By Shaun Matsheza
Standing there at Nzvimbo, listening to them talk of indegenization and empowerment, one man had experienced an unpleasant flashback, recalling the events that had led him back to that desolate rural home with nothing but the clothes on his back.
Standing there and braving the cold July wind, he thought about his business, trashed in deranged chaos instigated by a paranoid government. He recalled the overwhelming feeling of impotence that had engulfed him as he had once again had to call a wealthy friend to ask yet another favour.
He had been trying to make ends meet, and had set up a good backyard carpentry business in Kuwadzana in Harare. He shared a space with two other friends; Marve, who described his business as ‘leather works’; and Fatso, who spent the day churning out miniature giraffes that he would later sell to the tourists the Avenues.
The three of them had built up a functional workshop in the backyard of his property, where they could all work. He didn’t make a lot, but business was steady. Every society needs a carpenter; even if he’s one of the regular ones that don’t later rise from the dead and carve themselves a niche in great leather bound books.
Besides dealing in the vessels of the deceased, he would sometimes find clients who needed home fitting services, a wardrobe here, a cupboard there, and at the end of the day he managed to keep food on the table. All that had changed when the government decided to clean up the city.
They called it Murambatsvina.
He remembered that he had been making his way up the dusty path lined with burry grass, with his hoe slung across his shoulder, back from tending the small garden he planted with sweet potatoes and some maize.
His little daughter, the younger one who always had her thumb in her mouth at the ripe age of nine, no matter how much he or her mother told her not to, was running towards him. She was shouting something in her squeaky voice but he couldn’t make out the words.
By the time she got to him, he turned onto his own street, he could already see what was the cause of her distress. Three police vehicles, two santanas and a 40 tonne truck emblazoned with the Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP) logo, were parked on the street.
More than twenty policemen and municipality workers were systematically destroying what they called “illegal constructions”.
When he got to his own property, he found three policemen starting on the third wall of his workshop. They had already made short work of the front wall, which was really just a bunch of metal sheets. What were these people thinking?!
He tried to rush them to stop them, but his neighbours restrained him. They had already seen many people get beaten up and thrown into the Santana; arrested for ‘Public Disorder’ and ‘obstructing police from performing their duties’.
As he had stood there, watching the tall young police officer with the large ears swinging a sledge hammer into the walls of his working space, the only source of his income, the only way he had managed to put food on the table after many years of failure; his mind kept projecting images of what the next morning would be like.
What was he expected to do when he got up the next day? His little daughter would have nothing but her thumb to put into her mouth. What kind of government considered depriving its people of a means of making a living, a form of taking out the trash?
Of course his industry generated its fair share of waste, but most of it wound up on the fires to cook under the moon when the electricity went out everyday.
As the last part of the wall had come crumbling down in a cloud of red dust, and the policemen set their sights on the next illegal structure, he had wiped a tear from his eye, and felt greatly afraid of the future. He had had to move to a rural area, to Nzvimbo.
A place whose name means literally, when translated; ‘Place’, only seemed to mock his placelessness.
He listened to them talk, and like those around him raised his fist in the air. Everyone here knew you would get in trouble if your enthusiasm for the great leader’s presence was ever in doubt. And besides, there was going to me meat and beer after the rally, they said the first lady had truckloads of bread and sugar. Well, he would do what they wanted to see in public, and he would have some of those goodies for his family as well.
But come election day. He knew his vote was secret.
Now it was his turn to take out the trash.
