Reflections of a Ghetto Youth on class inequalities in Zimbabwe.

How do you even start to write about class inequalities in Zimbabwe?

Well, how do you do that without feeling embarrassed at every sentence? Remembering the pity that filled your friends’ eyes whenever the primary school teacher asked you to return home until your fees was paid. It’s a look you can’t quite shake off because you also remember the helplessness in the eyes of your little classmates who knew they could never help you no matter how much they yearned to do it, because they too didn’t have much to spare. But you remind yourself, it’s just how things are in Zimbabwe, or for people in your class anyway and you have given this look to someone before, your own mother!

You remember that time after Church when your mother had to beg a kombi driver to take her home on credit, because she could only afford to send you home. You remember how you had watched her, knowing she could have gone on her knees, had her daughter not been there, watching, helplessly.

And you have never forgiven that man, have you? Almost a decade later! For I’ve seen you deliberately not boarding his kombi till this day and when on the rare occasion you do so mistakenly, he catches you staring at him. But it’s never your kind eyes he meets, you stare, wondering if he can remember that day.

But writing this, you realise you might also want to understand him. That $0.50 loss on that day might not have seemed like much, but you start to wonder if it is because you were looking at things from your own perspective. In that perspective is where you chose to forget that he is a father, with children and a wife that need feeding too. You forgot too that the millions of self-employed Zimbabweans $0.50 is a really big deal. You begin to ask, who are you to demand that a man eats from his own pocket and feeds yours or your mother’s? You cannot be that selfish. you who lives in a country that has forced educated youths to be touts for a living, those that choose to earn an honest living that is. You know too that the same country has forced self-employed hairdressers like your mother to be beggars living on nothing except the Grace of God and the occasional kindness of the ruling elite who occasionally remember to stabilize the currency, enough for your mother to buy groceries till astronomical inflation takes over again. It is a sad state of affairs especially when you remember that after being employed in this sector for twenty-three years your mother has no tangible assets or pension to speak of. In a country where 88% of its employed population are in the informal sector[i], you would think your mother deserves better!

But you know that your sad story is just but one of the millions from where you come from. You were raised in the ghetto and, you grew up playing umamtshayana and learnt to skillfully navigate sewage spills when you were young. The filthy streets and dilapidated houses of Makokoba were the surroundings that you called home and your English accent didn’t save you from a hungry stomach every now and then. You too had to pay your dues to the ghetto life, like everyone else.

But you wish, you wish that when you had first entered this place there had been a warning sign reading;

Welcome to the ghetto, the burial sight of all things dreams and the resurrected of all thing’s depression.

It would have warned your brother, the future Lionel Messi that life had already dribbled him out of the game because he didn’t have a birth certificate[ii].

You wish the sign had continued to say,

Welcome to the ghetto where everyone is a traditionalist,

for parents often chose between paying fees for their children and getting that incessant cough of theirs checked up. They always chose the former, so knowing what tree healed what was lifesaving information.

You wish they had told you too to stop thinking about tertiary education, for education had long been declared a resource for the rich only. No exceptions whatsoever, no matter how academically brilliant you were. It might have saved you all that time you spent cramming chemistry formulas using moonlight on yet another night of loadshedding! It might have saved you the shock when you visited the Suburbs.

Welcome to the Burbs, 

the sign to the gated entrance manned by security men with guns whose name you could not even pronounce. This is where the parliament men live. Where Mr Surplus is neighbors to the Chief Executive Officer of the shell company that has just been awarded a multi-million-dollar tender.

Our Resident President is Chiyangwa, yes, the owner of the 33-bedroom mansion[iii]. Be careful not to use Ndebele or any other indigenous language you were forced to learn at school to make you more desirable on the job market, our children don’t understand that. They are international students at the Global School of the Elite.

This is the land of the GD6’s where our seventeen-year-old children drive the latest BMWs from England, the Westerners responsible for our sanctions. Please don’t mind the cameras in front of our air-conditioned mansions, they are there to protect our hard gained wealth.  Yes, this is where the forty-year-old liberation war heroes and heroines live, the ones who always think of the fulcrum of the matters, their pockets and what’s behind their zippers.

Yes indeed, this is how class inequalities look like in Zimbabwe, unfair, depending on how much money you have in your Bank account.

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[i] https://kubatana.net/2021/07/24/contribution-of-informal-sector-underrated/

[ii] https://www.chronicle.co.zw/birth-certificate-concern-in-rural-matabeleland-scores-fail-to-access-covid-19-relief-funds/#:~:text=Birth%20registration%20is%20a%20right,country%2C%20do%20not%20have%20birth

[iii] https://www.tinzwei.co.zw/2017/03/philip-chiyangwa-africas-flamboyant.html