Slate eBook Club - Best of 2003

by Slate. com

  I've spent most of this morning writing a story line for a 90-second film. My office is a converted garage in my back garden. One whole wall is made up of air bricks. They're great in summer when the temperature creeps upward but in the winter grass mats struggle to keep the wind out. The film is part of a competition called the Vision Awards, and the theme is "Building a Commonwealth of Freedom." I've taken the approach that there can't be any freedom without greater common wealth. My story follows Tendai, a young Zimbabwean fleeing fear and famine who goes to England to make some "real money." The exchange rate is Z$4,000 to 1 British pound, so he manages to keep his family fed back home. It's the story of thousands of young Zimbabweans all desperate to escape Mugabe's madness.

  Lunchtime, and I run with my dog Frank. I have a refrain going round in my head: "Mad dog's an Englishwoman … ." I love the heat and the sweat of the hottest time of the day.

  In the afternoon, I meet with a couple of fellow activists. We've just got some funding for an exciting project that combines art, technology, and activism. Unfortunately our funding period is short: only 4 months. We're hurrying to work out schedules and staff and strategies for street-level action that will both inspire and motivate Zimbabweans to reclaim their voice and their position in civil society.

  Later on, I go up to the shops to buy some wine because my friend Oliver is coming round for an early evening drink. In the cafe I chat with a woman while we're waiting to pay. She asks me what I think of Bush's trip to Africa. I say that I think it couldn't have come at a worse time. The great-white-hunter politician and his flying visit to dispense advice and money. His trip clashes with the African Union meeting, and this immediately raises questions about his sensitivities and his agenda. And then he wants to lecture African leaders about Mugabe's dubious re-election while his own election is shadowed by so much suspicion. But on Zimbabwean streets there are whispers of U.S. intervention and excitement about the effects of Bush's influence on Thabo Mbeki. Pro-Bush graffiti has begun to appear.

  Oliver is an interesting guy; he's here to teach during the Zimbabwe International Book Fair. His subject is sexuality. We go back a long way. Oliver agreed to be a sperm donor for my partner, Brenda, some years back. He totally appealed to me in his bohemian, handsome way. I tried to persuade him to get rid of his tight green corduroys, believing that they weren't helping his fertility much. Neither were the drugs and the wine. But we had a good time. In the end, there was no baby for us from Oliver, but back in London, where he's made his home, he's the proud father of a daughter named Rachel.

  Subject: Entry 2

  Posted Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2003, at 9:51 AM PT

  Last night I sat nursing a brown bottle of Castle in a little restaurant called the Tam Tam in central Harare. As I was paying my bill, I jokingly said to the waiter that I was in a hurry, that I had to get to the airport. He looked at me enviously and said that he wished he were, too. I asked him where he'd go if could leave right then and there. He replied: "Anywhere but here."

  He's trapped in this nightmare place along with countless other Zimbabweans reeling under the weight of poverty, hopelessness, and simmering anger. Earlier that day, I'd tried to get my car tires pumped up. Most of the service stations have stopped operating since they no longer have any fuel. No fuel means no oil. And no air, either. I asked an idle petrol attendant where I could get some air. Pointing across the road, he said, "Try those guys under the tree." I looked and saw a group of men sitting on concrete blocks fixing tires under a sprawling jacaranda tree. I turned to the petrol attendant and asked whether they charged for air. "Of course," he said, "but you must just negotiate." In Mugabe's Zimbabwe, even air comes at a price.

