‘Mbuya?’*

‘Woye?’ My maternal grandmother's soft reedy voice reassures me about the tentative start I am making.

‘Mbuya, there are things I would like to ask you about your life tomorrow evening. Please be prepared.’

‘About my life?’

‘Ehe.’

‘What exactly do you want to know?’

‘Things like where you came from, where you were born, what was your mother's name. Things like that.’

‘What are you going to do with it? Are you writing a book?’

It is late on Christmas Eve. I’m lying in my maternal grandmother's bed. It takes time to convince Mbuya Chiganze. I explain that I had done something similar that very morning before we had left kwaMurehwa. My father's youngest sister, Tete Evie, my grandfather's three surviving sisters, Tetes Ena, Evert and Venencia, and I sat together to draw a family tree five generations back to Tateguru Chigumadzi, the first of our family to come to what would become Murehwa communal lands.

Driving from Murehwa to Gandiya village, around 85 kilometres west of Mutare, my family and I had already gotten the sense that this Christmas, the first ‘post-Mugabe’ after the coup named ‘Operation Restore Legacy [of the liberation war]’, felt a little different. The roads were full of motorists cutting corners and overtaking on blind curves, impatient to spend Christmas kumusha.i We were delayed by the seemingly kilometres-long queues at the Rusape toll gate. These delays meant that, despite our mid-morning departure from Murehwa, we failed, as usual, to arrive in Gandiya village before nightfall, much to Mbuya Chiganze's dismay.

As soon as the familiar sign in front of Mbuya Chiganze's gate, ‘NDAPOTA VHARAI GHEDI!’ (Please, close the gate!), appeared, I had already begun trying to persuade myself to ask her about her personal history. The tall matriarch stood waiting to welcome us with my mother's only sister, Mainini Foro. I continued to bargain with myself until we retired for bed.

Although there are several spare bedrooms, with long stretches between visits, I prefer the intimacy of sleeping with Mbuya and Mainini. Mbuya refuses, as usual, to sleep on her bed. She lays out her mattress, while Mainini and I take the bed. This evening there is much activity on the dust road.