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Pic: @kpczim |
“I’ll walk home from
here,” I say to my hostess. She cocks
her head at great steaming thunderheads looming over Cecil Kop, rubs her throat in the morning
humidity. But okay.
We’re in the middle of town, in one
of the cul-de-sacs off the main street, which has lately been commandeered by a
particular group of street- sellers – those who are making a few hard-won
dollars from second-hand clothing. Not
the ultra-trashy, ‘zhing-zhong’ Chinese goods that have flooded most markets
and destroyed Zimbabwe’s once-flourishing clothing industry, but clothes
donated to charities in Mozambique, sold on in huge bales at US$250 a pop,
smuggled across, or rather ‘negotiated’ through the nearby border post. Now they lie in semi-chaotic piles on the sun-crazed
tarmac, the vendors bawling their specialties and hoping the summer rain will
hold off. Here a heap of handbags and
backpacks, there tiny-tots’ T-shirts, here packs of brand-new socks, there rows
of sometimes slightly bent-looking shoes (one of each so you can’t run off with
a pair).
My elegantly-built hostess likes
rummaging through skeins of gossamery dresses and shifts and tops whose
relevance to Africa has to be seriously questioned – but with a cry of triumph
she comes up with a vivid Ralph Lauren dress, probably worn once by some Parisian
deb and discarded: it fits her perfectly.
$4. For my part, I score a couple
of cool cotton shirts, one Malaysian, one English-made, and a pair of comfy
Australian bush shorts with lots of pockets, just the way I like ‘em. All in near-perfect condition: $2
apiece. The insane profligacy of the
developed nations meets the ingenuities of local economy.
Not that these vendors are quite the
impoverished who might benefit most. My
hostess chats amiably with some she knows well, not from the market but from
her educational projects: these are teachers boosting their meagre government
salaries during the school holidays, working ‘under’ another tier of
entrepreneurs who actually get the bulk deliveries into the country, making
middle-man (or often woman) profits that way.
We exchange our increasingly grubby and worn US dollar notes, getting a
bit of change in the new so-called “bond notes”. I ask some of the sales people what they
think of them, and get that characteristic Shona clicking expression of doubt,
if not disgust, “N-tskh-aahh”. The notes
are ostensibly backed by dollar reserves in the Reserve Bank, but if so how
come there’s a shortage – or gold, but mining has died or been colonised by the
Chinese and the Russians, so no one believes that. The startlingly crisp bond notes are ostensibly equivalent to the dollar, but
within two days of their issue a fortnight ago they were being traded at
alternative rates: they too are short in supply.
In the main street, as I walk back
across town, queues have built up at the ATMs: the amount of money one can draw
at a time has been abruptly raised, possibly with Christmas in mind, but it’s
still pretty meagre. And the banks –
some totally new, this year’s mushrooms and probably about as reliable as the
sundry quasi-religious “prophets of profit” gulling the gullible everywhere –
quickly run out of ready cash. I go in
to Barclays to see if I can draw some cash on my Visa card: No, that is no
longer allowed. So how am I supposed to
get cash and spend my lovely tourist dollars?
Shrug: “You can swipe.” That’s
all very well at certain petrol stations and South African-based supermarkets,
but most of the economy is cash-based – and the word is, or the fear is, that
the “swipe” will soon not be allowed either.
Then what? People are steeling
themselves glumly for a repeat of the hyperinflationary madness of 2008, and
all its ghastly consequences.
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Pic: @kpczim |
As always, street-corner vendors sell those
papers, government mouthpieces alongside ‘opposition’ rags whose persistent vilification
of Mugabe and ZANU-PF is tolerated as a sham of free speech: the government
clearly doesn’t give a toss. Though
there is much trumpeting of the apparent in-fighting, the so-called G40 group
against Lacoste (because its leader Emmerson Mnangagwa is known as ‘The
Crocodile’). It seems no less a mess
than the equally split and hapless opposition.
As I walk on up the main street, the
sultriness grows beneath the vividly clashing scarlet blossoms of the flame
trees and the mauve jacarandas that line many streets – many of these trees
must be older than I am. When I lived
here I didn’t think of the place as “tropical”, but after the thorny thickets
of the Eastern Cape and the dust-storms of the drought-stricken Free State, it
feels incredibly lush and steamy, uncut grass billowing into the edges of the
minor side-roads, the hills dark blue-grey with shadows of approaching
storm-clouds, promising the sudden warm runnels of drain-water I used to splash
along as a barefoot child.
I do not see another white person
walking, just one or two passing in cars.
Being white here, whatever the luxury in which some continue to exist,
is to be an irrelevance. Rather like the
old-age home in which my mother now lives, the community seems no less
culturally closeted than it was in the 1970s: you relate to Shona folk largely
in the form of aides, nurses, gate guards, gardeners, shop assistants,
bureaucrats. My hosts are seen as
unusual in that they actually socialise with Shonas as parents and colleagues,
and send their son to a school in which he is the solitary white boy in his year– with no
ill effects whatever, so far as one can tell.
The alternative is – as many families do, white and black – to board the
kid out to one of the ferociously expensive elite schools, whose obsession with
sport is a constant topic of conversation.
I take a short-cut across the
golf-course, which is obsessively maintained in the face of all economic
challenges, the fairways fringed by dark dense alluring belts of indigenous
forest harbouring melodious birds – Whyte’s barbets and Gorgeous bush-shrikes
and clicking Puffbacks – and also an offputting ground-covering of human
litter.
At a street corner, shaded by
jacarandas and figs, sits Tinashe at his little mobile stall, selling eggs and
chips and single cigarettes that he gets wholesale and sells on for a small profit. Friendly and chatty, he’s been installed here
for a couple of years now. He too is
suspicious of the bond notes, and is hoarding dollars as much as he can: no use
putting them in the bank. Most people agree
with him. He is unconvinced the
elections of 2018 are going to produce any benefits, but there is always that
Shona laugh and little shrug that expresses hope: Well, maybe...
I walk on, past a garden-plant nursery
that seems still to flourish, a huge rain-puddle that no longer drains off the
street, an ancient blue bus that has been broken down on an awkward corner for
five days now, a man who in the absence of municipal attention has taken it on
himself to fill some potholes with earth in the hope of a handout from
motorists. There does seem a surprising
number of pristine 4x4s and double-cabs on the streets, in between the ageing
smoking skedonks; I wonder if they care, shuttered like all suburbanites behind
their rumbling automatic gates, their lawn-mowers and their outraged dogs.
I am not far from my lodgings; I am
drenched in summer sweat; a wind picks up; thunder humbles the hills; big lovely fat
drops of rain spatter through the jacarandas; clutching their babies to their
bellies, vervet monkeys run, and so do I...
*******
Sad
ReplyDeleteWow Dan. You used to write letters like that.
ReplyDeleteThe inevitable boogalooification is no surprise.