Pulling up to the familiar address at the end of the street, we spotted something of a construction site: a half-finished, multistorey building looming ominously over the top of the fence, where the brick driveway would’ve been. Shortly after we arrived, the old black gate was peeled open a fraction and a man appeared, asking us to explain our presence. My mum told him we used to live there many years ago – a lifetime ago – and asked if we could take a look around. The man regarded us with suspicion but opened the gate further and led us through. There we saw not one half-built concrete edifice but two. The rest was rubble. The only thing left that resembled anything close to our past life was the pool – empty, save for a small puddle of algae-filled water in the deep end.
Before returning to visit my childhood home, I’d had to let go of the fear of losing my memories. Before writing my book, I had to do the same.
From the poolside we attempted to orient ourselves and piece together where our home would’ve been. The man relaxed somewhat, presumably realising we were genuinely nostalgic visitors and not there to cause any trouble. He informed us that several years before, Phillip Chiyangwa had set out to build a medical clinic on the land but, for one reason or another, the construction had stopped. Chiyangwa had been intermittently paying him as an informal security guard to keep squatters out, except he hadn’t been paid for many months now and the water had been turned off. We walked around some more, carefully scaling piles of bricks, skirting past a series of large solar panels on the ground that looked incongruous amongst the debris, and reached a spot where the man showed us a small crop of maize he had planted. Just nearby stood a small room, missing a roof, weeds poking through the cracks in the tiles – our old kitchen.
Before we left, the man introduced us to some of the people who had made one of the buildings their home. There was a fire going and some lunch preparation occurring, young kids running about and a sullen teenager playing what I recognised as Candy Crush on his iPhone. I realised that their presence was likely the reason the man had been wary of letting us in. We thanked him for allowing us onto the property; he’d humoured our sentimentality, even though there was little left to reminisce.
Before returning to visit my childhood home, I’d had to let go of the fear of losing my memories. Before writing my book, I had to do the same. But it was misguided of me to be so concerned; to think my return home as an adult would be akin to watching a magician turn off his smoke machine and reveal a hidden cabinet. I wasn’t time travelling. Things had changed. My house had changed. The country had changed. There was no objective truth of my past to be discovered. I only have what I can remember. The same was true for the writing process. Conducting research and learning more about my country as an adult didn’t bulldoze any memories or perceptions, nor my ability to write authentically from the perspective of a young girl. Quite the opposite: the more I researched and spoke to other people about their experiences, the more I remembered, synapses flaring as one event sparked the recollection of another. I figured it didn’t really matter, in the end, if the colours of the walls of my home were yellow, or oat-coloured, or even apricot. What matters, is that they were warm.
After we left the property that day, my mum shared the story of how she and I had come to live there. In 1996, she was finalising divorce proceedings in South Africa, planning a return to her home country of Zimbabwe, and needed to find a place to live in the city. My mum hadn’t seen the house in person before she bought it, relying solely on some photographs my grandmother had sent her in the mail. She told me that those photos helped her visualise a new start to life with her baby girl – not yet a year old – and it was what helped her through that tumultuous period. She’d hold the pictures of the house in her hands and think about how, once she got there, she’d put a safety net on the pool and paint the walls yellow.
