Many years ago in a little German town called Hamelin, the people had a terrible problem of rats. They were everywhere – in the streets, houses, beds and even baby cots. The mayor and his people were stumped. One day the Pied Piper came along and said he could deal with the rat problem, if the Mayor would pay a huge sum of money. The mayor agreed. So the Pied Piper played his pipes and all the rats gathered, followed him out of Hamelin and fell off a cliff. When it was time to cough up, the mayor balked. So the Pied Piper played another tune and this time, all the children followed him and never returned.

The story of the Pied Piper might just be folklore, but in a little town called Harare, in a country where the economy is dysfunctional and politicians make empty promises, people are generally preoccupied with daily survival and keeping body and soul together above all else. Crucial social services like garbage collection and disposal are neglected, sometimes to the detriment of the people concerned. As street corners pile up with garbage, a new menace has surfaced and its kind has an unparalleled reproductive ability.

They are everywhere, living and rummaging in the corners where we store our garbage, occupying private spaces and threatening to invade our homes as their numbers grow exponentially in direct response to the piling rubbish. Hundreds of them are being born each day threatening to colonize and congest our cities as well as spread disease. Their exaggerated shapes and sizes have made the once ordinary rodents almost unrecognizable. The little nocturnal creatures now shamelessly dart across alleys in broad daylight; have become resistant to most common traditional poisons and have grown less and less fearful of man. They have become a silent but perilous plague that threatens our very lives, yet a lot of us are oblivious to the real dangers presented by rats. Because of their tendency to live where we live, rats are an effective agent of disease transmission. We have been unaware of the risks of catching all sorts of diseases and some awful things from this vermin. A single rat by itself is unimpressive and each time I spot one, I am reminded of the infamous bubonic plague which wiped out whole communities and half the populations of Europe and Asia circa the 1300s.

While piles of rubbish continue to compete for space on street corners and open spaces, street cleaning and inspection systems have gone to the dogs and cutbacks in pest control expenditure and increases in takeaway food shop and food litter have consequently contributed to the dramatic increase in the thriving rat population that has become very comfortable guests in our backyards.

Where I live in the avenues, the problem of rats in the alleys has become a seriously worrying risk to public health because of garbage that goes uncollected for weeks.  Visiting the communal garbage corner in my yard is a frightening experience. Fearless rats the size of cats dominate the area to the extent that nobody bothers to deposit their garbage properly into the metal bins anymore. The way to do it now is to stand a few feet away, take aim, and then smash and run. Just behind this space is an open playground where the children run around all day and play – care free; their parents oblivious to the impending danger just beyond the wall. They are all exposed to the risk of catching rat-bite fever – a systemic bacterial illness that can be passed on from rodents to humans. All it takes is one bite or a scratch from a rodent. Ingestion of food or water contaminated with rat excreta or urine also causes deadly types of food poisoning whose symptoms can certainly not pretty.

At the corner of Fife Avenue and 5th Street in the Avenues, there is a huge rubbish dump container the size of a space ship that is eternally overflowing with rotting garbage coming from the adjacent supermarkets. The air in that whole area has literally become oppressively rotten and unbreathable. The shops should be taking better responsibility in careful disposal of rubbish and cleaning up after themselves. However there is currently no enforcement, but it would be gratifying to see some huge fines imposed for careless rubbish dumping especially by corporate companies.

The city council has sometimes justifiably been blamed for not providing bins. In the not too distant past, every street corner was occupied by rubbish bins that were constantly emptied. Many corporate businesses used to even donate branded bins to the city in those days. I am not sure if this is no longer a lucrative marketing gimmick or billboards are just the new favorite. Nowadays, it is not surprising to cut across the city centre without ever bumping into a bin. I have too often experienced the little annoyance of carrying around a banana peel hoping to find a bin soon then finally being forced to deposit it into my backpack because I’m just not gifted with the ability to litter.

We need to go back to basics on public health before this thing goes out of control, that’s the small price to pay or we will soon cry foul after the Pied Piper has left town with our kids in tow. It is our responsibility to make sure our neighbor doesn’t throw rubbish on pavements; if government is too preoccupied to put in place fines, enforce sanitary laws and improve efforts to collect and dispose of trash. The starting point for a coordinated approach needed is for us as citizens to realize our duty to practice good sanitation. It is the only rat proofing technique and we might even consider adopting traditional ways of disposing garbage by digging dirt pits in our backyards and other places where rubbish dumping occurs. If we are prepared to dig boreholes in urban Harare for clean supply of water, we should have no problem digging rubbish pits for waste disposal to ensure our health before the rats, flies, mosquitoes and all other vermin imaginable gain in on us.