  Chatting with a friend at the bar, I asked her what she would pay for air. She said she reckoned she'd be damned if she'd pay anything at all. That works for her; she's got a bicycle and a pump. But with my front tire sagging, I'm going to have to pay. Over our beer we got to talking about what we can't buy in regular shops, what we're forced to buy on the burgeoning black market, and what we're buying out of guilt. Instead of lining the shelves in supermarkets, sugar, salt, and cooking oil are stacked up in the dust on the side of the road. As you drive by, roadside entrepreneurs whistle and shout pointing their fingers vigorously at their stashes. The black market can satisfy all your needs—at a price, of course. Meanwhile, thousands of Zimbabweans continue to try to survive honestly and with dignity. Vendors crowd the streets selling tomatoes, prickly pears, magnificent bunches of green leafy rape; plastic pouches filled with multicolored cool drinks sit in neat piles on rickety old wooden planks that straddle piles of bricks. Earning a living in Zimbabwe is desperately difficult these days.

  At shopping centers, my guilt at having more than others forces me to come up with new and different ways of avoiding the increasing number of beggars, street kids, car guards, and People Who Sell Everything. There's this really old guy who must be over 90. He's got one yellow tooth left in his slack mouth, and his hair is a knot of shocking white. He sells spoons. Wooden cooking spoons ideal for stirring sadza—a starchy porridge that is the staple food for Zimbabweans—until it's perfectly cooked. And the other day I came face to face with a vendor who told me his name was Steven. He was peddling painted plates. Beautifully illustrated and carefully crafted. When I declined, shaking my head in a weary "no," his face fell. But he pressed on saying that his daughter had a head the size of a pumpkin. She needed to have an operation the following day. To make her right. And beautiful again.

  I need money. Please buy a plate.

  The ruses that are used to bring in a few dollars a day are becoming more and more creative and elaborate. Only minutes before, I had fielded a request from a boy who looked about 9 at best. He trolls the shopping center with clipboard and sponsor form in hand asking for money for a rugby tour. Meanwhile, plain old ugly hunger looks like its winning the game with him.

  I eventually found a service station that was open and still had an air pump. I pulled in and a young guy walked over to give me a hand. "You're lucky," he said, "your tire's nearly flat." We talked awhile about whether he'd have a job next month because of the fuel shortage, which means that's it's likely that his place of work will close down.

  "Go well, go Shell," he said smiling cynically as I drove off.

  Subject: Entry 3

  Posted Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2003, at 10:55 AM PT

  In Zimbabwe, it's not that hard to get a reputation. Even writing letters to the newspaper is considered dangerous, especially if you use your real name. And that's just the small stuff.

  I'd call myself a government overthrower. And I've got Mugabe in my sights. I've had him there ever since he said, in a speech at the opening of the 1995 Zimbabwe International Book Fair, that I don't have "any rights at all" and that I'm "worse than a pig or a dog." Whatever that means. I've been involved in political activism in Zimbabwe for the last 10 years or so. At one stage, I had a truckload of police louts descend on my office with a search warrant for "ponography" [sic]. Of course they didn't find anything salacious, but not wanting to go away empty-handed, they left with a directory listing bisexual groups around the world. Then the bunch of them push-started their truck and drove away.

  This invasion of my private space was back in 1995. Ever since, I've been waiting for a midnight raid, either on account of my being queer or for being an outspoken critic of the Mugabe regime. So, not wanting to give the men in dark glasses any more of an excuse than they already had to drag me down to central police headquarters, I recently decided to ditch my dildos. Am I overreacting? Some might think so. But when your government has banned The Penguin Book of Lesbian Short Stories, it's quite possible that being found in possession of a fake penis will land you in the back of a police Land Rover before you can say, "Let me see your search warrant."

  Welcome to Zimbabwe, where you have no rights at all. And don't you forget it.

  Some time ago, I was lying in bed, flipping through a sex-toy catalo
g. I had decided that I'd like to get a dildo. The selection was most impressive. I circled The One and asked my man Richard in England to go shopping for me. (Richard is a Zimbabwean now living in England who generously sends many different papers, books, videos, etc. to the gay community in Zimbabwe in a personal commitment to easing our isolation.) He didn't turn a hair (as my mother would've said, although she would've gone bald at the thought) and set out to find "Dave" in a sex shop in Cambridge. Outrageous that the dildos are prenamed, but what can a girl do from a distance? In a month or two, Dave was delivered disguised as a bookend and tightly wrapped in The Pink Paper, which was formerly England's premier gay and lesbian newspaper. My package was strung with string, all very neat and tidy and far too inaccessible for a not-so-diligent Zimbabwean postal worker to investigate further.

