Thursday, January 29, 2009

nothing changes

Ian Mills, a veteran correspondent who once (he said) rode horseback over the hills of Manica Province, had strings with just about every conceivable outlet at some point - Reuters, AFP, BBC, you name it, he'd worked for them. He died a couple of years ago. When I got to know him in 2004, he was a talented musician, edited a church magazine, was bringing up two vivacious teenage daughters with grace and gentleness -- and still managing to file a bit.

Visiting foreign correspondents (these days local papers call them parachute journalists -- they jet in for the drama and jet out again just as fast) swarmed his office in Robinson House on Angwa Street to use his filing machine. "You've got a filmmaker's lifestyle," an editor out from Britain told him once, wistfully comparing the lawn, the patio and the swimming pool to his own basement flat in London.

Once, after a press conference with the Rhodesian government, Mills went outside to find his tyres had been slashed.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

(Our tyres were slashed once outside Bon Marche supermarket in Chisipite suburb. But that was -- less excitingly -- the work of would-be muggers, who'd seen the baby chair and the wide-brimmed hat on the back seat in the middle of a weekday morning and presumed I was a woman driver on her own. I wasn't.)

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

eaten by a lion

Reporting from Zimbabwe has been dangerous for some time.

In Robert Cary's The Pioneer Corps (the story of the 57 whites who crossed the Shashi River and erected the British flag in what's now Harare's Africa Unity Square in September 1890) there's a mention of a certain Baumann, J in the "civilian" column.

Newspaper correspondent, the entry says. Eaten by a lion. November 1890.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

100 US

"It's just too much," H says.

Her husband's 19-year-old sister got into a scrape. A married-boyfriend-got-me-pregnant-and-then-I-tried-to-abort sort of a scrape. When the tetes (Shona word for aunties) refused to help, H and her husband were summoned.

Nyasha looked OK when they saw her first. Truculent even. H and her husband stayed for five days, noting how the other women in the township refused to greet the family. Nyasha had a certain sort of a reputation, it appeared.

Just as they were about to go, Nyasha got ill.

"Please, take me to hospital," she pleaded. Her stomach was swollen.

"Who did this to you?" H said. "A woman, six streets away," the girl said. 700 US later, H and her husband got Nyasha admitted to hospital (government hospitals have reopened their doors but patients now have to find 70 US per night, excluding medical procedures). When the doctors operated, they found a sharp object still inside her. And a rotting foetus.

H is furious. They'd been saving - H and her husband -- for a church blessing on their marriage, a childhood dream H has refused to let go of. "If we'd left her, she'd have died and then we'd have had to pay for the funeral, which would have been more," she says grimly.

But now that Nyasha is back on her feet and claiming she "did it" to herself, H and her husband are going back to the township to confront her and the maternal relative they suspect may have put her in touch with the woman six streets away. Who, by the way, charges 100 US per girl and apparently sees five a day.

"It's a police matter," H says. "They'll make them talk. I want my money back."

Thursday, January 15, 2009

clever by name, clever by nature

When you name a child in Zimbabwe, meaning is all.

Lovemore, Trymore, Blessing, Beauty: it's not hard to see the thinking behind those names. Reserve Bank Governor Gideon Gono (who got pelted at a funeral in Chitekwe Village last weekend) has children called Passion, Praise and Pride. A man we employed once as a painter was named Last, presumably by an exhausted mother as a warning to her husband. A softly-spoken female activist at a local AIDS project goes by the name Silence.

Often, parents give a child a name they hope they'll grow into. Sometimes it works: the president of the Zimbabwe National Students' Union is called Clever. His deputy (ZINASU VP) goes by the first name Brilliant. (Clever -- who's been arrested several times -- and Brilliant are currently lobbying the authorities to stop Zimbabwean universities charging in forex.)

Then there are the names you can only guess at the tortured thinking behind. A few years back, there was a state journalist called Jealousy. (Did he have an unfaithful parent?) Another writer was called Killer. (Did his mother die when he was born?)

I see on one of the Western embassy mailing lists that they're sending press releases to someone called Murder

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

after the attack

Two days after the snake attack, I develop heart pains.

I pore through an ancient Snakes in Rhodesia book (no-one appears to have brought out a Snakes in Zimbabwe edition). The map for black mamba distribution is shaded for the whole of the country, bar a tiny corridor along the southeastern border.

