Life in Zimbabwe can make you feel like a scurrying cockroach. Days pass as if you're caught running through a maze to achieve the most basic things. Our days are spent doing 'marunnings'. No time to sit. None to meditate. No, here we have to be creative. Stubborn. Like a mealie stalk blindly breaking through the concrete pavement. To live here one needs to cultivate a certain madness. We are all sick with this madness that tells us that we can recreate our power-cut country, that we can paint over the blood stains. We dream of painting the town red in an insurrection of graffiti vandalism.
Tese tinopenga. All mad. Mad with beliefs of overcoming. As we spend entire days waiting for petrol in petrol queues, hustling for money on the parallel market, lining up in generator-powered super markets. Yes, you do need to be mad to live in this country. Otherwise you're dead or diaspora.
Zimbabwe. Our land of contradictions. Ironies grow from the city concrete like mealies. Because these are parallel times of parallel economies and parallel lives. An economy turned-around so many times that it's dizzy, upside down, standing on it's head. It makes you laugh and cry in the same gasp.
This is a land where those selling cell phone air time are treated like criminals, where women selling veggies are dealt with as if the cops have finally found serial rapists. But all they've found is rape, a vegetable commonly sold by women determined to make sure their families survive. It makes you laugh how surreal it is sometimes: having vainly attempted to buy mbanje, weed in Zimbabwe, from the usual Rastas we succeeded in buying it from the local security guard. And when you pull up just down the road to fill up your car with petrol the garage is empty. 'No petrol' is the eternal graffiti. So instead you fill up your car from the makorokoza, the hustlers who swarm around the empty garage with their battered containers vomiting out petrol. Everyone is living upside down, turned around, on their heads. It makes you laugh and cry in the same gasp.
We live in darkness. The lights are out. The land of perpetual romance and eternal candle-lit dinners. We flounder in the dark for the light switch. But there's no power. Just this. Darkness.
We return after long days of korokoza-ring to dark corridors where we walk with solitary candles, trying to bring light to our invisible homes. Stubbornly believing that we can bring light to this black hole. But the power went a long time ago. And electricity is a small part of the problem.
In the mornings we go to the well. No water today either in this dry city where all we can produce is potholes and power cuts. And politicians who drink us dry. (Nhasi woisa tsvina mutsime.) So we pull up the bucket from the well and place it on the fire. No power still. But power lies in our pockets: why pay ZESA bills if they cut our power? Why pay the corrupt city council if their twisted understanding of 'refuse collection' is to refuse collection. We haven't paid our council rates for over a year because all they deliver are bills. I look forward to being taken to court and delivering a power point presentation on why we refuse to pay our rates. Power lies in a rates boycott. So stop floundering in the dark with that lone candle. Maybe then the light switch will work...
Ndeipi!
Welcome to the Comrade Fatso blog and the website in general. This will be a space where you get to see into the words and weird ways in our mad country of Zimbabwe. I'm a poet and an activist so for me the power lies in the word, written or spoken, rapped or spat. In times of oppression the word is the most powerful thing. So I try to use my word as a weapon, a non-violent weapon in a struggle for freedom.
There is power in performance. I have performed my protest poetry in many countries around the world but last week was one of my best performances. We tore apart the Harare International Festival Arts (HIFA) with a series of spoken word sets that climaxed in an inferno of spoken word-hip hop-chimurenga-jazz fusion as we ripped the stage with my band, Chabvondoka. Harare exploded into a riotous mood. Dust everywhere. Hope in the air. The word is power.
Ndeipi!
Welcome to the Comrade Fatso blog and the website in general. This will be a space where you get to see into the words and weird ways in our mad country of Zimbabwe. I'm a poet and an activist so for me the power lies in the word, written or spoken, rapped or spat. In times of oppression the word is the most powerful thing. So I try to use my word as a weapon, a non-violent weapon in a struggle for freedom.
There is power in performance. I have performed my protest poetry in many countries around the world but last week was one of my best performances. We tore apart the Harare International Festival Arts (HIFA) with a series of spoken word sets that climaxed in an inferno of spoken word-hip hop-chimurenga-jazz fusion as we ripped the stage with my band, Chabvondoka. Harare exploded into a riotous mood. Dust everywhere. Hope in the air. The word is power.
