Walking through Bulawayo

My home town is Bulawayo. City of Kings. “The place of slaughter.” Once the capital of the Ndebele kingdom under Lobengula, now the second city of Zimbabwe. Rail centre and industrial centre, often overlooked by Bamba Zonke (Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, “takes everything”). My home, where I grew up and where I worked.

I went to school in Bulawayo (Hillside and Hamilton) until Form Three. I taught in the Matopos for three years and then again in Bulawayo for another three years: Maths and English; Theology and Bible.

I walked a lot. I was younger then. Bicycled a lot in my youth and walked more as an adult. I learned to ride safely on the streets by going downtown to the Mobil Traffic Training Centre just off 4^th Avenue. They had a small layout of streets where one learned to use the correct hand signals and was introduced to the mysteries of giving way to the left (or was it right?). I rode every school day 15 minutes from our house on Leander Avenue to Hamilton High School and learned another mystery – that girls rode past us the opposite way heading for Townsend. No girls at Hamilton in those days.

 I remember walking through Bulawayo once in those days. From our house (Leander Avenue) to Queens Park for a cricket match. An English team was touring, and I intended to watch the last hour or so. The walk took me too long – it was about four miles – and the game ended just before I got there. So I walked home.

I walked more often when I taught at the Theological College of Zimbabwe, then just behind the Matopo Book Centre of Lobengula Street in what used to be the YMCA. We lived on Wiltshire Avenue in Hillcrest, about a three mile walk. It took me normally about an hour.

The first bit was through an open air market around the corner to the bookstore. I might stop for some peanuts or boiled maize in the market, or just enjoy the sounds and sights – music coming from open doors of shops around the market.

Past the bookstore to the High Court and turn down 8^th Avenue into the commercial centre of the city. I enjoyed that stretch, people everywhere, walking past the city library and Bulawayo Club and post office. Down the street towards what was once Haddon & Sly and then the city hall and bus rank. I could have taken a bus from there home, but walking was too enjoyable.

Past the city hall to Robert Mugabe Way (Grey Street as was) where I turned right and headed towards the suburbs of Bradfield, Hillcrest, and Hillside. There was a petrol station at 12^th Avenue and another at 14^th, where I might stop and buy a bag of biltong at the kiosk. Few delights were better than walking and nibbling on shaved biltong.

 I remember occasionally seeing a white beggar there named Arthur. I have no idea what happened to him, except that I occasionally shared my biltong before carrying on. I assume he slept rough in the open bush just beyond Parirenyatwa (Borrow Street, as was).

Turn left at 14^th or 15^th and join Parirenyatwa then head out Hillside Road for the longer stretch of the walk home. First came the trade fair grounds on the left, with Eskimo Hut at its entrance. These things have all changed now, but they live on in my memory.

After the fair grounds (reminding me of other scenes inside the grounds) came an open space and then the Bradfield Shopping Centre. Famona and Bradfield on either side of Hillside Road were medium density housing – reminders of a relatively vibrant middle class in Zimbabwe of 1990. A class soon to lose its vibrancy under crushing inflation.

I passed the shopping centre, resisting the urge to step inside and buy a Fanta, and walked on towards the Mater Dei Hospital, where I would cross the road to go towards Wiltshire. Now I was in the home stretch – right on Durham, left on Hampshire (or just beyond it, Gloucester) and right again on Wiltshire. Such incredibly English county names, glowing with echoes of “there’ll always be an England”, even in dry and dusty Zimbabwe waiting for the rain to come.

If I had stayed on Hillside, I could walk on to Leander and turn left on Cecil (past my old school, Hillside Junior) or on Leander and thence to Flint Road. I lived for some time at the corner Flint and Leander. Cecil John Rhodes; Leander Starr Jameson. The roads carry the history of Rhodesia, swallowed up within the history of Zimbabwe.

That route would also take me past the Malindela Baptist Church, where I attended for seven years as a boy, sitting under the preaching of Tom Anderson, a Scottish pastor and devout Bible preacher. I have still a book of Scottish stories I got from him.

Walking through Bulawayo. It’s all changed now, of course. Time rolls on, but my memories are still with me, and I walk or ride down those roads within, grateful for the years I lived in my hometown, City of Kings.

Canada Day 2021

Today is Canada Day 2021. The first day of July. Remembering the signing of the articles of confederation 155 years ago. Often called “Canada’s birthday”.

This year Canada Day is more sober than joyful. Discoveries of more than a thousand unmarked graves at former residential schools in Saskatchewan and British Columbia make for a difficult celebration. I have a calendar of African Proverbs. The proverb for July 1 reads, “The road to freedom is full of thorns and fire, yet happy is the one who follows it.” Our road to freedom leads through the thorns of fire of the residential schools.

