Features
Billet Magara
Are Zimbabweans living on the edge?
A popular song on Zimbabwe’s airwaves, “Chihwerure hachisvike kumba” focuses public attention on aspects of social behaviour in which people lose integrity by displacing their emotions on those around them.
The title of the song means that if one is harassed at work by one’s bosses, one must not get into the habit of venting one’s anger or frustration on members of one’s family.
It often happens that a man who is made to feel worthless by manic bosses, that man is likely to become edgy, morose and often violent with his family if he is irresponsible.
His anger becomes palpable and boundless as he swoops down on his hapless wife who in turn blasts her terrified children who beat the faithful family dog, which chases the cat, that vents its rodent fury on the last object in the chain of displacement, an inanimate bone.
Next time you look at a bone lying in the drain, gnawed clean by unknown forces, remember that it may have something to do with yesterday’s remonstrations from your boss!
Society would be lucky if all emotions ended up in non-living things, but they do not. Their effects are visible on the scarred faces of women, scalded hands of men and the deeply psychotic behaviour of disturbed individuals of our society.
There is a marked increase in numbers of mentally disturbed people among us and the border between “normal” and “mad” is no longer clear. It is quite common these days to see a beautifully dressed woman talking (not just muttering!) to herself in the street.
This writer is not of course suggesting that everyone who “talks to himself” is on the verge of mental disability. Technology has advanced so sharply that some “hands free” mobile phones also give the impression of a person going bonkers.
But men in designer suits now stand in our cities’ main thoroughfares all over the country, and hold fairly intellectual arguments with themselves. Some are shiny black with slime and grime and closely resemble coal miners emerging from a tiresome shift underground, except of course for the rotting piece of bread in their vice-like fingers.
When we describe such men as “mad”, how far are we from that condition ourselves? Experts would give the cause of these developments on economic crises and the pressures they exert on individuals at home and in the work place. True. Too true.
The potential for national growth is stifled as one after another, our human resource base falls victim to the invisible monster that leaves men and women acting like diseased marionettes with no control of themselves.
Everywhere you look, people are moving at top speed. Destinations are nebulous as the instinct for survival takes over. As long as one keeps moving, keeps talking, working, lying to impress and maintaining some respectable presence among peers, one is grateful to be barely alive.
Our society writhes in agony, an impending neurosis that is both psychotic and sociopathic. We are like a great river in flood, in the floodplains of our lives.
Everywhere one looks, pythons and monkeys share a floating log in the raging brown waters, their enmity temporarily forgotten as the crisis hurtles them towards roaring waterfalls ahead.
They cling tenaciously on for dear life as they leave everything to fate. Zimbabwe continues to slide on, float down river as willpower wanes and is supplanted by a sense of dejection and hopelessness.
But what happens on the riverbank? We see in our mind’s eye, female creatures looking lost as they try to solve the puzzle of their missing offspring. Their cries are weak from exhaustion and hunger.
They watch tremulously but wonder whether they are lucky or unlucky to be alive and alone. Our parents are perhaps the saddest as they witness the expiry of the lives they helped to bring into the world cruise to the cemeteries. The pressure mounts. The mind buckles, and the mad multiply.
Freedom is a smiling medusa. It is a happy monster that feeds on those who look it in the face. It turns us into pillars of salt or marble. Only those who care little about morality survive. The less clever get better jobs as “bosses” become scared of those below them with signs of wit or wisdom.
In the high rise buildings somewhere, a man loses his job. His world crumbles as he walks dazedly home to his expectant wife and children. He does not see a speeding garbage truck careening towards him, nor does he hear the screeching brakes, the driver’s curse and the grating of his gritted teeth.
The jobless man crashes out of this strife torn world on a bright sunny afternoon. A miserable funeral later, the children lose their mother to mental disability, as she cannot handle the pressures in an “I-cant-take-it-anymore” gesture of surrender.
The children pour into the streets, searching, seeking, seething with anger against a callous world of blind adults with fat stomachs and hanging cheeks.
Then one night, the eldest, a boy decides to try crime as an alternative. And we still wonder why our world has now assumed the safety of a snake pit.
The tug-of-war between sanity and insanity appears to be slowly edging in favour of the latter. The unbalanced behaviour of some of our countrymen and countrywomen point in that direction.
Imagine a newspaper headlines such as, “Man kills brother over sadza dispute”, or “Man commits suicide over vegetables”. In the first story, a man returns from work and finds that his unemployed younger brother has eaten the sadza that had been meant for the former.
He erupts into a rage and strikes his sibling with an iron bar and the rest is up to the morgue to reveal. Is this really about sadza or there are other underlying feelings that have merely taken a route out through the victim?
