by Constance Manika
– Zimbabwe –
In my last article I wrote that the situation here is so dire that many Zimbabweans, including myself, can now only pray for divine intervention to rid us of this dictator, Robert Mugabe.
Based on events that are currently unfolding, I think God may be answering our prayers in a way that we couldn’t have ever imagined!
I reported previously that by using former war veterans to help him garner support, Mugabe was “endorsed” as the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front’s (ZANU PF) candidate for the harmonized March elections.
Mugabe joined the presidential and parliamentary elections through a constitutional amendment. In previous years these two elections were held two years apart. When I vote in March I will drop two ballot papers: one for president and one for a legislator or member of parliament.
The “harmonization” is part of Mugabe’s exit plan; after these elections are held simultaneously, he can elect his trusted party members into ministerial posts and then retire. By doing so, Mugabe will have ensured that he will not be prosecuted for crimes against humanity.
That is of course, assuming he wins the election. But then we all know he will win, because he rigs such things all the time. Otherwise how would you explain why someone who is sleeping on an empty stomach or has been beaten by police or the army during a demonstration or had their home burned to the ground by Mugabe’s youth, voting for him? It just doesn’t make any sense and I don’t think Zimbabweans are that foolish.
Our votes have been stolen over the years because Mugabe has manipulated all the state entities that are supposed to ensure free and fair elections. Mugabe is the only presidential candidate of his party. He was elected unopposed at their congress in December because people within the party were afraid to pit anybody else against him.
Though there were divisions within the party over his decision to not retire, the opposition chickened out at the last minute. After seeing the masses of war veterans and ZANU PF supporters who turned out at the staged Million Men and Women March in support Mugabe’s candidacy, they were not sure they wanted to revolt. In a way, he stole the vote because he intimidated people into supporting him; the veterans who marched supposedly in support of Mugabe were bought, since he paid them money, transported them and gave them a huge feast afterwards.
We all thought it was over and that we would be stuck with this despotic leader until, well, without sounding callous – his death. But news that the ZANU PF old guard is planning to break away from Mugabe has given many of us here hope.
This story was first broken by an editor of the business weekly known as the Financial Gazette, which is believed to have links to Mugabe’s Central Intelligence Department.
When I first read the article, I dismissed it as a piece of propaganda, thinking that ZANU PF was just trying to make the opposition relax. However as more and more papers and international agencies continue to pick up the story, I cannot help but think that just maybe this is the only hope Zimbabweans have of removing Mugabe.
According to these speculative reports, some ZANU PF stalwarts are plotting a break away to field a candidate from within the party to challenge Mugabe.
They are still debating on the name they will use but the latest suggestion has been that they will call themselves PF ZANU. It is also suggested that the united front will include some senior ZANU PF officials and former cabinet ministers who are unhappy with Mugabe’s policies.
As you must already know, since the late 1990s, under Mugabe’s leadership our once vibrant and promising economy has been on a meltdown. We are struggling with shortages of foreign currency, basic commodities, fuel and water. Industry has been affected by constant power blackouts. The state of the health, education and farming sectors is in shambles. It is a tragic story about Zimbabwe and how Mugabe has ruined every aspect of our lives.
And I tell you the situation is worsening with each passing day. I have actually lost parts of this article three times since I started working on it four days ago because of the unscheduled power cuts.
Local reports say the break away party will be headed by former finance minister, Simba Makoni, who is said to be “accepted” by the international community. I don’t really know because many of us here are desperate and perhaps gullible in our effort to remove Mugabe, but they say Makoni has a “clean record” and is of “sober habits”.
All these attributes to Makoni’s character are good qualities in a leader and supporters of this split say they have confidence that Makoni will return Zimbabwe to prosperity.
Other than Makoni’s backing from the international community, he is also supported by retired army general, Solomon Mujuru, husband to the country’s second vice president, Joice, or Teurairopa (meaning “sheds blood”) as she was known during the war. (During the struggle for independence, people gave each other war names to inspire them to fight colonialism; it is said that Joice was a very brave fighter who undertook really dangerous assignments to defeat the British.) She is also a senior member of the ZANU PF party.
