The Sunday News
SOFIA’S hour of reckoning is drawing very close. She is standing trial for the murder of her husband Nyati. Her mother Fatima is very jittery as she is of the opinion that her daughter might lose the case and get a death sentence. In the event of the latter Fatima is prepared for the worst. Despite all this, a flicker of hope still remains. Fatima thinks maybe they will find Sofia innocent. Maybe they will not hang her after all. She knows very well that Fatima was forced into a loveless marriage, an empty marriage that produced nothing else but hatred and death. She says at times she wonders at the strange power to turn an angel like her daughter Sofia into a cold blooded killer. Sofia who could not even stand the sight of a foul being killed. Where then had she found such raw hatred to commit such a heinous crime?
However, Fatima blames Sofia for stubbornness. She had turned down the services of a lawyer hired for her by her friend Jeremiah. This very afternoon Sofia is going to be tried. The thin thread upon which Fatima is hanging is about to break, or would strengthen? One thing she was sure of was that it was not Sofia alone standing at the dock that day.
When the judges passed sentence, whatever it would have been, Fatima was determined that Sofia would not suffer it alone. She was going to take her two most precious possessions with her to court that afternoon; her Bible and her bottle of pills.
Given such a scenario, where is Fatima’s allegiance? Is she a Christian? How can she talk of her two precious possessions, the Bible which is meant to bring her closer to her creator on one hand, and pills meant to terminate her life on the other? The latter is an abomination to Christianity. The Bible says one cannot save two masters, God and mammon. Is this caused by severity of abuse which makes her fail to reason properly?
Last week we showed how tradition became a stumbling block to Fatima’s educational progress. After passing her Grade Seven examinations with flying colours Fatima was stopped in her tracks when her father refused to send her to Assisi Secondary School. We get a glimpse of child marriages when Marume tells Fatima who has just completed her Grade Seven that she is grown up and very soon he would be receiving a lot of cattle from a rich husband. Her dreams of going further with her education were shattered and she finds herself getting married to a very abusive man, Joseph Takundwa.
An example of abuse is shown when Fatima looks out through the broken window-pane. Takundwa’s fist had narrowly missed her head and had gone through to smash the window-pane. That was to be Fatima’s life. As was always the case, Takundwa’s madness would immediately surface whenever he got drunk. He had staggered into the house, and immediately accused Fatima of stealing all his money. Takundwa inflicts more pain on Fatima:
“Thief! Wake up and get out of my bed. Tell me, where are the things I put into the tuck shop last week, he-e? I put in goods worth four hundred dollars into that tuck shop, now there is nothing left? Why?” This is another form of abuse whereby Fatima is forced to produce money from scarce resources. Takundwa takes away all the money from the tuck shop and spends it on beer drinking without re-stocking, now he wants his wife to give money which is not there.
The phrase, “pain is a woman” has been over-used on these pages but I cannot help it except to make reference to it where relevant. Takundwa demands all his money even though it is late at night. He threatens to take his gun and shoot Fatima and then he will go to her mother’s home and will shoot every lizard and every cockroach he finds there swallowing his money. Fatima is falsely accused of stealing non-existent money.
Joseph Takundwa goes on to scold her calling her a useless money spender. He asks Fatima whether that was the reason why her father failed to send her to school, so that she spends her whole life just eating and stealing his money? Spending the whole day sitting like a cabbage waiting to be watered? Sensing losing the harsh verbal exchange Takundwa resorts to violence. That was the time when Fatima quickly ducked just in time to see Joseph’s firmly clenched fist smashing through the window-pane.
Looking through the wardrobe mirror, what Fatima sees is unbelievable. She cannot believe that the unkempt, spent and withered image is a true reflection of what she presently looks like. Too many teardrops have crystallised inside these dark and sunken pupils, thus giving them the glossy and frozen look. Her lips are dried and cracked. After pulling her lips apart, she is immediately confronted by the gap between her upper front teeth — the result of yet another of Joseph’s drunken tantrums.
On that particular day Joseph had lost a lot of money at the racecourse. As was always the case, he had staggered in after midnight, drunk. He demanded money made from the tuck shop. Fatima told him that there was nothing to sell hence she only got ten dollars the whole day. Joseph Takundwa did not take kindly to that. Things came to a head when Fatima asked him if she should sell herself in order to make money and order things for the tuck shop. He went wild when Fatima asked that question calling her names like “prostitute”.
He suddenly swung a vicious blow which connected right into Fatima’s teeth. She immediately sensed the salty taste of blood collecting inside her mouth. Takundwa let go another blow. Something solid snapped in Fatima’s mouth. Immediately she blackened out. This is real physical abuse faced by women in this text.
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