If you were having coffee with me, I would welcome you to the Sunshine City as Harare is known as, even though the sun is a bit on the much side and trying to burn us all. That’s why we pray for rain.
If you were having coffee with me I would share with you a story which is attributed to either Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin as having casually plucked the feathers from a live chicken then hand-feeding it to demonstrate how easy it is to govern the masses.
While the veracity of both versions is questionable, the Stalin story is the older known version, which came out 30 years after Stalin’s death from a source renowned for writing in elliptical, allegorical ways leaving the story more legend than fact. The story is used to illustrate how people dictators do things, simply because they can and chickens people accept their place in life.
If you were having coffee with me, I would say real or not, the story is a classical demonstration of the Stockholm Syndrome where one begins to look up to their oppressor, appreciating the handouts and forgetting, the oppression. A part of me has always questioned the theme central to the fairytale Beauty and Beast… a beast locks up a girl until she loves him nothing to see there…
Colonisation played a number on the continent leaving Africa with an institutionalised inferiority complex, some are seemingly little things such as how a successful person or boss is referred to as Murungu meaning “white person”; someone’s fluency in English is a yardstick for education and intelligence or even the way some foreigners can fly to Africa and be hailed as heros for performing self-serving interests packaged as humanitarian work…
A duo whose tweets went viral for all the wrong reasons were recounting how they had travelled to Africa to build a city without any money and even met up with president of Ghana…
Apparently Herofuturism.. immortality through heroism and technology.
Their accounts are now locked so I don’t know their final position on things but I found it ironic how they could easily set up meetings with heads of state and secure funding to bankroll their ideas, I am sure they had some merit to them but priviledge afforded them liberties.
If I had the exact same idea they had and tried to meet up with a head of state, how long would it take to be granted an audience?
If you were having coffee with me I would tell you that shuffling past the news channel I ran into the United States senator Cory Booker commenting how President Donald Trump should be not be running for the presidency if he can’t commit to a peaceful transfer of power and then he says with all due respect we are not Zimbabwe we are not Belarus…
I hate that my country can be used as a reference point for bad governance. We’ll I doubt anyone here would rack up 70 000 dollars as hair expenses but I am sure someone is taking notes on how to dip into expense accounts.
But This is Zimbabwe where the law is weaponised into a tool for lawfare to punish those who would dare question the status quo.
If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you how people demonstrating against corruption gets your court case tried in the Anti-Corruption court… wait what? Those who are supposed to prosecute the corrupt are prosecuting people who are campaigning against corruption.
And those who make allegations of being abducted by state agents will find themselves tried on various charges and if they say they are unable to stand trial due to trauma they are committed to stay in prison pending examination by government doctors even if they are supposed to be on bail and in a private hospital… And one has to be very careful how one talks about these things
If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that schools are phased opening of schools was supposed to start today…
But very few schools have successfully opened with students being turned away, teachers through their unions have been citing incapacitation and also the lack of PEP materials. The government is keen on schools opening before the year ends because they do not want students repeating the year as it would clog the system…. So they would rather advance learners to the next class while they are ill-equipped not to mention the exam classes who haven’t been learning the entire year…
There’s talk of schools opening and haven’t heard anything about the closing dates… how long would this term be, would they learn till next year without a break, to catch up, what would happen on Christmas?? Questions people are asking and haven’t any answers about…
If you were having coffee with me I would tell you that a center for Traditional Chinese Medicine & Acupuncture Center was opened at our main referral hospital Parirenyatwa.
This is all good but when will our own traditional medicine also be good enough to be recognised thus, for me this take us back to when nothing good can ever come from us and we constantly have to wait on others to tell us how to be us….
To quote Madeleine Albright who quoting Benito Mussolini “If you pluck a chicken one feather at a time, nobody notices.” There is a lot of feather-plucking going on right now.
If you were having coffee with me, I would ask you what’s been happening in your neck of the woods.
~B
Becoming The Muse 
Leave a comment