Launching Pads and Girl Gangs

She picked up a stone and threw it at Ba Kadya Beans. We hesitated, but when Louisa picked up her third stone, my sister Bongie picked one up too. The five others stood and stopped our games. We picked up more stones. We hurled more stones, one after another at Ba Kadya Beans until he ran off. When Chanda, the closest in age to me, started to laugh, we looked at her like she had gone mad. The comic moment in Ba Kadya Beans’ trousers almost falling off his bony legs and him wagging his finger at us before he started his run was enough to get us to join in Chanda’s laughter. The uneasy feeling in my stomach ebbed bit by bit on each exhale and laugh. Tears, both from fear and exhilaration, were pouring down my face.

When Louisa showed bravery at picking up a stone, all of us embraced the bravery. I felt invincible when I was with my friends. It made me feel safe, naively so with these young girls who had not gone out of this cocoon, we called Vuka, Bauleni. It is sheer luck that we did not get kidnapped or anything worse because our bravery and love for exploring took us into dangerous situations. My sister and I recently shared one incident with our parents and I don’t think they believe it happened. I still marvel at what was happening in my eight-year-old brain.

One day, there was a girl who came to visit at the Banda’s big house. We were playing as most late afternoons after lunch. The girl, who was the Banda’s niece, came out of the gate and asked if we wanted to escort her back to her house. We consulted amongst ourselves and said yes. Our group was smaller that day, instead of seven we were six, my sister Bongie included. So the six of us, barefoot and without any warm clothing on at 6 p.m. in a winter month, agreed to escort this teenage girl. She didn’t tell us where her home was or how far it was. She lied actually, she said ‘nipafupi,’ it’s near. So we started on the journey. I don’t know how none of us figured out we were being taken to a place we had no business going to, especially at that time of the day, but we were soon in a place we didn’t recognise. It had gotten darker, we hadn’t noticed that either. We had talked throughout the walk and none of us knew the way back.

We reached a house, a big house like the Banda’s in Vuka, and the girl said, “Here I am now. This is where I wanted to get. I’ve reached. You can go back now.” Panic swept through our group. The questions ranged from Louisa’s “How?” to Tila’s “Can you give us something to eat?” But this girl just gave us a blank look in reply.

I remember thinking, today is the day our mother will kill us. I could see the same thought in my sister’s eyes. As a proper last-born, I started to blame my sister. Why had she not been paying attention to the road when we started off, why had she allowed me to come with them? Did she know who our parents were? We shouldn’t have agreed to come with these girls after all their parents didn’t care about them as ours did. We had our first serious group fight then. I was the baby who was making things worse for them. I think we got lost more than ten times in that place before we emerged into Lusaka Central cemetery, the Old Leopards Hill cemetery. The shiny tombstones, all gleaming underneath the moonlight, looked innocent enough. It was the fresh graves, the ones with dirt and fresh flowers piled high which made my heartbeat accelerate, and my hands sweaty. We were bundled close to each other by this time, no one said a single word; at least we knew where we were now. Our feet had cuts and we were tired, so we sat down near the entrance to the cemetery. The older girls went near the road to stop any of the cars that were zooming past us. I don’t blame the ones who increased their speed when they saw us. Imagine seeing six kids, dirty looking, bare feet, unkempt hair, stopping your car by a cemetery? I wouldn’t have stopped either.

When a car stopped, we thought our ordeal had ended only to find out they had stopped so one of them could urinate. When we approached them, the woman who was urinating let out an unusual laugh, but we figured she was just surprised to see us. We explained our situation and she let us crawl into the back seats of the bus. There were two other adults with her in the car, a man who was driving and a woman who was slumped in her seat. We felt safe with two women and a man. We soon realised what a huge mistake we had made. The car was moving from one lane to the other, the occupants of the car were all beyond drunk. It was the worst ten-minute drive I have ever experienced; I was impressed to not have vomited after it was over, but thankfully we arrived safely, and hopefully, those reckless adults arrived safely too.

