Curiouser and Curiouser

“Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. I’m afraid the fox is back on the runway again so we’ll now have to wait until they move it on.”

Its 8.20pm. I am on the tarmac at Heathrow. It is a cold, wet winters evening, and I’m in a cramped aeroplane seat next to a huge and equally cramped South African. If the captain had said, over the tannoy, that there was large white rabbit running around the runway with a pocket watch and saying “I’m late. I’m late.” it would have been no stranger or more surprising than much of what we were to see over the next few days as we began the long slog down to Zimbabwe.

Having lived in Namibia for two years, I realized (when I saw Zimbabwe for the first time) that this was the picture-book idea I had grown up with when I was small. All redolent of “Daktari” and “Born Free”. Namibia with its sweeping, cinemascope type grandeur, breathtaking desert colours and huge skies, is an Africa all of its own. But Zimbabwe was the Africa I thought I knew – the Africa that made me want to go there in the first place.

The strange thing about Zimbabwe now is that it's not even the place I thought it was. It now has this indefinable, mercurial quality about it, which is further fogged by the fact that it's not that place I’m reading about in the newspapers, or watching on TV. For a start it's green. There have been plentiful rains, which means that driving across Northern Matabeleland land from Bulawayo to Gweru, there are fields of grass, waving gently in the breeze. You might be in Wyoming, or Kansas. It doesn’t seem or feel like the sort of place where people are going to rise up against anybody. Elsewhere in the world, indignant Icelanders were rioting in the streets and throwing custard at the Parliament building. Bulgarians were holding rallies and railing against the ills of capitalism. In Zimbabwe, where the people are oppressed and subjugated, they are going about their days with a smile, a wave and (nearly always) the most important thing they want to know is “Did you sleep well?”.

This is perhaps because a good night’s sleep is something that can be achieved with no money (which hardly any of them have) and then you begin to realize that encapsulated in that question and answer may well be one of the most precious things they have – the chance to sleep, and rest, and forget.

Maybe the people are broken, dispirited, have no fight left. But I didn’t get that feeling. The smiles are still there, but other things are missing and I’m still trying to work out what they are.

Simon Pope