The Sunday News
Highway to Success
THIS week I continue giving more examples of gender-based violence in the story. Thereafter, I will examine whether fate decided Sofia’s course of life. Fate is the development of events outside a person’s control, regarded as predetermined by a supernatural power. In simple terms fate is a power over which human beings have no control, a power that is believed to control what happens.
Remember last week I presented evidence showing that women in this story are down trodden. But I have not concluded that the writer is a male chauvinist. Picking it up from here, Fatima says she will never forget the day she went to collect her Grade Seven results. She had passed with flying colours. She had done better than Jerasi, her step-brother who had been in the same class with her. With her result slip in hand, she had confidently approached her father.
Squatting at a reasonable distance she told her father that she passed. Surprisingly, her father expresses ignorance of what she had passed. We have a case of a father who fails to take stock of what his children are doing at school and how well they are performing. He does not know that his daughter is already in Grade Seven. He thinks she is in Grade Five. What an irresponsible father! The fact that she is in Grade Seven, to him it means she is grown up.
Marume looks forward to receiving a lot of cattle from his daughter’s rich husband now that she is grown up. He is uninterested in the excellent performance of his daughter at school. She tells him that she came out with the best results at school. He views it from a male chauvinistic point when he gets to know that she did better than the boys. He challenges the workings of creation stating that a mistake was made when she was born, the creator intended to make a man out of her — a very clever and strong man just like her father. Was he clever and strong if one may ask?
Marume was shocked to hear his wife suggest that Fatima should be taken to Assisi Secondary School as quickly as possible if she were to secure a place for Form One. But Marume was shocked to hear that suggestion as well as the statement that her teacher suggested her father should take her there. He reacted angrily saying: “So who is this teacher now to tell me where to go and where not to go with my own daughter? Tell me now — what has this teacher become in my house? Go and tell that teacher of yours that he can take his own wife or daughter to Assisi if he wishes to do so . . .’’
Marume folded Fatima’s results and handed them back to her. Fatima’s dreams of going to Assisi Secondary School met a solid end. Her brother Jerasi, who had just scrapped enough points to qualify for secondary school, was fortunate to find a place at Assisi Secondary School. Joseph Takundwa, who became Fatima’s husband who had also managed to scrap through, also found a place at the prestigious Assisi Secondary School.
As Fatima looks out of the room through the broken window pane, painful memories begin to surface. That broken window is a painful reminder of broken dreams. What broke that window pane? Joseph Takundwa’s fist had narrowly missed her head and had gone on to smash the window pane. Looking at her reflection in the wardrobe, she is immediately confronted by a gap between her upper front teeth — the result of yet another of Joseph’s drunken tantrums.
Fatima ponders: “Did I ever truly love Joseph Takundwa? Or was marriage to Takundwa just another one of those rebellious acts that was aimed at spiting my father? I still remember quite vividly how fate had sewn our paths together. I can still remember that he refused to go back to school after going through his Form One.” Later on thinking about her daughter Sofia, Fatima says sometimes she wonders at the strange power of human emotions. Where do they get the power to turn an angel like her daughter Sofia into a cold-blooded killer? Sofia who could not even stand the sight of a fowl being killed.
Fatima is of the conviction that the truth, nothing else, nothing more will save her daughter Sofia. But then we have a question: “Was Fatima a Christian? She says: “This very afternoon Sofia is going to be tried. The thin thread upon which I am hanging is about to break, would it strengthen? One thing I am sure of is that it will not be Sofia alone standing in the dock today. When the judges pass sentence, whatever it will be, Sofia will not suffer alone. I am going to take my two most precious possessions with me to court this afternoon; my bible and my bottle of pills”.
Sofia later on told the lawyer hired for her by Jeremiah that she was a born again Christian and would stand by the truth which would free her. She opened her bible and her eyes were immediately on John 8 Verse 32: “And you shall know the truth;
and the truth shall make you free.” Sofia asked herself: “Am I a cold blooded murderer?” All the hours of severe introspection that she had endured had never provided her with an answer to that question.
She went on: “I will never use the word ‘never’ again. Anything can happen in this world. Who would ever have believed that I, of all people, would one day be sitting in this remand cell awaiting trial for murder! The little things that can happen to us are as many as the grains of sand in the soil. Those who claim to be in control of their own lives should be taught this simple truth. Events weave into each other like many strands of the spider’s web.
“No event stands on its own in our lives. This event will trigger off the next, whose outcome is equally unpredictable.”
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