Author: Tinashe Lee-roy

About the author: Writing is a passion that I intend to turn to a profession in the future. Right now I’m an Automotive Technician by occupation, 27 years old, and I’m based in Harare.

Story title: Mike Tyson vs Evander Holyfield

About the story: The story is set up in the mid to late 90s in Harare. It follows how a young man’s family dynamics changed drastically at the hands of his parents. It was inspired by the conflict that sometimes arises between Exodus 20:12 and real life experiences.

I don’t want to die like my father – alone, isolated from my children, with none of them in talking terms with me. I think that’s what he deserved. Hell, I didn’t even cry when I learned of his death. Yes, learned. I have struggled to understand how some people, especially my mother, of all people, felt comfortable terming me “heartless and unforgiving”, given the position we had been put in. How she managed to find space in her heart to let go of her bitterness is quite the conundrum. I could never. My father had four children with my mother – me, my older brother and my two young sisters. We were all born in the 80s decade, Alois came exactly two weeks before independence, I was born three years later, Chiratidzo two years after me and Dorcas in ’89. We never had much growing up, although my father earned just enough to send us to decent primary schools and rent a cottage in Waterfalls. He worked as a production line worker at Lever Brothers. It was a decent job with a decent income at the time, an income that could allow you to have savings if you spent wisely. This is where my mother came in. She had an entrepreneurial mind, and she came up with an idea of cooking sadza for sale to general workers who worked for companies that didn’t serve lunch to general workers in the Workington industrial area. Her being a sociable person with strong rural values quickly made her popular with the general workers who worked around Workington as most of them were young men migrating from the rural areas to the city for greener pastures. Within a half a year my father had saved enough money to afford a car, but my mother suggested that he kept on saving in order to open a grocery store back at the village. She also advised him to take a business course so that he’d be able to manage the business well when it was up and running. For a woman with only rural primary education, she surely was operating way beyond my father’s expectations, him being the one with a secondary school education. Since her business was flourishing enough for him not to worry about monthly bills, he didn’t see the harm in listening to his enterprising wife. A few months later, Dorcas was born, and my mother had to employ someone to help her with the business as she had to stay home more to take care of the baby.

The following year, in 1990, my father enrolled for a course in Business Management at Harare Polytechnic College. He took night classes since he would be at work during the day. He didn’t have to dig into his savings for the tuition, my mother covered everything from registration to study material from her business. All she asked of him was that he remained focused for the sake of the family’s future. We started seeing less and less of him as he would come home late in the night and leave early in the morning before we had woken up. He also attended weekend classes, sacrificing his occasional weekend half day shifts he usually took to earn overtime. We only took this to mean he was as dedicated to his goals as he had to be. Perhaps he was, if we were to align our definition of ‘goals’ with his. My mother’s helper, Eunice, was not as good a cook as she was, neither was she as good at handling customers so the business started losing clients to a new lady who had emerged at the beginning of the year. Because of this, my mother was forced to go back to work and Eunice was reassigned to home duties.

By late 1996, my father had worked hard enough to be appointed regional manager of Lever Brothers. One thing he was good at was his job. He made sure to make good of his Harare Polytechnic College education by opening his first grocery shop at Matsvitsi growth point in our rural home of Guruve. Between managing the business and being a manager at work, he became a perennially swamped man, who traveled a lot. We only got to spend a few hours with him in a week. Regardless of the busy schedule, he flourish well and the shop made good profit. Within a year and half or two, we moved from Waterfalls to Malbereign and my mother gifted her canteen business to Eunice. Her plan was to help manage the shop to take some load off my father, and possibly open another one at Nyangavi, the growth point that was emerging in the neighboring village. My father discouraged these plans, emphasizing that she ought to stay home and manage the household as Chiratidzo and Dorcas were still relatively young. My mother argued that since it was her money that started the business, she should be an integral part of it and help oversee operations and be part of major decision making processes, and he counter-argued, saying that she wouldn’t have been able to raise that money if he hadn’t funded her canteen idea in the first place. He went on to boast that it was because of his expertise and experience that the shop had become a household name in the village, negating the fact that she came up with the idea of him taking a business course and put her money into it. To him, there was no way an uneducated woman would manage business as well as he did. When the words came out of his mouth, the spirit of submission instantly deserted my mother, and she summoned her inner Mike Tyson. Unfortunately, for her, he summoned his inner Holyfield and it ended badly for her. We watched helplessly as he unleashed his anger on her, decorating the living room wooden tiles with her blood in the process. It was their first ever physical fight, and our first time ever seeing our father like that. Alois basically sacrificed himself by trying to hold him back and was thrown at the fine china display. There was no stopping him. He only stopped when got tired, and my mother was no longer screaming but just groaning like a dying cow. He packed a small bag with a few bags and a lot of documents before vanishing with his Toyota Hi-Raider. That’s the last memory of seeing my father I have. I was about fifteen years old.

My mother barely survived the butchering and had to be hospitalized for several weeks. She suffered severe injuries to her spinal cord and has been confined to a wheelchair since. About a month after her release from hospital, while getting used to the new reality surrounding our mother’s mobility, we received a letter telling us we had to vacate the house to make way for the new owner. The man my mother made sacrifices for had sold the house in which she was staying with his children, recovering from injuries he gave her. The men who delivered the letter were dressed like they would know the law, and they used highly sophisticated legal jargon that we took it seriously and had to make arrangements to leave the house. With the help of our former landlord from Waterfalls, we managed to sell most of the furniture, leaving just enough for the small cottage which we used to stay in. The lady was kind enough to offer us free accommodation in the cottage indefinitely as she considered us to be her family and she also empathized with my mother’s plight since she knew, first hand, how our mother built everything she lost to our father.

I dropped out of school that year to help take care of my mother. After a few months she had recovered and adapted to her condition well enough to be able to take care of herself, so she decided to start the canteen business with the money from the furniture sale. Although there were others now plying the same business all over Harare’s industrial areas, she had enough experience, skill and help from me to run the business well enough to make decent profit. Five years on, one night, while I washing dishes and my mother counting money, after a busy Friday at the canteen, we received a very shocking visit. My father, now a ghost to us, showed up at our doorstep with a heavily pregnant Eunice, a toddler who looked to be around three years old and a small, torn suitcase. I had grown into a young Floyd Mayweather myself and I won my first ever bout that night.