Tonight was supposed to be my group night, but it was one of those scenarios when everything in the universe conspires for something different to happen that ends up actually suiting most concerned for one reason or another . . . all except one . . . and that’s just the way it goes. So, I decided to share with my wider circle instead.

I am still recovering from a spell of madness at myself (and anyone else who may remotely have conspired) for having mixed the extremely precious commodities of petrol and diesel with each other thereby corrupting both. Fuck! What a huge waste . . . and certainly it is not a time to be wasteful in such things . . . anyway . . . done now.

We are once again on that edge, that part of the spiral where it looks everything could simply shut down and grind to a halt. It’s not the first time we’ve felt this way, and every time we come round to it on the spiral, it looks even more true than before. Frantic purchasing of whatever is available runs rampant as basic necessities have already disappeared and anything else, whose reappearance on the shelves is highly suspect, may also disappear from the open market and wind their way to join the very lucrative ‘underground’ where the spoils can only be for the privileged. Outright robbery and looting by those we pay to serve and protect us as police and army raid shops, force them to sell everything at half the price and then buy them out – abusing their ‘power’ in the hopes of pulling themselves out at least of this quagmire of our common experience.

On this latest move on fuel though – where coupons are now declared banned, I reckon even the privileged are going to come unstuck. (For the unfamiliar, coupons were a way of ensuring access to fuel and was based on paying in foreign currency. Govt. never had enough forex to bring in the national requirement, so people with access sorted it for themselves….and it was working!). The latest law is that these are now ‘banned’ and you have 2 weeks to redeem them into fuel. That’s all very well and good – only one problem, people are sitting on thousands upon thousands of litres worth of coupons which is beyond the capacity of the fuel stations to redeem within 2 weeks, and besides that, where does a person store such a quantity of fuel? Should you be one fortunate enough to have tanks or ample drums, that’s all well and good – then you can be had up for hoarding and have the lot confiscated….which will then probably be issued to police and army to round up more of the same! There is no way Govt. can bring in what’s required and also no way anyone is going to import and then sell for half the price they bought it at. What then? Without fuel, nothing can move – people can’t get to work, shops can’t be supplied. What happens then? It may or may not happen, and I’m certainly very curious to see how it is possible to avoid its happening by virtue of the decisions that have been and are being made. The more they try to impose control, the more everything breaks down (it’s an uncanny phenomenal parallel to the dynamic of ego disintegration – the more you try to control your world and have everything in your ordered little box so as to feel in control, the more everything falls apart and feels out of control….and actually does go out of control ultimately. Using control to ‘get’ control inevitably turns into ‘loss of control’ for the pure and simple reason that you can’t argue with reality.) The dictionary states “out of control” to be “no longer subject to guidance” . . . need I say more?

The CIZ (Commercial Ind. of Zim) are encouraging producers to continue producing despite the fact that government stipulated price controls pretty much guarantee them selling at a loss. Well, that has a lot of foresight! Who in their right mind would do such a thing??? Well exactly . . . so now, in the interests of serving the nation, we’ll simply have to take over your business thank you very much because you are refusing to do your national duty. And then everything will return to ‘normal’ in due course because, of course, the prices will creep up again and the new owners will have a business . . . can there be such manipulation as this? Well, I can’t say the same ploy worked out too well with the farms!!! A complete collapse of everything!? Zimbos must by now be very well equipped to write a highly comprehensive manual on the 10 most efficient ways to destroy a fully functioning nation!

And in our typical Zimbabwean orientation, we continue to “wait and see” (amidst the frantic buying of fast disappearing ‘anything’) so that we can afford to wait and see . . . and still survive in a fashion . . . the underprivileged become reliant on the privileged where they have access to such a thing, and for the rest it’s bare bones survival by any means – wheeling, dealing and stealing . . . and this seemingly inherent culture of continuing to suffer it, negotiate it and to “wait and see”, prevails. At what point does the snake eating its own tail swallow itself up? And what will that look like?

There is huge stress out there . . . and there are also people sitting at the Italian Bakery happily drinking cappuccino and ordering lunch seemingly unconcerned . . . for now . . . right now there’s only the cappuccino . . . quite right . . . you can still get a cappuccino by the way, but only when the power’s on….which is another thing becoming more unpredictable and less available . . . actually, it’s becoming quite predictable that it’s more than likely going to be off than on! The hum of the generators may soon be falling away too . . . mmmm

Amidst all of this, I work my connections in whichever way they exist – work, social, personal – where further challenges present themselves in this multi-faceted experience of existence persistent in its urge to move us one way or another.

And, oh yes, we pray . . . for remembrance, for our humanity, our connection, and for our healing . . . we also manage to keep a sense of humour in this craziness (I lose mine when I mix petrol with the diesel however!) And curiosity . . . mostly, I’m hugely curious . . . what now? . . . what now? . . . what happens now? Where is the bottom of this senseless barrel anyway? And what could it possibly look like? And we cannot know until we’re in it . . . and what is this “it” and how will we know? . . . so we wait and see . . . we wait like frogs heating in the water set to boil, to see whether or not we’ll notice our dying in this living, and our coming alive in this dying.

Reading the news tonight, one email leapt out from the rest and left me pensive, tense and outraged. “Lesbian Killing: We Demand Justice!” read the headline. The press statement condemned the murder of South African women Sizakele Sigasa and Salome Masooa, who were found murdered, execution style, in a dump site outside Soweto. The press statement describes the incident as a shocking event “that is not so new in South Africa in the light of the recent increase in violence and rape against women either identified as, suspected of or supporting lesbian and gay rights.”

