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Going
home
Everjoice Win, Mail & Guardian (SA)
October 02, 2007
http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=320668&area=/insight/insight__africa/
Going home . . . going
home . . . am a-going home . . . The lovely words of Aaron Neville-s
song ring in my head for a whole fortnight before my three-week
vacation in Zimbabwe. Each day I wake up and pump up the volume.
I am so excited, I can-t wait. I haven-t been home for
more than five months. This is long overdue.
August is vacation time
for me and my son. It also is time to renew insurances, annual medical
check-ups and, of course, sweet potato time. I love that stuff.
I could live on sweet potatoes for the rest of my life. And, believe
me, they don-t grow them that sweet anywhere else.
I have not been home
for so long -- it-s the first time I have stayed away that
long, partly out of fear of what I will find and partly denial.
I cannot face the dreadful realities that have become the story
of my country.
The constant text messages
from home don-t help; the place sounds as if it will fall
apart at any moment. The one thing that sustains me as I work outside
Zimbabwe is the belief that I will always go back home. I still
hold on to the illusion that my son will go to the same university
I went to, because I don-t trust anybody else-s education
system. And yet the bad news from across the Limpopo has been too
much to bear.
"Will you be okay?
Have you bought enough supplies? Can we help with anything?",
empathetic office colleagues ask in the weeks prior to my departure.
I am angry. Why am I being asked these questions? Where do they
think I am going? Darfur? Iraq?
I am reminded of how
I reacted when I met women from Nigeria during Abacha-s time
or women from Palestine. When I met Rana from Palestine, with a
lovely hair-do and manicured nails, I asked her if she really lived
"there". I had to be reminded that life goes on -- births,
deaths, weddings, falling in love, parties -- in the middle of all
the atrocities. Zimbabwe is no different.
Kissing
the ground
As I step off
the plane and into the arrivals galley I could kiss the ground --
pity the formerly blue carpet is now a rather squalid grey.
The immigration officials
chat to me and laugh as I "manage my passport", telling
them where to stamp, so they do not fill the pages. Getting a new
passport is not easy, don-t they know? "Ha sister,"
the officer says, laughing. "Those of you coming from the
diaspora can buy these things. Only US$200 these days."
The customs officer waves
us through. Too bored? Too tired to search us as they normally do
when they see large pieces of luggage? We get out swiftly and in
minutes my brother is driving us into the city.
Harare is not called
the sunshine city for nothing. It is a beautiful spring afternoon.
The sun shines brightly in the blue sky. Not too hot. A gentle breeze
is blowing. I am overwhelmed. I feel intensely happy as the sun
sinks into my bones. I lower my window with no fear of a gun being
levelled at my head at the traffic lights. Even my son sticks his
hand out of the window to catch the breeze. We haven-t done
this in a long time. Not in Johannesburg.
The streets of Harare
are clean. Too "clean", I notice, in that there are
few people about. The street vendors were "cleaned"
out by operation Murambatsvina a year ago. While some brave ones
have ventured back, it is a hazardous business.
I notice there are few
cars on the road. The fuel crisis is biting. But I am too happy
now to worry about it. I just want to enjoy being home.
Schedule
your life
I wake up on
my first morning to another beautiful day. The house is eerily quiet.
No radio. No television. Not even the boys on their PlayStation.
I realise the electricity is off.
My friend Nozipho tells
me it will be on again about 2pm. It is Sunday. That-s the
schedule in her neighbourhood. I soon learn that in the leafy suburbs
there is a regular schedule for power cuts and occasionally for
water cuts too. So you can schedule your life -- when to do the
laundry, when to iron, what time to start cooking ...
By the end of the first
week I have the schedules worked out. I know whose house to go to
for breakfast, whose for lunch and when to recharge my cellphone.
Manoeuvres
in the dark
But things
are not so easy in the non-leafy, high-density townships, where
the power goes off at any time. Perhaps the thinking is that poor
people are too poor to need regular schedules. But there are some
things you can-t schedule, like the ever-present funerals,
mostly the result of HIV and Aids. How do you conduct a wake by
candlelight? How do you feed the mourners in the dark?
We soon find out. My
friend-s dad passes away in Bulawayo. The power goes off in
the middle of his wake. Dozens of candles hardly make a difference
in the pitch darkness. The women -- always the women -- struggle
to heat water, cook and feed the large crowd. They manage.
At yet another funeral in a less well-heeled township, things don-t
go so well. The candles run out after midnight. The firewood runs
out after one meal. No one has fuel to go on a quest for these essentials.
The mourners go hungry. Many leave. By the time the burial is over
there are barely 30 people left.
