ZIMBABWE’S story may be told through two books.
One is Waiting for the Rain, Charles Mungoshi’s enduring novel about a society suspended between inheritance and change, certainty and uncertainty, yesterday and tomorrow.
The other is Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the famous play in which two men spend their lives waiting for someone who never arrives.
Both are stories about waiting.
But they imagine waiting very differently.
And somewhere between Mungoshi’s rain and Beckett’s Godot lies modern Zimbabwe.
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Zimbabweans have always understood the meaning of waiting.
Ours is a country built around seasons.
For generations, farmers have looked towards the horizon and searched the skies for rain.
Waiting was never unusual. It was woven into the rhythm of life itself.
But there was an important distinction.
Waiting for rain did not mean doing nothing.
Fields still had to be prepared.
Seed still had to be sourced.
Fences still had to be repaired.
Hope and action walked together.
That is what made the waiting meaningful.
In Beckett’s world, things are different.
His characters wait endlessly for a man named Godot.
They speculate, debate, complain and hope. Yet Godot never appears.
The waiting becomes the story.
More troublingly, the waiting becomes a way of life.
It is difficult not to see echoes of that condition in contemporary Zimbabwe.
We are waiting for jobs.
Waiting for investment.
Waiting for political reform.
Waiting for economic recovery.
Waiting for electricity.
Waiting for our children abroad to come home.
Waiting for the next budget, the next policy, the next breakthrough.
Waiting has become such a familiar feature of Zimbabwean life that we scarcely notice it anymore.
Perhaps that is because many of our reasons for waiting are entirely legitimate.
Decades of economic uncertainty have taught Zimbabweans caution.
People postpone decisions because circumstances are unpredictable.
They hesitate because the ground beneath their feet can shift without warning.
This is not laziness.
It is adaptation.
Yet every adaptation carries a cost.
The danger is that waiting can gradually move from being something we do to becoming something we are.
The graduate waits for employment.
The entrepreneur waits for capital.
The nation waits for better days.
Individually, these acts of waiting make sense.
Collectively, they begin to shape a culture in which tomorrow occupies more of our imagination than today.
The greatest tragedy is not that Zimbabweans wait.
The tragedy is that we organise our lives around futures that never quite arrive.
We postpone ambitions until conditions improve.
Put off living while preparing for a better tomorrow.
In doing so, we risk discovering that the future we were waiting for has quietly become the past.
This is also visible in the language of national life.
An investor will come. A donor will assist. A politician will deliver reform. A new policy will unlock prosperity.
Notice the grammar. In every sentence, Zimbabwe is the object. Something acts upon us. Someone delivers to us.
When a nation’s language defaults permanently to the passive voice, that language eventually becomes a worldview.
And a worldview is harder to reform than any policy.
Yet somewhere in Mbare, or Mkoba, or Sakubva — in a neighbourhood you know — there is a woman who did not wait.
She could not access a bank loan.
The forms were too many, the requirements too steep.
So she started anyway. A small table outside her gate. Tomatoes, cooking oil, airtime.
She is there before the sun is fully up, and still there when the light goes.
No investors. No policy working in her favour.
She has prepared her field.
She does not appear in any development report.
She is not waiting for Godot.
The farmer waiting for rain understands a truth Beckett’s characters never grasped.
Rain matters. But so does preparation.
The harvest depends not only on what falls from the sky, but on what was done before the clouds appeared.
One form of waiting is active. The other is passive. One prepares. The other postpones.
One eventually produces a harvest. The other produces only more waiting.
The question confronting Zimbabwe is not whether we should hope.
Hope has sustained generations through hardship.
The question is what kind of waiting we are practising.
Are we waiting for rain?
Or are we waiting for Godot?
Mungoshi knew something Beckett did not.
The rain does come.
But only to those who have already prepared the field.