One Foreigner's Ordeal

Prologue

Throughout my life, it had been my conviction that my future and that of my fellow Zimbabweans lay within the borders of the country of my birth. I had served my country’s government as a teacher for about one and half decades. These were not idle years. They were years in which I had tried to better myself so that I would remain relevant and of even better service to my country.

The song by Jamaican Musician Eric Donaldson had always rung true in my heart. I had sung it, replacing ‘Jamaica’ with ‘Zimbabwe’ to suit my circumstances:

This is the land of my birth

I say this is the land of my birth

I say this is Zimbabwe, my Zimbabwe

The land of my birth

I will never leave her shores

I will never run away

I will always believe in the dark,

The green the gold I say

Our nation greater are the trials

We must face the test of time . . .

But when the test of time came, I found myself failing it badly. I opted out of my country for South Africa.

I have often heard people say, But it is your country. Why did you leave it? Why couldn’t you fight for the change you wanted from within? Well, I do not have a good answer to that. The bit I know is that flight is a survival instinct and even as far back as the biblical times, man has been obeying it.

Chapter 1

How many of my neighbour’s servants have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger!

The 2007 Christmas and the ensuing New Year were perhaps the bleakest of my life. I had no money in my bank account to make the mandatory yearly pilgrimage to my rural home to be with my people. Even if I had some, my bank would not have been in a position to dispense it. Zimbabwe was running short of its own currency.

Supposing the country had no currency problems, the season would have been bleak all the same because there were no goods on the shop shelves. Had the goods been available still, their prices would have presented a problem. They were far beyond the reach of the ordinary person. A senior teacher like me required one third of his salary to buy five hundred grams of dried kapenta fish. The latter fish was a less-than-modest relish which in the good old days, every Zimbabwean could afford.

Masvingo, the country’s oldest town in which I resided, cast a perfect picture of a funeral scene. The people were barely managing. Hope was evaporating; the economy was ailing; the banks were stressed and the country’s inflation rate was hopping mad.

For me, one survival strategy had been to await the arrival of the Gweru-Masvingo train on Wednesdays. It brought with it hordes of vendors from the outlying area of Zimuto who sold all manner of mushrooms, milk, vegetables and even beer at reasonable prices.

I lack the necessary experience to give a word about beer consumption patterns. It however needed no specialist to tell that the local beer industry was under severe stress. There was no fuel to deliver the merchandise to the beer outlets, no spare parts to service delivery vehicles and no viable price at which to sell the liquor. The train therefore provided the necessary reprieve to those who loved the bottle.

The vendors from Zimuto played a cat-and-mouse game with the police. A requirement that the vendors pay a licence fee before they sold their merchandise in town was the cause of trouble. The charge was over the roof. To evade paying the licence fees, the vendors hid with their wares in the tall grass in front of the railway station.

We had to slog through the shoulder high grass in order to buy from them. In such a scenario, one begins to care little about the hygiene that goes with the preparation of the home-brewed beer, what Bush the mushrooms are picked from or how well the milk has been handled until the moment of its sale. Our priority was to fill the stomach. The alternative choice—starvation held no appeal.

We had to be careful to buy these items expeditiously. Local vendors were quick to buy them for resale at exorbitant prices. The innovative vendors used the law of threes in their business. That meant they aimed to get three times the money originally ‘invested’ as profit. They also resold vegetable leaves in threes at a cost of twenty thousand Zimbabwean dollars per ‘bundle’.

The city had run dry. It was wallowing in serious trouble. There was no water. It needed foreign currency to buy water treatment chemicals. If the local currency was not readily available, then that should tell how elusive the foreign currency must have been. Besides, Council appeared unwilling to allocate its scant resources towards water provision. These were the days of the Zimbabwe National Water Authority (Zinwa) debacle in which local authorities were required to surrender the water delivery function to the latter organisation. There seemed to be little motivation on the part of Council to expend its resources towards a function they were soon to relinquish.

For the greater part of the so-called festive season, opening water taps was promptly answered by the latter gadgets vomiting copious volumes of air and making prolonged gurgles before dying into sudden stony deaths. But air is not what people need to run water system toilets. Blair toilets would have served them better but these had not been part of the town’s physical plan.

The absence of water rendered toilets unusable unless of course residents were willing to have a rancid smell hovering in their homes. They did not seem to like it so they turned to the town’s pathways and byways for relief. Thus Bush toilets became fashionable.

Like the majority of the people of my ilk, I had long stopped using commuter taxis. I could not afford them any longer. Forced to trudge along the pathways and byways, I often saw the not-so-pleasant spectacle of human fecal matter. My observation was that this human excrement was mostly Brown.

