Behind dark glasses, the soldier watches the women. His arms are on his hips and on his lips is what appears to be a half-smile of bemusement.
For the woman right in front of him, the woman in the light-coloured dress leaping like a gazelle, is no lissom young thing. Comfortably upholstered, she has left the days of her girlhood behind.
And yet she springs high into the air, arms stretched out before her, right hand fisted into a clench, round bottom straining the fabric of her dress. Those behind her can see the dirty soles of her bare feet.
Facing her is another woman, her friend or perhaps a sister or a neighbour, or maybe a stranger she has just met.
The second woman wears a scarf on her head, a dark-coloured dress, a cardigan slung around her waist and the most radiant smile to grace a human face.
In this photograph by John Mauluka, all motion is suspended and all sound stilled. But as in the best photographs, so real, so alive is this captured moment that we are there with the women. We hear their laughter. Our ears ring from their ululated peals of exultation.
The day is April 18 1980. Rhodesia, the last outpost of the British empire in Africa, has died. From its ashes rises a country that will take its place among the free nations as Zimbabwe, the last among equals. The women in the photograph leap and spring, embracing this dream called Zimbabwe.
In the long war against the settler regime, the guerrillas evoked this dream in song. Smith — just hit him on the head until he sees sense, dzamara taitonga Zimbabwe (until we rule this country called Zimbabwe).
The struggle for Zimbabwe lit up the imaginations of people around the world. In London, in New York, in Accra, in Lagos. Bell-bottomed men and women with big hair and towering platform shoes sang the dream of Zimbabwe in the words of the eponymous song by Bob Marley: every man has the right to decide his own destiny.
The dream of self-determination came to pass at the end of 1979, when constitutional negotiations were concluded between all the parties at Lancaster House in London. The war ended, the green and white flag of the rebel colony was replaced for a few months by the Union Jack, and then by a new flag of riotous colour and heartfelt, if cloying, symbolism.
Zimbabwe’s flag, raised by the country’s first black prime minister, flew high, and with it, the aspirations of its people: from the Born Frees, sucking in independent air in hospitals around the country to rheumy-eyed men who peered at independence through their cataracts. And the women: ululating, leaping, exploding with joy.
Almost 30 years on, Zimbabwe is still under the leadership of that first prime minister, now an octogenarian executive president — with dyed hair, a glamorous wife and a stranglehold on power. The vendors on the streets of Harare haggle over how many mita or bhidza something costs — slang terms for millions and billions of Zimbabwe dollars.
These vendors and their customers, the nine or so million people left within the country’s borders — three million have fled — have been rendered criminals: for it is a crime now to buy anything at the non-gazetted prize, to change money on the parallel market, to ”externalise” foreign currency.
It is hard to ignore that many people still believe the ruling party line: that Zimbabwe’s current ”challenges” — as they call them — are a necessary pain. So what if a few people die because there are no drugs or dialysis machines or surgical supplies? This is a small price to pay for consolidating the gains of the liberation struggle.
Millions more, who do not share this particular vision of their independence, are disdained as ”puppets” acting at the behest of foreign governments. They are called sell-outs, inflated frogs, witches and two-headed creatures.
For them, the dream of Zimbabwe has mutated into the horrendous nightmare of rampant inflation. Everything is in short supply: food, electricity, water, surgical gloves and surgeons, textbooks and educators, drugs and nurses. The only leaping that women do is over potholes, or when they jump over pipes which spew waste and effluent on to the streets.
It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when this dream became a nightmare, when the political and economic decline began.
Did it begin with the land-reform programme? The war in the Democratic Republic of Congo? The unbudgeted pensions paid to the former guerrillas? Or were the seeds planted as long ago as the first years of independence, as Kingsway became Julius Nyerere Way and Railway Avenue was changed to Kenneth Kaunda Avenue?
Can it have begun that long ago, when an armed rebellion was crushed with a ruthlessness that would later be declared a moment of madness by its chief architect? Did things start to go wrong when the UANC and Zapu, the only political parties that could have formed a necessary opposition to the ruling party, splintered and disappeared? When Zapu was swallowed by the bloated leviathan that is now the ruling party?
Did it all turn sour in 1987, when a constitutional amendment created an executive presidency with no accompanying measures to strengthen parliament and the judiciary? Or was it in 2000, when the people delivered a vote of no confidence in the government by rejecting its proposed changes to the Constitution in a referendum?
Perhaps the origins of the problem can be traced back even before independence, when the guerrilla movement adopted ruthless methods of centralised control and stifling dissent from Mao Zedong.
Or back in the bush, in the struggle, when the talk was all of power and not democracy, control not inclusiveness.
Or when the liberation struggle was fought on tribal fronts.
Or when the government tried to impose a one-party state.
A style of government was honed with lessons learned from bosom friends of the struggle such as Nicolas Ceausescu, the Butcher of Bucharest. The ”revolutionaries” agreed with Kim Il-sung, the Great Leader and another bosom friend of the liberation struggle, that there was nothing intrinsically wrong with personality cults in which children were taught praise poems to honour a single man, nothing wrong when women flocked to the airport to welcome the home-grown Great Leader as he returned from his many trips, kneeling before him in the early dawn with his face on their bottoms.
Were things always wrong with this dream called Zimbabwe?
The painful truth may be that Zimbabwe, youngest of Britain’s former colonies, simply followed where the continent has led.
It has trod a well-worn path, beaten out of the lie that taking power from the colonialists and delivering democracy to the people are one and the same thing.
The coming election gives the country another chance to reimagine the dream.
And if it fails this time?
Well, there will be the next election and the election after that.
It may be no immediate comfort to the suffering, but nothing lasts forever.
Ian Smith said his Rhodesia would last a thousand years. If we include the era of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, it lasted only 14 years and five months.
This era, too, shall pass.
And when it does, somewhere, a photographer will snap a shot of women and men and children leaping to embrace a dream called Zimbabwe.
Petina Gappah is a writer and lawyer