When I was a young girl, one of my grandmother’s neighbours always borrowed stuff from us. One time it was washing powder. The next it would be sugar or vegetables or cooking oil. But, almost every month, she would ask for salt. Salt. Over the years, she became too embarrassed to come herself. So she would send her daughters, and eventually she sent her grand-daughter who was my age. Nyarai was her name. I remember her quite well. Sweet-faced, bright, talkative and very self-assured. Nyarai could beat (physically and intellectually) anybody in our class.
But, when she came to ask for that salt, Nyarai was a different person. Walking the 500m between our two homes would take her an hour. I would see her coming, slowly, down the path. Shrugging her shoulders. Sitting down in anger or shame or both? And finally summoning the courage to come through the ramshackle gate to say in a very low voice, “Kwahi nambuya tokumbirawo sauti [grandmother is asking for some salt].”
Nyarai spoke hardly above a whisper on these errands. She would fidget with her skirt hem or put her fingers in her ears or her nose, sniffle, shuffle about, anything just to get this to pass quickly.
Sometimes, my grandmother would be in such a bad temper and she would shout at poor Nyarai: “Will your grandmother return what she borrowed last month? Is she borrowing or just asking for free salt? What do you people do with it, bathe in it?” For a whole week after she had come to borrow salt, Nyarai would avoid me in class or on the playground. Similarly, her grandmother would not pass by our yard on her way to the fields, preferring to take the longest route around the village.
So here I am in 2005 and I am trying to understand how and in what words, exactly, my country’s president is trying to borrow his own measure of “salt” from next door? I want to know how he and our country have become like Nyarai’s grandma? The latter were poor. Very poor. Disenfranchised by colonialism, Nyarai’s family had a non-productive piece of land just like most of us in the village. But, in their case, they had no one working in town or on the mines, no cattle, no goats, nor any other productive resources. Each day was a struggle.
Even my grandmother, in her anger, continued to support the family because she knew their problems and what was causing them.
Now how does an entire nation with productive resources, a highly educated and skilled citizenry such as Zimbabwe get to the point where it borrows salt from next door?
I want to know how the conversation takes place in Pretoria or with Beijing: “Uuuhh … Mr President, we are here to ask for a small loan. Well, not exactly small, but just enough to tide us over. We are in a bit of a rough spot … things are not really going well for us. You know these British and their opposition … they are really messing up our economy. So we are just asking for a loan to enable us to pay our fuel bills, what we owe for our electricity and other such odds-and-ends. We promise we will repay you very, very soon. Just as soon as things settle down again.”
Nyarai had the advantage of twigs and shrubs to pull at back in our village in Nhema to distract herself from the humiliating task at hand.
So what was the governor of my Reserve Bank, Gideon Gono, pulling on — his cuff links? His pen? Or his mobile phone? What was the body language of the minister of finance? A whole grown up doctor of a man, in a Saville Row suit, engaging in a conversation about borrowing money. As we ask in Shona, “Vanenege vakatarisa pai mizvinda yevarume yakadai [where the hell do these big men look?].” Or, more rudely, we’d want to know, “havanyari [Are they not ashamed?].”
But I have never seen a more rude and unashamed bunch of borrowers than our leaders. They even have the gumption to harangue their supposed lenders at rallies and on television. If Nyarai’s grandmother had done this she would have known that was the end of salted vegetables. Although I know, sometimes, Nyarai told some of our classmates that my family were a bunch of stuck up misers, she never did say this to my face or in public. Our bunch of borrowers are behaving as if they are still in a position to be so brazen.
I am an ordinary Zimbabwean and I feel, like Nyarai, dreadfully ashamed and gutted by us asking for salt from South Africa and China.
I am not the one doing the asking, yet I feel personally implicated. I don’t know where to look when people discuss on the bus, on the streets and on television this issue of our massive begging bowl. I am like Nyarai now.
Everjoice Win is a Zimbabwean journalist based in South Africa