A prayer to Mwari and the ancestors at a time of drought - Anonymous Zezuru tribesmen

Tovela, our great father,¹ We have a petition for rain.
The country has become a dry potsherd.
People are suffering through lack of rain.
The flocks have scattered because of thirst.
Heaven has refused to let its tears drop down.
Our children say, ‘Father has thrown sand into our eyes.
He has exposed us to the sun like grain laid out to dry.
Our stomach is a cave of gnawing leguans, such is our hunger.’²
We have been Ignored. What are we to do?
To whom are we to cry?
Is there another parent better than you?
You are our Mwari of Guruuswa,³
The one who blazed the path for us.
Tovela, Nurse of mankind,
Wherever you go we are with you, like beads upon a girdle,
You who cause the rain to be given,
You who made food come out of the ground.
Pool of water present from the beginning,
Found before any search,
Being that began before any other,
All-powerful but all-kind, like a grandmother to all.
Stinting no-one, a grandmother to the whole land.
Our Mwari; it is you who brought us into this land.
You it was who followed the spoor,
Your ear able to shelter a whole company and to spare.
Mwari, who has no favourite,
Mwari, grandmother to young children and old men,
What crime have we committed which cannot be told to us?
We have told you the sufferings which have brought us here.
We do not mean to die like sheep.
The elder told us, ‘A child who does not cry will die in his cradle skin.’⁴

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Anonymous Zezuru tribesmen (date unknown) Zimbabwe
Translated by George Fortune
Source: Mambo Book of Zimbabwean Verse in English, edited by Colin & O-lan Style, Mambo Press, 1986 [Found on African Poems]

1. Tovela: Remote ancestor and spirit medium.
2. Leguan, iguana.
3. Guruuswa, meaning ‘land of high grass’, traditional ancestral home of the Shona from which they migrated to Zimbabwe.
4. A proverbial saying used to justify the present prayer.