village when I met her in 1987.

The Chewa are matrilineal. One of the children of the sisters of the chief or village headman is chosen to become the new chief or village headman. Elder women of the village choose the new leader. Because Dickson did not have sisters, some of his daughters’ sons would have become village headmen after him had he returned to his village of Manondo. Sorry my children Robreen, Ulalo, and Kabelo – it is too late now!

Of all these members of the family, Tambu is survived only by Catherine at the time of this writing. Catherine has been married to Jack Chitedze for over 42 years. They have four sons. Dickson Manondo passed away in 2012 at the age of 98. Lessa Jessie followed a year later. Wiskot passed away in 1990. Doris passed away in 1994. Anthony passed away in 1997. Anna passed away in 1999. Davie passed away in 2011.

In the next post, I will write about the birth and early childhood of Tambudzai Chirwa. She was three or four years old when her mother brought the family to Malawi from South Africa. I will explain the discrepancy in age at the time of return. You will also read about the type of child she was.

[1] Location of Manondo Village. https://trip-suggest.com/malawi/central-region/manondo

[2] Headman Msymboza of Dowa was converted to Christianity. https://mwnation.com/msyamboza-to-be-honoured-this-sunday/

[3] Bio of Norman Eaton. https://www.artefacts.co.za/main/Buildings/archframes.php?archid=450

 

Tambudzai Manondo Chirwa - A Beautiful Woman of Substance

 

Tambudzai Chirwa (1994)

Tambudzai Mauawawa Manondo Chirwa passed away on 20th January 2021 in Lexington, Kentucky, United States of America. The epitaph says “Loving Wife, Mother, Aunt, Sister”. The obituary says she is survived by husband Robert Chirwa, sons Robreen, Ulalo, and Kabelo, sisters Catherine Chitedze and Amy Brown (husband Matt), nieces Martha Tambala (Husband Alex), Hannah Thomas, and Sadie Thomas, grandnephews Alexander and Zachary Tambala, and many other nephews as well as nieces. Five words on an epitaph and one thousand words of an obituary cannot do justice to painting a picture of this amazing woman. Many called her sister, aunt, or granny because that is how anyone she cared about felt. Omitted from the list of sisters are names such as Dana Reitman, Margaret Seiffert, Sophie Kachoka, Joyce Mponela, Karen Berry, Julia Thorne, and Joyce Mponela just to mention a few. And she treated her nieces and nephews as her own children.

This is a story of a unique woman. A woman who was perfect. She was endowed with a good proportion of every good attribute of a person. And she carried herself very well. I have toyed with the idea of telling this story since her passing away. I hesitated to undertake this project for the past two years because I felt inadequate at the task before me. My insufficient vocabulary and poor word choice limit my ability to accurately depict this wonderful human being. However, I am compelled to write because I became a grandfather recently. A gift of this magnitude requires an act of gratitude of giving a written account of his grandmother. Later, when he grows to the age of asking questions, this account will help his parents (my son and daughter-in-law) to explain the type of woman his grandmother was.

The life of one Tambudzai Chirwa, or simply Tambu as we called her, will be documented in the coming pages. I will focus on her biography, her beauty, her loving nature, her intensity, her passion, her honesty, and her sense of humor. Along the way, I will also cover the diverse nature of her careers. Careers that ranged from manual labor to white collar office jobs. And you will read about how she was comfortable helping and befriending people of all ages and all economic classes.

I hope you will smile, laugh, and cry with me as you read these pages. For this is how I grieve her: smile, laugh, and cry. This is the best way of honoring her because she frequently went through all these emotions in short order. Incidentally, her grandson also goes through multiple emotions within a few seconds. He reminds me of Tambu.