I first met Esilina Sibanda one dusty hot Zimbabwean summer‟s day as I walked to my
local TM at Avondale shopping centre. She greeted me politely and stopped me to tell me
that she was looking for a job. I was wheeling my infant son in his push – char, while his
older brother walked by my side. I listened then told her that I was sorry but I did not
need anyone to work for me as I was at home with my children and managed all my own
housework. She told me that I must be a strong woman, and I chided her, telling her that
she also must be a strong woman if she could take on all my domestic chores. We stood
together talking before my children grew restless and irritable in the heat. Before we went
our separate ways she told me she‟s rented a tiny room behind a house a few doors from
me. This meeting was the first of many. We grew to recognize each other, become
gradually more familiar. We started greeting one another when we met on the grassy
pavement each carrying our own shopping or when I was walking my oldest child to and
from school.
Africa was my home and my birth place. It filled my soul as only a spiritual home can. I
had lived on my own since my husband left to be with a young woman, and now my
three children were reaching the age when the unknown world beckons ever more
persistently. I loved the sunny blue skies and the delicate green lacework of the acacia
trees that filled my garden. I loved the heat so hot that it shimmered on the tarmac. I
loved the fiery erithrina and the way its lucky beans were scattered like red pearls over
my lawn every year. At night I loved to lie on the cool grass, my dogs lying puzzled at
my side and look up at the stars until my heart stopped pounding and grew peaceful.
Esi came to my house late one very dark evening. The street lights were no longer
working as the city council had put all the services out to tender and established their own
private companies to serve the city‟s needs. I could almost hear my heart beating in my
chest as I walked cautiously out, with my two dogs running, barking, just ahead of me. In
the dark I did not at first recognize the short, slightly built woman at the gate. Her head
was covered in the old – fashioned way, as black women in colonial Africa did before
braiding and extensions became popular. She carried no luggage save a small
supermarket carrier bag, and on her head she balanced a woven basket, which I would
later discover contained all that she owned.
I quietened the dogs and my youngest son and daughter came out of the house and called
to me to see if I was all right. I told them I was fine, and asked them to call the dogs in. I
asked the woman how I could help her. People say that you can see the aura of a really
good person. I knew even before she came to the end of her story that she was one of
those people that some call an angel, one who comes into your life for a season or a
reason. We had a small, two – roomed cottage at the end of our garden. Esi had a haunted
hunted look in her eyes that I recognized from my own reflection in the mirror.
Something made me offer her the cottage, which she accepted with a huge sigh relief.She turned down my offer of bedding and said she had all that she needed but that we
would talk in the morning.
I returned to my bed and slept badly. I got up early and went to the kitchen to make
myself a pot of tea. The sky was dark, but the dawn was fast approaching and the birds
sang in the new day. From the window I made out a small shape huddled over, digging in
the back garden. I opened the door and went out to investigate. Esi held a worn hoe in her
hands and she groaned with effort as she struck the ground, loosening the black clay soil.
"What are you doing?‟ I exclaimed. „I have slept,‟ she said in a breathless voice. „Now I
must dig.‟
I stood for a while then walked back to the house and poured her a large mug of sweet
milky tea. She accepted it and leaned against her hoe. She thanked me and we drank our
tea together standing in the early morning light of an African sunrise. She asked me to
come and look at the back garden and asked me to make a mark to indicate how big the
vegetable garden could grow. There are times in our lives when we do not question.
Someone or something fits so neatly into our lives that we have no need to know any
more. Esi came into our lives that. I did not need someone to do more than a few hours of
cleaning in the house, but although I did not acknowledge it at the time, my soul was
almost mortally wounded and I needed someone to nurture me and show me the way to
heal myself.
Days blended into weeks and weeks into years. Esi grew older but her strength never
flagged. Although she liked to talk, there were times when she preferred to be silent. One
day as I walked back from work I found her walking in the road with her hoe over her
shoulder. I asked her where she was going and she told me she had found a piece of
unused land nearby where she was growing sweet potatoes and maize. I marveled at her
stamina and her consuming need to plant and grow things.
Often she would come and stand near me in my office, as I worked from my computer at
home. I realized later than she could sense my moods and my sadness and always knew
when I needed someone to talk to, just as I grew to know when she did.
I offered to hire someone to help her dig as she slowly transformed the back yard into a
huge vegetable garden. She declined my offer and said most of the gardeners in town
knew only about flowers.
She knew only about vegetables. We never discussed what she should grow or where she
should grow it, but sometimes I bought seeds from the supermarket and left them on the
window ledge in a small cardboard box. She took what she wanted to plant and discarded
the seeds she did not want. She also taught me to save the seeds from fruit and vegetables
that I bought, although some were hybrids and produced no fruit, even with the most
tender care. She shook her head as I explained to her about hybrids. Sometimes I would
find small red tomatoes on the window ledge, onions, carrots, a bundle of pumpkin
leaves, a ripe paw paw for my breakfast.In the spring I would also dig in the garden over the weekend, but I grew only flowers and lavender and herbs. Sometimes she would come and talk to me as I knelt, pulling out
weeds. We would speak of the garden, and of life, about my children of whom she grew
very fond, and whom I shared with her. Her brother had given her a baby girl many years
ago whom she had raised as her own child – a common occurrence in days gone by.
