Time to step up...

7 May 2014. South Africa is deciding it's future. The election campaign has been robust and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) -  red-bereted and with a lot of populist bluster and township (ekasi) swag -  is the cat among the pigeons. They are talking a radical departure from the market friendly policies which came from the negotiated settlement of 1994. The robustness of the debates, the ruling party's willingness to  engage with opposition parties an the general public on radio and television, and the high interest of the public in this election have been interesting to watch. This is true democracy at play, and those that grandfathered this country should be proud of what they built.
 Even, Paida, 10 years old has had her opinions. I heard her talking to her friends about what party she would be voting for, while little brother, Zhizha, 5, wants to vote for IEC...the Independent Electoral Commission (!), perhaps testimony to the extremely effective advertising which the institution has done.
But I am feeling left out. On an afternoon walk earlier we went past a school which is a voting centre. I fought the urge to walk in there and join the queues, putting my cross in the place of my choice. But I cannot. I am like the foster child, the orphaned child, who is left to watch the cooking fires, while the blood family members retreat to the main house to discuss intimate issues or offer libations to their ancestors. He is part of the family in many ways, but he will always be an outsider when it comes to internal family matters...as I, a bona fide, tax paying naturalized "South African" am an outsider when it comes to all things for the citizenry.
The last time I voted was in 1996, in Cranborne, Zimbabwe. I miss having a say in the affairs of the country of my birth or the country of my residence. So I am going to make the tough choices in the next few years...it cannot be enough to just see what is wrong and talk about it abstract academic terms within my circles. Increasing we as young Africans who have been gifted with voices our fathers could only dream of, will have to step up and initiate the changes that are required. 

Ode to English Winters

Ode to an English Winter

Winter lurks,

It's icy hand stretching like ghosts of the past,

Arctic breath whistling in the night.

Soon, the skies will cloud over

Chasing away the sun's light and warmth

Then it will be snow,

bells ringing on the mall,

Christmas lights twinkling in the darkness...

The only good thing of English winters

is the redemption Christmastide brings.

Making the winters, at least, bearable.

Indewhat Day?

I have almost forgotten “Independence Day” The lighting of the flame martial music mass displays women with be-faced hips and buttocks fists raised in the air, once triumphant turn to anger Thomas Mapfumo yodelling “Chitima cherusununguko” (Here comes freedom train) These are fading scenes in my mind which is fresh with questions Independence? From whom…one oppresser to another? the then - British colonizer to now Chinese? Liberation? To what end...an endless cycle of poverty and self-exiled ambitions? Happy Independence Day then, If you will… 17/04/2013

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.

A son watching a father

My father is dying slowly of cancer. Or maybe he is living with it; almost a year after they diagnosed it and tried to take it out, he is still himself – stubborn, head-strong, intelligent and lucid.

But for a son, the knowledge that one day soon, that which slowly gnaws in his groin will slowly destroy him is unsettling. But then I might go before he does, as my brother and his wife have done, and in-laws and neighbours and peers nowhere near his 70 years have fallen along the way. He has outlived young men and women and mourned for, and buried, many.
Prostate cancer is, to paraphrase a cousin who is an accomplished physician, the “good cancer, and if one had to have a choice of cancers, then choose it”. It is slow growing in old age and can be further slowed by treatments. But the nature of the treatments is radical and psychologically debilitating to a man. Because the is fed by the male hormone, testosterone, which leads to all the things we recognize as manly and associate with manliness and masculinity – the deep voice, balding, facial and body hair and a myriad other things that literally separate men from boys including sexual potency – to slow down its growth, castration is performed. This may be chemical via drugs which suppress the secretion of the male hormone or a snip of the testicles which produce it. The result in both instances is to change the man, the most profound and most psychologically difficult blow in this treatment is to a man’s virility.
In this day and age, thank God for viagra because that little blue pill can still allow the man to perform sexually despite the engine room being cut-off.

But this is not what concerns me about my father. It is the opaqueness of his feelings and his deepest thoughts on his living and his dying. In this culture we are not touchy-feely and that is the one thing that is good about it. We are busy trying to get on with the business of living, spending energy revealing our haunted thoughts is not important.
We enjoy a close relationship. As close as a man can have with his youngest of six children, whom he knew little in his formative years because he was away working and trying to put food on the table. In latter years, the past eight years perhaps, we have become closer – I have been an amenable son; the one who takes his advice and tries to play son.
And yet it is not easy to say things. But then again, if I had the werewithal, what would I say to him? That I am afraid; afraid to be alone in the world without his coolheadness and his loyalty, his energetic and adventurous manner and appearance. That I am also worried that because the nature of his disease is genetic, I too am in in line to get it as surely as I have inherited his baldness and his stubbornness? That when I turn forty, I will have to be subjected to annual scans of my manhood when I will be stripped by men and women whose sole purpose in life is to look at penises and balls and rectums? That in his way of dying, I see myself too and I am afraid...

Maybe I would say this. But what I would say more is that at seventy, my father has been incredibly lucky. First, that he is now more than double the life expectancy of the average Zimbabwean. That he has sent six children to school and now they try to look after him in his time of need as good children should do. And that he married right, even if he may, like any man, have his doubts from time to time: His wife, my mother, has sacrificed much of what she is and could have been for him. That she has shown loyalty through years of absence, endured torturous months when he was held in captivity during the war in the late 1970’s, through lean years of unemployment when she had to take up a job as a domestic in order to put us through school. And now with this recent illness, she has not wavered even when you could see her strength begin to flounder as she saw pints and pints of bloody urine drain from him.

