A Zimbabwean Christmas experience…

A few days before Christmas the front cover of one of our weekly newspapers carried the headline ‘Zim’s Bleakest Christmas Ever’. So true! This is one Christmas I hadn’t looked forward to at all; a festival that is supposed to be associated with joy and hope felt totally devoid of both. So I was very surprised when yesterday turned out to be one of the best Christmases I’ve had in a long time.

The few members of our family left in this country decided to make a special effort to get together this Christmas. But as plans evolved we found that we all knew other people who needed somewhere to go this Christmas - people who were probably dreading the day more than I was! So our small family group soon grew to include strangers whose last remaining relatives had left the country, or those who couldn’t join their other family members around the country because of fuel shortages.

We were a bizarre bunch of people, brought together only by circumstance, by inflation, and because of one man’s despotic rule. We pooled resources and shared food. Presents were irrelevant. I was struck by the oddness of it all several times through the course of the day - every time a complete stranger walked into my kitchen and offered to help with the dishes, or enquired where the fridge or toilet was.

The truth is, we all had a good time.

Inflation dominated the conversation yesterday, not politics. Normally people steer away from talk of politics when they’re in the company of strangers because no one knows whom they can trust in this country anymore. But talking about the economy is a real leveller in our society. Let’s face it, when a person vents about the power cuts, shortages of medicines, or lack of fuel, we all know that their anger traces back to one man and his government. It isn’t necessary to state which party is responsible and nor do we need to name names or point fingers.

But with a chorus of agreements and annoyance from a wide range of people responding to shared stories of corruption and incompetence, it felt as if we were all singing from the same political hymn sheet. Inflation has given us a vehicle to indirectly ‘talk politics’ freely, without fear.

It was very cathartic. Someone would start telling a story about their most recent story of government theft or corruption only to have someone else interject, ‘That’s nothing, let me tell you what happened to me…’ Talk naturally drifted to ways to deal with the corruption, or twist it back onto the corrupt and, as you can imagine, that’s when the evening started to get very funny.

There’s nothing more amusing or more enjoyable these days than hearing how some small-time opportunistic corrupt creep got his or her comeuppance. It seemed to me that every hilarious story we’d individually heard had been carefully stored away and privately enjoyed, waiting for the first chance it could be shared with others. We all laughed and laughed at the fools who think they have our lives in their hands. This wasn’t about fearing those more powerful than us; it was about mocking the corrupt, and ridiculing them for their short-sighted, short-term stupidity.

I have a renewed admiration for the strength of character of all Zimbabweans. I know that we all have our dark moments when we’re left alone with our private thoughts and fears, but no one yesterday seemed to be feeling sorry for themselves and there was no sign of bitterness or depression. We were simply a resolute group of people determined to make the very best of a very bad deal. I, for one, needed to be reminded of that extraordinary ability of Zimbabweans to ride out a storm and to endure hardship with humour – dark, dry humour, but hilarious and witty nevertheless.

It was clear to me that our spirit is far from destroyed by the machine-like unfeeling cruelty that mugabe and his henchmen use to try and control our minds and crush our hearts. Christmas is as good a day as any to go to bed thinking, ‘I think we’re going to be OK; I think we are a nation of people that can survive this evil’.

Technorati Tags: mugabe, Zimbabwe, inflation, corruption, politics, humour, Christmas

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