My human mind kicked in, of course – how do we know they were lesbians? How do we know they were killed because of their sexuality or their beliefs? I was reminded of the furore a few years back when two teenage boys were sentenced to death in Iran. Human rights and gay rights groups clashed. Were the youths convicted for being gay? Or for raping an even younger boy? Is the death penalty acceptable for murder but not rape? Rape but not homosexuality? For adults but not for teenagers?

But overriding all of that, my human heart kicked in. Do any of those questions matter, really? The basic fact is two women were killed. South Africa might have the world’s most beautiful Constitution, a functional economy, and resources that are the envy of the rest of the continent. But what do any of us – all of us – have to do to get the basics right. It’s not about politics or gay rights or freedom of expression or religious freedom. It’s about real, basic, day to day humanness. Seeing each other as people and therefore deserving of respect and decency.

As I flipped through the pages of the Mail & Guardian looking for more information on the women’s murders, I was reminded of the murder of Zoliswa Nkonyana last year, a 19 year old South African lesbian, whose murder took two weeks to be recognised in the national news. IRIN’s Broken bodies, broken dreams: violence against women exposed was released for women’s day in March last year. How much has changed since then? What is our awareness raising achieving, really?

I was speaking with a friend the other day who was saying that she didn’t want her sexuality to be tolerated, she wants it to be embraced. Me? As much as the colour of my hair or the size of my shoe is not cause for comment or judgment, so I want my skin, my gender, my sexuality to be non-issues. I don’t want to be tolerated. Nor do I want to be embraced. I want to be unflinchingly acknowledged as human. No more and no less.

Ubuntu. A person is a person because of other people. I am because we are. There’s nothing fancy about that.

A Kubatana subscriber shares her experience . . .

Yesterday I was shopping on behalf of some ambuya’s (grannies) at a Spar that does a discount for pensioners on a Wednesday. A few round loaves of bread were available, a lot of the items allowed two per customer, there were about forty little packs of chicken pieces and a few dozen frozen chickens. No meat. No fresh milk. Mazoe orange juice arrived from the back of the shop and there was a stampede with people grabbing as many as they could (only one per customer?). A crowd of rather poor and ragged women had gathered outside the shop – nobody knew why? They were chased away by guards, but I then discovered that they were asking shoppers to help them buy a loaf of bread. I watched some old people shuffling around the shop with a few $10,000 notes scrunched up in their hands, a vacant look of disbelief on their faces. Each day there is less in the shops, each day people must be getting more desperate to survive. Each day and night hundreds of thousands cross the borders in search of some food and security.

Walking the grey clouds
no black and white, good and bad

Everything is everything
fuel coupons are illegal
Pius Ncube in an adulterer
electricity cuts are increasing
cell phones cut off from the outside world
generators are without fuel

Everything is everything
no power in the mornings
no hot tea and BBC
no power at night living in candle light
fridges defrosting with the last precious food
no time on computers to connect with the world

We will survive but the things that people do . . .
gathering information / writing reports / bringing people together / food and fuel parents / feeding and healing / recording the stories
will this survive?

Walking grey clouds
no clear path.
Holding on to the ground
whilst learning to fly.

Everything is everything
I see God in everything
where people speak with sacred voice
we are everything
we have a choice at every step
with random acts of kindness
learning to fly

Thanks to the past few weeks of price controls, shop raids and shortages, things in Zimbabwe are finally looking the way maybe they “should” have been looking for the past several years. Surely, with inflation in the treble and quadruple digits, unemployment at over 80%, a life expectancy that crashed from over 60 years to around 35 years, the veneer of normalcy that a tour through selected parts of Harare can yield needs to be smashed.

But Zimbabweans have shown an incredible resiliency through farm invasions, Operation Murambatsvina, currency reforms, and a host of other plagues the past seven years. Thanks to creativity, initiative, remittances, foreign aid, cross border trading and the black market, people have managed to get by.

And in a way, I suspect its this very make-a-planness that is driving this government crazy. Zanu PF might be the country’s liberation party, but it doesn’t want to govern a liberated people. It wants to govern a people dependent on it, reliant on its patronage, its good will, its whims for its survival. Urban residents and vendors exercising a bit too much initiative? Then launch Operation Murambatsvina to destroy their homes and take away their livelihoods. Hungry Zimbabweans thinking for themselves and going to Botswana, Zambia, Mozambique or South Africa to do a bit of grocery shopping in the face of price controls and shortages? Then ban the importation of foodstuffs and household items without a permit, compromising the futures of cross border traders, their families, and the families that depend on their imports.

The frog in a boiling pot metaphor is beyond cliched in Zimbabwe. But this government doesn’t seem content with merely turning up the heat. It wants Zimbabweans boiled dry. Even if that means there’s no juicy bits left for us, or them.

Don’t you love them? People who cope with adversity through innovation and an unfailing sense of humour. I was sitting in a favourite cafe this morning, delighted that they are still able to serve up a world class cappuccino alongside a delicious stack of pancakes – with syrup – in spite of the shortages, price controls and regular power and water cuts.

At the table next to me, two Can Do blokes were talking to a long suffering colleague on their mobile phone. “Boet”, on the other end of the line, was clearly struggling to keep a fleet of vehicles alive on some remote farm in Zimbabwe. As they pulled his leg about “slacking” and “wasting time” they also reassured him that they were looking for “gennies”* and grease nipples and alternators and were making plans regarding how they could “save the seal on the 49″ and “get the 47 back on the job”.

Compare this to the Can Do attitude of Zimbabwe’s government. They Can make countless promises and break them countless times.

They Can take your property, business, passport, life, future and give you nothing in return. They Can make and break the law as they please.

Well, the bottom line is we Can outlast this government and we will Do it.

* generators