Land of Miracles

Let there be light! (or not).

To my two year old son (aka The Boy) this is the natural thing when one flicks the light switch on. And he loves to play with electricity, switching things on and off and on and off until he gets “the look” from me then he shies away laughing. Caught out, young man! (Perhaps he will grow up to operate a power station).

Here is a boy who enjoys being naughty like any normal child exploring the world and experimenting with the apparatus of this wonderous laboratory naturelle. A tap is for opening and marveling as the water pours out, and the most fun of all can be had the toilet - the flushing sound, waterfall of liquid gushing down into the bowl and the gushing of a refilling cistern. Hmmm, all the things you can do with that, his little mind is simply blown away…..

So The Boy is bewildered when he flicks the switches on and the light does not come on; the taps are dry and all the toilet does is to gurgle like an old emphysematous man gasping for air, lungs rasping. We are in Harare, and in the late seventies in our village in faraway Nyanga we used to talk about the capital city with great longing as “kumagetsi” – the place of bright lights and sophistication country bumpkins could only imagine.

To-day in Zimbabwe, when the lights come on and stay long enough to finish cooking, or when water flows out of the taps, it is a small miracle worthy if thanksgiving. And this is how Zimbabweans live their lives, from one little miracle to the next. Lights, food on the table, rains, the commute to work and back, all of these appear to be miracles, at least to those of us visiting from far where we take all of these mundane things as given and guaranteed. But the greatest miracle of them is quite possibly how the country has not disintegrated into open armed conflict or anarchy. Some people think that this is a curse rather than a miracle, for they argue the matter would long have been solved one way or the other had then been open conflict! Most people who say this do this in their air-conditioned homes or bars in Cape Town, London, New York far removed from the reality of war.

Zimbabweans have become more religious as a result of their travails. An irony really; while other people would question the existence of a God who looks on their suffering without interest, Zimbabweans seem to see their troubles as a consequence of their misdemeanours (whatever our collective sins might be).

So to-day the country has a delectable menu of churches available – the traditional protestant and catholic churches thrive. The Anglican Church once one of the most progressive religious movements in the country, however, is in the middle of a battle royale in which the Mugabe government is directly involved; renegade bishops are causing problems in Harare and Mashonaland provinces regarding the small matter of sexual orientation. Question – why are we so afraid of gay people? Another question – how many gay people do you know? Enough to disrupt a whole church of 3 million people just trying to worship their God? It is trite, really, that an unquantifiable minority (and largely irrelevant to the Zimbabwean Church) has been used as proxy to divide and conquer.

 The “African” churches – particularly the Mapostori church (no English translation for this word would do it justice despite it’s origins being from Apostolic) – in all it’s gazillion branches and sub-branches is the most prolific and most prominent in it’s visible dominance. Darted across almost every open urban space you will see devotees in their white or red or green garments (gemenzi) – a gathering of 10 people here, there a group of fifteen or twenty maybe more, over there a woman prophetess praying for a young child, another man raising his staff to the heavens like the picture of prophets of old in the Illustrated Children’s Bible. And it’s not just on Sundays when these scenes play themselves out (like in the old days) but now it seems you see them everyday. It is testament (no pun intended) to the lack of economic activity that a quarter to half of the townships are out praying during working hours. With all the talk of black Jews having taken residence in pre-historic Zimbabwe perhaps the Mapostori are an even closer branch to the writers of the Torah.

Then there is the new phenomenon of the pentacostal charismatic churches. Previously they were only a handful either homegrown or American, now they are coming in from Nigeria. No-one does pentacostal and charismatic quite like the Nigerians. With names like Holy Mountain Fire Church, Redeemed Holy Church of God, Holy Spirit Revival Church etc they have colonized buildings in downtown Harare preaching deliverance from the devil and ancestral strongholds and wealth to the poor. The bigger and more prosperous ones dominate the wiztech free-to-air satellite television offering with services beamed from Lagos or Johannesburg. And in Zimbabwe they find fertile ground to plant their churches.

So one can be cynical. But to be sure Zimbabwe is doing a Lazarus – it is a country that is being slowly raised from the dead. The problem is that the sisters (in the bible they were Mary and Martha, in our case they are Mugabe and Tsvangirai) are bickering while Lazarus is thirsty and asking for sip of life-giving water. If they don’t stop soon, this Lazarus might just die again… 

Christmas in Zimbabwe: to Gweru

First published in The Zimbabwean

We arrived in Gweru just after lunch, burning 50 liters of fuel in the process with a misfiring luxury car. It is a Sunday and we literally snake our way along the gulleys of the township road (these are not just pot-holes). The mood is a little bleak and it doesn’t feel like Christmas.