This is a bit personal but I sit here right now battling in my head what to do next in view of a conversation I just had with a very close relative of mine.  First she texts me, Please call urgently. I immediately start panicking thinking something is wrong, however I succeed in making that call. She wants to take her two sons aged 19 and 22 to Harare Hospital to get circumcised, so they will need a ride from there. I have no problem delivering them to and from the hospital. When I put down the phone initially, I think nothing of it. Then it hit me. Knowing how overbearing this particular relative (call her aunt Mabel) can get – there was a huge possibility that the two boys were being forced to go through this procedure. So I call her back to find out more and I wasn’t off the mark. That has become the new policy for the boys as long as they live under her roof and eat her food. In talking to her further I find out that this circumcision business – which in my books is just another one of the latest but fleeting donor fashion fads – has had a huge appeal on her and her colleagues. No matter what I tried to explain to her, I could sense that in a way Aunt Mabel believes that this one procedure is what could spare her boys a debilitating death ‘in these HIV days’.  I have begun to feel like such an accomplice to a heinous crime. Most of my adult life I have sought to protest against violation of human rights and now here I am caught in a conspiracy to take my cousins for circumcision against their will. If Aunt Mabel was going to be this cruel, I wonder why she didn’t just get it done when the boys were still babies, without a care and not in a position to make decisions for themselves. Surely that option was available long before then?

Although I understand and appreciate the benefits of male circumcision, I feel that efforts to dispel the lurking notion that this procedure prevents HIV infection have not been nearly as frantic as has been it’s marketing as a prevention method. A lot of people, including my aunt sincerely believe that if there is so much noise around this subject, there must be some immense life saving benefit to it. And there are in fact some immense benefits, just not entirely life saving. The watered down explanation that circumcision reduces chances of HIV infection, although the risk is still far too high and that condoms and safe sex must still be used is confusing a lot of people. I also think the concept of male circumcision has become a tad overrated.  And I can only but imagine how many young boys out there are meekly being led by overbearing mothers like sheep to the slaughter to get circumcised against their wishes.

Although the risks outweigh the benefits, I’m sure that if I were a guy, I’d appreciate having the final decision lying with me thank you, and circumcision, like all surgical procedures, has a risk of complications and adverse effects that include bleeding, infection, surgical error, injury to the penis, and adverse reactions to anesthesia, not to mention the 4-6 weeks of agony that male adults have to live with while waiting for the wound to heal.  I am also made to understand that foreskin removal desensitizes the penis head, and contrary to popular belief, sex is less stimulating compared to those who have their skins intact. In essence, the main benefit of foreskin removal is hygiene and aesthetics. I am pretty sure given the full info that a lot of men would then rather keep what God gave them. This is however not to say that it is a bad idea. Studies have shown that indeed, chances of circumcised men developing urinary tract infections and their female partners having cervical cancer are greatly reduced.

A friend of mine thinks that I am probably fretting needlessly and that the boys might actually be interested in undergoing this procedure. Perhaps they would like to be circumcised, but I doubt under such circumstances. In any case, I can imagine them now all grown up and feeling that they were mutilated and deprived of an important structure of their original anatomy without their consent. A lot of men are just as obsessed about this as those who clamor to be circumcised. It has also been suggested that the operation may cause psychological trauma. It is therefore a good thing that facilities offering this service provide counseling first. I think they must also have their clients sign consent forms and that in the case where they are forced but do not want to go through with the procedure, they can just come out without having it done and through doctor-patient confidentiality, their parents would never find out.

Author and playwright Steven Chifunyise never fails to tickle the funny bone in me. Last night I was at Theatre in the Park, excited at the thought of getting a dose of political satire from his new play, Heal the Wounds and equally excited about the opportunity to unwind in the cool breeze of the evening while breathing in the garden’s fresh soil and grass. While we waited for the play to start, the breeze was indeed cool, but it also transported the stinks of urine and other forms or human waste thanks to the vagrants who often use the park for ablution facilities. Thankfully the play was not as disappointing. It featured two brothers who, because of their different political orientations, could never be imagined as friends but at some point find themselves working and sitting together in a committee of national healing and reconciliation.

Sophisticated terminology, concepts and all, they are seen trying to sell the idea to their elderly rural parents who seem skeptical of the Global National Unity and the process of healing. Forgiveness is the gospel they both vociferously preach and believe to be the only ‘practical’ way forward to achieving healing and forming the basis of national development.

The parents believe that it is so simple for the people in Harare to just forgive and move on because they didn’t lose any cattle and their houses weren’t razed for perceived differing political orientation. The parents use an old metaphor to ask their sons how any healing is possible if lots of people in the village were still walking around with axes stuck in their heads. Of course the ‘masalad’ sons took the literal meaning, discarded it as ludicrous and soon started to argue between themselves about which party did what, in the violence of 2008.

