I have filled seven sheets of paper. The other six are already too long. I have to trim this list down, but everything looks important. How am I going to carry all this stuff across the bridge?
And so it came to pass: I got a new job back home in Zimbabwe. I leave my present one and my little nest in the Johannesburg sky in three months’ time. I should be doing cartwheels. I should be planning farewell cocktails. Instead, I am stressing myself out with putting together what I now call the “Zimbabwe survival kit”. It is not supposed to be this hard.
I always find it weird when people ask: “Is your family still in Zim?” As if, what? They were supposed to have all upped and left, all 102 of them? Leave their homes, lives and other pursuits to go where? On whose wages?
I don’t really know my real “home” anymore. A lot has changed since 1999. I was not there when all the big political and economic upheavals happened. Each time I went back, and I did so each Christmas, August school holiday, on Independence days and for family funerals — and there were so many that I lost count. I couldn’t relate. I became a visitor in my own country. I no longer belonged.
Over the past five years I stayed with my friend Nozipho when I went back. She became my mother and I her little child. When I needed airtime, she would simply whip it out of her bag. I would express an interest in sweet potatoes and magically they would appear in front of me. When the power went off, I would sigh and lie back in her nice bed, knowing that soon, very soon, someone in her house would figure out how to cook the next meal, boil me some bath water and even provide cold water to cool it down!
My friend Bella became my transport manager. Needed to see my parents? Bella provided the car, the driver and the fuel. Needed a one-night hotel booking? Bella knew every bed and breakfast in town and I would zip in and out like a business executive. Andrew, our wonderful driver-tour-guide-handyman-reliable-third-hand, knew where to find everything from tyres to cheaper beef and hair salons that were open on Sundays. Geri the doctor had to make house calls when I got the odd flu or needed to get drugs.
When I visited family members, I was fêted and spoilt. Nobody expressed any impatience with my stupid or strange questions. How much is bread? When will the electricity be back on? How do you get money these days? How much do we put in the Sunday collection plate? I was a visitor, you see. I was sister or aunty or child from Jo’burg, a whole planet away. I was smiled at and tolerated for not being in the know.
“Sister, this is how it is done in Zimbabwe now,” one of my brothers always chided me. That kept me mum for the rest of the fortnight. When I finished reading the books I had brought on holiday and I got tired of bathing from a bucket, or the lack of internet access got to me, I simply changed my ticket and ran away.
I will no longer have this luxury, which is why I am putting together my survival kit. I have listed: plastic buckets for storing water, a gas stove, long-lasting lamps, matches, candles, lots of candles. Someone says I need a bread-maker. But who will be making the bread? Moi? I have also been advised to buy a power generator, an invertor, a water tank. Eish! What size do I get? Where? I haven’t listed the groceries yet.
But it is the political conversations, if one can call them that, that I am particularly dreading. Over the years I had learnt to just listen, smile and shake my head in a noncommittal manner. It was along these lines: Tell us what Thabo Mbeki or Jacob Zuma are saying? What will they do? The high expectations of what the South African mediation was (and still is) supposed to deliver still baffles me. When people asked me “What are the South Africans saying?”, I wondered which ones they were expecting to hear from. The media here? Which, if it devotes an inch to issues beyond national borders, seems to be about an American celebrity or the Greek debt crisis. Or did they want to know what black South Africans in the townships think of Zimbabweans? Was May 2008 instructive enough?
So, since you asked: Am I excited about going back home? Umm, erm, ahhh, well, yes. Sort of. I am ecstatic in the morning and by nightfall I am in a complete state of panic. I do not know how to survive in the new Zimbabwe. I have become used to an easy, on-tap lifestyle. For the past 12 years I have slowly become removed from the rural credentials that I like parading around. At least in the village I knew where to find firewood or clean water. It was a given that we went to bed at 7pm, because that was the life. I read books by candlelight because that is what we did. I don’t know how to speak the political languages anymore; the shark-infested political pool and discourse look too murky to wade into them.
The social language of how you can — and screw the next person — get by is one that will take me years to get used to. Now, where do I buy good Indonesian coffee in bulk?