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A Rueful Reflection
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89 A Rueful Reflection He wanted to show me around his garden, of which he was inordinately proud. The house, a sprawling single-floor bungalow, sits in the middle of it, but it is the garden that delighted Morgan Tsvangirai. ‘When my wife and I first saw it,’ he said, ‘I thought, yes, this is it. This is it. I don’t want to move anymore. This will do. This is it.’ His street is far enough away from the main roads for the neighbourhood to have a countryside suburban feel. The only traffic sounds are the occasional returnings home of neighbours who then honk their horns so that their guards will open the gates. Not quite up-market enough to have electronic gates. Strathaven is not Borrowdale, the elite north-eastern suburb. But I had noticed, in downtown Harare, street hawkers selling electronic gate posts and intercoms – curiously without the wiring, so whether these were new South African goods smuggled across the border, or dug up from outside the gates of Borrowdale I didn’t know. Or care. The luxuries of that suburb stand in too much contrast with the emerging underclass in Zimbabwe. It is emerging because, simply, it wasn’t there before. This is not to say there was no poverty. There was a great deal of that. Before the mid-1990s, however, there had always been the aspiration to live a middle-class life and the sense that, if you worked hard or somehow got lucky, or both, then it was possible. A middle-class life, the lower reaches of it anyway, might be a small house in Chitungwiza – but the electricity would work, the television would not be stolen, the salary would pay for the school uniforms, and there would be a bus to take you into work in Harare. Perhaps, but this would be a luxury, you could afford a few small shrubs in the little garden, maybe even a small tree, grow a hedge to mark off your property, grow enough grass to dampen down the dust of the sprawling high-density commuter city. It was no surprise that South African replicas of the black US rapper groups are now so popular in the music stores. If now you’ve got to live a ghetto life you might as well romanticise it. But I couldn’t help noticing afterwards, at the Harare Book Fair, held in the gardens between the National Gallery and the Monomotapa Hotel, street urchins looking from a distance longingly at all the books on disA Rueful Reflection Citizen of Zimbabwe: Conversations with Morgan Tsvangirai 90 play. ‘What would it be like to be educated and have shelves of books?’ Perhaps I was myself romanticising, but that had been my background desire too – one day to have shelves of books. I had pretty much concluded that it had been Morgan Tsvangirai’s too. It had been a very interesting set of discussions. Tsvangirai himself enjoyed them and said he had seldom been pushed so hard. I hadn’t been conscious of pushing, simply of trying to move him away from political soundbites and rhetoric. Certainly, by the end, he was talking freely and movingly – and personally; that is he was talking about Morgan Tsvangirai as a human being, not a political leader or political symbol. I thought I would leave the conversations therefore in chronological order to give the sense of this development. I decided in the garden too that I would not try to edit his sometimes abrupt syntax too much. Some things would have to be mildly adjusted to make the transition from spoken word to the written, but I wanted to be true to both his expression of himself and his speech cadences. We passed by his mother and mother-in-law sitting on the verandah . His wife arrived home in the red pick-up, went inside and changed from her Western suit into the traditional wrap skirt and joined the other two women. The well-dressed and polite guards at the gates were talking among themselves and doing a good job of watching us in peripheral vision – doing their job unobtrusively. We had wandered around to the front of the garden and I noticed that my driver had not yet arrived. I said to Tsvangirai that I didn’t want to keep him and I would be perfectly happy to sit on the garden bench and wait. He said he would leave me...