It was one of those spectacular postcard images: the Zimbabwean sun was slowly turning into a huge red ball on the horizon. Everything around us glowed as we jumped over puddles of water, following the narrow path through tall green grass. On either side of the path, the fields were full of a promising harvest. After three years of drought, the rains had come as a most valued blessing. No-one would starve this year or be forced to line up for drought relief handouts from benevolent Western governments. It had been a good year.

As she walked, my mother commented cheerfully to my sister and me on the height of her neighbours' maize and sorghum and sunflowers. It was beautiful country. Memories of my childhood flooded my thoughts, just as the sunset bathed the granite boulders on the nearby hillside.

I was born under the ministrations of two village mid-wives in a hut which once stood amongst those rocks. That was long before my parents moved away from the main village and established their own corrugated-iron-roofed house up the hill, away from everyone else. But my mother never stopped going to the main village, whether for a social visit or an important meeting. And we children used to come back from boarding school and go swimming in the river with the village children. Living in Australia, I had treasured sweet memories of the village and longed to return to it û just to see the old folks again. Now I was going back. The beauty of the place had not changed. But an intense sadness hung above the peaceful valley: we were on our way to my cousin Patrick's funeral.

Suddenly Amai stopped pointing at the green fields. She quickened her pace and started to moan softly. As we approached the main village, she gradually raised her voice, then broke into a loud wailing and ran towards the funeral gathering. "Tovigwa naniko? Tovigwa naniko?" she cried. "Who will bury us? Who will bury us?" My aunt, Patrick's mother, came forward to embrace Amai. She had no voice left to mourn her son.

All night I sat with the women around the fire in the big kitchen hut. Every now and again Patrick's mother's husky voice would rise, mourning the death of her son. Someone would start to sing a religious song, and everyone would join in until the hymn became drowned by tears.

Outside, the men sat around a dying fire, weeping silently. Just before sunrise, my mother told the women that she had to accompany my sister and me to the bus stop. Two days later I was sitting on a Qantas 747 on my way to Australia, but my thoughts were back at the village. I could see all those people I had known since my childhood. They kept echoing my mother's mourning wail: "Who will bury us?" Amai had spoken not just for Patrick's mother or for herself, but for parents the whole world over.

*

Patrick was twenty-four years old when he died. Although I had last seen him twelve years before, I had vivid memories of him as a handsome, bright boy. He had grown up to be the pride of his parents, and at twenty-two was a school-teacher with a promising future. The whole family looked to Patrick for financial assistance; on his own salary alone, my uncle could not afford to pay for the education of his eight other children.

When Patrick had come home the previous Christmas, his parents had expected him to return to the small town of Masvingo where he had been teaching for the past two years. But Patrick did not go back after term started. He told his parents that he was sick. He started drinking heavily and smoking village-grown marijuana. His parents could not understand what had befallen their son. Then he started coughing and losing weight, and gradually he refused to be seen by people. My mother had visited him in January and she said he looked like an emaciated old man. She suspected that Patrick had caught the new city disease called hedzi.

Everyone was talking about this new killer disease, but not many people in the village knew much about it except that it was transferred sexually by prostitutes and urban men who were isolated from their rural wives. They saw this hedzi as a severe kind of gonorrhoea without any known cure. Any illness associated with sex or sexual organs was called sicky and was treated by traditional healers without being openly discussed, as it is taboo to talk about sex.

Patrick's parents could not believe that their mission-educated boy could have been sleeping with prostitutes. They felt that if this hedzi existed, it should affect other people û surely not their handsome boy. They started to believe that their son had had an evil spell cast on him by someone in the village or someone jealous of his success. For weeks they hid Patrick inside the house, and then one night they took him on a bus to Murambinda, 100 kilometres away, where there was a rural hospital. Two days later the nurses told them that Patrick had advanced AIDS-related tuberculosis and did not have long to live.

My uncle and aunt hired a car and had Patrick dropped off a few kilometres away from the village. At night they wheeled him home down a rocky hill in a wheelbarrow so that no-one they knew would see him in his terminal state. "He's got malaria," they told close relatives.

Patrick knew exactly what was wrong with him. But he could not talk to his parents about it because he felt guilty for having failed them. He called his mother in to him in his final hours and asked for forgiveness. "If only I had a wife and a child to be remembered by," he said to her. Yet to have had a wife and a child in his position would only have meant they were at risk from AIDS.

"How can I die so young?" Patrick asked his mother, then put his head on her lap like a little child, and died. It was early morning and there were just the two of them together. My aunt told my mother that she did not cry. She said that she was angry û angry with the evil forces that could take a young man in his prime.