Tikki, Johannes, Jameson ...

I was visiting my oldest daughter in Virginia.   We had been out shopping and were on our way home.  It’s August,  hot as Hades, and there, stopped  on the median, was  an Ice-cream Boy!

 I yelled out, “Hooray, look, it’s an Ice-cream Boy!”

“Except he’s more like an Ice-cream Man, mommy,” observed Kimi.

Ice-cream Boy.  Why on earth we named the men who roamed our neighborhoods on sweltering African summer days,  selling scrumptious ice-lollies, Honey Beats,  ……, was beyond me.  Until I thought about it.

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 When Karen was visiting family in South Africa she was greatly disturbed by my aunt referring to the woman who worked for her as ‘girl’.  This lovely young woman, an immigrant from Malawi, was called a house servant by my aunt.  She worked for about the equivalent of US$80 a month.  That’s for two families.  Yup, this grown woman worked for two households for $80. 

I grew up with house servants.  I loathe telling people that … now.   Talking about this with my daughters,  I experienced that same dread that seems to grip my gut nowadays.  I asked my girls.

                “Do you think I ever talked down or rudely to the people who worked for us?”

                “No,” Kimi was firm, “You aren’t a rude person.”

I had to agree on that count.  My folks would have been less than pleased with us if we had shown any disrespect to either Jameson, Linus, Rinus,  Johannes or especially Tikki who worked for us for over twelve years.  I think even if we had had something less than nice about Simeon and his cobra-raising, light-fingered wife, we would probably have gotten into trouble.  I don’t ever remember my mom or my dad calling anyone who worked for us by anything other than their name.

My parents were not the norm amongst families in Rhodesia.  We did have someone who worked for us all my growing up years.  It was usually a male and my mom never, ever had a nanny for us.  A nanny, in my culture, is the equivalent of the women who are spectacularly revealed and represented in the popular book by Kathryn Stockett, “The Help”.  (I recommend this read.)  There were more people than I care to recall who had nannies. The men who worked for us are

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well remembered and with great fondness.  Rinus ran off a burglar who was trying to fish things out of my bedroom window.  Linus was an amazing gardner.  Johannes had nicknames for us.  I don't recall mine, but my little brother's sticks out in my mind for some reason.  Johannes called him Tunku Abdul Rahman, Tunku for short.  Why?  I haven't a clue.

Generally,we were referred to as picaninny missus or or picaninny baas. Weird when you consider we were being referred to as missus or boss by adults to whom we should be referring to as Mr. or Mrs. and then their last name.  Our one worker, a great favorite in our household, was Jameson Chinaka.  We should have called him Mr. Chinaka, but we didn't, he was just Jameson to us.  Jameson came to my mom and dad after the war, asking for their help.  I had left home by then, but my mom said she and Jameson would work  together in the kitchen and discuss the bible.  Jameson was a member of a group that wore white robes and carried shepherd crooks.  He was such a good man, I remember him well from when he first came to work for us, it was his first job in a home, and I was a little kid and he was probably in his late teens.  It makes me happy to think that he found my mom and dad, hundreds of miles away from where we first lived.  I just hope the help my parents gave his family ended up being a long term benefit.

And Tikki.  Tikki worked for our family for the longest.  He was a small, slightly built, very dark man from Mozambique.  He was very meticulous in his person and could make the most amazing roast potatoes, if we let him.  Another peculiar thing our family did, was our own cooking, our own bed making (though more often than not Tikki would remake ours because we didn't do it well enough), and our own clothes washing.  When Tikki first came to work for us he told my mom that he would make dinner, and for some reason she let him.  It must have been when my mom had to work for the first time in her married life.  That is another story for another time, however.  So Tikki made us roast potatoes that were so delicious; crispy on the outside, fluffy in the middle.

Whomever Tikki worked for before he came to our home, must have been somewhat of a tyrant.  The first night he was with us, it was about 8 o'clock in the evening and we could still hear him working in the kitchen.  My mom went in to find him on his hands and knees cleaning the kitchen floor.  Tikki told her that his previous employer had made him do it every night.  My mom ended that quickly.  Tikki did the ironing, but my dad did the clothes washing.  Tikki would set himself up under the frangipani tree in the back yard, sometimes with his radio on, and iron the afternoon away.  Friends of his would sometimes drop by or he'd sit on the back steps having tea, a cigarette and a chat with the garden boy.  Yes, we called these hard working young men boys.  Gosh that makes me cringe when I think about it.

                                                 Frangipani tree ~ they smell heavenly!

Tikki had a wife, though she didn't live with him.  His hours were pretty good, I think.  He would generally come to work in the morning around 7 o'clock, work until noon, come back at two and work until five.  Wednesday afternoons were off and Saturdays he was off at one and didn't come back until Monday morning.  Tikki owned more suits than my dad, which we found very amusing. He could be seen strutting down the driveway, suit on, umbrella in hand, off to do whatever he did once he left our house.  He was quite the character!  He would get after my brother and me and tell us,
      "Miss Muff, don't make for mess!"
Or he'd click his tongue when he would find my brothers' messes of orange peels and empty milk glasses.  It wasn't unusual for my mom to get after us for making Tikki's life harder!

Tikki got sick after I left home and ended up dying in his kia at our house.  He had become sick over time and my parents sent him to the hospital.   He was in the hospital for a while, was sent home and was improving, but his wife, who suddenly appeared one day, sent for the Nganga (witch doctor).  The Nganga left some muti (medicine) in a Coke bottle for Tikki.  A couple of days later he died.  My mom and dad paid for his burial so that he wouldn't be sent to potter's field.

I wonder if the tables were turned if  I would have been as loyal as the workers we had were?  If I still lived in Zimbabwe, would I have servants?  I like to think I wouldn't, but at the same time, knowing the awful condition the country is in, I would, if I had the means, hire whomever I could in order for those people to have better lives.  And what constitutes a better life?  My view of what that is, or the view of people who value the simple things in life and not the frills and frivolities?

I think that will be something I dwell on for a while.

Why on earth would you DO that?

"Why on earth would you DO that?!"

That's what my children say to me when I do something they don't approve of. If my parents were to read this blog, that's exactly what they would say too. I'm taking a big step into the unknown by writing my thoughts, feelings and observations as a white woman who was born and raised in Zimbabwe.

I'm doing this more for myself than for anyone else. I have so many thoughts swirling around my mind as of late that I feel blogging about them is my only vehicle. Why now? Well, I can blame my youngest daughter for that.

Karen is my youngest. She's always been a tender-hearted, thoughtful person. We are quite close and, I think, good friends. Even as a young child, Karen naturally gravitated toward history and those who were treated less humanely than others. In second grade her teacher noticed she was reading a book with very graphic pictures, on the holocaust in Hitler's Germany. The teacher was a little perturbed but Karen assured her that my husband and myself were okay with what she was reading.

We were okay with our seven year-old reading about the holocaust. When our children asked us a serious question, we would give them a serious answer. Karen asked a lot of serious questions that she really wanted to know the answers to. Right from that early age she understood the repercussions of repeated mistakes by humankind. She loved history and wanted to help the world to stop making the same mistakes.

Fast forward to the present day. My baby girl is almost twenty three. She's visited Mozambique twice, South Africa and Chennai, India once each. She's graduated from college with a degrees in History and Political Science and is working on her Master's Degree in Social Justice and Human Rights. It's this last degree that has become a symbol of a change in my life, one that really began to stir up all kinds of emotion and sometimes great turmoil for me.