The Hairdresser of Harare

by Tendai Huchu

  Catching the same kombi to and from work worked out for me as well. Seeing me with my handsome lodger, the perverts who used to make passes at me all but stopped, except for the occasional cat whistle or crude remark.

  Dumisani had piles of black magazines from abroad, which he told me were sent to him every couple of months by his cousin in America. I discovered his generous nature and he was happy for me to borrow any that I pleased. I plunged through piles of Black Beauty, Black Hair Styles and Care Guide, O, Pride, Hype Hair, Hair, Style and discovered that a lot of his work was taken from these publications. There were styles that were wholly original that he had come up with himself but I could see how having access to this wealth of information influenced his work.

  He would ask me what I thought of a particular style and whether it could be done with the materials we had to work with. It was almost like all he ever thought about was the next huge style.

  ‘What made you decide to go into hairdressing?’ I asked him one day.

  ‘I guess when I was at school I realised that I wanted to be a hairdresser.’

  ‘What school did you go to?’

  ‘St. George’s.’

  ‘Get out of here, a St George’s schoolboy who becomes a hairdresser! That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard in my life.’

  ‘What’s so ridiculous about it?’

  ‘For starters, St George’s kids come from loaded backgrounds. We’re talking parents with serious amounts of cash.’

  ‘I had a rugby scholarship.’

  ‘A rugby scholarship! Since when have you been interested in sport? In any case don’t all St George’s students leave the country as soon as they’re finished?’

  ‘They can’t all do that because I’m still here.’ He fished out his rugby jersey and waved it at me pointing at the number 15 sewn on. ‘I was captain too.’

  ‘I’ve got to say I’m kind of impressed but it must suck being the poor boy in a rich kids’ school.’

  Dumi shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘I guess that explains how you know about white people’s hair, because most of the kids there were white when you were at school — right?’

  ‘In a way it does. I started doing a friend’s head and soon everyone was coming to me for haircuts and styling. I was a natural; black hair, white hair, it doesn’t matter to me because something inside me just tells me how to do it. I’ve always excelled in everything I do in life, but I should stop bragging. Tell me how you got into hairdressing. I’m sure that would be a hell of a lot more interesting.’

  I told him how I’d learnt my craft in backyard salons in Budiriro, doing women’s hair and experimenting there. I told him of my dream to open my own place one day and who knows, maybe some day own a string of top-end salons and boutiques. He listened to me with his head in his hands, looking as if he was hanging on to every word I said.

  That Saturday Dumi took Chiwoniso and me to Churchill Boys High School to watch some rugby. It would be the first game I’d ever watched in my life despite the fact that I lived so close to the school. We walked down the pine tree-lined Nigel Phillip Avenue. The school was massive with soccer fields on one side of the road, and, on the other, hockey and rugby fields. Young boys in smart royal purple blazers and gray trousers doffed their caps and said, ‘Good afternoon, sir — ma’am,’ as we passed by. It was amusing at first but by the time we reached the field my voice had grown hoarse from returning these greetings.

  ‘It is even worse at St George’s,’ Dumi said, with a hint of pride.

  The place was packed with parents and schoolchildren waiting for the main match. We found a place to sit at the pavilion and Dumi went off to get something to drink. A sound I had never heard before began to play. First there was the roll of drums and then a droning, then came a melody that was loud but sounded distinctly foreign. Chiwoniso clapped her hands to the beat.

  ‘Look, there’s the Churchill Pipe Band. They’re damn good.’ Dumi pointed at the group of school boys in skirts (kilts, he called them) coming up the field, followed by the rugby team in purple and white striped jerseys. They allowed their opponents on the pitch first. The spectators roared when the home side finally took to the field.

  There was a hush and the Churchill boys performed a weird war cry of unintelligible words as they moved and performed an equally bizarre dance. Dumi explained that it was their ritual to perform the New Zealand ‘Haka’ before each game. But if their opponents were meant to be scared by the performance, they didn’t look it at all.

