million-dollar tomato

Bata used to be Zimbabwe's main shoe chain. Until the price slash in August, that is. Now, in the store in the arcade, there's not a shoe to be seen. There are banners saying: "Latest arrivals" but the display shelves are white and bare, matching the mopped floor. A worker sits on one of the benchers examining his own -- highly polished, I have to say -- black pair of loafers. In the window there's a badly-typed sign: "We buy second-hand gum boots."

Next door, in OK supermarket -- "where the nation shops and saves" -- there's not much shopping to be done. No milk, cheese, cooking oil, mealie-meal, baked beans, sugar, yoghurt, loo rolls or flour. There are -- now let me see -- some bottles of pink and yellow Propose Hand and Body Lotion and there's mixed spice and a couple of lurid green rakes and some loose ginger and chicory coffee. And -- glory, glory hallelujah -- there are about 20 chickens in a freezer, which everyone's steering clear of because they're 30 million dollars apiece. The lowest-paid worker for the national water authority (ZINWA -- aka Zimbabwe No Water Available) gets 34 million a month, the main trade unions body complained yesterday. (When our neighbour phoned the ZINWA office about a municipal pipe burst he'd spotted last week, he was told the workers wouldn't come to fix it "because they are hungry." Our neighbour took his gardener and his tools and they fixed it themselves). I buy a chicken (we got money yesterday, before that our cupboard was bare) and squash it quickly into my shopping basket. I realise now that the advice the aunties gave at the kitchen tea I went to last month was spot on: "a woman must have a basket with a lid on," one of the Shona women said while instructing the bride-to-be in front of us assembled guests. "You don't want everyone to see what you've been buying." (The bride was under a frilly table-cloth with just her magenta-varnished toenails poking out, but that's another story). These days people look at you sideways if you've got more than a handful of tomatoes in your bag. After all, a tomato costs one million dollars.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that petrol stations in Zimbabwe do not usually have petrol in them. There may be cars parked by the pumps, but that's only so their drivers can sit in the shade. But when I get to the garage at the bottom of the road this morning -- they sell bread at the illegal price of 2.5 million a loaf -- I think I see a pump pumping petrol into a car. This is so strange that I challenge the man behind the counter. He admits there is petrol in the pumps. How much? He looks around him. A dollar, he says quietly. A US dollar, you mean? It's illegal to charge in foreign currency in Zimbabwe (although a ruling party MP's sons were picked up a few weeks ago in Chitungwiza for doing just that, selling fuel for forex). You have to go to our office in town and get one of these, the attendant says reaching into his top pocket for a fuel voucher. I see the company selling the fuel is called Praise Petroleum. As in Praise the Lord there's petrol, I guess.