Harare, Tinotenda

For the first time in years I feel a stillness in me about this tumultuous place. I drive out past Ngomo Kurira with my brother and his friends to another smaller gomo [hill]. Out through the increasingly rural settlements, where things are dusty and poor and organic and potholed and haphazard, where people walk long distances, and the Apostolics are enrobed in white for Easter. The grass is still tall from the rains. The path up the gomo starts at a woman's two-roomed homestead. She wears a shabby Zanu-PF tshirt. My brother speaks politely to her in Shona to ask that we may pass through, and to check where the path begins; she is fine with it. Most of the others in our group walk through with barely a glance, as if they don't notice that anyone lives there.

We push our way up through foliage onto the sprawling orange-earth boulder beyond, and then it is just us and the cascading rock and the sky. I fork away from the group. Dropping below are endless valleys of greens and blues and greys, the tinkle of Mashona cattle bells, and whispers of late-rain streams: this beloved and stunningly beautiful country.


I pass a broken clay pot in one of the clearings. Maybe something from the Apostolics. It is perfectly shaped, smooth, enticing to touch. It nestles the imprint of a cross at its base. (Tutu says: 'When the colonisers arrived, we had the land and they had the Bible. We closed our eyes to pray, and when we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible'). My first impulse is to take a piece of this exotica, and then I stop myself and ask why. Why do we want to take pieces of things that have nothing to do with us? And so I photograph the broken pot and leave it be. There between the earth and the sky, wind on its back, as it was on mine.

Water is a scarce resource. Our neighbours had their borehole pump stolen, so now my parents feed their hosepipe through a crumbling section of the dividing wall to help them out, despite the fact that for years we've suspected them of running a brothel. My parents laugh about it, and about the firewood business that their gardener has been running ever since they chopped down some huge Jacaranda trees that were threatening to fall on the house.

I see Mugabe’s siren-less motorcade driving down Borrowdale Road in the late afternoon. South Africa's young and highly controversial Julius Malema has been visiting, and the state newspaper says: "Malema Hails Zim's Empowerment Drive". Meanwhile, Gallery Delta has been raided by police for exhibiting photographs of human rights abuses during 2008, and a Bulawayo artist has been arrested for 'inciting violence' with his critical paintings. Veterinarian friends come over for drinks, during which one of them is called away to attend to a poisoned dog.

On Easter Sunday I go for an early morning run. The roads of Highlands are quiet and neglected. The weather is pristine. I savour the silence, so different from Johannesburg. An impeccably shiny, red Morris Minor passes me, carrying a full load of white-robed Apostolics to meet with God: men in the front, women in the back. I smile. At home I lay a competitive Easter egg hunt for my family and some friends.

Afterwards dad and I drive our domestic worker back to Mabvuku township, past Chikurubi maximum human-rights-abuse Prison and the cement factory. We visit the cemetery so that I can pay respects to Mishek, who died just before I returned to southern Africa - there was no chance to say goodbye. He is buried in a poor man's grave, thirty one rows down and seven across, marked by a small painted piece of aluminium, already overgrown by a flurry of weeds. The graves are many. We proceed to his wife’s house and greet her all-women family in their two-roomed structure on a tiny plot an the edge of the township. Her seventeen-year old daughter has just given birth to a boy, Tinotenda ('we thank'). Gratefulness and thanks even in these times of hardship. Nine months ago was before Mishek died. I wonder if he knew he was due to be a grandfather. We return home and I resume reading Antjie Krog's Country of my Skull, about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. It’s hard to stomach but I grit my teeth and push on. I'm lying next to a swimming pool, after all.

I buy fifteen kilos of beautiful stone sculpture the next morning on the way to the airport, for next to nothing, and somehow manage to fit it into my hand luggage... along with an avocado, and sprigs of lemongrass and rosemary from the garden. Zim lives on. All the contradictions rest more easily nowadays, for some reason. It’s been a good visit.