I cannot reflect meaningfully on the history of Canada’s residential schools, still less on the experience of being indigenous to Canada. I am a recent immigrant from the United States of
America, and I do not understand at all fully the experience of having one’s culture and language and family torn out from under one’s feet. I can listen and learn, rather than try to describe.

This brief essay, then, does not probe the Canadian reality more fully. Instead, I dig into my own memories sparked by the descriptions I am hearing.

I was sent to a residential school when I was a boy – in Zimbabwe, then Southern Rhodesia and part of the British Empire. I was seven years old when my parents took me from our home in the Matopo Hills to Hillside government hostel in Bulawayo. I lived there for the next 18 months until we moved for a six-month stay to Pennsylvania. On our return to Bulawayo, I moved to a missionary children’s hostel (Youngways) next door to our home. From age 7 to age 15, for nine months of the year I was in the hostel and for three months in my home.

There are fundamental differences between my experience and the residential schools in Canada. Two differences stand out: 1) Our family was fully agreed to the process, and 2) I was allowed to keep my language and identity. Indeed, my memories of the government hostel are generally good, and my memories of Youngways Hostel are even better. Even so, I remember one basic fact that reminds me of the residential schools in Canada.

In 1958, my Uncle and Aunt (Arthur and Arlene Climenhaga) were the head of our mission work in Zimbabwe. They lived about a mile from the school where I was in the government hostel. Soon after being placed in the government hostel, I walked away from school during the day and headed for their house. When I arrived, they took me back to the hostel. No escape that way!

Uncle Arthur may well have understood my feelings. About 40 years before, when my grandparents lived at Matopo in the 1920s, he was sent to school at Milton Junior School in Bulawayo and lived at the school hostel there. He also was homesick, and one day he walked away from the school and headed for Matopo Mission. The trip took him two days, and when he arrived at Matopo, my grandfather took him back to Milton.

I have heard several of our indigenous people in Canada tell their story, and often their stories include running away from the residential schools. Except that they were caught by the RCMP and returned. My parents and grandparents supported the schools we went to. We were willing participants in the process. Even so, young children miss their families, and my Uncle and I both tried to run away and go home. How much worse was it for our First Nations children when it was the state and not their own families who confined them to the residential schools. The description feels more like prison than like school.

Again, there is no real comparison between my experience and the experience of indigenous children in Canada’s residential schools. But there is a small point of contact, a moment in my life in which I can sit and consider that sense of loss I felt, magnified many times over to encompass my whole generation. I can’t wrap my mind around it, but I can live in it for a few moments.

Canada Day 2021. A time to celebrate, and a time to remember – even the thorns and fire that we walk through on our way to freedom.

Postscript: The above does not explore the complex blend of good and evil that  is part of every human institution. That there was good in the residential schools I do not doubt, and that there were good people involved I accept readily. I am noting only the basic loss fundamental to the hostel experience. Even when much more was good -- as in my own experience -- one is taken from one's family, and that hurts. A lot. In the case of Canada, the blend of good and evil is problematic at best, and we must explore the evil fully on the path to national healing.

For the Love of Cheerios

Our focus statement today is, “God loves us in so many ways. When we steep ourselves in that love, it comes out into our lives.” One of the Going Deeper questions reminds us that God’s love often comes to us through other people, and today I am remembering a time when someone showed me a special kind of love many, many years ago.

 

I was 10 years old, I think. My best guess is that this happened in the Christmas of 1960, perhaps 1961. I lived in Africa (Zambia and Zimbabwe) until I was 15, with only two visits to my parents’ families back in Pennsylvania. When I was nine years old, we spent six months in Pennsylvania, and for those six I lived with my Uncle and Aunt in Woodbury, PA. Also, during those six months, I discovered Cheerios! 

 

Then we went back to Africa. We didn’t have Cheerios in Zimbabwe! We had lots of good food, but no Cheerios. I loved Cheerios, and I made it known that I wished we had Cheerios in Bulawayo. Of course, we didn’t. 

 

My Dad was the Bishop of our church (the BICC in Zimbabwe) there, and we lived in the Bishop’s house. It was a big house in the shape of an L, and he had his office at one end of the house. His secretary (Lois Davidson) lived in the office wing of the house and ate her meals with our family. 

 

One day, Lois was in downtown Bulawayo doing some shopping and she found a box of Cheerios in a grocery store! I have no idea why it was there or who imported it, but it was there. She knew I liked Cheerios, so she bought it and brought it home. She kept it in her room until Christmas and then she wrapped it up and put it under the tree. I got a box of Cheerios for Christmas! (Here, that would be a crumby gift. Then and there, it was special!) 

