Finish things. That’s how you develop your voice. Whether it’s a poem or a short film or a painting or a piece of theatre, whatever it is, finish it. Let it go and move onto the next thing. Lots of the stuff I’ve done I think is really, really shit but it’s fine because it’s finished.  – Kate Tempest

Something was recently posted online that made me pause and reflect on how impersonal Zimbabwean society has become over the years thanks to the odious nature of our politics.

A reader posted on a bulletin board to comment on the death of someone prominent last week.

Thus read the comment: “Greet Satan for me. BYE.”

These forums have become the modern day agora where all sorts of comments are aired, yet I found it was one of those audacious statements that get you asking about the person’s cultural and social sensibilities, yet for anyone who has lived through the impunity dealt on political crimes especially, you somewhat readily see the anger contained in that statement.

We had always thought that every death is regrettable, that you commiserate with even your worst enemy, for death is something you cannot wish on anyone – alongside getting someone fired, I might add! Schadenfreude, I believe it’s called.

These are things enjoyed by the Devil’s disciples, we are often told, yet Zimbabwe’s post-independence narrative is fraught with emotions that have seen many deviating from the what would be a universally accepted response to the loss of human life and actually celebrating someone’s death.

Such tales abound and they invariably border on politics where, because ordinary people have been failed by all pretence to legal processes, see death as the ultimate equalizer.

There is no need to repeat the late Chenjerai Hunzvi’s words of condemnation to local youths who drank themselves silly celebrating Laurent Kabila’s death back in 2001. The same youths also rejoiced when he himself died that same year!

Thus it can be concluded many here will readily identify with Mark Twain’s witticism: “I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.”

Sad by any measure.

To celebrate Africa Day we asked our SMS community to send us a slogan; over 1400 slogans later we chose these two: Africa, our Africa. Laugh dictators and oppressors away. Ha ha ha and Africa stop chasing democracy: Ride it! The lucky winners get a cool t-shirt designed by the very talented graphic designer Baynham Goredema. Check out our map of slogans here. We’ve decided to dress up like members of the first family (do the same and send us your photos) when we join the Mugabe’s for lunch on Sunday 2 June at 8.30pm on the SABC3 channel; according to David Smith writing for the Guardian in Johannesburg, this is a surreal glimpse of Zimbabwe’s first family as no one has ever quite seen them before. Before the TV cameras Robert, wife Grace and two of their children declare their love for each other, discuss philosophy and religion, and laugh about the time Grace punched a British photographer. The result is compelling and at times jaw dropping. Some might describe it as car crash television. We found out that Combined Harare Residents Association is running a short survey on pre-paid meters; did you know that there is a statutory instrument, which has been gazetted, which compels ZESA to charge you $300 in arrears for the installation? We heard that the test case of Mildred Mapingure versus the State is before the Supreme Court today at 9am. Mildred Mapingure had child as a result of rape from armed robbers. The case is to sue the state for negligence on the part of state employees who failed to prevent pregnancy when it could have been reasonably prevented and they failed to further take steps to terminate pregnancy. Zimbabwe Women Lawyers Association is using International Women Human rights instruments to argue this matter with the hope of creating a favourable precedent in the management and care of Survivors of Sexual Violence. We were proud to hear that Dr. Peter Morgan, a naturalized citizen of Zimbabwe, has been named the 2013 Stockholm Water Prize Laureate for his work to protect the health and lives of millions of people through improved sanitation and water technologies. Several of his most prominent innovations, including the Bush Pump and the Blair Ventilated Improved Pit (VIP) Latrine, have been adapted as the national standard by the government of Zimbabwe. Over 500,000 Blair VIP latrines have been built and serve 3 million people in Zimbabwe alone, and many more have been built worldwide. Dr. Morgan also created the ‘Upgraded Family Well’, which now help half a million people improve the quality of water obtained from traditional wells. We watched Josephine Mudzingwa Siziba who moved to North Shields in Tyneside as a refugee 13 years ago give a guy called John some advice on life; although seen as rich by her family in Africa, she and her husband live on the Meadow Well estate, one of the most deprived in Britain. They survive on the minimum wage and work in a number of jobs to support their daughter as well as their extended family. Every month, she sends hundreds of pounds to help her family in Zimbabwe, who call her “Queen Makoti” because of her good deeds. We went to a Harare SPCA dog show and encourage people with a loving heart and space in their home to adopt one of these beautiful animals. We wondered whether greed is indelibly embedded in politician’s DNA as President Uhuru Kenyatta faces salary reform rebellion by MPs. We came across an article which suggests that the African Union as an organisation that reflects the social character of the states composing it, most of which are under authoritarian rulers who cling to power through force and electoral fraud, is ill-equipped to meet people’s aspirations for democracy and social progress. We learned that more than 12 African heads of state and other global leaders met and reviewed progress toward implementing transformative reforms in the AIDS, Tuberculosis (TB) and malaria responses and pledged to accelerate the pace of change (increase annual domestic funding for health care, particularly AIDS, TB and malaria services). We tested our knowledge and took the Guardian’s Africa Quiz. We were inspired by a pioneering foundation called Femrite that has helped a new generation of Ugandan women tell – or at least record – often harrowing stories of daily life in the country. We met Ben Sanders who travelled the length of Africa using only public transport from Cape Town to Cairo; check out the photos here. We read that a quarter of the world’s children are at risk of under performing at school because of chronic malnutrition according to the UK charity Save the Children. We found out what a week of groceries looks like around the world; Mali and Chad are stark exceptions to excess. And finally, we wondered if you think this is true . . .

