The first time I met Rana from Palestine, she looked as though she had just stepped out of a beauty parlour. Her hair was newly and nicely permed, her nails perfectly manicured and her toes were a beautifully pedicured, deep purple.
I kept staring at her, long after she had introduced herself. This could not be a woman straight out of the battle-scarred Palestine. Where and when do women have their hair done in the midst of conflict?
Okay, I could understand the hair — perhaps done in a makeshift salon at the back of someone’s house. But not the manicure and the pedicure. How can one be pedicured and still find time to dodge the war planes?
What would Rana have said if the Israeli military had found her feet immersed in a foot spa? ”Excuse me, major, while I soak them. Oh, mind my fingers, please, this polish takes a long time to dry!”
When it became obvious to Rana that I was staring at her, she felt compelled to tell me so. I explained to her exactly why.
She laughed hard. ”You watch too much TV! We still manage to get on with our lives, even in the midst of all that. We have to have hope and faith. For me the beauty parlour is a place I go to find some pleasure and peace. I know the planes may come any time. But why deny myself the chance to live when I still have it?”
I was a very green activist then. I tried hard to understand this wisdom from my new friend from a war zone. But I couldn’t. Zimbabwe had just completed its first decade of independence. We had barely entered the disgruntlement era.
How could I ever understand what it was to live in an occupied territory? Zimbabwean TV had done a lot to make many of us aware of the horrors of Palestine. Hence my thinking that the whole place was one huge battlefront, and that there were no beauty parlours.
Rana was a feminist fighter par excellence. As I got to know her over the three weeks in the year that we, together with other feminists, launched the first 16 days of Activism Against Violence Against Women, I came to admire her.
She related how, in Palestine, they organised as women in the camps and on the streets. She spoke passionately about freedom for women.
Since that year, 1991, I have wondered whether Rana is still alive. Those were the days before e-mail — for both of us, at least. I sent her a number of ”snail mail” letters. I never received a reply.
Today I find myself living in my own kind of Palestine. A different one, but a nation in conflict nonetheless. I get a number of breathless phone calls, e-mails and surprised greetings from my friends around the world: ”Are you all right? How are you coping? Are you sure you are okay? You look so well, have you moved from Zimbabwe?”
Read this with all the breathlessness that you can muster in a British, American, Indian or South African accent. Sometimes I get irritated. Like Rana, I don’t understand why people genuinely think there is something incongruous between my manicured nails, my waxed eyebrows and the politics I speak. I understand that sometimes they mean well.
Like Rana, I have chosen to enjoy the little pleasures of life when and if I still can — damn this conflict. Like Rana, I have also chosen to fight the good fight for my country, and for my rights and those of other women. I could easily wallow in my little world and abandon this struggle for freedom.
I am part of that small minority that can still afford to live fairly comfortable lives: meet for lunches at the fabulous Amanzi restaurant, have dinner at the Meikles, lie down for two-hour massages and fill trolleys in the supermarket.
We, the self-chosen few, can easily count our blessings and thank our various gods that we are still on our feet where others have drowned.
Our children can listen to the distant rumble of trouble in their land of plenty and wonder on which planet wahala, as the Nigerians call it, would be happening.
I read it in my daughter’s eyes a few months ago. She, at the glorious age of 17, could not understand why I was forever stressed, angry, and running hither and thither to ”political meetings”. She flicked through the DStv channels looking for the fun stuff, not mum’s weird current-affairs channels.
My aunt’s daughter Shirley died a week ago. Wonderful, full-of-life Shirley. I still can’t imagine her dead. I was not around to see her buried, so I am still in denial about her death. For two days she lay in Parirenyatwa Hospital.
No qualified doctor ever saw her. Just a group of medical students trying to figure out why she had gone comatose from flu. There are few doctors left in Zimbabwe. Most of the good ones have gone to other pastures. I don’t know whether they are necessarily greener.
What I do know is that they have gone to hospitals where there is medicine to give patients. Where there are systems that govern how patients are cared for. Shirley might have had pneumonia, as they told us after the fact. But she died of neglect.
My family are angry about all this. I don’t blame the doctors. They are doing the best they can with what is available. As the ”Rhodesians” like to say to us when they are angry, ”Go and tell your [Robert] Mugabe.”
I blame him and his henchmen (yes, men) for Shirley’s unnecessary death. The chain of events surrounding it serve as reminder of the rottenness of the state of Zimbabwe.
We could have put her in a private hospital, but we could not access the cash that was needed to pay the deposit. By the time we factored in all the basics, we needed about half a million dollars in cash just to get her in through the door of a decent hospital. They wouldn’t take bank-certified cheques because there has been too much fraud.
At Parirenyatwa, there were no specialist doctors to see her. We kept her there because we eventually found a matron who promised us that she would help us because, as she told us, ”here it is a matter of who you know”.
My cousin knew too few people, too late. Shirley died while waiting for X-rays and a head scan. Pari, as we call it, is the hospital of choice for the middle and lower-middle classes.
Until recently it was the place to go if you had a basic medical aid or a bit of cash. It was also a referral hospital for the lower classes with even less money and life-threatening illnesses.
Now you have to ”know somebody” to live? I sincerely hope all my middle-class friends and relatives know enough ”somebodies” to save their lives.
I hope, too, that all the people I work with in international NGOs and in the private sector who keep silent about the crisis in this country have enough of everything under their mattresses for all sorts of emergencies: cash, fuel, doctors, nurses, food, coffins and whatever else.
The problem, though, is that there is a limit to how much cash or fuel you can stock up on. There are too few doctors for them to be on personal call to all of us.
After Mugabe and the chiefs have had their share, we are left with the crumbs of these basic needs.
What should be a basic right and necessity has become a mammoth favour from those we ”know”. When you get a passport, as my friend Noma did after paying her way through several doors last month, you thank your ancestors.
We go around the world showing immigration officials where to stamp in our passports, just in case we run out of space. Sooner or later we’ll run out of space and out of the people we ”know”.
We can get manicured all we want, but as long as the rest of this country is not at peace, our nail varnish will never dry.
The reality of repression keeps barging into our false little spaces. That is why we must fight for what we are entitled to as human beings and as citizens of this country.
While I can forgive foreigners who breathlessly wonder how things are in Zimbabwe, I find the attitude of some of us who live and work here unforgiveable. I find the outlook of those who talk about development, rights and good governance quite incomprehensible.
Granted, not all of us can go throw stones at State House. But do we ever get angry enough to want to go and find the stones?
The day the upper and middle classes in Zimbabwe realise that cheque books and credit cards will not buy us the freedoms we need, is the day we will be like Rana.
Manicured and pedicured, yet still standing up for Zimbabwe.
Thandi Chiweshe is a gender activist based in Harare.