Birth
The beautiful jacaranda bloom season of Pretoria, South
Africa had just ended. The year 1963 was about to be closed. Lessa Manondo was
in the third trimester of a pregnancy as the seasons transitioned from Spring,
that runs September to November, to Summer. And the Summer rains had started. Lessa’s
older sister, Lizinet Thembachako, came to be with her during this joyous
pregnancy. At about 40 years of age, Lessa thought she was past the
childbearing age. And then this pregnancy happened.
“It’s a girl”, said the midwife on Monday December 9, 1963
as Lessa delivered [1].
“I am naming this one Tambudzai after myself”, pronounced Lessa’s
older sister.
“The name of this baby is Mauawawa”, chimed in Dickson,
Lessa’s husband.
Hello world! Receive your newest addition in the form of a
girl given the most uncommon collection of names. For Tambudzai is a word in
the Shona language that means troublemaker. While Mauawawa means “words hurt”
in the Chichewa language.
Within the same time period, Lessa’s older sister Lizinet
gave birth to a daughter whom she named Maria. Tambu and Maria were raised as
twins from childhood. At three years old, Tambu moved to Wanyemba Village in
Ntcheu, Malawi together with her mother and siblings. So did Lizinet and Maria
and their family.
Early Years
Tambu was a rambunctious child. Everyone in Wanyemba Village
considered Tambu a tomboy. She liked to play with boys and she got into many
fights. At age 6 she was enrolled in standard one at Kapalamula Primary School
in Wanyemba. Tambu’s student life was off to a rocky start. She was not doing
well in school. She narrated the following experience to me:
“One day, the teacher was teaching us names of different
parts of the body. To check if we were paying attention, the teacher asked me
the name of the bulging lines on the arm. I proudly answered, ‘muscles’. But
the teacher said, “No, it is veins!” I told the teacher that he was wrong.
There is no way those lines can have such a silly name”.
Outside the classroom, Tambu’s life was that of an ordinary
village girl. She helped her mother with cleaning, fetching water from the
borehole, washing clothes by hand, and cooking. She was trained in the Ngoni
manners. The elders taught her how to be a respectable and responsible female
in the community. Other than the fighting and playing with boys, she was
receiving the usual village girl training. The Manondo family had more wealth
compared to most in the village. They were able to pay for some labor such as
farm work. This enabled Tambu to be exempt from farm work. But she enjoyed the
authentic flavors of newly harvested fresh farm products such as green maize
(corn), raw groundnuts (peanuts), pumpkins, mustard greens, okra, and tomatoes.
And she enjoyed going to the market to bargain for cheaper prices of produce. Tambu
also learned early on that her father loved tea. She made tea for her father
three times a day: morning, afternoon, and night.
The family belonged to the Presbyterian Church. As such,
Tambu attended church regularly. She completed all the baptismal and
confirmation requirements of the church. The Malawi Presbyterian Church has
always experienced a shortage of trained clergy. Prayer houses that may have
upwards of 1000 members may not have a dedicated pastor. Pastors tend to be
assigned to mission stations whose catchment areas have many prayer houses. Therefore,
pastors tend to carefully plan visits to the prayer houses in their “parishes”.
It is not uncommon for a prayer house to have only two to three pastor visits
per year. The prayer house at Wanyemba was no exception. Due to this clergy shortage,
lay members fill in the preaching schedule. The quality of preaching by lay
members was sometimes hilarious. Tambu shared a story with me of a lay member
who was asked to preach. The member kept repeating:
“Jesus said hoho!”.
This went on for 15 minutes. The congregation kept wondering
if there was more to come. But alas! While the preaching sometimes left little
to be desired, the singing was usually good. The pure unaccompanied voices of
church members was usually uplifting.
Of all the Christian church traditions, Tambu enjoyed
Christmas [2] the most. Lessa Manondo and Lizinet Thembachako would coordinate
tailoring new dresses for Tambu and Maria. These would be presented to the
girls on Christmas day. The girls would proudly wear their new Christmas
presents to church. Later in the day, they would indulge in eating rice with
chicken and wash it down with Fanta orange soda.
Preteens
Tambu was in junior primary school in the late 1960s to
early 1970s. From a nation-building point of view, this was an exciting period
in Malawi. The country seemed to be developing in leaps and bounds.
Unfortunately, the political environment started to deteriorate as undemocratic
laws were passed so that the ruling party and its president would have a grip
on political power.
By then, some of Tambu’s older siblings were employed and
married. Anna, in particular, was employed by the Coca-Cola subsidiary in
Malawi and was married to Felix Mwasinga. They were living in Blantyre in the
south of Malawi.
