Mankhokwe...

Sometimes, grief feels numb. Like when you wipe the roof of your mouth with your tongue. Other times, grief burns. And, it’s raw. It bites. Like the feeling you have when there is a blister in your nasal cavities. I might be wrong. May be there are no moments when grief feels numb. Perhaps it is all a performance – that numbness – just to aid us live and survive through daily toils. It might be that each time grief is fire, carried in a knapsack. That when we lose, and grieve, we are forced to carry fire. As is every other fire, sometimes it warms us. Other times, it burns us. Unlike most fires, it does not consume us. Or, perhaps, it consumes us little by little. Maybe it nibbles at us in quiet gradual ways. Our souls disintegrate, it might be, at the pace of natural soil formation. Or, more aptly, at the rate of continental drift. In 2014, in December, I had texted with a friend late in the night. She was hospitalised. It had been a brief illness. Almost as if it was...

The Giddes Chalamanda you meet in the early hours of a Monday, seated on one of the couches of Scallas Café, is not the same one you saw moments ago on the stage. For now, on this couch, Giddes is that octogenarian. With a face that presents him as one nursing the worries or the pleasures of old age. He is – if his face can be used as a mirror into his soul – lost in a world of his own. As a few besotted fans come, sit next him, for a selfie, he can neither smile nor frown into the camera. He just exists in his space. The young fans are invaders. Neither unwelcome nor welcome. The look on his face communicates none of that.  Yet, minutes before – in the late hours of 16 December, a Sunday – Giddes had forgotten himself on stage. But, forgotten is not the word. Remembered must be. The time he walked on stage, welcomed by Davis Njobvu of the Edgar and Davis Band, Giddess had remembered himself. His passion.  It had been a long night. The promise of Giddes Chal...