Book Cover
By
Christopher Broek
A fragrant breeze of fortune was blowing from the golden Savannah and over all the land. They were women toiling in the fields both with sweat and tears and praying for a bountiful harvest. They were those shaking bones and twigs and casting them onto the heaven of earth and searching to read in their constellation of chance the things which the future might hold. They were old women with deeply lined faces flesh tar paving roads to the past with visible scars as the sign posts to everywhere that they had being. Sunken eyes that had seen too many things through the decades. Rough hands that both praised God and stole. Chapped lips that told lies, professed love and prayed for better days. These were the illegitimate ways of the times. An anorexic dream had taken over a nation which was bringing a great and mighty beast of colonization to it's knees. It was the ending of an era and the scramble of Africa and Rhodesia was on the brink of her Independence into Zimbabwe.
These were frugal times when a man must choose to pick up gun or spade. One purchased him a field of harvest and the other purchased him his freedom. The task at hand was a covert war with phantom soldiers...the guerrilla forces were growing exponentially and beginning to cause a real and present threat to the soldiers of Ian Smith. All hell was about to break loose but this was the calm before the storm.
Amia Peanut had named her son after her favorite spread. It was not unusual for children to be given random English names like Pretty-Girl, Remember or Remove. One poor soul was even blissfully and ignorantly named Damages. The villagers enjoyed the sweet sound of this new and peculiar Language of , as they called them behind their backs, the men without knees. The arrival of these men had not being a surprised to the villagers at all. To the Contrary it was the very specific prophesy of the Great Spirit Medium Nehanda. One for which she had paid dearly with her life. The reward of her martyrdom was that it was the last missing ingredient that those sons of revolution needed to stir their spirits to full blown action. The sweet cries of victory were silently brewing in the hills. The intoxicating vows of freedom were the drunken courtship and dance between the villagers and their freedom fighters. The "Bhakoma" would wander down from their hiding to participate in the the "Mupungwas" with the villagers. Here over dance, food and beer those who plowed the earth exchanged the fruits of their labor for the promise of a brighter future.
Indeed these elephantine promises would all be kept. It would be other less monumental ones which would be broken. Here in simple and hopeful times would begin a journey which would end oceans and continents away in another country. Dreams would be realized, hearts would be broken but above all God would be discovered. He would be seen in the face of strangers and heard in the voices of the poor. He would as in old days part the seas of opportunity where they seemed to be no way. And he would walk amongst us as an unexpected true friend.
This story is not to sell you on FAITH this is something you must encounter on your own. This story is not to prove to you that there is a God. God is a state of being when one reconciles all the irreconcilable aspects of their life under one forgiving umbrella that some call grace. God is a sense of responsibility for problems outside of our own narrow scope that incites actions that leads to once conceived impossible change. God is the experience of traveling halfway across the world without money and a bag full of dreams and navigating through all of lives challenges to realize a tender dream. I no more expect you to believe in God than a blind man to believe in color. God does not live in a church but some men who know him go to churches. Only you can allow life to open your own heart and eyes to the vivid nature of the extraordinary synchronicity of chance.
I wrote this story for one purpose alone. To remind you that there are no borders that one cannot cross. Geographical, Political, Emotional, Social, Economical, Spiritual, or Metaphysical there is nothing which can hold you back under the sun once you give yourself the permission to be. The challenge of writing this book was how to share all my truths and still feel whole. The things that shame, The things which I regret, the things for which I can be and will be judged for. It was a paralyzing fear which has held me hostage and resulted in the gestation period of completing this book been similar to that of an elephant multiplied by 4. Ridiculous at best yet precisely the reason I have now finished my story.
If I can salvage one dream. If I can give one person closure. If I can inspire one brilliant mind to make a difference in the world then that will be my God. The God with an invisible hand who has helped me with great patience to rearrange the seemingly broken pieces of my life until they came together in a picture so beautiful not even a Van Gogh or Michelangelo could rival it.
May the masterpiece of your existence like the scales of a piano that range from the highest notes of pleasure to the lowest notes of pain finally be rearranged through cognition into the breathtaking symphony that every life is meant to be.
Chiedza Mavangira
Born Without Borders
Coming
Soon
No comments:
Post a Comment