snippets

Things are never as black and white as they seem.

"Where's Mai X?" I ask. I'm in a sitting room again, barefoot. I have handed over my basket at the door as you do, inquired after everyone's day, assured all present that my husband and my child are fine. I like these slow unhurried rituals. Speed begets tardiness, the Shona say.

"She has gone to a funeral. It is her aunt. In fact, the aunt was like her mother. Mai X's mother passed away so the aunt, who had no children, brought her and some other children up."

I like Mai X. She is careful, funny, gentle and she treats me like a daughter, buying me a huge box of soap powder for Christmas. When I injured my head last year and had to have a cyst lanced at a local hospital, it was Mai X I turned to.

"The burial was supposed to be Sunday. But then her cousin-brother said, no, it could not be Sunday because he had business to do. He's that boxing man, you know? Stalin Mau-Mau. Well, Stalin Mau-Mau said there were relatives who wanted to come from England...

I've stopped listening, trying to digest what I just heard. Stalin Mau-Mau was a ruling party bigwig back in 2000, before he turned into a UK-based businessman. White farmers say that he -- backed up by war vets -- played a part in the early wave of land invasions in Harare (though he claims he was merely "negotiating" with farmers to help alleviate a housing shortage).

Mai X was brought up with Stalin Mau-Mau?

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Illegal gold panners are an increasing problem.

"They wreck all the greenery," says a friend whose parents -- by hook or by crook and most probably because the powers that be have realised Zimbabweans need minimal amounts of milk -- have managed to hold onto their dairy farm. Gold panners are panning in the stream that runs through their farm in eastern Zimbabwe and there's absolutely nothing her parents can do.

"My mother never used to have any problems in her garden," she says. We're sitting round a sparkling pool, eight or nine mums, munching coffee cake and watching our horribly-privileged preschoolers splash around with rubber bazookas imported from South Africa. There is no power but no-one notices that anymore. "Now she's got monkeys and pythons. They come because it's the only bit of greenery left. She lost the whole of her lychee crop and then last week a python took her dog.

She takes a breath. "My little boy (aged three, approximately goat-size, just right for a python) was playing with the dog three minutes earlier."

There's silence, white coffee mugs stopped staccato in the air. We do live in Africa, girls.

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In the morning, I drive past the Anglican cathedral with the huge red AIDS ribbon painted above the entrance, under the flamboyant trees, past a nursery school. Through my open window -- it's going to be a sweltering 30 degrees today, the radio says -- I hear the sweet sound of childrens' voices, one adult voice leading the song: "...everybody here, in His hands/He's got everybody here in His hands." Nothing could ever happen here, surely?

The police chief appears on the eight o'clock TV news bulletin. His officers are empowered to use "full force, including firearms," against protesters before, during or after next month's polls, he says.