 

Out Going Deeper questions lead me to wonder, how did getting a box of Cheerios make me feel? Ten-year-old boys sometimes don’t know how they feel, so I can’t tell you how I felt then, but 50 years later I met her again. In between that meeting and the gift of Cheerios, when I was in my 40s, I was pastor of a church in Indiana, where her sisters (Edith and Esther) were members. Then, 10 years ago, we were visiting Indiana, and I heard that the three sisters were living in a retirement centre in Goshen. 

 

I decided to drive over to Goshen and visit them. I found Edith and Esther, living together in an apartment. They were glad to see me, and we had a short visit. It was good to see old friends again. Then I went to Lois Davidson’s apartment. She welcomed me with open arms! She invited me in. We had tea together and talked and talked, and I realized that she loved me and my family. I remembered that box of Cheerios. It was more than just a box of cereal. It meant that she was thinking of me when she was in the grocery store that day, 60 years ago, because she loved that 11-year old boy. As a 60-year-old man visiting her that day, I felt loved and cared for by our old family friend. I knew it was God’s love! 

 

There you have it! You can ask your Mom and Dad if they have ever experienced God’s love, shown to them through other people? May you can even think of a time when someone else has shown you that they love you, and you can tell your parents about it.

Note: I told this story as the children's feature for our Sunday Service at Steinbach Mennonite Church on May 2, 2021

Ashwell and the Radio: A Different Perspective

I told Ashwell’s story in my last blog. I told a simple story of a minor offence – Ashwell entered my house and borrowed my radio while working on our high school soccer team’s equipment: without my permission. I noted also that Ashwell might have a different memory of this event than I do. I want to explore briefly some reasons that his memory might differ from mine.

I told the story as though the power differential between us was straightforward: I was the teacher and he the student. Of course, the setting was Rhodesia of about 1973, Smith’s Rhodesia. I grew up as a White Rhodesian. I went to boarding school at Hillside Primary School in Bulawayo at age seven, living in a hostel mostly populated by the children of White farmers. The school was segregated; Black Rhodesians (Africans, as we called them) had their own schools.

I went as far as Form Three in that system (studying at Hillside and then Hamilton High School) and then returned to Pennsylvania with my parents for Grades 11 and 12. In 1967, I went to Messiah College where I studied maths (not so well) and English literature (better). After graduation, I returned to my boyhood home (Smith’s Rhodesia) in January 1972 to teach at Matopo Secondary School, a high school for Black children.

This colonial dynamic – in which I was part of the system run by a White minority government – is missing from my original telling of the story. It is not just that I was a teacher and Ashwell a student; I was also a White Rhodesian (American) and Ashwell was a Black Rhodesian.

I acknowledged this dynamic in the original telling by saying that I lived in Zimbabwe. It was called Rhodesia then, but I named it Zimbabwe to acknowledge that all of us – Black, White, Asian – belong to something larger than the colonial reality. I miss Rhodesia; that is where I grew up. But Rhodesia was fundamentally flawed in its inception. A minority ranging between 2 to 4 % of the total population cannot control the lives of everyone in the country. I do not pursue the question of what we should have done in the 1950s through the 1970s; I simply acknowledge that the colonial reality could not continue.

But when I confronted Ashwell about using my radio, I do not know what that meant to him in light of the fact that I was (in his eyes) a White Rhodesian – by upbringing, if not by citizenship. I was also a missionary, and that is part of the equation; but the relationship between Black and White at that time involved a power dynamic much greater than our relationship as coach and player or as teacher and student.

That is the reason I say I don’t know what Ashwell’s memory of this event is. I do not understand the Black Zimbabwean experience from the inside. I have lived enough with that experience and with its consequences to know something about it, but it was not my lived experience.

I am fortunate to have returned to Zimbabwe as a teacher there before Mugabe’s excesses brought so much suffering to the country. I loved Rhodesia, and I love Zimbabwe. I grieve her current distress, the fruit of corruption and cruelty, and I love her people and my memories of her people. Including my friend, Ashwell the soccer player.

A short story: Ashwell and the Radio

Yesterday I did the children's story at church. Telling the children's story is harder than preaching a sermon any day. The sermon (Marg preached) was on Jesus' encounter with the woman taken in adultery (Jn 8) -- a contested passage, but also a fascinating story that Marg dealt well with. My story was a memory of an offence and forgiveness 45+ years ago. Here it is.

The Freedom of Forgiveness

Many years ago when the world was young, or at least when I was younger than I am now, I taught high school in a country called Zimbabwe. I taught English classes and Mathematics classes, and I coached the high school soccer team at a school named Matopo Secondary School.

In order to play soccer, you have to have good soccer equipment. Every Saturday morning, a high school student named Ashwell came to my house to check the soccer ball. We had a lot of thorns on the ground, and he often had to open the ball up and take out the thorns and patch the ball, so that we could use it for our practices and games.

