blood on the floor

These days, you're most likely to see Zimbabwe's state-controlled Herald newspaper soaked in blood.

Like most electrical appliances in Zimbabwe, my 'fridge is an old one. The white's peeling off the inside, the handle is half-eaten away and there are streaks of blue paint left from when I unwisely let my toddler use the door as a lovely long platform for his creativity. Worse still, the seal has gone, which means the freezer compartment freezes into a solid ice drift with remarkable rapidity. Every other day I take a hammer and bash away at the ice to make a space to store my milk packets (milk comes in sealed plastic bags, like giant tea-bags in Zimbabwe, if it comes at all). Banging is bad for my freezer (and yes Dad, it's bad for my sanctification) but there's not much else I can do. At least I still have power to make ice for good chunks of time.

Blackouts are lethal if you have meat in your deep freeze. The meat goes off, just like the power. So we line the bottom of our 'fridges with newspaper to soak up the water and the chicken blood. There are no private dailies here anymore -- the Media and Information Commission still hasn't decided whether to re-licence the wildly-popular Daily News, nearly four years after it was closed down by armed police -- so what do we use? The Herald of Total Honesty, of course. Problem is: there's a Herald shortage. Price controls mean the printers can only buy 14 tonnes of paper a week when they need 100 tonnes, reports said today. Hey presto: a thriving black market for the pro-government press. In Harare you can waste precious fuel driving from robot to robot (Zimbabweans copy South Africans and call traffic lights robots), looking for a copy. If you're lucky a black-market dealer/doormat-made-out-of-strips-of-old-tyre vendor might offer you one, at, say, 2 million Zimbabwe dollars a copy instead of 900,000. Snap it up.

We need the Herald badly. We need it to know what They are saying, we need it for loo roll (1 roll very thin greyish, disintegrating 1-ply = 3 million Zimbabwe dollars this week, ie three and a third Heralds. The other local loo-roll alternatives are gnawed mealie-cobs and -- this one's for deep in the bush -- large stones).

And we need it to mop up the blood in our 'fridges.