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As a cyclist on Harare's streets, I harbour no illusions about my position in the food chain. Which is maybe slightly above bottom feeders. Maybe. Slightly.
In traffic, I don't contest the patchy, potholed pavement. I shunt myself onto the shoulder, be it rugged, teeth jarringly cratered, sandy speckled with shards of broken glass, or slick with mud. I don't overtake my fellow cyclists when cars are approaching in my lane. I know they'll resent swerving around us two abreast and hoot ferociously. I don't assume that a car will yield to me at a give way, or that one won't ignore me as I cross an intersection and cut me off.
In this land of cars, we cyclists have no rights.
But in exchange for my rights, I do take certain privileges to be mine. I've been known to turn left on red when the coast is clear. I treat myself as a pedestrian when there are pedestrian-only robots for school children. I use alleys and paths that are blocked off from cars.
In some ways, I admit to a perverse pleasure in my status outside the system. I don't pay for fuel or public transport. I don't have to queue for a lift, or a petrol coupon or for the petrol itself. I don't have to get my vehicle inspected, and I don't get stopped at roadblocks.
Or I didn't used to. Last week a police officer stopped me at a road block and wanted to see my cycle license. I stared at him blankly. Apparently, I'm supposed to have gone to the city registry building and bought a registration for my bicycle. I was so genuinely in the dark about this fact that he officer let me off with a warning. I don't know that I'll be able to plead ignorance as convincingly the next time around. But I'm certainly not going to pay any licensing free to the illegal Harare City Commission for the privilege of moving about as a rights-less cyclist on these streets.
I wonder what the penalty is for operating a bicycle without a license.
The city road crew came along and did the potholes in the shopping centre near my office. On Monday I noticed the pedestrian crossing where I crashed Stevie has been repainted [see Split Second Zebra]. And yesterday I passed a road crew of six repainting another pedestrian crossing on the same street.
Maybe the Chinese have donated some white paint. And the government doesn’t know what else to do with it.
Meanwhile, Chipo came in yesterday [see A Fist Through the Wall]. At the clinic they told her they don’t let pregnant women onto their ARV trial programme. She says she had a pregnancy test on 13 January and it was positive. She’s known her HIV status since the end of last year.
I don’t know her story, or what her relationships are like. But I do know the way most black men treat most black women here, and the submissive, compliant way most black women are raised to be towards men. Did she try and resist? Did she ask him to use a condom? Did she try and use a femidom? Or was she too lost in the despair and hopelessness of her own situation to care? Was this the same man who transmitted HIV to her in the first place?
I don’t know the half of it. I only know its more complicated than I could ever imagine.
She wants to get an abortion. Which in Zimbabwe is illegal. But she asks if maybe I can help? She says she’s not very far along, and the people at the clinic said if she removes the baby, she can get on the ARV programme.
“Remove the baby. As in wait for it to be born?” I ask, wondering to myself if, with her 27 T cells this woman would even survive pregnancy, much less childbirth.
“No,” she insists, explaining it in Shona so it is more clear. “Abort.”
--You really want to have an abortion?
--She nods and looks at the floor.
--Are you sure? You don’t want this baby? You want an abortion?
--She nods. Sighs. Looks at the floor.
“Well,” I say. “I’m sure there are ways of doing that. Even here.”
She tells me a friend says if you take 42 birth control tablets—seven per day for six days—of the brown family planning kind, the foetus will abort. I raise an eyebrow sceptically.
“Is it too many?” She asks.
What do I tell her? What do I know. I have no idea. It just doesn’t sound very good for her. Or like it will work.
But she’s determined. When she finishes cleaning, she’s going to the pharmacy up the road. She’s pretty sure she has enough money.
Maybe it will work. And if on? There’s a host of wonders in Harare’s networks. Someone will know what to do.
