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BY NEVANJI MADANHIRE
My New Year’s resolution is that I will stop playing the Lotto, because, I’ve realised only fools believe in luck. Instead I’ll write a book that will win the Booker Award; it will be the first book by a writer living outside the British Isles to win the award.
It’ll also win the Commonwealth Literature prize if Comrade You-Know-Who agrees to have the country readmitted into the Commonwealth. I’ll win these prizes not by luck but by sheer hard work.
The book will be about a boy called Toni. He lives at a place called Mangoromera in St Mary’s township. Toni apparently is orphaned; he has been told that his mother was abducted by war vets in 2008 when he was an infant. She was never heard of again.
The mother had been an apprentice prostitute; her mentor was the woman popularly known as MaGumbo, who sells lots of things at the Big Bhawa including what she calls Gunpowder. Men love MaGumbo’s gunpowder which they mix with sorghum beer or cow-hoof soup; they say it brings harmony to their bedrooms.
MaGumbo adopted Toni when his mother disappeared or was abducted by the war vets. They live in a wooden cabin which Toni thinks is a dog kennel. When Toni was still only a year old the cabin caught fire; he lost all his right-hand fingers in the fire but the thumb survived. So Toni is sometimes called Toni Thumb.
He dislikes the name insisting that he is simply Toni but on his clinic card, the only document testifying to his existence, he is referred to as Toni Wachikoro. When Magumbo took him there for treatment, she realised the boy had no surname and told the nurse so. The nurse asked: “So whatchwecall him?” and Magumbo agreed saying, “Yes, Wachikoro?” The nurse scribbled the name on the card.
Toni belongs to the “Wachiko-ro” generation; a unique group of people born in Zimbabwe in the new millennium. Mangoromera is their home. Do you know what mangoromera means? It means the charms (muti) used by boxers to enhance their chances of winning a bout.
There is always a fight at Mangoromera and Toni enjoys the fights. He isn’t the only one, everybody enjoys the fights at Mangoromera. Toni wants to be a boxing ref when he grows up. He knows all the rules already.
The fights are not always in the ring but mostly outside it. There are two groups or gangs at Mangoromera. One comprises two characters calling themselves Comrade Forward Ever and Comrade Backward Never. They are war vets. Toni is always in trouble with these two because he often mixes up the surnames calling them Cde Forward Never and Cde Backward Ever. They don’t like him when he refers to them that way accusing him of being an agent of the West; Toni has no clue what that means. Their leader is a burly war vet calling himself Cde Vanguard Consciousness. Toni can never say the name, so he calls him Cde God!
This gang has other members, mostly fat women who always sing liberation war songs and young men who call themselves mamonya, which means thugs. The women’s dress bears the president’s head mostly on their protruding parts. It’s this gang against the rest of residents of Mangoromera, who call themselves the Chinja (Change) Brigade.
Toni belongs to both gangs. That is how he has managed to survive. You see Toni knows that the shop owners at Mangoromera secretly support the Chinja Brigade but they are afraid to come out into the open for fear of Cde Vanguard Consciousness. You see Cde Vanguard Consciousness calles meeting every night and everyone should attend. At the meetings anyone who is deemed to sympathise with the Chinja Brigade is called to the front and lectured about western neo-colonialism and the look-east policy. To make sure the message sinks he is beaten up according to what they call “the way”.
Toni has a knack for being everywhere people, especially businessmen, are discussing politics particularly chinja politics. That’s how he gets his food. When they have said more than enough he announces his presence by a giggle. When they see him he raises his hand, the one with only the thumb and smiles his cynical smile.
His thumbs-up sign and that smile are a bad omen for the businessmen. They often angrily say to him, “Toni, what’re you doing here?” but quickly tone down their anger. “Toni, here is a packet of maputi.” So Toni secures another meal.
If a businessman has been particularly stingy, Toni knows how to fix him. He would deliberately be seen walking around with the Comrades Gang, all lovey-dovey. Then later he would go to the businessman’s shop and mill around. “What do you want here, you little devil?” the businessman would say angrily.
But realising his mistake immediately, he would take a number of buns and offer them to Toni. “But I also need a drink to wash down the buns,” Toni would say. So Toni gets his dinner!
There is the mistaken belief that every story must have a moral; this one doesn’t. It is just about a boy belonging to a nameless generation that has learnt only one lesson in politics, namely that politics is a dirty game but one can thrive very well in the muck.
Someone might steal my idea, so I won’t go into further details. Suffice to say the book will have a happy ending.
The final paragraph will read:
Cde Vanguard Consciousness was now all worked up. He pointed at Toni and told the crowd, “We’ve to discipline them while they’re still young. This urchin here, Toni, has been destroying the party from within. He has been passing party secrets to the Chinja people.” The crowd, which had gathered that evening for political lessons, remained quiet. One could hear a pin drop. In a fit of rage Cde Vanguard Consciousness pulled a machete from under his overcoat and chopped off Toni’s thumb. Toni did not cry, he raised what remained of his palm and smiled. His best friend The Graduate stood up and asked the crowd, “Why did he do it?” The crowd surged toward the burly man.”
The happy ending will be that I’ll win the Booker.
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