Bushwe Reincarnated

I felt him for the first time when I was four years old, his dark looming  energy hung like a cloud over me and I remember vividly to my parents bewilderment,  that night I refused to sleep alone. I squeezed between my parents on their bed and clung on to my mother till dawn. He came into my dreams singing a song, song that I will never forget….

” Dzinonwa muna Save, mhondoro dzinonwa”

The raucous voice rang in my ears all night, held hostage in a state of sleep paralysis, unable to run, to scream but forced to listen to a rhythm that’s was to haunt the better half of my existence.
 

The spectral aurora magnified precisely on my 6th birthday. The year 1996 I was awakened by throaty stifled sobs that emanated from under my bed. I listened closely to the sobs, my heart threatening to leap out of my chest without so much as daring to move. I was petrified. My dad burst into the room yelling on top of his voice ” happy birthday my princess!”  To my father’s dismay, tears gushed out and overwrought weeps racked my tiny body. That day framed my life in a league of enigmatical personage of a battlefield against insanity. The transparent rudiments of a loosing battle ever so clear. To acquire a sound state of psychosis from the illusory grasps, was imprudent a thing as possibly could be attempted.

The ichthyicology of my demon which drove my family to a repeated eulogy of disparity was invincible. We met for the first time, eyeball to eyeball one morning as I prepared for school in the bathroom. It began with the steam that formed on the mirror assumably due to the scalding water running in the tub. The indiscernible vapours rapidly contoured forming a silhouette of person. A face emerged from within the silhouette, a wrinkly face of an old man and with a thunderous voice he yelled “Talk to me!”. My brain failed to decipher between fiction and reality, immediately shutting down in a black out. I was found fainted and naked on the bathroom floor.

For the following two years he would appear and disappear in the most compromising situations. One Sunday church service he started singing

“Dzinonwa muna Save mhondoro, dzinonwa”

Loudly at the top of my lungs. I was humiliated as I was escorted outside supposedly under demon manifestation. Countless futile therapy sessions with my psychiatrist proved my insanity beyond reasonable doubt.

” Psychiatrist: You carved  6 spears from your mother’s coffee table. Why?

Me: *shrugs*

Psychiatrist:  They are beautiful. Where did you learn to carve so skilfully?

Me: *deep sigh* I told you over and over again, it wasn’t me it was Bushwe.

Psychiatrist: The old man you say?  How come I can not see him?

Me: Dunno

Psychiatrist: Is he the reason why you grabbed your English teachers breasts?

Me: uhuh *stares at her cleavage*

Psychiatrist:  Are you fascinated by my cleavage? You have been staring at it since we started?

Me: *Licks lips* You are a beautifully molded woman.

Psychiatrist:  Hello Bushwe, what are the spears for?

Me: Self defense a man is not a man without his spears.

Psychiatrist:  *scribbles on a note pad*

Me: he is gone. For now. He will be back. “

I sat there thinking about my distraught mother, my dad hardly spoke to me anymore, all I got from him was the same apprehensive look of disdain. Living a life of a leper, alone, shunned and excluded from the society. I watched him stroll out of the therapy office singing the phantom song

“Dzinonwa muna Save, mhondoro dzinonwa”

The tiny loin skin covering his genitalia flapping away. I looked desperately at my psychiatrist and whispered ” I want to die.”

To be continued…