  Let me say now that for the most part, I don't give a crap if the whole world knows that I have a dildo in the drawer. I mean, big deal. But, like I said, having lived a lot of my life in anticipation of a raid in the middle of the night, the thought of the conservative creeps from central police headquarters ferreting through my stuff just wasn't appealing. So my sex toy(s)—Dave got a friend, Roger—have never been very close at hand.

  For a long time, Dave lived in a motorcycle helmet in the top cupboard in the bedroom. Then he was moved to the right pocket of my girlfriend's furry white terry-cloth robe. Then he was stuffed at the bottom of our voluminous sock basket. After that, he was moved to a vase in our kitchen. And finally, he ended up under a bougainvillea in the garden—the purple one by our neighbor Malcolm's wall.

  Luckily, my dog Frank never got hold of Dave. What then?

  Finally, I thought: This is ridiculous; let me stop forgetting where I've left Dave (and Roger) and give them the boot. I decided to toss them into a storm drain. On the way to dinner at my girlfriend's parents' house, I got ready but couldn't find a drain in the dark. When we drove into her parents' driveway, I saw that their rubbish bag hadn't been emptied. It was innocently waiting there for more items to be added for the next day's removal. But, as you can imagine, this suggestion didn't go down too well with my girlfriend, especially because Zimbabwe is in the grip of a fuel shortage and waste removal is therefore an erratic affair. It was likely that my in-laws would be saddled with Dave and Roger longer than was decent. So Dave and Roger stayed in the car while we had dinner.

  On the way home, I noticed how many rubbish bags were lining the roadside hopeful of a truck with fuel in the morning. In the end, perhaps it was the unsuspecting Mr. and Mrs. Flemming living at No. 3 Ardmore Close that finally took ownership of Dave and Roger. Or perhaps their groundsman smiled to himself when the rubbish wasn't taken the next day.

  Who knows?

  Subject: Entry 4

  Posted Thursday, Aug. 7, 2003, at 11:02 AM PT

  This morning, I found a handwritten note in my post box: a few scribbled words on brown newsprint from a woman I've never met. The message asked me to be at a certain place, at a certain time. Just like in the movies. The letter writer wants to get together to discuss media tactics, but she's ultra-cautious. Or maybe paranoid. It's hard to tell the difference here these days.

  My mother always said I was a troublemaker. She'd turn in her grave if she knew what I'm up to at the moment. My siblings and I joke that our parents did it only three times, and we were the result. My mother was born in Fort Beaufort: a dusty, one-horse South African town. My father immigrated to South Africa because he was looking to leave behind the hopelessness and certain poverty that Scotland offered him. He was a dreamer and a fly-by-night. I was born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second-largest city, which is situated in mining territory, because my father was in his "gold mining phase." (I actually lived in a caravan on the gold mine with my father for awhile.) He had many phases, including one where he dressed up in women's clothes.

  In many ways I think I do what I do today—work for justice—because of my mother. She instilled in me some of life's essentials: tolerance, respect, fair play, and a sense of humor. Whenever I was down in the dumps, my mother would flip out her false teeth and roll her eyes. We'd fall over laughing, my dark mood broken. (When my mother was about 22 years old, she and two girlfriends decided to have all their teeth taken out. Apparently it was the fashionable thing in those days. I can imagine them, arm in arm, laughing while they made their way to the dental surgeon on Eloff Street

  , where they would emerge as "new women.")