Solomon Mujuru was the first commander of the Zimbabwean army after the country attained independence from British rule in 1980 and still commands a lot of respect within the army. He is also being assisted by academic Ibbo Mandaza, war veteran Alfred Mhanda and retired army major Kudzai Mbudzi in mobilizing support for the split. All three are angry with Mugabe and ZANU PF for one reason or the other. One could say they are the best people to lead this revolt.
Mbudzi was suspended from the Zanu PF Masvingo provincial executive committee last month for deriding war veteran leader Jabulani Sibanda. Mbudzi was irked by Sibanda’s involvement in the solidarity marches to support Mugabe as the 2008 presidential candidate and openly attacked him, saying he was an “over-zealous, butt licking criminal”. This drew Mugabe’s wrath and triggered the subsequent party suspension.
Mhanda is a veteran who fought very closely alongside Mugabe during the war and is angry over the treatment that ex-combatants received from Mugabe after the war. Mhanda has spoken often and openly about his anger. He feels that Mugabe forgot about those who fought in the struggle and left them to languish in poverty without any assistance from the state to reintegrate into society.
Many veterans who left for war abandoned their education to fight, driven by the desire to free their country. After returning from battle a few managed to be absorbed into the army and the police force. A few made it into politics, but many found they had no educational qualifications to find other jobs and without state assistance, they found life very difficult. Bitter and betrayed, they returned to their rural areas, resigned to lives of poverty and destitution.
It was in 1997 (17 years after returning from war) that those who were still alive finally got war reparations for injuries and emotional trauma. This is Mhanda’s bone of contention.
Then Mandaza lost two of his papers, The Sunday Mirror and the Daily Mirror to Mugabe’s Central Intelligence Operatives (CIOs). Using a frontman, the CIO had secretly acquired some financial stakes in the newspapers.
Mandaza fell out with the government after his papers published some damning articles about Mugabe’s Operation Murambatsvina. Mandaza allegedly assisted a special UN envoy, Anna Tibaijuka, who had been sent to the country to assess the situation and to write the report that ultimately implicated the government.
One editorial published in the Sunday Mirror read,
“The opposition MDC has argued that the government’s main reason for Murambatsvina is to punish the urban poor for voting for the opposition during the March parliamentary elections. The cities are traditionally MDC strongholds…There has been speculation that the government is aiming to create a situation where the MDC has no choice but to merge with the ruling party.
“Commentators also argue that by forcing urban voters out into the rural areas by destroying their homes, the cities will be de-populated of MDC supporters thus enabling the government to re-populate the urban areas with Zanu-PF supporters. Further, MDC supporters will be forced to return to live in areas traditionally viewed as Zanu-PF strongholds.”
The board then came after Mandaza with trumped up charges of financial mismanagement and axed him. The CIO then took over the papers and ran them to collapse, leaving journalists jobless.
These are backgrounds of the men who are out to defeat Mugabe.
Although Mugabe’s spokesperson has already come out and dismissed the reports of a split as “a British sponsored coalition of the bitter,” I can tell you many people here are embracing this idea. It is the talk of the town in bars, hair salons, commuter trains, public taxis, buses, workplaces — just about everywhere.
For years Makoni has been touted as a possible successor to Mugabe, but many of his critics believe that he is a “political lightweight,” not capable of removing his combative opponent.
I hasten to tell you, this is not the first time that ZANU PF politicians have tried to revolt against Mugabe. In 2004 some party heavyweights led by the then information minister, Jonathan Moyo, tried to oppose Mugabe’s decision to appoint Joice Mujuru to the post of vice president.
As soon as Mugabe got wind of what has became known as the “Tsholotsho debacle” (named for the location where the plot was created), he fired Moyo. Six provincial chairmen (including Jabulani Sibanda) who had taken part also lost their jobs and were seriously victimized afterwards.
