Crazy Unbelievable Land
“A TOTAL OF 282 bakeries have been arrested for selling bread above the controlled price,” state radio reported on Friday. Yes, said the young woman with the flashing smile who runs the bakery where I get mine, they were arrested this morning.
“They took one of the guys minding the ovens and kept him at the police station for four hours.” A fine of 250,000 Zimbabwe dollars (about 30p, at today’s black market exchange rate) was demanded, enough for two loaves, at the new “illegal” price. Never mind that the price of flour has gone up 60 per cent, electricity by 280 per cent, in three months.
“Yo, this country,” she says, with a gesture of frustration. “The police are always trying to get into your head.”
Last item:
• YOU DEVELOP a shell to cope. Everything is crazy and unbelievable and so some of the time you can laugh. But the shell cracks under the weight of despair and poverty that is everywhere. Like last week when I parked outside the suburban home of a friend. A young man up the road spotted me, turned and sprinted to me. “Please sir, have you got a job for me?” he said breathlessly, wide-eyed. Never seen him in my life before. A straw, any straw.
Most of us, the last few foreign correspondents left in the country, and doctors, lawyers, priests, anyone who has to face the hopelessness of President Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, are on antidepressants or anxiolytics, or become worryingly eccentric.
Last week I was at my Polish dermatologist to renew my prescription for medication for stress-induced eczema.
“How iss yorr life in Zimbabwe this days?” she asked. There was a long pause when I was caught unexpectedly by the urge to burst into tears.
In other cheerful African news, Instapundit links to something about Malaria, a pet topic of mine, but I won’t link to it because I don’t want to see any spike in their advertising impressions this week, no matter how small, and misconstrue it.
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