Taken from scenes of my life. To prove a point. [Translation: heavy doses of irony]
It's Paris. The sun has long set, the stars are struggling to make themselves seen through a veil of fog so persistent you hardly notice it's there except when you see the pollution warnings in one of the daily's. Add that to the dazzling gaze of the lights and hardly any stars can be seen at all. Not that you are looking for them. You are tired. So tired. You woke up before dawn to catch the train to school. It's now almost midnight and you are only leaving work. You are running to catch the train home. Everyone seems to be running. Running to work the night shift. Running to relieve the baby sitter. Running to keep ahead of the looming tide of bankruptcy. Running past the white women sitting by the sides of the Metro stations with plastic coffee cups in one hand extended in a plea for anything to eat. Running past the dignified old blue eyed lady sitting wrapped in aluminium foil to keep her warm from the assault Winter will launch all throughout the night. You are all running so fast you can't even smell the dank urine that permeates some of the seedier Metro stations like the breath of a dead demon forgotten in the darker reaches of hell.
You feel like God. Standing on the edge of the mountain, you look down at the city cupped in the warm embrace of two oceans. She is beautiful. Beautiful in a way that you had never expected it would be. No wonder those white men had come here to fight wars for her land. The air is crisp and fresh against your face, the delicate scent of the mountain flowers adding to that heady feeling you have when you stand at great heights. You can see the Victoria and Albert Waterfront where you gazed at gadgets and fashion too expensive to even think about. Way on the other side is Carlton Beach with its white sand laid out like the carpet some sea god first steps on as they make their way onto land, make their way into Cape Town. Between here and there is a hodge podge of buildings, of homes of townships, alive in only the way South Africa is alive, only the way South Africa can dance for joy at Mandela's funeral. Only the way happiness makes it alive.
"It is the West!! It is the West!!!" He cries. His arms flap around him like the wings on a chicken, too stupid to know that they cannot fly. The West has done this. The West hates us. The West is evil incarnate, the West and its people the Whites. You look at him, half listening as you stare outside the glazed windows at the streets carpeted in purple blossoms, the Jacaranda's are in bloom again and Harare is as beautiful as a virgin awaiting her husband on her wedding night. But then again everything in this country is beautiful you think. From the Falls in the West that made Livingston stare in wonder and angels forget their hymns of praise. All the way to the East where mountains reach for heaven like fingers reaching up to scratch the underbelly of heaven. A land that is yours, a land that you call home. You turn your eye back to him. You feel like screaming at him:
Nothing is simple you fool. Half the problems you are screaming about are caused by you and your idiotic party.
Half the horrors you have listed come from the fact that there are not two brain cells to rub together to form the spark of an idea between the lot of you.
The remaining half of them because you never listen do you? When they told you devalue your currency or risk hyperinflation what did you choose? Print more money. When they told you invest in repairing energy infrastructure or risk power shortages what did you choose? Rural Electrification Programme. When they told you don't chase out skilled Farmers or risk a ruined agricultural sector what did you choose?
You don't even bother to answer the question.
This is the West you think as the bus drives along the highway. This is Merry Old England, the great colonizer who went through the world and arrogantly made it bow to her Queen, or King depending in which era you decided to pop out of your mothers womb. (Yes you Britannia who deigned to think herself superior to almost every country on earth, let us forget about the thousand or so years you were colonised by Rome. Not even Italy. Just Rome)
You look for the tell tale signs of superiority. Surely there somewhere amongst the sheep and cows grazing in the meadows of the Midlands there must be gremlins busy at work trying to trample all down. But all you can see are cows and sheep. Once or twice you see an old woman tottering on her stroller on her way to the grocery shop round the corner. Families walk through the greenland on their way to a picnic or church, heaven knows which of the two are holier persuasions. All you see is people where you had expected to see towering machines of war waiting to rain down fire and oppression, you press your face puzzled to the glass, its bitter coldness waking you up from your reverie just as the white hostess comes to your seat to ask if you want something to drink, "Sir" she adds in tones as respectful as if she was addressing a person who hadn't needed to save up for six months for this trip. You smile and decline. You wish you could ask her where they are hiding the guns aimed at Zimbabwe 24/7. Then you realise she probably doesn't even know how to spell Zimbabwe. Nor does she care.
