adminLenox Lizwi Mhlanga
IT is said that you can’t get anything past a Zimbabwean. We’ve seen and done it all. If you’ve been to hell and back, there’s hardly a scheme one has attempted to join or a venture one has been involved in.
You name it, we’ve been there.
In fact it rings true that we can beat the Nigerians at their own game though we still have one glaring handicap. We’re just too educated; or at least we think we are.
Years of colonial education, with all its faults and the celebrated post-independence experience, made us soft. A Zimbabwean will not fight at the first throw of a punch because he doesn’t want blood on his clothes. That is the job for the uneducated.
Civilised people sit down, analyse and talk things over. In West or East Africa, one bad move and the machetes are out. Now it’s guns and bombs. And we’re talking here of innocent victims.
The wars there are so bloody, it’s scary. No wonder those places are in a sorry state, in a violent sort of way. Lapha (here) we reason.
If you talked about Africa, it’s about hunger, famine, wars and disease and Zimbabwe happens to be outside that equation. At least until the time of the big freeze, we never imagined that we’d join the rest of Africa in the tubes. We used to scoff at the Zambians for instance. A trip across to Livingstone in 1985 was a shock for me then.
There were potholes and vendors all over the place. Now it’s like I’m describing home.
“You don’t know what this independence thing is,” was the ominous warning I got from a Zambian in the 1980s. “Wait and see!” he said. I was embarrassed when I went back 10 years later.
Zimbabweans have for decades imitated the Europeans to the extent that we’ve outdone them in most, if not all respects. This is why it’s not very difficult for us to adjust to that culture when we go there.
I’m reminded of how a Ghanaian colleague was so terrified to go out into the streets of Stockholm in Sweden without my company. He stuck to me like a tick so much so that I literally lost my liberty. It was like walking an overgrown kid around the city.
Our attachment to European culture has lulled us into a sense of false security. At one point we thought we were invincible. Times were so good. As we rode on the winds of change we became increasingly oblivious to the fact that we were living on borrowed time.
The inertia of the foundation we found was bound to give in sooner or later. Then the inevitable collapse began, the signs being subtle at first, the momentum picking up in the nineties.
We’ve to be honest that at one point, the country ran the danger of being turned into one huge game park. No-one doesn’t have a story to share about that dark period.
But here is the miracle. We came out of that hole and we lived to tell the tale. Some voted with their feet.
A good lot of them for that matter, while others chose to be “the last men standing”. Resilient and patriotic to the core.
How did we get out of the back hole? That’s a subject our academics need to interrogate. The world wants to know how we survived the worst economy in living memory.
The experience taught us a lot about the human spirit and the ability to survive the worst. We’ve come out stronger, and wiser and that situation has produced a peculiar breed of Zimbabweans.
After a decade of being an unwitting tribe of hunter gatherers, we’ve realised that one cannot take anything for granted. We’ve taken the meaning of the expression “self- reliance” to a higher level.
No opportunity goes to waste and there’s nothing one can do to keep one’s head above the water that is seen as embarrassing.
I have sold tomatoes, milk, ice cream, pirated music CDs and at one time, contemplated selling weed! I was nearly taken in for dealing in foreign currency and I unwillingly participated in that purely Zimbabwean economic activity that we dubbed “burning” money.
Today we wear that experience like a feather on our caps. We learnt our lesson very well. Scattered at all four corners of the globe, Zimbabweans are performing miracles wherever they are.
Everywhere you go, you find a Zimbabwean excelling in whatever they are doing, from flying rockets to mowing the lawn. What we touch turns to sold and indeed, gold.
Talking to a well travelled diplomat, he remarked how at a regional conference he attended, all the speakers who were representing Sadc countries were Zimbabwean! One could have been in Bulawayo or Harare and they chatted away in iSiNdebele and ChiShona during the break.
Our resilience and work ethic has even seen some of us getting in the cross-hairs of xenophobes in neighbouring countries. Do we really steal other people’s wives and jobs? Really? Or we just cheerfully work hard wherever we are.
Wherever you go in the world, panemunhu (there’s someone), so the joke goes. Not afraid to discover new frontiers of opportunity, we are just God’s chosen people.
Zimbabweans have embraced the concept of a global village and now take advantage of technological advances to keep tabs with abantu ekhaya (people back home).
The core of the new world citizen is the Zimbabwean. If God designed for us to be all over his earth, then let us use that privilege to change the world.
derick.khumalo