It must have been a Zimbabwean — grouchy and constipated from the unavailability of his breakfast pap thanks to the maize shortage — who decided to rebrand the country’s major assets.
And so the slogan for the Grain Marketing Board changed to ”Not a Grain of Truth”. The line for the country’s milk supplier, Dairibord, became ”We Milk the Nation”. As for the National Oil Company, the state importer of petroleum products should make it clear that ”We Fuel Corruption”.
Zimbabwe’s crisis has created paradoxes such as poor billionaires, the fastest-shrinking economy outside a war zone and other such clichéd oddities. Its citizens have sharpened their great survival tool: humour.
Amid the gloom, Zimbabweans have shown themselves to be self-effacing and funny.
The result is megabytes-worth of jokes that do the email rounds. Whole websites are dedicated to Zimbabwean jokes, such as Nyambo.com (”nyambo” is Shona for jokes). Some of these are generic, but have been given a fresh twist.
The most biting are the religious, the social and the economic aphorisms that question, poke fun at, and make sense of what being a Zimbabwean means.
It’s not all apocalyptic: there’s a striking facility with figures that harks back to the world-class education system President Robert Mugabe established in the early years.
Take the one about a quantum theorist and a thirsty man, who walks into a bar to be told that a beer now costs Z$1 500 000.
The theorist advises the patron to put away his notes, still damp from the country’s round-the-clock money-printer, Fidelity Press, and instead pay with 150 000 000 old one-cent coins.
The theorist calculates that the coins together weigh 450 000kg and that the poor drinker will need more than one beer to cool down from carrying his load to the pub. So he comes up with an even better idea: sell the metal and drink the proceeds.
Although the Zimbabwean education system was once so good it created quantum theorists, it is no longer immune to the general carnage in the country — as this joke shows. A primary-school teacher is keen to show off her pupils to a visiting school inspector. She invites him to ask them any question he likes.
”Class, who broke down the walls of Jericho?”
There is a stunned silence. Eventually, Jimmy raises his hand: ”Sir, I do not know, but I can assure you it wasn’t me.”
The inspector is shocked and looks at the teacher who says: ”Well, I’ve known Jimmy since the start of the year, and I believe that if he says he didn’t do it, then he didn’t do it.” Even more perturbed, the inspector goes to the headmaster, who is also clueless. Finally, the inspector takes up the issue with the minister of education who tells him: ”I don’t know the boy, the teacher or the principal, but just get three quotations and have the damn wall fixed.”
Other jokes poke fun at the distinct markers of the Zimbabwean. It is only Zimbabweans who think Coca-Cola is the generic name for all soft drinks, Cobra for all floor polish, and Colgate for toothpaste.
Other quips are in tragi-comic vein and are about Zimbabweans in the diaspora and how they have ”fallen” — the lawyers who are now care workers, and the London-based migrant who ”conducted a tearful funeral oration for his father on the phone as he is an illegal resident who can’t go to Zimbabwe and be allowed back into the UK”.
Faith is never far away, as shown in this parody of Psalm 23.
”Mugabe is my shepherd, I shall not work. He maketh me to lie down on the park benches. He leadeth me besides the closed factories. He restoreth my faith in the MDC. He guideth me in the paths of unemployment. Even though I walk through the valley of the soup kitchen, I shall still be hungry…”
A postscript to all this is the supplicant’s remark: ”Guys, my take-home salary can’t take me home. What am I to do?”
Laugh, perhaps, for isn’t that the best medicine?