The Story Of An Elephant, A Village, A Sharp Shooter, And Big Meat Day In Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe (Photo AFSC Photos)

Nearly 100 people have been admitted to hospital, and over 1,000 affected by typhoid in Zimbabwe over the last month.

Between 2008 and early 2009, when Zimbabwe was a basket case and its health system had all but collapsed, cholera killed more than 3,100 people and affected another 60,000 – a world record of many years.

Even worse, was the economy, with inflation reaching a crazy 9,000,000 percent!

There has been improvement since the coalition government was formed in late 2009 between President Robert Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF, and (now) Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangrai’s cheated opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

At least the shelves in shops are not empty anymore. And the currency stabilised, well, because the worthless Zim dollar was abandoned for the US dollar.

The US dollar works in cities and towns, but not in villages where poor people need denominations of the US currency that either don’t exist – or are hard to find. That said, Zimbabwe, economists say, is the one place you will find a dollar denomination that you will hardly see in America; the two dollar bill!

Recently I had a chat with a friend who works for an international company with very deep pockets. He had recently been travelling in Zimbabwe trying to make sense of the economy, and to advise his company whether they should invest in the hope that when the aging and ailing Uncle Bob passes on, they will cash in.

He told me a powerful story that, he reflected, demonstrated that there are simple relationships between people and state, and the humaneness of the Zimbabweans, that have not been destroyed by repression and long years of suffering. To him, it demonstrated that “deep down, Zimbabweans are still there”.

He was being driven outside the city of Mutare. His driver, as it happened, had a relative deep in one of the villages near Mutare. He decided to stop and greet the elders.

When they got to the village yard, they found a massive crowd had gathered and there was a lot of excitement. There was no political rally, nor had some quack pastor from the city showed up to rip off the people with dubious miracles.

The village, it turned out, was being terrorised by an elephant nearby. The villagers had reported the matter to the government. The government was shortly sending a ranger to shoot the rogue pachyderm.

That meant that there would be lots of meat to share. The villagers had gathered at the headman’s house and were haggling over how the carcass would be divided.

By the time the game ranger arrived, the list would have been done, and the cut for every household in the village agreed.

Maybe a polygamist called Chipiwa with two wives and seven children would get three kilos of elephant meat. The local headmaster called Chamakomo, with one wife and three children, would also get three – as a reward, because he was more useful to the community than Chipiwa.

The local prostitute Rufaro, a single mother with one child, would get half a kilo. That is because the elders, although they have all slept with her, despise her by daylight and claim she is a disgrace to the village – despite the fact that none of them has ever proposed that she be expelled.

Here was a system that worked. There was a humanity that recognised that everyone needed to be taken care of. Also that the government, discredited as it is, still took the task of sending a ranger to kill an elephant that was trampling the villagers’ crops, seriously.

© Charles Onyango-Obbo / twitter@cobbo3