When our folks have sunken so low as to kill for food, what does it mean to us all as a community? The second headline is even more startling when you read the story and find that the vegetables the guy takes his life for are those from his own garden, which has been invaded by the neighbour’s goats.
What this points to is the fact that so many things have exerted some force on the man and the incident involving the vegetable garden was “the last straw” for him.
But is suicide the way out of today/s problems? What is it that drives one towards taking one’s life? It certainly does not help anybody because a dead man serves little purpose other than act as a memorial symbol of our thoughts.
Suicide is the climax of self-rejection. When the esteem of an individual has hit an all time low, s/he begins to see little purpose in life itself. Everyone is a walking time bomb ready to explode at the touch of an emotional button.
The thought itself is unsettling in that the man or woman next to you could use you as a vent for their bottled negative energies. Our society, wounded constantly in its futile war against poverty, deprivation, crime, corruption and various other social evils, finds itself hemmed in by these daunting challenges without an escape route.
The frustration becomes chronic and develops into a torpid psychosis with no intention of hurrying out from our midst. We are stuck with it. There are precious few organizations that assist living souls in torment.
Meanwhile the headlines continue to scream into our psyches that something is wrong with our nationhood. “Brothers in fatal argument over $20.” “Teen mother dumps baby in latrine.” “Young mom pleads guilty to infanticide” “Man kills stepdaughter for soiling nappies”.
When you look at these headlines, there is no doubt that our nation now suffers from some subtle neurosis that threatens to reduce us to some emotional quirks in the near future.
What has gone wrong with us? What is the origin of this new urban callousness that sees us declaring “Each man for himself and God for us all”?
The story in a local daily about a man who got so incensed by his stepdaughter for soiling her nappies (she was a toddler) that he beat her until she died makes very sad reading.
Imagine a grown man exerting his prodigious strength and muscles to pound a little baby senseless and then dead. It is obvious that this was way beyond the irritation caused him by mere soiled nappies. Would he have beaten the child dead if it were a boy?
If it was his biological child? Was he angry with the mother, the boss, and peers perhaps? A funeral was held a few weeks ago and some little soul that could have grown up to graduate from Miss Malaika to the first female president of the country lies in a cold earthen grave, her life snuffed out by a human emotional wreck.
A complete absence of maternal and paternal piety and instincts coupled with economic desperation make a lethal concoction that has caused a steady haemorrhaging of human lives over the past year and half.
Social Psychologists, Sociologists and others like them must find a way out of this morass. The human volcanoes that now walk the streets in most towns will soon find their way into public office and the nation will be plunged into regular periods of mourning if that happens.
It has become quite a shock that violence has climbed into the highest echelons of political power with sad tales of leaders succumbing to great bouts of fury and meting out personal “justice” by knifing, clubbing or karate-kicking their wives while irate wives patiently wait by the stove with pots of boiling water ready to assist husbands to acquire new skin grafts.
Many men now walk the countryside with faces that resemble Halloween masks from boiling water and sizzling cooking oil. Graduating from a husband to a French fry is not a good idea at all! But such is the depth of bottled anger in our midst that any method to vent our pent up emotions will suffice.
A story about a woman punishing a six-year-old boy by locking him up into a refrigerator/deep freezer and alternatively biting off chunks of flesh off his back, gave me goose bumps a few years ago.
There is no doubt in my mind that there are loose canons among us with the potential to take human life without compunction or hesitation at all. Be that as it may, the other side of sanity does not do justice to this argument either.
Those with the responsibility to show the way forward like pilots of aircraft have become consumed with greed and now demand a staggering $18 million per month as salaries!
Someone must have whispered in their ears the falsehood that they fly very close to the residence of the creator himself! Now they want enough gold from the pearly gates to transform themselves into earthly gods. Some forms of insanity take on very complex characteristic don’t they?
Some of us have tasted luxury and we have lost all attempts at reigning in self-control in our demeanour. We must get maximum profit in all our dealings and with minimum effort.
So we push the prices of all goods and services beyond the reach of the ordinary peasant and smile while more of them walk to Chitungwiza and back to work everyday!
We “hope” it will be corrected soon, but by whom if we do not do it ourselves? The analogy I gave at the introductory stage of this article applies in every way.
We now really hang on to logs around us and the floodwaters of our sick nationhood are drifting us towards the roaring waterfall. Were it possible to reverse the process of birth and life without involving death, some parents would be frantically trying to send back their offspring into the womb (and beyond!) right now.
But we wait with bated breath to see how events will turn and how our poor children will adjust to them in time to have lives and children of their own.
Meanwhile watch out for that tormented soul next to you.
* Billet Magara writes in his personal capacity. He can be contacted on [EMAIL PROTECTED] or 263 023 259380
Mitayo Potosi
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