A dedication to the International Women's Day

 Were we not told our mother was the best? Of course, we had no choice in the matter and had no chance in hell or heaven to get a better or worse one.

Of course we knew she could hurt us. As babies we cried our hearts out when she stepped out of the door. What if she never, ever came back and left us motherless, helpless without any shelter whatever.

Of course we knew that she sometimes passed the pain done to her on to us. Of course we knew when she had made choices that were stupid and resented it when we asked her: "What do you see in that creep? Are you sure that was good for you and us?"

Motherhood is also about daughters learning from the mistake mothers make.

 Motherhood also goes back to those Mitochondrial Eves that, so say the genome scientists, lived their lives somewhere in Africa. And then their offspring migrated all over the globe switched to much paler shades of black when colder and less sunny climates required that.

Memes face hunger, attacks, malevolence and survive all this and they further hand on warmth and love to the following generations, however twisted and knotted that heritage may turn out to be. We are patient and are patient enough to disentangle what has gotten hopelessly entangled in troubled lives and difficult inheritances.

Men are more often than not like Emperor Alexander who in Gordon came across the most intricate knot ever produced. So he took out his sword, then the latest weapon of mass destruction, and hacked the knot.

He left a mess of wasted ropes and unsolved problems that then had to be swept up by, I am sure, mothers.

Mothers are used to dealing with the mess left by stupid boys. Mothers sometimes love their boys too much. They never cease to hope they can learn being motherly from them.

Do we not get hitched up with men, work in small and big offices for men thinking they are grand like Alexander?

Do we not collect plants, plough fields, nurse the sick, teach the young, give birth to children and nurture them even if they are twenty or our sister's or niece's children or a child from seemingly nowhere?

Yes we have been doing that and we have always kept a memory of that great maternal smile even when it had been driven out of our lives temporarily?

Baby after baby ripped us open when passing from womb to world, again and again, slaving in the fields, sweating over fires and boiling pots, rubbing clothes clean and dry with our knuckles, carrying firewood bundles and water buckets that cut into our skins, lying under men making what only they could call love and getting beaten for being too obedient or not obedient enough?

Children were born of sudden yearnings and weaknesses, of seduction and rape. But we had no grudge against these products of soon regretted unions.

We embraced the children in our wombs and under the sun. We died in child birth, of overwork and sometimes of men's envy that they could not give birth to children. "Meme no cry!"

We need smiles to face life. And mothers are the specialists, the experts of smile. They know how to make tears smile. "Meme cry to smile again after the tears.

Do it like the rain clouds that shed the water to make plants turn green, livestock lap liquid, rivers and water reservoirs fill up and then reveal a smiling sun!"

Families need mothers, sister and daughters and their incredible strengths. Some of us excel in schools, colleges, universities and run homes and productive units singlehandedly:

Woman-headed-units are the global hope. (Omazakhela) We are in charge of vendor market economies and raise children to follow us.

We hope for civil societies that are maternal and invest in future generations so that we and our daughters are not caught in debt tangles that strangle us.

We have been global ever since the Mitochondrial Eves and the transatlantic slave trade and the flights that bombs, guns and germs and the famines in their wake have been enforcing on us.

We sometimes get men's and society's sanction in the form of a grandiose and expensive wedding. We sometimes have children out of wedlock, the lock that wedding is for us.

We are called: "those girls that got children without fathers", But it should be called: the children of the fathers that chickened out and ran away from their responsibility.

Women even have to take the blame for male mess-up. Women are, indeed, everything. When men invented the birth that they could give by their brains they were just small boys crying for their mothers.

But we can be cruel, very cruel, too. In our effort not to cry we can beat, insult, spit and even commit the unimaginable.

We can be unpredictable, even under the veneer of motherhood. We can bicker among ourselves, tell lies, drive misunderstandings and give false advice, cause havoc. We can be jealous.

We can be what people call witches. But we can be ancestors' people who are said to go through apprenticeships in caves and at the bottoms of rivers (Mama Water) and come back with the healing power of sangomas.

What is a mother? It can be the birth mother or a female, even a male relative, a teacher, even a stranger mothering a child. It can be Brecht's Shen Te in The Good Person of Szechuan or the Beautiful Soul in his Caucasian Chalk Circle.

We all have a wish "to never cry again". But we know it will happen again. We have to learn to weep from joy and pride and realize that tears can clean the sky and enlighten our lives.

I was born into Southern Rhodesia and into the cruel heritage of Cecil John Rhodes, Cape to Cairo and into Mzilikazi's Flight from Shaka the Zulu that then battered into people of Masvingo's Zimbabwe Ruins.

I smiled when Mother Zimbabwe came into life with the help of Mugabe and Nkomo that messed up things by copying Cain and Abel.

Mother Zimbabwe made me very happy and proud at first and then I felt hurt like brother Dambudzo Marechera had sensed from day one.

It is a difficult heritage but then heritages are always difficult. We inherit the dead, the senselessly murdered and the living, the flaws and the strengths.

We are the generators of the generations and have to heal the dead generations and the generations about to be born.

Taken from eBook 'Meme no cry'.