Unlike Sibanda, who managed to force himself back into the party, the other five have not been re-admitted. They have lost all the privileges they once enjoyed including access to state tenders and loans with ridiculously low interest rates from various state entities. Their party vehicles were taken away. Their access to free fuel and grain were also taken away. Imagine waking up one day and realizing that you have no car and have to walk like everybody else. You wake up and you have no bodyguard to salute you nor aides to wipe your shoes clean.
The night that Moyo was fired, the CIO came and repossessed his ministerial Mercedes Benz and ordered him out of the state house. Moyo later managed to seek reprieve regarding his accommodations in court.
This is what Mugabe is capable of.
Mugabe has a long history of being ruthless and I urge all those who are plotting and planning to be very careful. He has never allowed anything or anyone to stand in the way of his political ambitions.
We must not forget the assassinations of Josiah Tongogara, Herbert Chitepo, two Zanla commanders who died during the war, leaving Mugabe to take over the party presidency. And numerous other mysterious deaths have also occurred post-independence, of politicians within his own party who appeared as possible threats to Mugabe.
Remember the robust leaders, Border Gezi and Moven Mahachi (once a security minister), who died in car accidents while their aides mysteriously survived? Remember retired Air Marshall Josiah Tungamirai, who was poisoned? Tungamirai, as his wife later revealed, sent his aide to buy him a packet of chips and after eating them his health was never the same. He died a few months later from kidney failure and told his wife before dying that he suspected he had been poisoned.
Those determined to break away must remember all this and be very wary of Mugabe’s ruthless nature.
Will this be the long-awaited way out for us? Perhaps… I will keep you posted.
About the Author
Constance Manika is a journalist who works for the independent press in Zimbabwe. She writes under this pseudonym to escape prosecution from a government whose onslaught and level of intolerance to journalists in the independent press is well documented.
In Meltdown in Zimbabwe, an exclusive and ongoing series at The WIP, Constance provides continued on-the-ground reporting from her embattled country where Zimbabweans struggle daily for democracy, economic sustainability and human rights.
You are a desperate MDC supporter, which is why you make all those schizophrenic projections. March will come, the White-farmer/Anglo-american puppet party will be defeated one more time..and not only will you feel more hopeless, you will also have to live with that reality.
Zimbabwe has transcended neocolonial trickery and arm-twisting. We have survived a decade of no balance of payments, no world bank loans, no IMF help, no Africa development bank banking, no HIV assistance- thanks to the Sanctions enshrined in America’s ZIDERA.
Our resolution is as hardened as your masters’ determination to safeguard settler monopoly of our resources.
Puppets like you are just that. Uneducated, misguided, little hodlums. dancing to tunes played by the whitemen.
Shame on you for your thick headedness. Judging from the way you defend Mugabe’s failures and the untold suffering he has caused Zimbabwe you must be the biggest fool in the world.
You boast that you have survived a decade of no balance of payments, no world bank loans, no IMF help, no loans from SADC (that what you think!!) and no HIV assistance but have you ever wondered how all that has caused Zimbabweans suffering. The way you just talk shows that your head is full of nothing but water and you are so out of touch with reality.
You are probably one of those people who killed white farmers for land which you cant utilise, one of those people who gets free diesel meant for genuine farmers and sell it on the black market and buy expensive, or one of those greedy ZANU PF supporters who have wrecked everything in our economy.
You think you have beaten neo colonialism when your inflation is standing at 150 000 percent and you recently printed a 10 million dollar note. You call that victory?? You just go and get your head examine. You are a shame to the woman who brought you into this world.
Have you ever slept on any stomach yourself, have you ever watched a relative, friend, a mother, a sister, a brother, waste away because she had failed to access ARVs while you boast that you have survived a decade without HIV funding. Have you ever been beaten and left for dead up by the police or the army at a demonstration.
Did you sleep in the open after your house was destroyed during operation Murambatsvina? Did you see women and children sleep in the open, in the winter cold after their houses were destroyed by your Mugabe? Did you see people close to you being buried alive when your Mugabe was killing innocent civilians during Gukurahundi.
As I said you are a shame to the womb that bore a heartless monster like you. You make me sick.
