Christmas in Zimbabwe 2009

15/12/ 2009

Africa is not for sissies, so the popular South African saying goes. Or maybe Africa north of the Limpopo river is for the hardy camper-types. I have probably been “sissied up” by staying too long in South Africa with the trappings of the middle class which bely a rural African upbringing.

Here we are in Harare; and unlike my recent visits in 2009 – 6 months and 2 months ago respectively – I have in tow the wife and two children, daughter, aged 6 years and who says what she thinks; and the boy, 20 months, and at the age where he does what he thinks and is irrepressibly energetic.

We land on an overcast Harare afternoon, it’s 10 days to Christmas, and take the shuttle to what used to be home. Now we have access only to the tiny and shanty outhouse because there are paying tenants in our former family home. The bags and most of our clothes are soaking wet thanks to BA’s sub-standard handling services at Johannesburg International Airport, and when we open the door to the little cottage Zimbabwe welcomes us. No electricity, no water flowing from the taps or for flushing the toilets. The children are hungry and unhappy; the clothes are wet and there is misery all around. An extreme camper’s paradise but not quite what we had bargained for.

I spend the next two hours driving around with a kind uncle searching for paraffin which we eventually snag at USD1 a litre in the working class township of Epworth. I buy three litres of the precious stuff, a kilogram of chicken (which is much cheaper than beef and of superior quality) and triumphantly hurry home like a hunter who has snared the prized beast. I arrive to hear that power has just come back.

I am tired and cold, and disenchanted. And when later on I curl in bed, I ask myself if this is a country I would come back to soon to settle.

16/12/09

Day 2

Day 2 at the passport office. I have with me my daughter,6, whose passport needs to be renewed. Yesterday afternoon didn’t go well. I met my contact (everyone who goes to apply for a passport in Zimbabwe needs a contact on the inside, even if that contact is the security guard at the gate). Or so we are made to believe. The contacts I had last time I was here three months ago were not very useful.

This time around my contact seems to be more in the action. Yesterday she had tried to get my copies authenticated by the guy in room 6, but he was not interested – he said it was too late in the day and that I should return the morrow.

So I am here to-day with Paida, my loquacious daughter, all carbo-loaded on bread and with mealies for packed lunch, just in case it turns out to be a daylong expedition. As we turn the corner into the parking street and Paida sees the large crowd milling outside the building she asks her first question:

“Daddy, are they refugees?”

She knows all about refugees because we went with her to the holding camp of Zimbabweans who were attacked in Cape Town in May 2008. So she knows about refugees and their plight, and she still prays for them.

But no, sweetie, these are not refugees, these people are us!

But maybe on second thought maybe we are all refugees, and this paper or small green passport book is the last step to full flight and asylum in seemingly saner places.

We park and head for the crowd and through to the office of our contact. She tells us to go to room 6 and trying to squeeze through the wall of human beings with a little hand to hold and guide becomes a perilous thing altogether. In crammed corridors, poorly lit, flesh presses against sweaty flesh waiting to push into this office or that office. The walls are dirty from all the touching, elbowing and shoving of a million bodies a year. The offices have rows and rows of dirty manila files and folders piled on brown clattered shelves, the ceilings are peeling and the crevices of the wooden panel walls are filling with dust and dirt. This is a makeshift warren of offices, a temporary wooden structure which has assumed a state of permanence it was not intended for. Welcome to the Passport Offices of the Ministry of Home Affairs, the same man who is director of this chaos is also in charge of the shambolic election process.

 Once at the gate, a woman has delegated herself the role of allowing access and she does not yield. This is the thing with these people, civil servants – instead of being at their desks pushing papers, half of their time is spent berating the crowd and telling us (“vabereki”, “parents” as they call us) to form orderly queues to sit down where they are benches or to start in tidy lines.

Eventually pushing through we get to room 6, get the signature and then we are sent to room 3, then we are told to go and pay the fees which entails jumping the queue (we are paying for the 3 – day passport so we get preference), and more strong words to “sit there and move along fast, vabereki”. Here the cashiers do not accept small notes, and for some inexplicable reason they have to write down the serial number of every note they receive. So the queue snakes along like a snail. Once we have obtained the receipt, they send us to room 5, then it’s back to the moody guy in room 6. In each of the various rooms that we visit there are queues to be navigated and bodies to be shoved and elbowed, a civil servant who lazily looks at the forms and scribbles some code or other and pushes it back with instructions to the next room – it’s surreal, if not funny and sad, a kind of Amazing Race in miniature where every room and signature is a much sought after pitstop and the ultimate prize is a passport, the privilege of the privileged.

 It is certainly not a right in Zimbabwe to possess a passport.