Chapter 1I was scarcely five years old and already collecting rejection letters. It was 1991 and my parents were trying to secure me a place at a primary school in Harare. They belonged to Harare’s up-and-coming black middle class and were determined to make the most of the opportunities emerging from Zimbabwe’s independence. Nothing focused their attention more than investing in my education. Education to them was everything. It meant social mobility. It meant respect.
In Zimbabwe in the nineties, for those who could afford it, education also meant a frantic, dog-eat-dog scramble to access the best private schools. Schools with names like St. Michael’s or St. John’s, like Bishopslea or Eaglesvale, not schools named Dzivarasekwa Primary No. 2. In other words, the “best schools” were those that had, not so long ago, been run by white people for white children when Zimbabwe was still Rhodesia, when the white settler minority governed the country, when education was largely segregated. Since the fledgling nation was just over a decade old, the school system was riddled with the inequalities, enmities, allegiances, and suspicions left by colonial rule and the war of liberation against it. And if all that wasn’t difficult enough, my performance in school admissions interviews didn’t help.
At one school interview, I asked my father if I could take home a trophy from the school’s display cabinet. When he said no, I wept shamelessly and without restraint. The teachers looked on in choked disgust, concluding that I was too unruly for them. At another interview, I was asked to draw a picture of my mother. My rendition in blue crayon was badly misshapen and compared poorly to the drawings of the other kids. The teachers there thought I was too dim-witted for outright admission, but they were willing to offer me a spot on the waiting list. My mother turned it down. She was troubled by the teachers’ proud embrace of the rod as an instrument to keep children in line. An interview at one of the most selective schools in the city seemed to go fine—it was incident-free, at any rate. But all the teachers there had been teaching since before independence and showed little sign of overcoming old prejudices. When we drove home from the school, a letter of rejection was already waiting for us in the mailbox. My parents complained for years to come about that letter. The school must have sent it earlier that week. Typical behavior from Rhodies, they scoffed. Those conservative white Zimbabweans were trapped in the habits of mind of the Rhodesian era. They had no intention of assessing me fairly, given their arrogance, their ever-tumescent self-regard, their preference for their own.
both my parents came from large families. My mother, Hope, was born in Uganda, the sixth in a brood of ten. My father, Tafi, was born in Rhodesia, the youngest of seven siblings. I was the first child born to my parents. They then tried and tried for another child. To their excitement and relief, my mother finally became pregnant again in 1990.
She was close to term when doctors in Harare went on strike against the government. The doctors demanded better working conditions and remuneration in the country’s public hospitals. Meanwhile, my mother had started to worry that something was off in her pregnancy, though she struggled to articulate what exactly. It just didn’t feel right. She tried to arrange a checkup with a doctor but there were no appointments available in the city’s public clinics during the strike.
After many phone calls, favors, and fistfuls of cash, a doctor in a private hospital agreed to see my mother on a Saturday.
In the doctor’s room, my mother lay supine on the bed and exposed her large belly. The room’s fluorescent light washed her in a brilliant white halo while the smell of carbolic acid soured the air. In slow, deliberate movements, the doctor lathered her abdomen with a cold gel before pressing an ultrasound probe onto her skin. Gently at first, then firmer and harder as he performed the scan.
She waited for him to say something. The intensity of his concentration chilled her to the marrow.
When, eventually, he looked at my mother, his eyes were full of sorrow.
“Mrs. Chigudu, regretfully there are no signs of fetal life.”
A curtain of darkness descended.
“It would be unfortunate to cut you open under these circumstances,” the doctor said in reference to a Cesarean section. “It would take many days for you to recover. I suggest that we book you in for an induction to deliver the stillborn.”
My mother called my father to tell him what had happened. As she tells it, my father’s first—perhaps only—concern was how he would break the news to his mother, who was eagerly expecting another grandchild. I’m sure my father remembers it differently, but that phone call is etched in bitter recall for my mother.
An anxious wait followed because of the ongoing doctors’ strike. At the time, my mother was employed by a Danish organization providing development aid in Zimbabwe. Her well-meaning European expat colleagues offered to buy her a ticket to Botswana and to pay for the procedure there, away from the uncertainty in Zimbabwe’s health system. But the mere thought of packing her bags, boarding a flight, traveling to an unknown country, finding a new doctor, conveying her medical history, and most likely doing all of this alone enervated my mother. Instead she went back to the private hospital in Harare four days later with a friend who stayed with her through the induction. When the baby was delivered, my mother shut her eyes, refusing to look at her lifeless daughter, at the dead sister I would never meet. Her friend held the body tenderly for a few moments before handing the swaddled child over to the midwife.
My mother came home from the hospital, anguished and alone. I sat with her, took her hand, and said, “I’m still here.” I was four years old and don’t remember this, of course, but it’s what she tells me. The two of us were bound in a melancholy whose depth I could not comprehend, aware only that my mother needed to be soothed. My father cried too. But not with us. He cried with his own mother. Despite their shared affliction, my parents could not find comfort in each other.
Grief, as rendered by the poet Denise Riley, is time lived, without its flow. To escape the smothering feeling of suspended vitality, my mother decided to return to Uganda. She was hired for a two-week consultancy there and took me with her. It would also be a chance for us to be with her family. My father stayed behind. We were not in the habit of traveling together as a family.
From as far back as I can remember, I wanted nothing more than to please my mother. Her sadness was crushing to me; I would do anything to make her happy. Throughout my childhood, then my adolescence, and well into my adult years, I would see myself as her ambassador and steady companion, someone she could always count on and who would make her proud.
My mother and I ended up staying in Uganda for several months after the stillbirth. When we returned to Zimbabwe, my mother used the money from the consultancy to buy my father his first car: a sky-blue Toyota Corolla.
After the months in Uganda, I had changed in one fundamental way: I had forgotten every word of Shona I knew. Before my mother and I left, I used to speak to her in English and to my father in Shona—the most widely spoken vernacular language in the country, the language my father grew up speaking, my native tongue. Now, my attempts to speak Shona left me feeling like a shortsighted driver trying to find my way at night through a maze of side streets and narrow passageways in a foreign city, in an unfamiliar car. From then on, we only spoke their shared language in the house: English.
there is nothing unusual about an unhappy couple trying to rescue their relationship by focusing on their child. In my family, this added another subterranean layer of meaning to my education: investing in my education was not only about my future, it was also about saving my parents’ union. I suspect that this is why my parents had enrolled me in an exclusive, racially mixed nursery school called Head Start even before the hunt for a primary school began.
One day, my father picked me up at around lunchtime. I must still have been four years old at the time. I was sullen during the car journey. He tried to coax me into opening up but I refused to speak. As he parked the Toyota and turned off the engine, I started to cry. I pointed at my skin: “Is this black?” I asked.
“I can’t quite remember how I answered you,” my father says now, “but I knew what had happened.” He picked up his keys and drove back to the nursery to confront my teacher, a white woman in her midtwenties called Debbie. She wasn’t surprised to see my father charging into her classroom that afternoon; she was expecting him. She looked at him with a mournful expression, not unlike a concerned physician delivering a cancer diagnosis.
“Mr. Chigudu,” she said, “we recently admitted eight new children to the school. They grew up on farms, you see.”
Copyright © 2026 by Simukai Chigudu. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