Their short display of ‘disunity’ invites the mockery of, and convinces the old men that nothing reasonable was being done in the ‘committee healing national’ as one of them kept confusing it. The long and short of it all was that this process is out of touch with the people and is not being done in as inclusive a way as it should be, that is by involving all stakeholders. The gospel of forgiveness that is being preached by politicians, some of who were themselves responsible for the atrocities surrounding the June 2008 elections, (abductions, rape, torture and murder), is just not enough for ordinary Zimbabweans.

The old men towards the end of the play prescribed 10 panaceas that they felt needed to be presented to the committee in order to allow real discussions about national healing to begin. In short, they described a number of transitional justice mechanisms, some of which are not practical, and seem very silly to the sons, but actually do lie buried deep in the hearts of many.

The emotional weight carried by most Zimbabweans from the many violent episodes since independence are the axes Chifunyise refers to. They are a constant reminder, which cannot be wished away, and they lie so deep they cannot just die a natural death at the prompt of forgiveness, especially coming from the highest offenders. Known offenders need to apologize in public; property-grabbers have to return the cattle, chickens, wives and whatever else they stole, to their rightful owners. In the rural areas, some people live with the reality of seeing their livestock in the stock pens of their neighbors.

People want to freely bury and mourn their dead, have a chance to be heard, to tell their story and to create a record so that there is a certain measure of closure. They want a commission of inquiry; but nothing like the joke that was the Chihambakwe commission of the 1980s. Insulted chiefs want to be apologized to. So do parents whose sons and daughters insulted them because of differing political views.

This all sounds petty, but could it be that the real journey towards true healing begins at the grassroots level and that the answer lies in each one of us finding a way of shedding the axes that we each carry in our heads?

Like untamed animals they live out cold in the open, in the tall dry grass that shields their existence from the rest of the world. An eternal stench of a combination of urine, feces and sweat hangs like a halo over their small compound. There are no toilets or water taps in sight. It is a miracle they survived the cholera. In the middle of winter, half-naked kids from anything between ages 2 to 16 loiter listlessly with blank expressions and mucus running freely from their noses. A few metres outside the compound are the posh mansions of the leafy Borrowdale and Gunhill suburbs.  Obscene opulence overlooks dire poverty; it is hard to imagine you are in the same neighborhood. Just opposite the main entrance to the compound stands the renowned Celebration Church. Borrowdale road is abuzz with posh cars zooming past at high speed oblivious to the mushrooming squatter camp amidst the tall dry grass. Sirens wail off in the distance, grow closer, and then fade away as the presidential motorcade zooms past. What the dwellers of this veld call home are two-meter high shelters made of highly flammable materials like grass, cardboard, plastic, and if you are extremely privileged, pieces of asbestos and scrap metal. Running water is a luxury that cannot be envisioned in this lifetime and bathing is an achievement. Some of the residents have lived here for many years; some were born here.

Amidst the shrieks and laughter of playing children, the soft moans of an old man in pain can be heard. After a hit and run accident on the busy Borrowdale road, he was lucky enough to be taken to hospital by kind passersby. His leg was put in a cast. It’s been about six months now and the old man cannot afford to have the cast removed. Just inside the race course a few metres away, corpulent women in their expensive spandex tracksuits take their vigorous health walk along the tracks that are sometimes graced by majestic racehorses. They often walk in groups of three as a precautionary measure, lest one of the squatters attempts to have a go at them. The squatters call the wealthy rotund women horse-pipes.

Yes the city council knows about the squatters, although they would like to pretend they do not exist. In fact, it is pretty obvious that the city council is behind the constant ‘police-raids’ that often happen at night. They have tried on many occasions to evict these homeless people. Evictions are now part of life for most of them, for that’s how they got here in the first place. After the government blitz of 2005 dubbed Operation Murambatsvina that destroyed illegal settlements, a lot of helpless people found themselves without a roof over their heads and trekked north to Borrowdale, where the open space next to the racecourse provided temporary haven, till Operation Garikai gave them the promised new homes. It has been five years. Now anyone who has lost his or her job or simply cannot cope with the dollarized lifestyle of Harare simply gravitates towards the camp. But that’s not all. The founders of the squatter camp were originally women married to the racecourse laborers. They were kicked out of the servants’ quarters because, whenever they did their washing, their children’s white nappies ‘panicked’ the donkeys. Living in mud huts turned out a convenient and cheaper option. Now over 200 men, women and children live there.

The police have a fetish for coming at night. At one time they started a fire that engulfed the decrepit little homes. The camp dwellers ran away momentarily, but soon returned to the only place they could have a modicum of quiet. The police have come again on and off, and last time, they bundled everyone into lorries and went and dumped them at the Pomona dumpsite. They are destined to be trash for the rest of their lives. What the government can’t deal with, it attempts to hide under piles of garbage. Only these are human beings we are talking about, see.

