The Sunday Mail
I know I torched an unforgivable storm last week by introducing this column with my defence of the small dogs.
I could hear the hushed discussions about how ‘‘daring this Mainini Beatrice is’’ in this particular kombi that I boarded on my way home to Highfield the other day and how some of you wished I had included my contact details.
For failing to provide my contact details, I sincerely apologise. This time, I have included them, and am ready to be engaged.
But I stand by my defence of the small dogs.
Enough of the defence of these small guns . . . now to this week’s subject. It is in order for me to try and deal with another shocking revelation from the Macheso household.
They have indeed provided us with fodder.
Now, now, now! This shocking method of how the musician treats (or is it treated) the fontanelle of babies in his household revealed by Tafadzwa has again left tongues wagging.
Let me give a blow-by-blow account (according to St Tafadzwa) of how the sungura maestro would insert his ‘‘kadora’’ into the mouth of the targeted baby, the boy he sired with Tafadzwa, that one he named after himself.
Tafadzwa says Macheso would insert his ‘‘kadora’’. Well, he could afford to shove his ‘‘small gun’’ into the baby’s mouth, given its supposed size into Alick Junior’s mouth. He would then let the small man suck it until he ejaculated and deposited semen into its mouth.
What grown man with a normal gun would get it to fit into a baby’s mouth for what amounts to oral sex?
The mother says she watched in horror as the grown Macheso came . . . directly into the small man’s mouth.
She further says she had no one to turn to. Sister Nyadzisai, says Tafadzwa, was in agreement with the ‘‘shocking treatment’’. So she could not go and complain to her.
She further says after the birth of the second child, she refused the treatment to be administered on the little girl and was thoroughly beaten for that.
She then says, to date, the small man remains a sickly child — always in and out of hospital. The doctor, revealed St Tafadzwa, has indicated that the boy has this undisclosed infection, which does not want to go away.
Whether the revelations are driven by malice or what, the jury is still out.
I have tried to engage elderly people from different tribes in the country and the region about the weird treatment.
None so far has confirmed this.
None of them, maybe because it was a small circle that I consulted, seems to recall this type of fontanelle treatment. But I have come across some internet sources that also point to something similarly repugnant on baby treatment involving papa’s gun (big or small) and his fluids.
The baby treatment is linked to the Bemba and Tumbuka peoples, across the northern border, in Malawi and Tanzania.
This web link says the treatment is meant to strengthen the baby’s health — how and why the baby’s health should be strengthened still remains a mystery to me.
The story goes, after a woman gives birth, her husband and she sleep in separate beds until the bleeding has stopped.
When the couple resumes sexual relations, the man releases semen on the baby or on the mother’s hands, who then smears it all over the baby’s body.
The baby should roughly be three to four months old when this ritual is performed.
This is supposed to strengthen the health of the child and has been confirmed among some tribes in both Zambia and Malawi.
This ‘‘child strengthening’’ has to be performed by the ‘‘real’’ father. Total honesty is demanded for this ritual or else the child dies. Mothers beware!
The couple has sex and just before the man releases his sperm he should withdraw and splash the liquid on the baby. The mother then smears the liquid all over the baby’s body . . . presumably strengthening it along the way.
If the man fails to ejaculate, the child could get sick.
Shocking, isn’t it!
Other than the copyrighted Macheso nhova treatment, I also hear of several of these other weird baby treatment methods involving the parents’ private parts.
In this other treatment for fontanelle, folks say, the mother wipes her private parts with a white cloth (never mind if it’s even clean) and then rubs the stuff on the baby’s palate. This is done soon after birth, well before signs of the baby’s imagined fontanelle illness shows. Advance treatment, one can safely say!
This particular treatment, that shocked me to the bone, is not even for fontanelle. They say it is to prevent the child, when it eventually becomes an adult, not to like too much sex. Huh?
The mother is instructed to squeeze milk from her breast directly on the baby’s private parts and then rub it with her elbow. Or, if the father is around, he then uses his gun to rub in the milk on the baby girl’s privates while the mother uses her hand on the boy.
But the million-dollar question is — should we continue with such practices that border on sexual abuse in this day and age?
For goodness sake, let us just leave our babies to grow in a normal way.
Even if you have a kadora, do not shove it into innocent babies’ mouths pretending to treat their not ailing fontanelles.
If you have similarly weird ways of treating babies who are not even sick, let’s share.
Till next week, let’s engage on [email protected]
