Fungai is a storyteller, ethnographer and archivist who weaves digitality into her ways of seeing the world.
Erections don’t mean affection.
This is obvious, I know. But in the 2010s of my 20s, it feels unprecedented to announce, especially as my first ever blog post.
It’s an era where the internet still feels like a small community of likeminds; thankfully, trolls are something I am yet to discover and no outspoken patriarchs flock to my blog to pass insidious comments to shame me.
My blog’s name is Fungai Neni and it is almost eponymous.
‘Fungai’, my first name, is also a command in Zimbabwe’s Shona language to think or reflect. ‘Neni’ translates to mean ‘with me’. ‘Fungai Neni’ constitutes a double entendre; ‘Think with me’ is one of its meanings, but so too is ‘Fungai and me’. Both are apt because I simultaneously seek intellectual engagement and connection in my digital foray.
Briefly - before Fungai Neni - there exists Banjo Queen, a blog I set up many years before but never publish content on to.
No, I do not play the banjo. But the moniker somehow seems to fit my look. I wear my hair in a voluminous Afro accompanied by colourful tiered skirts and stacks of bangles whose sonorous chatter precedes my arrival into any room. It seems feasible that I could whip out a banjo and strum it over some of the poetry that finds a home in my journalism notebooks.
Recently, I’ve found an old diary from my undergraduate journalism studies where I write that I feel like I am Walter Mitty. Walter is a fictional character I have encountered somewhere in my earlier life who escapes the monotony of his daily life through elaborate daydreams. His dissociation becomes relatable as I sit and drift away during my lectures. I don’t care much for the 5 Ws and H, the holy grail of journalism, and am even less inspired by ethics and law. In other diary entries, I write about the entrapment I feel at having to package words in the clinical way that journalism demands. It’s like looking at resin art; all the wildness and beauty seems trapped beneath a dense glassy finish.
My poetry and Banjo Queen aesthetic become my silent rebellion.
I am not enjoying this degree for many other reasons. One of them is that this public university education represents a massive shift from the private high school that I have attended for six years prior. In high school, we have it taught to us that we will soon become intrepid citizens of the world. We learn French and study the classical works of Mozart and Bach. We watch rousing films like ‘Dead Poets’ Society’ and our class of 28 is a mix of black, white and Indian girls. We aren’t taught much local history (or culture) because it is deemed divisive among the racial groups; also, it’s apparently not really useful for a life as a global citizen.
Even though we are living within the landlocked boundaries of Zimbabwe, it often feels like we inhabit an island. Nothing about what we are taking in reflects the material reality of a nation that is just about to enter its deepest economic freefall.
University moors me to the mainland, however, grounding me in what most of my classmates manage to escape by leaving for studies in the diaspora. The time is the early 2000s and a land reform programme has been hastily brought together by the government to repossess vast tracts of land that have been in the possession of white farmers for a century. Food shortages and hyperinflation ensue and these have a deep impact on all sectors of society. I take my studies in a newly opened but under-resourced department where we journalism majors have to imagine things like the shutter speed on a camera because we don’t have actual equipment to work with.
In high school, we have a dedicated computer room which we visit every Friday for our computer class. We are still mostly living in an analogue reality and don’t quite see the utility of this medium. So we use the time to play Solitaire and Tetris, or send emails to pen friends navigating this new medium somewhere in the western world. On the best of my university internet’s days, the churlish connection lets you get through a few links on the site you are navigating. If you are really lucky, you might get to send an email too. Otherwise, it’s us mostly writing notes and instructions in hopes of applying these skills sometime later.
It’s not just infrastructural disparities that are making things uncomfortable. My shift into early adulthood also comes with the discovery of my being Shona and this adds a new and awkward texture to my identity. In high school, we cleave into groups by skin colour. But in university, since we are all black, a new form of difference has to be fomented. And this time, it is by tribe.
The Shonas are the dominant tribal grouping in Zimbabwe. And there is a history of tensions between them and the Ndebeles, the dominant tribal grouping in Bulawayo, the city I am in and which I have grown up in. In the 1980s, a long political massacre of the Ndebeles is waged by a Shona government. Its impact, decades later, is for many Ndebeles to view Shonas as affiliates of massacrists. It might seem strange, but I have never previously experienced this polarity. My suburban upbringing has shielded me from many aspects of these tensions.
To survive these new unwelcoming perceptions, I learn to shapeshift across identities. Sometimes, I throw Ndebele phrases around to gain my Ndebele classmates’ approval and other times, I attempt to debunk the stereotypes that my Shona classmates - who mostly come from outside Bulawayo - hold about the city and Ndebeles. Shona and Ndebele alike, most of my classmates struggle to place me because they imagine I should be continuing my cosmopolitan trajectory by taking my studies somewhere outside Zimbabwe. Code switching is something which my high school experience has already granted me fluency in. But continuing it into this stage of life makes finding myself even more challenging.
