as more concerned with how early it was, much too early to be eating the last meal of the day. At that rate I would be hungry by the time I went to bed, and I had nightmares when I slept without a comforting mound of sadza warming my stomach.

at I noticed, very early on, was that some of the missionaries were definitely strange, strange in the way that Nyasha and Chido were Strange when they came back from England. These missionaries, the strange ones, liked to speak Shona much more than they liked to speak English. And when you, wanting to practise your English, spoke to them in English, they always answered in Shona. It was disappointing, and confusing too for people like me who were bilingual, since we had developed a kind of reflex which made us speak English when we spoke to whiteskins and reserved our own language for talking to each other.

It made me reckless in the way that draining the dregs in my father’s gourd had done when I was little. It made me tell Nyasha frankly what I thought. ‘Even if you have been to England, you should respect your mother,’ I told her. ‘I would not speak to my mother in the way I have heard you speak to Maiguru.

But I did not sneer at you,’ I protested, speaking in Shona. Our conversation was laboured and clumsy because when Nyasha spoke seriously her thoughts came in English, whereas with me, the little English I had disappeared when I dropped my vigilance to speak of things that mattered.