This state of affairs would be the source of a cholera crisis of immense proportions gripping the country in 2008. The epidemic was of far greater magnitude than The Great Stink which hit the Great Britain from 1854 to 1858. It prompted parliament to order the building of a new sewage system to prevent sewage from flowing into River Thames. Our government had no interest in such foreign solutions.

I am yet to find a government that follows the Bible to the letter as much as ours did. To prevent epidemics such as cholera, The Good Book says in Deuteronomy Chapter 23 verses 12 and 13:

"Designate a place . . . where you can go and relieve yourself." Pathways and byways had been duly designated for this purpose. "As part of your equipment, have something to dig with and when you relieve yourself dig a hole and cover your excrement". The government certainly had something to dig with. It was furiously digging at Western leaders such as Mr. Blair, Mr. Brown and the then recently retired Mr. Bush. The ‘troublesome’ trio was accused of waging biological welfare on an independent and sovereign state. What a likely story!

Two things seemed to have the energy to carry on. First were the flies which spent hours on end circling the huge rubbish mountains the municipality was having trouble removing. Next were the politicians, particularly those captured on posters. They had their fists clenched as usual and proclaimed, "Rambai makashinga [Persevere] Zimbabwe will never be a colony again." This message was also broadcast on national radio every other minute.

But persevere I personally could not, irrespective of what colonial status Zimbabwe came to. My opinion was that the conditions were dire and unacceptable. I felt completely lost in my own country. Because I felt lost, a tendency which made me to think like the prodigal son of Luke 15 began to manifest itself in me.

How many of my neighbour’s servants have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger!

I will arise and go to my neighbour, and will say to him, "Neighbour, I have sinned against heaven and before you [by being born on the wrong side of the border]. And I am no longer worthy to be your neighbour. Make me like one of your hired servants.

Who knew? Maybe my neighbour, like the father in the biblical account was going to say:

Bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet.

And so it was that on the 27th of January 2008, I found myself plodding amidst the human excreta in the town’s pathways and byways. I was headed for Exor garage near The Regent (Flamboyant) Hotel, a pick-up point for vehicles headed for South Africa.

A red Toyota Hiace with South African registration numbers pulled up, appearing to be in a hurry to begin the journey down South. Upon getting on the truck, I learnt that indeed the van was going to South Africa but not yet then.

Riding at the back of the van was a slim young man just past his mid twenties. He called out to hitch hikers that the van could take them as far down as the Beitbridge border post. The man was dressed in a red golf shirt, corduroy pants, and informal shoes.

The driver of the van was a man donning a small woolen hat which he seemed to have thrown on his head without much thought. He apparently had been caught speeding at a police speed trap earlier. Police had duly confiscated his driver’s licence pending payment of a spot fine. He was presently rushing to redeem the licence before the cops knocked off from their post for the day. When man and license were reunited, the van made a surprising u-turn for the Central Business District of Masvingo.

Logistics such as acquiring the requisite fuel for the journey were still to be attended to. This was no mean feat. The fuel was not available at the nearby Exor garage, nor was the commodity available around town. Only one place, simply known as kwaRanga (Ranga’s place) sold fuel. It was tucked somewhere in the heart of the industrial sites. The place did not accept the local currency.

The issue of the local currency should not pass without due credit being given to the governor of the country’s central bank. He was a creative man, for the bank at whose helm he was, produced the most colourful currency in the world.

The bank had the widest range of denominations. At one time, it had one-cent bank notes. I must hasten to mention that while Americans have been acknowledged for being the first to land on the moon, our central bank has never been acknowledged for producing the highest denomination of bank notes on earth. I smell a grand conspiracy here. Our now defunct currency certainly qualified to be in The Guinness Book of Records and to have been one of the Seven Wonders of the World!

Anyway, let us not digress. KwaRanga wanted nothing to do with the local currency. The men offered the South African rand instead.

The journey into Zimbabwe must have been unkind on the men’s financial resources for they made frantic cellular phone calls to their contact in South Africa:

"Yes, we have run out of money. Deposit cash in Jabu’s ABSA account. We will withdraw it as soon as we are in Musina. Fuel is exorbitantly priced here. No, we couldn’t wait for the burial. My in-laws agreed that I must return to look into the issue of the child. Sharp!"

Jabu was the driver. I got to learn that he was the only South African on the car. The man speaking on the phone was the one who had earlier invited us into the van. He told me later that he was a telecommunication technician working in South Africa. Two other passengers riding in front with the driver were Zimbabweans. They were the young man’s workmates.