It is a mystery to me how we get the internet to cooperate the day we have our blogging half-day session. It is a Friday morning and our visiting Fulbright professor has brokered a deal with one of our lecturers to use his double lecture for this training. Our tutor is a young American on a sojourn to Africa who has floppy blond locks, and is clad in shorts and slippers. After introductions, he sits at the head of the cramped room and proceeds to take turns between scrutinising his laptop screen and wrenching his neck to look at the projection of words and images on the wall behind him.
For many, the session signals an early start to the weekend. But I am having a different experience altogether. As I take down notes and watch the projections he brings up, I feel a long-dormant sense of aliveness awaken within me.
“Does anyone know where the word blog comes from?”
None of us responds.
Our instructor goes on to write the word ‘weblog’ onto the white board. After he is done, he draws a vertical line between the ‘e’ and ‘b’ to create two separate words.
“It’s a made-up word from people claiming the power of weblogs as a communal act.”
We blog versus weblog.
I am transfixed.
I create Banjo Queen some time later when I visit an internet cafe. Soon, though, I forget my log in details and return to my well worn practice of writing protest poetry into my notes.
When my degree programme eventually comes to an end, it feels like salvation.
Almost immediately after completion, I get a job and begin work in media and communications which – thankfully – steers me away from journalism practice.
But I never quite forget my kinship to blogging.
The work I do focuses on sexual and reproductive health and as an organisation, we try to find engaging ways to talk about HIV and AIDS. By this time, the AIDS pandemic has made its way through many Zimbabwean families and with this has come the realisation that pretending that people aren’t having sex is only exacerbating the problem. So we host workshops with journalists and create content like fact sheets and newsletters where we engage creatively to try to break taboos around condom use and HIV testing. I also begin to package my reflections on what are called e-discussion forums. You could think of them as discussion boards, with focused topics and content, sent to a group of email-based subscribers. These forums provide ground for me to question and challenge accepted ideas and ideologies, and build a following of supporters who enjoy my non-conformist take on things.
Finally, it feels like I am beginning to find my own voice.
Fungai Neni only comes to life after my contract isn’t renewed. And this is because of a fellowship I decide to take in Germany. The nation is just beginning to come out of its crippling economic downturn and the trauma of the last decade is still raw. So taking leave of absence from a decent job in 2009 is not an option.
The previous year, 2008, is the peak of the turmoil and when I begin this job. A memory I have from that time is of walking into an alleyway one evening to buy bread on the black market. Think of it as a speakeasy but for basic commodities. Cooking oil, sugar, soap; you name it, you will find it all there at a markup. The items are sold by some guy who has a connection to someone who works in a supermarket and figures out how to enter into partnership to siphon stocks whenever they get delivered.
By 2009, things are significantly different as a result of a coalition government being formed between the opposition and ruling parties. You can now buy bread and sugar in the shops again. Even things like lotion, which you’d have to stockpile from neighbouring nations like South Africa or Botswana, become readily available, so long as you have the US dollars to buy them; something which my salary allows.
Choosing to go on this fellowship obviously seems like professional suicide. And after three months away, I return to the inevitable news that my contract will not be renewed.
Experiencing Germany is worth it, though.
I begin to see why my worldly high school education has made integrating into local Zimbabwean society so challenging. By my teens, I know about Hitler and Nazism and nothing about the tribal unrest that has riven my own nation. I am better equipped with knowledge to navigate an international world, and not the one that I materially inhabit. I also use the opportunity to visit France and as I stand at the Arc De Triomphe, memories of my high school French classes and text books - which featured the monument - stir.
While in Germany, I also write for a few Zimbabwean digital news publications. It is something that I have been doing for some time before the fellowship and one of these publications is a national newspaper that publishes most of my musings. That is, all except when I send copy about attending gay pride.
During my job, I become aware that the growing liberality that comes with talking about sex and sexuality is not matched when it comes to discussing homosexuality. There is often resistance, and sometimes even revulsion, when it is broached. This is because homosexuality represents abnormality for many. So it is a stretch, I know, to expect a national newspaper to accept my musings.
It is this experience that helps to bring me to clarity that if I want to discuss some topics, I am going to have to create my own space to do so. And this is how, newly jobless, Fungai Neni materialises.
After my post about erections, I write a blog entry asking other young women whether they know what their vaginas look like. And I accompany the piece with an image that is a collage of vaginas in different hues and shapes. One commenter to the post responds that if a series of vaginas were put together in a police line-up, she would easily identify her own. She is the outlier as most others admit to feelings of shame and disconnection to their sexual bodies given the high proscription of women’s pleasure within Zimbabwean society.
Being digital feels like a mystical experience. In one moment, I am processing the material realities of my conservative patriarchal society which keeps reinforcing to me that my appearance and existence are ‘too much’. And yet in the next, I enter a non-physical reality where I create meaningful belonging. Two of my blog’s most ardent followers are women I don’t know who are living in Spain and Cameroon. Others are friends and connections scattered around the world.