Thank you for continuing to speak from your perspective, Constance, about the situation in Zimbabwe. I look forward to hearing more from you as the situation there unfolds.
Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing spoke with great force of the crisis in Zimbabwe in December. Here is her lecture, with its focus on the, in all senses, starving and committed young women of Zimbabwe. If you choose to look at this catastrophe from the point of view of zim-nationalism, you still cannot turn a blind eye to the suffering.
On not winning the Nobel Prize
I am standing in a doorway looking through clouds of blowing dust to where I am told there is still uncut forest. Yesterday I drove through miles of stumps, and charred remains of fires where, in ’56, there was the most wonderful forest I have ever seen, all now destroyed. People have to eat. They have to get fuel for fires.
This is north-west Zimbabwe in the early eighties, and I am visiting a friend who was a teacher in a school in London. He is here “to help Africa,” as we put it. He is a gently idealistic soul and what he found in this school shocked him into a depression, from which it was hard to recover. This school is like every other built after Independence. It consists of four large brick rooms side by side, put straight into the dust, one two three four, with a half room at one end, which is the library. In these classrooms are blackboards, but my friend keeps the chalks in his pocket, as otherwise they would be stolen. There is no atlas or globe in the school, no textbooks, no exercise books, or biros. In the library there are no books of the kind the pupils would like to read, but only tomes from American universities, hard even to lift, rejects from white libraries, or novels with titles like Weekend in Paris and Felicity Finds Love.
There is a goat trying to find sustenance in some aged grass. The headmaster has embezzled the school funds and is suspended, arousing the question familiar to all of us but usually in more august contexts: How is it these people behave like this when they must know everyone is watching them?
My friend doesn’t have any money because everyone, pupils and teachers, borrow from him when he is paid and will probably never pay him back. The pupils range from six to twenty-six, because some who did not get schooling as children are here to make it up. Some pupils walk many miles every morning, rain or shine and across rivers. They cannot do homework because there is no electricity in the villages, and you can’t study easily by the light of a burning log. The girls have to fetch water and cook before they set off for school and when they get back.
As I sit with my friend in his room, people drop in shyly, and everyone begs for books. “Please send us books when you get back to London,” one man says. “They taught us to read but we have no books.” Everybody I met, everyone, begged for books.
I was there some days. The dust blew. The pumps had broken and the women were having to fetch water from the river. Another idealistic teacher from England was rather ill after seeing what this “school” was like.
On the last day they slaughtered the goat. They cut it into bits and cooked it in a great tin. This was the much anticipated end-of-term feast: boiled goat and porridge. I drove away while it was still going on, back through the charred remains and stumps of the forest.
I do not think many of the pupils of this school will get prizes.
The next day I am to give a talk at a school in North London, a very good school, whose name we all know. It is a school for boys, with beautiful buildings and gardens.
These children here have a visit from some well known person every week, and it is in the nature of things that these may be fathers, relatives, even mothers of the pupils. A visit from a celebrity is not unusual for them.
As I talk to them, the school in the blowing dust of north-west Zimbabwe is in my mind, and I look at the mildly expectant English faces in front of me and try to tell them about what I have seen in the last week. Classrooms without books, without textbooks, or an atlas, or even a map pinned to a wall. A school where the teachers beg to be sent books to tell them how to teach, they being only eighteen or nineteen themselves. I tell these English boys how everybody begs for books: “Please send us books.” I am sure that anyone who has ever given a speech will know that moment when the faces you are looking at are blank. Your listeners cannot hear what you are saying, there are no images in their minds to match what you are telling them – in this case the story of a school standing in dust clouds, where water is short, and where the end of term treat is a just-killed goat cooked in a great pot.
Is it really so impossible for these privileged students to imagine such bare poverty?
I do my best. They are polite.
I’m sure that some of them will one day win prizes.
Then, the talk is over. Afterwards I ask the teachers how the library is, and if the pupils read. In this privileged school, I hear what I always hear when I go to such schools and even universities.
