Last night in an effort to fall asleep I took a gender mentality quiz from a recent FEMINA publication. The quiz was titled, “Do you think like a man”. The questions got more interesting as I got to understand what the author considered ‘male behavior’ that ‘normal’ women supposedly shouldn’t ordinarily display.

You had to strongly agree, agree or disagree with listed statements in the quiz. Some of them were: I can programme the remote control for my TV all by myself (of course I can!). I understand how a parliamentary system works. I know the basic rules of most sports including golf and tennis. I didn’t cry when I watched the Titanic (me, I didn’t really.) I know what an AC/DC transformer is and silliest of all; the angle between the floor and all four walls of any room is probably 90 degrees. Duh! I scored a lot of strongly agrees and at the end of the quiz, fell under the category of uber-male, i.e without any hint of womanly thought and susceptible to the same kind of weaknesses of the male mind in being unable to empathize with others and communicate needs effectively. What utter rubbish. Just because I understand a few things makes me male minded? I was surprised certain things were considered a preserve only for male species.

Anyhow, there was probably an element of truth in some of the things because for instance, here in Zimbabwe, how many women actually understand or even want to understand how the parliamentary system works, let alone the constitutional reform process that is currently staring at us?

At a Gender Forum meeting I attended recently, it was noted that a trend developed amongst women during the 1999 consultative processes. The women tended to boycott such processes because they simply either did not understand the processes and the constitution itself or recognize its immediate relevance to their lives. Some women are generally ‘technophobic’ and far removed from the language used in the constitution. Others simply do not care probably because they do not think their participation would make any marked difference anyway. These factors have presided over the oppression of women for a long time.

The chance to once and for all do away with the authoritarian 1979 Lancaster House constitution that has been amended at least over 15 times is here, and it would be such a disservice if women did not grab this opportunity to advance their interests especially in line with the many loopholes that dog the current constitution.

I believe it is up to civil society to point out to many an ignorant woman that a constitution determines how they are governed, and that our current constitution does not provide for things like reproductive health and sexual rights or guarantee women’s equal access to ownership and control of property. It also has sections like the S111B that prevent the automatic application of international human rights treaties like CEDAW. This would be an opportunity to lobby for the inclusion of women in parliamentary sub-committees and also ensure that the lack of a guarantee of security of a person’s bodily and psychological integrity is done away with, especially in view of the fact that there is a lot of justice outstanding from the violence that accompanied last year’s harmonized elections.

I believe it is up to all of us as individuals to take it upon ourselves to encourage and educate our neighbors about partaking in this critical process and attend consultative meetings. It is about time we set the precedent for our own possible Obama-like election hopefully to be called in 2011. The South Africans have just had something of a democratic election, and they boast one of the most democratic constitutions on the continent. It would be nice for once to stop wishing and thinking  when we too shall see democracy skate across our land. Only we can make it happen if we start by being or neighbor’s keeper.

For many years now, you have been witnessing for us all
the strange process this Zimbabwean experience has been.
Your listening ensured that we never lost our voice
patiently and kindly assuring us
we are being heard and supported.

And there has always been the question
when do we begin to speak of the other side of this story?
when do we step beyond the fear of drawing unwanted scrutiny
and speak of the seeds that are being sown?

When can we name the women and men who fix the bodies,
and who run the websites,
who stand outside jails,
who take care of the orphans,
feed displaced and aids victims,
who sell vegetables on the side of the street to feed their children,
who write the records and take the pictures?

When is the turning point
when we walk beyond our fear?
and bring the invisible into the eye of the world
and speak of who we are and what we have been part of?

Zimbabwe’s story of resilience  has been built on the individual efforts of the Zimbabwean people who, in the face of un-edited punishment, have stood their ground.  Within this chaotic process there has been a slowly growing pattern, a chaordic movement, small circles of creative action.

The Tree of Life circle has decided that it is time to tell our story and to speak of the new forest emerging from the trees planted during these years of chaos.

This is only one of many stories. There are circles of resilience and hope built around health clubs and herb gardens and football clubs and churches throughout Zimbabwe, and they have all played their part in the bigger picture.  Beneath the darkness, a strong light shines and we would like you to see it.

Life’s too short to not investigate all of your potential. This is why I have boldly taken to wearing colour of late. Orange, pink, yellow, purple, tie-dye; you name it, I wear it!

And it’s the most liberating thing that I have done for myself recently.

Why?

Because, I suppose I grew up at a time when wearing bright colours was either considered crude, or a sign of low class and taste – at least if you were any age above 16. Yes, even today, anyone who dares wear vivid colours will elicit one or two taunts for their braveness.

But I just don’t care what people say anymore, which is why it is so liberating to dress as I please. In my opinion, far too many women spend their lives being overly modest with themselves. They won’t try different things to help redefine their image and thereby get stuck in a hole they aren’t so happy to be in.

Now, I am not saying that constant change is for us all. But if you, like me, are the restless type who gets bored with having just one look, then all I can say to you is, “Do something about it!”

As one of my university lecturers used to warn us, “Time is moving and frankly, none of us is getting any younger!”

Too true – none of us is getting any younger. So, the way I see it, go for it! If you’ve always wondered what green and purple look like together, buy clothes in those colours and find out! If you’ve always wanted to get extravagantly coloured hair extensions, get them!

There’s nothing like a woman developing a safety zone and choosing to always wear ‘safe’ colours – like white and black, and brown – to avoid ever standing out in a crowd.

The world is not an entirely safe place, so why should your wardrobe be any different?! That is unless ‘safe’ colours are the only ones that you have a particular leaning towards. If not, I would suggest that you learn to live a little more on the fun side.

