By Wisdom Mumera
The anger of the weak has shrillness to its sound. It grates against the grain of convention. And here convention is not your standard bible of morals and social etiquette. It’s a new standard governing how the upper reaches of the corporate world lives.
Their convention has been allowing them to smile at you when you trudged in with a plaintive gasp for an added dew of more money.
“We shall work upon it and get back to you”.
Their voices are cultured and trained to weaken your cannibalistic anger. That anger which the night before lied to you that you would take nothing except money in the account for an answer.
Told to go back and wait by a caffeinated voice, you walk out floating on a wave of confusion, a voice at the center of your balding head whispering that somehow you have been cheated.
Yet the voice that gave the promise was so mellowed. So cultured. So steady. So truthful that you felt guilty to have gone in there with such a satanic anger clouding you.
They understand the gigantic need that requires such gross salaries in a parched time amongst the bleeding rest of you all. That you are dangling on a limb, panting for the next droplet of a scratched salary, does not matter to the iron conscience they live according to.
Because you are down here, living according to the World Bank statistic of a dollar per day, you cannot understand it, the need for US$200 000 dollars per month. Your mind can’t accommodate such a scary pay level. That’s why something in you wants to run into the street and shout a demonstration against all these infidels.
The American has said that 1% of the population is dining on the larger 95% percent of the national cake. The Chinese also wailed about another great disparity. And now it’s you, you and your cholera, your AIDS, your cheating husbands and raucous wives. You and your unexplored minerals safely lost in the vast jungles of fastly depleted forests.
It’s your turn. You and your never ending summits and conventions and assemblies and memorandums of understanding.
You and your politicians bellowing renaissance every electoral round, dangling sacks of maize and cassava and fertilizer and sex in silence.
Its time to suffer the consequences of your freedom. It is time to lick the glorious sweat that flowed down the furrowed cheeks of the heroic dead. Who died envisioning a new country?
A new country that got lost somewhere along the rush for the polls. A new country that got lost during the stampede for the most lucrative post in the new government.
Your cry for justice is shrill really. It grates against the standards of the day. The new day has bellicose chiefs who have to amass much.
You are the lost fragments of dead specie, and your place is at the museum where tourists come with expensive cameras, snapping shots for their catalogues. Your place is at the hotel door where you frolick up and down in sweaty gyrations living the art of your long gone ancestors.
The CEO wanted more money because he usually flies to America where he needs money to buy expensive gifts for his two children.
What do you need it for when you can walk through the foliage, past the flowing sewage, down the potholed gulleys and up the hillocks of smashed illegal houses, until you reach your workplace in Mbare?
The CEO has a bevy of small houses to grease so their illicit intercourse can be smoother, (what with that big belly). What do you need it for when the nearest red-mouthed whore at the small stores costs only a paltry sum to blow away in frenzied jerks behind the damn shops themselves?
Your children are used to sleeping on empty and dreaming of tomorrow in velvet colors all without a midnight scream. The children of the CEO can’t manage a wink before a desert of ice cream and strawberries to oil down a whole gourmet’s list.
Your complaint is shrill to their ears because your worlds are far apart. Your battle should not be one to downsize them to your level of paltry peanuts. Your aim should not be to empty their pockets.
Your mission should be to get to their levels and steal more than they ever did. That would be equal rights.
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