“You know how it is,” one of the teacher’s says. “A lot of the boys have never read at all, and the library is only half used.”
Yes, indeed we do know how it is. All of us.
We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.
What has happened to us is an amazing invention — computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked, What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print? In the same way, we never thought to ask, How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by this internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc.
Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education, and our great store of literature. Of course, we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning. But it is on record that working men and women longed for books, and this is evidenced by the founding of working men’s libraries and institutes, the colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Reading, books, used to be part of a general education.
Older people, talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education reading was, because the young ones know so much less. And if children cannot read, it is because they have not read.
We all know this sad story.
But we do not know the end of it.
We think of the old adage, “Reading maketh a full man” – and forgetting about jokes to do with over-eating – reading makes a woman and a man full of information, of history, of all kinds of knowledge.
But we in the West are not the only people in the world. Not long ago a friend who had been in Zimbabwe told me about a village where people had not eaten for three days, but they were still talking about books and how to get them, about education.
I belong to an organisation which started out with the intention of getting books into the villages. There was a group of people who in another connection had travelled Zimbabwe at its grass roots. They told me that the villages, unlike what is reported, are full of intelligent people, teachers retired, teachers on leave, children on holidays, old people. I myself paid for a little survey to discover what people in Zimbabwe want to read, and found the results were the same as those of a Swedish survey I had not known about. People want to read the same kinds of books that we in
Europe want to read – novels of all kinds, science fiction, poetry, detective stories, plays, and do-it-yourself books, like how to open a bank account. All of Shakespeare too. A problem with finding books for villagers is that they don’t know what is available, so a set book, like the Mayor ofCasterbridge, becomes popular simply because it just happens to be there. Animal Farm, for obvious reasons, is the most popular of all novels.
Our organisation was helped from the very start by Norway, and then by Sweden. Without this kind of support our supplies of books would have dried up. We got books from wherever we could. Remember, a good paperback from England costs a month’s wages in Zimbabwe: that was before Mugabe’s reign of terror. Now with inflation, it would cost several years’ wages. But having taken a box of books out to a village – and remember there is a terrible shortage of petrol – I can tell you that the box was greeted with tears. The library may be a plank on bricks under a tree. And within a week there will be literacy classes – people who can read teaching those who can’t, citizenship classes – and in one remote village, since there were no novels written in the language Tonga, a couple of lads sat down to write novels in Tonga. There are six or so main languages in Zimbabwe and there are novels in all of them: violent, incestuous, full of crime and murder.
It is said that a people gets the government it deserves, but I do not think it is true of Zimbabwe. And we must remember that this respect and hunger for books comes, not from Mugabe’s regime, but from the one before it, the whites. It is an astonishing phenomenon, this hunger for books, and it can be seen everywhere from Kenya down to the Cape of Good Hope.
This links improbably with a fact: I was brought up in what was virtually a mud hut, thatched. This kind of house has been built always, everywhere there are reeds or grass, suitable mud, poles for walls. Saxon England for example. The one I was brought up in had four rooms, one beside another, and it was full of books. Not only did my parents take books from England to Africa, but my mother ordered books by post from England for her children. Books arrived in great brown paper parcels, and they were the joy of my young life. A mud hut, but full of books.
Even today I get letters from people living in a village that might not have electricity or running water, just like our family in our elongated mud hut. “I shall be a writer too,” they say, “because I’ve the same kind of house you lived in.”
But here is the difficulty, no?
Writing, writers, do not come out of houses without books.
There is the gap. There is the difficulty.
I have been looking at the speeches by some of your recent prizewinners. Take the magnificent Pamuk. He said his father had 500 books. His talent did not come out of the air, he was connected with the great tradition.
Take V.S. Naipaul. He mentions that the Indian Vedas were close behind the memory of his family. His father encouraged him to write, and when he got to England he would visit the British Library. So he was close to the great tradition.
Let us take John Coetzee. He was not only close to the great tradition, he was the tradition: he taught literature in Cape Town. And how sorry I am that I was never in one of his classes, taught by that wonderfully brave, bold mind.