We drive into Mkoba township
in Gweru on a dark evening when the power is off. The entire place,
20 villages in total, is in darkness. Thick smoke hangs in the air.
I am worried about women-s and girls- safety and security.
Several scurry hurriedly to get home from work, the market, shops,
church. I am scared to ask if the statistics for violence against
women have gone up.
Water
water
On day two
I experience cut-off number two. Water. I am shown the dozens of
buckets, containers, pots, plastic bins -- anything that can hold
water. Every household I visit is the same. You keep storing the
stuff, just in case.
Unlike electricity the
schedules for water cut-offs are less regular in every area. But
things are worse in the high-density areas. It is much worse in
Bulawayo, where cut-offs last anything from one to seven days. No
one has that many containers.
Once again I see crowds
of women and girls around the few boreholes or water points. There
is an almost festive atmosphere as they converge there. They laugh,
talk, joke and wait. Sometimes the water comes out quickly, but
often it-s a slow trickle. The lines move slowly. Nerves get
frayed. Pushing and shoving starts and pandemonium breaks out.
Local youths come to
"restore order", abusing women in the process. Meanwhile,
back home the children wait, home-based care patients fret and husbands
get angry.
Women-s and girls-
lives have gone backwards in time. The development that seemed within
reach by 2015 is a distant, hollow hope. If it-s not a water
queue, it-s the search for firewood. Countless hours are spent
searching or collecting something.
In Glen View a group
of young women says it takes them up to three hours to walk to a
farm to search for firewood, another three to collect and cut it
down and another three to walk back. Meanwhile, other domestic and
economic activities must wait. What time do they have to go to school?
Learn new skills? Earn an income? Or do anything else in this hunter-gatherer
context? We are back to the rural way of life, but without the necessary
tools and changes in other circumstances to make this manageable.
Food,
glorious food
I have been
home for a week and I haven-t eaten beef. I am beginning to
have withdrawal symptoms.
There is lots of expensive
chicken. As a visitor I have been fed plenty. I can-t face
another drumstick. The government deregistered all abbatoirs, so
there-s no beef anywhere. I call a friend in the president-s
office. He is one of the new farmers. A very productive one. I ask
if he has beef. No beef, he says, just more chicken or he can do
mutton. I opt for mutton. Sadly, the president of Equatorial Guinea
is coming to town, so I never see the mutton.
On our way to Gweru we
drive into Kadoma Ranch Motel, hoping to buy a burger. I ask for
a menu. "You want to see a menu, mother? What do you want
to see on a menu?" the waiter asks me, with his arms akimbo
and a sneer on his lips. I lose my temper. I want the menu. Isn-t
this a hotel?
The waitron thinks I
am a Martian from Pluto. "Mother, here you ask us what we
are serving today. We don-t do menus anymore. This is a new
Zimbabwe. Ask me what I am serving and I will tell you. Today we
have two things: chicken wings and pork chops." He rattles
off the prices. I don-t listen. I just want pork chops.
I ask what drinks he
has and he almost keels over laughing. "But mother you are
really not from here right? Drinks? We have the usual, Mupfure River
crush -- oh, sorry, that means water -- and Mazoe [concentrated
orange juice]." I settle for Mupfure crush on the rocks.
By the second week we
have queuing down pat. My son, driver and I become experts at spotting
queues from miles off and joining them. It doesn-t matter
what the queue is for, we simply join -- and ask as we move along.
Jokes abound about people like us. One is that someone joined a
funeral body-viewing line and found out only when he was face to
face with the corpse.
We are lucky our efforts
are not in vain. It is always for something that either we need
or someone else can use: bread, cooking oil, fresh milk and sugar.
We feel so pleased with ourselves at every victory. Of course we
can do this only because I carry wads of cash in my big bag.
Sometimes we get desperate.
Our supply of bread runs out. I bump into a friend in a supermarket
and jokingly ask if he knows the manager so we can get bread. Sure,
he says. He goes over to negotiate with a shop attendant. We are
told to wait in the sandy lane behind the supermarket. I feel like
a common criminal making a deal with the attendant in the little
lane. We get three loaves. What happens if you don-t know
someone who knows someone who knows someone else?
The
shelves are bare
I finally get
confirmation of those images I have seen time and again on TV. The
rows of empty shelves in supermarkets. TM, the largest supermarket
chain in my hometown, Gweru, has two items filling up two rows:
plastic buckets and bran flakes. The first I can understand as people
need buckets for storing water. Bran flakes? Maybe nobody grabbed
them when prices were slashed and they just remain on the shelves.