The kids are excited to see their cousins and play in the streets, my wife is excited to see Maiguru and exchange tidbits of family escapades and village gossip. I am despondent; worried about the car and the other leg of the journey to the East and what it is all costing. Further to that I keep in the shadows lying in bed because there is no man’s company here. About 3 months ago babamukuru (my brother – in – law) finally threw in the towel and escaped. He now teaches in far away Kuwait and has indicated that he will not be able to make it home for Christmas.

Kuwait, Dubai, China, Cayman islands, Indonesia, Bermuda, all these exotic and far-away climes, is there no place that Zimbabweans are not exiled? In the face of an unyielding regime Zimbabweans have opted to put their tails between their legs and choose life rather than confrontation. And this apparent cowardice has served us well on the individual level but it has also wreaked havoc with marriage and family life. In some cases the very fabric that makes us who we are, the cultures and sub-cultures that make us Zimbabweans, haven been lost.

I am still grumpy when I take a commuter taxi into town – I cannot afford to get the fuel -guzzling car to town and back – to check out e-mails and try to connect with the outside world. Normally when I need cheering the virtual world sometimes offers solace, but after 30 minutes of catching up with the saner outside world (I deliberately avoid opening work e-mails), I am still walking around feeling the whole Zimbabwe on my shoulder.

Gweru – this used to be a vibrant little town, the “warm heart of Zimbabwe”, it’s residents used to call it, and I fell in love once here. But that was 15 years ago and, like the rest of the country, it remains firmly in the 1970s. There are no new buildings here nor any sense of economic activity apart from the Sunday fleamarkets selling sub-standard Chinese goods. The central feature of the main street is the tower constructed to the memory of those who served the crown in defending the English world from the Germans. Next to it is the Midlands Hotel, an early 1900’s building. Walk in there and you will be greeted by uncensored photographs of the struggle for Zimbabwe. This colonial building is now in the Kombayi family estate, and the late politician has chronicled his personal story and that of Zimbabwe on the photographs hanging on the walls spanning from 1976 to the 1990s. Pictures of Zanu-PF leaders arriving in Mozambique, Tongogara’s disfigured body and the gory details of a mortician’s job, independence with Kombayi becoming the first black mayor of the Gwelo, Kombayi’s botched assassination attempt…All these pictures are accompanied by detailed notes and it makes fascinating reading.

Now Gweru operates more like a remote rural village than a modern city. The roads are pot-holed everywhere and the few traffic lights don’t work. In the townships there is no water and people trek miles with buckets on their heads to well that were provided by donor finance. In some cases, my sister-in-law tells me that she wakes up in the dead of night to wait for water to fill up the various buckets; and in the bathroom, the scummy water used for bathing and laundry is not thrown away but rather kept aside for ablutions. The cholera will be back here soon, if it ever went away and it will probably be as vicious as it was in 2008.

All these thoughts feel my mind as I walk into the sunlight with streets filled with people. I decide to go into OK bazaars to buy bread and then I am confronted by scene from the Christmases of old. Back in the early 1980’s my parents would take us to Mutare for our Christmas shopping and there we experienced our Mall fever for the year – people scurrying up and down with trolleys filled with groceries for the festivities, the air was filled with corny piped Christmas carols and decorations hung from all shop fronts with season’s greetings. We would do our shopping, get measured for new clothes and then sit down at the Dairy Den to have pork pies and ice cream before setting off back to Nyanga. And those were the most wonderful Christmas memories being partly recreated in Gweru.

The shop is abuzz with activity, people pushing trolleys, holding baskets and picking up items – sweets, Mazoe juice, rice, drinks, beer – and earnestly preparing for the Christmas festival. There are long queues of half-laden trolleys (the US dollar would not allow for the filling of several trolley loads for these people) and excited chattering – a distinct change from last year (2008) and previous years – when people were said to have had Christmas lunch of pop-corn (maputi).

Who can look on this site and fail to be uplifted? Uplifted in spirit because despite the intransigence of the regime people are going ahead and living their lives; grateful for small mercies, and, doggone it, they are going to celebrate “their Christmas” and having survived another year and no-one is going to stop them!.

There and then my grumpiness dissipated and I could not help but smile ruefully at such a people. God bless Zimbabweans, God damn its leaders!