Zimbabwe at the end of 2010

Zimbabwe’s so-called recovery is now visible on the streets of Harare. Plastic bottles and all manner of discarded packages – evidence of increased consumption, perhaps, and reduced desperation.

There was a time when there was so little that even rubbish was scarce. Also in the growing behinds of Harare’s women, jeans being the newly found fashion and the sagging bellies of the city’s gentlemen, is a tale of improved conditions. The women on the streets are mostly young, some made up, all with fashioned hair – a boon to the Korean fake hair / horse hair / human hair traders. In America, they have made their millions from the African-American women who never thought to take over that trade and keep the money in their communities (but that’s another story, and it will probably get me in trouble anyway).

The men on Harare’s streets are also dressed better than last December, when I was here last. There is a newfound bounce in their step. All in all, despite the internecine wars raging in this wildebeest (GNU) of a government, there is a quiet confidence pervading Harare and the country. We the armchair critics would have preferred not the GNU but a big bang, a tsunami to sweep away the old and usher in a new republic. But things seldom happen that way….

Seeing Zimbabweans walking with increasing levels of self-assurance (we have generally never been arrogant people), you thank God for where we are as a country; and pray for more peace; more power. Perhaps, I am tempted to think if the parties in this marriage could co-exist like all normal human beings in matrimony (holy or otherwise), coalition is not a bad thing. Look at Britain and how there is much less arguing and much more doing since David Cameron got ‘married’ to that Clegg fellow. Contrast that to Obama’s America where the partisanship is hurting the country and holding it back in many ways.

The self-assurance and confidence seem to also show up in the congestion of traffic – a metaphor perhaps to show that this country is on the move but is maybe caught up in traffic jam. The price of fuel has stabilized, the chronic shortages of 2 years ago seem distant memories. Where bicycles and pedestrians used to outnumber cars (an environmentalist’s utopia, no doubt) now cars, buses and mini-buses snake their way for miles on end during peak periods. A journey from the North to the Eastern suburbs took me an hour and half; previously it would have been half an hour. Not that it snarls up a la Chinese highway to Tibet, but with non-functional traffic lights and limited lanes, it’s bumper to bumper. But surprisingly good-natured.

The commuter taxi drivers dive in and out of traffic like heron into a sardine run, making their own rules as they go along. They make double lanes out of singles. One morning we were suddenly driving down a cycle track on the opposite side of the main road and none of the passengers was surprised or complained. Normalizing the abnormal, I thought, Masipula Sithole’s prophecy coming to mind.

You have to feel sorry for the pedestrian in all this. There are few pedestrian crossings at traffic lights, cars turn with no regard to the pedestrian’s supreme and universal legal rights over cars. Even at the few ‘Zebra Crossings’ where pedestrians should have supreme right of way, cars zoom past with no regard to the poor-destrain. It’s as if drivers will stop only if they saw a Zebra! This is Zimbabwe, you get out of the way or you get hurt!

So, Zimbabwe is on it’s way to recovery, in it’s own clumsy, unpredictable way. Really. Perhaps. For now.

Harare will probably never be New York, or London or Cape Town. It will certainly not be the city we knew growing up in the 1980s and which we all hoped and dreamt would grow up into a Geneva or an Amsterdam. It is Harare, and will always be. A vibrant African city, capital of a mediocre to average African country, post-colonial, post-conflict, struggling to go from bad to average and then perhaps, to good. (No “good to great” here Mr Collins).

And as long as political rivalries remain out of sight, all will be OK. For now. Maybe. It could all go up in flames with the heated talk of an election. And in the greater scheme of things, the world wouldn’t care a hoot.

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