The parents and older siblings were worried about Tambu’s
development because she was not doing well in school. An intervention was
worked out. Tambu was going to live with one of the siblings who would impose
more discipline on her. The first sibling chosen to take up this responsibility
was Anna.
Felix Mwasinga was very abusive. He used to abuse both his
wife Anna and all the children. The abuse was both physical and verbal. He had
affairs and sometimes was away from home for days, spending those days at other
women’s homes. Upon returning home, he was irascible and would find fault with
anything or anybody of his choice. And he would beat whoever he thought was at
fault. He was particularly angrier when he was drunk. Tambu took a larger
proportion of the abuse because she usually answered back. Her sister Anna advised her not to answer back but to just take the abuse silently. Tambu did
not understand this type of advice. For this reason, Tambu was labeled
“wamwano” which means the disrespectful one. The Mwasinga’s had four children
all of whom lived in the house. The names of the children were Mike, Ronnie,
Solomon, and Maureen. There were also some relatives living in the house. Tambu
took up the role of protector of the children. She sought to protect the
children from their father’s abuse.
The abuse that Tambu experienced in the Mwasinga home made
her take a vow of never getting married in her life.
In 1975, Malawi moved its government headquarters from Zomba
in the south to Lilongwe in the center [3]. The government was encouraging
businesses to have a presence in Lilongwe to legitimize the move. The Coca-Cola
affiliate where Anna worked built a bottling plant in Lilongwe. Anna Mwasinga
was transferred to Lilongwe to work in the new factory. The Mwasinga’s moved to
Lilongwe and Tambu moved with them. She was enrolled in a new model primary
school that was built next to the new teacher’s training college. It was
appropriately named Lilongwe Demonstration Primary School. However, living with
the Mwasinga’s just did not work.
Teenager
Tambu was sent back to Blantyre to live with older brother
Anthony. Anthony was working for a British company’s subsidiary in Malawi named
Brown & Clapperton (B&C) also in Blantyre. He was married to Anne
Chibwana who worked at Air Malawi, the country’s official airline. B&C was
a heavy metal equipment manufacturing company. One of their products was maize
(corn) mills. In the later part of the 1970s, Anthony bought a maize mill from
B&C that was installed in Wanyemba Village for his parents. People from
neighboring villages brought maize and paid a fee to have it ground into flour.
This served as a source of income for the Manondo family.
For Tambu, life in the Anthony Manondo family was much better. The Anthony Manondo’s had four children as well namely Martha, Faith, Titani, and Chimango. Only Chimango is male, the others are female. Tambu helped with any house chores and childcare. Tambu became good at both cooking and housekeeping due to the expectations of doing chores. Later in her married life, she would put these experiences to effective use to the extent that there was clear consensus that Tambu’s food was scrumptious.
However, there was not much improvement in school
performance. Now in her teens and approaching the senior classes of primary
school, Tambu was sent back to Wanyemba. Again, she was a student at Kapalamula
Primary School. In narrating stories about her final enrolment at this school,
she often mentioned a teacher named Mr. Chigadula. This teacher had a positive
influence on her life.
Malawi education has a very narrow bottleneck between
primary school and secondary school. This bottleneck is even narrower for girls.
At the end of primary school in standard 8, all students sit for a national
examination. Less than 10 percent of those who pass the examination are
selected to go to secondary school. Very
few secondary school places were reserved for girls at the time when Tambu sat
for the examinations around 1979. Some schools such as Kapalamula went through
a drought of several years without having even a single student selected to go
to Secondary School. Tambu was not selected for secondary school.
One more intervention solution was conceived. Boarding
school! The parents and older siblings agreed to send Tambu to Dzenza Girls
Boarding School located in the northern part of the city of Lilongwe not too
far from where Anna Mwasinga lived. This school belongs to the Presbyterian
Church. (As an aside, my grandfather taught at this girls’ school when I was
young. I lived there from the age of 2 to the age of 6.)
At Dzenza, Tambu made friends with Joyce Thole. Joyce’s
older sister was the wife of a prominent Malawian named Katengeza. As such, she
enjoyed some niceties and luxuries that were not common to most boarders at
Dzenza. Some of the niceties included nutritious foods, personal care products,
and extra clothes. And occasionally, she was spoiled with cookies and candies. Joyce
shared most of these niceties with Tambu.
From the late 1970s to the 1980s, women and school children in
Malawi were forced to attend political rallies and dance for politicians [4].
This was done for propaganda to give the impression that the politicians were
loved by large crowds. The girls at Tambu’s boarding school were not spared of
this forced attendance. Tambu hated every minute of those political attendances
and dances. This was during the One-Party Rule in Malawi. The Malawi Congress
Party was by law the only permitted political party. Its leader was the dictator,
Hastings Banda. By extension, Tambu hated Hastings Banda and Malawi Congress
Party. This hatred lasted the entirety of her life.
