Of Coffee With Banana Yellow Fever

If you were having coffee with me, I would be glad to have you visit and wish you an awesome new month, I think its safe to stop wishing people a happy new year right…. Hmmm unless its someone I haven’t seen since last year…..?

Hello February

New month New Folder pic.twitter.com/i5lixR5o2e

— ~B 🇿🇼 (@Beatonm5) February 1, 2022

Did you know that Benjamin Rush an American phsycian in October 1973 blamed the Yellow Fever Outbreak on coffee, a pile of rotting coffee that was on the dockside to be precise, and of course removing the coffee didn’t decrease the yellow fever pandemic… That immediate response to seek blame, to target the innocent, is a hallmark of past epidemics, and it even persists today.

Its been an interesting week in the banana republic that is this teapot shaped country…. If you dropped by my last coffee date; Coffee With Great Expectations, one of the last things I mentioned was how Nelson Chamisa’s opposition party had undergone a rebranding from being MDC-A to Citizens Coalition for Change CCC and adopting yellow as their brand colour.

BABY GIRL OR BABY BOY?
The baby is about to be born.
And the parents are the citizens.
And the village witches want to steal and or kill this baby.
It’s a new birth not a rebirth.
And the name is…..… It’s a new day! pic.twitter.com/1mxxFKRbTD

— nelson chamisa (@nelsonchamisa) January 24, 2022

It must have been a hard decision to make considering the history behind the opposition party the Movement for Democratic Change which was formed in 1999. When the party was formed I was in secondary school and our History Teacher was explaining how people who do not learn from history are doomed to watch history repeat itself…

This was because he was explaining how the working class would always revolt against the status quo, which is why when you looked on the politics scene, one of those would be pro-working class, if it wasn’t there it would emerge. The MDC had its roots in the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) which was a union for Zimbabwean workers. Following the death of Morgan Tsvangirayi 14 February 2018 the MDC party has suffered from succession wrangles which have seen splinter parties and allies becoming rivals, embroiled in court cases and messy power plays that muddied the waters.

If you were having coffee with me I would tell you that with the presidential elections coming up in a year and our on-again-and-off-again by-elections also coming shortly, one of the reasons they had been reluctant to rebrand had been that it might cause confusion or that people might not get the memo and end up voting for the wrong party and thus diluting the votes. But if the past week is any indication, the yellow sea is making waves.

People have been taking to their social media to post pictures wearing yellow in support of CCC. A parody  Zimbabwe Republic Police Twitter Account posted a notice viral tweet on how eating bananas in public would now be a felony. People have joked that bananas might become a symbol of resistance and subjected to systematic brutality…. sharing past photos of run-ins with banana vendors.

Mainstream news media (read that as State-Run Media) has generally been silent about this rename exercise by CCC, the only mention I did see was the faux pas where they were calling out the “number one” gesture symbol by CCC as being a terrorist gesture… You cant make this up

FYI it’s not a terrorist gesture….. While IS may have adopted it for their own use, for accuracy when Muslims raise the finger, it’s the “Tawhid”, a declaration of “the oneness of Allah” A BBC reporter once reported this symbol as such and they had to issue an apology;  To reduce such a fundamental and important concept to a mere ‘IS salute’ is grossly wrong, ignorant, and damaging.

Meanwhile wearing yellow does seem like it might become problematic and one best avoided in case one is inadvertently caught in a crossfire similar to how some of us had stopped wearing red in public because you were likely to end up in playing temple run with the police. On Thursday supporters of CCC got arrested “for wearing yellow” as they claim, although the Police Commissioners disputed the claims, saying:

“They were arrested for blocking a pavement as they were chanting party slogans, so the police intervened and others ran away while some were arrested. So the arrest has truly nothing to do with their regalia.”

If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you there is always many sides to a banana. Just like how the ruling party wants to ban Chamisa from using the colour yellow as they used it first…

“Yellow, to us, represents wealth, it’s not just the colour that we took on ourselves, but most importantly, you should also take the fact that we have four colours, (that is) green and yellow, red and black. These colours will never change because of someone who wants to take them. They remain our colours, they symbolise the importance of the rich minerals that we have.” –Tendai Chirau

Legal experts will probably be having a field day explaining and cross-examining the intellectual property rights and ownership of colours or if one can have a monopoly on a colour and bar others from using… Then again it could be another sideshow on the road to the harmonised presidential elections.

If you were having coffee with me I would tell you that lockdown restrictions have been eased and schools are set to open from the seventh of February… finally…. But of course, there might be a problem as Teacher’s Unions are predictably citing incapacitation and threatening industrial action….

Whats going on in your neck of the woods?

Its been raining a lot past week due to Moderate Tropical Storm Ana which has dissipated and another Cyclone Batsirai in the Indian ocean is forecasted to cause heavy rain in our parts…. Is this what they mean when they say it never rains, it pours?

⚠️The tropical depression in Indian Ocean has intensified into a Moderate Tropical Storm.

It has been named BATSIRAI.

Moderate Tropical Storm Batsirai at its current trajectory is forecasted to become a category 1 Cyclone Batsirai over next four dayshttps://t.co/tFvK4CjGH9 https://t.co/ovaEau0xxl pic.twitter.com/yIYfxINWpQ

— ~B 🇿🇼 (@Beatonm5) January 27, 2022

~B