Because they are poor and homeless, they are automatically regarded as criminals. Anyone who has had a break-in immediately suspects them. Then the police have reason to celebrate a baton-throwing head-bashing field day.

When you are dressed in rags, smelling of sweat and are of no fixed abode, it is next to impossible to find a job. So they live mostly on handouts and rubbish bins. Very few kids go to school and those who do, it is just a meaningless routine that can be constantly broken to sell wares or beg for alms on the roadside. When you pay them a visit, they all gather around, anticipating you have probably brought them their meal for the day. If not, you are still received with warm, friendly smiles. They are grateful for anyone who cares to listen or bring their little ones some sweets. All they want is a roof over their heads and a decent meal. They are the victims of a dysfunctional economy and a government that has failed to repair the damage it inflicted on the poor in its botched urban clean-up operation. This is not fiction. Next time you are driving down Borrowdale road, or horse piping along the racetracks of Borrowdale racecourse, just take a moment to have a look among the tall grass and think twice about the kind of government you would like; one that reduces some human beings to nothing but trash or one that takes responsibility for its actions.

Most importantly, what are you going to do about it is the question?

Most of last week I was in the city of lights, Johannesburg, and because I was having so much fun being away from home, it completely left my mind that swine flu or A(H1N1) was reportedly resident, prevailing and spreading in South Africa. My work colleague and I traveled around and between Johannesburg and Pretoria for our various appointments. It wasn’t until the fourth day of our stay in South Africa when we were in a restaurant having breakfast and waiting to have a meeting with some of our partners that someone behind us suddenly started sneezing uncontrollably. In the wake of the swine-flu scare, the elderly woman was not even making an effort to cover her nose and mouth like anyone should who has got any flu, swine or not. My colleague and I just stared at each other, half realizing the risk of contracting swine flu and half annoyed and confused at the old woman’s carefree sneezing feat. Annoyed glances from around the restaurant went unnoticed by the chattering woman and I was half tempted to walk over to her table and admonish her for being so rude.

We are back in Zimbabwe but all weekend, I was pretty sickly with a sore throat, slight temperature and feeling restive. My family members thought I was just being paranoid when I insisted on being taken to the hospital in the thick of night on Saturday. I had had a genuine swine-flu scare and had been in the high-risk zones of  South Africa; the malls, restaurants, the airplane, and the airports. I was convinced I was going to die. It suddenly occurred to me that none of us really knew much about N1H1 in much the same way we had initially been indifferent to cholera until it claimed some of our own. It occurred to me that I had no idea where to go for testing, neither was I sure most of the doctors here were familiar with it or even knew how to recognize it.

Cases of swine flu have already been detected in Mutare. The state, which recently was unable to contain a cholera epidemic that killed more than 4000, and has a half dead health system claims it is on ‘high alert’ to combat swine flu.  Meanwhile, doctors are once again on strike. The country’s health minister, Henry Madzorera said health surveillance teams have been deployed to all entry points into the country (including airports) to look out for suspected swine flu cases among people coming into the country.  I do not remember seeing anything like that at the airport. The ministry has also not made it clear where individuals who suspect they have the flu can go for free testing, as should be the case. I seriously doubt the government’s ability or will to deal with a swine-flu outbreak.

The government of Botswana has put in place a toll-free number for reporting any suspected cases of swine flu. South Africa has established centers for testing all over the country and is on a mission to educate its population on recognizing symptoms, treatment and how to avoid catching it. If our own government has put any serious and practical measures in place, then clearly there hasn’t been enough publicity about them. But if you ask me what make cell phone was stolen off Chinotimba, I will tell you.

Silver's on it

This morning I had another encounter with Super Cop ‘Silver’ doing what he does best – this time at Avondale shopping centre in Harare. There I was among other peaceful mortals trying to do some banking when two gunshots went off outside the bank. Funny, instead of avoiding danger, people actually scrambled outside to see what was happening.

It was super-cop Silver making an arrest of apparently hardened criminals who had been illegally dealing in minerals at Wimpy (at least that’s how the story goes). In what was clearly a tip off, the suspects were caught mid-drumsticks and unaware.

In movie style: blue lights, police dogs and all, the notorious silver car was flanked by two brand new Isuzus to cordon off the vehicle belonging to the suspects. In his black leather jacket and shades, ‘Silver’ could be seen manhandling the suspects who were clearly not armed or resisting arrest. Meanwhile, plainclothes police stood around armed to the eyebrows with guns and baton sticks. Some could be seen shoving photojournalists away from the scene and I had a brief sense of déja vu of my days as a young journalist.

No one was wounded and it turned out the two gunshots had just been warning shots. Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill. If anything, these intelligence guys ought to charged under POSA and put behind bars for a day for causing alarm and despondency. I thought; this country would be a different place if they also moved with such great energy to arrest the very hardened criminals to whom they report.

Bloody show offs.