In order to write, in order to make literature, there must be a close connection with libraries, books, with the Tradition.
I have a friend from Zimbabwe, a Black writer. He taught himself to read from the labels on jam jars, the labels on preserved fruit cans. He was brought up in an area I have driven through, an area for rural blacks. The earth is grit and gravel, there are low sparse bushes. The huts are poor, nothing like the well cared-for huts of the better off. A school – but like one I have described. He found a discarded children’s encyclopaedia on a rubbish heap and taught himself from that.
On Independence in 1980 there was a group of good writers in Zimbabwe, truly a nest of singing birds. They were bred in old Southern Rhodesia, under the whites – the mission schools, the better schools. Writers are not made in Zimbabwe. Not easily, not under Mugabe.
All the writers travelled a difficult road to literacy, let alone to becoming writers. I would say learning to read from the printed labels on jam jars and discarded encyclopaedias was not uncommon. And we are talking about people hungering for standards of education beyond them, living in huts with many children – an overworked mother, a fight for food and clothing.
Yet despite these difficulties, writers came into being. And we should also remember that this was Zimbabwe, conquered less than a hundred years before. The grandparents of these people might have been storytellers working in the oral tradition. In one or two generations there was the transition from stories remembered and passed on, to print, to books. What an achievement.
Books, literally wrested from rubbish heaps and the detritus of the white man’s world. But a sheaf of paper is one thing, a published book quite another. I have had several accounts sent to me of the publishing scene in Africa. Even in more privileged places like North Africa, with its different tradition, to talk of a publishing scene is a dream of possibilities.
Here I am talking about books never written, writers that could not make it because the publishers are not there. Voices unheard. It is not possible to estimate this great waste of talent, of potential. But even before that stage of a book’s creation which demands a publisher, an advance, encouragement, there is something else lacking.
Writers are often asked, How do you write? With a wordprocessor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand? But the essential question is, “Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write?” Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas – inspiration.
If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn.
When writers talk to each other, what they discuss is always to do with this imaginative space, this other time. “Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?”
Let us now jump to an apparently very different scene. We are in London, one of the big cities. There is a new writer. We cynically enquire, Is she good-looking? If this is a man, charismatic? Handsome? We joke but it is not a joke.
This new find is acclaimed, possibly given a lot of money. The buzzing of paparazzi begins in their poor ears. They are feted, lauded, whisked about the world. Us old ones, who have seen it all, are sorry for this neophyte, who has no idea of what is really happening.
He, she, is flattered, pleased.
But ask in a year’s time what he or she is thinking – I’ve heard them: “This is the worst thing that could have happened to me,” they say.
Some much publicised new writers haven’t written again, or haven’t written what they wanted to, meant to.
And we, the old ones, want to whisper into those innocent ears. “Have you still got your space? Your soul, your own and necessary place where your own voices may speak to you, you alone, where you may dream. Oh, hold onto it, don’t let it go.”
My mind is full of splendid memories of Africa which I can revive and look at whenever I want. How about those sunsets, gold and purple and orange, spreading across the sky at evening. How about butterflies and moths and bees on the aromatic bushes of the Kalahari? Or, sitting on the pale grassy banks of the Zambesi, the water dark and glossy, with all the birds of Africa darting about. Yes, elephants, giraffes, lions and the rest, there were plenty of those, but how about the sky at night, still unpolluted, black and wonderful, full of restless stars.
There are other memories too. A young African man, eighteen perhaps, in tears, standing in what he hopes will be his “library.” A visiting American seeing that his library had no books, had sent a crate of them. The young man had taken each one out, reverently, and wrapped them in plastic. “But,” we say, “these books were sent to be read, surely?” “No,” he replies, “they will get dirty, and where will I get any more?”
This young man wants us to send him books from England to use as teaching guides.
“I only did four years in senior school,” he says, “but they never taught me to teach.”
