When hell closes down for repairs, the devil goes to Beit Bridge for a holiday.  I think he has a timeshare on the old railway bridge; it’s government property, but when you’ve got contacts in high places, anything goes – for a song.  From this colonial relic he encourages the crocodiles to eat border jumpers.  He is in friendly competition with the Ministry of Home Affairs who is training selected crocodiles to become customs officers.  Why crocodiles? I asked one of the trainers: because they always have a welcoming smile for the tourists.

You can sense the devil approximately 60 kilometres, going south, from the border township.  Suddenly you are in cactus land: thousands of dreadful thorny eruptions, indigenous to hell (kaktos Beelzebabelaas), which makes T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land seem like a Disney theme park.  Then there is the ten year old detour, which reduces even off-road vehicles to instant rattletraps.  The new stretch of tarred road, shorter than the detour, is almost as bad.  When will Zimbabwean civil engineers learn that tarring a road is slightly more complicated than icing a cake?

That stench, which causes you to gag, and wind up your car windows, is the devil’s incense.  The rotting corpses of cows and donkeys, rammed into oblivion by Formula One juggernauts, are paving the way to the god of bad intentions.  You can’t miss him: he’s coloured red, he has a forked tail, a huge willy, and he carries a ZANU PF stroke MDC membership card.

The township itself is a masterpiece of incompletion: half-built shops, half-built restaurants, half-built garages, half-built intersections, half-built homes, half-built human beings.  But the worst place of all is the border post (and it’s now just as bad on the South African side).  From street kids specialising in hub caps to the very highest officials specialising in shifty wheeler-dealers, you will find yourself in a gallimaufry of criminal activity over which only the devil could preside.

Here I am in Doha, Qatar with my jacket on inside a spectacular building on the Carnegie Mellon campus. I’m seated amongst hundreds of others listening to elevator music whilst we wait for Bill Gates to give his keynote address to the ICTD 2009 participants.

This gathering has brought academics, inventors, practitioners, entrepreneurs, media, local business and royalty together to talk tech and development. Thanks to contributions from a variety of sponsors including IDRC, Qatar Telecom, Microsoft, ExxonMobil, IBM and the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science a large number of us have had travel and accommodation costs paid to facilitate our attendance.

Freedom Fone has been allocated a demo space at the venue which has been a great opportunity to share our ideas, motivation and passion for do it yourself interactive voice response deployment with visitors and participants to the conference. Although still in its alpha version, our demo software provides a useful visual and audio experience to help people understand what we’re doing and where we’re headed.

Freedom Fone demo ICTD009, Doha

Postscript: Bill Gates was scheduled to visit the demo stands after his address but was sadly whisked away behind the scenes by the royal queen sitting in the front row!

As a kid growing up in Salisbury, as it was called then, one of the places I’d go to for entertainment and inspiration was the Rainbow Park Lane cinema. The big screen, popcorn, plastic cups of Coke – bliss for a thirteen year old! Then in my twenties I got to know Sonia, daughter of Jimmy Pereira, the driving force behind cinema in Zimbabwe. Sonia and I would meet up on some nights in the preview room at the Rainbow Park Lane and whilst the main cinema was filled with the movie going public watching the 8:30 film, we’d be checking out new movies being considered for screening in Zimbabwe. We’d share a whiskey and lose ourselves in the stories unfolding before us. Jimmy was often in the preview room with us, sitting in his usual spot, the seat on the aisle, in the back row.

Jimmy passed away recently. I sat in his memorial service looking at the programme. On the front, a dashing young man ready to take on the world; on the back, an older Jimmy, who had indeed taken on the world and forged an amazingly successful cinema industry in Zimbabwe. Here are some of the words from the service that celebrated his life . . .

Born Genaro Helder Pereira on 1st May 1928 in Lourenco Marques, Jimmy (as he has became known) experienced a somewhat challenging childhood. He schooled his prep school in Beira and for his secondary schooling he boarded at Prince Edward High in Salisbury. After leaving school he went to work informally with his father in the import and export business in Beira.

At the behest of his future mother-in-law’s to find a more formal position he moved to a different company in the same line of business. Shortly after this, in 1954 at the age of 26, he married Vanda Maria Lemos Silva. Soon after their marriage they moved to Salisbury where he tried his hand working for a company in the guano business which took him  travelling through Rhodesia, Mozambique and on occasion, Madagascar. After two years the company went bankrupt and Jimmy, now a family of four with Helder born in 1955 and Jad in 1956, returned to work with his father who was now based in Blantyre, Malawi.

In 1959 before his third and final child Sonia later in the year, Jimmy gave birth to the child he has always been most passionate about and opened his first Rainbow cinema. Converting an old plane hanger, he opened “Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines” with unprecedented flair and showmanship. It was here that Jimmy finally began living his passion and where Rainbow was born.

After nine years in Blantyre the vision for their family saw them returning to Salisbury arriving with only their furniture, three children and £100 to their name. From these humble beginnings Jimmy secured the investment needed and over the next 44 years gave his heart to his passion which began with Rainbow Park Lane in 1965 and blossomed into the Rainbow Empire we know today. He travelled extensively establishing relationships all over the world making sure he celebrated life long and hard along the way.

He became a well respected businessman in the field and in 2000 he was honoured by United International Pictures with “The Millennium Film Entrepreneur” award for his enormous contribution to the industry.

Always a showman, always a gentleman, Jimmy has become a legend and his passing on 4th April 2009 marks the end of an era.

I’ve been accruing credit notes all round town. Mugabe has dollarised Zimbabwe and we don’t have any change. Yeah right, on both counts: no political change and no American coins. So when you go shopping and your bill is $8.20 the shop offers you a credit note instead of Real, Live Change.

I’ve just come across this very cool campaign which reminded me of all the useless Zimbabwean money I’ve got lying around.

From the web site Marklives! here’s more information:

Conceptualised and created by TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris, these billboards and posters for The Zimbabwean newspaper were made entirely of worthless Zimbabwean bank notes. The billboard is made up of trillions and trillions and trillions worth of Zim dollar notes, which worked out to be cheaper than using paper.

A recent commentary by Eddie Cross caught Dale Doré’s eye. Among other things, Doré suggested:

The MDC must grasp is that they are powerless and that they have indeed been sucked into the ZANU(PF) morass. And, yes, there is something the MDC can do …… GET OUT!

This in turn caught our eye. Yesterday, we included some of Dale’s comments in our email newsletter, and we invited people to email us back with their thoughts. This has sparked a lively debate. The people who are responding to us disagree strongly with Dale, saying things like:

The GPA is cast in stone! We are tired of talks – and we do not want to backtrack and redo the talks. We will not achieve anything, we cant reinvent the wheel! Why should anyone want the MDC to pull out of the GNU when there are signs of progress written all over the wall? I say to this to these peddlers of venom, eat the humble pie. The GNU is here and is here to stay!

Read more here, and leave us a comment to share your thoughts on this debate.

Zimbabwe’s draconian media laws remain unaltered, not surprisingly. Of all the unity government’s designated reforms, Mugabe can be expected to resist this one the longest. Why? Because journalism’s job is to confront politicians with their failures. Mugabe, having contemplated nothing but his omnipotence for decades, will hardly be keen to encounter an accurate view of himself now. Read more from Heidi Holland