I learnt that the young man had just lost his wife. His employer had been kind enough to lend him a van to repatriate the wife’s corpse. This was the van which we were presently riding in. I also learnt that the deceased woman was survived by a three-day old baby. My guess was that she had died of complications arising from the child delivery. But just as Harare had a theory for the cholera outbreak, the young distraught man had a conspiracy theory for the demise of his wife. He was now freely propagating his version of events for my consumption. We Africans excel when it comes to inventing such theories.

"Will I be able to re-marry one day? How could fate make me a widower at this age?" he asked as if there was a specific age at which one became eligible for becoming a widower.

No, said the young man answering the questions he had earlier posed to nobody in particular. Everybody will think my wife died of AIDS. They will think I am infected too.

We were doing very well. I loved my wife. I took good care of her. All has not been well with her since her last visit here. But she should have seen it coming. I did warn her against being too keen on making regular visits home. She just wouldn’t listen to me. They certainly must have become jealous of her and bewitched her.

‘They,’ I suppose, were the young man’s neighbours. He went on to say he wanted the best for his surviving baby girl. He would make sure she was registered as a South African citizen and not a Zimbabwean. He did not give reasons for this preference, perhaps believing the motives were too self-evident for anybody to see.

Jabu was a fast driver. The speeding fine he had been made to pay by the police was not deterrent enough. From a glass window between the front and back compartment of the van, I could read his speedometer. His average speed was 120 kilometres per hour. In South Africa, which boasts of one of the best road networks in the world, this speed is not scary at all but in Zimbabwe’s narrow and potholed highways, such speed levels are a cause for panic. So we were travelling with our hearts in our mouths.

Jabu loved music and was easily swayed by its rhythm. The music was blaring from the car stereo. He kept his left hand on the steering wheel. The other was always raised high. He kept his first finger pointed to the roof of the car and shook his head to the rhythm of the pulsating music. His right foot was either pressing hard on the accelerator pedal or shaking in unison with the head and the first finger as the beat of the music dictated. The woolen hat surprisingly did not fall despite his vigorous head shakes.

We stopped briefly at Bubi. Our companions wanted to top up the fuel. The precious liquid was not there at the filling station. Upon enquiring from a loitering fuel attendant, Jabu and friends were directed to a backhouse where fuel was sold discreetly from greasy containers. They bought what they thought would take them to the nearest fuel selling point across the border.

Jabu had three of the country’s top bank notes in his possession. They added up to hundreds of millions of Zimbabwean dollars. That is probably the reason why he made a stop at one of the shops. He had paused to ask how much change he would get from one of the notes after buying a plate of sadza. The latter is Zimbabwe’s staple meal.

The answer Jabu got to his enquiries must have been outrageous judging from the way he waved, shook his head and said, "Hayibo! Hayibo!" [No! No!] Jabu said he hated being considered gullible. He said he was not going to be robbed of millions of dollars that easily. If the response to his enquiries had been meant as a shaggy dog story, said he, then he was in no mood for any sick jokes. Suddenly, his eyes beamed and he duly announced that he had seen a new value in the notes. He would forgo his meal and keep them as souvenirs for his wife and children instead.

Nobody succeeded in convincing him that indeed, that was the amount of money at which the meal was priced. The young bereaved man, speaking in the local Shona language, told the people to leave Jabu alone. He said he preferred to keep him in the dark on matters to do with Zimbabwe. The more people like Jabu knew about what he called the level of madness in the country, the more they tended to associate Zimbabweans with insanity. He said a perception was fast gaining momentum that Zimbabweans were the wretched of the earth.

Chapter 2

This is the river which Ngugi wa Thiongo might have wanted to call the the river between.

We arrived in Zimbabwe’s border town of Beitbridge without incident. Beitbridge is a town conspicuous by its ancient Datsun 120Y car model, its donkey carts and stray donkeys. Jabu, the bereaved man and I parted ways at the Zimbabwean side of the border post.

I had originally intended to travel with them to the South African side but changed my mind when I saw an old friend and fellow teacher. He was travelling to the South African border town of Musina. Once we were done with our Zimbabwean border formalities, my friend and I walked across the Limpopo River to the South African side of the border post.

The Limpopo is a giant river and crossing it, especially for the first time, fills one with great awe. It is imposing and makes a good impression of itself at the border post. By the way, this is Africa’s second largest river. In the dim evening light, I could see the tired and sluggish water travelling part of its 1 750 kilometre journey to the Indian Ocean.

This is the river which Rudyard Kipling described as the great, grey-green greasy Limpopo. I did not see the green part of the river but the waters were as ‘murky’ and ‘sluggish’ as Kipling observed them to be.

This is the river whose majesty, way back in 1884, at the Berlin Conference, the hawk-like eyes of the colonialists did not miss. It became a useful physical