I have seen a teacher in a school where there were no textbooks, not even a chalk for the blackboard. He taught his class of six to eighteen year olds by moving stones in the dust, chanting “Two times two is …” and so on. I have seen a girl, perhaps not more than twenty, also lacking textbooks, exercise books, biros, seen her teach the A B C by scratching the letters in the dirt with a stick, while the sun beat down and the dust swirled.
We are witnessing here that great hunger for education in Africa, anywhere in the Third World, or whatever we call parts of the world where parents long to get an education for their children which will take them out of poverty.
I would like you to imagine yourselves somewhere in Southern Africa, standing in an Indian store, in a poor area, in a time of bad drought. There is a line of people, mostly women, with every kind of container for water. This store gets a bowser of precious water every afternoon from the town, and here the people wait.
The Indian is standing with the heels of his hands pressed down on the counter, and he is watching a black woman, who is bending over a wadge of paper that looks as if it has been torn from a book. She is reading Anna Karenin.
She is reading slowly, mouthing the words. It looks a difficult book. This is a young woman with two little children clutching at her legs. She is pregnant. The Indian is distressed, because the young woman’s headscarf, which should be white, is yellow with dust. Dust lies between her breasts and on her arms. This man is distressed because of the lines of people, all thirsty. He doesn’t have enough water for them. He is angry because he knows there are people dying out there, beyond the dust clouds. His older brother had been here holding the fort, but he had said he needed a break, had gone into town, really rather ill, because of the drought.
This man is curious. He says to the young woman, “What are you reading?”
“It is about Russia,” says the girl.
“Do you know where Russia is?” He hardly knows himself.
The young woman looks straight at him, full of dignity, though her eyes are red from dust, “I was best in the class. My teacher said I was best.”
The young woman resumes her reading. She wants to get to the end of the paragraph.
The Indian looks at the two little children and reaches for some Fanta, but the mother says, “Fanta makes them thirstier.”
The Indian knows he shouldn’t do this but he reaches down to a great plastic container beside him, behind the counter, and pours out two mugs of water, which he hands to the children. He watches while the girl looks at her children drinking, her mouth moving. He gives her a mug of water. It hurts him to see her drinking it, so painfully thirsty is she.
Now she hands him her own plastic water container, which he fills. The young woman and the children watch him closely so that he doesn’t spill any.
She is bending again over the book. She reads slowly. The paragraph fascinates her and she reads it again.
“Varenka, with her white kerchief over her black hair, surrounded by the children and gaily and good-humouredly busy with them, and at the same visibly excited at the possibility of an offer of marriage from a man she cared for, looked very attractive. Koznyshev walked by her side and kept casting admiring glances at her. Looking at her, he recalled all the delightful things he had heard from her lips, all the good he knew about her, and became more and more conscious that the feeling he had for her was something rare, something he had felt but once before, long, long ago, in his early youth. The joy of being near her increased step by step, and at last reached such a point that, as he put a huge birch mushroom with a slender stalk and up-curling top into her basket, he looked into her eyes and, noting the flush of glad and frightened agitation that suffused her face, he was confused himself, and in silence gave her a smile that said too much.”
This lump of print is lying on the counter, together with some old copies of magazines, some pages of newspapers with pictures of girls in bikinis.
It is time for the woman to leave the haven of the Indian store, and set off back along the four miles to her village. Outside, the lines of waiting women clamour and complain. But still the Indian lingers. He knows what it will cost this girl – going back home, with the two clinging children. He would give her the piece of prose that so fascinates her, but he cannot really believe this splinter of a girl with her great belly can really understand it.
Why is perhaps a third of Anna Karenin here on this counter in a remote Indian store? It is like this.
A certain high official, from the United Nations as it happens, bought a copy of this novel in a bookshop before he set out on his journey to cross several oceans and seas. On the plane, settled in his business class seat, he tore the book into three parts. He looked around his fellow passengers as he did this, knowing he would see looks of shock, curiosity, but some of amusement. When he was settled, his seat belt tight, he said aloud to whomever could hear, “I always do this when I’ve a long trip. You don’t want to have to hold up some heavy great book.” The novel was a paperback, but, true, it is a long book. This man is well used to people listening when he spoke. “I always do this, travelling,” he confided. “Travelling at all these days, is hard enough.” And as soon as people were settling down, he opened his part of Anna Karenin, and read. When people looked his way, curiously or not, he confided in them. “No, it really is the only way to travel.” He knew the novel, liked it, and this original mode of reading did add spice to what was after all a well known book.