They are a living, breathing mass. A swarming, convoluted being spread out over so many miles yet one. They are an angry being. An avenging thing. They scream and they shout, their rage as apparent to you, as potent as scorpions and just as lethal. No to Gays! No to Homosexuality! Gay Wedding is an Abomination! Everyone should be Born to a Man and A Woman! The Eiffel Tower stands as a silent witness to their anger. Is it conducting their anger straight to God? Can he hear them and reach down to stretch a finger to bless them all?
Yes?
Perhaps not.
It starts drizzling on them, just as they have drizzled on your illusions of them. Back home they are known as they pedarasts, the immoral West come to corrupt the pure African and his pure ways (forget the killing of twins at birth tradition, or the killing of Albino's for black magic, forget that Christianity is a Western import as well) yet here they are screaming blue murder at a government that is trying to legalize what is legal in South Africa. Something is wrong here you think. Something is very wrong. But you remember the headline about the gay couple who were attacked a few weeks ago in the centre of Paris for holding hands and you realise that in the end, nothing is as what it seems.
You dream you are in high school again. Mr Tshili using his wooden ruler to mark off the angles of the triangles he is drawing on the blackboard. The swift accuracy of his hand as it describes arcs with the compass and then joins them with the ruler is nothing less than witchcraft. You watch fascinated as you listen to his explanation, his voice as swift as the path of the chalk he holds in his hands. In your dreams you note his voice, it's perfectly accented tones rising and falling in the silent class of students. Discipline is taken for granted here. No children throwing paper at each other, no one dares to pull out a phone in class, no one even dreams of school shooters. 98%. That's the literacy rate in Zimbabwe your dreaming self remembers. And it starts in classes like this. Classes littered all over the country, in beautiful private schools and underneath trees, in low density government schools and township schools like the one you are in: all filled with hard working men and women imparting their knowledge and skill as selflessly as they can, considering. No wonder certain Austrailian Universities consider a ZIMSEC D as equivalent to a Cambridge C. You smile smugly to your self satisfied self in your dream. That will teach those Western idiots who ask you were you learnt to speak such good english as if schools are as foreign a concept as beggars to the streets of Paris.
Oops.
"People are people. I see very little difference between Romans, Greeks, Carthaginians, Syrians, or any other you care to name..." - Julius Caesar in The First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullough
"The problem with blaming the West for ALL our problems is the subtle implication that we are not clever enough to create problems of our own let alone solutions" - Bongani Ncube-Zikhali
It's Paris. The sun has long set, the stars are struggling to make themselves seen through a veil of fog so persistent you hardly notice it's there except when you see the pollution warnings in one of the daily's. Add that to the dazzling gaze of the lights and hardly any stars can be seen at all. Not that you are looking for them. You are tired. So tired. You woke up before dawn to catch the train to school. It's now almost midnight and you are only leaving work. You are running to catch the train home. Everyone seems to be running. Running to work the night shift. Running to relieve the baby sitter. Running to keep ahead of the looming tide of bankruptcy. Running past the white women sitting by the sides of the Metro stations with plastic coffee cups in one hand extended in a plea for anything to eat. Running past the dignified old blue eyed lady sitting wrapped in aluminium foil to keep her warm from the assault Winter will launch all throughout the night. You are all running so fast you can't even smell the dank urine that permeates some of the seedier Metro stations like the breath of a dead demon forgotten in the darker reaches of hell.
You feel like God. Standing on the edge of the mountain, you look down at the city cupped in the warm embrace of two oceans. She is beautiful. Beautiful in a way that you had never expected it would be. No wonder those white men had come here to fight wars for her land. The air is crisp and fresh against your face, the delicate scent of the mountain flowers adding to that heady feeling you have when you stand at great heights. You can see the Victoria and Albert Waterfront where you gazed at gadgets and fashion too expensive to even think about. Way on the other side is Carlton Beach with its white sand laid out like the carpet some sea god first steps on as they make their way onto land, make their way into Cape Town. Between here and there is a hodge podge of buildings, of homes of townships, alive in only the way South Africa is alive, only the way South Africa can dance for joy at Mandela's funeral. Only the way happiness makes it alive.
"It is the West!! It is the West!!!" He cries. His arms flap around him like the wings on a chicken, too stupid to know that they cannot fly. The West has done this. The West hates us. The West is evil incarnate, the West and its people the Whites. You look at him, half listening as you stare outside the glazed windows at the streets carpeted in purple blossoms, the Jacaranda's are in bloom again and Harare is as beautiful as a virgin awaiting her husband on her wedding night. But then again everything in this country is beautiful you think. From the Falls in the West that made Livingston stare in wonder and angels forget their hymns of praise. All the way to the East where mountains reach for heaven like fingers reaching up to scratch the underbelly of heaven. A land that is yours, a land that you call home. You turn your eye back to him. You feel like screaming at him:
Nothing is simple you fool. Half the problems you are screaming about are caused by you and your idiotic party.