There are mambas everywhere.

"What happens if my child gets bitten?" I ask our GP. "It's a problem," he says (as a young premed, he used to do post-mortems on villagers who'd been killed by mambas). Anti-venom isn't used these days to treat snake-bite: the modern way is to use drips and blood transfusions immediately.

But immediate hospital treatment is well-nigh impossible in Zimbabwe, where doctors are on strike and private clinics won't let you through the door unless you can produce wads of US dollars (3,000 for our local one) in cash, straight away. And -- as a friend who recently went for a C-section found -- you have to provide your own drip.

Our dog was Labrador-sized, chunky. She probably weighed more than my son. It took her just 20 minutes to die.

I remember that terrible scene in Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, where missionary daughter Ruth-May gets bitten by a green mamba that someone's deliberately enticed into the chicken house. She dies in a matter of minutes: her mother weaves her a shroud out of mosquito nets.

White friends offer tales of horror ("I have a neighbour who lost two Staffies that way" or "There was that kid in Chirundu recently. His parents found him playing with what he said were worms. They were puff-adders. Not a thing they could do for him.") Black friends offer suggestions. Clear out the fallen leaves between your banana trees. Keep the bottom part of the kitchen door shut at all times (so that's why there are stable doors here). Don't go out at night.

I fantasise about setting fire to the next-door neighbour's bamboo (apparently a favourite snake haunt). I decide that DVDs are a great idea: they keep your kids indoors, away from snakes. Mostly I grieve for the dog and for what her death makes me think of now in Zimbabwe: hope gone sour, the sense of hidden evil waiting in the wings.

Monday, January 12, 2009

tale of two teachers

"You're phoning about the opening of term?" My son's headmistress is nervous. "No, we can't go ahead."

"We take our lead from the the private schools, and they've been told there'll be arrests if they open."

Teachers get arrested regularly in Zimbabwe. In the last 18 months, my son has attended two (private but far from exclusive) preschools. Both of his headmistresses have been arrested. The first one (who was heavily pregnant) was arrested for hiking fees without permission. The second spent a couple of nights in cells after she was (wrongfully) accused of stealing fuel coupons. She says her time inside wasn't too bad ("but I was worried about my children"). Understandably, she's keen not to see a repeat of the experience.

Schools were supposed to open on January 13th. State radio announced last week that lessons would now be delayed until January 27th, to give the authorities time to find (and perhaps pay) markers for last year's Grade 7 exams. Private schools mark their own examinations, so headteachers presumed the edict applied only to government schools and decided to go ahead with the January 13th start-date.

That was until they were notified by letter this weekend that they'd be arrested if they did.

'Phone me again on Friday," she says. In the backgrounds, I can hear 'phones ringing. More frustrated parents.

Sunday, January 11, 2009

second cup

Hanging on the living room wall in A's house, there's a framed cross-stitch picture in white and pink. "Home is where the heart is." The house is scrupulously clean, but there's no sign of the sideboard filled with trinkets - glasses, ornaments -- that used to have pride of place as you walked in. Sold?

There's tea, served in the thick Willsgrove pottery you'll find in every Zimbabwean home, every hotel, every cafe. It's then that I make my faux pas, when A offers a second cup and I nod quickly, without thinking.

She's used up the last of her powdered milk to fill the tiny jug that splashed the bottom of our four cups, first time round. There is no more milk, no sugar and there will not be when we leave the house. Embarrassed, A pours out black tea.

These days in Zimbabwe, it's bad manners to ask for a second cup.

Thursday, January 8, 2009

flipside

It seems impossible but cholera has a good side. So says T, who's back from Budiriro (the epicentre of the epidemic) for the new term at Africa University (which she won't be starting because they've upped fees from somewhere around 400 US a year to 1,750 US plus an obligatory 900 US top-up for last term).

"Jobs," she says. "Cholera's created jobs."

Apparently UNICEF is paying up to 400 US to locals who agree to work in their cholera clinic. It's hard and dangerous work: bathing, feeding cholera patients.

"And if they die, you have to put the sheet over them," T says, with a shudder. Her sister got cholera -- or something like it -- over the Christmas holidays but she got treatment and she's fine.

"And then you get sprayed by all these chemicals before you can leave the clinic. But the money's good."