It’s like I leave the wardrobe to enter Narnia every time I write up and publish a post. And there is a freedom and exhilaration there that has been missing from my material life for too long.
I blog my way through my unemployment and into my new job and then my Masters degree for which I get a scholarship to study in the UK.
It’s not just the spectacle of erections and vaginas that I discuss in my blogs. I write too about deeply personal experiences like when my father dies while I am in the UK and how my network of friends helps me cope. I also share many insecurities, contradictions and hopes.
There is a deep irony to the fact that I become this prolific of a blogger. In my early life, I am never someone who comes to mind when you mention boldness. In one of my childhood memories, I am sitting on the veranda of our house looking up as my sister employs an intricate strategy to climb up onto the roof. She has positioned a mattress on the ground and proceeds to jump through the sky to her soft landing below.
I am four years old but my brain’s wiring already reads this activity as risky. I do not participate in it in much the same way I resist my first best friend’s playground strategy to run slowly so that we get caught and kissed when the boys chase us.
Yuck, I think.
I have reminded another friend about how she would jump over the railing of their third-floor apartment and dangle her body towards the concrete pavement when we were five years old. She called it a game but I read it as nonchalant precarity that could lead to death. She remembers nothing of this, which baffles me because of the terror I would experience.
By high school and despite my imposing height of almost six feet, I still very much remain the cautious observer who hangs back and doesn’t enjoy overt attention or risk. I like to think I am invisible, except when I walk past a shop window and notice my reflection towering over everyone around me. Or when I see myself in class photographs and notice that I am half a head taller than the next tallest person.
It is always confronting because it reminds me that I am indeed there.
School is the island of exploration I have already described. But it is also a site of merciless bullying. Tall and fat, I become a perfect target for many girls’ shaming. In the movie, ‘The Nutty Professor’, Eddie Murphy stars as a quirky overweight scientist. And some girls take to calling me this when they see me. I do not respond and they erupt into laughter as I try to shrink myself to disappear. Other girls raise issue with how much I like to read or make me stand up to offer my seat when I try to hide by sitting in the back of the school bus.
I want to say certain things in class but I don’t because I doubt that they are of any value. When I do speak, the anxiety of my internal dialogue takes over and I mumble my way through incoherences that sometimes elicit laughter from my classmates.
Once, in English class, I hear a girl sitting close by use me to explain a word that we have just been asked to make a sentence with.
“Fungai is eccentric.”
‘Eccentric’ is the word we have just been taught and she shares her use of it to her neighbour in a whisper. She then chuckles softly.
Being academically smart creates a mask to many about how much I am struggling. But I am deeply wounded by all these experiences.
A friend’s mother takes to making unsettling comparisons between us that create more wounds. Reading my good grades as a sign of maturity, she creates a template out of me that she tries to draw her daughter around.
The day after we get our GCSE results, my friend tells me that she is in the car park waiting to see me.
“It’s about your results.”
To her mother’s displeasure, my friend has scored four A grades and wants to know how I have done. I have gotten six As. I reluctantly share this information with her mother through the half-open window of her car after an exchange of niceties.
“You should be more like Fungai.”
My friend’s mother turns to her coolly and with this stern glance, something dies within our bond. We both know I will constantly be a reminder of everything that her mother believes she isn’t.
Deeply contrasting, these two realities of how I am perceived each provide their own torture. In one reality, I am a source of ridicule and in another, I am the epitome of excellence. I am too young to hold this contradiction with any real grace. And underneath my semblance of composure, my identity fragments.
I am high achieving. But also extremely insecure. If I could, I would braid myself into an unworkable knot and disappear.
To cope, I turn to writing. And over time, I build up a collection of diaries of all my unspoken thoughts and feelings. It’s where, years later, I write about my difficult university experiences and other issues of my early adulthood that are a continuation of things I have not yet managed to resolve.
Blogging, in many ways, feels like keeping a diary. But only now, with a desire to speak publicly for the many times that I didn’t trust myself earlier in my life. You might even say that blogging is my attempt to make up for the lack of risk-taking of my earlier years; a bounty of daring thoughts and words that chase my screen’s blinking cursor.
In my blogging days, there was always a moment just before I pressed the publish button where I’d hesitate. I’d feel like I was sitting in my high school classroom again as a surge of doubt ran through my body. A thought would come over me that what I had just written didn’t make any sense and didn’t need saying. That it was obvious. Or worse, that it could be a source of derision.
I’d feel it again just after hitting the ‘Publish’ button when my refreshed page confirmed that I had surrendered another part of myself.
I’d want to become that unworkable knot again and let the earth to devour me.
I feel it too as I write this, dangling myself over the edge of precarity just like my childhood friend used to.
To any observer watching her, it looked like she was courting death. But now - with time and the joys and pain of living - I see that she was only chasing freedom.
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Two of Fungai's stories have been published by amaBooks:
'Rain in July' in Long Time Coming, Short Writings from Zimbabwe
and
'Alone' in Where to Now?, Short Stories from Zimbabwe
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