  ‘It’s going to be a good game, they’re playing Prince Edward who are equally as good,’ explained Dumisani, watching the game with a keen pair of eyes. The ref blew his whistle and I felt Dumi’s leg bouncing up and down as if he wished he was on the pitch himself.

  The game progressed and he tried to explain the plethora of rules to me but I didn’t understand them. All I could see were young boys knocking each other on the head and fighting for a ball. It seemed so violent that I wondered why they even bothered having a referee on the pitch. The match ended with the home side narrowly victorious. Despite Dumi’s passionate advocacy for the game, I told him that if this was what the sport was about then I had missed nothing in my life.

  Fifteen

  There was a changed atmosphere in the salon. Even Mrs Khumalo felt younger and oozed optimism. She began to talk about expanding the building for a third time. I can’t tell you how worried we all were at that prospect. The roof would probably end up falling on our heads. I sat with Yolanda on the lawn for our lunch break. She was going to be off soon for her exams.

  ‘I don’t know how we will manage without you for three whole weeks.’

  ‘Three and a half, actually.’

  A shadowy outline of a head showed briefly in the doorway. It was Dumisani’s. Yolanda sighed.

  ‘He’s a damn fine brother,’ she said licking her forefinger and tapping her butt.

  ‘I’ve seen better.’

  ‘Come on, he is living with you, so you can’t honestly say that you haven’t been tempted to do it.’

  ‘Don’t be sick. He is like a little brother to me. How old is he anyway? Thirteen or something like that.’

  ‘Don’t give me that; I have seen the way you look at him.’

  ‘More like the way you look at him. He is nearer your age anyway.’

  ‘No thanks, I’ve already got me a boyfriend.’

  ‘You sly thing, you. How come you didn’t tell us?’ I couldn’t help squealing with delight. At least one of us had a boyfriend now.

  ‘It’s still far too early. It’s only been a week you know.’ She had the look that was begging to be asked more.

  ‘So what’s he like?’

  She went on to tell me how he was called Tonderai, twenty-eight and unemployed. They had met at her church and fallen for each other. There was nothing physical happening between them yet. She was still of that naïve age where you actually believed that it would only happen after marriage. I didn’t want to tell her how hand-holding turns into kissing, that turns into something else and then bam you’re fucking. That relationships sour over time is a lesson that comes with age, so who was I to burst her youthful bubble?

  ‘Memory also has a man you know.’

  ‘No ways! How come I’m always the last to know?’

  ‘That’s because you’re always so full of yourself, Vimbai, trying to be a prima donna and all that. No one tells you stuff.’

  ‘I am not a prima donna.’ I was shocked to think the others thought that of me.

  ‘Never mind. Anyway, Memory’s seeing this guy from Waterfalls but he’s married.’

  ‘How can she do that?’

  ‘She doesn’t care. She says that she can share him with the wife.’

  I’d heard of desperate women who would take whatever they got even if it was someone else’s husband, but I never thought Memory would be one of them. I was about to say this when I recalled my own past. Those in glass houses sh
ouldn’t throw stones.

  Charlie Boy had a wife, so it was just me and Agnes, the singletons, left. That was some company to be in. Here I was turning twenty-six and with a child. I shuddered at the thought of my birthday, which was in October, just a few months away. My prospects seemed bleak all of a sudden.

  The next Sunday I invited Dumi to my church and he agreed to come with me. It was a Pentecostal church, which hired the Cine cinema in the city centre on Sunday mornings. The service ran from ten till four. Dumi, who was raised Catholic, said he did not have the stamina to endure a long service, but it was all right because we were knocking off at one o’clock. Mrs Khumalo had tried to extend Sunday hours for her clients but had given up because everyone went to church in the morning.

  The band was doing a sound check when we went in. The piercing noise of mic feedback was irritating. We sat together on the middle row in the left aisle. Seats were hard to find but at least we were early. Chiwoniso joined other children in a different part of the building where they held Sunday school.

