In which, here on Hirchenplatz, all's right with the world

I am sitting outside in the autumn sun, at a Mexican restaurant on Hirchenplatz in Zurich. I have had one margarita, one caipirinha, red snapper in mango sauce and Mexican rice. I have bummed a cigarette off the stunning blonde woman at the next table. I used to be a ten-a-day smoker, sending Everest fumes to the sky above the Law Faculty at the University of Zimbabwe, to the horror and consternation of the angry university gardeners who thought my smoking most unAfrican, most unwomanly. I am a social smoker now, smoking only when the moment feels right.

And this moment feels right.

A little girl with glorious russet brown hair falls on the cobblestones. She stands up and laughs at herself. The man right in front of me looks lost and English. The building behind him is bright yellow against the cerulean sky. It is unseasonal weather, everyone says.

I love Europe in the autumn.

A few moments ago, a band of kids came by, all Goth black and nose rings, full of energy and spirit. They are protesting antifeminismus with angry eloquence. My heart goes out to them and I take a flyer.

Two hours ago, I bought two beautiful Iranian kelims, worn and frayed, from two men who explained their history to me in elaborate terms. They spoke over each other, one in German, the other in English.

As I sit here smoking and taking in everything on Hirchenplatz, I think suddenly of Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge who reportedly composed part of Kubla Khan under the influence of opium, the poem going from him as soon as the opium did.

It seems to me very funny, that.

But it is Browning who comes to me next, Browning who stays with me as Pippa passes, because the lark may not be on the wing, or the snail on the thorn, God may not be in his heaven, but it seems to me that right now, right this minute, here on Hirchenplatz, all is right with the world.

Or maybe, just perhaps, it is the margarita talking.

The TWAG quote of the Week: an expert on magic speculates on Baby Kingsize’s sudden sex change

Our TWAG quote of the week comes courtesy of one of the many men and women who claim to be experts in the supernatural. According to the Herald, a little baby called Kingsize, a rather ironic name, as you will discover if you stay with me, was born a boy at Marondera Hospital on January 22 this year, but mysteriously changed to a girl this last Thursday. In other parts of the world, such sex changes occur only after painful surgery and batches and batches of oestrogen hormones. Here in Zimbabwe, we do not need medical instruments of any kind! Or hormones for that matter! That, right there, kiddies, is our comparative advantage!

An expert from the Zimbabwe Traditional Medicine Practitioners’ Council, Sekuru Kennedy Kachuruka Mbewe, advised that the sex change could be reversed by prophets or traditional healers, but added that the magic can be left to wear off over time allowing the baby to return to being a boy.

The expert said further this was probably caused by the kind of magic used by sex workers to make the genitalia of non-paying clients disappear.

“The client would wake up the next morning to discover that his manhood has disappeared, but in actual fact it will be there. In Shona, we call it mushonga wekupofomadza [medication that makes one blind],” Mbewe said.

He speculated that poor baby Kingsize may have been put down on a bed which had been treated by the magic spell’s owner resulting in the child’s sex change.

“Such sex change magic is of foreign origin,” he added.

Well of course it is!

I am only surprised that the Herald did not take this chance to blame the British, after all, they are to blame for all else!

Only in Harare: five men on a dead horse, mattress-wielding Amazons, nude Greek statues and a giant advert for Givenchy perfume

You, my dear blog readers, know how much I delight in the weird, wacky and downright loopy. Given my predilections in this regard, I find myself in exactly the right place in Harare. In my first week in Harare, I saw five men sitting on top of a dead horse in a truck on Enterprise Road. There was an explanation, there always is, but that arresting sight, five men, chattering nineteen to dozen, comfy as you please on this dead animal, stayed with me.

Outside Bays Linen Department store are these little Greek statues of Minerva and Aphrodite. They are, as Greek statues are required by statute to be, partially nude. Imagine my amusement when I walked past Bays a few days ago and heard two little kids, about 5 years speaking sternly to the statues and saying, ‘Imimi tinokumwai mukaka wenyu, tinoupedza wese.’ ‘We shall drink all your milk and finish it all.’ Heh.

Then there are the gangs of female rapists in Zimbabwe. These gangs have struck terror into the hearts of men, as they go about raping men. No one believed the victims at first because well, who would? The cartoon above, courtesy of my friend Edmund Kudzayi, is one man’s response to the news of female rapists. The whole thing seems barely plausible when you add little touches like the mattress: some of the women apparently go around equipped with a mattress. As my friend Ranga said, who will save Zimbabwe’s men from these mattress-wielding Amazons?

We may jest, but it seems this thing is real, there really are women who are going about forcing men to have sex with them. One of my taxi drivers told me that some of this is connected to wealth and success rituals. The most disturbing aspect is that some of the men are homeless and often mentally ill. Apparently, when it comes to secret rituals, the sperm of a mentally ill man is worth more than that of a sane one in Zimbabwe. Go figure.

