Our story is a difficult one. I never earned a lot of money. I only earned two pounds, three shillings a week, and that money had to suffice for all of us. So as the children were growing up, money was always short. People referred to us as marombe, or destitute vagrants. We would spend the whole day playing mbira without going anywhere, whiling away the day playing the mbira. But we paid no attention to them.
The children grew up. Irene was the first one who began to play, too. I think she was thirteen years old when she started learning by watching her mother play. And then we started teaching her, until she could do it. So, they called us marombe. But we never listened to them. People did not appreciate the importance of what we did. They considered the mbira a mark of destitution. So we just carried on, journeying with our instruments of destitution.
There was a boy who came after Irene, who was very quiet. He was stabbed with a knife at Katanga Beer Hall in 1979, when was 18 years old. He used to play darts. So his friends came to get him, and they went to Katanga Beer Hall. He tried to refuse, but they convinced him to go. And when they arrived, there was an argument. So he ran away when the argument happened. And he was followed, and stabbed with a knife.
After he died, there were nine children left, and the majority were boys. There were six boys, and three girls. Then the girls said, “We want another girl!” They just kept talking like that, pleading with us, “We want another girl so that there will be four of us!” So it took some time, but it happened. Then my wife fell pregnant, and she delivered a girl. Then there were four girls. I said, “Now, everything has turned out well.”
So then we carried on, just playing mbira. I was no longer working, and we ended up selling beer out of our home. We made a lot of money, but before we knew it, that money was gone. We had wanted to start a grinding mill. We were buying chibhuku beer, ordering chibhuku and selling it at the house. So, that money was all gone, we didn’t even know how it had disappeared. Even now, if we think of it we wonder, “But where did that money go?” We don’t even know. It was just gone. So then we say, “It doesn’t matter.”
Then we started facing severe poverty, desperate poverty. In a little while, we had sold most of our things. Those porcelain plates, so many of them, we sold all of them looking for money for food. We sold the fridge, we sold the display case, we sold all of it. Then we were left with just one bed to sleep on, and our pots for cooking sadza. There wasn’t anything in the house, not even a bench. We sat on reed mats on the floor, as there wasn’t even a chair. The children weren’t able to attend school, and only a few of the boys were able to advance.
So we stayed like that, just playing mbira. We never stopped playing mbira, we simply carried on. So people would come by and see that we were in a situation of utter destitution. But God is there, and the ancestors are there. Yes, the ancestors were telling us, “Carry on. Do not be troubled, things will change. You shall turn into people living well.”