If you were having coffee with me I would be happy to have you visit my these tangle of words. So, the other week I broke my favourite coffee mug and this week the kettle broke. As I wait for the water to boil, I am sitting here pondering how on earth we lived life without kettles.
A watched pot never boils but before it broke the transparent kettle made the process of waiting for the water to boil a meditative process looking at the swirls and ripples highlighted by an eerie blue light. So you see you could watch a kettle boil, and yes I know that the expression isn’t meant to be taken literally, lets’s just take it as a reflection on our mindsets and the fickle nature of what is versus mindsets.
If you were having coffee with me I would tell you that I have been pondering a lot over mindsets as it was a point which was raised repeatedly over a Litfest symposium on Black History Month on how our Traditional Knowledge Systems seem to not be commonly accepted as authoritative when compared to Modern (read that as Western) Knowledge Systems. An interesting point that was raised was how the pandemic had taken us back to our roots (both literally and metaphorically) people became more receptive to the idea of traditional remedies and alternative medicines in health and wellness.
How many of you have tried out steaming with different concoctions or taken all sorts of herbal tonics in the hope that it would help with the dreaded corona, whether curative or preventative? At the flick of a pandemic’s wrist, almost everyone suddenly became a herbalist of sorts. The most interesting thing is that some of these remedies have always been there, but before the pandemic mentioning the word herbs or roots seemed like quack remedies.
Sekuru Chamunorwa made an interesting remark about how we need to “swaggerise” our Traditional Remedies, package them into a product that’s trendy, stylish, acceptable. At times innovation does not simply mean reinventing the wheel but simply giving something that’s always been there a makeover, for example packing and selling a herbal tea in classy teabags.
We need to take pride in ourselves and our histories and preserve the little we still have left instead of seeking validation from beyond our shores. I have always found it crazy how the things we do go unacknowledged until the global world gives its acknowledgement and then suddenly we are falling over backwards trying to show this was something we always had… Did we have it and not know the value of what we had? Yeah, we need to work on our mindsets.
If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that the thing about our mindsets is: are our thoughts really ours? All newspaper headlines have been on the invasion or the specialised military operation that even the dreaded pandemic has taken a backseat; when was the last time you heard anything about it?
The last thing I heard about the pandemic was our president addressing a rally saying that we need to get booster vaccines. Have you gotten yours yet?
Election rallies are weird, you find politicians going at it to say, oh my rally had more people than yours, comparing numbers like kids in the playground bragging who has the bigger TV at home. If only change could come from packing the biggest audience, meanwhile, the answer will only come out when the votes come in and still even then, as everyone knows, its not the voting that counts, it’s the vote counting.
Anyhoo the invasion effects will sweep over us too, according to our Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) Monetary Policy Committee, in 2020 Zimbabwe averaged imports of a combined US$26,46million from Russia and Ukraine. Global prices are already being affected and so are ours.
The president’s mantra nyika inovakwa nevene vayo (a country should be built by its people) makes sense on this backdrop where we rely more on others than on ourselves. Its about mindset shifts, it begins with us.
What are my thoughts about all this? War is Ugly and Love is lovely.
What’s been going on in your neck of the woods?
~B
Becoming The Muse 
Your thoughts.. if you will?