I went this morning for a haircut. I find something cathartic about cutting my hair. And how often and how short it gets cut is generally inversely proportional to my overall sense of peace with the world. So the fact that I’d gone almost six months without some drastic shave was impressive in its own right. But, sure enough, eventually I got so angry and frustrated and enough with the world, the way we treat one another, the endless petty and gross cruelties and inhumanities and not knowing what to do about it all, I decided to shave my head.
It’s a quick, rough job that doesn’t require much skill. With an electric razor and a guard, I’ve done the job myself. I went to Lido Hair Salon, a no-frills barber on 2nd Street and Chinamano Ave. I walked in as someone was leaving, so there was no wait. I’ve done this for years now, and I’ve got the language down. “I’d like a barber,” I said to the woman behind the counter, her hair gently folded into waves, her white sunday blouse starched.
She looked at one of the two men standing in the corner talking. “Tawa,” she said to him in Shona, “This woman wants a barber.”
His lazy eyes dragged over to me, back to the woman, and then back to his friend. He shifted his weight, turned his back slightly, and carried on talking. She waited a moment before asking him again in Shona. “Tawa. This woman is a customer. Why are you refusing?”
He slumped his shoulders and walked towards me. Without a smile or a word of greeting he motioned to me to sit a chair facing the mirror. A low warped chair with curving metal arms and plastic upholstery. He draped a grubby brown plastic sheet over my lap and tied it around my neck. He stood beside me, looking at me in the mirror.
“So?”
“Number two please. The whole head.” [Universal barber speak for a close, but not quite bald, shave.]
As he plugged the razor in and got to work, three men came in. They greeted one another, nodding and clasping hands. One sat on the green plastic sofa pushed against the wall. He turned towards the television, a Sunday morning children’s programme. A den full of primary school children quizzing one another on bible figures. Tiny voices squeaked in poshly accented English: “I say a letter. And you tell me which bible person I’m thinking of.”
The other two men stayed standing, lurking about the barber and the counter where the woman sat. The one came and stood over me, hand on the mirror, leaning his weight against the wall. He spoke to the barber in Shona, asked about me in the third person, assuming from my white skin that I wouldn’t understand.
“What is she doing?”
My barber shrugged.
“Why is she doing this?”
Shrug.
He called to his friends, fishing for an explanation. Clearly a woman couldn’t just walk in and decide on a short haircut like him and his male friends. There had to be Something Wrong. So they started making guesses.
--Lost her child
--Lost her parents
--Jilted lover
I kept my eyes down and my face blank, not showing that I understood. The predatory air about them was not something I wanted to engage with.
Eventually they lost interest and moved out, flirting with the woman behind the counter, who flirted back. She and the two men wandered in and out of the room. The one man was teased. “What are you doing running around with women the way you do,” his friends asked him. “It’s a sure way to kill yourself.”
The woman flopped between the two men like a rag doll, draping herself on whichever man pulled her harder.
The barber stopped and unplugged his razor. He’d roughly shorn my head, leaving an uneven punk fringe at least an inch long across the top. I ran my fingers through my hair and looked at him through the mirror in horror.
“Too short?” He asked me in English.
“Too long.” I said firmly. “I said Number 2 the whole head.”
Sighing he turned back, bent heavily, and plugged the clippers back in. He fished the guard back out of the bin, and set to work again.
“She’s taking more off!” One of the men asked in amazement. The barber shrugged. I looked at the floor.
The men had tired of the woman, or she’d gotten bored of them, and she’d gone outside, maybe to the room next door to speak with the women hairdressers.
The topic shifted back to me. I kept my eyes turned down, seething at the proprietary way so many men see women.
“Would you do her?”
“Never. She’s crazy.”
“How much would you pay me to do her?”
“Id do her for free. One’s like her are like the devil in bed.”
“You couldn’t pay me enough. I’d never fuck a white woman.”
“It’s just this one I wouldn’t fuck. Look at her. She’s disgusting.”
