Becoming The Muse

Coffee with Chido

If you were having coffee with me, I would welcome you to my tangle of words and invite you to feel it home… its raining courtesy of the remnants of the now dissipated cyclone Chido, the third cyclone of the 2024/2025 cyclone season which left a trail of devastation in Mayotte, Comoros and Mozambique..

Our Met department forecasts that there might be heavy rains in some areas with hail storms and strong winds which might carry a potential threat but not as severe as a cyclone would cause. The rains are a welcome respite from the hot spell where temperatures where averaging 30°C  and even more in some areas… Is this global warming and climate change? Cause I have never been this hot before and usually around now we should already be in the rain season… but its been dry and hot till now.

If you were having coffee with me, I would ask if you know how cyclones get their names…. Chido is a Zimbabwean Shona name which means Wish or Desire..and one of the last devastating cyclones we experienced Cyclone Idai also had a Zimbabwean name. There was a time when hurricanes and cyclones only got female names alluding to the fury of a storm being equated to that of a woman scorned.

The World Meteorological Organisation has a strict procedure for the naming of storms incorporating suggestions from WMO member nations through their Regional Tropical Cyclone bodies. They pick on short names that are easy to pronounce, as well as have relatable significance to the people in the region. Cyclones get named when they reach the “Moderate Tropical Storm” stage following an alphabetical list beginning each cyclone season.

In the South West Indian Ocean, tropical systems are named from a list compiled by 15 countries and chosen by consensus during the Tropical Cyclone Committee which is normally held every two years.

Cyclonic season 2024-2025			Cyclonic season 2025-2026
Names	Provided by		Names	Provided by
ANCHA	Comoros		AWO	Malawi
BHEKI	Eswatini		BLOSSOM	Seychelles
CHIDO	Zimbabwe		CHENGE	Tanzania
DIKELEDI	South Africa		DUDZAI	Zimbabwe
ELVIS	Seychelles		EWETSE	Botswana
FAIDA	Tanzania		FYTIA	Madagascar
GARANCE	France		GEZANI	South Africa
HONDE	Malawi		HORACIO	Mozambique
IVONE	Mozambique		INDUSA	Kenya
JUDE	Seychelles		JULUKA	Eswatini
KANTO	Madagascar		KUNDAI	Zimbabwe
LIRA	Lesotho		LISEBO	Lesotho
MAIPELO	Botswana		MICHEL	France
NJAZI	Malawi		NOUSRA	Comoros
OSCAR	France		OLIVIER	Mauritius
PAMELA	Tanzania		POKERA	Malawi
QUENTIN	Kenya		QUINCY	Seychelles
RAJAB	Comoros		REBAONE	Botswana
SAVANA	Mozambique		SALAMA	Comoros
THEMBA	Eswatini		TRISTAN	France
UYAPO	Botswana		URSULA	Kenya
VIVIANE	Mauritius		VIOLET	South Africa
WALTER	South Africa		WILSON	Mozambique
XANGY	Madagascar		XILA	Madagascar
YEMURAI	Zimbabwe		YEKELA	Eswatini
ZANELE	Lesotho		ZAINA	Tanzania

If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that the rain has been on and off just like the windy episodes but otherwise it feels like there’s been much ado about Chido… Some have been joking about how Chido probably is employed by the power utility company and went into load-shedding. It might seem in bad taste to joke about a something that has caused destruction but sometimes relief from one thing just highlights underlying trauma.

I was looking forward to a deluge of rain, with a hope that the Kariba dam would fill up, giving us water for electricity generation, at the hydroelectric power plant and a decrease in load-shedding… but its really looking like we are headed into another drought year despite the met department forecast of normal to above normal rainfall for this rain season…

If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that Christmas is about a week away and the city of Harare finally had the Christmas lights ceremony, its beginning to look like Christmas in the Sunshine City. I could be wrong but it felt like they left it a bit too late to switch on the festive lights and did it more as an after thought… like oh someone turn on the lights…

And just a shortwhile later there was darkness in Harare CBD as the electricity went out… they say it was a fault, maybe it was loadshedding, maybe The Grinch was trying to steal the light at the end of the tunnel…

If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that we are not strangers to inopportune power blackouts, but the most embarrassing one happened during a live broadcast of the 2025 budget when the lights went out during the minister of finance’s conclusion of the budget and the president and had to exit parliament in the darkness…

Ironically the budget had not highlighted policies that would alleviate the power situation like for example incentives for solar and backup power solutions and for independent power producers to feed into the grid. Instead the government is concerned with our health and growing obesity that they will be introducing a tax on fast-foods to promote healthy eating habits, how benevolent of them, right?…

If you were having coffee with me, I would ask if you remember Sophia the robot? Well her name isn’t on the list cyclones unless if we ever have an AI storm… Anyhoo as part her 8 year anniversary tour the talking robot made an appearance at a University of Zimbabwe AI summit draped in our national fabric.

Local media who have been living under a rock for the past 8 years made it seem like Zimbabwe had created its first AI robot with some even referring to it as Nehanda Sophia as if Nehanda’s bones would be reborn as an AI robot but then again that would make a most interesting tale…. 🤔

Whats been happening in your neck of the woods?

~B