So in the twilight of his years, my father should know, as all fathers who have held families together in the most difficult of times, that he is loved. But also that this disease, slow in it’s progress, is a blessing. It allows one to watch the time and plan. That one can spend the best years of the last years – (two? five? ten? – who knows how many our God has decreed) – as if each one is the last, with those people that matter. That one can return the love and loyalty of one’s wife with tender conversation and laughter in this sunset zone. That one can create memories and more, deliberately, knowing that it is these memories in the hearts of those that will remain which makes those that depart immortal and eternal.

This too is what I wish for myself and those that will survive me.

Written October 2005.
Mr Simon Katerere lived to be 75 years old and died a painful but dignified death end December 2010.

Rich Papa...Poor Papa

Yee-hah!
At last someone has taken notice; and it’s none other than Mr Robert Kiyosaki, he of the ultimate capitalist bible, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. The property tycoon and real estate mogul has sent an invitation in my name. Count me in!
This particular missive is addressed with my very own website (apparently they can do that!) and a very personal method; David, it reads, “no matter what happens….your financial crisis could come to an end”
Hallelujah!
I have become fascinated in past two years by what I can only term capitalist literature. I am currently reading Warren Buffett’s biography. And Mr Buffett makes money like he is picking leaves. He makes money as a full-time pastime – a maths genius who has constructed the ultimate money-making machine – find a company that is struggling, buy it, and build it up.
I am also reading Trump’s money making ideas and philosophies. Rambuctious and loud, bordering on the obnoxious, Donald Trump is one of my favourite guys. On a recent trip to New York I made sure to glimpse his various towers, like a pilgrim to the temple of the god Mormon, even if it was from a tour bus. It turns out that everyone in New York hates him; or maybe they are just envious of his success and can’t bring themselves to love him.
I am sure my grade 7 teacher, one Mr LT Zungunde must be shaking his head in disbelief and consternation. It was he who indoctrinated our pre-teen minds with communist nonsense. In those days we would walk to Queensway, the road leading from Harare International Airport into the city and line up to wave “revolutionary and warm greetings” to visiting heads of states – KK (Kenneth Kaunda), Mwalimu Nyerere and, Mr Zungunde’s favourite, Comrade Samora Machel. In all fairness we also went to greet Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, and she sat there in her cavalcade under Zimbabwe sun, her radiating royalty in the open topped vintage Rolls Royce (the very one that takes Robert Mugabe to the official opening of parliament where he invariably rails against all things British, except the royal family).
So, the morning after Samora Machel’s death in a suspicious plane crash, Mr LT Zungunde came to class very angry and aggrieved. After a whole morning of hearing him harangue and condemn the apparent “perptrators” of this “heinous and cowardly act” which had “prematurely and tragically” ended the life of “one of Africa’s greatest revolutionary sons” we were ready to take up arms against the “apartheid regime”, South Africa. I sometimes remember those times when I see the ingratitude that South Africans show to Zimbabweans. Yes, we also fought for their freedom, even if it was in the classroom (but that is another story for another time).
Mr Sharples was Scottish and he kind of just appeared at the school one time – almost from nowhere – a gangly silver-haired white man with an easy smile. Later on we understood that he was Nasho’s “father”. He had adopted Nasho and his brothers after their father, Mr Sharples’ gardener died, and he lived with them in his own house like his own children. Mr Sharples had had his own children but he was estranged from his wife. Mt Sharples, tall and slender and with an easy toothy grin was also a keen golfer who mentored and coached Nasho Kamungeremu to the Zimbabwe Junior Open championship and beyond. In time, and for about four years, he was to be “father’ too, paying my way through secondary school in my father’s absence.
He must be chuckling in his grave, Peter Sharples, at my apparent conversion to his capitalist way of thinking. He once asked me that if everyone is equal and paid the same (like in the communist state that I was a disciple of), what would be the incentive for people to work. I didn’t understand that question but I blurted out an answer that convinced me…
Mr Sharples was a counter-poise to Mr LT Zungunde’s revolutionary zeal, and thank God for that. He probably thinks that it was all that counter-revolutionary propaganda that saved me and has me bowing at Rich Dad’s knees, but actually it’s just reality that has bitten me, and the poverty that has me beaten! A little more money never hurt anyone.
And a lot of money will probably save the world. Warren Buffett, the wealthiest self-made millionaire (nay, billionaire) in the world teamed up with Bill Gates to launch the Giving Pledge, a campaign to convince fellow billionaires to give half of their wealth away. In the US there are 403 of those super-rich persons. Already Buffett, a key funder in the Bill and Melinda Gates (BMG) Foundation, has previously said that his is to give away 99% of his wealth before he dies; he is making a difference in many ways. The Gates Foundation gives money to education, health, the arts and every aspect of life you can think of both in the US and across the developing world. The recently announced breakthrough in the anti-HIV microbicide owes it’s success in part due to funding from these philanthropists.
And this is my new ideology – no more of that comrade stuff – I now believe in philanthropic capitalism. It seems to be that the fallacy that it takes a village to the change the world, an African truism we are told, is perhaps incomplete. Rather, it takes one man, or one woman, one individual with a singular vision (and bagful of money) to save the village first before it can save the world.
So…Mr Kiyosaki, sir how can I can I be a rich papa..?

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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