I see a woman cleaning
an empty fridge and my hopes rise. I ask what will fill it. "Ah
aunty, we just clean them [fridges], so that they remain in good
condition."
Back in the
leafy suburbs in Harare one supermarket is filled with imported
foodstuffs; all kinds of pastas with names I do not know. I see
six kinds of fancy cheeses, pasteurised milk from South Africa,
imported washing powder, coffee and wine. Who buys this stuff?
My mother is
a small retailer in Gweru. My friend Sophia-s father is a
retailer in Harare. Both shops have empty shelves. I don-t
get to see Sophia-s dad. He is always queuing for soft drinks
at the distribution depot. My dad gets up at 4am to line up for
soft drinks. They do this to keep the shops open and running. There
is nothing else to sell.
We visit a widowed aunt
in a township. This gives me a micro picture of what the food shortages
mean. Normally a visitor is given something to eat and drink. It
can be black tea with sweet potatoes or just plain sadza -- pap
-- with veggies.
My old aunty welcomes
us with warm hugs. We talk and swap stories for almost an hour.
As the conversation winds down she begins to shift uncomfortably
in her seat, avoiding my eyes. Finally the penny drops. There is
no food to give us. "What shall I give you my dears? Things
are so bad. What can I give you?" I insist that we are not
hungry and she need not give us anything.
But this is not the way
of our people. Visitors must be fed to feel welcomed. In the end
she gives us two dry maize cobs. "Take these and roast them.
Please take them." She thrusts them into my cavernous bag.
My heart sinks. I give her cash and she weeps with gratitude.
The
meaning of independence
My visit home
coincides with Heroes- Day. In days gone by this commemoration
of our independence struggle was an important day on our calendars.
For those of us who can remember the second Chimurenga, it is a
time to reminisce and to sing along to the uplifting struggle songs.
But, after two days of
watching the same stuff on ZTV, my son casually asks: "Mum
isn-t there something else to watch besides this fiction?"
I am stunned. Fiction? I ask him why he thinks it-s fiction.
"Well, after all the bad things that this government is doing
and making people suffer, why are they trying to tell us that they
are heroes?"
My heart breaks. I am
in pain. If the story of our struggle is dismissed like this by
the next generation, what does it mean? If things have got so bad
that we can-t convince even our children about our history,
where are we going? But I have decided that this is not my burden.
If the leaders of Zimbabwe cannot see for themselves that they have
eaten their own legacy and they end up sounding like liars to the
next generation, it is their burden, not mine.
South Africans often
say Zimbabweans do not resist oppression hard enough. But one
area where resistance has been fierce is in the media and communication.
Almost every third household, even in the poorest townships, has
raised money to buy a Fortec gadget and a satellite dish. Unlike
DSTV, Fortec doesn-t need a subscription. Once installed,
all you need to do is check the frequencies don-t shift. Rather
than being subjected to ZTV, people watch foreign channels. Deep
into the night people listen to short wave radio, pirated from outside
the country.
After a week in my parents-
home, without Fortec or cable, I realise I miss al-Jazeera and my
favourite, Kaya FM. On Friday I stock up on newspapers, the Zimbabwe
Independent, Mail & Guardian and, on Sunday, the South African
Sunday Times and The Standard. I don-t bother with state-owned
dailies. No need to get my blood pressure up.
All
dressed up and no transport
Driving around
the cities and on every major route, I see hordes of people flagging
down lifts. At first I think there is some kind of protest or long
queue for something. I soon realise that it-s for transport.
In every direction, at
every bus stop, there are at least 40 to 100 commuters. Sometimes
more. Waiting. Boiling in the sun. We give lifts to a few in our
small car. Every passenger tells us a long story; he or she has
been waiting for two days, trying to get to a funeral, collecting
a sick mother from the village.
The fuel crisis
has spawned a public transport crisis. Again it-s the poor
who suffer. With no means to get from point A to point B, they are
subjected to the vagaries of a dysfunctional system. The evenings
are particularly heart-rending as poorly paid workers struggle to
get home before dark, before the power cuts or in time to look for
firewood, bread and maybe vegetables for supper.
Sex
for fuel
I soon learn
that as a member of the NGO community I am "a person to know".
Generally it is believed that NGO staff members have access to fuel
coupons and foreign currency.
I call an old "regular"
of mine. He is enthusiastic to hear I am in town. He would love
to hook up. But he has no fuel. Do I have a coupon? Just 25 litres?
Then he will "come and deliver". I decide I am not that
desperate for sex. I will hold on to my hard-won fuel. Or maybe
I should hold an auction? Find the most handsome bidder?
