Festivities?

I went to the Zimfest last Saturday.  It was a great day - hot and sunny and I bumped into loads of people I know.  We sat on the grass, drinking Zimbabwean lager, eating Zimbabwean food and listening to Zimbabwean music and just for a second or two we could almost imagine we were back in Harare.  

All the laughter and fun, however, couldn't hide the fact that we weren't there because we chose to be.  We were there because if we'd remained in Zimbabwe, we'd be dead, dying or facing a grim daily struggle for basic survival.   

In just over three hours the Zimbabwean dollar fell from Z$1.2 trillion to Z$1.3 trillion to the £ sterling.  The same meal will now cost more than it did at lunch time.

Zero Tolerance

Today the Zimbabwean dollar stands at Z$1.2 trillion to the £ sterling.  That's Z$ 1,200,000,000,000 to one pound or to put it another way - 10 million per cent inflation.  ...all those zeros and you still can't buy a single meal.

Deadly serious

Zimbabwe has collapsed - the official inflation rate is over 2 million per cent, hundreds have died in political violence, a month's salary won't even buy one meal, the country has no leadership after the single candidate 'election' so what counts as news for The Herald ( the government's propoganda paper)?  Why the government's battle against a plague of red locusts of course! 

For those of you fortunate enough never to have read a government mouthpiece, it's certainly a laugh, even if only for the surreal, head-in-the-sand approach.

Photo opportunities

I just can't stop looking at the photographs flooding in from Zimbabwe.  I don't want to but I can't stop.  Hundreds and hundreds of photos, broken, bloodied bodies.  The woman beaten so badly that her buttocks have been reduced to a mass of shredded flesh - the man beaten on the soles of the feet - the six year old boy with the swollen, bruised face -  the decomposing body of the MDC driver shot in the back with his trousers round his ankles.  On and on it goes and I can't stop looking.  I gorge unwilling, on the blood, the flesh and after a while the images merge into one.  Maybe if I keep on looking, the pain will subside and they'll just become pictures.

It's the ordinary, everyday details that really jar.  See the picture of the man with his fingernails removed?  He bought his shirt from the Farmer's Co-op... I can't believe they're still selling those shirts!  Look at Tendai Biti, shackled and manacled in prison... he's wearing an Arsenal top just like the man in the greengrocers down the road!  Check the photo of the man lying dead on the ground with that stick still embedded in his torso...  those huts in the background look just like the huts on the way to the lake!  The mundane details of life become infused with horror.

On and on and on it goes.  I walk down the High Road to the post office and I look at the faces of the people on the street and I wonder - if this madness was happening here, in Britain, in London, who would be the torturer and who would be the tortured?