Four hundred US is way above average salaries for almost all Zimbabweans. Plus, she says, they pay a 200 US transport allowance but because almost all the workers come from the township they don't have to take any buses. That makes a take-home pay of 600 US. A farm tractor driver wants (but won't get) -- so state media says -- 50 US a month.

christmas eve

So this is how it happened. It's shortly after lunch. It's rained a bit in the morning. My son and Audrey are in the back garden. Mai Agnes and Tommy are drinking tea. Audrey moves towards the banana grove. (Is she going to wash a plate at the nearby tap?).

"Snake," she shouts.

Tommy jumps up, seizes his catapult. The snake, a long grey thing, slithers quickly across the wet grass (snakes do not like clear open pieces of land) to the daisy patch by the washing line. There's a young tree there, a custard apple. Tommy fires stones at the snake as it slithers into the branches.

This is an aggressive snake. Which means only one of two kinds.

Mai Agnes calls the dogs, our semi-Rottweilers. One of them (the older, greying round the muzzle, probably not too much longer for this world anyway) stays well away. The other, two years old, not much more than a puppy in manner though bigger than either of the children, sees the stone-throwing, thinks this is some kind of a game. She rushes towards the snake. There is a yelp. Tommy beats the snake to death on its head.

My son comes running inside. My husband's in his office. I'm on the bed, still trying to shake off tick-bite fever and pneumonia (and no, I don't have heart problems, the Diagnostic Heart Centre confirmed this week).

"Daddy, Daddy, Tommy's killed a big snake." He goes to see what's happened, sees the snake still writhing. It is black inside its mouth.

"You've killed a mamba, Tommy," my husband says admiringly. Black mambas: one of the most deadly snakes in Zimbabwe. Green mambas are bad too, and pythons might take a small child. No-one mentions the dog.

A few minutes later - no more than five surely -- when my husband's back in his study, I decide to go to see for myself. My son is already sketching the dead snake, his piece of torn-out diary paper lodged on an upturned cardboard box.

"This is a bad snake, Mai Agnes," I say with a shudder. I did not know there were black mambas in town.

"Yes, but not too bad. It bit Wubie, but she's alright."

Bit the dog? I turn to look at her. She's drooling. She is definitely not alright. I run screaming into the house. "The snake got her, the snake got her." My husband scoops her up (as far as you can scoop up a heavy semi-Rottweiler). Frantically I 'phone the vet. No answer, but the surgery is only five minutes down the road.

I 'phone my in-laws. The children jump on the pushbikes, scoot happily across the verandah. I hope for the best. The bakkie drives back in through the gate 20 minutes later. "She's gone," says Tommy. The vet tried. He put in drips, injected her with anti-venom. It was too late. Twenty minutes from bite to death. And my child and Audrey were two metres from that snake.

We bury her in the garden, beyond the banana trees, metres from the fence where she loved to annoy the dogs next door. My son (four still, how can he understand?) puts a bunch of daisies and frangipani on top of the pile of earth. He does it carefully and solemnly, making a little hole to lodge the bunch in, as if he were planting a tree. His feet sink into the freshly-turned red clay.

In the drizzle, we turn away.

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

tank

There may be no birthday presents (they've been holed up from October onwards somewhere in Zimpost's flashy "space-station" building on the Harare airport road: the authorities say there's no fuel to make postal deliveries) but I want my son to have a birthday cake, at the very least.

"I want an army tank cake," he says.

An army tank cake could be a good idea. It's an easy shape: squarish. Easy colour too: sludge (which is about what we'd get from mixing the dregs of various inherited food colourings).

But a tank cake may be a bit iffy in Zimbabwe's political climate, especially now British newspapers are calling for a military invasion of the country and there are ominous images from Gaza on satellite TV. "The dogs of war are barking furious," fulminated Mugabe's press secretary in a column last weekend.

"Why don't you rather choose a cake in the shape of a swimming pool?" I hazard. "Or what about one of Nana's lovely chocolate ones?"

surviving

The house is dark by the time we arrive.

"No power, can you believe it?" says J, hobbling up to greet us. She is in her eighties, still going strong. "We thought they'd fixed it, but it cut out just before you came."

"Here, take a glow-worm."

A glow-worm turns out to be a small round battery-less light, a bit bigger than a Bovril top. It lets out an eerie blue glow, enough for you to see to wash your hands by (as long as you place it next to the soap-dish). The glow-worms come from J's adopted son in the UK.

