Act 1, Scene I. A desert place, courtesy of Operation Murambatsvina. Thunder and lightning. Enter three Zimbabwean Witches …
‘When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain?”
‘How about after Generations?”
‘That will be ere the set of the sun. Sevenish.”
‘Where the place?”
‘Upon the heath.”
‘Eish, Lulubelle, it’s all heath since the bulldozers left.”
Scene II. High camp near Harare. Alarum within — antacids are called for. Enter Comrade Mugabe, with chihuahua Idi and Professor Claude Mararike in tow. But more of them in a moment …
The 21st century will belong to Africa. This is because China will buy Africa the 21st century, in return for all its topsoil and most of its fertile women. The title deed, illuminated with bootlegged clip art and scratch-and-sniff Hello Kitty stickers, will prove it: Sold, by China, 1 x Century (21) to Africa. Congratulations on your engagement! PS: please stop phoning us. We gave you heap big wampum, now bugger off and leave us alone or we may be forced to stop being inscrutable. Modernisation will be rapid and dramatic, and by 2060 African scientists will have pioneered a way to grow trees in the perma-sludge, while African doctors will be doing ground-breaking work in the treatment of asbestos-perforated lungs.
All of which will make for some frisky multicultural high jinks when modernity meets tradition.
The belief in magic and witchcraft is a lovely thing. It provides answers to profound questions. It puts one in touch with the broader rhythms of the planet. It encourages wonder and exploration. It offers solace.
But then one enters kindergarten, and learns why it’s not helpful to lick snails, and everything becomes a little austere. That’s the trouble with developing critical facilities. It robs one of all the pleasures of being a halfwit.
Which is not to say that those who believe in the powers of witches, or of wicked frogs, or of demonic chameleons, or of youth commissioners are halfwits. Indeed, many of them are successful people, running large organisations, such as sausage factories and Home Affairs. Some are even doctors: witness the scene in Khensani hospital some weeks ago when a teenaged prisoner told nurses that he had a baby living inside him, after which the baby spoke out of the boy’s mouth and instructed them to release its host, presumably for some sort of paternity leave.
One can never be too careful when talking babies inside teenage boys’ stomachs want to go on the lamb, and so the staff ordered an X-ray. It revealed nothing. Said provincial health spokesman Phuti Seloba: ‘We later discovered that this young man is just very talented, and has the ability to make anyone believe that he has a child inside him.” The duplicitous fiend! To prey on the good faith of medical professionals like that!
Of course, one has to wonder just how many chatty abdominal homunculi pass through Khensani hospital. Have they ever, in fact, encountered one? If they haven’t, at what stage are they going to embrace their medieval credulity, and do away with evidence entirely? And if they have, what were they injecting into their eyeballs at the time? Either way, why are they allowed to touch human beings, let alone put things into them?
It’s enough to make a decent witch-fearing citizen come down with bad luck, limp penis, low salary, a spell from a rival at work, bad rash, cancer, low sex drive and unfaithful spouse all at once.
But if it all gets too much, one can always visit Vic Falls for the evening. Which is where Professor Claude Mararike, a sociologist at the University of Zimbabwe, comes back into the picture; for it was this scholar who last week broke the news that it is now possible, with the right muti, to fly in a reed basket between Harare and South Africa. Indeed, the professor is keen to ‘develop the science, patent it and market it”.
Further details were sketchy, but one assumes he was describing the standard single-seater Bulrush Zephyr model, with wicker altimeter, raffia ejector-seat, and the usual four-gallon muti-tank, that gets about 500 miles to the monkey paw, a little more if you go for the richer mix of human ear and tiger testicle. Stable and compact, it has only two blots on its safety record: an unexplained crash somewhere along the banks of the Nile about 3 000 years ago (an infant survived), and a 1967 hijacking attempt in which an American heiress held a Zippo to the fuselage and screamed, ‘Take this basket to Cuba!”
A basket case, indeed.