My mother -- Dorcas Climenhaga (nee Slagenweit) -- grew up on a dairy farm in Western Pennsylvania. One of eight children -- five boys and three girls. She inherited her mother's get to work attitude, always on the move. (Many years later, I married Lois Heise, who shares the same get moving approach to life. Now she is Gogo -- Zulu for Grandma, and expressive of her constant motion.)
Mother also inherited her father's penchant for jokes and laughter. When I first met PapPap as a three-year old boy just "home" from Zambia (where we lived as a missionary family), he got down on all fours and approached me as a growling bear. I backed up until I reached the wall; he kept coming. Finally, against my parents' standing rule, I pointed my finger at him and went "Bang!" He rolled over and played dead. Mom and Dad decided I hadn't broken their prohibition on "shooting people", since I had really shot a bear.
Mother had the Slagenweit humour to the full. I remember when I was a moody teenager, she would come up to me and start bobbing around me, jabbing and saying, "Let's box!" How can a 14-year old boy stay moody when his 4'11" mother is trying to start a boxing match!
We lived in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe then. We had servants inside and outside the house. People needed work, and refusing to have servants meant making them go hungry, but it was hard for a Pennsylvania farm girl to have someone else cleaning her house. She would tell Rida that they needed to wax the concrete floor (a red concrete I know from Zambia and Zimbabwe) and he would get to work. Then she would get down on her hands and knees beside him and they waxed and polished together. She said that they solved the world's problems working on the floor together. Rida said, "When uMfundisi [meaning my Dad] is the president of the United States and I am the Prime Minister of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), we will make everything right!"
Mother had the ability to work within the structures while subverting them with God's love and a sense of everyone's essential human-ness. What the Ndebele and Zulu people call "ubuntu". She was a Pennsylvania farm girl and a Bishop's wife and an African mother all together. She was and is my and my sisters' mother, our children's grandmother, and someone we love and miss more than we can say.
2 comments:
Miss her indeed.
And message to Rida (if he is still alive)—I’d vote for that combo.
By the way, is this Rida as in Rida Digest?
Rida Digest Ncube, who held a prominent position in ZANU (I think) following Independence. Sadly, he died in a car crash in the 1980s.
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