I kept my eyes on a small pale cream patch of chipped paint on the pink wall, next to the electrical socket. The barber couldn’t finish fast enough. The TV programme had moved on to gospel music. The woman was back behind her counter. The barber finished shaving and brushed my neck off. I stood and walked to the counter to pay. $70,000. Hardly more than a loaf of bread.
I leaned across the counter and put my face close to the woman’s. “Please do me a favour,” I said to her in Shona. “Please tell your friends that they were extremely rude and that they disgust me. Please also tell them that they shouldn’t be so full of themselves. A lot of white people do speak Shona these days. They should watch their mouths.”
As I was speaking, the men fell quiet and I knew they’d heard, and understood. I didn’t turn to look at them. I put my money on the counter and walked out, feeling the heat of their stares and embarrassment on my bare head. I swallowed the bitter sweet satisfaction of having stood up for myself. But it did little to temper the sharp metallic taste of anger with this world, these men, these insults and inequalities.
The other day a friend of mine got a text message from her sister. The sister’s just discovered that her 14-year-old son has been looking at pornography on his mum’s workmates computer.
So a few of us were discussing this over lunch recently. There are of course the more obvious questions. Like it being a bit cheeky to scan porn on someone else’s office computer. When there’s a computer at home the boy could be using. And that he was a bit doof not to erase the site history on Internet Explorer like his aunt taught him to do. And how does a mother show her concern about something without forbidding it. Given that, even if she did want to forbid it, he’d still find ways around it.
But more than that, it got us talking about pornography in general. How to define it. It’s role in society. The difference between sex and erotica and pornography.
My one colleague said that, for her, essential ingredients of pornography are power and a penis. And, whilst I don’t quite agree with the inference that there aren’t power issues in women/women relationships, I can appreciate her point. The male/female power imbalance is a given. Men have more power. And so much of our society in general, and sexuality specifically, reinforces that. Women who challenge that are labeled radical angry man-hating bitches. Men who challenge that are derided as “pussy whipped” or effeminate.
This power imbalance is so much the reality of the world that it’s difficult to have a calm, thougthful conversation about it. And it’s so hard to know even where to begin to unravel it. Like racism, or homophobia, or other forms of elitism, any questioning of the status quo is so threatening it’s dismissed as emotional or irrational.
In the face of that, my own temptation is towards anger. I know that the violent fantasies of hurling petrol bombs or taking a machete to the genitals aren’t productive. But I’m at a loss as to what would be.
The master’s tools of violence, intolerance and oppression won’t deliver the radical transformation towards humanity and justice that we need. But how then do we move towards that new reality? We cannot change what we refuse to name.
In a world that pressures conformity and rewards normalcy, perhaps the most revolutionary thing we can do is refuse to conform. Claiming our own positions and taking pride in our convictions might just be the first and most transformative radical action. Speaking truth to power is essential. But maybe it starts with speaking truth at home, at work, and in community.
Its something to midnight and I’m nowhere near sleeping. It’s a Wednesday, but I’m thinking about calling work and telling them I’m taking a four-day weekend. I’ve cracked the password for my housemate’s computer, and I’ve been exploring the music she’s downloaded onto it. Discovering new artists, and reuniting with old favourites.
Finally, I queue up my top five or six mellow hits and get into bed. Lying there, I know sleep is still a long way off. But there is something at once comforting and exquisite about the music, and I wrap myself in it like an embrace.
From a long way off, I hear a dull roar. Of a lorry on Lomagundi Rd, perhaps, or an aeroplane echoing off the low clouds. There’s been lightning flashing the whole night. Perhaps the thunder is finally catching up.
But the roar turns into a rattle and I swear I can feel my bed shaking. I stand up, thinking maybe its just me. But the windows are jerking and the door is banging. The whole house is moving. Something triggers deep in the recesses of my reptilian brain and I know Something Is Not Right. Im squatting on my bedroom floor in my night shirt trying to remember the Earthquake Emergency Procedure.
--Stop Drop and Roll? No, that’s for if you’ve found yourself on fire.
--Storm Cellar? No, I think that’s for tornadoes.