For the second time, Tambu was not selected for secondary school after taking the national exam
at Dzenza Girls Boarding Primary School.
Malawi Correspondence Centers (MCC) were started as an
alternative to secondary schools. The purpose was to give some of the students
who had not been selected for secondary school a detour. The hope was that this
would broaden the primary-to-secondary school pipeline. Students at MCCs were
supposed to study on their own to acquire secondary school education. Students
who enrolled in MCCs were given preprinted material to prepare them for the
national examinations that were given to secondary school students. At MCCs, there
was minimal instruction. Even in cases where there was instruction, the
teachers were untrained.
Tambu enrolled at Gowa MCC in Ntcheu District in 1981.
There, she befriended Sophie Kachoka. During our 33 years of marriage, this
phase of Tambu’s life was not discussed. The blackout was by mutual agreement.
All I know is that she became pregnant and could not continue at the MCC. In
those days, pregnancy was a death nail in a girl’s educational journey. Tambu’s
mother took her pregnant daughter back into her home in Wanyemba Village. Tambu
always told me that a mother’s love is unconditional. She gave the example of
her mother taking her back after what was considered a mess-up as an example
that mother is the last refuge.
A healthy son was delivered on 26th February 1983 to Tambu.
She named him Robreen. Tambu was 19 years old when she gave birth to her first
son.
What became of the other siblings? Dave became a businessman
who supplied stationery to organizations. He married Ida from Blantyre District
who also was a businesswoman owning a tailoring shop. The two had four children
named Memory, Eggley, Florence, and Dave Junior. They lived in the Machinjiri
neighborhood of Blantyre. Doris finished secondary school at Lilongwe Girls
Secondary School and worked for the Unilever subsidiary in Malawi that
manufactures chemical products such as soaps and oils. She was married to Leonard
Ganizani of Zomba. They had three children named Obed, Harry, and Jessie. They lived in the New Ndirande neighborhood of Blantyre. Catherine went to Ntcheu
Secondary School and later worked for People’s Trading Centre shops in Blantyre.
There she met and married Jack Chitedze who hailed from Mchinji in the Central
Region of Malawi. Later, Jack Chitedze was transferred to Lilongwe and
Catherine changed jobs. She joined the civil service and worked for the
Ministry of Health. Jack was transferred back to Blantyre. Both Jack and
Catherine retired and live in the Chilimba neighborhood of Blantyre. They have
four children named Brian, Eric, Jack Junior, and Clive. Wiskot married from
the Chisale family near Wanyemba village. They had 11 children that included
three sets of twins. I will not name the children but Tambu and I adopted one of the
children after Wiskot passed away in 1990. The girl we adopted is named Brenda.
Commentary
The early part of Tambu’s life had some dark aspects. These experiences imparted resilience, passion, honesty, perceptiveness, emphasis on education, and her complex view of men (including me). She was very partial when it came to children. She respected men but her antenna went up as soon as she detected any indications of abuse. She noted that in her experience, people got ahead based on social status and political connections. To her, education is the only vehicle that gives the rest of the people a chance to compete with the privileged. And so, she valued education. She loved cooking and hosting parties. She overcame the limitations imposed on girls by society and went on to obtain a bachelor’s degree and complete master’s degree coursework. And she was always there to help those in need. The next blog will describe Tambu’s journey towards bouncing back.
Footnotes
[1] All official documents say Tambu was born on December 9,
1964 in Ntcheu, Malawi. However, Lessa Manondo took contemporaneous note of the
birth of each one of her children by recording day of week, date, and place of
birth. The notebook in which these births were recorded was passed to Tambu and is
currently in my possession. The details recorded at Tambu’s birth have Monday
December 9, 1963 in Pretoria, South Africa. Apparently, the 1964 date in Malawi
might have been given to school and government officials to avoid scrutiny of
Malawi citizenship and other school related eligibilities.
[2] The Christmas season in Malawi is a joyful time for
families. Gifts exchange are exchanged and church services are held. Carols are sung acapella, with
the iconic African gift of harmonization filling the air with beautiful sounds
celebrating the birth of Christ. https://www.iexplore.com/articles/travel-guides/africa/malawi/festivals-and-events
[3] Malawi moved its capital city from Zomba in the south to
Lilongwe in the center. https://journals.co.za/doi/pdf/10.10520/AJA19376812_202
[4] Malawi Congress Party forced women and children to
attend political rallies and dance at the rallies. “Kamuzu Banda of Malawi: A
Study in Promise, Power, and Paralysis (1961 to 1993)” by John Lwanda, 1993.
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