In my life, in our time

By The Standard | Nov. 17, 2017 | 5 Min read

On Wednesday morning, I did not need an alarm clock to wake me up. By 3 00am I was already alert and in multiple conversations on my phone.

By Thembe Khumalo

After I watched the army’s ZBCTv address I still wondered whether to go out for my daily run, but that internal debate ended abruptly as I watched four fully-manned army trucks rumble past my gate. There is something about soldiers with guns that brings up the childhood Gukurahundi memories in me. When I see them, I don’t need to be told twice to sit down.

That is when reality hit, and I realised that life as we know it had changed.

This week we saw something that we have never seen before, something new and strange, frightening and thrilling all at once.

We saw the end of an error, or rather a collection of errors; errors we had been making and failing to correct for decades, and we also saw the end of an era. We saw the beginning of another — an era that takes us once more into unchartered territory. We texted, tweeted and told one another: “What a time to be alive!”

We alerted and advised and apprised one another of “developments” in our nation. For a people that have so long longed for change, it was surreal to watch it unfold before our eyes.

Change is something that my generation has longed for with a deep and plaintive thirst. Anyone would think we had not seen enough of it in our time. And yet, if you reflect deeply on our life and times you realise that by now we should really be the masters of instigating and managing change. We should be the experts in anticipating, evoking and managing change; because surely, have we not seen it all?

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We saw the dawn of independence in the eighties; watched our country change name, and subsequently saluted a new flag, and sang a new national anthem. We became the first generation of kids in this country to share classrooms with white children as equals. And we pondered with bewilderment how it was that even though we did better than them in class, they somehow still ended up more prosperous than us in life.

That is when we started to understand how colonialism really works — that it’s a generational monster, whose impact lasts long beyond the lifetime of both the victim and the perpetrator. We took notes, and continued to work hard. We watched the fall of apartheid in South Africa, celebrated with our brothers across the border, but quietly recognised that they were just starting their struggle for real freedom.

A little while later, we had a brutal introduction to HIV/Aids, a change that should have fundamentally shifted the way we do the business of life and living. Wiping out entire families and leaving a trail of devastation in its wake. HIV/Aids contributed to the drastic reduction of life expectancy from about 60 years in the 1980s to a low of 40 years in the early 2000s. A feared and relentless opponent which like colonialism, affects generations, we continue to fight HIV/Aids today, sometimes winning a battle and sometimes losing, because it too, keeps on changing.

Just when we thought adulthood and personal independence would give us a sense of stability, we entered the information age. The typewriters we learnt to type on at school, the telex machines that we thought were the height of technological advancement, all gave way to a seismic shift in the way the world does business. We went from mainframes to PCs to laptops to mobiles in what seems a very short time. We spent a ridiculous amount of time (and money) preparing for the Y2K changeover, which in the end turned out to be much ado about nothing. If only we had known what was coming, Zimbabwe could have told the world a thing or two about dropping zeros and making do!

Then came the internet; and with it, the world. Effectively shrinking the globe into a space the size of the palm of your hand, the internet gave us and all Africans a door to the worlds we might never have explored. And it supposedly gave our governments serious wake-up calls. With access to the world came access to opportunity and we bade farewell to our siblings, cousins and friends as the exodus out of Zimbabwe unfolded. Those of us who stayed behind still cringe when we hear people talk about the “brain-drain”.

“All the good people have left,” they say.

The changes we saw after that were for the worse, and this was driven home when a 15-year-old boy in Bulawayo was crushed to death as people stampeded in a queue for sugar.

At that point inflation was at 9 000% and the food shortages were a result of price controls. There were no cries of outrage from civil society, no one asked the then governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (or anyone else for that matter) to resign. People simply moved on, joined another queue.

I felt the hopelessness of recognising how cheap life in Africa is.

I recall the first day I walked into what was TM Borrowdale, and found bundles of muriwo in the fridges where meat used to be. I held back tears, not because of my love for meat, but because I recognised that we were in serious trouble.

We went on to make spectacular global history by achieving the highest inflation rate ever in the world. We watched in horror as banks collapsed like dominoes and with them any dreams of recovering our personal financial dignity.

It has not all been doom and gloom in our time. We have laughed out loud and learnt, many things; fell in love and birthed beautiful babies.

We have won Olympic medals, and unprecedented victories in many sports. We have made music, art and built phenomenal businesses and brands. Even though we want more than this, we are truly thankful for what we have had.

It has been a hell of a ride, Zimbabwe. And I have been tempted to get off more times than I care to recall. But I am still here. And I am ready for the next change, and the one after that, even though I do not know what they will bring.

What I know for sure is that we contributed to a lot of what went wrong in our time. We should have required more of ourselves and one another.

We should have taken responsibility and spoken up more. We should have attended community meetings and helped to organise, motivate and encourage one another. We should have held our leaders accountable from the outset. I know none of this was easy — but it being difficult does not absolve us from the responsibility to act. If indeed, we are moving into a new dispensation let us not make the same mistakes we made before. Let us not end up in the same place.