They Are Boiling My Bones in the Kitchen
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 May 2022
Summary
WHAT A LINE. IT KEEPS RECURRING in my mind. I hear it in the booming voice of Albert Nyathi, who already as a student at UZ was a zealous Marechera follower. I see him, years later, stamping onstage, blasting that first line, anger and contempt driving him forward as he recites the poem.
It was 1992. A group of five of us staged a performance of poetry and music to celebrate the publication of Cemetery of Mind.Soon afterwards, Albert became an imbongi, a Ndebele praise-singer, strutting proudly in traditional garb, a leopard tail around his head, more leopard tails flapping around his hips, singing the praises of his Ndebele king, old Mzilikazi. No wonder that twenty years on, in 2012, when my essay ‘Me and Dambudzo’ was hitting the news in Zimbabwe, Albert told the Bulawayo Chronicle that he ‘never suspected that Prof Veit-Wild had a sexual relationship with Marechera. She never at any time told us that the two were lovers. It's news to me.’ How ironic that the article was written by someone called Lenin Ndebele, who seemed as exasperated as Albert by the revelation that ‘they did it in motels, in a car and in her matrimonial home’.
Male traditionalists that you are, I can't help thinking, me, the ‘professor-perpetrator’: you can't hide your salaciousness – and rightly so, because that's how the poem continues:
They are boiling my bones in the kitchen
Between her thighs
They are criticising my poems in the newsroom
Between her lovely (so pink!) lips
The grotesque image, the strong rhythm. The doubling of the ‘b’ setting a stark, almost heroic tone, which right after – how it makes me smile – is dismantled, ridiculed by a typical Marecheran disclaimer: Don't think of cannibals sitting around a steaming pot at a fireplace in a Rider Haggard movie! It is just a kitchen …
A kitchen. In a flash I see myself lying in bed with Dambudzo under rough blankets in a dark room.
‘I have this place,’ he told me. ‘There are other people too but they might move out soon.’
He was referring to the flat in Sloane Court – which was soon to become his own.
At the agreed time I knocked on the window, then snuck in through the French doors behind the hedge that shielded the ground floor flats from the street.
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- They Called You DambudzoA Memoir, pp. 149 - 151Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2022