One Saturday, I went into the nearby city of Bulawayo for the day. Ashwell came to my house as usual and sat on the veranda to take care of our soccer equipment. When I got home in the evening, I noticed something inside my living room. I had a transistor radio to listen to the news and sports and music and such. Well, my radio had been moved. It was easy to pick up and carry, and I could tell that someone had come in to my house and used my radio. It had to be Ashwell!

I went down to where the male students had their rooms and found Ashwell. I asked him if he had gone into my house and borrowed my radio. It was a creepy feeling, knowing that he could have walked all over my house and gotten anything he wanted to from it.

Ashwell was clearly scared. He admitted that he had gone into the living room and brought the radio out. You could see that he thought I was going to report him to the principal of the school and get him in real trouble. He apologized and said he was really sorry for going in to my house and using my stuff without asking.

When I went down to Ashwell’s room, I was really quite upset. As I said, it was creepy knowing he had gone into my house without asking. But when he apologized, something happened. I realized I didn’t need to stay angry. I didn’t need to get him in trouble. I said something like, “Well, you have apologized and I forgive you. Don’t do it again.”

Somehow, apologizing and forgiving set us both free from what he had done. It doesn’t always work so simply, but this basic idea is true. Admitting what we have done and being forgiven really does set us free to live the way that we should. Ashwell and I were able to resume a good relationship and he kept coming to my house to work on the soccer equipment.

Most important of all, when we admit what we’ve done wrong to God, God forgives us and sets us free to live a better life. Ashwell and I are actually no different from each other. We both needed to admit to God who we really were, so that God’s mercy could flow over us. Mercy’s a big word – it’s another way of talking about God’s love. God loved all of us so much that God’s Son (Jesus) came to pour out God’s love and mercy in our lives.

Postscript: It would be interesting to know what Ashwell (not his real name) thought of the whole incident. He might remember quite differently from the way I have just recounted. That's one reason I didn't use his real name; besides, I didn't ask him if I could tell this story.

A Matopo Christmas

December 1958. It may have been December 22 – I am not sure. We lived then at Matopo Mission, 25 miles from the end of the tar on the Old Gwanda Road south ofBulawayo. In Manitoba, where we live now, Christmas comes with cold, up to minus 30 Celsius, but Matopo is in Zimbabwe, and Christmas means time for a picnic!

Every year the missionary family gathered a few days before Christmas for a picnic. We came from Matopo, Mtshabezi, Wanezi, and Bulawayo, 30 or so adults and children. In December 1958, we met at Matopo Mission, from where we drove to one of the “outschools” nearby, a place called Dopi.

At Dopi we unpacked the picnic, enjoyed our food and gifts and volleyball. Always volleyball when the missionaries played together. Then came the clouds and the rain. December in Zimbabwe is the rainy season, and we had a good tropical thunderstorm. With the rain pouring down, there was no choice but to head back to the mission, where we had enough room to finish our party inside, but there was a problem! A little spruit that we had crossed easily in our VW Kombis when we arrived was now a raging torrent, perhaps 100 feet across. [My childhood mind remembers 100 feet. Adult reflection suggests 20 feet is more realistic.]

The flood was too deep and swift and wide to drive across in our Kombis, so we went back to the school to make a plan. The adults decided that Frank Kipe and Al Book would walk back to the mission, hiking through the rocks of the Matopo Hills around the flash flood, get the Massey Ferguson diesel tractor there, and drive back to Dopi. [If other people remember differently about who hiked back to the mission, I defer to their memory.]

Meanwhile we waited in the school house. My Dad later recalled Elwood Hershey getting anxious about the long wait and piling wood on a fire we had built on the earthen floor of the school, until the sparks almost reached the thatched roof. When Dad pointed out that he might burn the school building down around us, Elwood hurriedly removed some of the logs.

My sister and Alvera sang a duet, “Deck the halls with boughs of holly.” We played games, sang carols, passed the time as well as we could while we waited for the men on a tractor.

Finally, Al and Frank arrived. We drove down to the river, which had sunk somewhat, but Frank still got wet driving through it, sitting on the tractor seat. The men took the spark plugs out of the VWs and then Frank towed us across. I remember lifting up my feet as the water ran across the floorboards of the Kombi. On the other side, the men dried off all the engines and reinserted the spark plugs. We finally got back to Matopo Mission about 1 a.m. [Again, the time is the memory of an eight-year old speaking 61 years later.]

The families from Wanezi still had a four-hour drive home. I suspect they put a long-distance call through to one of their number, who had not been able to join us. It might have been from Elwood to Dorothy Hershey, which would explain his frustration with the long wait and thus piling logs on the fire in the school house.

I probably went to 12 Christmas picnics, growing up in Africa. This is the only one I remember. A truly memorable Christmas Picnic.