--Earthquakes! Go to the ground floor and sit under a door frame. Or a table. Or something.
But instead I just stand there. Thinking, surely, this is not really happening. I’m in Zimbabwe. We don’t do earthquakes.
After a minute or two, the house falls still again. The blaring sirens, screeching car alarms and barking dogs in the neighbourhood reassure me that this wasn’t all in my head. My heart is racing. There is something indescribably disconcerting about that moment of panic. That instantaneous loss of control when suddenly something’s gone terribly wrong. And there’s absolutely nothing you can do.
I start to hear my neighbours outside. I slip on a pair of shorts, my glasses and my false tooth and go outside to join them. A white pensioner in her pink dressing gown barely hiding her frayed floral nightdress. An Indian man looking bleary eyed but desperate for answers. The security guard, relieved perhaps for a bit of excitement during an otherwise excruciatingly boring night detail. A black mother, children in tow, speaking rapidly.
--Was it a bomb?
--Unlikely. No one heard an explosion.
--A truck? Impossible. It lasted too long.
--An earthquake? Heavens. In Zimbabwe! Is that what they feel like? Now we know.
It’s not that we really think there’s anything to be done. There’s been no damage. The earth just shook for a few minutes. And now it’s stopped.
But there is something comforting in our shared fear, amazement and confusion. For that one moment, we are connected to a common awe. This is not just any night. Nature’s acted out. And to sit inside and ignore it seems irreverent. So we pass a few moments together before drifting back inside to bed.
The next morning, it’s on everyone’s lips. The gardener reckons it was an explosion somewhere in Mazowe. The security guard figures there was a tidal wave in Madagascar. When I check the news, I find out that really is what earthquakes feel like. A 7.5 tremor in Mozambique, hundreds of kilometres away, shook our windows and rattled our doors in Harare.
I think about the panic I experienced, home alone, when I felt it. And I entertain a small fantasy that the president, now 82 year’s old, would have suffered heart failure. Sure, it’s a bit far fetched. But maybe those goddesses were just warming up.
I wouldn’t generally describe myself as an angry person. But somewhere inside is this boiling mass of outrage that periodically comes bubbling up to the surface. And i imagine myself punching my fist through the wall. Or hurling some large object through the window.
Like this morning. I’ve been house sitting—a euphemism really for squatting at a friend’s place whilst she’s away. There’s not much to do, except to look out for Chipo, the domestic worker who comes round once a week to clean the place. 8 weeks or so ago she broke out in a nasty skin rash and went to the clinic. Not surprisingly, perhaps, in a country where over a quarter of the adult population is infected, she tested positive for HIV. There is a clinical trials programme run through the state University and state Hospital to provide Anti-Retro Virals [ARV’s] free to people on the programme. In a Constant Gardener-esque manoeuvre, the drug companies supply the ARV’s so that the impoverished Zimbabwean population can test their safety for the sensitive potential patients in the developing world. So obviously there’s a bit of a risk in getting on the programme. But, with unemployment at 80%, inflation soaring at over 500% and rising, and the country’s health care system collapsing, free risky drugs are more of a chance at survival than most people here have.
To qualify for the programme, your CD4 [T-cell] count must be 200 or lower. So to try and get Chipo onto the programme, she went to the ARV programme at the hospital to find out her count. She left her uncle’s contact number, and they promised they would phone her when her results were ready. Three weeks later, she still hadn’t heard, and we spent one morning fruitlessly trying to phone the Hospital and find that particular programme to ask if she could collect her results yet. We were given the run around, and no one at the Hospital seemed to know the numbers for the annex we needed.
In the meantime, she had been going to the clinic in the high density area where she stays, and had been given tablets, injections and cream that was helping with the rash. But at $400,000 per small tube of cream, and $200,000 per injection she could barely afford it, so I chipped in for another week of that. She then went to visit her family in the rural areas for a week. When she came back, much to my surprise, her uncle had been phoned and her results were ready. My fear had been that her count might be just over 200. Low enough to indicate just how poorly she was doing, but a bit too high to automatically qualify for the programme. I had envisioned myself having to go with her every week to the programme office to sit outside and demand that she be included in the trials.
