I met a distraught woman this week and my went heart to pieces. This is a fifty something year-old Zimbabwean grandmother who I see each day and pass the usual greetings and that’s where it ends – no personal stories, just the mutual goodwill that comes with African ubuntu. She went on and on about how she had made two long trips to the city’s largest referral hospital on foot and wasn’t looking forward to making another two trips the next day. Who are you visiting there and what are the doctors saying is the problem? I ask. No, the person died last week and the people at the hospital have been giving us all sorts of stories about why they have not been able to perform a post-mortem so that we may be able to begin funeral arrangements, the poor woman says. All this has taken seven days, I exclaim in disbelief. Ah, other people who came after us have had their post-mortem papers and left to bury their relatives and I think the hospital staff wants us to give them money for the post-mortem to be done and the body released to us. There she said it! Let’s be grim and morbid a bit: Imagine a relative rotting in what we know are malfunctioning morgues just because some poorly paid government person wants a bribe? Is that what the hardships here have turned us into? They say all this evil began at the top, but I refuse to be turned into that group of Africans for whom African-ness long departed from their consciousness and conscience. I wish I could go on about the poor woman’s grief but I’m so damn pissed off.

This entry was posted on September 1st, 2010 at 10:41 am by Marko Phiri and is filed under Reflections, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.