And
the epidemic goes on . . .
The story of
Zimbabwe would not be complete without something on HIV and Aids.
I visit three families to give my condolences for those who have
died in the past five months, see two sick relatives and hear of
a couple of other deaths.
Antiretrovirals are easier
to get in some towns than others. But a monthly supply of drugs
on the open market is unaffordable. I don-t know who can still
buy them.
The government clinic
in my hometown has stopped taking in new patients. The CD4 count
machine has broken down. Without it you can-t be assessed
for treatment. The food crisis has compounded the problem. Several
relatives on treatment say they struggle to get adequate and timely
nutrition so they can adhere to their regime.
My visits to
graveyards in Harare and Bulawayo confirm that more young people
are dying. Someone born in 1987 is in a grave already.
The
rich get richer
As in any place
in a crisis there is opportunity. Zimbabwe is no different. A new
breed of billionaires has arisen. Wheeler-dealers are everywhere:
smugglers, sellers of scarce commodities, fuel importers or just
plain thugs.
Moving mostly in the
leafy suburbs and among the middle classes it is interesting to
see the lifestyles and listen to the "woes" of this
group. At a hair salon the young come in their dozens to get fancy
hair-dos. I have never seen so many well manicured women as I do
in Harare.
At a popular restaurant
I eavesdrop on a conversation among those I call corporate wives.
One has taken up horse riding. Another is persevering with her flying
lessons. The third frets about the lack of seats on flights to Dubai
for her family for the school holidays. They-ll have to go
to Victoria Falls -- how boring, they all commiserate.
And you can-t believe
the fancy cars this lot and their offspring drive. An economist
friend tells me that because the Zim dollar is so worthless now,
saving is pointless. You-re better off chowing your money
in this manner. I worry about the long-term implications of all
this.
I meet a group of young
secretaries and hear fascinating stories about what the "indigenous"
or new farmers are buying their girlfriends. Plasma-screen televisions,
double-door fridge-freezers, leather lounge suites, Japanese used
vehicles, monthly fuel supplies, shopping trips to Jo-burg
or Dubai. Many of these young women have regular facials and massages
-- all paid for with the new money. For some, every cloud does have
a silver lining.
A new
birth
As I dance at
my friend Juliana-s birthday party, I disagree with Oliver
Mtukudzi-s new song, Gehena (hell), in which he says there
is no such thing as a slightly nice hell. Hell is hell, he sings.
Oliver dear, Zimbabwe is a slightly good hell.
I am angry at what I
see. It makes me depressed. I am angry at the unnecessary pain and
grind that women and girls, in particular, have become subjected
to -- the constant search for food, fuel and water. I am angry that
younger women continue to die unnecessary deaths from Aids or are
subjected to sex work when they could be earning their own incomes
in a functioning economy.
I am shocked at the denial
by those in power that there is a crisis in Zimbabwe and that poor
black people are suffering. These people are not related to Tony
Blair -- or Gordon Brown now --and have done nothing to deserve
this "punishment". All they want is to live in the functional
Zimbabwe they once knew.
And I am even more angry
that the solution being punted is another meaningless and wasteful
election -- an election that will not resolve poor women-s
and girls- problems. Just as all the other useless elections
in the past few years did not.
Yet I come out refreshed
and happy. After a visit to my gynaecologist and my dentist -- both
of whom treat me like a human being and not a tropical disease in
progress, as I am normally treated in South Africa -- I have every
right to be happy. I am greeted with a smile and a chat at the bank.
In Johannesburg I am "X-rayed 55 times", as I call it,
and my ID photocopied four times every time I visit my bank.
Having spent three weeks
travelling under the most beautiful African sun in three of the
safest cities in the world, I am at peace. For three weeks I do
not obsess about locking doors and windows and clutching my handbag.
The laughter, community and sense of hope in everyone I see is something
I will live on for the next few months. Even in the most trying
of times, or in the longest bread queue, there is hope and faith.
I cannot help but be
elated at the sight of new houses being built: big, beautiful houses.
No matter how much it costs, parents still sacrifice to send their
children to the best schools; buy them necessary school uniforms
and other supplies. University and college students study diligently,
hoping for a better life.
In Bulawayo-s Centenary
Park, although the flowers have not been watered for months and
the place looks desolate, I witness at least five weddings on a
beautiful Saturday morning. My eldest son has a new baby girl, who
looks so cute in pink; my younger brother has a baby boy with the
most beautiful long nails.
Life has become hell
for many, but it is a slightly good hell. There is hope. The struggle
to reclaim our beautiful country must continue.
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