And what’s the worst thing that could happen?

A few people might voice their disapproval, but the one thing I have learnt in my relatively short trek on planet earth, thus far, is that OTHER PEOPLE DON’T MATTER!

It is often ‘other people’ who try to bring you down, or make you not go for the things that you really want in life. They naysay about everything and anything, just to make you feel uncomfortable about having an opinion and an individual identity.

And these kinds of people will always be around us. The only real solution to overcoming their negativity is to nurture a true sense of yourself and go for what you want, regardless of what anyone might say about you. Liberate yourself from the group mentality.

Oh, I could go on and on about the fun side of colour. There’s no greater joy than discovering that your six year-old blue scarf, the purple earrings you bought yourself recently, your pink jersey and black skirt all come together to make a uniquely beautiful combination and celebration of colour.

It’s so much fun, too, to watch the passing crowds around you stop and stare and wonder where you are from because of your unique colour coordination.

For myself, my enjoyment has nothing at all to do with vanity, but rather a deep sense of appreciation that the wonderful kaleidoscope of colours I present to the external world represents the same world of living rainbows swirling inside of me.

There is always something uncharitable said about power whenever one has it in abundance and has the ability to influence things – and human beings. Thus it has been said that if you want something done expeditiously you must know people in high places. Power and influence. You have one, you have both. You have it all. The world in your palm. Where better else than well-connected politicians?

But there are also people in low places who have been known to have power and influence – the type that only gets you and them into trouble with the laws of Man and also the laws of nature as the favours they bestow and their line of work more often than not leave someone dead.

Power-drunk men and women have ruled ruthlessly over bamboozled men, women and children and stories abound about the Central African Republic’s Jean Bedel Bokassa being a cannibal having a strong palate for his opponents. Power to eat others, yes he had it! So imagine while enraged baddies scream “I will kill you,” you have them roaring, “I will eat you!” At least Hastings Kamuzu Banda, Malawi’s Ngwazi and self-anointed President-for-life let his pet crocodiles do the eating for him. Thus man and beast became no different.

It would be interesting to look at the favourite cuisine of African presidents, as a documentary showed on DStv the other day let us in on the food enjoyed by the two Bushes, Clinton and other past American presidents.

The powerful people that we know and who tend to be held in awe by other mere mortals have for some reason always been politicians. This is despite the truism that politicians are just people after all – very fallible and very mortal like everybody else. Do politicians go hungry? Stupid question! They have a right to eat, and whatever they eat will never be used against them in a court of culinary preferences! And what do we have to say for the powerless that appear by their own peculiar circumstances to have no right to eat? They are the wretched of the earth as Fanon put it.

Politicians tend to see themselves as “the Chosen Ones” (catch my drift?) both omnipotent and omniscient in the fashion of the philosopher-kings lionised, idolised and iconised by the sages of ancient Greece, so imagine someone who by a fluke of nature has been burdened by being endowed with the exact opposite. They are neither wise nor powerful but though they are hungry, they are sure not likely to eat one of their own!

These powerless people could be wise in their own eyes, but within their realm and physical realities have no power to control anything, not even the joystick of a play station if they were handed one. How can they when they are hungry? For them everything becomes heavy, not the type seen in political heavyweights who fail to lift themselves off giant beds! Just look at them trying to get off chauffeur-driven Mercs with their sagging bellies refusing to leave the car!

We know the mysterious power and ability of politicians to erect bridges where there is no river, ability to literally build castles in the air for rural folks, etc, but it is the ultimate powerlessness of a single unemployed mother to control the destiny of her offspring that raises the spectre of human limitation in a universe where political power appears to guarantee one economic utopia and therefore eternal bliss.

Have we not seen how aspiring parliamentary candidates fall over each other and fomenting bloodbaths as they seek to earn the right to represent “we the people” only because that unspoken determination to occupy that space is informed by that yearning for power? People “naturally” associate political power with the control of not only people’s lives but more importantly resources be they natural or man-made and thus becoming an MP becomes for many the ultimate triumph in the quest of all human endevours.

Ultimately one is inclined to rather ask a rather asinine question: what is power if it gives you the right to eat and it goes on to take away the right to eat from the powerless? Crazy world huh? “I can’t talk religion (politics[i]) to a man with hunger in his eyes.”  George Bernard Shaw (1905).

If only politicians could read!

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[i] italics mine.

Ifefe is a hill situated in the Matopos National Park.  The Ndebele word refers to one of our most beautiful birds: the Lilac-breasted Roller or “blue jay.”  According to Sir Robert Tredgold, the name is “probably a reference to the colouration of the hill.” The story goes that Mzilikazi, first king of the Amandebele, was the only one allowed to use the feathers of this bird for titivation; consequently it is also known as Mzilikazi’s Roller.

Not to Ifefe, but to a smaller eminence nearby, known as Ifefe Encinyane (Little “blue jay”) do we go to experience transcendence.  We picnic in the late afternoon at a point with a 360 degree view of the horizon. The crystalline granite hill encrusted with yellow, orange and silver lichen, upon which we sit, is about two thousand million years old

We have the world to ourselves.  We are waiting for the moment when the setting sun meets the rising moon: their size is equal, their radiance is equal. The light of consciousness merges with the light of instinct.  We sip our wine on the threshold of time and eternity.  We are neither male nor female; we are perfection.  Like salt dolls walking into the ocean*, we lose ourselves together with the world.  The experience is beyond meaning.

*This analogy is Ramakrishna’s

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.