rumblings

It's the hat I see first -- pink flowered, large-brimmed -- as I drive in the gate.

My husband is closing the gate behind me. As I unpack children, school bags, a tin of sausages, a laptop and a bottle of Avon foundation procured after lengthy and complicated negotiations (make-up for white skin in a country where whites make up less than 0.1 percent of the population is not readily available), I realise the hat has stopped to talk to my husband.

It's an angry conversation, though the anger is not directed at him.

"And you ain't seen nothing yet," she says loudly.

Zimbabwe's constitutional outreach programme started -- supposedly -- on June 23rd. Things aren't going well. The official Herald daily says merely that the process has got off to a "slow start", something to do with delegates not getting their supper. Reports from the former opposition MDC tell a different story. The MDC and its supporters want presidential terms restricted to 2 in the new constitution: the party's opponents are (predictably) determined not to let that happen. ZANU-PF has launched Operation Chimumumumu (Operation Shut Up/Dumb), forbidding all but selected and properly primed villagers to air their views to outreach officers. There are reports of MDC huts being burnt down. Today, 3 MDC supporters have been abducted in Marondera.

I watch the woman in the hat - she's a contact of the MDC MP who's frequently in our suburb -- make her angry way down the road and think of snatched conversations on road corners two years ago, when Zimbabwe's rumbling political crisis exploded into real violence.

Will it happen again?