Vuka was pitch-black when we arrived, and the first of our friends had her mother waiting outside their house. We knew then that we were in big trouble because this mother was one of the cool–as-long-as-you-get-home moms. Bongie and I tried to wipe ourselves with our own saliva to clean away the dirt from our legs but it was of no use. I pushed my sister forward, telling her that since she was the oldest she should be the first to enter our yard; she grudgingly did.

Our mother wasn’t outside like most of the days we got home past our bedtime. It was eerily quiet so a part of me thought, maybe today is our lucky day. My sister opened the door and we immediately came face to face with every member of our family. “Where were you?” was the first question our mother asked. Everyone sat around her like it was a jury of some sort to decide our fate. The next thing she said was, “don’t even try to lie to me because I’ve gone everywhere looking for you and you weren’t there.” By this time, I was already crying, she had not yet touched me but I knew it was coming. She looked as exhausted as I felt and for a moment I thought she would understand. So I suggested between sniffles that I was too tired, we could tell her in the morning where we went. But it did not work, she started with my sister first. My parents were mellow when it came to corporal punishment with my sister and me. We usually got an open-palmed spanking on our bottoms and that was it. It scared me when my mother pivoted on my sister and proceeded to physically extract our whereabouts with pinching her thighs, grabbing her arms too tight and when that failed she proceeded to use one of our father’s belts. Even with the beating, my sister came up with a lie. She said we had been at a farm, too far from Bauleni, and we got lost a couple of times in the forest. The lie was better than the truth, as the farms were thought to have better people than Mtendere, the township we had just walked to, or any other highly populated residential area in Lusaka with white immigrants and returning-from-abroad Zambians who couldn’t handle the city smells and dirt. My mother seemed to believe my sister, but she also dished out the beating on me with the belt. For the first time ever, I was sure that this was the last time I would ever venture out of the boundaries of Vuka to play. Our mother had effectively put the fear of God in me. So that’s the story we stuck with.

Life changed for Bongie and me when our mother moved us to a private school. Sadly, I now saw this group of girls, Louisa, Chanda, Tila, and the rest, as inaccessible to me. I liked reading books; I liked my new school and new friends. I didn’t realise at the time that I could have both sets of friends. I knew shame when I went to this private school. The kids in my class would snicker every time the teacher would loudly say where I came from. So I started to hide where I came from as new teachers appeared. That shame made me a different girl. I didn’t want to associate with my friends at home because words like combonic ─you behave like a person from a low-income residential area were thrown around even by the adults at this new school. I didn’t want to be combonic, I wanted to be mayadi ─from a mid-to-higher-income residential area. While I nurtured my new relationships with middle-class kids, my relationships with my first friends suffered and worse; while I assimilated into this new environment, my sister was suffering. She didn’t have the natural ability to move between two worlds as I did. We were both introduced to a new Lusaka and she didn’t feel at home in the new Lusaka. My sister tells me now that this was one of the toughest moments in her life. She remained friends with our friends at home. She played with them for a few minutes after we came back from school and maintained better relationships with them even when we all drifted apart for a while.

So with the memory of sore thighs months later, I watched as my friends played with my sister while I got less and less interested in playing with them. Bongie would sometimes initiate play in our yard to get me to come out, this would happen when our parents were away from home but not even the happy sounds of Chiyato and Waida so close to me would draw me outside the house.

“Is it because you guys now go to a private school and your mum now lives in Botswana?” I heard Chanda ask Bongie one day. Bongie didn’t answer. She continued to play with them until the school hours at our new school tired us both equally and she eventually stopped going outside during weekdays. The outside became non-existent on the weekends too because our father was home and he insisted on us doing our homework and watching educational programs. Bauleni became unreachable, just like the girls I first called friends.

Bauleni Township has a current population estimate of 120,000. Fondly referred to as Bauzdille by its inhabitants or KwaBauleni as my charming maternal grandmother called it, it is a low-income township located east of Lusaka’s central business district. Bauleni is a little different from the other low-income areas around Lusaka in that there are different parts to it. There is Vuka, where we grew up, right next to the Leopards Hill road and cemetery. There is kwaMpofu, named after the Mpofu family who owned most of the closely clustered houses in that area. Then there are the slightly higher-income parts called Overspill and Mulundu, which hardly pass for the usual Bauleni aesthetic of clustered housing. Big houses and yards are found in Overspill and Mulundu.

