I first met Mai Melissa, or Rosina, in 1995, when I was travelling through Zimbabwe during a break from my undergraduate studies. Approximately 16 years old, she was a dancer with a traditional mbira dance group performing at Great Zimbabwe, in Masvingo District, central southern Zimbabwe. She then lived in the Nemanwa communal areas nearby, at the rural homestead of her elder, half-brother, Peter Rukasha, whose wife, Francesca, was one of the mbira group's leaders. This was my first encounter with the Rukasha family, whom I grew to know very well as they hosted me over long periods of ethnographic fieldwork in the area (1997, 2000–01, 2005–06) and numerous other brief visits in between and since, most recently in March 2020. The story of Mai Melissa's possession by her own father, Sekuru Shorty, in 2006, until her death in late 2007 is very much a story about this family's complex kinship history, the migration of Peter and Mai Melissa's father from Mozambique many years before, and the many trials and struggles that this family have endured since settling in the Nemanwa area shortly after independence in 1980, as ‘vatorwa’ or strangers, living under Headman Nemanwa, in what was then part of the Chief Charumbira's territory.

By the time of my next visit to the area in 1997, then doing research for my honours degree, Mai Melissa had become a mother (to Melissa) and was married to Daniel Mutevedzi, the mbira group's lead dancer and a member of a prominent Charumbira family, where she now resided about one hour's walk from the Rukasha homestead. I visited her and her husband several times during this period, for personal visits or to attend family events, and became gradually aware of her change in status, from being a child living under the authority of her half-brother (then in many respects a proxy for their dead father, Sekuru Shorty), to being a vatete (paternal aunt) to the Rukasha household, and muroora (wife) to the Mutevedzi family. These changes in status were marked by new formalities of respect, and different obligations between the people involved, but also sometimes tension as well as care between her and members of the Rukasha household, especially Francesca, Peter's wife, who herself, like all wives, is a muroora (to the Rukasha family).