Or perhaps not.
Of all the things that Fortune thought he would do with his degree, this is the last thing he imagined. In a previous, and better, life, he had been a popular radio personality on his way to becoming a national legend. He had worked at the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation studio at Pockets Hill in Highlands where he was one of the most popular newscasters on Radio Zimbabwe. His nick name was Zikomo, taken from his signature ending, in Nyanja, ‘Zikomo, zikomo kwambili,’ thank you so much. He was also well known for the seven languages in which he greeted listeners: Ndebele, English, Kalanga, Bemba, Nyanja, and Shona ending in his native Tonga: ‘Salibonani mahlabezulu, good morning listeners, mamuka sei vateereri, momuka tjini bawilili, muli bwanji, muli bwino, mwapona!’
The national broadcaster had been his dream since childhood. In his childhood home in the resort town of Victoria Falls, he had grown up to the sound of the radio. He could tell the name of a song just from its first bars. The people he admired were the radio personalities, Kudzi Marudza and John Matinde, Peter Johns and Noreen Welch, Colin Harvey and Tsitsi Vera, Barney Mpariwa and Simon Parkinson. He could imagine no greater joy than to go to work to talk about music in all the languages that he spoke.
That is what he did. After he specialised in African languages at the UZ, he had gone straight to work for the Voice of Zimbabwe. He woke up every morning to go to work and talk about Lovemore Majaivana, and James Chimombe and George Pada. Then before going home, he stopped at his local, the Oasis, the bar that was a small patch of Bulawayo in the Bambazonke land called Harare.
Fortune turns his thoughts from the past back to GreatZim. com where he reads that in Harare, the weekly Politburo meeting of the ruling party has been postponed. Of course it has been postponed, he comments on the forum as Rhodesian Brigadier, the news from Asia is that the president delayed his flight home because of a medical emergency. Only he does not use the term president, he uses a term of insult so grossly offensive that if he used it on his home soil it would have made him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of the crime of ‘Undermining the Authority of or Insulting the President’ and thus liable to a fine not exceeding Level Six or imprisonment for a period not exceeding one year or both, as stipulated in Section 33 of the Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Act, Chapter 9:23.
‘Nasala neka ine mama, nasala neka ine mama. Nichite bwanji ine mama, nichite bwanji ine mama.’ Mokoomba’s beautiful wail makes him turn up the music. ‘Insulting the president’ is a specialisation of all of Fortune’s three avatars. He has not forgiven the president and his government for starving ZBC of funding while they insisted that journalists spread ruling party propaganda.
Before he left, Fortune had been moved from music to news on the Voice of Zimbabwe, where he had worked for a full year without being paid. Working in news meant reading no news at all, but pure propaganda, all to elevate the man they were forced to call, not just the president, but the President and Head of State and Government and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces.
After a particularly ambitious parliamentarian had said the president could not be compared to a mere mortal but was ‘God’s Other Son’, Fortune and his best friend Gabriel Makonyera had combined his official title with this new one and added the self-bestowed titles of Idi Amin and Emperor Bokassa to style him: ‘President and Head of State and Government and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas, the Thirteenth Apostle of Jesus Christ and God’s Other Son.’
It outraged Fortune that they used him and his colleagues in this way but were so contemptuous of them that they did not bother to pay them. In a calculated act, he had read an unedited version of the news, had made headlines for being fired, had spent two nights in the cells, and on his release, borrowed money and, with the news reports of his dismissal and arrest safely in his suitcase, had headed straight to the United Kingdom to the safe harbour of asylum.
Gabriel Makonyera had also done the same thing, but on television. Gabriel had also left, but no one seemed to know where. Fortune had come to suspect that Gabriel Makonyera had simply become one of the Disappeared. The responsibility bore heavily on him, because the idea to read the undoctored news had been his. When thoughts of Gabriel came to his mind he dealt with them by simply putting them out of his mind.