Instead, her CD4 count was 27. Desperately low, and a terrifying indication that, even if she does get onto ARV’s quite quickly, she might not have much longer to live. It also suggests that she may have been infected for many years now. Her four year old daughter has not yet been tested.
This morning I was waiting with some bread, fresh vegetables and money for her, anticipating her weekly arrival. Her uncle phoned, to say she won’t be coming in today because she’s at the clinic. She’s pregnant.
And that’s when the anger came in. Not so much with her, per se. I know it’s naïve to expect most Zimbabwean women to be able to demand protected sex. Or to express mistrust with their partner, or to demand fidelity from a man. But anger at the position of women and children in this society. And at the bad governance and mismanagement that continues to drive this country’s hopes further and further into the ground. What future for her, her daughter, or her unborn child? As Zimbabwe’s president mugabe celebrates his 82nd birthday, how many will die this week alone before they reach a fraction of that age. A fist through the wall is just the beginning.
Constant Gardener
CD4 Count
Driving Harare’s roads these days is enough to test the nerves of even the most accomplished Dakar rally drivers. Half the time the traffic lights have been taken out in a power cut. There is no general regard for the “non-functioning robots = 4-way stop” credo of traffic safety, and these intersections quickly become free-for-alls where only the strong-stomached survive. The country’s economic decline and general discontentment comes out in easily-sparked road rage, and the growing number of people who have bought their drivers licenses rather than suffer the bureaucracy of the Vehicle Inspection Division all make road safety questionable.
And this is even without considering the condition of the pavement. The potholes are shocking. Harare’s roads are deteriorating even quicker than before given the very wet rainy season we’ve had. For months, the potholes have been expanding into yawning cavernous pits easily able to swallow a medium sized dog. A friend of mine tried to swerve to miss a pothole the other day, and still ended up with three flat tyres.
So the roads have been eroding, and the non-elected, illegal, Minister-appointed, term-extended Commission ostensibly responsible for maintaining the functionality of the city has been standing idly by.
But the other day I noticed the potholes in the car park of a nearby shopping centre had been filled in with sand. Maybe the commission was finally getting active? Nope. Turns out some community-minded individuals have been going around fixing up shopping centre car parks. Apparently, they then go shop-to-shop asking the shopkeepers to contribute something to pay for the potholes having been filled.
Which then puts some of the shopkeepers in a bit of a quandary. There’s been a push for people to refuse to pay their city council rates because the commission is a) non-elected and b) non-performing. So do shops refuse to pay their rates and give this money instead to the private pavement fixers? If you fix your own street, have you been positively proactive, or have you given in and done the city’s job for it, thus absolving it of its responsibility? Should the private company go around fixing first and asking for donations later, or should they inform the shopkeepers in advance of their plans and let them decide if they want to participate or not?
This could all be the start of a new campaign. I remember a US-city mayor once announcing an “adopt a pothole” initiative in his city. Residents could donate to the city and specify which pothole they wanted their funds put towards. It seemed to do quite well there. But then Americans are forever adopting strange things like meteor showers, or goats in rural Mongolia, or highway rubbish collection.
But maybe some innovative Zimbabwean civic group could pick this up as a tactic: by day, fill in the potholes and fix the roads. Who’s gonna stop you! By night, sneak back and plant your signs and paint your logo claiming responsibility for doing something creative and inspiring to improve city life.
Though perhaps all of this won’t be necessary. Yesterday I came across a City of Harare vehicle and crew of at least six out doing some road work. On a Sunday! They were fixing up the potholes on a tiny alley off a side street in the back of a small shopping centre. Not exactly repairing a major thoroughfare. But maybe they were just doing some practise strokes?