My life as a toddler and pre-teen girl rotated around Bauleni. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that Bauleni gave me a childhood I can fondly look back on and be filled with nostalgia. Despite the poverty and general lack around us, I had a foundation that was cemented at home and through the people I met in Bauleni. These people have remained friends and some have turned into family. We used to have more girls in the Vuka section of Bauleni and this provided us with a gang that was both mischievous and notoriously protective of each other. My immediate older sister and five other girls were in this girl gang. Others were loners but the seven of us stuck together throughout our prepubescent days.

Most of the children from Bauleni attended school within Bauleni but others, like my sister and I, went to schools in neighbouring residential areas like Nyumba Yanga or Woodlands ─middle-income areas that were close enough to low-income areas to have the same sub-standard education system. Even then, we somehow still had no idea about how the rest of Lusaka operated. We were sheltered in a way, as sheltered as children living in an impoverished environment could be. We didn’t make friends with children from school who didn’t come from places like Bauleni. When we were not in school, we spent our time exploring the forest surrounding us, tagging along with our brothers who went bird hunting with their catapults and amateur traps made from a metal tin, and a string that held the tin open which was placed in a way that someone held it at its end. There was some leftover nsima maize meal placed strategically underneath the tin to attract a bird foraging for food on the ground. The person holding the string would wait for a bird to come and as soon as it was under the tin, he would let go of the string, trapping the bird. For some reason, I enjoyed this part of following our brothers around. Though they got irritated with us, we still found a way to them.

We are probably the reason our mother has grey hairs on her head now because night and day were not important when we played in our gang of seven. We sometimes used to get home at 10 p.m. I, aged eight, and my sister, aged ten, would arrive home way past the time we were required to take our daily bath, eat, do our homework, and sleep. Each time, we found our mother seated outside, bloodshot eyes, and she would take one look at us and we just knew that night would end in tears for all of us. It irritated me for a while, why wouldn’t they let us play? I thought. We knew where home was and it’s not like we were babies or anything. What further aggravated my irritation was that most of our other friends could slip back into their homes without their parents spanking them nor them crying or their parents crying too. I didn’t see what the big deal was with my family.

For me, this is how I’m tracing my roots, so to say. I write about Vuka. I visit Vuka. I keep Vuka close in the characters I create in my fiction writing and my prayers. I immortalise those seven girls who learned together and have stuck together in their adulthood. We lost a member of the gang of seven a few years ago. Tila died as a result of a botched abdomen surgery in a rural town in the Eastern province of Zambia; she was only two years older than me, and she had two children at the time of her death. Death tends to bring you back to who you are, stripping you of all excuses and pretences, it did for the remaining six of us. We have stayed in touch and meet whenever we can take time away from our adult lives. I didn’t talk to Tila much for about ten years before her death. Guilt was one of the main emotions I felt at her funeral. She was my friend and I missed her and wished things had turned out differently for her. Out of the seven, only three of us completed our secondary school education, only three of us can read and write in any language. Only three of us were able to escape from the sad stories that are commonplace in Bauleni and other similar places in Lusaka.

Unbeknownst to us, while we played, things took place around us. We were children during the peak of the HIV/AIDS crisis in Zambia and within Bauleni, claiming more people than we can remember. We innocently called HIV/AIDS Kadoyo during our role-playing games, a word we had heard the adults around us say which translates to a little animal in English. We laughed not knowing the severity of the disease in our country. Some of the girls around us were being married off too young, some were being abused. We didn’t know that, of course, as children until our gang started experiencing the same things. Until one of us got pregnant in her early teens and was married off. My guilt back then was that I was denying where I came from and not playing with my first friends but now as an adult, the guilt is more of “Am I so special? Am I doing anything worthwhile with my life to make sense of why I made it out of Bauleni?” because our biggest dream was to get out of there even at ages eight, nine, ten, and eleven.