White Man Crawling

Sewerage Pipe

71 Sewerage Pipe Shorn Coleridge had decided to commit suicide, or sewerage pipe, as he jokingly called it. He was going to do something predictable like hanging or poison. A bullet in the mouth, pointing brainwards, required too much red tape, too much economic outlay. Jesus, guns were expensive. He went to the local hardware store and bought three metres of sash cord, and a box of Ratkill. He took these items home and put them next to each other on the dining room table. How to decide. He thought of going ‘eeny meeny miny mo…’ but that meant he would have to use that racist word; so he searched the house for a coin to toss. Easier said than done. Coins had been out of circulation for months in Zimbabwe. Only the brown, $20 000 Bearer Cheques were of any value: about six potatoes of value. He found no coin, but during the search an idea came to him. Why not die usefully? The government, which had been in power since independence in 1980, looked as if it was going to remain in power for ever – unless the suffering masses took to the streets in their tens of thousands, in their hundreds of thousands (leave millions, billions, and trillions to the fiscus) and protested. Protested against vote rigging, politicisation of the police and the armed forces, the judiciary, the church, chiefs, domestic pets even. Shorn still bore the scars on his left index finger of the chomp of an African Grey; and his friend Shawn de Quincey still limped from the time a Rhodesian Ridgeback had buried its fangs in the region of his sciatic nerve. Yes, why not die usefully? Why not initiate a mass protest right here in Bulawayo. The town was already teeming with the unemployed, and with school children whose parents could no longer afford the fees. He needed a banner and a loud hailer. He would set himself up at the City Hall, under the clock; and then, once enough of a crowd had gathered, he would lead them along Sel… er… Leopold Takawira Avenue towards the Law Courts. There would be bloodshed, and Shorn would be a prime target, but by the time he fell, still clutching his banner, the protesters would be so numerous that the police would take to their heels. News of the uprising would quickly spread to Harare, thence to Masvingo, Mutare, Gweru, Kwe Kwe, 72 maybe even Colleen Bawn. The masses would rise up, and the government would fall. He made a banner out of a single-bed white sheet and two broom handles. Using thick, felt tipped pens, blue, red, and green, he wrote: DOWN WITH ZANU-PF POOFTAS. He used drawing pins to connect the sheet to the broom handles, rolled it carefully as if it were some sacred scroll, and carried it over his shoulder to town. (He couldn’t get hold of a loud hailer). He chose a week day when the streets and pavements of Bulawayo were at their most crowded. He recognized the uniforms of at least twelve schools, primary as well as secondary. The unemployed, surprisingly well dressed thanks to unscrupulous credit facilities at clothing stores, which plunged them into irrecoverable debt, wandered aimlessly about or hovered near news stands in the hope of getting a free read of the Chronicle, or last week’s Independent, or the previous week’s Standard, or the week prior to that’s Johannesburg Sunday Times. Beggars there were, and street kids aplenty: rivals, for junk food scraps, of pied crows, sparrows, pigeons, and rattus rattus alexandrinus. The banner unfurled was too wide to hold in his hands so he persuaded a couple of street children to hold it for him. Then he began to hurl philippics. People gathered, pointed, smiled, laughed, clicked their tongues. The street children soon grew tired of their task and allowed the banner to tilt. One of them squatted, which created a hypotenuse effect. Not much of the banner remained legible. Enough, however, for a pack of teenage militias, recent graduates from one of the Border Gezi training camps, who had been taught that any kith and kin of Blair and his gay gangsters, was Zimbabwe’s enemy number one. There were three girls and six boys, identically dressed in green combat outfits, black boots, black belts, and black batons. As they converged on Shorn, the small crowd he had attracted quickly dispersed to a safe distance from where they...