Fear passes from man to man
Unknowing
As one leaf passes its shudder
To another.

All at once the whole tree is trembling
And there is no sign of the wind.

Charles Simic

What:  Chimurenga (SA) launches THE CHRONIC at Book Cafe
When:  Thursday 3 October, 5.30pm
Where: Book Café, 139 S.Machel Ave/6th Street, Harare

On Thursday 3 October, the Book Café Bookshop invites Zimbabweans to the Harare launch of South African magazine “The Chronic” by Chimurenga, an innovative Pan African cultural platform based in Cape Town, whose network of cutting-edge contributors has gained an audience that includes public intellectuals, social leaders and activists who are instrumental in shaping Africa’s trajectory.  The launch will be presented by Teresa Ayugi, with a documentary film interview and Question & Answer session.

The Chronic is a quarterly gazette published by Chimurenga. It is a publication born out of an urgent need to write our world differently, to begin asking new questions, or even the old ones anew.

When will the new emerge – and if it is already here, how do we decipher it? In which ways do people live their lives with joy and creativity and beauty, sometimes amid suffering and violence, and sometimes perpendicular to it? How do people fashion routines and make sense of the world in the face of the temporariness or volatility that defines so many of the arrangements of social existence here?

These questions loom over a contemporary Africa. Yet most knowledge produced on the continent remains heavily reliant on simplistic and rigid categories unable to capture the complexities that inflect so much of contemporary life here.

The Chronic is one small, deeply subjective attempt to do things differently. They recognised the newspaper – a popular medium that raises the perennial question of news and newness, of how we define both the now and history – as the means to best engage the present; this question of thinking and writing critically about contingency and human agency today. They selected the medium both for its disposability and its longevity, its ability to fashion routine in a way that allows us to traverse, challenge and negotiate liminality in everyday life.

They favoured writing, art and photography that is open, plural, and inflected by the workings of power, innovation, creativity and resistance, and arrived at “a gazette, a collaborative living document that seeks out our capacity to continually produce something bold, beautiful and full of humour. We titled it the Chronic, a nod to both the art of chronicling, of documenting historical events in real time (the time-zone we call ‘now-now’), and because things are, well yes, chronic.”

Police corruption is the base definition of corruption in our country because it has a direct impact on the day-to-day lives and freedoms of our folks. Failure of the GNU and current parliament to recognise this is a sign to me that our politics has lost touch with its citizens and in the larger context they’re in conscious denial of the things that impact on our daily livelihoods. The Harare City Council is now advocating to add salt to our already nerve twitching wounds by advocating for street spot fines under the guise of keeping abreast with the international trends. The town clerk Tendai Mahachi is even making lame efforts to try and convince us that the South African standard is the International standard and that this is not about theft of our monies, as fast money for their men on the street and his starved coffers, but to bring sanity in the city. They have been promising for more than 5 years now that they are going to build commuter ranks outside the CBD but surprisingly the fault is never theirs but rather the commuters and the people.

In a rampant police corrupted country where even the commissioner of police is always on the defence that his forces are the cleanest and incorruptible, I think there has to be specific ways in which the people take things into their own hands and restore their own dignity. If we fail to defend our hard earned monies, these good for nothing lazies will continue with their malicious looting.
Commuters and all motorists have got to start investing in voice recorders and dashboard cameras to bring to book and shame this disease that is eating us everyday. This sounds ambitious and potentially expensive but for a minimum of R400, one can make sure that every road block is as it is supposed to be and when making complaints about illicit police dealing, the evidence through recording the incident will be enough. Shaming these corruptors by exposing them via social media is also a very effective way to curb this scourge.

In a case where all arms the state has failed to protect us, we should step in as our own protectors. There was a time when we could trust the state to secure our dignity through the police and the judiciary; the era is fast petering away from us and the only way left is to take a stand as a people and claim our dignity.

In this place where the mountains meet the sea
time is measured in millennium
the slow sculpturing of billions of tides
rounding, shifting, and emptying the rocks
leaving caves and towering giants
standing watchers
who have seen the rise and fall of oceans over millions of years

time measured in a dry river bed – raising and dropping its floor
in the changing fortunes of the rainy season

time measured by towering trees
still standing watch
in the centre of cities
where buildings rise and fall
and people hurry from meeting, to office, to shop, to pick up the kids, to home, to evening jaunt

the time it takes grow a tree
to get hold of the plumber
to microwave the meal

time measured in the seconds  required to start the computer

the instant conversation across the planet
weaving a new web in a new space

this is the time my grandchildren chose to come into this world
closing their eyes under a tree in the garden
beneath the mountain
and waking in a shopping mall
bright lights, loud music, bustling people, trollies, flashing colours
and they are there with un-judging enthusiasm
for this is part of their world

my time is of two generations before they were born
I have  watched my children become parents
trees grow
river beds rise and fall
cliffs move
trees fall
buildings rise
and sand dunes stretch out to the sea

and now I watch these new children
born into a world holding seemingly limitless visions and concepts and possibilities
and the emergent recognition of the damage we inflict
on our evolving system

how hard will it be to hold in their hearts
the mountains that watch over them
the trees that embrace them between root and topmost twig
to stay rooted in the millennium it takes
to round a rock by the sea?

Half way up Orange Grove Drive in Harare yesterday, mid lunchtime run, I found a man lying unconscious on the side of the road. I stopped and wondered, what do I do now? My running partner caught up and we decided that diabetes had felled him. Under a hot Zimbabwean sky we tried to flag down some cars to see if we could get something sweet to feed him. A guy driving two foreign visitors stopped and one of the passengers found a ‘seen much better times’ chocolate. The other drivers who stopped didn’t have anything to eat on them but a couple of old ladies gave us $2. A nearby security guard helped us move him into the shade where we patiently dripped water into his mouth whilst slowly getting him to suck on the chocolate. In the meantime the security guard headed off with the $2 in search of some Cascade (orange juice). Our calls for assistance at a house nearby reaped two peanut butter sandwiches and a bottle of cold Mazoe. The man who had collapsed looked like a rubbish picker. He was thin and at first his gender wasn’t clear. The security guard looked down at him and said, ah this guy, he’s hungry. The experience was a reminder about the beauty of collaboration. Two runners, some motorists, a security guard and a domestic worker (the goddess of peanut butter sandwiches) all came together to help a stranger. We’re not in this world alone.