On Borrowdale Road is a large billboard advertising Givenchy perfume. This, I must say, is among the most incongruous things that I have seen so far, but that is Harare for you, a surprise on every corner.

Cartoon: TheAfricanAristocrat

In which I become a returning resident, contemplate the upside of failure and look forward to writing history

It is official, I have moved to Zimbabwe! I now have, as my son would say, a great big lolloping stamp in my passport that says “Returning Resident”. At immigration, when I declared my homecoming status, the immigration officer told me, “The thing with returning residents is that the CIO wants to have a word with you”. “Really?” I said, with all the eagerness of a puppy, “Where are they? Are you one of them?” He laughed, and perhaps overwhelmed by my enthusiastic curiosity to speak to the intelligence dudes, stamped my passport and let me go.

So here I am, and here I will remain for the next two years.

As I write this, I am supposed to be in Poland, at a festival, but a combination of factors meant that I had to change my ticket and return home a week earlier than anticipated. I hope to visit Poland next year, and by then, maybe I will have a Polish book deal.

What this effectively means is that my Stockholm gig, and what a gig it was, is the last event in which I promote An Elegy for Easterly. I love meeting readers, and talking to journos, who have by and large all been intelligent and interesting, but I must confess that I am heartily sick of talking about the book. I am simply longing to have two uninterrupted months in which I do nothing but write. Talking about the previous book, I have found, does not advance the cause of writing the next book.

Speaking of the next book, I am sorry to inform you, my dear readers, that The Book of Memory will not be published next year. Oh no, I hear you say. Why not? Because, dear readers, and this is putting it mildly, The Book of Memory was not very good. Never ever sell a book on the basis of a few chapters. I did not have the space, time or separateness that was necessary to producing the book that I wanted to. After I handed in my manuscript, my wonderful editor Lee at Faber had to ask me, with great kindness, if my heart was really in it, to which I admitted that actually I hated the damn thing and could not bear to work on it anymore. I had to confess to him that in the last year, even as I was enjoying public success, I lived every day with private failure. I felt that I was held hostage by this damn book that was blighting my life. We had a wonderful conversation, one that turned out to be a watershed moment for me and my relationship with him. I love him with every fibre of my being, because he gets me and what I want to do, he gets that I have set my own standard for myself which has little to do with external approbation. With his support, and the support of all my editors and publishers around the world, without a single exception, I have moved on to the next thing, the thing I have been obsessed with since I was 14, and the novel which I was writing and researching even as The Book of Memory was supposed to be preoccupying me. It was to have been my third book, but is now to be my second. So that is what I will be doing now, writing that book.

So I want here to say how happy and grateful I am to have all this support, and to salute my agents Claire and Rebecca who matched me with just the right people in each territory. So the next time someone starts bashing the evil publishers of the west who think only of the bottom line, and who only want a certain story from Africa, you will understand it I am sure, if I say that my experience has been exactly the opposite.

I have two more trips to make this year, to Zurich, to talk about development and exile and all sorts of interesting things, and to do a TED talk in London. If you miss me then, you will always find me here because I will always be here, blogging away. I also continue to write for the Zim edition of the SA Sunday Times and I am in talks with a couple of other papers. Zimbabwe is in an interesting place right now, and I feel really lucky to be here, watching history unfold and writing about it.

The TWAG Quote of the Week: the Prime Minister accuses the President of acting "nichodemously"

So, this is what is happening in Zim. Mugabe keeps violating the unity agreement, and the MDC reacts the same way each time: with a statement. The President recently appointed new judges, ambassadors and governors without consulting the Prime Minister as he is supposed to do, and what did the PM do? He issued a strong statement! Really! A super-dooper extra-strong statement! He used Big Angry Words! War! Abhorrent! Disappointed! Disgust! Unacceptable! Nichodemously! Say what now? Nichodemously!

This word is not known outside Zimbabwe, or rather, outside the narrow world of the politics of Zimbabwe. It means to act furtively, and comes from Nicodemous, the Pharisee who went to Jesus by night to ask how a man could be born again - he went by night because he did not want his co-judges on the Sanhedrin to know that he was hanging out with the J-ster. So to act nicodemously or nichodemously, in this new incarnation, is to act furtively. The PM is so concerned about the President's "nicodemous" machinations that he used the word not once, but twice in his speech, providing us with this week's quote of the week.

To my utter surprise, and shall I say disgust, Mr Mugabe advised me onMonday that he had nichodemously reappointed the former governors in the same manner in which he appointed the previous governors on a Sunday when most of us where at church. I say "nichodemously" because those who are supposed to be served by these governors, the citizens of Zimbabwe knew nothing about it.

Incidentally, the entire speech, which you can read here, is completely devoid of substance. The PM needs to fire his advisers because it is a deeply, deeply embarrassing document. And what is most astonishing to me is that, according to a little well-placed bird that whispered in my ear, the Party was whooping it up at a party to celebrate this statement on Friday. Sigh.