Half the horrors you have listed come from the fact that there are not two brain cells to rub together to form the spark of an idea between the lot of you.
The remaining half of them because you never listen do you? When they told you devalue your currency or risk hyperinflation what did you choose? Print more money. When they told you invest in repairing energy infrastructure or risk power shortages what did you choose? Rural Electrification Programme. When they told you don't chase out skilled Farmers or risk a ruined agricultural sector what did you choose?
You don't even bother to answer the question.
This is the West you think as the bus drives along the highway. This is Merry Old England, the great colonizer who went through the world and arrogantly made it bow to her Queen, or King depending in which era you decided to pop out of your mothers womb. (Yes you Britannia who deigned to think herself superior to almost every country on earth, let us forget about the thousand or so years you were colonised by Rome. Not even Italy. Just Rome)
You look for the tell tale signs of superiority. Surely there somewhere amongst the sheep and cows grazing in the meadows of the Midlands there must be gremlins busy at work trying to trample all down. But all you can see are cows and sheep. Once or twice you see an old woman tottering on her stroller on her way to the grocery shop round the corner. Families walk through the greenland on their way to a picnic or church, heaven knows which of the two are holier persuasions. All you see is people where you had expected to see towering machines of war waiting to rain down fire and oppression, you press your face puzzled to the glass, its bitter coldness waking you up from your reverie just as the white hostess comes to your seat to ask if you want something to drink, "Sir" she adds in tones as respectful as if she was addressing a person who hadn't needed to save up for six months for this trip. You smile and decline. You wish you could ask her where they are hiding the guns aimed at Zimbabwe 24/7. Then you realise she probably doesn't even know how to spell Zimbabwe. Nor does she care.
They are a living, breathing mass. A swarming, convoluted being spread out over so many miles yet one. They are an angry being. An avenging thing. They scream and they shout, their rage as apparent to you, as potent as scorpions and just as lethal. No to Gays! No to Homosexuality! Gay Wedding is an Abomination! Everyone should be Born to a Man and A Woman! The Eiffel Tower stands as a silent witness to their anger. Is it conducting their anger straight to God? Can he hear them and reach down to stretch a finger to bless them all?
Yes?
Perhaps not.
It starts drizzling on them, just as they have drizzled on your illusions of them. Back home they are known as they pedarasts, the immoral West come to corrupt the pure African and his pure ways (forget the killing of twins at birth tradition, or the killing of Albino's for black magic, forget that Christianity is a Western import as well) yet here they are screaming blue murder at a government that is trying to legalize what is legal in South Africa. Something is wrong here you think. Something is very wrong. But you remember the headline about the gay couple who were attacked a few weeks ago in the centre of Paris for holding hands and you realise that in the end, nothing is as what it seems.
You dream you are in high school again. Mr Tshili using his wooden ruler to mark off the angles of the triangles he is drawing on the blackboard. The swift accuracy of his hand as it describes arcs with the compass and then joins them with the ruler is nothing less than witchcraft. You watch fascinated as you listen to his explanation, his voice as swift as the path of the chalk he holds in his hands. In your dreams you note his voice, it's perfectly accented tones rising and falling in the silent class of students. Discipline is taken for granted here. No children throwing paper at each other, no one dares to pull out a phone in class, no one even dreams of school shooters. 98%. That's the literacy rate in Zimbabwe your dreaming self remembers. And it starts in classes like this. Classes littered all over the country, in beautiful private schools and underneath trees, in low density government schools and township schools like the one you are in: all filled with hard working men and women imparting their knowledge and skill as selflessly as they can, considering. No wonder certain Austrailian Universities consider a ZIMSEC D as equivalent to a Cambridge C. You smile smugly to your self satisfied self in your dream. That will teach those Western idiots who ask you were you learnt to speak such good english as if schools are as foreign a concept as beggars to the streets of Paris.
Oops.
"People are people. I see very little difference between Romans, Greeks, Carthaginians, Syrians, or any other you care to name..." - Julius Caesar in The First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullough
"The problem with blaming the West for ALL our problems is the subtle implication that we are not clever enough to create problems of our own let alone solutions" - Bongani Ncube-Zikhali
