In the land of many editorials
I am not sure what I was expecting when I landed at Harare airport.
It couldn’t be memories because I had never been to the country, but this was 1987, and being a Ghanaian and a journalist of about 20 years at that time, entering Zimbabwe was bound to generate a riot of emotions.
How many editorials and demonstrations had there been in Ghana about Rhodesia, which there are some, I have to remind, is what Zimbabwe used to be called prior to gaining independence in 1980.
I was excited and apprehensive on entering the country of “the racist Ian Smith”
In my mind, on arrival on that first duty trip as a BBC reporter, I felt I knew the country already but of course I didn’t.
I was determined to shed all preconceptions and allow myself to be surprised, if need be.
I remember the first thing that struck me was how well-organised things looked, starting with the painless arrival routine at the airport.
Right out of customs, you got to the car rental place, and within minutes, you were in your car, with a map and driving to the hotel you had booked.
The icing on the cake was the young Immigration officer stamping my passport and telling me, “welcome to Zimbabwe our In-Law”.
The wife of the Zimbabwean Prime Minister at the time, a certain Robert Mugabe, was Sally Mugabe, a Ghanaian who was a known freedom fighter and a liberation struggle heroine in her own right and through her, Ghanaians were the official in-laws of Zimbabwe.
Once you went around town, you could see and feel many signs of the Rhodesia UDI days, when the country was under sanctions.
Since they couldn’t import many things because of the sanctions, they had become self-sufficient in many ways.
The supermarket shelves certainly showed many processed and well-packaged foods with Made in Zimbabwe labels.
I went to a tailoring shop and got a bespoke leather jacket made for me.
For many years afterwards, it was a glamorous item in my wardrobe, which I wore with pride and would tell everyone it was made for me in Harare.
The initial impression I got at the airport about things being well organised turned out to be well-grounded.
You didn’t get an idea that you had come to a rich country but the streets were clean and well laid out, people kept to time and appointments.
And the police did not try to take money from you for imaginary infractions of the law.
I might add that this initial opinion about the police in Zimbabwe persisted during subsequent visits even when economic conditions had worsened.
Maybe I must add a caveat, I haven’t been on a reporting duty trip since the year 2000, and therefore I do not claim to be recounting current events.
Good standing
Ghanaians were in good standing everywhere you went and not just because we were in-laws.
There were quite a number of high-flying Ghanaian professionals in the Zimbabwean public service, university lecturers, medical doctors, judges, among others.
There were others in business and the general view among them and other West Africans who had flocked there seemed to be that the Zimbabweans were doing quite well some seven to eight years after independence.
You heard loud prayers they wouldn’t become like the countries in West Africa and get into political instability and economic chaos.
I was invited to the home of some old friends, Professor Francis and Margaret Nkrumah, and had a most memorable dinner.
There were two main conversation subjects in town, the post-independence constitution was just about to be dumped, the largely ceremonial president, Canaan Banana, was stepping down and Prime Minister Robert Mugabe was about to start what was to become a long stretch as president of Zimbabwe.
I met lots of people who expressed their reservations about Prime Minister Mugabe becoming a president.
His stewardship as prime minister since independence in April 1980 had up to that time been widely acclaimed as a success, and fears were expressed that as president, he might change his attitude and become “just another African dictator, clinging to power”.
I included this quote in the second report I sent to Focus on Africa and was roundly condemned and told I was wrong and would be shown to be wrong.
The second subject in town and in the newspapers was the Unity Accord which had been negotiated by President Canaan Banana between Joshua Nkomo’s wing and Robert Mugabe’s wing of their liberation movement, ZANU-PF, which brought an end to two years of horrendous bloodletting in Matabeleland.
I drove to Bulawayo in Matabeleland and saw some of the scars left by the civil war, even though no one actually called it a civil war.
I was shown a toilet that had been abandoned near a school because seven bodies had been thrown into it by the infamous Fifth Brigade and “it now serves as their grave”, a teacher told me.
I spent a morning at a primary school in the hope I would get an insight into what the children made of the trauma and came away with a recording of a teacher who had a class of eight-year-olds, totally hooked on “a magic way of working out a 9x table; just write down 9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 and 0 and then just put 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 and 0 you have your answers to your 9x table.
9×1=9, 9×2=18, 9×3=27, 9×4=36, 9×5=45, 9×6=54, 9×7=63, 9×8=72, 9×9=81 and 9×10=90”
Nobody had ever taught me that trick and I was as fascinated as the eight-year-old children.
It was a happy class and I have always wondered what happened to that teacher.
As our stringer in Matabeleland who took me around said, most people in that part of the country invariably end up in South Africa.
This is long before the Zimbabwean economy had collapsed and the exodus to South Africa became nationwide.
Freshly independent
At this time, this was still a freshly independent Zimbabwe which apartheid South Africa saw as a threat to its survival.
This was the place that offered refuge and succour, near home, to Black South African freedom fighters.
I don’t now remember what a particular, popular nightclub in Harare was called, but all three times that my friends took me there for a drink, the conversation was about how long it would take before South Africa/Azania would be free.
There were nights when we were sure it could happen the very next year.
One of the Ghanaians I met decided that when I got to Gaborone, Botswana was the next and last stop on my trip, I had to stay with a Ghanaian couple who were his friends.