I've been reading Shake Hands with the Devil, Romeo Dallaire’s account of the failure of humanity in Rwanda. I’m only as far as January 1994, before the genocide, but already there are warning signs and the Arusha Peace Process is looking shaky. The public mood is violent and unpredictable, and the Interahamwe are already destabilising communities.
On several occasions, Dallaire describes rowdy crowds blocking roads, stopping traffic and shutting down movement across Kigali. He later learns that these are traps—deliberate attempts to bait the Belgian UNAMIR troops into attacking the crowds, causing chaos and leaving the extremists able to kill a few Belgian soldiers. This is because, the extremists reckon, if Belgium loses 10 soldiers, they’ll withdraw all their troops from Rwanda. The Belgians were the most trained and organised companies there, and the hope is that if the Belgians withdraw, the peacekeeping mission will be left fragmented and ineffectual, creating space for their Hutu Power objectives.
I’m explaining all of this because its gotten me thinking about how different the situation is here in Zimbabwe. As the economy has declined and bad governance has increased, local authorities have become less and less able [or willing] to maintain the basic functionalities of water, sewerage, rubbish collection, etc. In Harare’s high density areas, the cholera outbreaks that were warned about for years have begun, and young children are dying from the disease. Political greed and shortsightedness is killing Zimbabwe’s children. What then do the mothers, the communities, do with this?
What grief must a mother feel when she loses a child to something like cholera. I think about a place like Argentina, where the Mothers of the Disappeared turned their grief into anger, outrage, a passionate determination to set things right. Here in Zimbabwe, the combination of history, culture, intimidation and psychology has left the mood feeling much more one of helplessness and resignation. What is the alchemy of despair. When enough pain piles on top of itself, is it eventually transformed into anger? If it simmers long enough, does it distill into outrage? Can something catalyse this metamorphosis? Or does hopelessness run too limp to ever be refined into that white hot passion of conviction?
Romeo Dallaire
Interahamwe
Mothers of the Disappeared
Cycling home today on one of my more frequented routes, I spotted something curious. Along one small patch of tar had been painted a white lane dividing line and a zebra crossing, complete with the “Pedestrian Crossing” signs with the hunchbacked stick figures posted on each side. Never mind the potholes which are rapidly degenerating into Category 10 potstrips in Harare’s rainy season. Never mind the increasingly non-functioning traffic lights. Never mind the open pipes which gush water onto the roads even when it hasn’t been raining. No, the city had chosen to spend its negligible funds replanting dented, second-hand pedestrian crossing signs on a heavily trafficked road on which cars travel in excess of 80kph. This despite the fact that Harare drivers show flagrant disregard for pedestrian crossings at the best of times. And there are no shops, schools, hospitals, or other readily discernable reason for there to be such a crossing at this particular place on the road.
However, the new crossing does happen to be near the Police Golf Club. And a stone’s throw from the mayor’s mansion—currently inhabited by Harare’s non-elected illegal commissioner.
Seeing this new zebra crossing reminded me of a traffic accident I’d had some years back. Generally, I cycle everywhere. If I don’t cycle, I use ET’s—Emergency Taxis, the main form of public transport in which 16 passengers are crammed by hustling hwindis into mini-vans whose roadworthiness is questionable at best. However, for a short term, I was the proud driver of Stevie, a VW Beetle older than myself.
One rainy morning I went to take Stevie out of her shared garage, and found my fellow garage occupant wanting to sweep out the place. So I helped him, and chatted with him a bit. But I didn’t linger longer as the organisation I was then working for had a newsletter deadline I had to meet that day.
Driving down Tongogara Ave, I was myself about to go through one of those pedestrian crossings when I saw a woman and two children start to dash across the road. I braked too swiftly out of deference for them, and as punishment for my sins was rear-ended by a middle aged man talking on his cell phone in his new model SUV. On the rain-slicked pavement his brakes didn’t have a chance. Stevie [engine at the rear] was finished. The SUV [bull bar across the front grill] was barely dented. I spent the next two hours dealing with the traffic police, filing the report, and getting the Beetle towed to a garage. It would be six months before all the parts were imported and Stevie was back on the road. Later that day, I found out that the head of the my organisation had decided the previous day to cancel the newsletter, but had waited to inform me.
