Gilbert took me to a huge flea market – deemed ‘the solver of problems’ – where we found two clean second hand hand-sewn quilts for a tenner each.
I was the only white person, causing everyone to stare. This is a ZANU PF stronghold – white people used to come here – but no longer… I don’t know whether my discomfort was due to the attention or a perceived latent & measured hostility.
A huge council sponsored street sign declared proudly “Building infrastructure that promotes sustainable development’. The sign sported a huge decaying hole in its centre and had clearly been hit by some truck or other as it skewed off square; misshapen mockery.
All around the ghetto seethed with people selling & buying, hustling and just meandering – filling in time when not deployed on the task of making a living.
Later we went to the hardware market. Acres of scrap this and that – of every imaginable substance – recycled and scrounged – carpenters making tables, hideously florid lounge chairs, double beds like coffins, galvanised iron glinting pristinely silver, scrap metal, engine bits, car bits, refrigerators … wire… recycled wire… acres and acres – I was definitely a fish out of water.
Few people smiled – just glared as if the shock of seeing me there augured badly.
I weakly muttered ‘tatenda’ now and then when new directions were given – and was relieved when we made it back to our car and found it still in one piece. It could so easily have been stripped.
Cans of even the most simple foods cost more here than a can of beer: twice the price in fact. Tinned tomatoes that you can pick up for 75c ‘back home’ cost easily double that, sometimes 3 times more. Lion lager costs 80c a can or a $1 for a stubbie.
There is no longer any manufacturing in Zim – so everything is bought in from South Africa or China. Cheap Chinese crap abounds and is depressingly of an even more inferior quality than that found ‘back home’. There are no consumer standards here, no ASIC, no ombudsmen to champion rights. So everything breaks. Everything breaks quickly and costs way, way too much. Because it can. It’s heartbreaking really.
Folk who can scant afford the crap they are buying are continually hustling to make ends meet – to eke out a living. The cost of supermarket groceries is just tacitly unaffordable for many folk. Unlike in 2008, when there simply wasn’t any food in supermarkets and people had to cross borders to find bulk provisions in other countries, now shelves bulge with costly items that so very few can afford. When beer at 80c is a luxury, canned food is simply out of contention.
And dolarization is not as simple as it sounds… there are no US coins here – so if you purchase something at a supermarket and do not make a round figure – say if something costs you $4.20, you must either scrabble for something to make up the 80c – something you had not intended buying – or you ask for a credit note… assuming you go back to the same store and have the right amount of credit to match your next purchase. If you happen to have any ZAR – rand coins – these can be handy – but they are scarce – well everything is really – except the Chinese crap.
Farms here no longer produce much – they have been taken over by ZANU PF cronies who have no skills or interest – and so once fertile they now lie fallow and in disrepair. Maize is grown everywhere – and anywhere there is space. Small fires char grill long cobs by the roadside, even in the city streets – selling snacks to passers-by. The only fast food that seems healthy here.
Chicken Inn, Pizza inn, Baker’s inn, and Creamy Inn (ice-cream) franchises congregate together in showy street front phalanxes tempting with fast and almost-but-not-quite affordable food in every town centre. They are always together, found in a menacing pack touting their addictive carbohydrates, sugar and fat.
Often there is more than one string of outlets per town.
It is hard to reconcile the fact that I can sit in a café and order a double espresso ($4) and perhaps eat a chicken crepe ($10) and that after another coffee and a bottle of water I have spent $20 – or what some folks families survive on for at least two weeks – often more. It’s hard to reconcile being a first worlder – requiring little luxuries to endure in what is such a stressed out place. Bernard put his thumb on it when he reminded me of how crap it felt to live through the ten years of the Howard era… imagine 30 plus years of Mugabe – with no end in sight and the very real possibility of another civil war. The stress is palpable and the depression implacable.
So the litany of sadza ne ma bonzo, sadza chicken stew, sadza beef, sadza ne ma trotters (which I mistook, admittedly slightly horrified, for tortoise – African pronounciation leads to some amusing misconceptions on my part) is understandably constant.
Sadza is a corn meal made into either a thick porridge or more solid sticky mash. When eating the latter, you break off and roll a small portion into a ball then fashion a divot to soak up some of the smaller quantity of accompanying meat and sauce.
Sadza is eaten at every meal – ideally. Zimbabweans on the whole seem completely nuts about it – you just haven’t eaten of you haven’t had sadza. Thankfully because G is allergic to it I am not eating it more than twice a week – if that.
It’s fine… sort of like a tasteless polenta… but very stodgy and does strange things to an unaccustomed belly.
In keeping with the Soviet era allusions…
We went to Immigration the other day as my visa needed extending.
It was a Kafkaesque experience. After ascending via a grubby stairwell, with no signs to suggest that we were headed in anything like the right direction, we came to a wood panelled office where surly, bored, officials grunted disapprovingly and barely audibly from behind plate glass. Finally, grudgingly – after some persuasion that I was really not here to work illegally – my passport was stamped for another 30 days.
It was bleak. I felt unwelcome. An obsolete and alien presence – why on earth would anyone come to Zimbabwe for holidays these days anyway – was the underlying unspoken question.
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Margie Mackay 