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!