If you were having coffee with me, I would be pleased you joined, I would tell you I heard a Christmas carol in a supermarket so definitely the Christmas season is here, although the general mood is somewhat subdued.
If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that on Friday the 6th of December, Harare City Council switched on the Christmas lights, its officially Christmas in the Sunshine City.
I wonder if they are solar powered, I haven’t been in the city after dark and wondering how they are managing them in light of the electricity crisis…
If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you because of watching Christmas special movies and TV shows growing up I used to picture a typical “white Christmas” with snow and reindeer, a portly Santa Claus and his white whiskers. I have been thinking about this because been seeing some Christmas special campaigns with winter and snow themes a Christmas tree by a cozy fireside et cetera.
Here’s the thing it does not snow in these parts of the world; yet one of the first similes I learnt in school was As White As Snow. That’s not all, our Christmas is in the height of summer, the hot wet season to be precise, and it usually rains on Christmas day.
Shouldn’t our holiday festivities be more Summer themed and which part does the portly red jump-suited gent intersect with the nativity story….
If you were having coffee I would tell you I feel we are a product of someone else’s culture and traditions. “They” came, they saw they conquered; imposing their civilisation so thoroughly on us that if one should try and have a discussion about our ancestry it becomes an awkward topic or how even though English is not my mother language I can express myself better in it, than in mine….
One of the reasons why I write, why I encourage people to, is from looking at the amount of history that we lost throughout the ages, our knowledge was passed down via oral tradition and now no one remembers the stories and the lessons and the history books well those have been written and rewritten depending on who is in control of the narrative someone once hailed a hero becomes a traitor, some of the real heroes are never remembered, and others simply deny their part in history.
If you do not tell your own story someone else will tell it for you….
Recently BBC Hardtalk’s Stephen Sackur was in Zimbabwe for a series of On The Road In Zimbabwe episodes of HardTalk one of those was a short documentary on how the Victoria Falls faced a possibility of drying which some people interpreted as that the Victoria Falls have dried up, I wrote an article about this:
Drying Up Of The Victoria Falls
Another episode of the On the Road series shows Stephen Sackur in Harare’s Mbare city talking to citizens about the struggles they face…
Commenting on this a minister was quoted in local independent media as saying people are exaggerating their starvation…
Of course you can imagine there has been an online firestorm some saying the government is either heartless or out of touch with the plight of the ordinary citizens.
If you were having coffee with me I would tell you there’s 3 sides to every coin….
Heads, tales and the edge between them where the truth lies….
If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you this is day 9 of 25 days of blogging challenge and I should write about my best drink for the year…. Well in a roundabout way I meant to say that it’s summer and the mango season is about to begin, blending 100% mango juice from a mango in your back yard is the best thing ever…
What’s going on in your neck of the woods, has the festive season started yet?
~B
Becoming The Muse 
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