  ‘Why don’t you guys just build a church? This is just whacky, to hold a service in a cinema where they will be showing porn soon after you’re gone.’ Dumi spoke a little too loudly because a few heads turned round to look at him.

  ‘They don’t show porn here. Anyway we don’t have the funds yet to build a church.’

  ‘But let me guess, your pastor drives a Benz and wears flashy Italian suits.’

  ‘Shhh.’ I had to shut him up, half regretting I had brought him in.

  The fact that a building built for worldly entertainment had been converted, if only for a while, to the glorification of the Lord’s name was something wonderful to me.

  ‘I’m only joking,’ said Dumi, as if sensing my annoyance. He had a sensitive side to him. A part of me still fought against liking him. I felt I had to maintain an appropriate distance between us.

  The music began with the soft strumming of an electric guitar followed by the drums building up slowly. A woman with the mic began to sing, ‘I met the Lord by the river’. As if one entity, everyone began to sing along, we all knew the lyrics to the song. The whole place became animated with hands waving in the air, holding Bibles aloft. Dumi nodded his head and clapped his hands to the beat. There was a confident aura about him, the type that someone who knows he can fit into any circle has. I had brought people to my church before and they had been tense, but not Dumi. He was a self-assured young man. They played three more songs before the pastor came in and stood before the microphone. Pastor Roger Mvumba had built this congregation from the ground up himself. He had been raised in a family that held traditional African beliefs. One day, when he was sixteen, he was sleeping when a voice woke him up and told him to find God. He went back to sleep and the next night the same thing happened. On the third night he heard the voice. ‘Where can I find God? he asked.’ The voice told him to go to the Methodist Church, which ran a local mission. There he learnt the Bible and was baptised. Twenty years later he was living in the city, working as a messenger for the city council when he heard the voice again. This time it told him that the world was ending soon and that he should form a pure church called Forward in Faith Ministries, as all the other churches were corrupt and strayed from the truth. ‘How can I when I have a family to feed and I am not used to speaking in front of men?’ he asked the voice. It answered, ‘The Lord will provide.’ He quit his job and went about preaching on the street. Everyone thought he had gone mad. His family was thrown onto the streets because they could no longer pay rent. For years they had to live off the generosity of relatives. Gradually people joined the church and accepted his divine ministry. The church now looked after him, giving him a home to live in and food to eat. He never forgot the hard times and always encouraged us to give tithes so that the church could feed the poor.

  ‘I greet you in the name of Christ. Hallelujah.’ He bellowed from the pulpit.

  ‘Amen!!!’ The congregation replied.

  ‘Brothers and sisters in Christ. Today I want to talk to you about morality. As a messenger of God, I cannot keep quiet. It is my duty to speak the truth. Some of you may not like it, but these are not my words, they are the words of God. The end of the world is nigh, ‘The cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and liars. They will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulphur. This is the second death.’ Revelations 21, verse 8. The Lord will come like a thief in the night so be prepared!

  ‘Brothers and sisters, don’t you see the signs in front of your eyes? Look at Zimbabwe. Ask why the Lord is punishing us like this. It’s because the whole earth has become like Babylon or Sodom and Gomorrah. There are no more moral values in people’s hearts. Just coming to this church this morning, I saw many young women wearing mini-skirts. Why do they do this? They do not know it, but it is because they are sent by the devil to entice men and to lead their hearts astray. They are harlots like Jezebel and if you cannot resist, then it is better for you to pluck your eyes out so you may not see. People are having sex outside of marriage and this angers the Lord. There are people raping children and they will feel the wrath of the Lord on judgement day. Timothy 3, verses 1 to 9 teaches that ‘Men will be lovers of themselves in the last days.’ You must be on the lookout for homosexuals and sexual deviants. Perverts shall burn. How can a man and another man sleep together? God made Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve. Can a woman and a woman make a baby?

