By Wisdom Mumera.
Harare, Zimbabwe. (News of The South) -The journey to Chinhoyi from Harare is a drowsy and tepid drowning. A slip down a tarred path into the farmlands with plenty of nothing and some with plenty of tobacco.
A smoking nation or a nation in plenty of smoke?
The most striking feature after Coca Cola, in conjunction with the City of Harare, goodbyes you is that you fall into the palm of an open country filled with wide open farms that now look like dead football fields.
They are brown and grassless and empty.
They are waiting for the agricultural equivalent of Godot. Waiting for Godot maize. Godot oranges. Godot wheat. Some are however beautiful.
They are green with wheat, and tobacco and some indefinable produce that you can’t deduce whilst whizzing down the road at 90 kilometres.
The aesthetics of agricultural fields is most striking from a distance, watching the democracy nature has ordered.
The tobacco leaves are generally the same size and look similar in their wide open greenness.
The maize stalks are all thin and similar looking. Straight and waiting in anticipation for the cooling wash of irrigated rain.
Some fields have nothing but look beautiful all the same. They are brown and tilled, and their waiting is different to those empty in the manner of dead football fields. They are waiting for seed sowing. They are waiting for green to sprout from the thighs of earth.
Down the road you pass small shops with ambitious names. Funny names.
Queer names and family names. Mr and Mrs Kupara and Family. Kunanaira
Bottle Store and Shop. Duhwino Bottle Store.
Some are long closed and have dogs sleeping on their porches and hens pecking for granules of food around them. Some are open and don’t look to be making much of a profit. Their paint has faded and peels off in large sections that have not been scrapped off by lolling drunkards.
Then you get into Banket Town. After the lulling tube of farms and struggling small shops, the main town is a sudden adrenaline-inducing shot of energy.
Suddenly you are back in life with all the cars moving about and the colour of the open shops. The many humans walking around. The many stalls of fruit being sold. The sound of life.
You are back in the land of the living after the gauntlet of arable mortuaries behind.
Since you are rushing and are already late, you don’t wait around to find if they are still trading using the fallen Rand here or they now also love the Bond coin. Brother Bond, the once besmirched steel man who rose from the ashes after the initial disdain he was received
with, to claim his place in the sun.
You drive down the center road that is the highway and after one minute you are already out of the Town center and are back between the craggy thighs of similar looking farms again.
The experience is as before with little variations of the same phenomena.
Life and its various postures in death and towards death. Getting into Chinhoyi also does the same thing upon you.
You are suddenly ejected from the bland bird’s eye-view perch from where you have been watching death, and are suddenly washed over by the effervescence of life.
Chinhoyi’s town center is little bigger than Banket’s but still a sense of smallness pervades everything. They are all still midgets compared to what you are used to in Harare.
It has a single OK shop. They are no proliferation of takeaways with scaly chips and dirty tomato sauce bottles on display. Just a few straining for excellence that are failing to reach it.
They are fewer kombis running around in flagrant disregard of everything against quick money.
But there are still many vendors. Many vendors littering every street corner selling everything you need, to wear or to eat or to hammer onto your house wall or car.
Vendors are the common factor from Harare through Banket to Chinhoyi. They have tomatoes, spades, tins and window panes.
You drive past them. You shoot down the road and are soon past modernity and are back in the grass. Just as you are getting to the Chinhoyi Caves you turn left and trudge down past old houses with filthy walls and poverty brooding in the air above, hanging like a vengeful parent. Waiting for its recompense. Its pound of flesh, after the politicians got theirs.
Then you exit the tarred road and are soon in a red dusty road. No you don’t exit the tarred road. It ends. One moment you are flowing down a flat dark river of tar when you are suddenly thrown off into the cracked palm of red earth. The car shakes and groans and bumps and soon you are used to the dance.
You become confused when Muchiedza Primary School, your destination, fails to appear on your radar soon enough and you stop to ask passer-byes. It’s near. Just after the bend. You are told and resume your journey.
Finally the bend ends and there smack down in the middle of heat and dust and poverty is a ‘refugee’ camp filled with a raucous group of school children running around.
Muchiedza Primary School has an enrolment of 667 pupils and 17 teachers. This afternoon they are all outside and dusty brown and white.
Its midmorning but there is nothing mid or halfway about the dirty they have. They are clad in tattered shoes with poking toes and a mixture in uniform colours that confuses as to the true uniform colour.
Most of them if not all are already brown and white with dust. However they don’t go about weighed down by the sickness of their poverty. The palpable and gross indecency of the bleakness of their future even from the morning of their childhoods is only apparent to
foreigners such as you.
Tomorrow looks dark and heavy from their today, you think. Their classrooms are an assortment of derelict tobacco barns and old cold-rooms that have been converted ingeniously into classrooms but still failing to hide the desperate clawing for decency, which they fail to find.
A dog lies under a desk in one of the classrooms and does not run away when people enter. It just raises its face and scans them for danger or food. Finding none it rests back upon the floor.
The headmaster says at one time their pass rate reached 87percent but today it stands at 37 percent because they don’t have books, furniture and infrastructure. Some school children walk 5 kilometres to this hovel, and 5 kilometres back to their decrepit homes.
Here they glean minuscule bits of education which they hope to drag them out to somewhere where dogs don’t sleep in classrooms. Watching them you doubt if any such factor exists here.
You have come with Delta, the largest beverage maker in the country and your arrival has sparked off excitement. They don’t know what to expect but your cleanliness raises hopes high.
Delta has come to officially hand over a classroom block that it funded to be built together with some Blair toilets. Painted yellow and black the buildings are iridescent objects of hope in a valley of despair.
The beauty is that none of the school children seems to notice where they are stuck.
The children frolick around in tatters, dancing to the blaring music played by the Delta DJ. The play clucks. They jiggle their tiny bottoms. They dance museve. They are happy and it’s only you noticing the poverty.
They have become so conditioned to it they no longer see it. After the official mumbo jumbo and every other ego that thinks it matters has been massaged it’s time for eating.
The whole school lines up in a winding queer leading up to the room from which each child is handed a bottle of Maheu. Shumba Maheu.
The beaming smiles they have as they walk away says much that is best left unsaid. To describe it is to unmask the holiness of the human creature and the queer sensations that sustain it in today’s life.
The falsely manufactured reasons that prop up sanity in a sea of madness-inducing scenarios. The parents are lined later in the sun and receive each a can of drink.
Being among the invited guest you have been spirited away into the new classroom block and from there had chips, a boiled egg, salad and a can of drink with a hovering dish for me.
You feel ashamed at your gluttonous self for having all this.
The event ends and Delta takes down its banners and the DJ turns of the radio.
You climb back into the car and start the winding journey through death.
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