In the dining room, you'd think nothing had changed. J's white-robed domestic (a Malawian, been there for ever) has set the table with a crisp white cloth and creamy napkins edged with tatting. There are tall silver candlesticks and place-mats with Paris scenes on. (I get the Moulin Rouge.) The food is concealed in delicate casserole dishes, silver serving spoons waiting beside them. It's only when J takes the lids off that I see they're smudged with soot. The cooking's been done outside, on an open fire.

The boerewors sausage comes from neighbours who emptied their freezer in her direction when they took their Christmas holidays, says J triumphantly. The carrots and beans are from the garden. The butter for the potatoes also comes from the neighbours' freezer. The precious grenadilla jelly has been carefully saved from Christmas two weeks ago, as has the ice-cream (which bears the taste of having defrosted and refrosted several times).

A long time ago (or maybe only ten years) J and her (now late) husband and stay-at-home son lived a relatively easy life. This is one of Harare's best suburbs. J's plot is a big one with worn-smooth tennis courts (so far she hasn't been able to bring herself to subdivide). The subtle signs of struggle though are hard to hide. The pool is brown, with bream in (for two much-loved cats). The gate is broken. J's plimsolls have holes in. So do her son's clothes.

She can't ever go on holiday (she says) because she fears her domestic would eat the one tiny tin of pilchards she divides into five and mixes with breadcrumbs to do her cats' weeknight suppers.

Even before J's husband died, his Zimbabwe pension was worthless because of hyperinflation. J's son eeks out a living making brightly-coloured children's puzzles -- but these days the toy market has shrunk. Besides, he can't get the wood to make them. The pair survive on parcels, parcels from the church, parcels from J's adopted son, parcels from an ex-lodger's sister with the enviable London address of Cavendish Square. The parcels come from startups with names like mukuru.com, shopzim.com, zimseller.com: all people who're exploiting a big gaping hole in Zimbabwe's foodchain to make their own small fortunes.

J opens the wardrobe in the guest room where we're staying (no bulbs in the bedside lamps but a beautiful pink rose on the dressing table) and shows us rows of cooking oil and bags of flour. "We've got enough Sunlight soap to run a shop," she says grimly. "And candles," chimes her son.

What J needs really is forex. Sometimes she takes some of her parcel goodies ("tinned fruit, body lotion, things we don't really need", and tries to sell them cut-price to the staff at the local Spar). She and her son had just managed to amass the princely sum of 120 US to fix the car, but then she got a bladder infection.

The scan and the antibiotics gobbled up the car repairs.

"I don't know how it's going to end," she says. I've always loved J for her energy, her resilience. I see suddenly that she is getting old.

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

fake

What's got everyone worried is faked notes. Faked forex notes, that is, now that the Zimbabwean economy is almost totally dollarised.

Jeannette* has a shop in the Tselentis building. She left her workers on duty for an hour or two last week, (which was the first week of the new year. This year Zimbabweans aren't saying: Compliments of the season, they're saying: Complaints of the season.)

"In that time," she told a friend, "my workers had taken in three photocopied 100 rand notes and one fake 100 US note."

"It's the Nigerians and the Chinese. They're the ones faking things," complains Joyce, an 87-year old who wants us to examine her 50 US note "because the colour doesn't change when you tilt it to the light."

Traders are refusing -- for a reason known only to themselves -- US dollar notes issued in 1996. Our local Spar store refuses to accept my 50 US note because it has a 5 mm-high purple 15 stamped on it (and it's come straight out from England and is most certainly not fake). Having fought for 1) a shopping basket 2) a place in a long long queue at the checkout, I'm left speechless with fury.

And I have to leave half my goods behind, unpaid for.

on the road

At a roadblock near Macheke: (we have quickly hidden our one remaining apple and ginger biscuit in the glove compartment as police v. likely to ask for "Christmas box")

Policeman (absurdly young, 19? 20?)"Where are you coming from?"
Us: "Harare."
Policeman (smirking): "Oh, the City of Sewerage."

At a roadblock near Rusape:
Policeman (to me): So how is my mother?
Me (bristling even though I know it's the respectful Shona way of addressing any older woman/woman with a child's seat in the back): OK, thankyou.

It's not the my that bothers me. Not at all. It's the mother. Somehow, in a skip and a jump from white-iced Sacre Coeur, I have turned from a mademoiselle to a middle-aged matron with possible heart problems.