Fortune had hoped for greater things on his move to London, like working for the African Service of the BBC. But the closest he had come to that dream was to get a job with a com pany that cleaned offices at Bush House. He then waited on tables here and there, cleaned this and that office, all while living in a two-bedroom flat shared by eight other Zimbo men in Woolwich. They quarrelled over cleaning the kitchen; they stole his food. They brought in their girlfriends and relatives without asking. At one time, the flat had been so full that Fortune had spent a week sleeping in the bathtub while listening to the sounds of furtive copulation from the next room. In Woolwich, he had lived worse than he would have in any township in Harare.
The only secure work he could find was care work, and that is what he did now. To add insult to Fortune’s injury, the president had made caustic comments about how all people who had fled Zimbabwe were nothing but British Bottom Cleaners, only good for wiping the bottoms of white people. Until that comment, Fortune had been willing to live and let live. He had left the country after all, he was making a living, such as it was. He was able to pay his mother’s living expenses and for the education of his sisters.
Whatever happened out there was not his problem any more. To use an expression he first heard from a chap called Dave pronounced Dive, who had waited tables with him and had surprised him by not only by being gay but also normal and actually funny: ‘It’s not my circus, mate, not my circus, you know wha’I’mean? Not my circus, not my monkeys, mate.’ That had been his attitude, live and let live, not his circus, not his monkeys, but that statement about British Bottom Cleaners had been to him an outright declaration of war.
It seemed to him that the president had come to his house, ordered its destruction then pissed all over the shattered bricks and glass before laughing at his wailing grief. As though anyone would leave Zim willingly to do this work. As though anyone would voluntarily leave the job for which they had been trained, never seeing their families and sleeping in a bathtub. As though anyone would want to move from Harare or the resort town of Victoria Falls to live in Luton, a town described in a survey he had read as the bit of Syria that Assad does not want to control, the town at the end of humanity whose only redeeming feature was that its one motorway, three railway stations and airport allowed escape. As though anyone actually aspired to be paid next to nothing to be a British Bottom Cleaner. It had been a cruel jibe that had exposed the heartlessness of the inner man. The insult had cut deeply.
Fortune entered the fray. He became a warrior using the only weapons he had at his disposal. The rallying cry of the Second Chimurenga, the war against the settler regime had been: Tora gidi uzvitonge: Pick up the gun and determine your own fate. Fortune’s rallying cry along with his rowdy comrades in the new Chimurenga, which, on Twitter they call the Twimurenga, was tora keyboard uzvitonge, tora unlimited broadband uzvitonge, tora Photoshop uzvitonge. With these three weapons, Fortune became an Avenging Crusader and Keyboard Warrior.
The Dare reTwimurenga believed the Revolution would be tweeted, Facebooked and social forumed. They took it in turns to man the Twitter feed of the country’s cantankerous Information Minister. They are on the clock for every hour of every day, working in shifts to mock and pour scorn on his facile attempts to defend the increasingly hapless president: he did not read the same speech twice, he merely emphasised it. He was not sleeping in public, he was merely nodding in agreement. He did not actually fall, he attempted to break his fall.
Fortune and the Keyboard Warriors had drawn blood when the president suffered a humiliating fall on the carpet at the airport. They Photoshopped him into patently ridiculous situations. There
was the president doing the Pasodoble on Strictly Come Dancing; there he was, running from the truncheons of his own riot police, there he was, high on a broom in mid-air, facing Gryffindor in a Quidditch match; there was the president on a surfboard, California dreaming while hanging ten, surfing USA, and there he was on the moon’s surface, arm-in-arm with Neil Armstrong, one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. Revenge, Fortune believes, is a dish best Photoshopped.
Rhodesian Brigadier and Amai Bhoyi chime in to agree with Nyamaende Mhande. They have heard the same thing. The president collapsed. Other posters chime in so that by the time three hours have passed, Fortune does not need to support the rumour with his own sock puppets. The story is now feeding on itself, and growing as it feeds.