The entire incident made me think of that German film Run, Lola, Run. The split second difference in timing that can result in a fatal shoot out at the convenience store being averted. Or not. What if I’d known the newsletter had been cancelled and hadn’t been in such a rush? A few minutes later, I would not have been hit. What if my neighbour had not chosen that morning to sweep out the garage? A few minutes earlier, I wouldn’t have been hit.
But I was hit. And I’m back on my bike. Wondering just how many cars will ever bother to stop at this new poorly located pedestrian crossing.
Having grown up with a profound sense of disconnection, I find myself reflecting periodically on the nature of “home.” The other day I was thinking that any place where you have made your own living, found your own place to live, learnt the language, been involved in a struggle bigger than yourself, fallen in love, and made and lost friends, must surely qualify to be considered “home.” Experience with the health care system, the justice system, and pet ownership in a place would be supplementary categories. Having lived in Harare for going on seven years, I've experienced everything above aside from pet ownership.
I returned here recently after a few months in New York City, a place that decidedly did not feel like “home.” And my sense of relief when I landed back in Harare was palpable. I felt, as I have whenever I've returned here from time away, that I'd come home.
I've been house-sitting and staying with friends since I've been back. I'm undecided as to how long I will be here for, so I've been reluctant to find my own flat again. On the other hand, I know that having my own place to live is integral to my sense of feeling at home. My closest-ever friend is an inveterate rescuer of lost dogs. A few weeks ago, she took in her latest stray. Before I even met him, I knew that this dog meant something special to me. She and her partner had found him by the shops near their house, looking well fed but in enormous pain from his back paws which had been completely shredded.
I met him a few days later, and it was love at first sight. African hunting dog with a healthy dose of border collie, Themba/Simon/Zorro was breathtakingly gorgeous. Even with his back legs bandaged he had an air of the majestic about him, and I adored him. I accompanied him on a trip to the vet to have his dressings changed, stroking his coat and speaking softly to him as he trembled in fear and pain. There was something deep and wounded and compelling in his eyes, and I wanted him to be able to speak. I wanted to hear his story. I wanted to hold him close in my arms and tell him he was safe now. That I knew he had been hurt, but everything was going to be alright.
Of course, the women who had rescued him was also smitten by him. I daydreamed about moving him to the house where I was staying and nursing him gently back to form. I fantasised about finding a garden flat with room for him to play, and taking him in, but I feared his new owners would be reluctant to let him go.
At home they already had two dogs and four cats. One of the conditions for any new stray is that he get on with the pets that already live there. As Zorro regained his strength he became increasingly aggressive, going after the cats and one of the dogs. Harare is a hard place for stray dogs. Many people are leaving the country, and are looking for homes for their animals. Would be pet owners often look for dogs with a known pedigree, or puppies they can train without worrying what sort of history they carry with them. One look at the vet's notice board, filled with flyers overlapping one another announcing scores of pets looking for a home, and you know a dog like Zorro doesn't have a chance. So sadly, just two days after I'd met him, before I'd gotten a chance to nurse him back to health or find a new home for us, Zorro was put down.
I took his death very hard, and very personally. It was as if, in putting him down, some of my own faith in the future, some of my hopes for a deepened sense of “home” had also been lost. It's only now, some weeks later, that I'm able to feel less gutted. The experiences I've had here, and elsewhere, can never be taken from me. To some extent they define me, and what I do with them determines how much or how little I feel at home anywhere. More than that, though, I'm beginning to wonder if that elusive feeling of “home” isn't so much about where you are, or what you've done there. Maybe it's more something you find in yourself. Some inner calm, or contentment, or acceptance that you build from within, and carry with you wherever you go.
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