I went to Spar supermarket in Msasa the other day to buy a few things and in the butchery section of the supermarket I noticed a sign that said something like

Fresh Game Meat Available at Z$3500/kg

and I was curious as to what kind of animal the meat had come from (impala, eland?) so I asked the assistant and she fixed me with a stare and said

Wild Beast

You travel along Samora Machel Avenue going East out of Harare to get to this particular supermarket and along the way I noticed a long fuel queue stretching back at least a kilometre from the service station. There were gaps in the queue where some innovative (and trusting) Zimbabweans had written their registration numbers in chalk on the road booking their place in the queue. The guy I spoke with said he’d been waiting for about a week. His patience will eventually be rewarded with fuel for local Zimbabwe dollars and at a cheap rate.

I’ve been reading When A Crocodile Eats The Sun by Zimbabwean writer Peter Godwin – a beautiful but deeply sad account of Zimbabwe’s demise from 2000 onwards. But like all true Zimbabweans his raw account is laced with irreverent humour and charming anecdotes. I liked this one about hippos:

Of all the theories for the hippo’s antisocial behaviour, my favourite is the one offered by the San, the Bushmen with whom I have recently spent so much time for National Geographic. They believe that the hippo was the last animal to be created and was made of parts left over from the construction of other beasts. When the hippo saw its reflection in the water, it was so ashamed of its ugliness that it begged the creator – Kaggan – to allow it to live underwater, out of sight. But Kaggan refused, worried that the hippo would eat up all the fish with its huge mouth. The hippo promised that it wouldn’t eat any living thing from the water, and Kaggan relented. A deal was struck that the hippo must return each night to the land to eat and to shit so that the other animals could examine its dung to ensure that there were no fish bones in it. The regular humiliation of public faecal inspection could well account for the hippo’s irascibility.

This entry was posted on November 23rd, 2006 at 1:16 pm by Bev Clark and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.