Fortune sings along to the Mulemena Boys as he types. Ina’nga yati ye, umuti wafyashi, in’anga yatimishila yamukowe in’anga yeti le, imishilo yamikole ati tiye kuchipatala, umuti wabu fyashi, ati mai vali bwino. Turning away from the forum, Fortune entertains himself by typing a new Amai Bhoyi story. There she is, Amai Bhoyi, pleading with the man about to cut off her electricity and offering herself as a bribe. By the time Amai Bhoyi has her electricity reconnected, the news is now the top thread on the column: LATEST FROM ZIM, PRESIDENT COLLAPSES!!
Fortune looks at the time. It is 6 p.m., and it is time to begin his evening shift. He whistles as he showers and dresses. In his neat ironed care work uniform, he is again the Public Fortune, the one who has patience with the patients. What good fortune to have Fortune!
As Fortune puts in his hours, all around the world, in every city where Zimbos have taken refuge, in every city on every continent, there is an ecstasy of typing on Twitter and Facebook and WhatsApp, in Washington and London, in Helsinki and Geneva, in Johannesburg and Gaborone, in Dallas and back in Luton, as his countrymen and women across the world join to discuss the horizons that are revealed by this news. Text messages flash from Johannes burg, and Leicester, Slough and Scotland. The news is debated in forums on every website: on ZimOnline, ZimDaily, ZimUpdate, ZimNews, ZimSituation, ZimPanorama, ZimObserver, ZimTimes, ZimNow, ZimThen, ZimForever, RememberRhodesia.com.
The president gets progressively worse with each report. By the time that Fortune goes home to collapse in exhaustion at the end of his shift, the president is dead. In Manchester, a man called Tryson, who is of an entrepreneurial turn of mind, has to be convinced by his wife MaiKuku, that, money or no money, it would be in the worst taste possible to throw the party he is planning, a presidential death party with a cover charge of thirty pounds.
The news soon makes its way to international news channels, to Al Jazeera, BBC and CNN, only there the news is reported as what it is, not as a verified fact but a rumour of the president’s passing, but it is precisely this international imprimatur that gives the news wings so that in Zimbabwe itself, the words ‘BBC Reports President’s Death’ flash on Gift Chauke’s mobile telephone at eight in the morning.
Gift Chauke is selling newspapers and airtime at Newlands shops, a few steps from Barclays Bank. He shows the message to his friends Biggie and Nicholas, whose business models see them as vendors and walking purveyors of everything possible. ‘This cannot be true,’ Gift Chauke says. ‘Otherwise it would be in the newspapers.’
They turn to look at the headlines of the newspapers piled up next to Gift. Half the page of the Herald is given over to the headline that their already over-indebted country has secured yet another loan from China. ‘More Mega Deals and Mega Loans on the Way.’ As Fortune would say as Rhodesian Brigadier, has there ever been a country that has made so much of so little, trumpeting every loan as though it is a victory?
Nicholas fishes a cigarette from the upturned crate before him. On the box is a medley of his wares, cigarettes, plastic combs, and top-up cards that he sells to passing customers. Gift is about to say more when they see a man, portly and round-faced, approaching to buy a paper. For all they know, he could be a See-Ten. They are everywhere, the See-Ten, arresting people on public transport and in bars, listening on the street to punish those who would dare give their economic malaise a name, and that name, that of the president. They are often easy to pick out because they are usually the angriest-looking people in any crowd, ready, at any time and in any place, to get offended on behalf of the president.
They need not fear, for the man before them, who is called by his wife’s sister Ba’mkuru’Ba’Selina, is not a See-Ten. He bears another kind of guilt. Six months ago, he forgot his phone at home, forgot that he had forgotten it, accused a hwindi in a kombi of stealing it, and the hwindi had been beaten to death at Copacabana.
The three talk over each other as they approach him. Biggie thrusts his wares at him and says, ‘MaChinese herbs ese ari panoka m’dhara, maTiens zvese nefish.’
‘Mapple aya m’dhara,’ Nicholas says. ‘Nemagrapes, mapears tinawo, pamwe nemaAfro combs, mabelts.’
‘Toita here airtime baba,’ Gift says. ‘Kana muchida tinayo.’
‘No thanks,’ the man says.
The three are not put off. They nyin’inyira around him, aggressively begging him to buy from them, all while making exaggerated claims about how bad things are for them.