  Today I had lunch with a friend. We spoke about many different issues, including the fact that one of our mutual friends, whose father owns a chain of cinemas, is selling cash. It reminded me how far gone we all are in Zimbabwe. No one can point a finger at anyone else because everyone is trying to make a fast buck. Talk about unproductive—selling your cash for a 10 percent commission. So now we have a parallel banking system. Outside every bank, queues wind around the block. Thousands of people wait endlessly in the hope of getting the equivalent of $2 in the United States (the bank's limit on cash withdrawals) while others hoard cash and "make money for jam." It makes me want to puke.

  Last month, I was drinking coffee in a cafe in a suburb called Newlands. Suddenly, I heard the thud of marching men coming closer and closer. Voices grunted "uh, uh" in a rhythm synchronized to the beat of stomping boots. Across the street, a group of about 70 policemen waving their AKs in the air left shoppers scurrying in their wake. It was a show of strength from Mugabe's urban militia. The cafe patrons around me carried on drinking their coffee. All froth and no bother. Those drinking $900 cups of coffee (in Zimbabwean dollars) live the good life and carry on as if everything is normal.

  At the moment I'm reading some interviews with Samantha Power, author of A Problem From Hell. A lot of what she says resembles the current situation in Zimbabwe. We don't have enough upstanders here, only legions of bystanders willing to look on while a few screamers rage against the power-hungry clique that controls this country.

  I was in Bulawayo last week to run training workshops in electronic activism. This is a phrase I've coined to describe using e-mail and the Internet to advocate and mobilize. During my visit, I also conducted some interviews with political activists. One woman had been put in solitary confinement for 15 days, naked except for a blanket. She told me that the Zimbabwean prison authorities can no longer afford to give female prisoners adequate sanitary ware. Sometimes a woman gets one cotton pad cut in half—or nothing at all. Again, life's inequities hit me in the face. Some privileged women wear panty liners simply to keep their discharge off their underwear while in a Zimbabwean hellhole of a prison cell, women bleed down their legs.

  I've been giving Brenda (my partner) another ear-bashing, saying that in Zimbabwe—not to mention the world over—we need a fleet of aggressive peacemakers. Where are our Robin Hoods? We need to make some of our fairy tales come true.

  Subject: Entry 5

  Posted Friday, Aug. 8, 2003, at 10:19 AM PT

  A couple of Canadians came to Harare last month to interview me about the Web site that I manage. This morning, I watched some of the footage. Talk about shocked! I hadn't realized that I blink so much. I look like Barbie on speed.

  Actually, my nephew Devin, who's about 11 years old, keeps on commenting on what I look like. The last time I saw him he asked me why I have such a big forehead. Then he was concerned about my double eyelids. (Whatever that means.) He's an eccentric little bloke, and heaven only knows what it'll be next. In March, I went to visit my family in Australia. On the fridge in their kitchen, I discovered a little piece of paper with about nine black ballpoint pen marks scratched on it. I asked my sister what it meant; she said that Devin fines the rest of the family if he finds any hairs on the soap when he takes a shower. To amuse ourselves, we planted some "evidence," and sure enough, Devin strode furiously through to the kitchen to record his displeasure.

  For a couple of hours this morning, I played tour guide for a visiting friend. I drove him through downtown Harare—hold your b
reath and hang on tight!—where, just as there's no rule of law, there aren't any rules of the road either. It's every driver for herself.

  Part of our tour included going to the Harare Magistrates Court. Both the court and Zanu PF Headquarters are situated on a street called Rotten Row. How appropriate, I've always thought. Over the past couple of years, the Magistrates Court has processed a steady stream of political activists, often arrested on spurious grounds. Some activists enter the court having suffered ill treatment or torture at the hands of the police. In January, I spent an entire day waiting for my friend Michael, a Harare City Councilor, to be released. By the time 5 p.m. arrived, I was known as Mrs. Mike.

  The boredom of my long wait that day was eased by the goings-on around the court. There's this small blue-and-white caravan that rents out wedding gowns to women tying the knot in civil marriages. Sometimes manacled prisoners are led up the front steps of the court building side by side with blushing brides.