(*1951 & *1932)
I was born on Redbank farm in Rangemore, known to locals as Nyama Endlovu [meat of an elephant]. I got married to a man whose parentage was half-and-half like mine. – Edna (R). And I grew up alone, practically…never married or had children. – Ethne (L). On our mother’s side we had a Ndebele Gogo [granny], Songophi Mafuyana, and a British grandfather, Joseph Bunting-Gray. Although our mother was bilingual, one of our sorrows is that we never learned to speak siNdebele – only English was spoken at home. Our grandfather from our father’s side came from Madras, India, to South Africa. He worked as a chef on the railways in Cape Town, came to Zimbabwe by train, and married our other grandmother, who was a Cape Coloured-German mix.
What a wonderful person Gogo was. For an uneducated woman, she taught her children, washed and ironed and everything. But then, she had a husband who was with her, and taught her a lot! She also learned how to sew, so our grandfather bought her a machine. She sewed for her children. In the photo you can see the boys wearing dresses she made! [laughter].
Our grandfather, Joseph Bunting-Gray, came to Rhodesia when the British needed reinforcement for the Matabeleland uprising. In 1892 he landed at the City Hall grounds in Bulawayo after coming up by ox wagon from Johannesburg, South Africa – 16 oxen altogether pulled the covered wagons. When he died in 1967, our grandfather was one of the few White men who had stayed with his Coloured children to the end. He even had a fall-out with the Cape Coloured headmaster at McKeurtan [former Coloured school in Bulawayo], who did not want African-European ‘halfies’ at his school, also called ninety-nines – so not quite hundred percents. My grandfather went straight to the Education Department and said: “our children were born in this country, get these Cape Coloureds to go back to South Africa, this school is built for our children not theirs”.
Photo: Joseph Bunting-Gray (R) and daughters (L). Ethne and Edna's mother standing at far right.
There was animosity between the two Coloured groups – Capies and Halfies. In the early days it was wretched. But every now and again it rears its head, although it's not an everyday occurrence because the community is so mixed now.
Two of our grandfather's sons had to fight in WW II. The British Royal Air Force (RAF) used Rhodesia as a training ground. An RAF airman crash-landed on our farm in the kopjies [boulders]. It hit the Old Man square, as at the time two of our uncles were away at the front in Abyssinia. Both came back home.
One of things that Coloured soldiers were promised by the government those days, was farmland as a thank you for the war effort. Our uncles went to the necessary offices when they came back, but they were never given anything. It made them so bitter.
Our mother was a classical singer. The governess of Bulawayo heard my mother sing and put her in touch with a music teacher in Cape Town, who trained her. She would sing at weddings, and at parties. And my father used to play the guitar. I have a treasured memory of a day that we went out on a picnic out to Malemi dam, full of water and surrounded by kopjies. We had our lunch and went kopjie-climbing. My mother climbed up and started singing… and her voice! It carried right across the kopjies, the acoustics were perfect. She had a powerful voice. There were many whites parked along the road and they got out of their cars to listen to her singing. Oh, it was beautiful! Our mother got her powerful singing voice from her [Ndebele] mother. They used to sing while doing their washing down by the Khami river.
Photos: Maleme dam and the Matopos Hills.
We learned to play the piano and dance. I later taught piano and dancing at Rangemore school. Now this song that I just hummed…Gogo told our mother that when the White people came into the country, the Ndebele were running into the Matopos Hills. Now there are a lot of swamps there, and one man sang this song as he was being sucked down: “the white man is running after us, I am going to die! But he must know that this will be my country". And when old C.J. [Cecil John] Rhodes was on his deathbed, he hummed the same song as he passed. Being a White man, he didn’t know the Ndebele language, but he knew the tune. Even though the song was very derogatory towards the Whites. One of the lines of the song is so sad you know, as the Ndebele man is going down in the swamp, he is singing: “I will follow the dust of the zebra as they run off into the sunset”. Gogo used to sing this song. That’s gone with the generations now.
I started gardening when my husband was sickly. He died when I was 48. I used to grow vegetables and had private customers. Ever since then, I got into hard work – Edna. She doesn’t know her limits! You know what, I reckon when she is in the garden, she sees God’s creation. It brings her a sense of peace and calm, especially when she wastes water [laughter]! – Ethne.