  ‘Be careful of those who would lead you astray from the narrow straight path which leads to the house of your father…’

  It was a powerful sermon filled with the power of the Holy Spirit. I could feel his words coursing through us all and touching our very souls. When he finished we began to sing, praise and worship. People went down to have the Pastor lay his hands on them and pray for repentance. I would have wanted to stay on for much longer but Dumi nudged me.

  ‘We have to go, otherwise we’ll be late for work.’

  ‘There’s still a whole hour. Work is only fifteen minutes away.’

  ‘Come on, let’s get out of here. I don’t want to risk it.’

  We gathered our bags and left. Maidei would take Chiwoniso back home. The stiff manner in which Dumi walked suggested something was not quite right. It would be a long time before I learnt why, the hard way.

  Sixteen

  Dumi was not himself. He seemed distracted, as if there was something on his mind. Radio music played on but Dumi didn’t snap his fingers to its rhythm as he normally did. There was a mechanical efficiency to the way he did his clients’ hair.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Yolanda eventually asked him.

  ‘Nothing at all,’ he replied with a plastic smile.

  The salon was too busy for us to push the matter. Even Charlie Boy had three men sitting on a bench waiting their turn as he gave a school-boy a funky haircut that was sure to get him turned away from school. Only Charlie Boy, whistling out of tune, was oblivious to Dumi’s mood. I tried to catch my tenant’s eye but he avoided me. Was there something I had done wrong?

  At home I drank tea whilst Dumi sat on the floor with Chiwoniso helping her with her homework. It gave me a break since Maidei was illiterate. Chiwoniso was fidgeting, she would much rather have been watching TV. Dumi was patient and brought her back; where I would have shouted, he only had to speak and she obeyed. Seeing him with her, I thought he’d make a great teacher.

  ‘Uncle Dumi, can I go to bed now?’

  ‘Not until you finish your reading. There are only two pages left.’ There was a gentle authority in his tone.

  ‘But I’m sleepy.’

  He got her to finish and even made her read an extra page. Then he signed the brown card that told the teacher how far she’d reached with her book. At the kind of school I’d been to, we hardly had any homework and when we did, half the time the teachers didn’t check it. Admiral Tait Primary was a school that people from my home neighborhood
could only dream of. The teachers knew what they were doing and the library had the right books for my daughter to read. It was expensive though, and I dreaded what would happen when she finally reached high school. If I didn’t get my life sorted soon, she’d be forced into a former group B school in the high-density areas; a sure-fire way to flunk and get pregnant before she was nineteen. There were nights when I couldn’t sleep worrying that my baby would not have the sort of future she deserved.

  After I’d put Chiwoniso to bed I returned to the living room. The TV was showing a local drama. Dumi was on his favorite sofa, his eyes glued to the screen, but I could tell he was not watching it. I sat closer to him and decided to engage him.

  ‘I know something’s wrong. You haven’t been yourself all day.’

  ‘We should subscribe to DSTV, the ZBC stuff is crap.’ He tried to deflect me.

  ‘Is it something I’ve done?’

  ‘I mean this drama is twenty years old and they will keep repeating it.’

  ‘Dumisani, I’m trying to help.’

  ‘I don’t need any help!’ he shouted and got up, going to his bedroom and banging the door behind him.

  The sound of chirping crickets was the neighbourhood lullaby. Exactly why they had to rub their hind legs together just below my window was something I didn’t try to understand. The noise seemed only marginally preferable to a whining mosquito waiting to bite you. I tossed and turned. The room was very hot but I didn’t dare open the window in case I let mosquitoes in.

  I figured out that I couldn’t get to sleep unless I understood the source of Dumi’s bad mood so I got up and knocked on his door.

  ‘Come in.’

  ‘Hey, are you still awake?’

  ‘No, you’ve just woken me,’ he said, but his voice was not in the least drowsy. He was lying on the bed scribbling in a small black book.