Because when something happens, she’s the person I want to tell. The most basic indicator of love. - David Levithan

Sarah Ditum writing on the Guardian:

Former Crimewatch presenter Nick Ross seems to think there are parallels between rape and property theft.

“Don’t have nightmares!” Nick Ross used to say, when he hosted Crimewatch, but little did we guess at the Hellraiser-esque horrors haunting our plucky watcher of crime until this weekend. In an extract from his book, Crime, published in the Mail today, Ross reveals that he has been afflicted with a terrible case of visual agnosia which has left him unable to tell the difference between vaginas and laptops.

He writes: “We have come to acknowledge it is foolish to leave laptops on the back seat of a car […] Our forebears might be astonished at how safe women are today given what throughout history would have been regarded as incitement […] Equally they would be baffled that girls are mostly unescorted, stay out late, often get profoundly drunk and sometimes openly kiss, grope or go to bed with one-night stands.”

Obviously, writing a manuscript in a state of perpetual confusion between portable computers and female genitals is a distressing condition – is that a return key or a clitoris? – and Ross is to be applauded for battling through to the end of his wordcount. And so, in a spirit of compassion for the baffled, I would like to offer Ross a brief guide to the ways in which women and their vaginas are not like cars and laptops.

1. Not every car contains a vagina
When you carefully tuck your high-value portable property under the passenger seat (just kidding, smash-and-grabbers! That’s definitely not where my iPad is!), it’s because you don’t want potential thieves to know it’s there. But draping your vagina in a floor-length modesty frock is unlikely to persuade anyone that don’t have one, and therefore might not be worth violating. This is not a quantum mechanics problem. Schrödinger’s fanny is not a thing.

2. A laptop is a portable electronic device, a vagina is a body part
Does it whir? Does it make small clicking sounds? Can it be placed in a briefcase and carried around separately to its owner? That is a laptop. Is it a fibromuscular tubular tract located between a woman’s thighs? Vagina. Taking the former from a car would be an act of theft. Penetrating the latter without the woman’s consent would be a physical assault – and that’s true even if the woman has behaved in a way that makes it obvious that she has a vagina and sometimes uses it for fun! No one says to the victim of a beating: “Well, anyone could see you had teeth. You were just asking to have them broken with all the eating you do.”

3. You can’t insure a vagina
Having your car broken into and your valuables taken sucks. But, understanding that this is a world where some people might be driven to desperate acts for small rewards, you might make a heavy sigh and sweep up the glass (secretly hoping that the drugs your laptop has paid for turn out to be mostly cornflour), and then go and put in your insurance claim. Being raped is – and I know this is going to surprise you, Nick Ross, so prepare yourself – worse than that. There is no insurance that lets you claim back the state of being not-raped. There’s no cloud backup to restore your pre-rape internal data. You’ve been raped, and that is profoundly horrible.

When Ross compares rape to theft, he presents it as a crime of property, not a crime of violence. It’s an idea that belongs to the dark ages when women were permitted to own nothing apart from that abstract quality called “honour”. Now – oh, fortunate modern females! – we are understood to have to rights to all sorts of things, including the right to decide who we do or don’t want in our own orifices. And that’s a right we cannot forfeit. Whatever we’ve drunk, however we’re dressed and whoever we’ve kissed, a vagina is never a laptop.

One of the tragedies that Zimbabweans living in places that have become extremely dangerous – that is assuming they were not dangerous all along – is living with the fear of death, while at the same time not seeing the return to the safety of your own country as a particularly welcome proposition.

It has become the story of poor working class Zimbabweans toiling in South Africa where all this xenophobic nonsense continues despite the staged euphoria of the African Union’s golden jubilee.

No wonder President Sata had unkind words for the dream of a “continental passport!”

Zimbabweans who still dream of returning home, if only they could get jobs, have become the classic example of being caught between a rock and hard place.

I read the other day a news feature which I felt had been repeated for the past 10+ years but (not) surprisingly continues to be reported even today.

It was about a woman deported from South Africa only to return the very same day.

And what she had to go through to make it back to her Johannesburg hovel is mind-blowing.

But there is no new story there, yet the pertinent issue is why this keeps happening, why young people who continue to lose colleagues to xenophobes will tell you they are not about to quit the not-so-bright lights of Jo’burg.

Why, they ask, return to the misery back home?

Yet I know some who have returned to the potholed streets of Bulawayo claiming they want to return to school after witnessing what opportunities education can open for them in South Africa.

It’s sad really, but this is a song that has played for so long it has numbed our sense of shock and shame.