It is Saturday in Harare, the first weekend of my August holiday. I make my way to Avondale, where I want to spend the morning before heading to Parirenyatwa Hospital. Avondale is a middle-class suburb with happy memories for me. Up the road, in Mount Pleasant, is the University of Zimbabwe, scene of my first adventures out of school. It is also home to one of the largest flea markets in Harare, and it is there that I head.
One of my cousins has a stall at the market. I say his given name to the traders, but am met with baffled faces. I describe him, and comprehension dawns. "You mean Monya," a craftsman with a missing front tooth says. I stop to admire his work, an intricate model of a Harley-Davidson with thin wire for the body and black plastic sheeting for the wheels. "Yours for seven million dollars," he says. "Monya" is a Shona slang term for a muscleman—apposite for my cousin, who has had jobs as a nightclub bouncer and bodyguard to a government's minister's children. "I am looking for Mhonya," I say to two women seated at what I assume is his stall. "He has only stepped away for a moment," one of them says. I leave a message and wander around the market.
I walk past stalls selling cheap clothing, shoes made of plastic, garish toys and glittering knick-knacks from Dubai and China and Singapore. I am attracted by a child's cricket set. I have a vision of my three-year-old son, Kush, coming out to bat for Zimbabwe. But even after haggling a little with Greg, the stall owner, I do not have enough money to buy it. "I will return tomorrow," I tell him.
"Sorry, sister, I am at Borrowdale flea market tomorrow," Greg says.
"How about Monday?" I ask.
"Mondays to Fridays, I am at my regular job in town."
"When do you rest?" I ask.
"Sunday morning when I go to church," he says.
My cousin leads me back to his stall, a DVD business selling movies copied off the internet. Many of his films are not out yet in Zimbabwe; some have only just opened in Europe. Mhonya tells me that he downloads the films himself. "I know it's against the law," he says, "but at least I am not stealing from anyone." He is convinced that pirating foreign films is not as bad as copying local music.
It is almost time for visiting hour at the hospital. I promise Mhonya that I will look him up again and set off. On the way, I meet an old friend from law school and walk him to his car. In addition to his legal practice, he tells me, he grows tomatoes. He opens his boot and I see some, green and small. We exchange numbers and I walk to the hospital.
My former partner's brother, and my son's uncle, is unwell. Eight-year-old Tatenda, another cousin's child, is also here. I make my way to Ward A4 in paediatrics. Tatenda lights up when I say that I have come from Switzerland to see him. He proudly points to the blood that is making its way out of a plastic bag and into his arm. I give him the books and fruit that I have brought and make my way to the senior wards.
Parirenyatwa, known simply as Pari, started life in Rhodesia as a teaching hospital. Like Harare, like Bulawayo, like many of Zimbabwe's towns and their infrastructure, Pari was planned and built for a small number of whites. Inherited by a larger black population, it struggled for years to meet demand. Now that the country is facing "economic challenges," Pari is losing the battle. There is a shortage of everything: drugs and doctors, dialysis machines, scanning equipment, beds and nurses.
But at least what is there is clean. My reflection beams up from the shining floors. The nurses are pristine in white dresses. The doctors wear white coats or faded blue scrubs with the trousers tucked, curiously, into white wellingtons. As I walk along the corridors and up the stairs from paediatrics to Ward D, I meet Rudo, the sister of a schoolfriend. She has finished medical school and is a houseman, she tells me. At only 24, she and her fellow housemen hold the public healthcare system of the country in their inexperienced hands. Until, of course, they finish their two-year housemanship and mandated year of government service and disappear to England or Australia, South Africa or Botswana or the US, leaving the country's sick to others.
Upstairs in Ward D, I find my son's uncle so frail that it hurts to look at him. There is a drug that he needs, but the hospital cannot provide it. His nurse hands his family a prescription that has to be procured from a private pharmacy. When I express surprise at this, my son's aunt tells me that it is nothing; relatives often spend more time in accounts than they do with their sick. My son's uncle is due to go for a scan, but there is no doctor to approve it. I will see him again, on the following Monday and Tuesday. (On that last Tuesday, three hours after I have left him, he will die at the age of 55. He was a quiet man who loved to read thrillers.)
