Nhamo laughed when I related my story. ‘So what! I don’t care what he says,’ he shrugged, shocking me with this disrespectful language that I had not heard before. ‘I’m at school, aren’t I? It doesn’t worry me what he says about me. So what’s your problem? It doesn’t even affect you.” ‘But you can’t study.” ‘Who says? I should know. I go to schooi. You go nowhere.’ *But I want to go to school.’ ‘Wanting won’t help.” ‘Why not?’ He hesitated, then shrugged. ‘It’s the same everywhere. Because you are a girl.’ It was out. ‘That’s what Baba said, remember?’ I was no longer listening. My concern for my brother died an unobtrusive death.

Coming to the mission, continuing my education and doing well at it, these had been the things that mattered. And since these things had been progressing according to plan for nearly two years, I had thought that ambiguities no longer existed. I had thought that issues would continue to be clearly delimited, with Babamu- kuru, who was as nearly divine as any human being could hope to be, imposing the limits. Through him, because of him, black would remain definitely sombre and white permanently clear, even in , Spite of Nyasha, whose strange disposition hinted at shades and * textures within the same colour. My vagueness and my reverence for my uncle, what he was, what he had achieved, what he represented and therefore what he wanted, had stunted the growth of my faculty of criticism, sapped the energy that in childhood I had used to define my own position. It had happened insidiously,

hen Nyasha came back with the gravy, Anna following with the rest of the meal. Maiguru said that Babamukuru’s old meal was no longer fresh. She said she would eat it herself, that Babamukuru should serve himself another portion of food. Babamukuru thought his wife was making a fuss about nothing, but she insisted, so the ritual dishing out of my uncle’s food was performed again. This time Nyasha did not wait for her father to finish. By the time he was on to the third dish, she was helping herself to rice.