Losing the love...

Zimbabwe is a place I love – I don’t have much of a choice in that matter, because my umbilical cord lies buried somewhere in the red soil of Manicaland. And, so this is my land. That love is in my blood – the summer thunderstorms brewing over the long hot November afternoon, the people smiling through their minor triumphs and major trials, and their quirky way of self-expression, the blooming flaming jacaranda’s in Harare’s old and decrepit avenues… But I might have come to hate the place too, especially on my latest visit. It is late November, and there is anticipation and hope that the rains will fall. Zimbabweans are by their nature and breeding peasant farmers and the coming of the rains spells hope or gloom for their livelihoods and the teetering economy. The year and it’s prosperity is not marked on the highs and lows of the stock exchange like in other territories but by whether the rains have been good or bad and whether the harvest will be plentiful, now as when my father was a boy probably. But this country is now unrecognizable, though it nurtured me, it is also now a foreign place a world away from the streets I grew up in. The other night I saw a Lexus motor vehicle, no registration number plates yet, and straight out of the box – brand-spanking new. The next day, at one of the numerous restaurants serving traditional cuisine which have sprouted in Harare’s suburbia – kitsch to the nouveau riche – I saw a whole fleet of expensive luxury vehicles – Mercs, Volvos and the odd Jaguar – parked outside. The people looked ordinary enough, nothing gave away the fact that they were the new elites of a rapidly dividing society. In the city, there is the hum and cacophony of SUVs and ex-Japanese city crawlers, intermingling with overloaded and overworked mini-buses. There is no starker contrast of the way people here leave their lives than how they get to work or school. A drive along the iconic ring road, Harare drive, which once marked the outer limits of the colonial city of Salisbury, shows the “progress” that the country has made; if monstrous mansions sprouting up in the northern suburbs can be defined as progress. In the townships, Mbare, Mabvuku and Highfield which I visited for the first time in over a decade, the poverty is palpable, perhaps not through the proliferation of shacks – they are hard to find in Zimbabwe – but young men and women loiter trying to sell cheap Chinese goods. Others sit outside the numerous bars, “sportsbars” as they are called, with fanciful names like Vegas, Paradise, Beverley Hills etc playing deafening music and quaffing their troubles away. When this era is gone, we will have a nation of drunks and paupers on one hand and miseducated ignoramuses who take more pride in the cost of their shoes and handbags than in contributing to anything remotely meaningful. The point of all this is that Zimbabwe is now an unequal society. On the surface it appears as if everything is normal, but the gap between a small consumerist elite and the majority – poor, unemployed with intermittent access to services is the reality. In between is a smaller and shrinking class of the middle, which is highly leveraged trying to put children through expensive private education. Nobody really trusts the government education system. Private schools and colleges have sprouted up like measles on a baby; their standards might be debateable. We will reap the whirlwind.