When he reached the end of a section of the book, he called the air hostess, and sent the chapters back to his secretary, travelling in the cheaper seats. This caused much interest, condemnation, certainly curiosity, every time a section of the great Russian novel arrived, mutilated but readable, in the back part of the plane. Altogether, this clever way of reading Anna Karenin makes an impression, and probably no one there would forget it.
Meanwhile, in the Indian store, the young woman is holding on to the counter, her little children clinging to her skirts. She wears jeans, since she is a modern woman, but over them she has put on the heavy woollen skirt, part of the traditional dress of her people: her children can easily cling onto its thick folds.
She sends a thankful look to the Indian, whom she knew liked her and was sorry for her, and she steps out into the blowing clouds.
The children are past crying, and their throats are full of dust.
This was hard, oh yes, it was hard, this stepping, one foot after another, through the dust that lay in soft deceiving mounds under her feet. Hard, but she was used to hardship, was she not? Her mind was on the story she had been reading. She was thinking, She is just like me, in her white headscarf, and she is looking after children, too. I could be her, that Russian girl. And the man there, he loves her and will ask her to marry him. She had not finished more than that one paragraph. Yes, she thinks, a man will come for me, and take me away from all this, take me and the children, yes, he will love me and look after me.
She steps on. The can of water is heavy on her shoulders. On she goes. The children can hear the water slopping about. Half way she stops, sets down the can.
Her children are whimpering and touching it. She thinks that she cannot open it, because dust would blow in. There is no way she can open the can until she gets home.
“Wait,” she tells her children, “wait.”
She has to pull herself together and go on.
She thinks, My teacher said there is a library, bigger than the supermarket, a big building and it is full of books. The young woman is smiling as she moves on, the dust blowing in her face. I am clever, she thinks. Teacher said I am clever. The cleverest in the school – she said I was. My children will be clever, like me. I will take them to the library, the place full of books, and they will go to school, and they will be teachers – my teacher told me I could be a teacher. My children will live far from here, earning money. They will live near the big library and enjoy a good life.
You may ask how that piece of the Russian novel ever ended up on that counter in the Indian store?
It would make a pretty story. Perhaps someone will tell it.
On goes that poor girl, held upright by thoughts of the water she will give her children once home, and drink a little of herself. On she goes, through the dreaded dusts of an African drought.
We are a jaded lot, we in our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency.
We have a treasure-house of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come upon it. A treasure. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be.
We own a legacy of languages, poems, histories, and it is not one that will ever be exhausted. It is there, always.
We have a bequest of stories, tales from the old storytellers, some of whose names we know, but some not. The storytellers go back and back, to a clearing in the forest where a great fire burns, and the old shamans dance and sing, for our heritage of stories began in fire, magic, the spirit world. And that is where it is held, today.
Ask any modern storyteller and they will say there is always a moment when they are touched with fire, with what we like to call inspiration, and this goes back and back to the beginning of our race, to the great winds that shaped us and our world.
The storyteller is deep inside every one of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is ravaged by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise. But the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us -for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.
That poor girl trudging through the dust, dreaming of an education for her children, do we think that we are better than she is – we, stuffed full of food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities?
I think it is that girl, and the women who were talking about books and an education when they had not eaten for three days, that may yet define us.
Constance, thank you for your contributions to The Wip and the world– for informing us about what is happening in Zimbabwe. The recent response to your piece shows the level of ignorance and denial that still exist amongst Mugabe’s supporters. It is striking to see just how little the world changes, how little we learn from historical failures and that greed and despotism still persist in the twenty-first century. That said, it is inspiring to read your work. Keep reporting, keep writing and informing, despite the power failures and the negative criticism. Zimbabwe needs your voice.