Street life on Kwame Nkrumah
Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, is full of buildings that look like giant matchboxes at night.
Dusk was falling when, after attending a poetry session at the Book Café—an artist’s hangout at the edge of the city centre—I decided to take a walk through the streets.
Because I am carrying a backpack with a laptop and a top-of-the-range camera, I keep glancing around to make sure that no mugger is lurking in the shadows of the moonlit night.
Fortunately, I soon walk into a street with lamps that shower light onto the pavement. I feel safe.
Two men standing outside a city apartment/business office gesture at me and inquire about the latest forex rates. When I tell them I’m not a forex dealer, one of the men begins to wax lyrical about the qualitites of his favourite politician—Morgan Tsvangirai.
We chat, furtively, about politics for a while before I bid him farewell and continue on my journey towards the rank to catch a minibus home.
The dark has now fully gathered; around me the matchboxes look as if they’re waiting to explode under the weight of the nation’s groaning.
I cross a wide street at a little trot to avoid being hit by a fleshy black Mercedes-Benz that slides down the street at full speed.
As I reach the other side, at the edge of a street named Kwame Nkrumah, a tall soldier appears from nowhere behind me, walking with wide strides. I almost miss a heartbeat, thinking he is coming after me to confiscate the wide-lens camera in my backpack.
I keep my cool and he strides past; I try in vain to imitate his walk simply to test if I have a soldier in me.
I am lost in my soldier thoughts for a while until a bald man beckons to me and asks for a match to light his cigarette. I offer him one.
We end up talking (dialogue is a currency on the streets) about my pregnant wife and how our baby is due anytime now. Just then a text message beeps on my cellphone. Perhaps this is “the call”, I think, and I’m instantly relieved that it is just a friend asking where I am.
I walk towards the Supreme Court. Opposite it stands a group of soldiers silhouetted in the dark who suddenly scream loudly into the night that a hare is crossing the street.
For a moment, I stand frozen, wondering how on earth a hare could have ended up in a city filled with rock-solid buildings, until I notice that the so-called hare is just a cat. In fact, it’s two cats; one scampers away behind the court building and the other, on seeing me, dashes towards the chuckling soldiers.
Cats have joined soldiers in my thoughts as I walk on quickly towards the shop that sells one of the best things still available in Harare—ice cream. It’s usually packed, but surprisingly, tonight it is deserted.
Perhaps it’s the price increase; overnight price hikes in Zimbabwe can bring on a heart attack and new tactics have to be employed all the time.
Anyway, I purchase a huge cone of clear white ice cream that tastes like real cream; of all the things in Zimbabwe, I daresay, the ice cream at that shop competes with any other in the world.
As I lick away, my photographer’s eye can’t help but notice the post-election posters still plastered all over the city walls. They’re an eyesore given that the election was a stillborn.
I go for my camera to take a picture of the posters for posterity or perhaps just to record a piece in the process of human history. At the back of my mind I know I could get arrested and spend a night in jail in this expression-stifled city if the police or soldiers see me. I put the camera back.
Walking on I suddenly sink into a mass of human flesh. On the pavements are numerous men and women selling an assortment of agricultural produce in season - it makes sense for them to trade at night because the municipal police have already gone home. I buy a green maize cob for a total of Z$20, approximately US$0,05.
And then I careen my way through the madding crowd, till finally I reach the rank where I find a minibus to take me home through the Harare night.
Chief K Masimba Biriwasha is a children’s author, poet, philosopher and playwright. His first book The Dream of Stones won Zimbabwe’s National Arts Merit Award in 2004
