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David Mungoshi Shelling The Nuts
Members of the Jehovah’s Witness group have a long tradition of publishing some often very colourful literary and other material based on their take of the Bible. I must confess that I find the serene pictures of the happy chosen few who inherit the earth at the end of time quite attractive and even aesthetically gratifying.
The depiction of Adam and Eve in pristine conditions makes one hanker for a return to innocence. The Garden of Eden is portrayed as a beautiful place with luxuriant shrubbery and vegetation and a surfeit of all that is good and wholesome by way of nutrition. The Garden is well-watered, clean and healthy and there is no pollution.
Regardless of where one stands regarding the many stories of creation around the world, the one in Genesis 1: 1-3 tends to capture most vividly the imagination of the human race. It’s a lovely story of limitless blessings, a hapless fall and the loss of a paradise on earth.
We are told that “the earth was formless, empty, and dark” and we read from this that the first work of art was a divine one willed into being by the mere utterance of a word. The end-product was a world in a garden of limitless beauty and potential.
Cleanliness is next to godliness. This idyllic garden and terrain was the backdrop of what Gene Edwards describes as a “divine romance” whose origins are supremely beautiful, wholesome and divine. But logic together with a sense of beauty and responsibility demand that we look after our world. Accordingly, Genesis 2:15 says, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” Furthermore, Genesis 1:26 records:
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
Over the centuries, human beings have tended to ignore this divine commission. The result of this avarice and dereliction of duty is the continuous denudation and pollution of the world. We ignore the things we know we should be mindful of. But life has a way of hitting back. One of my favourite songs about the affinity that the human race has for self-destruction is “Where have all the flowers gone?” This is a folk song done by many artistes. However, I prefer the one by The Brothers Four which says:
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the flowers gone?
Young girls have picked them every one
When will they ever learn? Oh, when will they ever learn?
The question is; do we ever learn except when fire burns us? That is the question from all ages. When I was a child at primary school there was on the time table a slot for First Aid and Hygiene. In this slot we got our first formal lessons on personal hygiene and cleanliness.
We learned that you could still have clean teeth and fresh breath without ever owning a toothbrush. There were soft twigs from certain trees whose ends you could soften by chewing and use to brush your teeth.
We learned to always wash our hands after visiting the toilet. Yet there are many who will walk out of a public convenience and straight away tear at a piece of roast beef without bothering to wash their hands. They even lick their suspect fingers!
We also learned not to situate a water source downslope within range of a toilet that is not sufficiently far-removed from it. And if you had to answer the call of nature out in the bush the advice was always to make sure that your “deposits” would not somehow be carried into the rivers and streams.
You would think people would know better, especially after the vivid animated illustrations that we got on film. The frequent occurrence of typhoid and cholera in recent times tells us that we continue to ignore important health fundamentals.
This is in spite of all the campaigns and exhortation to wash our hands and boil the water that we drink unless we are sure that it is from a safe source. This callous negligence is everywhere in evidence.
Strangely enough some of the sore sights that assault our eyes and advertise us to the world as a slovenly people are caused by our law-enforcement agencies. These agencies usually mount roadblocks at certain places that for some reason they seem to be fond of.
Most rural buses (commonly known as chicken buses) are stopped, sometimes for inordinately long periods, at these roadblocks. Long after the police have left you can tell where the roadblocks have been.
Litter and all sorts of rubbish accumulate in such places at very alarming rates. Plastic bags and kaylite containers from takeaway food outlets as well as empty plastic bottles with a veritable multiplicity of fizzy drink blends-scar such places like a mad man’s art.
Day after day this happens on our roads until everywhere we begin to see mounds of rubbish growing. Despite the very noble efforts of the country’s Environmental Management Agency (EMA), citizens continue to litter the countryside. It is not unheard of to hear of livestock diseased from swallowing killer plastics. Don’t kill the world, I hear Michael Jackson crooning, but is anyone listening? Does anyone out there care?
So, which way do we go with this? There’s a time bomb ticking all the time and one of these days there will be hell to pay unless we do something drastic about it and do it soon. A new paradigm is necessary, and we don’t have to invent one either.
We just need to borrow from some of our neighbours. Kigali in Rwanda is said to be the cleanest city in the world. No littering is allowed and citizen arrests can be effected where anyone is seen to be flouting the by-laws.
A Rwandese friend of mine was about to leave for Kigali when he remembered that he would not be able to go beyond the airport with the many plastic carrier bags that he had packed some of his things in. It was an instructive experience to see him re-pack his bags and weed out plastic material.
For this to happen we need a buy-in from everyone and Zimbabwe is no stranger to such campaigns. The HIV prevalence rate is acknowledged to be the lowest in the region and that despite the paucity of resources. Our proactive response has consistently been the many health campaigns and the AIDS levy.
If we can muster such willpower we should be able to do this across the board. Schools, churches, companies and individuals should all play a role in cleaning up our countryside, especially along our international highways and everywhere else as a matter of course.
Catch them young should be our slogan. Children should learn from school quite early on in their education that we all have a duty to look after our countryside and to not pollute it with the kind of careless abandon that we witness on a daily basis whenever we travel.
Rubbish bins should be available everywhere; and they should also be regularly emptied. Shops and food outlets should begin to use environment-friendly bio-degradable materials. If that cannot be done in the short to medium term we could go into recycling big time as they say.
I dream of a clean country with a clean and unpolluted environment. I dream of communities in which willy-nilly everyone is a health inspector and we all monitor each other. Harsh perhaps, but necessary all the same.
About 10 years ago I spent three weeks at a writers’ residency in Switzerland very close to the shores of Lake Geneva. How I loved strolling there and dipping my toes in the cool, clear water! The lake was clear and clean, and its environs were clean as well. I remember just how excited I was when I saw my first piece of litter. My next email home was full of the exciting news!
A clean country is like a bride bedecked in her finery. We should lean to the flood of her beauty, to paraphrase the lyrics of a Leonard Cohen song, and be devotees at the altar of her allure. That way we can stop the rape and scarring of our beautiful country and replace it with a new-found beauty and serenity, quite undisturbed by the screaming noise of rubbish heaps.
David Mungoshi is an applied linguist, a qualified primary and secondary schoolteacher with vast experience in teacher education. He has also taught at university and is an award-winning novelist and a published poet.
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