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Some
cents and more nonsense from your guv'nor, the gift that keeps on
giving
Petinah
Gappah
August 02, 2008
http://petinagappah.blogspot.com/2008/08/of-cents-and-sensibility-and-your.html
I cannot tell you how
much I will miss Reserve Bank Governor Gideon Gono, if this happy
new Zimbabwe ever comes. To kill inflation, he prints money. To
kill it even deader, he removes zeros from the currency. There is
a great cartoon over at The Zimbabwe Independent, the ten removed
zeros giving a cheery goodbye wave to the bemused Gu'vnor. "We'll
be back in time for Christmas" is the caption. And now, a bare
two weeks after he issued a new 100 billion dollar bill, he introduces
a new currency. And, this is the best part, he brings back cents.
Yes, he has re-introduced the cent in a million plus per cent inflationary
environment. There is one upside to this, which is that young children
will get to see what coins are. To remind my Zimbabwean readers
of what they looked like, here is a passage from my story An Elegy
for Easterly, published in a Jacana anthology in 2007, and to be
published again by Kwani? in September.
Martha did not speak
beyond her request for twenty cents.
Tobias, Tawanda and the
children thought this just another sign of madness, she was asking
for something that you could not give. Senses, they thought, we
have five senses and not twenty, until Tobias-s father BaToby,
the only adult who took the trouble to explain anything, told them
that cents were an old type of money, coins of different colours.
In the days before a
loaf of bread cost half a million dollars, he said, one hundred
cents made one dollar. He took down an old tin and said as he opened
it, 'We used the coins as recently as 2000.-
'Six years ago,
I remember,- said an older child. 'The five cent coin
had a rabbit, the ten cents a baobab tree. The twenty had . . .
had . . . umm, I know . . . Beit Bridge.-
'Birchenough Bridge,-
said BaToby. 'Beitbridge is one word, and it is a town.-
'The fifty had
the setting sun ...-
'Rising sun,-
said BaToby.
'And the dollar
coin had the Zimbabwe Ruins,- the child continued.
'Well done, good
effort,- said BaToby. He spoke in the hearty tones of Mr Barwa,
his history teacher from Form Three. He, too, would have liked to
teach the wonders of Uthman-dan-Fodio-s Caliphate of Sokoto
and Tshaka-s horseshoe battle formation, but providence in
the shape of the premature arrival of Tobias had deposited him,
grease under his nails, at the corner of Jason Moyo and Leopold
Takawira, where he repaired broken-down cars for a living.
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