‘Just five dollars,’ Biggie says, ‘Kana yakawanda tinotaurirana.’
‘I said no thanks.’
‘Mhuri yafa nenzara, please buy just one packet; it will help me feed my starving family,’ says Nicholas. ‘They have not eaten in days and days.’
‘My mother is in hospital as we speak, please just buy something,’ says Gift. ‘If you don’t want airtime, I have these windscreen wipers.’
It is a strategy that usually works because their aim is to irritate potential customers so much that they become actual customers and give in just to be shot of them. It does not work today. The man who is called Ba’m’kuruBa’Selina by his muramu ignores them, buys the Daily News from Gift Chauke and moves to the ATM at Barclays Bank where he joins a queue of seven people waiting to withdraw money.
Left to themselves, Gift, Nicholas and Biggie abandon their aggressive pleading and pass on the news of the president’s demise to their WhatsApp groups, who in turn pass it on to theirs. Biggie catches a kombi to town and on to Highfield, where he delivers the news to Zodwa, Judith, Matilda, Ma’Shero and Shylet at Snow White Hairdressing at Machipisa. Amid talk of the death of Kindness, among the boy-cuts, and Rihanna weaves, the story of the president’s death is fleshed out.
‘He died, collapsed in the shower.’
‘It was the first lady who called an ambulance.’
‘But you know ambulances don’t carry dead people.’
‘It is true that he was ill.’
‘He has been ill for months.’
‘My son-in-law’s aunt works at State House confirmed it.’
‘My cousin sister’s muramu saw him at that clinic in Johannesburg.’
‘He had a coronary.’
‘He had a wasting disease.’
‘And it was prophesied by that man in Nigeria, that prophet weziAfro, that this would be the year that it happens.’
And on they talk in Snow White Hairdressing, among the blow-dryers, the tins of hair gel, the containers of Dark and Lovely, the hundred per cent Peruvian hair made in Brazil.
While Biggie goes to Machipisa, Gift Chauke goes on to Mbare, where the news has already reached a group of unemployed youths listening to a new dancehall song: ‘We see them through the eyes of Bob Marley, building mansions while we die of hunger. We see them through the eyes of Bob Marley, driving fancy cars while we push wheelbarrows. Only eleven per cent employed, with the eighty-nine of us just whiling away time.’
The news flashes on phones as the eighty-nine per cent huddle to discuss it. A youth nicknamed Chopper, a stalwart of the Grassroots Empowerment Flea Markets and Vendors’ Trust Association, who is given that name not because of any violent tendencies, though he has these in spades, but because he loves the music of Simon ‘Chopper’ Chimbetu, overhears t
wo of the eighty-nine per cent talk of the news of the death.
Chopper recently chased a woman called Anna out of the Mbare market, and he feels flushed with the success of his power. The two youths that have roused his wrath have put the small amount they have between them to buy one Scud of thick beer. They pass it to each other as they discuss the news.
‘If he is really dead, then tight,’ says the first.
‘He was too old,’ the second says. ‘Really he was old.’
Nodding in agreement, his friend says indeed, he is just about the oldest person in the country. In anger at what he sees as their naked celebration, Chopper grabs their Scud and pours it to the ground. The youths retaliate with their fists. A fight breaks out as more of the eighty-nine per cent join in to attack Chopper who is soon joined by his comrades from the Grassroots Empowerment Flea Markets and Vendors’ Trust Association, jobless youths whose main occupation, when they are not being empowered by empty promises, is to defend the president’s honour by any means necessary. Policemen from Matapi police station drive up in a truck and round up seven youths including the two Scud drinkers.
‘Arrest them, arrest them,’ Chopper says. ‘They were insulting the president. They said he is old.’
‘But he is old,’ says an officer. ‘What is ninety-two years of age if not old? Do we not all wish we could be as old one day?’
Chopper says, ‘They also said he was dead.’
‘How is it an insult to say that someone is dead if he is indeed dead? Or is he never to die at all?’ quips the same officer. ‘Is he Jesus of Nazareth or is he just a mere mortal like you or me?’
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