Visiting hour over, I decide to walk into town. On Josiah Tongogara Avenue, men stand in the middle of the road, selling everything from top-up cards for pay-as-you-go mobiles to hand-made sandals. I see metal objects that glint in the sun. Closer inspection reveals these to be funnels. In Harare, fuel is more often funnelled into a car from a can than piped from a garage pump. A man in a luminous green vest lifts his arms to give passing drivers a good view of his product: rolls of toilet paper in transparent bags.
As I cross Josiah Tongogara Avenue, a familiar sound tears the air. From the direction of State House come two outriders on motorbikes. The sirens wail as they wave motorists off the road. Three more motorbikes follow. The president is on the move. I stop to watch the motorcade pass: five motorbikes, two police cars, three sedans, two little trucks packed with armed soldiers, an ambulance—and, at its centre, a Mercedes limousine with dark windows and the licence plate ZIM 1. Thus travels the president, the dark panes of his limousine shielding him from sight while giving him a soft-focus view of the country he rules.
I cross Josiah Tongogara and walk into town. Harare may be on the verge of collapse, but it is collapsing cleanly. The brutal Operation Murambatsvina in 2005 had a far-reaching human cost, but achieved the government's immediate aim. Vendors now operate in defined spots or, like the funnel and toilet roll sellers of Josiah Tongogara Avenue, on the periphery of the city. For all that, Harare has taken on the character of a city dominated by petty commerce: where the government fails to cultivate conditions to create employment, people provide it for themselves.
I walk to Eastgate shopping complex. A knot of people around a giant television watches a football match between local teams. I walk past an internet café and into a supermarket. The scene here has become familiar in the week I have been home. Annual inflation hovers at around 7,000 per cent. (Working on the principle that if you ignore something long enough it will just go away, the government takes its time to release official figures.) Inflation is driven by greedy retailers hiking prices, the government said, and so it decreed price controls on all basic goods and services. The result has been empty shelves across the country, with supermarkets simply not restocking and long queues whenever there are rumours of bread or other goods.
In the supermarket, I buy the state daily and two weekly papers. The shelves are not totally empty. They are packed with toilet rolls and shoe polish, a few packets of biscuits, and a variety of crisps so vile-tasting that even my junk food-crazy nephews will not touch them. In the drinks section, the fridges are empty of the usual juices, mineral water, milk, milkshakes and fizzy soft drinks. Instead, they are bursting with bottle upon bottle of a urine-coloured drink and Diet Coke.
Once out of the supermarket, I decide to treat myself to afternoon tea at the Meikles hotel while I read my papers. Harare's premier five-star hotel, the Meikles retains a colonial air, but things are not what they were. There is no commissionaire in his grandiose costume; he has been replaced by a man in a suit that is too big for him. There are no uniformed bellhops in the lobby. The waiters in the Explorers bar have put aside their pith helmets. Since tourism is all but dead, the waiters serve a local clientele. The tearoom is surprisingly full.
As I eat my scones with cream and honey (there is no jam—probably the first time in the Meikles's history that this has been the case), I overhear a waiter tell a couple at the next table that the only toasted sandwiches on offer are chicken, cheese and bacon. Since the government de-licensed private abattoirs, there has been no beef in the country's shops or restaurants. A woman with a bad weave a few tables away complains in a loud voice about her mayonnaise. "This tastes like poison," she says. "Maybe, madam," the waiter replies, "it is only that you are not used to the taste of our home-made mayonnaise." I smile behind my papers.
As always, the state daily and the independent papers tell different versions of the same story. Zimbabwe has once again been the subject at a meeting of the heads of the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC). According to the state daily, the Herald, SADC stands by Zimbabwe. The private weekly, the Independent, leads with the news that SADC has made demands of Harare privately. The story is accompanied by an unflattering picture of President Mugabe with his mouth open, probably in the middle of a pan-African rant against the forces of imperialism. I pay for my tea and walk to Fourth Street to go home.
It is just after six, but it is winter and darkness is approaching. Fourth Street bus terminus is teeming with commuters and vendors selling frozen drinks in plastic bags. I board an omnibus and arrive at my stop in near darkness. The power is out again. The only light on the streets comes from homes with generators and solar power. I imagine the thousands who live in poor areas like Kuwadzana and Kambuzuma, Mbare and Mufakose, Glen View and Glen Norah, many of the people I met that very day. I imagine them stumbling home through the darkness to eat food cooked outside on three-stone fires, their children studying for their November exams by candlelight. My futile anger dissipates as quickly as it comes.
