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She is truly mysterious
Rejoice Ngwenya
February 11, 2013

She looks familiar, but I could be wrong. From a distance, her gait is graceful to the point of defiance, almost catwalk like, executed with languid, feline vindictiveness. I could make out her wiry arms beckoning me in slow hypnotising strokes through the glistening mirage of life-s dreamy uncertainty. As I draw closer to her, the privilege of proximity turns to an opportunity for despair. That grace was a farce, an illusion. She exudes a deep sense of intense unease, almost to the point of reckless self-neglect. There is a cold dark fragility, a nervous sort of insecurity about her. She looks like someone who has been emotionally hurt, almost violated but afraid to expose her vulnerability. Both her ear lobes are scarred, as if her diamond earrings were torn-off by some psychotic intruder, tossed east of her continent.

Friends and neighbours talk in hushed tones about her unlimited potential, her capacity to realise her dreams. They say underneath that calmness, that emotional fragility lays a woman waiting to explode with boundless energy. Being a habitual skeptic, I am unconvinced. I prod and probe, but draw nothing from her except . . . unlimited potential. I refocus on her expressionless face, the animated anguish painted in wide brushstrokes by an unknown canvas artist. That face - a masterpiece of anguish as if awaiting display in the public gallery of a political hall of shame.

Her lips are charred, but her cheeks do not look bruised, only revealing tell-tale signs of dried tears - like a silted riverbed constipated with ageless pain of property plunder and environmental abuse upstream. I do not know whether they were tears of joy, pain or recent bereavement. I cannot tell. I do not want to tell. Yet there is something welcoming about her, tantrums of comfort that swirl around her like warm Savannah winds, tickling droplets off the giant spray of Victoria Falls.

Her body looks lean, but neither famished nor undernourished - kwashiorkor banished for real! The whiteness of her eyes, the smooth neck is of someone who eats, albeit irregularly. When she speaks, she draws a strange response from her audience - they listen attentively, like are struck by a bolt of disbelief, yet continue their ways as if they have not heard. They look but only see beyond her, expecting someone else - a distant visitor - to reassure them that what they have heard is nothing but the truth, that what they see is a passing nightmare.

Yet I am convinced something is missing about her - a kind of permanent state of expectation, calculated anxiety, and dearth of self-esteem. I enquire. Her responses are tentative, her demeanor bordering on the experimental but with a reassuring poise. Her brow furrows with every answer, lips pouching with every denial. I try to hold her hand, to assure her I am as African, as patriotic as one can be. It is like there is a strong magnetic force around her - a negative polarity that momentary displaces my positive gesture, whipping my hand off an imaginary centre with irritating frequency.

I tilt my head closer and am convinced she is the one that I have always known. I live with her. I live in her. She is mine. She is my Zimbabwe, bruised by 32 years of violent, authoritarian kleptocracy. I raise my right hand, open my palm in symbolic party gesture in front of her expressionless face and scribble on an imaginary blackboard: "Hold on pretty woman, freedom is on its way."

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