At first she steered our conversations away from personal things, but gradually she shared
with me her history, and I shared mine with her. Sometimes the pain of my own
heartbreak grew too much, and I longed to curl into a small ball and retreat from
everything. I would hear her in my kitchen moving quietly around, chopping, preparing
food that had grown in her garden. Sometimes it was ground maize made into a thick
porridge, pumpkin leaves with cream and onions and tiny slivers of chicken. When it was
ready she would put it in the oven and silently slop away. It was as if by magic that the
aroma of the food would creep down the passage, till it seduced me, and I would
compelled to get up and go to the kitchen. I would take the lovingly prepared food and
eat it in the traditional way, with my fingers, all the time thinking of Esi and the way that
she seemed to cope with her immense pain and loneliness so much better than I did.
She had grown up in the rural areas. From an early age she fetched water and collected
firewood. As the only girl in her family, many of the household chores fell onto her. She
told me once that her mother had often beaten her to try and make her behave like a „real‟
girl. But even then she loved to garden, to feel the earth open before her, to plant her
seeds and look after them as they grew. She married a man not of her own tribe or of her
parents‟ choosing, and he let her down badly. When she was forty-two, he accused her of
being barren, and he threw her out of the house and replaced her with a young woman.
He never had any children by the new wife, or any of the subsequent women he lived
with. Esi never had another relationship with a man.
Esi told me that she cried a lot over that period. She could not understand why God had
not given her a child to keep her company, to help her keep her husband. Then she told
me that when she went to the maintenance court to try and retrieve some of her meager
possessions she was astonished to see so many women with children who had been
abandoned by their husbands.
To try and take her mind off her sadness, she told me, she grew cotton for the first time,
and sold it to the cotton marketing board. She built her ageing mother a house from
concrete bricks. She loved her rural home so much that my curiosity got the better of me
one day and I asked her why she did not leave the city and return there. She shrugged,
and then she stared hard at me, as if to say that part of the mission she was fulfilling
involved looking after me. Over the weekends, when she was not digging, she walked
around the suburb selling some of our excess produce. We never discussed what she
would do with the money but I would see a new fork, a pair of clippers, or a brand new
bucket, neatly arranged where she kept her tools in the shed. She spent hours cultivating
seedlings in an army of wooden trays chat I bought tomatoes in, from the supermarket.Esi taught me much about life. She taught me how life is mirrored in nature – that everything has a time to laugh and a time to cry, a time to grow and then a time to stop growing, and to die. The cruelty of men was something that she knew only too well. But
she taught me to avoid bitterness that cruelty cannot be paid back by the women who had
suffered – they must busy themselves with tending their gardens. They must plant, grow,
and heal. She taught me how to nurture and treasure my own little seedlings and in turn
my children too kept a special place for her in their hearts. She told me once as I cried
that my tears were the rain that would wash away my pain.
She loved the fact that in her garden she moved at her own pace, she grew what she chose
to grow, and she decided to pull up anything she considered a weed. She loved the beauty
of growth. She told me once that, given the choice, she would rather work with the soil
than do any other kind of work. It was strange to think that, had she been able to have
children, she might have spent a lifetime in the rural areas. In stead she had come to town
to start a new life away from both her disappointed family and her former in-laws.
She knew that life was unfair, and she always finished a particularly sad conversation
with „God knows‟. Her faith was the kind that could move mountains, but she accepted
her life with a stoicism I found breathtaking. On Thursdays she dressed in her Methodist
Church Women‟s uniform and spent the afternoon in church. She invited me and my
children to a service when she was ordained as a preacher and I witnessed a sisterhood
that sustained women in a visible way that I had only dreamed of. In the evenings she
would sit in her cottage and read, or copy out passages of the Bible in her spidery
handwriting. Although she had not been to school for very long she could read and write
and speak three languages.
The politics of the country had taken a turn for the worse when the ruling party had
decided, for a reason that I never understood, that they would never relinquish power, and
were prepared to destroy the whole country to accomplish this. They relentlessly pursued
their goal, crushing all opposition – whether real or perceived. White farmers left their
farms. For a time Esi though that perhaps she might be able to get some land, but the land
was not given to the likes of her.
My eldest son left Africa to study to become a film – maker. When my second son left
school he soon grew restless and I could see his desire to join his brother. When the
situation in the country deteriorated to a point beyond the comprehension of all except
those who lived in Zimbabwe, my anxiety and my longing grew too much. I packed a few
meager possessions and a friend paid for me and my two remaining children to fly to
England. I found a job at my local Sainsburys and rented a tiny cottage in West Sussex, I
bought a spade and a fork and some seedlings. I tied up my hair and I turned to my
garden to dig.