Zimbabwe’s Very Worst of Talk FM Radio

Xtreme OpiSatire with Rejoice Ngwenya

Agitated by a cumbersome combination of incessant boredom and compulsive spite, I regularly stray onto ‘ZANU-PF’s only commercial new private talk radio station’. Let me steer clear of the stinky waters of litigation by terming this daft novelty of a broadcaster ‘Moontalk FM’.

Surely if I felt an urge for serious radio talk, wouldn’t I rather plug into my favourable ‘pirates’ – VoP and Studio 7? At least these do not demand emotional ransom!

So on this day, an enthusiastic radio guest is all ‘yadder-yadder’ about his forthcoming ‘The Best of Zimbabwe’ full-colour picture book. This triggers a storm of literary ideas in my restive mind: I could entitle my own gloss hardcover ‘The Very Best of the Worst of Zimbabwe’.

I spontaneously lapse into my teenage memories – the 70s when hard rock ‘LP’ covers were the in thing – the ‘very best’ of slap bang scoundrels like Uriah Heep, Black Sabbath, The Who, UFO, Grand Funk, Thin Lizzy, Jimi Hendrix, Boston et al.

Buoy, those were THE days! Imagine eardrums of an ‘innocent’ teenager poisoned with satanic lyrics: ‘death is a welcome experience for those who live’ or ‘if you love me, kill me quickly’ and ‘I’d rather bury you alive than live for you’!

Yet Moontalk FM is a 5-star big yawn. Like the rest of them praise-singers, hero-worshippers of the ZBH stable: comrade so and so said; illegal sanctions this or commander in chief, head of state and government that; blah, blah – yet another desperate exhibition of superficial ZANU-PF patriotism. Which planet do these zombies come from!

But then there is light at the end of the literary tunnel: ‘Ngwenya’s Very Best of the Worst of Zimbabwe’. This is going to be a scorcher – a must for all coffee tables, trade missions, travel agents and the department of African relations in China!

Tourists and investors are going to step on each others’ toes for the first bus trip to my one-roomed rural cottage of Shurugwi. There will be so much chaos – Zimbabwe Republic Police even evoking emergency powers to persecute me for ‘illegally’ hosting frenzied book-signing crowds.

The Cape Town International Book Fair will look like a stroll in a children’s park, compared to my ‘Zimbabwe’s Very Best of the Worst’ launch event!

Here’s an idea of some of the Pulitzer Prize winning shots in my forth coming book: a nocturnal aerial photo of the Harare International Airport – complete with pitch darkness and invisible runway. The conical tower silhouettes against a ray emitted from a floodlight of a distant slum.

My double centre-spread depicts a mucous-infested toddler gnawing at a chicken bone next to her mother frying groundnuts outside a dilapidated commercial farmhouse. In another, a multi-coloured, kilometre -long queue of residents wait patiently at dawn for their turn to draw water off a mechanical borehole in Mabvuku high density suburb.

The picture book concludes with a woman in army camouflage displaying a large fluorescent badge inscribed ‘National Census Zimbabwe’. She is knocking absent-mindedly at the door of a solitary, grass-thatched hut in an abandoned animal conservancy. A few metres next to a chicken-run is a lifeless torso of a mutilated black rhino.

Caption reads: ‘In Our Beautiful Country, Soldiers Don’t Just Intimidate Citizens, They Also Count Them.” And so if you have a broadcast-quality voice, make a date with Zimbabwe’s newest ZANU-PF’s only commercial private radio station – Moontalk FM.

You can’t get through their dysfunctional telephone system? Just drive there, produce A ZANU-PF party card and wham, you are live on air!