fireworks

Cars line the dark verges, bumper to bumper. St John's private school is holding its fireworks display and le tout Harare is here.

This is an annual event apparently, though we've never been before. Commemorating Guy Fawkes has never seemed the right thing to do, not in a Zimbabwe still so furious with its colonial past.

There's little sense of unease tonight though. There are teenagers with blaring stereos and halter-neck tops that can only come from South Africa and cellphones that glow in the dark. (They are not all white, these kids, by the way). Brisk mothers in tight jeans with long blonde hair trail pre-teens. An expensive sound system is in place. Little Luke has lost his parents: can someone come to the front to collect him?

The rich and the want-to-be-seen go through the gate. Tickets are 20 US a head and they've sold out, B. tells us. Twenty US would buy a bag and a half of mealie-meal.

We sit among the rocks in the ditch beyond the fence, our friends and I. Our boys, both four, press their noses to the wire. They will see just as well from the outside.

B has the offer of a job in Botswana, which is -- as we say over and over again -- only a car ride away. "Not the other side of the world." But it is a long car ride. B and his wife are good friends: we met shortly after our boys were born. I had banked on us growing middle-aged in the same place, two couples comfortably swapping stories of our kids, the books we're reading, our leaky roofs.

"We have no option," B says sadly. They can afford to live in Zimbabwe no longer. He has a good job with a local bank. By the time he's paid -- every week, at least his company has the courtesy to do that for him -- his salary amounts to no more than cents. "And Botswana is the only door that has opened." They will leave in January.

From my spot in the ditch, I watch the showers of pink and blue and green stars reflected in the windscreen of a parked car. Beside me, B's wife nurses her three-month old.

This is the picture I will take from Bonfire Night 2008: two little boys, hands locked together firmly, eyes heavenward, shouting joyfully at each fresh bang. I still believe Guy Fawkes has no place in Zimbabwe, still shudder to think of what that money should have been used for in this desperately-hungry land.

And yet, and yet..