By Wisdom Mumera.
Harare, Zimbabwe. (News Of The South) -The women of Mbare have no care about all the things that you worry about.
They don’t care who the President of the country is. But they know who he is because in some areas of the market some ‘political muscles’ go around taking ‘taxes.’
They don’t care that they are elections happening in America come 2016, before ours in 2018. To them America is some large nation mammal with so much muscle to go around as a bull in a china shop, or something along those lines.
And of course America is where the grass is green, the electricity never goes and Beyoncé sings in a ‘is that a crotch i see?” leotard to wild applause. America is the wet dream gotten by everyone, including females, arrayed here in the blowing way of the dusty heatwave of September.
The vending women in Mbare, seated in the hot sun munching sugary doughnuts, don’t worry about the growing division between the rich and the poor. They know their position and they won’t waste time fighting the imbalances of life.
For all the false pictures of Europe sold on Digital Satellite Television (DSTV), the women under the hot eye of the deity here don’t have feelings and time to waste, feeling nostalgic about that. They
have their own problems and conflicts to deal with.
The vending women in Mbare know what life in Zimbabwe is.
Here life is a battle. It’s a dirty scrounge scrambling for the crumbs whoever was greedy left for the rest of them. And they know most of the people who are greedy.
They know them and talk about them. Some loudly (those who were greedy and got caught). Some in hushed tones (those still greedy and still gobbling chunks that should have been shared) some in the hush-est of tones with very close friends (those still stealing and very powerful politically to be arrested).
They sit in the sun and laugh at anything that avails itself to them.
They laugh at jokes recycled and shared all around. They laugh at each other. They gossip about the other women selling across the road. They laugh with the women selling along their own stalls.
They don’t worry about the end of the world. That can wait till Sunday. They don’t worry about the ozone layer, the nuclear war, the Pope’s false powers or the high numbers of refugees flocking into
Europe from Syria.
The vending women under the hot sun in Mbare don’t have such kind of worries.
But they do have worries. Worries about their lives and the numerous bends and risky turns it has been taking.
They worry about the scarcity of customers. Mbare is today teeming with vendors it’s a wonder how they all get to find customers. Those selling bananas. Those selling toothpaste. Selling Sadza. Underwear.
Plastic bags. Firewood. Bute. Cooking sticks. Everything.
They sit all day and their single biggest and most beautiful luxury in a vendor’s Zimbabwe today is that City Council security personnel don’t dare come here to chase them away.
Mbare is a sort of large untamed mammal upon whom authorities are not comfortable to exert superfluous by-laws about clearing pathways for pedestrians as done in the CBD. Mbare may recoil upon them with an uprising of the hungry and determined in a manner different from that exhibited by the tame tomato and samoosa vendors in the CBD.
Thus Mbare has been left to the women of no-high-worries to sell petticoats and hair dye whilst sharing advice about reining in wild husbands.
The few customer shared all around mingle and batter with them, buying at reduced prices, which they want reduced further more.
The few dollars circle around, stemming hunger, appeasing problems, quieting storms, granting granules of peace and dangling thin strips of hope ahead for the women.
They sit and worry about the teenage boy now beginning to experiment with Bronco and marijuana. They worry about the young girl and the emanating gossip that she may be pregnant. The husband who has been coming home erratically is another worry.
The hot sun burns, the wave of dust coats their wares in a bristly wave of sand and they navigate their minds around the worries they do have.
You go on with your high sounding worries
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